March 3, 2025
Shock, Rattle, and Awe
By Fletch Daniels

Every Republican president starts with distinct disadvantages. He inherits a largely disloyal and subversive federal bureaucracy, can expect nothing but hostile media coverage, and will be forced to battle for every inch against partisan judges who despise him.

Considering how long the Left has owned the culture and America’s educational system, these power centers are strong. Republicans in the past addressed this problem with the failed strategy of attempting to play nice with serpents. It was akin to kissing a rattlesnake, and didn’t end well.

President Trump understands that the only way to succeed with so many power centers aligned against him is to attack everywhere in a political shock-and-awe campaign. That’s exactly what he and his superb team are doing, which has led to the most successful first month by a Republican president in the modern era.

It’s military strategy 101. Colonel John Warden, an air power theorist, argued that every military enemy has five centers of gravity, which he showed as rings. It is critical to attack each of them. We saw this play out in Desert Storm in 1990 and the shock and awe campaign used against Iraq in 2003. You attack along so many fronts that the enemy can’t process the information to respond.

You get inside what one theorist, John Boyd, called the enemies’ OODA loop (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action). Actions require a process that involves observing, orienting, deciding, and finally acting. A shock-and-awe campaign disrupts these steps repeatedly. While the enemy orients toward one action, another attack disrupts and resets that process. Targets are under attack everywhere, preventing the enemy from being able to move to the action phase to defend any of the targets effectively.

For Democrats, it doesn’t help that they loaded the battlefield with so many obvious targets due to their obscene and anti-American policies. They are like the dog in the cartoon movie Up, seeing squirrels everywhere. The minute they take three steps toward one, President Trump throws another ball out, and their heads snap in a new direction. They don’t even get the weekends to catch their breath.

Consider some of what President Trump has already accomplished. He has made real cuts to the federal bureaucracy, something that seemed impossible before 2025. He’s secured the border, defended women, removed murderers and rapists from the country, attacked the corrosive merit-destroying horror of DEI, restored justice to political victims targeted by the previous administration, pushed for improving educational quality, unleashed the economic power of energy, and protected American industries, among many first-month highlights. He is standing for liberty, justice, and Americans with every action.

There was a popular Army commercial that excited potential recruits by promising they would do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day. That has been the zeitgeist of this administration, and their enemies are getting left in the dust.

Speaking of recruiting ads, that recruiting challenge everyone was so worried about for the last few years sure disappeared in a hurry. Recruits are lining up to join a military that focuses on unity and warfighting as opposed to celebrating differences and elevating mental disorders.

Elon Musk made an interesting comment that captured part of the challenge to the administration’s opponents when he noted that “DOGE is working 120 hours a week. Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.”

That’s shock and awe. This administration was ready to go on day one, and moved out at a furious pace never seen before. This was necessary. It was the only way they had any chance of advancing American interests without opposition bringing them to a screeching halt.

It gets harder from here. The administration’s opponents are adapting, so it is critical to both identify and attack their resistance centers of gravity nonstop. I’d prioritize those centers of gravity as the federal bureaucracy, the judiciary, the media, academia, and popular culture.

Federal Bureaucracy. The federal bureaucracy is almost universally Democrat. The behemoth believes it exists to loyally support any Democrat directive while resisting Republicans. America has no choice but to cut an entity many times larger than we can afford, even apart from ideological considerations, but cutting the government has the added benefit of sending a strong signal that subversion and resistance to the will of the public won’t be tolerated. Agencies that exist for no other purpose than to throttle freedom and advance leftist causes should be shuttered. Targeting USAID was a great start, and Betsy DeVos is absolutely right that the Department of Education needs to go.

This bureaucratic war is just starting. We have over 2000 agencies, which sounds like about 1800 too many. You can’t have a truly free society when the bureaucratic state has so many tentacles that you can’t even find them all.

Judiciary. The administration will be forced to battle judges nonstop. There have already been hundreds of lawsuits against the administration. That number will grow into the thousands since lawfare is the Left’s primary strategy when their positions are so wildly unpopular. The courts are loaded with sympathetic judges, and the rodents of the Left will scuttle to them.

The good news is that the government has a big advantage here. The government can use these court battles to draw money and focus from their opponents. The government has whatever resources it needs to fight legal challenges. Their opponents do not. Democrats use that as a force of evil. The administration should and likely will appeal every one of these politicized decisions and use the process to punish and drain their foes. The Republican Congress needs to pitch in and impeach some of the most obviously leftist judges who are not following the law. If nothing else, it will expose the efforts of these judges to the broader public.

Media. As far as the media goes, the administration is making all the right moves by elevating new voices and marginalizing discredited outlets. They are attacking media’s sense of prestige and entitlement. The president picked plenty of people who are uniquely talented at fighting in this arena. They need to continue to ensure the media understands there are consequences for lies and bad behavior, such as costly lawsuits or being removed from coveted press pools. The fact that some of the savvier media owners are reorienting their outlets shows a recognition that the playing field has changed.

Academia. There is plenty that the administration can and will do to keep freedom-hating universities on the defensive, such as taxing their endowments, suing to defend students, and offering alternatives to wise Americans that don’t include going into massive debt for useless degrees.

Culture. No Republican president has understood Andrew Breitbart’s observation that politics is downstream of culture more than Donald Trump. He connects with young people and has leveraged cultural forces like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. The progress in this battle has infuriated the Democrats the most since they view culture as their birthright.

Even as opposition hardens, the administration will continue its campaign to shock, rattle, and awe with missiles aimed right at the left’s resistance centers of gravity. What makes that so glorious is that the focus is on advancing three core principles we haven’t seen in a long time; freedom, our national interests, and a healthy dose of hope.