They should worry. Frankly, given the amount of bloat even in just the past few years, I’d guess that we could cut 30% of the workforce and not even notice. Then eliminate and consolidate departments to scale back further. It should be easy, but it won’t be. I hope that Trump has the stomach to make real, necessary changes.

Trump, in his formal campaign platform, called to redistribute workers out of the Washington area and implement large-scale cuts to the federal government, which he has long derided as harboring members of the “deep state.” Before leaving office in 2020, he issued an executive order that made tens of thousands of employees subject to firing with little due process if they were found to have resisted the administration’s policies – a move unwound by the Biden administration that Trump’s allies have vowed to restore. His calls for cuts have been amplified by surrogates such as billionaire Elon Musk, who insists such moves are necessary to cut down on waste and inefficiency.

Now that we’ve had a bit of time to reflect, it’s worth thinking about why Trump won. At the end of the day, I think it’s pretty simple. Trump won because of the fundamentals. We are at the tail end of a failed presidency where inflation has eaten away the quality of life of Americans, the pressures put on society by the open border (crime, wage pressure, housing, social safety net, schools, etc.) are real, and echos of totalitarianism felt during and since the pandemic scare people. Americans want change. Biden and Harris were not going to offer that change.

Trump was a flawed candidate for many reasons. He may have won despite that. Maybe. Or he may have won because of that. While flawed, he is unquestionably a tough change agent who has the capacity to effect meaningful change in the way our federal government operates. He is not about incremental change this time. And that’s what people want. We’ll never know if DeSantis or Abbot or someone would have won by a larger margin. What we do know is that Trump DID win. And he won because more Americans want him in the White House than those who didn’t. The same Americans who gave Obama two terms and Biden one term are the same ones who elected Trump. They are not bigoted, stupid, crazy, sexist, or fooled. They know who Trump is. They want change from the misery of the Biden years and Trump is the most likely instrument of that change. It’s as simple as that.

He is 100% correct and the Washington Post will be better off without the people who resigned. Is it too late for the paper to regain its previous stature? Time will tell.

The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, in his first public comments since igniting uproar last week over his decision to withhold the venerable newspaper’s endorsement in the presidential race, defended the move in a rare op-ed published Monday evening by the Post.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos, the billionaire Amazon founder, wrote. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”