I'll admit it up front - I don't like Trump. I consider him a con artist - charming in his way, sure, but out for number one at all costs and damn the collateral damage. Having said that, there is no denying he is popular right now. Laz pulled an analysis of this:
The New Battle Lines: Elitists Vs. Us, which I think is spot on, so read it (after this, of course!).
Unfortunately, the conclusion is, well, flawed.
It assumes that who is in the White House matters. They don't and have not now for nearly 100 years.
Being President has it's perks. You are the face of the country to the rest of the world, your power (provided you ignore such pesky things as the Law and the Constitution) is immense and you have not only the right but the obligation to surround yourself in government with people you feel comfortable with and appoint judges to the Courts who you see eye to eye with. Seems like a pretty sweet gig, doesn't it?
It must have been a revelation to Obama the day he sat himself down behind the big desk, got out his little pen and his little phone and found out the hard way that his whole "Hope and Change" schtick should more accurately have been called "Hopeless to Make Changes."
To take a small diversion into biology, consider any living thing. Pick anything at all - a flower, a sea slug, an E. coli bacterium. Being as this is the internet, you probably picked a cat, so here is a picture for you to consider:
All living things have attributes in common: they eat, grow, breed, have a will to survive. They also obey a fairly unknown universal law - the law of least effort. Any living thing will use the minimum effort needed to achieve it's goals. Cave fish don't bother growing eyes because they'd be a waste of energy. Male bees detach their penises after a successful mating to block other males access and ensure their energy hasn't been wasted. Cats domesticated humans to save them the bother of growing opposable thumbs. You get the idea.
Organisations follow the same laws as living organisms. They eat tax money. They expand constantly. They will sometimes pod off a sub-agency. They are virtually immortal. And they really, really, really put the Law of Least Effort at the core of their existence.
So, say Mr. Trump gets swept in to the Oval Office on a tide of pissed off voters and bad jokes about his hair. His first task is to decapitate the various agencies the Executive Branch is ostensibly in charge of and replace said heads with ones more to his liking. He'll expect results and rapidly, as he is not exactly renowned for his patience. Nothing will change. Sure, new policies will come into effect, edicts will be given, motivational speakers or experts on whatever management style is flavor of the week will see an upturn in business - and all those changes, unless they make the life of the agency as an organism easier, will be ignored until they die a quiet and lonely death.
The only way to make any fundamental change in government is to completely destroy the existing apparatus and build afresh using new people.
Hey - you guys did it once, a couple hundred years back.
Up for it again?
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