Opinion
Declarations
A Stiff Drink From the Trump Fire Hose
Some of his actions are exhilarating. Some of them make you ask: Are these people clinically insane?
By Peggy Noonan
Feb. 20, 2025 5:54 pm ET
When you think aloud for a living you’re lately getting a lot of wry comments like “It must be hard to come up with a topic with nothing going on.”
“It’s drinking from a fire hose,” the journalist will reply. Meanwhile, normal people are asking: He doesn’t really think he’s a king, right? I’ve grown tired of saying, “Well, that was insane,” and we’re barely a month in.
The most charitable gloss on the administration style—here we’re thinking of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s blithe announcement that he wants to cut defense spending 8% a year for the next five years—is that they’re simply riding high and have grown full of themselves, as opposed to clinically insane. The other day I remembered an old story about Muhammad Ali. The great boxer was flying to a championship bout, feeling on top of the world. As the plane taxied down the runway, a dutiful stewardess kept coming by: “Sir, please fasten your seat belt.” He smiled. “Superman don’t need no seat belt.” She said, “Superman don’t need no airplane. Buckle up.” And he did.
But that wouldn’t fully explain things.
The president’s remarks on Ukraine this week were wild and destructive. He isn’t wrong to wish to end that conflict—war is brutality and waste. Everyone knew that it would end on unsatisfying terms. But Ukraine didn’t start it, Russia did, in defiance of international law. The war isn’t Volodymyr Zelensky’s fault, he isn’t a dictator, he isn’t loathed by his people—all those things President Trump said were untrue. And the vast majority of those listening to these charges know they are untrue. Asking “Why does Trump do this?” is a decade-long cliché, but really—why does he do this?
Ukraine is a sovereign nation. Its citizens put everything they had on the field to defend themselves. Mr. Zelensky entered world history with spirit and guts, refusing to flee Kyiv: “I need ammo, not a ride.” After the Cold War Ukraine agreed to relinquish the nuclear weapons housed there for a promise the U.S. would always have its back. They trusted us. Must American presidents honor the honestly made vows of their predecessors? In this case surely yes, at pain of announcing to every friend we have, “You’re on your own, Uncle Sam has left the building.” Trump supporters think they want that message sent. It is a careless and destructive one.
It isn’t bad to tell Europe’s leaders that they have lost touch with their own people and no longer seem protective of them or their nations’ longstanding political principles, as Vice President JD Vance did last week. Candor is a compliment, as they say, it implies you can take it. It isn’t bad to tell them they’ve only grudgingly paid for a fraction of their own defense and need to step up. But long history should temper your approach. We and Europe have been friends a long time. We came from them. Their blood was our starting blood. It may be quaint to note this but it’s true: We go back. You can and will have disagreements with such friends, but when you speak to them publicly it can’t be casual or without warmth. It must take the past into account, even when they don’t. Especially when they don’t.
This is a matter not only of grace but of practicality. The future will be a hard place. All the unfortunate aspects of man’s nature will be sped up and made more fateful by technology such as artificial intelligence. In that world we will need old friends. There is a speech by St. Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws . . . and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?” Replace “law” with “friend.”
We won’t easily get through the future without them. Estranging them isn’t a safe thing to do.
On Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, anyone seeing how he’s presented himself to the public the last few years would conclude with justice that he is brilliant and impulsive, has penetrating insights and arguable judgment, seems both sincere and calculating, and is trying to create something stable while loving drama too much and exciting the audience too much.
All my adult life the answer to “let’s find waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government” has been, “Whatever you find will be a rounding error, it isn’t worth the pursuit, the money is in the entitlements and defense, all else is nonsense, don’t even try.” I never thought that true and never saw it only as a question of saving money but of assuring citizens that their government can be trusted. It is heartening to see DOGE attempt reform—exciting, actually. Mr. Musk comes in and zaps bad programs here and silly spending there and suddenly the good parts of the previously more-or-less unaccountable U.S. Agency for International Development are being blended into the State Department, and the bad parts are being shuttered. This allows citizens to feel they can direct their government. Which cheers them. They didn’t know it was possible.
But judgments about the definition of good spending seem to be up to Mr. Musk and his young men, who are assumed to know fat from muscle. Do they? We don’t know. Mr. Musk may be a freedom-loving American idealist who’s deeply grateful for what our founders created and who’d give all to protect it. But then for all I know, he could be a secret operative for a Liechtenstein-based cartel. He and his underlings are political novices. There is no one Mr. Musk need answer to but Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump likes what’s playing well with the base but is changeable. As aides sighed of Richard Nixon when he became enraptured by an intellectual like Daniel Patrick Moynihan or was taken by lessons gleaned from Robert Blake’s biography of Disraeli, “the boss is in love again this week.”
Everyone knows DOGE will make mistakes, but that isn’t the point. You have to be a fool to think there won’t be dreadful mistakes with broad repercussions. To take on seemingly all parts of government at the same time is to unsettle and confuse the entire government at the same moment. That is dangerous. It was a mistake to announce going in that they’d find $2 trillion in savings. Now anything less and their foes will paint them as failures, so they’ll want to meet their target, which will increase the chance they make or recommend cuts that shouldn’t be made.
In a larger way, all the movement and action of the first month of the Trump administration means that every president after Mr. Trump will have to show wild boldness in pursuit of his aims or be called weak. Presidents can’t stand it when you call them weak, so they’ll be wild too. Rightists, you won’t like this when it comes from the left. We’ll veer dramatically back and forth.
Like Muhammad Ali, buckle up.
wsj.com |
