Letters from an American - February 5, 2025

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

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February 5th, 2025. Five years ago, on February 5th, 2020, Republican senators acquitted then-President Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. Trump immediately vowed retaliation against those who had tried to hold him accountable before the law for his actions. It's payback time, one Republican said. He has an enemies list that is growing by the day. Now Trump is back in office and purging the government of those he perceives to be his enemies. His administration is purging the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Civil Service of anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the president.

But it is not clear that the 78-year-old Trump is the one calling the shots. Although Trump maintained during his campaign that he had no idea what the right-wing Project 2025 was, multiple media outlets have established that most of his flurry of executive orders appear to have been lifted from the 922-page document. That document is the product of a group of far-right organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to Viktor Orbán's Danube Institute. This week's threatened tariff war blew up in Trump's face. After his vow to put tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada sent the stock market plunging, he was left declaring victory over Mexico and Canada after they essentially

assured him they would do things they were already doing. In the meantime, as Carl Quintanilla noted today, Trump's tariffs on products from China are increasing prices in the U.S. Last night, Trump horrified even his own advisors by saying that the United States would take over Gaza and turn it into a resort area. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that Trump's team had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea when Trump blurted it out.

There had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal, Swan and Haberman wrote, let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required, or cost estimates, or even an outline of how it might work.

There was little beyond an idea inside the president's head, an idea his own officials considered fantastical, even for Mr. Trump. Trump's comments were so badly received in the Middle East that Matthew Gertz of Media Matters wondered if Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered additional security for the U.S. diplomatic facilities there. Today, Trump praised Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican of Alabama, for coaching Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in college, although Mahomes arrived at Texas Tech after Tuberville had already left. In his important piece, The Logic of Destruction and How to Resist It, published February

2nd in his Thinking About. Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder reflected on the president's multiple photo ops signing executive orders to, for example, blame former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for a plane crash that happened during Trump's term. Snyder referred to the president as a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras. Today journalist Gil Duran of the Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the US

government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a reboot of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a full-power start, a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power which risks destroying the ship Yarvin called for giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the Democratic government Trump whom Yarvin dismissed as weak, would give power to that CEO who would run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be

shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems. Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological army, the CEO will throw it directly against the administrative state, not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern. The new regime must take over the country and perform the real functions of the old and ideally perform them much better. It must seize all points of power without respect for paper protections." Duran noted that Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed Yarvin's prescriptions and that Trump's sidekick, billionaire Elon Musk, appears to be putting Yarvin's blueprint into action. Musk is taking a systematic approach, Duran wrote, one that has been outlined

in public forums for years. This morning, Anna Wilde Matthews and Liz Esley White of the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk's team has accessed payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS. Matthews and White note that CMS sits at the center of the country's healthcare economy. In 2024, it dispersed about $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the total amount of the federal total. On X, Musk said, this is where the big money fraud is happening. But in fact, CMS is not operating without oversight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates out of the Department of Justice,

investigates healthcare fraud. In June, 2024, it announced criminal charges against 193 defendants across 32 federal districts who allegedly participated in healthcare fraud schemes that involved about $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses. Indeed, as Eric Levitz of Vox pointed out, Doggie has not presented evidence of fraud. They have highlighted millions of dollars worth of spending that Musk considers wasteful. By contrast, the General Accountability Office identified $233 billion of fraud in 2024. We don't need to let a billionaire

ignore federal law to do government oversight. It is extraordinary how much access Elon Musk and his sort of creepy 22-year-old henchmen have to all of our data. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, told MSNBC today. They have information that would allow them to shut down your tax refund, your Medicare payment. Potentially, they know everything about you and your family. And the reality is that this could get dystopian very quickly.

If you were to start speaking ill of Elon Musk on social media, Elon Musk might be able to stop or delay your tax refund or your mom's social security benefit, in part because we have no window into what's happening inside the Department of the Treasury right now. While Murphy didn't say it explicitly, control over such information also gives Musk power over business rivals and

political leaders. When Musk's team went into the Department of Labor today, Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington, noted that he could manipulate quarterly job numbers and much more. We are talking about market moving information. Do employers want Musk to have access to any of their confidential data? Today, when asked about Musk's conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said that Trump had already promised that if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that Doggie is overseeing, that Elon will

excuse himself from those contracts. Donald Kettle, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hall of Bloomberg, I don't know of any other case anywhere in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest. In a shocking attack on the intelligence personnel who collect information around the world to keep Americans safe, today the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA sent a list of all employees the agency hired in the

past two years to the White House, sending the list by unclassified email. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that a former CIA agent called the reporting of the names a counterintelligence disaster. Lowell also reported that representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he understands that the White House insisted on the list coming through unclassified email. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted, exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. A disastrous national security development.

Today, protesters gathered across the country to protest the takeover of the U.S. government by Musk and his cronies. And Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican of Alaska, noted on Facebook that the U.S. Senate phone system has been overwhelmed with around 1,600 calls a minute, in contrast to the 40 calls a minute it usually receives. Representative Mark Pocan, a Democrat of Wisconsin, announced he would introduce the Elon Musk Act, the eliminate looting of our nation by mitigating unethical state kleptocracy act, which would ban federal contracts for special government

employees, similar to the bans for special government employees similar to the bans for members of Congress and other federal employees. Opposition might well continue to grow as the bite of the cuts the Trump administration and Musk are making to the federal government is only beginning to be felt at home. The collapse of U.S.ID is already an international crisis. Those cuts are poised to hurt Trump's own rural voters worse than they hurt Democratic areas. In Virginia, about 400,000 people in rural areas receive health care from federally qualified health centers. Half of these centers have lost their federal grants and are stopping some services

or closing. Trump is currently planning to eliminate the Department of Education. The top six states that receive grants under the department, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Nevada, all voted for Trump in 2024. Tonight, Democratic senators led by Chuck Schumer of New York, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Patty Murray of Washington, Gary Peters of Michigan, and Brian Schatz of Hawaii will hold the Senate floor all night in a filibuster to stop the confirmation of Russell Vogt, a key right-wing author of Project 2025, to direct the Office of Management and Budget. Vogt's proposals to slash federal funding will threaten Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the senators said. Vogt will

also continue to carry out President Donald Trump's illegal federal funding cuts, stopping taxpayer dollars from supporting local schools, police departments, community health centers, food pantries, firefighters, and other vital programs. programs.