Show us the money, receipts, proof – anything to back up your work
Credit: Grok 3/AI-generated image


OPINION

Show us the money, receipts, proof – anything to back up your work

Donald Trump claims he’s fulfilling campaign promises, but did voters back every extreme measure? Secret orders, deportations, and Elon Musk’s influence raise concerns. Transparency and trust in governance remain critical.

B. Jay Cooper

B. Jay Cooper

— 4 min read

P resident Trump says he is doing exactly what he said he’d do during his campaign to re-capture the Oval Office.

Fact check: This is mostly true.

But, for those who voted for Trump, did you elect him to do everything he said he’d do – from deporting possible legal immigrants to investigating and possibly throwing his perceived enemies in jail to, without seeming reason, firing federal employees providing important services to the taxpayers to starting a trade war? He did say he’d do those things.

Or, did you elect him to lower prices, inflation, and (further) secure the border?

You tell me – you voted for him.

Remember Trump saying he’d never read the Project 2025 roadmap that the Heritage Foundation wrote as a blueprint for Trump’s second term? It is a report that contains the most Draconian proposals possible and is an ultra-conservative’s dream of what a new U.S. government can be? I believe Trump when he said he never read it.

But I don’t believe he never thought he’d follow that roadmap.

Don’t think he is? Paul Dans was the chief architect of that report. When Dans’ draft became a political liability for Trump’s campaign, Dans was sent to campaign purgatory so Trump could get as much distance as possible between the two of them.

Now Dans has told Politico, “It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams … the way that they’ve been able to move and upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think portends a great four years.”

You tell me if what he says is what you voted for.

I get that prices were high during the last administration, and they remain high today. I get that lowering them can’t be done overnight, despite what Trump promised on his campaign.

But did you vote for Trump to ignore court orders? Did you vote for secret signings of the Enemies Act as a reason to throw people out of the country without due process? Did you vote that disabled people not get access to events? Did you vote that a group of talented, hardworking kids who are musicians have their dreams dashed of playing a concert in Washington with their idols because of the DEI ban?

Is that what you voted for?

Trust me, I get a lot of why MAGA followers are angry. They’re tired of not being heard, of feeling passed over – and they aren’t wrong. I don’t as much understand why swing voters moved toward Trump.

But did you vote to toss people out of the country without a fair hearing? I get that “criminals, murderers”, and others have cheated their way into the U.S., and they are wrong to have done that. And, of course, they should follow our laws to get in legally.

But are those the people we’re throwing out? I honestly don’t know because the government isn’t telling us. Instead, it’s signing secret orders behind closed doors, only disclosing them publicly when found out.

I can’t believe that’s what you voted for. That is not the American way.

Did you vote to have the richest man in the world – Elon Musk – use the same techniques he used in his companies to right-size the U.S. government?

Trust me, when he was doing that to Twitter and costing himself money, that was fine with me. He can run his companies however he chooses.

But not the U.S. government.

You and I own the U.S. government, not Musk.

He’s like a bull(shit) in a china shop.

The U.S. government is not a business that is run on profit and loss. The government provides, or is supposed to provide, services necessary to run a fair society. Hard to make a profit doing that, though it certainly can be run more efficiently.

Is there waste, fraud and abuse in the government? Of course, there is. But it doesn’t run in the trillions of dollars as Musk claims. If that was the case, don’t you think a bunch of other presidents – of both parties – would have found that “easy money” to cut long ago?

The current administration throws around words like corruption, crooked – please, just show us the proof of where it exists. I’m sure it does, but show us the proof so we know. I learned long ago not to fully trust what some people say to me.

So – just show us the money and where it’s being wasted. Show us! Don’t claim it’s being wasted, prove it. Show enough respect to we, the people that you trust us to see the truth.

If it is the truth.

GOING FURTHER



Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in The Screaming Moderate and re-published in Europeans TODAY on 19 March 2025 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.
▪ Cover: Credit: Grok 3/AI-generated image.







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