RUTHFULLY YOURS

During President Donald Trump’s first term and again in his second, we have heard his critics indict him for the “chaos” he’s stirred up in Washington. They see disorder and confusion. But those not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome recognize this as the needed shake-up of a government that had grown out of control and become a threat to those it was intended to protect and serve.

The “chaos” label has not been used as often as “Nazi,” “fascist,” “dictator,” “tyrant” and “authoritarian” to try to vilify Trump. But it’s been part of the campaign to – let’s be frank – dehumanize the man in an effort to cripple his administration, chase him from the public square and rile the unbalanced who would do him harm.

A week into his second term, Senate Democrats wanted the country to know about the “lawlessness and chaos in America” brought by Trump. A day later, an overwrought Charles Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, said Trump “plunged the country into chaos” when he “announced a halt to virtually all federal funds across the country.”

On the same day, San Francisco Democrat and former House speaker – may she never hold that post again – made a similar accusation, wildly claiming that the “administration’s cruel decision to freeze federal funding for critical services across the country has unleashed chaos, confusion and fear for hardworking Americans.”

Sounds as if the pair and their staffs coordinated the attack. But give the Democrats credit. They know how to move in lockstep, even to the point of producing a political puppet show in which they posted “identical talking points to social media” that was widely ridiculed for its asininity.

Even the Manchester Guardian, which daily cranks out copy scrawled by an assortment of cranks, has added its opinion, with its foreign affairs commentator whining about an “ensuing chaos” that “characterizes what may become the briefest honeymoon in White House history.” Le Monde, which bills itself as France’s “leading” newspaper, is also in the game, insisting that “Trump’s chaos” is the key to “revival” for the “unpopular and lost” Democrats.

During his first term, Time wheezed on about a “sense of constant chaos” in the White House; The Atlantic was sure there was “chaos coursing through the Trump White House”; and NBC argued that “chaos” defined Trump’s first week in office.

The day after Trump left office in 2021, the Sky News U.S. correspondent swore that he was “ending his presidency as I saw him start it – in an exhausting blaze of chaos.”

There was even a book written by about it all: Peter Bergen’s 2022 “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.”

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter gave us the phrase “gales creative of destruction” when he wrote in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” that the free market “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”

Creative destruction is the right way to look at what Trump is doing from the White House.

He is upsetting the Potomac country club that begets cushy jobs and power to insiders. He’s rooting out the entrenched, unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy that ran Washington according to its whims and has squeezed Americans’ economic and personal liberties. Joe Biden’s replacement is disrupting the rule-making apparatus, where a single regulator costs our economy the equivalent of 138 private-sector jobs per year.

People who refuse to think beyond the status quo cannot conceive of life without a powerful federal bureaucracy. Half of the country is enamored by and in love with government, and seems willing to fight, in the streets, if necessary, to ensure that it is an ever-growing machine that fronts for the Democratic Party.

The Democrats and the media cry for the federal workers who are losing jobs due to Trump’s “chaos” (and who, when gone, will be more productive economic cogs in the private sector). But never did they care at all when Barack Obama’s “multiple regulations led to tens of thousands of job losses.”

“People with no other training and who had been coal miners or worked in factories their entire lives lost their jobs with just a few days’ notice,” says Liberty Vittert, a Washington University in St. Louis professor of data science. “Entire communities were devastated by Obama and Biden-era policies, and in some cases they were quite proud of it.”

That was not a gale of creative destruction. It was an ill wind kicked up by a man who, says Victor Davis Hanson, “tried to move the country hard to the left and, in the process, radicalized and then eroded the Democratic Party at the local, state, and federal levels.”

There is much to repair in Washington, thick slabs of fat to excise, stubborn mindsets to be reset. Half the country needs to be educated about the harms of a running-wild bureaucracy. The paradigm that favors political society over civil society must be shifted. None of this will be painless or smooth. But it has to be done and now we finally have a president who is not shying away from the work.