He doesn’t need a facility that big to house himself and his cabinet…
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January 30, 2025 (Thursday)
Last night, just before 9:00 Eastern time, an American Airlines jet originating in Wichita, Kansas, carrying 64 people and a U.S. Army helicopter carrying three military personnel collided in the airspace over Washington, D.C. Both aircraft crashed into the Potomac River. Authorities say there were no survivors.
I’m going to leave that right there, with my best wishes for the victims and their friends and family, and hope that we can give them some breathing room.
It is perfectly legitimate to stop reading right here and pick the world up again tomorrow.
But for people who want to hear more about the larger picture of today’s United States, I’ll turn to what the administration’s reaction to this tragedy says about the ideology of the new Trump administration.
As Claire Moses of the New York Times noted, last night’s event is the most serious air disaster involving a commercial jet since 2009. Last night, more than an hour after news of the crash broke, President Donald Trump posted on his social media network: “The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!”
Trump’s impulse to blame other people for the tragedy even before anything was known about its causes reflects his rejection of the concept of the American government in favor of the idea that the world is simply a collection of individuals. Since the early twentieth century, the U.S. government has performed an extensive and remarkably successful role in public safety. But Trump talks about the U.S. government—what he calls the “Deep State”—as if it is the enemy and must be destroyed, while elevating those operating outside of it as society’s true leaders.
This rejection of the U.S. government began as soon as he took office as he purged officials and civil servants with the accusation that they had been poisoned by “Marxism,” or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Transportation safety officials were among those purged, and the loss of the person at the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) during former president Joe Biden’s term, Mike Whitaker, after he clashed with Elon Musk captures Trump’s antigovernment worldview. After Whitaker called for Musk’s SpaceX company to be fined $633,009 over safety and environmental violations, Musk endorsed an employee’s complaint that Whitaker required SpaceX “to consult on minor paperwork updates relating to previously approved non-safety issues that have already been determined to have zero environmental impact.” Musk wrote: “He needs to resign.”
Musk appears to believe that humans must colonize Mars in order to become a multiplanetary species as insurance against the end of life on Earth. As Jeffrey Kluger reported for Time magazine today, Musk has complained that the FAA’s environmental and safety requirements were “unreasonable and exasperating” and that they “undercut American industry’s ability to innovate.” Musk publicly complained: “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”
Whitaker resigned the day Trump took office. That same day, the administration froze the hiring of all federal employees, including air traffic controllers, although the U.S. Department of Transportation warned in June 2023 that 77% of air traffic control facilities critical to daily operations of the airline industry were short staffed. The next day, January 21, Trump fired Transportation Security Administration (TSA) chief David Pekoske, and administration officials removed all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, which Congress created after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Trump administration vacated the positions with an eye to “eliminating the misuse of resources.”
Other vacant positions at the FAA, according to CNN’s Alexandra Skores, are “the deputy administrator, an associate administrator of airports, an associate administrator for security and hazardous materials safety, chief counsel, assistant administrator of communications, assistant administrator of government and industry affairs, and assistant administrator for policy, international affairs, and environment.”
Late this morning, Trump spoke to reporters about the crash, saying “We do not know what led to this crash but we have some very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we’ll probably state those opinions now.” That opinion was that the people responsible for the accident were not of “superior intelligence.” He claimed that his Democratic predecessors had lowered standards for air traffic controllers (although the language he quoted from the FAA website was from his own time in office). “[W]hen I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before. I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first. And they put politics at a level that nobody has ever seen, because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible and their politics was even worse."
He continued: “The FAA, which is overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg—a real winner,” apparently forgetting that the former transportation secretary was part of the Biden administration and left office on January 20. “Do you know how badly everything’s run since he’s run the Department of Transportation? He’s a disaster…he’s just got a good line of bullsh*t."
Trump blamed diversity hiring for the collision. When a reporter asked Trump, “I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash,” Trump answered: “Because I have common sense, ok? And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t.” Trump’s new secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, whom Trump elevated to that position from his role as a weekend host at the Fox News Channel, also spoke, confirming that “We will have the best and brightest in every position possible…. The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department.”
Shortly after the press conference, Sydney Ember and Emily Steel of the New York Times reported that staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C., was “not normal” at the time of the crash, with one air traffic controller doing the work usually assigned to two.
In response to Trump’s comments, Buttigieg posted: “Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”
Tonight, Trump held a televised signing of a new executive order blaming former presidents Barack Obama, who left office in 2017, and Joe Biden for the crash. It says that “problematic and likely illegal decisions” during their administrations “minimized merit and competence in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).” They implemented “dangerous ‘diversity equity and inclusion’ tactics,” it said, and recruited “individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities in the FAA.” The executive order says that his return to “merit-based recruitment, hiring, and promotion” will “ensure that all Americans fly with peace of mind.”
MeidasTouch posted: “Trump’s handling of this situation should be treated as one of the biggest scandals in presidential history.”
But there is a larger story than that of Trump’s attempt to blame Democrats for a disaster that happened on his watch. His administration seems to be trying to replace the government Americans have created through their representatives over centuries to promote the interests of all Americans with a group of white men who can operate as they see best, without restraint.
Ashley Parker of The Atlantic reported last night that the Office of Management and Budget sent out the memo that froze all federal grants and loans—and thus prompted a constitutional crisis—without getting approval from the White House. Trump has nominated right-wing religious extremist Russell Vought, who was a key author of Project 2025, to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget, although he has not yet been confirmed.
Emily Davies, Jeff Stein, and Faiz Siddiqui of the Washington Post reported yesterday that the proposal emailed to many of the 2.3 million people who work for the federal government offering them an inducement to resign was also a surprise to the White House. The memo came from the Office of Personnel Management, now run by Elon Musk’s team, and the email had the same title as one Musk sent to Twitter employees when he took over the company.
Rather than cowing employees, though, the unauthorized and unclear offer prompted federal employees to flood Reddit with vows to “make these goons as frustrated as possible.” One wrote, “It took me 10 years of applying and 20 years experience in my field to get here. I will not be pushed out by two billionaire trust funds babies. I’M NOT LEAVING!"
Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Meta has settled a lawsuit Trump brought against the company after it suspended him because of his participation in the January 6, 2021, attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Meta will pay $25 million. The reporters explained that Trump demanded the settlement from Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg after the 2024 election, saying the case had to be dealt with before Zuckerberg could be “brought into the tent.” As Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said: “It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game.”
It seems that Musk and the technology billionaires want to smash the government to enable their futuristic visions, and Christian Nationalists like Russell Vought want to smash it to replace it with religious rule. Trump wants to smash it for money and power. But in the first two weeks of the new administration, their enthusiasm for breaking things has produced what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo—even before today’s frantic attempt to blame Democrats for the air tragedy—called “a fairly epic face plant.”
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I don’t normally like humor that includes people getting hurt, but in this case…
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January 31, 2025 (Friday)
On February 1, 1862, in the early days of the Civil War, the Atlantic Monthly published Julia Ward Howe’s "Battle Hymn of the Republic,” summing up the cause of freedom for which the United States troops would soon be fighting. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” it began.
“He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.”
Howe had written the poem on a visit to Washington, D.C., with her husband. Approaching the city, she had reflected sadly that there was little she could do for the United States. She couldn’t send her menfolk to war: her husband was too old to fight, her sons too young. And with a toddler, she didn’t even have enough time to volunteer to pack stores for the field hospitals. “I thought of the women of my acquaintance whose sons or husbands were fighting our great battle; the women themselves serving in the hospitals, or busying themselves with the work of the Sanitary Commission,” she recalled, and worried there was nothing she could give to the cause.
One day she, her husband, and friends, toured the troop encampments surrounding the city. To amuse themselves on the way back to the hotel, they sang a song popular with the troops as they marched. It ended: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; his soul is marching on.” A friend challenged Howe to write more uplifting words for the soldiers’ song.
That night, Howe slept soundly. She woke before dawn and, lying in bed, began thinking about the tune she had heard the day before. She recalled: “[A]s I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind… With a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen…. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”
Howe’s hymn captured the tension of Washington, D.C., during the war, and the soldiers’ camps strung in circles around the city to keep invaders from the U.S. Capitol.
“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.”
Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic went on to define the Civil War as a holy war for human freedom:
“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.”
The Battle Hymn became the anthem of the Union during the Civil War, and exactly three years after it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, on February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Joint Resolution of Congress passing the Thirteenth Amendment and sending it off to the states for ratification. The amendment provided that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It gave Congress power to enforce that amendment. This was the first amendment that gave power to the federal government rather than taking it away.
When the measure had passed the House the day before, the lawmakers and spectators had gone wild. “The members on the floor huzzaed in chorus with deafening and equally emphatic cheers of the throng in the galleries,” the New York Times reported. “The ladies in the dense assemblage waved their handkerchiefs, and again and again the applause was repeated, intermingled with clapping of hands and exclamations of ‘Hurrah for freedom,’ ‘Glory enough for one day,’ &c. The audience were wildly excited, and the friends of the measure were jubilant.” Indiana congressman George Julian later recalled, “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life, and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy, while I was inexpressibly thankful for the privilege of recording my name on so glorious a page of the nation’s history.”
But the hopes of that moment had crumbled within a decade. Almost a century later, students from Bennett College, a women’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina, set out to bring them back to life. They organized to protest the F.W. Woolworth Company’s willingness to sell products to Black people but refusal to serve them food. On February 1, 1960, their male colleagues from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat down on stools at Woolworth’s department store lunch counter in Greensboro. David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell A. Blair Jr., and Joseph McNeil were first-year students who wanted to find a way to combat the segregation under which Black Americans had lived since the 1880s.
So the men forced the issue by sitting down and ordering coffee and doughnuts. They sat quietly as the white waitress refused to serve them and the store manager ignored them. They came back the next day with a larger group. This time, television cameras covered the story. By February 3 there were 60 men and women sitting. By February 5 there were 50 white male counterprotesters.
By March the sit-in movement had spread across the South, to bus routes, museums, art galleries, and swimming pools. In July, after profits had dropped dramatically, the store manager of the Greensboro Woolworth’s asked four Black employees to put on street clothes and order food at the counter. They did, and they were served. Desegregation in public spaces had begun.
In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognized February 1 as the first day of Black History Month, asking the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
On February 1, 2023, Tyre Nichols’s family laid their 29-year-old son to rest in Memphis, Tennessee. He was so severely beaten by police officers on January 7, allegedly for a traffic violation, that he died three days later.
In 2025 the U.S. government under President Donald Trump has revoked a 60-year-old executive order that protected equal opportunity in employment and has called for an end to all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. This February 1, neither the Pentagon nor the State Department will recognize Black History Month.
Mine eyes have seen the glory.
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Not the face plant I was expecting.
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“Nobody expects the, er, tiger.”
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Context: that was a scene from one of my favorite movies ever.
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February 1, 2025 (Saturday)
Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.
The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.
Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”
Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump.
Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”
That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.”
Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.
Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn’t know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025.
You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868.
It shows in the new administration’s persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.”
The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.”
Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.
And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.
Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion.
Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X.
Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect.
The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution.
But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.
According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “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.”
Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.
Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “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.”
This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”
All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”
But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”
Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump’s MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.
Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.”
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I remember Obama leaning over at the inauguration and saying to Shrub-- according to a lip reader-- “Is there any way we can shop this?”
Shrub chuckled of course, but that sure has become a serious question. If there really is a Deep State, now seems like the time for it to emerge from the depths!
I wonder if anyone could simply arrest Tromp, Musk, etc., or somehow depose them. Could a military coup happen? (Not that that would likely go well.) How much authority does someone like the joint chiefs of staff have?
Scary times, my friends…
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I think most of the military is now pro-Trump, unfortunately. At least the top leadership and the rank and file, anyway. Scary times, indeed.
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Who could do anything anyway!? I would not even attend a protest.
Most likely people will be killed en masse at the first opportunity so that trump can declare martial law.
People who resist will die or disappear.
This could go on for a generation or two even if Trump had died yesterday.
In the interim there isn’t any law except what trump and musk want as law anymore. Or it has to be litigated like new. In his courts.
“We the people” had decades to fix the executive branch power imbalance and failed. We had four years to prosecute the coup. The US died so quiet and fast… Not with a bang but a whimper.
What am I supposed to take from that other than to accept I have simply believed a lie and a fairytale about a country like I had about a God once.
Whatever trump says is the law is the law and whatever he doesn’t isn’t.
I don’t like it but I’ve come to understand that the constitution was a nice idea no one cares about and so it just means what whomever controls the army says it means. In reality you can be dead a hundred years when some one hears about how you thought you had “free speech” and wants to make that relevant again.
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Even assuming no violence resulted, the idea of protesting at this point seems laughable. They’re Nazis. They’re not going to give up their power just because a bunch of people waved some signs, or even if they riot. They. Do. Not. Care. And the Democrats are making it very clear lately that they don’t care what the people they represent want, either. I keep being told that we, the non-fascists, are the majority of Americans, yet we don’t seem to have a single ally on our side. We’re just a bunch of disparate, unarmed citizens with no leader, no plan, no funding and no power. Maybe that will change, but for now it feels like we’ve already lost and the best we can do is try to help each other survive in the face of overwhelming evil that will last years or decades. I really hope that’s not the case, but I don’t see the alternative from here.
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I am of the generation and culture that went to fight for W Bush out of sincere patriotism for ideals I have now watched at times the self-same people shred, ingest, and shit out on their hands.
Idk what to do with that even.
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Was talking about that last night. We are down to local networks, local action, local resistance. Maybe that movement will grow, maybe not, but for now, we need to be thinking locally. Doing what we can, where we are, with what we have. Not thinking history-making things, just making it clear the fascists do not hold all the cards. Keep the faith and help someone.
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That’s what I mean by helping each other survive- supporting and protecting each other on a local level and trying to resist in ways that don’t dramatically save the country, but do something that adds up over time. I’m scared about how dangerous and how bad it will get on a local level. I’m hoping that the USA being such a vast country might make it harder for a fascist government to maintain strict control over everyday life, but who knows…
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It has been difficult to find recent voting trend data among actice military members. Much of the recent trend data has active members roped in with veterans, who are very different in age and makeup. Back in 2022 the trend leaned slightly democratic among all branches, with the exception of the USMC. Senior military NCOs and Officers (E7 and up, O-5 and up) were more republican leaning.
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I get the feeling some of them are being asked about that directly:
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