Another sleepy day with a cold, and it’s gloomy and drizzly outside today too.
- The latest on what’s going on, via Connie Willis and Heather Cox Richardson;
- LA Times on Trump’s idiotic order to empty two California reservoirs;
- An example of how the media would cover current US events if they were happening in another country: “Musk Junta Seizes Key Governmental Offices”
Let me summarize the latest outrages via columnists I follow.
Connie Willis on Facebook, 2 Feb 2025: IT’S A COUP–Trump Moves to Completely Take Over Government
First, during the campaign, Trump assured us he had no intention of seeking retribution on his political enemies. Now he has:
–fired everybody who worked on the January 6 investigation.
–fired everybody who worked for Jack Smith.
–fired all the top officials at the FBI.
–fired every prosecutor who worked on any investigation into Trump.
–instituted a mass purging of professional law enforcement–dozens and dozens of agents.
–dropped charges against Republican Representatives Jeff Fortenberry and Andy Ogles. (“In a dictatorship there will be those who the law binds but does not protect and those who the law protects but does not bind.”)
–Trump dismissed all 51 agents who said Hunter’s laptop was tampered with and contained Russian disinformation.
–Trump then signed an order preventing them all from entering federal buildings.
–88 FBI agents who worked on Trump cases were physically escorted out of Washington field offices this weekend.
–At least three different FBI senior officials, including Brian Driscoll, the acting FBI head, “forcefully resisted” the firings.
Second:
Trump has handed Elon Musk the car keys to our entire government:
–While Trump spent the weekend at Mar-a-lago golfing, Elon Musk and his cronies demanded (and forcibly took) access to all the federal employee data systems at the Office of Personnel Management.
–According to Reuters, “Elon Musk’s team has hijacked massive datasets of government worker dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers, length of service, performance evaluations, revoking access of the OPM officials.”
–The guy in charge, David Lebryk, the Acting Head of the Department, tried to fight them, then quit (or was removed) over their demand for access and his refusal. Update: According to the New York Times, he resisted, then was put on leave by Trump and then forced to resign Friday. (It’s a coup, people.)
–Senator Ron Wyden: “NEW: Sources tell my office that Treasury Secretary Bessent has granted DOGE ‘full’ access to this system. Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it.”
–Musk aides locked federal employees out of the system, which contains the personal data of millions of federal employees, including dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades, and length of service of government workers.
–Senior career employees have had their access revoked to the department’s data systems.
–Musk’s team moved in, installed sofa beds, and is working around the clock to do whatever it is they’re doing. Nobody knows what that is because there is no oversight. One official said, “We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems. That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications.”
Much more detail. Ending with:
Best line of the day, from Tea Pain: “Name one thing Trump has done since elected that Vladimir Putin wouldn’t approve of.”
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Heather Cox Richardson, 1 Feb 2025: February 1, 2025
Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.
First,
The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.
She then recounts some of the details that Connie did, and many others.
Second,
Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.
And third,
And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.
There’s a story here about why all the supposedly smart people in Silicon Valley have turned so right-wing and now support Trump, that I haven’t seen a good explanation for. They’re simply greedy? They’re being extorted? There’s also a story here about these guys’ fetish for science fiction scenarios which seem increasingly less and less plausible, to those of us who follow them.
Concluding,
All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”
But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”
Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump’s MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.
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An aside, perhaps, but an illustration Trump the moron. The photo at the top goes with this story.
LA Times, 31 Jan 2025: Acting on Trump’s order, federal officials opened up two California dams
• The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers abruptly increased the amount of water flowing from two California dams.
• The federal agency made the decision after President Trump signed an order calling for increased water deliveries.
• Local water managers, who were caught off-guard by the decision, said they convinced Army Corps officials to release less water than originally planned.
Problem is, the water just flooded nearby farm fields, and did nothing for Southern California. And the farmers need that water for later in the season.
Trump, meanwhile, shared a photo on X of water pouring from a dam, saying: “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!,” Trump wrote. “I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!”
He thinks water from reservoirs in the north will flow to southern California because… on a map, south is down, and water flows down? That would be my guess.
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I’ve noted that some (on the left) accuse the mainstream media papers of being too diplomatic, too even-handed, in any story with a political angle. The evidence are occasional pieces I see about how political events are covered in other countries. Here’s an example that someone on Facebook linked, from a site calls Doomsday Scenario. The source isn’t the point; the language is.
Doomsday Scenario, Garrett Graff, 1 Feb 2025: Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government, subtitled “Imagining how we’d cover overseas what’s happening to the U.S. right now”
Musk Junta Seizes Key Governmental Offices
February 1, 2025
By William BootWASHINGTON, D.C. — What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.
With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority.
The G-7 country’s newly installed president, a mid-level oligarch named Donald Trump, appeared amid Musk’s moves to be increasingly merely a figurehead head of state. Trump is a convicted felon with a long record of family corruption and returned in power in late January after a four-year interlude promising retribution and retaliation against foreign opponents and a domestic “Deep State.” He had been charged with attempting to overthrow the peaceful transition of power that had previously removed him from office in 2021, but loyalist elements in the judiciary successfully blocked his prosecution and incarceration, easing his return to power.
Over the last two weeks, loyalist presidential factions and Musk-backed teams have launched sweeping, illegal Stalin-esque purges of the national police forces and prosecutors, as well as offices known as inspectors-general, who are typically responsible for investigating government corruption. While official numbers of the unprecedented ousters were kept secret, rumors swirled in the capital that the scores of career officials affected by the initial purges could rise into the thousands as political commissars continued to assess the backgrounds of members of the police forces.
The mentally declining and aging head of state, who has long embraced conspiracist thinking, spent much of the week railing in bizarre public remarks against the country’s oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, whom he blamed without evidence for causing a deadly plane crash across the river from the presidential mansion. Unfounded racist attacks on those minorities have been a key foundation of Trump’s unpredicted rise to political power from a career as a real estate magnate and reality TV host and date back to his first announcement that he would seek the presidency in 2015, when he railed against “rapists” being sent into the country from its southern neighbor.
It goes on and on. The source has enormous links on many of the terms that I didn’t copy.
