At the End of Week One, Every Dark Prediction Is Already Coming
True
Trump
2.0 is following the “Nike rule”: Just do it, and dare the courts to come after
them later.
|
|
Jan 24 |
|
|
|
|
We’re nearing the end of week one of Trump 2.0. What
have we learned? Three things, all of them ugly:
1. They came in prepared this time, with outrageous
and lawless executive orders written and ready to roll out.
2. When Trump makes an impromptu decision (“Fuck it: Release ’em all”), it’s based on his worst and most authoritarian instincts.
3. Obviously, this administration will act totally
without regard to precedent or law.
From ending birthright citizenship to the shocking halt
of grant processing at the National Institutes of Health and diversity, equity,
and inclusion initiatives, and so much more, Trump is following what we might
call the “Nike rule”: Just do it, and let the courts sort it out; if some court
comes along in two years and says what he’s been doing is unconstitutional or
against some law, well, he got away with doing it for two years.
He went too far, for now, on birthright citizenship. A federal judge in Seattle not only called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional” but said it “boggles the mind.” Judge John C. Coughenour imposed a two-week restraining order, blocking the administration from moving forward. Trump will no doubt move to get the matter in front of a friendlier judge.
Most likely, the Supreme Court will have to weigh in
someday. It’s kind of hard to imagine the justices or any court overturning
birthright citizenship, since it says in plain English right there in the
Fourteenth Amendment—which, remember, is as much the Constitution as the first
10 amendments, as the words “We the People”: “All people born or naturalized in
the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the
United States and of the State wherein they reside.” But then again, this
Supreme Court has surprised us before. “Originalism” probably doesn’t cover
those meddling slavery-enders of the 1860s.
The NIH order effectively freezes that body’s grant-making process, which
accounts for about 80 percent of its $47 billion budget. It’s potentially devastating to scientific research in this
country, and it portends a bigger shakeup at NIH when budget time
arrives—especially if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is confirmed as secretary of health
and human services. And I hardly need to tell you why all of this is happening.
It’s not because the Trumpists care passionately about scientific research and
have wonderful ideas about reforming the system. It’s for one reason and one
reason only. Hint: It rhymes with ouchy.
On the DEI front, a conservative administration is bound to have a different view of these initiatives from a liberal one, and, yes, Trump won the election. A recalibration of these policies, or the appointment of a task force to reexamine them, would have been hard to object to from a small-d democratic perspective.
That, however, is not what’s happening. Some of the language in the memorandum from Charles Ezell, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, goes well beyond that. The memo directs federal employees to snitch on their colleagues. It reads in part: “If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to DEIAtruth@opm.gov within 10 days” (the A adds “accessibility” to the list of crimes, even though accessibility rights for people with disabilities are clearly enshrined in law). It threatens possible “adverse consequences” for employees who don’t comply. By next Friday, all executive agencies are to submit “a written plan for executing a reduction-in-force action regarding the employees who work in a DEIA office.”
Even more worrying is the administration’s halting of
work by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. No new cases, no
indictments, no settlements, no nothing. Usually, administrations just decide
on a case-by-case basis which of its predecessor administration’s lawsuits it
will pursue and which it will drop; not the Nike administration. It’s all
chucked out the window. The wide presumptions are that the division that
integrated the University of Mississippi will pursue no civil rights cases, and
all consent decrees monitoring police departments will be canceled.
That’s because Trump is a bigly law-and-order Republican, right? Well, not so fast. What kind of law-and-order Republican grants a wholesale pardon to some 1,550 rioters, 89 of whom have pleaded guilty to felony charges of assaulting Capitol Police officers (and some D.C. officers) on January 6, 2021? We know what kind. The kind who enforces the laws he agrees with and flouts or tries to undo the laws he doesn’t like. And that’s called lawlessness.
Again: It would have been … not exactly defensible, but
politically less vulnerable to criticism if Trump had decided to pardon only
those who weren’t charged with committing violence against officers. But that
isn’t what he did. Fuck it: Release ’em all.
I think he knew exactly what he was doing here. In freeing that many people—and especially in freeing the two generals of this army, Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes—Trump has potentially loosed upon an unsuspecting nation his own private militia. Is it early days to jump on the Germany 1930s analogies? All right, I’ll leave that alone. For now, Tarrio vows “retribution” against his pursuers, saying the “people who did this … need to be put behind bars and they need to be prosecuted.”
But let’s say there’s another Charlottesville, or a police shooting, or a mass shooting with a seemingly racial element. Do we really think these 1,550 people will just be content to stay at home and watch it all unfold on Fox? The father who called his own son a “traitor” (the son helped turn the father in) and said, “Traitors get shot”?
All this in four days. If these four days haven’t woken
you from postelection slumber, you need to ask yourself what it would take. And
imagine what four years will be like.
