In February 2017, Steve Bannon, then senior counselor and chief strategist to President Donald Trump, pledged to a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC; initiates pronounce it “See-Pack”) that the Trump administration would bring about “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon’s choice of the word “deconstruction” raises some possibility that he had in mind a textual interrogation in the style of Derrida. Laugh if you want, but Bannon claims an eclectic variety of intellectual influences, and the anti-regulatory movement that Bannon embraced did begin, in the 1940s, as a quixotic rejection of that same empiricism against which Derrida famously rebelled (“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte“). More likely, though, Bannon was using the word “deconstruction” as would a real estate tycoon such as his boss, to mean dismantlement and demolition. The “progressive left,” Bannon told See-Pack, when it can’t pass a law, “they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.” Kaboom!