Wanting to Believe

Trump and Musk appeared on Fox News on Tuesday night to defend the mass cuts they are making across the government, with Musk claiming Doge is just trying to "restore the will of the people through the president".

Apparently, Elon Musk believed that the "will of the people" was more bird flu, as the DOGE knife went after people in US Department of Agriculture. And now, to the surprise of no-one, it turns out that the USDA needs some, if not all, of the Food Safety and Inspection Service personnel who were told to take a hike and is now attempting to rescind their firings/re-hire them.

While President Trump often speaks, like many Presidents do, if a "mandate" to do whatever is they want to do (as opposed to what they campaigned on doing), I think what's really at work here is a certain amount of faith from his voter base that whatever it is the Trump administration does will simply work out in the end, so long as the "deep state" and other bad people can be kept away from the process. And that is something of a blank check to the administration, as it sets them up to take credit for any successes and to shift blame for any failures.

And it's going to increase the pressure for Democratic voters to give the same level of loyalty to their elected officials. Currently, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is deciding whether or not to force New York City Mayor Eric Adams out of office for corruption charges. There are a lot of things to consider, but simple partisanship doesn't appear to be one of them. At this point, I'm curious to see what things would look like if Texas Governor Greg Abbot were looking at needing to take action against Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson (one of a set of once prominent Democrats who have joined the Republican fold). In the modern Republican Party, such a move could be signing one's political death warrant for breaking from the understanding that co-partisans can do no wrong.

In any event, President Trump and his administration are currently able to continue doing things that have resulted in previous administrations being roundly derided as incompetent and/or corrupt. Whether the President makes a misstep that results in his voters deciding that he doesn't actually have their interests at heart is unknown, but I think that it's unlikely. The current Republican brand is much more invested in the person of Donald Trump than it was in the person of George W. Bush; at this point, I can't see Republican voters turning their backs on the 2028 Republican nominee in the same way that Senator John McCain's campaign became hopeless after the Bush Administration's response to the beginning of the Great Recession. That's going to give President Trump a lot more leeway to act than previous Presidents have had. It will be interesting to see if he becomes more adroit at using that leeway. Or if he even needs to.