They don’t sprout from thin air
The roll-out of Trump 2.0’s “shock and awe” effort has been pretty rocky. This week’s attempt by Trump to “pause” billions in spending on Donald’s whim caused mass chaos across the land. There was enough backlash and a court order pausing the pause that the administration covered up its backtracking by announcing it had rescinded the memo announcing the pause but not the executive commands behind it. (Never admit mistakes.)
Yet already one sees critics taking solace in the apparent inability of the Project 2025 team to implement it’s 900-page vision for remaking America as a white-Christian-nationalist dictatorship. But they won’t stop. Ideologues like these are relentless and committed.
Wired reports that “the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk” and to tech industry movers like JD Vance mentor, billionaire Peter Thiel. Indeed, many have noticed that OPM’s “Fork in the Road” memo seems to be a cut-and-paste job from a RIF memo issued by Musk to Twitter employees after his takeover. This controversy came after the directive to quash all DEI efforts:
Last week, federal employees across the government received emails encouraging them to turn in colleagues who they believed to be working on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access initiatives (DEIA) to the OPM via the email address DEIAtruth@opm.gov.
“This reminded me,” says Kelman, “of the Soviet Stalinism of turning in your friends to the government.”
While the country was captivated by the “cruelty and loyalty” show Trump made of signing executive orders prepared by ideologues in his orbit, it begins to seem more obvious that the easily manipulated Trump is merely a Trojan horse for an oligarch class flirting with dictatorship.
The parallels between Trump 2.0 and another dictatorial regime have not gone unnoticed. In particular, one clip Rachel Maddow used in her fall profile of JD Vance began spinning out online last night. “We need a De-Ba’athification program….”
One recalls the hubris of the Bush ideologues who implemented the De-Ba’athification program in Iraq. And how well that worked out. One might find that abject failure encouraging except for the chaos Bush-Cheney unleashed from Syria to Afghanistan. Not to mention hundreds of thousands dead.
Maddow’s review of Vance’s history includes his taking a lot of his ideas not only from Peter Thiel, but from “self-described monarchist Curtis Yarvin.” Quoth Yarvin, “If Americans want to change their government, they are going top have to get over their dictator phobia.” (They don’t want to govern. They want to rule.)
Those looking forward to Trump’s passing of natural causes may need to rethink that. Because then we get Musk-Thiel-Yarvin in the guise of JD Vance. The broligarchs are trying to implement their agenda now under Trump the Ignorant and with the useful-idiot assistance of white-Christian-nationalists. They’ll all have more free reign — and I use the term purposefully — under Vance.