Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

You’ve been boarded

Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation. — Anne Applebaum

More than a few of us not in federal employ feel the same. People I know have, like the refugees in Casablanca, fled the occupation. Except today it is the U.S. they are fleeing, not fleeing to.

Applebaum suggests that whether Musk-Trump’s Project 2025 saboteurs call their goal “Liberation Day,” or replacing all mid-level bureaucrats with MAGA loyalists (RAGE, in Curtis Yarvin’s coinage), or Steve Bannon’s “deconstruction of the administrative state,” regime change from within is the goal although their motivations may differ.

Hugo Chávez used a similar approach in Venezuela, as did Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Applebaum explains:

Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.

This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

Ask the people of Ukraine what that’s like.

What Musk-Trump means to achieve — Musk by Bond-villain design and Trump by feral instinct — is to replace the long-established culture of public service with something other. Applebaum is not sure what, but it’s not American.

Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests.

You can bet it will reflect the corruption at Trump’s core. Per Vought’s designs (himself a Christian nationalist), civil servants “who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than they could make in the private sector,” Applebaum explains, “must be forced to understand that they are evil, enemies of the state.”

From where federal workers now sit (state workers and university employees soon enough, then you), they can either resist the Nazis or join the Vichy government. That’s how Applebaum frames the choice in her link: “Putting them all together, the actions of Musk and DOGE have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced in recent history. Protest or collaborate? Speak up against lawbreaking or remain silent?”

Drink the Vichy water or waste-bin it?

The Ink this morning proposes another analogy for regime change: alien invasion.

In Cixin Liu’s massively popular sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem, an advanced society abandons their collapsing planet and sets out to take over the Earth. But to pave the way and make sure they don’t meet effective resistance, they monkey wrench human progress by distributing viral propaganda, recruiting allies in the gaming community, cutting sweetheart deals with oligarchs, and interfering with scientific research.

Thus, Physics World reports:

Scientists across the US have been left reeling after a spate of executive orders from US President Donald Trump has led to research funding being slashed, staff being told to quit and key programmes being withdrawn. In response to the orders, government departments and external organizations have axed diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, scrubbed mentions of climate change from websites, and paused research grants pending tests for compliance with the new administration’s goals.

James Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland, warned an audience this month at the Royal College of Art in London, “My country is in for a 50-year period of a new dark ages.”

The Ink continues, “It’s as if the tech oligarchs who’ve journeyed from South Africa to remake America — the guys who, as therapist Daniel Shaw remarked, ‘read Orwell’s 1984 and decided the hero was Big Brother’ — read Liu’s trilogy and decided the San-Ti (the alien invaders) were the heroes.”

We cautioned yesterday, that in plain view and through sheer doggedness, the United Daughters of the Confederacy succeeded in fixing “The Lost Cause” myth in minds across the South and farther for generations. Christian nationalists want a Jesus-über-alles theocracy and damn your religious freedom. Tech billionaires want their Red Caesar. The international autocrats’ club wants a capitalism even more rapacious, NATO castrated, and popular sovereignty replaced with neo-feudalism. They are all so focused on powers they hope to accrue that they’ve blinded themselves to what they likely will lose in making a devil’s bargain. None of this is secret, but their plans are obscured by the sideshow antics of men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Americans busy working and paying bills will be slow to catch on to what they are losing. Perhaps until it’s too late. But our history also holds solitary heroes like Rosa Parks whose actions inspire transformational movements. Pray we have a few left.

A commentator the other day said that there are only two guardrails left against Musk-Trump’s predations, meaning Congress and the courts. He was wrong. There is a third: Americans in the streets.

This is a Trump voter who works for the US government. Apparently, she didn’t think Trump would actually do what Project 2025 said they planned to do because Dear Leader lied to them and said he had nothing to do with it:

We voted for border security. We didn’t vote for my husband to lose his government career and benefits for which he has worked so hard.”

“This possibility is looming over countless families right now. We don’t know what our financial future holds. My husband dedicated the better part of his life to this country, first in the military and now working for the government. I have watched as he busted his ass every single day for this job. Our story is like many others, yet they [the Trump Administration] see them as budget line items.

We are not a fucking line item. We are real people with families who need to put food on the table just like everyone else. We have done nothing but support this country. To be disregarded and tossed out to save a buck is sickening. I support Trump on many things, but I won’t support him on this. He has already lost my support.”

Here’s a quote from a federal worker who didn’t vote for Trump:

Remember that story from a couple of weeks ago about all the Big Money Boyz celebrating that mainly Trump and the boys were back and they could treat people like shit in the workplace again. They might have to re-think that a little bit in the not too distance future. Their business is still business. Here come the leopards:

It took less than a month for the second Trump administration to cool the enthusiasm of chief executives and dealmakers. Consumer sentiment is down and inflation expectations are rising, driven in part by worries about the impact of a threatened trade war. The deals market just ended its quietest January in a decade. A Justice Department that was expected to wave through acquisitions instead sued to block a big technology merger.

Corporate bigwigs are now using phrases like “fragility,” “volatility” and “wait and see” to describe their outlooks.

“Nobody knows what’s up,” Nick Pinchuk, chief executive of toolmaker Snap-on, said on a conference call Thursday. “It’s like being on Space Mountain at Disney World. You get on Space Mountain, you get in a car, and you’re in the dark and the cars go left and right, left and right and abrupt turns, you don’t know where you’re going, but you know, you’re pretty confident that you’re going to get to the right place at the bottom.”

The recent whipsaw on tariffs seemed to hit hardest on business leaders’ confidence. President Trump announced plans to stick 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, only to delay them for a month a few days later. A number of executives, as well as top investment bankers and other industry advisers, have said that priorities have shifted in recent days to navigating tariffs and other policy issues.

They need to settle supply routes, discuss whether to raise their own prices and figure out what is even happening. That doesn’t leave much room for thinking about big bet-the-company deals.The reaction is evident in the deals market. Just under 900 deals were announced in the U.S. in January, according to data from LSEG. That compares with more than 1,200 transactions in the previous January and over 1,500 two years ago.

I’m sorry, did they think that because Trump is a pathological liar he wouldn’t do any of the things he said he was going to do? That the only thing that mattered was owning the libs?

He is a liar but after watching him for the last 8 years in politics if you didn’t know that he was a chaos agent and an imbecile who is incapable of making intelligent decisions then you weren’t paying attention. The economy did fine during his first term because he didn’t disturb the economic recovery and instead just took credit for it. He’s different now. He truly believes that he is omnipotent and that every thought that goes through his head becomes reality.

He badly botched his one big crisis which sent the economy into a tailspin from which his successor had to dig out. (It ruined him because of people like this who just wanted the show back.) Now Trump’s back and he can’t wait to fuck things up again.

Here are few more WSJ headlines from the past week. Are they having fun yet?

Last night he started talking about “reciprocal tariffs”:

President Donald Trump on Thursday rolled out his plan to increase U.S. tariffs to match the tax rates that other countries charge on imports, possibly triggering a broader economic confrontation with allies and rivals alike as he hopes to eliminate any trade imbalances.

“I’ve decided for purposes of fairness that I will charge a reciprocal tariff,” Trump said in the Oval Office at the proclamation signing. “It’s fair to all. No other country can complain.”

The politics of tariffs could easily backfire on Trump if his agenda pushes up inflation and grinds down growth, making this a high stakes wager for a president eager to declare his authority over the U.S. economy.

[…]

The United States does have low average tariffs, but Trump’s proclamation as written would seem designed to jack up taxes on imports, rather than pursue fairness as the United States also has regulatory restrictions that limit foreign products, said Scott Lincicome, a trade expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“It will inevitably mean higher tariffs, and thus higher taxes for American consumers and manufacturers,” he said. Trump’s tariffs plan “reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the global economy works.”

Trump’s proclamation identifies value-added taxes — which are similar to sales taxes and common in the European Union — as a trade barrier to be included in any reciprocal tariff calculations. Other nations’ tariff rates, subsidies to industries, regulations and possible undervaluing of currencies would be among the factors the Trump administration would use to assess tariffs.

So that should be fun. I’m sure they know what they’re doing. They’re all geniuses.

Trump tried to minimize the likelihood that his policies would trigger anything more than a brief bump in inflation. But when asked if he would ask agencies to analyze the possible impact on prices, the president declined.

“There’s nothing to study,” Trump said. “It’s going to go well.”

He said, “Prices could go up somewhat short term, but prices will also go down so Americans should prepare for some short-term pain.” Well, not so short term. He also says that the only way to fix this is for all the foreign companies to move their manufacturing to the US where they won’t have to pay tariffs. There will be a lot of jobs for Americans then. (Yes, he is even dumber than you thought.)

But sure, no problem. We love King Donald and we know that everything he does is for our own good. All Hail King Donald.

https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1889429966603034956

They’re continuously talking about “common sense” as they destroy the US Government. They have no sense, common or otherwise.

Trump’s executive orders, Musk’s power grabs, dismantling institutions faster than anyone can track, attacking science, knowledge and international cooperative bodies and allies are all part of the authoritarian playbook.

I’ve also grouped the actions in a table to illustrate this.

2 books (How Democracies die, The Road to Unfreedom) highlight key steps to erode democracy:
Undermine independent institutions
Weaken the opposition
Dismantle social protections
Retreat from international alliances
Weaponise nationalism
Undermine science
Undermine free elections (inc misinfo)

** Almost all of the actions Trump has taken over the last three weeks map directly onto those steps. **

This is from Prof Christina Pagel, @chrischirp.bsky.social. More here.

It’s pretty amazing to see it laid out like this isn’t it?

Sabotaging the government came later

Donald Trump: And your point is?

It’s not unlike the plot of that Die Hard movie where thieves keep police busy hunting for a bomb in a school while the they rob a federal gold depository. The Musk-Trump cabal has simply started firing federal law enforcement and robbing banks. Both robberies take place in New York City.

Forbes:

New York City officials alleged Wednesday the Federal Emergency Management Agency revoked $80 million in grants from the city’s accounts amid a feud with the Trump administration over the city’s use of federal funds to house migrants—a move the city’s comptroller called “illegal” and “highway robbery.”

“Revoked” is a polite term for “stole.”

Associated Press:

Gone is a $59 million grant that the administration challenged earlier in the week and another award for $21.5 million, City Comptroller Brad Lander said. The money was discovered to be missing overnight, and Lander said no one in his office had been aware that the federal government had access to the city’s bank account.

Lander is a candidate for mayor.

New York Times:

The funds in question were appropriated by Congress last year under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The payment was issued through a grant from the Shelter and Services Program, administrated by FEMA and initiated by Congress in 2023 to issue grants to cities and organizations providing services to migrants who had been released from federal custody after crossing the border.

Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, tweeted, “I have clawed back the full payment that FEMA deep state activists unilaterally gave to NYC migrant hotels.”

“FEMA deep state activists unilaterally” is propaganda-speak for both houses of Congress and the former president appropriating the funds. Legally.

Experts tell the Times that unless the city’s agreement with FEMA includes a clawback agreement, accessing the city’s bank account and taking the cash “could be illegal” (read: theft). Contracts have been signed; the money has been spent; these payments are legal reimbursments.

Forbes adds:

New York officials pushed back against Musk’s misleading claims and have said hotel fee payments were not made on luxury hotels, with Lander noting in a Wednesday press conference the funds approved as part of FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program have a $12.50 per night limit for migrants.

“Musk’s misleading claims” is polite for more lies and propaganda.

He’s not drunk, but still “bulletproof”

Some people still in federal employ will have no part of Donald Trump corrupting the functions of American justice (The New York Times):

Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

To review, the BBC recounts, “Adams is alleged to have accepted gifts totalling more than $100,000 (£75,000) from Turkish citizens in exchange for favours, such as waiving safety regulations at the Turkish consulate in the city. He denies the charges.”

Back to the Times:

Then, when Justice Department officials transferred the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption prosecutions, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.

Several hours later, three other lawyers in the unit also resigned, according to people familiar with the developments.

The serial resignations represent the most high-profile public resistance so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department. They were a stunning repudiation of the administration’s attempt to force the dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.

U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, in her resignation letter alleged that “Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.” That would be Emil Bove III, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s No. 2 official at the Justice Department.

Newsies are calling the serial resignantion Trump’s Saturday Night Massacre.

“Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has
committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by
improper considerations,” Sassoon told Bondi.

Bondi had Bove respond in accepting Sassoon’s resignation.

Expect more of this. Trump is intent on making corruption a hallmark of his second term.

Donald? We’re waiting for you to shoot a random someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue. You know you want to. John Roberts promises there will be no charges filed. Pam Bondi has your back.

Update:

https://twitter.com/KenDilanianNBC/status/1890178129362121084

Seeing Pete Hegseth running around in Europe like he’s a serious person is hard to take but we have to put up with him. His pronouncements about NATO and Ukraine are pretty shocking but they come directly from Trump so you can’t really blame him.

Reporter Josh Rogin had a good analysis on CNN of Trump’s “deal making” yesterday that I think is interesting:

The problem is that that creates a series of events that‘s now going to unfold that could have drastic and negative consequences for both Ukraine and the U.S., not to mention Europe. And what I mean by that is that the way that they‘re setting up this negotiation by dealing with Putin first and Zelenskyy second, and trying to negotiate away Ukrainian territory and Ukrainian aspirations without talking to the Ukrainians, in my view, is destined to fail.

And that‘s a big problem, because, you know, even though Trump really wants a deal, he thinks this is going to be a great deal and that everything is going to go fine, it‘s pretty obvious that the way that he‘s setting it up, it‘s going to be a deal that neither Putin is going to support, and the Ukrainians are not going to support.

So when you get to the end of that process that Trump just started, oh, we‘re going to give away all the concessions first, then we‘re going to negotiate, then we‘re going to see what other concessions Putin wants, and then we‘re going to see what the Ukrainians want, well, that‘s very low chance of actually succeeding. So we‘ll be back where we started by having given away all these concessions.

That‘s the risk of doing it this way, which is sort of the bass ackwards way of negotiating, where you give the concessions first and then you start the negotiations, and then you try to convince the Ukrainians to give up their territory, which they‘re not going to do. So it‘s kind of a mess, actually.”

The thing is that Trump has discovered that he can create his own reality. He will be happy to give Putin all of western Europe if that’s what he wants and he’ll just say that he’s the winner and it’s all much better for Europe because they wanted to be Russians anyway. Or something. But the fact is that it won’t be the reality. Most likely it will be what Rogin says and yes, it’s a mess. But what else is new?

Guess what?

BREAKING: France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain & UK sign a joint statement vowing to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty & demanding a role in the peace talks.This is leadership. It’s also unprecedented. A western alliance is having to form against a new, twin & united threat: Trump & Putin.

— News Eye (@newseye.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T22:29:38.250Z

Coming soon to a roadside near you?

This quaint little emporium just north of Travelers Rest, SC is identified as run by a neo-confederate hate group associated with The League of the South and “The Lost Cause.”

How is that even a thing 160 years after the South lost the Civil War? Paul Waldman explains:

The answer, of course, is an extraordinarily successful decades-long propaganda campaign known as the Lost Cause, which sought to recast the Civil War as having nothing to do with slavery; instead, it was presented as a principled crusade by virtuous Southerners to defend their land and way of life.

The damn Yankees were to blame for the South firing the first shots, dontcha know?

Today, Donald Trump and his party are waging a new Lost Cause, over the history and meaning of the January 6 insurrection. Now they have the power of the federal government behind that effort, and they are using it with a vengeance.

The lie that the 2020 election was stolen — which all Republicans are still required to pledge allegiance to, either in full or in its supposedly more moderate “There are lots of questions about what happened” form — is the wellspring from which the insurrection itself flowed, and the fuel that sustains the effort to undo history. After all, if the presidential election really was stolen by a sinister cabal of conspirators, wouldn’t violence be a reasonable response in order to keep the rightful winner in office?

It’s the same playbook the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded three decades after Appomattox, ran successfully — nay, very successfully — to whitewash treason as honorable and owning other human beings as “heritage.” So successfully that Jim Crow did not fall for a hundred years after the South’s surrender.

Which should have us asking: When a high school student in U.S. history class opens up a textbook 20 or 30 years from now (or turns on their tablet, or dons their VR goggles), what are they going to be taught about January 6? Will they learn about the lies and the violence and the fundamental fact that a crowd of thugs tried to overthrow an election at the behest of the biggest thug of all? Or will they get a sanitized, both-sides version of the insurrection?

That’s why it’s hard not to think about the Lost Cause, which put propagandizing to children at the center of its mission. As one official from the United Daughters of the Confederacy said in 1909, “We must see that the correct history is taught our children and train them…until the whole civilized world will come to know that our cause was just and right.”

Their fake history was indeed taught to children, generations of whom were given history textbooks that presented a version of the Civil War story in which the Confederacy was not a group of traitorous enslavers willing to plunge the nation into its bloodiest war in order to preserve their ability to own other human beings, but noble gentlemen wanting nothing more than to preserve their “heritage” and their homes. The Lost Cause story began in Southern textbooks, but before long it spread to textbooks used by students in the North as well.

The thing about such efforts, like Trump’s “Stop the Steal” program, is that the very lack of attempts to conceal them prompts us not treat them seriously, like Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run or his 2024 run as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. When they show you who they are, etc.

Waldman continues:

So the right is practiced at this sort of thing, and committed to the idea that history is never settled if it makes them and their ideas look bad. Their own rhetoric about January 6 is all over the place — sometimes they say there was no violence at all, sometimes they say all the violence was committed by antifa — but that fits right in with our chaotic media age, in which the maintenance of a single coherent narrative is less important than creation of chaos and uncertainty. And don’t be surprised if a half-dozen of the insurrectionists run for Congress in 2026.

You might think that in our age of surveillance, you couldn’t pull off this kind of lie. After all, the whole thing was caught on video — every smashed window, every cloud of bear spray, every cop getting pummeled with batons and flagpoles and whatever else the mob had at hand. But one of the key lessons of the Lost Cause is that the fight over history is never over; even when it looks like the liars have lost, with the proper timing, organization, and power they can renew arguments we thought had been settled.

The UDC was as relentless as a Jack Russell terrier with a knotted rope: “The thing is, conservatives often beat the left, not simply with money, but with sheer relentlessness. They play tortoise. Liberals choose hare.”

The rewriting begins with erasing (ProPublica):

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”

“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”

Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

[…]

The removal of the database happened more quietly, but it is worthy of notice in its own right. It signals the Trump administration’s intention to not only spare the president’s supporters any further consequences for their role in the riot, but to erase the event from the record — to cast it into the fog of confusion and forgetting in which the Greenwood massacre had existed for so long.

Look for the monuments to the Confederacy that the UDC erected across the nation over decades. Look again at the Dixie Republic up top. It’s not the only such establishment peddling white grievance and nostalgia for the days of ‘massa’ and docile ‘darkies’. For years in Columbia, SC, Maurice Bessinger’s BBQ joints had little nooks where he sold alternate Civil War histories and related odes to the mythic days of Tara.

Soon enough there will be January 6th roadside shops and websites selling MAGA “alternative facts” as truthy history. Buy fan fiction about principled Jan. 6 patriots, righteous defenders of the MAGA cause whose only crime was loving their king. Read how these peaceful protesters were violently attacked on Jan. 6 by jackbooted thugs of the Deep State.

Do not laugh off these people. One of their own sits in the Oval Office.