The Conversation -- February 23, 2025
Marie: Even when Musk came up with the Nazi-like name "Department of Government Efficiency," I didn't imagine anything as despotic as this ~~~
They’re terrorizing us. -- National Institutes of Health Employee
It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire who has never performed one single hour of honest public service in his life. -- Everett Kelley, President of the American Federation of Government Employees union
There is zero basis in the civil service system for this.... This is obviously designed to intimidate employees. Musk and DOGE and the Trump administration are persistently acting in a way that disregards civil service rules and they are just counting on the courts not being able to catch up and clean up after them.... They are counting on employees saying, ‘This is too much, I can’t keep doing this.’ -- Sam Bagenstos, former general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget ~~~
~~~ Kate Conger, et al., of the New York Times: “Elon Musk deepened the confusion and alarm of workers across the federal government Saturday by ordering them to summarize their accomplishments for the week, warning that a failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Shortly after Mr. Musk’s demand, which he posted on X, civil servants across the government received an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line, 'What did you do last week?'... Officials at some agencies, including the F.B.I. and the State Department, told their employees to pause responses to the email. Mr. Musk’s mounting pressure on the federal work force came at the encouragement of ... [Donald] Trump, who has been trumpeting how the billionaire has upended the bureaucracy and on Saturday urged him to be even 'more aggressive.' [Agency leaders' responses varied.] 'DOGE and Elon are doing great work! Historic. We are happy to participate,' Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C..., wrote in a message to his staff.... [F.B.I. Director Kash Patel wrote, '... When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses. For now, please pause any responses.'” Politico's horror story is here. ~~~
~~~ Here was the sequence of communications:
(1) Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him be more aggressive. -- Donald Trump, post on his failing social media site
(2) All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week... Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation. -- Elon Musk, post of his failing social media site
(3) What Did You Do Last Week? -- Office of Personnel Management, email to civil servants, subject line
Peter Baker of the New York Times: “In the first month since he returned to power, [Donald Trump] has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions. Mr. Trump has long been unfettered by truth when it comes to boasting about his record and tearing down his enemies. But what were dubbed 'alternative facts' in his first term have quickly become a whole alternative reality in his second to lay the groundwork for radical change as he moves to aggressively reshape America and the world.... The world according to Mr. Trump is one where he is a master of every challenge and any failure is someone else’s fault.” Baker cites example after example, ending with a recounting of how Michael Waltz, now Trump's national security advisor, flipflopped his assessment of the Russia/Ukraine war, so that “Mr. Waltz’s actual reality gave way to Mr. Trump’s alternative version.” ~~~
~~~ Journalist Claire Berlinski on Substack: “Donald Trump lives in a world of delusions. The things he believes aren’t true. Media accounts suggest that those around him treat him like a relative with dementia. They tell them whatever he likes to hear, so long as it keeps him happy and calm. They don’t correct his misapprehensions. They strive, instead, to make the world conform to his fantasies.... [The extraordinary damage Trump and Musk are doing] is only possible because so many Americans, and in particular, so many members of Congress, have chosen either to enter their fantasy world or deny the evidence that these men are insane. We’re witnessing a textbook case of folie à millions: an extreme collective delusion.” Berlinski goes on to diagnose, a la Erich Fromm, a collective or group narcissism, which she says “typically takes the form of destructive nationalism.... You are watching a superpower commit suicide. Not since the Visigoths sacked Rome has a great empire suffered so much damage to its power and prestige in so short a time.” A long Sunday read. Thanks to laura h. for the link. ~~~
~~~ Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, relying on a translation of a work by the ancient Roman historian Gaius Suetonius, compares Trump to Caligula. (Hey, if the sandal fits, strap it on.) “'Remember, I can do whatever I want to whomever I want.' It sounds like ... Trump, to the world. But it was Caligula, to his grandmother.... As Suetonius noted about Caligula, 'To the Senate he showed no more mercy or respect. He allowed some who had achieved the highest offices to run alongside his chariot in their togas for several miles or to stand, dressed in a linen cloth, at the head or the foot of his couch as he dined.' Sound familiar?” The translator, Joshua “Osgood writes of Caligula’s 'propensity to give in to every whim and the relish he took in putting down others with cruel remarks.'”
“Coalition of the Crass.” Ali Breland of the Atlantic: “Penis jokes are the kind of juvenile humor that Musk is known for.... His jokes, terrible as they are, are indicative of a new sensibility taking hold on the right—one that Musk himself, in his rightward shift, has played a role in shaping. Trolling in its various forms (posting about balls, trying to offend, making political opponents squirm) has gone from an occasionally used tool to a unifying touchstone of an entire political faction.... [Trump's] victory has unleashed a coalition of the crass that encompasses a growing number of Americans who are excited to be able to call things 'retarded' and 'gay' again, joke about deporting people, and delight in the performance of saying things that are 'not PC.'... It is not enough to beat your adversaries. They must be humiliated.” Thanks to laura h. for this gift link.
A Crude Collaborator Gets a Big Promotion. Lisa Rein of the Washington Post: “Leaders of the Social Security Administration had just opened an investigation into a career employee they believed was improperly sharing information with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team when ... Donald Trump elevated the employee this week to acting commissioner, according to three current or former government officials with knowledge of the events. The agency’s leadership team became aware in recent weeks that Leland Dudek, a data analyst working in a small anti-fraud office who had been unknown to many of them, was sharing unauthorized access to information with representatives of Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service.... [Dudek's] actions raised enough alarm that he may have violated privacy and tax laws that senior officials placed him on paid leave as they launched their investigation. The officials ... also were notified late last week that Dudek had sent harassing emails to employees in the agency’s personnel and security divisions to rush them to let several engineers hired by DOGE start work and gain access to agency computer systems. The officials pushed back, saying that they had not completed background investigations into the new hires.”
Katherine Faulders & Alexander Mallin of ABC News: "... Donald Trump is expected to name FBI Director Kash Patel as the acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.... The move comes after Attorney General Pam Bondi fired the ATF's general counsel, Pamela Hicks, late last week. Bondi said in an interview with Fox News on Friday that it was because the agency's lead lawyer was 'targeting gun owners.'" ~~~
~~~ Marie: Wait! Wait! If the task of going after violators of firearms laws is part of the name of your agency, wouldn't you kind of be required to "target gun owners"? What does Bondi think "firearms" are? Upper extremities aflame?
Edward Wong & Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times: “Trump administration appointees running the main United States aid agency have in recent days fired hundreds of employees who help manage responses to urgent humanitarian crises around the world.... The firings add to doubts raised about whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio is allowing employees for the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., to carry out lifesaving humanitarian assistance, as he had promised to do late last month during a blanket freeze of almost all foreign aid from the U.S. government. Trump appointees have fired or put on paid leave thousands of employees of U.S.A.I.D. A task force of young engineers working for Elon Musk ... has shut down many technical systems in the aid agency and barred employees from their email accounts. Mr. Musk has posted dark conspiracy theories about U.S.A.I.D. on social media, asserting with no evidence that it is a 'criminal organization' and that it was 'time for it to die.'
“The latest round of dismissals occurred on Friday night, when hundreds of people working for the agency’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance got emails saying their jobs had been terminated. Two employees who got the emails said they were strange because they did not state any job titles specifically and did not have the recipients’ names in the 'to' field. They were generic emails sent out in a large wave.... About 400 people were fired in recent days from humanitarian assistance positions, one U.S. official said. About 200 of those were contractors for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, the officials said, and another 200 were part of a unit called the Support Relief Group, a collection of crisis experts....”
It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down. -- Rosa Brooks, Georgetown Law ~~~
~~~ Gregg Jaffe of the New York Times: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to fire the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force represents an opening salvo in his push to remake the military into a force that is more aggressive on the battlefield and potentially less hindered by the laws of armed conflict. Mr. Hegseth, in the Pentagon and during his meetings with troops last week in Europe, has spoken repeatedly about the need to restore a 'warrior ethos' to a military that he insists has become soft, social-justice obsessed and more bureaucratic over the past two decades.... Senior Pentagon officials said that Mr. Hegseth has had no contact with any of the three fired uniform military lawyers since taking office. None of the three — Lt. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III, Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer and Rear Adm. Lia M. Reynolds — were even named in the Pentagon statement announcing their dismissal from decades of military service. A senior military official with knowledge of the firings added that the military lawyers had 'zero heads up' that they were being removed from office and that the top brass in the Army, Navy and Air Force were also caught unaware.” In his book published last year, Hegseth called the JAGs (judge advocates general) “jagoffs.”
We have some spy stories today. You would be wise to take them with the proverbial grains of salt. ~~~
“Krasnov.” brianinca of Daily Kos: “So earlier today, the Daily Beast’s Isabel van Brugen published a bombshell story about allegations by Kazakh Spy Chief Alnur Mussayev that the KGB had recruited Donald Trump as a Soviet Asset way back in 1987 under the code name 'Krasnov.'... Within hours, it was scrubbed from both the Daily Beast’s site.... There is no retraction on the Daily Beast site, or even any acknowledgment that the story existed, and several republishers have pulled the story as well.... The speed at which this is being memory holed is rather breathtaking.” Thanks to RAS for the link. ~~~
~~~ In today's Comments, Akhilleus tells us why he is skeptical that Trump is Krasnov. He has a point. ~~~
~~~ Nafeez Ahmed & Zarina Zabrisky of Byline Times: "A former senior Soviet KGB spy chief has claimed that Donald Trump was recruited as a spy by Russian intelligence as early as 38 years ago by his department, and given the codename ‘Krasnov’.... In an extraordinary post on Facebook on 20 February, Alnur Mussayev – who used to run the successor to the Soviet-era KGB in Kazakhstan – claimed that he was personally aware of Trump’s recruitment by the agency in 1987. The recruitment, he said, was undertaken by his own KGB department. One of the key roles of that department was to acquire intelligence through business leaders in Western countries." Thanks to RAS for the link.
Journalist Jacob Silverman: “Among the cadre of DOGE engineers now rooting through the guts of the administrative state, few have attracted more curiosity than Edward 'Big Balls' Coristine, a 19-year-old coder who interned for three months for Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company. Coristine has a brief but colorful history that includes being fired from Path Networks, a cybersecurity company, for giving company documents to a competitor. He apparently palled around with a criminal hacking group called The Com and, according to a Telegram account associated with him, had solicited hacking services online. In 2021, he founded a company called Tesla.Sexy LLC that, according to Wired, 'controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains....'... Coristine has email addresses at USAID and the Department of Homeland Security and was recently seen inside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department.... There’s one aspect of Coristine’s background that has escaped public notice: his grandfather, Valery Martynov, was a KGB spy who played an intriguing role in a sprawling 1980s espionage drama.” Silverman describes the spy v. spy interactions. The Russians eventually lured Martynov, who had become a counterspy, back to Moscow & executed him.
Paul Kane of the Washington Post: “With ... Donald Trump and GOP leaders distracted by other issues, Congress is on the verge of bungling its way into a shutdown of federal agencies in less than three weeks.... The most pressing problem — keeping the federal government open past the March 14 deadline — has been virtually ignored by top leaders. And unlike the most recent shutdown deadlines, the politics of the moment are not aligned to bring the two parties together with an obvious last-minute deal that simply adds more money for each side’s favored projects.”
News of the Resistance
Maeve Reston, et al., of the Washington Post: “Amid a barrage of executive orders from ... [Donald] Trump and dramatic steps by billionaire Elon Musk to downsize the federal government, Democratic attorneys general have emerged as the new administration’s most persistent — and effective — adversaries. While congressional Democrats who lack control of either chamber have struggled to respond to Trump’s first weeks, state attorneys general have marched into court, pledging to rein in an administration intent on pushing the limits of presidential power.... In the past month alone, multistate coalitions have sued the Trump administration seven times.... The quick and coordinated pushback from Democratic attorneys general is the product of months of planning and regular consultations since Trump’s inauguration, 10 of them said in interviews.”
Annie Karni of the New York Times: Sen. Chris “Murphy, 51, [D-Conn.] ... has seemed to be everywhere, all at once, since Inauguration Day, staging a loud and constant resistance to Mr. Trump at a time when Democrats are struggling to figure out how to respond to him. In two-minute videos on social media, which he records from his office on Capitol Hill; an almost constant stream of posts on X; passionate floor speeches; and essays he writes on his Substack, Mr. Murphy is attempting to explain in digestible sound bites that what is happening in Washington is very simple: It’s a billionaire takeover of American democracy.” This is a gift link.
SOS. Marie: The page is firewalled, so I can't get to it, but Gregory Thomas's lede in the San Francisco Chronicle is "A group of frustrated Yosemite National Park staffers hoping to draw attention to the federal government's sweeping workforce cuts hung an upside-down American flag Saturday thousands of feet off the ground on the side of El Capitan."
Perry Bacon of the Washington Post finds a college president willing to stand up for American values: “MichaelRoth, “the president of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University[,] wrote a piece in Slate that described some of the Trump administration’s rhetoric as authoritarian. He consistently reposts articles criticizing Trump’s decisions. He speaks and blogs firmly in defense of diversity, equity and inclusion, transgender rights and immigration.... In our conversation, Roth slammed prominent Republicans, specifically naming the president, vice president and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for using their Ivy League degrees to advance professionally but now portraying themselves as anti-elite populists.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Christopher Schuetze of the New York Times: “Germans are voting on Sunday in a rare snap election that has taken on outsize importance as the new Trump administration threatens European countries with tariffs, cuts them out of negotiations over Ukraine and embraces an authoritarian Russia. The election for Parliament was called after Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular and long-troubled three-party government collapsed in November. Seven months earlier than scheduled, the voting now falls in the midst of Europe’s struggle for strong leadership and as it recalibrates its relationship with the United States.”
5 Comments
Reader Comments (5)
How about this little punk justify his position to the American people? How about he list all the 100% honest, necessary, useful things he’s done in the last week? Can’t do it? Great. Get your shit and get the fuck out.
Fat Hitler a Soviet asset? More like a Soviet ass. He’d have been bragging about this to at least a few people (like NYC tabloid reporters) to “prove” what a cool, dangerous character he was. Plus, what was he gonna tell the Sovs? “Hey, I banged this hot chick in the dressing room at Bergdorf’s! She put up a fight but when you’re James Bond, they let you do it! Heh-heh.”
KGB internal memo: eyes only.
Dump that schmuck. He’s liable to start spilling our secrets, never mind getting us theirs.
Don't know if or when it might have begun, but the Pretender has been a Russian ass(et) since at least 2016.
His words and deeds have told us so.
Just had a week long visit from 8 and 10 year old grandsons. The eight year old thinks he's funny. He likes to report disasters that never happened, mixed with reports of some that have, and if you fall for his malarkey, he's shouts, "Psyche!"
Hadn't heard that one in years. A generation-skipping taunt, perhaps.
As I remarked the other day, guess that Russia "hoax" (wink-wink)
wasn't so funny.
Psyche!
This sermon appeared in this weekend's edition of our local paper.
The original ending had the hot link RAS provided here a few weeks back, but the paper couldn't use it, so it went with the Superman quotation. I was disappointed. I liked the link.
Regardless, thanks RAS and RC.
The Good Old Days
Trump entered the White House primed to wage war on America’s greatest enemy: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
In his first weeks in office, Trump blamed the Washington, D. C. air disaster on DEI, implying that the pilot of the Black Hawk helicopter that collided with a passenger plane was some incompetent minority. That the pilots were both white, a highly trained man and woman, did not elicit a White House correction or apology. Instead, the Trump administration pursued its siege against all government programs designed to foster DEI, firing those employed in such programs, and erasing all mention of DEI from government publications. Trump even rescinded a sixty-year-old executive order prohibiting and ensuring the absence of discrimination in the awarding of federal contracts (cnn.com). Trump wants DEI dead and wiped from the pages of history.
Some might ask why anyone in 2025 America would want to eliminate consideration of diversity, equity and inclusion from a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Who really desires what the absence of DEI would bring: more sameness, inequity, and exclusion? We already have the last two in large supply. Obvious economic and racial divides continue to roil our politics.
Unfortunately, the Right's attack on DEI and its predecessors like “woke” and Critical Race Theory (CRT—more scary initials) appeals to a large audience that seems to want unfairness, exclusion, and let’s be honest, white privilege. If it were not so, the war on DEI, “Woke-ism” and CRT would carry little political clout.
While the words and initials have changed over the years, the issues that animate this war are as old as the country. The United States began with exclusion, assigning slaves the value of one-fifth of a person and no rights at all. That changed at the cost of 600,000 dead in our bloody Civil War. Inequity was also part of our founding DNA, when voting was restricted to white propertied males. It took until 1920 for women to achieve the right to vote. Old habits die hard.
Considered on the scale of history, white privilege has had a tough go over the last two hundred years. In Western nations, slavery ended in the 1800’s, and following the last century’s two world wars, South American, African and Asian countries shrugged off their colonial chains. Now post-Mao China is competing with the United States and Europe for economic dominance. In history’s light, it’s reasonable to see the Right’s battle against DEI as another effort to turn back the clock to a time when rich white men controlled most everything. In a country as divided as our own, it’s a noxious brand of nostalgia.
It’s not as if I’m immune to nostalgia myself. I liked the good old days, too. Not only did my knees not hurt then, but I liked the days when progress seemed possible. When the nation was clear-eyed enough to admit it wasn’t perfect and tried to make it better. When a bi-partisan Congress passed the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. When women were given control of their own bodies. When the nation woke to the vast harm we were doing to our beautiful country and began to regulate solid, liquid and airborne pollution. When medical science and the help we provided other countries led to better human health here and around the world.
I’m all for nostalgia—of the right kind. When our laws, policies and actions healed the divisions of geography, race and class that we all inherit at birth, we made progress, and that progress made me proud.
The other day I saw that if I squint hard enough, I can still see “e pluribus unum” (“out of many, one”) hugging the edge of a quarter.
I looked to see if it was still there because Trump’s first official acts when he returned to office were to erase the intent of the country’s unofficial motto that has been with us since the time of Jefferson, when our new nation was struggling to come together as one.
Today, that motto still appears on most coins, on the dollar bill, on the Great Seal of the United States and on many military flags and uniforms (wikipedia.org). Today it seems more appropriate than ever.
Maybe it’s time to pull out a one-dollar bill, and read and think about that motto again.
And then there’s what Superman had to say about DEI way back in the 1950’s. “If YOU hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race or national origin-don't wait: tell him THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN.”
That’s the kind of nostalgia I like.
@Ken Winkes: Man, it's a good thing
CaligulaTrump can't read Latin. Otherwise, we'd have to get rid of not just the penny but all those other denominations that contain the motto "E Pluribus Unum." (And by law, that's all U.S. coins and currency.) Thanks for the heads-up. (Tails, we lose.)I have wondered why the right insisted upon using the initials DEI to describe the type of government programs they opposed instead of using, you know, a word. When asked what DEI stands for, some of them say, "Didn't Earn It." But the real reason I think they like using DEI instead of a word is that saying you're opposed to diversity, equity or inclusion sounds pretty damned anti-American and overtly racist.
These anti-DEI people do oppose traditional American values and they are racists, but most of them aren't ready to admit that. However, it looks to me as if Musk & Trump are preparing the hordes to embrace their inner racists and let them run wild.