Trump Versus Reality, Part Two, by Robert Gore

The song remains the same.

Part One

All eyes are on Trump and team, and that’s the problem. The government is the star around which everything else orbits. In the U.S., as in the rest of the world, government is the dominant fixture in the lives of those who must live under it. Trump promises to Make America Great Again. Effective as that slogan has been, that’s all it is, an advertising bromide. Nations and other collectives are never great; once in a great while individuals are. The only role governments have in the quest for greatness is to stay out of the way of the individuals capable of achieving it.

Very little in Trump’s domestic program betrays any realization that government is the problem, not the solution. Some of the measures being bandied about scream: Be careful what you wish for! One proposal is to move 50,000 federal officials from the Civil Service to Schedule F, where they would essentially be political appointees serving at the sufferance of the president. For its proponents, the proposal will be a great idea right up until the next Democrat president is elected.

Another proposal is to move agencies away from Washington, supposedly to make them more responsive to the people for whom they nominally work. As an example, it’s been suggested that the Department of Energy—which ought to be abolished—should be moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico. The proponents of that one have obviously never been to tiny Los Alamos. (I grew up there.) Its overpaid (Los Alamos is one of the ten wealthiest areas in the U.S.), underachieving (what do they do with $5 billion a year?) scientists have driven up housing prices to Washington levels and have made Los Alamos the most liberal county in liberal New Mexico. Who would have thought that a town that owes its existence to the government consistently votes for more government?

THE GRAY RADIANCE DESCRIPTION, CHAPTER ONE

THE GRAY RADIANCE AMAZON LINK (A Great Holiday Gift!)

Moving entire bureaucracies to the hinterlands will seed liberal enclaves, mini-Washingtons. Once they’re plopped in some place like Iowa or Montana, the locals and their businesses will quickly become addicted to government sugar and fight tooth and nail to keep it coming. Government money creates loyal Democrats among fifth-generation Americans just as readily as it does among illegal migrants. Keep the bureaucracies in one place, where they’re less likely to infect the rest of the country, and where they’re easier to target for elimination.

Eliminating government waste has been a campaign pledge of candidates from both parties since the government’s massive expansion during Franklin Roosevelt’s reign. The ceaseless growth of the government has belied the promises; waste is more rampant than ever. Now it’s Vivek and Elon’s turn, and their paradoxical first order of business is yet another cabinet department, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Elon has said that he, Vivek, and DOGE’s cost-cutters can whack $2 trillion in spending. Lending superficial credibility to that claim is Elon’s dismissal of 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce after he bought it.

Imagine Day One at DOGE. “Right here,” a cost cutter excitedly exclaims, “Health and Human Services spent twenty dollars for a five-dollar stapler. That’s fifteen down, one trillion, nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five to go!” Unfortunately, a glance at a government spending pie chart blows that pledge and Elon’s claim out of the water. From the Congressional Budget Office, in Fiscal Year 2023, $3.8 trillion of the $6.1 trillion the government spent was mandatory spending, the largest components of which were Social Security ($1.3 trillion), Medicare ($839 billion), and Medicaid ($616 billion). Mandatory spending is mandated by law, and only rescission or amendment enacted by Congress and signed by the president can change the applicable law. The Constitution does not grant DOGE a role in that process.

Discretionary spending in FY 2023 was $1.7 trillion, of which $805 billion was for defense. For Trump, defense spending is sacrosanct, so no cuts there—spending will increase. Nondefense discretionary spending on a wide assortment of programs was $917 billion. While there are undoubtedly programs that could be eliminated and other savings realized within this category, it also includes things like veterans’ benefits, scientific research, and agricultural price supports. Cuts there would hit Trump constituencies. New spending to pay for deporting millions of illegal migrants would fall in this category as well.

A quarter of $2 trillion, $500 billion, would be an ambitious target for the DOGErs. Cynics (realists) will take the under. While the DOGErs will eliminate some regulatory weeds, that’s not going to propel nearly enough growth for the tax take to increase $1.5 trillion and make up the difference. And what happens to DOGE when Trump, Elon, and Vivek have moved on to other pursuits? If things run true to form, DOGE will grow. Every year its budget will increase, because by Washington logic, the only way to cut spending is to increase it.

Omitted from the above reckoning was net interest (interest the government pays out to the public minus the interest the government receives on debt it issued to itself), which was $659 billion in FY 2023 and $882 billion in FY 2024. That 33.84 percent increase is what happens when the debt curve inflects upward and interest rates rise. Gross annual interest already exceeds $1 trillion, behind only Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. By the end of Trump’s term, gross interest will probably be the largest item in the budget.

The national debt of $36 plus trillion is almost $107,000 per citizen and $271,000 plus per taxpayer (usdebtclock.org). Cue the ominous opening chords from the first 22 seconds of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”.

That’s the sound of debt and interest crushing everybody and everything in their path. Until default, we are all debt slaves. Maybe Panglossian Trumpists aren’t Led Zeppelin fans.

Trump’s agenda has substantial nonmonetary costs that won’t show up on the government’s ledger. What is actually required to deport illegal migrants? If the estimates are correct, there are some 15 to 20 million of them, or 5 to 7 times the almost 3 million people who work for the federal government, including the military. If every one of those illegal migrants voluntarily showed up at government deportation centers, imagine the logistical difficulties of transporting them out of the country. Even if that transport was only over the southern border (the Mexican government would not be too keen on that), it would require a monumental effort, “monumental” being a euphemism for “impossible.”

Now relax the pie-in-the-sky assumption of voluntary compliance, what Mitt Romney called self-deportation. Cutting off freebies and birthright citizenship (doing the latter would have to survive an inevitable Constitutional challenge) would send some migrants packing. It would also send some into criminal endeavors, or, more constructively, into U.S. job markets, where they would join millions of their fellow migrants, legal and illegal. Federal immigration police will encounter sanctuary city resistance and employers who are shocked, shocked to find they’ve hired illegals.

There will be well-publicized deportations—put the over/under at 1 million—but enthusiasm will fade with overall failure. To save the effort, watch the vaccine passport idea get rebranded as the citizenship passport. The War on Migrants will join the Wars on Poverty, Drugs, Terror, and Germs as a civil-liberties destroyer that ultimately fails to accomplish its objectives. The criminal element will evade the law and law-abiding Americans will be stuck with their citizenship passports, which could easily incorporate vaccine visas, a central bank digital currency, an Internet permission slip (a Bill Gates’ idea), and firearms registration records.

Trump’s friends in Silicon Valley would be all for it, and nobody has ever called Trump a civil libertarian. Those friends also have a catalogue full of surveillance technologies, for use not only at the borders, but for the length and breadth of these United States. They will be helpful with the War on Migrants and the other aforementioned Wars. Many of them have already been field-tested on Gaza and the West Bank by the Israelis, with whom Silicon Valley enjoys a warm relationship.

Trump also intends to launch a War on Foreign Goods. Thomas DiLorenzo adroitly strips away the intellectual garbage that’s accompanied tariffs since whenever they were first imposed in one paragraph.

Protectionist tariffs are associated with a long history of economic and social calamities in America and the world.  Protectionist tariffs are a political tool of plunder and theft, and people don’t generally take kindly to being plundered and robbed.  They are the prototypical anti-populist government policy in that they benefit a relatively small group of already-affluent, politically connected corporations (and their unions) at the expense of the general public.  The politically connected line their pockets by forcing their customers to pay more for the exact same products.  To the extent that protectionist tariffs “protect” corporations from competition, they will produce shoddier and shoddier products to boot.  What protectionist tariffs protect consumers from is lower prices and better-quality products.

Thomas DiLorenzo, “Our History of Protectionist Tariff Train Wrecks,” Lew Rockwell, November 26, 2024

Tariffs are a tax. If you can’t tax your way to prosperity, you can’t tariff your way to it, either. Trump envisions government (the one sure winner from tariffs) tariff theft replacing government income tax theft. Fat chance! When government purportedly “replaces” one theft with another, inevitably the old theft isn’t eliminated and the new theft is added to the overall pile, making it that much larger and more burdensome.

Trump maintains that his tariffs will force businesses who want to sell into the U.S. market to hire and produce within the U.S. There will be companies, both domestic and foreign, who open new factories in the U.S., just as there has been since mechanized production first began prior to the Civil War. Trumpists will trumpet those openings as proof positive that their tariffs are working, but when the unseen costs they don’t trumpet are tallied, tariffs will be making America net poorer.

One recent proposal would transport Trumpian tariffs from merely destructive and impoverishing into a twilight zone of looniness. He would impose “100 percent tariffs” on BRICS nations who take steps to move away from “the mighty U.S. dollar” to other currencies in international trade. Those nations “should wave goodbye to America.” There’s nothing mighty about any fiat currency, even a reserve one, and many of those countries would like nothing better than to wave goodbye to America. Trump’s threat will hasten the movement he decries, and its costs will be plunder and robbery on steroids of millions of Americans. (see “Trump’s dollar threat against BRICS shows the US hasn’t learned anything,” RT, Tarik Cyril Amar, December 4, 2024)

Here’s one good thing a can-do Trump administration can do. If Joe Biden pardons favored suspected Democratic criminals en masse, it will be the final decriminalization of criminality. Final in the sense that no government that moves from implicit, hypocritical disrespect for its own laws to explicit rejection of them for the favored can long endure. Trump’s Department of Justice should fight the pardons all the way to the Supreme Court. The framers of the Constitution had to have known that the government they were establishing would never survive pardons issued prior to the initiation of criminal proceedings. Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 states:

The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of impeachment.

This clause can and should be interpreted to require the initiation of criminal proceedings before a pardon can be issued. (Gerald Ford’s preemptive-pardon precedent of Richard Nixon was never challenged and hence was never judicially affirmed.)

If Biden doesn’t issue preemptive pardons, or the Supreme Court invalidates them, Trump’s DOJ has to prosecute to the fullest extent. That is evidently his intent.

Notice, you are not hearing any vows of magnanimity from incoming Trump appointees. They are not pretending to forgive and forget. Neither are they crowing about retribution. They are reaching by law for the levers of power. They will discover and disclose the files that the blobists have not already managed to destroy. And where the files are missing, they are going to depose the blobists under oath and get them to say on-the-record what they did, and why, and who ordered them to do it. And you can be sure the blobists will be ratting-out each other to stay out of prison.

James Howard Kunstler, “Modified Limited Hang-Out,” Clusterfuck Nation, December 13, 2024

If Trump’s presidency is to mean anything positive, cowardly pragmatism cannot overrule principle on this one.

The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union began tolling the bell on huge, centralized, bureaucratic governments. Although they dominate the planet, they are incompetent, dangerous, and obsolete. Individuals are responsible for progress, prosperity, and peace; governments are responsible for destruction, tyranny, war, and death. Government-created horror set a record in the twentieth century, but the twenty-first is only one-quarter over.

Monstrous government is a bad idea, and a host of angels can’t turn a bad idea into a good one. History’s defining conflict is not any of its myriad and never-ending wars, but the war of the individual versus the state. If humanity is to survive, individuals have to win. Humanity has repeatedly discovered how fearful a master government can be, and government as a servant remains a purely hypothetical construct.

Trump, Putin, Xi and the rest of the world’s “leaders” aren’t leading anything; they are desperately trying to rein in the mounting forces of decentralization and the irrepressible yearning for individual autonomy and freedom. If Trump’s second term is judged a failure, and the odds say it will be, it will not be because of any particular failure of personality, personnel, or policy, but because he’s standing at the base of a crumbling dam, trying to stop a torrential flood that can’t be stopped.