Something happened to me in 1978 that caused me, a politically disinterested twenty-something, to say to myself, “If I ever become President, the first thing I would do is fire the entire State Department down to the third level.” Now, 47 years later, Donald Trump has acted on that prescient—but politically uninformed—statement and is taking my wish into the entire administrative state. So, what happened to drive that long-ago political wish?

I was assigned to live and work on the West African coast in 1978 as the coastal director for my employer, which operated global cargo shipping lines. I worked with our commercial shipping clients and politicians and ministers in the respective national governments all along the coast from Dakar to Kinshasa. For example, I knew and worked with William Tolbert of Liberia, and my last meeting with him was less than 36 hours before his assassination and coup in April 1980.

Image by Andrea Widburg, using AI.

Ex-pats were encouraged to register with the American Embassy and let them know they would be living in-country in case they needed to reach us during a crisis. The Embassy in Abidjan was my original stop. I quickly learned that staffers were important, don’t you know? Just ask them. I got invited to Thursday “movie nights,” when they deigned to let civilian Americans watch movies from the traveling diplomatic bag circuit and eat popcorn.

But during one slightly beer-soaked Abidjan movie-night conversation with a couple of the staff who were climbing the ladder of success within State (a posting to the Court of St. James in London, or Élysée Palace in Paris being the gold ring career destination), the mask slipped.

Although I was politically unengaged at that point in life, we chatted about how they handled a new American Presidential administration and potential changes in foreign policy from one to the other. They made a blanket statement: “We don’t care who the President or Secretary of State is; we have our own global goals within the foreign mission corps, and those agendas never change. They can’t tell us what to do. We wouldn’t listen anyway.” That was the moment when I formed my wish that, if I were president, “the first thing I would do is fire the entire State Department down to the third level.”

Twelve years ago, when I became a serious student of “The Big Picture” of globalism and its effects on America, the pieces started falling into place. I’ve tracked modern Marxism from the Frankfurt School rehabilitating it in the 1920s to Gramsci’s Long March through the institutions in the 1930s. I’ve studied the administrative state that Woodrow Wilson planned, one that would see specially selected, self-styled “elites” placed in agencies that are unaccountable to voters, all while freely spending money that Congress handed them and making regulations that carry the force of law. Looking at this history, one begins to understand just how we got into this spaghetti web of waste, fraud, and, most importantly, abuse of our freedoms in support of their globalist, progressive agenda.

President Trump is in the beginning stages of doing what I dreamed of 47 years ago. He is dismantling the entire administrative state that I glimpsed in 1978 but didn’t fully recognize then. And I predict the incoming “flak over the target” will only get worse as this embedded Gordian Knot fights back against the Deep State’s loss of power. Unfortunately for them, Trump is using the same solution as Alexander did in the original legend: cutting the knot, not trying to unravel it.

And he needs all our support and prayers as he continues this Augean task.

Lewis Dovland is a passionate observer of America’s future direction with a focus on exposing the “Big Picture” end goals of the progressive Marxist movement and administrative state and how we can prevail. Email at Lewis.Dovland@gmail.com