So, I was an hour late for work clearing the stupid snow this morning. Well, because of the snow and because I’m overly optimistic when it comes to estimating snow removal time. Or maybe I’m too lazy to get up that early. But it all got done and the world didn’t end and so I can move along with my day and week.
Yesterday Trump ordered sanctions against Canada, Mexico and China. Today Canada and Mexico came to terms by agreeing to Trump’s border security requirements and got a reprieve of a month on the tariffs to prove their good faith. And Panama has agreed not to extend China’s management of the canal.
And today I listened to Marco Rubio declaring USAID a rogue agency that will now be brought to heel for ignoring orders to account for who it has been giving money to.
Could this be “Little Marco” sounding more like Donald Trump, or at least an ally of Donald Trump and America? Has the world gone topsy-turvy? Or is it just that no one has ever stood his ground against the bureaucrats, influence peddlers and sycophants that infest Washington and waste our money by the imperial ton. Seeing the progress of Trump’s seemingly endless initiatives I can’t help but think that this is the first man to stand up to the bureaucracy. Ever! And it occurs to me that all those impossible things we heard about; defying the FBI and the CIA, and finding out what actually gets done with the defense budget, and reining in the EPA; all of these unattainable goals can be had for the cost of doing the hard work to find out what the bureaucrats actually do all day, and using presidential power to hold them accountable.
I was reading the ZMan’s post today comparing Trump to Isaac Asimov’s character the Mule in his classic science fiction series Foundation. The Mule was an outlier because his mutant psychic talent was not predicted by Hari Seldon’s “psychohistory.” And so, he blew up all of the best laid plans of the Foundation. ZMan thinks that Trump is the destructor laying waste to the managerial state (aka the Deep State). Well, I don’t disagree with that analogy. But maybe he’ll be more than that. Maybe he’ll be like the child who wasn’t afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes. And imagine if that lesson gets learned by not only JD Vance but even Marco Rubio. Now, of course, most of these Republican Senators and Congressmen are crooks and they want the payoffs from the defense and pharma lobbyists. But even if it’s only a handful of honest men, Trump has let the American people in on the secret and anyone who wants to inherit his mantle will have to call out the corruption, waste and inefficiency of the bureaucracy and get us our money back from the crooks that infest Washington.
I’m starting to get hopeful that Trump is going to take a chainsaw to the budget. And he has several incentives. Reducing government excesses will lower the debt, rein in inflation and lower taxes. But it will also starve his enemies of funds with which to attack him. They won’t be able to hand out millions of dollars to left-wing crazies. And the NGOs are where most of Trump’s enemies work when the Democrats are out of the White House. Losing their cozy perches and lucrative salaries will frighten them out of their wits. And that is exactly when they’ll be least likely to cause trouble. They’ll be forced to scramble to find a new source of income and they’ll lose the microphones they typically have to organize trouble for conservatives.
I don’t want to sound like a Pollyana. It’s not as if the Left no longer controls most of the institutions; the schools, the universities, the Media, Hollywood, the book publishers and most of Silicon Valley. But Trump has show us that controlling the White House can be incredibly helpful in throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of the Deep State. And since the Deep State at this point is the Left, it’s causing our enemies fear and pain.
Good.
Points of optimism for you: You say the Left controls most of the institutions; the schools, the universities, the Media, Hollywood, the book publishers and most of Silicon Valley. Our schools are failing and school choice is getting bigger every day. Trump may well end the Dept of Education. The Universities are losing students and power – that means influence as well. The old media is dying. The new media (Twitter, podcasts, etc) is ascendant. Hollywood is burning and will probably disperse into other states as CA is too expensive. The legacy book publishers are becoming more irrelevant every day… Read more »
You bring up some good points. But we are trying to come back from a pretty awful crash. Well, optimism is good.
I agree that Trump will be more than the Mule. Zman has the Mule = Destructor = Trump. I think Trump has a rebuilding plan. I consider downsizing USAID and putting it under the DOS and eliminating the DOE as positives. Decreasing the budget, etc–pretty much like you said. A friend of mine came up with
the phrase “Schadenfreude on Steroids” about Trump’s many doings. I sort of like “SoS” on a hat/bumper sticker.
There’s a lot of excitement right now. Like you, I’m hoping Trump has a well worked out plan. He’s gonna have a lot of angry Leftists trying to wreck his work. But I admit I’m feeling optimistic.
I wake up every day excited to see what new thing Trump and his team have come up with.
He is making it interesting.