Dakota Beacon

Nearly all of the grief President Trump has had in office can be traced to one specific failing:  his refusal to clean up his government and weed out all of the Obama holdovers. These appointees and hirelings of the Obama administration have been the gremlins which have been sinking him from Day One.  His impeachment was directly caused by this. Future problems will present themselves because he refuses to do his job and fire these Obama (and no doubt, some Bush) people. He was going to “drain the swamp”, wasn’t he?  He should start with the Executive branch. And he should begin today.  Arguably, his first job, as a newly-elected president, should have been to do the people's bidding by eliminating holdovers of the previous administration.  That was his job and he should have done it in January of 2017.   His greatest talent going in was firing other people.  He bascially got elected on his TV personality.  Why didn't he follow through?

Daniel Greenfield has an excellent article in today’s Frontpage.  He has tracked down the decision to fly Americans with Coronavirus back into the United States from a cruise ship.  This has been pointed to as a cause for the spread of the virus in our country, which had been nearly clear of any cases - until now.  

He pins the decision on one Dr. William Walters, an Obama appointee and holdover within the State Department, who was known - and honored by Obama - for bringing Ebola into the country in a similar fashion.  Unlike Ebola, however, which was more difficult to disguise, Coronavirus can spread rapidly in part because the symptoms do not appear as dramatically or as early and the disease is thus transmitted without knowledge of the carrier even being sick.  Ebola was transmitted by bodily fluids, so one would at least have a better idea if he had come into contact. Something spread in the air is more difficult to avoid. There is no solid information on the fatality rate, the re-infection rate, etc., of Coronavirus, so we don’t know yet how serious it could become.

The “public servant” who made this command decision to import the disease did not run his plan by the President or even by the Secretary of State.  Walters’ position is under the direction of the Secretary of State. Should we blame him? Maybe we should. Why did the Pompeo not review the files of the people in decision-making positions in the State Department and advise the President on terminating the employment of certain Obama-holdover decision makers?  

And, for that matter, what’s wrong with Trump?   He brags one minute about his wisdom in closing down ports of entry to travellers from highly-infected regions and then he and Melania fly off in Air Force One to India.  It is difficult from a podium in New Delhi to counsel Americans about avoiding travel and about how smart he was to close entry from certain countries. Who told him it was a good idea to go to India in the first place?  His job really is here, not overseas. The less he runs around the better. So while he tweets smart-aleck quips from India or wherever he is, he is not firing Obama appointees.  

One could argue that almost every problem he has encountered in his troubled presidency has been of his own making.  Keeping any Obama personnel is almost a guarantee of future trouble, but it takes time and application and serious thought to restore the bureaucracy to any small level of sanity and it’s not interesting to Trump to do this.  It has been his downfall every time. Sure, he beat the impeachment, but at what cost? Look at the distraction. Had he not been busy tweeting about that and ridiculing Pelosi and Schiff maybe, just maybe, he could have fired Walters instead, or done something concrete (the term is used advisedly here) about a wall if that was what he got elected to accomplish.  

Greenfield makes another, deeper, point, and one we should all discuss and take to heart.  He points out entirely correctly that our country has become less a republic governed by the people than an autocratic administrative state run by a top-heavy and unaccountable bureaucracy.  I have written this before, usually in the context of my argument AGAINST “term limits”, that the more we rely on bureaucrats and the civil service the farther we get from control of our own government.  I have said this before - if you want to see how government works watch the BBC’s Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. The bureaucrat is "Applebee". The man you went to the polls to elect is "Hacker". Just watch.  You’ll see it so very clearly. If we are to do anything but put bandaids on our crises, we must weed out the federal government. If I were to make a suggestion I would say to shut down whole departments, such as the Department of Education.  We can live very, very well without that whole department - and did so until Jimmy Carter created it. Within a constitutionally proper department, such as the State Department, clean out the unnecessary sub-departments. Streamline it and make sure that the Secretary of State knows what is going on in his department, that everyone finally answers to him (and thus, finally to the President, and thus, finally to the people).  The Defense Department is another area which needs a thorough house-cleaning. The fact that we are bringing Saudis into our country - not to mention our military bases - is reason enough to overhaul that department and our top military as well.  

Maybe Coronavirus won’t kill us.  Maybe it’s not the big bad wolf we are afraid has infected America.  We don’t know as much as we should because Xi, that guy Trump admires and congratulated on his 70 year Communist dictatorship in China, has kept much of the information secret from us.  We don’t know yet. What we do know for sure is that it is wreaking havoc on our economy. Our stock market is in a fall, our local businesses are slowing down. Travel is messed up and not just international travel.  We won’t know the extent of the damage to our economy of this virus hitting the US for some time yet, but we already know there is some.  

Is Coronavirus Trump’s fault? No, not really.  He didn’t create it. But is its effect on America his fault?  You could say yes, it is. Because at a time when he should have been tending to the business of the presidency - namely to have some control over the bureaucrats who ultimately answer to him (meaning he could fire them) - he has engaged in rallies (not a good idea if you want to maximize the number of live Republican voters in November, maybe) and tweeting, wherein he has made a lifestyle of smart-ass commentary and insults to people who might deserve to be insulted but who do not change one iota of what they do because of it.  He has acknowledged that he has made the work of his Attorney General impossible, but also states that he thinks it’s worth it because it’s how he stays tuned in to his base. That is putting party politics ahead of the business of the presidency and he has no business doing that.  

I hope that the malfeasance of Dr. William Walters in the State Department will spark the much overdue and much needed conversation about reducing the size of our government.  A republic cannot continue as a republic when the government gets so large that it is no longer accountable to the voters. The Founders understood this very well. They provided a solution for it - it is called federalism.  There are two planes of government called for in the Constitution. The federal level, which manages our borders (which it isn’t), provides for national security and defense (again . . . ), deals with international relations, immigration (here, again . . . ) and creates a currency (which should be the purview of the Treasury, not a quasi-public Federal Reserve Bank) which should be based on something real - gold, for example, or at least silver.  The other plane is to manage all the rest - transportation, education, public health, environmental matters, and whatever else the people feel they need at the state level. Then if Massachusetts screws up people can either fix Massachusetts or move to Connecticut or Rhode Island. It won’t wreck the whole nation. A matter such as Coronavirus would come under the tab of international relations and immigration. Clearly, the US could have done better.  Trump could have done better. Pompeo could have done better. But ultimately it is we who could have done better and must do better - we need to seriously cut our federal government down to size and the sooner the easier it will be and the better.  

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