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This is such a mess. How can I both endorse a politicians approach to the world and disagree with every particular action? Trump is right about government overspending, unaccountability, the need to reign in the bureaucratic class. But he is doing it in the absolute worst way possible. Cuts to Public Health? with H5N1 coming looming over us? It won't be China coming to power in 10 years, it'll happen in two when they actually manage a crisis that might decimate the working population of every "developed" country.

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Here's the thing: you and he are also wrong about the overspending, unaccountability, and the bureaucratic class.

Those things exist in about the same proportion they exist in any other large corporation, and is not special to the government. There has been a decades long campaign of Just Plain Lies to tell you otherwise. He is failing to seek out the waste, fraud, and abuse because they do not exist in anywhere near the numbers you imagine.

The government does not spend its money on employees. Those employees administer grants and spending programs. That is where the money is, authorized by Congress and depended on by industry and states. The administration is not especially expensive. To seriously cut spending you have to cut those things, and just as with the mass firings, you'll find that each dollar is actually doing something important.

Serious control over the budget requires a serious consideration of our actual goals as a country. But the last election sent the decidedly non-serious message "government bad" and everyone seems shocked that that is exactly what they are doing.

you and he are also wrong about the overspending, unaccountability, and the bureaucratic class.

I see spending at 123% of GDP, never that high outside war.

I see $35.46 trillion in debt, tripled over the last 20 years.

I dunno, looks he is right about overspending.

I don't know how many times I need to repeat this.

Musk and Trump are not concerned about debt or spending. If they were, Trump and Republicans wouldn't be rushing a billionaire tax cut bill that will add tens of trillions of dollars to the national debt.

If Trump cared about debt he wouldn't have run up $8 trillion in debt his last term with PPP helicopter money and more billionaire tax cuts.

But you at least acknowledge there is a spending problem?

The context of this discussion is that regardless of who is in office, there is an overspending problem. So it doesn’t exactly bear itself worth repeating here.

The spending is following Congress' priorities. You can't solve it by firing the employees, especially not by firing them at random, and not from departments making up a fraction of a percent of the spending.

As I said, fixing the spending requires us to look at our national priorities. We spend most of our money on defense, social security, and medicare. You can cut everything else and not close the deficit.

That requires a serious conversation. Which I cannot have with somebody telling me that somehow "DEI" is a substantial piece of our budget.

Nothing that is being done by this government is in good faith. All of the things that these people complain about are projections about the things they are doing or want to be doing.

Unfortunately a lot of seemingly switched-on people are still under the illusion otherwise.

> How can I both endorse a politicians approach to the world and disagree with every particular action?

It is because you have deeply misunderstand his approach to the world.

He has never demonstrated any desire to bring prosperity to anyone outside of his family. I don't understand how any of this is surprising. They told us exactly what they were planning to do in the Project 2025 plan.

> How can I both endorse a politicians approach to the world

You mean, like the proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza? Claiming Ukraine started the war? Threatening to take Greenland by force? Alienating Europe? Withdrawing from Climate Agreement and WHO? Cutting funds to USAID? Overall, becoming the new pariah of the world?

That's the particulars. The general approach is the destruction of the post-war great society new deal agenda that was already on its way out during reagan/thatcher and had only become an increasing weight represented by a bourgeoning managerial class that absorbed almost all economic gains outside of the ultrawealthy. That class, who enforced this chokehold of economic stagnation, needed to be done away with, perhaps radically so. But this is, as you say, doing far more than just doing away with the professional-managerial class.

The economic gains are being absorbed by the billionaires who are running the asylum

the billionaires have a lot of money as individual anomalies, but most wealth is generated by corporations that must pay market rates for labor or else they will get undercut by other businesses; labor is never cheap. Thus, those at the upper-echelons of the working-class--managers, senior engineers, etc.--as a class, hold the most significant stores of wealth in the US, perhaps far more than all the billionaires put together. I think about 10% of US workers make between $150-$300k a year, so multiply that number by twenty million--something like 2 trillion dollars just in one class alone. Billionaires cannot possibly account for the vast majority of GDP.

Let's not forget that in the last 10 years the US has added approx 12 trillion dollars to its GDP which far outpaces inflation in that same period, meaning absolute wealth in the US has increased remarkably--and, yes, the majority of that wealth is paid out to workers who make up the largest class in the country.

We're literally talking about a few people having more wealth than the bottom half of the country, and using that to have increasingly overwhelming political power. Most of the managers and engineers are still labor, even if they're able to afford a house in the bay area.

Worry more about the people who can buy national elections, who make their money by owning things, not the ones with higher salaries.

I worry that people are not ready for the truth that capitalism can only become more productive the more unstable it is. The theoretical limit of that instability is socialism in the Marxist sense, since only at that stage will people be prepared psychologically for the spontaneous, hyper-technologically mediated forms of labor organization. It is an extremely brutal process, but it is the only way to transform capital into something even greater.

The idiom "Actions speak louder than words" comes to mind.

People lie, some people lie as easily as breathing. But it is impossible to bear out a lie when your actions give a clear picture of your true intent and motives.

We're in the end game now.

Doesn't every generic Republican always support all of those things? Did you support any more normal Republican alternative to Trump, given his bad performance during the initial outbreak of Covid?

Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your priors and how you determine which kind of politician to support. This isn't a direct endorsement of alternatives, but if you considered your material conditions I think you would likely not land on Trump/Musk being the right executors of your wishes.

The thing I'd offer that you could perhaps consider that the people who push the "starve the beast" rhetoric are generally not in favor of accountability or efficiency but simply grifters leveraging people's shallow understanding of how government works - and that's the earlier cycles, not just the current obvious one.

The thing is that the ordinary cycle of government balances political interests with the need to actually accomplish things in an imperfect fashion. Whereas "broad cuts" tend to allow only the politically connected to survive since cuts have no rationality beyond "this government makes no sense".

He's targeting things that are discretionary spending.

Most of the federal budget the president cannot just cut.

> Most of the federal budget the president cannot just cut.

He legally can't cut any of it. Not even $1. Congress controls spending.

Illegally (which is how he has always operated and is operating now), he can seemingly do whatever he wants.

The courts say it is legal, so as of today, it is legal. Unless a higher court reverses the decision, you can complain about it, but you should complain on truthful grounds.

Trump administration can continue mass firings of federal workers, judge rules

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/ruling-firin...

The article states that the lawsuit was rejected merely on procedural grounds (specifically the doctrine of administrative exhaustion) . It does not come close to stating that the action was legal.

The actual court decison (which I have also read) is consistent with the article.

1. Firing != reducing spending

2. Many of the employment and B2B contracts they're cancelling are breaching the contracts, so much of the firing is likely illegal

3. This judge didn't rule on the legality, meaning his ruling has no bearing on whether it's legal:

"However, Cooper on Thursday said, he likely lacks the power to hear the case, and the unions instead must file complaints with a federal labor board that hears disputes between unions and federal agencies."

1. Firing != reducing spending

Budgets are set by Congress. The money is allocated and is supposed to be spent regardless of payroll.

It's very likely most of these reduced payroll costs will just be spent on outside contractors who cost much more per hour of work.

He can do anything people let him do, fear and influence are reaching places beyond legal authority. I’m in Australia, a multi year plan on corporate diversity standards fell over last week. It was already at an impasse about how to measure, but trumps influence seems to have been the straw.

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