The Washington Post has a long look at still-"acting" White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's efforts to put his own stamp on government while ducking anything that might peeve Donald Trump personally. Mulvaney has given up all of his predecessor's pretenses at controlling Trump or thwarting his apparent need for frequent childish outbursts, according to the Post's sources. Instead, Mulvaney is contenting himself with being the point man in charge of, well, every last little thing that Trump can't be bothered to weigh in on.
That means deregulation, deregulation, and more deregulation. The Post describes the former Freedom Caucus-aligned House Republican as single-mindedly obsessed with pressuring each Cabinet official to slash current federal regulations by as much as possible, as rapidly as possible. While Trump does whatever it is that he does—for example, watches television—it is Mulvaney who has installed "more than a dozen ideologically aligned advisers" throughout the West Wing and who has centralized "policy and spending decisions" in the White House—translation: inserted himself as point person—rather than leaving it to Trump's increasingly irrelevant and powerless Cabinet officials themselves.
The goal is to cut government regulations on business and environmental protections and otherwise drown in a bathtub as much of the government as can be mustered, and before the next election. You know, in case the Trump team gets tossed out. He continues to be roundly loathed both inside the White House and in Congress; it sounds like this is both a product of his aggressive control of and/or threats to Cabinet members and the natural result of Mick Mulvaney being, even in his House Republican days, an infamous ass.
The question becomes, then, how much of the government Trump is running versus how much of the government an "acting" Mulvaney is running with no particular input from television-boy. Trump is famously uninterested in policy and absolutely intolerant of efforts to educate him on it, and flits between a scant few topics primarily based on what he has seen on Fox News that morning. If it does not involve racism or self-promotion, Trump has frequently been unable to describe even the most basic premises of the "policies" his staff is promoting. Also, and we cannot emphasize this important point enough, he is extremely stupid.
"Some advisers say the president has no idea what Mulvaney and his aides do all day," reports the Post, which is among the least surprising statements to ever appear in a newspaper.
But that is why Mulvaney, as well as Mike Pence, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and the near-unanimous majority of the Republican Party have been so very careful to avoid criticizing even Trump's worst actions and declarations, isn't it? They do not care. Trump in the White House means that the rest of the party can install the federal judges they themselves desire, and deregulate the specific things they want to deregulate, and cut the taxes their wealthiest donors most want them to cut, and Trump will stay out of all of it unless something happens to make him take particular interest.
Which is rare, unless somebody has insulted him. On every other day, they run the government without his notice.