On Script

When you have spent 15 years being a very successful host on a TV reality show designed to make you its star even if others do most of the work, you do learn the importance of being a star and following a script.

And when you are the very successful candidate who got himself reelected to the Presidency of the United States (by a whopping 1.5% percent of the vote) you certainly can appreciate a 900 page script of what to do to achieve your goals when you get back to the White House – a document so skillfully prepared that it tells you when and how to do it. There it is, completed and totally available before you know you are going to be reelected, written JUST FOR YOU over a four year period by many of those who worked for you in your first attempt at being President back in 2016. And led by a group working since 1978 to make their idea of a US government a reality.

It is especially nice to know that you don’t have to read the entire script but to just follow it day by day and have people assigned to make certain of every move: One is your Vice President, JD Vance, the other is your oldest son, Don Jr.

And so, after four difficult years that left him a convicted felon, as if by magic, we see a man in a familiar blue suit and long red tie in full control of his situation…relaxed, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office, day after day, pen in hand, with no angst and no chaos, looking and acting like a Chief Executive… day after day quietly signing executive orders which have appeared like magic and are working to usurp the government we have known since the beginning of the American experiment.

In a matter of days and hours instead of weeks and months, we are introduced to a full slate of Cabinet nominees. The nominees come from Fox News, former Governors, political allies – all fully secure in their loyalty to him but in most cases, essentially unfamiliar with the work inside the Departments which they will now head.

It is obvious from the number of prepared Executive Orders and the speed of these Cabinet nominations that this confident President, did little or no work on any of it but knows full well that those who did know that Republican Senators will do as he commands – whether they appreciate the executive orders or the recommended candidates, or not.

Because we all know this is in that script. A Department head essentially unfamiliar with the work of the Department will follow orders he/she will receive in how to run that department – while an expert might have a very different notion.

The script for the Trump Administration leaves no room for disagreement.

All will be orderly, efficient and formal and part of the grander picture of significantly reducing the size of government, department by department, and with it the power and responsibility of a Congress originally in charge of those departments but no longer capable of reasonable government. And where will their lost power go? Directly into that Oval Office.

Look and listen to Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, literally abandon the Constitutional responsibility of the House of Representatives to decide on how money is to be spent and then pass the work of spending it to the Executive Branch and you will be seeing a stunning dereliction of how American government should work but no longer does.

Because the script written by the Heritage Foundation is potent. It has been working for forty years to significantly shrink the power, size and funding of government, getting rid of as many of our Civil Service employees as possible and focus hiring on those who will declare their loyalty to their President without taking any oath of office to the country.

As we write more than 70,000 such civil service employees – beginners mostly – have taken advantage of the offer to be bought out and have resigned. It is just the beginning.

In Donald Trump and his administration, Heritage has finally found the perfect tool to carry out its ultimate purpose.

As for Trump, he got lucky…$288 million dollars of luck.

And ta-da we have Elon Musk. He’s a perfect example – coming from a very different place both professionally and personally – and assuming a responsibility no other citizen has ever had. And Musk is not even an American citizen!

Over the years many very wealthy businessmen “purchased a thing or two” from an appreciative President of the United States. Maybe it was an ambassadorship; maybe some business deal with the government…maybe even a roll in the government itself.

Elon did better than that. With $288 million, he literally purchased a President who put him in charge of a non-government organization focused on shrinking government by getting rid of government agencies and by having a free rein within the Treasury Department able to find out how much money we all have and how we spend it. Using a small group ‘Lebensborn kinder” in their post teenage years, Musk has sent them into major areas of government to sit down and start asking pertinent questions of those in charge.

And then with charges of waste and fraud but not having to prove any of it…Musk and the kinder are simply doing as they please and government agencies are being shredded, funds seized, employees fired.

But while Musk is running free here and there, the newly minted President is issuing his daily Executive Orders…lined up with skill and focus.

Get rid of the “wonkie” Diversity, equity and inclusion rules that attempted to broaden the base of American thinking to reward a non-white community. No question about the scripted quality of that activity but when you are dealing with a performer as adept as Himself, you leave room for the adlib. And right on schedule, there it was. When it was learned that a woman was piloting the Army helicopter that slammed into the passenger plane coming in for a landing at Reagan Airport in Washington, there he was suggesting that the diversity policy had to be responsible for the crash – as if in fact, it actually was.

But he was back in his oval office the next day, papers in hand, in control, suggesting that his good friend Elon Musk was going to end America’s role as provider of goods and services to needy people across the world by shutting down America’s foreign aid effort USAID and firing all of those who worked for it all around the World.

He is slicing away major staff, sending offers to tens of thousands of employees to buy themselves out of jobs before they are fired. Long time USAID organizations seen as providing help to millions of foreigners in the name of America are gone. Just like that.

Well, not quite, because a Federal Judge has put a hold on those directives.

Another Federal Judge has put a hold on the work of the Lebensborn Kinder in the Treasury…sending them away.

But it’s only the beginning.

The next Presidential mission was to inform two million Civil Service employees that they could buy themselves out of their jobs now or wait to be fired. He told them to be sensible and leave now, they would be ahead of the game.

Another Federal Judge has intervened for the moment.

Trump has told Elon to study the Department of Education with every clear indication that he intends to shut it down and turn education over to the States. But of course, States already oversee local school districts in cities and counties. Whether they do a good job is another story. The Department controls billions of dollars which it distributes in all forms through the system most of it to assist students in financial need. They have little or not much to say about what is taught or how it is taught but the Department does study what is being done and what is planned.

Can Trump simply kill the Department of Education on his say so? It doesn’t seem possible given the number of judges who have intervened so far in his bid to close down and starve the government as he turns control over to himself.

The list of those stop orders gets continuously interesting.

And in the meantime, day after day: The Gulf of America? The purchase of Greenland. The idea that two million Palestinians will not be allowed to come back to Gaza as he turns it into some form of paradise: a Mar-a-lago of the Mediterranean?

The immediate end of birthright citizenship…which would challenge the 14th Amendment which established it.

A 60 day pause on approvals for all renewable energy development of public lands.

Tariffs on Canada and Mexico and China…and on steel and aluminum

The desire to buy Greenland and the return of the Panama Canal

Requiring trans women to be housed in prisons for men but disallowing them to play on women sports teams.

THE POLITICAL PARTIES

And if a complacent and fearful Republican majority approves all of this and the Justice Department manages to “reach” a friendly Supreme Court what will all of this new government mean to Americans?

Our reminder that all great powers lose them in time because they do not educate their public remains in force here.

How many now recognize that even at its very beginning, right now, the democracy we have all accepted is being challenged; that constitutional authority which makes Congress responsible for selecting how our money is spent is now being ignored at every level in government.

That a movement toward anarchy and authority is not off in the future but present today.

That the man in charge is but a very happy puppet gladly following the directions of specific plans designed just for him is working as one political party simply nods “yes” dumbly and in fear and the other political party seems helpless to provide a decent opposition made not of political slogans but genuine policy approaches that can work.

At this moment in time and after the Harris campaign, there seems no one in the Democratic Party with that talent.

But more interestingly, we are focused on a question posed to Mr. Trump about the work as spokesman that JD Vance is doing while in Europe. The question was about Mr. Vance’s chances of being the next candidate for President in 2028.

Mr. Trump did not equivocate. “No” he said, ”too early to tell.”

And then the vision of Trump himself during this last campaign assuring his crowds day after day, week after week, that they must get out to vote…because “it will be the last election that they would have to do so.”

We didn’t know what he meant exactly.

Now we are seeing the light.