Things are getting wild and woolly in the second Trump administration. After a slam-bang six weeks of nonstop wins, things feel like they are starting to slow down just a hair. The enemy has thrown everything it has at Trump, from bogus lawsuits to crying government flunkies lamenting that their make-work jobs are going away. That hasn’t worked. None of it worked. They thought they had him with the huge fuss out of that ill-mannered little corruptocrat from Ukraine getting booted out of the White House until he came crawling to The Donald on his belly like a reptile. Combine that with the stock market dropping a bit – even 2000 points isn’t what it used to be when the markets in the 40,000s – as well as with the Epstein records fiasco, and there’s a sense that things are bogging down.
Well, things were always going to slow down. Don’t be surprised. That is the way of all things.
In war, we call it “friction,” the accumulated obstacles, tangents, problems, and challenges that draw away your attention and focus, and, if not managed, will eventually make your campaign grind to a halt. Along with friction is something known as the fog of war. You can’t know everything that’s going on. That’s just impossible. So, you are always operating in a kind of haze, trying to know as much as you can but never having a perfect picture of the battlefield. That’s what’s facing the Trump administration right now, both friction and the fog of war. But that doesn’t mean we’re doomed.
After all, these phenomena are affecting our opponents, too.
The Trump administration has been doing a very, very good job of dealing with these inevitable realities. It came in with a very strong plan and a very aggressive focus. They bulldozed right through a bunch of the friction early on. Do you remember every regime media outlet was screaming about how Trump is a fascist, or about the poor government workers, or about how Elon Musk was going to steal your Social Security number? We ignored it. We bashed right through it, laughing and pointing and not allowing it to slow us down. The lawsuits were another attempt at friction, but we were ready for those. The pleadings that I’ve seen responding to the outrageous and bizarre leftist legal initiatives have been outstanding. The Trump administration has long been thinking about these fights, and it has, in fact, picked some of them. It’s turned friction into an advantage. By the time Trump is done with all these lawsuits, you’re not going see district courts with the ability to do national injunctions on minor issues, nor will they be able to micromanage the executive in the way they’ve been trying to. But, in the short term, it will be a hassle. They will stop us from doing some of the things we want to do, at least for a little while. And that’s OK. Again, friction is part of the fight. It’s not something that can be just waved away or dispensed with. There’s no magical formula for keeping the enemy from getting a vote and trying to stop you from doing what you need to do. The only way through is through. You have to fight every day.
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The Trump administration has done a very good job of that, particularly with the DOGE people who leverage technology to open the roof and let the sunshine in. Understand what’s happening here. We have a 20th-century establishment attempting to resist a 21st-century assault. When I say 20th-century establishment, what I mean is the processes, procedures, and technology that the deep state uses to obscure its actions and retain power are all old. The Deep State is designed for a time when, if you wanted to find something out, you physically had to walk into a basement, hunt down the right banker box, and go through 5000 paper documents to maybe find the truth. Of course, that made the truth easy to hide. That made everything opaque. It was just too tough to figure out exactly what was happening, which was a huge advantage to the bureaucrats. Moreover, even if you did find something, under the 20th-century model, the regime media would simply refused to cover it. You had no way of publicizing anything outrageous you managed to uncover. It was a pretty good system – for them. It worked pretty well to hide things during the last century.
But this is a new century. This is a new day, and the same rules don’t apply. The problem for the 20th-century bureaucracy is that it can’t hide from 21st-century algorithms. Modern data analysis techniques uncover and reveal the truth that the bureaucrats used to be able to keep hidden, usually are the chokepoint of the payment system. Now, even regular citizens can go online and uncover Ecuadorian transgender mine troop funding. That kind of ridiculous spending is impossible to defend, but the Democrats have to defend it. Under the 20th-century model, they used to be able to ignore it. No one would find out about it, or if they did, it wouldn’t go anywhere. But now, the regime media is not the only media. We have our own media. Sure, there are scams all over social media, but everybody knows about them. They can’t hide their pinko agenda anymore. Don’t underestimate how devastating this change is to our opponents.
Understand that the regime media can only focus on one thing at a time, and last weekend it was focusing on Donald Trump being insufficiently willing to spend American money in blood on some internecine Slavic slugfest. Putting aside that our elite very much misunderstands where Americans come out on subsidizing arrogant foreign deadbeats, the regime media only has the bandwidth for one Trumpian outrage at a time. This outrage isn’t that outrageous to normal people, but even as it’s happening, there are all sorts of other things going on in the background that they cannot cover. Lawsuits are getting beaten. New America First officials are getting put into place. Bureaucrats are getting fired. Leftist funding spigots are getting turned off. A lot is happening outside the spotlight.
They thought, for whatever reason, they were winning because of this fight over Ukraine. Whether they are or not isn’t the issue – the issue is that there are a whole bunch of other things going on that they don’t even know about. Yes, our enemies are victims of the fog of war as well. They aren’t seeing the entire picture. For every one place they believe they’re having success, there were a dozen places where they’re losing ground.
We have a tough fight ahead of us. Luckily, we anticipated it. We understood there was always going to be friction. We understood it would inevitably slow us down, but the question isn’t whether we’re being slowed down but whether we’re allowing it to stop us. We’re not. We’re trying to maintain awareness through the fog of war, even as our opponents forget that the fog of war exists.
They are old and decrepit and trying desperately to salvage an obsolete reality. We’re fresh and new and focused. My money is on us.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!
