Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Project 2025, and the contemporary Republican Party are shredding the capacity of the federal government to do its job — starting with keeping Americans safe and secure.
The mainstream media is so bound by standard journalistic conventions of evenhanded, unbiased reporting it has failed to tell a clear story with sufficient heft. Steve Bannon has explained the winning strategy for the MAGA crew: “Flood the zone with shit.” The media can’t resist the bait, so disinformation and distraction prevail. This time around Trump’s enablers have unleashed a deluge of presidential initiatives (in contrast to Bannon’s trolling and tales) to overwhelm.
If Democrats were speaking out clearly, the media would report that. But Democrats are adrift and have been ever so slow to step up.
Republicans are bound to Trump, whose “Republican allies play the parts he assigns them” (as Barton Gelman observed in another context in November 2020). So, no help from even from ‘serious’ Republicans in the United States Senate or elsewhere.
Garrett Graff — “Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government” does a bit of pretending to illustrate the failures of the media and the opposition to communicate the threat:
I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch. Here’s a story that should be written this weekend…
The first two paragraphs of Graff’s report on what’s happening in the U.S.A. as though it were happening abroad are enough to convey the big-picture failure he sees. But he has elaborated convincingly:
Throughout the week’s fast-moving seizure of power—one that seems increasingly irreversible by the hour—neither loyalist nor opposition parliamentary leaders raised meaningful objection to the new regime or the unraveling of the country’s constitutional system of checks and balances. A few members of the geriatric legislature body offered scattered social media posts condemning the move, but parliament — where both houses are controlled by so-called “MAGA” members handpicked for their loyalty to the president — went home early for the weekend even as Musk’s forces spread through the capital streets.
This playbook is not Donald Trump’s.
Donald Trump is ignorant of and indifferent to public policy. His only interest is himself. He’s playing at being king, serving up retribution, and enriching himself. He cares not a whit for the nation’s security or the general welfare or the prospects of democratic institutions going forward. He’ll bask in the spotlight no matter what generates the attention.
But the folks he has let in the door — including Musk and the Project 2025 crew — are crippling the capacity of our government. Shutting down agencies, blocking distribution of funds, purging personnel throughout the executive branch, and trampling over the Constitution and the law of the land. All of this will have profound long-term consequences.
And that’s the point. To do permanent damage. To unravel the administrative readiness of the federal government. To render the state incapable of serving working- and middle-class Americans. The oligarchs (and even mere corporate and financial interests) mostly just need government to stay off their backs, which the petty corruption we are witnessing in plain sight will ensure.
Americans know that government is failing them.
I was struck by a handful of survey responses related to government in the recent New York Times/Ipsos poll. Images from the survey’s Topline and Methodology:
Look at the survey results for Q4., Q5., Q6., and Q7.
More than two-thirds of Americans believe “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy.” Can our government respond effectively to this challenge? Is it possible to push back against this tide?
Sixty percent of Americans believe the government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient,” while seventy-two percent believe “government is mostly working to benefit itself and the elites.” (This disillusionment makes agreement regarding a disengaged America, as revealed in Q7., more likely.)
When the federal government fails to do its job(s), the result is cynicism. Failures are guaranteed if the rampages Trump has unleashed continue. Stripping the government of resources and qualified personnel, undermining the rationale of departments and agencies, and misusing the power of the state will accelerate the decline.
Public confidence in government is in short supply. Democrats are the party of government, the party that welcomes public policy solutions to improve our lives. Can Democrats make government work for Americans? A plurality of voters suggested in November 2024 that the party has failed on this score.
Turning this around will be a tall order, made even taller and steeper if the government has been stripped of capacity. Successfully pushing back against the power of the wealthy (which Republicans and Democrats alike agree is too great) will require a responsive, resilient government. The Trump-MAGA crew — led by the world’s richest man — are intent on snuffing out that possibility.
This is a crisis. And it is as if we are sleepwalking through it. The oligarchs, with corporate America and members of the Republican Party, are fine with this. It is up to the leadership of the Democratic Party to step up.
The voters have stripped the Democratic Party of control over all three branches of government. But it is free to communicate, if the party leadership can find its voice.
“The job of the opposition is quite literally to oppose,” as Josh Marshall reminds us. “Get to it.”
Post Script: This morning, David Kurtz concluded TPM’s Morning Memo with this excerpt from Timothy Snyder (discussing the “oligarchs around Trump“):
Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.
The sentence, “The destruction is the point,” immediately brought to mind Adam Serwer’s “The cruelty is the point.” It also crisply expressed the theme — the damage Trump’s MAGA functionaries inflicted on the executive branch over the weekend — I wished to highlight in a post (and which I set about writing).
I didn’t look at Snyder’s Substack piece until after putting up my post. Unsurprisingly, our respective commentaries have little in common, aside from the single sentence that I appropriated as a headline.