The New York Times reported this morning: “The Trump administration laid off thousands of federal health workers on Tuesday in a purge that included senior leaders and top scientists charged with regulating food and drugs, protecting Americans from disease and researching new treatments and cures.”

While Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suggested that eliminating 10,000 jobs would relieve the budget deficit, health personnel make up less than 1% of HHS spending; most funding goes to hospitals, doctors, and nursing homes.

Last Friday, the FDA’s top vaccine scientist, Peter Marks, resigned under pressure. Marks accused the secretary of trafficking in “misinformation and lies” in his campaign against vaccines, adding, “This man doesn’t care about the truth.”

Unfortunately, Kennedy, who has promoted vitamin A to ward off measles, has a following among parents who take him seriously.

The partial quotation in the headline above this post is from Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. From Nature: “This will go down as one of the darkest days in modern scientific history in my 50 years in the business. These are going to be huge losses to the research community.”

And Americans will suffer and die as a consequence. This policy is worse than senseless. It is recklessly, callously harmful. All because Donald Trump craves attention and deference and the Kennedy aura, and Robert Jr. — after being rebuffed by Kamala Harris — offered his support for Trump’s campaign in August 2024.

Politics is often transactional. But seldom as stupid and destructive as Trump has made it. For years to come, Americans who could have lived and thrived, will be struck by diseases and many will die as a result of Trump and Kennedy’s misrule.

In 2023, 107,500 people — mostly children — lost their lives to measles, a highly contagious respiratory virus. In 2025, kids in Texas and New Mexico have died from measles. Yet the disease was considered eliminated in the United States in 2000 as a result of the MMR vaccine and high vaccination rates. Vaccine skepticism, now boosted by the nation’s cabinet official overlooking the health agencies, is taking a toll, as vaccine rates plummet.

And of course the harm of the misinformation and lies extends much further and wider than measles, a single infectious disease.

Whatever Make America Great Again conjures up for the true believers, this can’t be it, can it? A return to the good old days (before the vaccine became available) when there were tens of thousands of hospitalizations due to measles in the U.S. and hundreds of Americans, mostly children, died from the infection each year?

For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.  

This quotation is often attributed to strongman Oscar R. Benavides, who rose from Field Marshal to President (1933-1939) of Peru. We North Americans (in the United States) are seeing a version of this in the second presidential administration of Donald Trump, but it’s not exactly a law and order regime that we’re watching.

Conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig recently wrote:

President Trump has wasted no time in his second term in declaring war on the nation’s federal judiciary, the country’s legal profession and the rule of law. He has provoked a constitutional crisis with his stunning frontal assault on the third branch of government and the American system of justice. The casualty could well be the constitutional democracy Americans fought for in the Revolutionary War against the British monarchy 250 years ago.

Obviously, the law reserved for Trump’s enemies veers sharply from the rule of law envisaged in a constitutional democracy. A recent discussion by Aziz Huq of The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, written by Ernst Fraenkel more than eighty years ago, suggests a critical distinction.

Fraenkel observed firsthand the erosion of constitutional and legal foundations of Germany and the rise of strongman rule under Hitler. But, in Huq’s words, “the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.”

As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. 

Trump and his administration, prominently including his DOJ, have created the prerogative state right before our eyes. It is a lawless zone where resentment and grievance rule, retribution is directed at enemies, while friends and family are rewarded and corruptly acquired payoffs buy immunity from the feds.

This is a perversion of a democratic America. For most folks, life can go on more or less as normal (though we have lost an ample measure of our freedom and security) — unless we attract the ire of the strongman or his lieutenants. Then, we may find ourselves subject to unlimited arbitrariness (and in some cases violence) — as thousands of people (civil servants, university and medical researchers, students receiving financial aid, demonstrators whose viewpoints offend MAGA, Democratic law firms, families with transgender kids, legal immigrants, et al.) have experienced in the first two months of rule by the Trump 2 administration.

This (hardly exhaustive) list will keep getting longer.

In a report last week in the New York Times (“‘This Is Worse’: Trump’s Judicial Defiance Veers Beyond the Autocrat Playbook,” Amanda Taub highlights the assessment of Steven Levitsky.

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”
“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orbán forced out hostile judges and packed the courts with allies — over many years. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey purged thousands of judges — over several decades. Both used subterfuge. Trump has been in office barely two months and his methods have been transparent.

Mr. Levitsky said he was struggling to find a precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.
“The zeal with which these guys are engaging in increasingly open, authoritarian behavior is unlike almost anything I’ve seen. Erdogan, Chavez, Orban — they hid it,” Mr. Levitsky said.

The Trump 2 administration is much different than Trump 1. Trump’s allies have had four years since the attempted insurrection on January 6 to prepare for this moment. The Project 2025 guys paved the way with a master plan. Trump cronies who populate the second administration hit the ground running. While their advances have often been clumsy, they’ve charged ahead at full speed.

MAGA has seized control of the federal government and is racing to remake it — just as Donald Trump promised during the 2024 campaign. The assault is degrading our democratic institutions.

Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.
So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate. But inside the administration, there are moves to coordinate and expand the assault. 

That’s from a report by kenneth Vogel and Shane Goldmacher in the New York Times on a concerted campaign to use the power of the state to cripple the ability of the Democratic Party to raise funds, to organize campaigns, and to rely on legal and organizational support critical to winning elections.

The report is replete with details of the crooked onslaught to tilt the playing field to favor MAGA Republicans — or, to put it another way — to rig American elections so Democrats can’t compete.

This is straight out of the playbook of authoritarians — Putin and Orban are among the most prominent today — to wound their political opponents and undermine civil society. MAGA Republicans have openly praised both the men, revering them as role models.

Trump pledged throughout his 2024 campaign to seek retribution against his political foes. He has whined incessantly about the weaponization of the justice department, while directing DOJ attacks on folks (“horrible people,” “thugs,” “scum”) who dare oppose him. Trump is intent on seeking personal vengeance, exacted through the coercive power of the federal government.

The course Trump is following is exactly what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — authors of How Democracies Die –predicted Trump would do (when interviewed last December, a month before he reentered the White House).

I quoted from the interview in a previous post; first Ziblatt: “So, it’s not about changing the rules, but really attacking civil society, attacking the opposition.”

Levitsky predicted that “we’re going to see really classic authoritarian behavior,” and he foresaw “politicizing the state and deploying it in ways not only to punish rivals, but also to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines. And so, you know, first and foremost, we’ve been told to expect that the Department of Justice will be wielded to punish those who have tried to hold the Trump administration accountable. I think we’ll see it wielded against some politicians. We’ll see it wielded against some businesspeople. We’ll see it wielded against some civil society leaders. We may see it wielded against Harvard and other elite universities.”

There’s nothing new here. Trump, the White House, the DOJ, and MAGA activists are literally following the path trod by foreign authoritarians (past and present).

Americans haven’t seen this before — not here. But it’s happening right before our eyes. The institutions that undergird our democracy and our civil society — associations separate and independent of state power — are being dismantled. Our president is grasping for unchecked power, in direct violation of the constitutional restraints that preserve our liberty.

Our rights as Americans, public policies that serve and protect us, and limits on the power of a single man to direct the government to inflict harm on us are being smashed to bits.

Meanwhile, scholars and commentators have been debating for weeks about whether we have, or at what point we might, encounter a constitutional crisis. This may be a significant question for theories of constitutional law or political philosophy, but it is hardly clear that it has much import for the rest of us.

In this morning’s New York Times Adam Liptak highlights the views of several legal scholars who shift the focus. For instance:

Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said that assessing whether a given development is a constitutional crisis is “generally unhelpful.”
“I think it’s more useful to say that this is moving us into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced,” Professor Huq said. “The law, in other words, becomes a tool to harm enemies, but not to bind those who govern. That is a quite different constitutional order from the one that we’ve had for a long time.”

The Project 2025 folks and the billionaires who back them are getting their way. Add Leonard Leo and his funders, countless MAGA enthusiasts on social media, and Republicans in Congress (who are ducking responsibility, but happy to stand back as the destruction unfolds). And let’s give a shout out to the five Republican men – all of whom have devoted their professional lives to advancing the agenda of the Republican Party – in the supermajority on the Roberts Court.

The deliberate destruction continues apace. The harm to Americans and to our country continues to metastasize.

The quotation is from First Amendment scholar Lee Bollinger, cited by Barbara McQuade:

We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.
We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.

From interview of Lee Bollinger, 1st Amendment scholar who served as dean of @UMichLaw, president of @UMich, and president of Columbia University. www.chronicle.com/article/were…

— Barb McQuade (@barbmcquade.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T19:17:01.492Z

This is unfolding right before our eyes. It is unmistakable.

[McQuade link via Josh Marshall at TPM.]

The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, will cast a vote — with enough of his Democratic colleagues — to enable Senate Republicans to pass the stopgap spending bill (the CR, continuing resolution) the House sent to the Senate earlier this week. Passage will prevent a government shutdown on Saturday at 12:01 a.m.

In doing so, Democrats (collectively, not everyone) in the Senate have given up the most significant institutional leverage they possess in this Congress. The CR can pass only with Democratic support to overcome a filibuster. This fall, Republicans plan to pass a budget that will slash personnel, spending, and a broad range of services and regulations that will reflect the MAGA vision of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Project 2025, and the rich individuals and corporations who will be big winners. That bill, under rules for reconciliation, will pass with a simple majority in the Senate.

Speaker Mike Johnson found enough Republican votes to shove the CR, with no concessions to Democrats, through the House. Since then, Senate Democrats have faced a choice: help Republicans overcome a filibuster to pass it. Or don’t help and watch the government shut down on Saturday morning.

Aaron Blake of the Washington Post suggested that this presented “an impossible choice” to Democrats. “There are quite simply no good or obvious answers for Democrats right now ahead of a Senate vote on whether to pass the GOP’s government funding bill.” Senators in the party of government really don’t want to shut down the government. (The Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, stepping into the stylish shoes of former senator Kyrsten Sinema, has drawn attention to himself while making this point.)

Jonathan Bernstein agreed that this presents a tough choice: “On balance I think filibuster is the best bad answer. But I don’t think it’s an easy call at all.” He adds that “things are bad now and letting this pass could make it worse.”

So, while mainstream media and political science are in agreement that this is a tough call, Democrats have decided: they won’t filibuster to defeat the CR. Ed Kilgore observed today, “Well, folks, looks like the fix is in,” adding, ‘I hope Chuck Schumer realizes nobody’s going to be fooled by this “we oppose the CR but not enough to filibuster it” position. It’s just a complicated way of caving. Maybe it’s the right thing to do in the end, but if so he shouldn’t be so devious about it.’ Josh Marshall called it “the Kabuki cave.”

So, the best possible choice? Or a missed opportunity?

Senator Schumer detested his options:

Either proceed with the bill before us or risk Donald Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown. This in my view is no choice at all.
While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse. For sure, the Republican bill is a terrible option. It is not a clean CR. It is deeply partisan. It doesn’t address far too many of this country’s needs. But I believe that allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.

.@SenSchumer (D-NY): "While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse … Therefore, I will vote to keep the government open and not shut it down." pic.twitter.com/1IkuJqOObr

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 13, 2025

Senator Adam Schiff offered a different perspective, explaining why he is a hard NO on the bill:

First of all, this is not a bill that would simply continue the funding levels of the government for the next half a year. This is a power giveaway to an executive already drunk with power. This would embolden the president to continue tearing down government services, closing Social Security offices, illegally withholding funds, illegally seizing more and more authority from the U.S. Congress. But worst of all in my view is we would be giving it to him.
It is one thing for those who aspire to dictatorship to take power. It is another to knowingly give it to him. I will not do that.

I'm a hard NO on the Republican spending bill. On cloture. On all of it.

When a wannabe dictator is trying to seize power, it must not be given to him.

Not without a fight. pic.twitter.com/yypHGJFXOw

— Adam Schiff (@SenAdamSchiff) March 13, 2025

In my view, as in Schiff’s, Trump and Musk are already ripping apart the federal government, unconstrained by the law or their lack of legitimate authority. Schumer and risk-averse Democrats fear Trump may throw “America into the chaos of a shutdown,” but we’re already seeing a version of this play out. Who knows what Trump and Musk and his techie kids will do if the CR doesn’t pass? It’s hardly clear that we are better off with a CR than without one. Schiff insists that he is not willing “to take ownership” of this rampage, essentially deciding to take a stand with his hard NO.

A tough call? Perhaps, but I’ll note that the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union representing federal workers, with more than 800,000 members whose jobs, working conditions, and the integrity of their agencies are on the line, asked senators to vote No on the CR.

If normal politics were at play and if an American oligarch and his DOGE fanboys were not wilding through federal departments and agencies, the folks (like Fetterman and Schumer) who are loathe to shut down the government would have a stronger case.

These aren’t normal times. The destruction that DOGE does between now and September; the loss of the government’s capacity to do what it was designed to do; and the resultant harm to real people (though it isn’t yet prominent) will be immense. Opposing this off-the-rails rampage and risking blame for a shutdown will serve to draw attention to what’s going on — even as the rampage continues, as it will. Day by day, Americans who aren’t paying much attention to things now, will begin notice.

Democrats, after tomorrow’s vote, will have dodged the opportunity to change the political dynamic. But isn’t that the responsibility of the opposition in a democracy?

Instead, Democrats are playing a waiting game (and hoping not to get blamed for the ongoing destruction). They’ve conceded the field to Trump and Musk. When things get worse, Democrats can blame those guys. But by taking this course, they have chosen to be bystanders, just watching as the chaos unfolds.

Is it possible that this bystander strategy could turn out to be effective in changing the political dynamic? That voting for the CR represents the best defense against the demolition underway? Yeah, maybe. But it sure doesn’t inspire confidence, nor does it signal urgency.

I’m still with Schiff.

March 14, 2025 Postscript: It was clear yesterday that (at least some) Senate Democrats prepared to go along with the CR were following a cover your-ass-strategy. But I tiptoed around the issue because there is a good-faith argument that a shutdown would be more harmful than a CR. I wanted to give folks the benefit of the doubt.

I hadn’t seen the most recent developments last night before I posted. As usual, Josh Marshall was on the case. I’ll let him speak for me:

There was a recognition up in the Senate yesterday that letting the bill pass was a bad idea, but that was matched by a pained realization that the caucus wasn’t ready for the fight. They hadn’t laid any of the groundwork. They didn’t have a clear answer of what they’d be fighting for if a shutdown happened. They’d put their bets on Mike Johnson not being able to get a bill through the House without Democratic votes. When he did, they were caught flatfooted. But the “they” here is Chuck Schumer. That’s the leader’s job. He lead them into a corner.
When you’re weak you only think about getting hurt. It not only constrains your actions. It shapes and limits what future possibilities you are able to imagine. It makes it impossible to see or consider the ways that acting and taking risks, making foes react to you rather than constantly reacting to them can change the playing field and create new possibilities. I think that’s what brought Chuck Schumer to this moment. None of us know the future. So disagreements are inevitable. What was unforgivable was Schumer’s trying to hoodwink his supporters.

I’m still with Senator Adam Schiff.

Kevin Drum offered sharply intelligent, conscientious, data-driven commentary on a wide range of issues related to public policy for the past two decades. He was always worth reading. His even-handed posts, which invariably gave folks with whom he disagreed the benefit of the doubt — without rancor or cheap shots; his openness to speaking about his treatment for multiple myeloma (after his 2014 diagnosis); and his fondness for his cats (he originated cat blogging) conveyed his personal character to readers. He was clearly a good guy. That’s why he will be missed by so many of us.

Folks who knew Drum personally and other readers familiar with his work, who are more articulate than I am, offered their takes:

• Josh Marshall
• Clara Jeffrey
• Michael Hiltzik
• Alex Tabarrok

I discovered political blogs shortly after Kevin Drum arrived at the Washington Monthly. I recall visiting his first blog (after he had stopped posting there), calpundit, a number of times just to soak up more of his thinking. I have read Drum virtually every day since that day. He has been my favorite blogger for nearly two decades. I occasionally disagreed with him, but his take was always thoughtful and well grounded.

Reading the post pictured above was a body blow. It was heartbreaking to think of losing him. The next several weeks, with Drum’s occasional posting about his health among his usual fare, and the absence of posting for days at a time, have been distressing. This past Monday readers learned from his wife that Kevin Drum had passed.

“He will be sorely missed, especially in these terrible times.” — Paul Campos.

In a pair of recent posts, I reviewed the MAGA communication strategy successfully wielded by the Trump administration. Another aspect of the White House messaging strategy is to silence critics and quash their views. While cancel culture has been associated with the Left, MAGA has taken it up with a vengance. Furthermore, the Trump administration has openly employed state power to snuff out dissent, a clear violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

David French, a political conservative and evangelical Christian, who hasn’t changed his mind about free speech or religious liberty since the rise of Trump, continues to embrace constitutional principles. From today’s New York Times:

One of the most frustrating elements of our post-election national conversation was the insistence in some quarters that the election represented a repudiation of censorship and cancel culture. It did not.
Instead, nearly half the American people voted against the party that was actively moving away from extremism — including the far-left censorship regime that has long afflicted America’s elite campuses — and instead voted for the party that didn’t just weaponize government against dissenting voices (through book bans, various anti-“woke” bills and prohibitions against drag shows), it also created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation against its political enemies.
The MAGA movement relentlessly attacked election workers, school board members and anyone else who defied its will to power or dissented from MAGA’s version of American history. Trumpian political correctness is becoming so absurd that The Associated Press reported on Thursday that at the Pentagon “tens of thousands of photos and online posts” have been “marked for deletion,” including a photo of Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, presumably because its name included the word “gay.”
I spent much of my legal career combating censorship and defending free speech and religious liberty. I defended people from across the political spectrum, but I was also very familiar with censorship from the left. I filed lawsuit after lawsuit against universities that, among other things, imposed speech codes, discriminated against Christian student groups and retaliated against conservative professors.
When I filed those cases, I believed the American right had a basic commitment to individual freedom. Today, it does not. It is far more committed to fighting the left now than it was to defending liberty then. As the right rejected libertarianism, it turned against the First Amendment.
And now Trump’s administration and his MAGA movement are the most dangerous and powerful censors in the United States.
When an administration blatantly attacks the First Amendment, it attacks our national identity. The First Amendment is core to the idea of the United States of America. 

Earlier this week, French highlighted an article in the Washington Post on the Trump administration’s “zeroing out” foreign aid, which devastated many Christian ministries. French observed: “If the Biden administration had done this, it would be deemed proof of the Democrats’ hostility to religion. But Trump is doing it, so his Christian allies turn against Christian ministries and gut their ability to serve the poorest of the poor.”

If the Biden administration had done this, it would be deemed proof of the Democrats' hostility to religion. But Trump is doing it, so his Christian allies turn against Christian ministries and gut their ability to serve the poorest of the poor. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec…

— David French (@davidfrenchjag.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T20:45:24.421Z

Two days ago I posted about the White House’s remarkably successful amplification of Bannon’s flood the zone strategy. Today Luke Winkie references that strategy in Slate and quotes Jesse Watters (from last month) describing how the thing works. Acyn has the video:

Watters: We are waging a 21st century information warfare campaign from the left…It's like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it.. and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T22:29:18.325Z

Transcript:

…
Dana, we are waging a 21^st century information warfare campaign against the Left. And they are using tactics from the 1990s.
They are holding tiny press conferences, tiny little rallies. They’re screaming into the ether on MSNBC.
This is what you call top-down command and control. You get your talking points from a newspaper and you put it on the broadcast network and then it disappears.
What you’re seeing on the right is asymmetrical. It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare.
Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.
It’s free money, and we’re actually talking about expressing information.
They are suppressing information.

That sums things up crisply and clearly, though it works only because — contrary to Watters — FNC, Musk, and other actors on the right suppress the truth — that’s key to making the strategy so successful. The big, beautiful bubble offers such reassuring certitude that folks inside it aren’t tempted to burst out into a wider, more disparate, less black and white world. MAGA media is alluring because it has so many channels, themes weaved together, and modes of engagement — it’s great entertainment — but it persuades because it ruthlessly suppresses views of truth and doubt and humility that clash with the party line.

Winkie describes sealing himself off from the mainstream media and immersing himself in MAGA via X: “I created a brand new Twitter—well, X—feed that followed, exclusively, White House agencies and their associated MAGA partisans. For the next 24 hours, it would be my only source of news.”

He observes: “It has never been easier for an American voter to elide mainstream airwaves and yet still think they know exactly what is going on.” And being sealed in a bubble encourages an unwavering perspective, unchallenged by whispers of doubt or dissent.

The MAGA worldview is “completely purged of a single contrasting viewpoint.” MAGA “is a place where the president is always right, and nothing is going wrong.”

When the nation is split more or less in half, with each side imbibing cues about what’s happening that the other side rejects (or blocks out altogether), this makes communication across the divide difficult. It renders the give and take of politics within democratic institutions virtually impossible.

We don’t hear or see the same dispatches. The stories we rely on to make sense of things are diametrically opposed. Our impressions, convictions, judgments hardly overlap. Small-d democrats and the Democratic Party have failed to communicate convincingly to half the nation.

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

This must change or our slide into authoritarian rule will continue apace.