What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[crazy canuck]

Posting twice in two days, I must not be well...

Sorry to say, but debating what brand of fool Trump is while the federal government and its agencies are being aggressively dismantled seems to be missing the forest for the trees.

Though I like the French version of that adage a lot better, "When a wise man points at the moon, the imbecile examines the finger." Perhaps it's not really time to examine the finger? Or is that your coping mechanism?

Anyway, whatever state Trump is, he is not the only one responsible for the ongoing Musk/DOGE/Project 2025 coup.

Yeah, it is a mistake to dismiss what the Trumpists are doing because Trump himself is an incompetent fool.

[HisMajestyBOB]

The Tariffs Were Never Real


Interesting text from the Atlantic.

Basically, everything Trump has done on the tariffs side was to please his electorate.  Talk loudly, declare a win, gain votes.  Fuck the numbers, he said he won, his voters believe him, the skeptics too.

Something the Democrats could stand to learn, if they ever hold power again. 

[Valmy]

The Tariffs Were Never Real


Interesting text from the Atlantic.

Basically, everything Trump has done on the tariffs side was to please his electorate.  Talk loudly, declare a win, gain votes.  Fuck the numbers, he said he won, his voters believe him, the skeptics too.

Something the Democrats could stand to learn, if they ever hold power again. 

I don't know man. That is so specific to Trump and his very specific skill set, I don't know how transferable it is.

[HisMajestyBOB]

The Tariffs Were Never Real


Interesting text from the Atlantic.

Basically, everything Trump has done on the tariffs side was to please his electorate.  Talk loudly, declare a win, gain votes.  Fuck the numbers, he said he won, his voters believe him, the skeptics too.

Something the Democrats could stand to learn, if they ever hold power again. 

I don't know man. That is so specific to Trump and his very specific skill set, I don't know how transferable it is.

Worth a shot. Especially when the Democrats actually have accomplishments.

[crazy canuck]

The Tariffs Were Never Real


Interesting text from the Atlantic.

Basically, everything Trump has done on the tariffs side was to please his electorate.  Talk loudly, declare a win, gain votes.  Fuck the numbers, he said he won, his voters believe him, the skeptics too.

Something the Democrats could stand to learn, if they ever hold power again. 

I don't know man. That is so specific to Trump and his very specific skill set, I don't know how transferable it is.

I don't think he meant loudly make a fool of yourself, like Trump. I think he is referring to the fact that Biden did a lot that nobody ever heard about.

Edit, he beat me to it

[Valmy]

I don't think he meant loudly make a fool of yourself, like Trump. I think he is referring to the fact that Biden did a lot that nobody ever heard about.

Edit, he beat me to it

Ah gotcha. Biden couldn't do that just due to his limitations. He probably needed some charismatic surrogates to do that. The VP would have been the obvious person but Kamala was mostly in the shadows until she was anointed.

[Jacob]

Posting twice in two days, I must not be well...

Sorry to say, but debating what brand of fool Trump is while the federal government and its agencies are being aggressively dismantled seems to be missing the forest for the trees.

Though I like the French version of that adage a lot better, "When a wise man points at the moon, the imbecile examines the finger." Perhaps it's not really time to examine the finger? Or is that your coping mechanism?

Anyway, whatever state Trump is, he is not the only one responsible for the ongoing Musk/DOGE/Project 2025 coup.

I hope you continue posting

[dist]

Tak, I'll see where this takes me.

From today's Letter--I'll only retain the parts related to the point I made earlier. I still see Trump as the distraction and the tool for the ongoing dismantling of the federal government.

February 5, 2025 (Wednesday)
Five years ago, on February 5, 2020, Republican senators acquitted then-president Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. Trump immediately vowed retaliation against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law for his actions. "It's payback time," one Republican said. "He has an enemies list that is growing by the day."

Now Trump is back in office and purging the government of those he perceives to be his enemies. His administration is purging the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the civil service of anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the president.

But it is not clear that the 78-year-old Trump is the one calling the shots. Although Trump maintained during his campaign that he had no idea what the right-wing Project 2025 was, multiple media outlets have established that most of his flurry of executive orders appear to have been lifted from the 922-page document. That document is the product of a group of far-right organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to Viktor Orbán's Danube Institute.

[...]

In his important piece "The Logic of Destruction and How to Resist It," published February 2 in his Thinking about..., scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder reflected on the president's multiple photo ops signing executive orders to, for example, blame former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for a plane crash that happened during Trump's term. Snyder referred to the president as "a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras."

Today journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a "reboot" of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a "full power start," a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.

Yarvin called for "giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization," headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would "run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts." "Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems."

Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological "army," the CEO "will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern." The new regime must take over the country and "perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better." It must "seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections."

Duran noted that Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed Yarvin's prescriptions and that Trump sidekick billionaire Elon Musk appears to be putting Yarvin's blueprint into action. "Musk is taking a systematic approach," Duran wrote, "one that has been outlined in public forums for years."

This morning, Anna Wilde Mathews and Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk's team has accessed payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Mathews and Whyte note that CMS sits at the center of the country's healthcare economy. In 2024, it disbursed about $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the total amount of the federal total.

On X, Musk said "this is where the big money fraud is happening." But, in fact, CMS is not operating without oversight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates out of the Department of Justice, investigates healthcare fraud. In June 2024 it announced criminal charges against 193 defendants across 32 federal districts who allegedly participated in healthcare fraud schemes that involved about $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses.

Indeed, as Eric Levitz of Vox pointed out, "DOGE has not presented evidence of 'fraud'; they have highlighted millions of dollars worth of spending that Musk considers wasteful. By contrast, the [General Accountability Office] identified $233 billion of fraud in 2024. We don't need to let a billionaire ignore federal law to do government oversight[.]"

"It is extraordinary how much access Elon Musk and his sort of creepy 22-year-old henchmen have to all of our data," Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told MSNBC today. "They have information that would allow them to shut down your tax refund, your Medicare payment.... Potentially, they know everything about you and your family, and the reality is that this could get dystopian very quickly.... If you were to start speaking ill of Elon Musk on social media, Elon Musk might be able to stop or delay your tax refund, or your mom's Social Security benefit, in part because we have no window into what's happening inside the Department of [the] Treasury right now."

While Murphy didn't say it explicitly, control over such information also gives Musk power over business rivals and political leaders. When Musk's team went into the Department of Labor today, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that "[h]e could manipulate quarterly job numbers and much more. We are talking about MARKET MOVING INFORMATION! Do employers want Musk to have access to any of their confidential data?"

Today, when asked about Musk's conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had already promised that "if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts." Donald Kettl, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hull of Bloomberg: "I don't know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest."

[...]

The letter is much longer and also mentions what has now been destroyed, what is at risk and some of the political and civilian pushbacks. I still believe these letters are a much better source of information as she connects the dots, something the mass media don't do.

I'll finish with this quote taken from some of Solnit's postings that highlight why I find mass media inadequate and source of despair/demobilization at the moment.

And the story, which seemed clear to me if not the AP, clarifies that Musk's apparent goal isn't to reduce the size of the federal government; it's to eliminate it. Especially if you relate it to all the other stories out there about what Musk is doing, though there's often a notion in mainstream journalism that connecting things to other things is editorializing, that the audience should be delivered facts stripped of context in the name of objectivity.

Source: Meditations In An Emergency

On her regular channels, Solnit also posts a lot about the ongoing acts of resistance. For those that feel anguish at the situation, it can be reassuring-ish.

[The Minsky Moment]

From dist's quotations

On X, Musk said "this is where the big money fraud is happening." But, in fact, CMS is not operating without oversight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates out of the Department of Justice, investigates healthcare fraud. In June 2024 it announced criminal charges against 193 defendants across 32 federal districts who allegedly participated in healthcare fraud schemes that involved about $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses.

Another check on healthcare fraud (and government fraud in general) are qui tam lawsuits, where private parties are incentivized to root out fraud and bring lawsuits which if successful result in the bulk of the proceeds going to the Treasury.  Yet under Trump's first term, the administration aggressively sought to shut down qui tam suits, including taking the extraordinary step of demanding courts dismiss suits where the Treasury would have benefitted from recovery.  Expect that policy to recur, weakening another check on fraud.

Especially if you relate it to all the other stories out there about what Musk is doing, though there's often a notion in mainstream journalism that connecting things to other things is editorializing, that the audience should be delivered facts stripped of context in the name of objectivity.

Let's start with the context that a decent chunk of Musk's wealth is tied up with Tesla's enormous investment in China.

Back of envelope calculation:

Musk owns 411 million Tesla shares.  Approximately 22.5% of Tesla revenue is from China.  At today's prices that means about $34 billion of his personal net worth is tied to China.  But that number is definitely an underestimate because it doesn't take into account that China is a key supplier for cars sold elsewhere.  $50 billion would be a reasonable guess of the amount of Musk's wealth that President Xi can hold hostage.

[The Minsky Moment]

Carl Schmitt's Political Theology should be required reading.  As with Schmitt's analysis of the weak seams in Weimar Constitution, the MAGA shock troops have identified broadly worded emergency powers legislation as a tool for subverting constitutional government.  The Nazis initally came to power through elections and through the constitutional process.  They built their one-party dictatorship on Weimar's constitutional foundations: first the Nazis convinced the aging and addled Hindenburg to invoke emergency powers to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, eliminating civil liberties; second, they got the Reichstag to pass the Enabling Act, nullifying itself and providing the legal foundation for the dictatorship.

We may see an Amercian-style Enabling Act presented to Congress, but it may not be necessary as long as the GOP holds their tenuous majority, as GOP Senators and Reps have made it clear that they intend to be docile collaborators to the Executive power grab.

[viper37]

IRS Employees Who Took Trump 'Buyout' Ordered to Stay, Told Their Work Is Too 'Essential'

I am hesitant to distract with such news, but fuck.

[garbon]

IRS Employees Who Took Trump 'Buyout' Ordered to Stay, Told Their Work Is Too 'Essential'

I am hesitant to distract with such news, but fuck.

Tale as old as time.

[crazy canuck]

It used to be that employers could not insist on specific performance of employment contracts.  Why? Because we know that by another name - slavery.

[crazy canuck]

From today's Letter--I'll only retain the parts related to the point I made earlier. I still see Trump as the distraction and the tool for the ongoing dismantling of the federal government.

Yep, exactly right.  I heard someone comment that while Trump is the head of state for the USA, Musk has become the head of government, in what can accurately be described as a coup.

edit, I now see that JR already made a similar point.

[crazy canuck]

Things are moving quickly. Universities have received a directive from the National Science Foundation not to use a number of specified words in research grant proposals.  It looks like there will be some retroactive implementation as the review of funding applications has been paused for the list of prohibited words to form part of the assessment of funding proposals already in the system, meaning that applications which have been submitted but not yet granted funding will be subject to the new restrictions.

If you are wondering what the offending words might be, they include "female", "historically" and male-dominated".  It is also worth noting the word "male" is not prescribed.  There will be no retroactive effect for funding already granted.  A Federal court judge has already ruled that the executive order freezing all funding was unlawful, and the Office of Management and Budget has rescinded its directive that currently funded projects be frozen pending review.

It is estimated is that this will impact thousands of ongoing research projects that are applying for continuing, additional, or new funding.