Of the ten richest counties in America, four are around Washington D.C., and one of them, Loudoun County, has the highest median household income of any state at $147,111 (2020 census)

Given that DOGE has uncovered billions of NGO grift via USAID, HHS, and the EPA, plus Social Security and Medicare fraud, and adding to the grift already known “in a town with only one industry”, plus $500 billion of Federal fraud that happened during Covid (there’s also plenty at State levels in pre-covid times, as in Calfornia), what Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett said in the following interview should not surprise anyone.

They’re gonna push back because you’ve got Congressmen on both sides of the aisle, that, If they follow that paper trail, it’s going to come back to them. You’ve got their wife and or girlfriend that works for some agency, quasi-agency or some business. I’ll get primaried for saying that but that’s the truth and we all know it. This towns as crooked as a dogs leg. Somebody’s gonna straight it out, it looks like it’s gonna be Elon Musk.
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I encouraged him to go as fast as possible, cause we’re gonna lose our guts [in] 100-150 days..

In another interview he was even more explicit, saying that DOGE could end up putting some lawmakers “in handcuffs”, and not just Democrats:

You’re probably going to see some people in Washington, and possibly some people in Congress in handcuffs over some of this stuff, because of the money and the graft… They think they’re slick, and … there’s no paper trail. But there’s a trail. There’s a trail for every dollar.

The way they set up these NGOs is, you get a rich person to put in a million dollars in something — it has some great name — and then some bureaucrat, unelected bureaucrat, puts maybe a billion dollars in their fund, of our tax dollars And then it flows in a circuitous route back to Washington, to those same politicians, to their campaigns, and possibly just straight to their back pocket, if they have a family member that works there.
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I have my suspicions, and it could possibly be in both parties. I’ll leave it, I’ll leave that to law enforcement.

This meme is circulating rapidly through right-wing circles.

Burchett also got to the heart of the squealing:

You’d think they’d want to get rid of the waste and abuse so that they can free up the money to give to those people that are deserving of it. Not the other way around, and unfortunately, that’s what they’re doing.

Of the ten richest counties in America, four are around Washington D.C., and one of them, Loudoun County, has the highest median household income of any state at $147,111 (2020 census). All this in an area that produces little more than piles of paper and volumes of hot air – and certainly not results (The 14 Step Process To Hell).

Everything is broken:

In January 2021, [Tablet editor-in-chief Alana] Newhouse wrote an essay addressing what she would later describe as “the growing sense, made more glaring during the first year of the pandemic, that whole parts of America were breaking down before our eyes.” She argued that major institutions of American life—from the media to medicine—no longer worked. “Everything Is Broken,” was Newhouse’s unsparing conclusion—and the essay’s memorable headline.

Newhouse thought it was no longer a fight between Left and Right but between “brokenists” and “status-quoists” (Bernie Sanders? Brokenist. Liz Cheney? Status-Quoist). Which explains the likes of ex-Democrats – very prominent Democrats – like Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jnr now in Trump’s cabinet. They’re “brokenists”, and so:

“Every day feels like a roller coaster,” explained Newhouse, “because now the people who want others to focus on what’s broken are in power, which means we all have to focus on what’s broken every day. We all have to wake up and see some new evidence of some new thing that is broken beyond what any of us could have imagined…. [Even if there is a ] “weirdness” of institutions being run by people whose “basic ambition is to tear those institutions down.”

A huge part of that brokeness is the fraud and grift that could always be seen by the evidence of those rich D.C. counties, but never proven, as the Tea Party knew back in the day, the precursor to Trump:

In the Tea Party heyday, we spent more time butting heads with the GOP establishment than with the Democrats. The “Harumph!” Republicans in D.C. have always been status quo fetishists who live in fear of change. If they’d had their druthers, the Bush/McConnell/Romney uniparty dream would have already ruined the Republic. 
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From 2009-2012, my Tea Party movement friends and I were the conservative outsiders who desperately wanted to shake up the Republican Party. Our primary goal was to make it get its spending house in order. We were also pushing hard for education and border policy reform. Any of that sound familiar?

It was the Tea Party movement that rescued the GOP – broken and hopeless in 2009 the wake of the 2006 Mid-Term “thumping” and then Obama’s triumph in 2008 – pushing them to a massive victory in 2010, winning back the House after just four years and shocking Nancy Pelosi and Obama.

And then the GOP basically shafted them. Thus Trump in 2016:

It took some time, but those of us who were on the frontlines during the Tea Party era began to realize that Trump was the anti-politician, blow-up-the-moribund-Republican-norms kind of guy we’d been waiting for. As his first term unfolded, it was the Tea Party types who were most vocal with our support. Proving that everything that’s old is new again.
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Four days into 2023, I wrote that I was all-in on a scorched-earth second Trump term. As he assembled the Trump 47 team last fall it quickly became apparent that he was all-in on one too. He was embracing outsiders who freaked out the GOP establishment types.

Thus the reaction of such people to Trump’s first few months as President in his second term.

“Frankly My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn.”

I was 18 when Reagan won his first term, with promises of reining in the excesses of the Federal government. As did George H.W. Bush. And Ross Perot. I voted for Perot because of his promises. I didn’t make that mistake the next time around but Bob Dole wasn’t making much in the way of promises. George W. Bush made campaign speeches, but even if he had meant it, 9/11 wiped out any chance of shrinking government – not that I believed him in the first place. Then we got McLame then Mitt. I’d given up on the idea that we were ever going to get off the express-train ride to hell.
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The Trump Administration was inside the OODA Loop of the Left. They were nearly paralyzed by the pace of the change. The media, the propaganda wing of the Left, could not build a Narrative™ fast enough to keep up…things are not slowing down. Outsiders are in charge of the DoJ, FBI, DoD, ICE…. Change is actually happening. Fraud and waste are being exposed. Spending will be curtailed, at least somewhat. The Ruling Class is no longer in control. They remain a serious threat….And I finally have some small measure of hope. I give a damn.

Donald Trump, the libertarian president?

Since 2016 I’ve had people ask me why I, as a libertarian, support Donald Trump. I think we’re seeing why now.

It’s true that Trump’s instincts, particularly in his first term, weren’t especially libertarian. Oh, the claims that he was an authoritarian, possibly a Fascist, maybe even a Nazi, were obvious bullshit from the beginning. But he showed no particular enthusiasm for limited government. Still, by that point I saw the government apparat as deeply corrupt and dysfunctional, and dangerously close to making its position so entrenched as to be unassailable through ordinary politics. Anyone promising to shake it up looked good to me, and in 2016 Trump had the added advantage of not being Hillary Clinton. I knew what her instincts were.

The writer of that, Glenn Reynolds, law professor and founder of Instapundit, is amused that instead of cuddling up to Trump to craft even bigger government, which he probably would have been fine with, the “apparat” – Deep State, Establishment, whatever you wish to call it – decided to go all in on destroying him, not just in his Presidency, but afterward. Thus they created Trump 2.0, who now knows what he faces and is apparently determined to destroy it in a way that would never have happened had he won in 2020:

If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, you can get a libertarian out of a conservative who has been targeted for political prosecution and abuse. Trump saw firsthand, to a degree greater than probably any American citizen ever, just how far the resources and lack of principles or moral fiber of the federal government go. It would be very difficult to remain a believer in Big Government as a good thing after that.
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The Libertarian Party hit its high point then and is now pretty much a joke, even when they manage to keep naked fat guys off their convention stage. Trump isn’t a joke. He’s delivering more cuts, and more blows to unaccountable Deep State authority, than anyone else ever has and there’s no one else who could do this right now.

So that’s how I, a libertarian, can support Trump. Not a hard choice, really.

Whether he and his team can cut the beast down to size is another question. At a minimum they have until January 2027 – possibly 2029 if history is refuted with a GOP win in the 2026 Mid-term elections.

But they’re the first ones to try in over a century and nobody else in the Republican or Democrat Party gives a shit.