"Hegseth recalled meeting Kirk more than a decade ago, when Kirk was building his youth movement, Turning Point USA. "I still have the sticker: 'Big government sucks,' Hegseth said. Kirk 'pursued that truth with more vigor than anyone I've ever met,' he added. 'We always did need less government. But what Charlie understood and infused into his movement is, we also needed a lot more God. Charlie had big plans, but God had even bigger plans.'"
"my first column explored the apparent contradiction between the Trump Administration preaching a fairly classic vision of small government, not least via the supposedly cost-slashing work of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, and simultaneously expanding the power of the state over civil society in radical new ways. In the end, I concluded that, actually, this wasn't much of a contradiction because the cuts often doubled as assertions of leverage, or intimidation."
A large MAGA gathering in Arizona honored Charlie Kirk after his assassination, producing a mix of forgiveness, retribution, and messianic rhetoric. Pete Hegseth praised Kirk's anti–big-government stance while emphasizing that Kirk infused his movement with religion. The Trump Administration's rhetoric of small government has often coincided with expansion of state power and symbolic rebrandings. Spending cuts have sometimes functioned as leverage or intimidation rather than genuine restraint, and promises of reduced government have become difficult to sustain amid rising deficits and unfulfilled efficiency initiatives.
Read at The New Yorker
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