The Trump Doctrine

We aren't protecting peace and democracy in Europe anymore. 

Now we are splitting Ukraine and sharing it with Russia. Russia's share is ownership of the current territory of eastern and southern Ukraine. The U.S. share is a royalty interest in the minerals extracted from the part that remains.

Here is the full text of the U.S.-Ukraine agreement, published in The Kyiv Independent. The agreement so far is an agreement-to-agree, not an agreement. Details come later. 

Agreement

The agreement is hard to decipher, but I think it means this much:

***The two countries will create a fund, and Ukraine will contribute 50% of the monetized income from the sale of any newly-developed mineral resources. 

***The two countries won't encumber or dilute the fund, nor sell part of it to third parties.

***The fund links U.S. interests to Ukraine's survival and prosperity.

***Ukraine acknowledges the American expense in assisting Ukraine's defense against the Russian invasion. The U.S. recognizes Ukraine having voluntarily given up its nuclear weapons at the urging of the U.S.

I see three big takeaways from this agreement.

1. It is a reflection of the new American policy, the Trump Doctrine. It asserts the primacy of hard power and like-for-like transactions in foreign policy. Trump doesn't care about squishy, sentimental, rules-based agreements. Any nation's borders are negotiable, just like everything else in business and war. A nation's borders are whatever a country can defend at any given moment. Borders and territory reflect relative strength, not justice or history or treaties or lines on a map. Therefore, there is no shame or guilt in a country abruptly changing its policy as it adjusts to shifts in relative power of itself and others. 

2. This isn't entirely bad for Ukraine; an opinion I recognize may surprise and disappoint some readers. I fully acknowledge that the new Trump doctrine is amoral, cynical, and that it is playing with dynamite. The Trump doctrine of constantly shifting borders, partnerships, and trade agreements creates multiple points of unending conflict. It is a dangerous, possibly fatal mistake in the world's 80-year effort to avoid nuclear annihilation. But, given that Americans elected Trump and that the Trump Doctrine is in effect, then partnership with Ukraine, where the U.S. has a financial stake in Ukraine, is better for Ukraine than the alternative, in which Ukraine is a black hole of endless war and expense. Trump would readily abandon a bad "investment," one with ongoing costs and liabilities. But now the cost of Ukraine's defense is different. Our Ukraine "investment" now has gained an upside for America businesses.

3. The sudden shift in American policy was a wake-up call for Europe. Europe has the potential to act like a great power. Europe can be a commercial and military peer to China and the U.S. Inertia in the Atlantic alliance, with America as senior partner, permitted Europe to be a perennial dependent. We may regret this change in status, and so might Europe. Europe may fall back into rivalries and war. That is their history. The U.S. will miss the European alliance. The U.S.is a more formidable rival to China when in close trade and military partnership with Europe. The old Atlantic partnership was out of date and better reflected the realities of the 1950s and 1960s than the realities of today. It was always a risk for Europe that a Trump-like American leader would come along. He came. 

I think the chances of a nuclear war in the next decades are much, much higher now than they were a year ago. The realpolitik goal for a dozen or more countries in a you-are-on-your-own world is to get nuclear capability and bioweapons. Each needs that ace in the hole.  And if a neighbor or rival might get those weapons, then any one country must get them, and get them first, and then use them first, upon plausible threat of attack by another. 

Americans voted for this, whether they knew it or not. It is 1914 all over again.

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The Happy Hunting Ground of Southern Oregon

"This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me."
       Woody Guthrie 1940

Southern Oregon Indian tribes are fighting over turf. 

The local regional university, Southern Oregon University, has a prescribed Land Acknowledgement Statement. It begins:

We want to take this moment to acknowledge that Southern Oregon University is located within the ancestral homelands of the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa peoples who lived here since time immemorial. These Tribes were displaced during rapid Euro-American colonization, the Gold Rush, and armed conflict between 1851 and 1856. In the 1850s, discovery of gold and settlement brought thousands of Euro-Americans to their lands, leading to warfare, epidemics, starvation, and villages being burned. . . .

The notion that this was the rightful and permanent home of the Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa from the beginning and until displaced by White settlers, is a premise. It might be true. But the geography of tribes in Southern Oregon suggests a different, more contentious past. Humans are in constant movement in an effort to find and control better fishing and hunting opportunities, even if it is currently controlled by another tribe. I presume it happened in the past in Southern Oregon because it is happening here today. The various tribes are fighting over turf, a fight played out with lobbyists, lawyers, strategic donations to politicians' campaigns and non-profits, with governors and state legislatures, in Congress, at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and in the courts. They are fighting for the right to earnings from gamblers, the modern-day equivalent of deer, elk, and salmon.

Tam Moore has been a journalist for seven decades. He is a Vietnam veteran and a former Jackson County Commissioner. He has observed and reported news for KOBI television and in print for the Capital Press. He lives in Medford, Oregon.

Tam Moore at 90

Guest Post by Tam Moore

Folks living in Medford, Oregon may wonder whose land it really is. On January 10, 2025 the U.S. Department of Interior on declared that 2.4 acres of land part of the Coquille Indian Tribe’s reservation. It is one of three decisions by the assistant secretary for Indian affairs issued in the closing days of the Biden administration that clear the way for tribes – once disbanded by federal order, now restored – to open gambling facilities on lands a significant distance from their ancestral homelands. 

The Department of Interior’s Medford decision is under legal challenge in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., where one of the other two casino sites was litigated before being granted. Interior rests the Medford decision on the 1998 Coquille Restoration Act, which authorized the tribe to serve its members living in a five-county service area – Coos, Curry, Douglas, Jackson and Lane counties.

Interior found that law gives the secretary of interior “trust land acquisition authority within the service area.”  The Tribe’s headquarters and exiting casino are 168 highway miles from Medford.

 

Here’s a map from the 1976 Atlas of Oregon which shows by language group and geographic territory, where tribes were located in 1850.

That’s a critical benchmark year for all tribes, because as White settlers swarmed into Oregon Territory – statehood came in 1859 – native peoples were dispossessed. By 1857 the government ordered all indigenous people west of the Cascade Mountains to either the Siletz or Grand Ronde Indian Reservations. 

The Coquille ancestral lands were in the coastal river drainage of the same name and some of the streams and sloughs of Coos Bay. They never had a reservation; the Treaty of 1855 removed the Coquille to the Siletz Reservation. But tribal records show many folks didn’t go and remained living in their aboriginal territory. The Coquille opened a casino, “The Mill” in 2000 on a site next to Coos Bay. In 2012 they purchased a Medford bowling alley and adjoining land, applying for the federal designation finally issued nearly 13 years later. Interior found that revenues from The Mill “are no longer able to keep pace with needs of the Tribe.” In addition, the Coos and Lower Umpqua Tribes opened a competing casino three miles from The Mill. 

Tribal casinos in Oregon and on its borders:

 

The January 10 Interior decision touched off quick moves by the Coquille. Their warranty deed transferring the bowling alley to the United States was presented to the Jackson County Clerk at 10 a.m. on January 13.  By January 14 when Rogue Valley Times visited Roxy’s Bar and Grill located in part of the former bowling alley, electronic gaming machines were on site and being played. Interior didn’t publish its record of decision in the Federal Register until the next day. 

Below: Players gamble on Class II gaming devices at the planned site for The Cedars at Bear Creek casino. Photo by Buffy Pollock, Rogue Valley Times.

The public record isn’t clear on when, or if, the tribe has filed a license with the Federal Indian Gaming Commission for the additional location. That law requires the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when considering new gambling site applications, to consult with other tribes and governments in the region—“the Secretary shall consult with tribes and appropriate  state or local officials. . . .”  

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Might makes right.

"The strong do as they can, the weak suffer as they must." 

Athenians to the Melians, 416 BC, as described by Athenian historian Thucydides. 

The Aegean island of Melos was neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta. Larger and stronger Athens approached Melos' leaders and demanded large annual tributes of wheat and silver, and said to pay up or be utterly destroyed. Melian leaders said this was immoral and unjust. We hurt nobody. Leave us be. Athens said it wasn't a matter of morality, it was a matter of strength. Melos resisted. Athens killed their men and enslaved their women and children.

We are at a moment of profound change in American foreign policy. 

America announced a change in values. In post-WWII world, America presented itself to the world as having a value system of good versus evil, of friends versus opponents. We told ourselves and the world that we were fighting for righteous causes: freedom, democracy, peace, fairness, prosperity, and free markets. We asked the blessing of God. We were the good guys.

It is different now. America isn't claiming to act on moral values. They are irrelevant. We are being selfish and realistic. America is open to partnering with undemocratic, unfree, unpeaceful, corrupt governments to achieve our interests, which include getting peace on any terms that will bring peace, and getting mineral rights from a country under duress.

There is a good argument that the U.S. has always been self-deluded and hypocritical in our foreign policy. We have always been looking out for number one. We dressed up self-interest under a cloak of righteousness. This painting by John Singer Sargent is in the main hallway at Harvard's Widener Library. I scoffed at it every time I passed it in the late 1960s as the Vietnam War was underway, but it was painted and displayed in dead earnest:

Inscription: They crossed the sea crusaders keen to help nations battling in a righteous cause.

World Wars One and Two, we told ourselves and the world, were fought to save democracy from German aggression. The Korean War was fought to stop communism. We were protecting Vietnam from being another falling domino of communism. Our interventions in Latin America were to protect private property and capitalism. We intervened in Iraq first to protect innocent Kuwait and then to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. We fund the United Nations to promote peace and international law. We fund foreign aid because we are good guys, feeding the poor, healing the sick. We are the Mercy Ship people.

There is truth in all of it, and hypocrisy, too. The hypocrisy is the point of the moral basis for our actions. We said and believed we were acting out of good, moral intentions. Allies thought we were a fixed point of reliability and consistency. We had beliefs. We had an ideology. Therefore, we would pay our bills, obey treaties, and defend an invaded democracy against an autocratic aggressor, even if it cost America something.

No longer. In the "dog-eat-dog" world, people, businesses, and countries act out of unsentimental self-interest. Trump announced that the U.S. is under new management with new policies. “My administration is making a decisive break with the foreign policy failures of the past administration, and frankly the past.” There is no right or wrong nor any rules of the game; only ability to take what you want if you have the power.

The U.S has shown itself to be an unreliable ally in matters of war and peace and, with the tariff announcements, an unreliable trading partner. That does not mean others cannot work with the U.S. They can, but there is a new north star. The U.S will do whatever transaction best advantages it at any given moment. There is no trust of consistency and honor. 

In our lives we know how to deal with unreliable people. We demand prepayment. We file liens in advance of doing work. We audit. We presume bad intentions. We try never to let ourselves get exposed. It is why we much prefer to work with known people and organizations with a track record of reliable service and partnership.

Trump is saying and demonstrating that nobody can trust us anymore. There is value in being trustworthy. This will cost us.

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Both left and right agree: The West is in decay

     "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

       Letter from John Adams to his wife Abigail

The left fears the West is in decline because the people have lost the civic virtues of respect for individual rights, tolerance for minorities, and obedience to lawful process that make liberal democracies possible. They observe the West is falling into fascism and tyranny. The left recalls the Roman Republic turning into the Roman Empire, Hitler's takeover of Germany in 1933, and Putin.

A book for the left

The right fears the West is in decline because the people have lost martial instincts and rigor. They observe the West falling into atheism, race-mixing, effeminacy, and moral relativism. The right recalls hippies, the French collapse in 1940, migration through unenforced borders, and drag queen story hours.

A book for the right

The left fears that right-wing populism will destroy the rules-based world order and social-welfare domestic politics that are foundations of  the prosperous and diverse countries of North America and Western Europe. The left fears that the right wants a harsh dog-eat-dog world in which strong countries dominate weak ones, strong businesses crush weak ones, and where existing social hierarchies are protected.

The right believes that such a dog-eat-dog world exists now and always has. The right believes that the left's sentimental idealism created a weak society in decline, one vulnerable to strong, clear-eyed opponents, including Russia and China.

The left recalls George Washington, who respected the constraints of civilian authority. Washington put the republic's interest ahead of his own. The right recalls Andrew Jackson, who ignored treaties and the Supreme Court in order to expel and kill Cherokee Indians to open up land for White settlers. Jackson respected the will of the western frontier voters who elected him.

The left wins a majority of female voters. At the height of the #MeToo movement the left pushed Senator Al Franken (D-MN) from office. He had mugged a camera shot pretending to grope a sleeping woman. In 2020, the left wanted to decriminalize cross-border migration. In 2024, the left defended trans-female athletes competing in women's sporting events and having access to women's locker rooms. Within the left there is talk of "toxic masculinity." Within sophisticated circles, men not only shave their faces, they "manscape" by shaving body and pubic hair.

JD Vance

The right wins a majority of male voters. Trump groped women, cheated on all his wives, and paid no political price. Vice President JD Vance wears a beard and goes to Europe to praise manliness. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg praises "masculine energy." Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth's qualification for nomination was his call to remove trans people from the military and females from combat roles. Big upper-body muscles are part of the brands of Trump-supporting podcasters Joe Rogan and Dan Bongino.

Rogan

Bongino

The left wants a more civilized world. The left believes the world is too interconnected for humans to continue to act like wild animals. We need to care for the planet. We need to domesticate ourselves, if we are to live in peace and harmony. 

Housecat at leisure

The right thinks that the West has domesticated itself into self-hating pushovers. They want the West to be proud of who we are biologically, culturally, racially, and nationally. We are number one. If that means pushing an ally around, so be it. If it means taking over Greenland or Gaza, who could stop us? 

Tiger in the wild, bringing down prey

At this moment, I don't see any rising star on the left who projects a different vibe. Democrats are still the party of the well-civilized. Republicans are sharpening their brand as proud apex predators. Dan Bongino was just named deputy director of the FBI; Trump announced a preference for Russia over the democracies of Western Europe; and Elon Musk is sending threatening emails to millions of federal employees. 

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"Thank you for your civil service."

     "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning we want them to not want to go to work. . . . We want to put them in trauma."

          Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget

 

You read that right. The new head of the OMB said he wanted federal employees to be so miserable they would quit their jobs, leaving the federal government unable to do its work. Watch.

College classmate Erich Almasy reflects on a hinge point in his life, that period in young adulthood when one makes decisions that send one's life in one direction or another. He and classmate Cynthia Blanton, now his wife, considered government service, then looked elsewhere.

Young people are entering the workforce getting signals on what direction to point their lives. Some are economic signals; where the jobs are, and what the pay is. Some are matters of image and brand; whether an organization has a future or whether it is a dead end. The Trump-Musk-DOGE administration is sending signals that in civil and military service one can be fired abruptly at random, by a boss who doesn't value you or the job you do. 

The U.S. president viewed Musk's random cuts, including mass dismissal of all new or newly-promoted people, and wrote, in all caps:

"ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE. REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE, BUT ULTIMATELY, TO MAKE GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. MAGA!

We see a bad boss who lacks respect for his employees. We see a risky career in a job that might disappear right after one has quit another job, moved, and bought a home with a mortgage. The federal government has repositioned from a bedrock of trust and reliability to its opposite.

This issue is personal with me. My mother was a hard-working 20-year employee of the Bureau of Land Management. In my youth I fought forest fires, digging fire lines in front of advancing fires. It was dangerous work. A gust of wind might accelerate a fire faster than my fellow hotshot crew members and I could build a containment line around it. I never doubted that my boss, and boss's boss, and management further up the line considered my work important.

Here is Erich's story.

Erich and Cynthia as young adults, at a costume ball

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

When I met my wife in college, I finished a semester early, and she had an extra year to go. She took a year off to save money (we were poor kids) to work at a think tank in Washington, D.C. She considered joining the foreign service and working her way to up to becoming a U.S. ambassador somewhere. Her time in the nation’s capital taught her that ambassadorships are rewards, not merit-based appointments. We both chose to attend business school after college.

I considered taking the Civil Service exam before or after joining the Peace Corps. I drew a high draft lottery number and was relatively safe. My dad (who served in the Canadian Army for six years during World War II) felt that service was owed to his or her country. Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and William Proxmire from my native Wisconsin nearly convinced me that government service was noble and worthwhile.

Nearly. The Nixon and Reagan years left me quite melancholy about who worked in government and why.

When people thank military personnel for “their service,” I wonder if they’ve ever thanked any bureaucrats they encounter or just yelled at them over the phone or across a desk. If they are like me, I doubt it. About this month’s massive layoffs, guess what? One-third of government employees are veterans, compared to only five percent in the private workforce. The layoffs will disproportionately affect those we thank. Government employee numbers have not increased in fifty years, while the United States population grew nearly 70 percent. Fewer IRS workers, Medicare administrators, USDA inspectors, and FDA clinicians will mean more fraud, illness, and delay of essential services, not less.

Who are we kidding? Everybody thinks the government workforce should be downsized until the Postal Service stops Saturday deliveries, the IRS delays their refund, and the appeal of their Social Security disability claim goes unresolved. Assume we get through this massive dislocation of a system that, by and large, works well without a nuclear accident, air catastrophe, cybersecurity blowout, or utility blackout. When will you feel safe boarding an airline or filing your (confidential) tax return again? It’s not just this debacle that is concerning. The government has shut down ten times since 1981, and our employees go without paychecks each time. Would you work for somebody who misses payroll and fires you without justification, notice, or severance?

If we want the best government, shouldn’t we hire the best, pay them the best, and ensure they want to stay? I like the most intelligent, most vigorous people watching over me and mine. DEI may have been overdone, but it did offer access to excellent people who had previously been shut out of government service. A DOGE workplace will ultimately become just as toxic to white males, not only women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities. Do the smart-ass DOGEmites too young to rent a car have enough empathy or wisdom to envision the unintended consequences of what they are doing? They cannot even admit mistakes - gee, $80 million, $80 billion, what’s the diff?

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Easy Sunday: The Kennedy Center makeover

History rhymes.

For a decade the hot ticket was Hamilton.  The current vibe goes in the other direction, to that least Hamiltonian of Americans, Andrew Jackson.

Trump is a 21st-Century version of Andrew Jackson. Jackson moved political power from educated sophisticates to rough backwoods farmers. John Quincy Adams considered Jackson and his ill-mannered supporters crude and deplorable.

Trump leads a movement in opposition to elite sensibilities in politics and culture. Trump just dismissed the trustees of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He says he hasn't liked their programming of operas, symphonies, and ballets: "high culture." He said he wants flags and country music.

Jack Mullen grew up in Southern Oregon. We thinned and picked pears together in local orchards. In high school he played sports and practiced high jumps with future Olympic gold medal high jumper Dick Fosbury. Jack is retired and lives in Washington, D.C.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen 

Washington is a very cold town, and I speak not just of low temperatures on wintry days in February. Washingtonians keep receiving daily buckets of cold water thrown into our faces.

We lament having no voice in Congress, but at least, thanks to the efforts of Oregon's former U.S. Senator Wayne Morse, Washington now has its own courts, mayor, and city council. Congress may vet any action taken by our D.C. government, but, thankfully, for the most part Congress has kept its nose out of Washington’s Home Rule. That is until now, when our president decided control of our nation’s capital should be returned to the federal government. One element of that is putting the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts under his own personal control. 

Mind you, Trump has admitted never having attended a performance at the Kennedy Center. The Kennedy Center hosts two million visitors each year, as it showcases arts and culture from America and around the world. Trump says there is nothing he ever wanted to see at the Kennedy Center.

Having grown up in Southern Oregon, I was exposed to Shakespeare's plays in Ashland and classical music at the Britt Music & Arts Festival in Jacksonville -- unquestionably "high culture." One of my proudest moments while working on U.S. Rep. Jim Weaver’s congressional staff was helping secure a Community Development Block Grant for the new stage at the Britt Festival. Britt has grown into a major Southern Oregon tourist attraction with its summer concerts.

 

Photo by Al Case from Britt Festivals website

I get it that some people call those who attend plays and concerts in the Rogue Valley "culture vultures." One of Oregon's culture vultures, John Frohnmayer, became the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during the first Bush administration. The NEA pushed the boundaries of high art and sophisticated sensibilities. Frohnmayer became famous for being forced to resign after the NEA funded display of the works of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The religious right and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan objected to some images. Frohnmayer's resignation was an early sign of a growing backlash to government support of the arts and the fight over what kind of art is worthy of taxpayer support. 

It is fun to consider what might be the new programming at the Kennedy Center. Michael Golden of Great Neck, New York suggested, in a letter to The Washington Post, performances such as:

“The Musk-eteers," with songs like “I Could Have DODGED All Night,” or “I Left My Heart in Silicon Valley,” performed by a chorus line of female Robettes.

Or, “A Day of Love," performed by The January 6 Hostage Singers. He imagined songs such as “Jailhouse Rock” sung by a quartet of Proud Boys and "Back on the Chain Gang" by members of the Oath Keepers.

The new Trump-led Kennedy Center will de-emphasize symphonies and Shakespeare's plays. They aren't MAGA. The irony is that high culture still thrives, but in places far away from our national capital, places like my old home town in Southern Oregon.

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What would president Josh Shapiro do?

Or AOC? 

Or Gavin Newsom? 

Or Pete Buttigieg?

Or any competent Democrat who becomes president?

He or she would clean house of dangerous enemies of democracy hiding within the government.

That is what Trump believes he is doing.

Tool for cutting the federal workforce

We need to start with a premise of how Trump sees the federal workforce.  He thinks they are enemies. 

Elon Musk, interviewed alongside Trump on February 18, said:

All we’re really trying to do here is restore the will of the people through the president. And — and what we’re finding is there’s an unelected bureaucracy. Speaking of unelected, there’s a — there’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the — the president and the Cabinet.

And you look at, say, D.C. voting. It’s 92 percent Kamala. Okay, so we’re in 92 percent Kamala. That’s a lot. -- They don’t like me here either. -- I think about that number a lot. I’m like, 92 percent. That’s, basically, almost everyone.

Elon Musk is not totally wrong. Federal employees are hired on the basis of merit. They skew toward the demographic that supported Trump the least: the college-educated person who would chose public service work instead of private enterprise. The culture of the federal system is to be loyal to the mission and the department, not to the president.

From Trump's point of view, he was completely surrounded by enemies and turncoats in his first term. Federal employees slow-walked his ideas. Nearly everyone turned out to be unreliable: Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, John Bolton, Mark Milley, James Mattis, and dozens of others including, in the end, even his vice president. Resistance goes deep. The vote in D.C. shows how deep. 

Let's say that a Democrat wins in 2028. Let's presume something plausible, that Trump fires hundreds of career lawyers in the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Defense and everywhere else, and replaces them with eager, ambitious young lawyers happy to be on the Trump team. Let's presume they write op-eds, make speeches, and post in social media that the Democrat candidate was a sexual predator communist wanna-be Hitler. 

Presume something else plausible, that Trump's administration fills hundreds of positions at the IRS with people who understood that their supervisors put a favorable eye on how many prominent Democrats -- journalists, Hollywood stars, leaders of advocacy groups, members of congress, state legislators -- an employee audited and found tax issues that required penalties and publicity. 

Presume, too, that replacement hires at the EPA were people who "got it," and opposed the "over-regulation" of methane gas emissions at fracking sites. After all, they understand that the country's goal is to increase production.

Trump believes he faces a workforce that is out of touch with him and therefore the public.  After all, he faced a 92 percent wipe-out in D.C. 

What should the Democrat do? He or she should clean house. Fire the MAGA employees. It sounds brutal, but it would be necessary. MAGA employees would undermine the work of the Democrat at every turn. Find the bad apples and root them out. Their social media and public comments are free speech. Good. They freely revealed themselves. The new president is free to fire them. 

Sloppy chainsaw cuts to the federal workforce will backfire on Trump -- it will damage work voters value. Moreover, Musk looks manic and unserious. People admire him, but he looks like a crazy teenager. People will come to think Trump mismanaged this. Still, chainsaw cuts are not illogical if one starts with the Trump/Musk premise that nearly the entire federal government is hostile.

A new Democratic president would have the opposite premise. I expect the Democrat would presume that he or she is welcomed back. 

The Democrat will do a version of what Trump is doing, eliminating the bad apples. Understanding that likely future gives Democrats a better perspective on the legitimacy -- if not the wisdom -- of Trump's chainsaw cuts. It is democracy in action. Democrats say they like democracy. Trump got elected.

Trump probably won't be successful in filling the ranks with 92 percent MAGA zealots. There is enormous inertia in huge institutions, and people will want to hang onto their jobs if they can. The Democrat will be able to work with a knife, not a chainsaw. But they will indeed use it.

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"You're fired!"

Trump's trademark line in The Apprentice was "You're fired." 

He liked saying it. The public liked hearing it. He was the can-do, decisive leader.

What a disappointment to be elected a mere president.

Trump thought the president had employees. Not really. Federal workers are employees of the federal government. 

Take a few seconds to click on the YouTube link. Trump practiced saying this line off-screen, so he would get it right for his brand. Sometimes he pointed his finger. His face had a look of accusation and judgment. 

https://youtu.be/crmvHJpCkfM

Democrats worry that Trump is forever changing the balance of power between the presidency and the Congress. That is a risk, especially now that a president has immunity from prosecution for his acts as president. But my sense is that the current shift in power away from Congress is situational. The president is popular with his MAGA base. Those voters intimidate GOP legislators to do what Trump asks, and they are a majority in both legislative chambers. They are letting Trump be high-handed. This isn't a revolution or power shift. It is democracy. When the public tires of Trump, Republicans -- and therefore Congress -- will reclaim power.

The real revolution in our form of government is with the president's relationship to the employees in the federal government. Trump discovered to his dismay that a great many of them have a mind of their own. His first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, obeyed third-party standards of justice on recusal, and therefore frustrated Trump, who wanted to stop an investigation into Russian involvement in Trump's campaign. The second AG, Bill Barr, was loyal to Trump up until Trump really needed him, which was to assert along with Trump that the Justice Department believed the 2020 election was stolen. Barr said it wasn't. Trump's own chiefs of staff said "no" to him. His appointees at the Defense Department said "no." Up and down the federal bureaucracy, people followed the law, tradition, or science -- not Trump. Even the National Weather Service embarrassed him, refusing to change a hurricane prediction. Then, in election year 2020,  Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC acted on their own authority as epidemiologists, frustrating Trump's narrative.

Federal employees fit a pattern that coincides with right-wing, anti-intellectual populism. Federal departments are led by subject-matter experts: foresters, lawyers, physicians, nuclear engineers, epidemiologists, meteorologists, computer engineers, economists, statisticians, and career military officers. Trump led MAGA voters to be very skeptical of experts. The financial crisis of 2008 sparked skepticism of expertise. Covid accelerated it. Trump converted this skepticism into votes. 

Most federal employees, especially those in leadership, are "career" people, with loyalty to their professions and its standards of behavior. They aren't political. They are professional. 

This is a moment of shock and awe. The Trump/DOGE blast emails tell employees that the non-political, merit-based Civil Service era is over. Under the theory of the unitary executive, the president is responsible for how laws are enforced, down to the lowest person in the chain of command. The way to send that message is with blunt force. Firing all new hires and new promotions is essentially random -- like firing everyone with a last name beginning with the letters A through E, or by closing whole departments in a single day, locking up a building with work half-done on desks. BAM! People see it: Trump is the boss and your job depends on him, personally. If he says "You're fired!" and for whatever random reason, then you are jobless.

Some people consider the federal bureaucracy is the fourth branch of government. Trump is taking it on, bringing us back two centuries to a Jacksonian notion of an administration, one that is openly partisan and directly connected to the popular will of the moment. 

The public may want that -- at least for a while. The federal bureaucracy has a reputation for being rigid and impervious, lacking common sense or reasonableness. Trump is transactional. He helps his friends. He punishes his enemies. He is shaking up that bureaucracy, making it responsive to him. But there is a downside. The opposite of bureaucratic is subjective and idiosyncratic, i.e., cronyism and corruption. 

Cronyism is closely associated with special-interest, oligarchic government, and Trump is openly cozy with oligarchs. A corrupt government led by oligarchs can be a stable form of government, although perhaps not with a people who are accustomed to democratic government. Corrupt cronyism may be the most enduring result of Trump's presidency.  

People wanted someone who would shake things up. They knew Trump was an agent of chaos. Americans are getting what they voted for.

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The American Revolution of 2025

People will go to work as usual. The mail will get delivered.   

There are no tanks in the street. 

But amid the quiet routine, a giant reordering of power and policy is taking place.

This week Trump announced that the U.S. was switching sides in Europe. We will be backing Putin and Russia, not NATO and Western democracies. 

President Trump and top administration officials announced the outlines of the new order to startled European leaders. The U.S. would be meeting with Russia to negotiate a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war, without participation of Ukraine. Ukraine would need to cede territory to Russia, Trump said. The U.S. may seek repayment from Ukraine by demanding a 50-percent share of Ukraine's minerals. We would be ending economic sanctions against Russia. We would restaff American and Russian embassies. The vice president scolded European democracies. He said that Russia is not the enemy. He said your enemy is within, in your own effort to protect globalized multiculturalism by suppressing right-wing populist sentiments.

This will reorder our trade relationships as well as our alliances. The U.S. used to be reliable. Businesses would make decisions with an understanding that the U.S. stood for something. We paid our bills. We were who we said we were. An investment in China, Russia, Haiti, or Zimbabwe has uncertainty built into it. Their governments might abruptly decide to change the rules of the game, and one's investment would be lost. But America was different. Now it isn't.

Trump may be the most consequential president since FDR. He is leading a giant reset in the locus of power at home and in the place of the U.S. in the world. The bell cannot be un-rung. Trump spoke to reporters on Tuesday and wrote Truth Social posts on Wednesday. They were full of outrageous misstatements. He said Ukraine started the war with Russia, and that Ukraine had stolen billions from the U.S. CNN "fact checked" his remarks. CNN need not have bothered. It is a new world. What is true doesn't matter. What matters is what Trump says. 

There was talk two decades ago about "the end of history" as the developed world became capitalist, free-trade and market-oriented, and democratic. We thought we had it figured out. 

Except there was a problem. Markets create inequalities that strain democratic society. The left (conspicuously voiced by Bernie Sanders) said we needed a revolution of income distribution so that frustrated citizens felt they got a fair shake. The right (conspicuously voiced by Trump) claimed we needed a revolution that re-established traditional values in nationality, religion, sex roles, and race, plus that economic fair shake. Sanders blamed and condemned billionaires. So did Trump in 2016, but then he switched. He embraced them in 2024. The real issue was who had power, and Trump said it was the "experts" embedded in the administrative agencies of government, people who were stand-ins for cultural elites. Trump chose billionaire oligarchs to be the mechanism for wresting power from the powerful elites. The billionaires were on the side of the forgotten American, he said.

Trump's first term wasn't the revolution. He tried to exercise power through the embedded experts and managers in government, and they stopped him. The revolution started in earnest after the election in 2020 when Trump declared openly that election rules don't apply to him because the whole system was rigged by experts and institutionalists in the government, the media, election departments, the courts, the FBI, and the health experts who manufactured and spread Covid to sabotage his presidency. He sold the idea to Republican voters who couldn't quite believe that Biden won handily and legitimately. This MAGA base became the revolutionary army, the equivalent of the Parisian crowds storming the Bastille, Mao's comrades on the Long March, and partisans in Castro's revolution. Trump was a messenger and a symbol, and like Cuba's Che Guevara, he has a defiant image and poster.

Trump is replacing all the people who ran the government prior to him. That enables the revolution in American government to proceed.

Revolutions make me nervous. Much could go very wrong in a world with nuclear weapons. But I am optimistic. Trump is doing what revolutionary leaders do. He is being bold, not careful, because the people he roused demand boldness. This is their moment of opportunity. Throw all the bums out. Burn it all down! Elon Musk is not designed for the long haul. Like Robespierre and Stalin's generals, he will get pulled into the fire. Tips will get taxed. Safety nets will wither. Poor people will get poorer. Deportations will please people, then anger them. Chaos is exhausting. 

This will be a rough patch for the U.S., but if we can avoid starting a nuclear war, I expect us to come out of this okay, but much weaker and poorer. It will be hardest on the MAGA working people who trusted Trump. 

Oligarchs are an unreliable ally for Trump, and I predict they will turn on each other and abandon Trump before long. They want stability and reliability in government. 

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