Whenever I begin one of these with “I personally despise Donald Trump”, his supporters immediately tune out. “Another mindless liberal” is one of the nicest things I’ve been called. It’s a little sad, because the next word from me is likely to be “but”.

Whenever I begin one of these with “I personally despise Donald Trump, but”, the legion of his haters collectively throw up their hands. “Another Nazi lover” is usually truncated to “Another Nazi”.

And so it goes.

The upshot is, I can’t write anything either meaningful or for that matter reasonable about current policy in the United States unless I significantly disguise the opening. “Well, don’t write about Trump” is completely useless advice, thanks all the same, because it IS all about Trump. Anyone who says differently has somehow managed to miss the past three months, and while I confess a degree of envy, these people are not my target audience.

Which does beg a useful question: Since everyone either abhors or worships Mr. Trump already, to whom can I write? Which minds out there remain open enough to be swayed? Which hearts are not already hardened past even the concretized casings of the average American mind? What sort of conversation can be held between an acumen embittered to the point of pickling and another that’s been reduced by rage to meaningless repeated chanting?

Please note, I don’t assign parties to these last two. They are, in my experience, somewhat interchangeable.

Nevertheless, now that I’ve alienated everyone who could possibly care and bored into somnolence all those who don’t, I’d like to mention a patently obvious fact that even Trump’s critics have somehow lost sight of:

Given the massive, unbridgeable budget deficit our country has been running for the past four decades (please don’t mention Clinton or I’ll have to publicly eviscerate you in the comments), significant cuts in Federal spending — which means both services and staffing — are the very least of what absolutely needs to happen in order to avoid what presently looks to be an inevitable default on the National Debt. When that happens, every economy in the world will collapse overnight, resulting in war, famine, disease, starvation, and suffering of every sort on a scale impossible to conceive. The consequences to humanity cannot be overstated. Anyone who says this should not be avoided by any practicable means is either psychopathic or deluded.

The present efforts to cut spending, however, have been more theatrical than actual. They began by attacking one of the most obviously bloated budgets, State’s private collection of Congressional earmarks and leftover pork from previous administrations. It made for wonderful headlines (or terrible, depending on one’s point of view) but, in the end, very little in real savings. The Pentagon laid off a large number of civilian staffers, but did so by moving active-duty military into those roles — again, not a real efficiency. Several high-profile low-amount battles between the Department of Education and various universities have resulted in minimal savings with large headlines as well.

There’s a pattern here, if you care to look: Trump is after headlines, not results.

His political opponents are fighting tooth and nail, engaging the White House’s efforts with every legal obstruction they can manage. In the process, they’ve ended up looking precisely as petty and partisan as their enemy — which, to be fair, is what happens when you engage in a mudfight. They are, however, entirely failing to acknowledge that some of what’s been cut was genuinely wasteful, or at a minimum the sort of expenditure that the overwhelming majority of Americans would object to — as is the nature of government pork.

Anyone sincerely interested in slashing bloated bureaucratic budgets would perhaps have started with USAID and Education, but their next move ought properly to have been against the War On Drugs, which since its inception has never been more than a horrendously expensive attempt to turn the wealthier half of the country’s population against the poor at the cost of everyone’s civil liberties. Over a hundred billion dollars per year go to fund those agencies solely concerned with drug interdiction, and that doesn’t count the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, Homeland, ICE, and the expense of nationally militarized police forces combined with vast intrusive networks of surveillance over our own civilian population.

Those civilians, incidentally, spend over one trillion dollars per year buying drugs. Nobody forces them to do so; they are willing, even eager, participants. By so doing, they fund the government’s opposition tenfold, letting them purchase top-grade military weapons, turning the border into a war zone and whole vast swathes of Mexico into the private fiefdoms of enemy warlords.

No conceivable amount of government spending could possibly ever achieve more than the occasional minor interdiction of supply, which in turn only ever increases the street price of drugs by about ten percent. The entire operation is doomed ab initio.

Yet Trump, by declaring war on immigrants (legal and not, evidently) has apparently determined to mobilize the entire force of American military might against the drug cartels, the precise opposite of any move that might involve fiscal responsibility or even sanity.

Meanwhile, there have been zero moves made against the bloated expense of higher education, the obscenely vast increase in administration expenses for healthcare, that deeply entrenched system of corporate welfare known as Defense Department procurement, Wall Street’s systemic takeover of the nation’s residential housing market, corporate profiteering over foodstuff pricing, or indeed any of the major causes of unaffordability in modern America, both for its citizens and its government.

Any one of these would be worthy targets for cost-cutting. None are happening.

Now, again, let’s be fair. We were to Trump’s opponents; we can give him the same courtesy. He’s only been in office ninety days. Perhaps some of the items just mentioned are on his agenda, but only after he’s placated his base and gotten support lined up in Congress. We’ll even go a step further and imagine that his aggressive approach to border security will generate concrete results, at least in Mexico.

Can he actually eliminate all supply of illicit narcotics, fentanyl for instance? No. Canada, our neighbor to the north, is a country made up largely of uninhabited coastline, and which shares thousands of miles of entirely unmonitored border with us. For a trillion dollars annually, it’s hard to imagine a motivated illicit businessman who would be unable to adjust from southern smuggling routes to northern. Heroin is produced in high volume in southeast Asia; coca is grown throughout equatorial South America. Both have other potential sources, however, so even military conquest couldn’t stamp out global production.

Honestly, even superhuman efforts can’t stamp out the supply of drugs when there’s so very much pressure of demand for them. Then too, philosophically, we have to ask ourselves if we’ve even the right to fight against substances that are so broadly wanted by the world’s otherwise free peoples. Aren’t our governments there to protect the freedom of those they govern? If we’re not allowed to poison ourselves with stimulants, how long is it before they take away our steaks — or our coffee?

But of course by this time there’s nobody here. You all left on the first line, your minds made up before you got here. Even those few still reading from politeness, boredom, inertia, or perhaps just a perverse desire to prove me wrong aren’t paying attention. And how could I blame you? Or anyone?

Would I truly have people suddenly come wide awake and confront the unmitigated horror that goes on all around us constantly? They’d all run stark raving mad before their eyes were fully open. Self-delusion is their first defense, a coping mechanism against that intolerable truth that is reality. Let them have their sleep, for the alternative is all too terrible.

And so we come full circle, and there is still no way even to begin.

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