“I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Grover Norquist, Republican.
Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform in a 2001 NPR interview intoned above what has been the Republican Party’s dream—a federal government so small that it might one day disappear except for a strong military, with no public services that protect all Americans and bind us together as a nation, regardless of creed or color.
It has been the Republicans’ wish since at least Ronald Reagan’s “government is the problem” declaration as he attempted to downsize government by cutting taxes and ignoring laws (IranContra) when he could get away with it.
Donald Trump has now been chosen to fulfill their dream. He is effectively destroying many of those institutions through a very calculated mismanagement by choosing incompetence over competence, domination over cooperation. The problem is the US economy can’t function at all without a well-functioning central government since at least Roosevelt’s New Deal.
It takes healthy people and businesses protected from the ravages of a catastrophic climate to be productive. Yet Republicans via Trump are eliminating the institutions that protect our environment, healthcare and social services. They even attempted to abolish Obamacare more than 30 times, the only private al health service that insures 30 million Americans even with existing medical conditions.
And now Republicans want to add more tax cuts to our $36 trillion national debt that is 121 percent of our GDP, as portrayed below. Economists are predicting the tax cuts will add an additional $5.8 trillion to the national debt. But they can’t bring their budget hawks who oppose such debt to agree without cutting more social services, such as to social security and Medicaid.
The legacy of the Republicans’ dystopian dream by Trump would return America to a past century of horrific wars and pestilences, and not only be the destruction of our Democracy and freedoms we take for granted but raises the possibility of another worldwide recession or depression.
The price paid to date has been $Trillions in stock and bond market losses in just the five days as President Trump attempts to bend the rest of the world to his will with a tariff war, which is another, maybe disastrous demonstration of his incompetence and maybe worse, his mental deterioration as he writes countless executive orders that have little validity in law.
Consumers are now beginning to realize the damage Trump is causing. In further bad news, the University of Michigan’s gauge of consumer sentiment fell to 50.8 in a preliminary April reading from 57.0 in the prior month.
And inflation expectations of those surveyed rose to the highest level since 1981, which was the stagflation era that caused the Federal Reserve to raise its Fed Funds rate to 20 percent.
“Consumers report multiple warning signs that raise the risk of recession: expectations for business conditions, personal finances, incomes, inflation, and labor markets all continued to deteriorate this month,” said Survey Director Joanne Hsu.
When will Republicans wake up enough to realize their dystopian dream is becoming the nightmare of Donald Trump’s dog-eat-dog primal world in which ultimately no one can survive?
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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