Trump And Musk Bring The Chainsaw

President Trump is moving faster than any president of my lifetime to get things done.

It is astonishing. Astonishing.

I’ve never seen an administration move this quickly to do as many different things as the Trump administration is doing right now.

Whether you’re talking about walking back support for the UNRWA, ending support nationwide for transitioning children, ending DEI initiatives all over the country, reconstituting the Defense Department (by the way, recruitment immediately skyrocketed since the appointment of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense), or getting wins at the Panama Canal (where the Panamanian government has now announced it is not going to participate in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative anymore), this administration is pushing so hard, so fast on so many fronts, that it’s exceptionally difficult for any opposition to truly form around any one issue. 

The best the Democrats have done so far is mobilize around the end of USAID. USAID is an agency that was originally brought into being by foreign aid initiatives of Congress and then put into power by an executive order by JFK all the way back during the middle of the Cold War. USAID essentially was designed as a way of spreading America’s foreign policy tentacles all over the world. That was the explicit purpose. It wasn’t just to do nice things; it was to do nice things and also to support institutions in various countries that were going to be a bulwark against communism.

Since the end of the Cold War, USAID has been transformed into supporting trans pride flags in Africa or boondoggle projects that are designed to pay millions or billions of dollars to Left-wing NGOs, both in the United States and outside the United States, and keep up an entire employment line for people who are out of power.

While Republicans are in power, USAID is still paying many blue organizations to keep trains running on time and to make sure money continues to flow to various organizations abroad that are willing to spread social leftism.

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The idea of USAID is not wrong. The idea that you want to find non-governmental organizations in countries that are teetering between China and the United States and support them to make that country more pro-America is not a bad idea.

The problem is that the USAID infrastructure has been hijacked by the radical Left. What the Left has done with so many institutions — and USAID is only one of them — is to take the original purpose of the institution, gut it, and then wear the face around like Hannibal Lecter.

That is exactly what the Left has done with the university systems in the United States. They did it with the mainstream press in the United States, and they did it with USAID.

USAID has been participating in tremendous waste and fraud for a long time. As Daniel Greenfield of the David Horowitz Freedom Center points out, USAID has sent $9.3 billion to Islamic terrorist states collectively responsible for killing over 3,000 American soldiers. There are an enormous number of terrible organizations supported by USAID.

A wing of the Republican Party wishes to use the fact that these institutions have been so thoroughly corrupted to go totally isolationist, which is a mistake. Two things can be true at the same time: USAID has become a totally corrupted institution, but that doesn’t mean that the best strategy for the United States is to retreat from the world entirely and simply grant that vacuum to the Chinese, the Russians, or the Iranians.

Elon Musk said that there basically is nothing left at USAID that’s worth saving. The budget of USAID is somewhere between $40 and $50 billion. It is an extremely large governmental program. So when people say things like, “It’s only 1% of the American budget,” that’s true. But that’s just because our budget is far too large. That doesn’t mean we should be wasting tons of money on interests that are antithetical to American interests abroad.

The spread of social leftism in Zimbabwe should not be the goal of American foreign policy. Flying “Pride Progress” flags outside the Vatican should not be a goal of American foreign policy, and neither should supporting Left-wing NGOs that are also supported by people like George Soros.

President Trump deployed Elon Musk and the Department of Governmental Efficiency to go into USAID’s headquarters, dig through the personnel files, and try to figure out where all the money is going. The acting heads of USAID tried to resist. So President Trump fired them.

Many people on the Left got very upset about all of this for a couple of reasons. First, they actually like the “Pride Progress” flag being flown in far-flung African nations with American taxpayer dollars. They want America to fund abortion abroad. They support precisely the things the American taxpayers don’t want to do.

But there’s something else going on, too, which is that USAID, like so many other federal government programs, is an absolute gravy train for Democratic allies. It is a bunch of money that is being spent on various constituencies that Democrats cultivate and use as the incoming State Department officials if Democrats win office. It is not a coincidence that so many Democrats, both elected and non-elected, worked at places like or funded by USAID. It’s a giant grab bag of cash which has essentially become a handout mechanism for the Left-wing.

The administration’s strategy seems to be to move fast and break things, to make all of these cuts, to bring a chainsaw to the party.

The way an executive branch agency works is that everyone serves at the pleasure of the president of the United States. If you don’t like that, there is a way this could have been avoided: not having created a massive administrative bureaucracy.

But since the beginning of the 20th century, the Democrats centralized extraordinary power in the executive branch. And now they’re furious that the person in charge of the executive branch is using that power to carve away all of their permanent substructures.

What we are watching is a sea change in the way that government is done, not because Trump is “dictatorial” or “authoritarian,” but because he is using precisely the same power every Democrat has used so that he can carve away the permanent root of the Democratic Party.

President Trump is seeking victories and attempting to minimize defeat.

The caterwauling from the Left is about the fact that the plaything of the permanent Democratic Party, the administrative bureaucracy they built and have lavished with trillions of dollars over the course of decades, is now being redone by the Trump administration, and they are freaking out about it.

And when the Left freaks out about a thing, I tend to like the thing.

Very much.