The ‘Energetic Executive’
Donald Trump is tirelessly tackling many of the nation’s problems, and people are cheering.
“Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70. I’d say that depends on the focus of that energy.
Donald Trump is only busy on days that end in “y.” In other words, he’s the polar opposite of AWOL Joe Biden, who was never fit to be president but whose last months in office were punctuated by scandalized media stories about how incapacitated he really was.
The New York Post reports that Trump’s “days start at 6 a.m. and often end close to midnight over small convivial dinners in the White House with assorted dignitaries.” What a contrast with Biden, whose days began around 10 a.m. and finished up by 4 p.m. or so.
It takes many hours each day to accomplish all the things Trump has in his first three weeks. “We have a country to save,” says White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Indeed, Trump has signed roughly 500 executive orders, actions, proclamations, directives, etc., aimed at doing just that, and it seems like every one of them comes with a press conference. Remember when Biden couldn’t be bothered to answer a single question after a few disjointed remarks every blue moon?
Yesterday, Sunday, ended in “y,” so Trump was busy again. He flew from Florida to Louisiana to reach Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans, and while traversing the body of water to our south aboard Air Force One, he signed an executive order officially renaming it the Gulf of America.
Trump became the first president to attend a Super Bowl (he left at halftime), and he greeted several players and families while he was there. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and his wife Brittany were rumored to be Trump supporters. Patrick’s mom Randi left no doubt, wearing a MAGA hat earlier this season. “She’s a Trump fan,” Trump said of Brittany after visiting the family suite before the game. “She’s a MAGA fan, so I happened to love her, but she’s a great person.” Chiefs defensive star Chris Jones was also spotted eagerly seeking out Trump for a warm handshake on the sidelines before the game.
“It’s always cool to be able to play in front of a sitting president,” said Patrick Mahomes pregame, “someone that is at the top position in our country.” Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce said it would be a “great honor.” Trump picked the Chiefs to win the game.
Alas, it wasn’t enough. As a Chiefs fan since before Taylor Swift was born, I had to endure a horrendous blowout loss to Joe Biden’s favorite team, the Philadelphia Eagles. It was like one last stab from the political grave for Biden. His supporters in Philly proceeded to violently riot and cause mayhem as they do, win or lose, after big games.
The last time the Eagles won the Super Bowl, in 2018, several of the players took shots at President Trump and refused to attend the traditional White House ceremony. Trump ended up canceling it. This year may be different, but maybe not. Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts was decidedly more cool toward the president’s attendance than his Chiefs counterpart: “He’s welcome to do what he wants.”
Politics makes strange bedfellows, of course. Trump got a raucous cheer from the crowd when he was shown on screen, while Swift was booed during her turn on the Jumbotron. The singer, who is dating Kelce, issued a short, perfunctory, and seemingly requisite endorsement of Kamala Harris last summer. And, well, “the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”
“The only one that had a tougher night than the Kansas City Chiefs was Taylor Swift,” Trump wrote on social media after the game. “She got BOOED out of the Stadium. MAGA is very unforgiving!”
Anyway, back to Trump’s other duties: At 3 p.m., Fox News aired his pre-Super Bowl interview with Bret Baier — you know, the softball, watched-by-millions interview that Biden skipped both of his last two years. Yet that interview had plenty of substance, too. I’ll focus on just one particular part.
Naturally, the subject turned to the eye-popping success of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by Elon Musk. “I’m going to tell him very soon … to go check the Department of Education,” Trump told Baier. “He’s going to find the same thing” as he’s found in other wasteful agencies like USAID. “Then I’m going to go into the military. Let’s check the military. We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse, and the people elected me on that.” He added that “the people want me to find” the waste.
No wonder Democrats are panicking.
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has echoed Trump’s call to eliminate the Department of Education. As for Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee to serve in that role in his second administration, he said, “I want her to put herself out of a job.”
While the DOE is the smallest Cabinet agency, the Pentagon is arguably the world’s biggest bureaucracy. It has failed an audit for seven years running, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says that’s going to change. “We are going to focus heavily to ensure that at a bare minimum, by the end of four years, the Pentagon passes a clean audit,” he told DOD employees last week. “I believe we are accountable for every dollar we spend and every dollar of waste we find or redundancy is a dollar we can invest somewhere else.”
With so much meaningful success already in his second term, it’s no wonder Trump also told Baier, “I try and walk off sometimes without dancing and I can’t. I have to dance.”
