- Heather Cox Richardson on the dismantling of the US government, on libraries and museums, and on the rule of law;
- WaPo’s Dana Milbank on Musk’s ignorance of the government he’s dismembering, on what judges do, and on the administration’s bows to white nationalism;
- Robert Reich on the attacks on education, and on the American mind;
- Headlines about DEI and white supremacy, the cruelty of closing a library to Canadians, how Trump voters don’t regret that he’s ruining their lives, and burying the names of non-whites at Arlington.
Heather Cox Richardson, 21 Mar 2025: March 20, 2025
It seems as if the Trump administration is rushing to tear apart as much as it can as opponents of its wholesale destruction of the United States government organize to stop them.
Today, members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” team showed up at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which helps to fund libraries and museums across the country and whose elimination Trump called for in an executive order last week. They sent employees home, swore in a new acting director in the lobby, and proceeded to cancel contracts and grants.
(Who needs libraries and museums? They’re not efficient!)
Even as this dismantling was going on, District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander was blocking the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing data at the Social Security Administration and ordering them to destroy copies of any personal information they have already accessed. “The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”
(Aside. This is how some of these people think: JMG, 1 Mar 2025: Lutnick: If You Complain When Social Security Checks Don’t Come, That Means You Were “Stealing”. Photo of Lutnick above. I’ve long noticed the tendency of conservatives to think the worst of other people.)
Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote that “[j]udges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” trying to obscure that it is the role of courts to determine whether or not the power the executive is claiming is, in fact, legitimate. On the Fox News Channel, “border czar” Tom Homan said: “I don’t care what the judges think.”
(What does he think judges are for? Is he unfamiliar with the balance of powers in the US government?)
The attack of Trump and his MAGA supporters on the courts and the rule of law has illustrated how quickly the United States is sliding from democracy to authoritarianism. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky told Amanda Taub of the New York Times. Along with his colleague Daniel Ziblatt, Levitsky wrote How Democracies Die. “We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” Levitsky said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”
And so on. There’s much more.
\\\
This makes one of the points above.
Washington Post, Dana Milbank, 21 Mar 2025: Don’t know much about history? I’m here for you, Elon Musk., subtitled “‘Due process’ might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding.”
The man President Donald Trump put in charge of taking a chain saw to federal agencies showed once again this week that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the government he is dismembering.
“This is a judicial coup,” Elon Musk proclaimed, reacting to the growing list of federal judges who have moved to halt the Trump administration’s headfirst plunge into lawlessness. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”
How did this guy pass his citizenship test?
(Since Musk himself is an immigrant, and had to take that test.)
Anyway, the judges are doing their job.
Musk, growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, probably wasn’t taught to revere constitutional democracy. But what’s the excuse of his colleagues in the Trump administration?
They have issued scores of executive orders that flatly contradict the Constitution and the laws of the land. Apparently, they are hoping a submissive Supreme Court will reimagine the Constitution to suit Trump’s whims — and federal judges have reacted as they should, by slapping down these lawless power grabs. As such, the administration is on a prodigious losing streak in court. Judges, in preliminary rulings, have already blocked the administration more than 50 times. Over the past week alone, judges:
… with a list of six major actions judges have taken against Musk and Trump.
There’s an obvious reason Trump is getting swatted down so often: He’s breaking the law. Instead of changing course, the administration is now trying to discredit the courts — and the rule of law. White House adviser Stephen Miller denounced “insane edicts of radical rogue judges” and declared that a judge had “no authority” to stop Trump. Border czar Tom Homan went full-on authoritarian on Fox News: “We’re not stopping,” he said of the deportation flights a judge had temporarily halted. “I don’t care what the judges think.”
Further down.
The new administration’s bows to white nationalism continue apace. It removed, at least temporarily, thousands of pages from the Pentagon website and others that celebrated the integration of the armed forces and the contributions of people of color: a Native American who helped hoist the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima, the Navajo code talkers of World War II, the native American who drafted the Confederacy’s terms of surrender, baseball great Jackie Robinson, and a Black Vietnam veteran, on whose page the URL was changed to “deimedal-of-honor.” Trump, meanwhile, reiterated his offer to give “safe refuge” to White South Africans, while at the same time expelling the South African ambassador. The administration has restored the names of Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, which honored Confederates — getting around a law prohibiting this by technically renaming the bases for other people with the surnames “Benning” and “Bragg.”
Much more. His fans don’t care; apparently many of them approve.
\\\
Again, their “efficiency” targets are selected with ulterior motives.
Robert Reich, 20 Mar 2025: Trump’s attack on the American mind, subtitled “Behind his closure of the Education Department and his assault on higher education, science, libraries, and museums lie the oligarchs of the techno-state.”
Friends,
Today, Trump is dismantling much of the Department of Education. He has ordered wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut most of her department, although student loans and special education funding will continue.
His executive order will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year executive department created by Congress under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago.
But there’s a much larger story here.
Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research) and his effective closure of USAID (which underwrites research in global diseases).
Put this together with Trump’s attacks on the freedom of speech of university students and professors.
And with Trump’s (and RFK Jr.’s) attacks on vaccine science.
…
What’s the larger picture?
Not an “attack on the liberal state,” as I keep reading. Not “the culmination of Trump’s culture wars.” Certainly not that Trump is seeking “small government” over “big government” or advancing traditional conservatism over traditional liberalism.
What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.
Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media.
Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
Those who believe in democracy, on the other hand, have been at the forefront of the movement for free, universal public education and for public libraries, museums, and the arts.
They understand that democracy depends on people knowing what’s occurring around them and having the capacity to deliberate critically about it.
Trump is only the frontman in this attack on the American mind.
\\\
Headlines.
- Note the subtitle. Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 21 Mar 2025: Taking down Jackie Robinson reveals what the fight against DEI is all about, subtitled “The Trump administration wants to pretend that the world is a meritocracy where white men happen to be the best”
- The cruelty is the point, as Adam Serwer has said. USA Today, 21 Mar 2025: Library that straddles the US-Canada border to be closed to Canadians. (Lots of beautiful pics in this piece.)
- This is an aspect of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning; most people will never admit they were wrong. Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 21 Mar 2025: “I don’t regret the vote”: Why most Trump voters stand by him, even as he ruins their lives, subtitled “It’s not totally hopeless: Some swing voters who backed Trump may learn their lesson”
- OK, they’re not *removing* the names of non-whites, just burying them. NPR, 14 Mar 2025: Arlington National Cemetery stops highlighting some historical figures on its website
