** So that gets us to Trump, who, as someone who has never worked in government before, certainly doesn’t know where the bathrooms are. What should we expect in terms of continuity on national security when he takes office?**

Well, the first question is, what does he want to do? And what does he tell the bureaucracy to do? He’s told us at various points during the campaign some contradictory things about what his policy directives are going to be. So take a worst-case scenario. Suppose he really tries to deliver on the most draconian policies he has described, like reinstituting waterboarding or “taking out the families” of people he suspects of being terrorists, both of which he has said he’d do. What is the effect going to be within the agency? What happens if he tells the intelligence services to institute these sorts of policies and they say no? I mean, the short answer is he fires them. He fires whoever says no and causes those people to be replaced with people who say, “Yes, Mr. President.” And there’s no difficulty in finding people who will say that. There’s a long line of individuals willing to replace somebody who is insubordinate. And there is a strong incentive to be subordinate and compliant, because you could lose your job, lose your income, be ostracized by your friends and professional associates. How many people in Washington are really going to stand up and say no? That just really doesn’t happen. If it did happen somehow that the directors of these programs ended up successfully defying a presidential order, what would happen to the legitimacy of democratic government? Suddenly you’ll have reversed the power flow that is set out in the Constitution. Instead of having power flowing from the constitutional institutions to the departments and agencies created by the president and Congress, you have power flowing from them to the presidency. There are other twists and possibilities we can talk about, but I just don’t see it working. I don’t see bureaucratic checking as a realistic way of stopping a populist authoritarian president.

OK. That is not what I expected you to say. Everything you’ve told me up to this point made it sound like there’s this bureaucratic inertia that comes from having this network of managers that we can count on to create continuity.

Well, let me continue. There’s another possibility, and that is that the managers would not engage in direct defiance of a presidential order, but rather that, backstage, behind the scenes, they would slow-roll what the president wants to do. They would effectively present the president with an intensified form of the bureaucratic inertia and torpor that has, in the past, caused the bureaucracy to be such an impediment to changing national security policy. So the question is, would that work as a check? Yes. That phenomenon is present. Whether it’s intended or not, that’s the way bureaucracy works—it’s part of the plumbing, and you can’t turn it off by twisting the faucet. The sluggishness and slowness is part of the system and it could be more protracted if there’s a measure of intentionality behind it.

However, while that could work in the short term, it’s doubtful it would work in the long term. Ultimately, the leadership of the bureaucracy—the Trumanite network, as I call these several hundred people—does have essentially the same overarching objective as the leadership of the Madisonian institutions, and that objective is to appear in the eyes of the public to be on the same page. Because when there is a public dispute between the two, they lose legitimacy. So there’s a strong incentive to remain in sync, and over the medium and long term, you would most likely find a kind of power-sharing arrangement in which the leadership of the national security institutions comes to adapt and accommodate themselves to president Trump’s policies.