There is a problem with this. Trump is just a wrecking ball. The problem is not the ball, the problem is the holes it leaves behind. Whoever replaces Trump, will arrive in the driver's seat of a vehicle which has had plenty of its safety rails removed or disabled.
The problem is what happens, when a more capable, less octagenarian replacement arrives.
Not all of us agreed with the previous (or current, for that matter) size of the US federal government. The ideas behind draining the swamp and DOGE were reasonable; the problem is that the POTUS has nowhere near the power to achieve it in any meaningful sense. You cannot dismantle the government using the government. (This is something nobody wants to acknowledge as it lays bare the utter farce that is “democracy” and “a government by the people, for the people”; the United States, just like China and Russia, is an oligarchic dictatorship.)
Much of what Trump officially destroyed should never have been built in the first place. Most of the damage he has wrought is not from his actual platform, but from his sheer stupidity. Covid and Russia both come to mind immediately, but also the irreparable harm he has done to the ~century-old carefully crafted global illusion of American legitimacy. As far as we can tell, he doesn’t read, including without limitation the daily intelligence briefing. There is no way to act strategically if you don’t avail yourself of all of the relevant information or you purge the administration of the messengers of news you don’t like.
As we know, stupidity is far more harmful to society than malice, as malice is at least zero-sum: someone gains when you lose.
Stupid people through their actions simply harm everyone, themselves included.
Think of what an improvement it would be (over Trump) to have someone hyperintelligent as POTUS, but with the exact same platform. It would be bad, but not the catastrophe that Trump has wrought by being a moron who can’t think more than 15 minutes in advance and fundamentally doesn’t seem to understand the concept of strategy.
when you say "size" of the government, what are you exactly talking about? The military budget? The amount spent on healthcare? The investment in research? Neoliberalism has been turning these into funnels to the private sector since Reagan. Like how does free market do anything other than create oligarchs? This language about "government too big" is too vague to be useful in discussion and I just assume it's cover for "punishing the poor and removing social services". ICE has a bigger budget than the Marines and FBI combined, and all the maga chuds clapped like circus seals. I don't know how to have an honest discussion about government policy with right wingers that isn't just a stream of weasel words for culture war.
I’m talking about the entire federal budget, primarily the big ones: federal healthcare and the military and adjacent paramilitary forces (like DHS/FBI/ICE). I also think the state should be entirely out of the education and research business.
It of course includes the social services you speak of too, but those are barely a drop in the bucket compared to the public-private wealth transfer that is the military-industrial complex.
The president simply isn’t permitted to dismantle it; there are too many stakeholders way more powerful than the holder of that single office that will not permit it.
