AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/trump-musk-christian-nationalism.html
Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?
Credit: Will Matsuda for The New York Times
Listen to this article · 11:42 min Learn more
by Katherine Stewart
February 7, 2025
New York Times
They told us they would smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy. And that is exactly what they are doing.
Many Americans chose not to believe what they were saying. Will we now believe what we are seeing?
To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.
The natural tendency in a functioning democracy is to look for ways to “work across the aisle” and “agree to disagree.” But appeasement now would be a mistake. This anti-democratic movement has no interest in compromise. Any concessions will help consolidate the powers of a lawless presidency and entrench a new, kleptocratic, authoritarian form of government in the United States.
It is also bad politics. The Trump administration has charted a course for eventual catastrophic failure. Those who attempt to work with it will go down with it. We must work instead to safeguard our democratic institutions, communicate the threat to the many sectors of the American public that have yet to understand it and prepare for a major cleanup operation in years to come.
Democracy isn’t just about the results of the most recent election. Without a system of justice that applies equally to all citizens, you’re voting for the next elected despot. That is why the leaders of the anti-democratic movement made clear well before the election — in documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which sought to provide Trump with an aggressive right-wing agenda he could just pick up and run with — that they intend to demolish the system of justice as we know it and replace it with a form of policing in service of the ruling party and its chosen leaders.
In its first two and a half weeks, the Trump administration has delivered on that promise. The stream of transparently lawless executive orders — to make it easier to fire federal officials, to freeze spending that the president cannot freeze, to take away a right to citizenship that is written into the Constitution, to name just three — tell us in no uncertain terms that this administration has no intention of respecting the law or the Constitution. (And if you are comforting yourself with the idea that the administration will respect injunctions from judges, which it has in the past, I invite you to consider Mr. Trump’s recent behavior in court.)
The decapitation at the F.B.I., the sidelining of individuals at the Department of Justice and the de facto shuttering of the foreign aid agency U.S.A.I.D. all serve the same purpose. It means that Mr. Trump and his favorites of the moment will find it much easier to operate with the kind of immunity that the Supreme Court has already granted the president.
Tellingly, the most galling indicator of the administration’s lawless intentions actually came early: the blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, even those who attacked Capitol Police officers, which provides Mr. Trump with a powerful recruiting tool for elements that might wish to support him with political violence.
Democracy relies equally on a professional government, staffed with individuals who are subject to ethics constraints and act on the basis of reason and evidence in accordance with the law. That is why the leaders of the anti-democratic movement declared war long ago on what they jeeringly call the “administrative state.” Project 2025 promised a brutal assault on what it maintains is a “weaponized” and “woke” civil service bent on persecuting conservatives, and proposed purges.
Russell Vought, a leading figure behind Project 2025 and now Mr. Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget for the second time, promised to put government employees “in trauma.” The new-right intellectuals behind the anti-democratic movement draw heavily on crackpot writers like Curtis Yarvin, who condemns “the cathedral” — his term for the people and institutions that sustain a functioning modern state — and openly champions monarchical rule.
In its first weeks, the Trump administration has delivered on that promise. The probably illegal firing of inspectors general throughout the federal government; the tawdry “buyout” offer for federal employees; the commandeering of highly sensitive government data by Elon Musk’s DOGE minions; and the ongoing dismantling, firings and deletions of data at multiple federal agencies — these are not ways of making the government accountable to the voters in the last election, as partisans falsely suggest. They are about making sure that the people can never hold the president and his cronies to account. They also have nothing to do with “efficiency.” We are about to witness administrative dysfunction on a grand scale.
Democracy also depends on a corporate sector and a media sector that work independently of the government in power. That is why the leaders of the anti-democratic movement essentially opened a storefront in advance of the inauguration and began inviting corporations and wealthy individuals to prove their loyalty to the ruling party with inaugural fund contributions. Then came the meme coins that allow anyone to enrich the president and his wife, at least in theory, by purchasing digital tokens with no intrinsic purpose or value.
This proved to be one of the easiest parts of the process. The leaders of Meta, Amazon, JP Morgan, Google, OpenAI and a long list of other corporate titans seem to be making it clear that if protecting their profits means appeasing a corrupt autocratic regime, then that is what they will do.
Democracy relies on something softer, too, namely a sense of unity and shared purpose that allows people to work with one another despite their differences. That is why Rule No. 1 of the authoritarian playbook is to divide the populace. Mr. Trump, of course, is a renowned expert in that department. It is hard to think of another American president who would have taken advantage of an airplane tragedy to push hateful rhetoric about D.E.I. To be sure, reforming policies on diversity is not inherently unreasonable. But the administration’s total war on anti-discrimination law has nothing to do with “merit” and everything to do with stoking division.
Similarly, immigration policy is and ought to be debated. But in the past weeks, the administration has made clear that it will use its powers not to solve the many real immigration issues but instead to perform stunts intended mainly to reinforce the myths that helped get Mr. Trump elected (like the myth that immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans or the myth that the previous administration encouraged bands of these immigrant-criminals to roam free).
Why are they so desperate to weaken or even destroy democracy? Mainly, because they know that our system of justice, a functioning government, an independent economic sector and a united people stand in the way of unearned wealth and privilege. But it is important to understand that the anti-democratic movement is not monolithic. In fact, it isn’t even coherent.
One part of the program answers to the oligarchs — that is, the leaders of tech oligopolies and the most narrow-minded of our nation’s billionaires. These people are betting that the deconstruction of the administrative state means no pesky government oversight on their economic activities, plus tax cuts as well as privileged contracts. They may fatten their pocketbooks in the short term, but the idea that wreaking havoc on our democracy will enhance their wealth is tragically mistaken.
Another part of the program is the work of fanatics. I do not use the term loosely. If you take the trouble to read the writings of the thought leaders of the new right, who form a good portion of the brain trust of the anti-democratic movement, you will discover a group of men who really hate women, admire Nazi political theorists such as Carl Schmitt and believe in the existence of an insidious, all-controlling monster called “the woke,” which apparently works out of diversity, equity and inclusion offices in the back of “the cathedral.” They are acting out their fantasies now, taking revenge on imaginary enemies, and the American republic will be the principal victim.
The Christian nationalist ideologues who supply much of the rest of the ideology of the movement are no less extreme. Just listen to Doug Wilson, the powerful pastor from Moscow, Idaho, whom Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has praised. Mr. Wilson is among the growing contingent who say that women should not have a right to vote. Or Lucas Miles, senior director of Turning Point USA Faith and the author of “Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity,” who has called progressive Christianity “heretical.” In a promotional video at December’s AmericaFest, an annual convention sponsored by Turning Point USA, Mr. Miles said, “I want to see woke church defunded.”
The left, “recognized early on,” Mr. Miles added, “that they knew they needed a vehicle to carry this progressive ideology, this Marxist agenda, and the best vehicle is the church. … It’s been going on since the 1700s that progressive thought has been creeping in.”
Still another part of the movement, which usually gets the most attention even though it has the least power, is the mass of voters who remain faithful to Mr. Trump. They come in many different varieties. No doubt some saw a vote for him as a vote against “Biden-flation” and the sharp rise in the cost of living. Some may really believe that the 2020 election was stolen or that public schools are indoctrination camps forcing gender change on students. Some did not understand the threats to democracy, others did not take them seriously and some simply don’t value democracy.
What is to be done? Let’s start with that dread word: messaging. In the coming months and years, the anti-democratic movement will cause many people to suffer real harm. We need to make sure these people know who did this to them — and who will fight for them.
As people lose their jobs or have to pay more as a consequence of needless tariffs, as they lose out on the benefits they earned and government services they deserve, as the Trump administration prioritizes buffoonish stunts over sound policy, as our most trusted allies abandon us, as women find more of their rights at risk, as people who don’t fit the regime mold find their careers faltering, and as the oligarchs behave ever more outrageously, we need to say, over and over: They did this.
But there is much more we can do. Now is not the time to curl up in despair. We have institutions to protect, pro-democracy organizations to support, and elections in less than two years. We have lawsuits to pursue, corruption to expose. In normal times, it is the duty of democratic citizens to help a newly elected president succeed. In the present circumstances, it is our duty to protect our democratic republic from a lawless president and the profoundly anti-American movement he leads.
More on the first weeks of Trump’s second term:
Opinion | Jamelle Bouie
There Is No Going Back
Feb. 5, 2025
Opinion | Thomas B. Edsall
‘Trump’s Thomas Cromwell’ Is Waiting in the Wings
Feb. 4, 2025
Opinion | Michelle Goldberg
The Familiar Arrogance of Musk’s Young Apparatchiks
Feb. 3, 2025
Opinion | The Editorial Board
Trump’s Test of the Constitution
Feb. 1, 2025
Opinion | David French
How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality
Jan. 26, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Katherine Stewart (@kathsstewart) is the author of “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy” and “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/elon-musks-revolutionary-terror
Letter from Trump’s Washington
Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?
Credit: Will Matsuda for The New York Times
Listen to this article · 11:42 min Learn more
by Katherine Stewart
February 7, 2025
New York Times
They told us they would smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy. And that is exactly what they are doing.
Many Americans chose not to believe what they were saying. Will we now believe what we are seeing?
To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.
The natural tendency in a functioning democracy is to look for ways to “work across the aisle” and “agree to disagree.” But appeasement now would be a mistake. This anti-democratic movement has no interest in compromise. Any concessions will help consolidate the powers of a lawless presidency and entrench a new, kleptocratic, authoritarian form of government in the United States.
It is also bad politics. The Trump administration has charted a course for eventual catastrophic failure. Those who attempt to work with it will go down with it. We must work instead to safeguard our democratic institutions, communicate the threat to the many sectors of the American public that have yet to understand it and prepare for a major cleanup operation in years to come.
Democracy isn’t just about the results of the most recent election. Without a system of justice that applies equally to all citizens, you’re voting for the next elected despot. That is why the leaders of the anti-democratic movement made clear well before the election — in documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which sought to provide Trump with an aggressive right-wing agenda he could just pick up and run with — that they intend to demolish the system of justice as we know it and replace it with a form of policing in service of the ruling party and its chosen leaders.
In its first two and a half weeks, the Trump administration has delivered on that promise. The stream of transparently lawless executive orders — to make it easier to fire federal officials, to freeze spending that the president cannot freeze, to take away a right to citizenship that is written into the Constitution, to name just three — tell us in no uncertain terms that this administration has no intention of respecting the law or the Constitution. (And if you are comforting yourself with the idea that the administration will respect injunctions from judges, which it has in the past, I invite you to consider Mr. Trump’s recent behavior in court.)
The decapitation at the F.B.I., the sidelining of individuals at the Department of Justice and the de facto shuttering of the foreign aid agency U.S.A.I.D. all serve the same purpose. It means that Mr. Trump and his favorites of the moment will find it much easier to operate with the kind of immunity that the Supreme Court has already granted the president.
Tellingly, the most galling indicator of the administration’s lawless intentions actually came early: the blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, even those who attacked Capitol Police officers, which provides Mr. Trump with a powerful recruiting tool for elements that might wish to support him with political violence.
Democracy relies equally on a professional government, staffed with individuals who are subject to ethics constraints and act on the basis of reason and evidence in accordance with the law. That is why the leaders of the anti-democratic movement declared war long ago on what they jeeringly call the “administrative state.” Project 2025 promised a brutal assault on what it maintains is a “weaponized” and “woke” civil service bent on persecuting conservatives, and proposed purges.
Russell Vought, a leading figure behind Project 2025 and now Mr. Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget for the second time, promised to put government employees “in trauma.” The new-right intellectuals behind the anti-democratic movement draw heavily on crackpot writers like Curtis Yarvin, who condemns “the cathedral” — his term for the people and institutions that sustain a functioning modern state — and openly champions monarchical rule.
In its first weeks, the Trump administration has delivered on that promise. The probably illegal firing of inspectors general throughout the federal government; the tawdry “buyout” offer for federal employees; the commandeering of highly sensitive government data by Elon Musk’s DOGE minions; and the ongoing dismantling, firings and deletions of data at multiple federal agencies — these are not ways of making the government accountable to the voters in the last election, as partisans falsely suggest. They are about making sure that the people can never hold the president and his cronies to account. They also have nothing to do with “efficiency.” We are about to witness administrative dysfunction on a grand scale.
Democracy also depends on a corporate sector and a media sector that work independently of the government in power. That is why the leaders of the anti-democratic movement essentially opened a storefront in advance of the inauguration and began inviting corporations and wealthy individuals to prove their loyalty to the ruling party with inaugural fund contributions. Then came the meme coins that allow anyone to enrich the president and his wife, at least in theory, by purchasing digital tokens with no intrinsic purpose or value.
This proved to be one of the easiest parts of the process. The leaders of Meta, Amazon, JP Morgan, Google, OpenAI and a long list of other corporate titans seem to be making it clear that if protecting their profits means appeasing a corrupt autocratic regime, then that is what they will do.
Democracy relies on something softer, too, namely a sense of unity and shared purpose that allows people to work with one another despite their differences. That is why Rule No. 1 of the authoritarian playbook is to divide the populace. Mr. Trump, of course, is a renowned expert in that department. It is hard to think of another American president who would have taken advantage of an airplane tragedy to push hateful rhetoric about D.E.I. To be sure, reforming policies on diversity is not inherently unreasonable. But the administration’s total war on anti-discrimination law has nothing to do with “merit” and everything to do with stoking division.
Similarly, immigration policy is and ought to be debated. But in the past weeks, the administration has made clear that it will use its powers not to solve the many real immigration issues but instead to perform stunts intended mainly to reinforce the myths that helped get Mr. Trump elected (like the myth that immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans or the myth that the previous administration encouraged bands of these immigrant-criminals to roam free).
Why are they so desperate to weaken or even destroy democracy? Mainly, because they know that our system of justice, a functioning government, an independent economic sector and a united people stand in the way of unearned wealth and privilege. But it is important to understand that the anti-democratic movement is not monolithic. In fact, it isn’t even coherent.
One part of the program answers to the oligarchs — that is, the leaders of tech oligopolies and the most narrow-minded of our nation’s billionaires. These people are betting that the deconstruction of the administrative state means no pesky government oversight on their economic activities, plus tax cuts as well as privileged contracts. They may fatten their pocketbooks in the short term, but the idea that wreaking havoc on our democracy will enhance their wealth is tragically mistaken.
Another part of the program is the work of fanatics. I do not use the term loosely. If you take the trouble to read the writings of the thought leaders of the new right, who form a good portion of the brain trust of the anti-democratic movement, you will discover a group of men who really hate women, admire Nazi political theorists such as Carl Schmitt and believe in the existence of an insidious, all-controlling monster called “the woke,” which apparently works out of diversity, equity and inclusion offices in the back of “the cathedral.” They are acting out their fantasies now, taking revenge on imaginary enemies, and the American republic will be the principal victim.
The Christian nationalist ideologues who supply much of the rest of the ideology of the movement are no less extreme. Just listen to Doug Wilson, the powerful pastor from Moscow, Idaho, whom Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has praised. Mr. Wilson is among the growing contingent who say that women should not have a right to vote. Or Lucas Miles, senior director of Turning Point USA Faith and the author of “Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity,” who has called progressive Christianity “heretical.” In a promotional video at December’s AmericaFest, an annual convention sponsored by Turning Point USA, Mr. Miles said, “I want to see woke church defunded.”
The left, “recognized early on,” Mr. Miles added, “that they knew they needed a vehicle to carry this progressive ideology, this Marxist agenda, and the best vehicle is the church. … It’s been going on since the 1700s that progressive thought has been creeping in.”
Still another part of the movement, which usually gets the most attention even though it has the least power, is the mass of voters who remain faithful to Mr. Trump. They come in many different varieties. No doubt some saw a vote for him as a vote against “Biden-flation” and the sharp rise in the cost of living. Some may really believe that the 2020 election was stolen or that public schools are indoctrination camps forcing gender change on students. Some did not understand the threats to democracy, others did not take them seriously and some simply don’t value democracy.
What is to be done? Let’s start with that dread word: messaging. In the coming months and years, the anti-democratic movement will cause many people to suffer real harm. We need to make sure these people know who did this to them — and who will fight for them.
As people lose their jobs or have to pay more as a consequence of needless tariffs, as they lose out on the benefits they earned and government services they deserve, as the Trump administration prioritizes buffoonish stunts over sound policy, as our most trusted allies abandon us, as women find more of their rights at risk, as people who don’t fit the regime mold find their careers faltering, and as the oligarchs behave ever more outrageously, we need to say, over and over: They did this.
But there is much more we can do. Now is not the time to curl up in despair. We have institutions to protect, pro-democracy organizations to support, and elections in less than two years. We have lawsuits to pursue, corruption to expose. In normal times, it is the duty of democratic citizens to help a newly elected president succeed. In the present circumstances, it is our duty to protect our democratic republic from a lawless president and the profoundly anti-American movement he leads.
More on the first weeks of Trump’s second term:
Opinion | Jamelle Bouie
There Is No Going Back
Feb. 5, 2025
Opinion | Thomas B. Edsall
‘Trump’s Thomas Cromwell’ Is Waiting in the Wings
Feb. 4, 2025
Opinion | Michelle Goldberg
The Familiar Arrogance of Musk’s Young Apparatchiks
Feb. 3, 2025
Opinion | The Editorial Board
Trump’s Test of the Constitution
Feb. 1, 2025
Opinion | David French
How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality
Jan. 26, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Katherine Stewart (@kathsstewart) is the author of “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy” and “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/elon-musks-revolutionary-terror
Letter from Trump’s Washington
Elon Musk’s Revolutionary Terror
The evisceration of U.S.A.I.D. isn’t a policy fight—it’s an execution designed to strike fear in our own government.
by Susan B. Glasser
February 6, 2025
The New Yorker
Source photograph by Amanda Perobelli / Reuters
Nearly twenty years ago, the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote a classic account of the shambolic American takeover of the Iraqi government, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” Most memorably, he described what a Times reviewer called “the lethal combination of official arrogance and ineptitude” that plagued the foreign occupiers from Washington who, after the 2003 U.S. invasion, moved into the Green Zone—the walled-off compound that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein. Young conservatives were favored, heedless of experience. Some job seekers were asked their views of Roe v. Wade. Others were hired after sending their résumés to the right-wing Heritage Foundation back in D.C. While Baghdad spiralled into out-of-control violence, the G.O.P. ideologues who reported for duty in the desert worked to privatize Iraqi government agencies, revamp the tax code, and launch an anti-smoking campaign. A clueless twenty-four-year-old found himself in charge of opening an Iraqi stock exchange. It didn’t work out well.
I was reminded of this gloomy chapter in American history while reading accounts this week of Elon Musk and his small army of anonymous intern-hackers, who have been deployed on Donald Trump’s behalf inside an array of agencies to take control of computer payment systems and government H.R. functions. A nineteen-year-old high school graduate who now has access to sensitive government information is known online as “Big Balls.” A former intern at Musk’s SpaceX, who dropped out of the University of Nebraska, is now working out of the General Services Administration. Scenes of low comedy and spy-movie drama have been reported throughout the federal government—an unclassified e-mail listing all recent C.I.A. employees was sent to the White House to comply with a Musk decree; workers at NASA were ordered to “drop everything” in order to scrub the space program’s Web sites of offending references to banned phrases such as “diversity,” “Indigenous People,” and “women in leadership.” Musk and his command team at the Department of Government Efficiency, a made-up agency with no legal power that Trump established by executive order on his first day back in office, have been sleeping at the Office of Personnel Management.
In its short existence, Musk’s small occupying force has gained access to the entire U.S. Treasury federal payments system—to what end, no one yet knows—and has seemingly orchestrated the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the decades-old federal agency in charge of distributing American foreign aid around the world. Upcoming targets reportedly include everything from the Department of Education to the government weather-forecasting service and the U.S. aviation system. Federal employees were given a deadline of Thursday at midnight to accept Musk’s offer of a government-wide deferred-resignation “buyout.” A federal judge has delayed the move, which was expected to yield more than forty thousand takers—well short of the five per cent or more of the federal workforce that Musk hoped to purge, but still an enormous upheaval whose repercussions will echo for years.
In a series of posts on X, the social-media site that Musk owns, the world’s wealthiest man bragged of feeding U.S.A.I.D. to “the wood chipper,” claimed the agency was a “criminal” enterprise, and crowed about “dismantling the radical-left shadow government.” This seemed like a far cry from his initial mandate of serving as an “outside volunteer” to advise Trump on possible budget cuts. Let the record show that, at 3:59 A.M. on day sixteen of the Trump restoration, as Democrats sputtered ineffectually about an unelected billionaire’s illegal power grab, Musk openly proclaimed his project as nothing less than “the revolution of the people.”
A day later, I spoke with a Republican who worked closely with the architects of America’s botched Iraq invasion. I asked whether he had been surprised by anything so far in a Trump Administration designed to shock. Yes, he replied—Musk’s sneaky takeover of the apparatus of the vast U.S. executive branch was something entirely new in the annals of global coups. “Elon figured out that the personnel, information-technology backbone of the government was essentially the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteen-fifties television tower in the Third World,” he observed, and “that you could take over the government essentially with a handful of people if you could access all that.” My friend, incidentally, chose to speak on background despite his years of public criticism of Trump, noting that a think tank with which he is affiliated receives government contracts. Fear, in this revolution, as in all revolutions, is perhaps the most effective weapon of all.
Two decades ago, Bush’s Republican Party chose to topple the far-off regime of Saddam Hussein. It’s worth taking a second to reflect that, only a short political lifetime later, the government that Trump’s G.O.P. has chosen to go after is our own.
Trump and Musk have pushed out a steady stream of propaganda and lies to justify their claims for why a revolution wholly outside established laws, procedures, and norms is now necessary. According to a Thursday morning post on Trump’s own Truth Social network, U.S.A.I.D.—which, as far as I can tell, Trump never mentioned on the 2024 campaign trail—is one of several agencies where “BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN,” including as a “PAYOFF” to the “FAKE NEWS MEDIA” for promoting Democrats. This conspiracy, he warned, might be “THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL.” In the run-up to the all-out assault on U.S.A.I.D., Trump’s White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, spread the absurd tale, via Musk’s team, of fifty million dollars that the agency supposedly earmarked for condoms to be sent to the Gaza Strip. By the time Trump later repeated the story, he had elevated the nonexistent bequest of condoms to a hundred million dollars. Think of this as the information-war equivalent of covering fire from the artillery before the ground assault begins. Days later, the U.S.A.I.D. Web site, with the report proving that there were no condoms for Gaza, had been taken offline. By midweek, that Web site was back up but stripped of all content except a curt message informing readers that “all USAID direct hire personnel” were being placed on “administrative leave globally,” effective at midnight on Friday. In the end, the Trump Administration apparently plans to keep only about two hundred of the agency’s more than ten thousand staff.
We don’t yet know to what extent this brazen ploy will succeed, of course. Congressional Democrats and others have mobilized to defend various embattled agencies; lawsuits have been filed; protests have been convened. But for now, the politics may even be working for Trump and Musk. The Democratic strategist David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, have both warned that they fear their party is falling into a trap in defending U.S.A.I.D. “My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’ ” Axelrod told Politico’s Rachael Bade. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”
It’s also true that, if cutting the federal government is what this is all about, then Trump and Musk would not be bothering with tiny U.S.A.I.D., whose estimated budget of some forty billion dollars is less than one per cent of the federal government’s. The point is not a policy fight; it’s an execution. They are killing one agency to terrify a thousand others. Congress should be one of the main aggrieved parties here, given that it passed the laws authorizing U.S.A.I.D. and other departments under attack and appropriating the funding for them, but this is the Republican-controlled Congress in the age of Trump. Speaker Mike Johnson, on Wednesday, dismissed the furor over Musk’s power play as “gross overreaction in the media.” Perhaps the most perfect distillation of where elected Republican officials are at right now came from the North Carolina senator Thom Tillis. Asked about what Musk is doing on Trump’s behalf, he replied, “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he added, “nobody should bellyache about that.”
The message here is loud and clear: the revolution will not be stopped on Capitol Hill. And indeed, on Tuesday, two of Trump’s most controversial nominees, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Tulsi Gabbard for director of National Intelligence, were voted out of Senate committees after key Republican senators abandoned their objections to them. On Thursday evening, despite an all-night Democratic filibuster against the nomination of Russell Vought to be Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Senate was expected to go ahead and confirm him. Vought is an intellectual architect of the attack on the federal government who helped write the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the new Administration, and he has made little secret of the pain he is hoping to inflict. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at a conference in 2023, a tape of which was later obtained by ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work. . . . We want to put them in trauma.”
Earlier this week, I spoke with one of Vought’s millions of targets, a career prosecutor who’s spent decades in the Justice Department’s environment division. The purge of her corner of the bureaucracy hadn’t yet made headlines, but it had arrived nonetheless. “They’ve already come,” she told me. Four of the division’s eight section chiefs had been removed and reassigned to a task force on combatting so-called sanctuary cities. Multiple employees whose roles involved “diversity” had been placed on administrative leave. The division’s “law and policy” section attorneys were told their entire office would be eliminated. And all that was before the incoming Attorney General, Pam Bondi, was confirmed by the Senate. “It’s just basically like we’re in a black hole, where our leadership has been eliminated but no political leadership has come in,” she said.
If trauma is the goal, Trump and his minions have already succeeded. But my source also offered up an eloquent rebuttal to the mindless cutting, an approach that she compared to an elementary-school principal deciding that, rather than trim the budget a few per cent, she’d just go ahead and eliminate the entire third grade. Should we get rid of air-traffic controllers and FEMA and E.P.A. testing for lead in your kids’ water, too? She asked. Frankly, her defense of the federal government was better than just about anything I’ve heard from the beleaguered Democrats. The revolution, however, will get the last laugh: after more than thirty years of public service, she already planned to retire later this year. Congrats, Elon Musk. ♦
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has a weekly column on life in Washington and is a host of the Political Scene podcast. She is also a co-author of “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.”
