I haven’t seen Chuck Schumer so happy in months. There he was Wednesday, practically ready to burst into song while celebrating the Trump administration’s withdrawal of a memo ordering a federal spending freeze.
“Americans made their voices heard,” Schumer crowed. “Donald Trump rescinded the OMB order.”
Schumer was too giddy to tell the full story. On Monday, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directed federal agencies to stop spending money, with exceptions for entitlements, defense, and direct support for individuals, until grants-in-aid programs were aligned with the president’s agenda.
The document’s broad language resulted in confusion. Democrats stoked the outrage. A federal judge enjoined the order. Before long, the White House rescinded the OMB directive—though not, said press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the president’s earlier executive orders on DEI and the Green New Deal.
For 45 hours this week, then, the Resistance was reborn. But just for a moment. The memo kerfuffle was quickly, and tragically, overshadowed by the collision over Reagan Airport, as well as by hearings for some of Trump’s controversial cabinet picks.
The memo dust-up was news precisely because it was so unlike the Trump’s administration’s first week in office. According to one tracker, at the time of writing, President Trump has issued 64 executive actions. They have been issued swiftly and smoothly. And they have left the Resistance in shock and Democrats stunned.
Trump’s orders are sweeping. They cover the economy, immigration, education, transgenderism, and beyond. They enact policies he laid out on the campaign trail. And they have a singular aim: removing progressive ideologies from the federal machinery.
Read their titles. “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”
Two things bind the populist conservative coalition. The first is Trump. The second is opposition to wokeism: the catch-all of anti-Western, anti-American attitudes that sees the world through the victim-victimizer binary and privileges group membership over individual rights.
Hellbound and Down 