Trump is following through with unprecedented and swift action to begin his presidency – which has reset the national mood

Trump is following through with unprecedented and swift action to begin his presidency – which has reset the national mood

Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen said it best: “Last week has totally reset my conception of what’s possible, in two wholly different dimensions.”

As Andreessen often is, he’s right. 

Soon after November’s election, I suggested that if Donald Trump were smart, he’d come in like a wrecking ball: Move fast, break things and precipitate change across many fronts all at once, subjecting the Democrats, the media and the left (but I repeat myself) to shock and awe. 

Boy, has he ever done that, unleashing unprecedented change in just his first 100 hours.

He banned DEI throughout the federal government, closed the borders to illegal immigrants (according to Customs and Border Protection, illegal crossings dropped 97% by Trump’s second day in office), halted government censorship efforts, refocused the Defense Department from social issues to warfighting, and started a massive cleanup at the corrupt Department of Justice.

The new administration immediately found 80,000 of the Biden Administration’s 300,000 unaccounted-for migrant children, Fox News reported, and Trump overturned Biden’s order blocking the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. 

And Trump himself has been all over the place: Lecturing the fat-cats at Davos about freedom (joined by Argentina’s Javier Milei), showing up for the Biden-ignored victims of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee, and barnstorming to California to demand that state and local officials do their jobs and not tie up recovery efforts with red tape.

Meanwhile, his Department of Government Efficiency is already canceling wasteful government contracts, and federal employees are threatening to quit as Trump orders everyone, finally, to end their COVID-era remote work.  

A week or two ago, all these things seemed too hard to accomplish. 

Now they’re simply being done. 

Oh, there’s resistance: The Air Force announced that as part of Trump’s DEI ban it would stop teaching cadets about the Tuskeegee Airmen scandal, an act of obvious bad faith designed to grab headlines.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who knows whereof he speaks, rightly called this “political theatrics” and “passive-aggressive performative nonsense . . . It’s all an act.” 

It is an act, and the actors should be sacked.

But that they’re trying this sort of idiocy is proof that they’re flailing and desperate. Trump has the momentum.

One reason for this, of course, is that things like the DEI ban and immigration enforcement are wildly popular. 

The American public has never supported affirmative action or open borders. 

Those are policy preferences of the elites, who bullied opponents by calling them racist.

That doesn’t work anymore.

So along the practical side of Andreessen’s dual dimensions, it’s amazing: We were headed down a destructive path that, it turns out, most Americans didn’t want, and now we’re quickly turning around.

But the other dimension of Andreessen’s observation is spiritual, and here the shift is even more striking.

In Inman Majors’ excellent novel “The Millionaires,” a political consultant observes that there are only two campaign themes: “Bright New Day,” and “Back to Basics.” 

It says something about the poor quality of Democratic governance that Trump can declare a Bright New Day simply by returning to basics — racial equality, an orderly border, a competent military.

OH, AND BY THE WAY:

 AND THERE'S ALSO THIS: