(above is a selected artwork from famed and highly acclaimed/collectible modern artist Hunter Biden)
Was chatting with a friend. He is no fan of Trump. But, he isn’t outwardly political at all. I don’t think he’s a big fan of the Democrats either. His beef this time is that the people Trump has nominated don’t have the right experience or credentials for the job they are going to assume. This guy had a distinguished career and went to one of the top colleges in the United States. He’s no dummy or one to just pop off.
I get it. There isn’t a persuadable answer to that objection.
Elon Musk never built a car, never built a rocket, never bored a subway tunnel, yet here we are. Henry Kaiser had never built a boat, and more Liberty ships were built during WW2 than anyone had ever seen before. What backgrounds or credentials did they have?
Of course, they were/are singular-type people. But, great change doesn’t come with the status quo. It’s generally outsiders who take on the establishment and topple it. They aren’t restrained by anything.
The Establishment Wall Street Journal wonders if Trump will do better in a second term. Establishment types won’t get it until after it happens. Then, they will rush to take credit if they can and they will support any positive change. They will be strident critics of any failure.
51 credentialed people signed a fake memo that said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Credentialed people advocate for the elimination of Israel in favor of terrorists. The credentialed people who are attracted to the trappings of government and the power it brings are no different than glorified highly paid consultants. They get to move or advise how to move the chess pieces on the chess board with none of the consequences when the Queen is taken leaving the King vulnerable.
I laughed when I read a left-wing venture capitalist blog about technology and crypto being unleashed on America. He is fearful. He wasn’t fearful when Big Tech was actively suppressing freedom and spying on American citizens who had different political beliefs on behalf of the US government.
They turned the other way when the Department of Justice actively imprisoned American citizens who had different political beliefs than the corrupt Biden Administration.
Freedom is a one-way street for them.
The credentialed people cannot even guarantee the safety of Trump at an outdoor inauguration. That’s how bad it is. The credentialed people can’t keep their people safe in Los Angeles and broke the social contract the government has with people. The credentialed people in Chicago said that illegal immigrants are not illegal at all but indigenous people who are coming to America to reclaim their land. The credentialed people tell me San Francisco is paradise, and New York City subways are safe. The credentialed people lie on their job applications and say they are something they aren’t. When found out, they pay no price at all. The credentialed people told us Hunter Biden was a great artist when in reality, Joe Biden and his family are some of the most despicable and corrupt political families in American history. It will be great just to see them go away.
I think there are things that you have to understand about Trump.
First off, he seems singular like Musk. Especially when it comes to politics. He campaigned like no other politician, breaking all norms. He is an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs do not follow a playbook. I know academics and status quo people who think Musk is crazy. Musk doesn’t follow Robert’s Rules of Order when it comes to human resources. Yet, at the same time, I know people who work with Musk and interface with him personally. They like working for him.
Who’s correct? The credentialed people or the people who work for him? The scoreboard says Musk gets positive results.
Trump gets positive results too. The Trump hotel chain has done very well.
Second, I met a guy in 2019 who had done business with Trump. He was a casino guy. He said, “Trump is a genius. I have been on the same time of the table as Trump, and he’s sued me. I have had dinner at his house. He’s a genius. He might be an evil genius, but he is our evil genius.”
When you listen to what Marc Andreessen says about him, he says Trump is a “systems guy”. As Andreessen observed when Trump spoke about the California water situation, it was the entire system that he looked at. He understands how things flow and work together. It comes from building big buildings where you have to understand that or you lose money.
I think Trump understands microeconomics better than any other President we have had. He experienced it in business. Sometimes, he is off base in his remedies for problems. Tariffs come to mind. But, on the whole, he gets it. Since he is a systems guy, he knows intuitively and in his gut that if Americans have access to cheap energy it is great for the economy and innovation. As a businessman, he saw how taxes influenced decision-making adversely and he is trying to get rid of them along with the agency that enforces them, the IRS.
Trump is thinking big. He has four years to leave a mark. In actuality, it might only be 18 months. He is going to go fast. I like that and hope he thinks bigger. Securing Greenland and reclaiming the Panama Canal are good ideas. They are national security good ideas and they are national commerce good ideas.
I also think that Trump is an experiential learner. Some people are book learners and can read what to do and implement it. Trump needs to go through it personally first. That means he makes mistakes.
His first picks for his first cabinet came on the advice of people who had been in Washington. They didn’t work well with the way Trump wanted to do things. This cabinet was picked because Trump had experienced DC. He understands how it all works now. He picked people that he wanted, not that some consultant wanted. One sign of that was not taking an FBI briefing after he was elected in November.
Trump has clear goals he wants to accomplish and he put people in positions of power that he thinks can accomplish them. In some cases, they will burn it all down. I think you will see a lot of chafing in organizations like the military where DEI has been strictly implemented. It’s so bad, that it’s filtered throughout the officer core, and since their incentives for promotion will change, some of them will rebel. They will have willing accomplices in the press and people like Congressperson Vindman. That guy is an awful person.
I think if Trump had won in 2020 his second term wouldn’t have been as good as I anticipate this one being.
One reason I think 2024 will be significantly better is the election of Mileil in Argentina. Argentina was far more messed up than the US. Look what he has done in a short time there. From trade deficit to surplus. Inflation is way down. Trump saw what Mileil did. If Mileil would have failed, Trump certainly would have criticized him. But, he didn’t and Trump smells a huge opportunity.
If Trump can do the same to the US bureaucracy it will be a huge win for America. He has some tailwind due to the Chevron ruling at the Supreme Court. Getting rid of entire departments and agencies would send shockwaves through the system. The mainstream press would fearmonger like no other time in American history about the dangers of getting rid of the Department of Agriculture. As if farmers couldn’t figure out how to plant crops on their own and universities couldn’t engage in meaningful agriculture research without the oversight of the government.
Milton Friedman was right. Keep the Department of Justice, the Department of State, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Defense. The rest of it gives people the illusion of safety. Certainly, ALL departments need to be reformed so they align with different incentives than they have now.
Fortunately, Fair Tax is starting to get some attention on Twitter and it was trending the other day. I am hopeful someone with some power to grab Trump’s attention sees it and mentions something to him. If he were to institute it, that would upend the bureaucracy and the way Americans interact with their government.
Already, paid protestors are in Washington DC marching and chanting. If Trump were truly vindictive, they’d be put in prison like the Jan 6 people, and then show trials would commence. My guess is that won’t happen but those people will probably get violent like they did with Black Lives Matter. Hey, the leader needs a couple of new homes. The LA fires weren’t kind to her but karma certainly was.
(a photo I took at a Las Vegas Trump rally in February of 2020)
We're all on the Titanic and all the smart people are arguing about the menu. The ship's hands that can see the ice berg in the distance are trying to change course. They may hit another ice berg, they may hit another ship or some other peril, but they are trying to steer clear. If you look what the US faces now after all these years of bilateral mismanagement and fiscal abuse -- fill in the blank for your self -- and all the other woke lunacy, I'm not sure it really makes a difference. It may be too late to course correct. Credentialed people got us into this mess, but my feeling is that with Trump's people we at least have a chance to avoid the ice berg and confront the next disaster.
I think the credentialed class, the Dems’ leadership, and gutless establishment Repubs have no one else to blame but themselves for Trump's victory.
They did it to themselves in large part by falsely conflating Trump’s often grating and obnoxious public persona with criminality, and then grossly abusing the national security apparatus and the courts in order to frame and vilify him. Hell, there were even two assassination attempts on him!
In the process they made the guy into a political martyr.
And, as if breaking the law/rules in order to screw Trump wasn’t enough, they covered up Biden’s mental diminishment going back to the 2020 campaign.
To paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, the coverup basically allowed largely anonymous people with lanyards hanging from their 11-inch necks to run the executive branch.
Getting even with these crooked scumbags should not be the first, second, or third goal, but if many of them get it shoved so far up their exit ramps it makes their eyes bulge, it’s all for the better.