IMaginot that?
Donald Trump’s Project 2025 forces overran Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, illegally impounded $3 trillion in funds for a host of congressionally mandated spending, and “threw the nation into chaos.” Officials administering “Meals on Wheels, Head Start, school lunches, child-care help, student loans, disaster relief, crime-fighting assistance and Medicaid” were left wondering what hit them and whether they could continue operating Wednesday morning.
“No president in history—not even Trump in his first term—ever logged so many illegal actions in so short a time,” Timothy Noah observes. “This is not a close legal call. Trump’s previous violation of this law concerning aid to Ukraine prompted Trump’s first impeachment 11 months into his first term.”
What else would we expect from a 34-time convicted felon?
Not even the White House seemed to know what it had done with its Monday night memo to “pause” the spending. White House’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, 27, with Sean Spicer-esque confidence, declared, “President Trump is back, and the Golden Age of America has most definitely begun.” Leavitt made sure reporters knew who Trump meant to target with the cutoff. But asked if Trump’s hold order cut off Americans on Medicaid, Leavitt answered, “I’ll check back on that and get back to you.”
Dana Milbank reports:
How long would the cutoff be? Leavitt could only say that it was “temporary” and that Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget, “told me to tell all of you that the line to his office is open for other federal agencies.” So the guy directing this cataclysmic “pause” is an unconfirmed nominee who doesn’t even work for the federal government? (Later on Tuesday, a federal judge delayed the freeze until at least Feb. 3.)
But Trump 2.0 was not done for the day. The man known for slapping gold leaf onto his properties offered civil servants of questionable loyalty a golden parachute that was neither. The message? Quit or be fired (Washington Post):
The White House’s Office of Personnel Management sent an email blast Tuesday to federal employees offering them a way to resign with pay through Sept. 30, the most sweeping effort yet by the new Trump administration to shrink the ranks of the federal workforce.
The email instructed workers to reply to the message if they want to resign and take the offer, which expires Feb. 6. According to a White House Q&A, most of the 2.3 million federal workers are eligible for the incentive, which landed as many employees were facing return-to-office mandates and threats of layoffs.
[…]
A website details the offer for federal employees. The email sent to the federal workforce said employees who choose to resign will be exempt from the return-to-office requirements until Sept. 30. An Office of Personnel Management memo issued late Tuesday said employees who do resign should “promptly have their duties re-assigned or eliminated and be placed on paid administrative leave” until the end of September, but left room for agency directors to require employees to keep working for some time.
Not being a Beltway denizen, it’s not clear to me whether Trump legally can direct funds this way. But observing the law is no longer even a hindrance to Trump. It’s not clear what this “deal” means for workers, their severance or benefits. It appears a slap-dash an effort at replacing civil servants with MAGA loyalists as the Monday memo from the acting director of OMB. This isn’t an effort to reform government so much as to occupy it.
What Trump is asking of career civil servants is to become collaborators in a powerless Vichy government between now and when he finally eradicates the old republic in September and consolidates control. He’s not offering an olive branch.
Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton, writes that Trump is moving swiftly, as autocrats do, to disorient opponents with a flood of stunning actions. His governing principle in his second term is rooted in cruelty and loyalty:
Trump seeks to govern through cruelty and loyalty. Defending our constitutional democracy requires that we don’t look away when cruelty is visited on members of our community and that we refuse to allow our democracy to crumble into personalistic attachment to the leader. To stand up to this will require a unity of purpose so that we cannot be divided by fear and it will require that we defend the principle that no man is above the law—nor can he change the law to put himself above it. Those of us concerned about the future of our democracy need to regroup and prepare for a long hard fight. We cannot let ourselves be divided and conquered—or distracted by everything that is flooding the zone right now.
Meantime, Trump’s ICE deportations are not ethnically cleansing America fast enough to satisfy Trump.
IMaginot that?