· 8 min read
Actually, the brutish are already here and in control of the executive branch of a rapidly dwindling federal government. Note carefully that Congress, the federal government, we the people, and possibly the judiciary are the ones being dwindled by an aspirational authoritarian president. The indiscriminate hacking apart of federal agencies and programs duly passed by Congress violates the spirit and likely a good many letters of the US Constitution.
The president and his cabal (clearly) seem to think that Trump 2.0 is a "genital-grabbing-shooting-anyone-from-the middle-of 5th-Avenue" moment all rolled into one. Believing these kinds of opportunities don’t come often, the MAGA-minded intend to take full advantage.
They’re even going global. How long they’ll be able to get away with their brand of thuggery is anyone’s guess.
There's nothing overly imaginative about Trump’s and Musk’s unbridled attack strategy. They’re using the nation’s bigness and control of the jobs and money to intimidate – primarily friends.
The Oval Office scene involving Ukraine President Zelenskyy staged by Trump and JD Vance was a reprehensible way to treat an ally – especially since it’s his country being pounded into the ground by the aggressor Russia. It’s sad that only one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), had the character and integrity to call the Oval Office treatment of the Ukrainian president what it was – sickening.
It’s important not to be totally taken in by what the co-presidents say they’ve done – “done” as in actually accomplished. Just because Trump signs an order or sends a message via Truth Social or X doesn’t mean a promise is kept. Nearly everything Trump has done through the daily disgorging of directives is being challenged in court by and on behalf of blue states and cities, as well as by tens of thousands of individuals and thousands of organizations who’ve been suddenly turned out by the dynamic duo – without as much as a fare thee well.
As reported by POLITICO and others, Trump announced at a second cabinet meeting that the decision of who to keep and fire is back in the hands of agency heads. The announcement is likely the result of internal pressure from top appointees who are finding it impossible to manage their own departments.
Experience strongly suggests that the way Musk has gone about reform will create massive inefficiencies because DOGE fired or chased out many of the only people who knew how to get things done. The batch firings, e.g., all employees still in their mandatory year or two probation period, swept away key links in the administrative chain.
Trump 2.0 should have learned from Trump 1.0 that you need competent bureaucrats to implement your policies. Just because you think someone was hired because of their skin color over a white person doesn’t mean they’re not the best one for the job or that their mission isn’t critical. These types of self-crippling mistakes, e.g., firing nuclear inspectors because they were still on probation, means there will be a lot of confusion and finger-pointing in Washington over the entirety of Trump’s second term. They would have done well to follow an old carpenter’s maxim – measure twice, cut once.
The busiest people in the new administration are going to be the lawyers defending flawed executive orders and failures to follow the Administrative Procedures Act.
If chaos and chock-full court dockets are what Trump promised on the hustings, then promises made, promises kept, Messrs. President!
Capitol Hill Republicans seem to have any inclination to temper either Trump's or his co-president Elon Musk’s enthusiasm for chainsawing their way through America’s government. In addition to being guilty of a poor understanding of how governments are required to work, the Trump 2.0 administration is shot through with possible conflicts of interest that will profit the individual as they weaken the belief in government.
Trump’s cabinet, along with the co-president, are still involved in companies that stand to benefit from agency decisions.
Musk’s possible conflicts are only the most obvious. For example, Musk is trying to convince Commerce Secretary Lutnick to ditch the Biden administration’s “Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program.”
The program is intended to provide under-served and rural areas with internet access. The $42.5 billion effort was passed as part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) – one of the three major climate-related laws passed by Congress during the Biden presidency.
Without getting deep into the weeds of the situation, the conflict is that the alternative to the fiber optic option chosen by the Biden administration (BEAD) – for good reasons – is Musk’s Starlink (non-fiber) system. It was also discovered that there was an order for armored Tesla trucks to the tune of $400 million, which the administration now says it (maybe) won’t fulfill.
Ukraine’s Starlink connection – so critical to the country's resistance to Russian aggression – has been threatened by Musk on multiple occasions.
Should BEAD's fiber optics be swapped out for Starlink, what would prevent the co-president from threatening to cut US access off if it didn’t meet his demands?
It's wise to remember that Musk is attempting to boost far-right European parties, e.g., AfD, with historic ties to Nazism.
Musk is hardly the only member of Trump 2.0 who might not pass a conflict-of-interest test. The administration's firing of all of the agency inspectors general or any position that might have oversight, e.g., an agency's general counsel or whistle-blower protectors, whose loyalty to Trump could be questioned, makes it appear as if the Trump 2.0 crew was up to something – or soon will be. (Just sayin’)
Unsurprisingly, the massive stoppages and uncertainties of what happens next have set off a scramble by organizations and programs to be “exceptioned” back into existence.
Trump 2.0, unlike any Republican administration since Richard Nixon, is even against high-risk, long-term research. It’s always been the fallback position of Republican administrations to show they weren’t total troglodytes – especially when it came to new energy technologies.
Although Trump 2.0 has shown a particular dislike for climate-related science, it is attacking most federally-funded scientific research. The National Institutes of Health have suffered devastating reductions in workforce and programming funds.
The disjointing of federal agencies and programs will be made worse – at least not improved – by the rush to be put back into the federal budget. In these situations, the piecemeal return of things is based on politics – whoever can be most effective in their lobbying strategies.
This kind of trial by ordeal further skews federal programming away from a balanced approach to governance.
Think of what will occur in terms of the boardinghouse prayer my old dah taught me: “father, son, and holy ghost, the one that grabs the fastest eats the most.”
Trump is more motivated by revenge than any deliberate and rational reform of the federal government. Lawyers assigned any duties as part of the investigation into Trump's dealings as president and private citizen have been purged – no matter that they were only doing the assigned tasks.
Everything is being cast in terms of consistency with “the policies and positions of the president," whatever they may be. Anyone who disagrees is swarmed on by the MAGA-minded, called a woke crazy socialist, virtually tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail.
Presidents are elected because of their proposed agendas. However, their obligation also involves carrying out the directives of a duly elected Congress as written into legislation and those enumerated in the US Constitution. Contrary to Trumpian governance theory, presidential powers are far from absolute.
The rudeness and arrogance of Trump’s administration is quite astonishing. Asked by a reporter why Trump decided to go with tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China, press secretary Karoline Leavitt vehemently told the journalist it was really none of his business and being disrespectful.
“You're asking me what the president's justification is for these tariffs. It's not up to you. You're not the president … and frankly, I think it's a little bit disrespectful to the families in this country who have lost loved ones at the hands of this deadly poison.”
Although illegal fentanyl use is a problem in the US, it’s not as easy to stop as Trump seems to imagine. According to the Congressional Research Service, “fentanyl’s potency enables TCOs [traffickers] to meet US demand with a relatively small amount of product (measured in terms of weight), raising challenges for interdictions.”
The amount of chemicals coming over the Canadian border is infinitesimal. Moreover, everything in the fentanyl supply chain, e.g., chemical components and pill-making machines, isn’t illegal to buy or sell.
The point, of course, is that fentanyl is just the excuse that Trump has chosen to use to do what he intends to do anyway. The belligerence of nearly the entire administration, e.g., Vance to Zelenskyy, may be getting them compliance and capitulation today, but things have a way of changing.
The less Trump intends to support European allies in peace and in war, the less reason these countries are going to have to buy all of the oil he hopes the US is willing to pump. The more federal policy turns against electric vehicles and clean energy technologies, the slower the uptake of rare earth minerals Trump hopes to mine -- whether from Greenland’s shores or Ukraine’s mountains.
Trump may be getting away with the mean-spirited, doctrine-driven actions he’s undertaken early in his second term now, but they are going to come back to haunt him.
It’s not always outside forces who bring down a failed leader. Often as not, it’s their hubris. It’s something of which this administration has an abundance. Messrs. Trump and Musk would know this if they valued history as much as themselves.
As a final note, libs aren’t the only one concerned about Trump and his administration’s brutishness particularly to friends and allies. Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute believes:
“America’s alliances give it great leverage on many issues, from maintaining the international primacy of the dollar to confronting the Iranian nuclear program. A superpower without friends won’t be so super anymore.”
The brutish are here and it’s anyone’s guess if the US will be able to maintain the efficient operation of the federal government and have any true friends left in the international community during their reign.
