The best explanation of President Trump’s aggressive strategy can be found in ancient Greece. Like Alexander the Great, Mr. Trump is cutting the Gordian knot. 

According to legend, in Phrygia (in what is now Turkey) an oxcart was held together by a complex knot. No one could untie it. An oracle prophesized that whoever could loose the knot would rule all of Asia. 

When the brilliant young Macedonian king arrived, he examined the knot carefully and could not find the ends. So, he pulled his sword and cut the Gordian knot. It was unconventional but effective. He went on to conquer what the Greeks considered Asia, including part of India (while being driven out of Afghanistan). 

The term cutting the Gordian knot came to mean breaking through a seemingly unsolvable problem by brute force or thinking differently than everyone who had tried to solve it.

William Shakespeare caught the spirit of decisive breakthroughs when he wrote in Henry V: “Turn him to any cause of policy, The Gordian Knot of it he will unloose.”

Mr. Trump is clearly operating in the tradition of Alexander’s willfulness and cleverness.

People have been trying to explain the new administration’s aggressive efforts to take on and change the establishment as though they were politics and government as usual. 

Talking heads have been stunned by Elon Musk and his band of young computer geniuses using algorithms to find waste in government. 

The speed and aggressiveness are clearly creating injustices and errors — which will have to be rectified over time. A few of Mr. Trump’s most sweeping changes will end up in long drawn-out court fights. Some simply won’t hold up on closer examination. 

What most observers miss is that you can’t analyze and understand the Trump administration in the context of the last nine decades. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal established a remarkable number of bureaucracies. They were then dramatically expanded by President Lyndon Johnson in the Great Society period.

Since 1933, we have been willing to operate within the assumptions and structures of this establishment. Even the greatest conservative leader of that era, President Reagan, worked to create the conservative side of the establishment — not to take apart the establishment itself.

In the 36 years since Mr. Reagan left office, the establishment has metastasized into a corrupt, overwhelming, out of control bureaucracy which has become a threat to freedom and the survival of the economy.

Every reasonable effort to tame the establishment and bring it under the control of the American people has failed. We currently do not have President Abraham Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” 

The people have been replaced by lobbyists and bureaucrats. Such a government inherently produces scales of corruption which are staggering and almost unbelievable. 

Mr. Musk captured the scale of the dishonesty in a recent tweet on X when he wrote: 

“I am 100% certain that the magnitude of fraud in federal entitlements (Medicare. Social Security, Medicaid, Disability) exceeds the combined sum of every private fraud you’ve ever heard by FAR.” 

Beyond the entitlements, the fraud in the various green energy programs has been breathtaking. There is fraud in big city schools designed to pay the teachers union while children fail to learn. There is fraud in contracting government-wide. Each of these is astonishingly large.

You also must consider the $36.22 trillion federal debt. You aren’t going to start reversing annual trillion-dollar deficits without making significant, likely disruptive changes.  

Finally, the core of the establishment has become a left-wing movement. Its members believe they have moral importance and authority. They use the power of the government to coerce Americans into proscribed behaviors and activities. It has become a major cultural problem that is threatening the fabric of our society.

Faced with this entrenched, gigantic lobbyist-bureaucratic power structure, small steps to change have no effect. Mr. Trump spent his first term trying to bring Washington under control the traditional way. Then the establishment tried to destroy him.

Washington has become a Gordian knot. Mr. Trump knows firsthand the system has time on its side and the resources to absorb small reforms without affecting change. So, he is using a sword.