Don’t say, “No one could have imagined”
One of many famous quotes from the G.W. Bush administration was by National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. “No one could have imagined” an enemy using a plane as a missile and slamming it into our buildings, she told reporters. Except novelist Tom Clancy imagined a terrorist flying a passenger jet into the U.S. Capitol in “Debt of Honor” in 1994.
Rice later admitted to Congress that in fact people inside the government had imagined it, that “there were these reports in 1998 and 1999” she only learned about later. The Bush administration looked even worse when the President’s Daily Brief from 6 August 2001, headlined “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” was made public.
Signs are even clearer today that Donald J. Trump and his MAGA minions are determined to strike at the heart of the United States government should he win reelection and establish permanent minority rule where U.S. democracy once stood. He’s not only admitted wanting to use the levers of executive power to exact retribution against political enemies, Just Security documents he’s done it before “at least a dozen times.”
Trump has a history. He’s even more explicit today about weaponizing the Department of Justice and the military in a second term against any who dared hold him accountable for actual crimes.
Just Security admits it did not document similar efforts by the Biden administration for one simple reason: “because there is no evidence that he or anyone at the White House ever took similar actions.”
Don’t you dare
If we allow Trump to be reelected, we, all of us, have no excuse for saying no one could have imagined that the MAGA godfather would actually do what he said, and the authors of Project 2025 have put into print. Lists of prospective Trump II administration employees are being assembled even now. Their plan is to gut the U.S. Civil Service, replace experienced, dedicated public servants they’ve demonized for decades with people whose primary qualification is being MAGA loyalists. When Trump says jump, they’ll say (with tears in their eyes), “Sir, how high?”
His brain trust’s idea of making America great again is a place where life is poor, nasty, brutish, and short for everyone (in their view) not born to rule and plunder.
Donald Trump “has no conception or understanding of the concept of public service. He views public life and even the presidency as an opportunity to personally enrich himself, at the literal expense of the American people and the country as a whole.” He’ll emulate the autocrats he admires, arrest his enemies, loot and coopt public resources, maybe even raid the national treasury in the grand tradition of world’s most notorious autocrats. And he’ll do it under legal protections granted by the conservative Supreme Court majority he appointed in his first term. You have been warned.
To remind Americans what public service really looks like, Michael Lewis just published the lead essay in the Washington Post series he mentions in the video above. The Post means to spotlight federal experts with a dedication to the work, not to making big money from it, the sort of mission-driven public employees Lewis profiled in “The Fifth Risk” and that conservatives vilify as public enemies. Each year since 2002, the Partnership for Public Service presents awards known as the Sammies to federal employees for remarkable work no one’s ever heard of:
Even the people who win the award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them — and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back. Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work! Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother. Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.” Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it.
They were the carrots in the third-grade play. Our elected officials — the kids who bludgeon the teachers for attention and wind up cast as the play’s lead — use them for their own narrow purposes. They take credit for the good they do. They blame them when things go wrong. The rest of us encourage this dubious behavior. We never ask: Why am I spending another minute of my life reading about and yapping about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris when I know nothing about the 2 million or so federal employees and their possibly lifesaving work that whoever is president will be expected to nurture, or at least not screw up? Even the Partnership seems to sense the futility in trying to present civil servants as characters with voices needing to be heard.
Geeks, essentially.
Lewis this week profiles Christopher Mark, who has spent his career in “the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States.” A former coal miner himself, he earned a Ph.D. in rock mechanics from Penn State and went to work for the U.S. Bureau of Mines.
“As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, the notorious communist.
Mark just wanted to keep miners safe. He solved problems for the fun and challenge of it, and the only place to solve problems like these was in government service. Is it any wonder the modern conservative and guys like Trump find such characters suspect?