Let’s see if I can keep up. Today the Trump administration reversed the directive from two days ago to freeze federal grants until they could be scrubbed of improper thoughts. RFK Jr testified. And Trump announced he’ll build a detention center at Guantanamo for all the nasty immigrants he wants to rid the country of. At least he’s not calling it a concentration camp. Oh, and an internal memo directs defense agencies to ignore certain holidays that do not honor white men. (MLK Day, Black History, Pride, etc.) Only white men matter.
Here’s an item about that last one.
Raw Story via NewsBreak, 29 Jan 2025: Defense agency takes aim at MLK Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day in leaked memo
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Let’s look at takes from the commentariat.
Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the story so far, concerning Project 2025, Hungary, and the aim to… well, I’ll bold it.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term prepared by a number of right-wing institutions led by the Heritage Foundation. The plan called for dismantling the nonpartisan civil service and replacing it with officers loyal to an extraordinarily strong executive. It called for that strong executive to take control of the Department of Justice and the military and then, once firmly in power, to impose Christian nationalism on the country.
The members of the Heritage Foundation who wrote Project 2025 are closely aligned with Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s Danube Institute, and their plan looks much like his erosion of democracy to create a dictatorship that enforces white male Christian patriarchy.
And
On January 24, Nik Popli noted in Time magazine that a number of the people who wrote Project 2025 have been tapped to serve in Trump’s second administration and that nearly two thirds of the executive orders Trump has signed either mirror or partly mirror the plans in that nearly 900-page document.
So don’t anyone out there act surprised by all these executive orders. Writing Tuesday:
Today, the Trump administration sent an email blast titled “Fork in the Road” to federal workers offering to let them resign and keep their pay until September, a transparent attempt to clear places for loyalists.
The last phrase is probably the real reason, while the ostensible reason is to reduce the size of government, something conservatives have always been obsessed with. Why? To what levels? How do you know the government is too big? Conservatives have very simple reflexes: taxes, too high. Military spending, too low. Size of government, too big. There is *never* any rationale for why any of these are too high or low. How about identifying a target situation, justify it through objective measures, and then decide how much to tax or spend or cut. But they never do.
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Robert Reich‘s take on the motivation for the “Fork in the Road.”
29 Jan 2025: The basic equation, subtitled “What’s behind the apparent chaos today in Washington”
But these new initiatives are not about shrinking the size of the federal government. They’re about centralizing control of the federal government in Trump’s hands. Trump aims to put people into these jobs who are more loyal to him than they are to the United States.
Trump’s attempted takeover of the U.S. government is itself part of a larger strategy to replace American democracy with an oligarchy.
The basic equation throughout history is that concentrated power promotes concentrated wealth, just as concentrated wealth promotes concentrated power. The two are symbiotic.
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Another take on the motivation for freezing government spending.
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 29 Jan 2025: If All This Sounds Delusional, That’s Because It Is
Donald Trump is waging war on the American system of government.
On Monday afternoon his Office of Management and Budget ordered a pause on nearly all grants, loans and other forms of federal assistance, affecting as much as $3 trillion in funds, including cash for education, disaster relief and small-business loans, and hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to state, local and tribal governments. Countless organizations, from research universities to women’s shelters, were left adrift, scrambling for answers.
The only real explanation, from the O.M.B. memo, was that this was a necessary step to root out the malign influence of “Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering policies” from government. If this sounds delusional, that’s because it is. But now, it seemed, millions of Americans would have to suffer while the president’s apparatchiks chased down the specters of their fevered imaginations, confident that they’d find the source of their cultural alienation in the disbursement of funds to a veterans’ suicide hotline or free lunch for low-income schoolchildren.
The president has no legal authority to do this, Bouie goes on, explaining. And concludes:
Put another way, the American system of government is not one in which the people imbue the president with their sovereign authority. He is a servant of the Constitution, bound by its demands. Most presidents in our history have understood this, even as they inevitably pushed for more and greater authority. Not Trump. He sees no distinction between him and the office, and he sees the office as a grant of unlimited power, or as he once said, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The freeze, then, is Trump’s attempt to make this fanciful claim to limitless power a reality. He wants to usurp the power of the purse for himself. He wants to make the Constitution a grant of absolute and unchecked authority. He wants to remake the government in his image. He wants to be king.
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The same point, from Zack.
Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 29 Jan 2025: Trump is already acting like a king, “The order to shut off federal grants reveals a vision of the presidency at odds with basic democratic principles.”
To those who criticize Trump’s move,
The counterargument to this critique is straightforward: Trump is doing what he promised. Voters elected him after he promised to claim impoundment powers, and he has a popular mandate to deliver.
And, referring to “advocate for untrammeled majoritarianism” Christopher Caldwell:
Writing favorably about foreign right-wing leaders with authoritarian inclinations, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or India’s Narendra Modi, Caldwell repeatedly argued that these leaders were the true voice of their respective peoples — and that their attacks on legal protections for ethno-religious minorities, in particular, were actually expressions of the popular will.
Later:
It’s worth noting Trump and his allies don’t apply similar logic to Democratic executive actions. When Biden used executive authority to forgive student loans, a questionable but far less egregious assertion of power than Tuesday’s executive order, he and many on the right called it illegal even though it was an explicit Biden campaign promise.
Well, of course. It’s becoming increasingly clear that, for all their veneration of the Constitution, many conservatives don’t actually believe in it. (Any more than they do the New Testament.) They prefer an authoritarian strong-man.
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I don’t know which is scarier, that these people don’t know what they’re doing, or that they do.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 29 Jan 2025: “Trump is trying to collapse our economy”: War on “woke” revealed as a war on all Americans, subtitled “Christian nationalists behind the spending shutdown aim to punish everyone, not just imaginary Marxists”
Initially, the most striking detail in the White House Office of Management and Budget memo that has put a “pause” on huge swathes of the American economy, is how unhinged the paranoia is. The order insists that all federal grant and loan spending must be halted to combat “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” Ordinary people may see nothing but a local bridge being repaired, broadband internet being installed or a park getting cleaned up. Through MAGA-colored glasses, it’s all a plot to turn you into transgender Marxists and probably vegans, who are worse than Satanists.
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A follow-up to this post about how Americans were *not* healthier in the old days.
Slate, Laura Helmuth, 29 Jan 2025: Hello, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., subtitled “He’s nostalgic for the good old days of public health—when more people died.”
This sounds a lot like your average web-surfing conspiracy theorist, who is chuffed because he’s found the secret that all the elitist authorities have missed!
Instead of accepting the fact that society and science have progressed, RFK Jr. will have you know that he’s smarter than everyone else. He is the only person brave enough to reveal that neurologists, epidemiologists, data analysts, pediatricians (those devils), the media, medical philanthropies, pharmaceutical companies, and publishers of scientific journals have conspired to hide the truth that vaccines are causing a “holocaust.” Instead of accepting that the world has become more inclusive, RFK Jr. clings to a fraudulent 1998 paper claiming that vaccines are responsible for a rise in autism. The link has been debunked and disproven by studies around the world using decades of data and including hundreds of thousands of children. The original study has been retracted. Every relevant scientific and medical institution has affirmed that vaccines are some of the most lifesaving and health-improving interventions in history.
Have to wonder yet again, is this the best that the Trump administration can do? Seriously?
RFK Jr.’s view of reality is warped, and he’s belligerently wrong about plenty of things. He actively fears modernity. He has questioned whether AIDS is really the result of a virus, despite the fact that HIV-suppressing drugs have saved millions of lives and prevented millions of infections. He’s in favor of jailing people with addiction. He claims Wi-Fi causes cancer. He promotes drinking raw milk, at a time when the H5N1 bird flu virus is circulating in dairy cows and is concentrated in milk before it’s pasteurized. It’s “natural,” so it must be good. Even though the most natural thing in history is to die of infectious disease.
There’s more. But here’s the key.
Trump and Kennedy are a lot alike, too: messianic, grandiose, verbose, narcissistic. But the most important thing to know about both of them is that you can’t believe what they say. They lie. They reject clearly established facts. They make up stories to make themselves look like heroes.
