Confronting
Chaos, Corruption, Cruelty and Cowardice Four ways to hold the line on Trump and the Muskrats
“The ship has weather’d
every rack,” Walt Whitman wrote in “O Captain! My Captain!” his poem after the Civil War and the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln, born 216 years ago today. Of course, we haven’t
weathered every rack yet; lots more racks are
on the way. There’s no safe harbor in this storm, and every Democrat is
seasick. Is there anything we can
take for that? Having been burned last week after mistakenly believing
that Republican Senator Bill Cassidy — a physician and strong advocate of
vaccines — might sink Bobby Kennedy Jr., I hesitate to offer cheering
thoughts amid a coup. But as Gene Kranz’s
character (actually screenwriters Al Reinert and Bill Broyles) says in Apollo 13: “Failure is not an option.” A
mighty force of democracy defenders has already filed more than 50 lawsuits
aimed at making sure that J.D. Vance’s view of the
Constitution (a monarch/CEO in
charge, per Curtis Yarvin) does not prevail. The good (or less bad) news is
that the plain language of the Constitution — and recent Supreme Court
decisions — suggest that at least some of DOGE’s work is flatly unconstitutional and will be rendered so, even
by a high court that favors Donald Trump. Remember, in late 2020, the court
refused to review any of the more than 60 cases Trump brought to overturn the
election. Can the court now turn itself into a pretzel and reverse last
year’s decision that curtailed the power of
agencies to make big decisions without congressional authorization? Sure, but
I’d bet against it. The big question will
be whether Trump, per Vance, will defy court orders ala Andrew Jackson’s
famous line, quoted favorably by Vance: “Justice Marshall has made his
decision, now let him enforce it.” Trump is already slow-walking compliance,
but we don’t know yet how far his defiance will go. Call me Charlie Brown
trying to kick the football as Lucy snatches it away, but I don’t think he’ll
be able to ignore the Supreme Court, which, in the chief justice’s year-end
report, issued a stinging rebuke to those who would challenge the rule of
law. If Trump does, it’s curtains for our 249-year-old democratic experiment. In the meantime, here
are four ways to hold the line as Democrats regroup and prepare for critical
gubernatorial contests this year in Virginia (trending blue, thanks to all the
federal employees)
and New Jersey (where Republican registration is way up) and for the midterms: Power of the Purse Deal After a month of
wrangling over lawsuits and funding interruptions, the debt ceiling debate
will come to a head on March 14. Former New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski argues in The Contrarian that House Minority Leader
Hakeem Jeffries should tell the GOP: If you can’t keep the government
open because of your own embarrassing internal differences, and you ask me to
help, I’m going to need a guarantee that the president will respect the
budget — even if it's a Republican budget — that Congress passes. This means that if we give Trump
$100 for Meals for Wheels, or to run a community health center or to feed
hungry kids around the world, he will spend that money exactly as Congress
directs. Period, end of story. It means Elon Musk and
his gang taking over government agencies are done — Musk can no longer cut
anything Congress funds or fire anyone needed to carry out our instructions.
And anyone unlawfully fired, whether FBI agents or USAID officers, is
reinstated. I like the way
Malinowski thinks but fear it won’t work out this well. While the Supreme
Court is unlikely to uphold an end to birthright citizenship or eviscerate
the 1883 Pendleton Act (establishing the civil
service), it may well declare the 1974 Impoundment Act unconstitutional and
reverse Humphrey’s Executor vs. U.S., the landmark 1935 decision that upheld the independence
of certain agencies, boards, and commissions (against FDR’s encroachments).
That means Trump may well have his way with the Federal Trade Commission, the
National Labor Relations Board and the Kennedy Center, among other
institutions assumed for decades to owe their allegiance to the public, not
just the president. For all of the great work underway by 21
attorneys general,
this momentous legal wrangling will leave Americans dazed and confused, which
is just what the authoritarians want. The antidote is to just keep suing,
which offers the chance of a successful defense and at least a small measure
of justice. Which brings us to…. Bust the Muskrats Under last year’s appalling Supreme Court
decision, President Trump cannot
be called to account. He is immune from prosecution for “official acts,”
which no doubt contributes to the utter impunity with which he violates his
oath. But the immunity decision says nothing about the people who work for
him. If they don’t comply with the temporary restraining orders that have
already been issued, judges should wipe the smug smiles off those pimply
faces with a series of contempt citations. Some of the Muskrats are literally
camped out in federal agencies that Musk wants “put through the wood
chipper,” as this billionaire vandal said about USAID and other agencies that
have dared to probe his empire. The kids need to make sure their knapsacks
have more than one change of clothes — for more than one night in jail. And,
of course, their even more contemptuous Heil-Hitlering Afrikaner boss
deserves to join them, sans “Little
X” or whatever he calls that prop-child Trump was babysitting in the Oval
Office. Message Discipline Chuck Schumer recently
echoed Beto O’Rourke’s 2022 apt characterization of Greg Abbott’s
governorship: “Chaos. Corruption, Cruelty.” (I’d add a fourth “C”:
Cowardice.). O’Rourke lost, but not because of that line, which is a good
summary of our present predicament. The problem is that I found almost no one
who followed the Leader on this useful alliterative talking point. If these
were marching orders, no one marched. That’s one of the
Democrats’ big problems. It’s not just that they have no strong counterpart
to the GOP’s media ecosystem; it’s that they have no game plan for making
sticky content stick. Compare the fate of “Chaos. Corruption. Cruelty” to
“the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
expecting a different result,” a line attributed to Einstein that Bill
Clinton popularized in 1992. After Trump’s proposal for Gaza last week, I
heard Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Senator Lindsey Graham, and two or
three other Republicans repeat the insanity line as a way of suggesting it
was time to do something different in the Middle East. Given the insanity (or
plain cruelty) of Trump’s ethnic cleansing proposal, one might have thought
that morning’s GOP talking points would have included a different metaphor.
But the point is, they have talking points for their
surrogates; Democrats apparently do not. It reminds me of Al
Franken’s old line: “Our bumper stickers usually end with ‘continued on next
bumper sticker.’” Maybe his fellow Minnesotan, Ken Martin, the new head of the DNC, can do something about that with a
messaging war room. Until Democrats stop being bored by repetition (one of
Trump’s strengths) and annoyed by the very notion of “discipline,” they won’t
win. Smart Lobbying Democratic lawmakers
are upset with “the groups” — party activists besieging Capitol Hill in such
numbers that they're overloading the phone system. While it always helps to
hold your own side’s feet to the fire, the Republicans are the only ones with
the power to stand up and do anything real to stop Trump’s runaway train. My
question for cowardly Republicans is this: Why did you go into politics in
the first place? Is it really worth all of the sacrifices in salary and
family time to be a powerless rubber stamp for arrogant tech interns? To give these members
a stake — and the rest of us a fighting chance of survival — constituents
need to contact their elected representatives in a smart way. That means
focusing on Republicans. Snail mail is preferable to calls as long as the
letters are not part of an orchestrated campaign, which legislators tend to
discount. A short, personal, thoughtful typed letter with reference to the
member’s good constituent work (e.g. on hospitals wrecked by NIH cuts) will
often reach the House member or senator directly. That’s the best way to make
them see the political downside of complete capitulation. None of this is rocket
science, and that’s the point. Musk thinks that because he’s really smart
about rockets and cars, he’s smart about everything. He isn’t, and his meat
cleaver cuts are both illegal and irrational. They can be stopped — and
Donald Trump checked — with a loud and disciplined campaign in the courts and
the public arena. We’re edging closer to one now. |
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Yesterday afternoon,
in a bizarre performance, President Donald Trump hosted reporters in the Oval
Office, the formal working space of the President of the United States. As
Trump sat quietly behind the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to the
United States as a symbol of international friendship, billionaire Elon Musk
held center stage. Musk talked to the reporters, wearing a jacket over a
T-shirt, and a “Make America Great Again” ball cap—a likely violation of the
Hatch Act, which Trump’s people routinely ignore—while his young son X
wandered around the room, at one point exchanging a look with a downcast
Trump that observers immediately captioned: “You’re sitting in my daddy’s
chair.” The event was Trump
signing another executive order, this one essentially putting Musk’s
“Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) in charge of the U.S.
government. The executive order, titled “Implementing The President’s
‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,”
provides for an operative from DOGE to be assigned to every agency, where
that operative will be in charge of all hiring and firing. It also puts
downsizing in DOGE’s hands and establishes that only one new employee can be
hired to replace four who leave. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted that these operatives report to Musk, who is
“clearly operating here as an independent actor whose actions the President
blesses after he’s found out what’s happened. This is a parallel overlaying
of authority over the entire structure of the U.S. government.” Trump said that Musk
had found “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse,” but
in fact they have produced no evidence of such waste. Today Representative
Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said Congress has had no information from Musk or
DOGE, and when asked to produce evidence of fraud, White House press
secretary Karoline Leavitt simply listed things that seemed to be “against
the president’s policies and his America-first agenda.” As both the New York Times and the Washington Post reported today, the big winner from all the cuts to
the government has been Musk himself, who has eliminated the agencies that
were scrutinizing his businesses. On the floor of
Congress today, Moskowitz pointed out that Musk’s claims to have uncovered
waste, fraud, and abuse present a problem for Congress. Led by House speaker
Mike Johnson (R-LA), the Republicans have not yet managed to fund the
government for 2025, but rather than trying to pass the 12 appropriations
bills necessary before the March 14 deadline for a government shutdown,
Johnson is hoping to pass a continuing resolution that will extend funding as
a comprehensive package. Moskowitz pointed out that if, in fact, the
government is full of waste, fraud, and abuse, Congress should debate each
appropriations bill in detail rather than use a continuing resolution that
would perpetuate what the Republicans say is billions of dollars of waste,
fraud, and abuse. Long gone is any
pretense that the administration will work to lower prices for ordinary
Americans. The Consumer Price Index report out today from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics shows that inflation surged in January, gaining a half a point as
the cost of gas, rents, and groceries went up. Egg prices rose 15.2%. On
Monday, Trump levied a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum, raising concerns
that prices for cars and trucks, as well as appliances and rebar for
construction, will also rise. Today Senator Mitch
McConnell (R-KY) published an op-ed in the Louisville Courier Journal warning that “Kentuckians can’t afford the high cost of
Trump’s tariffs,” which could cost the average Kentucky resident $1,200 a
year. “[P]reserving the long-term prosperity of American industry and workers
requires working with our allies, not against them,” McConnell wrote, and he
called for “strengthen[ing] our friendships abroad.” Trump responded to
today’s report by posting on social media: “BIDEN INFLATION UP!” The Republicans
submitted their budget resolution for funding the government today. It called
for cuts of $2 trillion to mandatory spending, a category that includes
Social Security and Medicare. Two Republican lawmakers told Meredith Lee Hill
of Politico that Republicans expect to cut food aid for more
than 40 million low-income Americans; Hill’s colleague Grace Yarrow reports
the House Agriculture Committee is eyeing about $150 billion in cuts to
supplemental nutrition programs. The proposal also calls for $4.5 trillion in
tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and an increase of $4 trillion in
the debt ceiling. Today saw a landmark
shift in the foreign policy of the United States. Since World War II, the
U.S. has stood behind the international organizations that worked to
stabilize the globe by creating spaces for countries to work out their
differences without resorting to war. Among the principles of those
organizations was that bigger countries couldn’t simply take over other,
smaller countries, and one of the ways countries enforced that principle was
through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the collective
security agreement in which signatories agreed that an attack on one would be
an attack on all. In 2016, Trump’s
people weakened the U.S. stance against Russia’s incursions on Ukraine by
softening the language of that year’s Republican platform, and Russia worked
to help Trump get elected, apparently because Putin believed Trump would look
the other way as Russia took not only Ukraine's Crimea but also significant
territory in eastern Ukraine. Then, in his first term in office, Trump often
took Putin’s side and threatened to take the U.S. out of NATO. President Joe Biden
and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked hard to strengthen NATO and
pulled together a strong coalition to back Ukraine when Russia launched a
full-scale invasion in 2022. But when he took office just three weeks ago,
Trump alarmed observers by suddenly talking about taking over other countries
like Panama and Canada, and Denmark’s territory of Greenland. Such moves
would directly undermine the post–World War II international organizations
the U.S. has always championed. They would destroy NATO and the North
American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint U.S.-Canadian
organization that protects North America from aerospace threats, and would
also rip apart the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that has joined Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States since World
War II. Today it appears Trump
is making good on this threat to turn away from the longstanding policy of
the U.S. and toward the foreign policy advocated by Russian president
Vladimir Putin. Trump has been talking
about demanding $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange
for continued U.S. support, but today, at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group,
a group put together under Biden to coordinate assistance to Ukraine, Secretary
of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested a new U.S. position. Hegseth echoed Putin’s
demands, saying that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an
unrealistic objective” and that the U.S. will not support NATO membership for
Ukraine, thus giving up two key issues without apparently getting anything in
return. He said that Europe must take over assistance for Ukraine as the U.S.
focuses on its own borders. He wanted, he said, to “directly and
unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United
States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Trump’s social media
account—it did not sound like his own words—posted today that he “just had a
lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of
Russia…. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each
other’s Nations,” thus offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been
isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine. And, the post said,
they had agreed to start negotiations over Ukraine, although it also
specified they had not included Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in
their talk. The post said that Trump “feel[s] strongly, [the talks] will be
successful.” The Russian
government’s readout of the call added that “bilateral economic relations
between Russia and the United States were also brought up during the
conversation,” language that almost certainly means Putin wants Trump to lift
the economic sanctions imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine that have wreaked
havoc on the Russian economy. The Trump
administration also swapped U.S. teacher Marc Fogel for Alexander Vinnik, a
kingpin of Russian cybercrime who operated one of the world’s largest
currency exchanges, facilitating drug trafficking, ransomware, and money
laundering. When announcing Fogel’s release, Trump was asked if Russia had
given anything in exchange. He answered: “Not much, no. They were very nice.
We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually." Russia refused to
include Fogel, who was wrongfully detained in 2021, in the large prisoner
swap of June 2024. Today, the Senate
approved Tulsi Gabbard, who has often made comments sympathetic to Russia and
who has defended former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia
after the Syrian people ousted him, as the U.S. director of national
intelligence. All Democrats voted against Gabbard and all Republicans voted
in favor of her, with the important exception of Senator Mitch McConnell, who
said: “The ODNI wields significant authority over how the intelligence
community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis, and
manages the classification and declassification of our nation’s most
sensitive secrets. In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that
she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust.” Tonight, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom released a joint statement vowing to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and making it clear that “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations.” |
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Just to give you some idea of how vast the diameter of
the firehose that Trump is spewing stuff through is right now, I decided to
go back through social media to give you a sense of all of the legal issues I
was tracking on Tuesday. Just Tuesday and just the mainstream legal issues.
This is the opposite approach from the one I have schooled myself to stick
with here, trying to take it all in and distill it down to just a few key
items each evening. That’s the approach I’m committed to here and with The Democracy Index. But this little zoom out is important to get a sense
of just how much Trump 2.0 is doing and how fast they are doing it. It serves
to underscore what we all know, that none of this is normal. If a new president was really looking for evidence of
waste and fraud in agency spending, he’d send in forensic accountants,
investigators, and prosecutors—not coders and hackers. If he really wanted to
reform government, he wouldn’t do it by breaking laws, like the ones about
how to go about lawfully replacing inspectors general. The lack of commitment
to good government—and by extension, to us, the citizens of this country—is
apparent everywhere. Right now, there is so much going on that it’s
virtually impossible to track everything. At least we know why there is so
much happening—Trump is trying to flood the zone with distraction in hopes we
will be unable to figure out what’s most important, let alone focus on it.
It’s become relatively clear that his goal is accumulating power, using
non-government agency DOGE to do the dirty work of disrupting democracy to
get there. That basic idea, that Trump is engaging in a major
disruption and transformation of government, properly called an internal
coup, continues to remain front and center for me. This morning, in the
pre-caffeine haze that is becoming so familiar, I had an idea and dictated a
start on my column for tonight on that theme. That’s the column you may have
seen this morning (complete with the name misspelling of Allen Charles Raul,
whose excellent column in The Washington Post I discussed). Instead of saving
the column to work on later after I got my first draft down on paper, I hit
send. This is my life in the time of Trump; even as you try to maintain some
sanity in the face of everything that’s going on, the crazy can still get to
you. I share this both out of embarrassment and apology,
but more importantly, because it feels so emblematic to me of what happens
now that we’re constantly drinking from the gushing firehose. The next four
years are not going to be easy for any of us, but they’re going to be
important. We may have to tolerate a little mess to get the job done. If you didn’t get a chance to read “Call it What It Is” this morning, since it landed in your mailbox at an odd
mid-morning time, I hope you’ll take a look tonight. The central idea feels very important to me right now. As for the big picture on Tuesday, by the end of the
night I had so many tabs open on my computer—half a dozen court decisions and
even more news reports—that it was groaning about lack of memory. Here are
some of the crazy in bullet points: ·
In a clear, and also an
extremely petty, violation of the First Amendment, the Associated Press reported that they “were informed by the White House that if
AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s
executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would
be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office.” Later in the day, they
were refused access.
·
We have
serious problems. This is ridiculous. ·
The New York Times is
trying to get DOJ to release Volume 2 of Jack Smith’s report, the one about
the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. So far, DOJ has refused. The Times
is appealing the decision administratively, inside of DOJ, but they’ve filed
a lawsuit as well, in the likely event DOJ refuses to release Volume 2.
·
The head of DOJ’s tax
division, a veteran of 40 years, resigned instead of agreeing to be moved to a different position. Some commentators saw it
as a sign the White House is preparing to use tax as a political tool. ·
Elon Musk acknowledged
during his Oval Office jag that he isn’t always truthful. A reporter confronted him with his claim that $50 million in condoms were
sent to Gaza, when in fact it was a program in Mozambique meant to prevent
the spread of HIV. Musk responded, “First of all, some of the things I say
will be incorrect.” That didn’t come as a surprise to FEMA employees who were
fired after he made claims that weren’t true about the use of disaster relief
funds.
·
Trump also went on the
attack against FEMA
·
Doctors for America
filed a lawsuit because the administration has taken down CDC, NIH, and FDA
websites doctors use regularly when treating and diagnosing patients. A
federal judge entered a temporary injunction ordering the government to restore the public
health web pages by midnight Tuesday. Perhaps suspicious of whether the
government would comply, the judge ordered them to update him by 5:00 p.m. on
Thursday. ·
Christian and Jewish
groups filed a lawsuit together, arguing that ICE's new policy of making arrests at
their places of worship violates the First Amendment. They asked the courts
for an injunction to stop the intrusions. ·
The American Bar
Association issued a statement condemning Trump’s
violations of the rule of law, including this, “No American can be proud of a
govt that carries out change in this way. Neither can these actions be
rationalized by discussion of past grievances or appeals to efficiency.
Everything can be more efficient, but adherence to the rule of law is
paramount.” ·
Reporting surfaced
that Kash Patel, who told the Senate under oath that he was leaving his
revenge lists behind, wasn’t candid.
·
Fox News ran this headline: “GOP lawmakers set sights on PBS, NPR amid Trump's DOGE
crackdown.” The piece goes explains, “Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., is leading
a bill in the House of Representatives that would halt taxpayer dollars from
going to either media broadcaster and reroute existing federal funds to
reducing the national debt, according to legislative text previewed by Fox
News Digital.” If they wanted to reduce the national debt, the should have
just kept Democrats in charge. Instead, they’re killing the news. ·
Russ Vought, folks.
He’s one of the architects of Project 2025, which calls for NIH to be gutted.
Now, as the head of OMB he’ll be involved in the plan to devastate research
sponsored by the agency, even though his own kid, who has cystic fibrosis,
benefits from one of the “miracle drugs” its research has made possible.
That's a lot, but it’s also still just a slice of
everything that’s going on. And that’s the point: who could pay attention to
everything? It’s important that we understand that and recognize
the effort to overwhelm us. They want us to give up. They want us to resign
ourselves to the inevitability of whatever Trump is going to do for the next
four years. That, of course, is what we can’t do. This is the time to summon
our moral outrage, call it the coup that it is, and make sure we don’t let up
on our senators, representatives, or even the White House; we have to
continue to express our concerns and our outrage. Lest you think it doesn’t work, following the public
outcry over the weekend after the vice president seemed to suggest that the administration should flout judges’ orders
if they lost in court, three Republican Senators went to bat for the rule of
law. Josh Hawley said the president
doesn’t have the power to defy the courts. That might seem like civics 101,
but in today’s context, it was critical for him to say it. Senate Judiciary
Chairman Chuck Grassley chimed in to say that he had
“learned in eighth grade civics about checks and balances, and I just expect
the process to work its way out.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune expressed his belief that the courts play an important role in the
balance of power between the branches of government. These aren’t folks who
tend to make statements like this—ones that cut against the leader of their
party—just for fun. It was a response to the alarm bells we raised. So, let’s
keep going. Don’t let the crazy overwhelm you. We’re in this together, Joyce |
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