How Trump filled the swamp

There was never any chance that Trump would do anything other than restock the swamp.

Dear James,
You are right. Elections don’t matter. Never have. Never will.
You are wrong. People might want to defect from the system, even ‘en masse,’ but the system won’t let them.
That’s the part that you and your anarchist friends don’t seem to get. Until the system is “dismantled” or “dies a natural death from its decrepitudes,” it will not permit any “independence” anywhere within its sphere of influence.
It’s not that I don’t want the freedom and independence you advocate, it’s rather that we differ in the way we believe that that independence can ever be won. People will have to fight for it. Or they will never have it.
Ask the people of the Great Lakes Regions in Africa. Ask the Syrians. Ask the survivors of the First Nations in North America. Ask the peasants in India who are even now being expropriated.
It isn’t true that ‘we’ ourselves have allowed illegitimate power to entrench itself over our lives by willful neglect.
That power, as you well know, is the military, the air force, the navy, the police, and the court systems.
These things, these vicious institutions, are the legacy in modern form of pre-capitalist times gifted to the modern era, of might that is the right to rule, organized to create and enforce conditions that make for exploitation and dominance.
How will your groups of voluntarists deal with these monopolies of organized violence when they finally notice that too many people are defecting and need to be corralled back onto the reservation?
If,as you yourself make the case, the system rests on power, i.e., upon a monopoly over the means of violence, as it most certainly does, what makes you believe that people will be able to simply disengage and set themselves up somewhere peaceably beyond the reach of that power, of that violence, if they do not first do something about neutralizing that violence?
See, that’s the thing about capitalism: people think that it’s just shady bankers and entrepreneurs, criminal business monopolies and cartels, psychopathic men and women in suits. They tend to forget about the elements of naked force and coercion.
Here is something worth brooding over, in my estimation, namely, that capitalism is expropriation, that it is at its most transparently obvious in precisely “. . . those moments when great masses of [people] are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on the labour-market ” — to quote Marx . . .
As he reminds us, as the wars of aggression that capital wages remind us,

[in] themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarisation of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour. [Norm’s emphasis] As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it. The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.

— Karl Marx, First English edition of 1887, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy / Volume One, Chapter 26, pp.507-508.
So remind me again, James, what it is that makes you think that we, the majority, who are the system’s most precious commodity and possession, can just peaceably disengage and walk away?
The era of primitive accumulation is still upon us. It never ended. And it will not end until capital itself ends.