Demolition of the Republic
Monday, February 17, 2025
Justinian in Corruption, Donald Trump, Roger Fitch Esq, US attorney general, US
politics
Self-coup
underway ... Crime and punishment run rife ... Loyalty to Trump replaces the
Constitution at the Justice Department ... Musketeers eat away at the core of
government ... Private equity takeover ... Democrats dither ... Roger Fitch
files from Washington
"Who can
deny but the president general will be a king to all intents and purposes, and
one of the most dangerous kind too; a king elected to command a standing army
... The President-general, who is to be our king after this government is
established, is vested with powers exceeding those of the most despotic monarch
we know of in modern times ... I challenge the politicians of the whole
continent to find in any period of history a monarch more absolute ..." - Benjamin Workman
("Philadelphiensis"), American Anti-Federalist who warned in 1787-88
that the proposed Constitution would centralise power to an appalling degree,
especially in the executive branch.
"Like a
clogged sewer erupting into the streets, Donald Trump returned to office on
Monday, and, as promised, unleashed his filth upon the country. In a flurry of
lawless, unconstitutional, racist, bigoted, violent, and, in some cases,
plainly stupid executive orders and pardons, Trump set his reign of terror in
motion. The future we feared has officially arrived." - Ely
Mystal on the inauguration.
The 119th
Congress has stood down. Majority Republicans are
forgoing their constitutional Article I obligations, acquiescing fully in
Donald Trump's shocking, continuing, executive coup.
A self-coup like Louis Napoleon's,
it resumes the failed January 6, 2020 plot. Even so, it took most by surprise.
Just as Donald
Trump was the first president elected after the supreme court gutted the
protections of the Voting Rights
Act, he is now, thanks to the same court, the
first president effectively
above the law. He can't be criminally prosecuted, even
for blatantly illegal acts.
Immediately after
inauguration, Trump began crimes and unlawful acts on a
scale unknown in America, or perhaps any democracy since 1933, when Adolf
Hitler demolished
the Weimar Republic in 53 days.
How
long will it take Donald Trump? Not long, judging from his administrative
actions and executive orders, e.g, his dangerous and
highly-unconstitutional "invasion"
order, the immigration
orders that followed, and more. Dozens
of lawsuits against the illegal acts have been filed.
Hitler's first
cabinet. January 1933
But first,
America's Führer illegally
sacked 17 Inspectors-General of important government
departments, many of whom he had appointed during his first term; this was
their reward for collectively identifying $183.5
billion in government waste and fraud; so much for the
detection of these being the purpose of the unappointed, uncredentialed goons
rifling the files of government departments and agencies.
Throughout
government, ethics offices were closed and their employees stood down.
Next, Trump purged
officials in the Justice Department and FBI, before the
Attorney General had even been confirmed by the senate. He appointed in their
place, without senate confirmation, his personal team of three lawyers from his
New York criminal fraud case, who have proved to be loyal
sycophants.
Alarmingly,
targeted prosecutions may be next, another step towards American
authoritarianism.
As
David Dayan commented,
the purges were like an armed gang
shooting out closed-circuit cameras before the robbery. These lawless acts were
the preliminary, foundational crimes.
Lawlessness
is the point: Trump believes in crime and supports it. It's been his governing
philosophy, guiding him throughout his life. That's why he
doesn't pardon the innocent, victims perhaps of some miscarriage of justice,
but only
the guilty; he even pardons
war criminals, and delights in assisting crime any way he can: one of his
more disturbing
acts was to lift
Biden's sanctions against violent West Bank
settlers attacking Palestinians and their property.
On the other
hand, those who have prosecuted Donald Trump will most certainly not be
forgiven. The president has won
his war on the Justice Department, where hundreds
of lawyers who had (quite properly) worked on the now-dismissed criminal
cases against Trump now fear for their jobs, while the department's FBI staff
face similar retribution.
Bondi sworn in by the
ethically bereft Clarence Thomas
When, in due
course, the appalling
Pam Bondi was confirmed as AG, she promptly proclaimed
that the first obligation of the department's lawyers was
to Donald Trump, who reserved the right to
directly interfere in the department.
Such personal
loyalty to a president is unethical and corrupt; for Justice Department
lawyers, it's heresy. Many are
quitting.
Bondi is proving as corrupt as Trump. After the president flouted the supreme court decision
upholding the statutory exclusion of TikTok, Bondi was able to sell
indulgences, i.e, undertakings to friendly tech companies (quickly accepted),
that she won't
prosecute them for offences which are clear violations
of statutory law and supreme court precedent. Generous campaign and
inauguration "gifts" by Google and Apple have been rewarded.
≈ ≈ ≈
By the time of his (second) inauguration,
the convicted felon Donald Trump had turned his reign into a duumvirate, illegally
designating South African-born oligarch Elon Musk "Administrator" of DOGE,
a pretend-department whose website has already
been hacked. Unconfirmed by the senate, Musk
has the hallmarks of a confirmed fascist, as monomaniacal as his partner in
crime.
Together, Trump
and Musk purported to stop legally-appropriated Federal grants (states
have responded) and freeze departmental spending.
Musk's demolition
crew of young, inexperienced "engineers" broke
into key departments, seizing the main computer systems in Treasury and Personnel
Management.
The ransacking of
files and systems and possible installation
of malicious programs (e.g, AI) prefigures a corporate
takeover of the US Government itself.
As one anonymous
Republican told the New Yorker's Susan Glasser:
"Elon figured out that the personnel,
information-technology backbone of the government was essentially the
twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteen-fifties television tower in the
Third World ... you could take over the government essentially with a handful
of people if you could access all that".
Musk: ransacking the
government
One of Musk's
earliest acts was freezing
foreign aid through USAID,
the agency that provides relief and foreign aid around the world.
Legally-entrenched, and heretofore enjoying bipartisan support, USAID
represents the best of American soft power.
Immediately, dusky women and children in funded hospitals and refugee
centres overseas began dying and starving, the evident goal of the cruel and
implacable Musk.
Because USAID
helps the poor and sick, it was apparently the first
to be attacked by the demented Musk, who shares Donald
Trump's distain for the homeless, destitute and non-white wretched.
All this was, of
course, highly illegal. The Washington Post did notice that
something was amiss, duly
reporting it on page A17.
Atlas (i.e, US
capital), has indeed shrugged, if not in the way Ayn Rand foresaw;
as Americans dozed, Democrats dithered and congressional Republicans kept
careful silence, the US slid into an un-American,
Randian nightmare, unfolding in real time.
In this fever
dream, Elon Musk's looting of the US Treasury is the ultimate private
equity takeover, the logical end of unrestrained and
unregulated predatory capitalism. Nina Burleigh comments.
As
Professor Michael Dorf sadly observed, maybe
the constitution is a suicide pact after all.
