• by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, February 24, 2017

President Donald Trump is speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) as we go to press. It sounds very much like a campaign rally speech. Trump is touting his successes over his first month and bashing the “mess” he was handed from President Obama.

Yesterday, two of his top aides, chief strategist Steven Bannon and chief of staff Reince Priebus, spoke at CPAC and offered various insights on the overall goals of the administration. With a backdrop that included signs from the NRA, the Heritage Foundation, Liberty HealthShare and Breitbart, the two top White House advisers presented their expectations for a Trump presidency.

One of the most shocking, but not unexpected, comments came from Bannon, who calls himself a Leninist. He stated the goal of the administration as the “deconstruction of the administrative state." Are CPAC members aware he is using a Russian Communist as a role model?

Lenin wrote that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the state machinery and wield it for its own purposes,” it must instead smash, break, destroy that machinery. Bannon echoed Lenin in a Daily Beast interview last year: "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

The alt-right Bannon coupled administrative deconstruction with two other aims: a focus on security or “national sovereignty” and “economic nationalism.”

This three-pronged strategy of White House policy provides a much more coherent understanding of where President Trump’s chief strategist hopes to take the country.

The deconstruction has already begun.

The White House curtailed Obama-era policies on climate and water, has stripped aspects of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Now, Trump has reversed a federal rule that allowed transgendered students to use the bathroom of their choice. The response from the White House is the administration doesn’t believe the rule should be imposed from the federal government.

Where does deconstruction go from here?

Could the federal government and a conservative court rule that voting rights, civil rights and women’s rights are best left to the states? It doesn’t seem unlikely. (In 2014, key parts of the Voting Rights Act were eviscerated by the Supreme Court.)

As Bannon, clearly the more ideological of the two speakers, said: “There is a new political order being created.”

We now have a better idea of what this order will look like. Clearly, the Trump White House won’t hesitate to make decisions that offend public opinion if they further the goals set out by Bannon and his alt-right cohorts.

With the “maniacally focused” Trump as the vessel, and Bannon who said he “sometimes runs hot” in the cockpit, progressives, independents and Democrats will have to work hard to preserve the liberal order that has largely kept peace — and ensured prosperity — over the past half-century.