Inside the Beltway, deep staters are suffering from a severe case of shell shock. Never before in modern history has an incoming administration conducted such a successful offensive against the uniparty oligarchy that has seized control of our nation’s democratic institutions over the last half ce ntury. Unused to having their authority challenged, they are now lashing out to attack the most populist president of our lifetimes as an authoritarian who threatens democratic norms. The irony is overwhelming. The new narrative was perhaps best seen in a long CNN hit piece ominously headlined “Trump is using the power of government to punish opponents.” The lengthy article claims that the “unprecedented” actions taken by Trump “against his perceived political and ideological opponents” display a “stunning willingness to test the limits of his powers.” President Trump’s actions, the article solemnly intones, “are paralyzing institutions that stand as pillars of America’s independent civic society.” Holy civil liberties, Batman! Is Trump using lawfare to prosecute and incarcerate his political opponents? Is he threatening academic freedom? Is he imperiling freedom of the press? Is he posing some sort of hazard to the independence of the judiciary? Well ... no. Upon examining the details of the exhaustive case that Trump poses a fascist-like threat to American democratic norms — worked up by an entire bevy of CNN reporters — we find that he is doing just the opposite. He is liberating all of our major national institutions by going after members of the elite uniparty oligarchy that captured them over the last half-century. One of Trump’s sins against democracy, it turns out, is that he is terminating federal contracts and revoking longstanding security clearances of law firms that engaged in harassment lawsuits and unfounded lawfare prosecutions against Trump over the last four years. Remember, they tried to keep him off the ballot last November. They tried to put him in prison for the rest of his life before the voters could put him back in the White House. It is richly ironic that groups specifically engaged in the anti-democratic project of denying voters a choice at the polls are now citing Trump’s pushback against their project as the real threat to democracy. The evidence of their flagrant abuse of the legal system was so overwhelming that a number of firms decided to reach multi-million dollar settlements in pro-bono legal services to the Trump administration in order to avoid negative consequences. Another example cited of Trump's supposed danger to the civil order is his threat of action against Columbia University and other elite Ivy League institutions that failed to control disruptive anti-Israel protests, encampments, and harassment and intimidation of Jewish students on their campuses. With the looming threat of the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants, Columbia caved to policy changes demanded by Trump. These included "stricter rules for protests, banning masks, announcing a plan to hold student groups accountable” for violence and disruption, “empowering law enforcement, and reviewing its Middle East studies programs and admissions.” This, former Columbia President Lee Bollinger complains to CNN, constitutes “the most serious intrusion into academic freedom and autonomy” he can remember. Far from viewing disruption of U.S. college campuses as a matter of academic freedom, most Americans would agree with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s assessment that America grants visas to foreign students “to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.” The desperate attempt to portray President Trump’s shock-and-awe campaign against the entrenched Washington oligarchy as an attack on democratic institutions continues with another laughable claim — that his battle against the legacy news media cartel imperils the freedom of the press. Trump took the long-overdue step of relegating dying, untrustworthy and untrusted mainstream media organs to a back seat in White House press briefings, while giving the alternative media a position in the press pool justified by their newly robust influence. As Trump piles up wins against the administrative state and its Beltway dependents, the last refuge of establishment scoundrels is to depict his spate of executive orders and his ferreting out of administrative waste and fraud as an unconstitutional assault on legislative authority. Even though Trump explicitly campaigned on the promise of having Elon Musk run a Department of Government Efficiency to discover waste and abuse in executive branch agencies, that popular effort is now being challenged in court by the bureaucracy and characterized as an “attempt to bend U.S. institutions to his will.” In other words, he is attempting to ensure that employees of the executive branch, who work at will of the president, carry out the will of the executive. The deep state obviously became complacent about its ability to call the shots in Washington. Otherwise, its critique of the first serious assault on its heretofore unchallenged power wouldn’t be so transparently ridiculous. Rob Wasinger is co-founder of The Ragnar Group. He was director of Senate relations for the Trump transition team in 2016 and the first White House liaison at the State Department during the Trump administration. ...read more read less