Ezra Klein is a columnist for The New York Times. His podcast is wildly popular. He synthesizes events that seem disparate.
He explains succinctly the moment we are in.
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An aging, angry, vengeful man is re-elected President. That would be Trump. He is surrounded by people with an agenda, like JD Vance, who is an acolyte of a radical anarchist, Curtis Yarvin. The primary financier for the President is the richest man in the world. That man, of course, is Elon Musk. He gave Trump almost $300 million for his campaign, and that gift buys a lot of gratitude.
Until recently, the public was not aware of Musk’s political views. But now we know. He is a far-right extremist.
Trump gave Musk a mission: Cut the budget. Do the hard things that Congress won’t do because they fear doing anything too unpopular, like cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Right off the bat, Musk sends an email to two million civil servants: retire. Make a decision by February 5. Retire or risk being laid off.
Trump gives Musk carte blanche to do whatever he wants. Musk brings in a team led by inexperienced 20-somethings. They go from department, copying private and personal data.
Musk has billions of dollars in contracts with the government. He can, if he chooses, learn about his competitors’ contracts and personal tax returns. He has the personal information of hundreds of millions of people.
He begins making recommendations for slashing agencies. He hates foreign aid, which he considers “wicked,” even though a large part of it feeds hungry people and cures deadly diseases. Every foreign aid worker is called home. He hates NPR and PBS, and it seems likely that he will terminate their funding. He has many other personal grudges, which are sure to influence his recommendations.
Why are Republicans supporting this handover of responsibility from Trump to Musk? Why are they willingly defending the removal of their own Constitutional responsibilities?
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Republicans sit back and watch as Musk takes that power. The Constitutiin gives Congress the authority to create and close departments. Why are Republicans silently giving him permission to close down the USAID?
Why are they so enthusiastic about one-man rule? Why have they abandoned the Constitution? Didn’t they take an oath to defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic?
I am attaching a good article on this subject by David Wallace-Wells.
It is, so far, worse than I feared. Last Friday, at the end of a week in which a vaccine skeptic and sometime conspiracy theorist auditioned to lead the country’s nearly $2 trillion, 80,000-person public health apparatus, much of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website went dark — its weekly mortality reports, its data sets, certain guidance for clinicians and patients, all taken offline. C.D.C. researchers were ordered to retract a huge raft of their own, already-submitted research. Next to go dark was the website of U.S.A.I.D., which Elon Musk announced that he would be working to shut down entirely, after several staffers resisting agency takeover by the billionaire were abruptly put on leave. (When the agency website later popped back online, it featured an announcement that all overseas personnel would be placed on leave and ordered to return.).
This is after the new administration had already suspended the country’s most successful global-health initiative, PEPFAR, which has saved millions of lives globally. The State Department later issued a PEPFAR waiver, but the program appears to have been rendered effectively inoperative by staff cuts; if the pause holds for even 90 days, it would result in over 135,000 additional children being born with H.I.V. The Famine Early Warning System Network was shut down, too.
Sometime between Jan. 6, 2021 and Nov. 5, 2024, many American liberals came to feel that “the resistance” — the reflexive mobilization against President Trump, after his first victory, on behalf of American institutions — had been embarrassing, pointless or even counterproductive, and that it might have been a touch hysterical to worry in grandiose terms about the threat posed by Trump rule. At the moment, it is hard to see it but hysterically: a blitzkrieg against core functions of the state, operating largely outside the boundaries set by history, precedent, and constitutional law, and designed to reduce the shape and purpose of government power to the whims, and spite, of a single man.
Or perhaps two men. The news about U.S.A.I.D. wasn’t delivered by President Trump, for instance. Instead the case against the agency was mounted on X by Musk, who this weekend called it a “criminal organization” saying that it’s “time for it to die”; the email telling staff that the agency’s headquarters would be closed appeared to come from one of Musk’s 20-something government “efficiency” groupies, who had somehow acquired a U.S.A.I.D. email address. Both the manner and the target of the attack offered the same lesson: that soft power was not real power, at all, and that only the hard kind truly counted.
Musk eventually won access to payment systems at the Treasury Department after a similar fight — after an official protesting the move was seemingly pushed out of the agency. “There are many disturbing aspects of this,” the political scientist Seth Masket wrote over the weekend. “But perhaps the most fundamental is that Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the president nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government.” Indeed, to the extent he enjoys any formal authority, at the moment, it is through a loose executive order broadly understood to authorize the initiative only to upgrade government I.T. systems and protocols. “Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices,” Masket went on. “That is not efficiency; that is a coup.” Other relatively sober-minded commentators have called it “ripping out the guts of government.” Still others a “Caesarist assault on the separation of powers” and a “constitutional crisis.”
Is it? Well, T.B.D. Much or all of this will be adjudicated in court, in the coming weeks and months, and maybe, ultimately, overturned or undone. Some initiatives have already been halted in the courts, though it’s nevertheless grim to see researchers celebrating that their ability to gain access to data on respiratory illness has been restored. (Even more so to scroll through the long list of “forbidden words” now being purged from C.D.C. research) And trusting that there remain checks and balances sufficient to block what my colleague Ezra Klein called the president’s longstanding desire to be king — or to block Musk’s effort to rip apart the government of the world’s most powerful country, as he did to Twitter — invests a lot of hope in state attorneys general, federal judges and the Supreme Court, not to mention advocacy groups like the A.C.L.U.
Already, it seems absurd to base expectations for Trump’s second term on the ultimate outcomes of the first, and perhaps unfortunate that so many commentators have spent the last year eye-rolling about “resistance historians” and their hyperbolic warnings. When JD Vance talked about the need to reconstitute the federal government with a program of “de-Baathification,” it sounded extreme enough. But in barely two weeks the “anti-woke” ideological agenda has already become a flimsy pretext for a much more sweeping evisceration of state function.
“This is a five-alarm fire,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote this weekend, and on Monday she called on her colleagues to block Trump’s nominations in the Senate in protest. In the days that followed, many of her colleagues in the Democratic coalition found their rhetorical footing somewhat, at least calling out the initiative’s overreach — some of them coalescing around a message of “Fire Elon Musk” — rather than treating it with a mix of soft skepticism and performative sympathy.
But many had spent the transition developing a line of rhetorical attack based on food prices rather than the language of fascism, treating the return of Trumpism as an episode of normal politics rather than exceptional or existential ones, and trying so hard to learn the lessons of the so-called “vibe-shift” that they often sounded less like they were preparing for a fight than for a listening tour. Over the weekend, many appeared genuinely shellshocked.
Who isn’t? Perhaps it is even true that Trump won re-election thanks simply to frustration with immigration and the cost of living, however much that talk of vibes helped inflate the importance of a thin quotidian victory and lend credibility to what might otherwise look more like a hostile takeover of government by a marauding few. But where does all that leave the work of opposition? This is one demoralizing effect of staking a presidential campaign on themes of status-quo continuity, while conceding to many of the other side’s critiques (on immigration, on energy, on crime). You end up, after the election, looking a bit lost.
The war on public health is just one facet of this ugly diamond, but through it you can see both the breadth and the cruelty of the whole assault — and how it often hides behind an alibi of “reform.”
All of a sudden, last Friday, you could not view C.D.C. data about H.I.V., or its guidelines for PrEP, the prophylactic treatment to prevent H.I.V. transmission, or guidelines for other sexually-transmitted diseases. You couldn’t find surveillance data on hepatitis or tuberculosis, either, or the youth-risk behavior survey, or any of the agency’s domestic violence data. If you were a doctor hoping to consult federal guidance about postpartum birth control, that was down too. As was the page devoted to “Safer Food Choices for Pregnant People,” presumably because that last word wasn’t “Women.” Throughout the pandemic, conservative critics of these institutions complained that their messaging was unequivocal and heavy-handed. The new message seems to be: You are on your own.
In the end, this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s message, too — beyond his claims about vaccines and G.M.O.s. The man who will almost certainly assume control of the country’s entire public health apparatus is often described as a late arrival to MAGA, and an unlikely ally — a longtime environmental lawyer and anti-corporate activist who was even considered a potential E.P.A. administrator by Barack Obama. But he nevertheless embodies the broader program, as does the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement for which he serves now as a hood ornament.
In the aftermath of the pandemic emergency, Americans grew increasingly distrustful of many of the country’s institutions of health — it wasn’t just faith in organizations like the C.D.C. and F.D.A. which fell, but trust in nurses, doctors and pharmacists, too. But the administration isn’t proposing reform. Kennedy’s core focus is asking sweeping questions about vaccines and about the food system and environmental contamination. This emphasis represents a paradigm shift, from a social and epidemiological view of illness and disease, emphasizing collective responsibility and mutual aid, to one focused on behavior, diet and lifestyle. Which is to say, personal responsibility — in place of public health, health libertarianism.
This shift is not just the work of Trumpist right, as left-wing critics of Joe Biden’s pandemic policy have long argued. But you could see the dynamic quite clearly at Kennedy’s confirmation hearings. Senator Rand Paul, rather than asking any serious questions of the nominee, instead delivered a long and passionate monologue about the need to question medical orthodoxy and the oppressive weight of that consensus, as he felt it, during the pandemic.
His rant was not without merit: Hepatitis-negative mothers probably wouldn’t need to vaccinate their children against the disease on Day 1 of their lives, as the committee chairman, Bill Cassidy, seemed to acknowledge, and early in the pandemic it might have been useful to communicate a bit more clearly about the striking difference in risk faced by the old and the young, as I was writing as far back as the spring of 2020, too.
But these were not the questions that Kennedy was asking most conspicuously at the height of the Covid emergency — about how we might do better with guidance and communication and trust, or whether we had done enough to communicate the age skew of the disease or the strength of “natural” immunity. Instead, he was focusing on the horrors of the new vaccines. Indeed, fighting to stop their authorization, and any future authorization for any future Covid vaccine, not just for little children or those who’d already survived infection, but for any American of any age and suffering any health condition.
This was in May 2021. The rollout had begun just six months before, but vaccines had already saved, it was estimated, nearly 140,000 American lives. In the years that followed, they would save perhaps three million more. That is to say, if Kennedy had been successful, the pandemic death toll in this country could have been about three times as high.
This attempt at public-health sabotage towers over the new secretary’s meddling in Samoa, which may have contributed to the deaths of dozens by measles in 2019, and it came more recently, concerning millions of American lives. It was also what earned him a spot in the Trump coalition — indeed a starring role. The Covid vaccines were a medical miracle, probably the most consequential American one in several generations. Kennedy did what he could to stop that miracle, which he later called “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” When the country encountered a rampaging novel disease, he told us very clearly, he would have preferred we all faced it naked and alone.
This should be disqualifying. Instead, it proved the opposite. In the name of reform and government overhaul, the new administration is approving and ushering in something much more like destruction, with the president imploring his new health secretary to “go wild” in the role. The admonition does not apply just to Kennedy and public health, or even just to Musk and his initiative. A new generation of libertarians is not letting the country’s crisis of confidence go to waste. On Tuesday, Ted Cruz declared, “Abolish the IRS.” Up first, apparently: the Department of Education.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is holding hostage the more than five million students in public schools while he demands vouchers for kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools. Abbott has refused to increase funding for the state’s public schools unless the legislature approves vouchers, most of which will subsidize the affluent.
Last year, the legislature refused to approve vouchers. Since then, Abbott engineered the defeat of several anti-voucher Republicans. He’s hoping to win approval in the current session. Vouchers will pass easily in the state senate. We will see what happens in the House, where rural Republicans stood against vouchers in the past, before Abbott’s purge.
Abbott is playing Reverse Robin Hood. He is stealing from the poor to pay for the rich. Billionaires like Jeff Yass, the richest man jnnOennstlvsnia, and Betsy DeVos of Michigan, are funding his intransigence with millions in campaign contributions.
The Texas Monthly reports that school superintendents are increasing class sizes, laying off teachers, eliminating electives, and doing whatever they can to keep their doors open.
The article says:
Two years ago, during the 2023 legislative session, superintendents of Texas schools were optimistic that state lawmakers would boost public-education funding. After all, soaring inflation was straining the already meager finances of districts across the state, and lawmakers had at their disposal a $32.7 billion budget surplus. Spending some of that money on the urgent educational needs of the state’s children might have seemed like an uncontroversial proposal.
Instead, the unthinkable happened: Legislators left Austin without putting any significant new money into schools or giving teachers a raise. The consequences have been dire.
Texas’s public schools were already among the most poorly resourced in the country: Our per-student funding is about 27 percent less than the national average. The basic allotment—the minimum amount of funding per student that school districts receive from the state—has been stuck at $6,160 since 2019. That would need to be upped by about $1,400 just to keep pace with rising costs. Public education advocates worry that lawmakers will provide only face-saving increases to the basic allotment in 2025 while diverting billions to private schools.
Many school leaders have had to undertake draconian austerity measures. Nearly 80 percent of districts have reported challenges with budget deficits. Given the stakes, 2025 could be a pivotal year for Texas’s public-education system….
Texas Monthly spoke to a group of superintendents to ask about how they were coping. They all spoke about the budget cuts and unfunded mandates (like requiring the hiring of police officers without providing funding). One superintendent, Jennifer Blaine of Spring Branch, said:
JB, Spring Branch: We don’t have anywhere else to cut. We are cut to the bone. I consolidated everything I could, and I cut everything that I could. If we have to cut further, you’re talking about severely impacting academics in the classroom and, quite frankly, safety and security. Five and a half million kids are in Texas public schools, and I don’t understand how our legislators and our governor don’t see this as a crisis. If we don’t educate these kids to the highest levels and prepare them for postsecondary success, we’re going to crumble as a state. I don’t know where the disconnect is. Education is the great equalizer. But nobody is talking about that, and I think it’s a missed opportunity because this is not going to end well.
The title of the article in the print edition was “A Legislature That Will Spend at Least as Much Per Pupil as Louisiana.”
As part of the radical overhaul of the federal government, some 2 million employees were asked to resign and accept a leave with pay if they did. But there is no money appropriated to pay for the offer, and there are multiple lawsuits opposing it. Nor was there any consideration of the value of the employee’s work.
When Elon Musk took charge of Twitter, he made a similar offer and fired 80% of the workforce. He got rid of content moderation teams and opened the platform to Nazis and misinformation. The downside was that he lost every major advertiser, and he’s now suing them for conspiring to hurt Twitter.
The New York Times reported on the final day of the offer:
Some federal employees have a new symbol for their resistance to President Trump’s and Elon Musk’s radical overhaul of the U.S. government: a spoon.
Last week, in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” the administration urged federal workers to consider resigning from their posts and said they would be paid through September — a bid to rapidly shrink the size of the work force.
Union leaders have urged employees not to accept the offer, questioning its legality and legitimacy. And on Wednesday, workers at the Technology Transformation Services, the tech-focused arm of the General Services Administration, made their displeasure with the offer known during an organization-wide meeting with their new leader, a former employee at Mr. Musk’s automaker Tesla, by sharing spoon emojis in an online chat, according to people familiar with the response.
In the meeting, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was appointed to lead technology efforts at the G.S.A., attempted to assuage worries about the deferred resignation plan and told workers to “read as much as you can” about the offer, according to an audio recording provided to The New York Times. He also urged federal workers to review information posted on the website of the Office of Personnel Management.
“Have that context in mind as you think through the decision you have to make in the next 24 to 30 hours,” Mr. Shedd added. “The deferred resignation is the first step in streamlining the federal work force. In-person work will be the next step.”
His assurances did not appear to work. Employees in the tech division rained down spoon emojis in the chat that accompanied the video meeting, which was watched by more than 600 people, according to photos of the chat screen provided to The Times and three people familiar with the reaction. Some employees also added spoon emojis to their statuses on Slack, a workplace communication app.
“Thomas: Whether you mean to or not, you’re playing a role in destroying TTS,” one worker wrote in the chat.
“The culture is the people,” another employee wrote. “Without the people, TTS is NOTHING.”
After Mr. Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022, he sent an email with the same subject line — “Fork in the Road” — to the company’s employees, offering them a buyout to leave the company if they didn’t want to participate in his “extremely hardcore” vision.
During the Twitter takeover, employees used the salute emoji as a sign of solidarity with their co-workers and as a goodbye during mass layoffs.
After renaming the social media service as X, Mr. Musk has pushed for severe cuts to the federal government. He shared a post that estimated 5 to 10 percent of the federal work force would take the deferred resignation offer, potentially saving the government $100 billion.
The last date to accept the offer is Feb. 6, according to the email to government workers.
Musk is sending his agents to sensitive federal agencies and taking over. He has taken control of the payments system at the U.S. Treasury, which processes trillions of dollars in Social Security payments, Medicare, Medicaid, and other obligations and holds personally identifiable information about recipients. They gained access to the computers of the Office of Personnel Managenent, which has records of federal employees, and locked out its government overseers.
Now his team has barged into the offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, clashed with security officers who barred their entry into restricted spaces; the security officers were suspended, and Musk’s team is now downloading their computers.
The Washington Post reported:
The Trump administration has removed two top security officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development after they refused to let representatives of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” access restricted spaces at the agency, said current and former USAID officials.
The placement of the security officials — John Voorhees and his deputy — on administrative leave is the latest effort by the Trump administration and Musk to wrest control of the world’s largest provider of food assistance, which they have denigrated, without offering evidence, as left-wing and corrupt amid objections from Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
Amid the turmoil at the agency, Matt Hopson, the USAID chief of staff and a political appointee, resigned, according to a current and former USAID official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Hopson did not respond to requests for comment.
On Sunday, Musk repeatedly attacked USAID on X, calling the long-standing government agency “evil” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”
“USAID is a criminal organization,” he added. “Time for it to die.”
By Sunday afternoon, USAID’s X account had been taken down, with a message saying the account “doesn’t exist.”
Reuters reported that the Trump administration was dismantling USAID and had fired more than 100 of its career staff.
The New York Times reported that the Trump administration will probably shift the agency into the State Department. Trump currently has imposed a 80-day freeze on all foreign aid.
State Department officials did not answer inquiries seeking to clarify the purpose of the moves, which lawmakers and aid workers said could be anything from a restructuring to an effort to significantly downsize, if not eliminate, most U.S. foreign aid programs.
But Democratic lawmakers said they feared a potentially bleak endgame for the aid agency.
“All the signals of how the senior staff have been put on administrative leave, many of the field staff and headquarters staff have been put on a gag order,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, who sits on the Senate panels on foreign relations and appropriations, said Saturday afternoon in an interview.
“It seems more like the early stages of shutting down than it does of reviewing it or merely retitling it,” he added.
U.S.A.I.D. is the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Since it was established in 1961, it has received foreign policy guidance from the State Department, but otherwise functioned as an independent entity.
Ironically, the Washington Post published an editorial today defending the value of foreign, especially humanitarian aid.
Foreign assistance is one of the more misunderstood items in the federal budget. In creates an enormous bang for a relatively small buck. American aid supports thousands of programs across 204 countries. It provides lifesaving drugs for millions of people afflicted with HIV/AIDS and malaria. It purifies drinking water, helps rid former war zones of leftover land mines, and trains local police to combat human trafficking and the illegal wildlife trade.
For many people around the world, aid is also the most visible symbol of U.S. power — soft power — and a tangible demonstration of America’s decency. Amounting to $68 billion in fiscal 2023, foreign aid is only about 1 percent of the federal budget. Yet it has long been in the crosshairs of some fiscal conservatives and other critics who deem it a waste of taxpayer dollars that could be better spent at home.
On President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order suspending all foreign aid for 90 days, pending a review, saying the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio followed up with a cable on Jan. 24 to all U.S. diplomatic outposts stopping work on most foreign aid programs during the review period, which is supposed to be completed by the time the freeze expires. Initially, exemptions were made only for emergency food aid and military assistance to Israel and Egypt — and conspicuously not for aid to Ukraine or Taiwan. Then on Tuesday, perhaps bowing to global outrage and criticism, Rubio issued an additional waiver for lifesaving humanitarian assistance…
Consider just a few of the programs taxpayers fund, starting with PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, launched under President George W. Bush in 2003. By the end of last year, PEPFAR was providing antiretroviral treatment for nearly 21 million people in 55 countries and delivering pre-exposure prophylaxis (to prevent people from contracting HIV) to 2.5 million people. In South Africa, PEPFAR covers much of the costs for staff to administer the drugs, for HIV-prevention messaging and for supporting the country’s HIV research. It remains unclear whether Rubio’s waiver extends to PEPFAR, but it should. A months-long delay would cost lives.
The United States is also the world’s largest donor to the global fight against malaria, mostly through the President’s Malaria Initiative, known as PMI. In fiscal 2024, Congress allocated $795 million to the U.S. Agency for International Development for the effort to diagnose and treat malaria and to distribute insecticide-treated mosquito nets. With even a short suspension of this aid, prevention gains could be reversed, especially in malaria-prone cities such as Lagos, Nigeria, African health officials warn….
All in all, foreign aid is an extraordinarily effective policy tool. Helping eradicate poverty and promote democracy generates goodwill that makes the United States stronger. Combating life-threatening pathogens and removing the causes of economic and social instability make the world safer. Expanding global prosperity creates new markets for American products.
Rubio’s waiver should expand to include all programs vital to health and well-being. And the secretary should see that the review is done quickly and fairly, so that the flow of aid can resume before the pause does lasting damage.
The editorial was written in response to Trump’s 90-day freeze. It did not acknowledge the all-out assault on USAID, nor the fact that Trump is dubious about all foreign aid and Musk thinks it’s “evil.”
Bear in mind that Musk does not believe in philanthropy. He is the world’s richest man, with wealth of more than $400 billion. But where is his philanthropy? Has he endowed any universities, hospitals, museums, medical research? Or anything else. He once denounced Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife McKenzie Scott because she was so generous with her gifts to struggling nonprofits; he said she was undermining Western civilization. I can’t find evidence of any philanthropy on his part. If it exists, it’s well hidden.
Elon Musk has a hard, cold heart. If he has one.
During the campaign, Trump told Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator on Day 1. He understated his goal, as we now know. He intends to be a dictator after Day 1. He wants to take complete control of the federal government.
He wants to destroy the civil service, place his loyalists in every policy making position, politicize the Justice Department, and eliminate all dissenting voices.
Both the Justice department and the FBI are supposed to be insulated from politics. Trump hated that. He’s putting them under the control of close allies. Every career prosecutor at the Department of Justice who worked in the Trump investigations has been ousted. The FBI has been purged.
His plan to eliminate the civil service, called Schedule F, has been rolled out.
He fired a dozen Departments’ Inspectors General. These are the nonpartisan officials who scrutinize each Department and guard against waste, fraud, and abuse. Will he replace them with MAGA flunkies?
To be sure, Trump is the puppet, not the mastermind. Others are pulling the strings. Musk, Vance, Stephen Miller (the architect of his plan to deport 11 million immigrants). The billionaire Peter Thiel pulls Vance’s strings.
Trump’s failed effort to stop-payment on almost every federal program may have been Vance’s idea. Vance is closely aligned with the radical libertarian guru Curtis Yarwin, who believes that democracy is a failure and that what is needed is a dictator who will eliminate most of the government.
The offer sent to two million civil servants asking them to resign in exchange for a payout likely came from Musk, who downsized Twitter by offering a mass buyout. Some Twitter retirees are still suing to get the buyout. No money is available now and unlikely to be appropriated to pay those who accept the offer to give up their civil service jobs.
The loss of top civil servants in every agency will undermine their effectiveness. These are the people with institutional memory; they know the agency far better than their political bosses. They serve, no matter which party is in power. And they are leaving in droves, pushed out by the new bosses.
Just when you think it can’t get worse, another Executive Order rolls out. Trump boastfully signs with his Sharpie. Does he know what’s he’s signing? Does it matter? Day by day, Trump demonstrates that he has “absolute immunity.” Day by day, he brings another part of the government under his control. And the Republicans in Congress not only acquiesce, they praise him for abrogating their powers.
Trump is a puppet, and cowed, pusillanimous Republicans in Congress are his lapdogs.
Day by day, the foundation of a Trump dictatorship are put into place. When he jokes about running for a third term, is he joking?
Simon Rosenberg is a leader of the resistance to Trumpism. He blogs at Substack, where his blog is called Hopium. He wrote today:
Morning/Afternoon all. If Donald Trump has a superpower it has been the evasion of responsibility for the bad things he’s done in his life. Yesterday he blamed Biden, Obama, Pete Buttigieg, DEI for the 67 dead in the Potomac. Deflect, blame others, rinse, repeat. So let’s be clear about a few things today:
Trump Is Trying To Break The US Government And Owns All The Troubles That Come From It – Trump’s savage attack on the day to day operations of our government will result in many, many bad things to happen. The 67 dead in the Potomac are an example. He has gutted the leadership of our government’s aviation security and has waged a war against rank and file employees of the government including air traffic controllers. When things fail like they did this week outside of Reagan National Airport we must hold the President to account. He is literally trying to break things now and when they break there is one person to blame and it sure isn’t Mr or Mrs DEI.
It is possible those outside of DC don’t understand the scale and scope of the purges happening at senior levels of every department and agency right now. Incredible knowledge, expertise and operational capacity are being lost. The entire National Security Council career staff, for example, was just sent home last week. They are disabling the ability of the US government to carry out its daily responsibilities.
Trump’s Economic Agenda Is Causing Prices To Rise For Everyone. Tariffs Will Raise Them Even Further – As we discussed with Rob Shapiro earlier this week the President’s proposed economic policies will raise prices for everyone, re-ignite inflation, raise taxes on middle class Americans, cut benefit programs that will cause costs to rise on a wide variety of services including health care and provide extraordinary tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations. As Rob explained to us the tariffs Trump may implement tomorrow are a national sales tax on an incredible array of goods including food, oil and gas, wood and other construction products. Prices on all these things will rise significantly, immediately, perhaps as early as tomorrow, and further fuel inflation.
Trump’s inflationary agenda is already re-igniting inflation. From Reuters this morning, Key US inflation measure posts largest monthly gain since April:
U.S. inflation increased by the most in eight months in December amid a surge in consumer spending, suggesting the Federal Reserve would probably be in no hurry to resume cutting interest rates soon.
Other data on Friday showed labor costs rose in the fourth quarter as wages edged up. Price pressures picked up in the fourth quarter, stalling the progress in lowering inflation.
We all need to be very clear that Trump has no plan to lower prices and costs. Regardless of his rhetoric his plan actually seeks to raise prices and costs, not lower them, and here we are – inflation and costs are rising for every American, already.
Mass Deportation Will Raise Prices For Americans, Disrupt Our Businesses and Slow Growth – As we discussed with David Leopold last week Trump’s mass deportation plan is going to remove millions of workers from our labor force at a time of historically low employment. This will cause our companies to lose long-time productive employees; make it far harder for all companies to hire and grow; prices will rise for food, health care, day care, restaurants, hotels and many, many other items; families and communities will be shattered. All of this contribute to re-igniting inflation, ensuring the Fed does not lower interest rates, keeping mortgages and borrowing costs for all companies and Americans at elevated levels, slowing growth and worsening the cost of living crisis in America. It will also have this effect, via Hopium community member Catherine G:
My daughter-in-law is a prosecutor. Victims of crime and witnesses are now not showing up for court dates and/or preparation because they are afraid ICE will seize them at the court house. That means cases can’t be prosecuted and that means criminals stay free to commit more crimes. Party of law and order my sweet Aunt Annie.
The savage treatment of the migrants we are sending back, the bullying of countries to accept them, the levying of tariffs on our closest allies, the threat or actual seizure of land from sovereign nations/allies will turn America into a rogue nation, a pariah state, and make us a far less safe and successful nation.
Life Saving Aid Programs, Medical Research, Clinical Trials, Public Health Programs Are Still Turned Off – It’s possible that the most dangerous actions Trump has taken so far involve a wide array of programs whose funding remains stolen/frozen. Here is a new NYTimes story today that suggests the cut off of foreign aid programs could result in millions of people dying around the world in the coming months, How The World Is Reeling From Trump’s Aid Freeze:
In famine-stricken Sudan, soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in a war zone have shut down.
In Thailand, war refugees with life-threatening diseases have been turned away by hospitals and carted off on makeshift stretchers.
In Ukraine, residents on the frontline of the war with Russia may be going without firewood in the middle of winter.
Some of the world’s most vulnerable populations are already feeling President Trump’s sudden cutoff of billions of dollars in American aid that helps fend off starvation, treats diseases and provides shelter for the displaced.
n a matter of days, Mr. Trump’s order to freeze nearly all U.S. foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised profound questions about America’s reliability and global standing.
“Everyone is freaking out,” Atif Mukhtar of the Emergency Response Rooms, a local volunteer group in the besieged Sudanese capital, Khartoum, said of the aid freeze.
Soon after announcing the cut off, the Trump administration abruptly switched gears. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this weekthat “life-saving humanitarian assistance” could continue, offering a respite for what he called “core” efforts to provide food, medicine, shelter and other emergency needs.
But he stressed that the reprieve was “temporary in nature,” with limited exceptions. Beyond that, hundreds of senior officials and workers who help distribute American aid had already been fired or put on leave, and many aid efforts remain paralyzed around the world.
Most of the soup kitchens in Khartoum, the battle-torn capital of Sudan, have shut down. Until last week, the United States was the largest source of money for the volunteer-run kitchens that fed 816,000 people there.
“For most people, it’s the only meal they get,” said Hajooj Kuka, a spokesman for the Emergency Response Rooms, describing Khartoum as a city “on the edge of starvation.”
After the American money was frozen last week, some of the aid groups that channel those funds to the food kitchens said they were unsure if they were allowed to continue. Others cut off the money completely. Now, 434 of the 634 volunteer kitchens in the capital have shut down, Mr. Kuka said.
“And more are going out of service every day,” he added.
Many of the aid workers, doctors and people in need who rely on American aid are now reckoning with their relationship with the United States and the message the Trump administration is sending: America is focusing on itself.
Most of the soup kitchens that feed 816,000 people in Khartoum have shut down. Patients were told to leave a U.S.-funded refugee hospital on the Myanmar border. Organizations that provide maternal care, vaccinations and firewood were forced to suspend operations.
“It feels like one easy decision by the U.S. president is quietly killing so many lives,” said Saw Nah Pha, a tuberculosis patient who said he was told to leave a U.S.-funded hospital in the Mae La refugee camp, the largest refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border.
Across the US a freeze/theft of government funding has crippled medical research, clinical trials and other basic public health care systems.
Governor Bill Lee was determined to get a universal voucher bill, regardless of which families get the money or what it costs the state. Since Republicans control the legislature, he got what he wanted. The plan will be phased in.
The legislature knows that most vouchers will subsidize private school tuition. They probably know that vouchers don’t raise academic achievement. They surely know that Tennessee students did well on the national test, NAEP, compared to most other states. And they know that paying the tuition of all the students who attend religious schools and private schools will be a heavy financial burden.
The only thing that is not clear is which billionaire or billionaires was behind the state Republicans’ readiness to sabotage their public schools.
None of that matters.
Marta A. Aldrich reported for Chalkbeat:
Tennessee lawmakers on Thursday approved Gov. Bill Lee’s universal private school voucher bill, creating a new track for educating K-12 students statewide.
The 54-44 vote in the House, where Democrats and some rural Republicans joined to oppose the program, came after four hours of debate, including dozens of failed attempts to add amendments aimed at strengthening accountability and protections for students with disabilities, among other things.
The Senate later voted 20-13 to pass Lee’s Education Freedom Act.
The Republican governor called the bill’s passage “a milestone in advancing education in Tennessee.” He is expected to quickly sign his signature education bill.
“I’ve long believed we can have the best public schools & give parents a choice in their child’s education, regardless of income or zip code,” he said on social media.
Tennessee joins a dozen states that have adopted similar programs allowing families, regardless of their income, to use public tax dollars to pay for alternatives to public education for their children.
President Donald Trump this week signed an executive order that frees up federal funding and prioritizes spending on school choice programs.
Lee’s office did not immediately respond when asked if the federal order has implications, financial or otherwise, on Tennessee’s Education Freedom Act.
Also this week, results of a major national test show that Tennessee students held their ground in math and reading, in a year when average student test scores declined nationwide.
The new voucher program is scheduled to launch in the upcoming school year with 20,000 “scholarships” of $7,075 each to aid families toward the cost of a private education. Half of them will be for students whose family income is below a certain threshold — $173,000 for a family of four. Those income restrictions will be lifted during the program’s second year. The number of available vouchers can grow by 5,000 each year thereafter.
About 65% of the vouchers are expected to be awarded to students who already attend private schools, with 35% going to students switching out of public schools, according to the legislature’s own analysis of the proposal….
The packages will cost almost $1 billion this year in a state that has seen its revenues drop because of tax breaks for corporations and businesses enacted in 2024 under another initiative from the governor.
The Education Freedom Act itself will cost taxpayers at least $1.1 billion during its first five years, state analysts say, under a provision that allows the program to grow by 5,000 students annually.
In addition to providing some families with vouchers, the legislation will give one-time bonuses of $2,000 each to the state’s public school teachers; establish a public school infrastructure fund using tax revenues from the sports betting industry that currently contribute to college scholarships; and reimburse public school systems for any state funding lost if a student dis-enrolls to accept the new voucher.
Trump has always expressed contempt for public schools. In his first term, he appointed billionaire religious zealot Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education. She has spent many millions over decades to promote charters and vouchers, and she shoveled as much money as she could to charter schools, especially large chains.
His nominee for Secretary of Education, wrestling-entertainment entrepreneur Linda McMahon, will be no less spiteful towards public schools than DeVos. McMahon is chair of the extremist America First Policy Institute, which peddles the lie that public schools “indoctrinate” their students to hate America.
In his 2024 campaign, Trump pushed school choice as one of his major issues.
Yesterday he signed an executive order directing that discretionary federal funds be spent to promote all forms of choice, and he praised states with universal vouchers.
His executive order lambastes the “failure” of the public schools, a refrain we have heard from privatizers for the past 30 years, and he makes false claims about the benefits of private choices.
He says:
When our public education system fails such a large segment of society, it hinders our national competitiveness and devastates families and communities. For this reason, more than a dozen States have enacted universal K-12 scholarship programs, allowing families — rather than the government — to choose the best educational setting for their children. These States have highlighted the most promising avenue for education reform: educational choice for families and competition for residentially assigned, government-run public schools. The growing body of rigorous research demonstrates that well-designed education-freedom programs improve student achievement and cause nearby public schools to improve their performance.
This paragraph is larded with lies. Despite decades of loud complaining about how public schools hurt our economic competitiveness, we have the most vibrant and successful economy in the world. Our public schools, which enroll 85-90% of our nation’s students, contributed to that success.
Next is his patently false claim that universal choice is the best path to educational success. There is no evidence for that claim. In fact, Florida–a leader in universal choice–just experienced a sharp drop in its NAEP scores. Its reading and math scores dropped to their lowest level in more than 20 years.
And most ridiculous is his assertion that “rigorous research demonstrates that well-designed education-freedom programs improve student achievement and cause nearby public schools to improve their performance.”
Josh Cowen’s new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers thoroughly debunks those claims.
The most rigorous research, which Cowen reviews, shows that poor kids who take vouchers and switch to a private school experience a dramatic decline in their test scores. Many return to public schools.
The most rigorous research shows that most students who use vouchers were already enrolled in private schools. The voucher is a subsidy for their religious and private school tuition.
The most rigorous research shows that universal vouchers in every state that has them are used by affluent families. They are welfare for the rich.
The most rigorous research shows that public schools lose funding when new and existing state funding goes to nonpublic schools.
The most rigorous research shows that universal choice busts the budgets of states that fund all students, including private school students.
Trump has sharpened his knife to destroy public education.
Fight back!
Join the Network for Public Education and link up with people in your community, your state, and the nation who believe that public dollars should be spent on public schools.
Sign up for the annual conference of the Network for Public Education in Columbus, Ohio, April 5-6 and meet your allies.
Organize, strategize, resist!
A maxim: Where Trump goes, chaos reigns.
The across-the-board federal funding freeze imposed by the Trump administration was withdrawn, according to this report at MSNBC.
The freeze was announced, then modified, and today it was withdrawn. It caused widespread chaos, as numerous programs were confused about whether or not they had funding. Red states, where federal funding is concentrated, were hit hardest.
The New York Times added details:
Grant freeze: The White House rescinded an order on Wednesday that froze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans and sparked mass confusion across the country, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter. A federal judge had temporarily blocked it on Tuesday…
The initial directive interrupted the Medicaid system that provides health care to millions of low-income Americans and sent schools, hospitals, nonprofits, research companies and law enforcement agencies scrambling to understand if they had lost their financial support from the federal government.
A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Tuesday afternoon temporarily blocked the order in response to a lawsuit filed by Democracy Forward, a liberal organization that argued that the directive violated the First Amendment and a law governing how executive orders are to be rolled out.
On Wednesday, Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director for the Office of Management and Budget, sent a notification to federal agencies notifying them that memo freezing aid had been “rescinded.”
“If you have questions about implementing the President’s executive orders, please contact your agency general counsel,” Mr. Vaeth said in the notification.
Diane Ravitch's blog 