But they can still do a lot of damage
The Trump “Rolling Thunder” operation, as former presidential adviser Steve Bannon calls it, hasbeen in full effect in the week and a half since Donald Trump was restored to the presidency. Day after day, one atrocity after another has been perpetrated on the American people as Trump and his henchmen take a wrecking ball to the federal government. Do they know what they’re doing or are they just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks?
Over the course of these 10 tumultuous days Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of all the January 6th rioters and his Justice Department has closed any pending cases. Various agencies have fired and demoted personnel, some of which can only be seen as acts of retribution such as the firing of career prosecutors who worked on the Jack Smith Special Counsel cases and the dismissal of almost all the Inspectors General.
Much of what he’s done so far has focused on rescinding civil rights policies and imposing new discriminatory ones even rescinding an executive order that goes back to the mid-60s signed by Lyndon Johnson mandating non-discrimination by government contractors. His big donors no doubt applauded his chutzpah is just outright declaring that there is no longer any need to ever hire another woman or racial or ethnic minority. Money well spent.
And then there is his draconian immigration agenda, which is off to a fast start. He started by declaring that the government would no longer recognize birthright citizenship despite its being in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. That one has been stayed by a federal court and will wind up in the Supreme Court where Trump says he expects to win.
But that was just for starters. He declared a National Emergency at the border, re-assigned all federal law enforcement as Immigration officers and Wednesday announced that they will build his first migrant concentration camp at Guantanamo. It will be big enough to hold at least 30,000 prisoners indefinitely.
He’s reversing every climate change policy of the past decade and is turning America’s health system into a giant dumpster fire. And yes, in a paroxysm of pettiness he renamed Mt. Denali, Mt McKinley and the Gulf Of Mexico the Gulf of America and had the official Pentagon pictures of generals and others he hates removed. (Don’t be surprised to see Biden, Clinton and Obama’s removed too.)
Then there is the impending trade war with Mexico and Canada which he plans to announce on Feb. 1st and his declaration that Gaza should be ethnically cleansed of Palestinians. (He’s said in the past, licking his chops, that it has some very nice beachfront real estate.) Yesterday, he blamed “DEI” for the tragic plane crash in DC on Wednesday night and when asked for evidence calling his depraved racism “common sense.”
When you see just a few of the items laid out like that it truly does seem like an unstoppable juggernaut. But a couple of things happened this week that changed the zeitgeist.
Until the last couple of days, the opposition has seemed to be paralyzed, trying to get its bearings under the onslaught. (There’s not really any excuse for that since all of this was telegraphed for months by Project 2025 and Trump’s own rhetoric but it is what it is.) When the Office of Management and Budget put out a memo on Monday night ordering a “temporary pause” on all federal-government grants and loans, people woke up.
The memo was an embarrassment, going on about Marxism and transgenderism and the non-existent Green New Deal but that’s to be expected — all the memos and orders from the new administration sound like they were written by right wing social media troll-bots. What was shocking about it was that it actually caused a firestorm that Republicans couldn’t ignore.
The next day websites went down and people all over the country were calling their Reps demanding to know what was up. Senators reportedly “hit the ceiling.” And rather than just telling everyone to shut their traps and deal with it as they’ve been saying for months to anyone who questions their odious policies, the White House backed off.
According to the Atlantic’s Ashley Parker, they claim the memo wasn’t vetted by Trump’s deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller as it should have been and went out without his ok. (If that isn’t a CYA, I don’t know what is. )
The order ended up in court with a judge issuing a stay prompting them to “rescind” it. Press Secretary Karolyn Leavitt then went out and made it clear they really didn’t mean it:
That understandably did not impress the judge who issued a restraining order saying that Leavitt’s comments about the memo vs the order were “a distinction without a difference.”
It was a blunder and a big one considering how important this “impoundment” gambit is to the Project 2025 architects that are running the program to destroy the federal workforce. These were said to be the meticulous planners who knew what they were doing and it ended up waking up the press and the opposition and even alarming some Republicans. And if Stephen Miller is running away from it you can bet that there’s friction between them and the White House already.
The other big blunder came from co-president Elon Musk who apparently unilaterally copied and pasted the “buyout” memo he sent to Twitter employees and sent it to the entire 2.3 million federal workforce offering them a bogus “inducement to resign” that was so vague it could mean almost anything, causing yet another wake-up call/firestorm.
According to the Washington Post, Musk has taken over the Office of Personnel Management, the independent agency that runs the human resources department for the federal government and staffed it with a bunch of Silicon Valley cronies with a mandate to start gutting the federal government immediately. If that process goes as well as it did when he bought Twitter and purged the company of most of its employees, the American people are not going to be amused. It wasn’t good. Seeing as many of the people he promised severance pay never got it and are suing him, Democrats like Virginia Senator Tim Kaine are right to be urging their federal employee constituents not to accept his “offer.”
It’s one thing if Musk is actually running the government while Trump is just holding press conferences and ceremonially signing orders but it’s another if he’s screwing up as he clearly did with this buyout email. It’s possible that he got a Trump thumbs up on his way out to play another round of golf one afternoon but according to the Post none of the senior officials in the White House or the career staff at the OPM knew about it.
Trump has empowered people like Musk and Vought (even though he’s still working on the outside not having been confirmed yet) and they are running their own shows. I don’t think he cares much what they do but he’s got to remember that it all blows back on him when they screw up. And they are screwing up bigly.
Whether that means he’s ready to cut anyone loose remains to be seen. But it’s certainly proved one thing. We were told that this was a different caliber of people than the first term and they would come in knowing exactly how to efficiently work all the levers of power to enact the MAGA agenda. Well, it turns out that they are just as incompetent as the man they work for. They can still do a ton of damage just by throwing all this stuff against the wall. But a well-oiled, systematic, authoritarian machine they aren’t. I’m not sure that’s any better but it’s good to know what we’re dealing with.
Salon