Donald Trump has a lot of issues, and this country will continue to have a lot of major issues. But for any libertarian – or anybody at all – to say that Trump is just another part of the ruling elite is to not acknowledge the situation.
There are some people who just can’t find any good no matter what. The Berlin Wall comes down and the Soviet Union collapses, but there are still people there assuring us that communism is actually winning and gaining ground.
Trump has a lot of faults, and many of them are indefensible. It makes it much harder to defend him against his leftist enemies who like to call him a dictator when Trump makes threats to other countries.
Trump has made some disturbing comments about Gaza. He doesn’t understand the situation in Ukraine well enough. His threats over the Panama Canal are unacceptable. His use of tariffs to blackmail other countries is immoral and harmful to us.
I also have a concern that there won’t be enough permanent changes coming from this administration on the good things. If Trump uses executive orders to “fix” a lot of things, then they could just as easily be overturned by the next group that gets in there.
With that said, what Trump has done so far is absolutely incredible. It is actually an embarrassment to the first Trump term and to every other administration of this century and probably long before that.
DOGE Shines a Light
In less than 3 weeks, Elon Musk and his DOGE team have uncovered more than every government agency has uncovered in the last 25 years. It is actually shocking how much has been uncovered in such a short period of time just by actually investigating some things.
This is a little similar to what happened when Musk bought Twitter and exposed the government trying to “persuade” companies to censor content. It wasn’t shocking that it was happening, and many of us knew it was happening, but we finally got the proof and the details of it.
With the exposure of USAID, it isn’t shocking that this stuff was happening. It is just shocking that we are getting to see all of these details.
We know that the U.S. taxpayer through USAID was spending $1.5 million for promoting diversity in Serbia, $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, and $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.
These aren’t big amounts by federal government standards, but they are quite symbolic of what is going on. The U.S. taxpayer has also been forced to pay many foreign media companies to spread the propaganda of the U.S. government.
And that’s just the point. As Clint Russell pointed out, it isn’t just that this money is “wasted”. It is money spent by the government to actively sabotage us – the American people – while enhancing the power of the ruling elite.
Where Has This Been?
This just shows how evil, or at the very least, unconcerned, every prior administration has been for the last several decades. While transgender comic books may be somewhat new, you know this has to go back many decades before the turn of the century and in agencies throughout the government.
How does Elon Musk come in and uncover more in 3 weeks than everything we’ve seen coming out of the government for the last several decades? It is because he actually cared to do so and Trump let him do it.
Maybe it was the bullet to Trump’s head and all of the prosecutions. But Trump 2025 is a different animal than before.
If Trump had officially won the 2020 election and continued in office in 2021, I don’t think this would have happened. Maybe we had to suffer through Joe Biden for four years to get anything good and decent. In saying that, I don’t mean to downplay the suffering and death that happened over Biden’s time in office.
If Elon Musk has been able to uncover this much in less than 3 weeks, what else are we going to see over the coming weeks and months? Maybe the revelations will slow down, but it is nice to know that there are people in a position of power who are actually trying to uncover the truth.
Chaos
This has been a time of chaos. We can still be sympathetic to government employees who might lose their job, as long as they aren’t the ones who were actively trying to destroy us.
At some point, things probably need to calm down a little. I think there have been mistakes made such as forcing government workers back into an office and offering a blanket severance to anyone who quits. Some of these actions could cause more spending. If you get all of the people who issue the Social Security checks/ deposits to quit, I’m pretty sure Trump is going to have to refill those positions.
I know some libertarians might like that kind of chaos, but I don’t think we should wish for chaos. We know that Social Security isn’t going away or even getting phased out under Trump. We need some continuity and order given the realities.
It is also important to realize that some chaos is necessary. When you have this monstrosity of a federal government doing all of these things and spending nearly $7 trillion per year, it isn’t going to be a pretty sight when things start to come undone.
Look at it this way. There is going to be chaos no matter what. If Trump 2025 did nothing new and allowed the federal budget and the debt to grow like crazy, we would eventually be hit with some kind of default or major dollar crisis. Maybe we will get that anyway. But at least this is a more controlled path to that.
I am not against giving severance pay to government employees in order to make it less chaotic and make some of them go away in a quieter fashion. If we can eliminate many government jobs that aren’t necessary and are outright harmful, then we will be better off in the long run.
Supposedly, DOGE is going to be digging into the military next. I hope they do not hold back. We are paying for people to be stationed all over this country and all over the world, and most of it is not necessary to the defense of our country. Some of it is obviously quite harmful. There are literally hundreds of billions of dollars in waste per year to be found here.
For libertarians, we should celebrate these wins. Trump is no Ron Paul, but who is? Some of these actions would have been unthinkable a short time ago. It is still stunning just how much has been done in the first 3 weeks of this administration.
Respectfully, I don’t see much in the way of wins. The appropriate way to cut funding is constitutionally, through the congress by changing the hearts and minds of the people. Not letting a unelected billionaire who effectively bought influence through election donations break into Treasury payment systems. Similarly I would argue growing the economy through friendship and trade rather than threatening our neighbors with taxing their imports. The method absolutely matters, otherwise there will unquestionably be blowback once the political winds shift.
Mark my words, you can quote them and take them to the bank. By the end of Trumps term, military spending will be higher than when he took office. Any “savings” will quickly be eaten up by other expenses in pursuit of military adventurism into Gaza, Greenland, Panama, or perhaps even Canada.
I agree that Trump should not be threatening other countries using tariffs. On the spending, I agree to the point that we need to change hearts and minds and to have sustainable cuts coming from Congress. With that said, Trump was elected. Some hearts and minds have already changed. The waste and corruption that is being uncovered now is going through unelected bureaucracies. We should celebrate that these horrible things that the government uses against us are coming to light.
Even if there is an argument that the executive branch is overstepping its duties, most everything these bureaucracies are doing is unconstitutional and criminal. The more the truth comes out, the better it is for liberty.