Musk is scrambling for change behind the sofa. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.
The Rafah Riviera. The withdrawal from Ukraine. The Republican proposal, apparently serious, to rename Greenland “Red, White, and Blueland”. In foreign policy alone, the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term have been bewildering: radical, revolutionary even, smashing decades of settled policy at a stroke. Yet listen to observers across the political spectrum, and all this pales compared to what’s happening inside America’s borders.
To supporters and detractors alike, the Department of Government Efficiency promises to remake the republic. Already, the media is stuffed with lurid stories of teenagers accessing the US Treasury Department’s archaic payment systems, even as swathes of the bureaucracy have already been defunded. Given USAID alone boasted an annual budget of $40 billion, it’s clear change is coming, and that’s before Elon Musk’s outfit gets to the $500 billion of government spending supposedly “unauthorised” by Congress.
Yet if the Right heralds the demise of the pen-pushers, and their liberal opponents fear the rise of an American Caesar, the truth is far less impressive. Whatever the sluggishness of DC’s civil servants, DOGE barely scratches the surface of government spending. And besides, worrying about waste, let alone fantasy projects abroad, ignores the real problem — that US democracy is fundamentally broken, that Congress is incompetent, and that none of the country’s basic challenges, from immigration to jobs, can be solved by its exhausted class of ancien régime failures.
In basic terms, DOGE is Trump’s attempt to assert wider control over the way the government handles its finances. This flies in the face of well-established American norms. The US Constitution clearly states that the federal government is supposed to operate on a division of powers: appropriating money is meant to be the prerogative of the legislature in the form of Congress. It is Congress that decides what the government will spend money on, how much money to spend, and when to spend it. The role of the president is simply to handle implementation.
Trump and Musk argue that the discretion the president has in implementing the decisions by Congress should include the right to defund government agencies — if, that is, the president deems they’re not doing their job properly. Certainly, that’s the argument Trump’s lawyers are busy making, even as their claims wobble between acceptable political manoeuvring and an unconstitutional power grab. Just a few weeks in, Trump and DOGE are unsurprisingly drowning in court challenges, injunctions, and other legal headaches. An increasing number of Trump’s supporters are getting impatient, clamouring for the day when he simply tells the judges to take a hike. As Andrew Jackson once said of a Supreme Court justice: “Marshall has made his decision, now let’s see him enforce it.”
At the surface, this feels like a very serious drama. The world’s richest man, an erratic and unaccountable billionaire, has been set loose on the federal government — boasting undefined powers to wreck the republic. The reality, though, is rather more mundane. To understand this, you must appreciate the scale of DOGE’s sweep. Yes, it’s easy to mock USAID for schemes such as the $70,000 spent on a “DEI musical” in Ireland. Yet when placed next to the full size of the national budget, Musk is conducting the administrative equivalent of scrambling about for change behind the sofa.
After all, the government today runs a deficit close to $2 trillion a year. To fund this deficit, it borrows roughly $10 billion each and every day. It’s important to realise here that while most countries do have some kind of national debt, the size and trajectory of America’s deficit is different. In 2000, the national debt was some $5.7 trillion dollars. In 2017, when Trump first took office, it was $20 trillion. Now, it’s over $36 trillion, putting unsustainable pressure on defence and social welfare costs. Even the most generous accounting of what Musk and Trump have achieved so far boils down to a few hours of US debt. And that’s if they can defend it all in court, and make it stick — and there’s no guarantee of that.
DOGE, in short, is a gimmick. Any meaningful control of US government spending can’t be attained through bureaucratic jiu-jitsu or legal trickery. To really cut the deficit, Trump would either have to literally crown himself king and abolish the Constitution, or else go to Congress and get them to actually do the job the Founding Fathers gave them. But Trump can’t do either of these things. If he simply ruled by decree, a polarised nation would explode into civil war. Yet, as bleak as that sounds, it might actually be more realistic than having Congress appropriate the funds. The legislature can nowadays barely pass the stop-gap, temporary funding measures it uses in lieu of actual budgets to prevent government shutdowns. The last time Congress passed all its required bills on time was in 1996, and over the last 40 years it has only managed to complete the appropriations process a grand total of four times.
Where, then, does that leave the president? In a word, trapped: in a political system collapsing round his ears. To take one practical example, consider the so-called “mass deportations” Trump promised pre-election, with his supporters hoping that once he assumed office, decades of illegal immigration could be upended in an orgy of raids and detentions. To a lot of Trump’s followers, deportation almost seemed like a matter of willpower: as long as you simply wanted it hard enough, anything could be done.
Yet once Trump was finally sworn in, nothing much happened. The administration initially promised to publish the daily number of arrests and deportations. Soon enough, though, people realised that Trump wasn’t doing a much better job than Joe Biden, let alone Barack Obama. The administration’s deportations are hitting a “wall” as the limitations of funding, facility space, and personnel become ever more acute. But the hype must go on: The Guardian even discovered the White House was gaming Google search results to create the illusion of activity, with old press releases given 2025 timestamps.
Eventually, the administration simply stopped talking about mass deportations. The stories that now do come out are mostly bad, and Trumpworld is back to doing what the President himself attacked Biden for: letting arrested illegal immigrants go free because of a lack of detention capacity. That gets to the heart of the problem. Building a detention centre is less an act of will, and more about planning and resourcing. But the US government simply does not have the capacity to fulfil these dreams of “mass deportations” in the medium term. That would require additional officers and cells and aircraft, none of which the country ultimately has.
There are other examples here, too, from the Mexico border wall to reshoring jobs. All these projects require the legislature to cooperate, to pass laws and appropriate funds. But, again, it’s an open secret that what the Trump administration most dreads is having to abandon executive orders — which give the appearance of strength — and wrangle enough votes in the House and the Senate. When that happens, Trump’s mirage of strength will vanish.
In theory, of course, he could get Congress to find the cash to build his camps and finish the wall and bring the factories home. That, certainly, is what the legislature is there for. But, at this point, everyone knows Congress has become too broken to do the job, and its failures since 1996 are merely the start. First, consider the question of polarisation. With politicians ever more focused on painting their opponents as evil, actually working together has become near-impossible. Then there’s that ballooning deficit. At this point, the threat of Weimar-style hyperinflation, or else a government default, hangs over Congress like the Sword of Damocles, as an increasing share of the federal revenues are gobbled up by debt servicing. At the moment, over 25 cents on every dollar that the federal government makes goes towards paying interest on its debt, leaving precious little for other things.
Add to that a gaggle of special interests — healthcare, for one, uses lobbying and campaign financing to keep state spending high — and America’s ledger remains grimly in the red. Like cutting the deficit, of course, Trump could simply stage a coup, placing a crown on his head and declaring that the wall will be funded and the factories built. But, once more, that’s not actually possible: most of the state apparatus would refuse to go along, to say nothing of how ordinary citizens would react.
Combined with the hopelessness of Congress, Trump’s recent obsession with tariffs, like DOGE, must therefore be seen as a sign of weakness. At first blush, that seems counterintuitive: someone constantly threatening to destroy Canada’s economy seems like someone positively drunk with power. Well, given the Constitution, Trump can’t raise taxes or appropriate money directly — but what he can do is impose tariffs on Ottawa, as long as he fibs and pretends it’s for national security reasons. That is one of the few remaining ways to raise cash now left to the man who claims to be the most powerful on earth.
The US allies trying to parse Trump’s muddled messaging — “Is he angry about fentanyl? Does he want to annex us?” — are anyway overthinking things. America is broke, politics has frozen, and the system can’t function as the Founders envisaged. No less striking, paralysis is spreading through the whole government apparatus. By all accounts, the Republicans are having an extremely tough time crafting even a temporary spending bill that the party can agree on. A deal with Democrats, it goes without saying, is increasingly unimaginable.
All the while, the deficit is only rising. Even if Congress weren’t such a mess, a massive fiscal crisis is approaching, and Trump seems destined to be president when it arrives. This isn’t exclusively his fault, though he did very little to turn the ship around during his first term in the Oval. Rather, these crises are the result of decades of systemic mismanagement, with bickering politicians and special interests burrowed deep.
Even more worryingly, we’ve been here before. In 1788, France was also drowning in debt, and also had an executive desperate trying to correct the tailspin. No less striking, the Ancien Régime also had a legislature too broken to find solutions — but not so broken it couldn’t spend its time blocking attempts at reform. As for today, future historians won’t remember the squabbles around USAID: that just isn’t the story of our age. What matters instead is a financial system in ruins, a political class out of ideas, and the inevitability of a 1789 moment sooner or later.
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SubscribeKeep drinking the Contrarian Kool-aid Malcolm, it’s been a stunningly successful three weeks. I’ve always considered myself lukewarm on Trump but he’s completely redeemed himself.
DOGE hasn’t even scratched the surface yet. It’s also now being reported that there was 135 billion dollars in Covid fraud with only 6 billion recovered thus far. There’s a potential issue with the statute of limitations but it points to a clearly identifiable problem to be addressed going forward…the treasury is being looted.
Nobody expects decades of problems to be fixed in four years. It’s about righting the ship. And we will right that ship. USA USA!!!
But Trump just doesn’t have the power to fix these problems.
“DOGE hasn’t even scratched the surface yet”
Well, why hasn’t it? Wouldn’t you start with the major items first not the trivial ones?
Arguably a Republican Congress could closely work with him to achieve something, but this seems itself extremely difficult to.achieve. The article was spot on. The political system in the US is admirable in many ways, but only works if there’s a certain amount of bipartisanship. And that is now a distant dream.
Far from being “spot on”, the article was just a hack piece with which the author seeks to make a name for himself whilst trying to create an illusion of ‘historical perspective’ with trite references to the Ancien Regime.
He’s a product of the liberal education system, with very little to recommend him but a byline in florid writing that puts the heat of Florida in the shade.
Come back next year for the minimum of rational perspective, dear author. Or rather, don’t bother. Go and do some real work.
Too often folks fall into the classic ‘only trust those who tell you what you want to hear’ LL. Folks need to listen to more to those who tell you what you don’t want to hear. As Orwell said, those are the ones to trust more.
Too often folks fall into the classic ‘only trust those who tell you what you want to hear’ LL.
Can’t decide whether the complete absence of even a scintilla of self-awareness here is funny or tragic.
He’s trying harder to listen than you these days. I don’t know what box to put you in yet either, but if and when I decide I’ll be more like you than I ever want to be.
HB is right, so was JD Vance, – try listening to him in Munich.
I suspect you are not a Brit. JW is a Blairite elitist who thinks that government should be ‘left to the people who know best’. There is, of course, no such thing as ‘the people who know best’. That’s why we need democracy. It is human nature to convince oneself that what is good for you must therefore, by definition, be good for everyone. Just as the Blairites – who are exclusively drawn from the property-owning graduate class – have convinced themselves that we need open borders because it makes them richer – and remain quite indifferent to the damage it has done to poorer people.
From our previous exchanges, you ought to remember I am a Canadian-born dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.. I’ve lived in the States, with a few interruptions, since I was 7, in 1978, What are you?
To me your labels for j watson say more about you than him. I’m not saying there’s no accuracy to them, but it is still reductive labeling. Which is one of your worst, most persistent habits.
Despite all his blind spots and excesses, he provides an important contribution to this website. One that is way more significant than your constant targeting of his posts with a one-two punch of the broadbrush and the microscope.
What are you even for, Hugh? I see little more from you than ridicule, opposition, and general negativity.
If you were a Brit you might understand that JW operates as a mouthpiece for a class in British society that has, over the past thirty years, become almost entirely parasitic. The policies he defends have resulted in the largest upward transfer of wealth in our history. People like that need to be challenged and ridiculed whenever possible.
Ok, mock on then. Hope it feels good and stays fresh. I’ll note that you seem to oppose huge upward transfers of wealth, at home and abroad.
I think a healthy economy (and society) is one in which people are rewarded for the contribution they make and the risks they take to succeed, not one in which the most reliable way to become wealthy is by gaming the system.
Amen. But I’m not sure how that comports with anything more than reluctant or qualified support for Trump or people like Musk. Elon is receiving billions from the federal government and using a selectively wielded sledgehammer to target others and quell active lawsuits against his own companies.
I don’t think you can take a real look at the facts and find that Biden is MORE corrupt than Trump. I’m sure you disagree, but that’s not a fact and you are not asserting in within any factual or balanced framework, but as a self-evident truth that needs no evidence, an article of faith or nearly so. Both corrupt, all corrupt? Sure, maybe. But we’re on a different scale with Trump the megalomaniacal TV personality. Are you a fan of Berlusconi too? He was principled and restrained by comparison.
*Follow-up thought: I just chatted with my neighbor, a white-skinned Bosnian-born Muslim mom of two teenagers. Next time my bald head catches fire I’ll try to remember her take on the Presidents’ Day holiday, which is today: “They’re all the same, believe me—they are for themselves”. Her reply when I suggested we could choose our own favorite presidents to honor.
I can’t fully agree but it seems like a true enough dose of perspective from someone born in what was Yugoslavia.
This sounds like a perfectly reasonable comment but I wonder who is who here: Are the one’s ‘gaming the system’ the big businesses that move profits around to avoid tax – or maybe the businesses that fraudulently claimed Covid payouts? Or are they the one’s at the other end of the system who each grab a few extra pounds [not millions] on cheating the benefit system. Similarly are the ‘hard workers and risk takers all the startup entrepreneurs or the people at the bottom shuffling two or three zero hour contracts. Strikes me that there is a lot of comment on here but little real objective thought.
In Britain the central problem is the parasitism of the middle class, not the very wealthy. More than £1.5 trillion has disappeared into the pockets of suburban property owners just since the pandemic. That’s enough to fix all the country’s problems. Twice. And that’s before we talk about all the other scams, the unfunded pensions, the NGOs, the troughing in academia and the Civil Service.
Try JD Vance in Munich, boy did he tell the EU/UK elite what they didn’t want to hear.
Vance embarrassed himself, drenched in naive hypocracy.
So no actual rebuttal then? ..just rhetoric?
“Wouldn’t you start with the major items first not the trivial ones”
Not necessarily.
Pick a few easy targets, get a reputation for success, get the public interested, and monitor who is getting uneasy: that’s how to do it.
Easy target? Reputation for success? Like the Nuclear industry staff they are now desperately trying to rehire.
Not sure you pay much attention to the details NS. Be more discerning and check. It’s not WWF.
They got Al Capone on a tax charge.
“DOGE hasn’t even scratched the surface yet”
O come on give us a break, even Christ took 40 days from Resurrection to Ascension.
And God took 7 days CS. God’s on his side apparently.
His problem is Govt funding only extended until late March before Congress got to square the budget again to avoid shutdown.
Agreed, he’ll need a miracle!
I take it you hold Labour to similar standards?
The Democrats are literally governed by Conflict Theory. Remind me where Sinema and Manchin are right now after they wouldn’t agree to abolish the filibuster. Just stop with the Bipartisanship nonsense. The Dems literally branded themselves “The Resistance.”
This is a virtually braindead echo chamber of a comment board. Repeating your “literal” exaggerations over and over doesn’t make them true. It just makes them sound closer to true. To you and those that need to keep believing in this awful, unfolding trainwreck of a presidency: Keep watching. Use your own eyes, ears, mind, and heart.
What’s left of them*. I appeal to you because I know you are intelligent, decent, and fair.Get a grip***rude and unwarranted, sorry. I was pretty angry but that’s not a good excuse and I take it back.
**should follow my own advice here. Have a good day.
You’re fine.
I responded to you below. The West has a massive censorship problem. When have the Censors ever been on the “right side of history” is my question to you?
I don’t have an example. The Rising Right wants a lot of books banned at the the K-12 level and some topics deemed off limits. I even agree with some of the examples they’re targeting, but it’s gone pretty far pretty fast.
Your posts reveal you to be too smart to resort to such an obvious logical equivocation. Restricting access to books on the basis of age is no more an instance of book banning than restricting access to a driver’s licence on the basis of age is an instance of access to transportation banning. As is the case with all life forms the duration of human existence stretches through time, and not all reading matter and responsibilities appropriate for human adults are suitable for humans as children. You know this perfectly well.
I agree. But in the case of objecting to access to To Kill a Mockingbird or the Bible for high schoolers (two actual examples), it is hysteria. I know there are many instances of irrational agitation against books and speakers on the left also. Overall, they have been far worse in recent decades, especially at universities. (Neither side practices much intellectual or moral charity these days).
One parent’s objection caused a graphic novel called New Kid, by Jerry Craft, to be banned as “critical race theory” in Texas. The parent doubted whether the authors firsthand-experience based accounts of things like the kid being worried when police pulled over his dad could even realistically happen. She thought the quite apolitical account of (basically) a black nerd trying to fit in and just get along at a nearly all-white private school—mostly autobiographical—was a deliberate attempt to “poison future generations of white children”, hers included. That just seems insane, an (admittedly convenient, single) example of where we are these days.
Restriction can be sensible or quite panicky and silly. Protests can be censorious without rising all the way to censorship. We ought to be able to have a better conversation around the details, where both the devil and much of the good sense resides. Or we can just remain in camps of mutual distrust and opprobrium, where the answer to “can’t we all just get along?” is still: “Of course not!”
I don’t support jailing people for online activity that doesn’t clear some high bar for incitement to violence, for example. Yet I don’t think that’s the same thing as wanting N a z i-apologists firewalled from German government. I wonder what you think about any of this, since I can tell you’re no cognitive slouch yourself.
Thanks for replying to my intervention in a conversation that was, strictly speaking, none of my business. I’m a retired Canadian reference librarian with a philosophy M.A. and an ongoing concern about the state of the information commons; so it won’t surprise you to learn we’re in accord about censorship, an issue with a clear enough history not to require irrelevant side-excursions into purely regulatory matters or instances of silliness to highlight its significance (they blur it instead, thereby serving evasion). Whatever one’s politics, and wherever one happens to lie on the I.Q. continuum, our judgment can never be more reliable than the sources that inform it—from which you might presume a claim that freedom of expression and information access should be apolitical concerns a permissible inference. While this is in fact my belief, it of course hasn’t been my experience. Before ever having opened a philosophy book I could see that ideological commitment was incompatible with truth questing; but we live in an ideological age and there’s no escaping the limitations of one’s era.
I’m not sure what I can say about censorship that you wouldn’t likely already know, or that would interest you. Have you read Randall Collins’ Sociology of Philosophies, though? It provides a good overview of how ideas have historically come to be, how they typically diffuse through societies, and what the impediments to that diffusion are. We’re often told that access to uncensored information is essential to properly functioning democracies, and while I wouldn’t contest this view my own is that objections to censorship don’t require any utilitarian support. The war crimes trials at Nuremberg made clear that each individual is ethically responsible for his/her own actions, and that this responsibility can’t be delegated to politicians, religious leaders, or anybody else. In order to follow this precept we have to be able to judge effectively, which is impossible when censors interpose themselves between individuals and relevant information. With responsibility, in short, comes a concomitant right of access to what’s needed for discharging it.
We’re also told by those who think otherwise that public order and safety are sufficient justifications for censors expropriating this right and exercising it on our behalf, thus sparing us the scourge of misinformation. Here’s my own rebuttal to this argument: we say we’re ‘misinformed’ as a convenient shorthand for saying we’ve been given information that’s inaccurate, incomplete, or in some other way unreliable; but it doesn’t follow from this conventional usage that there’s any such thing as misinformation: ontologically speaking, ‘misinformation’ comprises a null set. Everything that comes to our attention is information, and what we normally want to know about it is its truth status, relevance, utility, etc., matters that can only be settled by empirical investigation.
It’s exactly such investigation that censors seek to prevent. The only real existence ‘misinformation’ has is as a bogus label, a tool in the censors’ arsenal: it pretends we already have answers to questions we haven’t even been allowed to ask yet. Why bother? Censors arrogate to themselves the onerous responsibility of assessing information’s (not misinformation’s) worth, and we didn’t even have to ask them. What guys—and what luck for us!
P.S. Since you asked my opinion on a different matter entirely, I’ll give it here. We can’t substitute ‘Nazi apologist’ for ‘AfD member’ in a proposition without committing a logical equivocation (i.e., without changing the proposition’s meaning). Whether or not the AfD is ‘far right’ in such a derogatory sense, or is even ‘far right’ at all (I think Germany’s immigration policy is suicidal, and I’ve always voted left) is, alas, exactly what’s at issue in a politicized information environment—so politicized that no one needs a graduate degree in information science to know that this issue can’t be settled by simple appeal to ideologically captured legacy media silos. It’s worth asking how the merits and demerits of AfD, or DOGE, can be assessed, and more generally how hypotheses can be confirmed or disconfirmed, when data are routinely suppressed or enrolled in narratives deliberately crafted to disguise the data’s significance. While censors and would-be social engineers can obviously have political motives the health of the information commons is nevertheless an apolitical concern, since in the absence of reliable information the censors themselves will be at sea without knowing it.
One problem, IF they are true ,then they will be repeated over and over. Or does your 2+2 sometime come out 5?
The assertion of mathematical certainty is surely part of the problem, left and right.
The Democrats aren’t in power now.
But I suspect were they we might find they cancelled the Billionaire tax cuts.
When people have to work from January to June just to pay Government taxes..the system is doomed.
Let’s rephrase this to say when the common man has to work from January to June to pay the government taxes, the system is doomed. All the while Mr Tusk skates through by mid January
Some people perhaps, although be interested to see the calculation behind that.
The tax cuts he wants to extend save the highest earning 0.1% over £300k each (US Treasury own calculation published in Jan 25). If he can’t afford all his promises, (v unlikely at the moment) watch for whether this one gets de-prioritised and something that helps the ‘little guy’ prioritised instead. You probably know already what’s going to happen.
You said it – The Democrats aren’t in power NOW.
Perhaps you haven’t listened, EVERY demographic increase their support for Trump. What shred of legitimacy can the Democrats claim when they put up a senile old man as a ‘front’ for whom exactly? The Special Counsel investigating Biden’s ‘secret papers’ even decided not to prosecute because he was “An Elderly man with a poor memory.”
I wonder if your memory is on a par for you to come on and claim the Democrats would be preferable!
IF Credibility is what you are after, you are in for a big disappointment. Anyone who supports the previous regime needs to refresh their memories. I particularly like the explanation accompanying the ‘pre-emptive’ pardons -. “Not that they are guilty of anything!”
Somehow, I wish we could replay some snippets from Republican stalwarts during the Obama administration whose mission first and foremost to obstruct the Obama administration from having any effect whatsoever
What is it you want the Dems to approve of? Come on let’s roll it out. Tell us in glaring terms how you want to slash all those “WOKE” Snap programs and welfare and Medicaid. So Mr Tusk can be a trillionaire sooner
Concur. It amazes me sometimes had little some of the regular comment makers seem to understand about US system.
Trump’s a tiny majority in the House. He needs a financial Reconciliation Bill urgently passed to fund the Govt. He wants to protect the Billionaire tax cuts and pay for all his new detention centres and Sheriff Joe’s. He can’t square it without more debt. And the fiscally conversative Republicans are indicating more borrowing not appropriate. He had political capital he could have used to get a bit of Democrat support but he’s burnt it with his approach last 3wks. No strategy.
So he’s stuck. He hasn’t put DOGE onto the real money – health, entitlements, defence because of election promises and vested interests
He had political capital he could have used to get a bit of Democrat support
And you accuse others of not knowing anything about US politics? Can we just add that to the list of things you really shouldn’t write about?
Do you at least acknowledge that he could have taken a less divisive stance, instead of insulting Biden while he was there at the inauguration or politicizing major disasters, including deadly fires and air crashes?
ROFL – after the last 4 years of the Democrats?!!!
Why should he be polite to Biden, who is quite clearly a criminal? A lot of people have died because Biden and his cronies treated the state as their piggy bank. Would you be polite to a man who tried corruptly to put you in prison? I wouldn’t.
Discussion is impossible with you on most important topical topics. You must know that already (if not, that’s even sadder). I’ll just keep this in mind going forward: You think you pretty much know it all, with a built-in extra condescension toward Americans. Even when you are speaking about “our” politics. I understand that you have spent some time here, and America’s politics have global ramifications. But good God—dial down the self-certainty and smug knowingness why don’t ya?
*I’ve really just about never seen you grant one point to anyone you don’t already agree with about most things. That’s terrible. And weak.
**You might very well be a better and more fair minded person in real life, and I hope you are.
You’re attacking me personally here because you don’t want to answer my question, which was asked in good faith? Would you be polite to someone who has corruptly used the entire power of the state to try and imprison you for what, at worst, might be a minor misdemeanour solely in order to prevent you from challenging him in an election?
The answer of course is: “It’s Ok when my guys do it”.
The question is loaded and has a predetermined answer for you. If the ENTIRE power was used why did it fail so spectacularly in its chief goal of preventing an election denying president from re-entering the White House? The packed Supreme Court maybe?
I apologize for getting too personal but I hope you can sense your own fondness for insult and polemical rant. You seem to be talking right past me to a favourably disposed readership. I don’t think that’s a good-faith tactic at all.
You still haven’t answered the question. But that’s OK because we both already know the answer, don’t we?
Come on. Be fair! No one can resist being condescending to ‘Americans.. that’s just unreasonable.. if you paint the word ‘doormat’ on your forehead expect people to walk on you’
btw: you’re also making the same mistake in relation to my attitude to Americans that JW made when he accused me of anti-semitism.
Ok so you oppose American power and foreign policy while claiming, very unconvincingly, to like most individual Americans. Likewise with Israel and Israelis? Aren’t you in favor of Netanyahu policies. If not, we can find a rare point of agreement.
I’ll be fair enough to admit that’s it’s easier for me to hear a hectoring, lecturing tone from you and others than it is from my own “voice”. But you have to know that you don’t attempt much discussion or respect across difference. I cannot be the first one to tell you so.
You suffer from poor comprehension. Read my post again and think for a few seconds before responding.
Can you point me to evidence of the deaths that have occurred because of Biden’s corruption? Right now due to the instant, indiscriminate disabling of USAID people are trying to survive with clinical trial implants that need to be removed. A woman was killed in sad haste during the riot, and some cops killed themselves after Jan 6th. One died soon after being severely beaten. His surviving family has been harassed. Trump encouraged the whole thing and sat and watched it on TV for hours, unconcerned about the probable deaths of Pence, Pelosi and others. This is all documented and corroborated.
Trump wanted to put Hilary in prison, according to some of his own handpicked people. I think Biden just wanted Trump to be barred from office, at which he massively failed. They should have stuck to Jan 6th and the “find me votes” cases. Too late now. Enjoy.
Whenever truth is uncomfortable it is labeled ‘politicising’ ..do you remember when speaking the truth used to be regarded as worthwhile in itself? Now we have to be selective lest it be ‘politicising’ or ‘criticising’ certain people (aka Antisemitism).. as well as getting rid of Wokism can we also pension off these two other idiotic ‘defences’ as well please?
In less than a month, Trump has done more than Labour in 8 months.
The pro-Trump Koolaid is at least as strong, intoxicating, and distorting.
You just don’t know it. Yet. When you come down you’ll see you were pretty out of your mind right now. At least I hope so. The USA is an elective Republic. For now.**it’s too early to know just where will end up at this breakneck pace and scale of upheaval.
I’m more measured than you suspect I am. We’re 37 trillion in debt with almost all of it accruing in the past 25 years. Nobody is willing to make cuts to entitlements. If that’s the case, you need to cut bloat elsewhere. All Elon is doing is an audit.
My primary issue with the Democrats is their desire to muzzle Conservatives. If Republicans start muzzling good faith Liberals like yourself than you’ll have a point.
You may be measured, but you are almost entirely onesided. The theoretical conditions for nuance and good faith exchange, which you pretend to await, already exist, you just prefer not to see or fight for them. You are—not always but for the most part—more concerned with pushing the Overton Window (it ain’t open enough fore you yet). Conservatives ain’t muzzled right now. Which is fine, in and of itself. But if you love Trump a lot, in a fundamental way you’re not much of a conservative. This is more like Right Wing Radicalism. You only hate or call out extremes in one direction these days.
You’ve brought up a couple of times that I have many fixed perceptions. All that’s really saying is that I have some stubborn bias. I’m sure that’s true, my question is why do you think you’re less biased than I am. I think you rely on plenty of fixed observations that I don’t agree with.
A glaring one is that “DeSantis has no charisma.” That is an opinion statement and one I completely reject. I think he’s got a really likable and friendly personality. He’s far less stiff than the vast majority of politicians. That label (along with the elevated boots) was hoisted to weaken his credibility. It’s a character attack not a substantive attack.
So if you’re operating on a more conciliatory plane than I am, why are you so fixed in this kind of position?
The way I see it: I am not as invested in having one side of the left/right divide win as you are. In fact, I see both sides as necessary and I would even love to see a viable third party that can take some of the best from conservatism and liberalism. What I tend to hate, though I think there’s a place for it and the world will always have it, is absoluteness or hardcore tribalism. It’s true if you gave me a coin flip for the Dems, even in their current state, I’d take them over this version of the Reps. But I was gonna vote for McCain in 2000 over Gore, until Bush Jr. pulled ahead in the primaries. And I absolutely dislike the Squad and other left wing bullshit whereas you seem to have almost no problem with sickness and extremism to the right of you.
I know I’m being confrontational and a bit unfair but I’m in a raw mood and I’m curious to know whether character matters at all to you in politics. We’ll just have to (agree to?) disagree on Ron DeSantis; I’m not saying he’s the worst guy of all time but I don’t find him likable at all.
Of course that isn’t a fact or a higher truth but neither are your FOX news and Tucker Carlson inflected takes on what “everyone” on the left supposedly does all the time.
I think you’re ignoring how many former Obama supporters are in the MAGA coalition because of State-sponsored Public-Private Censorship. You’re correct that Conservatives broke through the censorship complex and have spoken pretty freely for the past 2-3 years (especially once Chris Rufo brought CRT into the public consciousness). But I’m not going to forget that it happened and just give the people that ran with it a pass.
It’s not an opinion that Democrats (and a few Republicans) bought into the ESG agenda. It’s a fact. The Agenda is thought-conforming. It requires people to accept certain debatable narratives as incontrovertible facts. The mainstream media was aligned to peddle talking points and character attack and label anyone that questioned the Narrative as an extremist or conspiracy theorist.
The same thing is happening in Europe. In fact it’s worse in Europe. ESG is a global agenda. If you think for instance that fossil fuels are directly causing severe weather events leading to death, you literally have to suppress dissent. If you think racism is a public health crisis than you have to impose institutional quotas to limit health inequality. If you think questioning an MRNA vaccine will lead to viral infection than you have to label those people as “vaccine hesitant” or “vaccine denialists. If consensus is required to achieve an objective, anyone who questions a foreign policy agenda has to be labeled as mis and disinformation spreaders.
You’re a free thinking individual. Do you think it’s unreasonable for me to be biased against those seeking a consensus mandate?
No. But I don’t think your insistence on generalizations or general trends is a virtue. Individual character matters. A lot. And at its best and worst it crosses all sociopolitical divides.
Weird to say I “ignore” something I didn’t highlight. I guess I could say you tend to ignore the majority of actual conservatives who fear/hate/despise what Trump and his apologists advocate and make excuses for. And many of the remainder are just jumping on the bandwagon, often in quite a spineless way. (Granted, many politicians are spineless, in both parties).
If you don’t think Trumpism has its own conformist juice and cult of personality aspect, you are not paying attention man. Let’s just see where you and the world are in year from now. I think you’ll have at least a measure of regret about hitching your hopes to a very bad and selfish man. Maybe not. But if so perhaps you’ll be able to see more truth and value to the center and left of your own beliefs and assumptions.
I think you’re gonna get upset with me for saying this but I don’t believe Trump has a personal character deficit next to his Democrat rivals like Biden or Clinton. I don’t think Harris is a serious person at all. There’s a plagiarism thread and lack of authenticity that runs through the Democrat mainstream. These candidates aren’t allowed to have their own opinions because honesty might alienate an interest group in the base.
I recall Clinton staffers in 2016 walking back a perfectly reasonable position Hillary had on the Kate Steinle case. Biden was walking on eggshells the whole time. Harris was literally just memorizing lines. You need to be able to take bold stances and risk scrutiny. The staffers micromanage Democrat candidates until they’re almost completely robotic.
MAGA does not have an Authenticity problem, yet at least. Might they at some point? Sure if Democrats get their act together and stop taking the 20 percent on every 80/20 issue. I watched a Democrat on Msnbc that wanted to be the next chair. He was really good actually (James Skoufis). But the guy didn’t get any traction.
The Democrats did not used to be this collectivist. They use to have people that would go against the status quo. They didn’t have to mouth slogans.
I think you have to recall how much of the base was moving on from Trump before the lawfare. There are still plenty of Republicans that will criticize him if he takes an unpopular stance. But right now he’s doing what his voters expected him to do. The Establishment Republicans are falling in line because they fear getting primaried. That is Democracy in action. As long as you are responsive to your constituents it’s hard to be criticized from within.
I’m past the mood for getting upset. But I absolutely think Trump has a character deficit next to 99 percent of all people, including most of the worst among all other presidential candidates, left right and center. His authenticity is as follows: “I’m a selfish and vindictive scammer, and I’m gonna get away with it”. He is surrounded and celebrated by actual hardcore bigots. You admit that, right? Miller and Bannon just for starters.
He ran a scam university and a scam charitable foundation. He’s cheated contractors repeatedly. He treats the presidency like a combination of a reality show and a real estate opportunity. He thinks he is literally above the law and apparently most of his hand picked Supreme Court does too. He was perfectly willing to see Pence, Pelosi, and others die on TV on 1/6/21 if he could have stayed in office. “He who saves his country commits no crime”—blatant and contemptible self-importance and arrogance.
Yet you love him. Even when you look as his nasty, mean orange face. Fine, but that will remain a point of sharp disagreement. DeSantis too, although less so. You are right wing these days, but I do not think you are conservative. What do you want to preserve, conserve, or protect? Please say something that concerns people more than money or abstract nouns.
What do I want to preserve/conserve? How about the English language, sovereign borders, private property rights, the male/female gender binary, freedom of conscience, the ability to publicly disagree with people that claim to be my ethical and intellectual superiors.
That wasn’t even an argument. It was an unhinged personal attack and assertion of moral superiority. You’re claiming that you’re a better person than me because the people you vote for have higher character than the people I vote for. You’re saying I have no right to personally believe that Biden is at least as corrupt if not more corrupt than Trump. I have no idea how these permanent government employees get so wealthy. Maybe there’s a valid explanation. I have just yet to see it.
You are 100% fixed in your position and have zero tolerance for any disagreement. You’ve pigeonholed yourself and you’re taking it out on me in a patronizing, holier-than-thou attack. I’ve never tried to be disrespectful to you in anyway.
Ok, I apologize. I was drinking on the weekend and should not have posted.
I think my characterization of Trump holds up far better than your ideas about Biden and Obama. (Of course you think the reverse). I agree the Clintons are corrupt and morally tainted, especially Bill.
When I come to this website I see a rah rah bias toward nativism and populism, and you seem to be among those leading the charge. I don’t think it’s necessary to use a wrecking ball and vicious rhetoric to restore border security or biological gender. Maybe it is—but this is coming at a huge cost that we will probably have to pay for decades.
It’s odd that many of those who call themselves patriots don’t value the separation of powers so much when their guy is in charge. I suppose that was true of Democrats under FDR too. 49.8% of the vote doesn’t put Trump all the way above the law, I hope you’d agree. 70% wouldn’t.
There’s not much for us to talk about anymore these days but I wish you and your family well. I’m sorry I was insulting and disrespectful to you, whether in my cups or not.
You kind of went back at me in a similar, high handed fashion, but fair enough. I don’t fault you as an individual but I fear and detest the movement you champion. The mirror image of your feeling about present-day Democrats, whom you regard as radical far-left in a way I don’t except among a small minority. I think the whole Republican Party is in Trump’s pocket now, whatever individuals actually do or don’t believe. Dissenters are regarded as traitors or mere “contrarians”. DeSantis would have been better than this is going, let alone likely to go. It’s Honeymoon in MAGAland.
I do value the separation of powers a great deal. You’re entitled to your opinion but control over Executive Agencies is an immensely complex topic. The movie Vice (2018) about d**k Cheney was all about the Unitary Executive Theory so this is far from a new debate.
There’s a belief amongst Conservatives that the Legislature outsourced their role to “experts” within the bureacracy and then set up a bunch of barriers (like the Impoundment Act) to restrain the Executive from controlling Executive agencies. There’s also the question of why low level regional federal courts have the ability to issue nationwide injunctions.
Again, reasonable people can disagree but these are far from settled debates especially when America has a labyrinth of conflicting laws.
True enough T Bone. But from my angle the Overton Window is wide open and I don’t feel much moderation or compassion blowing in. I think many Trump supporters are living in a celebratory bubble, a bit blinded to the reality of who and what is in charge. Your level of information and intelligence, combined with your level of partisanship and apology for just about anything to the Right of center, makes me continue to wonder about and not be able to get a real sense of where you are. I’d say that’s to your credit overall. Hope you won’t ingest too much from FOX News or their former guy Tucker Carlson, let alone Infowars or whatnot, just as I avoid MSNBC. Maybe we can meet at Michael Smerconish (a conservative radio guy that does a Saturday show on CNN)?
Ok so this is my take and you’re welcome to disagree. I don’t claim this is infallible narrative but it’s not based on pure speculation either.
I do genuinely understand and appreciate the need to have a “center” that defends against the tyranny of Imposed Equality on one hand and Social Darwinism on the other. That’s the balance the West has tried to navigate since WW2. But let’s be honest, Imposed Equality is alot less threatening at first glance than Social Darwinism. That’s why there are more safeguards, educational and public policy warnings about the former than the latter.
During the Cold War and after the 60s the US had a pretty good grasp on both extremes. When the Soviet Union broke down, the End of History was declared. Institutions believed that progress would occur gradually. While the dangers of Social Darwinism were taught widely, fears over Imposed Equality became an afterthought.
At the same time Critical Theory (and Intersectionality) were burrowing themselves into Academia and Hollywood. For along time, Grievance Studies were simply boutique fields that in many cases dovetailed with real historical cases of oppression. Sure, they were radical but they contained kernels of truth and didn’t really have the cultural power to undermine principles of Equality under the Law.
But over a period of time, they were able to gain more and more traction until through a series of sympathetic events, achieved almost total bureacratic capture in 2020. Imposed Equality became Institutionalized at scale. Imposed Equality does not believe in Equality under the Law but Equity which is a form of reparative retribution.
What we’re seeing now is certainly a Reaction and a rollback of the excesses of Imposed Equality. I do agree with you that there are hypothetical risks of going too far the other way. There are Social Darwinists that feel emboldened right now. I understand that and completely get the need to be on guard.
Where I think we disagree is on the extent of the capture and how feasible it is to get quickly rid the ideological excess from institutions without throwing away basic safeguards and opening the door to Social Darwinists. I am of the belief that bureacratic bloat has to be addressed promptly but with discernment. When an ideology institutionalizes false claims like Free Speech caused the Holocaust or warns about the dangers of Bothsideisms, the purveyors of that logic can’t stay in their positions of institutional trust.
“That’s why there are more safeguards, educational and public policy warnings about the former than the latter.”
Note- I got this backwards. All I was trying to say is that we have far more Anti-Fa$cist Education and safeguards than Anti-Communi$t.
Yes, I understand your argument, and accept the logic of it, to a limited extent. When you qualify the very real and present dangers of right-radicalism with “hypothetical”, I totally part company.
What’s your feeling on AfD? Should Hamas, for example, be listened to as just another viewpoint that deserves to be heard, however far out there on the authoritarian left (plus some madness of their very own)? Hamas bends around the horseshoe and meets H i t ler fans and minimizers at vicious antisemitism. I understand AfD and other right-populist parties are not exactly repeats of the 1930s-40s. But they keep touching what used to be a third rail, robbing it of juice. Is that progress?
Extremes breed and feed into one another, with an increase in mutual hostility. Attempts at consensus and understanding—when they are sincere—can reduce the influence of both extremes.
Project 2025, which Trump pretended to disavow, is in substantive effect right now on many fronts. I’m pretty sure you know this to be true. Many of its chief architects are current or former Trump officials. You’d be outraged if a Democrat tried the seize this much power, and outraged with ample reason.
I know you have some independence of mind and like to think freely, but you aren’t immune to prevailing currents; few of us are. I’m not. Not that we should be.
I think you have been carried rightward in recent years whereas I have moved toward the center. You may have been farther and harder right all along, and I may be a bit more to the left than my self-perception. But I am definitely somewhere in “the middle half”. I say these things as opinionated estimates, not solid or unqualified facts.
I share some cultural sympathies with conservatives, around things like good old books and music and respect for tradition, including religion. Respect, not enforcement or political enshrinement. I’m in favor of a robust marketplace of goods and ideas, but I do not think corporations and powerful individuals should be able to do things like “drill baby drill” unchecked, with no respect for the air and water we all have to breathe and drink. Those of us who can’t escape to Mars anyway.
I find the Nihilism or Social Darwinism among many on the New Right scary and appalling. Is that where you situate yourself these days?
Nihilism or cynical godlessness joined to anti-humanism is something I loathe from the left too. The Horseshoe Effect is in effect there too. The warring extremes want to defeat or even eliminate one another, but they share some hollowness of heart and negativism.
In any case, I do find it reassuring that we can mostly stay civil across huge disagreement…you can at least!
I do you think you need to define “Far-Right” thinking at some point. Where would you put a Clinton Democrat that took over for Rush Limbaugh like Clay Travis? It seems like your definition has something to do with animosity toward each pole and not policy? But if its animosity, I don’t see how you could be more Centrist than me because I think your hatred of Trump and Trump voters far exceeds my irritation toward Democrats and Democrat voters. If Hate vs Not Hate is the centrist barometer, I think I’m pretty square in the middle.
I honestly don’t know enough about the AofD to comment. The news out of Germany is so curated I’m not sure if I could get an unbiased read but I will look into it.
I do know what I’ve seen from the EU and current party in control of Germany and find it breathtaking that they can call what they’re doing “Democracy.” They had a bunch of German Prosecutors on 60 minutes laughing about pre-dawn raids on 50 people at one time for reposting insensitive memes. When you have Committees that arbitrate what qualifies as “Hate Speech” than you’re not a free society.
I look at it like this for both extremes of collectivism. Whenever you look at a group of people and say Those are Bad People with Ideas instead of Those are People with Bad Ideas you’ve dehumanized the group and can justify anything. You are going down the rabbit hole of Totalitarianism.
I was raised to believe everyone is redeemable. That doesn’t mean trust everyone or let people off the hook. I’m extremely cynical of certain people but I also recognize we all have the same basic needs. Everybody goes down the wrong path in life. Its about getting back on the right path. I’ve never celebrated anyone’s death. Maybe Bin Laden but that was more about the symbolism than the Man.
I’m going to continue saying what I think because I think it’s important not to suppress what you believe to be true. But don’t confuse some harsh criticism with pure disdain for others. I don’t hate individuals on the Left. I don’t even see you as being part of a “different group.” You’re just a guy with different ideas than me based on experience.
I like that attitude. I believe in redemption. I don’t like it when people are called monsters or pieces of [bleep] and try never to do that myself. Even the worst actors among us are in an essential and sacred way fully human, perhaps all too human. I was raised in that belief by my ex-Catholic hippie parents too.
That said, I think some people are too selfish or sick to be in charge of very big things. (At least for now; they could be transformed).
The far right has some combination of these features: 1) presumed supremacy of blood or tradition 2) vilification of an out group within, whom they want to remove 3) elevation of capital over people and over the health of the air, water, soil and whole natural world.*
That’s just a quick and incomplete one-two-three but you’ll see a lot of it intersecting and fighting for attention on what I perceive as the Far right. I absolutely don’t think people who hold any part or even all of these ideas are bad to the core, let alone beyond redemption.
Of course my ideas are not mainly my very own. Nobody’s are. But I try to be selective and to temper them with influence from the past, through great writing and thinking and music that has surivived in some form, in multiple traditions. As a lifelong dabbler with a few deep dives, not any kind of expert. I think you do too.
I don’t have PURE disdain for whole groups or MANY individuals either. I once called people: The squabbling human family of the world.
In my heart I know that full judgment belongs to the creator. Yet I have always called out certain beliefs and actions I see as hellish. I think you do too, though in a decidedly less preachy way than I might.
Sometimes my harshest words or greatest frustrations are reserved for those I have major esteem for. I try not to engage at length with someone unless there is depth or warmth or respect there, preferably all three. I feel all that toward you, and many of the others I “get into it” with here and in my offscreen life. In fact, as I get older I find things to like and respect in nearly everyone, with a few exceptions that may say more about me than them. I’m willing to learn from those I disagree with, though not all day every day. I hope you’ll remain genuinely open to peaceful and kind pathways toward improvement**, reform, and greater unity, whatever direction they come from. The head must be joined to the heart, and gut—or our hands tend to get very dirty.
To paraphrase a Republican: May the better angels of our nature guide us all.
*I see traces of 3), which I’d call “free market radicalism” or “doctrinaire libertarianism” in your comments. Nothing of 1) or 2) that goes beyond a natural preference for one’s own ways and traditions, without trying to export or enforce them on others, except in what is truly criminal. I have some of that prejudicial fondness and I don’t think it’s bad in of of itself, whether from me as a Celtic Westerner, or for an Egyptian Coptic Christian, or Muslim, or you name it.
The “economic fundamentalism”, if you will, of 3) seems far more susceptible to correction and moderation than the blood and soil stuff.
And I know it’s not all confined to the so-called Right. But these are recurrent forces with a bloody history. At their most severe they become about as likely as their mirror-image enemies to subjugate and kill. Which side is worse is quite irrelevant. We must choose NO version of tyranny or inhumanity.
**which is not captured by Progress, whether industrial, technological, social, or moral. (Progress toward what?!).
I’m a huge Milton Friedman fan. He believed in an extremely limited Government with only about 4/5 agency departments and a massive reduction in regulations. He supported migrant labor so long as they weren’t coming here to go on the public dime or welfare roles.
In one of his documentaries (filmed around 1980) he goes into the Library of Congress and plops this massive stack of regulations on the table. It’s the reason we can’t build anything or finish projects (high speed rail for instance).
I’m not a trade protectionist in any way. I would just prefer we deal with countries unilaterally vs these massive multilateral treaties where make extensive long term promises in return for influencing other governments.
Friedman is certainly a towering influence on modern economics. My very limited understanding makes him seem like most brilliant thinkers: brilliantly correct about some things. I’m against bureaucratic red-tape clusters too, but not in favor of abolishing medical licenses or calling any corporate concern for the wider society a betrayal of the stockholders. There’s a 2000 interview with documentary on Freidman that I plan to watch: “Commanding Heights”.
I think Keynes has a level of well-earned influence too. But I’m not gonna pretend I know much about the so-called “dismal science” at all.
To respond briefly to one of your earlier points: I think I am more centrist because I value and consider conservative and libertarian input more than I think you do liberal or social-democrat input. I read many conservative articles here and all the right of center columnists at NYT. I’ve been a regular listener of Glen Loury. I’ve admired aspects of WF Buckley and George Will, widely esteemed conservatives, whom if I recall correctly you don’t have a very high opinion of (I might be off here).
For the most part, I feel you read or listen to left of center voices only as opposition research or ammunition for later debates. I sense very little willingness to budge in response to things from your left. I could be wrong, but I notice that there is little Trump can do that you don’t support or make excuses for. At most, you briefly take issue before whatabouting with a pile of objections to the other side. You may think I do the same in reverse. But I am persuadable, especially over time.
If you were far left, or read my responses to rare far-left commenters here, you’d probably see that my opposition to both far poles is sincere. I don’t see net wins in hasty upheaval that boils existing bad blood, instead of cooling it. Nor agood opening for any American King. And I don’t welcome anyone ready to engage in violence unless in true self defense or on behalf of a defenseless party. Jan 6th was a disgrace. The degree and nature of that disgrace seems debatable to me, but not the fact of it. Despite conspiratorial claims to the contrary, those were nearly all hardcore Trump fans. I don’t see you as riot ready, but I wonder if you now think it was a “day of love” organized and enacted by patriots or sensible protesters. Hope not; I’m genuinely curious.
I’ve gone on well too long again. See you next time.
I think Right/Left/Center is basically a directional guidepost for classifying people into groups by clearly identifiable trends. It works better at the group level than the individual level but even then its falsifiable.
I completely understand why you’re alienated from the Far Left and seek input from Never-Trump Republicans who you’ve identified as “True Conservatives” like Brooks, Goldberg, Will etc. These are people (especially Will and Goldberg) that I probably agree with more on Free Trade/Economics than the Trade Protectionists.
Yesterday I watched JD Vance Munich Speech, the Munich Chairman’s rebuttal, Brooks/Goldberg podcast, an FDR biography and Piers Morgan’s podcast with Dan Crenshaw, Glenn Greenwald and Wajahat Ali.
One of the things that jumps out at me is the real binary that we’re dealing with today is between Pragmatists and Atlanticists. The Atlanticist almost Manichean view that the world is made up of fixed categories of Rational Actors (Good People) and Irrational Actors (Bad People). Once someone is classified as a Bad Actor than nothing they say can ever be true. The Atlanticist rule is that you don’t negotiate with Bad People. There’s a rejection of Pragmatism.
But a dead clock is right twice a day. By rejecting Dead Clock Theory, people can box themselves into absurd ideas and go down a doom spiral of irrationalism. That is what I think is happening with Trump Resistance. Its not that Trump is saying anything brilliant, its that his opposition automatically opposes him and it gives him a wide open lane to easy layups.
If certain people are deemed permanently on the “Side of Democracy” than Democracy attaches to people and is unmoored to principles like free expression and giving the population the ability to choose candidates with the best arguments. It seems like the European perspective on Democracy is a form of limited Democracy governed by “Democracy experts.”
I agree that those labels have limited value. They even become obstacles. We’ve been over that general subject multiple times. A point of strong agreement between us.
However, you often use the labels quite freely yourself, and prefer to speak in general or abstract terms much of the time. So the terms will get used—by you, and by me in response. I know I start it often enough too. I am often trying to get a better sense of where you stand. It’s only human, if regrettable, to think labels apply better to others more than oneself. I try to move beyond that.
In a significant way several European countries have more democracy, by allowing parties with a certain minimum percentage of the vote some proportional seats. And by preventing offices from being for-sale to the degree they are in the U.S.
Please look at the under 10-minute video called “The Far-Right Is arising in the Land of ‘Never Again’ by Jan Bohmermann in the NYT, if you can get it. One knowledgeable and detailed point of view by a German:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/opinion/germany-elections-afd.html
It’s true I’m far more willing to listen to never Trumpers or at least Trump skeptical people to my right. But I will listen to a few others, such as Glen Loury, or you. When the topic is the air and attention swallowing person himself (DJT) they tend to sound smitten or too optimistic, to my ear.
Still, I get the point about automatic rejection, and I’ve tried to correct for that and become better at detecting it in my fellow Trump opponents. Not saying I’m “cured”.
You act as if the stopped clock is accurate nearly all the time. Trump’s constant cycles of fire-fueling followed by firefighting performances (stolen from the article “An Arsonist Posing as Firefighter” in today’s National Review) don’t strike me as brilliant or profitable on the whole. The script-flip on Ukraine is insane, like a parody of what the big bad Left said he would do in sucking up to Putin. Referring to himself as a God-anointed national savior who can commit no crime and (wink wink) should maybe serve a third term as Bannon says he ought to is insane, and wrong, to me. And how does cozying up to Russia and lusting after Gaza, Greenland, Canada, and Panama fit with anything like a domestically oriented America First agenda?
I’m in favor of the end of DEI as an institutional giant and of a stronger border, but this chaos comes at a cost as well as potential reward. You see a huge net benefit. At some point you may have to rescue your own libertarian and conservative leaning viewpoint from the chaos agent it’s currently hitched to. We’ll see. Keep us posted, T Bone. I’ve enjoyed this long exchange overall so far. Have a great day.
I’m not saying labels are useless. If you see politically aligned people repeating identical language over and over than its quantitative evidence that those people ascribe to a specific ideology…whatever it may be.
Everyone is guilty of this. I’m guilty of saying “drain the swamp” to signal my support of reducing the size and reach of the bureacracy. You might say something like “So and so is repeating Russian talking points” to imply X person is harming the Ukrainian cause. These are ideological queues. Both of us probably think the other is being anti-intellectual with these types of comments.
I think J6 was a clown show. If the J6 Tribunal was conducted in a remotely serious, impartial manner without splicing and distorting evidence (like Josh Hawley appearing to flee). Or if it was genuinely focused on causation instead of the hyperbolic argument that Trump directed it, the guy would have been toast. Trump’s response was completely negligent but it was not calculated. It was stupid and buffoonish. But you can’t just overcharge people just because you don’t like them. Thats not how our system is designed.
But what happened as with the lawfare is that the punishment became more aggregious than the offense in the eyes of many people including myself. This is a pattern that repeats with Trump. He’s treated like a non-human. We talk about “election denialism” all the time but nobody talks about “assassination denialism.” In Eric Kaufman’s poll, a third of Democrats polled wish Trump had been killed. A 1/3 of Democrats also believed he staged the assassination attempt.
I think J6 was absolutely ridiculous as were the months of horrifying, destructive riots that predated them. And the Democratic Presidential candidate still has a tweet up about getting the rioters released from jail and back on the streets. Printing Tom Cotton’s editorial with the NYT about the Insurrection Act should have never led to James Bennett being forced to resign.
The main point is, neither side has a monopoly on moral virtue and the faster the Resistance learns that “insurrection scolding” is lost on deaf ears, the quicker they can rebuild.
We won’t get past this*, at least while Trump is in office, but having the president himself deny and try to obstruct certification of election results is different from the fact that some on the left excused or downplayed the racial anger (and COVID restlessness) riots. It’s leagues apart to me. I was outspoken against the post-Floyd eruptions too, especially for things like threatening the Portland mayor for not being progressively sold out enough or holding Seattle like a warzone. And Trump fans forget who was president during ALL of that. How did he handle it?
The best thing Trump did was fast track the vaccine, which many of his fans “forgive” him for.
Still, I’m pleased you don’t celebrate 1/6/2021. Trump does. It wasn’t “a clown show” but a violent menace with obstructionist intent. I’d say we came through it ok but its chief enabler is back in charge of damn near everything. And the chief architects are pardoned. I can see letting them go after a few years served but full pardons are demented.
The way Trump is attempting to flip the script and actual record on Ukraine is demented, and so far many Republicans have spoke out against his Putin rehabilitation and Zelensky vilification efforts. Does that have anything to do with the latter’s refusal to provide dirt on the Biden’s back in 2019? We’ll see how long the group of outspoken Republicans speak up or give any pushback.
Again, as for your views on the Capitol Riot: I’ll take it, better than nothing. Fair enough overall.
*find much to agree on about it, that is
Let’s keep in mind it makes absolutely no sense for the Biden family to have been operating in Ukraine. The (to my knowledge) first in history, Pro-Active family member pardons date back to 2014 which is an odd date. The Laptop story getting censored before the election was absurd and the intelligence community knew it wasn’t Russian misinformation.
I think you’re extremely downplaying the BLM riots and especially their cultural impact. There were thousands of police officers attacked. Watching police officers get pelted with bottles was one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen. It happened all over the country for months. I remember all the buildings being boarded up for the election. Everyone knew that if Trump won the city was going to burn. The 2020 rioters won. They changed laws and institutions and the West is still reeling from the changes.
Just remember I lived in an 85/15 blue city (in the Midwest). You can probably piece the location together. The majority of my friends were Anti-Trump. It was fine. We rarely got into politics. I also grew up in a union stronghold town that was probably 60/40 Democrat. I had lots of liberal friends in college. People with your worldview are not foreign to me.
I actually enjoy talking with you more about stuff that doesn’t include Trump or Democrats because the emotion gets taken out of it. Emotion is a factual wrecking ball. I’m sure we could bounce some comedy/movies off each other and it would be more delightful ha.
There ya go. Let’s turn the page for now.
I take your point about what the right calls the BLM riots seriously. I was more of a critic than most around me here in the Bay Area, but maybe not as outspoken or denunciatory as I could have been. And I won’t even whatabout you this time
The fact you fall for it no surprise TB. It’s like you’d roar with approval at the baddie getting it at WWF without realising it’s all an act.
Did you see them trying to rehire the Nuclear industry staff yesterday in a panicked hurry? I assume you aren’t too worried about basic competency in DOGE.
He’s no intention in going after the big Federal costs – health, entitlements, defence. If he did he’d have gone at them now whilst he had maximum political capital. Instead he shows his weakness in going after cheap-change.
Health? Isn’t that JFK Jr’s domain?
When the rubber-hits-the-road is when entitlements ( Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security) get addressed – the so-called ‘third rail’…..a crazy number of folks are on Medicare who shouldn’t be getting benefits….
He promised in the campaign not to touch those CC. He knew if he had he may well have lost.
So you suggesting he reneges on his indication or that you knew it was a lie all along?
(On Medicaid/Medicare – the fairer strategy would be to target the industry’s profiteering and reduce costs that way, but he’s not going at them you’ll have noticed)
Ahh, the American Dream! Dream on and enjoy the slide.. the US is toast; every rigor mortus failing move makes the dying US Empire look more and more like every dying empire before it. Denial can only work for so long.. so, I say to you: So long buddy.. it was good for you for a long time (terrible for the world) but now it’s over..
If you look at big items of USA budget: health, military, veterans it will be very difficult to make serious savings.
Trump record in his first term is of ever rising deficit.
If Musk trims 10% of deficit it would be amazing achievement.
Border issue is Trump strength.
Force Mexico to secure their side to stop arrivals.
Then start rounding up illegals already inside USA, starting with criminals.
I’ve been an American since my birth 62 years ago, and since I can remember the demise of our great nation has been forecast, often by those outside and often by the envious.
Trump was elected to do exactly what he is doing, not to throw up his hands and quit. One can do good however small or just give up. Don’t expect us to do the latter.
Elected to find £2trillion in Federal savings. Starts on the small beer – USAID, consumer protection agency (check your credit card smallprint as your recourse to any provider abuse now weaker)
Why’s he not started on the big costs – defence, health, social security?
He isn’t doing what he was elected to do because he’s no intention. He just wants to chuck you a bit of red meat and hope it distracts, for a while at least, whilst he gets the Billionaire tax cuts through and enriches himself and his cronies.
Even with the obstruction of activist judges, he is pushing forward to shrink government by laying off probationary workers. DOGE is going after the Dept of Education and DOD next. He’s doing what I wanted him to do.
It seems clear that nothing he could do would please you. Incidentally, I too am happy to see tax cuts maintained.
Because DOGE is going after the power nexus. It’s only partly about “efficiency”. The waste in the system is in reality intentional because it supports the Democrats and their client voters. There’s no moral, political or legal reason why the US government should be borrowing money to fund Democrat lobbyists and social engineering programmes.
Will it make a dent in the deficit? Probably not. Will it make a dent in the Democratic party? Quite possibly yes, and is making such a dent a requirement for getting the deficit under control? Definitely.
It’s also a time critical mission. We saw in the Biden admin that the Democrats are willing to do nearly anything to destroy conservatives. Smears, lawfare, bullets, attempting to imprison their opposing candidate on false charges, the works. But the ultimate prize is one they’re now starting to pursue around the world – giving the franchise to immigrants immediately and at scale. Both the NY Democrats and Labour are openly talking about this. If they do that then effectively democracy is over, as there is no longer a “demos” at all when one party can use borrowing and tax to import an infinite number of pliant voters into their jurisdiction.
So cutting off the Democrats at the knees is fundamentally required to achieve any of Trump’s other goals. Detention centers can be built, officers can be recruited, but for as long as USAID and its ilk are trying to grow the problem the left hand is fighting the right hand.
And you never know. Congress might reform itself. A lot of the current problems are clearly caused by the geriatrics in charge. People like McConnell and Feinstein will surely soon shuffle off this Earth just due to old age, enabling younger people to take over.
“There’s no moral, political or legal reason why the US government should be borrowing money to fund Democrat lobbyists and social engineering programmes.”
This is a totally false presumption. Numerous studies have followed the money to RED STATES who gobble it down while screaming horrifics like this memo
I think the author misses an essential point. What DOGE is doing is showing the people where their money is going. And it is going to make them angry. Angry enough to stick with the Trump project.
I think we could all do with a look at our nation’s books to see where government and councils spend our money.
Anyone for rainbow zebra crossings that cost tens of thousands to implement? Thought not.
How about rainbow stripes on police cars? Pointless renaming of streets? If you want a real laugh have a dig into our state arts funding (see the work of Charlotte Gill on that one).
Yes. A DOGE moment will hopefully come for us all. It is sorely needed.
Indeed.
As any reasonable financial planner tells their close-to-bankruptcy and insolvent client, the first step to financial solvency is to go through the recurring credit card bills and eliminate purchases that are not absolutely essential. Doesn’t matter if the purchases are big or little. And in the process, establish transparency and accountability for each and every purchase.
Someone who tells the close-to-bankruptcy client that cutting back on the credit card purchases is “a gimmick” – and that controlling one’s costs is useless – does not have the best interest of the client at heart.
In this regard, Democrats seem to aspire to become the Vogon alien-race bureaucrats (“one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy—not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous”) in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Vogons are infamous for their counter-argument and battle-cry, “Resistance is useless”, as they demand that everyone to fall in line within their massive and unwieldily bureaucracy.
Dylan, you’ve swallowed the Trump/Musk/GOP nonsense hook line and sinker. USAID, like any $50 billion organization, had controversial projects, but they also saved a great many unfortunate people from famine and disease. The NIH was one of the jewels of science funding. The CDC, whatever you think of its performance during COVID (I thought it wasn’t so bad), is absolutely vital to the public health of this country. The inspectors general, whom he fired en masse, were crucial to reining in corruption in the bureaucracy. And so on. Trump and Musk are simply terrorists: they have no idea how the government works. All Trump cares about is payback; and all Musk cares about is paydays. If you care about the deficit, as you profess to, look first to the fantastically wasteful defense budget and then to the $36.2 trillion net worth of the 1 percent or, to spread the pain, to the $69.8 trillion net worth of the top 10 percent. That’s intellectually and morally serious, unlike our idiot President and his idiot party.
Yes, that’s the answer, take that persons money, that person over there and give it to me I say….
“Other people’s money” is a fundamentally incoherent idea:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/what-were-we-thinking
The so-called ‘good intent’ of the above said projects means nothing if it leads to a system that eventually crashes & burns. What short-term universe does your head live in ?
I live in Paul Krugman’s universe. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/. If you lived there, you’d know that productive government expenditures — unlike the disgusting plutocratic tax cuts that Republicans regularly waste America’s resources on — reduce the deficit.
Just in service of better understanding (always a good thing, in my opinion), I’m not sure a payday is all Musk cares about. There’s a lot of chaff and a lot of noise but we can’t forget that Musk styles himself a visionary. He is personally invested in everything he does and sees what he does as not just furthering the human race but pivotal. He believes genuinely and sincerely that by going to Mars as soon as possible we can ensure the survival of the human race.
That’s the fundamental belief which is at the crux of everything he’s doing. MAGA and memes and whatever — it’s all just smokescreen and falsity. He is consciously telling the people most vulnerable to demagoguery exactly what they want to hear in order to further his own ambition. That’s what MAGA really is to a lot of powerful people. It’s a conveniently intense ideology with tens or hundreds of millions of devoted adherents. Zeal makes you vulnerable, and MAGA is nothing if not zealous.
In a sense, whether this is money or Mars is immaterial. In another sense, it can’t be harmful to work with a more nuanced picture of the man because, like it or not, he’s calling a lot of the shots now.
MAGA is more based on reality than what went before. It is wonderful here in the UK to watch Trump turn the woke western world upside down in days. I wait with interest to see how Germany votes at the end of the month, but the UK would return Reform tomorrow given the chance.
I just listened to JD Vance’s speech in Munich. That alone was worth Trump being elected. He may struggle with the US, but boy has his VP upset the EU/UK woke left apple-cart AND did they hate him doing it. Even more amusing is there wasn’t a thing he said that wasn’t true!
Trump may not be able to have a 3rd term, but on the evidence of that speech Vance is the man to continue the project.
.
Like paying for the Nuclear industry staff who they are now desperately trying to rehire to look after crucial infrastructure and stockpiles. Total incompetence driven by idiotic ideology.
The AID industry certainly has some corruptions, but DOGE not gone after anything big yet – defence, health care costs, entitlements etc.
DOGE was to get the reaction you’ve had and a smokescreen.
So what’s the alternative? Carry on as before until the entire US becomes a third world slum? We’re already seeing that in the UK – have you been to Birmingham recently? Let’s not wish that on the US as well.
What percentage the funds that are seized, gutted, or saved do you think will trickle down to rank and file voters, especially after new tax breaks for corporations and the ultra-wealthy are announced?
You’ve completely missed the point, which is to prevent the state from going bankrupt – which would not be good news for anyone.
As you often do, you’ve attempted to reduce a complex, dynamic situation to one single Point. Very unsuccessfully. Of course America has more real poverty than the UK. Wouldn’t take a Marxist level redistribution to make it a bit more fair for the average Joe or Jill. Instead they have the world’s probable richest man (Musk wants you to think it’s Putin instead—maybe so)—who receives several billion in federal grants—in charge of Reform. On behalf of a billionaire president who called himself the King of Debt and wants no debt ceiling at all. And what does Trump think of his fellow strongman Putin?
What do you think of Zelensky? Like Ange, he suspended elections, Putin points out correctly that Zelensky rules with no democratic mandate.
There’s some wartime autocracy there. My inexpert sense is that Zelenskyy is more beloved of his people and could win a real election post war. Putin would never dare to try democratic elections, and was almost toppled by a sawed-off ex-con warlord.
Zelensky has stated he does not wish to stand
Incorrect – the Ukrainian constitution (ratified well prior to Zelensky) does not have elections during a war, there are a few million refugees and another few millions in occupied Eastern Ukraine plus troops who can’t just wander to the church hall voting booth. Wouldn’t seem like a ‘fair’ election huh Bill?
As you often do, you’re obfuscating a simple issue for partisan reasons.
I consider myself far less partisan than you. With ample reason.
You love what is or seems simple. But it doesn’t love you back, not nearly as much anyway.
ROFL – 21 days in! Labour are 8 months in and have only managed to sack 3 ministers and at least one Downing Street advisor! AND you complain DOGE haven’t gone after anything big yet!
If you actually think about it, DOGE isn’t actually showing anyone anything. It dutifully releases some data about graphs and a quick politi-speak blurb as to what an intern thought was a good idea to write down, but it’s not really showing us much more than a dollar amount and a graph of connected nodes. DOGE is telling us remarkably little actual, investigative information about what these payments are actually doing when they get to their endpoints. We know this because investigation takes time, and DOGE is moving extremely quickly through huge data structures with a skeleton crew.
My sinking suspicion is that Elon is simply looking at broad-strokes figures and essentially making up stories about what’s going on behind them. These he presents to a rabid fanbase on Twitter in 144 characters or less (usually much less) which are dutifully then repeated, usually losing even more precision in the process… for example, the honorable Rep. Nancy Mace’s breathless exclamation that the government is spending tens of millions on creating transgendered animals, when in reality that research is for transgenic animal research; i.e. animals whose genetic sequences have been “injected” with those of other animals.
I agree that more transparency is needed. But we’re not getting it in any real way. We’re getting information filtered through the self-interested political lens of the unelected Elon Musk.
We’re falling for a quick fix when actual investigation is required. Elon is giving us what we asked for: something easy, palatable, and ultimately quixotic. It’s tailored to an era in which JG Wentworth’s “It’s my money and I want it now!” is the byline of bylines. We don’t want to think too much about what’s actually going on; it’s our ideological dopamine fix and we want it now.
You don’t seem to mind the many thousands of un-elected bureaucrats that are actually running the Government. But then, they are overwhelmingly looking at things through the same ‘political lens” as you do. You’re only critical of the opposition. That makes you a partisan hack and a hypocrite.
Total hypocrisy from someone who has been shilling for progressive deep state for years
If,DOGE were a contained, fluidly documented and fully transparent operation, then it might be possible to show the people where their money is going;
HOWEVER DOGE is anything but, so Fox and all the other AltRight propaganda masters are creating reports on the fly by evaluating the wreckage. What a way to educate the masses.
I recommend you listen to JD Vance in Munich.
The problem is these things are not where the overwhelming majority of the money goes – they are just small change. The really big items, apart from interest, are Social Security (pensions), Medicaid, Medicare (healthcare for the elderly), and defense. Unless one of them is massively cut any talk of reducing government spending is for the birds. Thing is, the voters love those items.
Sobering piece
Which relies heavily on the assumption that congress is beyond repair
Can the author perhaps elaborate on this topic? As in a full article ? Else, this current one has little merit, or rather, is rather difficult to analyse
I’d agree that Trump has very little manoeuvring space. The Republican Party was as much part of the problem as the Democratic Party, and to a degree, still is.
My view is that Trump intends to bully rep congress into submission by creating a popular wave.
Last point : if this is to be the future of the USA, pray for us in Europe and our profoundly corrupt governance
It’s a bitchy hit piece. They’re becoming all too common in Unherd of late. What is clear is the USA is spending far too much. Musk is putting a stop to that day by day. Good luck to him.
You just can’t handle hearing what you don’t want to hear.
You should actually welcome it. Paying to be in an echo chamber infantilises
You provide principled opposition to the (un)herd. I agree with the above and with much or the rest of what you have to say. Cheers.
The site provides about as much pro -Trump, pro-Right-populist content as possible, short of brutal one-sidedness. I’m glad to get the perspective, distinct from my centre-Left overall info diet (with other exceptions). But in a sort of mirror-image of N Forster, I admit I get upset or ‘triggered’ by some of it.
Congress is beyond repair because the U.S. founders failed to bake in term limits. As a result we have a system that thwarts any attempts to reign in the spending habits of its members who need to continue to bring home the bacon for their constituents in order to stay in power, often for decades. It doesn’t matter how many smart, determined people you throw at the system to reform it, the system will always win.
US still the strongest economy in the World with the strongest military.
Many things wrong, but need to keep in proportion. Problem is more how it apportions and shares it’s wealth.
I know I’ve said this before but it obviously needs repeating: the shorthand approach doesn’t make you appear knowledgeable or sophisticated, just pretentious.
Mr Smith goes to Washington was made in 1939. Worth watching it.
Trump may have had sufficient political capital to get a decent Reconciliation Bill through the House if he compromised – maybe even cancelled the Billionaire tax cuts. But he’s burnt through that ‘capital’ with his ‘move fast & break things’ first 3 weeks. Now he’ll get no bipartisan support and a Govt shutdown quite poss late March.
Essentially he’s acting like he won a landslide for the WH and Congress. He didn’t. It was third narrowest win ever. The US public didn’t vote for a revolution. Which is why some resistance to what he’s doing entirely legit and democratic.
There is a big issue about US debt. The debt to defence spending ratio of special concern – US spends more on debt repayments than defence. Trump essentially is looking to increase it.
You people are comedic….So you you are lamenting the demise of a compromise where Trump has to give up tax cuts. Wake up…this is exactly the kind of Compromises that Trump was elected to not make. I find it distasteful that the Progressive idea of a compromise always requires the Conservatives to make all the sacrifices.
You lost the election. Like Obama told conservatives after he won in 2008, “We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”
As it transpires it’s not actually a decision in Trump’s gift. Congress needs to decide and the House needs to pass a Reconciliation Bill later this year. In this it needs to either pass law that balances Trump’s requested income and expenditure changes or increase the US debt and debt repayments. Nothing changes that reaity.
It’s not really that comedic that you appear to have not clicked that making promises, even winning an election, doesn’t suddenly generate a money tree. But it does show some are clowns.
IF JD Vance is a clown ,then the EU/UK needs more of them.- Try watching his speech in Munich – IF he stood for election in any European state based on that speech, I suspect he’d win a landslide.
As we keep finding out whoever wins, winning elections is the easy bit.
We have been hearing that the debt is unsustainable for 50 years. Often, however, much of the underlying macro-economics are ignored.
Here is a step by step version of what typically actually happens when the government runs a deficit if you look at the accounting:
1 The Treasury can go into overdraft and create money in the deposits of banks.This is not allowed (for historical reasons) and so the government issues bonds for the same amount as the overdraft.
2 The banks buy the bond for the money they just got and thus swap cash for an asset that earns them an amount of interest over time. Don’t panic. That interest, again, is paid by going into overdraft and selling bonds.
3 The bonds can then be sold on the secondhand market, also to foreign investors keeping demand of the depreciated dollars high.
4 Optionally central banks (the Fed in this case) can buy the bonds and replace them with freshly printed money, pushing down interest rates on ‘debt’. This happened a lot after 2008 (4 trillion) and especially during the pandemic (5 trillion), but for some reason this is constantly ignored. Perhaps you are not supposed to notice this because a lot ended up in the pockets of the 1%.
Hopefully you did notice that much of this is money creation in the end. The Weimar had a huge amount of foreign debt, paid for by capturing their industrial output. For the US it is different, it actually runs a huge trade deficits.
Of course we do see the problems of too much money printing and artificially low interest: take housing prices. DOGE, however, just scratches the surface. Does it see the huge managerial bureaucracy and public-private consultancy networks that occurred in the 90s after rounds of privatization and market fundamentalism? And what about those trillions from the Fed nobody is talking about?
You have to scratch the surface to get at what lies underneath. The steps you describe cannot go on indefinitely. This isn’t politics; it’s math.
Sure, but my point is that if you want to do the math you have to derive the entire equation first. Not just half of it and certainly not one that isn’t even correct.
America still has the world’s largest economy, and the world’s most fearsome military. Some combination of tax increases, tariff revenue, economic growth, and devaluation will return our debt levels to a manageable level.
We also need the “refugees” to go home. They’re expensive, and contribute little to our Treasury.
USAID was a cutout for the CIA’s color revolutions, and a continually smashed piggybank for Washington insiders. Along with State, it spent ridiculous amounts of money on ridiculous things. Our healthcare, education, housing, transport, and other systems are also wasteful, rife with fraud, and simply bad at what they do. There are innumerable fields of low hanging fruit for Musk and Trump to harvest, which is to say there are countless opportunities to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, while the GOP holds both legislatures and the Oval Office.
Cleaning house will cause some pain, Hard work and sacrifices are ahead. But we are nothing like pre-revolutionary France – our peasants and lumpenproletariat have televisions, central heat, automobiles, clothing, and an obesity problem. France’s great unwashed starved half to death leading up to the revolution, while their rulers draped themselves in jewelry and silk, and fought global wars with England and Spain.
Extricating ourselves from a losing battle in the Ukraine will alone save us billions, and this can be done while preserving Ukraine’s western and central territory. Crushing Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran will assist global shipping. Those tariffs aren’t so high, and we need to preserve critical industries. They’ll come down, if other countries would like to buy our products, and allow their citizens better lifestyles.
DEI encourages waste and incompetence. Notable efficiency gains will accrue once competence replaces conformity, and political rancor will lessen.
Our energy sector is the commanding heights of our economy. We can save billions more by abandoning useless things like solar and wind, and our own vast energy reserves will power an economic revival in our heartlands.
We aren’t an empire in decline. We’re a nation, ascendant.
Well said, and optimistic without dreaming. Thank you
YOUR: “peasants and lumpenproletariat have televisions, central heat, automobiles, clothing, and an obesity problem”.
Indeed and a very large amount of GUNS as I recall. So “don’t count your chickens etc “.
Yes, that’s true. We don’t restrict our firearm ownership to aristocrats, tally-hoing through their fiefdoms.
We were carved out of a wilderness not so long ago and still have some of the world’s deadliest fauna, from polar bears and mountain lions to rattlesnakes and alligators.
Our rural areas can be hours away from a police station, and we have a developing country to our south that’s more violent still. We’ve always been a very heterogenous society, accepting arrivals from all over the globe, and, though we have much shared culture with Old Blighty, people from Los Angeles are VERY different than people from New York, or Chicago, or Atlanta.
Most of our criminal homicides involving firearms are the outcomes of petty beefs, between poorer young men, in the poorest parts of our bigger cities. Few of them own those guns legally. Most are stolen, or bought illegally.
Middle aged sport hunters living in suburban or rural areas commit very, very few street crimes. Neither they nor their families should be left defenseless.
Nor did it escape our attention when Australia literally sent people to COVID camps, and placed entire provinces under house arrest. Londoners now get to observe militant left wing or pro-Islamic rallies, while policemen seem more interested in censoring speech, than in protecting the public. Canada was strictly ruled by a very far left wing party, and their PM is almost certainly Fidel Castro’s natural son.
None of those countries allow firearm ownership like the US does. None of them are as free.
Governments should fear their citizenry. They’re far less likely to oppress them, if that’s the case.
No one should fear their own government.
My reply was not meant as a criticism but was merely an observation.
However if anarchy is to break out it is useful to have the ‘tools to hand’, as you do.
Australia was an absolute disgrace and should have been jettisoned from the Commonwealth for its draconian behaviour. However as a former penal colony “old habits die hard” as we say.
Again you are correct in castigating our once renowned Police Force.The days of ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ are long gone! Now as you correctly say they spend their time trawling through social media for Non-Crime Hate Incidents and other such tosh. Much safer and easier than having to deal with real tough criminals, but again, frankly a national disgrace.
Up until the great Covid Scam I would have disagreed with you about ‘Governments fearing their citizenry’, however not any more. As your late President Ronald Reagan put it so eloquently, the greatest threat to our life, liberty and happiness is the wretch from the Government. The whole of Europe is thus coerced and the U.K. is rapidly following suit.
However somewhat fortuitously a ‘star’ has risen in the west in the form of Messrs Trump & Vance, so salvation may not be too far away.
More tea Vicar?
“None of those countries allow firearm ownership like the US does” – how true, and none of them have 40,000 gunshot deaths per year!
Mostly ‘Black on Black’ as I’m sure you will concede.
I’m sure that you know that is a wildly incorrect statement – half of them are suicides, what source have you got for the racial makeup of the other half?
Forget about the suicides that’s just Darwinian self selection.
As to the rest of your query this is what my AI robot thinks. Is ‘he’ wrong?
“Yes, most Black homicide victims in the United States are killed by other Black people, but not all Black on Black homicides are due to systemic racism. In about 80-90% of cases, the victim was killed by another Black person”.
Don’t be so quick to surrender your scholarly bona fides to the machine intelligence. Your robot seems to know and cater your biases. Not denying the numbers of black-on-black murders, most of the mass murders are committed by whites who tend not to be especially poor. Often they’re radicalized or made sicker by voices in the Cloud. They’ll never take the guns from our living hands here, but they could make it somewhat less easy to get one quickly.
Thanks for spurring me out of my lethargy on this subject!
According to the US Census for 2023, Whites make up 75.3% of the population, and Blacks 13.7%.
According to a website called ‘Statista’ in 2023 some 9284 Blacks were murdered and 7289 Whites.
Additionally 8842 Whites were convicted of murder and 6405 Blacks.
Need anymore be said?
*I assume most of the victims were shot, as the spanner, lead piping, rope, dagger, and candlestick have rather gone out of fashion these days.
I don’t know what point(s) exactly you think are ‘QED’ with that data to be honest. For sure blacks are statistically more likely to kill or be killed here in the States. If you factor in poverty, the disparity gets much narrower—though it doesn’t disappear, admittedly.
I’ve heard/read that non-Hispanic whites are about 60-65% here. I’m just glad that my Irish ancestors were let into the ‘white tent’ about a century ago. Despite every agitation for versions of justice I think being a white guy still gives one the least steep climb in most walks of American life. Not that I’ve done much with it, at least so far.
To recap Tony Price Esq opened the batting and mentioned the “40,000 gunshot deaths per year”,*I replied by saying I thought most were “Black on Black”.
I think the figures I have quoted make my case don’t you?
As to the reasons (not excuses!) for this, no doubt poverty has some part to play, as off course does losing any sense of self control.
As you may recall I am a firm believer in what the late Cecil Rhodes said about being born English:-
“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have subsequently drawn the greatest prize in the lottery of life.”
Thus I agree it is tough being born Black but there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. We have to live in the world as it is, however unfair that maybe.
*50% can be discounted as Darwinian Self Selection, otherwise known as suicide.
Fine Charles. I’m not gonna fault you for who you are now at age 90 or whatever.*
*Let’s table your cheap shots and mild provocations for now, yeah? Cheers.
O dear AJM I didn’t mean to upset you but my facts are indisputable.
It is only on the ‘causes’ of such a malaise that we obviously differ.
As such anything we say will always be mildly provocative for those who wish to be provoked.
You will have to define ‘cheap shots’ for me’ as I am unfamiliar with the term.
All the best, and “no hard feelings” as we say.
According to Human Freedom Index, 13 of top 20 freest countries are European and 9 of the top 10. US wallows in 18th behind the rest of the Anglosphere. It’s not us that need a lecture.
“Human Freedom Index.”
O dear you don’t seriously believe that twaddle do you?
How on earth do you qualify ‘freedom’ anyway. Is it right to commit sodomy for example? Or torture animals in the cause of gastronomy? Or what?
One thing I find particularly offensive as an Englishman is that in all these so called ‘free’ European societies the Police habitually carry guns. Even the damned Vatican Police have them! I think only the Republic of Ireland and Norway are the exception, along off course with our good selves.
This is hardly surprising as all of them are very new to any concept of ‘democracy’ and have spent most of their miserable existence ‘under the lash’. In short they are natural born Helots, and behave accordingly.
I wouldn’t like the police to habitually carry guns, although I can see why they do in uncivilised societies like America.
Here in NZ you don’t even get as much as a lecture when the police are writing up your speeding ticket, from my (admittedly too many) experiences they’re more likely to just ask where you’re off to
How very comforting, it used to like that here not that many years ago.
English born and bred, there’s not much that’s making me want to return to be honest
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.“
I could still maintain my romantic view of England when I visited in ’83, though it helped to have rose-colored glasses. The way I hear it now, even with glasses those days are gone.
There are still a few pockets left of this once “ green and pleasant land”, but not many I’ll grant you.
interested you stated ‘refugees’ not illegal migrant workers. Are you implying you are slightly nervous that alot of industries actual rely on the latter and there would be an adverse impact, initially at least?
Re: Ukraine – extricate and encourage Xi to blockade Taiwan? Who’s interested in being a US Ally in that scenario if walked away from Ukraine? (And no US soldiers died in Ukraine by the way). Xi’s watching US resolve and unity. He takes Taiwan where you getting the microprocessors from and what sort of economic worldwide shock would you expect?
US isn’t an empire in decline. It remains strongest nation ever in World history. But it may be about to take decisions that do send it rapidly into decline.
It’s a good start.
I think this ignores the strength of Trump’s mandate. The Washington system layered on impeachments, smears, convictions, bans, fines, censorship, raids, attacks on his businesses and jailed his supporters. Voters knew about the smears, the convicted felon, the legal sex pest, the election faker and secrets hoarder, and yet they still chose him to be president over the DC system. Officers and bureaucrats that try to step in front of that train will be run over in these early days.
As time passes and errors and flaws show up Trump’s power will wane. But now, and perhaps only now, he has the political heft and pressure behind him to sow the chaos the voters wanted.
He won the 3rd narrowest victory ever. That’s no revolution. Millions didn’t vote for the chaos, and whilst a bit of WWF spectator sport fun in the first few months once the actions start to have impacts it won’t take much to flip. Mid terms less than 2yrs away.
It’s not about the size of the victory, but the nature of the victory. Trump should have been crushed given the way The Establishment tried every weapon to keep him out of the presidency. But he won, (and also won the popular vote) with the public having full knowledge of the claims of his misdemeanors and character. The DC Machine lost and lost public legitimacy in the process – that’s what makes the mandate so strong. The power will wane, but the impact will be deep, just because of the removal of staff and agencies, and unpicking of unpopular policies like DEI. This isn’t stuff that is easy to put back.
We can never entirely know how many voted positively for Trump, and how many primarily really to punish Democrats/Biden.
Unfortunately for your fairytale the numbers in the House remain v tight and it’s the House that will decide on how he finances things. Pays to understand how the US system actually works.
Trump hasn’t gone after the Washington system much in reality because he hasn’t gone near the vast majority of Federal spending – entitlements, health care and defence.
DEI retreat I favour in large part, although it’s more an issue in Academia than anywhere else. But it’s overstated to throw you some red meat and off the track of who he’s really favouring. You’re being suckered.
“Pays to understand how the US system actually works” … Umm…
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5297896/elon-musk-doge-pentagon-dod
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/nx-s1-5288835/doge-sets-its-sights-on-medicare-and-medicaid
Both Trump and Musk are famously chaos personified, and millions did in fact vote for that.
And in the meantime he has maneuvered you mopes into defending all sorts of waste and corruption. The people at large has made note of this.
The dysfunction is why Trump was possible in the first place. Let’s start with that point. If the republic was healthy, there would be no place for someone like Trump nor would he have run. What’s noteworthy is how many people defend the status quo.
The writer’s take is curious if not misguided. Yes DOGE is starting with low hanging fruit like USAID. Because you have to show people the receipts before they get what the goal is. The program needs to establish baseline credibility before taking on the larger agencies where the problems are far greater.
Look what’s happened thus far: Elon’s team is doxxed and threatened, judges are trying to stop anything from happening, and self-interested parties are defending their slice of the the govt cheese. The opposition also has a personal animus toward Trump and Musk that clouds its already-incoherent judgement.
USAID is not the end; it’s the start. Because every plan has to start some place and usually, it’s where odds of success are good so that the plan can expand to more substantive goals. The author’s take is unique but it misses a larger point.
You’re falling into the ‘after-the fact’ justification. When you have maximum political capital (i.e when you come into power with a mandate) you go at the most important things early. He’s avoided that by going after cheap change and drained his political capital. And that’s because he’s no real strategy other than keep chucking out some red meat. Remember he and Elon promised £2trillion in Federal cuts, yet seem to want to leave Defence and Health alone. They’ve got you in dreamland.
And did you see they are rushing to try and re-employ the Nuclear industry staff who look after the stockpiles and can’t contact them? ‘Well of course a few eggs are gonna get broken, but hey…’
Cretins. And the incompetency being displayed will gradually register.
Maybe add politics generally to that list, eh?
I don’t think Trump operates on any concept of “political capital” and nor does Musk. That kind of thinking is suited to European PR systems but not Trump.
You make a lot of assumptions with no basis. When you see the rot at USAID, you then ask what the big depts look like. Unless you’re a dem; then you spout a lot of sacred bull over allegedly sacred cows like DEI in Serbia and pronouns training for journos in Sri Lanka.
I don’t want defense left alone, nor do I expect Medicare/Medicaid to be ignored. Both are suspected hotbeds of abuse and fraud. The taxpayer has been robbed and you’re mad at the people who are pointing that out.
Alot of the Aid industry is a self-interested racket, but some still gets through to those in real need. Smashing the lot obviously stops that and doesn’t attempt to differentiate. Breaking things easy bit. Reconstructing then v difficult. DEI in Serbia, if indeed anything true of much in it, will save peanuts.
Remember he promised not to touch entitlements. So he can’t say I’m doing what i said to justify it.
He could though go after the Healthcare providers and the profiteering. That’s what drives Medicare/caid costs up. Let’s see if he takes on the AMA et al. Won’t though will he.
And as regards Defence – v unlikely with Musk at the helm and hugely compromised given his own contracts. Let’s wait and see though. To get a substantial Reconciliation bill through the House he needs to move fast to give legislators, and possibly Bond markets too, confidence that he really can balance income/expenditure and not just increase US debt.
Perhaps you need to have a word with Starmer?
I reluctantly have to agree with the conclusion that all DOGE’s good work will only make the smallest dent in the massive US deficit. Even Musk has acknowledged that inescapable dilemma, by revising down his initial estimate of savings from $2 trillion to less than half that.
Approximately one-third of the budget is made up of ‘entitlement’ spending – social security, Medicare etc. That is untouchable, although those schemes will be effectively insolvent within a decade due to demographics. Defence spending represents a $trillion and interest on the debt another $trillion. That leaves very little for meaningful spending cuts.
I think this explains Trump’s opening gambit to Russia and China to discuss large-scale reductions in military budgets. That’s possibly the only room to manoeuvre he has left.
Would the person who downvoted this comment care to provide a counter argument?
In terms of a direct dent in the deficit, you might be right. But exposing the fraud and corruption might be far more valuable, and not merely in financial terms. And then there’s the opportunity to see who defends the fraud and corruption.
“Just a few weeks in, Trump and DOGE are unsurprisingly drowning in court challenges, injunctions, and other legal headaches.”
Yes, because tattling to compliant liberal judges has long been the Option One for Progressives unable to sell their agenda to the voting public.
But then again, on the brighter side…Each incident of the Progressive using the judiciary as a weapon simply reinforces what the voters already know, as their voting for Trump in spite of the legal warfare the Progressives used to damage him shows.
Now they are also seen as being in a huge panic to defend the corruption. This isn’t just a visual impression, it is finally a peek at the truth. We are seeing how the Marxists have through the Cabinet Departments and other agencies, misappropriated our own tax dollars in order to fund their overthrow of our system.
All this talk about the debt and spending and nary a word about the the president and much of the republican party’s effort to make permanent a tax cut that will add trillions to the debt they supposedly want to cut. Perhaps best to dig a bit deeper to figure out what they are actually trying to achieve.
Tax cuts are not the cause of debt…spending is. Spend your own money. Don’t steal mine.
The conclusion, to fix our wrecked economies and democracies could well result in it being that radical change will only come about through ‘revolution’.
What ‘revolution’ means in 2025 is probably a declaration to suspend our democracies and declare martial law.
This may be the only way to bring down our corrupt client state and bring fiscal responsibility back into Govt.
The problem of course is having sorted it out how do you get rid of those in control?
The bigger question is if the problem stems from those in charge and such martial law is likely to be to their benefit, serving to protect them fro revolution. It would be unsuccessful for them of course. But only after a bloody conflict.
The risk that every revolution or coup brings is that there is likely to be a few within it that takes over as dictators themselves and history has shown that often times they are worse than that which was before.
We didn’t hire Mr. Trump to sit in the dust and do nothing because it’s “too difficult”.
Most Americans assume that agencies like USAID or the Dept. of Education are inviolable, carved in stone. Just demonstrating that it’s possible to make real changes is a great service to the voters.
Despite the fact that I know dozens of people who work at non-profits/NGOs, I had no idea that so much of the money was coming from the Treasury. Tax payer’s money. I’m sure I’m not the only one. This must stop. Simply illuminating the problem is a good first step, and much more than any other American politician has done.
In fact, until Trump all of the rest have been enabling or at least turning a blind eye to this nonsense. Politicians miraculously wind up getting very wealthy. One could make a case that the Congress’s paralysis is good way to keep that mystery income flowing. The Uni-Party pretends to do trial-by-combat while everyone profits on the sly.
And these are just some of the moves that Trump and Co. have made in their first month in office!
This time Mr. Kyeyune’s essay misses the mark.
As an expat permanent resident in the US, I consider myself something of a dispassionate observer in all this. As such, I thought the writer had an interesting perspective, and his thesis is of course supported by the fact that Entitlement spending, which represents the vast majority of the Federal Budget, is apparently outside DOGE’s remit.
Since I would like to see some serious reform of the bureaucracy (I live in California, for God’s sake!), I do find his remarks about the lack of resources/infrastructure necessary of concern, and I’m disappointed that most of the pro-MAGA posters on here just seem to think its enough to be rude about his analysis rather than engage with it more seriously. I don’t know whether he’s correct, but as i say, its an interesting perspective.
It always strikes me that it must be exhausting to be so angry all the time, but more seriously, I think being focused on ‘owning the Libs’ every waking minute is a distraction from what ought to be the serious focus of a radical government.
It’s not outside DOGE’s remit, hence the kerfuffle over whether dead people are receiving benefits.
Good, I understood you, Malcom!.
Let’s follow the path of Sweden, where you live
Sweden is consistently way higher in ‘happiness’ indices than the US and has virtually no gun crime/deaths. Sounds good to me, no wonder he prefers to live there.
Didn’t that rather change only the other day with that school shooting?
Also what about the immigration rape gangs who haunt the big cities, ( all two of them) or is that just an urban myth?
ps. Someone shot and killed their Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986. You lot last managed that in 1963 and ‘we’ haven’t done it since 1812.
“Virtually no gun crime”
Sir, you don’t need to lie to make your point. Sweden right now is a true hell hole with car bombs going most weeks and gangs do carry guns. Also, if I was a woman I wouldn’t be exactly happy given it’s the rape capital of Europe.
I thought those gangs prefer grenades and car bombs. Only the occasional gun crime to worry about.
No gun crime. Seriously? Have you read the news since 1980?
Sweden? Have you ever been there? A sterile wilderness where nearly half the year is in frozen darkness, and the rest beset by midges.
Now wonder the splendid Queen Christina* binned the place for Rome and never came back!
ps. Only the other day Sweden’s current Queen Silvia asked, “Where did the beautiful Sweden go?”
Incidentally since 2020 Sweden has recorded about 9,000 rapes per annum. A staggering 59% of the rapists were ‘foreigners’ mainly from The Middle East, Afghanistan and the Maghreb.
The sight of blonde hair, blue eyes, lily white skin and cherry pink nipples appears to be irresistible to these chaps.
*1626-1689.
Oh, come on! That sight is irresistible to just about all of us. The difference is that we’ve been taught a competing code of conduct.
I would call it self control something ‘they’ rather obviously lack.
Howling at the moon.
This is a pretty good piece, though as other readers have commented, it underplays the fact that DOGE has begun to address the deficit problem by taking on easy targets first as a viable way forward. The best is ever the enemy of the good.
Thank you for this analysis. Wonderful and compelling. And yet… the complexity of things almost always surprises us.
Just a wee bit of hyperventilation here in an otherwise accurate portrait of a legislature unable to manage its power of the purse.
The solution (the only solution, sadly), of course, is inflation. 5% inflation per year for 10 years will, by diluting the money supply, cut the deficit in half. We went through something quite similar in the 1970s with outrageous Great Society give-aways far outstripping tax revenue, and a president too obsessed with foreign policy to care about it. The consequences will be a lost decade – or more – but we will pull through and probably figure out what to do about Congress someday. Balanced budget amendment?
Now do France, dear author? Or any other western country in similar condition as tge US. At least, Americans know how to autocorrect. Gimmick is simply a pejorative you are using 2 weeks into the new administration. Hence the question: what’s your point?
DOGE is bringing forward examples of waste and questionable spending, something that either the legislative branch should have addressed during budgeting or the executive in effectively carrying out the responsibilities approved by congress. When your country is running huge deficits and is wallowing in debt, every little bit saved helps.
According to the US Department of the Treasury, “In FY 2024 total government spending was $6.75 trillion and total revenue was $4.92 trillion, resulting in a deficit of $1.83 trillion.” 27% of US federal spending is paid for with borrowed money. As the saying goes, things that cannot go on, typically don’t.
The two largest shares of federal spending are Social Security and Medicare. Both are projected to use up their funding in the early mid 2030s, resulting in benefit cuts.
We in the United States are going to have to make some painful and tough choices on our entitlement spending, otherwise know as benefit freezes or cut and increases in taxes.
I’m sure that sacking National Park Rangers (at a time when more are needed) while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy will really help that deficit! Cutting staff numbers at the IRS should help too – even though it is established fact that the cost of extra IRS staff is way more than covered by the evaded taxes brought in.
Yep. USAID cuts is cheap change and burns political capital Trump should be using on much bigger fish. But it’s performative and plays to his and Elon’s WWF style. (AID industry has much wrong with it and some cuts v needed, but…).
As many may have now heard the Administration is desperately trying to rehire it’s Nuclear industry staff that oversee the stockpiles. It fired them week ago. And this won’t be the only example of idiocy they have to throw into reverse when the reality of their action becomes clear. You couldn’t make it up.
The fiscal crisis is coming – late March probably. Trump could begin to balance things and get some needed bipartisan support in the House if he cancelled the Billionaire tax cuts he’s been prioritising. He should then move DOGE onto medical health costs and the way defence contractors perform. That’s where the real money is.
But he won’t do either. Elon not capable of dealing with the former and compromised on the latter.
The ‘con-job’ is unravelling. Was always going to be the case.
The only con job is “billionaire tax cuts,” a stupid and disproven talking point. Also, highlighting the excesses within USAID makes thinking people, which apparently excludes anyone on the left, question where else their money is being spent.
No you’re incorrect. The individual and estate Tax provisions are up for renewal imminently. When he pushed them in 2017 he could only get through with a time limit due to concern on the potential long term. That time limit had an expiry date. All the analysis shows they benefit the v highest earners. US Treasury’s own Office of Tax Analysis estimates that the top 0.1% of earners would get a tax cut of $314,000.
That a priority?
I correspond regularly with a German expat living in the U.K.. She is bright and thoughtful, and I often ask her to help me to understand Europe and its zeitgeist – a task at which, I must confess, she has been completely unsuccessful.
What is going on over there? Why is everything and everybody so cynical? Here in the States things have been pretty bleak, but nobody – that I know, anyway – has ever given up; we’ve always had hope. Now, post-election, the spirit is upbeat, optimistic, and forward-looking. We just may make it.™
Yes, we have horrible problems – IMHO the worst of which is our sovereign debt. Once the money-printing slows and its full weight comes upon us, times will be tough, but nobody is ready to blow his brains out.
What’s with you guys, anyway?
We don’t like our governments and we’re sceptical of the opposition. Opening the borders to infinite unknown immigrants is apparently easy, as per Merkel in 2015, but smaller issues such as the UK/Ireland border are, like, the hardest problem in the world.
There are few genuine innovations to invest in so the smart money just goes into housing in the nice areas and drives prices through the roof. Not that there’s an awful lot of smart money. Energy prices also going through the roof but governments are killing energy-dense, portable and dispatchable sources and throwing money down the renewables hole.
Raiding pension funds, inheritances and other savings is what governments are reduced to. To fund essential services, they say, but any analysis shows that welfare spending dwarfs all other “essential services”.
Fertility rates are declining rapidly. The preferred method of birth control is simply not to risk meeting anyone of the opposite sex.
Shall I go on?
LOL…,As an American I’d have to admit that much of that list seems very familiar. it’s the guns that are the difference I think. We know that our Constitution gives us the responsibility and authority to overthrow the thieving bastards and they left us the tools with which to do so.
Not that anyone is looking to that really, but we always have that light in the tunnel. Europeans however loudly they shout and no matter how many rocks they throw, do not have the legal right, nor the means to dump a foul government and form a new one.
If I may speak for the UK, we have just endured 13 years of a so called right wing government, only to recently replace it with a so called left wing government.
In reality there is hardly an iota of difference between the two. Both stand for the covert destruction of national sovereignty, the complete abrogation of individual personal freedom, and wilfully encourage unrestricted mass immigration, all managed by a huge and ever increasing parasitical state bureaucracy.
Additionally for the past fifty years or more, a pernicious culture of ‘progressive’ social engineering has been forced onto a sceptical public by very coercive legislation, which now embodies such horrors as Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI).
Finally these two gangs of muppets are hell bent on pushing the absurd Net Zero mantra. For some extraordinary yet inexplicable reason, laced with post Imperial arrogance and hubris, they sincerely believe that the rest of the world will be duly impressed by the fact that the puny little UK, which can only manages to produce a miserable 0.8% of Global Emissions has gone to Net Zero! To lapse into the vernacular, it’s all completely bonkers!
Thus the land that George Orwell described some eighty years now, is gone forever:-
“The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement.”
More tea Vicar?
I just spent a few weeks in Italy and consider it a friendlier place now than the UK. In fact, the only real violence I’ve seen was in the north of England. By that I mean merely a pub brawl, but for some that is an unsettling thing to observe. Maybe it’s partly (or largely) the result of getting older, but I think times were better when I was young and aren’t likely to return to those days.
That would be because the point of DOGE is to cancel govt departments that are either investigating musk or impacting his profits. That’s it.
So … he’s worried about making a profit on this enterprise?How does that work? He’s the richest man on the planet and is doing DOGE’s work for free.
Putting aside the billons he protects with his own overreaching hands, that is. And the invaluable sway he gains at the nexus of sick wealth and access to the heights of power. Inequality personified. Sure he’s smart, but he ain’t good for mankind, nor does he care to be in any widespread way. Congrats if you can afford a ticket to Mars after our one given planet is trashed. Hubris has a way of melting its wings.
Are referring to Clinton, Obama, Bezos, Zuckerberg’ s wealth Trump/ Musk are protecting? Wealth enjoyed by democrats?
C’mon. Zuckerberg belongs on your list along with Bezos and the other tech oligarchs. But Musk leads the pack for hubris and for sheer capital of the monetary and political kind. He’s X-ing out as much of the world as he can. He has an actual world-saving complex now. He claimed the world would be doomed if Tetris failed. Follow the scent.
I don’t claim that Democrats, including presidents, are free of greed and corruption. But Trump is about as hollow and sold-out as they come. Musk is more of a true believer in his imagined superpowers. In a way that’s scarier. Just stay tuned.
I thought Bezos and Zuckerberg just ‘changed sides’ or was that just an illusion?
Even ‘our’*new Ambassador to the USA did an amazing volte-face the other day and made the most abject and grovelling apology for previous insults to President Trump.
I was very surprised that the President was so magnanimous as to accept Mandelson’s ingratiating behaviour, I certainly wouldn’t have.
*UK.
They kissed the ring. Bezos has a Left platform in the Washington Post, whereas Musk turned the formerly quite hard-left lean of Twitter into a hard-right lean, to the X degree.
If you had to pick: Would you want the dominant rule of Alexander or Caesar or Napoleon, or the weak tyranny of Nero or King John or (still aspiring, results not in) Trump?
Caesar.
Not looked at his own Federal Govt funded contracts has he. SpaceX been given c£17billion by US Govt and that’s just one of his contracts and one of his companies.
As has been pointed out, this is as much about delivering the message, allowing us the freedom to acknowledge all the crap we’re forced to put up with. Look up “I was asked to keep this confidential” on youtube by the scarily intelligent (& just plain scary) physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. Her rant, starting at 6.30, is quite extraordinary
quote: “Trump can’t raise taxes or appropriate money directly — but what he can do is impose tariffs on Ottawa, as long as he fibs and pretends it’s for national security reasons.” . . . . What he does not clarify for his fanbase, is that tariffs on Ottowa or any other country are, in principal, paid by Americans. They are taxation by a different name.
There is something to keep in mind if you are an American. You may think that Trump has all the answers and the more power and control he is given it is all good. But 4 years from now someone else will be entering the White House, and people might not feel so confident to allow them all the same degree of power.
“DOGE, in short, is a gimmick.”
I once thought Tesla was a gimmick, SpaceX was a gimmick, Starlink was a gimmick, but Elon Musk proved me wrong and became the world’s richest man in the process.
Even if DOGE started out as a gimmick, it does not mean it will stay a gimmick.
@SwordMercury is Account Suspended on X
Wonder why?
A gimmick perhaps, but impactful and destabilizing. Like the Trump yeasayers he opposes, Kyeyune seems to welcome the collapse of the current System at almost any cost. What will we get in its place, and in its bloody aftermath or smoldering ruins? As for 1789, there’s some echo in the Capitol Riots and pardoning of its architects and malefactors.
Less than a month into their gathering madness. Stay tuned and don’t let rah rah sympathies cloud too much of your judgment. Trump Derangement Syndrome is not confined to Trump’s opponents. Far from it. I hope the Christians in this readership have a good and thoughtful Sunday.
DOGE is trying to impose the most ordinary of accounting standards on the US government, which has been literally unaccountable – effectively unaudited and unauditable for decades. Knowing if appropriated funds have been properly used and who are the payees is fundamental. If you want to have taxpayers go along with the austerities that will be needed in the future, they have to have confidence that government is not committing widespread fraud on the taxpayer.
Revalue gold to $140,000 dollars an ounce and your $36T debt is balanced by the assets in the treasury. Job done.
This author uses too many words to confuse his point. I am no wiser after reading his article, nor do I know what he means by what he says.
I don’t disagree, but the article does a fair job of pulling together a lot of information and parading it in front of the reader. That’s helpful, at least for those of us outside the US.
Yes, it’s difficult – so why bother? That’s the message we have all been hearing for decades. Do not assume that Trump will think inside the bureaucratic box – he doesn’t and things can change quickly. For a start the GOP control Congress. Start by sacking the complicit judges and start behaving like responsible adults. The World needs the Trump administration to create a new road map or the first World will become ensnared further in its own disaster planning. If we refuse to be optimistic due to dogma then we are finished.
Mr. Kyeyune, you have been one of the most incisive commentators, but today your wisdom is to assume that what we have seen in the first three weeks is all there is to see. You’ll soon learn that you are mistaken.
Disturbing observations and conclusions. Thank you. I am surprised to see almost no comments.
The answer to budget deficits is easy. Just print more dollars. It has worked well before !
Malcom lives in Uppsala Sweden.
Finger on the pulse in Washington Malcom, finger on the pulse mate….
Me thinks you write what you hope, not what is real.
Noughts mean a lot – 1 billion $ bills = 68 miles tall. 1 Trillion = 68000 miles tall.
After all, the government today runs a deficit close to $2 trillion a year. To fund this deficit, it borrows roughly $10 billion each and every day. It’s important to realize here that while most countries do have some kind of national debt, the size and trajectory of America’s deficit is different.”
TUSK and the DOGE would be far more effective in assisting the affairs of America if his task was radically modified and Tusk were challenged to build wealth for America the way he has built wealth for himself. According to some reports Tusk has 700M$ invested in Bitcoin type assets. Why not develop a USA Bitcoin revenue stream to pay off all the Chinese owned debt? Maybe the problem here is demanding the US conform to Nineteenth century standards to alleviate its debt.