Trumptatorship 4: Speech, Free & Otherwise

This is the 4th in a series of articles covering Donald Trump's efforts to end liberal democracy in the United States and replace it with authoritarian autocracy--a Trumptatorship--and the grim consequences of that. The others:
Trumptatorship 1: The Crisis
Trumptatorship 2: Of Enemies, Alien & Domestic
Trumptatorship 3: Gangster Government

The last few weeks have seen Donald Trump and his underlings repeatedly tease the idea of illegally renditioning Americans to a torture dungeon in El Salvador, Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has suggested Trump could suspend habeas corpus--something a president has absolutely no power to do--if the courts don't allow Trump to proceed with unconstitutional mass-renditions/deportations. Appearing on NBC's MEET THE PRESS, Trump was asked by interviewer Kristen Welker, "don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?" Trump's response: "I don't know."

Under the Trumptatorship, that's what we call "days that end in 'y.'"

In their first months in office, newly-elected American presidents tend to have a great deal of political capital, Americans grant a new administration a sort of grace period of relatively high approval and it has become a tradition for each new president to use his first 100 days to press congress for lots of presidency-defining signature legislation. In his first administration, Trump signed 24 bills into law. But since taking office in January, Trump has signed only 5 bills, the fewest of any president in the last 70 years, and the only substantial one was passed during Joe Biden's presidency.[1] He has lots of executive orders though--142 in his first 100 days, 161 as of this writing[2]--and his EOs aren't like any other president's EOs. As these articles have been covering, they purport to overturn and rewrite wide swathes of U.S. law, state and local laws, even the constitution itself, and centralize unprecedented power in the hands of the chief executive, to officially declare which political views are acceptable to the government (with unacceptable views targeted for government suppression), even to authoritatively (and inaccurately) dictate matters of history, nature , biology and the "culture," as if any of this has anything to do with the legitimate job of a president (deviations from those dictates also targeted for suppression). His several official Proclamations and Memoranda are of the same character. Trump's ultimate vision of America this time around doesn't involve things like congress or courts, checks or balances, laws, the constitution or a free, liberal democratic society. In his first 100 days, Trump focused on building that vision, a sort of alt-presidency that functions entirely outside the bounds of the law and the constitution as a reactionary despotism that destroys the constitutional order that empowered it, one that seizes control of the institutions of the civil society, one in which the only "law" is the whims of the dictator and where the biggest, most unforgivable "crime" is refusing to submit to them.

The dictator dictating.

After spending the entirety of his first presidency weaponizing the government against those he saw as enemies then 4 years out of office spent disingenuously whining that the government's lax and belated efforts to prosecute him for a few of his many crimes amounted to inappropriate political "weaponization" of the state against he and his cronies, Trump's first executive order in January had some things to say about the subject. In outlining its "purpose," it weaves a laughable fantasy version of the Biden presidency, and preposterously unearned aggrievement gushes through its every line but through those fumes, it also uses as premise some alleged principles:

"The American people have witnessed the previous administration engage in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community against those perceived political opponents in the form of investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related actions. These actions appear oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives. Many of these activities appear to be inconsistent with the Constitution and/or the laws of the United States, including those activities directed at parents protesting at school board meetings, Americans who spoke out against the previous administration's actions, and other Americans who were simply exercising constitutionally protected rights.

"The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process. It targeted individuals who voiced opposition to the prior administration's policies with numerous Federal investigations and politically motivated funding revocations, which cost Americans access to needed services."

So that kind of thing is bad, right? Well, while the EO was called "Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government," it doesn't actually order it ended. Rather, it orders the agencies of government to review the Biden administration's alleged political "weaponization" and report to him "with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions." In short, while purporting to condemn the practice, it's really just an example of it--the dictator settling scores while consolidating power. In the Trumptatorship, there are no legitimate disagreements, just enemies, and the enemies of the dictator become Enemies Of The State. Using the state to go after such Enemies has been a major focus of the Trump regime and Trump has actually carried out--quite aggressively carried out--the things for which he often mendaciously accused Biden and condemned in that EO.

In the Trumptatorship, Enemies Of The State certainly don't have things like 1st Amendment rights. Trump has always had the fascist's omnivorous utilitarianism when it comes to the rhetoric of discontent and one of the poses he's stricken in recent years has been that of a defender of the 1st Amendment, which he has adopted while, out of the other end of his firehose of falsehoods, regularly spewing calls for extensive restrictions on 1st Amendment freedoms. In another of his first-day orders, "he" (meaning whichever underling wrote it for him) praised the 1st Amendment as "essential to the success of our Republic," an instrument that "enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference." He asserts that his predecessor

"trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans' speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve. Under the guise of combatting 'misinformation,' 'disinformation,' and 'malinformation,' the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government's preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society."

He ordered that it would the policy of his administration to "secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech, ensure that no agent of government would facilitate any conduct that would abridge free speech and ensure that no taxpayer resources went to any such project. He called the EO "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship."

Sounds great, in isolation. Presidential, even.

But even for one mercifully unacquainted with Trump, his complete lack of seriousness was there in the order itself, which concludes, "This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person." One of his other first-day executive orders gets down to what his regime is really about, juxtaposing aliens in the U.S. "who intend to commit terrorist attacks" with those who simply hold political views that are protected by the 1st Amendment but that Trump dislikes and calling for government action against both as if they were the same thing. This kind of not-at-all-clever juxtaposition has become standard in the Trumptatorship. Let's call it a Trumpstaposition.[3]

Only days after Trump declared in a speech to congress that "I've stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America," he sent Homeland Security goons to kidnap Mahmoud Khalil, a former student at Columbia University and legal permanent resident, for the "crime" of protesting mass-murder committed in Gaza by the current government of Israel with the support of the United States. Agents abducted Khalil near his apartment complex in New York,[4] where he lives with his wife--an American, who was about to give birth to their first child--and spirited him away to 5 different locations across multiple jurisdictions, a ploy the regime has been using to try to stay ahead of any potential rapid legal countermeasures by its targets. Ultimately, Khalil was warehoused at a detention center in Louisiana, over a thousand miles from his family, friends and his lawyer, and under the legal jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit, the most backwards, "conservative" circuit in the federal judiciary.

Trump took to social media--and charged through the looking-glass--to crow about this.

But Khalil is anti-Hamas, has repeatedly condemned antisemitism and it's precisely because he protested the slaughter of innocent people that Trump is trying to deport him. If the observer not sufficiently churched in American public affairs finds all of this inexplicably incongruous--as much so as Trump, who has long cultivated support from the ugly white nationalist subculture, leaving untouched that part of his base that is the home of violent antisemitism in the U.S. while representing himself as a crusader against antisemitism[5]--the Rosetta Stone is that all Trump actually means by "pro-Hamas", "supporting terrorism", "antisemitism", "pro-Jihadist" and other such phrases is opposition to the gruesome mass-murder carried out by the far-right Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu,[6] an international fugitive wanted in the Hague for crimes against humanity.[7] The very crimes Trump is trying to deport Khalil for opposing.[8]

A legal permanent resident can only have his green card pulled for things like committing crimes, but the Trump regime didn't even accuse Khalil, who has no criminal record, of having done anything illegal. Rather, it has asserted it can go around federal law on such residents and deport Khalil for speech fully protected by the 1st Amendment because of--you'll love this part--a section of an antisemitic McCarthy-era law. The McCarran-Walter Act, better known as the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), was designed to, among other things, exclude Jewish Holocaust survivors from the U.S. under the pretext that they were "subversives." The regime is citing a section of it that allows for the exclusion/deportation of foreigners from the U.S. on ideological grounds, despite that portion of the law having been largely repealed decades ago and the constitutionality of what remains being extremely dubious. The revised version says an alien isn't deportable

"because of the alien's past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien's admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest."

The immigration judge hearing Khalil's case had to threaten to release Khalil and close the case to get the regime to produce such a determination, which, undated, was probably created only at that point and to satisfy that demand.[9] It amounted to an hilariously empty, padded page-and-a-half letter in which, in lieu of any evidence of anything, Trump's Sec. of State Marco Rubio just wallowed in the Trumptatorship's favorite pastime: defamation.

Rubio writes "I have determined that the activities and presence of these aliens in the United States [Khalil being one of them] would have potentially serious foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest" because of their participation in "antisemitic protests and disruptive activities." Khalil has condemned and rejected antisemitism[10]--again, by "antisemitic protests," the regime simply means any opposition to the atrocities of the Israeli government and U.S. support for it--and any "disruptive activities," real or, as here, imagined, are completely irrelevant.

The aliens' "public action and continued presence," Rubio asserts, "undermine U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States." Even if the latter was true, rather than merely libelous, it wouldn't be any sort of "foreign policy interest" and would be irrelevant, and the letter provides no evidence whatsoever of anything Khalil has ever actually said or done that was antisemitic or threatened Jewish students, much less how anything he's ever said or done would have "serious foreign policy consequences" or undermine any foreign policy interest, compelling or otherwise.[11]

Rubio's larger "logic" that Khalil should be deported because "condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective" subordinates the 1st Amendment itself to, in this case, made-up foreign policy interests fabricated specifically for that purpose, and--pay attention here--applies with equal force to Americans as to aliens.

Having nothing more with which to hit Khalil than his 1st-Amendment-protected speech, the regime continued its defamation campaign against him.[12] The limited jurisdiction of the immigration court--such courts are employees of the executive branch, not part of the judiciary--didn't allow it to consider the matter beyond the Rubio declaration, so Khalil's substantive 1st Amendment/due process lawsuit against the regime will be heard in a federal court in New Jersey, which has jurisdiction over the habeas petition rapidly filed by his lawyer after his abduction (and while the regime was still moving him around to try to avoid such action).

The abduction of Khalil was, indeed, just the first of "many to come."

Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish-born Ph.D student attending Tuft's University on a student visa, was kidnapped on a public street in Massachusetts by 6 masked ICE goons, stuffed into an unmarked black vehicle then transferred around to 5 different locations before being deposited in a facility in Basile, Louisiana. Her "crime": she was one of 4 co-authors of an editorial in a student newspaper arguing that, because of the ongoing mass-murder campaign by Israel, the university shouldn't just dismiss a student resolution to divest from companies with ties to that country. This was characterized by a DHS spokesman as her having, in the words of a PBS report, "engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group." PBS noted that "the department did not provide evidence of that support," and the editorial, which never even so much as mentions Hamas, is her only known pro-Palestinian activism. The Washington Post reported that in a memo produced by the State Department prior to Öztürk's abduction,

"the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged."

Swift work by Öztürk's lawyer has ensured she'll stay in the U.S. until her case is finished. Over two months after Öztürk was kidnapped, the Trump regime has produced no evidence whatsoever against her, except that editorial.

Mohsen Mahdawi, who is pursuing a master's degree at Columbia University, has been a legal permanent U.S. resident for a decade and is working toward becoming a U.S. citizen. ICE goons arrested him while he was attending his naturalization interview, one of the final steps in that process. His "crime," as with the others: opposition to Netanyahu's butchery in Gaza. DHS planned to put Mahdawi through the usual jurisdiction-hopping shenanigans but some very quick work by Mahdawi's lawyer preventing him from being removed from his home state of Vermont. On 30 April, Judge Geoffrey Crawford released Mahdawi on bail. The regime's response was the usual. As recounted by the New York Times,

"Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, denounced Judge Crawford’s decision in a post on social media.

"'When you advocate for violence, glorify and support terrorists that relish the killing of Americans and harass Jews, that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country,' Ms. McLaughlin said, without offering any evidence to support her accusations."

Mahdawi is a Buddhist who preaches non-violence, has no criminal history and is an anti-antisemite.[13]

The stories are many and all variants on the same theme. Since its revision--nearly 4 decades ago--the portion of the Immigration and Nationality Act being cited by the Trump gang as its pretext for this has never been invoked based solely on lawful, constitutionally-protected speech and activities. In only a matter of weeks, Trump has invoked it in that way hundreds of times, an ongoing war on the constitution aimed at crushing these Enemies Of The State. As March crept to a close, CNN reported,

"Around the country, scholars have been picked up, in some cases by masked immigration agents, and held in detention centers, sometimes a thousand miles from their homes with little warning and often with few details about why they were being detained.

"'It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,' Rubio said at a news conference in Guyana, where he was meeting with leaders."

That the Secretary of State is spending his time doing this certainly helps explain the present state of U.S. foreign affairs. In these matters, the regime has standardized the kind of Gestapo tactics I've described, showing up in plainclothes in unmarked vehicles, wearing masks and whisking away its victims for speaking thoughts the regime finds intolerable.[14]

Our own loss of fundamental freedom makes for quite the spectacle too. The world sends its young students to be educated in the U.S., the alleged bastion of free expression, only to see them Gestapo'd for merely exercising that freedom while an execrable menagerie of screeching idiots who represents the repressive regime responsible goes on television raving about how going to school in the U.S. is a "privilege" and tells the world its children are terrorists and hate-mongers who deserve such mistreatment.

If the Trumptatorship is allowed to establish itself, they're not the only ones in for it; all of us will be.

In another front in this same war, Trump is already targeting our ability to resist Trumptatorship. One of those critical freedoms enshrined in the 1st Amendment is the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances but in February, Trump began issuing a series of executive orders targeting law firms because they'd represented clients in causes Trump disliked--often representing clients suing the Trump regime itself. The firm Jenner & Block is representing clients currently suing the regime for illegally freezing EPA grant money, for illegally freezing funding to healthcare providers if they perform gender transition treatments and, as Reuters puts it, are part of the legal team "representing immigrant-rights groups challenging Trump's efforts to curb asylum rights." Wilmer. Cutler. Pickering. Hale and Dorr--WilmerHale--has been representing clients suing the regime over Trump's mass-firing of inspectors general. And so on.

As inappropriate as they are unprecedented, these EOs attributed the causes these law firms have undertaken on behalf of their clients, which, in the Trumptatorship's typical Slander Mode, they grotesquely misrepresent, to the firms themselves. Firms stand condemned for working with "activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification."[15] They're roasted for engaging in "obvious partisan representations to achieve political ends." Representing clients challenging draconian anti-immigration practices is characterized as "the obstruction of efforts to prevent illegal aliens from committing horrific crimes and trafficking deadly drugs within our borders." Taking on clients challenging laws intended to restrict voting rights is presented as "supporting efforts designed to enable noncitizens to vote." And so on. The grievances Trump's ghostwriters have levied against the firms are for political differences with Trump--for their speech.

As this suggests, the EOs ubiquitously employ language that describe the firms as Enemies Of The State. For taking on these disfavored cases--that is, doing their jobs in the constitutional scheme--they're said to engage in "conduct detrimental to critical American interests"; to take "actions that threaten public safety and national security, limit constitutional freedoms, degrade the quality of American elections" and "undermine bedrock American principles"; to "threaten the national security." They "undermine justice and the interests of the United States" and "democratic elections, the integrity of our courts, and honest law enforcement."

All of the firms targeted in EOs have some connection to people who have investigated Trump. Covington & Burling is attacked for taking on, as a client, Jack Smith, who formerly worked as special counsel during the latter portion of the Biden administration, investigating and prosecuting Trump. Perkins Coie represented the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, when she ran against Trump, then represented clients who challenged Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election after he lost.[16] Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison (Paul Weiss) is kicked around because a partner in the firm had previously worked with special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election and filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Washington D.C. Attorney General against the pro-Trump terrorists who carried out the 6 Jan. assault on the U.S. Capitol. WilmerHale is scourged because Mueller worked for the firm in the past. Trump calls the Mueller investigation "one of the most partisan investigations in American history," one that "epitomizes the weaponization of government"--an investigation that, in the real world, was carried out entirely by the 1st Trump administration. "This weaponization of the justice system must not be rewarded, let alone condoned," raves Trump, in sentiment echoed throughout these EOs.

Readers will have to decide if it's sentiment offered with a complete lack of self-awareness or in the absence of sufficient minimal decency to feel shame. Trump's EOs order the blanket suspension of the security clearances of anyone who holds one and works for these firms. The firms are not only barred from receiving any federal contracts but anyone who has employed these firms to represent them in any matter is barred from getting federal contracts as well. Trump orders the  Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to investigate the firms' hiring practices--something Trump has no legal authority whatsoever to do.[17] Agencies of the government are barred from hiring current or former employees of these firms without obtaining a multi-part waiver. Employees of the law firms are barred from government buildings--courthouses--and government employees are barred from interacting with them. With no hint of constitutionally-mandated due process, Trump's EOs amount to a death penalty for the targeted firms, federal government retaliation for the "crimes" of representing clients attempting to petition the government for a redress of grievances, taking positions on political issues--speech--that the dictator dislikes, for challenging the dictator and his dictatorial policies. Not just aiming to neutralize these specific firms by blocking them from challenging his regime but warning off any law firm from representing clients challenging the regime.

Trump has blatantly used these EOs as a shakedown. Extortion. Systematized in this way, a protection racket by a gangster government. Paul Weiss and 8 others who were threatened by the Trump regime with similar action rolled over, turning over partial control of their firms to the Trumptatorship in exchange for Trump foregoing such actions against them. In exchange for Trump reversing his EO, Paul Weiss agreed to

"adopting a policy of political neutrality with respect to client selection and attorney hiring; taking on a wide range of pro bono matters representing the full political spectrum; committing to merit-based hiring, promotion, and retention, instead of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' policies"

...all as determined by the Trump regime.The firm also agreed to provide the regime with $40 million in pro bono legal services. So far, the 9 firms that gave in to Trump have collectively pledged nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for Trump's regime. One will struggle in vain to find any provision of the U.S,. Constitution or the laws adopted under it that empowers, authorizes, condones or allows the president to seize control of private law firms or any precedent for any president even attempting to do so--this is strictly the work of would-be dictators. Offering or accepting a thing of value in exchange for an official act, on the other hand, is, in in U.S. law, the definition of bribery, one of the criminal offenses the constitution specifically enumerates as grounds for impeachment and removal. Trump is doing this openly.

Four of the firms targeted by Trump have gone to court to challenge the EOs. All four swiftly obtained restraining orders blocking the administration from acting on the EOs. The Trumptatorship went into court and asserted that, by its concept of government, the courts couldn't even review, much less rule on, these actions. As of this writing, three of the four suits--those by Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale--have already been resolved at the district court level, resulting in summary judgments in favor of the firms that permanently enjoin the Trumptatorship from enforcing any part of its EOs targeting them. The rulings are often quite eloquent in their defense of constitutional principles and authored by judges who seem to be in disbelief by what the regime was attempting. It's a heartening result but--as with so many of these things--no confidence can be placed in either the judiciary, with the present toxic majority at the Supreme Court atop it, upholding it in the event of appeals actions or the regime abiding by the courts if the courts uphold the rulings against it.

These actions are only a part of a broader campaign by the Trumptatorship against lawyers who oppose it, or, more to the point, lawyers who represent Americans who sue the regime in opposition to its actions. On 22 March, Trump issued a Memoranda condemning what it called "grossly unethical misconduct" by lawyers and law firms, which, it asserted, is "far too common." It gives away the game, saying it aims to address "baseless partisan attacks" by lawyers. Actual misconduct, as opposed to merely opposing the Trumptatorship, is the jurisdiction of the judiciary and of the various state bars, not the executive, and the document orders the Attorney General to seek sanctions and disciplinary action against attorneys "who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States or in matters before executive departments and agencies of the United States"--opposing the Trumptatorship--but then, getting to the real point, it says lawyers who are so targeted will face executive-branch actions mirroring those directed against the large law firms. It orders the AG to review cases against the federal government for the past 8 years, so as to get in those who opposed Trump during his first administration. The document, of course, says nothing about any of the grossly unethical conduct by the lawyers employed by the Trump regime, who, at the direction of their superiors, have, in the last few months, routinely lied to and misled federal judges, defied court orders and are now subject to multiple pending investigations for criminal contempt.

The law firms are only one institution the Trumptatorship has tried to take over (earlier articles in this run have covered others, and the next will probably be about still more of them). They have the resources to provide strong representation to Americans against the Trumptatorship juggernaut while the other branches of government still stand and the regime, having not yet consolidated sufficient power to entirely disregard them, still pretends to care they exist.

As bad as it is, what I've been describing in this piece is how things begin, not how they end. Alongside occasionally lip-servicing respect for some of the constitutional protections addressed here, Trump is in the process of ending them, setting the precedent for endless encroachments against them until they're undone, showing great enthusiasm for the task. When they're gone, they won't just be gone for foreign students and wealthy law-firms. While it's exactly what some think they want, most Americans are not down with a Trumptatorship (and most of those who think they want it will only realize they don't when it's too late). But if you don't want it, you have to fight it, because Trump isn't taking any rest-breaks here.

It can't be strongly enough stressed that the other institutions of the government, which are supposed to resist this sort of thing, cannot, as presently constituted, be relied upon to either protect you or to prevent this. Congress is in the sway of Republicans who, instead of asserting that institution's prerogatives or doing anything to stand up for the Constitution or the rule of law, have been trying, all along, to grant even more power to the dictator. While Trump has amassed a loss-record in the courts that is staggering, the Supreme Court, with its current monstrous majority, stands poised to rubber-stamp most of what Trump wants to do to you. In this situation, having the other branches line up behind Trump is the worst possible outcome; it would mean there was nothing left to save. But even if congress and the Supreme Court doesn't go whole-hog on the Trumptatorship, the damage they can do--and are already beginning to do--by going along with it can be fatal to the American project. That's where we are.

As I've said before, we don't need some return to pre-Trump "normalcy"; that was the noxious environment that produced Trump and MAGA in the first place. We need something better, and you can build something better. But the threat right now is existential. If Trump succeeds, there won't be anything to build or any way to build it, or anything but a squalid dictatorship over which you will have no meaningful say. Even if he doesn't get his grand Trumptatorship, what he does get, without massive resistance, won't be recognizable as the United States of America. You can't rely on things to fix themselves this time; Trump is gutting the checks and balances. If you don't want this, if you want that Something Better, you have to get involved.

--j.

---

 [1] Of them, three just repealed regulatory rules promulgated by federal agencies during Joe Biden's presidency, one was just a stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown, and the only one of great significance was the awful Laken Riley Act, passed under Biden but held up by congressional Republicans so that Trump could take credit for signing it. It will be a black mark against everyone involved in passing it until the courts strike it down.

[2] Franklin Roosevelt was noted for issuing a lot of EOs; Trump blew past FDR's first-100-day total (99) in only 64 days and kept on trucking. By the end of a hundred days, he'd issued 142, which is more than the total of first-100-day EOs issued by his 6 predecessors combined.

 [3] The EO says "the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles"--language Trump ubiquitously uses to describe the views of his domestic political opponents--"and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security." Continuing that juxtaposition--that Trumpstaposition--it even tries to incorporate Trump's pose as a defender of 1st Amendment protections while attacking those protections, calling on his regime's officials to offer recommendations

"to protect the American people from the actions of foreign nationals who have undermined or seek to undermine the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people, including, but not limited to, our Citizens' rights to freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment, who preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands, or who provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists."

That's how you call for ending fundamental constitutional protections in the name of those protections. Just call it "culture"; the rest is easy.

 [4] Agents who had been surveilling Khalil approached him and told him his student visa was being revoked. But Khalil isn't present on a student visa--he's a legal permanent resident with a green card. When the ICE goons were informed of this, they said it had been revoked too. They claimed to have a warrant for his arrest. When, over the phone, Khalil's lawyer said she needed to see that warrant, the ICE agent simply hung up. It later turned out the ICE goons were lying and had no warrant of any kind.

 [5] On 14 May, ProPublica identified multiple individuals "with close ties to antisemitic extremists" who are currently serving as officials in the Trump regime itself.

 [6] Trump has long parroted the long-running far-right press fantasy version of alleged college campus "antisemitism" during the Israeli government's campaign of mass-murder in Gaza whereby every protest of that slaughter is slapped with that label, with an extensive accompanying mythology to be used as a cudgel against dissent and institutions of higher learning. In January, Trump issued an executive order stating, "It shall be the policy of the United States to combat anti-Semitism vigorously," but it's focused on--and lost in--that fantasy and refuses to acknowledge that constitutionally-protected protest of that murder campaign and its U.S. backing even exists. The "fact"-sheet released with that order is an even more explicit--but more to the actual point--trip to Looney-Tunes-ville, ranting against "leftist, anti-American colleges and universities," which, it says, "have been infested with radicalism like never before" and asserting that

"Immediately after the jihadist terrorist attacks against the people of Israel on October 7, 2023, pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals began a campaign of intimidation, vandalism, and violence on the campuses and streets of America."

It characterizes protest of Israeli violence as "pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation" and "pro-jihadist protests" by "Hamas sympathizers" and promises to "quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses."

 [7] Netanyahu is also being prosecuted in Israel itself for bribery, corruption and other charges.

 [8] Further clarifying all of this--if any further clarification is needed--Trump sanctioned the International Criminal Court for its actions against Netanyahu and even declared the matter a national emergency!

 [9] The statue also requires that, if the Sec. of State makes such a determination, he has to submit it to the chairmen of the relevant congressional committees along with the "reasons for the determination." As of this writing, Rubio doesn't appear to have done so.

[10] In reporting on the campus protests back in April 2024, CNN talked to Khalil.

"'I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Anti-Semitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,' Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week..."

He added that Jewish students "are an integral part of this movement."

[11] After the fact (and as if acknowledging the legal "case" against Khalil was weak), the regime began arguing that Khalil had lied on his green-card application regarding past employment; NBC News did a deep dive into that "evidence" and showed it to be nonsense, sourced to inaccurate "reporting" in far-right tabloids.

[12] Rubio posted an AP story on the case on X, with the text, "We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported." The Department of Homeland Security posted that "Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization." White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt raved,

"Mahmoud Khalil was an individual who was given the privilege of coming to this country to study at one of our nation's finest universities and colleges, uh, and he took advantage of that opportunity, of that privilege by siding with terrorists, Hamas terrorists who have killed innocent men, women and children. This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted, uh, college campaign classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda, flyers with the logo of Hamas."

Note the weasel-wording. The regime has no evidence that Khalil did any of that, so it's strictly guilt by association. Someone at some rally Khalil may have attended may have handed out some flyers, something over which he has absolutely no control, and that makes him pro-Hamas. Khalil's Jewish classmates have come to his defense on this. One relates how, in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of 7 Oct., 2023, "Mahmoud condemned the violent, hateful act by Hamas terrorists and expressed grief for the immediate loss of life and continued impact on the communities." Later, he writes,

"I saw Mahmoud... harassed by other students, asking him if he supported Hamas. Mahmoud would not raise his voice or respond with aggression, but instead simply answer the question by condemning Hamas and all forms of violent extremism... [H]e never wavered in his denouncement of all forms of violent extremism, including the actions of Hamas on October 7th."

"Mahmoud has protected Jewish students at Columbia like myself more than the university ever has," wrote another.

[13] In a Nov. 2023 article about a pro-Palestinian rally organized by Jewish Voice For Peace, the Columbia Spectator reports, that an unidentified bystander began "screaming antisemitic and anti-black statements, then attempted to instigate fights with numerous students. Mahdawi was present and confronted the fellow.

"After the incident, Mahdawi walked to Low Steps and grabbed the megaphone to address the crowd at the demonstration.

"Mahdawi directly denounced the individual, saying, 'Shame on the person who called [for] "death to Jews,"' which broke out into chants of 'shame on you' from the demonstrators... Mahdawi ended his speech by acknowledging and appreciating the solidarity of 'Jewish brothers and sisters who stand with us here today.' Referring to the antisemitic incident, he further condemned the individual, saying 'you don’t represent us.'"

[14]  The completely inappropriate Secret Police-style character of these interactions, repeated constantly for months now, isn't just Trumptatorship messaging to Enemies Of The State but seems deliberately intended to provoke some sort of desperate, violent response from the victim, who correctly perceives they're being kidnapped, as a bloody-shirt rationale for continuing the program. Weeks after I initially wrote this note, these tactics have led to the current protests of ICE's activities by Southern California residents.

[15] Even while posing as a crusader against antisemitism, Trump can't resist wallowing in the far-right's antisemitic Puppet Master tropes in invoking Soros.

[16] Between presidencies, Trump filed an alleged civil RICO suit in Florida against a large number of political enemies, real and perceived, and Perkins Coie was among them. It ended with the court dismissing it as "a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose," failing to even state a triable case. The judge was so offended he fined Trump and his attorney Alina Habba nearly $1 million. Now, the same fantasy grievances that led to that suit were resurrected in Trump's EO targeting the firm.

[17] As the New York Times outlined, "Under federal law, an [EEOC] investigation can be opened either after the commission receives a complaint of discrimination from an individual or at the request of [an EEOC] commissioner. But in any case, the investigation is supposed to begin as a confidential process until a lawsuit is filed." A president can't order them.

*          *          *

UPDATE (16 June, 2025) - On 11 June, District Judge Michael Farbiarz of New Jersey granted Mahmoud Khalil a preliminary injunction, ruling that Khalil can't be deported or even detained based on Marco Rubio's absurd declaration. As usual, the regime argued that under its notion of government, the court couldn't even hear the case and as usual, the court rejected this. Khalil's lawyers argued that if the court let stand the Rubio declaration, their client's reputation would be destroyed, his entire planned career in international relations derailed and free speech chilled; the regime didn't even contest any of this. Judge Farbiarz held that Khalil's challenge to the constitutionality of what was being done to him re:the Rubio declaration was likely to succeed.

The court gave the regime time to appeal and make the argument that it was detaining Khalil based on the also-ridiculous claim that Khalil had omitted information from his application when applying for permanent residence status. The regime had introduced that charge in transparently bad faith over a week after Khalil had already been abducted and in his ruling, Farbiarz cast extreme doubt on this as a rationale anyway, noting that those facing such an accusation are practically never detained. The regime failed to offer any appeal, so Khalil's lawyers requested he be released and instead of simply granting this, Farbiarz gave the government opportunity to respond, then backed off from his earlier ruling, allowing the regime to continue to detain Khalil based on the phony application charge.

*          *          *

UPDATE (17 June, 2025) - The American Bar Association has just filed a lawsuit against the Trump regime for its targeting of law firms. Running 85 pages, the suit properly contextualizes the regime's actions:

"[Trump's attacks on the law firms are] not isolated events, but one component of a broader, deliberate policy designed to intimidate and coerce law firms and lawyers to refrain from challenging the President or his Administration in court, or from even speaking publicly in support of policies or causes that the President does not like."

It understands what's at stake:

"Using the powers of the Executive Branch to target private citizens and private firms for destruction is unprecedented, and bad enough regardless of the President’s motives. But the Administration's Law Firm Intimidation Policy is uniquely destructive because of the critical role that its targets--lawyers--fulfill in our constitutional system... Without skilled lawyers to bring and argue cases--and to do so by advancing the interests of their clients without fear of reprisal from the government--the judiciary cannot function as a meaningful check on executive overreach."

The ABA shows great optimism in believing that meaningful elections will ever be allowed to happen again but the org outlines what would happen in a world in which there were meaningful elections and in which Trump's actions are allowed to stand:

"The longer the Law Firm Intimidation Policy--and the resulting coercion and submission--persists, the more it will be normalized in our legal system. Whoever wins the next election will be free to squelch dissent based on policy disagreements. There is no limiting principle: The next Administration might threaten adverse Executive Branch actions against any lawyer or law firm that dares to represent an oil company, or a gun manufacturer, or the Federalist Society or Fox News."

The lawsuit offers 6 counts against the regime, the first 5 being various violations of the 1st Amendment. "The Law Firm Intimidation Policy is unlawful," it reads.

"Our Constitution does not vest the Executive Branch with the power to point to individual lawyers or law firms, declare by executive fiat that their work or their internal policies are 'against the national interest' or otherwise illegal or improper, and direct (or threaten) executive action against that lawyer or law firm. Exercising such power--and threatening to do so--violates the First Amendment and purports to exercise power that the President does not have."

The 6th count deals with "Ultra Vires Presidential Action - Separation of Powers." It notes that no aspect of Trump's actions against the firms have been authorized by either congress or the constitution--the only sources of a president's power to issue executive orders--and that congress has, in fact, specifically prohibited such actions, providing a long list of statutes and species of statutes that Trump's attacks on law firms have violated. It also notes that Trump's actions usurp the power of the courts to discipline attorneys who appear before them and are, functionally, a bill of attainder, which the constitution explicitly forbids. Collectively, the items in the 6th count illustrates how Trump is running what I've called an "alt-presidency," operating entirely outside the bounds of the constitutional order.

The lawsuit extensively quotes Trump and his underlings, who, by their public pronouncements, have buried themselves. Reading through it, something that stuck out at me was their repeated Orwellian claims that their actions--the actions of the government--against these law firms--private law firms, who control no aspect of the government--were aimed at beating back the "weaponization" of government.

The ABA asks that Trump's actions be declared unconstitutional and that the regime be enjoined from enforcing them or from bringing misconduct proceedings against the ABA or its members "based on the individual's law firm or organizational affiliation, or based on the identity of the individual's or individual's law firm's client representations."

The lawsuit outlines the chilling effect Trump's actions have already had and notes that "the ABA itself is also experiencing the effects, as it has had to forgo litigation against the Administration because counsel who previously were willing to take on such work are no longer willing to do so." So the ABA is being represented here by Susman Godfrey, one of the firms targeted by Trump with an EO.

Trumptatorship 3: Gangster Government [Updated Below]

(This is the 3rd in a series of articles covering Donald Trump's efforts to end liberal democracy in the United States and replace it with authoritarian autocracy--a Trumptatorship--and the grim consequences of that. The 1st part is here, the second here.)

The U.S. Constitution vests the federal government's legislative power, including the power of the purse, in congress. The president's charge on this is that he "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." To change the constitution requires a constitutional amendment. All basic civics stuff, right? But since returning to the presidency in January, Donald Trump has asserted that he, in effect, has the power to unilaterally write and rewrite, ignore and alter laws, override federal, state and local laws he doesn't like, including eliminating entire agencies of the government created by congress, and even to change the constitution itself, all with nothing more than the stroke of a pen. The powers of a dictator, entirely outside the constitutional ambit of a president, directed toward destroying both the substance and the institutions of the liberal democracy.

In 2023, Trump had asserted that "for 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the President had the Constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending through what is known as Impoundment."[1] The constitution grants no such power to the president, nor, contrary to Trump's Uranian "history," have presidents ever held that as any "constitutional power." Over five decades ago, then-President Richard Nixon advanced that notion and got it in his head to carry out a raft of impoundment efforts aimed at thwarting the policy objectives of congress. This led to the creation of the Impoundment Control Act (the ICA), which established procedures by which a president could request that congress--the body with legislative power--delay or rescind congressionally-appropriated funds. This was uncontroversial at the time--the final vote in the House of Representatives was 401-6, the Senate passed it unanimously and Nixon, not long before he was forced from office by the Watergate scandal, signed it into law. Since then, presidents of both parties, including Trump in his first term, have made liberal use of these procedures, and no president until Trump has ever asserted any "constitutional power" to impound; the notion began with Nixon and very swiftly ended with him, with even Tricky Dick conceding the point. As the cherry on top, the U.S. Supreme Court then ruled, in a case preceding the ICA but decided shortly after it, that Nixon had no power to impound money legally appropriated by congress in the Clean Water Act. The ruling was unanimous.[2] Trump was, of course, impeached after trying to impound security assistance to Ukraine as part of a scheme to force the Ukrainian government to announce a baseless investigation of his political rival Joe Biden. Then, during the 2024 campaign, Trump described the ICA as a "disaster of a law" that "is clearly unconstitutional" and, perhaps most bizarrely, "a blatant violation of the separation of powers." Just words, unconnected to anything in the real world.[3]

I spend a whole paragraph and some footnotes on that matter only to reinforce a point I made in the previous article of this series, one that will recur throughout the ones to come. Trump's stated position on impoundment authority is, like his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act against a prison gang, baseless rubbish cobbled together to provide a "well, he has to call it something" pretext for a dictator to go around the constitution and the body of laws adopted under it to do things he wants to do but that the constitution and the law don't allow him to do. It isn't some alternative theory of How These Things Work. No aspect of it even attempts to be a serious analysis, even a bad one. It's offered as frivolously as the most vacuous social-media troll-post and Trump doesn't really care about any of it. Yet he's asserting impoundment "power" he doesn't have and using it, in utter violation of the law, to try to impose sweeping policy changes he can't get through constitutional means, including dismembering wide swathes of government institutions established by those means.

Some more basic civics stuff: The constitution (Article I, Section 4) provides that "the Times, Places and Manner of" holding federal elections "shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations..." Congress has directly set rules for federal elections or, in some cases, delegated the authority to independent agencies it has established for the purpose but most election regulation is done by the states. The president is given no power whatsoever to make laws or rules regarding federal elections, yet on 25 March, Trump issued an executive order that purports to usurp the power to do so from congress and the states in direct contravention of the constitution and regulate federal elections in a number of ways that violate a raft of laws established over the years by the bodies with the actual constitutional authority to make them.

Trump orders that federal voter registration forms created over 30 years ago by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) be changed to require onerous "documentary proof of United States citizenship" and require that "a State or local official [is] to record on the form the type of document that the applicant presented as documentary proof of United States citizenship," both directly violating provisions of the NVRA.[4] Trump purports to order the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to "take appropriate action" within 30 days to "require" these changes and to "take all appropriate action to cease providing Federal funds to States that do not comply" with this rubbish--impoundment. But the EAC is an independent body created by congress as part of its constitutional duties to regulate elections; Trump has no more authority to direct it to do any of these things than he has to order someone to commit seppuku.[5] The federal funds the EAC provides to the states--for the maintenance of their election systems--are dispersed according to a formula established by law, not by the capricious edict of a dictator.

At present, 18 states accept mail-in votes that arrive shortly after election day as long as they were sent and postmarked before or on election day (state laws vary on this). The speed of the postal service is out of the voters' hands. Trump's order tries to impose an election-day deadline for receipt of such ballots. This is based on a very questionable interpretation of federal law, but based on that interpretation, not any clear directive, Trump is essentially trying to overturn laws in 18 states. He orders the Attorney General to take "all necessary action to enforce" this and pretends to order the EAC to "condition any available funding to a State on that State's compliance" with it. As before, he has no authority to either direct the EAC in this or to impound congressionally-allocated funds.

In the perhaps-naive belief that, with the civil society collapsing around their ears, the judicial branch will save America, voting-rights groups, civil rights groups, civil liberties groups and Democratic groups are suing the regime over all of this.

Some not-insignificant context here is that Trump's executive order came in the wake of the failure, last year, of the SAVE Act, an obnoxious piece of legislation created by corrupt MAGA congresscritter Chip Roy and endorsed by Trump, which contained versions of many of these same measures and would disenfranchise millions of Americans. Roy has reintroduced it in the current congress but it's unlikely to pass. With a legitimate path to creating such measures likely closed, Trump's EO seeks to will them into existence by dictatorial fiat.

What would a dictator be without a powerless minority to hate on and target, right? Only about 0.6% of Americans are transgender but Trump is marshaling the might of the U.S. government against them. He's already issued multiple quite ugly executive orders attacking transgender people and their rights--9 of them in his first 10 days in office alone, and he was just getting started. The toxic animus that gushes from them is appalling, mirroring Trump's vile anti-immigrant rhetoric from last year's campaign. One was directed, in part, toward what it called "restoring biological truth," adopting the language of outright Nazism. Among other things, it insisted that merely acknowledging the existence of trans people amounted to impermissible "gender ideology" and ordered his government to house trans women convicts in male prisons and deny them medical care. In another, targeting trans servicemembers, Trump, who, in his first term, pardoned and even promoted war criminals then fired the Secretary of the Navy for objecting, asserts that

"adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual's sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one's personal life.  A man's assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member."

Another defines medical treatment for gender dysphoria for young people as "the chemical and surgical mutilation of children," even when they're 18, and orders that his regime cut off all research or educational grants to medical institutions that provide medical care for the purpose of gender transition. But those grants are federal laws, withholding or conditioning them in this way a violation of the law, and Trump is asserting the power to repeal or alter the law, something a president--the reader may tire of hearing me point out--has absolutely no constitutional authority to do.[6]

In February, another such order declared "it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs" that refuse to exclude trans women--maliciously misgendered in this order as in the others as "men"--from women's sports. At the Governors Working Session at the White House a few weeks after that one, Trump randomly picked a public fight with Maine Gov. Janet Mills, threatening to illegally cut off federal funds to her state if she didn't move to, in accordance with his executive order, ban the 2 trans girl athletes in 2 of the 126 high-schools in Maine from competing in women's sports. "We're going to follow the law sir," Mills retorted. "We'll see you in court."

Trump cites as his authority for this Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal money, but, as ProPublica reported,

"Title IX has never required schools to exclude [trans athletes], and Trump's order can’t rewrite federal law, said Deborah Brake, a professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

"'The president can put out an executive order saying anything he wants,' Brake said, but 'there has never been a court decision interpreting Title IX to require the exclusion of transgender girls from girls' sports.'"

From the Maine Morning Star:

"[Title IX] does not explicitly say anything about trans students and can't be applied to exclude trans athletes from sports, [Rachel] Perera [of the Brookings Institution] said.

"'So I think they're also out on a limb there, where they are interpreting the law in a way that doesn’t reflect the law, which gives Maine more opportunity to push back,' she said.

"Rewriting Title IX would need approval from Congress..."

And at the other end, the Maine Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination against transgender people; the state would have to act in violation of its own laws to go along with Trump's legally-baseless EO.

The aftermath of Trump's effort to publicly bully Mills was extraordinary, a flurry of Trump regime agencies targeting Maine's educational institutions. The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced an investigation of one school district in the state,

"after it was reported that Greely High School, a school under its jurisdiction, is continuing to allow at least one male student to compete in girls' categories."

Yes, those are their own words. This is happening even as Trump has ordered OCR to stop investigating the actual complaints about alleged race and sex-based discrimination that congress tasked it with fielding (and of which there is always a massive backlog). Trump's executive order directed federal agencies to "prioritize" these anti-trans actions. Whereas, the Maine Morning Star notes, "almost all OCR investigations were historically initiated due to complaints filed by agencies or individuals turning to the civil rights agency for help," under Trump, "those have taken a back seat and the office has pursued proactive 'directed investigations,' ordered by the administration." ProPublica reports that, starting only hours after the Trump/Mills dust-up, the first of what would eventually grow to six different Trump regime agencies came to target Maine, meaning that

"more federal agencies are pressing down on Maine than there are transgender girls competing in girls' sports in the state. Only two transgender girls are competing this school year, according to the Maine Principals' Association."

It's also, of course, the case that these "investigations" are a sham--just another example of a dictator manufacturing a pretext for doing the dictator shit he wants to do. "Not ordinary," as ProPublica, with somewhat greater restraint than is merited, puts it. The Department of Health and Human Services, for example, doesn't really enforce civil rights laws in schools but at Trump's order, it launched an "investigation," and while such inquiries typically take "months, if not years," Trump's HHS decreed, after only one business day, that Maine was guilty of violating Title IX without having interviewed a single relevant official in the state. And so on. David Webber, a Maine civil rights attorney, pretty much hit the nail on the head when he dismissed these inquiries as "a show."

"'It's a political move dressed up, very barely, with a legal process, but it's a fake legal process. So it is very concerning because they're not even trying to make it look like it's due process,' he said."

Whatever one thinks about transgender athletes, this is the President of the United States not only insisting he has the power to, in effect, unilaterally rewrite federal law then use his rewrite to override a state's own (democratically-enacted) laws but fanatically weaponizing the entire federal government to try to dictate the policy of a pair of local high schools in one small state.

This is happening alongside Republican efforts in congress to amend Title IX in exactly the way Trump's EO pretends to do. The GOP bill narrowly passed the House in January but is unlikely to pass in the Senate, so Trump just issued an EO and pretends the whim of a dictator accomplished the same thing.

Trump has been on a rampage through various agencies of the government on the pretense of targeting "waste, fraud and abuse." Trump's commitment to combating those things is rather jarringly belied by his illegal mass-firings, across the government, of inspectors general--the officials charged with investigating and putting a stop to those things at federal agencies--but, y'know, Trumptatorship.[7] Alongside disposing of the legally-designated cops on the WF&A beat, Trump willed into existence the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE), a sort of fake "agency" that, operating outside the bounds of the legitimate government, is allegedly supposed to root out these bugaboos. DOGE is either led by billionaire Trump mega-donor Elon Musk or not, depending on what day--and what court--is asking. That ambiguity is emblematic of everything about DOGE, which many progressive commentators have correctly characterized as a "coup." The "agency" wasn't created by congress but by another of Trump's executive orders, and with seemingly little or none of the vetting, background checks or adherence to conflict-of-interest rules required of employees of actual government agencies, this fake "agency" has been allowed unprecedented access to real federal agencies, combing through, among other things, payment systems and all manner of sensitive government records on Americans. The world of dire concerns this alone raises about things like privacy and information security becomes a galaxy of alarm in the face of the regime's insistence on resisting any real transparency regarding DOGE's activities. While Musk has said DOGE is working inside nearly every federal agency, Trump has engaged in a shell-game aimed at corruptly concealing most details about it and its operations. ProPublica reports,

"Most of DOGE's money, records show, has come in the form of payments from other federal agencies made possible by a nearly century-old law called the Economy Act. To steer those funds to the new department, the Trump administration has treated DOGE as if it were a federal agency. And by dispatching members of its staff to other agencies and having those staffers issue edicts about policy and personnel, DOGE has also behaved as if it has agency-level authority.

"The use of the Economy Act would seem to subject DOGE to the same open-records laws that cover most federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the State Department. However, DOGE has refused to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, saying it operates with executive privileges. Musk has also flip-flopped about whether DOGE's staff members are paid. Initially he said they were not, but earlier this week he said some of them were.

"The conflicting stances put the Trump administration in a bind, legal experts say. If DOGE is a federal agency, it can't shield its records from the public. If it's not an agency, then DOGE's tens of millions of dollars in funding weren't legally allocated and should be returned, some contend."

Musk's companies receive billions in government contracts, with no end to the potential conflicts of interest in his being involved in this, but--inspiring as much confidence as the rest of this enterprise--he's keeping his finances secret. While DOGE hasn't found any "waste" or "fraud" or "abuse," it has joined Trump in perpetuating a fraud on the public by copiously slapping those labels on federal spending--passed into law by the body constitutionally authorized to spend--that Trump dislikes and purporting to cancel it.[8]

Trump has used DOGE as part of his effort to attack and dismember wide swathes of government institutions he has no authority to cut. While the record on this is far too extensive to even begin to properly cover here (I expect it will be a recurring subject as these articles proceed), Trump's efforts to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are sort of a microcosm.

Created by congress in the wake of Big Finance crashing the economy in 2008, the CFPB is, simply stated, the anti-scam police, the federal agency charged with monitoring mega-sized financial institutions, enforcing consumer protection law, cracking down on fraudulent and abusive practices by finance. And, for Trump (and many in his party), that's the problem; the CFPB is a rare part of government that operates against the oligarchs and on behalf of the public. In a regime prioritizing what Public Citizen calls "'get out of jail free' cards" to corporate criminals, the CFPB was an obvious target.[9] Since opening for business in July 2011, the CFPB has returned to consumers over $20 billion extracted from them by inappropriate business practices by these institutions, at a cost of a fraction of that--a bargain, by any measure.

But under the Trumptatorship, black is white, up is down and we get Trump telling reporters at the White House that he aims to eliminate the agency that combats waste, fraud and abuse "because we're trying to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse."[10] Eric Petry and Ian Vandewalker of the Brennan Center For Justice get much closer to the actual "why" in noting

"Donors from the broader financial services industry, including hedge funds and investment banks, spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Trump's presidential bid, and some have now taken on prominent administration positions."

One of those donors is Elon Musk, who owns multiple enterprises regulated by the CFPB. That, alone, makes any involvement by Musk corrupt and inappropriate but, of course, it's even worse, because isn't it always?[11] Petry/Vandewalker note that there have been hundreds of complaints lodged with the CFPB against one of Musk's businesses.[12]

Trump has no constitutional authority to terminate a federal agency created by law--in this case, created by congress as a delegation of its constitutionally-assigned power to regulate commerce (Article I, section 8)--but he was illegally and unconstitutionally proceeding to do so anyway. Trump fired CFPB director Rohit Chopra. By law, the deputy director of CFPB takes over the agency in the director's absence but Trump then appointed, as acting director, Russell Vought, his chief of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Trump claimed as his authority in this, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, but that law allows for that kind of temporary replacement only if the official being replaced "dies, resigns, or is otherwise unable to perform the functions and duties of the office." Being fired by a dictator isn't on the list.

The illegally-appointed Vought then ordered the CFPB to halt all work on the duties assigned to the agency by congress, told its employees not to come in to the office, closed its headquarters in Washington D.C., took down its signage and informed the General Services Administration that the lease on the building will be terminated. Trump sent in DOGE, which deleted the CFPB's account on X, removed its homepage from the internet and began nosing around in its computer records. The CFPB is funded by the Federal Reserve; Vought informed the Fed that the CFPB wouldn't be taking any more money--defunding it. The agency's newer employees, subject to a 2-year probationary period, were all fired, 70 of them. By email.  Vought canceled over $100 million in CFPB contracts, many of them critical to the CFPB's functioning. Through the looking-glass, this is how officials were trying to spin this:

"'Acting Director Vought is wasting no time getting to the bottom of the waste, fraud, and lavish spending at this rogue and weaponized agency and in bringing it to heel,' an OMB spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg Law. 'We are in the process of canceling hundreds of wasteful and unnecessary contracts worth over $100 million.'"

Vought then sought from the OMB--which he also runs--an exemption from a 90-day notice period required when a full-blown reduction in force is about to happen. On the chopping-block in this: over 1,000 CFPB employees--basically, the entire agency. Unsurprisingly, Vought granted himself his own request.

The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents, among others, CFPB employees, filed suit against the regime for all of this. Some of the regime's efforts to defend against the suit--by essentially blowing smoke up the judge's ass while continuing to attempt to dismantle the agency--were so outlandishly dishonest that they drew an extraordinary rebuke from DC District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who wrote that they were "highly misleading, if not intentionally false," and "so disingenuous that the Court is left with little confidence that the defense can be trusted to tell the truth about anything." Jackson imposed a preliminary injunction against the regime's activities, documenting all of this in her order.

This same story has repeated itself dozens of times across a wide range of government agencies.[13] In an example that has gotten more attention than most, Trump has announced his intention to eliminate the Department of Education and signed another of his Orwellian executive orders to that end. Unusually, he's been qualifying this, sometimes saying he would need the approval of congress to accomplish it, but eliminating any government agency created by congress is something that, constitutionally, only congress can do. Trump has a congress controlled by his own party, but even with that, most of this--like most of the rest of what Trump has tried to do--would never get through the regular legislative process.[14] Trump's "solution": I am the law.

When not trying to outright eliminate them, Trump has also attacked agencies that congress established to have some degree of independence, trying to bring them under his own control. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an example. The FTC is charged with, among other things, enforcing anti-trust law. It was established in 1914 and is composed of 5 commissioners who are appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate and serve 7-year terms, with no more than 3 commissioners at a time to come from one party. By law, a commissioner can only be fired before his term has expired due to "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office," but in March, Trump fired both current Democratic commissioners because, they were told, their service was "inconsistent with [the] administration’s priorities." Ninety years ago, Franklin Roosevelt tried to fire an FTC commissioner on those same grounds; the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which, in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, unanimously shot down the firing. The commissioners fired by Trump are suing. NPR offers a list of members of various independent agencies like the FTC that Trump has no authority to fire but has purported to fire anyway. Several have challenged their firings and have been reinstated but legal action proceeds.

Trump has issued an executive order that, if carried through, would end the independence of regulatory agencies in an extraordinary centralization of power. Elie Mystal, in the Nation, writes that the EO requires that

"every single one of the agencies' regulations and proposals must be routed through the Office of Management and Budget. That may sound like a bunch of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, but what it means is that these independent agencies will no longer be 'independent.' It means that every single regulation in the country--from what disclosures have to be made to shareholders to how much broken glass is allowed to be in your childrens' toys--are subject to the whims of the president, and the president alone. No hearings, no panel of experts, no opportunity for public comment--it'll just be Donald Trump and a Sharpie..."

With this, Trump, who has no constitutionally-granted legislative power, asserts the ability to wave his hand and grind to dust the enabling statues of all of these agencies, along with all of their subsequent statutory modifications. And, of course, the amount of despotic mischief enabled by what Trump is trying to impose is incalculable.

Besides being illegal in themselves, these actions against independent agencies come with another set of serious constitutional problems, because so many of these agencies tend to be a delegation of power that is held by congress. The FTC is an independent agency that carries out its duties under congress' constitutional authority to regulate commerce. If a president is just allowed to carry out a hostile takeover of it or other such agencies, rather than taking the matter to congress and getting the body to restructure it, he is taking over and assuming, without any delegation to him, powers reserved to congress and that a president doesn't have, and doing so contrary to the agreement between the legislative and executive branches about how those agencies are to operate and how they always have (for, in the case of the FTC, over a century).

Standing against this sort of thing certainly shouldn't be read as any sort of general defense of government institutions.; This writer doesn't have one of those in him. Our federal government--and, in fact, this can be said of all our layers of government--does many things that are stupid, inappropriate, wasteful, despicable, profoundly immoral. All of us can rattle off plenty of things the government does that we dislike. Some of us hate that it even exists. And our system for interacting with it is profoundly corrupt and dysfunctional too. We need something better--much, much better. But allowing Trump to destroy the liberal democracy, even the profoundly flawed version of liberal democracy with which we've long been saddled, is no pathway to anything better, and the dictator-led super-state with which he's trying to replace it is the worst of all species of government. Once all the checks and balances are gone, they're gone for good.

Trump has asserted the power to directly nullify provisions the constitution itself--a public official whose only powers, indeed, his office itself, come solely from that enabling instrument claiming he can, in effect, change that instrument on a whim, without ever bothering with the laborious process it establishes for enacting changes. On the first day of his new regime, Trump issued an executive order directing his administration to ignore and regard as invalid the birthright citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment, which established that anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen.

A brief history lesson: The U.S. inherited birthright citizenship from English common law. When it came to white guys, that was always the status quo, but in 1857, the Supreme Court issued the appalling Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which concluded that Americans of African descent

"are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States."

This is universally regarded as one of the worst decisions ever made by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was adopted, its first provision rejecting this and providing that

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

Pretty straightforward. If there was any doubt--and there wasn't, but that didn't prevent the government from grotesquely violating this provision at at times--it was settled in 1898, when the Supreme Court ruled, in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, that a Chinese man born to Chinese parents during a period in which they lived in San Francisco was, in fact, a U.S. citizen (he had been denied entry into the U.S. on the grounds that he wasn't).

Birthright citizenship has been a settled constitutional matter for 157 years, a settled matter for the Supreme Court for 127 and our vast body of relevant laws, stretching far beyond the lifespan of anyone living today, have been built around the concept, but so many years after we consigned the Dred Scott ruling to the landfill of history, the Trumptatorship has unearthed its substantive "reasoning" to try to assign a constitutional provision to that same plot of moldering earth.

Trump's EO says,

"[T]he Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.  The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'"

That's true, and the amendment's history also makes plain what this references: diplomats from foreign nations, who have diplomatic immunity, or members of an invading army occupying U.S. territory.[15] The Wong Kim Ark decision tracks these exceptions back deeply into the English law, noting that this wording excludes "the two classes of cases--children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state..." But Trump's EO proclaims that, "among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States" to undocumented immigrants, and he orders that "no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship" of those born to undocumented immigrants.

One can point out that this is a "reading" that is entirely alien to the entire history of the 14th Amendment. One could even cover that history. For example, Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, gave a nice, compact recitation of it in which she noted that

"Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the legislative history of the Citizenship Clause is that both its proponents and opponents agreed that it recognizes and protects birthright citizenship for the children of aliens born on U.S. soil. The Reconstruction Congress did not debate the meaning of the Clause, but rather whether, based on their shared understanding of its meaning, the Clause embodied sound public policy..."

And one can point out that Trump's "theory" here is one that was explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court (in Pyler v. Doe in 1982), and that it's yet another of those fringe crackpot notions on to which he's latched, this one from the disgraced John Eastman,[16] and that any scrutiny makes it crumble to dust as entirely as Count Orlock on a sunny beach.[17] Trump does not care.

What matters here isn't Trump's phony window-dressing rationales. What matters is what he's trying to sell with them. What matters is that Trump is charged to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," yet is not only violating the law on a daily basis as a matter of policy but nearly everything he's done has directly violated the law. That's all he's doing. That's how he's ruling: the presidency as a criminal enterprise. What matters is that Trump raised his hand and swore to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" yet not only trespasses against it at every turn but has straight-up said he isn't bound by it and can, in effect, rewrite it at will when it suits him.

A "president" who can do these things--is allowed to do these things--can do anything, and he and his successors will do anything, every successful outrage precedent for the next. If he's determined to do them and there's nothing to stop him, then, practically, it matters not a whit that he has no authority to do them. So far, the courts have very often held the line, but that isn't likely to last. Experience dictates that the obscenity that is our present Supreme Court, the court of final appeal, will only continue the project it has had underway for years now, its majority hollowing out the constitution and acting as a steadfast, even enthusiastic patron of authoritarianism--a tag-team partner for the Trumptatorship. The congress, dominated by those committed--or at least supinely acquiescent--to the Maximal Leader have responded to the lower courts' defense of the law and the constitution by threatening to gut those courts' power. It's a very bad situation, a major crisis that has highlighted the extent to which so much of our government rests on a sort of gentleman's agreement and exposed what happens when that agreement is abandoned. Every president has, at times, violated the law, contravened the constitution and had to be put back in his place for it--that's the nature of this sort of power, and we've often done a very poor job of smacking it down--but the U.S. has never experienced anything like this, a dictator operating entirely outside the strictures of the constitutional system and, recognizing no limits that former system placed on his office, writing his own rules and using the power he gives himself to leave it in ruins. Unless this is stopped, the U.S. is never again going to see anything but this.

Americans, if you don't want that--and even if any of you think you do want it, you don't, I promise--you have to do something about it.

--j.

---

 [1] That style is typical of the Trump gang's pronouncements when making so many of its outlandish claims--sounds confident, assertive, obvious but is, substantively, pure fringe-crackpot rubbish that isn't backed up by history, fact or law.

 [2] The case was Train v. City of New York. Two decades later, the court took up Clinton v. City of New York (1996), a case that challenged a legislative line-item veto, which allowed the president to unilaterally rescind spending provisions already passed into law. This was basically the same power Trump is claiming but had more legitimacy, as it was at least passed by congress and signed into law by the president, but the court struck it down as unconstitutional too.

 [3] I'd originally planned to go into the history of this matter in more detail but it's already been done for me. Trump's recent claim of a "constitutional power" to impound and the Bizarro "history" he references to support it come from legal memos prepared by Mark Paoletta, his Office of Management and Budget general counsel, and some colleagues. Last year, Zachary Price, a professor at UC Law San Francisco eviscerated it. In February, an NRP "Planet Money" article kicked it around again.

 [4] Also undermining the entire point of the law, which was to provide a simple, straightforward and convenient means of registering to vote.

 [5] The EAC was established nearly a quarter-century ago by the Help America Vote Act. It was established as an independent, bipartisan org. There are four commissioners, chosen by the President and the Democratic and Republican leaders in congress, no more than two commissioners can be of the same party and the vote of at least 3 are required for the commission to act.

 [6] PFLAG and others filed suit against this executive order. They successfully argued for a temporary restraining order against enforcement of the EO by the Trump regime, then a preliminary injunction.

[7] Trump fired 17 IGs late on the first Friday night of his present regime--a move intended to minimize press coverage--and continued firing them in the weeks after. A president can legally fire IGs but the Inspector General Act of 1978 requires 30 days notice to congress prior to any firing and in 2022, in response to Trump's first-term antics with firing IGs who got in his way, the law was changed to require, in the words of American Oversight, that the notice to congress "also include a substantive explanation and case-specific reasons for the removal or transfer of an inspector general."

 [8] Trump, of course, lies as easily as he breathes, and he and his underlings have accumulated an extraordinary rap-sheet of false claims regarding DOGE's work. In one infamous example, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt--in her very first news briefing--claimed that

"DOGE and OMB [the Office of Management and Budget]... found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money."

Actually, that was a preposterous lie, and the next day, Trump escalated it, claiming his regime "identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas" [emphasis mine]. Trump was present when Musk admitted to reporters this wasn't accurate, but he then not only repeated it but  opted to double the dollar-figure, insisting that $100 million in condoms had been intended for Hamas. A month later, he was still repeating this. For the record, the actual amount of dollars designated to condoms for Gaza or Hamas was $0.

 [9] Trump is all about the oligarchs. In March, Public Citizen released a report detailing how Trump "is moving rapidly to halt and hinder federal investigations and cases against alleged corporate lawbreaking."

[10] Everything else Trump said about the CFPB in those comments was ludicrously false. Recalling his 2017 insistence that there were "very good people" taking part in a Nazi rally in Virginia, Trump said the CFPB

"was set up to destroy people. [Elizabeth Warren] used that as her little personal agency to go around and destroy people... That was set up to destroy some very good people, and, uh, and it worked--a lot of great people... If you looked at when she really ran it, wow, that was a vicious group of people. They really destroyed a lot of people."

Elizabeth Warren originated the idea of the CFPB when she was a professor at Harvard Law but she never ran it in the way Trump described, because she never ran it at all. Warren helped establish the CFPB as a special advisor to then-President Obama. Obama briefly considered appointing her to run it but chose former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray as its first director instead. Speaking of the CFPB in the past tense, Trump said, of eliminating it, "We did the right thing. It was a very important thing to get rid of." The whole incident was reminiscent of the sort of rambling Joe Biden has done since 2019, where it sounds like he's talking about some movie, only marginally related to anything in the real world, that is playing out only in his head and trying to make policy based on it.

[11] Trump and DOGE have already attacked multiple government agencies and regulators investigating Musk's companies or taking or considering regulatory actions against them.

[12] Petry/Vandewalker point out that investigations of those complaints "will not proceed under the administration's order to stop all supervisory activities." The CFPB maintains all kinds of sensitive information on businesses, consumers, their own employees, files Musk's DOGE can peruse at their liesure. Hanna Hickman, a bureau attorney, tells CBS News that

"[Musk is] potentially able to gain access to files of his competitors like Venmo and Cash App. He is able to take out the regulator that would've been the watchdog for his company."

[13] Among other things, the regime has carried out illegal mass-firings, aimed at crippling the ability of disapproved government agencies to function. To try to square this, legally, the Trump gang has claimed these employees are being given their walking-papers because of poor job performance, which, among other things, puts a black mark on the victims' employment records and prevents them from accessing unemployment, and, of course, it was a total lie, one that, once these actions resulted in numerous lawsuits, the regime then presented to courts, in the face of the entire documentary record.

[14] House Republicans are pushing a bill that would allow Trump to ignore the regular legislative process and would not only retroactively endorse his destruction of federal agencies but give him carte blanche to continue it, letting him submit a plan for "restructuring" government agencies and only requiring his proposals get a simple majority vote from congress. This is unlikely to go anywhere but it's another disturbing example of Republicans giving in to, instead of standing up against, a dictator. As I've said repeatedly, it's much worse if the rest of the state backs the dictator's play; at that point, all is lost.

[15] At the time, it also included American Indians, who were not U.S. citizens--a state of affairs that ended when citizenship was legally extended to Native Americans

[16] Eastman's highlights include this, his "argument" that Kamala Harris wasn't an American citizen because of it and wasn't eligible to be president and his notion that, after the 2020 election, Trump's then-Vice President Mike Pence could, in his ceremonial role overseeing certification of the electoral college results, just unilaterally throw out the electoral votes from multiple states. Eastman's license to practice law in his own state has been suspended and his state bar is undertaking disbarment proceedings against him.

[17] Three lawsuits challenging Trump's EO on birthright citizenship have already resulted in 3 court orders barring the Trump gang from proceeding with this while litigation is pending. The regime appealed all 3, and all 3 appeals courts upheld the orders. The administration is now trying to get the Supreme Court to throw them out but, as there's no disagreement among any of the courts involved, intervention would be extraordinary.


__________

UPDATE (15 April, 2025) - A would-be dictator running a gangster government entirely outside the bounds of the constitutional order certainly aren't going to tolerate any of the oversight baked into the system he's endeavoring to supplant. Trump has moved to quash any such oversight.

The firing of the inspectors general was part of this. IGs are federal officials charged with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the executive branch. Congress began creating IGs in the 1950s. Each oversees an agency or department of government. Those who oversee cabinet departments are nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate; those who oversee agencies below that level are chosen by the heads of the agencies. They're non-partisan posts--IGs serve through administrations of both parties and, being auditors, are supposed to have a degree of independence. Those very characteristics--non-partisan, anti-WF&A and independent--make them verboten to any would-be dictator. Verboten to Trump.

In March, the New York Times did a good, compact video on the fired IGs, people who have saved taxpayers billions. On 9 March, CBS News' 60 MINUTES produced a good segment, "Firing the Watchdogs," about how Trump is "casting aside those who might stand in his way," and talked to Paul Martin, who, before his firing, has been an IG over multiple government agencies over the run of 6 sequential presidential administrations. He was the IG for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers most civilian foreign aid and is one of many federal agencies Trump is illegally trying to eliminate.[1] Early on, the Trump gang froze foreign aid spending and put most of U.S. AIDs workforce on administrative leave. On 10 Feb., Martin issued an alert warning that, because of all of this, nearly half-a-billion dollars in intended food assistance to the developing world had been left in limbo, "at ports, in transit, and in warehouses at risk of spoilage, unanticipated storage needs, and diversion." Rather than immediately getting on this problem and trying to fix it, Trump just fired Martin. The next day.

Eight of the illegally-fired IGs eventually filed a lawsuit, demanding that the courts enforce the law--make Trump recognize that they hold the office or make him legally fire them.[2] A futile gesture, perhaps. In March, when it finally got to court, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said it would be difficult for the court to reinstate them, saying the best she could probably do was back-pay, but, she said, "I don't think anyone can contest that the removal of these people--the way that they were fired--was a violation of the law."

60 MINUTES also spotlighted Hampton Dellinger, who ran the Office of Special Counsel. The OSC is an independent agency established by congress where, among other things, federal employees can bring employment complaints--a big deal in a Trump regime that has been illegally mass-firing federal employees at every turn--and, perhaps most importantly, where whistleblowers can report wrongdoing within the executive branch and be protected from retaliation--a huge deal in a Trump regime operating as a gangster government. By federal law, the Special Counsel serves a 5-year term and "may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." Trump didn't have any of those reasons; he fired Dellinger anyway.

Dellinger sued. The Trump regime's only real "argument" in its defense was that the law preventing Trump from firing the Special Counsel for no reason at all--which had been in place for nearly half a century--was unconstitutional, that the OSC exercised executive power that rightly belongs to the president. The court rejected this and gave Dellinger the win, noting that there is "no genuine dispute of fact that would preclude a finding that plaintiff’s removal" was a violation of federal law. The court found that

"the elimination of the restrictions on plaintiff's removal would be fatal to the defining and essential feature of the Office of Special Counsel as it was conceived by Congress and signed into law by the President: its independence. The Court concludes that they must stand.... [The Special Counsel's] independence is inextricably intertwined with the performance of his duties. The Special Counsel's job is to look into and expose unethical or unlawful practices directed at federal civil servants, and to help ensure that whistleblowers who disclose fraud, waste, and abuse on the part of government agencies can do so without suffering reprisals. It would be ironic, to say the least, and inimical to the ends furthered by the statute if the Special Counsel himself could be chilled in his work by fear of arbitrary or partisan removal."

The court ordered Dellinger reinstated but in March, an appeals court allowed him to be fired again while the matter was adjudicated and, given the time and expense of further pursuing the case, Dellinger tapped out, setting the worst possible precedent.

---

[1] U.S. AID was initially established by then-president John F. Kennedy under authority granted him by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961; it was later made a congressionally-established agency by the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act. Rather than asking congress to abolish the agency--something even the current appalling congressional majority may not be predisposed to do--Trump, who has no authority to do any of this, simply ordered its work stopped, fired its workforce and had his Sec. of State Marco Rubio declare, in a dispatch apparently issued from the Twilight Zone, that "Thanks to President Trump, this misguided and fiscally irresponsible era is now over." The death of U.S. AID wouldn't be anything to mourn--it's an instrument of U.S. soft power around the world with an ugly history--but this isn't the way to engineer it.

[2] The plaintiffs' lawyer immediately got on the wrong side of the judge by waiting 3 weeks after the firings to film the suit, then filing it as an emergency motion, forcing the court to immediately consider it.