"Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government/The billionaire is creating major upheaval as his team sweeps through agencies, in what has been an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual."

This is an important NYT article — with 6 authors (including Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman) — and I've been trying to force myself to blog it since yesterday evening. I'd read the article and thought of some idea of how to present it. 

"Aggressive Incursion" — was I going meditate on the meaning of "incursion" and the avoidance of its thesaurus roommate "coup"?

Now, I've delayed so long I'm tempted to just drop this and run...

Fraud in the federal government is closer to 10% of disbursements, so more like ~$700 billion per year.

Outright waste is at least 15%, so another trillion+ dollars.

Anyone who works in government knows this. https://t.co/P0622Wr2Y6

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

... but I'll go on. I'll find my way back to where I was going. Ah, yes. It was this:

Is it wrong for President Trump to use the White House Rose Garden to deliver what turned into a campaign speech?

Yesterday's speech was similar to his long, extemporaneous rally speeches — except it didn't have the exuberant energy and humor. I wrote about it in the previous post — reacting to Charlie Sykes's trashing of the event — and at one point I said, "The main objection is that he's in the Rose Garden setting, and he's making the case against his political opponent." After publishing, I had the question I've put in the post title.

There is something called the Rose Garden strategy. From the Political Dictionary:

A Rose Garden campaign is when an incumbent president takes advantage of the power and prestige of his office to help him run for re-election. The phrase originally referred to a president staying on the grounds of the White House to campaign as opposed to traveling throughout the country....

The term “Rose Garden campaign” was first used by then-candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976. At the time, Carter was challenging the incumbent president Gerald Ford. Carter complained that Ford was using a “Rose Garden strategy” to get himself free publicity, staying in the public eye by signing bills and making pronouncements....

That implies doing presidential work in a way that implicitly makes the case for reelection, not using the Rose Garden as a platform for campaign speeches.

On a metaphorical level, a Rose Garden strategy refers to any time the incumbent president distributes political favors or largesse as part of his re-election strategy. This can mean offering economic packages to certain key states....

Obviously, that's a worse problem than choosing your backyard as the location for overtly political speeches!

The Political Dictionary cites a NYT article from May 2019, "Why Trump Can't Get Enough of the Rose Garden":

"The iconoclasm is good for us. It’s a great political issue for the president."

Said an anonymous "senior [Trump] campaign official," quoted in "Trump’s Twitter feed reads like a local crime blotter as he stokes a culture war" by Josh Dawsey (WaPo). The "crime blotter" material in question is the vandalism aimed at public statues and monuments. And, yes, it makes sense for the Trump campaign to see this as a good issue for them, but they didn't start the unrest and destruction. It strikes me as unfair to say that he's "stoking" any kind of "war," when the protests and attendant violence arose out of police actions in particular cities (cities run by Democrats).

What did Trump have to do with that? Is he supposed to stand back and say nothing? His antagonists take whatever they can get, every single day, and spin it against him. Are they "stoking" a "war"? No, they're just doing their normal thing, plying their trade, writing columns like "Trump’s Twitter feed reads like a local crime blotter as he stokes a culture war" by Josh Dawsey in The Washington Post. Josh Dawsey is writing that and Trump is doing his tweets, taking the material of the day, and spinning it into an argument for his side.

Of course, he's going to improve his political standing by crying out against "the two Anarchists who threw paint on the magnificent George Washington Statue in Manhattan" and the rest of the violence toward inanimate objects. He sees and takes the advantage of embracing and extolling the icons in this time of iconoclasm.

Dawsey quotes the presidential historian Douglas Brinkley:

"His argument is Main Street values against a crazy wave of anarchy. A lot will depend on how inflamed the monument issue gets. Trump has a vested issue in this. He’s actually cheering the anarchists on, daring them to take more down."

He’s actually cheering the anarchists on... You see how that works (in the mind of the eminent historian)? Because Trump speaks out against the destruction and some people hate Trump, they're inspired to do more destruction. It's a way to get Trump. And you see the rank perversity of the implicit argument: Don't speak out against the destructiveness you oppose, because it will only inflame the destroyers, and they will do more destruction.

But look more closely: This dynamic of Trump taking advantage of the iconoclasm and the iconoclasts ramping up their destruction might hurt the moderate Democrats who are trying to win the 2020 elections. It's not a good issue for them, and hanging back and waiting for it to die down and go away on its own isn't working.

ADDED: I'm reading the Wikipedia page for Douglas Brinkley:

[D]uring the 2013 inauguration coverage, CNN referred to him as "a man who knows more about the presidency than just about any human being alive." In contrast, in 2006, historian Wilfred McClay in the New York Sun appraised Brinkley's scholarship as one that has failed to "put forward a single memorable idea, a single original analysis, or a single lapidary phrase." Similarly, author Bill Bryson characterized Brinkley as "a minor American academic and sometime critic whose powers of observation and generosity of spirit would fit comfortably into a proton and still leave room for an echo."