There’s been no shortage of posts flying around the interwebs about everything Musk and DOGE has been up to. You’ve got people who are in favor of all of it, saying the government has never been audited, and expressing how appalled they are at how much fraud Musk has found in so little time. Millions of dollars going to condoms in Gaza! Paying to send Angelina Jolie to Ukraine! $59 million to house migrants in luxury NYC hotels! When this amount of wasteful spending is happening, it sure seems justified to starting taking the axe to anything and everything government related.
On the other side of the argument, you have people objecting to the way these cuts are happening. Musk is acting sort of kind of on behalf of Trump, but definitely not on behalf of Congress, who approved all of these programs. (More on that in a moment.) Does the Executive Branch have the power to just . . . cut off the money Congress has approved to spend? And what about the way some of these cuts are happening? Firing thousands of employees with no attention given to performance or purpose? Even if you legally can do those things, there’s a real question of whether or not you should.
It doesn’t matter, says the other side. The government fat cats have been spending billions of our hard earned money on things that don’t help Americans. They must be stopped!
And the argument goes back and forth and back and forth. In the end, I don’t think they’re ever going to see eye to eye, mainly because the two sides are living in two different realities.
Trump supporters believe Trump. They believe he’s acting in their best interest. When he and Musk make claims about the fraud they’ve found, Trump supporters believe those claims. They don’t need to do any research into them, because why bother? Anything that contradicts it can be dismissed as part of the System trying to defraud the American people. More importantly, they believe these claims because the claims fit in with the worldview they’ve already had. The claims confirm what Trump supporters believed all along.
The arguments I see against those cuts are all based much more firmly in reality. In facts and figures. In discussions about the Constitution. They are much more in line with how things used to be done. When I read all those outlandish claims from Musk about the waste he’s uncovered, I did what I usually do. I wanted to find out for myself. There’s an article in Forbes that does a great job going over each of them in turn. (Is Forbes reliable? These days, I turn to this handy Media Bias Chart, which does an excellent job showing what sort of slant each publication has on the news. Forbes is just left of center, for those wondering.
But as I said, none of those arguments are going to sway the Republican support Trump currently has. (Something like 2/3 of Republicans support these measures.) Until these cuts and changes actually start hurting those supporters in a way Trump can’t successfully convince them is due to Democrats, I don’t see that support eroding. How much it actually has to hurt them for them to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt is going to change from person to person. His approval ratings are already dipping, and that will continue. Inflation is already going up. He’s blaming Biden. I don’t see that blame ever going away as long as he’s president. Anything bad will be due to “the mess he inherited.”
How many people actually believe him . . . that’s the thing that will change. I think he realizes that, and so he’s trying to do as much as he can now, before pesky things like courts and the law get in the way. (And even then, he’s laying the groundwork to try and convince his followers that the courts and the laws are corrupt, and he’s entitled to ignore them in the name of the Greater Good.) I just hope enough cold water gets thrown on enough people in time to snap them out of the lockstep acceptance of everything Trump says before too much damage is done.
But I’m one of the ones who believes in research and verifiable facts.
(*Yes. I realize it’s technically “Whom do you trust?” But I worried anything that had that title would be auto-ignored by some people, just because they’ve got this thing against people who actually know how to use whom correctly. On the other hand, I could see a number of people show up to read it just to tell me it’s actually whom, not who. So . . . yeah. These are the sort of debates I have in my head sometimes.)