Disruption

Disruption

By

Leonard Zwelling

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/us/politics/trump-saves-country-quote.html

“When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,”

Richard Nixon

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”

Donald Trump

I have two grandsons. One is 6 and ½. The other just turned five. The older one is a bit of a builder. He likes to use the plastic blocks with magnetic edges we gave him and his brother to construct garages for his toy cars.

His brother equally likes to destroy what the elder child has built.

But they are children.

We are a month into Donald Trump’s second term. He has used Elon Musk (who is using whom?) to take apart various departments in the Executive Branch and fire thousands. The two men (boys?) believe that they are doing what the people elected Trump (not Musk) to do. I just want to know what principles they are using to decide what to destroy, how they will supplant the functions these terminated people used to perform, and where the country goes from here given that there are already multiple law suits trying to prevent Trump and Musk from continuing their path of governmental disruption.

My Trump supporting friends think that what has transpired is a good thing. There was government bloat, fraud, and abuse, and this was the only way that would end, or at least be the beginning of the end.

I agree with my friends that there is a great deal of bloat in the federal budget and in the huge number of personnel that work in certain agencies. I have no doubt that there was corruption in USAID in its delivering of foreign aid. However, that does not mean foreign aid is unimportant. There had to be a less disruptive way to examine USAID and root out the bad while keeping the good. Alas, that does not seem to be the way this will go.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a host of other agencies including the IRS have gone under the Trump-Musk axe. Undoubtedly there will be more. People I know think that this is all just fine. It was the only way to shrink the government.

Now Trump says he will not only shrink government, he will make it more efficient. I think he is counting on Mr. Musk to do that. Musk is good at that after all.

First, I seriously doubt that any unelected person in the history of the country, let alone an immigrant, has wielded the kind of power that Mr. Musk has over the past month at least since Alexander Hamilton. This is by definition dangerous. I understand that Mr. Musk has been adroit in running companies using technology I believe he actually understands. The same cannot be said of the government. If he understood it, he would know that tactics like the ones he is using could really hurt people who depend on government services with which he may be interfering.

Second, there is a reason Article I of the Constitution is about Congress. Congress was considered the most important branch of government by the Founders. They certainly did not want an imperial presidency after having suffered under the reign of a king. Even George Washington saw the wisdom of having an executive official without supreme power. The kind of changes Musk is making ought to be in conjunction with Congress which established these agencies in the Executive branch. But Congress is impotent on both sides of the aisle and the Republicans seem to be happy with what Musk and Trump are doing.

Over the years many Presidents have sought to go beyond the power allotted them in the Constitution. The most recent, of course, was Mr. Nixon (or maybe W?). What is so humorous to those of us that lived through Watergate is that under the current opinion by the Supreme Court, Nixon probably wouldn’t have had to resign despite having committed many illegal acts during his presidency.

Third, now it seems that Mr. Trump and his vice president want to disrupt the NATO alliance that has kept Europe safe since WWII. Even Mr. Zelenskyy believes that Ukraine is being abandoned by the United States and Europe may have to fend for itself against Russian aggression and home-grown terrorism.

Many people who voted for Mr. Trump, including some real smart ones, believe that this disruption is just what the country needs. They will go on believing that until that disruption metastasizes to their lives. When they can no longer get help for their businesses because all the immigrants have been deported, they will know. When they no longer get their tax refunds because the IRS is depleted of people to help Americans, they will know. And when it is unsafe to go to Europe, let alone the Far East because America has withdrawn from the world and erected trade barriers to the free exchange of goods and services, they will know.

To me, I believe that Mr. Trump was indeed elected to do something about the unbridled growth of the federal budget, the deficit, and the federal work force. But he was elected to do it wisely and Mr. Musk was never elected.

After what I see surrounding the Eric Adams case in New York, the appearance of a quid pro quo to cease a legitimate prosecution for political purposes, a classic Trump transactional move, I would say that Trump is just supplanting one kind of corruption for another.

Disruption for disruption’s sake is just fine in a five-year old. It is not fine when done by grown men with immense power.

My message to both Trump and Musk is—grow up!