He wants security in the arctic and the Panama canal, where the precious administration had China encroaching. He's not taking Gaza, trying to get the region to take control of those people. He's not the first nor last to use Eos. Border traffic is way down despite no bipartisan border bill- something we were told couldn't be achieved just last year. Reducing bureaucrats and regulation is indeed reducing government.
Wading through the vast amounts of typos in here...I'll do the best I can.
You don't need to annex Canada and Panama to have security in those places. Frankly, the security bogeyman he has imagined re: China, didn't exist there to begin with. This wasn't something that happened under the "previous" Administration. The Hong King based company had ports in the canal for over two decades. You're not accurate in your assertion.
Greenland isn't about security (we already operate bases there via NATO with Denmark's blessing), it's about natural resources for (ironically) green energy and what Musk can profit from there if anything were to happen.
Your characterization of "taking control" of "those people" in Gaza says quite a bit. Even taking your wrong view of it at face value, Trump has directly said it's not about taking control of them to keep them in the area, he's talking about an ethnic cleansing in Gaza and forcing them to move to other countries.
In any case his plan(s) for the areas, by definition, expands the footprint of the US Government.
You mention he's not the first or last to use EO's. That wasn't the point of what I said. I specifically stated his use of EO's that are attempting to be used to enforce actions that are unconstitutional. If you'd like to address that specific claim, go for it.
1. If your litmus test for reducing "bureaucrats" is all that is needed for reduction in government then you would have loved Bill Clinton......ANYWHO...you've made a reduction in government an inherently good thing. It's not. Could it be? Sure. Could it be bad? Sure. Reducing the IRS the way has/is attempting to actually handcuffs the way we collect tax revenue...which is kind of important. He tried to reduce government over the nuclear stockpile, not a good idea for obvious reasons.
Principally, I'm not against the idea of reducing "wasteful" spending, but that devil in that is in the details. Trump and his cronies have painted USAID, who accounts for something like .015% of the entire federal budget, as some great "waste" of money. Are there some things on the line items that I kind of roll my eyes at? Sure....but that's true of any department in history...US Govt or not. The issue is Trump and Co are painting every spend they ideologically disagree with as "fraud". It's not. They just disagree with the spend. USAID did A LOT of good around the world in helping developing nations facing disease, famine, and the like. They were one of the biggest weapons we had in combating the AIDS epidemic in Africa.
2. Trump is not reducing regulation. He's actually increasing regulation and enforcement, but it's on topics that you agree with. For example, the memo his DoE sent out a week is actually an
increase in regulation of K-12 schools as well as public/private universities, but I'm sure you'll say that's fine...because you agree with the memo from an ideological standpoint.
Lastly, re: border traffic being down...
One month since President Donald Trump was sworn in as president, the White House is touting the administrations’ succes
www.politifact.com
Unsurprisingly the White House is getting cute with numbers. ..or flat out refusing to report comparative numbers to the Biden border.
In any case, the border bill wasn't simply about reducing border encounters. It was about better managing the immigration process into the US. It called for better controls/more control over entry and how to actually manage the crossings. Trump's "plan" or actions don't really address that, he's basically just ended immigration in general..he's literally made it impossible to schedule a meeting/encounter at the border.... and is refusing to report comparable numbers.
Immigration in general is a net positive for the economy. At some point Trump will have to re-open the border so to speak and he doesn't have any enforcement arm to make the process work. The border bill he killed actually made it more difficult to claim asylum and legally immigrate to the US anyways...so now when the border is re-opened (and it will be) he's ended the app that made immigration possible/more efficient, and has no bill on being stricter on asylum seekers and the like. Biden EO'd something a year ago constricting asylum seekers reasons for entering. The bi-partisan bill constricted those reasons even more...and part of the bill provided for more judges to more quickly adjudicate those cases to reduce the amount of asylum seekers being allowed entry into the country while awaiting their court date.
As with most(all?) things Trump does...it is nice red meat for his base who don't know anything about..well..anything...but long term there is no plan and generally things will become worse as a result.
Boiling the border bill down to simply being about reducing encounters is counterfactual. It was part of a larger comprehensive plan for longer term border security and immigration management that sought to address the root causes of the crisis.
