The Herald’s Joe Battenfeld is having a grand old time bashing ‘deranged’ Dems fighting President Trump’s attempts at “reform, transparency and accountability.” I have to admit: There’s more than a little MAGA in me that thinks it’s about time someone took an ax to some federal agencies’ budgets. I also acknowledge: I’m so tired of progressive Dems’ indignant, moralistic, performative-politics response to anything they don’t like.

But, please, don’t tell me the Trump-Musk assault on federal agencies is all about ‘reform, transparency and accountability.’ It’s not. That’s merely the spin to cover up the fact that this is really a full-scale ideological assault on a federal government that conservative elites have long wanted to wage, as David Brooks at the NYT notes in his column this morning (“Can We Please Stop Calling These People Populists?”). … And these non-populist elites will clam up and look the other way as Trump stress tests the nation’s laws and the constitution, as I noted the other day (‘For many Republicans, the end justifies the means’).