Sen. Eric Schmitt’s call to disrupt Washington masks a mess of real-world consequences | Opinion
They say you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. But what if breaking the eggs is the whole point?
What if the omelet never gets made? What’s left then?
I ask the question because Sen. Eric Schmitt, the Missouri Republican, seems to think that egg-breaking is the whole point of the chaos being caused by President Trump and Elon Musk as they fire federal workers, freeze funding for a whole array of programs and generally upend lives and American governance from coast-to-coast.
“Never forget what this past election was all about,” he wrote Sunday on X. “The American people wanted fighters to disrupt Permanent Washington.”
Sounds bold. But what does it actually mean?
Not much, I suspect. “Disruption” is a tech-industry buzzword — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing — that obscures the very real costs of what Trump and Musk are doing while justifying any amount of breakage.
It’s a term that sounds great in PowerPoint presentations and sales pitches. In real life, not as much.
The Great Depression was a “disruption.” World War II was a “disruption.” The COVID pandemic was a “disruption.”
They weren’t any fun.
Voters wanted a return to normalcy
One problem here is that Schmitt’s thesis is probably wrong.
What was the biggest issue in the 2024 election? According to Gallup, it was the economy: 52% of voters rated the issue as “extremely important” to their vote, while another 38% ranked it as “very important.” That meant the economy was a “significant factor to nine in 10 voters,” the polling service said.
There’s no mystery here. Americans were sick and tired of never-ending post-pandemic price increases for eggs, cars, houses and everything else. They just wanted inflation to go away.
Which would seem to suggest that a lot of Donald Trump’s voters thought they were voting for a return to normalcy of sorts.
That’s just not what they’re getting.
Did voters really want the disruption caused by firing instructors and staff at Haskell Indian Nations University, leaving students without teachers for some of their classes and throwing the survival of the institution into question?
Did voters really want to disrupt the life of Maria Loconsolo, a Prairie Village woman who was just 10 months into what she hoped would be a career of service at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration?
“I feel such a strong desire to try to stand in the gaps and offer whatever shield I can to our most vulnerable community members,” Loconsolo told KCUR this week. “The fact I can’t do that for them … it’s really hard.”
Did voters really want to disrupt funding to the Missouri and Kansas farmers who put food on our tables, right at the moment they’re about to head into the critical spring growing season?
And did voters really want to disrupt their tax returns from the IRS, where 6,000 workers — including about 100 in Kansas City — were given their walking papers right in the middle of tax season?
I’m skeptical.
Musk, Trump are making a big mess
“The status quo has worked really well for the powerful and for the elites,” Schmitt wrote in that X post, “but not so much for working folks.”
You know what? He’s not wrong.
But ask yourself a question. Who reaps the benefits when all those services — education, mental health counseling, farm payments and much, much more — are slashed by a couple of billionaires like Musk and Trump? Who wins when chaos is the default mode of governing, with no real endgame in sight?
It’s not the working folks, that’s for sure.
Disruption for its own sake is merely destruction. You know what you get when you break a bunch of eggs without ever getting to the omelet-making part?
A big gooey mess.