In 1917, American journalist Jack Reed, a naive but talented communist ideologue with a blue-blood education, was in Russia to watch and cheer on a revolution. He was there in October when the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky held power—Czar Nicholas II had been overthrown—but refused to pull the nation out of the murderous Great War or otherwise reform.
That book and the events it valorized has now been superseded by another 10 days that have shaken the world. Donald Trump took the oath of office to become U.S. President on Jan. 20, 2025, following a sweeping and decisive victory that the entire establishment fought ferociously.
I’m typing this 10 days later. It is clear to me and many others that nothing will ever be the same, not in the United States and not anywhere in the world that is watching the exciting events unfold. It’s nothing like we’ve ever seen, and far beyond anything we had expected or even been promised.
Whereas Reed’s Ten Days were about the building of the Leviathan state, our own 10 days is about tearing it down and restoring freedom. Already what has been uncovered and stopped is for the ages, to the point that as I write the United States has plugged scandalous spending leakage at a rate of $4 billion per day, thanks to the work of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency.
That appears just to be the beginning. Agencies and funding sources are being shut down by the day and hour. The whole spending machine was shut down for a few days before a federal judge intervened. Even that did not stop the push to shut down the spigots: it took a second judge to intervene and finally restart it all. Even then, it was just the beginning.
What is popularly known as the “deep state” has never faced such disruption.
Hardly a minute goes by when we do not get news of various outrages operating at all agencies of government, spending that gives new meaning to the word decadence. It’s all been happening for many years, even decades, even as the American middle class has been hollowed out, real incomes have declined, and economic opportunities for average people have thinned out to create culture-wide despair and ill-health.
The excitement began minutes after inauguration when the team of Elon Musk, tasked by Trump to figure out what is going on with this empire of lies, unfurled a plan that had long been in the works but never announced. They installed sofa beds on the 5th floor of the Office of Personnel Management and tossed out the chief of staff. The plan was to work 24/7 to get the job done, never leaving the offices. Yes, in Godfather parlance, they literally “went to the mattresses.”
They gained access to the computer system and sent a memo to 2.3 million federal government employees. It invited all of them to resign immediately and get 8 months of severance. They only needed to hit reply and type “resign.” The expectation going into this was that 10 percent would flee but it could be more. We are still waiting for the numbers.
All the while, the Trump administration was issuing executive orders, more than 300 in these magical 10 days. They froze regulations. They froze spending. They issued a universal fatwa against all DEI policies and abolished “affirmative action”—all while heralding the single principle of non-discrimination. They proclaimed that no government agency may ever again tell private media and social media accounts how to operate, either directly or indirectly through third-party cutouts. They banned the absurdities of the transgender movement and made adolescent mutilation illegal.
The orders were so sensible that they generated almost no resistance other than predictable sputtering. There were of course muttering that Trump was behaving like an authoritarian. If so, it is an odd form of authoritarianism that uses power to take power away from government and give it back to the people. The driving motivation of all these efforts was to reboot the promise of 2016 to drain the swamp. This time they were serious.
Following the takeover of the Office of Personnel Management, the truly great challenge was to get to the source of the largess, the spigot spilling so much money that it was creating $1 trillion in debt every 100 days. This has gotten worse decade after decade. It is the determination of DOGE to get to the bottom of it.
The team—which converted itself quickly into an official government office to evade that obvious criticism—headed to the U.S. Treasury and announced an audit of the entire government. In order to conduct that, they would need the logins to the system. The auditors had already figured out that the whole government was operating on autopay, with billions flowing to enemy regimes and rackets of all sorts. Shutting that down had to be priority number one.
What they found was an acting head of the U.S. Treasury named David A. Lebryk, who turns out to be the highest-ranking person in the civil service. Lebryk had been promoted to that position on January 20, but his former boss was the deputy head of Treasury, a Nigerian émigré named Wally Adeyemo, who had at one time been head of the Obama Foundation. His resignation put Lebryk in the driver’s seat of the world’s biggest outgoing payroll system.
That’s right, you cannot make this stuff up!
Lebryk absolutely refused to turn over the passwords. After what was said to be a shouting match, he resigned on the spot. Then Elon’s crew took control of the passwords to the system that was sending out $6 trillion on autopay.
When regular people think about this, they start asking serious questions. Why is it not a normal thing for the new administration to be in control of the spending systems? Why is this such a shocking thing to have happened? Isn’t auditing the books just what any new president would do?
Most likely, it is shocking simply because it has never happened. For all the world, this looks to be a situation in which we are witnessing the very first actual transition of power in our lifetimes.
There will be more court challenges, claims, and counterclaims, but mainly we can look forward to an information flood of finding out precisely how our tax dollars have been used these many years if not for decades. This is in many ways the ultimate nightmare of any entrenched bureaucracy that has been unburdened by accountability for a very long time.
Change is now here, and it appears that the Trump administration is not letting up. All the while, Trump’s cabinet picks were facing a brutal grilling from Senators. This time, however, we have the means to discover the hand in the glove. We have tools like Open the Books, Open Secrets, and others, to reveal precisely what industrial interests are behind these politicians. It appears as of this writing that public pressure is going to push all of Trump’s picks through.
No one can say for sure how this story ends but we are getting an intuition. The Trump administration, barring some unforeseen disaster, is well positioned to go down in history as the regime that saved the country from secret and systematic pillaging that has been going on without check for probably all living memory.
Is that an exaggeration? Sadly, it does not appear to be so based on what we are learning by the hour. These are the new Ten Days that Shook the World. The first time around, history was set on a path toward the disaster of communism and totalitarianism. This time, the revolution is being reversed—the people are really taking charge from an elite class that has enjoyed unchecked rule in the Western world for all of living memory.
