I woke up to a text from a friend in Texas the other day: “How many months has it been since Monday?” And yes, it was a long five days! It was a long five days in which too many ugly things happened. To be clear, though? It’s been all of one week.
The new administration is out for blood, and it’s employing a younger, more nimble, more unqualified, and more criminal regime of actors to get what it wants– what it has described as a powerful mandate, even though nowhere near a majority of Americans even voted for the guy.
On the note of younger, the communications apparatus snatched up 27-year-old Taylor Budowich, who we might remember from having been deposed in Mar-A-Lago Why-Are-These-Classified-Documents-Being-Stored-In-A-Bathroom-Gate. Budowich is a college dropout whose accolades have included a couple of internships and running MAGA organizations including a SuperPAC that allows donors to funnel dark money to the president.
On the note of both younger and more criminal— a twofer- is the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, also 27, who allegedly criminally concealed hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions to her own failed congressional run.
So, without further ado, here’s my list of the eleven worst things from our first week of Blitzkrieg– I’m, sorry, “shock and awe”:
11. Suggesting That Disaster Aid Is Conditional Upon What The President Wants.
In a normal, functioning democracy, disaster aid would be disbursed as befits the disaster. A bigger disaster would receive more funding. Such is not the case in the new administration, where the president opined in a press gaggle that he would release disaster aid to California only if Los Angeles County implemented voter ID (let’s remember, for the 500,000th time, that even by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s own tracking of the matter, voter fraud isn’t a thing). This wasn’t particularly surprising. But it’s also not popular with the California Republicans, whom the razor-slim House GOP majority needs to pass, well, anything.
Abolishing FEMA is also unlikely to be popular, seeing as most FEMA aid goes to red states.
10. Raising Drug Prices for Low-Income Americans.
This was done by rescinding an executive order issued by then-president Biden. It is unclear what the immediate effects will be, but the effort was broadly popular, given the high price of certain prescription drugs, and the fact that we’re not fucking garbage bin humans.
9. Continuing an Invented War on Trans People.
While the inauguration speech was weird– weirder than the “this American carnage” speech, which even George W. Bush told Michelle Obama was “some weird shit“- the new administration’s speech focused more on punishment and revanchism than it did on positivity and unity. Key to this punishment was the declaration– completely unprecedented in an inauguration speech, to talk about these culture war issues- that there are only two genders, and they are decided at birth.
The medical and scientific establishment know that it’s a little bit more complicated than this, of course. But what does the AMA know, right? With their *checks notes* 271,000 doctor members? Why should we listen to the people who have dedicated their lives to studying this stuff and following the hippocratic oath?
8. Signaling That Discrimination Is Now Legal, Even Though It’s Not.
Rescinding an executive order made by Lyndon Johnson does not, notably, supersede the US Constitution, nor dozens of Supreme Court cases argued since that time in favor of desegregation, or against racial discrimination. This is a mostly symbolic act. But it’s some fucked up symbolism, because it argues that discrimination among federal contractors is now, well, legal. Discrimination is not legal, to be clear, for the aforementioned reasons, but it’s unclear whether the executive has any ability to even do much beyond the symbolism here.
And it is, to be clear, atrocious symbolism.
7. Utilizing the US Military for Mass Deportations.
Similar to the EO on discrimination, it’s not really clear that this is doing much more than optics, seeing as the Biden Administration deported migrants in record numbers. Mexico didn’t even allow one of these flights to land. Apparently, countries still have sovereignty over their own airspace! From a “responsible governance of giant organizations” standpoint, though? As a commenter pointed out, one of these big honkin’ transport planes costs something like $15-20,000 an hour to operate. That’s a pretty hefty cost per deportee when buses across the border will do the trick. But we know that the president loves his big machinery.
6. Assembling the Oligarchy to Kiss the Ring.
I will not even name names, because they all disgust me so much. It’s been interesting, though, to see how quickly we went from how Big Tech was bad and had to be broken up– most Americans agree with this, in fact- to praising the CEOs of Meta and Amazon for kissing the president’s ring.
5. Beginning to Dismantle the US Public Health and Research Apparatus.
The freeze on activities for the NIH, CDC, and other vital public agencies that not only administer information about public health, but also help fund it, could be potentially disastrous, and I’m not just talking about the current threat of the H5N1 bird flu.
This will also, no doubt, affect institutions like the one that cuts me a paycheck (whose views I do not represent, in case this was unclear, O HR Gods!). Michigan State University receives the better part of a billion dollars each year in federal funding. And we don’t have no University of Michigan endowment up here in the country, now, ya hear!?
Anyway, Michigan State has already kowtowed to our new leaders, effectively demanding that university departments abolish DEI programs immediately. My own school has acceded without public challenge, and this disgusts me, but there’s nothing I can do about it other than, you know, tell people about how we shouldn’t just lie down and let these schoolyard thugs trample us.
4. Freeing A Thousand Convicted Terrorists.
I don’t really know what to say about this, except that it’s probably not going to end well, whether that means white supremacist militias starting shit at abortion clinics, Democratic campaign offices, or, you know, take your pick. Meanwhile, Anthony Fauci has long had to have a security detail because of the number of people who have made threats on his life. The president, of course, immediately removed his security detail, essentially painting a target on his back. Still not clear to me why everyone hates the guy except that they’ve spent too much time on conspiracy theory websites.
3. Publicly vilifying clergy.
This— publicly attacking for clergy who plead with the new regime for mercy against the less fortunate and historically marginalized, something Jesus himself might have vibed with- is another classic hallmark of an authoritarian regime. And let’s remember that even Franco wasn’t without conflict with certain elements of the Catholic Church. In the current administration’s case, though, the church contains not only the Christian evangelical right, but also other churches that are perhaps less evangelical and less right-wing, and this, of course, represents a threat.
A threat, perhaps, but the evangelical church meanwhile represents perhaps the largest single portion of the Republican base, and has now for decades. As they long for the return of the King, they will settle for a lower-case king on earth, and that king is the current president. He can do no wrong, and what did we need democracy for anyway? The people don’t know what’s best for them, and what’s best for them is Jesus, whether or not that was envisioned in the Constitution, and whether or not that would, in fact, run afoul of the same Constitution!
That church represents folks like my in-laws, who will tell you about how they voted for the guy even though he probably isn’t Christian, is a globalist, and probably indeed cheated on his third wife and lied about it– they’re voting for the party, because the party believes in protecting babies and in small government (neither of these are, of course, true, but when you live in a tiny world and only consume propaganda, it’s, of course, much more believable. The trannies, they say, are destroying America, and this guy will stop it!
Meanwhile, they don’t love that there is a woman pastor to begin with, let alone one asking the president to show mercy against those less fortunate.
2. Freezing all international aid.
Again, not surprising. More surprising was that Rubio was confirmed unanimously. Rubio, once famous for his vitriolic public criticism of the president he would later come to obsequiously serve, seems poised to do the president’s bidding, which, assuming he gets his way, may well involve a similar administration as that of Mike Pompeo and Rex Tillerson.
Let’s briefly recall that tenure for the State Department was marked not just by the high-profile departure of Tillerson (one of the best people, the president had previously said when he picked the former Big Oil executive), who called the president a fucking moron, but later by his replacement Pompeo’s profane tirade against an NPR reporter. Or by forcing long-time civil servants into retirement.
Or, by a unilateral policy relationship with Israel that involves renaming territory and giving carte blanche to right-wing extremists hellbent on genocide in Gaza and the West Bank (or, as Mike Pompeo calls the latter, “Judea and Samaria”). The current regime seems hellbent on handing over eastern Ukraine to Russia, with the president– after previously buddying up to Zelenskyy- saying this week that the Ukrainian president is “no angel.” Opposition to foreign aid to Ukraine has been a hallmark of Republican politics since the beginning of the Russian invasion, even though most of that aid is effectively federal subsidies to arms manufacturers, many of which are located in Republican districts.
The list goes on.
1. Purging Inspectors General
Of course, I saved what may well be the best for last.
We often think of the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes as being defined by bold, memorable logos or unmarked vans carrying death squads. But equally as important in the public conception of an authoritarian regime is what it does in private– in this case, working to unravel the complex and independent internal machinery that allows for oversight and checks and balances in the government.
This is not unusual for the current administration’s past history. We know, for example, that the Paycheck Protection Program created by the first iteration of the present administration was rife with fraud. We also know that the then-president removed the inspector general who was supposed to be overseeing fraud. Indeed, one study found that as many as 15% of all PPP loans had at least indicators of potential fraud.
I am ending with this one because of how unusual it is– and how telling- that a president would argue that “it is not only my right to do what I’m trying to do, it is also my incontrovertible right to do it with impunity and without any oversight whatsoever.” While complaining about historical problems with fraud and poor governance within the federal bureaucracy– and there are plenty, including seven years of consecutive Pentagon audit failures, half of which have been under the returning President- the new administration is doing the exact same thing. Anyone who is trying to hide something is probably trying to hide something.
And try though his supporters might to suggest that it is up to the electorate, not some career bureaucrat Washington Swamp inspector general, to determine whether he has done the job that he’s been elected to do, the fact remains that institutions with poor governance end up with much higher rates of fraud and corruption than do institutions with best practices of internal controls, audits, and checks and balances for power.
Transparency is a hallmark of good governance. That doesn’t mean mob rule, nor does it mean absolute and unfettered public access to every corner of the government at all times. But it does mean that a government that openly gets rid of the tools meant to help it regulate itself is likely going to try a lot more dirty shit (n.b., more sweetheart deals, more corruption, more human rights violations, more direct conflicts with the Constitution) that those mechanisms of self-regulation are meant to prevent.
And this last one is why we must remain vigilant and keep pushing to be able to maintain access to information and decisionmakers.