The Triumvirate

Trump, Vance, Musk

The three central figures currently engaged in the reshaping of the federal government are very different people.

Trump

Trump is the most important at present, since both Vance and Musk have political power only to the extent he gives it to them. He is a very competent demagogue, as demonstrated by his winning a series of political conflicts that almost everyone expected him to lose. So far as I can tell from his history he has no political views of his own, uses ideology as a tool to get power, attention, status. Conservatives were a substantial faction unhappy with the state of the nation, with what they viewed as the political and cultural domination of the country by their opponents, hence a potential power base for him. Progressives had overplayed their hand, pushed woke ideology too far, due to face a backlash, useful as enemies. He adopted the role of conservative champion, destroyer of wokeism, borrowing details of his program most recently from Project 2025, a detailed conservative plan for how a conservative administration could restructure the federal government.

Trump’s Ukraine policy is to produce a peace for which he could claim credit, a deal that holds until at least 2028. To force Zelensky to accept he had to make it believable that he was willing to drop US support for Ukraine if Ukraine refuses to go along, and he did. To force Putin to accept he will have to make it believable that the US is willing to continue, even expand, support for Ukraine if Russia refuses to accept a peace plan.

It may work — provided that he can find a plan that both sides can accept. Unfortunately, for reasons I explored in my previous post, there may not be one.

Trump’s other high profile activities are the elimination of parts of the government that he and his supporters disapprove of, largely delegated to Musk, and tariff wars. The former makes sense both as delivering what his conservative supporters wanted and as a way of weakening his opposition. The latter is more of a puzzle.

Tariffs can make sense as a way of getting political support from the protected industry, benefiting a concentrated interest group at the expense of a dispersed one. But to do that you want tariffs on specific industries, not the sort of general tariffs Trump has largely been imposing. Tariffs make sense, for someone who does not understand the relevant economics, as way of reducing the trade deficit, benefiting the US at the cost of our trading partners. It is likely enough that Trump does not understand the relevant economics, still more likely that the voters he wants to impress do not, but that does not explain the on again/off again nature of his tariff policy.

The stated objective, with regard to Canada and Mexico, is to get them to block flows of fentanyl and illegal immigrants into the US across their borders. I don’t believe it; that is an excuse, not a reason. The other side of those borders is ours; if we cannot block them why should we expect that they can? Besides which fentanyl can be produced anywhere; Canada, judging by border seizures, is not a major source.

The most optimistic interpretation of what he is doing is that he wants to get our trading partners to do something, hopefully to lower their trade barriers, and is demonstrating the damage he can do to them if they don’t. That is possible but there is not much evidence for it. The explanation I find most likely is that Trump enjoys pushing people around and this is a way of doing it.

The personality type was described in a poem written almost forty years before Trump was born.

His feet are swift to tumult,
His hands are slow to toil,
His ears are deaf to reason,
His lips are loud in broil.
He knows no use for power
Except to show his might.
He gives no heed to judgment
Unless it prove him right.

Vance

Assuming no rupture with Trump and no failure of their administration extreme enough to break Trump’s control over his party, Vance will be the Republican nominee in 2028. He is young, handsome and smart with a beautiful and intelligent wife, is playing a minor role now but could be a major political figure in the post-Trump world. Unlike Trump he has political views of his own, not merely the desire for power. What are they?

I devoted two of my earlier posts to trying to answer that question, Vance and Revising the Republican Party. My conclusion:

The conservative movement of Bill Buckley rejected the New Deal. Vance does not. The past he wants to return to is an idealized version of America in the fifties, perhaps the sixties. The movement he wants to build rejects both the pro-market economics of the pre-Trump conservative movement and the cultural program of current progressives. He wants an America of stable marriages, views parents as more reliably committed to the future than the childless — hence the much-quoted line about childless cat ladies. One of his more intriguing proposals is that children should get votes, cast by their parents, giving a family with three children five votes.

…

The Republican party Vance wants to build looks, economically, like the Democratic party of the fifties and sixties, culturally like the inverse of the progressive, aka woke, movement.

Musk

The project the three of them are attempting is a full scale revision of the federal government. Of the three, Musk is the one who might be competent to do it. Trump’s skill is charisma, the ability to get people to pay attention to him, admire him, want to please him. That is how he got to a position from which to revise the government but it is not the skill needed to do it. Vance has demonstrated even less of the relevant abilities; his accomplishments so far are writing a very interesting book and winning a senate election

Musk, in contrast, has created two very successful firms, taken over and revised a third. None were projects on the scale of what he is now attempting but they are smaller projects of the same sort. Hence it is at least possible that, with the authority Trump has so far been willing to delegate to him, he can convert the federal government into something smaller, less expensive, better functioning, judged at least by the standards of Trump and his supporters.

He is doing it with a chain saw. That is inelegant, results in firing some people who will have to be rehired or replaced at a later stage of the process. The argument for it:

The dynamics of bureaucracies are such that wholesale creative destruction is easier than reform. (Commenter online)

He is also doing it with exaggerated claims about what horrors he has discovered and how much money he is saving, claims further inflated by Trump fans online. That is no surprise. His record in the past is of overpromising, delivering much less than he claimed — but still much more than anyone else expected.

The first test of whether he has done it this time will be government expenditure for Trump’s first year. It is a safe bet that it will not be lower by the trillion or two implied by what Musk says but even a measly two or three hundred billion would be impressive. The second test will be whether the country collapses in the next few years due to the changes.

My guess is not.

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