I sure wish I could call it a blitzkrieg, but, you know, that Hitler stuff..
Lots of people are writing and thinking the same thing, but I’ll state it anyway: the way Trump has begun his second term is politically and strategically masterful, as well as entertaining. It is also unprecedented, with the only remotely similar example in American history being Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as he rushed to get control of both the Great Depression and the cratering moral of the public. No President has moved this quickly and decisively, however, or caught his opposition so flatfooted and impotent.
This is an experienced CEO doing what effective CEOs do best. It took planning, foresight, guts and learning from past mistakes. Here, a substack essay explains how it occurred. The writer doesn’t cite any sources, but it had to be something like what he describes. The critics of Trump who insisted that he was mentally feeble-minded—you know, like all conservatives—and a certain a disaster waiting to happen are being proven so astoundingly wrong that they are reduced to babbling, screaming or saying huminahuminahumina like Ralph Kramden when he was exposed to his wife as a fool.
Here is how you can distinguish the Trump Deranged hacks from the Trump detractors with integrity. The latter will say, “You know, I have to say, I don’t agree with most of what he’s doing, but this is very impressive. I didn’t think he could do it.” Here are the other kind are like Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson in their Times piece called “Falsehoods Fuel the Right-Wing Crusade Against U.S.A.I.D.” [Gift link!] It’s all the logical fallacy known as “The Texas Sharphooter,” as the authors choose misreported and exaggerated examples of USAID waste without acknowledging the damning grants that would be sufficient to justify distrusting the agency even if it had never given a penny to Politico.
The hair-on-fire hysteria of Democratic Party leaders and the Axis media over Trump’s assault on big government and Great Stupid wokism is noted with disgust in this excellent post at “The Hill” by Jonathan Turley.
“Across the internet, politicians and pundits are in a monstrous mood. The same people who spent the last year declaring the imminent death of democracy if Donald Trump were elected are now insisting that the real threat is the monster he has unleashed upon the federal bureaucracy. For Washingtonians, Musk is the bogeyman they have long described to their children around campfires at night: An outsider who comes to town and lays waste to government waste, firing thousands and slashing budgets…
For decades, both Democratic and Republican presidents have run on reducing government and making it more efficient. But everyone knew that such campaign pledges would be quickly discarded after each election. What is so terrifying this time is that Musk means it. We know that because he has done it before….
Liberals correctly saw Musk’s defiance as an existential threat. For years, they had exercised virtual total control of social media, legacy media and academia. Opposing views were denounced as dangerous disinformation.
The key to their system was that you maintain orthodoxy by coercing people into silence. During the COVID pandemic, scientists who challenged the enforced view of masks, COVID-19 origins, and other issues were banned or fired. Others remained silent as they watched colleagues exiled for expressing their opinions.
Musk had to be destroyed, or others might start to believe that they could also defy the groupthink.”
The hysterical attacks on Musk are both silly and self-indicting. That TIME cover…
is a good example: for four years the U.S. really did have someone or someones serving as shadow President while Joe Biden leaked IQ points, yet Henry Luce’s fading baby never let their readers in on the secret. President Trump found the perfect individual to delegate one of his most difficult tasks, “draining the swamp,” uncovering the graft and scams, trimming the budget. That’s what successful leaders do: they find the best people to do the hard jobs. I realized how sad and impotent Democrats have become when one of their “leaders” in the anti-Musk rally actually tried to start a “Heigh Heigh Ho Ho, Eon Musk has got to go!” chant. Wow. I almost feel sorry for them.
Almost.
What Americans are witnessing is a transitional, tipping point moment that has rarely been seen in our history. Jackson, perhaps. The two Roosevelts. But it has only been a little more than two weeks! Disney should reprogram its Hall of the Presidents to have all of Trump’s predecessors turn and salute #47. If they weren’t audio-animitons, I bet most of them, may be all, would be thinking, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Regarding some specific items…
- This time the Education Department really may go the way of the passenger pigeon. At very least, it will be cut down to a shadow of itself. What are the arguments for keeping it? “We can make it work” is disallowed: a nearly 50 year test is more than fair, and the department flunked. Nobody can question the stark reality that our children were better educated before there was an Education Department. Now all levels of education have become progressive indoctrination farms while fewer and fewer children can read. Turn it over to the cities and states.
- Foreign aid? Sure, that’s a valuable way to keep allies and order, as long as the U.S. has the money to do it. It doesn’t. Biden allowed the National Debt needle to swing into the red zone, probably forever. It’s not isolationism to refuse to spend funds that we can’t afford to spend. It is called “being responsible” and “having the right priorities.”
- The anti-DEI push is an excellent example of how a President moves the culture from his “bully pulpit.” The President saying DEI is virtue-signaling, discriminatory crap has real force in public opinion as long as he is more popular than not. The NFL announced that it is taking its obnoxious “End Racism” message out of its end zones. Good.
- Taking away Joe Biden’s security clearance is being framed as a tit-for-tat move by Trump, but allowing someone whose brain is turning into cottage cheese have access to state secrets would be incompetent and irresponsible.
- This EO, reaffirming the primacy of the Second Amendment, is mostly puffery, but its message is an important one for a President to make, especially after four years of his predecessor lying about how citizens couldn’t own cannons in the 18th Century. Take that, David Hogg!
- Trump making himself Chairman of the Kennedy Center? OK, that’s a bit much. It is also pure revenge: the Kennedy Center let honorees embarrass and denigrate Trump in his first term as they threatened to boycott the glitzy ceremony and refuse to attend the usual First Lady’s reception for awardees. This was one many of the distinctions and traditional perks of the office that were denied Trump by “the resistance” and the D.C. elite. The Kennedy Center leadership should have told any complaining Kennedy Center Honors designee that they could either be patriotic Americans or the Center would give their awards to someone else. I’m inclined to give Trump a pass on this: he deserves some fun. And the truth is that nobody outside of D.C. cares about the Kennedy Center.
- [ADDED] Trump fired the Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan. Blogging defense attorney Scott Greenfield, who is better than this but has now revealed himself to be completely Trump Deranged, has a whole post about how terrible her dismissal is. I think the post is mostly just an excuse to spit venom at Trump: “[I]t was just another in a series of petty moves by a puny man as retribution against those who hurt his feelings,” he writes. Trump’s “a current president who uses power as payback like a butthurt child.” Then, “What possible reason could there be for such a petty narcissist to do such an inane thing?”
Oh, go on, Scott, call Trump a poopy head; you know you want to.
Here’s a perfectly valid reason to fire her: after Trump’s experience of being sabotaged repeatedly by entrenched leftovers from Democratic administrations during his first term, he is justified in canning any Biden appointee. Better safe than sorry, after all.
Amazingly, this is just the beginning.
Ethics Alarms 
This time the Education Department really may go the way of the passenger pigeon.
Education is not one of the enumerated powers of Congress. It can set education policy for the District of Columbia and United States territories, but other than that, they can not set education policy.
The NFL announced that it is taking its obnoxious “End Racism” message out of its end zones.
The NFL did not have this message in the end zones during the height of the Civil Rigts movement.
The biggest mistake the Democrat Party ever, EVER, made was defeating Trump, by whatever means, in 2020. I bet he learned his lessons well before that, but I can’t imagine he would have been able to get all of this in place during a continuous two term office; and he certainly wouldn’t have had RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard on board!
Skitch ’em Spot; they’re not my dogs!
It’s a site to behold; and that’s before you see his staffing picks gnawing their critics down to the bone and then sucking the marrow out!
Education Department: Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt warned everyone about what consolidating of schools and giving the power of education to a massive federal department of education would do to indoctrinate our youth. Seriously, look at what she wrote and said about it way back when Regan was President and then try and tell me that some of what she warned hasn’t come true. Were the accuracy of some of her warnings genuine foresight or just dumb luck?
Watching the reactions has been more entertaining than I could have ever thought. I didn’t so much vote for Trump the first time as I voted against Hillary, Trump didn’t seem like a positive choice. But this time, this is exactly what I voted for. And had the wuflu just been treated as a seasonal flu, Elon probably would still be doing business as usual in California and Trump would now be out of office after two terms and D.C. would likely look the same today as it did eight years ago. Talk about unintended consequences!
Your comment about “This is an experienced CEO doing what effective CEOs do best.” is right on target. Seeing how thoroughly Trump has prepared for this term, particularly uncovering how the deep state has been able to hide their actions, is very impressive.
And the old adage about government can’t fix the problems that government create has been the perfect challenge for Elon and crew to take on.
I can only hope that the same people who saw through the bs of the last eight years and changed their votes to Trump fully realize how corrupt the system is and how badly the American people have been taken advantage of, and take out the rest of the trash in the next couple of elections.
To be frank, the word blitzkrieg occurred to me, too. Yes, the President’s detractors will use any excuse to tie him to Hitler but the term rather fits so I have no problem using it around people who understand it.
As it happens, just yesterday I was monologuing to Mr. Golden (God bless his patience) about FDR’s unprecedented bank holiday. Democratic norms!
I also read the following piece which has its share of ups and downs regarding the comparison of Trump to General Jackson;
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/08/politics/donald-trump-spoils-system-what-matters/index.html
Regarding Security Clearances: In truth, revoking a clearance isn’t strictly necessary because having a clearance–by itself–doesn’t grant you access to ANYTHING. All having a clearance does for you is make you ELIGIBLE to be granted access to classified information.
To have actual access to anything, you need to be actively working on a project where access is required for you to be able to do your job–and even then, you are ONLY granted access to what is required for you to be able to do your job.
In that light, the only reason to revoke a clearance is to PREVENT anyone (like a rogue government employee in a managerial role) from granting access to and/or hiring the person in question.
In Biden’s particular case, he’s no longer a government employee, so he no longer has any Need-To-Know that justifies access to classified materials. Revoking his clearance really is unnecessary.
It’s also worth mentioning, as I have in the past, that the entire concept of “classified information” and “security clearances” were created by Executive Orders, not an Act of Congress, so the President of the United States is the ultimate authority on what is or is not classified and who does or does not get cleared.
–Dwayne
Dwayne, am I wrong in thinking former presidents were given daily security briefings and now Biden won’t as a result of his having lost his clearance? Certainly, the idea of Biden being briefed on “what’s going on in the world” is preposterous. He can’t even take a briefing on what’s going on in his living room.
I don’t have any knowledge of what happens with former POTUS’s, but if President Biden’s clearance is revoked then that definitely precludes him from being in any sort of briefings that contain classified information.
No different from you or I, really.
–Dwayne
Former presidents typically seem to retain security clearance as in times of national emergency they can be asked to serve the sitting president with advice. However Donald Trump’s security clearance was revoked in 2021 with as justification given the events at January 6th, 2021.
PWS
Wasn’t the archivist a key player in trumping up the Mar-a-Lago “classified documents” show trial?
In truth, no. She came on later.
D.C. inside baseball stuff.
I have to feel a tad vindicated seeing Trump being viewed as a different breed of cat rather than a huckster with a flat learning curve. He’s a real estate developer. He does projects and identifies and solves problems along the way. He sells a vision to lenders. He envisions projects. He gets people to work for him. He’s never run for student council or dog catcher or the school board. He doesn’t spend his entire life grubbing for donor money. And thank God for that. The Dems spend a lot of time trying to enforce the rule that not anyone can grow up to be president. You have to be a hack who’ll do the bidding of the entrenched bureaucracy. You can be president, but you can’t mess with what the experts and bureaucrats are doing. THEY know what’s best. Politicians can come and go and they’re basically buffoons, but it’s the sinecured, august, all-knowing government employees who save the country from being run by the people the hoi ploi foolishly elect. It’s the John Brennans and the Jim Clappers we should be grateful for. Assholes.
I must admit I am greatly enjoying the show. The best part, for me, is watching the likes of Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters attempting to use their same old red-meat-for-the-base tropes. It’s all they know. But they seem to have haunted looks on their faces that suggest a creeping awareness: more than half of the nation now finds them sleazy, pathetic and laughable.
I was wondering whether those highly senior members of the Congress did not feel a sense of embarrassment when shouting “Hey ho…Elon has to go”, or when arguing at the door of the Department of Education by a single security guard. Even when you are a Democrat you must cringe when you see these “august” Senators and Representatives reduced to throwing tantrums like toddlers, whose toys have been taken away by Mom and Dad. And that is the issue, they know that they are completely powerless, and powers that be see no reason to take them serious as by know everyone can see that they are not fighting for a just and moral cause; the Dems simply want to keep their toys, such as tax payer money for friendly media, DEI initiatives, NGOs and unions that launder tax payer money back into the Democrat’s campaign coffers. In other words, these politicians do want to retain a corrupt and unaccountable bureaucracy that abuses the taxpayers simply to help the Democrats retain their power, by any means possible.
I am afraid this is also the reason why the Biden administration supported illegal immigration. The Democrats hoped that these illegals would be in a pipeline to citizenship, creating a thankful and compliant new constituency for the Democrats.
The problem for the Democrats is that the optics are really bad for them. They have barely any traction in the confirmation hearings in the Senate, as the ranking Democrats appear unhinged during the hearings, and have been called out personally for their financial ties with Big Pharma. The mainstream media is in a complete meltdown about all the Trump initiatives, they are losing money and viewership, and if DOGE uncovers and stop any more payments from the federal agencies in DC to the press they will even lose more. Looking forward to the upcoming election in 2026, if things stay as they are today, Mom and Dad (the voters) will simply deal with the toddler by putting to bed without a dinner.
What is the way out this predicament for the Democrats?
I think you’re correct, both with your diagnosis and the treatment plan. The challenge is that the Democratic Party seems hell-bent on ignoring the disease, so the treatment will be a non-starter.
You are also ignoring the possibility that many of those news outlets will go bankrupt without the government money. I have wondered how CNN stays in business with middling YouTube channel viewership numbers. The Democratic Party seems to be mainly smoke and mirrors funded illicitly by the Deep State with tax dollars. If Trump can turn off the tax dollars, will those Deep State elites fund the Democratic Party with their own money or will they let it collapse?
The Manhattan Contrarian, along with Ann Althouse, are on the most outrageous attempt to “STOP TRUMP!”
Kindergarten Konstitutional Law Comes To The Southern District Of New York — Manhattan Contrarian
As per usual, the State AGs have gone to Federal Court to have a standard issue elite (brilliant beyond imagining!) lawyer/judge protect the “permanent bureaucracy” (Francis Menton’s apt term).
Amen. Again, “What is wrong with these people?”