Thomas Zimmer
Appearances
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
He is entirely devoted to, again, bending the entire machine to Trump's will.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
This is another reason why vote is important or interesting, because he is competent, right? He knows how government works. And I think, you know, in the first Trump administration, there was this saying, oh, malevolence of tempered by incompetence, right? As we're once again, sort of looking at... What we're in for with the second Trump administration.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
And we see a lot of fundamentally incompetent people because Trump insists on nominating them. But then on the other end of the spectrum, there's people like Russell Vogt who he knows how government works and he knows how to make it work. I mean, I think people tend to think that's of the extreme. Extremists, the nutty MAGA people are also incompetent.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
And conversely, when you go up on the competence scale, you tend to go down on the nutty ideology scale. But that's, again, if you look at someone like this, this is a truly committed ideologue. He really means this kind of stuff. He's fundamentally not on board with any kind of ideology.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
pluralistic vision of a democracy in which people have disagreements and they kind of, you know, try to come to some sort of, I don't know, consensus or understanding. No, he's not on board with that. He's a truly committed ideologue, but he's also very competent. And so these are the more, in that sense, I think these are the more dangerous people that we need to worry about.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
I'm concerned about this also, honestly frustrated, because I think modern society and complex modern societies and modern states are difficult for any authoritarian regime to bring in line, even if they're fully competent. But since the election, I think ostensibly anti-MAGA political leaders and liberal institutions have...
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
kind of really assisted the Trumpists in kind of bringing the machinery in line, I'm not saying Biden should completely sabotage the transition. That's not the position, right? You have to worry about state capacity and you have to worry to some extent about norms and precedents. Fine. But why do you need to do a photo op with the first lady on the premises of the White House?
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
This sort of signals normalcy to people, right? It signals to people it can't be that bad. If Trump really was, I don't know, a fascist, whatever, or like a fundamental acute threat to American democracy, Joe Biden and Jill Biden wouldn't be doing that, would they? So this is signaling normalcy. It signals a kind of accommodation to power, a kind of acquiescence.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
And the best example, honestly, is the way the kind of Musk-Ramazwami joint, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has been treated, where you have sort of Democratic governors go on Fox News to say, oh, this is really interesting. We really need to do something about government waste or whatever, as if this was kind of a good faith effort at government reform. Come on.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
As of yet, still, I guess, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
It's not, right? It's not.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Yes. Or you have Bernie Sanders, just a few days ago, praising Musk for supposedly pushing back against the military industrial complex. What are we doing here? This is the kind of legitimization and normalization of these people that we... No, we shouldn't do this. We should be very clear that this is not a department, first of all. It has no legal or constitutional authority.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
And these people are not good faith actors actually concerned about, you know, government efficiency. So we shouldn't be sort of normalizing it in that way because we will at some point, right? I believe things could get potentially really bad in the Trump, in the second Trump administration. And at that point, we will need people, the American public to actually not look at Trump as,
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
as a totally normal president, a totally normal administration. But we will need them to be clear about, no, these are dangerous, fundamentally anti-democratic forces that are in charge of American government right now. And we need to think clearly and grapple seriously with how do you deal with that?
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
And I don't think the right way to deal with that is just signal normalcy and pretend, oh, we're in a normal transition.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Who knows, right? Who knows? Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Yeah, I mean, in many ways, I think he's had a fairly normal, if you want to call that, career path as sort of a career operative. He had positions at almost every level inside and around the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. over the course of almost two decades. I think he's in his late 40s now, I believe. And he went from low-level staffer to high-level...
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
person who is pulling the strings in the background. He was a congressional aide, a part of the think tank and the lobbying machine, a campaigner, and then a member of the Trump administration. I think in terms of where he comes from, people used to see him as a fiscal hawk, that sort
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Small government conservative who's looking for ways to, you know, cut the budget and maybe cut departments or whatever.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Yeah, no, absolutely. So that's what he was known for. And then to me, he's interesting because he is, I think...
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
very much emblematic of the trajectory of these kinds of people who very much talked about themselves as small government conservatives to people who now whatever you want to call him now that's not what he's talking about now he now wants to mobilize government and use of the coercive powers of government to impose a certain vision on american society these are the same kinds of circles who when barack obama was thinking about using an executive order called him a tyrant and now
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
I mean, this guy, he himself has, will gladly tell you that he has drafted dozens, maybe hundreds of executive orders. So there's a trajectory there. And I think that is really worth getting into and sort of trying to understand what's going on there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Yeah, I think what's interesting is that he himself calls it radical constitutionalism. That's what he wants. That's what he says what is needed now. And it's really quite interesting how someone like Russell Vogt, he will not even talk about himself and his own political project in the idiom of conservatism anymore. These people will tell you conservatism is no longer enough.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
That is sort of the rallying cry of these kinds of circles. So he calls it what is now needed as radical constitutionalism because he says there is just nothing left to conserve. So he would probably tell you, okay, so 20 years ago, there's sort of traditional small government conservatism. That's what was needed if you were a constitutional conservative.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
But because in their understanding, the left, the progressives, the socialists, honestly, he uses all those terms interchangeably. It's all kind of the same. They have, in this understanding, completely taken over. They've taken over government. They've taken over all the major institutions of American life. They are in charge. And so now there is nothing left to conserve.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
So this kind of a conservatism of limits, a conservatism of preserving and conserving, that's just not good enough anymore. What you need now is counter-revolution data. talk about this constantly. They call themselves counter-revolutionaries, right? So again, not at all in the idiom of conservatism.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
So what he will say is basically, look, what we did 20 years ago was the right thing to do at that point, but because this leftist revolution has already happened and it has succeeded, now what we're left with Nothing short of a proper counter-revolution will now suffice to save the nation and save real America and whatever they talk about.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
And I think that is how they make sense of their own trajectory and how they would tell you this is not just hypocrisy or it's not just there is no tension. It's just a reaction to the fact that the leftist revolution has succeeded. And so now they have adapted to that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
And it's not just the Democratic establishment, it's the Republican establishment as well. And it's even like, Volt will tell you that he thinks what the Federalist Society is doing is completely misleading, and that's just not good enough. Because they also, that type of originalism...
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
It's also not good enough because it pretends we still have a constitutional order that you can preserve, but you can't. I think it's really important. He constantly says we're in a post-constitutional regime now. He doesn't just mean a kind of formalistic view of how, say, the different constitutional actors relate to each other.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
It's this idea of a natural, quote unquote, natural order or divinely ordained order that was supposedly enshrined in the constitutional order, supposedly enshrined in the nation's founding documents. And that has been destroyed. So it's a much more fundamental, a much more, the stakes are so high, so existential for these people, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Because it's not just, oh, hey, should the administrative state do this or that? No, for them, this is just a manifestation of fundamentally, the natural order has been undermined by the radical left.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
If you really believe this, if those are the stakes, if the constitutional order was the only thing that's made America good and noble and kept the evil forces of modernism and all that kind of stuff,
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
at bay and if that has been destroyed then yeah it totally makes sense to say we can't just sit here and do like small government conservatism we need to do something more right we need to mobilize the coercive powers of the state against you know this unnatural leftist enemy and that's where this guy has sort of arrived.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
This idea that there's so little time left is just pervasive in these circles. They will constantly say this. This is our last chance. This is the one chance we got now with Trump coming back to power. If we can't reverse course now and make this counter-revolution happen, it's not going to happen. I think the fact that he says Marxist, I think this was a lengthy post on ex-Twitter or something.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
what you just quoted, that is so revealing. He really doesn't make any difference between socialism, Marxism, communism, liberalism, progressivism. It's all the same. It's all this kind of subversion of the quote-unquote natural order. You can't come to an agreement with those people. This is not
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
This is not someone who thinks about the political conflict in like democratic, small d democratic terms, right? Oh, you have a political opponent, you disagree with them and you kind of, you know, you kind of work it out. No, this is a fundamentally illegitimate, fundamentally anti-American project that he sees on the quote unquote left that doesn't need to be like bargained with.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
It needs to be destroyed.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Again, this is not dismantling the state, right? They want to do that. They want to get rid of the Department of Education, whatever. But what you heard there was, no, we're going to take over government. And we're going to do it by, A, purging the government, purging the state of the leftists, the bureaucrats.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
And by the way, he sees all of these career bureaucrats, experts as just part of the leftist takeover of government. And so he was, even in the first Trump administration, the biggest proponent of Schedule F, this presidential executive order that would convert thousands, maybe tens of thousands of career civil servants into political appointees and then make them fireable.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
That's what that is about, right? And so that's what they want to do again, purge government, purge all these agencies, departments, every part of the administrative state of government. what they see as the enemy within, and replace them with loyalists.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
That was very much part of all the big right-wing planning, Project 2025 being one of the big planning operations on the right, is of this idea, we need to get rid of these people and we need to find our people to replace them with. That's one part of it. The second part is, they're very clear that their project is fundamentally not popular.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
If you tell the American people what they actually want to do, people will say, that sounds not great. So they know this will lead to protests, or they are expecting protests. And I think when you hear Russell Vogt talk about his biggest regret from the first Trump administration is precisely that in the summer of 2020, during the George Floyd protests, they did not...
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to suppress those protests. And they're 100% clear this will not happen again. Next time we'll be ready. They think they had too many of those Federalist Society, RINO lawyers in and around the White House who kind of talked them out of this. Trump wanted to do this in the summer of 2020, but they didn't.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
They were sort of talked out of it by lawyers, legal counsel, whatever. And so they're 100% clear, this must not happen to us again. Next time, we will absolutely use the military. We will invoke the Insurrection Act. And so that is what they've been preparing. One of his biggest frustrations is precisely this. We were much too lenient. We allowed protests. We shouldn't do this.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Yeah, he himself calls OMB the nerve center of the federal government. And I think he's kind of right about this, or at least you can use it that way. It's always a question of what do you want to do with these institutions and agencies? And for him, and I think you saw this again in the first Trump administration, he became director of OMB in 2019. And
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
Some of his greatest hits were he held up military aid to Ukraine because Trump wanted to pressure the Ukrainian government in terms of delivering dirt on Joe Biden. He directed billions of dollars from the Pentagon to Trump's border wall fever dream. He was the most aggressive proponent of Schedule F. So this is a powerful position if you want to use it that way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Michael Weiss and Thomas Zimmer: Competent and Radical
And he absolutely sees it as a kind of position where you can bend the entire machinery to the will of Donald Trump. And that is, I mean, to be clear, he really sees Donald Trump as a gift from God. That's how he describes him, literally a gift from God, someone who is precisely the right kind of radical figure to lead this counter-revolution.