If It Can’t Be Fixed, Break It

Like many others I have lamented just how quickly the shock-and-awe campaign by Trump, Musk, DOGE, etc on the federal leviathan has ground to a halt. I think the effort was well intended and sincere but ultimately doomed to fail.

Many normiecons were crowing about how Trump 2.0 was kicking ass and taking names. I will admit it was a fun few months because a lot of garden variety social media leftists were losing their minds over and over. Each day was like Christmas Day and all of the presents were liberal tears.

One thing I noticed kind of early was that the left seemed to be sitting this out. Apart from the judicial injunctions, there wasn’t much going on apart from screeching from AOC and her negro avatar Jizzmine Crockett. There is a chance that the national injunctions might be coming to an end: Supreme Court Set To End Era Of Nationwide Judicial Injunctions. As the article points out, even leftist twat Elena Kagan was opposed to the idea of a random judge being able to block national policy on a whim.

If that goes down then many of Trump’s executive orders are going to go forward until they get to SCOTUS. I can’t imagine that will not lead to a new phase of “resistance”.

Yet despite all of the effort, what has really been accomplished? Sure USAID was a cancer and that has been mostly shut down and lot of stuff has been exposed but is the Federal leviathan really smaller and/or more efficient in any substantive way? Of course not.

This is what I have been saying over and over, you cannot undo in 4 years while hobbled while hobbled what has been going on full speed for 60 years. I replied to a comment the other day with this:

What we have seen in the first few months of the Trump 2.0 admin was as close to an all out assault on Big Government in my lifetime and probably at least as far back as pre-FDR and what it has accomplished is fuck all. This is why I say that we cannot fix what is broken within the constraints that are supposed to have prevented it from happening in the first place.

I can’t overstate how unprecedented the DOGE thing was in our lifetimes. Even back in the “Contract With America” era that helped catapult the GOP into control of the House for the first time in decades, the size of the government wasn’t reduced appreciably. While the government ran a very small surplus from 1998 to 2001, that was completely undone in the first couple of years post-9/11.

^{Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD/}

That is why I say that while the system as designed and intended was fine, the current implementation means that it is preventing any attempt to undo what the system was supposed to forbid in the first place.

At this point halfway through May, I am not even sure what Trump is focused on. He is overseas now and while he is doing some good stuff, he is also doing things like declaring victory over the Houthis which is not true at all. When you are dumping high tech fighter jets in the sea trying to avoid missiles launched by goat humpers, you aren’t winning.

The system is by design made to be unfixable. In an inversion of the old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, the situation now is that “If it ain’t fixable, break it”.

This shouldn’t be read as a call for a really futile and stupid gesture being done on somebody’s part. I get enough of those in the comments. You can’t go lone wolf and cause the system to come apart. It needs to come from closer to the top. In some ways I kind of hope the SCOTUS doesn’t slap down the lower courts, because then perhaps Trump will just ignore the courts entirely and go scorched earth.

The system has failed and the longer we pretend we can fix it without first breaking it, the worse our position will become.