Try to think back, if you can, to the transition period of the Biden-Harris administration. I’m talking about the personnel decisions — and particularly the key Cabinet appointments — that the incoming administration made in the weeks after the media called the race for Joe Biden, back at the end of 2020.

Those personnel decisions were treated as non-stories. They came and went, and the media didn’t talk much about them. There wasn’t a lot of outrage or debate. Pete Buttigieg, for example, became the Transportation Secretary because he likes trains and was vaguely interested in airplanes. And he’s gay. Those were his qualifications. So they put him in charge of the Department of Transportation, which has a budget of tens of billions of dollars and oversees the nation’s railways and airports. Why not? It made sense to Democrats at the time. What’s the worst that could happen? A train carrying toxic chemicals might derail somewhere in Ohio? What are the odds of that?

And then there was the nomination of Lloyd Austin to lead the Defense Department. That was really inspiring. You see, Lloyd Austin was serving on the board of Raytheon, one of the biggest defense contractors in the world. Raytheon was paying him a lot of money. And then, without much fanfare, the Biden-Harris administration appointed Lloyd Austin to run the Pentagon. What could go wrong? Surely Lloyd Austin wouldn’t try to enrich his former colleagues in the defense industry by, say, sending billions of dollars worth of weaponry to a tiny, corrupt country in Eastern Europe. That would be unthinkable.

And then there was the appointment of someone using the name Rachel Levine — a biological male originally named Richard who decided in middle age to start wearing a dress and rebrand himself as Rachel. It made perfect sense, we were told, for a man deeply confused about the basic realities of human biology to oversee the nation’s healthcare system. Sure, he might pressure hospitals to castrate and sterilize as many children as possible. He might pose for some uncomfortable photographs with Sam Brinton, the cross-dressing nuclear waste expert and kleptomaniac who’d been terrorizing airport baggage claims all across the Eastern seaboard for years, before also being appointed for a role in the Biden Administration. But that’s the cost of human progress, the transition team told us.

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I’m going through these appointments to make a couple of points. The first point is that all of these appointments — and many others like them, including the appointment of an open-borders advocate to run the Department of Homeland Security — were grotesque. None of them should have been allowed to go through. But they did, and the country paid the predictable consequences. Biden appointed more cross dressers that we’d been used to seeing in government at that point, but otherwise his picks were exactly what we’ve come to expect. A bunch of corrupt and useless bureaucrats, who went on to do what corrupt and useless bureaucrats always do.

Thankfully, it’s clear that Donald Trump is not going to follow that typical strategy. Donald Trump’s incoming administration is already unlike any other in American history. This is a transition team that’s making a concerted effort to select competent, independent Cabinet officials — people who aren’t self-interested cronies, or morons who are selected on the basis of identity politics. He’s picking people who are actually competent and who might actually advance the agenda that the American people voted for. Imagine that.

Let’s start with one of the selections that was announced last night. Donald Trump revealed that Pete Hegseth, a Bronze Star recipient who served nearly two decades in the military — including in Iraq and Afghanistan — will be nominated as Secretary of Defense.

Hegseth is most recognizable at the moment as a Fox News host, where he often advocates on behalf of veterans. He’s also used his platform to outline changes that, in his view, need to be made to the military immediately. Watch:

This is all common-sense stuff. The overwhelming majority of countries don’t allow women in combat roles, for obvious reasons. And no, the military shouldn’t be teaching its soldiers about “white rage,” nor should the Pentagon be focused on recruiting girl bosses or “diverse” applicants. That strategy isn’t working. The military is now regularly missing its recruitment goals primarily because they’ve gone out of their way to alienate white men for political reasons. As a result, our military is much smaller than China’s. Morale is terrible. We’re constantly losing war games, as Hegseth pointed out. And making matters worse, our military leaders are clearly inept, as evidenced by the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

With this track record, the absolute last person you’d want to pick for the job of Defense Secretary is another Lloyd Austin. The Lloyd Austins of the world are the ones who created the very situation that Hegseth was talking about in the clip. That’s why you need someone who’s motivated and equipped to make some radical changes. You want someone who knows what it’s like to be a soldier in a warzone, and who hasn’t been corrupted by his connections to the military-industrial complex. In short, you want someone like Pete Hegseth.

As you’d expect, Democrats don’t see it that way. They lost their minds when Trump briefly paused the flow of military weapons to Ukraine, and now they’re losing their minds because Pete Hegseth might spurn the defense industry, too. Elizabeth Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, was particularly enraged. She was sneering last night, along with a lot of her colleagues. She wrote: “A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense. I lead the Senate military personnel panel. All three of my brothers served in uniform. I respect every one of our servicemembers. Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.”

So right away, the woman who pretended to be an Indian tries to dismiss Hegseth as a “weekend co-host.” She completely ignores his military service, his ideas, and his advocacy for veterans. We’re supposed to believe that, if Hegseth had served on the board of Raytheon, he would somehow be vastly more equipped for the job. We apparently want Defense Secretaries who are bureaucrats or defense contractors. Because that has obviously worked out so well over the past three decades.

And in the context of a second Trump administration, the criticisms of Pete Hegseth make even less sense. Recall that, under the first Trump administration, the Pentagon actively sabotaged Trump’s policy objectives. Our envoy to Syria has admitted this. It’s one of the most incredible admissions ever printed, but it never got much attention. The envoy stated that officials in the first Trump administration were, “always playing shell games” in order to hide the actual number of U.S. troops in Syria from Trump.” That’s an actual quote — “shell games.” In other words, they were lying to the commander in chief. Trump wanted troops to leave Syria, and they told him the troops were gone. And it wasn’t true.

People should’ve been put on trial for that. But it just faded from memory. Given that background, you can understand why — this time around — Trump wants someone he can actually depend upon. He wants to work with people he can trust. That’s the single most important quality that a Cabinet pick can have. And that’s very obvious to Trump now, after what he experienced in his first term.

But Democrats are still going to resist this nomination anyway, for reasons that they can’t even articulate. They just know that it would be a disaster for them if an outsider took control of the Defense Department. 

That’s why one of CNN’s hosts tried to push back on Scott Jennings’ arguments for Hegseth last night. Watch:

 

For starters, it’s pretty amusing — as Jennings points out — for television pundits to attack Hegseth for being a “TV host,” when they’re all television personalities too. Either being on television makes you an idiot, or it doesn’t. And if it does, then all of these people should quit their jobs now, before CNN closes down and fires them anyway (which appears more likely to happen with each passing day).

And then the anchor says that civilians give the orders in the military, which is obviously true. But it’s the Pentagon — which is also run by civilians — that has the job of carrying out those orders. And as Jennings pointed out, the Pentagon has repeatedly failed to do its job. They were wrong about the spy balloon and what it was doing. They were wrong about the logistics of the Afghanistan pullout, which resulted in the deaths of American servicemembers. They couldn’t even build a pier properly. So what exactly is the argument for keeping these kinds of people in control of the Defense Department? How could we possibly do any worse than they’ve been doing?

That’s a point that Tom Homan, the incoming border czar, just made on Fox News. He was asked whether he was worried about having the title of “border czar,” given that Kamala Harris has done everything she can to run away from that title. Here’s how Homan responded:

🚨 HOST: "The last person who was 'border czar' didn't want to be called border czar. You're proud of it, right?"

HOMAN: "I'm going to look like a genius. Because when you follow up failure you can't help but succeed." 😂 lmao pic.twitter.com/fyCbWbXqTs

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) November 11, 2024

“I’m going to look like a genius. Because when you follow up failure you can’t help but succeed.” 

That pretty much sums up the entire transition so far.

We’re so used to administration officials who lie to us — who try to use emotional blackmail and manipulation — that it’s pretty much impossible to be disappointed by the incoming Trump administration at this point. Just by demonstrating that they don’t care about the media’s manipulation and false narratives, they’re already well ahead of their predecessors.

It’s also clear that the federal bureaucracy, which functioned to undermine Trump at every possible opportunity, isn’t going to exist in the same form the second time around. Last night Trump officially announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be running the Department of Government Efficiency, (DOGE). Trump said the goal of this new department will be to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” He said they’ll be done within two years — what he called the “perfect gift to America on the 250th Anniversary of The Declaration of Independence.”

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The task of “dismantling government bureaucracy” should be the number-one focus of Trump’s second term. And Elon Musk is just the guy to do it. He showed up to Twitter and immediately axed 80% of the staff. Everyone in the media said it would destroy the company. They said the whole site would crash and be forgotten. And yet, here we are. Two years later, the place is running better than ever. The problem in the federal government is like Twitter, multiplied by a million.

Unlike every other company on the planet, the federal government doesn’t undergo layoffs. It just grows and grows, year after year. It siphons more and more money from taxpayers, without any accountability. These bureaucrats call themselves “public servants,” but really the public is serving them. We’re the ones who go to work every day to pay their salaries. And what exactly do they do for us? Do we really need these people to spend tens of thousands of dollars on “gender equity” in places like Honduras? Do we need them to develop new bat coronaviruses in secret labs in Wuhan? Do we need them to use our money to subsidize some of the most useless college degrees in existence? Do we need them to conduct fraudulent criminal trials of the leading presidential candidate? Do we need them to issue insane new regulations banning the sale of gas-powered vehicles?

Of course we don’t. We’ve never needed any of that.

What we have needed, for a long time now, is for the government to get out of the way of human progress. They need to stop spending and printing money as if it’s endless. They need to do what every American in the private sector has to do, which is to justify their salaries. They need to explain how exactly they’re serving the public, instead of the other way around.

This is a reckoning that would’ve been unthinkable if Kamala Harris had won this election. We’d be dealing with another parade of useless, BIPOC-transgender-whatever appointees who exist only to check boxes. Now things are different. And giving Musk and Ramaswamy the hacksaw with a directive to go to town on the federal bureaucracy means that maybe, for the first time ever, some real and substantial cuts will actually be made. No Republican president in modern times has ever actually done anything to cut the size of government. Much less have they taken any steps to gut the federal bureaucracy and get rid of all the useless people and their useless departments and programs. In fact, Republicans have only contributed to the problem.

There is good reason to think that this time will be different. Trump has picked the two right guys for the job. Which is why the federal bureaucrats are panicking, and their panic will only become more unhinged in the days ahead.

For everyone else — for people who actually earn their living — it’s a time to celebrate something that’s never happened before in modern American history. The behemoth federal bureaucracy is about to get what it deserves. What’s been coming to it for decades.

If Trump fulfills his promises and simply lets the people he’s hiring do the jobs they’ve been hired to do, it will mean ultimately that America becomes a freer, safer, more prosperous place. If this is the “fascism” they warned us about, it can’t come soon enough.