In politics, as in medicine, there comes a moment when you stop prescribing antibiotics and start talking about surgery. You can only ice a knee for so long before someone tells you the cartilage is gone and it’s time for the scalpel. Donald J. Trump’s second term is that surgery. This isn’t the swaggering, improv-comedy, seat-of-the-pants first term of 2017–2021 — this is a man who came back from exile with a scalpel in one hand and a blowtorch in the other, determined to cut out what he calls the rot and flush out what his people call the moles.
And let’s be honest — last time, he didn’t do it. He stomped into Washington like a casino tycoon crashing a church bake sale, kicked over the folding tables, and shouted at the choir — but he left the choir in place. He didn’t purge the ranks. He didn’t fire everyone. He let the Intercom — that sprawling network of NGOs, media organs, State Department adjacencies, USAID soft power tentacles, public-private influence laundromats — keep humming in the background. The machine simply waited him out. When Joe Biden took over in 2021, they just plugged the phones back in, rehired the benched players, and went right back to running the show.
This time, it’s different. This time, it’s a scorched-earth doctrine.
Within weeks of retaking the White House in January 2025, Trump began executing a plan that looks, from the outside, like the Elon Musk “fire half the company” model — except with federal agencies, NGOs, and grant pipelines instead of engineers and HR staff. The official line was budget cuts. The unofficial reality, whispered with a smirk by loyalists, was a purge. Mass terminations at the Department of Justice, State Department, USAID. “Voluntary retirements” that weren’t voluntary. Contractors sent packing. Entire NGO budgets zeroed out.
It’s not just about saving money. It’s about de-powering the Intercom — the complex of institutions that Trump and his base see as the enemy within. In their view, taxpayer dollars were funding their own opposition. Federal grants bankrolling NGOs that churn out anti-Trump narratives. USAID and State programs propping up ideological causes overseas that inevitably bleed back into domestic politics. Soft power turned against the people footing the bill.
The old Trump — the 45th president — didn’t fully grasp how deep it went. The new Trump — the 47th president — seems to believe the only way to survive is to remove every last wire from the surveillance grid, every last bureaucrat from the chain of command, every last mole from the warren. If the patient — the republic — has to be brought to the brink of death on the operating table to excise the cancer, so be it.
And here’s where the paradox gets weird. The opposition to this purge isn’t led by farmers in denim overalls or angry working-class union men. In Washington, D.C., the daily protesters outside Trump’s orbit are almost all current, former, or retired government lifers — NGO directors, agency lawyers, think tank fellows. And they are, without exception, white. The image is almost absurdist: a line of liberal elite professionals in pastel polos and smart glasses holding signs that say “Fascist!” while drawing pensions from the very machine they’re defending.
Enter Sean Dunn — a case study in miniature. A Department of Justice trial lawyer, bar-certified, paid by the taxpayers, sworn to uphold the Constitution, square up against federal agents in the streets of Washington and hurl a Subway sandwich while yelling “Fascist!” This is not a cartoon; this happened. It’s the ouroboros of governance: the federal government calling the federal government fascist, one arm of the machine slapping another in public. Judge Jeanine Pirro’s swift response — felony charges, job terminated — was the point in miniature: the purge doesn’t just fire you, it arrests you if you cross the line.
Trump-world sees Dunn and others like him as moles — agents embedded inside the apparatus, wearing the badge of the state but working toward its subversion. Whether that’s fair or not almost doesn’t matter. What matters is the perception that the entire executive branch, from DOJ to State to the Pentagon’s upper ranks, is shot through with loyalists to an opposing ideology. Last time, Trump tried to govern around them. This time, he’s pulling them out by the roots.
That’s the deeper lesson of the “fool me once” theory of political insurgency. Being a revolutionary is intoxicating — everything feels like a victory. Governing, on the other hand, is exhausting. It requires compromise, administration, patience — all things revolutionaries tend to despise. Trump’s first term was the revolution. His second is the occupation. The mission isn’t to fight the establishment in the streets; it’s to ensure the establishment’s desks are empty.
And this is where the metaphor of the Intercom matters. For decades, America’s soft power, foreign aid, and NGO ecosystem has been like a massive, invisible PA system broadcasting a particular ideological tone — not just overseas, but back into the domestic sphere. It was designed for influence, not accountability. To Trump’s people, dismantling the Intercom isn’t just budget politics; it’s survival politics. Turn off the feed, cut the wires, and suddenly the constant hum of the opposition’s messaging goes quiet.
In practice, that means shuttering USAID projects, pulling grants from public media, axing State Department “cultural outreach” programs, zeroing out funding for advocacy NGOs. It means agencies like NPR, PBS, and even the Corporation for Public Broadcasting lose their sugar supply. It means cutting off the oxygen that keeps the other side’s infrastructure alive.
This isn’t reform; it’s amputation. And it’s not happening in whispers this time. Every high-profile firing is a signal. Every agency dismantled is a message. Every protester in front of the White House is framed as proof that the purge is necessary.
And yet, the paradox persists: the loudest voices calling “fascist” are themselves part of the same system they accuse of authoritarianism. It’s as if the palace guards are rioting against the king while still cashing the king’s paychecks. This absurd theatre — the Sean Dunn moment — will be remembered not just as a PR sideshow, but as a symbolic turning point: the government openly at war with itself.
From the Trumpian perspective, this is simply finishing the job. The rot wasn’t scraped out in 2017–2021, so it metastasized. Now it’s surgery with no anesthesia. Cut deep, cut fast, and cauterize the wound before the patient — the republic — wakes up screaming.
tl;dr
The provided text, "Cutting Out the Rot," discusses a hypothetical second term for Donald J. Trump, focusing on his alleged intent to enact a widespread purge of federal agencies and institutions. The author suggests that unlike his first term, where he merely "shouted at the choir," this time Trump would employ a "scorched-earth doctrine" to dismantle what he perceives as an "Intercom" of entrenched opposition within the government. This includes mass terminations, budget cuts to NGOs, and the cessation of various government-funded programs, all aimed at de-powering ideological adversaries. The text highlights a paradox where the loudest protestors against this "purge" are often current or former government employees themselves, illustrating an internal conflict within the governmental structure. Ultimately, the piece portrays a theoretical "surgical" approach to governance, designed to eliminate perceived "moles" and "rot" from the system to ensure the republic's survival.
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