Opinion | Trump-Vance Is Making Something Very Clear About Trumpism - The New York Times

Removing these guardrails on presidential will opens up obvious opportunities for cronyism and corruption; that's why civil service protections and the procedures of administrative law were adopted in the first place, as good-government reforms. From a populist perspective, though, this may be a feature rather than a bug. Yet corruption is a useful lever for maintaining personal control over the operation of a sprawling bureaucracy, for example. That's one reason that corruption is endemic in authoritarian regimes. 

Mr. Trump's enthusiasm for tariffs, which presidents have a great deal of latitude to both impose and issue waivers from, and for a more discretionary, personalized approach to antitrust have a similar populist rationale. And those are similarly destructive of any kind of neutral institutionalism. His proposals would give the executive branch a lot of power over the economic fates of specific businesses and sectors. That's a recipe for personal corruption and for rampant economic distortion — but it's also a means to enforce administration policy through the private sector without going through the grinding work of drafting and passing legislation...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/opinion/trump-vance-populism.html

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