Tag Archives: Trump

No More Rule Of Law

Talking Poiints Memo has been considering what the publication calls “Musk’s Little Green Men.”

The little green men are the Musk operatives who have been taking over the top federal administrative agencies–the Office of Personnel Management, the OMB, GAO, the Treasury Department…).  TPM asks “Who are these guys?” and the answer turns out to be far from comforting. These Musk flunkies are young men between 19 and 24 years of age. Several are college dropouts who left to go into tech and are currently interning at Thiel’s or Musk’s companies. At least one is a “Thiel fellow.”

They know a lot about computers–and nothing, obviously, about the Constitution or the rule of law.

These interns have gained access to the private information of millions of government employees. They have connected insecure computers to the secure ones used by the federal agencies, allowing them access that could allow them to cut off payments to government vendors, Social Security recipients, humanitarian NGOs and state governments.

Like Musk, these young “techie nerds” are unelected, unappointed and unauthorized– and happily violating numerous laws.

As Josh Marshall writes,

In other words, hard right, techno-red-pilled bros, who now have access to things like your social security checks (whether you get them or not), your financial and, likely in some cases, medical records and at least the ability to shut down whole sections of the federal government at will by simply turning off their funding spigots. (Not good!) It sounds crazy and absurd to think that individual people could have that kind of power absent anything the law recognizes. But this is what it means when you’re this far up (or down, choose your metaphor) in the brain stem of the national government. This is what it means when you have access to the central Treasury Department payment network. You can simply turn off a spigot of funding. (I’ve now had it described to me precisely how you do it.) If you have that access, whether it’s legal or not isn’t relevant. The best analogy I can provide is that there’s some person at your bank who could just change a setting and suddenly all your checks and payments would be rejected and your funds would be frozen. Now imagine if “you” is NIH or USAID or … well, Social Security.

Musk is claiming that they’ve “found” $4 billion dollars of “waste” a day, and is threatening to turn it off. Of course, what Elon Musk considers “waste” is undoubtedly similar to the version of “free speech” with which he destroyed Twitter’s utility and credibility. 

Whether Musk’s version of “waste” is accurate or not, however, is beside the point. What he and his band of techie hackers are doing is illegal. Monumentally illegal. 

Senator Ron Wyden has challenged the hacking–noting that Musk lacks a security clearance and has multiple conflicts of interest. (The full text of his letter is available here.) 

To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems … The federal government is in a financially precarious position, currently utilizing accounting maneuvers to continue paying its bills since it reached the debt limit at the beginning of the year. I am concerned that mismanagement of these payment systems could threaten the full faith and credit of the United States.”

The press has previously reported that Musk was denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China — a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems — endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.

Americans did (narrowly and with the help of significant voter suppression) elect one megalomaniac, but no one cast a vote for Elon Musk. No voter, no legislative chamber, no public official was empowered to authorize his takeover of vital federal agencies, or the substitution of his opinion about expenditures for that of Congress.

While Trump diverts public attention by undermining what had been the world’s strongest economy, terrorizing immigrants and making the country safe for White Christian Nationalists, Musk is managing the coup.

Neither respects–or obeys–the law.

Comments

About Those Alternative “Realities”

Trump and Musk are engaged in a takeover of the federal government, and MAGA folks have no idea it’s happening or what it means.

A recent Letter from An American— Heather Cox Richardson explained why–explained the peril at the very heart of this time in America’s history. That, of course, wasn’t her point–in her usual, immensely important fashion, she was deconstructing Trumpian propaganda by providing a factual context to yet another “Big Lie.”

It was one relatively small example of the flood of lies being facilitated/echoed by rightwing media.

In this case, it was the President’s recent lies about his threats to Colombia. Trump’s version of events was that, in the wake of Colombia’s refusal to accept two military planes filled with deportees, his threat to impose tariffs on goods from that country had caused an official retreat. His bullying had won! See how great he’s making America??

As usual, with Trump, reality was…different.

It turns out that Colombia and the U.S. had reached an agreement under President Biden, under which it had accepted 475 deportation flights from 2020 to 2024– 124 flights in 2024 alone. The Biden administration had used commercial and charter flights and scheduled them; Trump used a military plane that arrived unannounced.

As Tim Naftali of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs explained: “If a foreign country tries to land its military planes—except in an emergency—without an existing agreement that is an infringement of sovereignty.” Colombia rejected the military planes without prior authorization and offered the use of its presidential plane instead.

Colombia also asked the U.S. to provide notice and decent treatment for its people, an issue that had been raised and resolved in 2023 after migrants arrived in hand and foot cuffs. Colombian president Gustavo Petro noted that the U.S. had committed that it would guarantee dignified conditions for the repatriation of migrants.

Note that Colombia actually accepted the migrants; after the plane landed in Honduras, Columbia sent its presidential plane to pick them up.

America’s Bully-in-Chief not only lied about what had occured, he deported Colombian staff members of the World Bank who were working for international diplomatic organizations in the U.S., and canceled visa appointments at Colombia’s U.S. Embassy.

Not only did he lie and overact–Trump is nothing if not performative-his threat to levy a punitive tariff led Colombia’s President Petro to threaten a retaliatory one. If that occurred, American farmers would bear the brunt.

Colombia imports 96.7% of the corn it feeds its livestock from the U.S., putting Colombia in the top five export markets for U.S. corn. According to a letter written by a bipartisan group of lawmakers eager to protect that trade, led by Senator Todd Young (R-IN), in 2003 the U.S. exported more than 4 million metric tons of corn to Colombia, which translated to $1.14 billion in sales. “American farmers cannot afford to lose such a vital export market,” the lawmakers wrote, “especially when access to the top U.S. corn export market, Mexico, is already at risk.”

Trump’s White House–never tethered to honesty–declared “Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again.”

Really? Do you “respect” the drunken uncle who disrupts family get-togethers and infuriates everyone?

And that leads to the major peril referenced in my opening paragraph. As Richardson put it, “The administration’s handling of the situation with Colombia reveals that their power depends on convincing people to ignore reality and instead to believe in the fantasy world Trump dictates.”

Richardson noted an announcement by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that “[d]eportation flights have begun.” But–as she also pointed out, in the real world, nothing is “beginning.” In 2024, Colombia accepted more than two U.S. flights of migrants a week on average, and everyone on this particular deportation flight had been arrested and detained by the Biden administration.

Richardson’s Letter provided details of the migration and deportation agreements forged with Latin American countries during the Biden Administration, details which demonstrate the dishonesty of Trump’s characterizations of these events. But most Americans won’t see those details. Most–even those who detest him– will take Trump’s outright lies at face value.

Use of “the big lie” technique comes to us from Nazi Germany. Wikipedia defines it as a “gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily used as a political propaganda technique.” The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, to describe how people could be induced to believe colossal lies. He wrote that people would believe big lies because they would not believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Trump and his unelected sidekick Musk consistently demonstrate that “impudence.”

These are perilous times for “non-Aryans”– and for all people of good will.

Comments

Bigotry Unbounded

There is no longer any way to mask what MAGA is all about: Christian Nationalism, White Supremacy and the “othering” of anyone who isn’t a White “Christian” male. The persistent attacks on the Constitution are efforts to overcome legal impediments to the goal of returning White “Christian” men to social dominance. 

The evidence is everywhere.

The new Secretary of Defense, the unreconstructed (and thoroughly unqualified) Pete Hegseth, has ordered the military  to suspend all observances and/or recognition of the following holidays: Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Black History Month, Juneteenth, Women’s Equality Day, National Hispanic Heritage Month, Pride Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Asian American Pacific Islander Awareness Month, and American Indian Heritage Month.

He has also indicated his desire to revert military installations to their former Confederate names.

Incoming MAGA officials have wasted no time before eliminating all DEI–diversity, equity and inclusion–programs. Trump’s fire hose of Executive Orders has been matched in red states like Indiana, where incoming Governor Braun undoubtedly delighted his Christian Nationalist running mate Micah Beckwith by ridding Indiana government of any DEI efforts to combat years of discriminatory practices.

Some DEI efforts have arguably gone too far toward what we used to call “political correctness,” and research has suggested that they have been relatively unsuccessful in erasing bias. But it is impossible to ignore the message intentionally sent by their wholesale erasure.

My Christian friends (including several in the clergy) tell me that “Christian Nationalism” is many things, but Christian isn’t one of them. Wikipedia agrees.

Christian nationalism has been linked to prejudice towards minority groups. Christian nationalism has been loosely defined as a belief that “celebrate[s] and privilege[s] the sacred history, liberty, and rightful rule of white conservatives”.  Christian nationalism prioritizes an ethno-cultural, ethno-religious, and ethno-nationalist framing around fear of “the other”, those being immigrants, racial, and sexual minorities. Studies have associated Christian nationalism with xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, political tolerance of racists, opposition to interracial unions, support for gun rights, pronatalism, and restricting the civil rights of those who fail to conform to traditional ideals of whiteness, citizenship, and Protestantism. The Christian nationalist belief system includes elements of patriarchy, white supremacy, nativism, and heteronormativity.  It has been associated with a “conquest narrative”, premillennial apocalypticism, and of frequent “rhetoric of blood, specifically, of blood sacrifice to an angry God”. 

MAGA evidences all of those elements.

Trump’s intemperate rage against immigration has always been directed against Black and Brown immigrants–those from “shithole” countries. Despite his rhetoric about expelling “criminal” immigrants, the recent ICE raids have swept up  undocumented people who had never committed any crime and people who are U.S. citizens.

MAGA’s war on women is in high gear. Christian Nationalists are determined to strip us of autonomy over our own bodies, and return us to a status subservient to–and ultimately dependent upon– males Having achieved their goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, they are now coming for birth control. In several states, Republican lawmakers are pushing to restrict access to birth control methods they claim are “really” abortifacients.

The escalating attacks on trans youth are part and parcel of MAGA homophobia. Given the broader culture’s about-face on LGBTQ rights generally, MAGA bigots have thus far focused on the tiny group of trans individuals who are less well understood.

And who can forget the rioters in Charlottesville– described as “fine people” by Donald Trump–who chanted “Jews will not replace us”? Or efforts to keep all Muslims out of the country?

Any and all efforts to move the American public beyond bigotry are met with claims that efforts to eradicate discrimination against any minority group really amounts to discrimination against White Christian men, and a retreat from “meritocracy.” Trump even blamed “DEI hires” for the recent plane crash–presumably, because “DEI hires” would be less competent than the pathetic assortment of unqualified clowns he has nominated.

Hegseth is an excellent example.

Lloyd Austin, Biden’s Secretary of Defense– a Black man– had a distinguished 41-year career in the U.S. Army, retiring as a four-star general. He held key positions, including Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, Commander of United States Forces – Iraq, and Commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM). He was awarded the Silver Star for valor. Following his retirement from the military in 2016, he served on the boards of several companies, including Raytheon Technologies, Nucor, and Tenet Healthcare. 

Hegseth did serve briefly in the Army. He subsequently was fired from two nonprofit organizations for mismanagement, and became a Fox News host. Aside from those “accomplishments,” he faced credible accusations about extreme drunkenness and wife-beating. He also reportedly sports White Supremacist tattoos.

But hey! He’s a White “Christian” male, so obviously superior to the Black guy.

Welcome to MAGA world.

Comments

I Told You So…

Okay, okay…I hate smart-alecks who say “I told you so”– and now I’m one of them.

During my twenty-one years as a university professor, I constantly talked (well, ranted) about the American public’s lack of civic literacy–Americans’ gob-smacking lack of knowledge of our national history and constitutional structure. I established a Center for Civic Literacy at IUPUI (now IU Indianapolis), where researchers documented the gaping holes in public understanding of even the most basic elements of the country’s legal and political structures.

That public ignorance is largely responsible for our ignorant, embarrassing and very dangerous President.

David French connected those dots in a recent “conversation” among opinion writers for the New York Times. The writers had been discussing whether people cared about Trump’s assaults on America’s most fundamental philosophical commitments, and French pointed to the elephant in the room (pun intended): civic ignorance.

I really wish those of us who follow politics very closely understood more, because there’s a another question besides “Do people care?” and that is “Do people know?”

French noted that one thing that distinguishes Trump from other presidents “is the extent to which he has weaponized and exploited civic ignorance.”

One of the things that I think we’re learning is how much the American experiment has depended on the honor system. That presidents of both parties, with varying degrees of truthfulness and honor, by and large, maintained American norms and did not explicitly weaponize American ignorance in the way that Trump has.

I think what Trump and the people around him have realized is that he can do wild things, like some of the executive orders that will thrill MAGA and, of course, enrage his opposition. But then outside MAGA, there won’t be a ripple that any of this occurred at all.

Those American norms were rooted in the political philosophy that undergirds the Constitution and the Bill of Rights–a particular approach to the purpose of government, and especially to the importance of restraints on the exercise of government power. When a majority of the population doesn’t understand that philosophy and/or the centrality of those restraints, would-be dictators emerge.

I have previously posted about the importance of language and the effects of imprecise usage. An example is the way in which the term “limited government” has been transformed from the meaning given to it by the Founders into a belief in small government. The early American public insisted on passage of a Bill of Rights as a condition of ratifying the Constitution, and that Bill of Rights incorporates their insistence upon limiting the power of the state. (And since we are talking about words and their usage, I will note that “the state” in this context means government.)

If most citizens understood  America’s foundational principles, today’s media propaganda would be far less effective–audiences would recognize when claims being made are incompatible with America’s constitutional structure. Fox News and its clones rely heavily on the civic ignorance of their viewers.

In our system, government is supposed to be limited (not small). Among other things, it cannot tell citizens what they can say, what they can read, what they must believe. Government may not base laws on any religion. It may not interfere with citizens’ activities in the absence of probable cause. It must guarantee criminal defendants due process, and may not impose unreasonable penalties on those who are subsequently found guilty.

In the wake of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment added further limitations. Probably the most important was the mandate of equal protection–government cannot treat different kinds of citizens differently. (That amendment also included a provision that anyone born on American soil is a citizen–a provision that can only be changed by Constitutional amendment.)

The original Bill of Rights also explicitly limited the authority of the federal government by providing that powers not expressly granted to the federal government are retained by the states and/or the people.

Trump and his racist MAGA movement stand in opposition to virtually the entire Bill of Rights. It is very likely they have absolutely no familiarity with, or understanding of, that document. Worse, the election of Trump is evidence–as if we needed it–that the majority of Americans (especially those who didn’t bother going to the polls) were unaware of the degree to which a Trump victory would be inconsistent with America’s founding principles; evidently ignoring the campaign rhetoric that clearly pointed to that inconsistency and threatened those principles.

Too many Americans simply fail to understand that–far from making America great– Trump is intent upon destroying the genuine greatness to which America has aspired.

Comments

The Assault On Science

Facts exist whether you acknowledge them or not.

Among Trump’s blizzard of demented, anti-American Executive orders were several that attacked science and evidence. The declaration of an energy emergency was one–no such emergency exists. Asserting that the southern border is under invasion conveniently overlooked the fact that there are far fewer immigrants there than when he left office. The airy dismissal of climate change and the withdrawal from the Paris accords are part and parcel of a diseased mind that rejects irrefutable evidence of what is currently the single largest threat to human life on the planet.

Trump’s attacks on medical science were especially breathtaking, and enormously consequential.

As Talking Points Memo put it, the new administration has “turned off the spigot of funding for a huge amount of cancer research and various other health fields and diseases, and all signs point to a cutoff that will be thorough-going and draconian.”

This comes after a similar halt to the weekly MMWR report which CDC sends to hospitals and doctors every week with information on flu, COVID and other infectious diseases.

I think we’re at the point in this where you can’t yet categorically say that this is being done for RFK Jr.-adjacent anti-research nuttery, but basically all signs point in that direction. And there is at least a temporary and disruptive halt to how health research gets funded in this country.

The American Prospect reported on the assault on NIH.

All travel has been canceled, ruining many important conferences. All agency communications have been banned until further notice, blocking a highly anticipated report on the festering avian flu outbreak that has killed millions of birds, and could cause another pandemic if it mutates to enable human-to-human transmission. Worst of all, all study sections, which are required to disburse NIH’s $40 billion in grants—supporting some 300,000 working scientists at thousands of universities—are also halted indefinitely.

Before 1933, Germany was the clear world leader in academic research and achievement, winning far more Nobel Prizes than any other country. Hitler and the Nazis blew that up in a crusade against liberalism and “Jewish science,” driving most top researchers across Europe (like Albert Einstein) to Britain or the U.S., where many of them worked on the Manhattan Project. German science never recovered fully…

All agency communications have been banned until further notice, blocking a highly anticipated report on the festering avian flu outbreak that has killed millions of birds, and could cause another pandemic if it mutates to enable human-to-human transmission. Worst of all, all study sections, which are required to disburse NIH’s $40 billion in grants—supporting some 300,000 working scientists at thousands of universities—are also halted indefinitely.

As the Prospect concludes, Trump heads up a “rising tide of vengeful, crackbrained irrationalism” that is likely to end American scientific pre-eminence.

The Week reported on the Executive Order withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization.

The problem is there is no similar organization ready to take its place. Meanwhile, global health threats continue to proliferate thanks to mass travel, rising urban populations and human encroachment on wildlife habitats. Without WHO, we leave ourselves unprepared.

Why, you might ask, has Trump withdrawn us from an organization that might protect us from (or at least alert us to) the next pandemic? Evidently, because the organization’s acceptance of medical science on matters like abortion and gender care is “woke.” (That’s the trouble with science and reality…they do tend to be “woke.”)

Trump hasn’t simply disrupted ongoing medical research–he has also censored medical information. Federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes for Health, have all been ordered to pause all external communications, including health advisories and scientific reports.

So–American doctors and scientists not only won’t be pursuing research into diseases and public health, We the People won’t be informed about evidence they’ve previously uncovered. If we experience another pandemic, we will once again be told to ingest bleach or a horse medication–or perhaps, given the overwhelming influence of anti-science White Christian Nationalists–we may just be told to pray the disease away.

Trump’s cuts to foreign aid included numerous assaults on global heath. He’s stopped bird flu monitoring in 49 countries; halted efforts to eradicate polio; cut off support for vaccination of 90 million women and children; halted drug supplies keeping 20 million people living with HIV alive, and services for 6.5 million children affected by HIV in 23 countries.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been recognized as central to both America’s prosperity and its geopolitical influence. As one article put it, the social and strategic benefits of owning such an immensely successful research complex are immense.

The benefits to individuals of living in a humane and fact-based world are also immense.

Comments