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If we're doing electoral politics culture war, how about the news out of Ohio?
For those not paying too much attention there's a fairly competitive race going on for Ohio governor between Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. On Twitter yesterday Walter Curt, whose biography describes him as the State Director of the Conservative Caucus of Ohio, posted this video. The video features one Donna Arthur, Amy Acton's mother, who says the following:
That's a pretty powerful ad! Getting a candidate's mother to come out against them like that. Acton's campaign had their own response prepared, of course.
Those are some pretty explosive allegations! Perhaps Acton's mother's opinions are not very reliable if Acton was removed from her custody at age 12 and Donna chose her rapist husband over her daughter. As best I can tell, the allegations are true. National Review alleges to have reviewed documents showing one Cledith Arthur was charged with having sexual contact with Acton while married to Donna. Donna has her own criminal history as well, with a conviction for theft by deception and accusations of animal abuse. Interestingly the Huffington Post dug up another 2020 interview with Donna from Operation Rescue. According to that interview:
...
It seems to be Donna's own testimony that her husband was arrested for sexual abuse of Action and Donna and her husband skipped town while on bond to avoid any kind of trial.
Journalists naturally reached out to Ramaswamy's campaign for comment, and they said:
On the one hand, it's hard for me to see how one goes forward with the ad above knowing the full story. If the question is to be one of credibility I am not sure I trust Acton's mother, whom she has not spoken with for almost 50 years and who chose her rapist husband over Acton, above Acton herself. Especially if she has her own criminal convictions for specifically fraud-adjacent behavior.
On the other hand, how did you not know this information? As best I can tell it took the National Review and Huffington Post less than a day to get their hands on the primary legal documents detailing the dispute. The campaign's own statement references the 2020 interview, in which Donna admits the sexual abuse allegations and discusses their leaving town ahead of a trial. I guess the hope is voters see the ad but don't dig any further into the situation or context?
MAGA was pillaged from 2 sides in 2024 - the technocrats and the neocons; The technocrats, were a mix of recently politically homeless 'elites', with a sense of social liberalism, and economic conservatism (to a point), and mostly anti-woke (some of course, had been instrumental in enabling woke). They cozied up to Trump and Trumpism in a variety of ways, but in reality are a mix of opportunistic and somewhat aligned politically. Basically all were Obama liberals, and would have been quite to the left of Clinton.
Vivek is the worst and most transparently slimy of this crowd, and boy isn't it great to see his grift collapse. Here's a guy who's presidentail campaign was a super strained argument that he was an even bigger Trump ally than Trump himself, and relied on word games like "God is real" as a major campaign plank, to appeal to Christians, while simultaneously asking them to agree with it in a form that was transparently a unitarian platitude. Point being, tortured epistomological games worded in ways meant to trick the dumb voters is neither new, nor successful trick of Vivek's.
His Governorship run is just a leftover plate spinning from when early in Trump II it looked like the technocrats had won. Elon had DOGE, Vance came from Thiel, SV had trump's ear... The neocons had attached themselves to DeSantis (who, was an otherwise viable actually America First, populist conservative successor), and helped sink in by attaching their stink to him, while he went up totally unprepared to skip Trump in line.
But alas, DOGE was a failure, Vance turned out to be more MAGA than SV (yay), and the neocons won the current administartion in the end with Iran; Vivek is a dying gasp of the silicon plot.
At some point I think this is worthy of a larger conversation. I'm of the contrarian opinion (I know it's contrarian) that DOGE succeeded. Massive federal layoffs, ongoing deregulation. The gutting of USAID was significant. The actual DOGE employees all got assimilated into other departments or projects and have mostly all become more powerful. DOGE's successor program Tech Force is quietly achieving a lot of the same goals without attracting almost any attention.
My supposition is that most of the "DOGE failed" narrative is pushed by a liberal media and Republican MAGA critics who want it to have failed, while the actual people involved are fairly satisfied with the work they were able to do and very satisfied to continue doing the same work under other names with almost no scrutiny because "DOGE failed".
More than this, DOGE was the Trump 2.0 administration's opening move to tame the bureaucracy that had been one of the cornerstones of the Trump 1.0 'Resistance.' It wasn't just the downsizing of large parts of the bureaucracy, but who took the buyouts, and why.
The USAID takedown was a not-subtle shot across the bow of the largely non-legislatively-defined executive branch what had existed more by convention/inertia than as a statutory-defined structure. The instigating incident where USAID leaders tried to physically stop USAID from accessing facilities and classified information was practically tailor made for the most Trump-favorable legal resolution on established American national security law- that the US President is the ultimate authority of executive branch (classified) information, and that no one beneath the president could overrule the president on accessing the president's information. (The exception to this- US nuclear secrets- are not the president's information, but rather covered by acts of congress.)
The USAID takedown demonstrated that the administration could, and would, take physical custody of US federal government information systems, and that there was no real legal recourse against it. Various inside-the-fed resistance activities from the Trump 1.0 period, such as the national-security channel coordination used in the Russiagate abuses, or the 'fortify the election' meetings that were bragged about after post-Trump-1, or the Pentagon subverting directives to withdraw from Syria, were not going to stay hidden inside federal servers. Similarly, the DOGE requirement that employees justify what they did that week- even taken over by the Departments at DOGE's expense- had a similar effect of demonstrating that federal employees could be required to provide information on their activities.
There was more to the downsizing than just that, of course. The whole DOGE campaign read like a pressure campaign leading up to the downsizing like out of a business 'how to make organizational change' text. But the people most likely to take the buyouts included the people most able to see the writing on the wall about executive branch compliance efforts, and could see the risk to themselves for past or potentially current opposition.
In this framing, the success of DOGE has little to do with DOGE as an organization, or even counter-corruption. It has more to do with changing how, and whether, the executive branch follows presidential directive. In Trump 1.0, it wasn't exactly uncommon for the framing to be that 'the adults in the room' would limit what Trump would do. That wasn't just a matter of secretary-level appointments. It also is far less a factor in Trump 2.0.
It's fine and fair to not like that. It is harder to argue that more bureaucratic insurgency in your favor is a more efficient government organization.
This is an important part. Everyone is interpreting DOGE as if it was this one-off endeavor that can be judged on its own terms. As far as the admin is concerned it was just phase one. There were some big successes and some big failures and a lot of lessons learned. Now they're on phase two (or three, or whatever). There are a lot of internal debates about how to proceed. There are a lot of insiders who would even agree with my analysis and who openly talk of DOGE "failing". But on the whole I don't think the DOGE mission really finished. History will see the entirety of Trump's term and judge everything as one continuous effort.
For example, there's the question of fraud. Elon made some big gobsmacking headline-grabbing allegations of fraud that everyone eventually discredited as hyperbole. He made different statements at different times so it's hard to judge what exactly to even discuss. At one point, he claimed that there were $50 Billion in fraudulent payments made annually by the federal government. At another point he estimated $233B-$521B, which is apparently based on a GAO figure he might have misinterpreted. I believe at one point he claimed the entire federal deficit could be solved by prosecuting fraud and abuse, which would be somewhere on the order of
$2T. Everybody agreed that all of this was preposterous and that Elon's vast exaggerations poisoned the well on enthusiasm for DOGE.But if I go to the White House fraud report page (www.whitehouse.gov/fraud), they are currently claiming to have stopped $260 Billion in Fraud and $72 Billion annually. Not bad? Maybe someone can do the math and determine that the White House is lying or exaggerating. But I don't see any news outlets noting that the official position from the White House is that, essentially, Elon was right. And I thought DOGE was a failure.
This stuff compounds in all sorts of non-obvious ways. For example I guess that the new Anduril Arsenal-2 navy shipyards contract in Baltimore would not have happened without this kind of post-DOGE restructuring. Military contracts seem like the kinds of things that were always happening on autopilot, wouldn't it have happened anyways, maybe my guess is wrong. But in reality government contracting rules are deeply inscrutable and it takes a significant amount of work for politicals to exercise any authority over them. So I strongly suspect that the next generation of war spending is all going to be downstream of DOGE in ways that are hard for outsiders to see.
Not really, but in a way that is hard to explain. It is a deeply opaque system by design and is very resistant to change. FedGov Procurement is a monster, and it's incredibly inefficient, layered with fraud, abuse, waste and a ton of other shit. Government TPOCs are often retarded or petty kings, sometimes both. Anduril is just joining the big boys in playing the game, probably hired enough former big defense guys and ex-gov strategic hires to get told how the sausage gets made. Honestly, this is one of those things you just need to spend 5 years of your career in to properly hate. But I can promise you, any thought you have about FedGov competency in the procurement process is hopeless copium, put it in the locker along with your cellphone and keys before you come into the SCIF.
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I'm not so sure about that. The USN is... well, not desperate, but they're having to scale up construction massively for tbe AUKUS program, and I feel like they'd have thrown money at anyone with a decent plan and a lobbyist or two in DC.
AUKUS is a symptom, not the cause. The root of the ship-building spinup is China. AUKUS is more of a bet/trade on short-medium term constraints for medium-longer term capacity gains.
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