After years of battlefield defeats, on November 10, 1942, Winston Churchill’s resolute voice filled the Mansion House during the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon to announce the outcome of the Battle of El Alamein: “Now, however, we have a new experience. We have victory—a remarkable and definite victory. The bright gleam has caught the helmets of our soldiers, and warmed and cheered all our hearts.”
One cannot help but wonder if Republican-populists and/or MAGA supporters felt the same way upon learning of the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) revelations regarding the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) unconscionable expenditures and, subsequently, President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio’s swift shuttering of what constituted the Democrat Party’s taxpayer-subsidized, over $32 billion (2024) international and domestic political slush fund.
But USAID is not the only taxpayer-subsidized slush fund the Democrats enacted to fuel their party and, indeed, the entire political infrastructure of the left. One need only look at the multi-trillion-dollar spending spree, including bills such as the deceptively named “Inflation Reduction Act,” to understand how the then-Democrat majority and Mr. Biden skyrocketed both the federal debt and inflation for their own partisan gain at the expense of the American people.
As the unearthed revelations cascade into the avalanche that felicitously sweeps and buries USAID in the dustbin of history, one can limn the outline of the monster it created. Over the past several years, the public has become increasingly aware of how the Democrats have weaponized the police and surveillance powers of the state against their political enemies for partisan gain. Within this public awakening, the focus has been understandably upon which powers and positions the Democrats had weaponized. What DOGE has done with USAID is to commence closing the loop by investigating how the Democrats and their Deep State have weaponized government funds.
The emerging contours of USAID’s unaccountable and injurious weaponization of public funds for progressive aims are a repulsive entity using the American people’s money to wage war against Americans and our allies around the world. Using passthroughs, both internationally and domestically, USAID has foisted progressive imperialism upon our more culturally traditional nations, including the United States; interfered in elections and otherwise destabilized allies who were not leftist enough; created media echo chambers by subsidizing leftist information outlets; and even underwriting groups designated as extremist/terrorist organizations. In sum, USAID has knowingly, willfully, and deliberately abetted the undermining of America’s domestic unity, prosperity, security, and tranquility, and that of many of our allies.
Eyes welling with crocodile tears and cynically cradling the poor as props to shield their rampant malfeasance, the paymasters of USAID claim removing their control of these tens of billions of dollars will wreak havoc on indigent peoples. It will wreak havoc on USAID’s NGOs and sundry Democrat Party cohorts’ taxpayer-subsidized funding streams. But the harsh truth is that USAID’s multibillion-dollar laundry mat of passthroughs and unconscionable expenditures cheats the poor and the hungry. Every dollar USAID’s now-fired partisan political progressive hacks siphoned off for their faddish left-wing projects at home or to foment instability in an ally of America abroad was another dollar’s worth of food stolen from the mouths of starving children in a developing nation.
Perhaps it is a tender mercy that these administrative state mountebanks’ hubris renders them immune to self-awareness. For if they were capable of it, they would die of shame.
Nonetheless, these brazen zombies of the Deep State lumber into the federal courtrooms of their judicial activist cronies and beseech them to forestall the destruction of USAID, to allow them to keep their grubby, self-entitled mitts on your hard-earned money; and to persist in reigning supreme and impervious over the sovereign citizenry.
Consequently, carrying the historical analogy further, in the struggle to reassert the sovereignty of the citizenry over their servant government, by creating and directing the DOGE, President Trump has won a battle against a well-entrenched bastion of the Administrative State. But, as with the Battle for North Africa, other engagements in even more well-fortified theaters remain to be stormed.
Recognizing the hard slog ahead is not meant to diminish the present gleam of victory against the federal Leviathan or chill the warmed and cheered hearts of MAGA supporters and Republican-populists. The Battle of El Alamein was a key step in rolling back and ultimately defeating the Axis.
Thus, it is wise to also recall the caution the Prime Minister advised in the warm glow of an initial victory: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Fight on!
