A month or so into his presidency, Trump has smashed into the federal bureaucracy like a category 5 typhoon leaving the inhabitants of the national capitol stunned and paralyzed. Not since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt 120 years ago have some many “rice bowls” been broken. The stodgy bureaucracy assumed that no president would be able to actually keep promises to enact massive cuts to government spending or upend the comfort zone of so many career officials. They were, as they knew, “the real government.” Politicians come and go but they were eternal, so they thought. Their allies in the national “legacy media” and academia are aghast but the Trump juggernaut is continuing to roll on, with his cabinet appointees being confirmed, one after the other though conventional wisdom was certain that most would be sidelined after withering cross-examination from the Senate. Change would be minimal and brief, only the most conventional candidates to receive senatorial confirmation. Somehow that didn’t happen and as of this writing, only Mr. Patel remains among Trump’s most electric nominees to be confirmed (which will have likely occurred by the time this article is published).

Billionaire Elon Musk, once lauded but now detested even more than Trump by legacy media, Democrats and academia continues to expose the massive hidden budget and agendas of government institutions accustomed to operating on auto-pilot with minimal oversight. Congress has been negligent in its oversight duties for over half a century, allowing unelected bureaucracies to enact a regulatory morass so vast that legions of lawyers at enormous expense, are required to keep businesses and individuals under the radar of overzealous bureaucrats. Those failing to do so faced potential bankruptcy from fines and prosecution, not from criminal intent but simple oversight of an unknown regulatory interpretation. Musk and his “whiz kids” have identified billions in outrageous expenditures that no politician could defend at election time but remained buried deep within agency budgets, placed there by anonymous staffers. Court challenges to Musk’s authority abound with some judges believing it is they, not the president, who runs the executive branch. A Rhode Island federal judge decided that he had the authority to order all funding restored to foreign aid accounts impounded by Trump, at Musk’s recommendation. An appeals court disagreed and the cuts remain impounded, for now. Not widely known is that the Rhode Island judge’s daughter held a job with an agency under fire, a job to be eliminated; do you detect a judicial conflict of interest?

Critics of Musk and Trump hysterically proclaim a “constitutional crisis” exists, as “nobody elected Musk!” True, but neither did they elect Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor nor a host of other influential presidential advisors. Under the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt in WWII, his (unelected) close confidant and friend Harry Hopkins represented Roosevelt in high-level negotiations with Churchill and Stalin on the conduct of the war. Roosevelt even had Hopkins move into the White House where he resided from the late 1930’s until the end of the war in 1945. Other unelected presidential advisors also assumed powerful positions. Danish-American industrialist “Big Bill Knudsen” was given the rank of a 3-star general, put in uniform and empowered to organize and dictate the mobilization of American industry in WWII. He did so with powerful effect, as did other “dollar-a-year men” such as shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser. What Musk is doing is not without precedent and is necessary to effect extraordinary change, without which, America is headed into a fiscal cliff worse than that experienced in the Great Depression of the 1930’s. I am very much concerned about the kind of world we are leaving to our children and grandchildren, not just fiscally, but the very existence of America as a free nation. Censorship is rampant in Western Europe, a phenomenon once normal in Eastern nations, especially those under totalitarian governments. Now nations once celebrated as bastions of free speech, thought and conscience routinely persecute their own citizens for expressing thoughts or religious ideas we still take for granted in the United States (but not in Canada, where persecution of religious and political ideas is quite advanced). We also face the rise of powerful totalitarian states that threaten our very physical survival as a nation as our national defenses have been significantly eroded since the 1990’s. 

Can Trump engage in less hyperbole? Sure, instead of re-naming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, why not call it “the Gulf of the Americas?” After all, it does front on North, Central and South America. Trump’s assertion about taking on ownership of Gaza to re-make it into another Riviera reveals a certain naivete about Middle Eastern politics. Gaza is a snake-pit; those people have been taught to hate their Jewish neighbors and us since infancy; they just want Israel and its occupants to die, and then us. Gaza used to belong to Egypt, give it back to them, let the Saudis pay for clearing the rubble.

Are there legitimate reasons for directly engaging in the region with military force? Absolutely! The Houthis terrorist group in Yemen have launched 140 missile attacks on international shipping transiting the Red Sea/Suez Canal, forcing commercial shipping to detour thousands of miles around the area at enormous costs. However, they’ve also launched 170 direct attacks on U.S. Navy warships. Biden did virtually nothing in response. Obliterate that missile threat, then let Iran know if they continue to support Houthis attacks, they’re next.

Al Fonzi is an independent opinion columnist for The Atascadero News and Paso Robles Press; you can email him at ajfonzi2@hotmail.com