Of MAGAts And Men (and Women)

 No, I’m not going to kick her in the teeth rhetorically:

"We had the flag, I had the shirt – I was a MAGA junkie," Piggott told CNN.

Piggott's job was eliminated when DOGE gutted the bureau where she was classified as a probationary civil service worker.

"I cried," she said, tearing up again. "It’s scary, you know, it’s a really scary thing, and I was embarrassed."

DOGE cut Piggott and her colleagues over alleged poor performance, but she told CNN that she'd received "the highest rating" possible on a job review three weeks before she was fired, and she now regrets voting for Trump a third time.

“I’m not sure that I would have [voted for Trump], and the way that it’s been done," she said. "I’m for balancing the budget, that type of thing, but not, not in this context, it’s just not right."

A federal appeals court judge has refused to pause a ruling that requires the administration to reinstate more than 17,000 workers who lost their jobs across six agencies, but that's little consolation to Piggott, who said she has been targeted with vandalism and death threats since speaking out about the cuts.

"I expected better from [Trump], I really did," she said. "I expected that you would do what was right and cut waste and fraud and all of those things that you promised us before we elected you in office, but you're not doing that. You're creating a disaster, and I don't know what America is going to look like if this continues."

I don’t even blame her for believing a balanced budget is the be-all and end-all of governance. Clinton “balanced the budget.” I defy you to explain what that means, or even what good it did. Certainly nobody noticed.

Government should run “like a business.” Trump’s businesses, per the NY state court, were all operated on a fraudulent basis. Truth Social is only slightly worse off than Twitter since Elmo took over. Tesla is failing because it’s not only not the next big thing, it’s run by a Nazi (not a real inducement for sales). And their cars are held together with glue.

Yeah.

I worked on a case once where I came to understand the nature of business debt. Car dealers work from up what is called a “floor loan.” Essentially the lender buys the cars from the manufacturer, and as the dealer sells cars,  the loan is repaid. Never fully paid, of course, because as cars leave the lot, new ones arrive. The debt is constant, but it’s always being used to provide cars to sell.

Businesses can go bankrupt, but governments can’t. Oh, they can make a hash of their national economy, but there is no bankruptcy court they can retreat to. A car dealer has a “balanced budget” so long as income doesn’t endanger debt service. A big car dealer in the Houston area disappeared in a few days because the bank canceled his floor loan and he couldn’t buy more cars to sell. It wasn’t a long, slow fall, just advertising heavily one day, then off the air and the parking lot empty the next.

Twitter and Tesla keep going mostly because investors keep pumping money into them by trading the stocks. That and they have enough capital to keep stumbling on. Businesses can also be run by one person (a lot of investors are complaining that Elmo needs to come back to Tesla). Governments, especially democratic republics, don’t work that way.

One reason why not is what happened to Ms. Pigott.

There’s certainly a “be careful what you ask for, you might get it” story here. But the better question is: why is this what she asked for? For 60 years the Republican Party has been preaching the gospel of a balanced budget. They got it with Clinton, but that only proved they didn’t mean it. 

This, now, is what they meant. Just like Trump meant to follow Project 2025, even as he denied it. And now the country’s going to get what Republicans wanted, and they’re going to get it good and hard. The silver lining is, so far, they don’t seem to like it very much. Connect it to the balanced budget shibboleth, and you might see a real sea change in American politics.

We live in hope.