- David Wallace-Wells on the sabotage of the American government;
- Paul Krugman on “autogolpe” and the Musk/Trump chaos;
- Heather Cox Richardson on how Republicans have, ever since Reagan, convinced voters that there’s an enemy “deep state” out to destroy their country;
- Nicholas Kristoff on his experience with USAID and how now “the world’s richest men take on the world’s poorest children”;
- Brief items about MAGA’s Politico scandal, and supposed “anti-Christian bias”;
- And a NASA reporter reflects on DEI and how inclusion is the point of the work NASA does.
Breaking News: Trump Takes Over Kennedy Center. Presumably he’ll tell them to play only pretty music. By white men.
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This piece is by the author of a book about the consequences of climate change, which I reviewed here, whose first sentence was “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”
NY Times, David Wallace-Wells, 5 Feb 2025 (in today’s print paper): This Isn’t Reform. It’s Sabotage. [gift link]
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.
Musk and his minions either don’t understand what these agencies do, or they don’t care. The writer goes on about Musk and his minions.
“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.”
As in yesterday’s post, the theme here is the destruction of the American common good.
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.
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Paul Krugman identifies an underlying motivation.
Paul Krugman, 7 Feb 2025: Autogolpe, subtitled “What’s really happening beneath the Musk/Trump chaos”
My very first post after I left the Times and brought this newsletter out of dormancy was about DOGE, the not-a-government-agency created by Donald Trump and run by Elon Musk (Vivek Ramaswamy has been run out of DOGE.) The supposed goal of DOGE was to save taxpayers huge sums by going after “waste, fraud and abuse.” I argued that this effort was doomed to failure as Musk and his cronies appeared completely ignorant about how and why the federal government spends taxpayer dollars.
While everything I said was true, I would like to offer a mea culpa. What should have been clear to me even then, and is unmistakable now, is that everything Musk and Trump say about what they’re doing is false, including what they say about their motivations. The ignorance and chaos are real, but you should never lose sight of the underlying thrust of their actions.
For what’s happening in America right now is an attempted autogolpe.
Which is:
An autogolpe is literally a “self-coup” — when a legitimately elected leader uses his position to seize total control, eliminating legal and constitutional restraints on his power. Are Musk and Trump trying to pull off an autogolpe here? Of course they are. And they are doing so with, as far as I can tell, the full support of every Republican in the House and the Senate.
You should look at everything they do through that lens. Yes, we can ask whether a policy move makes sense in terms of its announced goals. But you should also always ask, “How does doing this serve the autogolpe?”
(Another version of follow the money, I would say.) Displaying the graph shown above, Krugman goes on:
Take, for example, DOGE’s obsession with finding ways to lay off federal workers. This makes no sense as a priority if you know anything about where the taxpayer dollar goes.
The federal work force is no larger now than it was under Dwight Eisenhower.
But making “headcount reduction” a policy goal is a way to purge civil servants who remain loyal to the law and the Constitution and replace them with Trump and Musk loyalists.
Folks who complain about the size of the government look only at raw numbers, without taking into account the increased size of the entire nation over the past century.
Musk-Trumpocracy’s illegal shutdown of USAID should be seen through this lens. Musk clearly hates the idea of helping people in need: just look at the rage he has expressed over the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife. While he may believe that the agency is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”, it also serves the purpose of purging civil servants while demagoguing to Trump’s base. The same can be said of the confected furor over DEI.
It hardly needs pointing out that the attempted purge at the FBI, targeting anyone who investigated Jan. 6 rioters or Trump himself, is an integral part of the autogolpe. And so, obviously, is the terrifying attempt of Musk and his acolytes to seize control of the Treasury payments system and give crucial power to rewrite the code to a 25-year-old who turns out (surprise!) to be a racist and eugenicist.
Krugman goes on with recommendations: to acknowledge the reality, but not to despair; the bad guys haven’t won yet. And this:
For those writing or talking about what’s happening, it is important not to get distracted by Trump’s bright, shiny objects. No, Trump isn’t going to take over Gaza, annex Canada, try to retake the Panama Canal or seize Greenland. But Trump’s bizarre announcements are a feature, not a bug: they distract from the ongoing autogolpe.
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My running thesis: conservatives are those who largely believe things that are not true.
Heather Cox Richardson, February 6, 2025
Since President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have won elections by convincing their voters that their opponents are not trying to use the federal government to help Americans like them but are instead trying to hand tax dollars and power to undeserving Black and Brown Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Over the past 45 years, that rhetoric has created a population that believes the federal government is controlled by their enemies, now sometimes called the “Deep State,” whom they blame for destroying the country. Those Republican voters now appear to hate the federal government and to be willing, even eager, to dismantle it.
She relates how the Trump administration is “gaming” Google to create an illusion that there are more mass deportations than there actually are.
But the Republicans’ vision of the nation never reflected reality and now, under President Donald Trump, it is entirely made-up. Today, Brian Stelter of Reliable Sources recorded some of the disinformation in which MAGA voters are currently marinating. Trump lied that Elon Musk found that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” and that last week’s fatal midair collision that took 67 lives was due to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
As with the items below, MAGA gets all a-flutter about trivial issues that they misunderstand, deliberately or not. They are chaos agents, and panic agents. The CBS interview of Kamala Harris; the payroll of Politico (see below); condoms to Hamas; plane crashes due to DEI; delivering water to California. She recalls:
Brian Stelter posted a December 9, 2017, quote from the New York Times: “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” Stelter wrote: “I think about this quote a lot.”
Performative victories over “the Libs” make MAGA voters happy, but to what end do political leaders distort reality in order to stay in power?
And the balance of this long piece speculates what else the administration will do.
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Among other things, this is an example of how conservatives don’t seem to understand investments in the future. (Or ‘soft’ power.)
NY Times, Nicholas Kristoff, 5 Feb 2025: The World’s Richest Men Take On the World’s Poorest Children [gift link]
The world’s richest man is boasting about destroying the United States Agency for International Development, which saves the lives of the world’s poorest children, saying he shoved it “into the wood chipper.”
By my calculations, Elon Musk probably has a net worth greater than that of the poorest billion people on Earth. Just since Donald Trump’s election, Musk’s personal net worth has grown by far more than the entire annual budget of U.S.A.I.D., which in any case accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. It’s callous for gleeful billionaires like Musk and President Trump to cut children off from medicine, but, as President John F. Kennedy pointed out when he proposed the creation of the agency in 1961, it’s also myopic.
Cutting aid, Kennedy noted, “would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive.” He added: “Our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperiled.”
Perhaps that’s why Russia has praised Trump’s move.
In contrast with Kennedy, the Trump administration braids together cruelty, ignorance and shortsightedness, and that combination seems particularly evident in its assault on American humanitarian assistance.
Going on with examples of USAID aid that Kristoff has seen around the world. Then concludes,
Trump scoffed that U.S.A.I.D. was “run by radical lunatics.” Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literacy for girls? To fight blindness?
If this is woke, what about the evangelical Christians in International Justice Mission, which, with U.S.A.I.D. support, has done outstanding work battling sex trafficking of children in Cambodia and the Philippines? Does Trump believe that rescuing children from rape is a radical lunatic cause?
Trump’s moves are of uncertain legality, not least because U.S.A.I.D. was established by Congress, but the outcomes are indisputable. Around the world children are already missing health care and food because of the assault on the agency that Kennedy founded to uphold our values and protect our interests.
To billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game. But to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.
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Relatively trivial, but typical.
Slate, Jim Newell, 7 Feb 2025: The Most Ridiculous “Scandal” Yet of the New Trump Era, subtitled “The rage about this is absurdly misplaced.”
On Tuesday morning, the D.C.–area news publication Politico missed payroll. The publication chalked it up to “technical error,” and employees were paid later.
But in certain corners of the Elon Musk–owned social media platform X, this administrative matter required further investigation, and the investigators worked backward from the assumption of corruption.
Since USAID had been shut down, the ‘investigators’ leapt to the conclusion that Politico missed its payroll because USAID had been funding it. Nonsense, as this piece explains. My impression is that everything MAGA flies into rages about is this kind of paranoid conspiracy mongering.
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And
Friendly Atheist, 7 Feb 2025: Trump’s task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” is a complete waste of time, subtitled “His executive order didn’t cite a single credible example of anti-Christian bias”
My reaction is just as the article begins:
“What anti-Christian bias?” You would think the people who make up the most popular religion in the country, and 87% of Congress, and 98% of elected Republicans are doing just fine. Complaining that Christians have it rough is like saying the problem with racism in America is that it really hurts white people. If Christians are the victims, I’m sure non-Christian groups would be thrilled to swap places with them, at least with regard to how much persecution they receive and how much political power they have.
And when you read Trump’s executive order on the subject, it’s clear whoever wrote it couldn’t think of any examples of this so-called bias. I’m not saying there are no good examples of it. I’m saying there are no examples of it.
It’s long been a cliche that Christians just love feeling persecuted. Presumably the motivation here is to remove any recognition of any other religions at all. Or, as the article suggests, it’s about people who were breaking crimes and happened to be Christian. To arrest them amounts to Christian persecution, in their eyes.
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On a more upbeat note, and considering a perspective conservatives will never understand.
Slate, Shannon Stirone, 7 Feb 2025: The Real Point of Space Exploration, subtitled “It’s not about collecting data, or making scientific advances. It’s bigger than that.”
“What’s the function of a galaxy?” the speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin once asked. “I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part.”
While most of us go about our days, immersed in the minutia our lives, we remain very much a part of something bigger than ourselves, and even bigger than humanity. Right now, as you read this, you’re on a rocky water-covered planet (an average one) orbiting around a star (also pretty average) that is busy fusing hydrogen into helium.* Our solar system is nestled on the third arm of the Milky Way, a spiral galaxy that is, yes, average: just one among 2 trillion galaxies in the universe.
We exist here on our planet together, each with our different stories, different backgrounds, beliefs, preferences, and routines. That is what makes our small home quite special.
We know so much about our broader home—the cosmos—because people across centuries have devoted their lives to asking questions about it. Today, some explore planets like Mars and Saturn. Some use telescopes to discover other planets in whole other solar systems. Some obsess over galaxies and the beginning of the universe. Still others think about the end of the universe, how it will happen and what it will mean. And some are really passionate about the stories rocks have to tell us—rocks have all the secrets. Together, the work of all of these scientists gets at why any of this stuff—in space, on our home planet—exists at all, why it turned out the way it did, and what that means for us.
This is about DEI.
I’ve spent a decade reporting on NASA. Employees at the federal agency recently received a directive from their headquarters to remove specific words from their websites, including “inclusion,” “diversity,” and “anything specifically targeting women (women in leadership, etc.),” among many others. Donald Trump’s sweeping attack on DEI is upsetting on a number of levels. When it comes to NASA specifically, I can say that inclusion is part of the entire point of the work that they do.
With examples from her career. And concluding,
What’s happening with DEI is horrible. But the thousands of people who work for NASA will continue to climb mountains to peer through telescopes, study the big bang, drive rovers on Mars, and ask the big questions. The administration cannot take what makes NASA out of NASA by deleting websites or removing the words “women” or “diversity” or “people of color.” NASA is special because it takes all of us to do this work, to take it in, and to make meaning from it.
