{Concerns about the powers of the American presidency have been expressed since the Constitution was ratified in 1788. That these concerns, for the most part, have been laid to rest, does not change the fact that our constitutional structure remains vulnerable to any President possessing sufficient ambition and lacking scruples, respect for law, or any sense of decency—in other words, someone like the current occupant of the White House.)
“The President has come to regard constitutional opposition to any scheme of his own as a rebellion or a crime which the executive must punish. This is at present, in my opinion, our most serious national danger." (Charles Sumner)
Henry Lockwood, from The Abolition of the Presidency (1884):
The presidential system, when first proposed, encountered the most strenuous opposition, not only in the Convention which framed the Constitution and in the different State Conventions which ratified it, but also at the hands of the press of the country. Not solely did the plan, as a whole, meet with objections, but each particular part of it was severely criticized. Prominent patriots resisted the establishment of any government which even savored of a limited monarchy. There seemed to be no division of opinion as to the absolute perniciousness of the elective form of monarchy.
Leading thinkers and writers have resisted the presidential form of government from the very formation of our system. Objections were made to conferring on the President the power to command the army and navy; to grant reprieves and pardons; (particularly in relation to the pardon of those guilty of treason, for the President may be engaged in the treason himself) to establish himself in regal authority; to nominate officers, civil and military. The President, as constituted, was a King in everything but in name; that though he was to be chosen for a limited time, yet, at the expiration of the period, if he is not re-elected, it will depend upon his own moderation whether he will resign that authority with which he has been invested.
The President, from having the appointment of all the various officers, in every part of the civil departments—who will be very numerous in themselves, and their connections, relations and friends and dependents, still more numerous —will have a formidable host devoted to his interests, and ready to support his ambitious views. The army and navy may be increased without restraint and commanded by the President in person, the officers of which, from the highest to the lowest, are to be appointed by him, will be dependent on his will and pleasure, and of course subservient to his wishes, and ready to execute his commands; in addition to which, the militia will also be entirely subjected to his orders; that all these circumstances, in fine, combined together, will enable him, when he pleases, to become a King, in name, as well as in substance.
At the Convention, Patrick Henry spoke thus:
"Your President may easily become a king. If he be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy it is for him to render himself absolute. The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him, and it will be the subject of long meditation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to accomplish his design; and will the American spirit survive when this happens? I would rather have a king, lords, and Commons, than a Government so replete with insupportable evils. If we make a king, we may prescribe the rules by which he shall rule his people, and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them, but the President in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke. I cannot, with patience, think of this idea. If ever he violates the laws, one of two things will happen; he will come at the head of his army, to carry everything before him; or he will do what the Chief Justice will order him. If he be guilty, will not the recollection of his crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American throne? Will not the immense difference between being master of everything and being ignominiously tried and punished, powerfully excite him to make this bold push? But, sir, where is the existing force to punish him? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?”
The dangers and evils of personal government still exist. The law fosters and protects a disguised monarchy. The question is, whether the common sense of the people will give timely recognition to these facts.
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{Who among us is not familiar with the classic ‘Pascal’s Wager’ which suggests that living ‘as if’ God exists is a prudent choice for those who cannot actually believe but aren’t willing to bet their lives on that disbelief. However, the ‘Wager’ in today’s post has absolutely nothing to do with God, with belief, or with eternal life. Pascal the existential Russian blue cat thanks you for your attention to this matter!}
“These are the times that try men’s souls, and they’re no picnic for women, either.” (Thomas Paine, more or less)
What are the odds that American democracy can survive Donald Trump? What would you be willing to bet that America’s tripartite federal government will withstand the current assault by advocates of a ‘unitary executive’? An associated wager could be made on whether MAGA will succeed in shrinking the federal government to where it’s small enough for Grover Norquist to drown it in a bathtub.
I am not ordinarily a betting man, but I am putting what little money I have on America's ability to outlast the barbarians currently within its gates. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it seems unlikely that the modern administrative state can be destroyed in one presidential term, especially when those attacking it have no idea how it works or what it does. For months now, MAGA has been tilting at windmills of its own devise—DEI, the “woke military,” “trans ideology,” and the all-purpose chestnut, “waste, fraud, and abuse”—and repeatedly hoisting itself on its own petard. Trump 2.0 isn’t “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” it’s “the gang that keeps shooting itself in the foot,” or “the gang that amputates its own feet with a chainsaw.
The DOGE Chainsaw Massacre
For all its cruelty, callousness, and mean-spiritedness, Trump 2.0 is less a ship of state than a ship of fools: the USS Dunning-Kruger. It’s not just a clown car, it’s an entire cavalcade of clowns in a seemingly endless clown motorcade, led by the Bozo-in-Chief. Are we really supposed to believe that the American government, crafted by statesmen of genius, with its mettle tested and proven by history, will be undone by the likes of Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, the brainworm-addled Robert Kennedy Jr., the canine-intolerant Kristi Noem, and the ketamine-enhanced Elon Musk, a basket of cognitively compromised deplorables not one of whom is capable of more than what Lionel Trilling once called “irritable mental gestures” in place of coherent thought? I refuse to believe that. You might as well tell me that George Washington is being replaced on Mount Rushmore by Pee-wee Herman.
I do not mean to minimize the damage being done, much less the damage yet to come; we will be digging ourselves out of various wreckages for years to come. Nor am I unaware that, while institutions may survive, individuals are being harmed, some of them beyond repair. 1 Lives are in the balance, and we are witnessing unprecedented disregard for legal processes, not to mention compassion. We may never put all Trump’s toxins back in the tube where they belong; they may linger in the public square for years, perhaps even decades, the political equivalent of Love Canal. But neither the American government—you know, the one MAGA calls “the Swamp” and the “Deep State”—nor the American people are “snowflakes,” “pussies,” or whatever other term of art makes the Trump legions feel better about themselves. We will get through this nightmare; to paraphrase my friend Alison Pipitone, “We are not going down fighting, because we are not going down.” 2
Since almost everything Trump and his minions are attempting to do—from tariffs to deportations to revoking tax-exempt status for “woke” universities—is illegal, and because courts have appropriately blocked, reversed, or put on hold various diktats and executive decrees, the best word to describe our current situation is “uncertainty”. We are plagued by economic, legal, and political uncertainty, the only thing worse than which would be allowing the President to become a king, a rank to which he obviously believes he is entitled. So far, the courts are holding the line.
Beyond today’s uncertainties, however, is this reassuring certainty: the Trump administration will not last forever. In November 2028, the American electorate will have a chance to repent. That prospect seems like an eternity away, but it will come. Will we at that time reverse the course that Trump and MAGA have set, and begin to undo the damage they have done? Will civic sanity at last prevail?
As I said, I am not ordinarily a betting man, but my money is on “Yes”.
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1 Of course, “We all are going to die,” so for heaven’s sake, don’t get all worked up about it.
2 Alison Pipitone (2016): https://youtu.be/lzhZx4ZIxdQ?si=wR79hnKp1UvfkStq
(The following is addressed to our wise Overlords, who have our best interests at heart.)
Dear President Trump and Co-President Musk,
I have a very small favor to ask, not just for me but on behalf of the American people: could we please have our government back? You very clearly don’t like it, don’t believe in it, don’t know how it works, and don’t think it serves any useful function; you aren’t planning to use it for anything constructive, so why not hand it back to people who (a) respect it, (b) understand it, and (c) want to improve it rather than destroy it?
I realize it was our mistake to have given you the keys in the first place. We saw, back on J6/2021, what your MAGAts would do if they managed to get inside. I guess we thought they would behave better this time around, especially with their Lord(s) and Savior(s) having been returned to power. We were wrong.
You may recall that former President Obama was excoriated for declaring, regarding his ability to impose his policies, "I have a pen and a phone." You have outdone Obama: "I have a pen and a phone and a chainsaw." If your administration were a movie, it could be titled "The Deep State Chainsaw Massacre," or perhaps "Honey, I Shrank the Government and Now We Can Drown It in the Bathtub."
I am by no means criticizing Your Majesties. To your credit, you have many exciting and ambitious plans: taking over Gaza, taking back the Panama Canal, pitting Canada against Greenland for the privilege of becoming our 51st state, and cutting America in for its well-deserved share of Ukraine’s natural resources. In addition, your DOGE minions will be kept busy tracking the money flowing into the treasury from tariffs—your crafty, brilliantly concocted plan to have other countries fund what’s left of our government!
President Trump has expressed admiration for the policies of the late President William McKinley, aka “the Tariff King,” aka "the President who got shot in Buffalo". “MAGA” apparently stands for “Make America Gilded Again,” that is, for the President’s desire to return us to the era of Robber Barons and Copper Kings, an admirable goal, to be sure; America was never richer (or happier!) than when 90% of its wealth was controlled by a small cabal of industrial tycoons, railway magnates, greedy financiers, and blatantly corrupt politicians.
Allow me to ask, Sirs: if we agree to sculpt your likeness(es) onto Mount Rushmore, name a majestic mountain or two after you, and let you invade Hawaii or the Philippines, then will you give us back our government?
I am not suggesting that the two of you are in effect holding the government hostage; I am simply noting that your current policies seem almost perversely designed to wreck it, and I do not believe that you were elected/appointed for that purpose; that is, exit polling back in November did not indicate that your supporters were eager to lose their jobs. We understand that you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs, but since eggs are now unaffordable, maybe we should hold off for a while on the omelets?
In closing, please consider this quote, which I have taken from Evan Hurst (at “The Moral High Ground”) and which references your dismantling of USAID programs: “People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.” 1 When it comes time to tally your achievements and to measure your greatness, don’t you want us to be able to count the dead? If you give our government back to us, we promise to make doing that a priority.
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1 I don't mean to overreact, but "even the programs to count the dead are cut" is the most chilling phrase I have heard in some time. I just wish it didn't refer to American policy.
{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat will resume his series on 'decline' just as soon as the current political maelstrom passes. Right now, the forecast calls for continued turbulence for the indefinite future; idiot winds are expected to persist from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol, and you don't need a weatherman to know which way they're blowing.}
“The powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.” (Stephen Miller, 2017)
“L’Etat, c’est moi.” (“I am the State,” attributed to Louis XIV of France)
It’s (Stephen) Miller time! Stephen Miller serves as Reich Minister chief of staff for President Donald “Long live the King!” Trump. In that capacity, Miller recently offered reporters what he called “a brief civics lesson”:
“A president is elected by the whole American people. He’s the only official in the entire government that is elected by the entire nation. Right? Judges are appointed. Members of Congress are elected at the district or state level. The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president. That president then appoints staff to then impose that democratic will onto the government.”
“Schoolhouse Rock,” this is not. Who knew, aside from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that there was such a thing as “the whole will of democracy” which could be “imbued” into one person and then “imposed” onto the government? I mean, elections have consequences and all that, but this seems a bit of a stretch.
For anyone unable to understand his civics lesson, Miller spelled it out:
“Americans vote for radical FBI reform, and FBI agents say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote for radical reform in our energy policies, but EPA bureaucrats say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote to end DEI – racist DEI policies, and lawyers in the Department of Justice say they don’t want to change. What President Trump is doing is he is removing federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people.”
That last statement will come as news to the more than 75 million Americans who voted against Donald Trump but who nonetheless consider themselves part of “the whole American people”. More important, Miller seems not to understand that the present controversy revolves around whether Trump’s orders are in fact “lawful”; Miller presumes they are, but others have their doubts.
Beyond that, however, a larger question must be posed: why do Miller’s remarks sound so ominously familiar?
Well, once upon a time, in a land far away, a group of prominent jurists issued this statement:
“The Fuhrer is the constituent delegate of the German people. The Fuhrer is the supreme judge of the nation. There is no position in the area of constitutional law in the Third Reich independent of this elemental will of the Fuhrer.” 1
One of those jurists (Hans Frank, later executed as a war criminal) later explained to colleagues: “Formerly we were in the habit of saying: ‘This is right or wrong.’ Today we must ask the question: ‘What would the Führer say?’ We are under the great obligation of recognizing as a holy work of our Folk Spirit the laws signed by Adolf Hitler. Hitler has received his authority from God.”
Around the same time, German State Secretary Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart said that “Those actions of judges that seek to limit the political decisions of the Führer and ultimately obstruct them are in direct opposition to the central legal conception of the National Socialist state, namely the Führer Principle.”
What is this ‘Fuhrer Principle’ (Fuhrerprinzip) to which Dr. Stuckart referred? In the words of Reich Justice Carl Rothenberger: “With the Fuhrer a man has risen within the German people who awakens the oldest, long forgotten times. Here is a man who in his position represents the ideal of the judge in its perfect sense, and the German people elected him for their judge—first of all, of course, as ‘judge’ over their fate in general, but also as ‘supreme magistrate and judge.’ The judge is on principle bound by the law. The laws are the orders of the Fuhrer.”
In short, “The ‘Fuhrer Principle’ compelled obedience to the supreme leader who—by personal command—could override the rule of law as exercised by elected parliaments, appointed committees, and bureaucracies.”
To the delight of Reich Minister Stephen Miller, our President has now arrogated to himself the power to disburse (or not) monies approved, appropriated, and earmarked by Congress. He has assumed the authority to fire, without cause or notice, anyone working in any federal executive agency; he has decreed that entire agencies and departments be shut down, though their existence is protected by statute. The President now asserts control over traffic policies in New York City and over high-school athletics in Maine; he openly conditions federal funding on the willingness of state governments, universities, and nonprofit groups to bend to his will. 2
These actions and policies represent an unprecedented attempt to redefine American democracy. To be clear: Donald Trump is not Hitler and MAGA America is not Nazi Germany. Regardless, the specter of authoritarianism looms just the same. DOGE God only knows how this is going to end, but it seems unlikely that it will end well. The best the rest of us can hope for is that it ends soon.
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1 From a statement issued by the Association of National Socialist German Jurists, of which Carl Schmitt was president. Schmitt’s views on democracy were summarized by John Keane: “The democratic principle supposes that the citizens’ will is sovereign, and that citizens are capable of expressing a unanimous opinion - a general will -on matters of common political concern. Essential to democracy is the argument that the real will of outvoted minorities is in fact identical with the general will, as and when it is expressed in the will of the majority.”
2 ICYMI, President Trump has also asserted American sovereignty, either now or in the future, over Panama, Greenland, Canada, and the Gaza Strip. He has demanded that Ukraine hand over a share of its mineral wealth in return for our military aid. He has withdrawn America from various international agreements (the Paris Climate Accords) and organizations (the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council). He has announced that America will begin issuing “gold cards,” an upgrade on the traditional “green card” for immigrants; the “gold cards” will cost $5 million apiece and will, obviously, attract a better class of immigrant. Revenue from the cards can help subsidize our purchase of Greenland!
The Fuhrer is always right.
{The new fascism, American-style, targets, among others, undocumented immigrants, transgender individuals, and employees of the federal government, aka ‘the swamp’ and the ‘Deep State’. Large swathes of the American population need to understand a simple truth: MAGA does not have your best interests at heart. In fact, MAGA relishes the idea of hurting you and disrupting your life.}
This may come as a surprise, but the DOGE efforts to slash the federal workforce are not rooted in a desire for “government efficiency” or in a need to save money; they are rooted in contempt for the government as an institution and in contempt for government workers in general. 1
Way back when, Ronald Reagan set the tone: “The nine most frightening words in the English language,” he explained, “are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” That remark was temperate compared to Grover Norquist’s declaration, “My goal is to get government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
More recently, Charlie Kirk, the right-wing wunderkind/grifter responsible for Turning Point USA and associated scams, said the quiet part out loud:
Federal workers have jobs that we pay for…they don't do anything of value. They show up, get a cup of coffee, reshuffle some papers, go into a conference room, and they're out the door by 3:30 or 4 o'clock. They operate as — not them personally — but they operate as worthless parasites on the American taxpayer. They’re not doing anything that they can even report on. They simply exist. They are leeches on us, and this is the core of what Elon is surfacing, what President Trump is flushing out. 2
Then he said it again, louder:
A lot of these people are less than desirable. They could not hold a job at your local Chipotle. In fact, your local Uber Eats driver, your local Chipotle worker, they're working their tail off every day, and God bless them. But the federal work — those are plushy jobs where nothing is done. These jobs never should have existed in the first place. There are millions of jobs that should not exist. There are famously entire departments of the government just filled with people taking months on end to do what would take a day in a start-up or any real company with a bottom line.
They have been fleecing us over the last couple of decades. For every single person out there that has had a private sector job, and there are millions of you listening and watching, you should be angered and incensed by this. They think that if you have a federal job, we can't ask a question.
The federal government is not just slow and bloated and inefficient, it's largely become 80% unnecessary — of course, there's core function of the federal government that should exist — 80% of these jobs should not exist, 90% should not exist, and they're proving our point. 3
MAGA is not our friend. MAGA voters individually—many of them, at least—may be decent human beings, but the MAGA movement as a whole is less of an ideology than it is an outbreak of sociopathy. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) even resorted to the famously cynical trope, "You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs." Americans (including me) should be ashamed for having let this happen; in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.”
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1 Unless, like Jesse Waters on Fox, you happen to know one of them, in which case, “You have a friend in Jesse.”
2 Charlie Kirk says government workers "operate as worthless parasites on the American taxpayer" | Media Matters for America (For a counterpoint, see my upcoming essay, “Charlie Kirk Is a Worthless Parasite”.)
3 Charlie Kirk says 90% of federal jobs "should not exist" | Media Matters for America (For a counterpoint, see my forthcoming book, Charlie Kirk Should Not Exist, soon to be published by FedEx/Kinko’s.
Charlie Kirk in a reflective moment...
{Like many of you, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has received an urgent memo from our DOGE overlords demanding that he justify his existence. It’s like the old saying: the only things certain in life are death, taxes, and periodic demands to justify your existence. Luckily for Pascal, he has been hard at work, as this reply demonstrates.}
Dear Elon Musk, Esquire, Sir, Your Excellency, Your Highness:
First, allow me to congratulate you on your recent promotion to BOSS of US, a post which includes plenipotentiary powers. I have heard that money cannot buy happiness, but I am sure that “more money than god” plus “unlimited power” should do the trick.
Second, in response to your memo demanding that I account for my work time and productivity this past week, I am proud to provide that information.
I hope these efforts justify my continued existence and employment, Sir. Working together under your leadership, we can Make America Great Again!
Yours,
Pascal the existential Russian blue cat GS-5, Department of Rodent Control
{It is a banner day in our nation when a Cretin-American like Kash Patel succeeds on the basis of nothing but merit, hard work, and a basket of deplorable beliefs.}
Come on down, newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel, the winner of today’s STFU tribute!
A proud Cretin-American who is both refreshingly honest and undaunted by critics, Kash speaks his mind, such as it is. Here are some choice passages from his book Government Gangsters:
Government gangsters are the group of individuals, career bureaucrats who have been installed by what we call the deep state into every agency and department in the United States government. In the most extreme circumstances, corrupt bureaucrats imagine a crime and then manufacture the evidence to pin on their opponents. They are thugs in suits, nothing more than government gangsters who act like they are righteous.
The problems we face are not just the result of our leaders’ incompetence but more so their malice; how the media is not just one-sided but liars. What became known as the Deep State isn’t some crazy conspiracy but a real force—and the most dangerous threat to our democracy.
The Trump era was, more than anything else, an apocalypse in the truest sense of the word. It was an unveiling. It was a time when suddenly we came to see that unaccountable elites in Washington armed with the powers of the state believe that anything is justified—absolutely anything—to preserve their power. We know what we’re up against: a coordinated, ideologically rigid force independent from the people that manipulates the levers of politics and justice for its own gain and self-preservation. This group is the Deep State.
The Deep State is the politicization of core American institutions and the federal governmental apparatus by a significant number of high-level cultural leaders and officials who, acting through networks of networks, disregard objectivity, weaponize the law, spread disinformation, spurn fairness, or even violate their oaths of office for political and personal gain, all at the expense of equal justice and American national security. Within the government, they operate at the highest levels of almost every agency, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to the intelligence community to the Department of Defense (DoD). In many ways, this bureaucratic wing of the Deep State is the most dangerous.
[Kash Patel, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy (Post Hill Press)]
Don’t fail to borrow Government Gangsters from your local public library and then deposit it unread in your local landfill!
Kash has explained to Steve Bannon what a second Trump administration will do:
We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media. We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice, and this is why they hate us. This is why we're ‘tyrannical’. This is why we're ‘dictators,’ because we're actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.
In 2023, Kash announced to the world the fraudulent nature of American elections:
"[Trump] has every right to tell the world that the 2020, 2016 and every other election in between was rigged by our government because they were."
Accused of embracing conspiracy theories, Kash responded by sharing his views on critical thinking:
“What I’m telling you is there is truth in a lot of things that many people say, and what I’m putting out there is the truth. And how about we have some fun along the way? Let’s have fun with the truth.” 1
Finally, consider this impassioned sermon from Government Gangsters:
The price of rule by the Deep State is high—nothing less than the end of self-government in America. That is not hyperbole. Our battle with the Deep State isn’t just another theater in the fight between Democrats and Republicans. At the root, this isn’t partisan at all. It’s about the nature of our government. The Deep State is a cabal of unelected tyrants who think they should determine who the American people can and cannot elect as president, who think they get to decide what the president can and cannot do, and who believe they have the right to choose what the American people can and cannot know. This is a battle between the people and the corrupt ruling class. It’s a choice between whether America decides its policies and direction by vote, or whether we are ruled by the whims, egos, greed, and power struggles of a small body of incestuous, power-hungry, unelected oligarchs in Washington who hate us and play by their own made-up rules. If they win, we don’t have a democracy, a republic, or a sovereign people anymore. We have a tyranny that has arrogated for itself the right to wield absolute control over the American people.
All Americans should be very afraid. There are no depths to which the Deep State will not descend, crimes they will not commit, or lives they will not destroy to get their way.
With all due disrespect, allow me to say: STFU, Kash Patel. Every time you open your mouth you increase the amount of stupidity in the air. 2
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1 “Having Fun with the Truth” is a great slogan for the entire MAGA movement!
2 Listen, if we can measure the humidity in the air, why can't we also measure the stupidity? There are days when the stupid in America is thick enough to choke a horse; we should issue "High Stupidity" warnings and create highway signs that say WARNING: STUPIDITY ZONE AHEAD!
Ask for it by name!
Today in "Unhelpful Punditry":
According to Rachel Bade (writing at Politico), Democrats upset about the Trump administration’s targeting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), are picking the wrong hill to die on; most Americans, Ms. Bade decrees, don’t care about foreign aid. As she explains, “Billionaire Elon Musk’s campaign to dismantle the federal bureaucracy piece by piece at Trump’s behest, starting with the U.S. Agency for International Development, lit a fire under many Democratic lawmakers — several of whom rallied Monday outside USAID headquarters. But relaunching the resistance to defend one of the least popular corners of the federal budget could be a monster miscalculation…”
Strategically, say the prominent political strategists consulted by Ms. Bade, USAID is a pawn that Democrats can afford to sacrifice:
Some prominent Democrats told me they have serious strategic reservations about how their party is fighting back. When I asked veteran strategist David Axelrod whether Democrats were “walking into a trap” on defending foreign aid, he literally finished my sentence. “My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’” he said. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”
Educating people about the value of foreign aid, or about the actual portion of the federal budget allotted for that purpose, or about the specific programs being financed and the rationale for financing them, would be far too much trouble. Better, say the strategists, to throw USAID under the bus and to wait for an easier, more obviously winnable case:
Rahm Emanuel — the former House leader, Chicago mayor and diplomat — told me much the same: “You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch. And my view is — while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador — that’s not the hill I’m going to die on,” he said.
The strategists have spoken. Ms. Bade (whose publisher, Politico, is now itself the subject of MAGA outrage) acknowledges that “The political considerations in vocally defending foreign aid are of course entirely separate from the humanitarian and national security concerns at play,” but she brushes that aside. “Democrats aren’t reading the room,” she writes. “They’ve raised alarms about Trump and Musk firing inspectors general, purging FBI officials who probed Trump. and offering to buy out thousands more federal workers. Only a fraction of Americans have a personal connection to any of it.”
Ms. Bade does not entertain the thought that her strategists’ strategy might be short-sighted at best. The dismantling of the administrative state will be done (is being done) piece by piece, agency by agency, department by department, line item by line item, no one of which, in isolation, will constitute a hill worth dying on. Public broadcasting? The National Weather Service? The Bureau of Land Management? The constituency for most government programs is never more than “a fraction of Americans;" if we're waiting for unanimous consent before we stand up, we'll be waiting a long time.
In other words: first they came for USAID, and we shrugged it off. Then they came for Inspectors General, and no one cared. Next, they purged FBI workers and weeded out unreliable federal employees, but who noticed? When they came for Politico, Rachel Bade put in a call for help, but David Axelrod was out to dinner with Rahm Emmanuel and couldn’t be reached; the two of them were reportedly discussing over dessert which hill they would be willing to die on.
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Democrats Are Falling For Trump and Musk's Foreign Aid Trap - POLITICO
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