So the empire strikes back.
Donald Trump’s tsunami of executive orders threatens to wash away the entire “DEI” establishment of the deep state even as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency conducts a thorough financial proctological examination on the books and payment systems of the deep state.
The revelations have been embarrassing, almost stupefying. The sums featured abundant use of that great Babylonian invention: the zero. Millions, even billions, apparently misplaced, misallocated, wasted. I almost expect to see milk cartons with ads for missing appropriations alongside the portraits of missing persons.
But then came the cavalry of the opposition. Democratic attorneys general filed lawsuits. Democrat-appointed district judges issued restraining orders with immediate and “nationwide” effect. Do they have the authority to do that? Never mind. Like a diminutive animal that puffs itself up and snarls when threatened by a predator, the histrionics are impressive. The message? How dare Musk expose waste, fraud, and abuse on this massive scale.
Senate ranking member Chuck Schumer spoke for this group when he admitted that there was governmental abuse but complained that Musk was taking a “meat axe” to the problem. The problem for Schumer and his ilk was articulated with amusing exactitude on social media: “that’s what we axed for”.
The bottom line is that the acrid aroma you can sniff in the air is the scent of panic. According to one observer, more than “three times more people in DC are googling ‘Criminal Defense Lawyer’ than anywhere else in the US!” Uh oh. Which is to say “tick tock”. At a recent meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, Musk raised a question many people have asked over the years. How do public servants who pull down salaries of, say $180,000 per annum, manage to amass fortunes in the tens of millions or more? Perhaps, Musk suggested, such people are whizzes at investment and we should be seeking their advice.
Asked whether he would defy the court orders, Trump said “No”. “I always abide by the courts,” Trump said, but “then I’ll have to appeal it”. He then pointed out the obvious. Restraining orders and injunctions do not only slow down the process of reform, they also give “crooked people more time to cover up the books”. Depending on which side of the legal pas-de-deux you occupy, that opportunity may appear as either a feature or a bug.
My own feeling is that Trump should consider taking a page from the playbook of president Andrew Jackson. In the 1830s, he wanted Northern Georgia for the United States. Chief Justice John Marshall led the Supreme Court to determine Cherokee Indians owned the area. Jackson nevertheless evicted the Indians, reputedly observing that Marshall “has made his decision; now let him enforce it”. Trump wouldn’t have to openly defy the court orders. He could just ignore them.
But Trump seems committed to playing the long game. He says that he “can’t imagine” a court would uphold a ruling that prohibited “the president or his representatives – like secretary of the Treasury, secretary of State, whatever … the right to go over their books and make sure everything’s honest”.
That’s exactly where we are now with the desperate order issued by district judge Paul Engelmayer, an Obama appointee. Engelmayer’s order effectively prohibits Scott Bessent, the newly-seated Secretary of the Treasury, from looking into his department’s books or payment system.
Will the ruling stand? Probably not. But the fact that it was promulgated at all shows what desperate straits denizens of the deep state now occupy. Elsewhere, I cited TS Eliot’s observation in “Burnt Norton” that “humankind cannot bear very much reality”. Similarly, bureaucracy cannot bear very much transparency. It is like a vampire: sunlight is fatal.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books
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