The Grand Illusion
Both Elon Musk and Donald Trump have taken Mark Zuckerberg’s early mantra – “Move fast and break things” – to heart in their efforts to reshape and downsize the federal bureaucracy.
This is already presenting at least three major problems. First, like Humpty Dumpty, some of those things they’re breaking shouldn’t have been broken in the first place and may not be easily repaired or replaced.
Second, one of the things they’re trying to break is the concept that the United States is a land of laws, and that the laws are superior to the desires of those who lead government. Trump, of course, has nothing but contempt for any law that thwarts or restricts anything he wants to accomplish, regardless of either existing law or the future consequences of his acts.
Third, they really don’t know what they’re doing, beginning with firing the federal employees in charge with the nuclear weapons stockpile and reducing the number of FAA and IRS employees at a time when both agencies are understaffed. Firing the Forest Service and National Parks employees will only increase the severity of fire damage and turn the parks into trash heaps, especially now, given the backlog of infrastructure maintenance at the parks and the increasing number of visitors.
Blaming Canada for the fentanyl epidemic is also absurd, since less than one percent comes from Canada, and imposing tariffs on Canada will hurt the U.S. far more than it will impact Canada, particularly U.S. auto manufacturing. It also won’t do anything to reduce drug trafficking.
Trump and Musk also haven’t targeted the most obvious sources of waste, especially the U.S. military/industrial complex. There are so many U.S. military bases/facilities both in the U.S. and worldwide that there’s not even a consensus on how many there are. Reputable estimates range from 800 to 1,200, and the military has been trying to consolidate and close a number of those installations for years, but for some reason, Congress doesn’t like the idea when it comes to reducing bases in the districts of individual members.
Regardless of critics, moving fast will continue, at least for a while, and civil liberties will be further eroded; prices will increase; productive federal employees will be fired, while unproductive ones will be retained; and Trump will proclaim how wonderful everything is.
I don’t agree with it, but the Canada tariffs do make some sense, so long as you take into account Trump’s stated goal of annexing Canada into the US. While he won’t succeed, he will manage to cause a huge amount of damage to many industries in the US and Canada. This will be especially true when he doesn’t get what he wants within a couple of years and tries to treat them like Venezuela, where any country that buys certain things from Canada would be subject to high tariffs as well.
When people don’t understand the ship of state, and their own desires are all they can see, then when they set the ship for full speed ahead, all they do is ensure maximum damage when the ship hits the obstacles they’re blind to.
And they are TOTALLY incompetent as Jeff Goldberg’s Atlantic article today describes. They are using Signal app to discuss highly classified subjects and ‘accidentally’ included him (a journalist) is the planning for this month’s strike on Yemen. AND THEY DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE IT!!! This administration. like Trump’s first has a large number of imbeciles in it. The scary part is their wielding an enourmous amount of power.
Break things, indeed.
In regards to the conflict between laws and the desires of those in power, I think that there is some nuance typically left out of most discussions regarding the topic.
In my opinion, the main issue is the difference between what the law is intended to do and what the current administration intends to achieve. There is a large amount of pedantry in politics when it comes to interpreting laws. The problem is that language is similar to statistics; if you twist it hard enough then it will tell you whatever you want to hear. Therefore, I would argue that the intent of a law should be considered before the text of the law.
I believe that in a legal context, the power of the current administration should fall somewhere between the intention of the law and the text of the law. In simpler terms, the government should worry about the intention behind a law, and then worry about what the presidential administration wishes to do that might conflict with that. If no conflicts are found, that is when the text of the law itself should be taken into consideration. Any other process results in asinine discussions about antiquated language and legal jargon.
Sorry if I didn’t make my point very succinctly, I should probably drink more coffee before trying to post about a complex topic.
As for the tariffs, I certainly don’t like them. However, I think that what Trump is attempting to accomplish is different from his stated goals. Economic independence is an ideal shared by most people on the American right (though I cannot speak for other countries). The whole charade about fentanyl is just a sort of financial casus belli to bring more industry to the US. Regardless of one’s own opinion on if that is a good thing, I think that most can agree that such sudden tariffs hurt everyone in the short term. A less destructive way to achieve the same goal would be to announce the tariffs significantly in advance so as to allow for time to move production to the US.
Is there any real coverage in the USA of how badly Make America Grate Again is playing in the rest of the world, especially the nonsense re Canada and Greenland? Or is the reaction that JD Vance is right and everyone is freeloading?
Perhaps it is a good wake-up call for Europe to remember that the USA only ever joins real wars three years late.
FAOD, that was snark, but Europeans can find it easy to forget that the USA only joined World War 1 because the Kaiser’s ministers had a fit of insanity and sent a telegram to Mexico suggesting that they and Japan distract the USA and that Rooseveldt did not have to worry about persuading the Senate and the Congress to declare war on Germany because Hitler beat him to it.