Last Friday night, minutes after President Donald Trump announced the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a purge of the military’s top lawyers, I received an e-mail from my cousin in Los Angeles. “Why are we not in the streets?” she wrote. “The Germans even marched against Musk. The French would have barricaded every government building.” All week long I’ve been thinking of that message, composed in the heat of the moment after an unprecedented event that already seems forgotten amid all the subsequent unprecedented events.
There really does appear to be some form of cognitive dissonance here with our friends on the left. Apparently they believe that there is a constitution that safeguards a giant government bureaucracy from any action from a duly elected President. Apparently they also somehow believe that there is some constitutional duty for an elected President to behave in the same manner as other Presidents that liberals were more in tune with. They apparently believe that the duly elected President, commander in chief, and head of the executive branch is subservient to over 800 separate district judges, who need not follow any laws or any constitutional guidelines as long as they are stopping the duly elected President from doing what he was elected to do.
Moreover, they are not understanding as to why the American public is actually fairly happy with the President, more than happy with the long overdue idea of a department of government efficiency, and less than happy with the Party that is in total opposition to this and apparently cannot muster any other political stance other than resistance. Perhaps the fact that only 21% of the country is in approval of what Democrats are doing is the reason why there are not people out in the streets protesting for their resistance.
Trump has entered into this with a shock and awe strategy. It is likely that not everything he hopes to accomplish will end up being accomplished in the short term. Some things will probably be stopped in the courts, but not nearly as many as the liberals currently believe. The majority of what he is doing is perfectly legal and will eventually be upheld by the high court. Other things will take little more than a tweak of the language of an executive action, a slight change to satisfy a concern, or for the President to find some law in existence that already provides said authority. He only needs to look to how Biden continued to try to write off billions in student loans in a variety of manners, even after the USSC told him no. There are ways of doing the same thing in different fashions that will get around many of these lower court rulings. Unlike Biden, Trump is not likely to challenge the high court, but I expect that court will rule more in his favor than not.
But this is not a sprint, but rather a four year marathon. The battles will go on as the resistance has little choice other than to try to create a war of attrition. But the President and his team will continue to be President and will have the position of strength as he keeps the pressure on, hopefully for the full four years. Many of these Government employees will not be able to fight things for four years and will have to move on to other employment. Many of these programs, once shuttered, will never get congressional approval again. I would like to believe that congress would not allow this to creep back into play over the long term, but I am a bit more skeptical of that they will not eventually be duped again by the deep state into funding these nonsensical things, albeit at a much lower rate and with much more effort. The genie is out of the bottle right now, and it may be harder than some think to get it back into that bottle.
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