Being aggrieved is his pursuit of happiness, so 2020’s sore loser is 2024’s sore winner. Hence his announcement that his administration’s adult supervision will not come from Mike Pompeo (West Point, four-term congressman, CIA director, secretary of state) or Nikki Haley (two-term governor, U.N. ambassador). Both have been excommunicated from the Church of Trump for unspecified (but easily imagined) deviationism.

Donald Trump, whose election owed much to inflation, ran promising to increase living costs. His favorite word is (“freedom”? “justice”? don’t be silly) “tariff,” and the point of tariffs is to increase prices of domestically produced goods by depressing competition from foreign goods. (A truism: Protectionist nations blockade their own ports.)

Elon Musk’s reward for services rendered to Trump’s campaign will be leadership of a commission to slice waste from and infuse efficiency into government. The world’s richest man is about to get a free public education. He will learn this truism: Life is not one damn thing after another; it is the same damn thing over and over.

Musk says he can cut “at least” $2 trillion from federal spending - say, one dollar in three. (Fiscal 2024 spending: $6.75 trillion.) Well.

Debt service (13.1 percent of fiscal 2024 spending) is not optional and is larger than defense (12.9 percent), which Trump wants to increase. Entitlements (principally Social Security and Medicare) are 34.6 percent, and by Trumpian fiat are sacrosanct. So, Musk’s promise is to cut about 30 percent of the total budget from a roughly 40 percent portion of the budget, politics be damned.

Musk was 10 years old in 1982 when Ronald Reagan appointed entrepreneur J. Peter Grace to purge government of waste and mismanagement. Grace, said Reagan, aimed to make government “more responsive to the wishes of the people.” The problem is that government is too responsive to those wishes.

Instructed by Reagan not to “leave any stone unturned” combating “inefficiency,” Grace found that under every stone lurks someone like the farmer who was the father of Major Major, a character in Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel, “Catch-22.” He was “a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism.”

Grace’s commission produced 2,478 recommendations, including this: Electricity produced by the Hoover Dam was being sold to parts of three Western states at Depression-era rates that were one-fourth to one-fourteenth of those paid by unsubsidized Americans. Congress responded to Grace’s proposal - stop this! - by stampeding to extend for 30 more years this way-below-market price of a federal resource.

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 64-34, with Western senators unanimously adamant about continuing the subsidy lest an obnoxious principle - federal resources should be sold at market prices - be extended to water, grazing fees and other natural rights. Heaven forbid.

Musk might do some good; Trump’s tariffs will do nothing but harm. Both, however, could cause Congress to rethink its decades of delegating dangerous discretion to presidents. They can unilaterally wreck international commerce and domestic prosperity with vague incantations about “national security” and “unfair” practices.

Progressives, especially, are executive power enthusiasts. They are about to discover the obvious: Things achieved by executive high-handedness - President Joe Biden’s executive orders; bureaucratic improvisations (e.g., the electric vehicle mandate) - are written on water. Trump’s dictates erasing Biden’s, which erased Trump’s, will endure until the next Democratic president erases them.

Policy instability is a price paid for Congress’s abdications. Another Trump presidency might provoke most Democrats and many Republicans to revise their excessively president-centric understandings of government.

Democrats’ post-election grieving will intensify when they realize this: After the 2030 Census, the migration of voters from high-tax, slow-growth blue states to booming red states will redistribute electoral votes. California likely will lose four of today’s 54. New York, which had 47 in 1940, and has 28 today, might lose three. Illinois, which had 26 in 1972 and has 19 today, might have 17. Texas might gain four and Florida three.

Meanwhile, Democrats, who are experiencing freedom as Kris Kristofferson defined it (“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”), should remember what today’s Barry Goldwater remnant - the few, the proud, the obdurate - remember. In 1964, they voted for the Arizona senator who lost 44 states to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Commentators wondered if the GOP would ever again be competitive. With huge assists from Johnson - Vietnam, Great Society excesses - Republicans won four of the next five and five of the next seven presidential elections.