Orhan Ãam – stock.adobe.com
The worst thing any government can do is to fail to act on its promises. Across the world, there are governments of all stripes suffering for doing just that.
In Britain, the Labour government is already sinking in the opinion polls because it promised things it hasn’t been able to do. And it has also done things it promised not to do — like raising taxes.
It´s the same in Germany, Italy and other European countries, where governments promised to deport illegal asylum seekers and have so far failed to get almost anyone out of their countries.
But before the Trump administration has even taken office, there is a political problem that should have easily been avoided.
The prospect of a government shutdown didn´t come out of the blue. It came out of the machinations of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other Democrats. They have spent recent days plotting to make sure that the spending bill they want to push through has enough bad things in it that they knew that Republicans couldn´t vote for it.
President-elect Donald Trump has already responded by insisting that Republican lawmakers tear up the bipartisan agreement. Elon Musk went on a 4 a.m. X rampage insisting that the spending bill “should not pass.” He continued, “Unless DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency] ends the careers of deceitful pork-barrel politicians, the waste and corruption will never stop.” He is right.
And so there is a real possibility that the government could shut down this weekend. This will mean the usual haul of stories about park rangers failing to get their Christmas pay and much more. And there is a more than distinct chance that the Democrats will then get to pretend to the American public that the big, bad Republicans are the people responsible for the government shutdown, with all the negative stories it will bring with it.
But it could all have been avoided. After all, the fact that Schumer may have spent the period before the inauguration plotting to harm the Republicans should have come as a surprise to no one. Plotting is what Schumer does for a living. He is exceptionally good at it.
But the fact that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and others did not see this coming is of more concern.
And it is a reminder of something that the whole Trump team needs to take increasingly seriously. They should already have an eye to the midterms and think about how they can have control of both houses of Congress for a full presidential term.
By putting so much waste in this spending bill, the Democrats have already signaled that they will do everything they can to stymie Republicans. And that is why DOGE and every other part of the new Trump administration had better get going from day one.
The games that Schumer & Co. have been playing are the sort of thing that not only bring Washington to a standstill but keep the country in stasis. That is what they want. They want the chaos, and they want the blame to be sent in the direction of the Republicans.
Democrats like Rep. Pramila Jayapal and Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger have spent the past 48 hours playing their own political game — pretending that government spending is being dictated not by elected representatives in the House, but by the unelected Elon Musk.
But they miss the point. The whole point of DOGE and Trump 2.0 is that things are going to have to be done differently. The days of government overspending and waste have to be reined in. And lawmakers of all stripes should remember that this didn´t used to be such a controversial idea.
During the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, there were serious efforts to cut the fat around the government. That should be a reminder to Democrats that nothing the Republicans are proposing is crazy.
Yet the fact that those earlier efforts largely failed is a sign that Washington uninterrupted is terrible at actually cutting waste. It is excellent at talking about it, but much worse at actually doing it.
Given Musk’s desire to cut some $2 trillion (around 30%) of the federal budget, there are going to be some huge changes to the federal workforce.
And you can´t tinker with things like that. As Argentinian President Javier Milei has shown, you just have to get in and do it. That means actually getting rid of government departments. Which is the sort of thing that naturally scares the DC consensus.
But Trump´s mandate is in part precisely to destroy that consensus.
After all, why should the left always be allowed to dictate what is or is not politically acceptable?
Just this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) appeared on the unwatchable and unwatched Joy Reid´s show on MSNBC, where she seemed to excuse the cold-blooded recent murder of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson. Referring to the man accused of Thompson’s murder, Warren said, “Violence is never the answer.”
And then came the inevitable “but”: “But people can be pushed only so far.” As if the privileged, disgusting young man accused of the murder was somehow pushed into his act of violence because of rising health care costs.
This is the sort of normalizing — including the normalization of violence — that the radical left has played with for years. All the time pretending that they are the nice and caring ones.
That is just one of the things that is going to have to change. Musk and Trump want to change the weather in Washington as well as the future of this great country. They want to make the federal budget leaner because no country can just keep raising government spending and continuously pushing up the debt ceiling. Eventually, you run out of other people’s money as well as your own.
The political shenanigans of this week show DC at its worst. But they are also a reminder that the Trump administration is going to have to hit the ground running. Because there are plenty of people already plotting to make it fall flat on its face before it has even begun.