Whether you like President Donald Trump or not, he has in just a short time changed the nature of the U.S. presidency.
Gone are the days of “Sleepy Joe,” replaced by an activism that the country has not seen before, unless one goes back to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago.
Trump has transformed Roosevelt’s motto of “Speak softly and carry a big stick” into “Speak loudly and carry two big sticks,” in case one breaks over somebody’s head. Roosevelt would have thought that jolly good.
Whether it’s throwing Volodymyr Zelenskyy under the bus in his bromance with Vladimir Putin or fighting with the Associated Press over renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, the man at age 78 has shown more dynamic interaction with the press and the public in a week than Joe Biden did in a year.
During just a few short but heady weeks, Trump, with little notice or commentary, has also changed the nature of the vice presidency.
In fact, he seems to have three vice presidents, one official vice president in the person of Vice President JD Vance, and two unofficial “vice presidents” in Elon Musk and Tom Homan.
It is a triumvirate with Trump sitting at the top parceling out presidential assignments to three individuals, Vance, Musk and Homan that would normally be handled by one, the vice president
While Vance, 42, the official vice president was off in Munich setting the Europeans straight at the Munich Security Conference, the other two “vice presidents” — Musk and Homan — were back home assigned by Trump to remake America.
Musk, as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), throws people out of their jobs and Border Czar Homan throws them out of the country. And the public loves it.
Ordinarily those jobs in the past, as well as others, went to the vice president, so that he could stay busy and take the heat for the president
The last time there was a major attempt to fight waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, for instance, was in 1993 and it was headed by Vice President Al Gore during Democrat President Bill Clinton’s administration.
It was called the National Partnership for Reinventing Government and was designed to make government “work better, cost less.”
Bonuses of $25.000 were granted to people who left government service. Some 800 agencies were consolidated and 100 programs eliminated along with the jobs of some 250,000 people.
It was small potatoes compared to what Musk and DOGE are doing today, but the point is that it is being done by Musk, not Vice President Vance.
Which means that Musk is taking all the heat for all the government firings and programs from government unions, Democrats, progressives and their allies in the media that normally would have gone to Vance had Trump given him the assignment.
The same is true for Trump’s appointment of Homan as “Border Czar” to conduct the “largest deportation program in American history.”
Soon after he became president four years ago and began waving illegal immigrants into the country over an open southern border, Biden named a reluctant Vice President Kamala Harris, a fellow politician, as his “Border Czar.”
Her charge was to seek out the “root” causes of the millions of illegal crossings at the Mexican border, which she may have even visited once, or at least visited close to it.
Although Harris did visit Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, nothing much came from her appointment other than a few word salads.
So, it would not have come a surprise if Trump had named Vance as his “Border Czar.”
But Trump, wiser than in his first term, chose Homan, a career illegal immigration specialist who began his career as a border guard, to be his “Border Czar,” over Vance, the politician, thereby sparing Vance from all the political grief that goes with the job.
Vance, meanwhile, free from such burdensome and controversial assignments, won praise for the straight-talking speech he gave in Munich telling our allies to clean up their act and be more open and democratic like Trump’s America.
Not a joke, as Sleepy Joe would say.
Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
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2025-02-28 08:10:21