Five Ways Trump Is Sabotaging the United States
Yesterday, arguably for (at least) the second time, Trump declared fealty to Vladimir Putin.
As I contemplated the awful but in no way surprising developments (here’s a good podcast, featuring Marc Polymeropoulos, Doug Lute, and Rosa Brooks), I thought about the various ways Trump is sabotaging the United States, based on apparently different motivations.
But we only assume those motivations are different because we (or much of the legacy press, anyway) accept the claimed motivation Trump offers. When you look at all of them together, you simply can’t rule out they’re all part of the same effort to capitulate to Putin.
Project 2025
There’s a consensus that Trump is following the plan mapped out in Project 2025. This Politico report, from early February, laid out how Executive Orders Trump had signed implemented plans to attack diversity and LGBTQ protections, attack migrants, and protect disinformation. It focuses on fossil fuel plans that have mostly defunded renewable energy without raising fossil fuel exploitation (in part because it was already so high under Biden).
Even if that were the only thing going on or if that were really what was going on, it would raise real questions about foreign influence. Last year, Casey Michel mapped out how Viktor Orbán used the Heritage Foundation as a beachhead for his influence peddling in the US (which I discussed in this post on Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025).
While much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the cost.
Much of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.
Part of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things, has said he doesn’t think Joe Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor” to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage finalized what they refer to as a ‘landmark’ cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s government.*
The Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.
A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation told The New Republic that their arrangements with the Danube Institute is “restricted to carrying out educational research and analysis, as well as related events—none of which involved any financial commitment from either party” and that “at no point did Heritage receive funds from or pass funds to the Danube Institute, the Hungarian government, or the prime minister’s office.”
The Danube Institute claims it is dedicated to “advocat[ing] conservative and national values and thinking,” which almost always ends up with the institute praising Orbán’s pronouncements. It has become, according to Hungarian journalists at Atlatszo, “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad”—and one of the “main vehicles” to “building a political network in the United States.
Christopher Rufo, the propagandist behind the demonization of trans people, has ties to the Danube Institute.
So even if this was just about implementing Project 2025, that would best be described as replacing American democracy with Orbanist authoritarianism — adopting the model from a key Putin puppet.
DOGE infiltration and destruction of US government
There have been a slew of stories about how DOGE provided cover for Russ Vought and Stephen Miller to implement Project 2025. Wired, for example, described how Stephen and his wife Katie, who is formally on the DOGE team, serve as gatekeepers to Elon and use Elon to carry out their dirty work.
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller has, along with Project 2025 coauthor and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, became one of Musk’s closest allies in the administration, The New York Times reported earlier this month. WIRED has learned that the relationship is far closer, and more complicated, than has been previously known publicly.
In many ways, Musk’s targeting of federal agencies is perfectly in sync with the aims of Miller, who has championed DOGE’s work internally and even helped in making a lot of it possible. (In public, Miller has equated federal workers with “radical left Communists” and “criminal cartels.”) Still, sources tell WIRED that Trumpworld is more comfortable with Musk taking the heat for the recent federal cuts rather than the less famous—and, in their view, far less telegenic—Miller.
Yet through their actions so far, the Millers and Musk have developed a MAGA version of the Pet Shop Boys adage from the song “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)”: You’ve got the brawn / I’ve got the brains. Stephen Miller’s knowledge of the federal apparatus, Katie Miller’s contacts on Capitol Hill, and the couple’s good standing among Trump loyalists, coupled with Musk’s relentless ambition and effectively infinite resources, made the scale of the DOGE government takeover possible. Musk is not the independent actor he’s often portrayed as and taken to be, in other words, but is rather carrying out actions essentially in concert with the man to whom the president has delegated much of the day-to-day work of governance.
“Stephen is kind of the prime minister,” one of three Republicans close to Trump and familiar with the situation tells WIRED. Another Republican familiar with the dynamic also used the term “PM” to describe Miller, short for prime minister. The implication is that Miller is carrying out the daily work of governance while Trump serves as head of state, focusing on the fun parts of being president.
But DOGE is going beyond the scope of Project 2025, and in ways that directly harm the United States.
Take the Project 2025 recommendations on USAID, the first target of DOGE. DOGE adopted the general theme of the Project 2025 chapter — that USAID had been used to implement a lot of radical plans. But the virtual elimination of USAID implemented last week goes well beyond Project 2025’s recommended reversal to 2019’s budget of $39.3 billion.
Project 2025 hailed Trump’s use of USAID to push for religious protection for Christians which — as I showed — got shut down early along with everything else.
It promoted international religious freedom as a pillar of the agency’s work and built up an unprecedented genocide-response infrastructure.
It specifically called for greater reliance on local NGOs — and pointed to PEPFAR as a model.
Streamlining Procurement and Localizing the Partner Base. USAID is a grantmaking and contracting agency that disburses billions of dollars of federal funding in developing countries through implementing partners, such as U.N. agencies, international NGOs, for-profit companies, and local nongovernmental entities. In rare instances, such as in Jordan and Ukraine, the agency provides direct budget support to finance the operations of host-country governments. USAID far more often counts on expensive and ine!ective large contracts and grants to carry out its programs. It justifies these practices based on speed and a lower administrative burden on its institutional capacity.
[snip]
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has shown that localization at scale is possible within a short time span. Over the four years of the Trump Administration, the multibillion-dollar program increased the amount of funding disbursed to local entities from about 25 percent to nearly 70 percent with positive overall results. This model should be replicated across all of USAID.
But as declarations in various lawsuits repeat over and over, these local partners are not getting paid, and it’s destroying the credibility of the US (and rule of law).
11. Currently my mission has more than $30 million in unpaid invoices for 2 months of implementing partners’ work, with half of those past Prompt Payment Act due date (30 days) and incurring interest every day. If one were to extrapolate the numbers across all of the missions and USAID/Washington, given that annual USAID appropriation is $40 billion, the total dollar amount of unpaid invoices would certainly surpass $1billion at the most conservative estimate.
[snip]
13. Arbitrary withholding of due payments to U.S. and non-U.S. based partners does grave damage to the reputation and reliability of the U.S. government both domestically and internationally. USAID is a USG Agency which signed the contracts and grants in line with the Code of Federal Regulations and other statutes; USG refusal to pay for the past performed work and non-compliance with the TRO can shatter Americans’ certainty in the rule of law.
Rather than empowering local partners and capabilities, the quick decimation has devastated them — and left Americans still located overseas exposed to backlash.
USAID is just the most substantiated example of the sheer waste DOGE is creating. We’re seeing similarly stupid decisions in the firings of critical personnel (some of whom get hired back), but also the elimination of long-term maintenance or safety programs that will cost far more when those protections are gone.
Project 2025 envisioned stripping civil service protections and politicizing the bureaucracy. But with DOGE cuts, it’s not clear the bureaucracy can be rebuilt, even assuming the Heritage hires knew what they were doing. Meanwhile, the method of those cuts is more likely to elicit a backlash from judges, potentially even from the Supreme Court justices whom right wingers were counting on to bless all this.
And all that’s before you contemplate the possibility that Elon’s DOGE boys are doing something else with the data they’re accessing, or — intentionally or not — setting up backdoors via which adversaries can do so themselves.
Assume you were a true believer in Project 2025 (and not far greater authoritarianism). DOGE puts all that at risk, because by breaking so much so early, it is eliciting backlash and collapse of the economy.
The installation of useful idiots
It’s not just Elon who is making a mess. So are the other unqualified useful idiots Trump has installed — people like Pete Hegseth (who has fired three senior women officers after assuring Joni Ernst he wouldn’t target women) and Tulsi Gabbard (who parroted the same Russian propaganda she partly disavowed to get confirmed yesterday) and RFK Jr (who reneged on his promise not to cut off vaccine programs) and Kash Patel (who reneged on his promise to appoint a career FBI Agent as his Deputy).
These people are doing precisely the affirmative damage to the US that Democrats warned they would do — most obviously in RFK’s initial dismissal of the measles outbreak spreading from Texas to other states. And they’re doing it after years of parroting Russian propaganda.
The personalization of DOJ
We expected DOJ to be politicized in a second Trump term. I was even cynical enough to imagine that he would pardon all the January 6ers. The denialism about both Russia and January 6 were baked right into Project 2025.
- The Federal Bureau of Investigation, knowing that claims of collusion with Russia were false,5 collaborated with Democratic operatives to inject the story into the 2016 election through strategic media leaks, falsified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications, and lied to Congress.6
- Personnel within the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign—while the FBI had possession of the laptop the entire time and could have clarified the authenticity of the source.
[snip]
- The FBI engaged in a domestic influence operation to pressure social media companies to report more “foreign influence” than the FBI was actually seeing and stop the dissemination of and censor true information directly related to the 2020 presidential election.11
But the personalization of DOJ, along with Pam Bondi’s orders to stop chasing foreign influence operations, does something more.
It effectively makes foreign bribery — as well as the kind of kickbacks we saw in advance of Trump’s inauguration — legal.
As I noted here, the SEC, for example, has paused its suit against Justin Sun. As Judd Legum describes, this follows the Chinese-linked businessman’s multi-million “investment” in Trump’s crypto currency.
In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies, accusing him of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token. The SEC accused Sun of wash trading, which involves buying and selling a token quickly to fraudulently manufacture artificial interest.
[snip]
Sun’s purchase put millions in Trump’s pocket. WLF was entitled to “$30 million of initial net protocol revenue” in a reserve “to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve was met, a company owned by Trump would receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.” Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve. As of December 1, this amounted to $18 million for Trump — 75% of the revenues of all other tokens sold at the time. Sun also joined WLF as an advisor. While the purchase benefited Trump, WLF tokens are essentially worthless for Sun, as they are non-transferable and locked indefinitely.
Nevertheless, Sun has since invested another $45 million in WLF, bringing his total investment to $75 million. This means Sun’s purchases have sent more than $50 million to Trump, Bloomberg reported. Sun has also continued to shower Trump with praise. On January 22, Sun posted on X, “if I have made any money in cryptocurrency, all credit goes to President Trump.”
Once you’ve installed lawyers who publicly represent they are Trump’s lawyers, once you’ve ensured that no one friendly to Trump will be prosecuted for bribery, then Ukraine was bound to lose any negotiation with Russia. Russia has been dangling bribes in front of Trump for years and now they’ll be free to deliver in plain sight.
And Trump has never placed his own self interest behind the interests of the United States.
The capitulation to Russia
Keep all that in mind as you consider Trump’s abject capitulation yesterday.
Keep in mind that even before yesterday’s ambush of Zelenskyy, Pete Hegseth ordered Cyber Command to stand down any targeting of Russia.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Hegseth gave the instruction to Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh, who then informed the organization’s outgoing director of operations, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Ryan Heritage, of the new guidance, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
The order does not apply to the National Security Agency, which Haugh also leads, or its signals intelligence work targeting Russia, the sources said.
CISA, too, has taken its focus off of Russia, something that risk grave damage to private companies as well as the government.
Liesyl Franz, deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity at the state department, said in a speech last week before a United Nations working group on cybersecurity that the US was concerned by threats perpetrated by some states but only named China and Iran, with no mention of Russia in her remarks. Franz also did not mention the Russia-based LockBit ransomware group, which the US has previously said is the most prolific ransomware group in the world and has been called out in UN forums in the past. The treasury last year said LockBit operates on a ransomeware-as-service model, in which the group licenses its ransomware software to criminals in exchange for a portion of the paid ransoms.
In contrast to Franz’s statement, representatives for US allies in the European Union and the UK focused their remarks on the threat posed by Moscow, with the UK pointing out that Russia was using offensive and malicious cyber-attacks against Ukraine alongside its illegal invasion.
“It’s incomprehensible to give a speech about threats in cyberspace and not mention Russia and it’s delusional to think this will turn Russia and the FSB [the Russian security agency] into our friends,” said James Lewis, a veteran cyber expert formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “They hate the US and are still mad about losing the cold war. Pretending otherwise won’t change this.”
The US policy change has also been established behind closed doors.
A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.
A person familiar with the matter who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.
The person said work that was being done on something “Russia-related” was in effect “nixed”.
And, again, this happened before the ambush yesterday.
Eight years ago, as Mueller’s prosecutors started to focus on Roger Stone’s possible implication in a hacking conspiracy with Russia, Trump declared that he was going to partner with Putin; Russia and the US would jointly guard things like elections.
Now, Trump has chosen to unilaterally disarm.
Yesterday, Roger Sollenberger unpacked the Gitub of one of Elon’s boys, Jordan Wick.
In addition to his AI start-up, AccelerateX (which Wired wrote about), Wick has been fiddling with:
- Tracking government employees by union status
- Downloading Xitter DMs
- Identifying open source data on submarine cables, ports, and mineral deposits
Sure, the utility of some of that — tracking union status — maps right onto the Project 2025 plans DOGE is purportedly implementing, even if that, plus the DM download, raise grave concerns about privacy.
But the submarine cables too?
Even as Donald Trump has made his fealty to Putin clear, even as his Director of National Intelligence parrots Russian disinformation (protected now by the FBI), Elon Musk has been vacuuming up all the data of all the government. And every claim that he’s been modernizing networks or searching for fraud have fallen apart.
At this point, we simply cannot rule out deliberate wholesale sabotage.
Update: Thought I’d repost what I wrote in December in response to Kimberly Strassel complaining about Trump’s useful idiot picks.
But I don’t doubt that the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s advisory team believes that Bobby and Tulsi do accomplish something. The question is whether some really smart politicos believe it’ll be a good thing to kill children and give dictators America’s secrets and let the richest men in the world destroy America’s banking system and the dollar exchange — whether they believe this will win lasting approval from America’s great disaffected masses. It might well! It certainly will expand the pool of disaffected Americans, and with it, increase the market for a strong man to respond to it all.
Or whether there’s some reason Trump is tempting Republican Senators to defy his plans to do great damage to the United States. Perhaps he intends to dare them to start defying him in bulk.
Or perhaps the rat-fucker wing of Trump’s entourage simply has an unknown reason they want to destroy America. Maybe Trump has other election debts — debts he’d get in more trouble for ignoring — that make him amenable to dropping policy bomb after policy bomb on America’s children.
But that’s sort of the point. You’ve got Kimberly Strassel up in arms because Trump is going to the mat for a conspiracist with a Democratic name who’ll get children killed. But it’s more likely to do with the policy bombs that RFK will help Trump drop than the specific conversations that led Bobby Jr to drop out of the race.
WOW, this is amazing, Marcy!
I am so VERY grateful for all you do. <3
I am not saying that Trump is an agent or asset of the Russians, but it’s hard to imagine what a Russian agent/asset in the WH would do that Trump isn’t doing.
Exactly.
MICE: Counterintelligence and the recruitment of agents: Why people commit “treason”:
Money: for financial gain (money laundering).
Ideology: by political or religious views (Christian nationalism).
Compromise: to avoid blackmail, criminal exposure, or to gain approval (pee tapes).
Ego: by a sense of grievance or perceived mistreatment (narcissism) .
Exactly. Trump has absolutely no ideological beliefs, but the other three – publicly Money and Ego, and privately almost certainly Compromise – *are* Trump.
The greatest successful intelligence operation of the modern era and executed by the former head of the KGB..
And without a shot fired.
I think we all should say that Trump is either an asset or an agent of Russia. And a traitor (OK, maybe not technically so, but practically yes). By now it should be pretty clear that the evidence is overwhelming this is so. And Democratic politicians should repeat this same mantra over and over.
MAGA already went there (as well Convict-1 / Krasnov) when referring to Ds they don’t like so precedent has been established for the use of the term.
Krasnov (I had to look that up) knows a thing or two about treachery.
Fair enough. The many connections and relationships between the Danube Institue and Heritage Foundation show a certain sympathy in both goals and methods. But Trump cares only for Trump, and you don’t need kompromat to explain his personal goal of a global shakedown protection racket. It aligns perfectly with his long-expressed values.
And Heritage can be explained by their long–held libertarian values and goals. They see the destruction of the regulatory state and American meddling abroad as a good unto itself, freeing the American people from liberal tyranny and wasteful foreign spending. Both Heritage and Trump have been as clear as humanly possible about their values and goals for a long, long time. The Russians are simply pressing a happy alignment of goals, and are much better liars and realists.
This misstates things—Heritage was staunchly opposed to Russian aggression, up until fairly recently.
Jimmy Kimmel called him “KGBFF” and I almost fell off my couch.
That nip-of-the-ear shot might have been a “reminder” of who he owes what? But Trump himself is not competent to act effectively. The real threat is people like Miller. I believe Trump when he says he didn’t and won’t read Project 2025. Golf is likely his maximum capable focus. So, the true agents of destruction hide behind him, the big useful idiot. Somebody (or bodies) seems to be intent on the actual destruction of American democracy and the rule of law and thus should qualify as true enemies of the state.
Somebody fed Trump all of Project 2025, told him it would be his Agenda 47, because he made videos on each major bullet point of the Project/Agenda for his campaign.
IOW, Trump lied. I know, you’re as shocked as I am. He is fully on board and lets his team of handlers use him like a meat puppet to achieve their aims which include Project 2025 but as Team Muskrat have demonstrated, go even further.
From Just Security in 2019,
“Is Trump a Russian Agent?: Explaining Terms of Art and Examining the Facts”
Worth a read, great background discussion. From the article (boldfaced in the article):
“He clearly crossed a line and can be objectively labeled an agent of a foreign power in the standard definition of the word.”
https://www.justsecurity.org/63660/is-trump-a-russian-agent-explaining-terms-of-art-and-examining-the-facts/
A detailed, early, and prescient (2019) article—one well worth reading as it describes how Trump “is a cauldron of potentially exploitable vulnerabilities.”
Information is the key to intelligence operations. Moreover, information has recently developed into perhaps the most valuable asset in our society, as noted by the valuations of social media and browser companies.
I think Elmo realizes this and that is why he and his fanboy gang are vacuum cleaning up everything the US Government has in its inventory.
The value of the collective of that information is near limitless.
How he uses this information only time will tell. But it is fairly clear that it will be used to enrich himself.
That anyone in Congress or Government would allow this is happen is beyond me.
Musk emerged as the more valuable asset to Putin the night Trump won the election. All those phone calls with Vladdy that Trump won’t dish about? I’d bet money he was reassuring Putin that yes, indeed, Musk would be disassembling the US government…exactly as promised.
Any word on yesterday’s SCOTUS hearing regarding AID funding ?
How about checking Google News or other news aggregator yourself? Please don’t make demands of contributors.
It wasn’t a hearing. It was a response deadline. Here’s the filing.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A831/350905/20250228115232365_USAID–SCOTUS%20Opp.pdf
Thank you, EW. The Government’s intransigence in the face of this TRO is just stunning. If SCOTUS rewards it with more delay, I give up altogether.
Even if the aid is ordered to be spent, the checks aren’t being cut or forwarded so the order doesn’t have teeth.
What might happen is that those who are hurt by these rug-pulling exercises will sue the US Government which may stick the taxpayers with the bill. However, note that all of these acts are being adjudicated as unlawful / unconstitutional which I think strips the presumption of official acts immunity. Until recently, a government worker could not be prosecuted for incompetence but has always been liable for criminality.
If not protected by the immunity shield, these commissars are potentially on the hook for some beaucoup bucks.
If he survives his McD diet long enough to leave office in 2029, Trump’s list of pardons will be encyclopedic in length. Or, given Stephen Goebbels Miller, it might be one sentence long, starting with “Everybody….”
Re DOGE . . .
In my current congregation and congregations I have served in the past, I have plenty of parishioners with government positions. I’ve been reaching out to some of these folks to see what they are experiencing (if still in those jobs) or what they are hearing from their former colleagues.
It’s not pretty, on so many levels.
1) Some saw the writing on the wall and resigned/left before Jan 20.
2) Some were close enough to retirement that they took the Fork in the Road and moved their timetable up.
3) All were shocked at the mindlessness of the firings. Going after “probationary” workers was done because it was easy to do, not because these were the folks who needed to be removed. That term is applied to folks who are in a new position, which includes not just 22 year old new recruits but also long-tenured employees who were asked to accept a promotion and relocation, in order to head up a regional office because they’ve done a great job heading up their local office. Seeing these folks shown the door was stunning not just to them, but to everyone who works with them.
4) It’s not even close to being finished. The latest is the order for every agency to prepare plans for a 50% reduction in force. Not because of documented bloat, but because of an ideological hatred of government workers. From GovExec:
Even those who left or retired before all this started find this breathtakingly traumatic. They know the value of the work they and their coworkers have been doing, and are beyond broken at how their work and their coworkers are being devalued and discarded.
Here’s an example that hits close to home. The Great Lakes have a multi-billion dollar commercial and sport fishing economy. That means I can get fresh lake trout and whitefish here in Chicago. It’s delicious. That industry was nearly destroyed by the sea lamprey eel, an invasive species that kills fish.
The problem was solved by a chemical deadly to the eels but not to fish. The chemical is put into streams and rivers that pour into the lakes. The people who run this program are from Marquette on the Upper Peninsula on Lake Superior, and Luddington, on Lake MIchigan. Luddington is just west of Baldwin, home of Ryleigh Cooper; Marcy discussed her story earlier this week.
I’m sure many of the people dependent on this industry voted for the criminal, just as Cooper did. What is the plausible basis for wrecking the lives of those people? Why do legislators have to beg Trump to save the programs they voted for?
Here’s an article: https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2025/02/trump-firings-hit-great-lakes-sea-lamprey-program-michigan-forestry/
If “Russia, Russia, Russia” was such a nefarious “hoax,”
then why is trump behaving exactly like an asset?
(Gross speculation: Did he become an asset when he married Ivana?)
Ivana might have been pushed into his path as a reward.
These actions if being reported from any other country would be call a coup or an over throw of the government. Purges in the Military, installing unqualified yes people in positions of authority, infiltrating all data systems of government agencies by an unelected, unaccountable welfare queen, infiltrating government payment systems, starting to control the media access, performative politics without substance to list some. The coup its taking place faster the courts can react, law enforcement of rulings is highly questionable.
Nothing short of a coup except Americans elected him. This will truly be the first lawless government elected.
That’s WHY it’s not a coup… but an AUTOGOLPE:
What’s really happening beneath the Musk/Trump chaos
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/autogolpe Paul Krugman Feb 07, 2025
Another word for AUTOGOLPE is Self-Coup. Here’s Fiona Hill just after J6:
Opinion | Yes, It Was a Coup Attempt. Here’s Why.
What Trump tried is called a “self-coup,” and he did it in slow motion and in plain sight. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/11/capitol-riot-self-coup-trump-fiona-hill-457549 Fiona Hill 1/11/21
So all this [waving hands wildly about] is not TRUMP’s first rodeo.
I apologize, Marcy, if you already covered this, but I came across the news this morning. New York Times recently (2/28?) had an article about how Musk came up with the idea of DOGE and built DOGE. My local newspaper reprinted it today on their front page. The authors interviewed more than 60 people familiar with Musk’s efforts.
There’s a bit of a firewall on the NYT site, but here’s the NYT link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/musk-federal-bureaucracy-takeover.html
Thanks. I did read it. While I appreciate the past experience the Xitter journalists bring this pulls a great deal of punches. How do you omit, for example, that DOGE’s claims of savings are lies?
The NYTimid? I gave up when it described Musk as having “built” DOGE. What did he build? He renamed a tiny IT unit in the WH basement. He’s hiding what it does, who’s in charge of it, what it’s budget is and from where, and what it’s authority is to act.
What he seems to have built is a tower of falsehoods, hiding the rampant destruction of a towering ego.
And I’d bet he wasn’t even wearing a suit.
Indeed. Does Elmo the Dick ever wear a suit? Well, he is at war with the American people. He wears casual casual because no one can say boo to him, even in a Cabinet meeting of the people who are supposed to run govt, but let Elmo run it instead.
Outstanding piece! Thank you!
Putin and Semion Mogilevich have complete financial and political control over Viktor Orbán. And both use Orbán to regularly vaccinate Trump against Trump leaving Team Putin/Mogilevich.
Orbán and Trump are Putin’s and Mogilevich’s useful idiots.
Since 2014, Putin has been intent on getting Trump elected US President. Putin was successful in 2016, narrowly missed in 2020, and was successful again in 2024.
Over the next year, Putin will guide Trump through the process of removing all current US sanctions and barriers against Russia.
Putin will also continue pressing Trump to press Zelensky and Ukraine to stop fighting Russia in Ukraine.
Once this process is completed, Trump will demand that both he and Putin receive the Nobel prize for their joint efforts to bring Russia and the US back into full diplomatic relationships and for also stopping the war in Ukraine.
Putin has always coveted having a Russian military base in Alaska. Between 2026 and 2028, Putin will manage and help Trump convince the MAGAS and Republican Party to accept a Russian military base in Alaska.
Deconstructing the federal government, stripping it for scrap metal and profit, while imploding the entire idealistic notion of America as Great Democratic Beacon and Protector–this has been Putin’s project for over a decade. For me, the first blaring red flag signaling that he had (at the very least) an ally in that project was the Paul Manafort-engineered change in the RNC platform in 2016. But I was “hysterical” and “overreacting” when I yelled about it then.
Trump seems now to be making up for lost (or in his view “stolen”) time. Time Putin put to use by slaughtering his neighbors, although now we’re supposed to see poor Vlad as the victim of every “hoax” we never heard of.
More than almost anything else, Trump has rendered Putin and Russia under his stranglehold much bigger and more central to world politics than they were or ever would have been without Mr. Art of the Deal. I have to keep reminding myself that in population and, mainly, economy, Russia is like the lamprey that wants to swallow the shark.
Trump is so weak, so cowardly, so needy that his fear of the shark would notoriously get him electrocuted. He IS the shark. He fears himself more than anything else except death. Death will get him eventually, but the lamprey is already feeding off of his–and our nation’s–undead corpse.
I suspect that the precise goal is to wreck the bureaucracies necessary to run these organizations, then claim that the agencies are broken and should be outsourced to the private sector.
Privatization is only profitable if service is either reduced or prices are raised. See, e.g., water privatization in England.
Ed, That certainly is the goal of Project 2025: destroy the federal government, then point to it and declare that it doesn’t work; ipso facto, its destruction was justified.
That has long been the GOP project. Some of us remember Reagan. This is just the visibly corrupt and very sudden realization of that goal. With Trump’s perverse sellout to the much-less-powerful Putin as an accelerant.
Pete Hegseth-Stephen Miller’s latest head-on-a-pike is the forced retirement of Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, MPH, MD. She is Black, a West Point graduate, and was the officer commanding the Pentagon’s Defense Health Agency. She had previously been the Army’s Surgeon General.
The now acting head of the DHA is a seventy-ish white male Dr. David J. Smith, whose public biography is pretty bare bones.
Smith gets the job because we need more white boys under the new DoD DEI policy.
On the last day of Black History Month. Nice touch.
You missed the EO where he renamed it “Blacks ARE History Month”?
See? That proves he’s not a racist. Also, Vance spoke at National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on Friday, thus proving he’s a good Christian.
/s
I have to believe that as these traitors destroy our country that people will overwhelming turn against this administration. Yes, I know that Trump is itching to have the military shoot people for protesting. However, I recall the Orange Revolution in Ukraine where the Russia stooge quickly exited the country when his fate was going to be determined by the angry masses.
He doesnt want the military shooting protestors, he wants his supporters shooting protestors for him.
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Regarding Russia: Melania is Drumpfs “handler”. Notice the often public rebukes that are often left unsaid by him. Anyone else would be crucified.
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That doesn’t makes sense given that Melania’s nude pics were broadcast on Russia’s 60 Minutes as a guise to reference Melania’s return as FLOTUS after Trump’s election win.
For me, that sent the message for both of them to toe-the-line that Putin wants – or there will be more retribution for both by Putin.
After all, by publicly shaming Melania, Putin demonstrates to both that nothing is off-limits and who is in the dominant position. Putin has used misogynistic attacks and rhetoric for decades to demean his enemies and bolster his supporters.
“At this point we simply cannot rule out wholesale sabotage” BINGO. I’m increasingly perplexed at any other explanation. Sabotage is insane. And it de-stabilizes the social and economic fabric of the US. Which is the point. Trump, Musk, Vance are counting on this to further radicalize MAGA who will be disproportionately hurt and radicalize protesters of the sabotage. They are kicking off vortex of chaos so their ideology will look like the answer: authoritarianism, Christian nationalism,
Cryptofinance.
Actions have consequences.
For reference Haltbakk Bunkers is a Norwegian shipping company
Zelenskyy was telling Trump that Putin might be friendly now, but he could reveal himself to bee an enemy in a heartbeat, ocean or no ocean. That set Trump off, who angrily told Zelenskyy not to tell him how to “feel,” impliedly about the threat from Putin, which Trump could never acknowledge. But his quick, defensive reaction says Zelenskyy hit bone with that one.
It points to what might be the true hold that Vlad has. I looked at that in the previous post, but my current theory is that Putin knows Convict-1 / Krasnov is flat broke without Putin’s help. Fear of being seen as poor is the only thing C-1 / K fears as far as I can tell, he has no convictions otherwise and means he’ll take money from anyone or grift any way he can.
Perhaps it’s time to follow the money, which will be harder with the crypto pieces.
my bad. Bunkers is a Norwegian fueling company which ships fuel to vessels.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2021304/norway-fuel-giant-refuses-fill
It seems to me we should take the same approach the US did on the eve of Russia’s invasion: tell everyone in sight what’s going to happen and what to do about it.
e.g., How can we contact all military and remind them of their rights to refuse an illegal order? National Guard, too. Ensuring that immigrants knew their rights has been key to slowing ICE.
Police need to know they’ll be held accountable locally for any assistance they render to illegal military incursions. Hey, maybe they could reconsider just who they should serve and protect…
“[T]ell everyone in sight what’s going to happen …”
Notice and accountability: Provide notice of foreseeable harm and to whom that harm will accrue; hold accountable those whose behavior caused the harm.
Back in December, Timothy Snyder called Trump’s nominations to his cabinet a “decapitation strike.” Events bear this out.
Gabbard: “Zelensky has been trying to drag the United States into a nuclear war with Russia/WW3 for years now.” Pause on that idiocy of a sentence for a minute. It will be no surprise when it becomes clear — albeit too late for it to prevent the damage — that the entire Trump ecosystem was turned by Moscow (long known for playing the long game). The American post-1990 triumphalism will turn out to have been vapor.
Good catch. The idea of Zelenskyy–with all his nukes?–trying to drag us into a nuclear war is risible. Clearly, Trump is signaling that, like Putin, he will use the “nuclear war” card to shut down any rational conversation. We can only pray others see through it.
In the late days of January, in the Bluesky comments, I came across a cite of a youtuber with a compelling and well-made video about the water system in CA, especially as it relates to firefighting and trumpian politics. He made it 3 years earlier, and I shared it here.
Today I want to share another video, part 3 of a set of 4 about the war on Ukraine, that is his most popular – hoping that it will add to everyone else’s knowledge base, while taking people back, like it did for me – Shut Up About Nato Expansion.
Comrade Krasnov put on quite a show yesterday, didn’t he? Woo-eee! I thought the old, orange, spray-painted pervert was going to have a cerebral hemorrhage yelling at Zelenskyy! All of that orange bronzer troweled over his highly vascular face when he was mad, made him literally glow like an illuminated mango on TV! Of course, he had to drag Hunter Biden into the tirade, appropos of nothing other than Hunter did some work in Ukraine. What a loser. There is no way this reptile makes it four years as president of the United States. No. Way.
Unfortunately, if he doesn’t make it, we get Mr. Manspreading Mansplainer Vance, the typically invisible but for this occasion all-too-visible wingman. Less bronzer, perhaps, but all the bloviating idiocy.
One of the most striking things I heard at the Friday WH TV fiasco was when Trump, mid-frenzy, said of Putin and himself that “WE went through so much with Russia Russia Russia” and then devolved into Hilary and Hunter Biden nonsense. WE? Putin didn’t get impeached; the Mueller report had no negative impact on Putin and in fact likely the opposite. It’s crazy but Trump appears to believe he has a firm bond with Putin based on shared grievance and I imagine the bond has been cultivated. Trump’s motivation to avenge himself against various and sundry US citizens obviously bodes poorly for our nation. But therein lies my question: to what end? Personal stuff aside, what economic benefit would there be to resuming trade with a crippled petrostate? No matter how low the price, will US companies import Russian oil? Will they invest in Russian oil production when they don’t want to invest in US production? And why invest to bring more oil onto the market to depress prices?
Rubio tried to sort of justify Trump’s Russophila by telling Breitbart(?) the plan was to peel Russia away from China. Maybe he should look at the various unfinished Trans-Siberian energy projects and stop embarrassing himself.
Want rare earth minerals? Right below China, is Vietnam. Go invest. What else is there? Is Trump just playing the powerful guy role to give things to Putin, like the Abbott point of care COVID test machine? Or maybe I should stop looking for intelligible motive.
As you say, all that shared grievance talk did indeed sound cultivated. Putin has suffered exactly nothing from the “hoaxes” Trump vituperated about, yet he seems to have convinced Trump during one of their (secret!) talks that the two share these wounds.
That is the work of a trained FSB officer. Too bad for us that Trump’s infinitely fragile ego needs to believe that this “bond” means that he too is a big, “tough” killer like the man batting him around like a toy.
Russia has an established oligarchy with a high standard of living even as their citizens suffer. U.S. oligarchs are fed up with republican progress on their lie that they would “reduce govt” so they could “drown it in the bathtub”, so we are getting the shower scene from scarface instead.
OTOH, Russia & the rest of the world’s oligarchs would like more of the “we don’t actually have to work or provide anything of value” wealth of the U.S. billionaire class.
I didn’t pay enough attention in econ class to know if that’s going to work out for them.
The ‘we’ thing stuck out to me, too, and I think Ginevra offers a better explanation of it than I could.
As for the ‘we don’t actually have to work’ bit: President Musk seems to think AI will do all the hard work; robots and computers will serve their masters.
People are unnecessary, there are better tools.
I can’t link reporting for this because it was told to me personally, but they cut off funding for an MD on the brink of ending one of the most incurable childhood cancers. Musk and Vought are not going to replace him with AI or a robot.
I am asserting that the U.S. billionaire class does not work, and that non-U.S. oligarchs want a piece of that action. Reference for today: Trump’s crypto pump.
Juicero is still the greatest example of Silicon Valley stupidity, until January 20, 2025, that is.
So he doesn’t like any of the creative arts, not even writing, which produce pleasure for most of us.
*Billionaires* don’t do anything for the world.
As heard on MSW-Jack today, Controversial ex-judge from Oregon appointed to Trump administration
Former Marion County Circuit Judge Vance Day, who refused to wed gay couples, and for hanging a picture of Hitler in the courthouse — has been hired by the Trump administration to serve as senior counsel to the Office of the Deputy AG of the US. Emil Bove has been acting head of the office since Jan. 20.
OR Supreme Court ultimately suspended Day for three years beginning in 2018.
Local Republican groups, including the Oregon Conservative Caucus, lauded the appointment.
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2025/02/controversial-ex-judge-from-oregon-appointed-to-trump-administration.html
https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/mercy-corps-warns-of-devastating-consequences-after-trump-cuts-41-programs/
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There are indications that Trump may have become a Russian asset as far back as 1987 when he took a trip to Moscow, where (as reported) he was cultivated by the KGB. Here is a brief summary of that thinking, published just the other day.
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5162890-assessing-new-allegations-that-trump-was-recruited-by-the-kgb/
This is not a new theory. When Trump returned to USA after that trip, he did something was uncharacteristic based on his previous behavior: He paid for a full-page ad in major newspapers, advocating for US foreign policy positions that appeared as favorable to Russian interests. Here is a quick summary as published at the time.
https://apnews.com/article/05133dbe63ace98766527ec7d16ede08
Buzzfeed published about this incident in 2015, shortly after Trump announced his candidacy, posting a copy of the ad which was titled “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure,”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ilanbenmeir/that-time-trump-spent-nearly-100000-on-an-ad-criticizing-us
Trump continues to promote some of those same themes – although the geopolitical actors have changed. For example, the ad reads “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States … The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.” Does that voice sound familiar?
Here is another article making the case that he was KGB-cultivated during that 1987 trip and connects the full-page advert to it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book
Critter7, I can’t thank you enough for gathering these resources for us. I just read the first and found it exponentially more valuable than I’d expected–by far the most substantial evaluation of this rumor I’ve seen, by a Rutgers professor of Russian and Ukrainian history. He made me want to read more of his work.
I can’t wait to read the rest. You’ve done a real service here!
Thanks for this Marcy! Your point that one cannot rule out that this is intentional sabotage is as salient as it is sobering. Many of the comments above discuss whether and to what extent Trump is a Russian asset. At the very least, it is, as Peterr noted, “hard to imagine what a Russian agent/asset in the WH would do that Trump isn’t doing.” But it’s also hard not to think about where this might go.
Putin wants to dismantle the western democratic order. Trump and his lackeys are doing a bang-up job of severely weakening the US (politically, diplomatically, destroying the administrative state that has allowed America’s post-war hegemony, etc.), and therefore they’ve excelled at destroying a cornerstone of that western democratic order. For now, Trump has utility to Putin. But at a certain point, there will be, for Putin, diminishing returns vis-a-vis Trump–there’s only so much china in the china shop for the bull to break. Trump wants to believe that he and Putin are BFFs, but once Trump has no more value for Putin, Putin will no doubt throw him under the bus. And it would be incredibly ironic if Trump couldn’t see that coming given his propensity for the same.
And although it’s perhaps too speculative or otherwise silly to ponder, it is hard not to imagine, after letting Trump do as much damage as he can, that Putin’s coup de grace would be dishing the dirt on Trump, whatever that may be. (It strains credulity to imagine that there is no dirt.) The political fallout would likely be seismic. After years and years of Trump calling everything Russia a hoax, if Putin came out and unambiguously told the world how a hostile foreign nation was able to infiltrate the presidency, Trump would meltdown, there’d likely be severe political consequences for the GOP (if our constitutional republic could even survive the shock), and most importantly, the US would cease to have ANY credibility on the world stage. Whether Trump’s supporters could navigate the cognitive dissonance is an open question. And certainly the apparent circling of the European wagons in the wake of the US’s abdication presents another challenge to Putin’s goals. But the destruction of America’s political order–and its place in the world’s–would be a huge win for Putin, and it seems inescapable that stabbing Trump in the back would be an excellent way to effectuate this goal. The question then just becomes one of timing for maximum effect.
We knew of Trump’s allegiance from 2016 on; I’m sure the intelligence services, unless completely incompetent, knew it a lot longer. There are reasons he had never been prosecuted before he became President in 2016, and probably those reasons and also new ones made Biden/Garland allergic to prosecuting Trump and the high-level conspirators in Congress, DoD, Secret Service, FBI, etc. once it was clear that bc of public opinion after the 1/6 Commission that they had to do something, they eventually got Jack Smith in, 22 mons later. Due to the fact that so much time had elapsed, he didn’t have much time before the next election for the case to be tried, and he filed a stripped down complaint both in defendants, only Trump, and in the causes of action. It was evident to me at filing that the odds of it getting to trial, especially given the defendant and his delay tactics, were remote. I believe that, once backed into a corner where they had to look like they were doing something, Biden/Garland’s plan was to do too little, too late.
My question is, given repeated, overwhelming evidence of the close connection and criminal misconduct, how is it that he is now President? That tells me that the rot is too deep, that both Republicans and Democrats are complicit, and that extreme wealth has utterly overwhelmed our system of government.
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This is conspiracy theory unless you have evidence to back up your claim. You apparently haven’t been reading here often enough to recall the multiple times Marcy pointed out the difficulties with prosecuting January 6; you need to overcome those challenges with your claims.
I have read them and completely disagree with them.
Again, you offer no evidence provided to overcome Marcy’s points, just your opinion. Got it. We have plenty of that proliferating while we need facts.
Art of the Dirty Deal
Mr. Happy Mealy Mouth
with demi-TASS to kowtow,
celebrates a deal gone south,
pinky swears his Putin vow.
There is no way to massage
this so blatant sabotage,
Subject to a barrage,
Democracy now just camouflage.
It’s so clear they’ve sold us out,
There’s no both-sides or what-about,
There isn’t even a slight doubt,
The Don’s a Judas, and Vance a lout.
Trump takes pride as Putin’s man,
He swept us into their dustpan,
Schemers sugarcoat their lootings plan,
Goon heist, klepto and cussed klan.
As we watch while the world grieves,
Our republic stolen by MAGAt thieves,
What else is there, and up whose sleeves
are the heroes and the reprieves?
Nailed it.