Bill Kristol steps in it.

Says the quiet part out loud and gets schooled on X

There was a time when I really respected Bill Kristol. He was an intelligent, well thought out analyst who simply got the concept of neo-conservatism sort of wrong. Not sure it was wrong in theory, just wrong in reality as in it just never worked. Since then Kristol has become sort of a cranky old man who is still convinced that neo-conservatism is still the way to go and that any sort of America first or isolationism in politics is akin to sacrilege. I am pretty sure he will go to his grave believing that America must be the international police and control what the rest of the world is doing through brute force.

For these neo-conservatives, Donald Trump with his MAGA populism is the worst possible case candidate to become President. They hate everything that MAGA stands for. They hate his isolationism. They hate is America first ideals. They hate more than anything that he ends our military engagements rather than starting them. The only person I can think of more neo-conservative than Kristol is Dick Cheney who also happens to hate Trump with the white hot passion of a thousand burning suns.

Now if you read the Kristol post here, it basically suggests that the institutional resistance to Trump is not just acceptable, but sort of required. The idea that a President would want the people reporting to him to be on board with his agenda would be fine if he was George Bush, Obama, Biden, or if had been Kamala Harris. But the principles that these people believe in are far more important than the ideals of democracy and our constitution. While Kristol appears to garner quite a few likes and reposts, the comment section was overwhelmingly negative and quite frankly overwhelmingly right.

This was one of the more polite responses from our old pal Gerry Daly from what used to be Daly Thoughts. But much of the criticism of the post was centered on the concept that the election put both the President and his agenda in charge. At the end of the day there is no constitutional reasoning for any sort of underlying bureaucracy to be allowed to defy this agenda or otherwise not follow constitutional orders. Leadership of these various agencies change most every time we get a new President and that is by design. Those working in those agencies are supposed to take direction, not defy it. No different from any other job. Of course there are plenty of people out there who daftly assume that our country and our constitution allows for some bureaucracy outside of the politics that does the day to day business without interference from any politicians. But that is simply not true. Every single department is under the executive branch and other than the "FED" there are no real independent executive branch agencies, in spite of people calling them that or demanding that they exist (or should exist). There is even questions as to how independent the "FED" actually should be. What we are finding is that when we leave these agencies unchecked, that they basically become like USAID, which was little more than a 40 billion dollar slush fund that spent less than a quarter of their funding on foreign aid.

What Trump is doing right is likely going to take more than four years. Probably why many are already suggesting that he should be allowed to run for a third term. The better option, however, is to have a heir apparent in line to take the helm and hopefully continue the work for another four or even eight years. I would offer that even twelve years of Republican Presidential rule may not root out all of the problems we currently have with our Federal Government. But I think it could change it to the point where it would be almost impossible to ever reach the point it has gotten to today. That would be a worthy goal.