You said that Trump wouldn't win, couldn't win, and if he did win, he would be a loser that was too dumb, egotistical, and timid to actually accomplish anything. You said he was a millstone around the neck of the right and that we'd never win anything with him.
Now you are complaining that he's being too ruthless and aggressive against a state who not only bent all its faculties to destroy him (including in all likelihood, multiple assassination attempts) but is also being revealed to be gigantically, fabulously, hilariously corrupt, even beyond that contemplated in the most fevered imaginations of the Coast to Coast AM set. Like, sure, the state is a grift, but who would have imagined that it's literally the main source of income for initiatives to replace the native population of Norway or keeping Politico in the black?
Maybe you should just accept that you've been wrong about absolutely everything related to Trump and will continue to be wrong in the future, and shut up.
Trump is proving to be exactly the loser we all said he was. He is rudderless, and being used by various factions all vying for power and control. He has already weakened the U.S. abroad to an unprecedented degree. The Chinese and Russians cannot believe their good fortune. And Trump is already failing to secure the Southern Border. With no functioning Federal Governments in place we will basically be relying on corrupt structures like ICE who happily cut lucrative deals with the cartels. Notice how incredibly ineffective the Trump administration has already been at „mass deportations“. Nothing is happening other than massive theft and grift.
"The basic reason Donald Trump came back into power is that people wanted things to go back to normal."
That's where you're wrong. Did you really think that the optimal move here was to "de-escalate and make some degree of peace with the establishment and the left"? That ship has long since sailed. I cannot imagine how you could possibly think that was realistic, let alone desirable. No, Trump came back into power to raze the establishment and the left to the f*cking ground.
I for one, will be content when their bones are ground into powder. They deserve nothing less for what they've done, and what they'd continue to do if you got your way.
Maybe you don't like that. I really don't care, Margaret. I and many others are way, way past pretending that the state of affairs you call "normal" is ever coming back. The world you grew up in no longer exists. The sooner you come to terms with that, the better off you'll be.
"One reason I did not want to vote for Trump was the way in which whatever good he managed to do in his first term was immediately reversed and then some by Biden—as of now, it seems certain that this will be the case once again at some point in the relatively near future."
You're wrong about that, too. Yes, Trump is issuing a lot of executive orders that it will be trivial for a subsequent administration to reverse. Whatever. Even a temporary reprieve is better than nothing.
But what you're missing is that this isn't all Trump is doing. Trump is destroying an organic, bureaucratic ecosystem that took decades to build. Such ecosystems can absorb a remarkable amount of punishment and keep on trucking. What they can't absorb is massive discontinuities in funding or personnel. Put more concretely, yes, fiddling with top-line policies may be very easy to reverse, but firing a lot of people is not. Discontinuing programs, even temporarily isn't either, precisely because it often leads to firing a lot of people.
The reason this is so difficult for organizations to recover from is that once people leave, you can never get all of them back. The more time elapses after a person is let go, the harder it is to get them back. People get other jobs. Sometimes they like the new jobs. Even if they don't, some non-trivial percentage of them will decide to stay where they are rather than go through the disruption of switching jobs a second time. This is particularly true for people who wind up relocating, and the percentage of people who do that only goes up over time. Assuming Trump continues to get his way on these issues, which I think likely, it will be at least four years (hopefully twelve!) before a new administration can change course. That's a very, very long time in terms of organizational discontinuity.
Also, in this particular case, a lot of federal employees will likely have opted for some form of retirement, early or otherwise. Getting them to come back into the office will be almost impossible. They've simply no incentive to return.
All of which to say that while it is certainly possible for a new Democratic administration to reverse a lot of the decisions Trump has made now, the damage he is doing to the Deep State is likely to have a very long-lasting impact. Which is why Regime flunkies are screaming so loudly. They understand this.
You may very well be correct that the administrative state will never again be as large or as powerful as it was previously. I am not yet convinced that there is no danger in the steps that are being taken to achieve this. Any weapon that is wielded by one side will eventually be taken up by the other. If the administrative state gives way to a new normal in which the President's word becomes much closer to law, the next Democratic administration will operate in that way too--and may thus be able to enforce its will in ways that it couldn't previously.
The administrative state has long since given way to a new normal in which the President's word--or lack thereof--is law. Seriously. This isn't wielding a new weapon that may one day be used by a Democratic administration. This is wielding a weapon Democratic administrations have been using for decades.
You also fail to recognize the fact that all of the actions which rustle your jimmies here involve the President wielding executive authority over the Executive Branch directly. Federal employees. The President has always had almost untrammeled authority there. This is very, very different from attempting to impose obligations or prohibitions upon anyone who isn't a federal employee. And nothing Trump has done has moved that needle a millimeter.
The legality of many of Trump's recent actions is tenuous at best. But if we're being honest, no one really cares about whether any of it is technically legal or not. The core issue here is the attitude that the executive branch--originally intended simply to *execute* policies determined by Congress--will instead use its authority over the bureaucracy to simply set its own policy agenda while ignoring Congress (and even the judiciary) as much as possible. Perhaps you think that's a good thing because it's your side that currently benefits from it. I am more cautious.
Again, all the things you're worried might happen have been happening for a long, long time now.
It's not cool to bring a knife to a fist fight. We all agree about that. The issue here is that you're pretending this still a fist fight after the other guy has stabbed you multiple times. This is not "cautious," it's just pathetic.
Bull. Never had personal loyalty tests. Never had mass random layoffs. Never made foreign bribery legal. Never made race discrimination legal. The basic difference you refuse to see is that FDR and LBJ took action the HELP regular people, while Trump takes action to help only RICH cronies. And mainly himself. He thinks Gaza is his new property. 🤪
Can you explain to me how this fits with Biden accepting the courts’ overturning of much of his student loan forgiveness plan?
Next, can you reconcile this with the SCOTUS Chevron decision?
Why don’t you be honest will all of us and admit you want Trump as Dictator, and not pretend what we are seeing today looks like anything we have seen before (in this country).
Trump has prepared well. All of his moves so far have been within his constitutional powers as Chief Executive. The only one on shaky ground constitutionally is declaring an end to birthright citizenship. The rest, despite the intervention of corrupt judges, is his right to do. The USAID and Treasury revelations have uncovered a mess of corruption that is almost unfathomably huge. Our own tax money and government institutions have been used against us, to succor our enemies, attack our rights to free expression, suppress opposition, and destroy our culture and traditions. Not to mention enrich a bunch of criminals.
If cleaning that up isn't the President's job as head of the Executive, whose is it? And how is he supposed to attack such entrenched corruption without offending your sense of decorum?
Interesting. So you don't think that the gravy train of money going to bribe foreign and domestic news media is in any way corrupt? Or the massive amount of money that simply disappeared, with no indication of where it went? Hmm ...
This right here is 10,000% why I shifted from "Trump is gonna have another dumb boomer Presidency" to "it is a shame Trump is so old, otherwise it would have been a Hail Caesar moment"
This is a permanent realignment, not just another 4-year cycle. The signs are all over the place. The lack of constitutional restraint, ie acting until someone is willing and able to stop you, has been politically acceptable since the boomers replaced the silents around 2000. Trump is using that tactic to finally kill the rotten institutions that are prolonging solvable problems. After that, a new consensus will allow a return to less disruptive tactics.
I think solving our problems is going to be disruptive in ways that shock and dismay the average American in ways we can’t imagine right now. This isn’t about whether Team R or Team D occupies the White House, but whoever is unlucky enough to be there when things hit the fan over the next decade is going to take the blame.
We know for sure that entitlements are about to become insolvent. The dollar’s status as global reserve currency will continue to get squeezed by a variety of macroeconomic factors. We’re also drifting into an pre-WWI arrangement amongst the world’s great powers.
We’ll see how it all shakes out, but a hard reset on America’s global position and domestic economy is coming. I hope Trump and Musk are factoring that in to what they’re doing right now so the landing is as soft as possible.
Universal democracy is an aberration in history, and more importantly, it has not existed in the US at all in the post WW2 period. The elite have run the west as a media and bureaucracy driven state since 1945, if not since 1913, and the awful excess of the Biden years was the natural conclusion of this era.
Whatever comes of Trump and Musk's work, it won't be a return to the 1990s or even the 1950s, but an entirely different entity. My guess is a technology and AI driven rightwing globalist state.
I think one of the reasons why people are ambivalent about Trump and musk consolidating power into the executive branch is that Congress has a 13% approval rating but some crazy high reelection rate. The reason for this is simple – people just don't have the time to research the individual senators and representatives and understand their policy positions, so it's just easier to consolidate all of the power under a small number of individuals.
I agree with everything you're saying, although it'll be interesting to see whether the pendulum actually swings back as far when the left gets into power. one of the asymmetries between the left and the right is the fact that the left are disproportionately represented in the institutions, whereas the right is disproportionately disenfranchised. so the right will always have more of an incentive to tear things down and start over, at least in the near future. this also ties into the gender divide between the two parties.
Whenever a Democrat is in office again, they will not only attempt to undo what Elon Musk has been doing, but they will also surely take steps to try and prevent anything like it from being attempted ever again. It will be interesting to see what that looks like. When Democrats have a trifecta again, I would expect legislation aimed at preventing another DOGE.
Maybe — but democrats were the ones who created doge (originally named the US digital services).
I think there is a valid criticism against the Democrats going back to the Clinton administration that they have largely become the party of the status quo and bureaucracy.
If musk is employing a “move fast and break things mentality“ the Democrats employ a “move incredibly slow and never fix things“ mentality.
Still, I can definitely see things swinging back in the opposite direction (something that I wrote about most recently on my own Substack). But I think it’ll require an entire breakdown of the DNC apparatus before it does
Well yes, what I mean would be attempting to block a repeat of how DOGE is being used, which is as Elon Musk's personal commissars who essentially run the entire rest of the government answering only to the President (if even him). The US Digital Service did not do this.
You're assuming the Democratic Party as we know it survives. That's a big assumption. Trump is changing the paradigm, and the kooks, weirdos, and psychopaths running the Party may very well have to give way to a saner, more intelligent bunch to save the Party from total destruction. A turning like this can produce an entirely new set of accepted ideas and attitudes, especially when they've been brutally suppressed and they make more sense than the prevailing fatuousness.The trans nonsense, for instance, may soon be as unfashionable as leisure suits.
I’d prefer a softer transition, but that’s no longer possible.
Congress is not interested in doing its job, and hasn’t been for decades.
Without Musk, the US will be bankrupt by 2035. Interest is the third largest expense in the budget; larger than the military; and the budget deficit continues to grow.
“When something can’t go on indefinitely, then at some point, it will stop.”
That point is approaching quickly. We can stop it now in a controlled process, or we can stop it in an uncontrolled way later (probably around 2035).
I think this would be a valid point if Elon Musk were actually attempting to do anything about the federal deficit. He is not, or rather technically he is, in the same sense that a child throwing a pebble at a tank is attempting to destroy it. The entire federal workforce--all of it--is around 5% of the budget. Foreign aid is 1%. Even if he could completely wipe these things out, it would make little difference.
The three things that will make us bankrupt are entitlements, debt servicing, and defense spending--and it's mostly the former two. Donald Trump has explicitly pledged not to touch them. Eliminating a few million dollars in waste/fraud here and there will not do anything in the big picture. The only way to avoid bankruptcy will be to actually cut spending on these things, and Trump has moved the Republican party quite heavily *away* from doing that. If you are actually that worried about this, you should prefer the early 2010s Tea Party to MAGA, as Republicans at that time were far more vocal about the debt and actually did make it one of their main concerns.
Musk in the most recent White House meeting said there may be over $1T waste and fraud. He said combine that with gdp growth and lower interest rates and the deficit goes to zero in a couple years. I don't necessarily think he's right but that's quite different from what you're saying.
If Elon Musk finds and eliminates over $1 trillion in waste and fraud, obviously I'd re-assess my statements at that point. That goes for double if the deficit actually somehow goes to zero.
Donald Trump’s party, which is currently in control of the House, just passed a budget resolution that takes deficits significantly HIGHER. What on earth makes you think that Trump or Musk actually intend to bring the deficit down, after Trump added almost $8T of debt in his first presidency? At what point do you admit that this joke about bringing down deficits is playing the public for fools?
At some point, probably fairly soon, the interest on the public debt will be the single largest expense in the budget. Indeed, the interest expense will, on current trends, exceed the US tax income. When this happens, the US will be effectively bankrupt.
When precisely will this happen? My guess is in the mid-to-late 2030s.
Should the Congress be cutting taxes? IMO,no; while I wouldn't support tax increases, I also don't support tax cuts.
"It is not sustainable for the consequences of losing elections to become more and more severe every time that one is lost."
This is already the case, and has been for a very long time.
"This would have created strong incentives for other political actors to accept Trump’s administration as legitimate and normalize his movement, allowing them to cede ground on issues that they were losing anyways and save some face without their core interests being threatened."
Given the rabid histrionics from the Left that we've been enduring for almost a decade now, what makes you believe this is a plausible outcome of Trump moderating his agenda?
>This is already the case, and has been for a very long time.<
No, it is only a development of the past 10-15 years; or perhaps you could argue that it only really ramped up within that timeframe. Regardless, the choices are to either try and stop the trend, or embrace it and thus also embrace eventual civil strife and state collapse. If someone wants to actually argue for the latter I'd be interested to hear it. So far I have only seen people expressing the dishonest belief that they can somehow have their cake and eat it too on this question.
>Given the rabid histrionics from the Left that we've been enduring for almost a decade now, what makes you believe this is a plausible outcome of Trump moderating his agenda?<
I don't believe that the Right, now that it has achieved substantial political power and the cultural winds are blowing in its favor, ought to moderate its positions or renege on its promises to voters for the sake of attempting to appease a *demonstrably unappeasable* Left.
Outcomes are driven by incentives when the target of those incentives is a rational actor. When the target in question is an ideological fanatic, with only a tenuous grip on realities as obvious as sexual dimorphism, I don't believe the carrot is any longer a viable option. The stick is required.
Everyone is a rational actor eventually. Perhaps more importantly, ideological fanatics are only ever small minorities seeking to lead around the more pliable majority.
I agree that Trump shouldn't renege on his promises to voters, hence why I agree with his taking decisive action on the various issues that caused people to support him. "I will burn down the federal government" may have been one of his promises, sort of, but I don't think it's the main reason most people voted for him (although admittedly many are fine with it happening). What I think has happened is that someone who does have burning the state as his priority (Musk) has successfully inserted himself into the administration and is now using it to forward his own agenda. That agenda may align with mine in some places, but such an alignment is temporary at best, and in the big picture it certainly does not represent my values.
I keep seeing this word "left" being used. Who is it supposed to be describing? One day the left is all misguided youth and some college professors and the next they've been running everything into the ground for generations. Since I've been alive (1968) I can't think of one President who could be described as remotely leftist. Certainly we've never had a congress full of leftists. Is ALEC a leftist run corporate lobbying/legislative group? Might as well complain about the unicorns. Nice sneaking of the word "trannyshit" into the piece as well to let us know your real concerns.
I will add that many commenters here seem to misunderstand why Trump was reelected: because people wanted to go back to "pre-2020 normal" (mostly, no massive inflation or immigration). Bringing up Milei as a parallel is a bad example because his main promise was drastically scaling back the government (and he did it, by 30 per cent under a year). Voters in Argentina effectively said that "things have been run in a bad way for decades, let's try something radical to change it!"
Now, many MAGA Republicans (among them, most of the commenters) actually agree with this sentiment, but the low-information voters who decide elections probably didn't and if the drastic shakeup of the federal government (or Trump's tariffs) has negative repercussions, they will turn against him.
That said, "breaking down things" is easier than building them back, and this favors Republicans here. As Ryan Davidson writes, most liberal-leaning federal workers who are dismissed from the government probably won't come back when the Democrats take power again.
Also, a common sentiment among hardcore Republicans/conservatives is that when Democrats/liberals offer compromise, it's not long-lasting, just a temporary truce so that they can gather power and drive cultural change again - at least that's the conclusion they have drawn after the the "conservative turn" of the 1980s and 1990s (on welfare spending, crime etc) was followed by a liberal turn under Obama.
They trans kids and rioted in every major city and had millions of illegals to punish the population. There is no going back to normal we need to get over that
I didn’t vote for Trump or the DEI hire, but there are several things that he has done in his first month that I agree with.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
"The basic reason Donald Trump came back into power is that people wanted things to go back to normal. Joe Biden came into power in 2020 with that being the promise—elect me, and things will go back to normal."
No, and this is a very bad take for the reason that everyone now knows that the previous 'normal' is precisely what brought us here.
As an example imagine a house burglar surrenders when you draw your gun and he says, "Hey, how about we just go to the previous norm where you were asleep in your room and I was just quietly lurking outside? Let's call it even". For the very obvious reason that the burglar has an agenda and a history of predating on you the previous norm both cannot be tolerated and was not secure enough to protect against him.
Even more on point is the moronic NAFO types who want to try and unwind Ukraine by going back to the exact same norm that led to the NATO military encroachment that started the fight in the first place. Instead we get the absolutely cowardly take of, "Hey man, liberals might be upset that we don't let them rape kids. Let's just let them do it because I don't want to be yelled at"
You said that Trump wouldn't win, couldn't win, and if he did win, he would be a loser that was too dumb, egotistical, and timid to actually accomplish anything. You said he was a millstone around the neck of the right and that we'd never win anything with him.
Now you are complaining that he's being too ruthless and aggressive against a state who not only bent all its faculties to destroy him (including in all likelihood, multiple assassination attempts) but is also being revealed to be gigantically, fabulously, hilariously corrupt, even beyond that contemplated in the most fevered imaginations of the Coast to Coast AM set. Like, sure, the state is a grift, but who would have imagined that it's literally the main source of income for initiatives to replace the native population of Norway or keeping Politico in the black?
Maybe you should just accept that you've been wrong about absolutely everything related to Trump and will continue to be wrong in the future, and shut up.
He just wants to grill.
Sometimes you have to clean out your grill.
Trump is proving to be exactly the loser we all said he was. He is rudderless, and being used by various factions all vying for power and control. He has already weakened the U.S. abroad to an unprecedented degree. The Chinese and Russians cannot believe their good fortune. And Trump is already failing to secure the Southern Border. With no functioning Federal Governments in place we will basically be relying on corrupt structures like ICE who happily cut lucrative deals with the cartels. Notice how incredibly ineffective the Trump administration has already been at „mass deportations“. Nothing is happening other than massive theft and grift.
Grab a rifle and a plane ticket to Ukraine while there's still time.
To be fair...he would be the first volunteer that Ukraine would say "Nah...We good" to.
I don't even like Trump but this is peak cuck.
"The basic reason Donald Trump came back into power is that people wanted things to go back to normal."
That's where you're wrong. Did you really think that the optimal move here was to "de-escalate and make some degree of peace with the establishment and the left"? That ship has long since sailed. I cannot imagine how you could possibly think that was realistic, let alone desirable. No, Trump came back into power to raze the establishment and the left to the f*cking ground.
I for one, will be content when their bones are ground into powder. They deserve nothing less for what they've done, and what they'd continue to do if you got your way.
Maybe you don't like that. I really don't care, Margaret. I and many others are way, way past pretending that the state of affairs you call "normal" is ever coming back. The world you grew up in no longer exists. The sooner you come to terms with that, the better off you'll be.
"One reason I did not want to vote for Trump was the way in which whatever good he managed to do in his first term was immediately reversed and then some by Biden—as of now, it seems certain that this will be the case once again at some point in the relatively near future."
You're wrong about that, too. Yes, Trump is issuing a lot of executive orders that it will be trivial for a subsequent administration to reverse. Whatever. Even a temporary reprieve is better than nothing.
But what you're missing is that this isn't all Trump is doing. Trump is destroying an organic, bureaucratic ecosystem that took decades to build. Such ecosystems can absorb a remarkable amount of punishment and keep on trucking. What they can't absorb is massive discontinuities in funding or personnel. Put more concretely, yes, fiddling with top-line policies may be very easy to reverse, but firing a lot of people is not. Discontinuing programs, even temporarily isn't either, precisely because it often leads to firing a lot of people.
The reason this is so difficult for organizations to recover from is that once people leave, you can never get all of them back. The more time elapses after a person is let go, the harder it is to get them back. People get other jobs. Sometimes they like the new jobs. Even if they don't, some non-trivial percentage of them will decide to stay where they are rather than go through the disruption of switching jobs a second time. This is particularly true for people who wind up relocating, and the percentage of people who do that only goes up over time. Assuming Trump continues to get his way on these issues, which I think likely, it will be at least four years (hopefully twelve!) before a new administration can change course. That's a very, very long time in terms of organizational discontinuity.
Also, in this particular case, a lot of federal employees will likely have opted for some form of retirement, early or otherwise. Getting them to come back into the office will be almost impossible. They've simply no incentive to return.
All of which to say that while it is certainly possible for a new Democratic administration to reverse a lot of the decisions Trump has made now, the damage he is doing to the Deep State is likely to have a very long-lasting impact. Which is why Regime flunkies are screaming so loudly. They understand this.
Why don't you?
You may very well be correct that the administrative state will never again be as large or as powerful as it was previously. I am not yet convinced that there is no danger in the steps that are being taken to achieve this. Any weapon that is wielded by one side will eventually be taken up by the other. If the administrative state gives way to a new normal in which the President's word becomes much closer to law, the next Democratic administration will operate in that way too--and may thus be able to enforce its will in ways that it couldn't previously.
What planet have you been living on?
The administrative state has long since given way to a new normal in which the President's word--or lack thereof--is law. Seriously. This isn't wielding a new weapon that may one day be used by a Democratic administration. This is wielding a weapon Democratic administrations have been using for decades.
You also fail to recognize the fact that all of the actions which rustle your jimmies here involve the President wielding executive authority over the Executive Branch directly. Federal employees. The President has always had almost untrammeled authority there. This is very, very different from attempting to impose obligations or prohibitions upon anyone who isn't a federal employee. And nothing Trump has done has moved that needle a millimeter.
The legality of many of Trump's recent actions is tenuous at best. But if we're being honest, no one really cares about whether any of it is technically legal or not. The core issue here is the attitude that the executive branch--originally intended simply to *execute* policies determined by Congress--will instead use its authority over the bureaucracy to simply set its own policy agenda while ignoring Congress (and even the judiciary) as much as possible. Perhaps you think that's a good thing because it's your side that currently benefits from it. I am more cautious.
>Bill Clinton gets rid of hundreds of thousands of federal employees
>Person Online sleeps
>Trump gets rid of less than half of that
>REAL SHIT
Again, all the things you're worried might happen have been happening for a long, long time now.
It's not cool to bring a knife to a fist fight. We all agree about that. The issue here is that you're pretending this still a fist fight after the other guy has stabbed you multiple times. This is not "cautious," it's just pathetic.
All of this is predicated on your belief in the Deep State lie. Dispel that lie and your entire line of reasoning crumbles.
Say what now?
Bull. Never had personal loyalty tests. Never had mass random layoffs. Never made foreign bribery legal. Never made race discrimination legal. The basic difference you refuse to see is that FDR and LBJ took action the HELP regular people, while Trump takes action to help only RICH cronies. And mainly himself. He thinks Gaza is his new property. 🤪
Cool story, bro.
Can you explain to me how this fits with Biden accepting the courts’ overturning of much of his student loan forgiveness plan?
Next, can you reconcile this with the SCOTUS Chevron decision?
Why don’t you be honest will all of us and admit you want Trump as Dictator, and not pretend what we are seeing today looks like anything we have seen before (in this country).
Trump has prepared well. All of his moves so far have been within his constitutional powers as Chief Executive. The only one on shaky ground constitutionally is declaring an end to birthright citizenship. The rest, despite the intervention of corrupt judges, is his right to do. The USAID and Treasury revelations have uncovered a mess of corruption that is almost unfathomably huge. Our own tax money and government institutions have been used against us, to succor our enemies, attack our rights to free expression, suppress opposition, and destroy our culture and traditions. Not to mention enrich a bunch of criminals.
If cleaning that up isn't the President's job as head of the Executive, whose is it? And how is he supposed to attack such entrenched corruption without offending your sense of decorum?
He already broke a bunch of laws. You just believe your fairy tale Dictator Executive theory.
Also they haven't found any corruption. You are delusional.
Interesting. So you don't think that the gravy train of money going to bribe foreign and domestic news media is in any way corrupt? Or the massive amount of money that simply disappeared, with no indication of where it went? Hmm ...
This right here is 10,000% why I shifted from "Trump is gonna have another dumb boomer Presidency" to "it is a shame Trump is so old, otherwise it would have been a Hail Caesar moment"
“I for one, will be content when their bones are ground into powder.” ~Ryan Davidson, calling for another holocaust, c. 2025
"Another holocaust..."
Dude, if yer not a bot, then you're a meme gained sentience.
How else would you interpret someone expressing joy at the prospect of a large group of people’s bones being ground into powder?
Hyperbole. Quit being deliberately thick.
How do you know what he means, Bryce?
This is a permanent realignment, not just another 4-year cycle. The signs are all over the place. The lack of constitutional restraint, ie acting until someone is willing and able to stop you, has been politically acceptable since the boomers replaced the silents around 2000. Trump is using that tactic to finally kill the rotten institutions that are prolonging solvable problems. After that, a new consensus will allow a return to less disruptive tactics.
I think solving our problems is going to be disruptive in ways that shock and dismay the average American in ways we can’t imagine right now. This isn’t about whether Team R or Team D occupies the White House, but whoever is unlucky enough to be there when things hit the fan over the next decade is going to take the blame.
We know for sure that entitlements are about to become insolvent. The dollar’s status as global reserve currency will continue to get squeezed by a variety of macroeconomic factors. We’re also drifting into an pre-WWI arrangement amongst the world’s great powers.
We’ll see how it all shakes out, but a hard reset on America’s global position and domestic economy is coming. I hope Trump and Musk are factoring that in to what they’re doing right now so the landing is as soft as possible.
Universal democracy is an aberration in history, and more importantly, it has not existed in the US at all in the post WW2 period. The elite have run the west as a media and bureaucracy driven state since 1945, if not since 1913, and the awful excess of the Biden years was the natural conclusion of this era.
Whatever comes of Trump and Musk's work, it won't be a return to the 1990s or even the 1950s, but an entirely different entity. My guess is a technology and AI driven rightwing globalist state.
Sounds disgusting.
I think one of the reasons why people are ambivalent about Trump and musk consolidating power into the executive branch is that Congress has a 13% approval rating but some crazy high reelection rate. The reason for this is simple – people just don't have the time to research the individual senators and representatives and understand their policy positions, so it's just easier to consolidate all of the power under a small number of individuals.
I agree with everything you're saying, although it'll be interesting to see whether the pendulum actually swings back as far when the left gets into power. one of the asymmetries between the left and the right is the fact that the left are disproportionately represented in the institutions, whereas the right is disproportionately disenfranchised. so the right will always have more of an incentive to tear things down and start over, at least in the near future. this also ties into the gender divide between the two parties.
Whenever a Democrat is in office again, they will not only attempt to undo what Elon Musk has been doing, but they will also surely take steps to try and prevent anything like it from being attempted ever again. It will be interesting to see what that looks like. When Democrats have a trifecta again, I would expect legislation aimed at preventing another DOGE.
Maybe — but democrats were the ones who created doge (originally named the US digital services).
I think there is a valid criticism against the Democrats going back to the Clinton administration that they have largely become the party of the status quo and bureaucracy.
If musk is employing a “move fast and break things mentality“ the Democrats employ a “move incredibly slow and never fix things“ mentality.
Still, I can definitely see things swinging back in the opposite direction (something that I wrote about most recently on my own Substack). But I think it’ll require an entire breakdown of the DNC apparatus before it does
Well yes, what I mean would be attempting to block a repeat of how DOGE is being used, which is as Elon Musk's personal commissars who essentially run the entire rest of the government answering only to the President (if even him). The US Digital Service did not do this.
Musk is not going to fix anything
You're assuming the Democratic Party as we know it survives. That's a big assumption. Trump is changing the paradigm, and the kooks, weirdos, and psychopaths running the Party may very well have to give way to a saner, more intelligent bunch to save the Party from total destruction. A turning like this can produce an entirely new set of accepted ideas and attitudes, especially when they've been brutally suppressed and they make more sense than the prevailing fatuousness.The trans nonsense, for instance, may soon be as unfashionable as leisure suits.
No - no party in power will ever limit their own power. The best we can hope for is a party going out of office to change the rules.
I’d prefer a softer transition, but that’s no longer possible.
Congress is not interested in doing its job, and hasn’t been for decades.
Without Musk, the US will be bankrupt by 2035. Interest is the third largest expense in the budget; larger than the military; and the budget deficit continues to grow.
“When something can’t go on indefinitely, then at some point, it will stop.”
That point is approaching quickly. We can stop it now in a controlled process, or we can stop it in an uncontrolled way later (probably around 2035).
I’d rather do it now.
I think this would be a valid point if Elon Musk were actually attempting to do anything about the federal deficit. He is not, or rather technically he is, in the same sense that a child throwing a pebble at a tank is attempting to destroy it. The entire federal workforce--all of it--is around 5% of the budget. Foreign aid is 1%. Even if he could completely wipe these things out, it would make little difference.
The three things that will make us bankrupt are entitlements, debt servicing, and defense spending--and it's mostly the former two. Donald Trump has explicitly pledged not to touch them. Eliminating a few million dollars in waste/fraud here and there will not do anything in the big picture. The only way to avoid bankruptcy will be to actually cut spending on these things, and Trump has moved the Republican party quite heavily *away* from doing that. If you are actually that worried about this, you should prefer the early 2010s Tea Party to MAGA, as Republicans at that time were far more vocal about the debt and actually did make it one of their main concerns.
Musk in the most recent White House meeting said there may be over $1T waste and fraud. He said combine that with gdp growth and lower interest rates and the deficit goes to zero in a couple years. I don't necessarily think he's right but that's quite different from what you're saying.
If Elon Musk finds and eliminates over $1 trillion in waste and fraud, obviously I'd re-assess my statements at that point. That goes for double if the deficit actually somehow goes to zero.
What makes you think I didn’t support the Tea Party?
And yes, Musk’s current efforts will not solve the problem. But nobody else is doing anything. I see it as a start. As necessary, but not sufficient.
Yes, I know about Ron Paul. What problems did he solve?
No it wasn’t. The Tea Party was dead by 2016; suborned by Con Inc.
The energy of the tea party was gone as early as 2012, tbh. The grifting started as soon as the tea party started.
Unfortunately yes. All previous conservative movements have been impotent. If one of them had had a spine, perhaps we wouldn't be here right now.
Donald Trump’s party, which is currently in control of the House, just passed a budget resolution that takes deficits significantly HIGHER. What on earth makes you think that Trump or Musk actually intend to bring the deficit down, after Trump added almost $8T of debt in his first presidency? At what point do you admit that this joke about bringing down deficits is playing the public for fools?
Elon keeps talking about how he's going to eliminate "$1 trillion" in waste, fraud and abuse. I think he's just delusional and high on his own supply.
How would it go bankrupt exactly? And no Musk is not going to bring the deficit down, it is up to the congress. Instead they are cutting taxes.
At some point, probably fairly soon, the interest on the public debt will be the single largest expense in the budget. Indeed, the interest expense will, on current trends, exceed the US tax income. When this happens, the US will be effectively bankrupt.
When precisely will this happen? My guess is in the mid-to-late 2030s.
Should the Congress be cutting taxes? IMO,no; while I wouldn't support tax increases, I also don't support tax cuts.
"It is not sustainable for the consequences of losing elections to become more and more severe every time that one is lost."
This is already the case, and has been for a very long time.
"This would have created strong incentives for other political actors to accept Trump’s administration as legitimate and normalize his movement, allowing them to cede ground on issues that they were losing anyways and save some face without their core interests being threatened."
Given the rabid histrionics from the Left that we've been enduring for almost a decade now, what makes you believe this is a plausible outcome of Trump moderating his agenda?
>This is already the case, and has been for a very long time.<
No, it is only a development of the past 10-15 years; or perhaps you could argue that it only really ramped up within that timeframe. Regardless, the choices are to either try and stop the trend, or embrace it and thus also embrace eventual civil strife and state collapse. If someone wants to actually argue for the latter I'd be interested to hear it. So far I have only seen people expressing the dishonest belief that they can somehow have their cake and eat it too on this question.
>Given the rabid histrionics from the Left that we've been enduring for almost a decade now, what makes you believe this is a plausible outcome of Trump moderating his agenda?<
Because outcomes are always driven by incentives.
I don't believe that the Right, now that it has achieved substantial political power and the cultural winds are blowing in its favor, ought to moderate its positions or renege on its promises to voters for the sake of attempting to appease a *demonstrably unappeasable* Left.
Outcomes are driven by incentives when the target of those incentives is a rational actor. When the target in question is an ideological fanatic, with only a tenuous grip on realities as obvious as sexual dimorphism, I don't believe the carrot is any longer a viable option. The stick is required.
Everyone is a rational actor eventually. Perhaps more importantly, ideological fanatics are only ever small minorities seeking to lead around the more pliable majority.
I agree that Trump shouldn't renege on his promises to voters, hence why I agree with his taking decisive action on the various issues that caused people to support him. "I will burn down the federal government" may have been one of his promises, sort of, but I don't think it's the main reason most people voted for him (although admittedly many are fine with it happening). What I think has happened is that someone who does have burning the state as his priority (Musk) has successfully inserted himself into the administration and is now using it to forward his own agenda. That agenda may align with mine in some places, but such an alignment is temporary at best, and in the big picture it certainly does not represent my values.
Stopped reading at the word “trannyshit”- never heard a word so dumb
I keep seeing this word "left" being used. Who is it supposed to be describing? One day the left is all misguided youth and some college professors and the next they've been running everything into the ground for generations. Since I've been alive (1968) I can't think of one President who could be described as remotely leftist. Certainly we've never had a congress full of leftists. Is ALEC a leftist run corporate lobbying/legislative group? Might as well complain about the unicorns. Nice sneaking of the word "trannyshit" into the piece as well to let us know your real concerns.
Good article!
I will add that many commenters here seem to misunderstand why Trump was reelected: because people wanted to go back to "pre-2020 normal" (mostly, no massive inflation or immigration). Bringing up Milei as a parallel is a bad example because his main promise was drastically scaling back the government (and he did it, by 30 per cent under a year). Voters in Argentina effectively said that "things have been run in a bad way for decades, let's try something radical to change it!"
Now, many MAGA Republicans (among them, most of the commenters) actually agree with this sentiment, but the low-information voters who decide elections probably didn't and if the drastic shakeup of the federal government (or Trump's tariffs) has negative repercussions, they will turn against him.
That said, "breaking down things" is easier than building them back, and this favors Republicans here. As Ryan Davidson writes, most liberal-leaning federal workers who are dismissed from the government probably won't come back when the Democrats take power again.
Also, a common sentiment among hardcore Republicans/conservatives is that when Democrats/liberals offer compromise, it's not long-lasting, just a temporary truce so that they can gather power and drive cultural change again - at least that's the conclusion they have drawn after the the "conservative turn" of the 1980s and 1990s (on welfare spending, crime etc) was followed by a liberal turn under Obama.
They trans kids and rioted in every major city and had millions of illegals to punish the population. There is no going back to normal we need to get over that
I didn’t vote for Trump or the DEI hire, but there are several things that he has done in his first month that I agree with.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
Most retarded article award
"The basic reason Donald Trump came back into power is that people wanted things to go back to normal. Joe Biden came into power in 2020 with that being the promise—elect me, and things will go back to normal."
No, and this is a very bad take for the reason that everyone now knows that the previous 'normal' is precisely what brought us here.
As an example imagine a house burglar surrenders when you draw your gun and he says, "Hey, how about we just go to the previous norm where you were asleep in your room and I was just quietly lurking outside? Let's call it even". For the very obvious reason that the burglar has an agenda and a history of predating on you the previous norm both cannot be tolerated and was not secure enough to protect against him.
Even more on point is the moronic NAFO types who want to try and unwind Ukraine by going back to the exact same norm that led to the NATO military encroachment that started the fight in the first place. Instead we get the absolutely cowardly take of, "Hey man, liberals might be upset that we don't let them rape kids. Let's just let them do it because I don't want to be yelled at"
He is destroying the unelected fourth branch of government, and thank God for that.