Cutting Off Their Supply Lines: Trump and the Element of Surprise

I remember when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and dug his troops in there. The world was focused on the Iraqi positions and obsessed with where the Americans might land in Kuwait. There was round-the-clock commentary and speculation on the difficulties we would have attacking the entrenched Iraqi positions.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army, under General Norman Schwarzkopf, had secretly massed its troops in Saudi Arabia. Rather than launching a frontal attack against Hussein’s entrenched positions, Schwarzkopf raced north through Iraq behind Hussein’s army, severing his supply lines and cutting his forces off from their homeland. After that, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, as the attached picture from the infamous “Highway of Death” illustrates.

Something similar seems to be going on with Trump’s return to office. During the buildup to the inauguration, the press was obsessed with which individuals a Trump administration might go after and who was at risk. The press was maniacally focused on the Biden pardons, who made the list, and who did not. But events are starting to feel eerily reminiscent of the press’s obsession with the beach landings that never quite happened the way they had expected (IIRC we did land a few soldiers on the beaches as a ruse and distraction).

Instead, the Trump administration seems to be bypassing a frontal attack on individuals and is, instead, going for the throat of the entire rotten machine. What is being revealed by DOGE and DataRepublican - whose surprising and timely appearance on the battlefield feels a little bit like the Elvish army arriving unexpectedly at Helm's Deep - evokes an eerie sense of deja vu. There is a vibe in the air that hearkens back to the press’s stunned reaction when, instead of attacking where everyone expected - with the resulting rivers of American blood - Schwarzkopf instead cut off Hussein in a matter of days, after which it was all over but the shouting.

Trump doesn’t seem to be targeting individuals; he appears to be going after the whole rotten machine.

All is being revealed, and the competent and rapid application of technology is bathing the grift machine, and the entire rat infestation, in unaccustomed light.

Trump apparently intends to cut off the rats’ food supply and rip the heart out of the machine. Perhaps the blown-up, elegantly framed copy of his mug shot, which he chose to hang on the wall just outside the Oval Office, is suggestive of a disinterest in letting bygones be bygones.

The left is increasingly panicked, having woken up to their true peril. And like the priests of the god Serapis, they are desperate to convince everyone who will listen that if Trump and DOGE “violate the majesty of the god”*, the world will return to chaos.

But the blow has already been struck, and all the rats are scurrying forth from the cloven idol, just as they did that fateful day in the Sarapeum. And notwithstanding the psychodrama on the left, “the thunder was still silent, and both the heavens and the earth continued to preserve their accustomed order and tranquility.”* Who, after all, except the rats inhabiting the darkened recesses of the idol, has yet been even inconvenienced, much less harmed?

Why, it’s almost as if the obscene spending and propaganda were never really about the needs of the American people at all.

*Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire