The Left's Love for Big Government Is Impenetrable, and Constitutes Much of the Reason It Hates Trump.

To paraphrase the Chief Justice, the only way to cut government is to cut government.

Sometimes deciding what to write about is hard and sometimes it’s easy. Today it was easy.

The Washington Post came out with this howler from one of its favorite banshees, Ruth Marcus. Here’s the headline (emphasis added):

“Trump 2.0: The most damaging first two weeks in presidential history. Trump’s second term is all about curtailing government’s power and reach.

You’re less than two dozen words into the piece and you already know these people can’t hear themselves one little bit. Here’s a taste of Ms. Marcus’ column:

As I laid out shortly after the election, Trump had a detailed road map to enhance executive power: challenging congressional authority to control spending…

You gotta love the words “control spending.” The more truthful way to put this is, “congressional giddiness to balloon spending to levels we can’t afford and haven’t been able to afford for decades…”

…putting independent agencies under his thumb, seizing control of the civil service…

Again, let’s translate: “…having the audacity to think that employees of the executive branch he was elected to head should make a determined effort to advance the programs he told the public he would implement.” (As an aside, I should mention that I was a member of the executive branch civil service for much of my career and at no point thought my priorities should push ahead of my superiors’ version, whether I agreed with them or not).

…and abusing his authority to install officials through recess appointments rather than having to endure the inconvenience of Senate confirmation.

I might be missing something, but I don’t recall a single cabinet officer or judge who has been recess appointed. Instead, everyone who has taken his or her cabinet seat so far has been confirmed — and the Left whined about that, too, at almost the same quite annoying decibel level that they’re ready to use on recess appointments, if there ever are any. But the even odder thing is that Ms. Marcus admits in the very next paragraph that her pearl-clutching angst is just made up (emphasis added):

We knew this was coming. Trump and his allies trumpeted their plans during the campaign. Still, I had expected this revolution would take months to unfold. Astonishingly, all but the last of these has already come to pass — and we haven’t seen a showdown over recess appointments for the simple reason that the Senate, with the sole exception of the failed effort to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general, has caved to Trump’s desire to install evidently unqualified candidates in many of the most sensitive positions in government.

Didn’t Marco Rubio get a unanimous vote? Well, let’s not bother with details. And when other nominees have received divided confirmation votes, to date it has been almost entirely because the Democrats’ bovine partisanship has been at record levels, not because any of those confirmed so far has been unqualified under traditional criteria.

And remember all that stuff about how Trump would be the death knell for democratic rule? Now that he’s survived a Leftist assassination attempt, won the election Joe Biden ducked, and taken office, the complaint is — ready now? — that, “We knew this was coming. Trump and his allies trumpeted their plans during the campaign.”

Translation: “We know that Trump is killing democracy because he’s doing what he repeatedly told the voters who elected him what he would do and, oh the horror!, is doing it in weeks not months.”

As I say, they don’t hear themselves.

But Ms. Marcus’s stupidity and partisan capture, though amusing in its own unfortunate way, is not the main point. The main point that she and her pals on the Democratic Left simply don’t get, or out of hate for the Framers’ vision for the country choose to ignore, is that Americans don’t want a government with the size, power, reach, expense and overall wet-blanket quality it has now and has been slouching into for seventy years.

Here’s a little reading that might help Ms. Marcus and her allies along. From Gallup:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A 54% majority of Americans believe the government is “trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses,” whereas 43% think it “should do more to solve the country’s problems.” This critique of the government is similar to Americans’ views over the past two years; however, it differs from 2020, when 54% of Americans said they wanted the government to do more. That reading, taken in the first year of the pandemic, is the only time in Gallup’s trend dating back to 1992 that a majority have wanted a more active government.

For at least an entire generation, with one year’s exception, the public has shown substantial majorities favoring exactly what the Left fears and resents — especially from Donald Trump: a cutback in the federal government’s power and reach.

This graph is even more telling:

There’s been a good deal of discussion about whether Trump is a “true conservative” in the sense that, for example, a Reagan fan would appreciate. Paul and I have been and will continue to be in that discussion. While there is justified doubt whether President Trump will in fact cut the size of government, and how much, deep down, he really wants to, there can be no reasonable doubt that his oft-stated distrust of the size and sweep of government (1) would be right at home with Reagan’s fans, and (2) more importantly, is what a huge majority of the American people believe as well.