By by Peter Van Buren, The American Conservative, Nov 25, 2024
Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.
The opening salvos in Trump’s war on the fourth branch of government have been fired.
The war has begun. It’s Trump, Elon, Vivek Ramaswamy, and their new Department of Government Efficiency versus the federal bureaucracy in a no-holds-barred cage deathmatch. The first punches have been thrown; who will win? At stake: your tax dollars.
Watch parties used to be a long-standing American diplomatic tradition, held at embassies with local guests invited to watch the election results dribble in, showcasing our democracy. Great care was taken to make the party patriotic but not partisan; both candidates were featured, and usually a mock election was held with host country government officials voting one way or another. About the only bad part of the night was listening to American diplomats like me struggling to explain the Electoral College system in bad Mandarin or high-school Spanish. …