From the perspective of ordinary people who don't follow the news closely, I imagine all that matters is that nothing disastrous has affected their own lives, so why care about the drama swirling around Washington.
Presumably the Trump base enjoys the spectacle. They elected Trump to shake up Washington, and he is shaking it up. If Washington insiders are upset by what he is doing, no further proof is needed that it must be good. The swamp is being drained!** The MAGA base are politiphobes who believe, as the article puts it that:
[O]bvious, commonsense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking. The reason these obvious solutions are not enacted is that politicians are corrupt, or self-interested, or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding. Not surprisingly, politiphobes think the obvious, commonsense solutions are the sorts of solutions that they themselves prefer.Trump shaking up Washington means getting rid of all these things and implementing the easy, common-sense solutions to our existing problems. And even if he doesn't, he sure is making Washington entertaining in a reality TV sort of way.
Then there is the perspective of economic royalists, who believe that most of the civilian government shouldn't exist at all. The reason the economic is flourishing is that Trump, in cutting taxes, gutting regulations, and wrecking much of the federal government by corruption and incompetence, has freed the economy from the dead hand of government and allowed it to achieve its potential. (I am guessing the MAGA crowd shares this view at least to some extent). And the royalists are, after all, the ones who have real power and influence.
From the perspective of an economic royalist, everything is based in property. Fundamental to all freedom and prosperity is the absolute right to property -- to own and use it with no outside constraints. Since taxes take away people's property and regulations interfere in what people can do with their property, both are inherently illegitimate. At the same time, anarcho-capitalists are a distinct minority in the libertarian movement. Most economic royalists concede government as a necessary evil and taxes as the price of civilization. The goal, then is to hold government and taxes to an absolute bare minimum. And that means holding government to its "essential core functions."
For the most part, essential core functions mean a criminal justice system -- police, courts (both for trying criminals and for civil actions) and prisons, presumably with a few chits thrown in for prosecutors. But the criminal justice system in the US belongs at the state level, and economic royalists consider the federal government even worse that the states. From a royalist perspective, the federal government should not consist of much more than the military. Admittedly, a true libertarian would want to limit the military to the bare minimum necessary to deter invasion, which is probably not much. But economic royalists are nothing if not flexible. The nature of political alliances brings them into alliance with foreign policy hawks, so they will concede a much larger military than would otherwise be necessary. Since these foreign policy hawks would eschew diplomacy in foreign policy (more on that later) economic royalists are happy with a major shrinking of the State Department, though presumably they would keep it in much smaller form to perform consular functions, coordinate with allies, and deliver ultimatums to enemies. In another bit of flexibility for the sake of political alliances, economic royalists are probably now willing to concede border security. And a small Justice Department for the very small portions of law enforcement that legitimately take place at the federal level. Throw in a few chits for federal courts, and for a Treasury Department large enough to collect the taxes for all this (in the form of sales taxes and now imports taxes, but definitely not income taxes) and write the necessary checks. Finally, although there is a vocal minority of goldbugs among the economic royalists, the majority probably recognize the need for a central bank printing money.
A few points here. First of all, if we cut government back to all these functions, it would allow for some very large tax cuts while keeping the budget balanced. Thus Republicans keep passing massive tax cuts in hopes of forcing government to be cut back to its essential core functions.
Second, please note that these are all "daddy" functions, with the possible exception of the State Department. (Possibly another reason right wingers hate it so much). Economic royalists invariably see all "mommy" functions as redististributionist and therefore illegitimate.
I have no doubt that royalist would prefer to see these government functions dismantled in an orderly fashion, rather than wrecked through corruption and incompetence.*** But they have been waiting since Ronald Reagan's time for someone to shut down most of the federal government in an orderly fashion, and it hasn't happened. They may therefore very well regard wrecking the federal government through corruption and incompetence as a second-best alternative. I do recall that during the Bush II Administration, political appointees kept the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) from doing its job, so employees spent their days viewing internet pornography. No one, least of all an economic royalist, wants to pay federal employees to watch internet pornography all day. (What a waste of taxpayer money!) But from the perspective of an economic royalist, an SEC that pays employees to watch internet pornography is at least preferable to an SEC that does its job and interferes with the free market by engaging in economic regulations.
Furthermore, from an economic royalist perspective, there is a real danger in merely suspending the operations of the federal government rather than shutting it down. Sooner or later, a Democrat will be elected President again and may resume operations. But really effectively wrecking the federal government through corruption and incompetence will make it unsalvageable and a Democrat won't be able to revive it.
The next point -- wouldn't economic royalists prefer to wreck the federal government by honest incompetence without the corruption? After all, libertarians have long made an exception to the generalization that capitalists can do no wrong -- capitalists can no no wrong, unless they enlist the state to their aid. Granted, big capitalists might be willing to set aside their principles in favor of self interest so long as they are the ones benefiting from the corruption. But then there is the whole matter of systematic corruption, i.e., not dismantling the state regulatory apparatus, but using it as an instrument to reward supporters and punish enemies. (Such as threats to Amazon because of its association with the Washington Post). This sort of thing should scare the hell out of Republican donors and economic royalists. I can only assume they are unconcerned because they see Trump as too incompetent for this sort of thing and his destruction of large swaths of the federal government as making this type of corruption impossible anyhow. (And, indeed, his attacks on Amazon remain no more than tweets, with no serious plans to act on them).
And it may be the economic royalists, though sincerely opposed to corruption in government, nonetheless welcome it in what Marxists call a "heightening the contradictions" sort of way. In other words, the more corrupt government agencies are, the more public opinion can be turned against them, and the stronger the case for shutting down such agencies altogether.
Of course, there are those crazy liberals, who believe that sooner or later wrecking vasts swaths of the government through corruption and incompetence will cause problems. I assume that economic royalists will dismiss such concerns with the assurance that even if there is some inconvenience in the short run, the unregulated workings of the free market will always bring about the optimal result in the long run, so deliberately wrecking the federal government couldn't possibly cause any problems.
Or at least it wouldn't if only people would get over their false consciousness (to use another Marxist term). Hurricane Katrina is an excellent case in point. The Bush Administration was highly successful in wrecking FEMA by corruption and incompetence. When disaster struck FEMA did a terrible job. Success! But instead of leading to calls to abolish FEMA, Hurricane Katrina just led to pressure to make FEMA work better. Reforms were made to improve its performance. Libertarians can take comfort in the knowledge that FEMA agreed that it was a mistake to rely altogether on the feds to handle disaster relief, and that the best approach was to mobilize people in the area of the disaster as a resource. But, alas, coordination is needed for such mobilization to work efficiently, and FEMA has gotten quite good at such coordination. So instead of being abolished, FEMA has become much more effective, which makes in politically unassailable, and libertarians have failed.
And if the Trump Administration wrecks the VA (as they seem to be working on), they may soon run into the same problem.
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*Just to be obvious, of course Trump had nothing to do with Hurricane Maria striking Puerto Rico. But his reaction afterward can only be described as willful neglect.
**Once again, from the perspective of a Trump supporter, the "swamp" does not mean big money interest, so much as experts, career government employees, and the civilian federal bureaucracy of any kind.
***This article explains very well the dangers of shutting down large swaths of government without advance planning.
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