The administrative state views former President Donald Trump as an “existential threat,” Ned Ryun, founder and CEO of American Majority and author of the upcoming book American Leviathan, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday.
Ryun discussed the emergence of the administrative state, which he described as a “massive, sprawling bureaucracy under which you have people — call it the Deep State — I call it the surveillance state, the FBI, CIA, NSA — very powerful aspect of the administrative state, which, I would argue, Matt, actually operates more as a Praetorian Guard to protect the administrative state than actually protecting the American people and advancing their interests.”
“Then you’ve got the regulatory state in which, you know, I think the regulatory state is one of the greatest threats to economic freedom and our national security,” he said, also pointing to the 800,000 nonessential federal employees who “view it as a patronage system, and they just exist off the taxpayer toll.”
Ryun said it is important to know that the administrative state is all about “powerful unelected bureaucrats who run the various departments and agencies and make a lot of the decisions, the regulations and the statutes that do the actual governing of this country,” which is not what a Constitutional Republic is at all.
He pointed to Trump as the “great outsider” who “brought to the surface this conflict between two very different governing philosophies when he showed up in D.C. in January of 2017 and really essentially declared, ‘I’m the duly elected President of the United States. I’m the one who decides both foreign and domestic policy,'” he said, noting that it created mass conflict with the administrative state,
“That’s the conflict, if you boil everything down, the Russian collusion fairy tale hoax, Ukrainian quid pro quo, this constant political war between Donald J. Trump and D.C. It comes down to who decides,” he explained.
“Let’s say we get Donald Trump back in the White House,” host Matthew Boyle said.
“That’s step one. … That’s like the preamble to step one, right?” he asked.
“Remember, the administrative state is inside the executive branch,” Ryun said, identifying the president as the head of that branch. So if Trump takes over the White House again, he will have it in his power as the head of the executive branch to “dismantle, destroy, and devolve the administrative state.”
“Every administration gets about 5,000 political appointees. Of that, there’s probably, call it 400 or 500 important decision-makers that Donald Trump has to get 100 percent correct to send them to the various departments and agencies to then implement all of those reform items,” Ryun said.
“Matt, over the course of four years, you can do extreme damage to the administrative state, and that’s why they view him, Donald J. Trump as an existential threat: because the most important thing that he has done unlike any president since Reagan — and that includes George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — he rejects the premise,” he said.
LISTEN:
“He rejects the premise that the administrative state is legitimate. They know that. I think after his four years, he has come to a greater knowledge of his power as executive and also what the fight is about — because I would agree with you. One of the key issues in 2024 is what are we going to do with the administrative state?” Ryun added.
“And if we allow it to remain, we have given up any last chance of actually restoring the Constitution Republic,” he warned.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.