> Has nothing to do with party, has a lot to do with authoritarianism and opposing destruction of the government.
Destruction of the government would be something like suspending elections or the executive using the military to disappear judges who make unfavorable rulings.
Destruction of the federal administrative state is fairly well inside the Republican platform at this point. It's what they said they were going to do and then people voted for them so now they're trying to do it.
> See former Republican Colorado head of state senate and head of state house
Parties change and then people change parties. "Former Republican opposes Republican" is the thing you'd expect them to do as implied by the word "former".
> Trying to compare laws against Jaywalking or pot to those against government malfeasance and corruption is ridiculous.
The laws against jaywalking or pot don't even scratch the surface. They're just the ones people know they're violating.
People have this problem where the law is supposed to specify ahead of time what is and isn't illegal, but doing that is hard and people also hate it when somebody is doing something they don't like but it turns out that thing isn't illegal. So what they've been doing, for a long time, is passing a lot of laws broad enough to encompass common behavior and then only enforcing them when somebody offends them, or rocks the boat.
There is also a variant of this for politicians where they pass a law that sounds good, and should be enforced against everyone, but is set up in such a way that enforcement is hard without the cooperation of insiders. So a politician is not allowed to solicit a bribe, but if someone pays them and then they pass a law that the someone likes, that's just fine, and if the bribe was solicited off-camera then neither of them have any incentive to report it because they both want the arrangement to continue. Which is how you get this:
> Trump is the most corrupt president we've ever had.
The amount of corruption in Washington is staggering. The place runs on it. The primary difference with Trump is that he has no shame.
It would be great if something was done about this, but nobody wants to throw the first stone because of all the glass houses, and targeting only Trump while ignoring all the rest of it is evidence of not liking Trump rather than not liking corruption.
> I also don't find this part necessarily bad but Trump is less opposed to spending wasteful or not wasteful then previous Republican politicians.
The true measure of this is whether government spending goes up or down during their administration, and by this measure every President of every party has been failing for generations.
But this is also the first time in a while that anything like DOGE has even been seriously attempted, and it's plausible that at least Musk wants it to actually do the thing. The real test is what they remove from the budget in a few months.