You do realize that Trump was already the President once? And, not only that, he was President with a Republican majority House, Senate, and Supreme Court, for 2 full years.
I don’t understand this fantasy that Trump would do all these things, “if only he was in power”, like we don’t have any way of knowing whether he would actually do those things. He did not reduce spending. He raised the budget for the Deep State, for welfare, and for the military. He did it with a Republican Congress and a Democratic. He pumped billions of government money into the general public, leading into the US election, and generated a bubble in the stock market - while generating a debt that’s larger than we had for WWII.
He also rejected the actual Republican plan to reduce illegal immigration (e-verify). The only way you’re cutting it is to remove the source of funding - employers. Once you start prosecuting people for knowingly hiring people who are illegally in the country, that whole segment of the economy will collapse.
Creating pretend programs that sound good but have no resourcing or way to accomplish anything - against all advise by Republican-approved office holders - is just headline generation with no true intent to do anything about anything. Likewise with building walls in the middle of nowhere where you get like 3 crossings a year (but, hey good money for friends in crime) or increasing H-2B visa quotas, specific to asylum seeker countries, so you can move people around and make your asylum seekers disappear as “legal, seasonal workers”, without having to admit that you accepted asylum seekers.
You can say all sorts of shit. Actually doing things means actually doing things. Headlines are just ink.
Elon Musk has no idea how to run a government, or a large business, or indeed, a lemonade stand. He’s an “idea guy” (I use that in the loosest possible sense of the world as even most of his ideas are ripped off from other sources) who then takes credit for the actual hard work that other people put in to make companies like SpaceX and Tesla work. It’s super easy to talk about cutting giant amounts of money from the federal budget; it is entirely a different thing to find actual programs to cut that don’t have critical impacts or that will actually save money that isn’t already committed via contracts or other legal obligations.
A hypothetical second Trump administration will not actually be able to do most if not all of the things they claim it will do. It for sure isn’t going to deport some untold millions of undocumented immigrants in the first few days because it is a complete logistical impossibility even if they ignore all humanitarian concerns. They certainly aren’t going to be able to accomplish anything that actually requires control of government agencies or coordination of resources. But what they can do is effectively dismantle the civil bureaucracy, which might seem like a good idea to anyone who has been frustrated by spending a day at the DMV but when you realize that you can’t get access to benefits, or a passport issued, or funds to repair federally-supported highways what an actual disaster that would be, and how difficult it would be to fix that watch once you’ve broken it.
Indeed. Trump runs hotels. If those hotels have food showing up every day, then the guy understands logistics.
For most things, you can argue that he’s just an incompetent who doesn’t understand things. But in terms of things like the logistical necessities behind efforts like holding a criminal trial of each illegal person, then jailing said persons, even Trump would understand the costs of the hundreds of thousands of lawyers, tens of thousands of new courts you would need, the millions of new jail cells that you would need, and the billions of dollars and decades of investment that would cost.
And that all to get rid of people who got educated on the tax dollar of their home country, plan to retire back to and live on the social security system of their home country, but want to spend their prime years working in the US at jobs that Americans don’t want and don’t need, adding to US production capacity at a massive discount to the country.
One almost wonders why every business minded Republican from Ronald Reagan to George W Bush was such a fan!
Trump owns a few motels, and license his names on a bunch more. He doesn’t understand anything about how the hotel runs, and certainly not down to the level of food deliveries or other basic logistics. (And is shows if you look at reviews of the quality of their service.). He’s actually had a longer record of failures than successes, even in the casino industry where all you really have to do is get asses in seats to get a statistically guaranteed return. Donald Trump is a guy who, until recently, has never been held to account for any of his failures or assaults, and has never developed any abilities except how to run a train of bullshit for investors and promote himself.
Plus, the reality is he was offered options to do things for border security and to decrease immigration. Consistently, he rejected those in favor of things that made headlines but which were patent nonsense.
The effective things would also have made headlines but they would have harmed his business interests as a hotelier and person with friends in the construction industry.
No; the point of gerrymandering is to control as many districts as possible. Therefore it’s common practice to create districts carefully designed to give the Republicans an edge of a few percent, in order to lock out the Democrats as much as possible.
The controls elections to the House of Representatives and state elections, but it doesn’t have any bearing on the election of US Senators or the President/Vice President, as those or their Electoral College electors are elected by a statewide direct count.
Not to mention that - as said above - Trump has no apparent desire to dismantle the government, he just wants it to be full of yes-men.
As far as the EPA goes, during his first administration he fired a lot of people and then hired them all back as contractors, with no actual loss in manpower (it just cost the government more) - meaning that he was using more of your tax dollars on the EPA than previous administrations while being able to claim that he shrunk the agency, falsely.
But the president can undercut their effectiveness by appointing feckless, inept, or obstructive leaders, and Congress can slash budgets, hold pointless but disruptive hearings to showboat, and obstruct agencies and major programs like it did with the U.S. Global Change Research Program, disbanding the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment and refusing it any funding to promote the conclusions of the 4th and 5th National Climate Assessment Reports. And with compliant federal courts and Supreme Court, a legal challenge is unlikely to get any real traction.
Trump can’t be the absolute dictator he imagines himself to be (at least, not without a lot more erosion and changes) but he can monkey up the works to the point that there is little in the way of functional bureaucracy and force career civil servants to retire or quit in frustration, or at bast just sit at desks and ineffectually twiddle their thumbs while given pointless, unlawful, or unworkable orders.
Agreed, that blog was pretty pointless and wrong, and I think Trump and Heritage Foundation goons are going to realize they they actually need a lot of that bureaucracy to enact their Project 2025 plans, hopefully after the already counterproductively jam up the works and fire or drive off everybody who can fix it. That is as much optimism as I can muster today.
Congress, especially if the Democrats wind up winning the House after all. In normal times, the Supreme Court.
The point is that the President can’t easily or unilaterally wave away deeply embedded government functions. Nor can he dictatorially direct Congress to pass bills doing his bidding. The army will not march into American cities and set up detention camps for immigrants, whether here legally or illegally.
Certainly his minions will try to disrupt any programs they don’t like. As Stranger wrote, there are many ways a determined President and his staff can make lives unhappy. Will he eliminate the Department of Education, as he stated? No, because he has no idea what the DoE does. Putting critical race theory into elementary schools is not in its bailiwick. Pell Grants are. Touching them has always raised howls from those affected and their representatives.
I’m sick when I think of what the next years will be like. But the battles are going to be glorious as every bureaucracy fights tooth and nail to keep its funding and jobs. Trump will really see what the Deep State is like.