For starters, Donald Trump wants you to believe he’s a poor judge of character.
How else could he explain the long list of proficient presidential appointees he’s personally hired and subsequently fired? Unless they’d chosen to resign on their own terms, in which case Trump would insist he dismissed them first.
Take his billionaire pal Carl Icahn, handpicked during the president’s first term to cut the federal government down to size. Icahn soon thought it prudent to step down from his role amid public scrutiny of potential financial gain. The White House said he was axed.
Fast forward to the opening months of the president’s second term, where we had Elon Musk and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy—similarly tasked with draining the swamp of rising deficit and inefficiency—up and quit the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Ramaswamy was in such a hurry he skipped town the very day Trump took the oath of office.
As for the once glorified rocket man, he ejected himself with a thunderous boom more than a year before the July 4, 2026 deadline to complete the president’s mass government layoffs and other draconian initiatives.
Not that DOGE ever had a chance of succeeding.
Or that Trump is remotely serious about reducing the deficit. Fiscally responsible this president’s not, that much he’s proven, although he wants you to believe otherwise.
Even if the president and Musk had remained conjoined they could never have come close to the unviable goal of slashing $2 trillion “at least” per year in federal spending—a whopping one-third of 2025’s projected government outlay of $7 trillion—let alone whittle 441 federal agencies to 99 or fewer.
And get a load of this eye-opener: through June 2025, DOGE claimed total federal savings of $190 billion, while the Internal Revenue Service estimated revenue losses of $500 billion due to “DOGE-driven” cuts.
Bloody hell, as my Celtic cousins would say.
More astonishing, the entire time Musk and his merry band of DOGE experts were reining in the spiraling debt, Trump sat behind his curtain maneuvering his “One Big Beautiful Bill” through a privately skeptical Republican-controlled Congress, in doing so shamelessly adding $3.5 trillion to the federal deficit.
No wonder Musk blasted off to another space. It’s even reached the point where the SpaceX founder is questioning the future of democracy under Trump.
“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” he wrote on his social media platform X, blasting Trump’s big fat bill as “utterly insane and destructive.”
But not to worry, Musk added: “Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”
What better moment in US history, I ask, for a new national party to take shape? A political refuge for disenchanted Republicans and Democrats alike, founded—and funded—by the world’s wealthiest man and largest donor in the 2024 election cycle.
Yes, easier said than done, but were a viable third party to clear its costly hurdles and realize fruition (Musk hopes in time for the 2026 midterm elections) you can rest assured its inaugural slate of candidates would head into battle with the richest campaign coffers in modern history.
And that potential reality should frighten every Republican senator and congressman who voted yay for Trump’s deficit-exploding bill—as in Montana’s entire congressional delegation, despite the misery it will inflict on this state and its population.
What happened to Montana grit?
Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, a former longtime neighbor of mine who is widely respected across the political aisle, says it best:
“Sick and tired of Republican Senators coming to me privately saying, ‘Mark, keep speaking up, you’re our conscience.’ I don’t want to be their damn conscience. I want them to vote their conscience.”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.