A lot of people who have keys to the kingdom may not really care about it. But it would be a mistake to think that there aren't any white nationalist ideologues within rank and file. At the very least, they are enabled and empowered.
These types of people blame the failures of their own policies on the scapegoats because they're convinced their ideology is actually natural law.
They control the courts, presidency, congress, most state houses and governors offices, have most popular news shows and networks, and they're unwilling to admit their policies are incompetently administered so therefore socialists and trans people must actually be running things, somehow, somewhere, in some invisible way.
They refuse to take responsibility and imagine conspiracies where some scapegoat is puppet mastering their failure.
You might have who I'm talking about confused. Musk, Vance, and their cabal don't actually believe in it. It's fascism and fascism needs an enemy to point at. That isn't to say they don't have people in their ranks that don't believe in it.
They do though. They mention obscure authors and theories about white replacement and neo-eugenics. There's constant controversies of people finding the online handles of these power players on sites like gab and bitchute where they express pretty unambiguous sentiments.
Musk has a trans child he's cutoff all contact with. There's very little evidence these people are faking it. There's never been a group chat that gets leaked to expose them as secretly fine respectable people.
We have this tendency to think socialist and leftist are all very serious about it while the people on the far right don't actually believe it, they're just pretending.
They're not cutting the budget, just rearranging spending priorities (i.e., more to the border -- as if that is where our biggest military threat will come from).
In fact, the upcoming Budget calls for an _increase_ in the defense budget.
One thing to keep in mind that Federal Spending represented 23.4% of GDP in 2024. Around 12% of that is defense spending. I have yet to see any way these cuts do not result is massive decreases in GDP. Even if all of it is redirected to defense.
Indeed. It's moreso the case that they view everything as "waste and corruption" and are making everyone miserable, but if you look at the (currently) top thread[1], it's a deliberate move at that.
Your article points out that that's a rare topic where there is a disconnect among the Administration. Not everyone in Trump/Elon's orbit seems to be aligned on what to do about military spending. DOGE has so far steered clear of it.
They are definitely not as laser focused on that as they are on nickling and diming workers and removing database columns that deal with diversity and inclusion.
How many people work for Doge? It's only been a month, after all. From what I've seen, I assume from their limited staffing, they're moving from department to department, rather than attempting to look at all departments in the government at once. It's seems reasonable to target the military later, for PR and utilitarian reasons.
You would think, with limited staffing, they'd want to start by focusing their efforts on departments where they could have a much bigger impact. Yet they decide to start with such small potatoes instead of the huge spenders?
It feels as though I'm trying to cut down my household spending and I focus on canceling my $15/mo Netflix account rather than negotiate down my $1000/mo credit card bill or work on finding an apartment that's $1500/mo rather than $4500/mo.
Military is pretty far down the list on total spent [1].
SS is biggest spending, and one of the first departments. USAID was viewed, by the administration, as being 100% waste.
Rather than starting at the biggest spender (and subjective greatest waste), what do you see as the metric for ordering? Do you think PR should be involved in the ordering? Do you think the administration ordered based on PR?
This is why in the debate of : Are they fascists or idiots? I tend to come down on idiots.
Fascist can be idiots, of course, but they tend to glorify the military (per Eco). And thus far, these guys have shown that they are mostly going to just bumble around and be gloryhounds. Sure Donny like the pomp, but real fascists wouldn't be gutting the NNSA or the DoD. They'd be building it up and expanding it, even at this early stage.
The only 'but' I can think of is that they are going to gut the military, then build it back up with fellow nutters. Something that many admins (and countries!) have tried to do to the Pentagon, and have all failed at.
Still, assume stupidity, not conspiracy, per Hanlon's razor.
I think this is an excellent point. If Trump and Musk were as brilliantly malicious as the Left claims, they’d be going about this much smarter. I think they’re solipsistic, nihilistic fools, and they’re going to ruin tens of millions of people’s lives.
"Dupes to the billionaires" sounds like something a dupe to the bureaucracy would say. I've never once had a problem with a billionaire. They have the common courtesy to stay out of my life. Can't say the same for the bureaucrats and their worthless gatekeepers and credentialed "experts" I'm forced to pay and spend time on because of their endless rules.
Smart and winning are not the same. Left was very correct about conservatives, Trump and Musk. They were correct about Vance too. They were punished for being correct.
Plus the rules are assymetric - Republicans can lie, strike outrage and do massively amoral things, but left and democrats are criticized for the same. Both sidism ensures that when Republicans do something bad, center knee jerks with euphemism it away while massively criticizing minor issues on democratic side.
> real fascists wouldn't be gutting the NNSA or the DoD. They'd be building it up and expanding it, even at this early stage.
Not necessarily. If those organisations were not blindly obedient to the leader (which they shouldn't be in a functioning democracy) then the fascist playbook then would be to neuter them and replace them with a more loyal apparatus.
In Hitler's Nazi germany, the SS were a new organisation with loyalty to the Fuhrer rather than the state. The SS acquired immense power and became a virtual state within a state.
You're also assuming that the fascist end goal is global domination. If the Fuhrer was driven primarily by narcissism, and by nature lazy rather than as hard working as Hitler apparently was, and they already have control of the largest democracy and arsenal in the world, then war and global domination may not be required to satisfy their psychological urges.
> The memo, dated Tuesday, calls for military leaders to provide a proposal for eight percent in budget cuts each year for the next five years. The proposals for the massive cuts to the Pentagon’s budget of approximately $850 billion are due by February 24, less than one week after Hegseth issued the memo.
> It was issued the day before President Donald Trump endorsed the House’s budget plan which includes a $100 billion increase in defense spending, suggesting a major disconnect within the administration. Hegseth himself called for an increase to the defense budget one week ago. While visiting Stuttgart, Germany, Hegseth said, “I think the US needs to spend more than the Biden administration was willing to, who historically underinvested in the capabilities of our military.”
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/19/politics/hegseth-military-maj...