Inertia as a force in physics and life is oftentimes very difficult to overcome.
My business partner and I once had an opportunity to demonstrate our technology to laboratory staff at Mekorot, the Israeli national water company. We drove north to one of their major labs and explained our technology while doing some testing with the staff. As we left devices and instructions for them to use, the head of the lab sternly said that they had been using the same methods for forty years and had no interest in changing what they did. After a few weeks, they said that they had no interest in integrating our sensor technology into their systems or even using it to compare with their standard methods.
One of the major effects of Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been the complete upending of the status quo. For years or decades, certain patterns of behavior have become ingrained in all facets of the US government. It did not matter who the president was, there were norms like DEI, incompetence, waste, double-dealing and a revolving door between government/military work and consulting. Donald Trump and his very serious group of advisors, secretaries, and DOGEniks are turning Washington and the world upside down. For years now, I have seen Navy ships going in and out of port with rust covering large parts of their exterior. I would imagine that Pete Hegseth will not allow such dereliction of command to continue. Elon Musk asked how the Treasury Department could send out trillions of dollars of payment without some type of identifying code as to the nature of the payment. Pam Bondi is demanding Epstein files that could have been released more than a decade ago. Tom Homan is actively pulling illegal alien criminals off of the street and sending them back home. The State Department has finally begun the process of throwing out Hamas-loving visa holders.
All physical systems at rest like to remain at rest—unless some energy is applied that can get them moving. The Democrats and Europeans were more than happy to let the war in Ukraine go on until Zelensky and his wife were the last two people standing. After Boris Johnson helped scotch a peace deal two years ago, the system went into automatic mode: send billions in cash and weapons and let the Ukrainians and Russians grind themselves into dust. Nobody until Donald Trump thought to make a ceasefire or peace deal a top priority. Nobody had dared to question Zelensky the rock star as Donald Trump and JD Vance did in the Oval Office. The status quo demanded that we give the man whatever he requested—the fate of the world depended on it. Nobody had a plan to end the war other than the fantasy-driven goal of driving Putin from office.
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This upending of the status quo and the subsequent kvetching by relevant parties extends to the work of Elon Musk and his DOGE crew. People act as if the US does not have the right to redirect its own monies or simply cancel future contracts because they are no longer considered relevant. How dare they stop funding some trans clinic on some island nation smaller than Mar-a-Lago! How do they have the nerve to apply tariffs to countries that have massive standing tariffs on American products entering their borders? How can they send people illegally in the US back to their home countries? How can they cancel the Education Department, which was set up by an executive order of Jimmy Carter? Everything that Donald Trump and his people have done would appear to be within the purview of an executive branch and president as envisioned by the Constitution. Sure, the Democrats run to the courts to try to preserve the old system, and sometimes they get some small victories. But Donald Trump, by virtue of winning last November, and by the manner in which he won, has the power to tear up the status quo and put the country in a new direction, which is really its original direction until things began to go haywire around the time of Bill Clinton.
The changing of the way things have been done has enormous implications. European countries may have to cough up a lot more money for their defense, which in turn might significantly reduce the social benefits they offer their citizens. Tracking Treasury payments would allow for faster detection of fraud and greater control of how taxpayers’ money is spent. Changing the status quo as Trump is doing is good for Americans but bad for players who have made careers of gaming the system—as it exists today. NGOs and countries that simply lived at the USAID trough suddenly have no money. Countries that could use tariffs to generate massive trade imbalances with the US now find that Trump wants to even the playing field. Guys who thought that they could grab the ladies’ gold will have to go back to being mediocre with the guys. Almost no part of American society or the world community is not experiencing some type of upheaval in the relatively short period of time that Donald Trump has returned to power. Everything goes under the microscope and what comes out will benefit the US and American citizens. Illegal aliens, foreign countries, and grifters will find out that the old way of doing this is over. It will hurt, but hopefully it will hurt exactly the right people, like generals obsessed with DEI or NGOs that took huge amounts of cash for nothing work.
The status quo will not go quietly into that good night. They tried to jail Donald Trump forever. They tried to remove his name from key state ballots. They tried to kill him. They tried to stop his cabinet picks, and now they try to use the courts to stop the president from using the power granted him by the Constitution. Donald Trump is a Terminator on steroids, but nothing less would be able to tear up the national and international status quo. When he presented his Gaza plan, people were shocked. Everyone just assumed that the place would be rebuilt for the same people so that they can continue to attack Jews at some time in the future. Donald Trump threw an atomic curve ball and suggested removing the locals, fixing the place up and making it into an international go-to destination. The Egyptians just convened the Arab League to blunt the Trump plan and keep the Palestinians close to the Jews they hate—just as every program has done since 1948.
Donald Trump is a disruptor and those affected are not happy. Whether it be federal workers shown the door or European leaders forced to defend their own countries, there are a lot of people not happy that Donald Trump is destroying the status quo that was so ineffective, inefficient but financially rewarding. The beneficiaries are the American people. Sending people to Washington to work for us. What an old and now revolutionary idea.
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