Donald Trump’s Projects (I)

President Donald Trump is acting faster than other political leaders of his generation. In a dozen weeks, he has already overturned “American imperialism” in favor of his “exceptionalism.” This is still not the end of the problem, but it represents a considerable step forward for both the United States and the rest of the world.
Simultaneously, he has cut federal bureaucracy by eliminating agencies that did not fall under his jurisdiction and laying off 230,000 federal employees.

Donald Trump has been in office for more than three months. He has issued a staggering number of executive orders of all kinds, giving the impression of a confused personality. However, despite the short time he had, his first results are beginning to appear.

DECOLONIZING THE “AMERICAN EMPIRE”

He initially sought to decolonize the “American Empire.” However, since his 2017 attempt was a resounding failure, he changed his approach. During his first term, on the eighth day of his term, he had, by executive order, removed the permanent seats of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of the CIA from the National Security Council. [1] This ensued a revolt in the senior administration that led him, sixteen days later, to dismiss his National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn.

This affair has left its mark, as the senior National Security Administration intervened during the last election campaign to falsely assert that Hunter Biden’s computer did not exist and that those who claimed to have seen it were agents of Russian disinformation. [2] Donald Trump therefore stripped them of their top-secret clearances in the first days of his second term [3].

This time, Donald Trump took the bull by the horns: he forced early retirement of all the officials who had fought against him during his first administration and dissolved the Federal Executive Institute that trained them [4]. Once this level of personalities was purged, he also revoked the security clearances of 15 politicians (including former President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) to ensure they would not stand in his way again [5]. “Never two without three,” as they say: he also dismissed six more officials from his National Security Council [6] on April 2, because they continued to work with their Straussian friends [7].

Once these people were incapacitated, President Donald Trump began peace negotiations on Ukraine, Palestine, and Iran. Everyone reacted when he put the unelected Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in his place, but he also put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his place twice [8]. The first time, he responded to his plan to annex Gaza by announcing that he would rather build a new Riviera than see him occupy the territory; the second time, he told him that he could do nothing to divide Syria and that he could not attack Iran either.

Certainly, for the moment, none of these three hotspots is at peace, but things are moving quickly:
• In Ukraine, he has admitted that Crimea, Donbass, and part of Novorossia are indeed Russian. Moreover, it is clear that a presidential election will have to be held. The “integral nationalists” [9] already know they have lost. Regarding the territories to be divided, the only two Ukrainian demands are, on the one hand, the recovery of the Zaporozhye civilian nuclear power plant (which Russia is firmly opposed to [10]) and whether or not Moscow will be allowed to annex Odessa without having to conquer it.
• In Palestine, he has made almost everyone admit that Hamas could not return to power in Gaza, but he has failed to find an alternative to the “revisionist Zionists” (i.e., the disciples of the fascist Vladymyr Jabotinky [11]) in Israel. Donald Trump has failed to stop the massacre of Palestinians, who are still starving in Gaza, nor to end the sectarian massacres in Syria, which is still dominated by jihadists, but he has forced Israel to abandon its ambitions in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. • In Iran, he is just getting started and has not yet made the Islamic Republic admit that it cannot safely arm the region’s Shiite minorities, but he has not yet offered to guarantee their security by any other means. The situation here is more difficult because he has threatened Iran, as he did with Ukraine and the Palestinians, prompting an immediate hardening of Tehran’s stance [12].

In all three cases, President Trump used his military without engaging in combat: he briefly suspended the intelligence the Pentagon was providing to the Ukrainian armed forces [13], causing a military collapse; he also briefly suspended arms deliveries to Israel, although this point was not publicized, but it caused great concern within the Israeli general staff. Conversely, he is building up forces in Diego Garcia to threaten Iran [14]. His only military action was to attack Ansar Allah in Yemen; a deadly and tactically useless action, given that the Yemenis were prepared for it, but useful for getting his message across to Iran.

PURGING THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY

In parallel with his reorganization of US foreign relations, President Donald Trump has begun to “trim the mammoth,” that is, to prune the useless branches of the US federal government. This is the other major project of the “Jacksonians,” that is, the disciples of President Andrew Jackson [15]. To achieve this, he relies on the oligarch Elon Musk. However, the richest man in the world is not a Jacksonian, but a libertarian. His concern is not to destroy the unconstitutional attributes of the federal state for the benefit of the federated states, but to diminish its influence. In this case, these two distinct objectives are served by the same actions, at least so far.

In twelve weeks, Elon Musk has managed to register the resignations or dismiss 230,000 federal employees. While we certainly experience this approach as savagery, the fact remains that he is not questioning their competence, but their usefulness, which is quite different. Most of them were ensuring the enforcement of rules that should not have existed. This doesn’t mean they’re bad, but they simply don’t fall within the federal government’s purview and should therefore not be implemented with taxpayer money. This downsizing has accidentally brought to light numerous cases of corruption, such as a $900,000 grant awarded by the Small and Medium Enterprises Agency to a nine-month-old baby. However, the real issue isn’t there yet. $6 billion in Pentagon grants have just been canceled, including grants to universities, with no connection whatsoever to US homeland defense. Once DOGE has access to the nation’s accounts, it’ll be able to see the purpose of every transfer made by the federal government, such as the salaries paid to numerous foreign leaders. It’s therefore understandable why the ongoing legal battle is underway to keep all this secret. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) predicts $150 billion in savings over one year from these cuts to bureaucracy and the fight against fraud, a gain of $931.68 per taxpayer. This is small compared to what was projected, but absolutely considerable.

No comparison should be made between the United States and other states, only with the European Union, whose federal bureaucracy is equally opaque, as demonstrated by the current scandal involving secret grants to NGOs [16].

to be continued