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Klein made a compelling case but I still disagree with him. The first Trump admin was a mess, but I don't think it was a mess because of a lack of personal loyalty, it was a lack of ideological loyalty that led to that lack of personal loyalty. Add on to that that personal loyalty is basically impossible to vet (I mean, are you only going to hire ride or die Trump supporters that were willing to storm the capitol?), and that leaves you with a much more ideologically lockstep second Trump term, but I still think will hold back the super crazy Trump tendencies when their personal loyalty to follow him no matter what is tested..
If you operationalize "personal loyalty to Trump" as "conformist authoritarian tendencies", then we've had a profiling instrument for that for awhile courtesy of Bob Altemeyer at U Manitoba: https://theauthoritarians.org/ . You can take a version of his research questionnaire at http://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RWAS/ to get the flavor of personality type that it's trying to detect. (No it doesn't capture every way there is to be authoritarian, yes woke is left authoritarian, it still seems relevant to answer the question at hand.) Couple that with "amount of pushback against direction from superiors" as an item of quarterly personnel review to set up evaporative cooling dynamics, have semiannual shit tests and purity spirals, and I bet by year 3 of a Trump admin you could get at least some of them to rerun Jonestown. Maybe have a not-legally-binding oath to Trump personally, just to engage the monkey brain a bit harder.
This would probably do terrible things to your talent pool, mind! It's basically building a cult around the Presidency, with direct interpersonal dynamics rather than parasocial ones like we've already seen with the Trump cult of personality. Selecting for that trait seems like it starts trading off against general competence, independence, ability to be delegated to, pretty quickly.
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The only way I can see something like that working is if congress repealed the Administrative Procedure Act, putting Trump and his immediate appointees in direct control of federal regulations.
Curtis Yarvin talks a lot about how no president has been truly in charge of the government since FDR. The reason for this is the Administrative Procedure Act.
Yarvin is wrong. The APA was in response to a growing administrative state and was an attempt to put safe guards on it. The biggest problem has been incredible deference to the administrative state ignoring the APA.
Loper Bright (and to a lesser extent Kisor) reduces some of that deference. The major questions doctrine reduces yet more. And the continued vitality of forcing administrative agencies to respond with real thoughts to comments shows the courts are finally taking the APA seriously.
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Which is silly, because the APA is a way of regularising the use of the broad powers delegated by Congress to the executive during the New Deal era. Pre-FDR Presidents had less control over the government, not more - both because the federal government had less control over "the government" viz-a-viz the states, and because the executive had less control over the federal government viz-a-viz Congress.
That the federal government was small enough for one man to control in 1890 and not in 1930 seems entirely plausible. But Yarvin defines the government as "that which is sovereign" - which in 1890 still meant the system of shared sovereignty between the feds and the states.
I’m afraid the ship had sailed by 1881 at the absolute latest.
I agree with you that the Pendleton Act is the point at which the US Executive Branch stops being a one-man show.
But the bigger change over the 20th century is the shift in power from Congress to the Executive.
Even now, the US government is more of a one-man show than it was when an effective House Speaker could have more power over domestic policy than the President did.
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Curtis Yarvin talks about a lot of things. Most of them don't hold up if one doesn't share his beliefs about philosopher-kings.
The President hasn't controlled the government since John Adams.
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Especially with Loper Bright overruling Chevron deference, the president has even less authority to regulate than they used to.
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