XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.republicans, talk.politics.guns
He certainly isn't sleeping all day like his predecessor did.
'Trump’s Second Week: A Turning Point in American Governance'
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/trump_s_second_week_a_turning_point_in_american_governance.html>
I'n his second week of his second term in office, President Trump has
asserted the right of the Chief Executive to effectively manage the
Executive Branch. He has blindsided -- even gelded -- his detractors in
the media and Congress, and issued an astonishing array of executive
orders which reveal how tax funds have been flowing out of the Treasury
to the benefit of the Deep State and its friends without regard (and
often even being inimical) to the national interest. So much has
happened that I cannot cover it all, but I will try to hit briefly and
in no particular order some of the most significant developments this
week.
Gaza
Trump has proposed that Gazans be relocated to Jordan and Egypt so that
Gaza can be rebuilt and Hamas’ presence removed. Jordan and Egypt have
balked at that notion but the President, who notes how financially
dependent on us they are, insists it will happen. Amjad Taha of the
United Arab Emirates details how this project makes sense. It would
allow Gaza to be rebuilt more quickly, it would allow Gazans exposure to “different educational systems, ones that don’t glorify death and antisemitism.” He details the cost of providing for them and the history
of Palestinians fomenting wars in the area. Taha concludes:
The solution must be approached logically, not emotionally. It has
nothing to do with Israel itself. If you examine the situation, Israel
wouldn't take Gaza even for free under any condition; it just wants Gaza
free of hostages and rocket launches targeting its schools and
hospitals. The real question is whether all the corrupt Palestinian
leaders genuinely want a state, or if they merely use the idea of
statehood as a rhetorical tool to create obstacles, resist peace or normalization, and fill their pockets and bank accounts.
And per Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia are
closer than ever to normalizing relations.
Bulldozers and heavy bombs which Israel had ordered and paid for and on
which Biden held up delivery have been delivered at last.
California
The President tweeted that the U.S. military “turned on water flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest… The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER.” The claim was
disputed, but it was true.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dramatically increased the amount
of water flowing from two dams in Tulare County, sending massive flows
down river channels toward farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley.
Federal records show that water releases from Terminus Dam at Lake
Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success jumped early Friday morning.
The sudden increase occurred four days after President Trump said on
social media that the U.S. military had “entered” California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” Trump also vowed during a visit to Los Angeles last week
to “open up the valves and pumps” in California to deliver more water.
According to federal data, the flow from Terminus Dam into the Kaweah
River near Visalia increased from 57 cubic feet per second to more than
1,500 on Friday morning. The flow from Lake Success near Porterville
into the Tule River increased from 105 cubic feet per second to 990.
The Army Corps of Engineers is “conducting controlled water releases”
from the two dams, said Tyler Stalker, a spokesperson for the Corps in Sacramento. “The action is being coordinated with local officials. The releases are within the capacity of the downstream waterways.”
Responding to questions about the reasons for the sudden increase in
water flow, Gene Pawlik, a spokesperson at the Corps’ headquarters in Washington, said in an email that the action was “consistent with the direction” in Trump’s recent executive order to enact “emergency
measures to provide water resources” in California.
The feckless governor Gavin Newsom finally got around to directing state agencies to maximize storage of water from rivers to recharge
groundwater and boost reservoirs.
As the President showed up Newsom in California, he also showed up the
Biden FEMA operation in western North Carolina which had been stalled
for months. Flood victims were quickly moved from hotel rooms and tents
to furnished apartments, and Trump ordered all the roads and bridges,
including private bridges, quickly restored.
The Military
8,950 active-duty servicemen and 5,727 reserve troops who were
transgendered have been removed from service and in their stead 8,000
military personnel who had been removed because they refused the vaccine mandate have been welcomed to return with back pay.
Foreign Students
Much of the chaos, disruption, and antisemitic activities on college
campuses which the prior administration ignored involved foreign
students here on temporary visas. The administration has begun
identifying them, revoking their visas, and repatriating them home.
Freeze on Spending
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is taking a scalpel to
outlandish and often anti-American foreign-aid grants.
[OMB] ordered a massive freeze on all federal aid programs outside of
Social Security, Medicare and other assistance that goes directly to individuals. (Ed: $3 trillion worth of federal grants.) The freeze is
because the agencies were just churning them out without review.
The two-page memo, which is set to take effect on Tuesday night, could
impact lower-income households that rely on Medicaid, school breakfast
and lunch programs; Section 8 rental assistance, and the Special
Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children,
according to Roll Call.
The memo also noted that the OMB can grant exceptions to the order on a case-by-case basis.
"The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism,
and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer
dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,"
the office wrote in the memo.
“Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to
align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people
as expressed through Presidential priorities,” the memo continued. "This memorandum requires Federal agencies to identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with
the President’s policies and requirements.”
The federal programs impacted will each be assigned a "senior political appointee to ensure Federal financial assistance conforms to
Administrative priorities.” Reports from those individuals will be due
Feb. 10.
The most outlandish grants now frozen were the billions of dollars spent
on non-government agencies like Catholic Charities to bring in people
from the Third World to swamp our communities, drive down employment and housing opportunities for poorer Americans, increase our tax burden, and jeopardize our safety.
Scrutinizing the grants of the Biden regime, the new administration has
come up with numerous other equally preposterous outflows, so absurd
they can only be considered payoffs to friends and money laundering,
Here are just a few:
In 2021, the Biden administration gave $540,000 to "Transgender Equity Consulting, Inc." This firm is comprised of "six black and Latinx
transgender and nonbinary individuals" -- one of whom is apparently the
"first BBW trans porn star."
The Biden admin issued $850,000 in federal grants to a left-wing
organization's "LGBTQI+ family support program," which some have
characterized as promoting gender ideology for the children of military families.
The DOGE team has gained access to the U.S. Treasury's computerized
payment records and will be able to conduct an audit of expenditures.
Foreign Aid
The funding of projects overseas is just as full of ridiculous, if not suspicious, grants. By way of example, when Biden approved $100 million
to support “basic rights and freedoms” of Afghan women, $15 million was
to be spent on distributing condoms there. I consider it unlikely that
the money went anywhere else than into the pockets of the Taliban and
leftist agencies, and the title of the grant was to hide the real
recipients and purpose.
Coffeeandcovid substack has a marvelous and lengthy review of some of
this week’s actions, with an explanation of the reason and dynamics:
Chaos. Confusion. Epoch-making. What Trump has done was, until
yesterday, unimaginable. When the Wall Street Journal called “the memo” “unexpected,” it was a masterpiece of understatement, kind of like describing the Hindenberg [sic] as an unscheduled travel delay.
It came in two parts (so far). Yesterday, Trump’s Office of Management
and Budget (OMB) unleashed a two-page memo upon the entire federal
government. It was nothing less than a multi-trillion-dollar, whole-of-government spending freeze, excepting only a small handful of essential items like Medicare, emergency relief, payrolls, and Social
Security. Like that, Trump shut down the government.
You can be sure that nothing like this has ever happened before. It has completely flipped the script. Instead of Trump trying vainly to wrestle control over a vast bureaucracy, now the bureaucrats must come to Trump
for permission to do anything.
Overnight, Trump has managed to turn the vast, out-of-control federal bureaucracy into a command-and-control system.
After four years of a virtual meat puppet in the White House where
unnamed assistants allowed the bureaucrats to run wild and toss around
federal funds like confetti, this certainly must be a shock and awe
moment.
Starting at 5pm today, all government financial assistance (excluding
the aforementioned categories) must be temporarily frozen until further
notice, after Trump Administration officials can “review” all government expenses to “determine the best uses of the funding.”
Until yesterday, nobody would have believed such a pause for review was
even possible. It’s too big. Trump isn’t asking the bureaucracy to
follow orders; he’s forcing them to come to him for permission to
function at all. It is totally unprecedented, and it raises all kinds of questions about separation of powers between the President and Congress,
but it also resonates on a common-sense level.
If the President is the nation’s chief executive, shouldn’t everything
be centralized in his office? And if it got out of control, shouldn’t
some President get it back under control?
This must be especially the case in the USAID, a hidden financier of the
CIA that funds many things antithetical to our interests and which is
likely on the Trump chopping block:
One of the biggest sources of funding for NGO’s -- especially foreign
NGO’s -- is the State Department’s USAID, which many have long suspected was a CIA front for destabilization operations. According to the Kiev
Post, USAID has distributed over $30 billion dollars to Ukrainian NGOs
and contractors, a vast uncharted ocean of misspent money.
USAID is the deep state’s ATM.
Yesterday, the AP ran a story related to the financial freeze orders,
headlined “US places dozens of senior aid officials on leave, citing
possible resistance to Trump orders.”
According to the AP, 56 senior USAID personnel and “hundreds of contractors” were placed on immediate administrative leave yesterday,
pending review, which is the closest thing to getting fired career
bureaucrats get.
The dramatic USAID purge seems related to malicious compliance inside
the agency. Someone leaked an internal USAID memo sent late yesterday,
which quoted new acting administrator Jason Gray, who said he had
identified “several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the
American people.”
Boom.
We can quibble over precise definitions, but nobody can argue that USAID isn’t a core component of the Deep State, however you want to define
that term. It’s ironic that Chuck Schumer has become the Deep State’s poster boy, since Trump is attacking the Deep State “six ways from
Sunday.” He’s cut off their money -- the Deep State’s lifeblood -- and now he’s ruthlessly making examples of employees who defy legal
instructions. And not just a few employees, either.
This is the long-awaited deep state showdown -- but on a scale nobody
imagined. It’s like what we hoped would happen during Trump’s first
term, except that it has been working out during its four-year hiatus
and now it has roid rage.
If Trump succeeds in these agency purges, and gathers the money strings
back under White House control, in one transparent database, then the
deep state as we knew it is finished.
FBI and DoJ
Actions of personnel in these and other agencies are being scrutinized,
and by firing, placing on leave pending investigation of their work,
requiring them to report to work, attrition (refusing new hires) and reassignment, the federal work force is being streamlined and malicious compliance (like removing the story of the Tuskegee airmen from military education in an effort to tar the administration) are being forcefully
and rapidly dealt with. The scrutiny and actions involving the corrupted
FBI and DoJ are noteworthy for their thoroughness. Aides to Elon Musk
have been ensconced in the Office of Personnel Management working round
the clock (even bringing mattresses with them so they can sleep in the
office). They have locked the door to the computer facility and are
checking who’s on the payroll, where, what are their jobs, and when they
were put on the civil service rolls. (Attorneys recently hired as
probationers in the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. who were engaged to
work on the now dropped J6 cases, were around election time transferred
by Biden to permanent status. They are now out the door, the effort to
burrow them in and hamper the operation of the new U.S. Attorney is
over.)
Foreign Policy Achievements
Special envoy Richard Grenell flew to Venezuela and promptly returned
with six Americans that Nicolás Maduro had been holding and a promise to accept those illegal entrants from his country who are being repatriated
at Venezuela's cost. Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro, who said he wouldn’t accept illegal aliens we are repatriating, turned on a dime.
Not only will be accept them, but he sent his own plane to pick up the
first batch. Respecting countries we do not rely on to keep repatriated criminals, the President has announced he will send these people to
Guantanamo.
The Media and the Dems
The 51 former intelligence officials who misled the public about Hunter Bidens’ laptop likely being Russian disinformation (often in the same
media which earlier pimped the lie that Russia was interfering in the
2016 election to aid Trump), have had their security clearances revoked
and may not enter a secure federal facility without an escort who is responsible to assure that they see no classified information. In
practical terms they are as up on current intel as your Aunt Agnes,
which means fewer media appearances and even less influence and board of directors offers. Some legacy media have had their offices in the
Pentagon cleared out in favor of new media.
So much, in fact, is going on that the Washington Post reports that
Democrats are now more unpopular than the party has been in nearly two
decades. They are leaderless and, as usual, spouting untruths in a vain
attempt to stop what is happening. This week they largely misrepresented
facts and gave speeches instead of questioning cabinet nominees, often
looking particularly stupid, as in the case of Senator Maggie Hassan
when she yelled at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that settled science might be
wrong but we can’t question it because to do so would halt progress.
Propagandists Jim Acosta at CNN and Chuck Todd at NBC are out.
I anticipate judicial challenges and efforts to delay, but most of these changes, if not all, will remain largely undisturbed
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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