The Sizzle: Eliminating Government, Reverse Coyotes, and Blue Bubbles Popping (Mar. 30, 2025)

What do today's details mean about the future of the big picture and actionable intelligence? Read on for what you won't find the media telling you about.

Welcome to the latest installment of The Sizzle, which provides a deeper assessment of what the news won’t tell you when rattling off typically deranged headlines and untruthful narratives. These musings cover items and stories making the rounds in the news as we wrap up March:

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I. The Truest Conservative of Them All

A common theme is emerging – Donald Trump has a strong approval rating, but Republicans continue to sweat special elections. The GOP lost one in a Trump +15 district in Pennsylvania last week for State Senate, has their backs against the absentee-balloting wall in Wisconsin for a crucial Supreme Court race, and is currently sweating the early voting partisan turnout in the FL-6 House special. I think Republicans will wind up sitting comfortably on turnout once the Election Day vote gets out, but it couldn’t be more obvious that the party is struggling to find its identity without the name Trump appearing at the top of the ticket.

This is both good and bad. Trump has taken politics by storm and expanded his coalition of supporters consistently over time. In doing so, he has reoriented what GOP voters want in favor of what his policy proposals are. The flip side of this coin is that the contrast he has drawn now highlights the stale positions held by many long-term party mainstays who continue to pursue nominations or wish to placate those in the old guard rather than get with the program. This is not a condemnation of any particular candidate, but the dynamics are similar to a dog no longer being interested in his dry food once he’s had it drizzled with gravy and meat scraps for long enough.

Trump is Reagan now. Forty years from now, when the GOP brand needs a boost, a lot of 30-40 year old MAGA supporters are going to recall the nostalgia of what brought them into political maturity. With any luck, MAGA will still be a viable strategy, but some of the immediate needs and fixes will have passed us by. So it is with Reagan-era “conservatism,” as I’ve written many times.

Hey guys, the Cold War is over. Can we fix the illegal immigration problem or stop sending our jobs overseas?

Nope – rub a little conservatism on it and muster up some more support for sending troops to the Middle East this Thanksgiving.

No one, not even Ben Shapiro, can even accurately define what “conservatism” is. Some think it means knowing which bathroom someone should use. Others think it means forcing the playing of the national anthem before every school event. It’s not really even something people are consistent about – no Republican would run on repealing Social Security, because he’d never get elected. All Republicans should support a border wall, which isn’t technically conservative because it requires more government, more contracts, more permits, more money, and more enforcement.

Therefore, I would argue conservatism has to do more with decreasing the power of one body to rule over another – namely the federal government over the states – rather than it does regulating social phenomena, which ebb and flow over time and are topics the church should be working to influence.

What then, could be more conservative than not just reducing government, but eliminating government? Now that courts have finally done something not directly harming the administration and given Elon Musk and DOGE the right to operate freely, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have announced the formal end of USAID, the international bribery spigot funded by you, the American taxpayer.