It has been highly entertaining and heartening to watch the reforms embarked upon by Team Trump this past month, although not for the minority that voted for his opponent who has maintained a steady rage on social and legacy media since things actually started getting done. Team Trump has kept up a relentless momentum, with acts ranging from barring the 51 conspirators associated with the Hunter Biden laptop saga from federal buildings, to granting amnesty to the January 6 protestors, to demanding to see what the US government has actually spent money on over the past 80 years, to telling a few home truths to their European friends and withdrawing from deeply corrupted global institutions (the WHO) and international scams (the Paris Accords). They are shining a light on places, mainly within their own borders, long kept dark for all the wrong reasons.

(Article by Gigi Foster, Paul Frijters, Michael Baker republished from Brownstone.com)

They have also played their cards cleverly and showed immaculate preparation. They have paced the revelations, strategic insults, big power moves, and promises of more revelations such that they have grabbed the headlines every day and created enthusiasm among their supporters for what is coming next. This enthusiastic support has been crucial in getting Trump’s cabinet picks through the Senate in what otherwise could have been a series of typical swamp-monster-infested, forever-delayed affairs. Facing the prospect of wrath from Trump-positive voters has made it impossible for the Republicans on Capitol Hill to do anything but fall in line, yielding a crucial victory for Team Trump as it shows they can get things done.

Ignoring the many lawfare attempts to prevent Trump from actually doing what a US President is supposed to do – lead the executive – has also projected strength and stoked fear among opponents who have been seen to search the internet frantically for terms like ‘statute of limitations.’ Announcements of more juicy reveals to come, ranging from the release of the Epstein list to revelations about the CIA’s covert operations, promise that the momentum will keep going for a while yet. We are seeing the high point of the power of Trump’s second administration: they can now do things deemed unthinkable for the past 50 years, including threatening to invade Denmark to wrestle Greenland from it, and deleting entire government departments. They have established themselves as a force to be reckoned with.

Yet, in terms of truly cleaning up institutions, it is very early days. The Pentagon, the FBI, and the CIA are still extant and populated by thousands of staffers suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Big Pharma has lost the battle to bar RFK, Jr. from the top government health position, but has not yet seen its products banned or its executives arrested. Better yet for Big Pharma, the announced war on the Mexican drug cartels is a government-sponsored thorn in the side of one of their biggest competitors. Similarly, the US arms manufacturers will have been very happy to see Trump bullying the European allies into spending more on their own defence, which is code for ‘buying more US-supplied armaments.’ Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US Department of Defense has set records for sales of weaponry to the EU, and it is keen to do even more business.

In short, Team Trump is yet to truly win against the forces that viciously went after Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and the others before the elections. They have these forces on the backfoot, but they are not yet knocked out. In the EU and Australia, where we live, disinformation still proliferates daily on Ukraine and the latest flu. Musk and Trump are still depicted in mainstream media stories as fascist, anti-democratic dictators who have more in common with the leaders of Nazi Germany than those of an enlightened democracy. The EU is offering safe refuge for the American TDS crowd and its supporting billionaires, although much to the chagrin of the majority of US voters who had a good laugh when Taylor Swift was booed at the Super Bowl, the latter have mostly just whined and threatened without actually departing. Much of the propaganda machinery that the US was so instrumental in building up is still functioning, ready to destroy Team Trump at the first opportunity.

What more radical steps do we hope Team Trump has in store in the coming months, apart from the institutional, health-specific, and forward-looking advice we were trotting out in these pages in the years leading up to the election? We see three areas of opportunity.

Opportunity 1: Overhaul the Security Establishment

While Trump’s fight with the Justice Department may grab the headlines, it is with the well-organised guys with guns at the US security agencies that the main battle will be fought that we believe will decide the personal survival of Team Trump’s members. Here, the essential choice is between internal reforms or new growth. Team Trump can either try to reform the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon by getting rid of some people and appointing others, or they can set up new security agencies that start from nothing and gradually take over the useful tasks of the existing agencies, leading to the abolition of the old ones by the end of Trump’s second four years.

Growing new agencies from scratch is far easier and more assured of success than reforming the old ones, because as long as one keeps the existing agencies, one’s opponents have a place to hide and bide their time, kept safe by thousands of little deals and blackmail-ready information they have on file about the people working there and at places closely related to the agencies. Releasing the Epstein list and other such revelations is far more useful as ammunition for getting support for new agencies than for helping to clean out the old ones, because the list is but the tip of the iceberg: in a mafioso environment, there is ‘mutual dirt’ on everyone because all mafiosi are at risk if there are ‘clean’ people among them.

Achieving successful internal reform while retaining (some of) the same people would be far more difficult in the case of the US security agencies than it was in the case of, say, Twitter, where there was no reason for Twitter insiders to keep lots of dirt on the technicians who were actually needed to run Twitter. Because of this, Musk had a core group of untainted nerds (often with significant experience in the organisation) upon whose shoulders to build his improved Twitter (X). Things are very different in a government security environment where corruption survives by compromising everyone. Those there the longest are likely to have the fullest closets of skeletons and the most bags of dirt on others, and any new workers joining such a corrupt team will be compromised swiftly.

We fear Team Trump believes they can ‘do a Twitter’ on the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon. So far, it is not even the oldest and dirtiest federal workers, but the most recently hired ones, whom DOGE is getting rid of first.

It is far preferable to set up a CIA 2.0, FBI 2.0, and Pentagon 2.0, staff them with trusted entities who hire total outsiders to grow the new organisations, and have them gradually learn the trade and take over useful tasks from the old entities, which then get the axe. This can happen concurrently with a supposed attempt at internal reforms of the existing agencies, using those internal reforms as a means of subduing the opposition while training their replacements.

Opportunity 2: Get Serious about Redesigning Health

Far less important than how they handle the security agencies will be how Team Trump addresses the stranglehold of Big Pharma and other vested interests in health, education, and the media. Team Trump might not be truly interested in unravelling these Gordian Knots – they may instead be watching to see whether big bribes are forthcoming from those vested interests to keep things as they are. These bribes might include help in subduing the pesky security agencies, whose demise is far more important than is achieving real reform in other areas for the personal survival of Trump and his team. This could take the form of Big Pharma bosses ensuring the cooperation of Pharma stooges within the political establishment when Trump’s team makes a move against the security establishment. We do not know.

If RFK, Jr. and others are serious about taking on the vested interests that are keeping Americans unhealthy, there are good ways and bad ways to go about it. Hearings and inquiries are a good way to keep opponents on the back foot, keep one’s own supporters entertained, and create political momentum for real change. Indeed, one could set up a few more than already planned to really set the tongues wagging. To keep the captured and now useless ‘medical scientists’ busy, for example, one could launch entertaining investigations into the medical journals that openly sided against Trump and the American population during Covid times.

Yet, one would have to be very naïve to think that a corrupted Deep State ‘health’ system is going to come up with detailed blueprints for how to dismantle itself and kneecap its key corporate backers. Hearings and inquiries are for show. They are not how you come up with solutions. We hope Team Trump already has true reform ideas up its sleeve whose blueprints we have simply not yet seen.

Because the vested interests in health are so rich and deeply entrenched, we recommend that true reform efforts pursue a dual track of disrupting current industries through unleashing market chaos while simultaneously offering and growing a core health package consisting of the most cost-effective parts of the health system.

Consider first how to cause market chaos and set the industry against itself, neutering its ability to halt real reforms.

One way to unleash raw market forces in health is to abolish lists of approved medicines, tests, and procedures, taking away the legal protection of the industry against everyone else who claims to provide health solutions. Lift all laws against quackery and all requirements that some accredited body of insiders must sign off on bringing anything ‘health-related’ to American shelves. That will open the floodgates to a huge array of alternative health products and service providers who will eagerly compete for customers, from Germanic medicine approaches to counter cancer, to traditional Chinese medicine to counter mental health problems.

Hospitals, insurance companies, and Big Pharma would suddenly face an entirely different competitive field with new opportunities and new dangers, setting them all up against each other. This can be set in motion virtually overnight by presidential decree, even invoking non-discrimination clauses to break open the deals that insurance companies have made with Big Pharma, hospitals, and doctors. One can sell it as getting rid of red tape and anti-competitive regulations, which it is. Similarly, one can get rid of medical liability laws which have led to overmedication and overtesting. Let the old adage ‘caveat emptor’ (buyer beware) apply to health, just as it does to computers.

In the meantime, one identifies the most useful bits of the health system and lets those bits grow. Family physicians, cheap, generic essential medicines, basic surgeries, clean water, garbage collection, community sports, and a few other elements are pretty good things to keep around and galvanise into a modest core health system, which could be private or public. One treats, and presents to the public, all the rest that is marketed as ‘health’ as an unregulated entertainment industry and sits back to watch what true market forces will discover.

We see no indication at present that Team Trump is gearing up for real reforms of this nature. They are stuck in bureaucratic fantasies like ‘evidence-led medicine’ (meaning ‘insider-approved treatments only’) and ‘expert health reform groups’ (meaning ‘a source of the problem being asked to lead the solution’).

Opportunity 3: Get Serious about Redesigning Education, the Media, and More

The mooted abolition of the Education Department is more promising than any action we have seen so far on Team Trump’s health reform agenda, but we are yet to see the radical reforms needed in education. Here, as in health, much of the problem is embodied and entrenched in very wealthy private charities and well-organised interest groups. Going after those bodies requires brutality and stealth, plus a willingness to throw the whole sector into chaos to create the conditions and smokescreens that allow real reform to happen.

A simple low-hanging-fruit reform is to walk back all regulations requiring accredited education for jobs in government. That would unleash a storm both inside the government bureaucracy and inside the education industry that is currently protected by accrediting mechanisms. Let the accredited educating bodies (state universities, rich private universities, and everything accredited in between) compete with newer, non-accredited private educational institutions on merit, while making sure citizens understand that ‘caveat emptor’ now applies in education so they need to do their homework (no pun intended) and directly examine quality as consumers.

While one is at it, one can go after the huge endowments that give many existing educational institutions an unfair advantage, simply by declaring any endowment above a minimum amount a form of anti-competitive market rigging, which it is. If need be, one can force the endowed bodies to spend their endowments quickly, which as a bonus would boost the economy.

We recommend a similar ‘create chaos in the establishment while planting the seeds of new organisations’ strategy for reform elsewhere. We hope for example to see reform efforts in the media sector before Trump’s presidential term ends. Still, it makes sense not to start with this sector, but to see what happens organically in the near term first, both to enable the establishment media players to hang themselves with the strings of pearls they are clutching with ever more desperation, and to provide a stomping ground on which new channels may start to prove themselves.

We look forward to the coming entertainment that has already been promised, and we hope that Team Trump has well-worked-out plans up its sleeve to deliver on its promises. These are exciting times in which we sincerely hope our American brethren show the rest of the world how it’s done, providing a much-needed example for those interested in tackling the similarly huge messes in Europe and Australia.

Read more at: Brownstone.com