What Comes Next?

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There’s a lot of talk about what Trump should do first thing on 20 January. So, first thing, just figure that anything I say is likely to be overwhelmed by actual events. If there’s anything we’ve learned in the last nine days, it’s that Trump is thinking so far out of the box that he probably can’t see the box anymore. It’s over the horizon behind him. So we got some interesting surprises, and you know what? I would rather think about why he’s making the choices he’s making than jump off a cliff saying, “Oh, I’m so much smarter than he is.”

Look, anyone who thinks Trump is dumb is — oh, hell, “high on their own supply” is a horrid cliche, but I’ll accept nominations for a better one. 

What we do know, however, is that he went from a massively biased judge in a courtroom in a massively anti-Trump state facing massively Trumped-up felony charges (and yes, I did that on purpose) to 312 electoral votes and a trifecta, with the House and Senate as well as the Executive and a dominating majority in the popular vote.

So, if he’s dumb, we should wish Mitt Romney had taken some dumb lessons from him.

Let’s examine some of his nominations and ask ourselves what he was thinking.

Let’s start by asking what his actual goals are. It’s not like he hasn’t been pretty clear on them—which is one reason he blew past Harris like a cyber truck in a drag race. He told us what he wanted, and it was things Americans wanted.

• He wanted to control inflation, which means controlling the money supply, which means controlling spending because we’re financing the excessive spending by printing money.
• He wanted to control the border. Now, I’m a little squishy on immigration. I’m a libertarian at heart and think people are entitled to live where they want. But we need to allow immigration with some kind of controls. Instead, we got a situation where the Biden administration was encouraging countries like Venezuela to empty their prisons and send the worst to the USA—at the USA’s expense. Examining their motives would be interesting at another time.
• He wanted to clean out the Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community. Part of that, I think, is a desire for revenge. But another part is that we really are in a scary world, made more scary by the previous Obama administrations, including the recent Obama III one. We need to be able to trust that they are working in the U.S.’s interests. I’ll probably write more about that topic in a separate post; for now, leave it at that.

Money Supply/Spending/Inflation

So he has Elon and Vivek. It’s going to be interesting to watch that, but the thing I’m certain of is that we can’t cut government by very significant amounts within the current government. 

Every one of the current government employees knows down deep in their bones that their phony-baloney job is essential and, in fact, should have more funding, and they will resist cuts in their budgets to the death.  Every damn one.

Remember that both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter tried to cut spending within the normal government processes (e.g., zero-based budgeting) and failed. I don’t think it can be done within the normal bureaucratic processes no matter what the Executive Branch says.

Immigration

On immigration, he’s got really all the power he needs to make a big impact. 

Mass deportations? The trick there is that adjective: what’s a mass deportation? Having ICE, or worse, the U.S. military going from door to door asking for people’s papers just isn’t happening, and if it were tried, NGOs would be funding immigration attorneys to fight in court for the next fifty years. Teenagers now would be abuelos and abuelas before they were expelled.

But then — there are many many ilegales here who have been convicted of felonies. They can be expelled pretty straightforwardly. Start with them. Then start enforcing the laws that say you can’t employ the ones who remain, and cut off assistance to non-citizens. This should result in a lot of voluntary (in some sense) exits. Maybe provide support while they get a reservation on a plane home.

Reduce the inflow, achieve a net outflow, and the problem will more or less solve itself.

The ‘Deep State’

Another kind of horrid cliche, but I don’t have a better word for it. We have seen, and now know with real certainty, that from not long after Trump came down the escalator — maybe even before — the U.S. government, through the FBI and the intelligence community (if there’s any useful distinction any longer), began an extensive, expensive, active program to prevent his election, and when that failed, to make his administration as ineffective as possible, perhaps even remove him prematurely.

This is where it gets really interesting. 

Let’s start with the biggest recent kerfuffle: Matt Gaetz. Yes, autocorrect I mean Gaetz. I don’t know that I’d nominate him for dog catcher — he threw bombs at people in Congress who didn’t deserve it and hurt the GOP cause in the process. (I’d put Marjorie Taylor Greene in the same category.) But he was done dirty by DoJ and he’s got the receipts. (See Mollie Hemingway’s piece in The Federalist for details, but the TL;DR is he was accused by anonymous sources, the Justice Department spent a year and didn’t find anything, but people keep dragging it out.) Make it a recess appointment, make it an “acting” appointment, and replace him with Matt Whittaker in six months. In the meantime, we’ll see a lot of bad actors fleeing the department, and Merrick Garland will need to put anti-diarrheal meds on his Amazon subscription.

It would be interesting to see if Garland committed any actual crimes.

John Ratcliffe for director of the CIA — once again, this is picking someone who knows where the bodies are buried. When I was exposed to the CIA 30+ years ago, everyone — I mean everyone, with very few exceptions, was there because they thought they wanted to be James Bond but they liked their offices too much. It really looks like it got worse. I suppose I can’t repeat the phony-baloney jobs video, but I’m tempted.

Anyone who knows the history of CIA is aware that they figure they’re too smart to let themselves be constrained by mere executive directives.

I think Ratcliffe’s biggest problem is going to be whether the CIA can bring itself to accept any direction, and what to do if they won’t.

Tulsi Gabbard as director of National Intelligence. Once upon a time, the director of the CIA was the director of Central Intelligence, which is exactly the same job as the director of National Intelligence. We got this extra layer of bureaucracy when if was discovered that the DCI wasn’t up to it.

Well, adding that extra layer doesn’t seem to have actually helped much, and it opened up the chance for more political influence. And Tulsi knows about political influence on the Intelligence Community, having been declared anathema days after she called Hillary a warmonger.

This is really the ultimate Eff Around and Find Out nomination. We can expect to learn a lot about what’s been going on in the last eight years, which I think is justification enough.

The fact is, the DNI is many layers away from operational intelligence; the primary job is to present the presidential daily briefing. What we need is someone who will insist on believing the PDB.

Things to do in general

The biggest problem for Trump is going to be getting hold of the reins. He will have lots of resistance from the remnants of the previous Obama-corrupted administrations that he will have to deal with firmly and forthrightly. A start on that:

• Declassify lots, including especially what he thought he declassified at the end of his first term. The Epstein client list. All the Crossfire Hurricane stuff. Maybe with a little care about sources and methods, but the default should be declassification.
• Terminate all the security clearances for everyone who holds a clearance after leaving government. Make them re-apply. But the Famous 51 should be told not to bother. And seriously consider charging them under the Espionage Act.
• There are several retired officers, like Mark Milley, whom Trump should seriously consider recalling to active duty for court martial. Conduct unbecoming, which is what officers get charged with in place of insubordination.

Do you remember the old joke about what you call 500 lawyers buried neck-deep at low tide? “A helluva start.”

It looks to me like Trump’s nominations so far are a helluva start.