Dear Reader,

History provides examples of transitional governments like the Girondins in France, Kerensky in Russia, Weimar in Germany, the Second Spanish Republic, Chiang Kai-shek in China.

In order, they were replaced by Robespierre then Napoleon, Lenin then Stalin, Hitler, Franco, and Mao.

In each of these cases, the transitional government was caught between and ultimately smashed by pressures from both sides: industrial and intellectual partisans of the old regime on one side, and the radicalism of the populist movements that brought new people to power on the other.

Threading this needle is not easy in revolutionary moments. Of such times, history teaches one lesson more than any other. The new regime must be brutally honest about the criminality of the old one and work with focus to dismantle it as fast as possible.

Anything short of that leads to its own discrediting and eventual replacement.

In every area of government today under the second Trump administration, we witness these very historical forces at work. The grassroots movement that beat all odds to put the new people in power had high and even revolutionary expectations following the five most horrid years of our lives.

Some of these hopes are being partially met in good ways but blocked and neglected in too many other ways that are unbearably conspicuous. This dynamic affects the budget disaster, the demand for transparency, and public health.

As a result, the wild optimism that greeted the inauguration of Trump has turned to something different, a mixture of incredulity from the grassroots combined with outrage and disgust from the legacy media and establishment that fought this revolution at every turn.

This further raises the prospect about which I’ve repeatedly warned: the Trump administration could go down in history as a transitional regime like we’ve seen so many times in history, a four-year experiment in moderation bookended by different brands of totalitarianism on either side.

This is a serious matter, not a parlor game. Nor is this a typical political battle.

What happened over the last five years was for the ages. The world economy was smashed by nearly all states due to a lab leak for a product partially funded by the U.S. government. The unannounced fallback plan, pushed in the name of science, was to universally distribute a new shot with a new gene-altering technology.

The shot did not work. It was not effective. It was not safe. Nor were they properly vetted because they were imposed by military edict under the cover of emergency. Other therapeutics were disparaged and banned.

The critics in all areas were censored and shut down. People who refused the injection were fired. Public health collapsed in the name of preserving it.

Those harms have seen no justice.

Meanwhile, to finance this calamity, debt-financed spending ballooned by $8-10 trillion, leaving the federal government’s budget $2 trillion higher than it otherwise would have been.

None of this is a secret, as it might have been in former times. Because of information technologies, people are well aware of every detail. The so-called “populist movement” has become a vast community of in-depth expertise, fully capable of running circles around legacy people and institutions.

The new leaders — elected to change course on all the above and more, including the accompanying crime and migration chaos — began with tremendous bravado and sweeping edicts that seemed promising.

Four months later, they are asking for patience while dealing with legacy barriers on all sides from media harassment to court blockages.

The trouble is that public trust is completely gone. The whole country, traumatized by years of lies, has become Missouri: show me.

First, no one believes that the “one big beautiful bill” is just a first step on the way to future draconian cuts. We’ve seen this too many times, which is why Elon Musk finally broke his silence and denounced the entire “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill” as “a disgusting abomination.”

Second, in areas of government transparency, there have been some steps but not nearly enough to fulfill the promises. There are still no new Epstein files. The JFK files are a mess and incomplete. We know no more than already public information about the two shooters who tried to kill Trump.

There are still many lingering questions about 9-11, the Covid disaster, and so much else. This is not the opening for which the people had hoped.

The people in power in the federal agencies are pleading for patience. That is not unreasonable. Remember that these few appointees are confronting a beast larger, more entrenched, and better financed than any hegemon in human history.

The pharma/media/tech/NGO/academia complex is larger and more powerful than the slave trade, the East India Company, Standard Oil, or even the munitions industry that started the Great War.

It’s certain that such a Leviathan cannot be ended in three months, not even with the best people in charge. All the grassroots really need to see is evidence of progress plus a transparent reason for delays.

Above all else, what we really need is the blunt truth about the last five years. We need to hear frank talk about the harms, the mandates, the suffering, the deceptions, the payoffs, the graft, the abuses, the illegal vanquishing of freedom, science, and human rights.

It is not enough to proclaim a new Golden Age and be done with it. This pertains to every aspect of public life. Press conferences by the new officeholders, with smiles and promises of better behavior in the future, don’t cut it given the mass loss of trust, rampant cynicism, and grassroots fury.

We hear daily rumors that decisive action this is coming. Great. In which case, the new leaders need to make that clear. The masses are not inherently unreasonable.

But they are the people within whom the leadership must reason — not “message,” not presented with flim-flam, not entertained with digital Punch and Judy shows, and not sniffily dismissed as ignorant extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Every new leadership in government that inherits that kind of disaster of the last five years is necessarily going to be squeezed between the legacy regime — including its vast bureaucracies and industrial interests — and the populist movements that put them in power.

In these cases, the status quo usually proves irresistible but with disastrous consequences later.  Now is the time to stop that unfolding disaster, one which can only compound the errors of the past.

Jeffrey Tucker

for Freedom Financial News

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