Trump 2025

[JK22]

jallajall skrev (7 minutter siden):

Får se hvem som tar oppfordringen hans.

 

Det var aktuelt et bilde av en penis som var hans "våpen". 

Hva Garcia, som tilhører en voksende fløy av demokratiske kongressmedlemmer som er rasende over den dårlige ledelsen av Schumer som hadde nylig blitt avslørt å være i ledertog med Pelosi som fremdeles manipulere Demokratene, mene - er å gå ut i krig, hvor de politiske våpnene skal hentes fram. Han vil ha åpen krig mellom demokratene og republikanerne omkring budsjettarbeid og vil ha en nedstengning av staten i mars 2025. 

Med andre ord; han vil slåss med alle midler. 

[JK22]

Har ulykkeguden kommet til det amerikanske militæret i Hegseths skikkelse? Helt siden det veldige øyeblikket han var nominert av komiteen for valg i senatet har det vært en meget oppsiktsvekkende utvikling med et halvt dusin flykrasj - derimot et helikopter som kollidert med et passasjerfly - og nå det siste; et hangarskip var veddet ved feil av et lasteskip! Det er ikke oppstått strukturelle skader, men for overtroiske militære er alt dette ganske påfallende. 

[Mannen med ljåen]

Han har akkurat begynt i jobben. Var det ikke mer logisk å mistenke de ansvarlige som ble ansatt mens Democrats hadde makta? Spesielt hvis de ble ansatt som del av DEI-programmet?

[Tussi]

Svein M skrev (1 time siden):

Robert F. Kennedy jr. USAs nye helseminister. Katastrofe!

 

Mannen med ljåen skrev (1 time siden):

Det er forskjell på å barbere seg, og å skjære av seg hue'.

Vaksiner er like polariserende som resten av politikken. Det føles som om man enten er for alle de dyptgripende overtrampene under kårånaen, etter så er man anti-vaxxer.

Jeg har selv tatt mange vaksiner, inkludert sånne som ikke var obligatoriske, fordi jeg mente at det var riktig for meg.

Jeg respekterer at andre ikke vil, og forstår at de blir mistenksomme når myndighetene tvinger dem. Og de fikk rett. Folk døde av bivirkninger. Vaksinene har reddet flere enn de drepe, men det hjelper ikke de som døde av AstraZeneca.

Kennedy har gitt uttrykk for at MMR-vaksinen kan gi autisme, og har sagt (eller Trump har sagt) han vil lede en kommisjon for å finne årsakene til autisme. veien kan bli kort til forbud mot MMR-valsinen og en katastrofe for Amerikanske fødte og ufødte barn.

jallajall skrev (46 minutter siden):

Nå tror jeg ikke akkuratt Hegseth har sagt noe slik, det handler om at militæret ikke skal delta på ulike Black/Asian/Hipsanic/White/Male/Female eventer og messer for å drive rekruttering..

Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Harmeet Dhillon, Jay Bhattacherya, Scott Turner, Lori Chavez DeRemer, Alex Wong, og jeg synes ikke Steven Cheung ser så hvit ut heller.
 

Takk 😊

[Maabren]

Trump har egentlig drept alle håp om å presse Russland ut av Ukraina med nada Nato -medlemskap og at grensene før 2014 ikkje er reelle mål for Ukraina. Greit at Trump får Putin til forhandlingsbordet, men det hadde og vore mulig om Trump hadde trua Putin tilbake til steinalderen viss Russland ikkje er ute av Ukraina inna slutten av februar. 

Håper Ukraina ber både Trump og Putin ryke til helvete, så får Europa ta tak i dette og gå inn å hjelpe Ukraina med å jage Russland ut av Ukraina. 

[Mbappe09]

BadCat skrev (4 timer siden):

Jeg gjorde det. Jeg skrev faktisk ikke på over to måneder. Fristelsen ble nok for stor under valginnspurten.

Flott, fortsett gjerne med å ikke skrive 🙃

[JK22]

Ønsker Trump å starte en erobringskrig? Det kommer til å sjokkere flere titalls millioner som lever i fred langs en grense som er noe av det fredeligste i verden! Så langt virker det som at amerikanerne flest ikke maktet å forstå hva som rører seg i det kanadiske folket, og dermed antar det vil skje fredelig - som gjør det tydelig at de er i la-la land. 

Førti millioner mennesker med en halv million våpentrente menn i 20 til 50 års alder fra politibransjene og militæret langs en uforsvarlig grense hvor det ikke finnes militærbaser verdt navnet, med dårlige kommunikasjoner langs som over grensen som er basert på vann og ødemark. Et folk med en historisk antiamerikanisme med røtter tilbake til 1783, da kongelojalister - som aktuelt utgjør et lite flertall i 1775 - måtte flykte nordover, og som fram til 1940-tallet var holdt i livet i folkebevisstheten. Kanadisk identitet er ganske enkelt å ikke være amerikaner. 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/trump-s-remarks-on-canada-becoming-the-51st-state-raise-a-lot-of-questions/ar-AA1yYtJN?ocid=BingNewsSerp

På amerikansk hold begynte man å realisere at de kanadiske provinsene er likestilt med delstatene og dermed kan disse ikke unngå delstatsstatus. De fleste provinsregjeringer vil aldri akseptere tap av deres selvstyrerettigheter og status, og i visse provinser som Alberta er det en stemning for sterk selvstendighet. 

Militært sett er ikke USA i stand til å erobre Canada, som kan åpne opp store bresjer for et russisk angrep over Arktis fordi Canada er en del av det kontinentale forsvarssystemet. De topografiske forholdene er ikke god, enorme millionbyer står i vegen, og befolkningen vil gjør voldsom motstand samtidig som de vil angripe dypt inn i USA som respons. Det vil være en gjentagelse av den russisk-ukrainske krigen. Og dessuten har mange amerikanske militære familie, venner og kolleger på den kanadiske siden, slik at de kan være troende til å avsette Trump fremfor å følge hans ordre. 

Hegseth har dessuten utløst mye frustrasjon og sinne i militæret, hvor de også opplever slett behandling av militærsveteranene.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-and-musk-are-going-to-war-against-military-veterans/ar-AA1yZkRm?ocid=BingNewsSerp&cvid=694300c0ab024e9abde7261dd56bc12d&ei=62

Se her; " - Donald Trump's new executive order, titled "Implementing the President's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Workforce Optimization Initiative," outlines exactly how Trump and Elon Musk plan to dismantle the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and strip transitioning military veterans and their families overseas of the generous federal hiring incentives they rely on - "

At de våge! Siden militæret forlot vernepliktmodellen til fordel for profesjonellmodellen i 1970-årene har man vært nødt til å tilby velfredordninger for å lokke interesserte til seg, og dette innbar veteranbehandling som intet fornuftig politiker hadde våge å røre. Militærsveteraner skulle hedres og hjelpes som gest for deres offer og mot på vegne av den amerikanske nasjonen. 

For years, politicians have promised to fix the VA and take care of veterans. But this Trump executive order does the opposite - it throws veterans under the bus and a few other fast moving objects. First, by cutting veteran federal workers who make up a huge part of the workforce; second, by slashing the very services those same veterans need; third, by denying our military service members and their families adequate support overseas and here at home; and finally, doing anything but making sure veterans have a stable place and support system to build a life post-service. 

Trump couldn't care less about veterans - he never served and doesn't understand or respect those who do. It's not clear whether Musk has taken an oath to the U.S. Constitution. Neither man can begin to grasp the sacrifices military members and their families make every day to keep Americans safe. 

Det amerikanske militæret har allerede fått problemer med å rekruttere nok menn, som måtte ikke være kriminell og som måtte oppfylle opptakskravene som er strengt, nå har de et stort problem med å få tak på høyutdannede menn - spesielt fra de fargede som aktuelt utgjør en meget stor del av nøkkelpersonellkorpset for militæret. På mange steder er det få hvite blant de fargede i offiserskutene. Og de trenger å garantere sine soldater fair og rettferdig behandling om disse skulle bli skadelidende - det er hele 100,000 Irak-veteraner som trenger medisinsk omsorg. 

Mange flere vil dermed nekte å gå inn i militæret som et resultat. Og soldatenes lojalitet kan bli så rystet, at de kan finne på å svikte sin plikt i verste fall. 

Ønsker Trump å ødelegge det amerikanske militæret? Hvis han starte krig mot venner og allierte, kan dette lede til sammenbrudd og alvorlig strid. 

[sedsberg]

Trump starter ikke kriger. Han er jo eneste Amerikanske presidenten i historien som ikke starter noen kriger.

[obygda]

sedsberg skrev (10 minutter siden):

Trump starter ikke kriger. Han er jo eneste Amerikanske presidenten i historien som ikke starter noen kriger.

Han kan nok snuble inn i en. Gitt måten ham går frem på så vil han jo lett trigge noen til å reagere. 

Mannen er jo splitte pine gal og er selvsentrert så det rekker. Slike mennesker kan fort tråkke feil.

 

[jallajall]

 

[JK22]

Ex-Republican blasts 'irresponsible' Trump voters — and says they should be held accountable | Opinion

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/ex-republican-blasts-irresponsible-trump-voters-and-says-they-should-be-held-accountable-opinion/ar-AA1yZDJ3?ocid=BingNewsSerp&cvid=c9be9d163e014217a30d72fd139e236a&ei=88

In his book, The Present Age, the late sociologist Robert Nisbet applied a pithy descriptor to a phenomenon we have seen all too often in public life: the “no-fault” theory of political action, particularly in foreign affairs. “Presidents, secretaries, and generals and admirals in America seemingly subscribe to the doctrine that no fault ever attaches to policy and operations,” he wrote. “This No Fault conviction prevents them from taking too seriously such notorious foul-ups as Desert One, Grenada, Lebanon, and now the Persian Gulf.”

Nisbet did not live to see a spectacular example of his theory. George W. Bush, having failed to prevent the 9/11 disaster his own intelligence agencies foresaw, proceeded to initiate a years-long disaster in Iraq, a catastrophe of his own making. Yet what were the consequences? The American people rewarded him with a second term in the face of abundant evidence of his incompetence and bad faith.

It would appear that Nisbet’s thesis needs revision. What he said was blatantly obvious: of course politicians rarely blame themselves for their own egregious policy failures, for it characterizes the typical behavior of ambitious, self-confident, and often corner-cutting people.

We frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like... How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

What is more significant, and troubling, is the reaction of the people who elect them: why do they more often than not reward leaders who inveigle them into national calamity? Isn’t there also a no-fault doctrine that applies to the American voter, a doctrine that is for the most part rigidly observed by journalists, pundits, and the self-proclaimed wise men who monopolize the op-ed pages of the prestige newspapers?

From the platforms of the chattering classes, we frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like. Holding someone accountable implies that the person in question is a functioning adult who can be considered responsible for his actions. How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

Turning back to Bush, his reelection did not end his reign of error. His policy of radical financial deregulation, about which he and his underlings bragged incessantly, and about which the public had to know if it were remotely paying attention, led in his second term to the greatest financial meltdown in 80 years.

Temporarily chastened, voters latched on to Barack Obama as the savior du jour. It turned out that Obama was no Moses leading the people to the promised land. A nominal Democrat, he was more an old-school Rockefeller Republican whose two terms were mostly an uneventful placeholder in history—not that such administrations are necessarily bad, as the current all-enveloping chaos demonstrates.

But placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection. So they grew tired of Perry Como’s crooning, hankering instead after Ozzy Osbourne smashing his guitar and biting the head off a bat. That explains a good deal about how we got Trump 1.0 and 2.0.

Placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection.

Wait, say the pundits, weren’t great swathes of the American people in 2016 victimized by the system, suffering from “economic anxiety?” But exit polling data from 2016 showed that Hillary Clinton won by 12 points among voters making less than $30,000 a year and by nine points among those making between $30,000 and $49,999. Trump, on the other hand, won every demographic making $50,000 or more

In 2024, the U.S. economy was the best in almost 60 years, with October unemployment at 4.1 percent. This is not to argue that everything was ideal, but the economy was better than recent U.S. experience, and unemployment and GDP growth were far better than most developed countries.

Accordingly, pundits dropped the economic anxiety excuse. Instead, we have been inundated with think pieces about how Democrats in some unexplained way “lost the working class,” a demographic conveniently left undefined. This claim contradicts continued polling evidence that Trump consistently did better among more affluent voters. The notion that Trump has magnetic appeal among Americans living a precarious economic existence is largely myth.

Otherwise, the media has treated Trump’s election like an asteroid falling from the sky, a natural disaster seemingly without input from the electorate. Why? It may be that the press still refuses to violate the last moral taboo in American public life: the essential innocence and virtue of this country’s citizens.

Denouncing the rascality of politicians is a revered American tradition, from Artemus Ward to Mark Twain, to Will Rogers, right down to the late-night TV hosts of today. Even the ultra-refined Henry Adams, scion of the Adams's of presidential fame, approvingly quoted the line, “A congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and beat him on the snout!”

Perhaps the only well-known American literary figure to take a dim view of the people who actually elect the politicians was H.L. Mencken. He denounced vigilantism during World War I, Prohibition, the 1920s resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the revival of religious fundamentalism that same decade, not as some plague that befell the country from nowhere, but as an expression of Americans’ mob mentality, anti-intellectualism, and search for easy solutions.

Otherwise, American literary tradition gives us Walt Whitman singing the praises of his fellow citizens, Carl Sandberg (“the people, yes . . .”), Thorton Wilder and his sentimental tale of small-town folks, and Frank Capra’s maudlin cinematic paeans to the fundamental goodness of the common clay. Thousands of lesser lights have engaged in similar rhetorical puffery to the present day. The tragic, grown-up sense of social life in Victor Hugo or the great Russian novelists is absent from the American tradition.

Mystification merely being academic slang for bamboozlement, the theory never answers the question: why are the people so easily conned by the most childish lies and distortions...?

Editorial departments still hew to this convention. A journalist friend recently submitted a piece to a well-known center-left magazine arguing that some responsibility must attach to the voters for the 2024 election. The response: “We can’t say the American people are stupid,” even though the editor agreed with the author.

Political theorists from the center to the far left are also prone to this delusion. They have built an edifice of psychological denial on the idea that even if there is a pervasive system of illegitimate corporate or governmental control, it is miraculously unconnected with the character of the people the system administers. Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is typical of the species, a late-20th century adaptation of Karl Marx’s theory of mystification: that the common people do not recognize their genuine interest because they have been mystified by the powers-that-be.

Mystification merely being academic slang for bamboozlement, the theory never answers the question: why are the people so easily conned by the most childish lies and distortions when accurate information is easily accessible, and never more so than today? (This is quite apart from the fact that Trump told voters very explicitly about the horrors he would inflict, meaning that something other than gullibility is also at work).

It wasn’t always thus: farmers in the 1890s, the core support for the old People’s Party), knew very well who was screwing them: the railroads, the banks, the grain traders. So did 1930s production-line workers in steel, autos, and rubber, struggling for union recognition: they knew it was their own employers, not foreign competition or some culture-wars chimera that was responsible for their miserable conditions.

But now, farmers vote overwhelmingly for Trump, despite their suffering under foreign retaliatory tariffs resulting from his ill-considered economic policy during his first term and likely further damage in his second. And unionization is at record post-World War II lows, despite the material benefits of union membership.

What changed? Historian Rick Perlstein, writing in The Invisible Bridge, said that in the 1970s, as the crises of Vietnam, racial unrest, and Watergate abated, the American people had a chance to learn from these events: in other words, to grow up and be responsible citizens.

They didn’t. Ronald Reagan’s soothing fairy tale of innocent virtue, of a country sinned against but never sinning, became America’s secular religion. I would extend Perlstein’s thesis by suggesting that this bogus innocence has become embedded in the American psyche and individualized into a personalized martyr complex. Every vicissitude of life is now the fault of some detested minority, or the elites, or the system generally.

The vanguard of this personality type, the people who actually generate the atrocious ideas the Trump regime is now implementing, is what substacker John Ganz calls the “creep-loser.” You know the type from high school: awkward, asocial, and full of resentment against the world for failing to recognize his genius.

Many of them become brooding, failed intellectuals, the sort that were the idea engine of authoritarian movements throughout the 20th century, and who now infest places like the Claremont Institute and Heritage Foundation. They are to MAGA what the Old Bolsheviks were to the Communist movement. It is no coincidence that Steve Bannon described himself as a Leninist. Their goal is simply destruction as revenge.

It is true that all of these resentful fantasists together would barely fill a stadium: hardly a key national voting bloc. But their nihilistic attitude is surprisingly prevalent among “real Americans” who never read Ayn Rand or attended Hillsdale College. Beginning in 2015, pollsters have been rather surprised at the frequency that respondents claim they just want to “burn it all down,” not troubling themselves with what will happen to the social infrastructure that supports their very existence.

If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious?

Add to them the rapturist Christians, the hard core of the Christian fundamentalist voting bloc (the largest single constituency of the Republican Party). The belief that a millennial holocaust wiping out earth is something to look forward to is in its basic psychology no different from Hitler’s Götterdämmerung in the Berlin bunker or suicide cults like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. Even the wider fundamentalist belief system is prone to rigidly separate human beings into the blessed and the damned, a mindset hardly consistent with pluralist democracy.

A final demographic is the most diffuse and least attached to any ideology: the tens of millions of unserious Americans who refuse to take anything seriously, for whom the smallest exercise of civic responsibility is either uncool, or boring, or a violation of their freedom to be irresponsible. Some of them voted for Trump because “he’s funny;” you may know the type. No doubt they think even now that plundering Greenland or sending combat troops to Gaza is comedy gold. Others will apply a sort of degenerate folk wisdom that they think is clever, saying they “always vote those in office out, and those out of office in,” or some similar nonsense.

Other unserious people feign a righteous anger over the price of eggs on the assumption that the White House controls the cost of consumer goods regardless of circumstances like bird flu. The price of eggs or broiler chickens is much more important to them than living under the rule of law or handing down a decent and humane society to their children.

Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it.

If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious? No doubt indifference, because it won’t affect them, just as arrests of Jews or Social Democrats didn’t affect “good Germans” in the 1930s. As for the true believers, whether religious fundamentalist or secular neoreactionary tech-nerd, they’ll be cheering it on: they never believed in any nonsense about democracy or human rights in any case.

How can America’s purported thought-leaders seriously maintain that a working majority of Americans (those who voted for Trump and those who didn’t bother to vote because they didn’t care) didn’t consciously will what is now unfolding? As Steve Bannon’s role model Lenin was reputed to have remarked, “who says A must say B:” people are intellectually and morally responsible for the consequences of their actions. To argue otherwise is the equivalent of saying that tens of millions of Americans are legally incapable of signing contracts, marrying, driving cars, or exercising the franchise.

Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it. It’s a Wonderful Life is conventionally viewed as a heart-warming Christmas movie, with a depressing second act making the finale all the more sentimentally fulfilling, like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Yet, but for the contingency of George Bailey’s having been born and lived, Bedford Falls inevitably would have defaulted to Potterville, hardly an affirmation of the goodness and civic-mindedness of the majority, who might have been expected to resist the designs of the grasping Mr. Potter.

Contingencies work that way in real life, too. But for the pandemic and the resulting inflation, we might be living in a different world. Alas, given the recent price of eggs, most Americans preferred to ditch safe, staid old Bedford Falls for the vulgar excitement of Potterville. The town’s owner, whether Mr. Potter or Donald Trump, will cheerfully ensure that while he might fleece you for every cent and jail you if you defy him, you’ll never be bored.

Endelig en amerikaner som ser på sitt egne folk fra utenforståendes perspektiv. Han har også rett ved å påpeke at et meget alvorlig demokratisk problem har oppstått i de siste tiår hvor uansvarlighet, barnslighet og uvillighet til å stå med sine verdier mer eller mindre har overtatt, og mye av dette har spredt seg til Europa, deriblant Norge. For førti til femti år siden var ideen om folket som et ansvarsbevisst element ved sine fulle fem og dermed ansvarlig for sine lederne og sine handlinger, høyst levende over hele verden da man ville inkludere folket i beslutningsprosessene uansett om det var faktisk eller på liksom. 

Og sjuende og sist er folket ansvarlig for sine ledernes politikk, og det bli verre om det er i et demokratisk land der man har makt gjennom stemmeavgivning. Da valget i 2004 fant sted med Bush juniors seier, sa jeg den gang at dette var den progressive USAs død. 

Jeg hater å få rett. 

[Delvis]

Så Dagsnytt 18 med eksperter om hva som skjer på innsiden i Usa nå. Det høres seriøst dystert ut med tanke på demokratiet der borte. Det er bare til å belage seg på det verste.

[JK22]

There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing

Opinion by Anne Applebaum

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/there-s-a-term-for-what-trump-and-musk-are-doing/ar-AA1z0rsv?ocid=BingNewsSerp&cvid=8fed7fa81f5d48ac85a91e9c78af040a&ei=6

Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.

No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,” a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing.

These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose.. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.

This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

The destruction of the modern civil-service ethos will take time. It dates from the late 19th century, when Theodore Roosevelt and other civil-service reformers launched a crusade to eliminate the spoils system that dominated government service. At that time, whoever won the presidency always got to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even for menial jobs. Much of the world still relies on such patronage systems, and they are both corrupt and corrupting. Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They appoint unqualified people—somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a party hack—to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron, not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply.

Until January 20, American civil servants worked according to a different moral code. Federal workers were under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations. They were supposed to measure objective reality—evidence of pollution, for example—and respond accordingly. Not all of them were good administrators or moral people, but the damage that any one of them could do was limited by audits, rules about transparency, and again, an ethos built around the rule of law. This system was accepted by everyone—Republican-voting FBI agents, Democratic-voting environmental officers, the nurses at veterans’ hospitals, the air-traffic controllers at LAX.

What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk’s companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers’ rights, and consumer protection.

The new system, whatever its ideology, will in practice represent a return to patronage, about which more in a minute. But before it can be imposed, the administration will first have to break the morale of the people who believed in the old civil-service ethos. Vought, at a 2023 planning meeting organized in preparation for this moment, promised exactly that. People who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than they could make in the private sector, must be forced to understand that they are evil, enemies of the state. His statement has been cited before, but it cannot be quoted enough times: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at the time. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”

The email Musk sent to most employees in the federal government, offering them a “buyout”—several months’ pay, in exchange for a commitment to resign—was intended to inflict this kind of trauma. In effect, Musk was telling federal workers that he was not interested in what they were doing, or whether they were good at it, or how they could become more efficient. Instead, he was sending the message: You are all expendable.

Simultaneously, Musk launched an administrative and rhetorical attack on USAID, adding cruelty to the hostility. Many USAID employees work in difficult places, risking terrorism and violence, to distribute food and medicine to the poorest people on the planet. Overnight, they were told to abandon their projects and come home. In some places, the abrupt end of their programs, for example those providing special meals to malnourished children, will result in deaths, and USAID employees know it.

The administration has not acknowledged the dramatic real-world impact of this cut, which will, if not quashed by the courts, result in relatively minor budgetary savings. On the contrary, Musk and others turned to X to lie about USAID and its alleged waste. USAID did not give millions of dollars in direct grants to Politico, did not fund the visits of celebrities to Ukraine, did not send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, and did not pay $84 million to Chelsea Clinton. But these fictions and others have now been blasted to hundreds of millions of people. Information taken from grant databases is also being selectively circulated, in some cases fed to internet trolls who are now hounding grant recipients, in order to smear people and organizations that had legitimate, congressionally approved goals. Musk and others used a similar approach during the so-called Twitter Files scandal to discredit researchers and mischaracterize their work.

But the true significance of USAID’s destruction is the precedent it sets. Every employee of every U.S. department or agency now knows that the same playbook can be applied to them too: abrupt funding cuts and management changes, followed by smear campaigns. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which safeguards bank customers against unfair, deceptive, or predatory practices, is already suspended. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, which mostly manages student loans, may follow. Within other agencies, anyone who was involved in hiring, training, or improving workplaces for minority groups or women is at risk, as is anyone involved in mitigating climate change, in line with Trump’s executive orders.

In addition, Musk has personally taken it upon himself to destroy organizations built over decades to promote democracy and oppose Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence around the world. For example, he described the journalists of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who take extraordinary risks to report in Russia, Belarus, and in autocracies across Eurasia, as “radical left crazy people.” Not long after he posted this misleading screed on X, one RFE/RL journalist was released from a Belarusian prison after nearly three years in jail, as a part of the most recent prisoner exchange.

Putting them all together, the actions of Musk and DOGE have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced in recent history. Protest or collaborate? Speak up against lawbreaking or remain silent? A small number of people will choose heroism. In late January, a career civil servant, Nick Gottlieb, refused to obey an order to place several dozen senior USAID employees on administrative leave, on the grounds that the order violated the law. “The materials show no evidence that you engaged in misconduct,” he told them in an email. He also acknowledged that he, too, might soon be removed, as indeed he was. “I wish you all the best—you do not deserve this,” he concluded.

Others will decide to cooperate with the new regime—collaborating, in effect, with an illegal assault, but out of patriotism. Much like the Ukrainian scientists who have kept the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant going under Russian occupation because they fear catastrophe if they leave, some tech experts who work on America’s payment systems and databases have stayed in place even as Musk’s team of very young, very inexperienced engineers have demanded illegitimate access. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one government employee told my Atlantic colleagues Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost.

Eventually, though, if the assault on the civil service is not blocked, the heroes and the patriots will disappear. They will be fired, or denied access to the tools they need to work, or frightened by the smear campaigns. They will be replaced by people who can pass the purity tests now required to get government jobs. Some will seem silly—are you willing to say “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico”?—and some will be deadly serious. Already, the Post reports, candidates for national-security posts in the new administration are being asked whether they accept Trump’s false claim to have won the 2020 election. At least two candidates for higher positions at the FBI were also asked to state who the “real patriots” were on January 6, 2021. This particular purity test is significant because it measures not just loyalty to Trump, but also whether federal employees are willing to repeat outright falsehoods—whether they are willing, in other words, to break the old civil-service ethos, which required people to make decisions based on objective realities, not myths or fictions.

To show that they are part of the new system, many loyalists will also engage in loud, performative behavior, designed to attract the attention and approval of Trump, Musk, Vought, or their followers. Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., wrote a missive addressed to “Steve and Elon” (referring to Musk and his associate Steve Davis) in which he vowed to track down “individuals and networks who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees.” If anyone is deemed to have broken the law “or acted simply unethically,” Martin theatrically promised to “chase them to the end of the Earth.” Ostentatious announcements of bans on supposed DEI or climate-change projects will similarly threaten civil servants. Late last month, the Air Force removed videos about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, the first Black and female Air Force pilots, from a training course. After an uproar, the videos were put back, but the initial instinct was revealing. Like the people asking FBI candidates to lie about what happened on January 6, someone at the Air Force felt obliged to deny older historical truths as well.

Eventually, demonstrations of loyalty might need to become more direct. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out that a future IRS head, for example, might be pressured to audit some of the president’s perceived enemies. If inflation returns, government employees might feel they need to disguise this too. In the new system, they would hold their job solely at the pleasure of the president, not on behalf of the American people, so maybe it won’t be in their interest to give him any bad news.

Many older civil servants will remain in the system, of course, but the new regime will suspect them of disloyalty. Already, the Office of Personnel Management has instructed federal employees to report on colleagues who are trying to “disguise” DEI programs, and threatened “adverse consequences” for anyone who failed to do so. The Defense Health Agency sent out a similar memo. NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the FBI have also told employees who are aware of “coded or imprecise language” being used to “disguise” DEI to report these violations within 10 days.

Because these memos are themselves coded and imprecise, some federal employees will certainly be tempted to abuse them. Don’t like your old boss? Report him or her for “disguising DEI.” Want to win some brownie points with the new boss? Send in damning evidence about your colleagues’ private conversations. In some government departments, minority employees have set up affinity groups, purely voluntary forums for conversation or social events. A number of government agencies are shutting these down; others are being disbanded by organizers who fear that membership lists will be used to target people. Even private meetings, outside the office, might not be safe from spying or snooping colleague.

That might sound implausible or incredible, but at the state level, legislation encouraging Americans to inform on other Americans has proliferated. A Texas law, known as the Heartbeat Act, allows private citizens to sue anyone they believe to have helped “aid or abet” an abortion. The Mississippi legislature recently debated a proposal to pay bounties to people who identify illegal aliens for deportation. These measures are precedents for what’s happening now to federal employees.

And the fate of federal employees will, in turn, serve as a precedent for what will happen to other institutions, starting with universities. Random funding cuts have already shocked some of the biggest research universities across the country, damaging ongoing projects without regard to “efficiency” or any other criteria. Political pressure will follow. Already, zealous new employees at the National Science Foundation are combing through descriptions of existing research projects, looking to see if they violate executive orders banning DEI. Words such as advocacy, disability, trauma, socioeconomic, and yes, women will all trigger reviews.

There are still greater dangers down the road—the possible politicization of the Federal Electoral Commission, for example. Eventually, anyone who interacts with the federal government—private companies, philanthropies, churches, and above all, citizens—might find that the cultural revolution affects them too. If the federal government is no longer run by civil servants fulfilling laws passed by Congress, then its interests might seriously diverge from yours.

None of this is inevitable. Much of it will be unpopular. The old idea that public servants should serve all Americans, and not just a small elite, has been part of American culture for more than a century. Rule of law matters to many of our elected politicians, as well as to their voters, all across the political spectrum. There is still time to block this regime change, to preserve the old values. But first we need to be clear about what is happening, and why.

* Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one

* Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO.

* Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests

Mange kommer til å dø. De første meldinger om dødsfall tikker nå inn pga. ødeleggelsen av USAID, og det vil ikke vare lenge før mange amerikanerne vil dø. 

Etablissementet er kraftig opprørt over utviklingen, og man kan se at forretningsstanden er i ferd med å reagere på Trumps tollinnføring. 

Trump vil ha et diktatur, han vil forkaste enhver som er amerikansk. 

Borgerkrig nærmere seg, ikke minst ved å realisere at en stor del av befolkningen er så uansvarlig, at de risikere å komme i konflikt med en lik stor del av befolkningen som misliker disses uansvarlighet og uforstand. Det meldes at de yngre skal ha begynte å vende seg bort - kanskje "moroa" de hadde sett fram til, hadde blitt for mye. Amerikanerne gjerne lot politikerne slåss mot hverandre som en fornøyelsesoppvisning, men hvis de skulle ende opp med å slåss mot hverandre er det ikke lenge underholdende eller morsomt. 

 

Endret 42 minutter siden av JK22

[sedsberg]

Når var det DOGE skulle gyve løs på Pentagon? Det kan bli interresant.

[BadCat]

2 hours ago, Mbappe09 said:

Flott, fortsett gjerne med å ikke skrive 🙃

Den dagen du ikke er frekk og kjepphøy. Du bør tåle at samfunnsutviklingen går andres vei. Jeg har ventet lenge på tur.