Author: Tom Sullivan

Turning the White House into a chop shop

Anand Giridharadas’s The Ink this morning announces:

Musk’s hostile takeover

It’s hard to know just how destructive this will be in the long run, but for now, this is arguably the most troubling development in a day of extremely troubling developments. Elon Musk appears to be trying to do to the federal government what he did at Twitter/X: massively disrupt its functioning and drive out experienced employees not on board with his transformations and his personality cult. [Tusk]

Musk bought his way into the White House complex and now means to, as they say, “have his way” with the federal government.

If you haven’t heard, Musk locked Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) civil servants “out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees” (Reuters):

The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department’s data systems.

The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.

“We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems,” one of the officials said. “That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”

A nongovernmental employee and his team are taking over federal government systems.When things start breaking, you know why.

— Bradley P. Moss (@bradmossesq.bsky.social) 2025-01-31T20:23:44.322Z

As Digby noted, some of Musk’s aides are barely out of high school. Here’s where we are:

OPM has sent out memos that eschew the normal dry wording of government missives as it encourages civil servants to consider buyout offers to quit and take a vacation to a “dream destination.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove has ordered a massive purge of FBI agents beginning with “at least eight senior FBI executives” and extending it seemingly to anyone and everyone associated with investigations into Trump’s “very special” Jan. 6 insurrectionists and with Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s election plot and stolen classified documents:

“I do not believe the current leadership of the Justice Department can trust these FBI employees to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” Bove wrote.

Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll wrote in an email that his orders include reviewing “thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts.”

As news of possible firings spread Friday, bureau employees traded information and some sought legal advice.

One person who works at the FBI’s Washington Field Office relayed to a colleague that supervisors had told agents to prepare for the White House to publicly release the names of the agents who worked on the two Trump criminal cases on Monday, and that those agents would to be terminated that same day.

Rachel Maddow noted that the public release of the names of FBI employees who would no longer be agents as of Monday was a signal to MAGA minions and just-released Jan. 6 criminals to “have at ’em.” And since the Jan. 6 investigation was the largest in bureau history, virtually all agents touched it in some way. They too have targets on their backs (NBC News):

In a separate memo to the FBI workforce sent out Friday night, the bureau’s acting director, Brian J. Driscoll, Jr., informed employees that acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, had asked for a list of all FBI employees who worked on January 6 cases for “a review process to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

“We understand that this request encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts,” Driscoll wrote. “I am one of those employees.”

It was not immediately clear why the FBI and DOJ officials had been ousted. The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.

Trump is not only taking retribution against anyone who particpated in investigating his past crimes, but defenestrating federal law enforcement so that no investigations of his current and future criminal activities are even possible. The Roberts court has already preemptively shielded him from that.

Trump now gets to do the one thing many Americans know him for more than anything else: say “You’re fired!” “It’s our dream to have everybody almost working in the private sector,” Trump told reporters on Friday.

That’s been the Midas cult dream for decades. Any product or service provided by We the People on a not-for-profit basis is a crime against capitalism that has to be stopped. Middle men must take their percentage. Or else.

Here he is complaining about people in government working remotely not doing their jobs:

“You don’t know what they’re doing. And then at some point, we may ask them to certify that they didn’t have two jobs. Meaning, were they really getting a check from us, the government, and then were they also working a second job and a third job on government time?”

REPORTER: With your efforts to reduce the federal workforce, are there any concerns about protecting the public?

TRUMP: Everybody is replaceable. We want them to go to into the private sector. It's our dream to have everybody almost working in the private sector. pic.twitter.com/aLsLjSlL6w

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 31, 2025

So says a government employee actively lining his pockets with money from “individuals, companies and foreign governments that want to curry favor with the president.”

Trump and the techbro oligarchy are here, active, and bent on turning the White House into a chop shop.

Friends have asked what people this rich want with the government.

Answer: They want it all.

Cartoonist First Dog on the Moon asks if China’s hyped Deepseek AI might save us “from the smug tech broligarchy.”

Answer: “Only a mass global insurrection against the dictatorship of capital will do that – in fact DeepSeek make it cheaper and easier to put AI in everything, but at least we got to laugh at some of the worst people in the world briefly.”

Solved another problem quickly and easily

Donald Trump is the smartest little boy in the room anywhere he goes. He knows everything about everything. He has a very big brain and great genes, the best genes. He’ll gladly tell you.

He’s also the Seven Deadly Sins on two legs. He’s susceptible to acting on information from the last person he spoke with, and prone to hearing a factoid and building a fantastical narrative around it that he himself believes. Like his riffs about sweeping the forests to prevent wildfires. Or his bit about the big shutoff valve somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. See, fire hydrants ran dry fighting the Pacific Palisades fire because some government idiots up there were dumping perfectly good water into the ocean.

In fact, some Los Angeles hydrants went dry during the January fires because of extreme short-term demand, not because of lack of supply. The state’s “reservoirs are at or near historic levels,” Politico reports. But don’t confuse Trump with facts.

The boy genius now giving orders in the White House directed federal dams in California on Thursday to dump water stored for irrigation so he could have his photo op.

A news site covering water supplies in the San Joaquin Valley reports that “in response to President Trump’s Jan. 24 executive order mandating that federal officials exert all efforts to get more water to fight southern California wildfires,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at Kaweah and Success lakes began discharging water from the dams.

“Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory!” tweeted the boy genius. “I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire!”

Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire! pic.twitter.com/Oaz92ZeiTh

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 31, 2025

Mad King Donald

One teensy little problem, Donny. The water can’t get to Los Angeles from the lakes southeast of Fresno, and local water managers in the valley are trying to capture the additional flows in recharge basins anyway (SJV Water, Jan. 31):

Tulare County water managers were perplexed and frustrated, noting both physical and legal barriers that make it virtually impossible for Tulare County river water to be used for southern California fires.

First, it would have to be pumped at great expense across the San Joaquin Valley to get to the California Aqueduct and then travel hundreds of miles south. 

Second, this isn’t “loose” water free for the taking.

“Every drop belongs to someone,” said Kaweah River Watermaster Victor Hernandez. “The reservoir may belong to the federal government, but the water is ours. If someone’s playing political games with this water, it’s wrong.”

Not to mention that Trump’s actions sent locals scrambling to relocate equipment and warn farmers about possible flooding: , (SJV Water, Jan. 30):

Water managers said they got about an hour’s warning from the Army Corp’s Sacramento office to expect the Tule and Kaweah rivers to be at “channel capacity” by Thursday night. 

Channel capacity means the maximum amount of water a river can handle. For the Kaweah, that’s 5,500 cubic feet per second and for the Tule, it’s 3,500 cfs.

Those levels were last seen, and surpassed, during the 2023 floods, which destroyed dozens of homes and businesses and caused significant damage to infrastructure.

This should be 25th amendment level conduct. The president ordered water to be released from a random dam in California nowhere near the wildfires and then claimed it would help. That’s literally Mad King behavior.

— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) 2025-02-01T01:58:17.705Z

People who actually do know something about water management in the region were not as happy as Trump boasted about his order (SJV Water, Jan. 31):

“A decision to take summer water from local farmers and dump it out of these reservoirs shows a complete lack of understanding of how the system works and sets a very dangerous precedent,” said Dan Vink, a longtime Tulare County water manager and principal partner at Six-33 Solutions, a water and natural resource firm in Visalia.

“This decision was clearly made by someone with no understanding of the system or the impacts that come from knee-jerk political actions.”

That person is Donald Trump, boy genius.

Responding to Trump’s Oval Office comments on Friday afternoon and not to this water nuttiness, Aaron Rupar commented:

i covered the entirety of Trump's first term and things are getting much darker much quicker than they did last time around.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-01-31T22:18:58.580Z

I just want to say for the record that when the history books are written centuries from now, I believe the election of Donald Trump in a free and fair election in 2024 will go down as one of the most senseless and self-destructive own goals in human history

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-01-31T22:37:01.994Z

Now. What are we going to do about it?

Two can play at that

As Digby reported yesterday, Sen. Chuck Schumer, one of several Beltway Democrats past their expiration dates, is catching shit from a half dozen Democratic governors. They are mad as hell at Donald Trump’s newest reality show, the Project 2025 Demolition Derby, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They insist somnolent Democrats on Capitol Hill — how did Trump put it? — fight, fight, fight.

Paul Krugman concurs in his newsletter, offering similar political advice he normally eschews:

Today, however, I’m going to make an exception, and offer three words of advice to Democratic politicians and MAGA opponents in general: oppose, oppose, oppose. And make noise. A lot of noise. Don’t make conciliatory gestures in the belief that Trump has a mandate to do what he’s doing; don’t stay quiet on the outrages being committed every day while waiting for grocery prices to rise. I can’t promise that taking a tough line will succeed, but going easy on Trump is guaranteed to fail.

Trump and his MAGA minions deserve no quarter and certainly no deference. Republicans gave Obama and Biden none and Democrats should respond in kind.

Democrats’ first mistake is assuming that he won because his “issues” held salience for voters who somehow missed his being morally and intellectually bankrupt while being sanewashed by the press. Other pundits Krugman’s read, as I have, seem to be drinking their own Kool-aid. If only Democrats had paid more attention to this (pundit’s pet) issue and less to that one, etc. Oh, the price of eggs!

But Democrats can’t just sit around waiting for Trump’s promises to fail. They need to constantly challenge him on the issue, keep reminding voters that he lied about it all through the campaign, and hang rising prices around his neck every step of the way.

Nor, as I see it, should they narrowly focus on kitchen-table issues. One reason low-information voters may have believed Trump’s nonsense claims about being able to reduce prices is that some of them really thought he was the brilliant manager he played on TV. The reality, however, is that the Trump administration has made a complete shambles of its first 10 days, especially with their it’s on, no it isn’t, yes it is spending freeze that is both destructive and clearly illegal, and has itself been frozen by the courts. It would be political malpractice for Democrats not to make an issue of Trump’s raging incompetence.

The Attention Age

What’s it going to take, Democrats? A high school cheerleading squad to chant it in front of the U.S. Capitol? Actually, the spectacle will get them more press than another caucus presser. Sure, they’ll be condemned by the right. But as Chris Hayes points out in “The Sirens’ Call,” Donald Trump dominates the messaging battlespace because in his mind any kind of attention is good attention, even the worst kind. This is something Democrats don’t get.

Hayes told Anand Giridharadas, “Democrats have been conflict-averse and conflict draws attention, and have also not understood how important it is to get attention, even if you run the downside risk.”

That’s not exactly Krugman’s message, but it rhymes:

So Democrats and MAGA opponents shouldn’t hold their tongues and try to make nice with Trump in the belief that he represents the will of the people. Americans are just starting to find out that they guy they elected and his policies aren’t at all what they thought they were voting for. And we should do everything we can to accelerate their awful journey of discovery.

One Democrat who gets it is AOC, as Digby pointed out. Hayes does as well:

And the one person who gets it is someone who figures prominently in your last book, who you profile, is AOC, who is the best at this of Democrats. Whatever you think about her, whether you agree or disagree with her politics, as an attention age politician, she is by far the most gifted.

The Schumers are living in the past and past their primes. Their seniority is a liability in the attention age.

UPDATE: Go on narrative offense.

Is there any point to keeping count?

Remember when politicizing a tragedy was gauche? Not just among Republicans inside the Beltway but among Fox News hosts and right-wing talkers? Well, those tragedies typically involved mass shootings, often at schools. But a mass casualty event in D.C. involving an airliner and an Army helicopter in the first month of Donald Trump’s watch? It’s a perfect opportunity for the president to make political statements and display his skill at stopping the buck anywhere but his desk.

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post documents that the president’s rants attributing blame for the midair collision on his doorstep this week to DEI policies were four Pinocchios-worthy (gift link):

In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for imposing what he called “a big push to put diversity” that he said weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.

Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”

[…]

But here’s the rub: During Trump’s first term, the FAA began a program to hire air traffic controllers with the conditions that Trump decried.

You can get the rest at the gift link. Suffice to say Trump’s press statements are epic bullshit, a word Trump applied on camera to former Biden transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s remarks on the crash.

In Trump’s first term, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post kept a count of Trump’s lies and misstatements. The paper quit counting somewhere upward of 30,000. Trump 2.0 appears intent on setting a new record. It’s not clear yet if the Post under publisher and CEO Will Lewis will restart the count. But, hoo-boy, Trump’s comments on the midair collision had fact-checkers scrambling. They will have steady work until Trump finds a way to early retire them as well as tens of thousands of federal employees.

David Graham of The Atlantic notes Trump’s evil Chauncey Gardiner-ness for his similar obsession with television. Trump likes to watch. Then he comments profusely and demonstrates for the world that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He can’t even pull of seeming to be president and is clearly not interested in doing the job for which he was hired:

Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Trump ally, has claimed that Trump wasn’t even running the government during his first term. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Matt Yglesias notes, Trump was more interested in offering punditry on how the government was doing than acting like the head of the executive branch. And on January 6, 2021, according to federal prosecutors, Trump sat at the White House watching the violent sacking of the Capitol and doing nothing to stop it.

]…]

One vignette from the first Trump administration illustrates the dynamic. In April 2019, as the White House was juggling half a dozen serious controversies, Trump called into Fox & Friends and yakked at length about whatever happened to be on his mind until even the hosts couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, Brian Kilmeade cut in and brought things to a close. “We could talk all day, but looks like you have a million things to do,” he said. Trump didn’t appear concerned about it.

What’s odd is that even as Trump acts so passively, his administration is moving quickly to seize unprecedented powers for the presidency. In part, that’s because of the ideological commitments of his aides, but Trump also has a curious view of presidential power as an à la carte thing. He’s very interested in acquiring and flexing power to control the justice system, punish his enemies, and crack down on immigration, but he’d just as soon get the federal government out of the emergency-management business.

Those ideologue-aides and multibillionaire Trump backers have their hands so far up Trump’s back that you might see their fingers waggling in his mouth. Like the fictional Gardiner, they decided the simpleton would fit their hands like a glove and be a perfect remote-control president.

Subtlety is not their agenda

I’ve long described the right-wing policy ratchet this way: Find the line. Step over it. Dare anyone to push them back. No pushback, or if it fails? New line. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

That was timorous, beta pre-Trumpism. The authoritarian goal today is no line at all.

David Graham describes Trump 2.0’s stumble over pausing funding already allocated by Congress as more than ineptitude. “It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch,” and not simply chaos, but “a battle over priorities within the Republican Party.”

They may mismanage business, but they still mean business:

“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” Trump’s nominee to head the OMB, Russell Vought, wrote in Project 2025, the blueprint for a conservative administration created by the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned right-wing think tank. The strategy is to seize power and dare both Congress and the courts to stop it. This tactic is unpredictable, as this week’s misadventures show, but it’s also relatively low-risk. The ideologues inside the administration want to see what they can get away with, and if it doesn’t work, so be it.

Find the line. Step over it. Dare anyone to push you back.

Returning power “to the American people” is a cruel conceit. That’s the last thing Trump and his backers intend. Trump’s motto may be “L’État, c’est moi,” but lackeys like Vought mean to use him as a front for their own power grab, starting with challenging the Impoundment Control Act Vought refused to commit to following during his confirmation hearings.

Trump simply might have asked Congress to claw back the funds instead of issuing his failed edict. He has the support there to pull it off, writes Graham. But seizing executive power is the real objective.

Graham concludes:

Because this effort is core to the ideological agenda of Project 2025 principals such as Vought, the revocation of this executive order likely won’t be the last effort we see along these lines. And having to back down for political reasons tends to make the internal battles only fiercer. Trump’s attempts to decimate the civil service and clear out career bureaucrats are well known, but Project 2025’s authors reserved special animus for those they expected to be on their side during the first Trump administration.

“I had a front-row seat on many of these issues and importantly [saw] how bad thinking would end up preventing what we were trying to accomplish, from less-than-vigorous political appointees who refused to occupy the moral high ground, particularly in the first two years of the president’s administration,” Vought said in a 2023 speech. He has no intention of letting that happen again.

We’re not in Kansas anymore. Brace yourselves for a particularly Orwellian period in which the cure for bad thinking is right-thinking, as with fringe ideologues it always is. Occupying “the moral high ground” transmits a darker, dog-whistle meaning most Americans will not catch. Its meaning has nothing to do with preserving the republic for which the flag stands, or did, any more than a MAGA hat means “patriot.”

The civil war of which the right has long dreamt and for which cosplaying militiamen have long armed themselves is here. But it is a cold one not fought with AR-15s but with a string of proxy battles and political power plays meant to whittle away at the republic from the edges, Ho Chi Minh-style.

A smaht, I say, a smaht chicken would be more subtle so as not to be so obvious in Washington. But these amped-up testosterone junkies are mini-Lokis not interested in subterfuge. They want conquest and want to be seen doing it.

Tony Stark: Yeah, divide and conquer is great, but he knows he has to take us out to win, right? THAT’S what he wants. He wants to beat us, he wants to be seen doing it. He wants an audience.

Steve Rogers: Right. I caught his act at Stuttgart.

Tony Stark: Yeah, that was just previews. This is – this is opening night. And Loki, he’s a full-tilt diva, right? He wants flowers, he wants parades. He wants a monument built to the skies with his name plastered…

[Stark pauses; he and Rogers look at each other knowingly]

Tony Stark: Sonofabitch!

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….”

JD Vance: “We need a De-Ba’athification program in the U.S….We should seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all of the people…every single middle-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people.” pic.twitter.com/NOcMnIQZT8

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) July 15, 2024

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.

#BREAKING: Legendary #Maddow: "The billionaire [#PeterThiel] who gave him [@VP] all of his jobs and installed him in the U.S. Senate, and who then reportedly TOLD Trump to put him on the ticket with him as his vice presidential running mate…is on the record saying he DOES NOT… pic.twitter.com/Hpo5lThMKE

— Emoluments Clause (@Emolclause) January 29, 2025

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.)

More #Maddow: "Trump had to get rid of his first term VP because his first term VP wouldn't help with his effort to overthrow the govt…For the new guy, he picked this RANDO, who'd only been in the Senate about five minutes, who nobody in the country had really heard of, who had… pic.twitter.com/hZDRSyRz9Z

— Emoluments Clause (@Emolclause) January 29, 2025

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.

We’re only two weeks in

For those lacking time or bandwidth for TL/DRs.

Didn’t know honky gumption built the railroads, didja?

View on Threads

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.”

I need to be sure everybody caught this…“No more funding for illegal DEI programs… no more funding for the green new scam… no more funding for transgenderism and wokeness across our federal bureaucracy and agencies.”Trump froze federal grants & loans just to target BIPOC & marginalized groups.

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) 2025-01-29T02:24:41.177Z

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.)

They don’t care about government efficiency or saving taxpayer dollars. They are literally going to pay civil servants to QUIT THEIR JOBS! The goal is to eviscerate the government so that they can privatize everything & let corporations run rampant.

All in Project 2025. https://t.co/xaoAZm3pgl

— Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) January 28, 2025

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.

This is grossly irresponsible reporting by the AP. What’s being offered is not a buyout. The deal is if you agree to resign in September you can continue working remotely until then. There is no buyout or severance.

— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) 2025-01-29T11:55:50.557Z

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.

Trump: Round up MORE than the usual suspects!

— Tom Sullivan (@tmsullivan.bsky.social) 2025-01-27T19:41:22.902Z

IMaginot that?

And not in a good way

This oligarch cover of “All Over the World” won’t be spawning flash mobs. At least not the dancing kind.

Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic:

During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

That is not how it works in other countries, Applebaum explains. Campaign spending in European countries is limited by law, and such barricades against the influence of Big Money exist elsewhere. Donor transparency, equal time, rules against hate speech, etc., are intended “to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates.”

Tech billionaires with enough money to control the weather threaten popular sovereignty. They are aided by a system of cryptocurrencies that can channel dark money into anonymous disinformation accounts across social media. Both have undermined our democracy here and are now at work internationally. What was once a Cold War practice of nation-states surrepetitiously funding foreign political parties is now practiced by an impossibly rich class of transnational oligarchs seeking “agenda setting” power beyond the legal reach of popular will to bring them to heel.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

Enter Trump-Vance:

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”

I read that twisted use of “free speech” and thought “To Serve Man.” They’re using our own principles against us.

Where once Vladimir Putin was the most prominent player seeking to undermine European sovereignty, Applebaum explains, now it’s über-rich Americans:

… because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.

In my earlier post, I cited a Laura Clawson comment that “Once again I feel like this reality is brought to us by a writer badly in need of an editor.” For myself, this growth of tech oligarch power resembles the plot of a bad 50s sci-fi flick I saw as a kid. Anne Applebaum suggests it’s spreading all over the world.

(h/t DJ)

More headlines we’re sure to see

Donald Trump is already making America “great again” … for lowlifes.

This first gentleman’s demise predates Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, but he might have received one if he’d still been in jail. Plus, if he’d owned a GMC Denali, it would now be a McKinley, January 4:

A man who fired an assault rifle inside a Washington, D.C., restaurant in December 2016 while claiming to investigate the “pizzagate” hoax died this week after being fatally shot by police during a traffic stop in Kannapolis, North Carolina.

On the night of Jan. 4, Edgar Welch was a passenger in a 2001 GMC Yukon that was stopped by officers, Kannapolis police said Thursday in a news statement.

The traffic stop was conducted after officers linked the vehicle to Welch, who was wanted at the time on an outstanding arrest warrant, police said.

When officers recognized Welch and moved to arrest him, he produced a handgun from his jacket and pointed it at one of the officers, police said, and after refusing commands to drop the gun, two officers opened fire on him.

“Florida Man” revisited, January 22:

A Florida man who prosecutors alleged attacked police with an explosive device during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — and whose case was dropped following President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons and commutations issued Monday, was arrested Wednesday on pending federal gun charges, according to court records.

Daniel Ball, 39, was taken into custody Wednesday morning, according to an arrest warrant, on a separate indictment returned by federal prosecutors in Florida last summer that charged him for unlawfully possessing a gun as a felon.

“Indiana State Police did not provide additional details,” January 26:

An Indiana man who was recently pardoned for his participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was shot and killed during a traffic stop by a sheriff’s deputy Sunday.

Matthew Huttle, 42, was involved in a traffic stop at 4:15 p.m. by a Jasper County sheriff’s deputy, authorities said in a news release. It alleged that Huttle resisted arrest and was found to have a firearm on him.

“An altercation took place between the suspect and the officer, which resulted in the officer firing his weapon and fatally wounding the suspect,” the release said.

Still wanted after all these years, January 27:

A Houston man who was pardoned by President Donald Trump after being convicted of assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was released from a federal prison last week but is now wanted in Harris County on a pre-existing charge of online solicitation of a minor.

Andrew Taake, 36, was sentenced to six years in prison in June 2024 after pleading guilty to assaulting officers with bear spray and a whip-like weapon during the attack in Washington D.C. Taake was released from a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, on Jan. 20, after he and more than 1,500 others involved in the insurrection were pardoned by Trump on his first day in office.

[…]

On Monday, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare confirmed in a statement to Houston Public Media that Taake is still wanted under a pending state warrant for the alleged online solicitation of a minor in 2016.

How many of the Trump “very special” 1,500 will be back in headlines and/or obituaries in the coming months?

So in less than a week we’ve got one January 6 pardon killed by police at a traffic stop and another wanted for online solicitation of a minor? Once again I feel like this reality is brought to us by a writer badly in need of an editor.

— Laura Clawson (@lauraclawson.bsky.social) 2025-01-27T22:24:07.998Z

Please review Digby’s post from last night about Donald Trump’s freezing of “all federal grants and loans, domestically and internationally.” Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck remarks ominously, “If presidents can impound appropriated funds at any time and for any reason, then there’s not much point to having a legislature.”

Then again, maybe that’s Trump’s point … or ultimate goal. Is this just the start?