Despite the impression you might get from social media and cable news, there's a lot more to the Trump Administration than the daily drama at the White House. In policy terms, the real action is taking place at other federal departments and agencies, where Trump's Republican appointees are trying to enact the Party's radical and regressive agenda.
This agenda has nothing to do with the economic nationalism and the pledges to defend the welfare state—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid—that Donald Trump campaigned on. It is, instead, the agenda of billionaires far more ideological than Trump, such as the Koch brothers, the Mercer family, and the Ricketts family, who want to limit the government's role in areas ranging from the environment to labor relations to health care to financial regulation. As the historian Josh Zeitz pointed out in a piece for Politico a couple of months ago, the ultimate aim of this agenda is to roll back not merely the regulatory reforms of Barack Obama but the entire Great Society vision of Lyndon Johnson.
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