The Razing Of Washington - The Trump Juggernaut And The Long Awaited Dismantling Of Government

On his first visit to Washington, driving down Independence Avenue, a visitor could not help but notice the ranks of imposing, monolithic buildings lining the thoroughfare. 'What is this one?', he asked his friend, a longtime resident of the city. 

'That?', she replied. 'The Department of Agriculture, and if you randomly cut one-third of the jobs there, no one would even notice.'

 

And so it was that the best-kept secret in the Capital was outed.  The emperor had no clothes on. He was as naked as a jaybird. Government was little more than an overfed, fat and bloated, useless giant - Roald Dahl's The Big Friendly Giant, full of whizzpoppers, snozzcumbers, and sloshfunking. 

After that it was hard for the visitor to see anything but warrens of bureaucrats shuffling papers, hustling back and forth between cubicles, running off to meetings, and returning to recycle and rejigger political encyclicals; and he would not be wrong.  

It took Elon Musk to barge into the bureaucratic havens of Washington, round up the circular thinking, time clock punchers, and send them packing.  A Washington journalist, somewhat carried away by the first enthusiastic flush, wrote:

Down the Potomac like lemmings, scrambling, flailing, grasping for purchase as the tide took them out to sea. The sluice gates had indeed been opened and the odd bits and pieces which had been clogging the works for far too long were washed out into the Chesapeake and into the Atlantic beyond.

A bit overwritten to be sure, but the journalist got it right in one. Finally and at long last the detritus which had been clogging the pipes was floating down the Potomac like so much flotsam and jetsam. 

'Oh, no! Think of their families', howled progressives up and down Constitution Avenue, in chambers of Congress, and from the pulpit of the Westmoreland United Church of Christ.  The Reverend Phipps Knowland was in his element, aggrieved, inspired, and angry.  'This will not stand', he shouted to the congregation, holding his bible up like a shield or an offering to a righteous God.  'As John said in 17:7-14, "The Day of the Lord has come, and we will make way for his goodness"'. 

Here the pastor stopped, mopped his brow, and looked out over the congregation, every seat in the church filled, hanging on his every word, waiting for some note of solace, hope, and redemption.  The walls of Jericho were coming tumbling down and who would be there to fill the void, and people the New Zion?

'The man in the White House has been sent by Beelzebub himself', Knowland continued, 'and our fight is mighty, sanctified, and right.  We are the new crusaders, marching to war against evil'

The pastor was known for his passion and commitment, but was also a windy man. One had to winnow and sift to extract the kernels from this windbag's bellows, and this was one such time.  The Devil must be enjoined. 

 

There was some hope in progressive Washington when Elon Musk departed to return to his many private ventures.  There would be at least a pause in the destruction, a breath of air for the poor, disenfranchised, lost government servants who had been summarily tossed on the curb; a hiatus while official Washington regained its composure and held its fire. 

Wrong again, another misreading of Donald Trump who was energized by the exodus, the lines of bureaucrats headed out Route 66 to the hinterlands.  If anything, it was time to finish the job, to refire the bulldozers and head down Constitution Avenue. Who was there to stop him?  Who would stand in the way of the cleansing of the Augean Stables?  Attacking the rot, waste, corruption, and hanger-on venality of the bureaucracy? No one. 

 

Bob Muzelle, a lifelong progressive, tireless soldier in the trenches, advocate for reform and compassion, was angered by the Musk pogroms.  It was a Washington Kristallnacht, a rounding up of bureaucrats no different than Hitler's storm troopers raiding the Warsaw ghetto, a horrific sight, a secular ethnic cleansing, a fascist marauding as devastating as the destroyers of Genghis Khan's Mongol armies pounding out of the steppes. 

Most Americans, even those with Democratic sympathies, wondered, now that the charade had been exposed, exactly what those thousands of highly-paid government employees were doing with their taxpayer money. Certainly you didn't need thousands to screw in a light bulb, so send the buggers packing. 

It was like the demise of DEI - hundreds of companies were just waiting for cover to get rid of the nonsensical, daft, politically-driven affirmative action idiocy; and when Trump said what everybody in private had been thinking, out went the sanctimony and with it the sensitivity training, white-bashing bullshit they had put up with for so long. 

Now it was bureaucracy's turn.  Now that the incredible, unproductive, unnecessary clot of civil service sycophants had been outed and removed, even the most liberal Americans could not help but applaud. 

The floodgates had been opened, anything was possible, every Washington thing needed to be exposed for the blatant chicanery that it was.  The Musk/Trump juggernaut was only the avant garde.  Middle America got the picture and were on board.  'Fuck 'em' was the meme, crude but true, about the Washington insiders who had built an empire of assumptions backed by a complaisant, obedient bureaucracy.  Anything you say, Massa, and the behemoth got bigger.  

Until now when the gloves came off, the tomfoolery of the entitled Left was exposed, and their shibboleths came tumbling down. 

Bob shook his cane at the tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue in a military parade in honor of Donald Trump's birthday, the Second Coming of Adolf Hitler, the SS, the Gestapo, and the Brown Shirts. 'God help us', he cried out. 

'God help you!', shouted a Trump supporter standing next to him, waving an American flag and holding his young daughter on his shoulders so that she could see the parade.  To him Bob was a supernumerary, an insignificant, irrelevant, moldy relic of a past that was long gone.

Bob, wounded, cast down, and disconsolate moved his way through the crowd and back to his rambler in Bethesda.  He was so disturbed, so uncontrollably angry that he thought he could hear the shouts of Trump supporters on the Mall, miles away; or were they just the imaginings of a febrile mind? That, at his advanced age, was a troubling thought.  It was bad enough that he couldn't remember if he had changed his drawers that morning.