The other day, while listening to BBC morning news about all the shock and awe in America, a random thought popped into my addled brain: whatever happened to Toni Braxton? She was huge in the 1990s and early 2000s. She had eight Top 10 hits and Unbreak My Heart stayed at number 1 in the charts for 11 weeks. Bingo! That’s the connection between US current events and Toni Braxton — not a random thought at all. How to unbreak the breakage?
It’s not really about Trump
Allow me to submit that what’s going on in the US has very little to do with Donald Trump.
Yes, Trump is a buffoon who disrupts things all the time — Gulf of America, buy Greenland, repossess the Panama Canal, make Canada the 51st state, Ukraine started the war, Gaza as the Mediterranean Riviera, exploding paper straws. The purpose of this nonsense is to stay in the spotlight. This much is all about Trump, all the time. But he’s not that interested in actually running the government. During his first 50 days back in office, he’s played golf 18 times.
Trump has no problem with the disruption. He encourages it, but he’s not the one behind it or moving it along lickety-split. In Silicon Valley they say: “Move fast and break things”, but Trump knows diddley squat about Silicon Valley.
Project 2025 and social security
We’re witnessing Project 2025’s plan being implemented by Elon Musk and his Musk rats. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has zero to do with efficiency. Is it efficient to fire 6,700 employees at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) at the time Americans are filing their 2024 tax forms? DOGE is supposed to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse. How come 17 inspectors general who professionally ferret out real waste, fraud and abuse were fired? Has DOGE come up any with waste, fraud and abuse?
Why yes. United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sent $50mn worth of condoms to Gaza, AND Hamas was using those condoms to make bombs! But pesky journalists quickly found out that the condoms went to Gaza Province in Mozambique as part of Republican President George W Bush’s PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) initiative – OOPS!
OK, but what about social security? Musk claims that Social Security Administration (SSA) is “the biggest source of fraud in human history”, with millions of 150-year-olds still getting social security checks. Not so. SSA uses COBOL software: if a birth date is missing, it automatically defaults to 1875. At this time, we don’t know how many of us old geezers have been dropped from social security, even though we’re not quite 150 years old yet. You would think a billionaire tech genius like Musk might do a little fact checking first. But when you move fast, there’s no time to check facts – and stuff breaks.
The real objective: breaking the government
Breaking things is precisely the Trump/Musk/DOGE objective; specifically, breaking the federal government — tearing it apart limb by limb. So far, so good:
- IRS, 6,700 fired
- Defense, 5,400
- FEMA, 200
- Federal Aviation Administration, 400
- Veterans Affairs, 1,000
- Health and Human Services, 2,800
- National Institute of Health, 1,500
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,300
- Energy, 1,000
- Interior, 2,300
- Homeland Security, 405 including Cyber Security, 130
- National Parks, 1,000
- National Nuclear Security Admin, 300 (by the time they realised they needed those 300, they’d already deleted their contacts)
- USDA, 4,200 including those working on bird flu
- Consumer and Financial Protection Bureau gone (let the buyer beware)
- And USAID is functionally kaput.
Since the end of January, 1.2 million HIV+ Tanzanians are no longer getting antiretroviral drugs through the PEPFAR program. Health officials estimate over 30,000 will be dead before Christmas.
Trump’s mandate not worth the price of eggs
Trump claims he got a mandate from the American people to fight the radical left Marxist liberal democrat diversity, equity and inclusion “woke agenda”. He won with 49% of the popular vote, unlike in 2016. But if we use the total of 245 million eligible voters as representing the ‘American people’, he got 31%, Kamala Harris and other candidates got 33%, and 36% of patriotic Americans didn’t get off their big fat sofas and vote.
A week after becoming a dictator on day one, Trump’s favourable job rating was 47%, unfavourable 48%. After 30 days of chaos, Trump had gone from -1 to -8. In that same 30 days, Musk dropped from -1 to -19.
And the price of eggs has doubled since Trump took office.
Breaking the law, breaking the system
Most of what’s going on now is illegal. Musk and DOGE don’t have the power to sack groceries, much less sack tenured federal civil servants. However, once all these cases get adjudicated and appealed with more cases and more appeals, it will be too late. In breaking news: two district judges have ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the 62,000 federal employees fired so far. The administration is appealing; but given Trump’s tactic of delay-delay-delay, it remains to be seen whether all, or any, will get their old jobs back.
The saying goes that if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. Trump/Musk/DOGE don’t want to make an omelet, they just want to break as many eggs as possible and do it before the courts defuse their weapons of mass destruction. And, because they moved fast:
“All the court judges and all the courts’ men
Can’t put the government back together again.”
On 19 February, Illinois governor JB Pritzker, said: “It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.” Of course, Hitler and the Nazis were way more efficient than Trump and Musk.
