The U.S. has seen
high-profile immigration raids since Trump took office, but Dara Kerr
of The Guardian today reported that the Trump
administration “is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations.” On
January 24, 2025, old online press releases from Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) from as much as a decade ago were updated to make Google
prioritize them as new releases, thus creating the illusion that raids are
taking place all over the country. When The Guardian asked ICE and Google about the
changed dates, some of the new dates disappeared, dropping those stories out
of the top of search results. Since President Ronald
Reagan, Republicans have won elections by convincing their voters that their
opponents are not trying to use the federal government to help Americans like
them but are instead trying to hand tax dollars and power to undeserving Black
and Brown Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Over the past 45 years,
that rhetoric has created a population that believes the federal government
is controlled by their enemies, now sometimes called the “Deep State,” whom
they blame for destroying the country. Those Republican voters now appear to
hate the federal government and to be willing, even eager, to dismantle it. But the Republicans’
vision of the nation never reflected reality and now, under President Donald
Trump, it is entirely made-up. Today, Brian Stelter of Reliable Sources recorded some of the
disinformation in which MAGA voters are currently marinating. Trump lied that
Elon Musk found that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
spent “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” and that last week’s fatal midair
collision that took 67 lives was due to diversity, equity, and inclusion
initiatives. Trump today claimed CBS
“defrauded the public” in “the greatest broadcasting scandal in history” when
it exercised normal editing procedures on a 60 Minutes interview with then–vice
president Kamala Harris that he insisted—falsely—involved replacing her
actual answers with others. Today, Trump called for CBS News and 60 Minutes to be “immediately
terminated,” despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution protects the freedom
of the press. MAGA is amplifying
right-wing lies. Today, influencers—including Musk—claimed that USAID
secretly bankrolled Politico, claiming that the media site had
taken $8 million from USAID. In fact, that sum was not an annual grant, but
rather years of subscriptions from across the government to Politico Pro, a pricey subscription service for
data and legislative analyses for lobbyists and government officials. “Politico…has never taken a cent of
government subsidies or state funding,” said the chief executive officer of
its parent company. “[P]eople are paying for… [Politico Pro] because they need the service,” he
said. “It’s not subsidies, it’s capitalism.” When Representative Lauren
Boebert (R-CO) joined the chorus parroting the lie, fact-checkers noted that
her office is a subscriber: it paid $7,150 for a yearlong subscription
starting last January. Nonetheless, Trump
posted in all-caps that it "LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN
STOLLEN [sic] AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS
MEDIA AS A 'PAYOFF' FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS." Another story
spreading disinformation appeared today after the State Department claimed
that Panama had agreed to let U.S. government vessels transit the Panama
Canal for free. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino told reporters that the
story was “lies and falsehoods” and noted that he had told Defense Secretary
Pete Hegseth that he doesn’t have the legal authority to waive transit fees
for anyone. This morning, at the
National Prayer Breakfast, Trump boasted that he had delivered water to
California, saying: “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada,
I guess, but the Pacific Northwest. And it comes down by millions and
millions of barrels a day and uh, I opened it up. It wasn’t that easy to do.
But I opened it up and it’s pouring down.” Camille von Kaenel and
Annie Snider of Politico talked to Trump supporters
among California’s farmers. They reported today that the 2 billion gallons of
water Trump dumped onto the ground last week was water for irrigation that
could never make it to the Los Angeles fires, which were under control by the
time he dumped the water, in any case. For now, the farmers are sticking with
Trump despite the loss of the water intended for their fields in the dry
summer, but called for “close coordination” over the “incredibly complex”
California water system. Brian Stelter posted a
December 9, 2017, quote from the New York Times: "Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to
think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he
vanquishes rivals." Stelter wrote: “I think about this quote a lot.” Performative victories
over “the Libs” make MAGA voters happy, but to what end do political leaders
distort reality in order to stay in power? The current
administration’s actions strengthen the hand of foreign nations, especially
China, against the U.S. Yesterday, Pam Bondi, Trump’s second choice for
attorney general—the first had to withdraw after the House Ethics Committee
drew attention to his drug use and sexual behavior—took the oath of office. Today, Bondi disbanded
the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and
cut back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Then-director of the FBI Christopher Wray established FITF in 2017 to stop
countries like Russia and China from interfering with American politics, as
Russia had done in 2016 to help elect Trump. FARA required anyone accepting
money from a foreign government to declare that connection, and was key in
helping law enforcement agencies to dismantle foreign influence operations.
Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort, for example, pleaded guilty to
violating FARA when he didn’t disclose that he was being paid by those linked
to the Russian government. (In December 2020, before he left office, Trump
pardoned Manafort.) Prioritizing human
smuggling and drug cartels, the Justice Department under Bondi is scaling
back white-collar crimes like bribery of foreign officials, kleptocracy, and
money laundering. In the past few years, the Justice Department has recovered
yachts, planes, and real estate from Russians sanctioned because of the
attack on Ukraine. “Taken together these changes are an invitation to foreign
actors to interfere in American affairs,” Aaron Zelinsky, a former national
security prosecutor for the Justice Department, told Ben Penn of Bloomberg
Law. “Even worse, it’s an invitation to Americans to help them do it.” The assault against the
United States Agency for International Development is tangled in foreign
power struggles, too. Andrew Duehren, Alan Rappeport and Theodore Schleifer
of the New York Times reported today that while
Trump administration officials claimed they were conducting a general review
of the Treasury Department’s payments system when they sought access to it,
emails show that the plan all along was to freeze payments to USAID. Daniel Wu of the Washington Post noted today that the
destruction of USAID will take billions of dollars from American farmers, as
well as other businesses, and Paul Sonne of the New York Times reported today that
authoritarian leaders, including those of Russia, Hungary, and El Salvador
are cheering on Musk’s boast that he was “feeding USAID into the wood
chipper.” USAID funding was less than 1% of the U.S. budget and focused on
humanitarian assistance and healthcare for underserved populations. But it
also promoted democracy. It has monitored elections in Russia, documenting
extensive voting irregularities there. With the U.S. abandoning foreign aid,
China can step in to fill the void. China will also be
able to step in at the G20 summit of the world’s largest economies to be held
in November in Johannesburg, South Africa, if Secretary of State Marco Rubio
keeps his vow not to attend. Rubio says he is walking away from the
international table because Trump says he is unhappy that South Africa is
“confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.” Trump
ally Elon Musk hails from South Africa and has agreed that “white South
Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country.” South
Africa has also refused official approval of Musk’s Starlink satellite system
because of a state requirement that 30% of a company must be owned locally, a
requirement SpaceX has criticized. Yesterday, a White House
order signed by Trump required the Central Intelligence Agency to send over
an unclassified email listing all the employees hired in the past two years.
David Sanger and Julian Barnes of the New York Times reported that the list included the first names and
first initial of the last name of those hires, including “a large crop of
young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China,
and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are
constantly seeking to identify them.” The top Democrat on
the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, called the
sharing of the information over unsecured channels “a disastrous national
security development,” adding: “Exposing the identities of officials who do
extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China.” If there are
advantages for foreign adversaries in the policies of the administration
currently in power, there are also advantages to favored corporations. Musk’s
team, along with Trump’s officials, is dismantling the government with the
claim that it is inefficient and corrupt, but it appears their plan is to put
Musk and his ilk in charge of the services Americans need. In what sounds like an
attempt to hand over air traffic control systems to Elon Musk’s Starlink
satellite system and his AI company, Trump today said—and here are his words,
as Aaron Rupar transcribed them—“We’re all gonna sit down and do a great
computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together,
obsolete, like it is, land-based. Trying to hook up a land based system to a
satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this
happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up
satellites to land. It doesn’t work. We spend billions of billions of dollars
trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying cut it
loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system one by two or three
companies, very good companies, specialists, that’s all it is. They used 39
companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen. And I don’t
know how many people of you are good in terms of all the kinds of things
necessary for that. And it's very complex stuff. But when you have 39
different companies working on hooking up different cities at different
people. You need one company. With one set of equipment. And there are some
countries that have unbelievable air controller systems. And they would’ve,
bells would’ve gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same
height. Because it traveled a long distance before it hit. It was just like,
just wouldn’t stop. Follow the line. But bells and whistles would’ve gone
off. They have ‘em where it actually could virtually turn the thing around.
It would’ve just never happened if we had the right equipment . And one of
things that’s gonna be, I'm gonna speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck
and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill just pass
where we get the best control system. When I land in my plane, privately, I
use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I’m landing in
New York and I’m using a sys— I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system
from another country because the captain says ‘This thing is so bad, it’s so
obsolete.’ And we can’t have that.” Transportation
Secretary Sean Duffy posted today that “the DOGE team” is “going to plug in
to help upgrade our aviation system,” saying that “‘experienced’ Washington
bureaucrats are the reason our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling.” Former secretary of
state Hillary Clinton pointed out that “US airlines had gone 16 years without
fatal crashes. Then MAGA fired the FAA chief, gutted the Aviation Security
Advisory Committee, and threatened air traffic controllers with layoffs. Now
there have been two fatal crashes. Hope your unvetted 22-year-olds fix things
fast.” Critics of the idea of
Musk taking over the nation’s air traffic control systems note that his Tesla
electric vehicles have the highest fatal accident rate among all car brands
in America. The average fatal crash rate is 2.8 per billion vehicle miles driven;
Tesla has a rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven. On social media, “God”
posted: “Thou shalt not let the foreign billionaire whose rockets blow up all
the time anywhere near the air traffic control system,” an apparent reference
to the January 16 explosion of a SpaceX rocket over the Caribbean that
scattered debris over the region led the Federal Aviation Administration to
lock down airspace over Turks and Caicos. There is apparently yet
another reason that people will lie to gain power. Today, Katherine Long of
the Wall Street Journal reported that one of Musk’s
young team of engineers, Marko Elez, 25, abruptly resigned after Long linked
him to a social-media account that championed racism and eugenics, the idea
that human populations can be improved by selective breeding, an idea
embraced in Nazi Germany. Last night, Senate
Democrats filibustered for 30 hours in an attempt to convince Republicans to
join them in rejecting Trump’s right-wing religious extremist nominee for
director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, a key author
of Project 2025. In the House, Democrats introduced the Taxpayer Data
Protection Act to stop Musk and DOGE from accessing personal financial data. U.S. District Judge
John Coughenour indefinitely blocked Trump’s executive order altering
birthright citizenship, calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” “It has become
ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an
impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him,
something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political
or personal gain,” Coughenour said. The Department of
Justice under Attorney General Bondi immediately said it would appeal the
ruling. And tonight, Senate Republicans confirmed Christian nationalist
Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget. Stephen Groves of the
Associated Press noted that Vought once described the budget director’s job
as “a President’s air-traffic control system.” Senate minority leader Chuck
Schumer (D-NY) described his confirmation as a “triple-header of a disaster
for hardworking Americans.” |
|
I know we’re all feeling a little bit of this, so let’s
just get it out there. What were they expecting? Trump did more than just
signal his plans for 2.0, he was explicit.
And where he wasn’t, Project 2025 was.
Like with this:
The authors of Project 2025 wrote,
months before the election: “The fourth pillar of Project 2025 is our 180-day
Transition Playbook and includes a comprehensive, concrete transition plan
for each federal agency. Only through the implementation of specific action
plans at each agency will the next conservative presidential Administration
be successful. Pillar IV will provide the next President a roadmap for doing
just that.” This so-called fourth pillar was not
made public, but anyone who read the plans for each federal agency contained
in Project 2025 knew where this was headed. It’s fair to say that people
didn’t anticipate that it would be an all-fronts assault on day one of the
new administration, but given the slow start Trump got the first time, the
criticism of that, and the reporting that they were better prepared this
time, it’s hard to say any of this is a surprise. One of Trump’s day one executive orders was titled “Establishing and Implementing The President’s ‘Department
of Government Efficiency.’” It created a
temporary DOGE agency, presumably the twenty-somethings now running amuck in
federal payment systems, likely in an effort to
avoid inconvenient details like government transparency rules and conflict of
interest standards and disclosures for employees. The stated goal was
modernization of the federal government’s computer systems, which any
employee will tell you is a worthy goal.
But what has actually been happening
with DOGE is well outside of that assigned mission. There is no suggestion
that what the executive order directs DOGE to do is actually happening, and
of course, the holdup to modernizing federal systems has always been funding,
which would require congressional action and runs contrary to Elon Musk’s
stated goal of cutting billions from the federal budget. Nothing we’re seeing should come as a surprise. Shock and
awful was always the plan. Revenge investigations underway at DOJ? It was a
practical certainty even as Pam Bondi and Kash Patel testified
under oath in confirmation hearings that it wasn’t.
But let’s set that aside and be
pragmatic. There are people among us who are only waking up to how horrible
this administration’s policies are when they are touched personally. Or who
are only awakened to politics when they feel some of the pain. But for the
moment, at least, they are paying attention, and we should use our civil
discourse skills to keep them here with us. Our goal between now and the midterm
elections, because yes, they are coming, is to get ready to make a last-ditch
stand for democracy. It’s going to be hard to break through disgust with the
political process, but Trump’s deluge of activity may have done that. We don’t have to agree with people
on every issue to work together towards that worthy goal; that’s the lesson
learned by mature and responsible people who believe in this country. We
learned that the first time around with the Never Trumpers. It’s sad that
people have to feel the pain personally before they begin to question what
Trump is doing, but that is where we are, and every last voter and pocket of
support will matter. We all have our personal lines, and I know that for many
of us that means there are people it’s not possible to make common cause
with. We can’t and shouldn’t abide by the racism, the Christian nationalism,
the misogyny, the hatred of migrants, LGBTQ people, and other groups. But so
many Americans have simply kept their heads in the sand up to this point.
Almost 90 million of the 245 million Americans who were eligible to vote in 2024 didn’t. So: To the people who voted for cheaper
eggs and got a coup. To the people whose Medicare
coverage is in jeopardy. To the people who think Palestinians
and Israelis deserve our support negotiating a settlement that lets that war
torn region try to move forward with dignity, not as another real estate deal
that benefits the Trump Organization. To those who are worried that Elon
Musk’s best interests aren’t the American people’s best interests. To federal employees who voted for
Trump and are now threatened with losing their jobs. To people who think cutting USAID
will make volatile regions of the world more dangerous and lead to human
tragedies, and not coincidentally, more illegal immigration as people flee
danger. To the people who are shocked that
funding to conservative religious groups that do good works at home and
abroad is on the chopping block. To people who believe in public
education and public health and worry about a future where they are
privatized for profit. Welcome to the fight. We’re in this together, Joyce |
