The Element of Surprise
Trump's Deep State Strategy Comes Into View?
I wrote the observations you can read immediately past the break as a note on Substack yesterday. It turned into something a great deal longer than anything I usually post as a note, and I don’t really know why I did it as a note instead of a normal post, other than the note was kind of an off-the-cuff observation that turned into something longer than I had expected. It was originally a simple exercise in analogic reasoning that sort of spiraled into a universal theory of everything. (Not really, but you’ll see what I mean.)
I later posted a version of the original note on ricochet.com where it has garnered some interest there. I would not have turned the note into the post at this remove if not for some corroborating points of view I have come across this morning. Below the second break I’ll add a couple of links to these corroborating perspectives, along with some brief comments about why I was motivated to include them with this post.
I remember when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and dug his troops in there. The world was focused on the Iraqi positions and obsessed with where the Americans might land in Kuwait. There was round-the-clock commentary and speculation on the difficulties we would have attacking the entrenched Iraqi positions.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Army, under General Norman Schwarzkopf, had secretly massed its troops in Saudi Arabia. Rather than launching a frontal attack against Hussein’s entrenched positions, Schwarzkopf raced north through Iraq behind Hussein’s army, severing his supply lines and cutting his forces off from their homeland. After that, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, as the attached picture from the infamous “highway of death” illustrates.
Something similar seems to be going on with Trump’s return to office. During the buildup to the inauguration, the press was obsessed with which individuals a Trump administration might go after and who was at risk. The press was maniacally focused on the Biden pardons, who made the list, and who did not. But events are starting to feel eerily reminiscent of the press’ obsession with the beach landings that never quite happened the way they had expected (IIRC, we did land a few soldiers on the beaches as a ruse and a distraction).
Instead, the Trump administration seems to be bypassing a frontal attack on individuals and is, instead, going for the throat of the entire rotten machine. What is being revealed by DOGE and
- whose surprising and timely appearance on the battlefield feels a little bit like the Elvish army arriving unexpectedly at Helm's Deep - evokes an eerie sense of deja vu. There is a vibe in the air that hearkens back to the press’s stunned reaction when, instead of attacking where everyone expected, with the resulting rivers of American blood, Schwarzkopf instead cut off Hussein in a matter of days, sitting between Hussein’s army and his nation’s capital, after which it was all over but the shouting.So, for now at least, Trump seems to be foregoing the individuals and targeting their strategic sources of funding.
All is being revealed, and the hyper-competent and rapid application of technology is bathing the grift machine, and its entire rat infestation, in unaccustomed light.
Trump is seemingly maneuvering to cut off the rats’ food supply, and rip the heart out of the machine.
Perhaps the enlarged, elegantly framed copy of his mug shot, hanging prominently on the wall just outside the oval office, is suggestive of a disinterest in letting bygones be bygones.
The left seems increasingly panicked, apparently awake now to their true peril. And like the priests of the god Serapis, they are desperate to convince everyone who will listen that if Trump and DOGE “violate the majesty of the god”*, the world will return to chaos.
But the blow has already been struck, and all the rats are scurrying forth from the cloven idol, just as they did that fateful day in the Sarapeum. And notwithstanding the psychodrama on the left, “the thunder was still silent, and both the heavens and the earth continued to preserve their accustomed order and tranquility.”* Who, after all, except the rats inhabiting the darkened recesses of the idol, has yet been even inconvenienced, much less harmed?
Why, it’s almost as if all the obscene spending and propaganda were never really about the needs of the American people at all.
*Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
After posting this yesterday I awoke find two interesting and related essays that offer points of view that are similar or, at least, adjacent.
The first one is this new blog post by
. He has also noticed the supply-line analogy that neatly characterizes recent events. He has this to say:What Elon is doing is cutting the left’s supply lines, and he is cutting those supply lines clean in two. It is starting to look as though the leftist juggernaut was made up of ensconced bureaucrats, kennel-fed media, and astro-turf mobs, and all of it financed by the long-suffering taxpayer.
I also came across this link to
via . Mr. Crew (a.k.a. Bill Shipley) offered observations not unlike my own, in regard to the unexpected decision by Trump and team, unexpected by the left at least, to go for the financial throat of their entire enterprise. This is what I was getting at yesterday in noticing the similarity to the Schwarzkopf strategy during the Persian Gulf war.But I don’t think the Democrats/Progressives anticipated Elon Musk and his engineer boy-geniuses, nor did they expect that the first target that would take multiple incoming torpedos from DOGE would be the federal programs that have funneled huge sums of money to the left-wing NGOs through a variety of slush funds.
The fight is just beginning and, as in every battle, the enemy has a say.
