Opinion: Someday, most likely, the buck will stop with Trump

Since taking office last month, Donald Trump has governed like a man with a sledgehammer and a checklist. He’s moving at a breakneck pace — executive orders flying, agencies gutted, norms obliterated. USAID workers? Put on ice. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Unprotected. Low-flow toilets? Flushed. The Gulf of Mexico? No longer found on Google Maps. And that’s just a brief sampling.

Sure, the courts will put the brakes on some of it, but this is political whack-a-mole at its finest. That’s the genius of it: While first responders are scrambling to stamp out dozens of small fires, who will realize the whole city has burned down around them?

This is a stark contrast to the messier way things started the last time Trump won election. In 2016, he stumbled into the White House like a guy who had somehow wandered into the cockpit of a 747, started pushing buttons, and figured the autopilot would handle the rest. This time, he’s got a plan and a highly motivated flight crew — co-pilot Elon Musk, advisor Stephen Miller, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought — and they are shutting down the “deep state” faster than a Georgetown cocktail party when the open bar closes.

Trump and Co. are using two time-tested strategies to pull it off: “flooding the zone” and “expanding the Overton window.” The first overwhelms the opposition with an avalanche of activity, so no single scandal sticks. The second is an old-school haggling trick: Start with something extreme, and when you scale it back just a notch, your new position — although still extreme by the standards of a few moments before — suddenly seems conceivable.

Take Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. The courts will probably bounce it faster than a bad check. But by the time that happens, we’ll all be debating the mechanics of mass deportation as though that were just another line item in the budget. “Should we fix potholes or round up a few million migrants?” That’s how this game works.

But here’s the thing: Throwing a million strings of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks is exhausting. Not only for stunned onlookers, but also for the guys doing the throwing.

Think of it like a football team that sprints through their first 15 scripted plays, running a hurry-up offense with precision. Then reality sets in. The defense adjusts. The playbook runs dry. Suddenly, your players are gasping for air, getting sacked at every turn, and hastily throwing interceptions.

Which brings us to Musk’s plan to inject Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos into government.

The problem? When you break things in government, lots of people get hurt — people who did not choose to speculate in tech investments or work at a startup. You can’t just gut the Federal Emergency Management Agency and then reboot it right before hurricane season and expect the federal disaster response to function. You can’t lay off half the FBI and then roll out a “patch” to protect national security as well as those experienced professionals did. And if you’ve decimated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there’s no “undo” button available when the next pandemic hits.

Now, I’m all for cutting waste, streamlining bureaucracy and making the system work better. But any self-respecting conservative (as in “to conserve”) should understand that there’s a difference between fixing a leaky pipe and blowing up the water main.

The problem with the “government should run like a business” mantra is that, in business, when things go south, you can declare bankruptcy, pivot to selling NFTs or just ghost your investors. Last I checked, the United States of America doesn’t have a “going out of business” option built into its framework.

And here’s the real kicker: When you take a sledgehammer (instead of a scalpel) to the government, guess who gets crushed under the debris? Well, everyone. But among the folks down there in the rubble you’ll find the very people who orchestrated the destruction.

The folks who slashed FEMA? They’ll be the ones on TV explaining to incredulous Trump voters why no one showed up to offer relief after the next Category 5 hurricane. The guys who gutted the FBI will be shocked — shocked! — when a major terrorist attack “somehow” slipped through the cracks. And the ones who slashed National Institutes of Health funding will fumble their way through a public apology when the next mystery virus starts making the rounds.

I know what you’re thinking: Trump has a remarkable talent for dodging responsibility, always finding someone else to blame. Whether it’s Musk or a Biden administration DEI hire — just as he did after the recent midair collision near Washington, D.C. — he’ll find a scapegoat. But at some point, the “You break it, you buy it” rule kicks in, and the buck stops with the president. Trump’s failure to respond adequately to COVID-19 likely cost him the 2020 election. In that moment, at least, he was held accountable. It could happen again.

Then again, it’s possible the next four years will pass without some major test or system failure that would spark a backlash. Maybe the rules don’t apply to Trump and everything will work out fine. Maybe he’s magic, in which case he is about to redefine everything we think we know about American politics. Again.

Regardless of how this all shakes out, one thing’s for sure: Trump’s back. And this time, he’s not just pushing random buttons — he’s got a plan. Or at least a crumpled cocktail napkin with a zillion half-baked ideas scribbled on it.

And at the top, in all caps? “SHOCK AND AWE.”

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”