Letters from an American - February 23,2025

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

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February 23rd, 2025. Something is shifting, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder posted on Blue Sky yesterday. They are still breaking things and stealing things, and they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading. Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here

beyond the desire for personal wealth and power. Rather than backing down on their unpopular programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans are intensifying their behavior as if trying to grab power before it slips away. Trump's blanket pardons of the people convicted for violent behavior in the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol were highly unpopular,

with 83% of Americans opposed to those pardons. Even those who identify as Republican-leaning oppose those pardons 70 to 27 percent. And yet, on February 20th, the Trump Justice Department expanded those pardons to cover gun and drug charges against two former January 6th defendants that were turned up during Federal Bureau of Investigation searches related to the January 6th attack. Then, on February 21st, a number of people pardoned after committing violent crimes,

including Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison, and Proud Boy Ethan Nordine, 18 years, and Dominic Pizzola, 10 years, as well as Oath Keepers leader Stuart Rhodes, 18 years, and Richard Bego Barnett, who sat with his feet on a desk in then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office,

four and a half years, held a press conference at the US Capitol to announce they were going to sue the Justice Department for prosecuting them. Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that the group followed the route they took around the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, then posed for photos, chanting as they had that day,

"'Whose house? Our house!' Protesters nearby heckled the group, and when one of them put her phone near Tario's face while he was talking to a photographer, he batted her arm away. Capitol police officers promptly arrested him for assault. A number of the January 6 rioters were visiting the Capitol from the nearby Conservative Political Action Conference being held in Maryland. There MAGA participants continued to normalize Nazi imagery as both Steve Bannon and Mexican actor Eduardo Verrastegui threw fascist style salutes to the crowd. Yesterday Tarrio

posted a video of himself following officers who defended the Capitol on January 6th through the lobby of a Washington hotel where the anti-Trump principles first conference was taking place. According to Joan E. Grieve of The Guardian, Tarrio followed officers Michael Fanon, Harry Dunn, Daniel Hodges, and Equalino Ganell saying, you guys were brave at my sentencing when you sat there and laughed when I get 22 fucking years. Now you don't wanna look in my eyes, you fucking cowards.

Fanon turned to him and told him, you're a traitor to this country. Today, the hotel had to be evacuated. After someone claiming to be MAGA emailed a threat claiming to have rigged four bombs, two in the hotel, one in Fanon's mother's mailbox, and one in the mailbox of John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, turned critic. After listing the names of several of the conference attendees and

singling out Fanon, the email said they all deserve to die. The perpetrator claimed to be acting to honor the J6 hostages recently released by Emperor Trump. Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump are also ramping up their behavior, even as the public is starting to turn against the government cuts that are badly hurting American veterans, American farmers, and US medical research. The courts keep ruling against their efforts and their claims of finding waste, fraud, and abuse are being widely debunked. Rather than rethinking their course in the face of opposition, they seem

to be becoming more belligerent. On Saturday, Trump urged Musk to be more aggressive in cutting the government, although the White House has told a court that Musk has no authority and is only a presidential adviser. We'll do, Mr. President, Musk replied. He then posted a command to federal employees. Consistent with Trump's instructions, 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. Shortly after, emails went out giving workers 48 hours to list five things they had accomplished

in the past week. This sparked outrage among Americans, who noted that Musk has spent 24 hours tweeting more than 220 times and engaged in public fights with two of the mothers of his children, while allegedly running companies and overhauling the government, while Trump spent at least 12 nights at Mar-a-Lago in his first 29 days in office. SVDate of HuffPost noted on February 18th that Trump has played golf at one of his own properties on nine of his first 30 days in office and that Trump's golf outings have already cost the American taxpayer 10.7 million dollars. Reddit was flooded with potential responses to Musk's demand, scorching it and Musk. The demand also exposed a rift in the administration as department heads including Kash Patel, the newly confirmed

head of the FBI, as well as officials at the State Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of the Navy, asserted their authority to review the workers in their own departments, telling them not to respond to Musk's demand. Then users pointed out that the new government employee email system the Department of Government Efficiency team set up explicitly says that using it is voluntary and that resignations of federal employees must be voluntary. Musk responded by sending out a poll on X asking whether X users think federal employees should be X asking whether X users think federal employees should be required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished in

the past week. The entire exercise made it look as if the lug nuts on the wheels of the Musk Trump government bus are dangerously loose. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented, drunk on power and ketamine. Historian Johann Neame, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump's destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy, and the people

are justified in treating him as a thief and a robber. Whosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law and makes use of the force he has under his command, ceases in that to be a magistrate and acting without authority may be opposed as any other man who by force invades the right of another." Locke wrote. Neame notes that Trump won the election and his party holds majorities in both chambers of Congress. He could have used his legitimate constitutional authority, but instead, with the aid of Elon Musk,

has consistently violated the Constitution and willingly broken laws. Neame warned that courts move too slowly to rein Trump in. He urged Congress to perform its constitutional duty to remove Trump from office and urged voters to make it clear to members of Congress that we expect them to uphold their obligations and protect our freedom.

Otherwise, Neem writes, Americans will be subject to a pretender who claims the power, but not the legitimate authority of the presidency. He continues, Trump's actions threaten the legitimacy of government itself. In the Senate, on Thursday, February 20th, Angus King, an independent of Maine, also reached back to the framers of the Constitution when he warned, again, that permitting Trump to take impoundment, is absolutely straight up unconstitutional,

King said, and it's illegal. The reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power, King said. They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn't want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic where power was divided between the Congress and the president and the courts. And we are collapsing that structure," King said. The people cheering this on, I fear, in a reasonably short period of time are going to say, where did this go?

How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened, he said to his Senate colleagues, is we gave it up. James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no, right now we're just sitting back and watching it happen.

This is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country, King said. It's the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don't want to buck the president, we'll let the courts take care of it. That's a cop-out. It's our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That's what we swear to when we enter this body? What's it going to take for us to wake up? I mean this entire body to wake up to what's going on here. Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the president has secreted

all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What's it going to take? This is a constitutional crisis, and we've got to respond to it. I'm just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no we don't do it this way. We don't do it this way. We do things constitutionally. That's what the Framers intended. They didn't intend to have an efficient dictatorship and that's what we're headed for. We've got to wake up, protect

this institution, but much more importantly, protect the people of the United States of America. Senator King, along with Maine Governor Janet Mills, who stood up to Trump in person earlier this week, are following in the tradition of their state. On June 1st, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican of Maine, delivered her famous Declaration of Conscience, standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin, who was smearing Democrats as communists. I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul-searching and to weigh our

consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges," she said. I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of Calumny. Fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear. On July 24th, 1974, Representative Bill Cohen, a Republican of Maine, who went on to a long Senate career but was at the time only a junior member on the House Judiciary Committee, voted, along with five other Republican members of the committee and the Democratic majority, to draw up articles

of impeachment against Republican President Richard Nixon, fully expecting that the death threats and hate mail he was receiving proved that that vote would destroy his political career. But, Cohen told the Bangor Daily News, I would never compromise what I think is the right thing to do for the sake of an office. It's just not that important. Only time will tell if the people will accept that judgment. Days later, the tape proving Nixon had been part of the Watergate cover-up came to light. Suddenly there was a switch in the people who had been defending the president, Cohen recalled. That's when people back in Maine, Republicans, started to turn around and said, we were wrong

and you were right, and we'll support this. It's a good week to remember that politicians used to use as a yardstick the saying, as Maine goes, so goes the nation. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.

It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.