Ruth Marcus is rending her garments at the Washington Post over what she describes as “the most damaging first two weeks in presidential history,” and bless her heart for describing it in terms meant to scandalize and horrify her readership, but send my soul soaring: “Trump’s second term is all about curtailing government’s power and reach.” (God forbid.) Susan Glasser at the New Yorker is wailing about Elon Musk’s “revolutionary terror,” informing us of the delightful existence of a “19-year-old high school graduate” on Elon’s team who goes by the nom-de-guerre “Big Balls.” (She’s appalled, but I’m just hoping the kid’s an AC/DC fan as opposed to afflicted with some unfortunate condition.)
Glasser’s piece is notable, not just because of its panic-button hysteria, but because she accurately captures the magnitude of what is currently going on inside the federal government while failing to grasp the strategic calculation Musk and his DOGE team are making. Beyond any doubt they have hit the ground running, with a pre-existing plan of attack and enormous ambitions: to reorganize the federal government, shear its hull of all the barnacles long since attached to it via long unexamined log-rolling contracts, and cleanse it as much as possible of its engrained “deep state” mentality.
Needless to say, it’s a prospect to horrify all Democrats everywhere, as well as many a mild “good government” type. But Glasser and her ilk completely misunderstand the reason Musk is moving so abruptly and quickly — she is thrown off by his admitted inability to stop trolling on social media — attributing these actions to cruelty and a desire to instill fear in the entire federal government. (The analogy to revolutionary terror is typically overheated for Glasser; Felix Dzerzhinsky did far more than merely cancel people’s opposition newspaper subscriptions in Lenin’s Soviet Union.)
Such nonsense isn’t just easily mocked, it’s self-defeating for the Left; it fails to understand the true purpose behind Musk’s methods. The cruelty isn’t the point of these sudden and (purportedly) indiscriminate cuts, the speed is. Musk and his team are no strangers to the world of litigation; they know as well as anyone else that these firings and defundings and restructurings are going to be litigated fiercely in court for years to come, and that to delay this process now — in a hopeless attempt to make every cut politically palatable — is to give up on it altogether by slow-rolling it to death. It is this urgency which shocks so many progressives and media types, but it is an urgency borne of years of experience reforming sclerotic systems. We have long accustomed ourselves to the idea that the entire edifice of federal government, with its deep entanglement in left-wing causes and funding, has simply gotten too immense and overgrown to ever prune back in any substantive way.
We ran CNN’s infamous 2020 “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful” Chyron in the last hour, so it’s only fair to mention last night’s banger as well: Musk’s DOGE Team: CNN Panel Gets Testy Over Accomplished Teen Genius Named ‘BIG BALLS.’
As with Brooke Baldwin’s classic 2017 freakout over Clay Travis’ line that he believes in “the First Amendment and boobs,” it doesn’t take much for CNN’s distaff newsreaders to dive for the fainting couches:
