When I was young, and romantic, I used to be dazzled by stories about people who had faced vast challenges and overcome them. Not just heroes, but even the mass of ordinary people who simply lived through epic, Earth-shaking periods of history, whether it was the Second World War, the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights Movement, or going back further, the Civil War, the westward expansion of the United States, the founding of this country, and so on. Times that try men’s souls, as Mr. Paine once wrote. Times of danger, and high stakes, and life-and-death drama.

It all seemed very exciting.

At my age, I am of a generation that has seen a few bold-faced moments of our own: Vietnam, the AIDS crisis, 9/11 and the ensuing wars, the 2016 election and all that followed, the COVID-19 pandemic, and January 6^th all come to mind.

We are in another such historic moment right now, bigger perhaps that any of those, or any that our generation has lived through before, maybe even rivaling some in that first paragraph. It’s a time of an unprecedented test of America democracy, with no guarantee that the republic will survive. Stakes don’t get much higher or scarier than that.

And I gotta tell ya: it ain’t as much fun as I imagined. 

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight and the certainty of a happy outcome, the struggle to defeat Hitler and Nazism—to take but one very extreme example—seems glorious. But while it was going on, and people were suffering and dying, and the prospect that fascism might triumph and crush all humanity under its bootheel was very real, it must have been…..uh…..stressful.

I do not mean to invoke Godwin’s Law here with that analogy, only to note that we are in a hard slog, the outcome of which is by no means certain. And it’s sure to get worse before it gets better, if in fact it gets better at all. Let’s hope that our children and grandchildren are able to read about it and feel that same vicarious, romantic glow that we get looking back on the dark times that our predecessors lived through and prevailed over.

AMERICA WORST

Of late this blog has, for obvious reasons, been focused on our domestic crisis, but let’s spend a little time on foreign affairs, which once upon a time was my preferred métier, and with which the ongoing emergency at home is unavoidably intertwined.

Pete Hegseth went to Europe and put down his cocktail glass and stopped groping women long enough to announce that the US was turning its back on 80 years of security commitments and to give the EU and NATO and non-aligned but friendly countries a big fat middle finger. To their great credit, American middle schoolers in Department of Defense Dependent Schools in Germany heckled the new Secretary of Defense (cough, cough) and staged a walkout when he spoke. (The White House recently banned a bunch of books from DoDDS schools for being “too woke.”)

I am a product of those schools, where my mother was a teacher, in Germany no less, way back when the Berlin Wall first went up, and it made me proud to see what those middle schoolers and some of their parents did. Why are those kids braver than the entire Republican Party and half the Democratic one too? That’s a rhetorical question, in case it wasn’t sufficiently clear. (Literally old school DoDDS education ain’t too shabby, n’est-ce pas?)

But speaking of craven cowardice, elsewhere on the Continent—in Munich, to be precise, for those of you who like things really on the nose—J.D. Vance had the gall to lecture Europe’s leaders on authoritarianism with language that sounded better in the original Russian. Then to top it off, and in case anyone missed the neo-Nazi point, he met with the leadership of the odious far right AfD party, already poised to make big gains in the German elections next week, and to praise it.

Who’s gonna tell the Greatest Generation—those very GIs who fought the world war that I referred to at the top of this piece—that we switched sides? Sorry about that whole “please invade Normandy” thing, fellas. Turns out we prefer the fascists to be in power after all.

What else? Oh, a Russian stooge was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence. (That sound you hear is Champagne corks popping in the Kremlin.) Way over yonder in the monarchy, Secretary of State Marco “L’il Marco” Rubio was in Riyadh to see what Crown Prince Mohammad Bonesaw Salman wants us to do. Of course, that’s a complicated triangulation with what Vladimir Putin wants us to do. It’s hard to have lot of different masters we’re beholden to, people.

And last but not least, the draft dodging, twice-impeached, 34 times-convicted felon Don Trump himself sold Ukraine down the river, barring it from “peace talks” (more like mobsters carving up newly acquired turf) about its own future, as well as—similarly mobster-like—demanding Versailles-dwarfing protection money, blaming Kyiv for being invaded by Russia, and calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” who “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”

Sheesh.

All in all it was one of the worst weeks for American foreign policy in recorded history.

I have long been critical of US military misadventures abroad. It’s a topic near and dear to me. But what we are seeing now is not a welcome antidote to that by any measure. On the contrary: it is a tragic error just as wrongheaded in its own way, and ironically, driven by the same venal and arrogant nationalism. Because in the end, isolationism is just interventionism’s equally evil twin.  

The United States’s abdication of its essential role as the indispensable nation (I did not say “exceptional”), a role that it has played since 1942, is a world-rattling shift, and not in a good way. For all America’s flaws—not something MAGA cops to, or that figure in its calculus—withdrawing from engagement with the rest of the world like this does nothing but cede power to the Putins, Xis, Erdogans, Bibis, Orbans, and Kims of the world, vile company that Donny is of course desperate to join. It further imperils the already imperiled cause of liberal democracy the world over, and it consigns beleaguered peoples like those of Palestine and Ukraine and elsewhere to something that can without exaggeration be called extermination, if not the dreaded “g” word.

And it makes me ashamed of my passport.

THIS WEEK IN SHINY OBJECTS

So that’s the wider world. But maybe things were better here at home?

LOL. It’s good we can laugh, right?

Here in the land of round doorknobs, Musk’s hostile takeover of the mechanisms of the US government continues, even as his figurehead partner carries on establishing a white nationalist regime.

The notion that Musk is curbing waste is laughable on its very face when Trump is firing inspectors general and DOGE is slashing nutrition programs for poor children (to name just one of its highlights). This week we learned that Musk wants to get into the weeds of the IRS, as The Washington Post reports that DOGE “is seeking access to a heavily-guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country, according to two people familiar with the activities, sparking alarm within the tax agency.” Can you imagine if a Democratic administration wanted the IRS to give this kind of access to a bunch of unelected twentysomething staffers under the control of a billionaire in its camp?

In a piece for The New York Times called “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up,” Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind reported that there are “at least 11 federal agencies that have been affected” by Trump’s attack on the federal government, agencies that have “more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.” Those companies include Tesla; SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink;  Neuralink, the AI startup XAI; the Boring Company (which is a tunneling venture); and of course, the Gulf of MeXico, Formerly Known as Twitter. Edsall adds that, “In addition, the federal government has awarded contracts with a total value of $13 billion over the past five years to Musk companies, Lipton and Grind found, most of which went to SpaceX, making it “one of the biggest government contractors.”

And now Musk even wants to be let into Ft. Knox. (And I thought Ian Fleming was dead.)

Responding to polite inquiries about what the fuck this Boer douchebag is up to, the White House risibly claimed that Elon Musk is just an unofficial advisor with no authority, and not even an actual employee of DOGE (which it can’t definitively say is or is not a federal agency or what). Man, I was born at night, but guess what? Wasn’t last night.

Trump/Musk, of course, claim they are only carrying out the will of the people. At a White House briefing last Wednesday, Elon defended what DOGE is doing by saying, “If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected officials in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”

Irony, thou hath an Afrikaaner accent.

The New York Times’s Thomas Edsall asks, “How, then, does granting one man, a very rich man, unchecked power to reconfigure the federal government from the ground up get to be described as democratic?” He then gives us Musk’s answer, as delivered at a White House press event this week:

“We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House. We won the Senate….The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. They’re going to get what they voted for…..And that’s what democracy is all about.”

We have already discussed in previous blogs that Trump’s claim of a mandate is both mathematically false and willfully deceptive. (I know, it’s hard to believe, right?) But even beyond that, the idea that an unelected outsider—who also happens to the world’s richest man, with a pronounced affinity for far right wing politics and massive federal contracts—is going in and taking control of the machinery of government with no legal authority to do so, and almost no transparency to what he is doing, is the very opposite of democracy.

The Guardian quotes Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island):

“I think their claims that they’re going after waste, fraud and abuse is a complete smokescreen for their real intentions”……Likening Trump’s firing of the IGs to “firing cops before you rob the bank,” Whitehouse stressed: “It’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is a very deliberate effort to create as much wreckage in the government as they can manage with a view to helping out the big Trump donors and special interests who find government obnoxious in various ways.”

That is it exactly. All this zone-flooding-with-shit is ultimately in the service of distracting us from the giant tax break the GOP is about to give the richest 1% of Americans, to the tune of about $4.5 trillion, “justified” on the money saved/not really saved by cutting programs for poor children.

You know, I am beginning to regret voting for Elon.

AND HE SHALL BE ELON

So what exactly is going on here? In that same issue of the New York Times, Thomas Edsall neatly summarized the state of play in a piece called, “Elon Musk Is Leading a ‘Hostile Takeover of the Federal Government’.” Laurence Tribe, emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told Edsall:

“I can think of no precedent in American history of such enormous power being entrusted to a private citizen.

To say that this delegation of unsupervised authority by President Trump to Elon Musk is an unprecedented violation of the appointments clause of Article II of the Constitution, which at a minimum would demand the Senate’s advice and consent to the appointment of anyone exercising the kind of power, would be an understatement.”

Michael Dorf, a constitutional scholar who is a professor of law at Cornell, told Edsall that the authority given to Musk is “truly unprecedented in US history.”

By way of comparison, opposition parties have occasionally raised substantial objections when even a small amount of power was given to persons who held no official office: think about the Republican reaction to the essentially advisory role that Hillary Clinton had in the formulation of health care reform in her husband’s administration.

Or consider the concerns raised by many Democrats when Dick Cheney (who was the elected VP at the time) was meeting with private industry leaders to help formulate energy policy during the George W. Bush administration. Yet Hillary Clinton and the industry captains with whom Cheney met held only advisory power. By contrast, Musk appears to be formulating and executing policies.”

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, speculated to Edsall that Trump is empowering Musk as payback for what he did to get him re-elected, and/or “for future financial assistance with Trump’s legal difficulties.” He also suggested that “having Musk do the dirty work” will let Trump be the good cop when it comes time to negotiate some of the more extreme measures. (I am not sure that is going to happen, but let’s hope.)

Brooke Harrington, a sociologist at Dartmouth, has been studying wealth, power and the rise of oligarchs since the turn of the century. In a phone interview, told Edsall “that a tech broligarchy has effectively bought the presidency.”

Trump gets to be chairman of the board, cut the ribbons in day-to-day ceremonies, while control of the structure of government is left to them, in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the federal government.

Speaking to Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” the night after Trump’s inauguration, Harrington compared Putin’s relationship with his oligarchs to Trump’s with his own wealthy patrons who propelled him back into the White House:

“At least Putin has a red line with his oligarchs. The grand bargain was that he was going to let them get rich on condition that they kept their noses out of his political business. At most, they would be his errand boys. What Trump has done is so extraordinary. He doesn’t have that bright line with the new oligarchs of America at all. He basically said, ‘You bought it. Do what you want’.”

Even some on the right are unhappy with what’s going on. In a January 13 interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, Steve Bannon called Musk  “a truly evil person. Stopping him has become a personal issue for me.” Wow, it’s a rare day when I agree with Steve Bannon. (Other than that, it’s mostly just our mutual love of field jackets.)

Yet even as he’s at odds with the far right wing of the American GOP, Musk is somehow managing to cozy up to the far right in other countries, the ideological brethren of the racists who ran the apartheid-era South Africa in which he was raised. Speaking to an AfD rally via pre-recorded video, Musk told the young brownshirts: “I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” adding: “It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” He added that there has been “too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”

Still think that wasn’t a Nazi salute he gave? The man is openly courting the connection. Musk is even to the right of Nigel Farage, who has bristled at Elon’s ideas for his Reform UK party.

Edsall writes:

Musk’s engagement with these parties suggests….that his agenda at DOGE is at least as much about being partisan and radically conservative as it is about cutting spending or increasing efficiency. His targets, so far, have been liberals in the federal work force, particularly those involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and such federal programs as consumer protection and foreign aid that draw workers, in the main, with liberal views. Musk, then, is in charge of a campaign to purge left-leaning or liberal government initiatives, with little or no regard to legal or constitutional constraint.

WHEN PUSH COMES TO SHOVE

So far, the most significant push back to what Trump and Musk are doing has come from the federal courts, which Robert Reich calls our “last defense.” That is also why the White House and its allies have begun shamelessly attacking them.

Calling Trump “the most lawless president in American history,” Reich writes in The Guardian:

But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts. On Sunday, J.D. Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power “legitimately”, not the president.

Vance, a Yale Law School graduate who clearly knows better, also told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “If the Supreme Court said the President of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit.”

It’s a nonsensical analogy, as it’s premised on the Court making a plainly unconstitutional and incorrect ruling. One might as well say, “If the Supreme Court said the head of state is really Ryan Seacrist, the President has the prerogative to ignore it.” As Reich writes, what Vance really means is, “if the US Supreme Court rules against Trump on an important issue, there’s a fair chance the Trump-Vance-Musk regime will thumb their nose at it.”

They are already at it. Just last week, federal judge John McConnell Jr. expressly declared that the Trump White House is disobeying his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, alleging that the administration is openly defying the “the plain text” of his edict. The previous week, US district judge Loren AliKhan reprimanded the OMB for disregarding a similar order.

So yes, we should take heart that there have been such orders, and others from federal judges like Paul Engelmayer and John Coughenour denying DOGE access to the US Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, and blocking the executive order ending birthright citizenship, as well as lawsuits from sanctuary cities and counties challenging Trump’s executive order on that front, and from state attorney generals led by New York’s Letitia James. But we should not kid ourselves that they will stop Trump, who is quietly—and not so quietly—ignoring rulings invalidating his actions.

Undoubtedly we are on the road to a showdown at the Supreme Court, where, to quote Woody Hayes, only three things can happen and two of them are bad.

1. The Trumpified Court might have his back (as it did when it was asked “Is Trump a king?”), or,
2. The justices rebuff him and he defies them.

Possibility No. 3, the idea that the Court remembers what it learned in law school and upholds the Constitution, remains a longshot.

IS DONALD TRUMP GOOD OR BAD? THE JURY IS STILL OUT, PEOPLE

Despite all this, the center-right MSM (let alone media outlets even further right) continue to treat Convicted Felon Donald Trump like a conventional politician—rather than a terrorist and aspiring despot—and give his proposals credibility they don’t remotely deserve.

We see it from The Wall Street Journal (“Peace in Ukraine Needn’t Mean Russian Victory”) to The Economist (“Will Donald Trump and Elon Musk Wreck or Reform the Pentagon? America’s Security Depends Upon Their Success”). That last one cannot be a serious question, of course, and just asking it makes it impossible to view The Economist any longer as a serious magazine. Next week: Are Trump and Musk going to serve poor people at a soup kitchen next Thanksgiving, or will they be lighting cigars with US citizens’ Social Security checks? No one knows!

Of course, the WSJ has gone even further in it drooling subservience to Trump, like its recent piece “Did Trump Just Win a ‘Tectonic’ Election?,” in which the Princeton historian Allen Guelzo—also an ordained minister and harsh critic of the 1619 Project—muses that Donald could wind up in the company of FDR or even Lincoln. And we need not even get into the bootlicking Republican politicians who want to make his birthday a national holiday (an honor accorded to—hang on, lemme count—zero other US presidents), or put him on Mt. Rushmore, or rename Dulles Airport for him.

Even The Atlantic has gotten into the act. It ran an article recently with the infuriating headline “How Progressives Broke the Government,” which leads one to believe it is yet another piece blaming the left for the right wing nightmare we’re in. In fact, it’s mostly a discussion of turn-of-the 19th-century Teddy Roosevelt-era Progressivism…..and even when it does turn to today, its ultimate critique is that small “p” progressives have been too timid, too willing to bow to the less-government-not-more mindset of conservatism. So in that regard it’s really a critique of the right. So the headline is the worst of it, but the piece itself is also sketchy in its desire to be transgressive. It even includes the classic journalistic CYA trope of “to be sure,” comme ça: “Conservatism, of course, hasn’t been helpful in making government more effective.”

Oh, is that so?

Give me a fucking break. We will continue to be in this mess as long as the journals that the chattering class reads busy themselves with this tripe. It’s bad enough that allegedly respectable conservative ones like the WSJ and Economist do.

Despite the navel-gazing solipsism of the MSM, we keep hearing that the American people will soon begin to feel the pain from Trump’s actions—that is to say, from both the things he has lied about, like lowering the price of eggs. and the things he didn’t, like his plan to destroy the federal government as we know it. But for now, Trump is still in the mode of blaming Biden and Buttigieg for air disasters that happened on the GOP’s watch (a fourth one this week, an American flag carrier, though it crashed in Toronto) even as it was in the process of gutting the FAA. And I don’t see barricades going up in the streets.

Is all this very dramatic, very grave, very profound? It is. And I wish it wasn’t upon us, and I could devote all my time to “Seinfeld” trivia and fantasy football and re-organizing my record collection alphabetically by recording engineer. Sadly, none of us have that luxury right now.

We all know the famous curse, “May you live in interesting times”—often (but apparently erroneously) said to be an old Chinese proverb. But I never truly appreciated it until now.

*********

Photo: Two American GIs of the 79th Infantry Division after a battle in the Bien Woods, near Lauterberg, France, December 20, 1944. Photographer unknown.