If last week was a tectonic wake-up call, this week the Trump Administration unleashed a 7.8 magnitude earthquake against the deep state.
The world is literally changing before our eyes. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal made history, perhaps unknowingly, with its story blandly headlined, “
White House Orders Pause of Federal Financial-Assistance Programs.” The sub-headline said only that “Agencies scramble to understand the unexpected memo.” Then, Politico ran a related and oddly similar headline, more blunt but also more confused: “
‘It will kill people’: Chaos, confusion after Trump halts US foreign aid.”
Chaos. Confusion.
Epoch-making. What Trump has done was, until yesterday,
unimaginable. When the Wall Street Journal called “the memo” “unexpected,” it was a masterpiece of understatement, kind of like describing the Hindenberg as an
unscheduled travel delay.
It came in two parts (so far). Yesterday, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unleashed a two-page memo upon the entire federal government. It was nothing less than a multi-trillion-dollar, whole-of-government spending freeze, excepting only a small handful of essential items like Medicare, emergency relief, payrolls, and Social Security. Like that, Trump shut down the government.
You can be sure that
nothing like this has ever happened before. It has completely flipped the script. Instead of Trump trying vainly to wrestle control over a vast bureaucracy,
now the bureaucrats must come to Trump for permission to do anything.
Overnight, Trump has managed to turn the vast, out-of-control federal bureaucracy into a command-and-control system.
“Many in the aid space,” Politico reported, “said they couldn’t remember any such sudden halt to funding in the past.” One darkly predicted destruction, saying, “This order is cruel and deadly; It will kill people.”
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) predicted it would create total chaos, insisting, “It will mean missed payrolls and rent payments and everything in between: chaos for everything from universities to non-profit charities, state disaster assistance, local law enforcement, aid to the elderly, and food for those in need.”
Neither the WSJ nor Politico quoted anybody supporting the freeze, or any Republican at all, for that matter. They didn’t even quote any other prominent Democrat voices apart from Schumer’s.
There’s no narrative yet, no talking points. The completely one-dimensional report means the media is in shock, terrified,
cowed. It doesn’t know which way to turn or what to think.
Can he really do this?
Expect a tsunami of litigation starting …
right now.
Nothing like it has ever happened before in American history. In fact, nobody even thought it was possible. Useless media has lost the plot — Trump's war against the deep state is fully underway.
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