The Groper is doing just what he promised to do during the campaign. He’s being quick about it, too.

He told us he knew more than the generals, and right off, he booted the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff from the inner circle of the National Security Council and appointed Bad Boy Bannon, his political advisor, to replace him. And, oh yeah, he also demoted the director of National Intelligence. That’s draining the swamp, I guess. At any rate, it pulled the plug on the Obama policy of having qualified people calling the security shots.

But don’t worry. After the president’s spokesman, Sean Spicer, caught his breath from that temper tantrum about how the press had dissed the president regarding crowd sizes, he assured us that all was well. Big Boy had been in the Navy. That made me feel a lot better.

The Groper was also quick to honor his pledge to close our borders to terrorists. All of them: children, certain legal residents of the U.S. who been visiting some Muslim country (he had to take that one back), snowshoe competitors from India, and every tourist from a Muslim country other than ones where he had done a deal or might be thinking about doing one.

That made it a little hard for the multi-national corporations that make up a huge part of America’s economic engine to do business. There are any number of Muslims, quasi-Muslims, friends of Muslims, and other foreigners working in financial services, IT, and, dare I say it, oil, whose work requires them to cross the United States border at will.

Another thing. Chances are the next time you wake up at night in a hospital, howling in pain, no one will be standing by your bed ready to order that extra hit of morphine. The doctors who work the graveyard shift seem mostly to be from some latter day yellow-peril part of the planet, and they are no longer welcome here. But just keep pushing that call button and be grateful that the Groper is delivering on his promise to keep us safe.

The mess at airports and borders reminds me of one time forty years ago when I got off a plane in Baghdad. To get through customs, I had to fill out a form indicating my religious affiliation. A guy next to me filled in “Druid.” He didn’t look anything like a Druid, but any answer except “Jewish” would work, and everyone knew it. We also knew you couldn’t get into Iraq if your passport indicated that you’d ever been in Israel. It’s oddly reassuring to know that the Groper, who usually does things his own way, is so keen on keeping us safe, he’ll even emulate the security practices of a Muslim country.

We’re still in the early days of swamp draining. It could change. So far, though, the Groper, Bad Boy Bannon, and Kid Kushner seem bent on creating an activist government. They are messing with our daily lives as much as Bernie said he would. Just different goals.

All that repealing of executive orders and regulations and closing borders and wall building and firing people adds up. And he’s just getting warmed up.

An unnamed source at the General Services Admiration reports that the words on the Statue of Liberty are going to be changed to “keep your tired, your poor losers.”

And any day now, we can expect repeal of Obama’s fake birth certificate and retroactive impeachment proceedings.

That’s big government, if I ever saw it.

I never had any use for Reagan’s claim that government is the problem. It was a nice tough-guy sound bite, but it was too broad and too simplistic.

Still, the Groper is making me think the Gipper may have been on to something.

Paul Willcott publishes somewhat longer essays about once a month at www.geezerblockhead.com.