The Turnaround, by Robert Gore

This works or it’s revolution.

The best way to understand Trump is also the simplest: he’s a businessman. From that perspective, little of what he’s doing is as inexplicable or surprising as many make it out to be. The inexplicability arises from general ignorance of business. Most Americans have little knowledge or understanding of how private American businesses work, although they generate the majority of the U.S.’s $29 trillion GDP and employ many of them.

Trump is now CEO of the federal government. That enterprise has over $36 trillion in direct liabilities and unfunded liabilities in the hundreds of trillions. Its cost of credit is rising and debt service is taking an ever-expanding share of its revenues. Self evidently, it cannot continue on its present course.

The common element of successful business turnarounds is that they don’t emerge from slow, incremental changes from within the system. Somebody comes in and administers shock therapy. Turnaround artists are never popular. Lots of people are fired, unprofitable operations discarded, finances tightened, business philosophies rethought, and the company’s direction radically reset. Because the company’s situation is dire, this all has to be done quickly, with shareholders howling and creditors pounding at the door.

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It begins with the numbers. In failing enterprises, they often reek of falsification, self-dealing, and corruption. You analyze the numbers and you keep asking questions until you uncover the real answers. What Musk and DOGE are doing would be standard operating procedure in a comparable business situation; indeed Musk did the same thing when he took over Twitter. Applied to government, it’s considered revolutionary, but how many politicians or bureaucrats have ever run a business?

That the Department of Defense has never passed an audit and the Federal Reserve tenaciously resists one tells you all you need to know about the government’s numbers. Finding the “anomalies” is like shooting fish in a barrel. Resolving them invariably uncovers sordid secrets. Secrecy is the decaying dreck that feeds swamp corruption. Publicly, swamp creatures are screaming about “democracy” and DOGE access to the government’s sacred information. Privately, they’re checking into overseas bank accounts, defense attorneys, and realtors while updating their LinkedIn profiles.

There are valid security, cybersecurity, and legal, even Constitutional, concerns about the way DOGE is operating that would not be present in a business situation. DOGE’s victims can be counted on to litigate these issues and courts may well impose restrictions. There will also be pushback from within the bureaucracy, even from Trump appointees. Kash Patel has already told FBI employees not to file Musk’s what-I-did-last-week emails. Courts and pushback could derail the project, in which case, revolution would be the only avenue left to defeat the Blob.

At Twitter, Musk fired 80 percent of the workforce, reflecting business wisdom that 20 percent of any workforce does 80 percent of the work. For government, those figures should be revised to 10 and 90. However, is any of the work useful? It’s often counterproductive, producing results contrary to its stated purpose. Government-declared wars on poverty, drugs, and terror produced more impoverishment, drug-addiction, and terrorists, wasting billions. Those “war fighting” agencies and many others should be terminated.

Trump has decided that Operation Ukraine must be terminated. The sunk cost fallacy—throwing good money after bad—has cost the U.S. government trillions, particularly in its military endeavors. The fallacy justifies future spending, and in the case of the military, more destruction and death, on a failing project (like Afghanistan) by citing money already spent and lives already lost—sunk costs. Those costs are irrelevant in deciding whether to continue a project; only the probability of future success matters.

Businesspeople who throw good money after bad go bankrupt. They don’t have fiat money or tax dollars to perpetuate their mistakes. Trump’s not going to throw more money down the Ukrainian rathole. He’s talking about cutting the military budget in half, and the only way to do that is to forego these forever fiascos. The money already spent on Ukraine cries out for an illuminating line-by-line audit. If it happens, watch the cockroaches scatter, including the Bidens and the Clintons.

It appears that Trump and team have decided that unipolarity—the foreign affairs equivalent of monopoly—must give way to multipolarity—the foreign affairs equivalent of oligopoly. As a businessman, Trump undoubtedly prefers monopoly, but reality requires recognition of competitors who are too big to eliminate.

Trump now acknowledges Russia as a peer oligopolist, and obviously, so, too, is China (see “Russia and China Are Facts of Life,” SLL, 1/28/25). It’s always a risk trying to guess Trump’s thinking. However, he apparently wants to settle the ugly Ukraine business quickly and get on with the three-party oligopoly in which the oligopolists sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete—hopefully economically and diplomatically, not militarily. Blood, as businessman Virgil Sollozzo noted in The Godfather, is a big expense. Oligopoly may well have been Trump’s thinking back in his first term (see “The Eagle, the Dragon, and the Bear,” SLL, 6/21/18). However, the Russiagate hoax prevented him from even making overtures in that direction.

Everyone else, including Europe, will be second- or third-tier, although jockeying for markets and securing favorable arrangements for extracting resources will be important aspects of oligopolistic competition. Like many oligopolies, there will be a territorial dimension. Without admitting it, Trump will cede Eurasia to China and Russia while shoring up the U.S. base in North and South America. That may be the thinking behind Trump’s rhetoric concerning Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal. Africa and the poles will be open territory over which the oligopolists will compete.

The Middle East and Israel have bedeviled presidents since Truman. If it had no oil, the Middle East would be a desert backwater, an oxymoron. The U.S. has plenty of oil and natural gas. It could buy Middle East oil when prices were favorable and otherwise stay out of the region. However, there is the relationship with Israel, which gets far more from it than the U.S. That’s intolerable from a business perspective, but it’s a political necessity for Trump. The relationship could destroy Trump’s presidency if the two countries wage war on Iran. Given Iran’s ties with Russia and China, such a war could escalate to World War III.

While Trump’s business perspective brings fresh thinking and some honesty to government, there are times when it’s grossly inappropriate. Since 1948, Palestinians have been squeezed into ever-smaller areas in the land formerly known as Palestine, and it’s clear that Netanyahu and Trump want them completely evicted. Getting rid of them and turning Gaza into a luxury beach resort may have a cold-blooded business logic to it, but it’s a patently unjust solution for the Palestinian “problem.” The Trump Gaza video recently released on Truth Social is beyond grotesque.

Back at home, Trump and many Americans understand that the U.S. government is a rathole. Indeed, it’s been common knowledge since Roosevelt’s New Deal, which turned a recession into a Great Depression on the moronic mantras that government bureaucrats are omniscient and government spending is the key to prosperity. Unfortunately, the average American has no power to force the government to disclose information or change its ways. Turnarounds are top-down affairs, which is why so much hope rests on Trump, Musk, and DOGE.

You can’t cut costs to prosperity; successful turnarounds require new revenues. In the case of a government turnaround that doesn’t mean government finds new ways to soak the productive private economy. It means government gets out of the way and lets entrepreneurs, capitalism, and markets do their revenue- and wealth-generating thing. Laws, regulations, and bureaucratic extortion are barnacles encrusting the U.S.S. Economy, stopping it dead in the water. Neither inflation-adjusted private-sector incomes nor the real economy have grown in years. (The public sector has made out nicely, though.)

If Trump and Musk fire government employees, but thousands of laws and regulations aren’t blowtorched, their efforts will come to naught. Legislation drafted by the ignorant stifles industries they don’t understand. Many businesspeople have to “politely” explain to regulators the business they presume to regulate.

That their taxes pay the salaries of these parasites, often with additional “taxes” levied under the table, compounds the absurd injustice. Large, connected, crony-socialistic enterprises can absorb the costs, gaming the system to subsidize themselves and stifle the competition. Ultimately, it’s the much-heralded but much-abused entrepreneurs and small businesses who are crushed. Europe has snuffed out its innovation and economic dynamism almost entirely. The U.S. is well down the same path.

Unfortunately, Trump wants the government to “help” business instead of simply getting out of its way. Business will supposedly thrive behind tariff walls, but its going to be the large, crony-socialistic enterprises that benefit. Trump’s Stargate project will throw half a trillion dollars at well-heeled Silicon Valley outfits to develop AI. China’s DeepSeek and Musk’s latest iteration of Grok has made Stargate obsolete before it spends its first dollar. The one thing Trump and team can do that will help all business is slash spending, reducing the government’s drain on the economy and the national debt’s upward pressure on interest rates.

Honest, successful businesspeople—and the U.S. still has plenty—must deal with reality. They have to produce a good or service at a cost less than what the market will pay for it. The miracle of profit propels production and progress. Yet, it’s the villain in the unreal worlds of government, academia, and mainstream media and entertainment, none of which would survive a day if somebody out there wasn’t generating profit. America is built on profit, not politics. General recognition of that fact would restore some sanity in what’s loftily called the “national discourse.”

The business of America has been and must be business. Trump can’t elucidate an Ayn Rand-type defense for the morality of free enterprise, production, and profit. However, he realizes that the productive element of society is supporting its own parasitic destroyers. Nor can he elucidate a John Quincy Adams-type defense of a foreign policy in which America minds its own business. However, he apparently recognizes that the empire cannot be sustained.

It remains to be seen if Trump and team can turn around America at home and abroad. They’re taking on a powerful Overclass that produces far less than it takes, destroys far more than it creates, and will fight tooth-and-nail to preserve its sinecures. One thing is clear. Without recognition of hard realities and a dramatic turnaround, America’s government will go the way of other failing enterprises that couldn’t change course, sooner rather than later.