Donald Trump vs. the Leviathan

U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order for pardons on January 6 offenders in the Oval Office on January 20.
JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

Donald Trump vs. the Leviathan

America’s new president begins a fight to reduce the power of the ‘deep state.’

Many people are still processing what Donald Trump’s election victory means for the United States and the world. President Trump enjoys immense popular support and has promised a “golden age of America.” Yet the last time he was elected president, his administration was hamstrung by a cabal of “deep state” agents operating on their own compass heading regardless of who the American people put in power.

However, President Trump seems to have learned a valuable lesson during his wilderness years: He will never tame the sprawling leviathan that has taken over the federal government; he must destroy it instead.

Immediately after taking office, President Trump signed an executive order instructing the 2.3 million civil service employees to report for work at their official duty stations. Many of these employees have been working remotely since the start of the covid-19 pandemic. President Trump wants them where he can keep an eye on them. Department of Government Efficiency Director Elon Musk agrees and hopes many employees will quit rather than return to work.

President Trump also signed an executive order directing federal officials to freeze all hiring for vacant positions as of January 20; any federal employees who do quit after President Trump’s order to report back to their official duty stations will not be replaced anytime soon. The Biden administration hired 631,639 new civilian workers from 2020 to 2024. Trump’s executive order could shrink the federal workforce by roughly 0.5 percent per month for as many months as the order is in force.

The hiring freeze also instructs the directors of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to work with Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency to “submit a plan to reduce the size of the federal government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.” The order did not specify how many jobs are to be eliminated, but Musk has indicated we may need to lay off 75 percent of federal workers to make the government efficient.

A third executive order clarifies that the president of the United States is the “only member of the executive branch, other than the vice president, elected and directly accountable to the American people.” Therefore, the president has absolute authority to remove an employee engaged in insubordination or misconduct. This order is already hotly contested by congressional Democrats, but a fourth executive order helps the president maintain control over the civil service by establishing a direct line of accountability from senior executive service managers through their respective agency heads to the president. This order explicitly states that all senior executive service managers must implement the Trump administration’s agenda and policies.

The fifth executive order bars federal agencies from hiring employees on the basis of race, sex or religion; and a sixth executive order withdraws the national security clearances of the 51 intelligence community officials who signed an October 2020 letter claiming the Hunter Biden laptop computer was “Russian disinformation.”

A seventh executive order imposes a 60-day freeze of all proposed regulations that have not been published in the Federal Register. This order will make sure a Trump appointee has time to review all new regulations before the American people are subject to more bureaucratic micromanagement. Americans must now obey 17 regulations issued by unelected bureaucrats for every law passed by Congress. The incoming Trump administration needs to take action to ensure that government by the people does not perish from the Earth.

In addition to these seven executive orders, President Trump also released a memo on January 21 instructing that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (dei) employees must be put on paid leave as agencies work to dismantle dei initiatives. The Trump administration has not publicized how many dei employees there are, but the new president does not want taxpayer dollars wasted on people whose purpose is to divide the nation.

The president of Hillsdale College, Larry Arnn, delivered a speech on Nov. 19, 2024, crediting Trump’s victory to his ability to convince a people, jaded from broken promises, that he would ‘drain the swamp.’” This is exactly what President Trump is trying to do now that he is in office.

“In 1930, government consumed 12 percent of the gross domestic product of the nation,” Arnn declared. “That was about how it had been from the beginning. Today, government handles a little over 50 percent of the nation’s wealth. This is a gigantic transfer of resources from the private to the public sector, which defies the meaning of a free society. … Somehow, we have come to think that the fruited plains bear more fruit when the government owns them. … We have converted America from a bottom-up to a top-down country.”

Arnn said his favorite Trump proposal is the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency because it “directly addresses the problem of the administrative state.” The Make America Great Again movement cannot restore constitutional government to the nation by staffing the administrative state with conservatives. It must return power to the people by reducing the size of the government.

Bible prophecy strongly indicates President Trump will have some measure of success in his quest to slay the sprawling leviathan that has taken over the federal government. In the August 2019 issue of the Philadelphia Trumpet, editor in chief Gerald Flurry explained that President Trump is an end-time type of King Jeroboam ii. Amos 7:12-13 tell us he will be supported by a religious movement called the “king’s chapel” and a secular government entity called the “king’s court,” or “kingdom’s court.”

“In Washington, D.C., is the Supreme Court building, where judges are to interpret the law,” Mr. Flurry wrote in “Can President Trump Get Control of His Own Divided Government?” “In the same area are buildings for the cia, the fbi, the Justice Department, the State Department, the Pentagon and others. Most of them were built during and after the Great Depression, when they had a lot of manpower to use, so they built some truly impressive structures for the government. It is logical this prophecy is talking about these government structures, or agencies. After all, if Jeroboam is going to be used to save Israel, he would need the law on his side. He wouldn’t be able to use the government like he needed to without the legal structure behind him. He needs that power. The leader of end-time Israel in Amos 7 has a lot of power, but he has had to fight to get that power and hold it.”

President Trump was unable to get control of his divided government during his first term primarily because America’s administrative state is too big. Now he is signing orders clarifying that he is the head of the executive branch while whittling down the civil service.

The radical left hates this, but the U.S. Constitution authorizes only three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial. Executive branch employees must support the duly elected president to be legitimate.

It is refreshing to see America waking up to the fact that it must balance its budget and shrink its government. Yet the resurgence brought about by this end-time Jeroboam will be temporary unless the American people make some permanent changes. President Trump is working with Musk to restore the “basic idea that the people we elect run the government,” but the character of the American people must improve to halt America’s collapse.