Twenty five is a nice solid milestone. Like one’s age, it’s more substantial than 21 or 22, let alone the teens, and without the aches and pains implied with 80 or 90. A balance of youth and experience, admittedly with the former still outweighing the latter, but not in nitwit ways.

So it is that my naturally optimistic nature has moved up a notch or two with developments in the last year that deliver us near to the end of the first quarter of the 21st century.

Despite my US-watching I’m not just talking about Trump’s election win, but also Milei’s stunning success in Argentina…

As a politician, much of Milei’s genius consists in a very strong understanding of political, economic, and social institutions. Despite the fact that—or perhaps because—he is an individualist and an anarchist, Milei thoroughly understands that the left is institutional; the peronists and the socialists that he despises for destroying the Argentine nation obtain and maintain their power institutionally: They fill the ranks of government ministries, regulatory bodies, non-profit organizations, unions, state enterprises, universities—in short, everywhere the harsh laws of supply and demand do not apply. The basis of his political theory (if not the practice) is relatively simple: eliminate the enemy by depriving them of their subsistence. 

… and the collapse or troubles of many Left-Wing governments in the West as their Big State “solutions” grind to a halt. Plus this: If a UK Election Were Held Today, Farage’s Reform Party Would Win 14 Times The Number of Seats It Has Now.

Meantime in the US, following Trump’s ‘Terrifyingly Competent’ campaign in 2024 (Vanity Fair hysterics as usual), it appears he’s also learned a lot of lessons about who to pick for his team and how to make the transition to President. It’s all operating so smoothly that opponents are unnerved (see The Atlantic article, The Bizarre Normalcy of Trump 2.0) and both the transition and himself have positive approval ratings, unlike 2016, and for the first time ever when it comes to himself.

The people he’s nominated so far to help run the government are competent but also free of the governmentitis that was so much a part of the crew and problems in his previous Administration. Some of them were also competent (not Anthony Scaramucci or Omarosa obviously) – but only in running giant government machines that were malfunctioning and corrupted in multiple ways and in need of drastic reforms that they didn’t get.

I was amazed when Trump didn’t fire James Comey as FBI Director on Jan 20, 2017: it was perhaps the first part of Trump’s neophyte problem, and that personnel decision cost him more than any other. But look at who he eventually hired as the replacement FBI Director: the smoothly slithering Chris Wray, recommended by Chris Christie after Wray rescued him from his “Bridgegate Scandal”; Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State; General Milley as Chair of the JCS, and so forth.

🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

By contrast this time almost all the picks are disruptors of the status quo; people who have the intention of tearing apart the Washington D.C. bureaucracies that have so badly failed the American people time and again over the last twenty five years, and are competent only in feathering their own nests, defending and endlessly growing themselves in the most negative example ever seen of Public Choice Theory in practice.

Moreover, some of the new selected leaders have been targeted by the outfits they’re now going to head up, so they have both a burning motivation and the inside knowledge to tear apart these malfunctioning machines and re-build them to actually do the jobs they’re supposed to. A quick sample of the ones I very much approve of:

  • Susie Willis as his Chief of Staff: very capable and a big part reason things are going smoothly.
  • Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary: already covered here and here.
  • Kash Patel as FBI Director: I must do a separate post on this as he was actually targeted by them and I covered their problems in Faithless, Brutal and Incompetent: Part I, II and Part III, and Part IV.
  • Michael Waltz as National Security Advisor: served as a Green Beret in Afghanistan.
  • Lee Zeldin as head of the EPA: an environmental lawyer who has defended people and companies against EPA insanity.
  • John Ratcliffe as CIA Director: former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) he’s one of the people who exposed the fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation and nailed the FBI on their related abuse of the FISA “wire-tapping” court.
  • Tulsi Gabbard as the DNI: an Iraq veteran and scathing critic of the intelligence community, who responded by putting her on a flight terrorist watchlist.
  • Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH): a professor of medicine at Stanford, few of Trump’s picks were as badly abused by the US government as he was by the NIH and CDC, merely because he went against their lockdown recommendations by co-writing the Great Barrington Declaration with Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard in the early days of the pandemic.
  • David Weldon as head of the CDC: a doctor, former congressman and strong critic of the CDC and its policies on vaccines and other measures.

Some I have my doubts about:

Knowing it was a case of self-defense, she appointed a corrupt special prosecutor and arranged for two biased, corrupt judges — one was so obvious he was disqualified — who did their best to convict Zimmerman.  She enabled the race hustlers that destroyed George Zimmerman’s life and plunged America into a racial morass from which it has not yet recovered. At the time, she basked in that destructive glory. Perhaps she’s changed. Perhaps they tricked her. Perhaps Trump doesn’t know. In any case, she has a lot of explaining to do.

  • Kirsti Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security: I liked her a lot as the Governor of South Dakota fighting back against the control freaks during the Chinese Lung Rot scare, but I wonder if she’s the right pick here? Admittedly I think the whole DHS should be scrapped.
  • RFK Jnr as the Director of Health and Human Services (HHS). I don’t hold with Kennedy’s general anti-vaccine stance, especially when it comes to autism, where he needs to be confronted about how much he’s still influenced by the now-infamous (and long-since debunked) Lancet article connecting vaccines with autism. Having said that I can’t deny the following, or his general point that Americans, especially kids, are a hell of a lot sicker than they were in his Boomer generation:

At least one I think is an absolutely wrong pick:

  • Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Secretary of Labor: she’s one of only three Republican House members who voted for the PRO Act, which copied a dreadful California law and would have strippe right-to-work laws in 27 states. If you were a gig-worker you could kiss goodbye to that and say hello to welfare until the unions got you a job. Anybody as supported by unions as she is should not be a GOP nominee – but then Trump has cosied up to the Teamsters and Longshoreman’s Unions.

So there are possibilities here for massive change to the US government functions, which may hopefully lead to a shrinkage of government in terms of employees and spending – although I’m not too confident on the latter given it’s the non-discretionary part that seems unfixable and it makes up the vast bulk of the $6.1 spending this year.

Still, here’s the hopeful list of government improvements we might see as part of the effort to kill the Administrative State, using Mao’s philosophy of “Shoot one. Educate One hundred”:

  1. A reformed Pentagon, DOJ, plus reforms of the smaller but influential ones like the EPA, HHS, NIH, and CDC.
  2. A restructured FBI, CIA, and DHS (preferably the latter shut down but that’s very unlikely).
  3. A number of Departments just flat out deleted: DHS, Education, Labour and a host of smaller, bullshit ones. Maybe DOGE will get the latter from a funding POV.
  4. Defunding of semi-government outfits like NPR-PBS, and NGO’s like Planned Parenthood.
  5. Re-start the de-regulation drive of his first term, where thousands of regulations were dumped – and aside from activists nobody noticed. The end of the Chevron Defence will greatly aid this.

There’s also some things I want to see a Trump Administration do that are only partially connected with the appointments above:

  1. Pardon the vast majority of the J6’rs. Their treatment has been an outrage. Jake Lang, a prisoner for over three years without trial and is still currently in solitary confinement (What is The Sixth Amendment?) Too late for the likes of some of the non-violent ones who pled quilty on the understanding that the DOJ would drop other charges, only to find the DOJ then asking for a terrorism enhancement that would mean years, not months, in jail. Some of those committed suicide: well done Matthew Graves, you fascist piece of shit.
  2. It would be nice if the likes of Jack Smith, Graves, and even Merrick Garland found themselves on the other side of the investigative-prosecution process, just as a lesson even if no convictions are obtained. Hopefully Trump has learned from letting Hillary Clinton escape legal consequences. A review of the entire, shitty process is needed and can be treated as part of reforming the DOJ.
  3. Secure the border, deport as many illegal aliens as possible, and end birthright citizenship. That last being very, very unlikely because it requires Congress and infringes on the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. But Trump may consider a fight all the way to SCOTUS to be worth it.
  4. Withdraw from the World Health Organisation and the Climate Change Paris Accords. They’re both as corrupt as hell in the basic sense of screwing the US while getting money out of them. Pulling out of the latter might also crash it and let other nations like us escape it. The resistance and demands to re-enter may not be as strong as in Trump’s first term as people watch countries like Britain and Germany kill their industries with Net Zero bullshit while China and India smoke away on coal.
  5. Restart Keystone and ANWR (Arctic) and reverse every Biden executive order on drilling and fracking. Cheap energy, right now, will be one of the biggest kick-starts the US economy can have.
  6. Repeal the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances). It sounded like a good idea to merely protect abortion clinics from bombers and such (even though I do not support abortion), but it’s been weaponised to dump non-violent, elderly grandmothers in jail.
  7. Ban “gender-affirming care” for minors and solidify the true meaning of Title IX to stop the trans bullshit in women’s university sports.
  8. Investigate Soros’s network of DAs that he’s funded with hundreds of millions of dollars:

    George Soros and his son, Alex, have spent at least $117 million since 2016 to reshape America’s justice system. They’ve been successful: three in 10 Americans now live under a Soros prosecutor. But the Soroses’ influence doesn’t end on Election Day. After Soros-backed prosecutors take office, the family’s apparatus tells them what to do, documents show. . .

    They’ve crucified law abiding citizens in places like San Francisco, LA and Chicago with their bullshit theories on dealing with criminals. Luckily quite a few have been booted by voters anyway.
  9. Defund any school district that teaches CRT or trans theory.
  10. Deport college campus rioters and Jihadist (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc) supporters and defund any university that tolerates it. Take away their platforms: I hear the Left love that shit because the deplatformed still have free speech – ammirite?

If even half of that is accomplished, especially the big one with the bureaucracies in Washington D.C., it would be more than any GOP administration has achieved since at least Reagan, and perhaps since Coolidge.