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Politics, Religion, and Morality

One of the two candidates was a prosecutor and a career public servant, perfectly well qualified for the office of President of the United States.
I think this is imporant to touch on. In the 2020 primary season, Kamala had very few citizens behind her. If Biden said in 2023 that he was not running for reelection, there would have been time for Democrats to have an actual primary for 2024. A lot of people felt shafted by how Harris was just made into the candidate, it felt undemocratic and she had 107 days to build an entire campaign. And as we saw, a lot of people just didnt show up that were there to vote for Biden. Kamala probably wouldn't have been the candidate, but I would bet in that universe it would have been a Democrat sweep.

I posit that Trump winning is 100% Biden's fault.

Politically, love is also a much weaker driver than hate nowadays and Trump was able to capitalize on hate. He was even able to use the intimate relationship between love and hate to create a voting base, where "you only really love your country if you hate the people trying to ruin it." The less you define the enemy the easier it is to court voters, and that is where Trump excels.

It would be nice to have a candidate that I want to vote for, rather than vote because I need to vote against a candidate.
 
I'm going to call you out on this Dad_Scaper. You're missing the forest for a single tree.
U_M didn't specify local television news.
Local news can be TV, radio, newspaper, (including digital newspaper), student-run campus papers/radio, or even independent blog sites. He even specifically said that he
You latched onto U_M's opening paragraph (which even addressed your point by mentioning that he doesn't like corporately-owned 'local' outlets).
Most of the substance of his post is regarding the right to self-defense, which you completely skipped over.
I apologize if you just made a quick initial reply due to time constraints and intended to write more later.
I have no particular interest in going through his entire posts and responding point for point. They tend to be very lengthy, and are unsourced. Which is totally fine, because posting on the internet is free and he should do it if he wants. I am doing the same for you: letting almost everything go, though I disagree with it. We don't have referees here, and it is fairly certain that we don't even have anyone to persuade.

I will, however, take your "forest for a single tree" metaphor to direct you back to this, which you wrote earlier:

Just going to ask the obvious question here:
If more people voted for Donald Trump, then he was elected democratically, so how can any reasonable person claim that democracy is in danger?
From the forest itself comes the handle for the axe, right?

As for elections in 2028, I will be happy if they happen, and even happier if Trump is not on the ballot. We already know from 2020 that he has no regard for a peaceful transfer of power or conceding when he lost. So no, I do not think our concerns are out of place. And if you voted for him because you disliked Harris or for whatever reason that much, even you are allowed to be worried, after his conduct in 2020.
 
Politically, love is also a much weaker driver than hate nowadays and Trump was able to capitalize on hate. He was even able to use the intimate relationship between love and hate to create a voting base, where "you only really love your country if you hate the people trying to ruin it." The less you define the enemy the easier it is to court voters, and that is where Trump excels.
I agree with your entire post except for this paragraph.
In order to characterize Trump's campaign as 'hateful', you must have a very different definition of hate from me.
I'd like you to expand on this point. I see a lot of people claiming that he and his supporters are hateful bigots, but I simply do not undetstand this. There are plenty of videos of people who you may not expect attending Trump rallies and being welcomed warmly.
Also, to your final point, Harris seemed to be actively avoiding defining herself.
 
Oh mb I didn't know that history and the constitution didn't count as sources around here, I'll do my best to keep those silly things out of the conversation going forward :ROFLMAO:

Drumpf winning is 100% the American people's fault, they voted him in (allegedly.) That's the best part about a system democratically elected leaders, they brainwash masses into voting on emotion. IMO it's turned into warring celeb-worship cults with little critical thought on behalf of the people voting (or perhaps our education system has failed :unsure: ) the sporting event analogy that dad scaper brought up is exactly how I see it. I think that is because I'm mostly disengaged from the political propaganda (I SEE HATE ON BOTH SIDES :mad:) and I don't participate in watching sports (soccer, football, etc) either, so I draw parallels based on my comparable contempt of each system.

It would be nice to have a candidate that I want to vote for, rather than vote because I need to vote against a candidate.

Preach. Fr there probably IS a candidate that you would honestly vote for somewhere out there, they just aren't getting votes/corporate $$$ support like the people on the R & D trains. Oh, speaking of constitutional republic with democratically elected leaders, I really need to stop gaslighting; we're actually a corporatocracy :ROFLMAO:
 
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
-Douglas Adams, (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)
 
I'd like you to expand on this point. I see a lot of people claiming that he and his supporters are hateful bigots, but I simply do not undetstand this. There are plenty of videos of people who you may not expect

The GOP and Trump spent millions of dollars during this campaign vilifying people who share my demographic. I have very real concerns about how this will affect my quality of life. I think my geographic location will protect me from the worst of it which is a lot more than I can say for a lot of other people I know. There is a non zero chance I will have to make the choice to leave the home and community I have created for my own personal safety if things get bad enough, which is a very real possibility. I like to think of myself as a kind person, but it is very hard for me to want to extend kindness to a large swath of people who want to make a world where I would not exist.

~Dysole, who had been following along quietly but felt compelled to speak up regarding this point
 
But when we do have an ordinary 2028 election, will you be willing to admit that your fears regarding Trump were unfounded?
If normal elections are held in 2028, and if no efforts were made to "delay" or "postpone" them (another common trick in the authoritarian playbook), I will let out a great sigh of relief and say, "I have never been more glad to be wrong about something in my life." I could very easily live with having to say that. If I am right, and elections are canceled or "postponed indefinitely," what will you say? "Oops, sorry I supported a dictator? My bad?" Could you live with having to say that?

If you're referring to the case in New York and see the judge as anything other than a partisan hack, I don't know what to say to you.
Was Trump unfairly targeted for his crimes by NY prosecutors? I suppose so, in the same way that Al Capone was unfairly targeted by the feds for tax evasion. I honestly don't have an issue with that kind of unequal treatment; if you're a criminal who wants to avoid prosecution, maybe don't be such a high profile figure? I believe it's called "laying low."

(I believe Dad_Scaper is a city or state prosecutor and could speak to this particular subject way better than I, whose knowledge of the legal system comes mostly through occasional reruns of the various Law & Order shows.)

As mentioned it is interesting watching from an outside perspective. In Canada we typically get news from the independent CBC, national news from AP, reuters or the US big names. International news typicality takes first place then national, rarely regional. I have no idea how I would find out the local high school hockey scores, whereas when I visited the states it seemed high school football results were on the local news.
I am shocked to find out high school hockey scores are not a bigger deal in Canada. I feel like I've been lied to about the sport's importance to your culture. Next you'll be claiming that you guys don't like maple syrup.

One more thing. The results of this 2024 election are further evidence, if one needed any, that Trump's loss in 2020 was legitimate; if Democrats had the ability to rig elections, they surely would have done so this time too. As it turns out, all his talk about stolen elections was just the dangerous whining of a sore loser. I wouldn't want to play a game of Heroscape with Trump, let alone vote for him.
 
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The GOP and Trump spent millions of dollars during this campaign vilifying people who share my demographic.
But you didn't say that you, yourself, were being villified. I've known you to be very intentional with your posts generally, and I do believe you meant precisely what you said.
Trump has indeed been vilifying anyone who would promote the castration of children, which seems entirely reasonable, and indeed, a morally good thing, while also not preventing informed adults from taking similar actions.
I don't believe that you, Dysole, have ever advocated for puberty blockers or surgeries for children. The sheer uptick in teenagers claiming to be transsexual can only be reasonably explained as a social contagion and most will grow out of it by age 20 or so. Even then, most just need to know that there is nothing wrong with fulfilling societal roles that are traditionally associated with the opposite sex (see engineers, stay-at-home parents, etc.) and that doing so doesn't mean that you were born in the wrong body.
Please do not take this as a personal attack of any kind. I am merely advocating for the prudence and temperance of all parties involved, both virtues of which I know you have excercised throughout your own personal struggles.
I like to think of myself as a kind person, but it is very hard for me to want to extend kindness to a large swath of people who want to make a world where I would not exist.

~Dysole, who had been following along quietly but felt compelled to speak up regarding this point
As a general point here, kindness is held as one of the cardinal virtues of modern western society, and it is often in direct opposition to goodness.
It is not 'good' to give an alcoholic a drink, a fat person an extra large pizza, or to humor the delusions of a man claiming to be the second coming of Christ, while these poor soul would likely credit you for your kindness if you did so.
Societies flourish when kindness is esteemed and expected, while being subservient to some higher moral code.
 
But you didn't say that you, yourself, were being villified. I've known you to be very intentional with your posts generally, and I do believe you meant precisely what you said.
Trump has indeed been vilifying anyone who would promote the castration of children, which seems entirely reasonable, and indeed, a morally good thing, while also not preventing informed adults from taking similar actions.
I don't believe that you, Dysole, have ever advocated for puberty blockers or surgeries for children. The sheer uptick in teenagers claiming to be transsexual can only be reasonably explained as a social contagion and most will grow out of it by age 20 or so. Even then, most just need to know that there is nothing wrong with fulfilling societal roles that are traditionally associated with the opposite sex (see engineers, stay-at-home parents, etc.) and that doing so doesn't mean that you were born in the wrong body.
Please do not take this as a personal attack of any kind. I am merely advocating for the prudence and temperance of all parties involved, both virtues of which I know you have excercised throughout your own personal struggles.

As a general point here, kindness is held as one of the cardinal virtues of modern western society, and it is often in direct opposition to goodness.
It is not 'good' to give an alcoholic a drink, a fat person an extra large pizza, or to humor the delusions of a man claiming to be the second coming of Christ, while these poor soul would likely credit you for your kindness if you did so.
Societies flourish when kindness is esteemed and expected, while being subservient to some higher moral code.

And here you show that you have not actually spoken and listened to trans people and what our concerns are. The fact that you call it a "social contagion" or that you think we just don't feel our societal roles match (and boy howdy there is in fact a lot of societal pushback if you step outside of gendered roles) and that you equate puberty blockers with castration or think that surgeries are part of the standard process for minors shows you have no idea of the WPATH standards of care nor do you have any idea about the medical research around gender affirming medicine for trans people. I wish I could have transitioned much much sooner than I actually did and puberty blockers would have been a godsend for me. I lucked out in many ways around my appearance but there are still a lot of things that an earlier transition would have nullified and others that I had to spend a lot of money bringing to a place where it was no longer actively causing me distress. Society had no issue when it was my eyes that I needed to get corrective lenses for after a medical professional said I needed to and I wish it was the same for my gender affirming care which SAVED MY LIFE. Restrictive anti trans policies HAVE resulted in an uptick of suicides in trans youth and Trump's policies will only make that number worse.

There is a call to push back on the "normalization of transgenderism" in documents the Trump campaign has signed onto. They want us removed from federal offices. They don't want us to update our legal documents. They don't want us to be seen as just another spectrum of humanity. They want us gone. I have heard it too many times from too many corners including some that were people very close to me. I have once again been very lucky on this front as I know a lot of people who have endured worse. The GOP has spent a lot of money pushing a narrative about trans people that we are basically awful pedophiles and sexual predators and that our existence is a threat to the "proper way of life". I 100% believe them that they will try to make "correcting this" happen.

I agree that kindness is not inherently goodness but I'm seeing these sorts of things that are all "hey we should all get along" and it's very hard for me to subscribe onto that when the expressed policy and statements of the party coming to power have said they are a direct threat to my existence and way of life and that they very much don't think we should get along. I have a lot of thoughts about American Christianity and how it has for the most part given itself over to a pursuit of power, capitalistic ends, and a moral view that only cares about "the right kind of people". I have long stopped looking at the American Church for any indicator of moral goodness. So yes, kindness is not goodness but I see neither in the coming administration and feel odds are very good that policies which will directly hurt people like me will be held up as some standard of "moral high ground".

~Dysole, who will not apologize if her rage came through in this; she has lived too many experiences and heard too many more to not be livid at how trans people are seen by a large swath of people in American society today

EDIT: I am not trying to say you are a "bad person" if you believed the anti trans narratives running around. So few of them have actual trans people involved (and if it is it's like the same three detransitioners when they like to say detransitioning is the norm for something that has lower regret rates than almost every other major medical intervention) so it's not exactly easy to find trans voices (there's basically no way in hell that will change under the current administration.) I am more trying to say that one should listen to what trans people are actually saying rather than the people who are pushing the narrative that we are awful people. I am very frustrated about all the misinformation floating around and how hard it is to speak to it because of how deeply ingrained some gendered biases and such are in our society.
 
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@Dysole though you ask for neither you have my respect and my sympathy, as a good Canadian I can only say I'm sorry.

It is sad that what should be a simple policy - treat all humans the same and give them equal rights, freedom and equality - is still not only an open question but such a boiler point. It is frankly ridiculous that the treatment that would better the lives of so few while basically not impacting anyone else in any meaningful way was such a hot topic. So many wasted words and time on what we will hopefully look back on with embarrassment we feel from so many bad policies.

Even if God or whatever does exist and really does prefer man and woman marriage, I think she would be more pissed with letting people starve, stuffer and die than whatever we might get in in the bed room that affects no one else than the person (or people) we love. And damn if God (or anyone else) cares about us dressing/behaving/changing our bodies to feel peace with ourselves, well the can mingld their own business and let society get in with making everyones lives a little bit better.

Iirc the only time Jesus was pissed was with the bankers in the temple. Maybe stop worrying about what might be between someone's legs, and look ath those that are hoarding wealth and exploiting there fellow humans. When bonobos and chimps engage in gender fluidity it is a little interesting but within normal behavior. If a chimp stockpiled all the bananas to the point his troop starved, we would dissect that ape to find out what the hell was wrong with it.
 
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Just returned from Scape Con East -- had a blast. I don't expect anyone here to agree, but the Democrats' election loss was completely self inflicted. This opinion piece in USA Today sums it up pretty well:


Families are hurting under Biden/Harris' inflationary policy decisions. Young people can't afford to buy houses for their young families. Brings back memories of 1979-1980 when interest rates were 18% and the economy was in shambles. That ushered in the Reagan presidency.

The other big issue was of course Harris herself. She is arguably the worst presidential candidate selected by either the Republicans or Democrats that I have seen since 1974 when I started following politics during Watergate. The general populace had no confidence in her ability to run the country and solve problems. Again very similar to Jimmy Carter's situation in 1980.

Trump is not going to turn the country into a dictatorship. He has limited powers under the Constitution. We'll all have a chance to vote again in 2028, and if the economy is better, and the Democrats nominate a reasonably qualified candidate who can express a clear message, they will have a reasonable shot to retake the White House.
 
Were the inflationary policy decisions really potatus/scamala though? I've always been under the impression that it happened under drumpf, when we printed gazillions of dollars in 2019-2020 alongside the authoritarian lockdown & destruction that came shortly after. I wouldn't even entirely blame drumpf for that inflation, since it's fed reserve (and the scum in that legalized crime ring) that are abusing the entire country with even more invisible taxes every time it prints money. Some of trump's major platforms in 2016 were "build the wall & drain the swamp" and afaik he failed both of those objectives; we are seeing the results of those failures snowball in real time. Not that it hasn't been a problem for years before that ofc, but I also had some hope bc finally someone that wasn't a career public thief was, at least verbally, threatening this wasteful gubmint machine.

I hold my breath with the alleged "dept of gub efficiency - DOGE" talk about slimming useless gubmint fat coming from elon/rob. What I hope will happen: unconstitutional gubmint agencies & jobs eliminated (spoiler alert: that's probably well over 50% of them 🤣🤣🤣) What I actually think will happen: People on the "wrong side of the political aisle" fired and replaced with elon/rob/drumpf friends so they can continue the crime ring with their own friends running the show.
 
Were the inflationary policy decisions really potatus/scamala though? I've always been under the impression that it happened under drumpf, when we printed gazillions of dollars in 2019-2020 alongside the authoritarian lockdown & destruction that came shortly after. I wouldn't even entirely blame drumpf for that inflation, since it's fed reserve (and the scum in that legalized crime ring) that are abusing the entire country with even more invisible taxes every time it prints money. Some of trump's major platforms in 2016 were "build the wall & drain the swamp" and afaik he failed both of those objectives; we are seeing the results of those failures snowball in real time. Not that it hasn't been a problem for years before that ofc, but I also had some hope bc finally someone that wasn't a career public thief was, at least verbally, threatening this wasteful gubmint machine.

I hold my breath with the alleged "dept of gub efficiency - DOGE" talk about slimming useless gubmint fat coming from elon/rob. What I hope will happen: unconstitutional gubmint agencies & jobs eliminated (spoiler alert: that's probably well over 50% of them 🤣🤣🤣) What I actually think will happen: People on the "wrong side of the political aisle" fired and replaced with elon/rob/drumpf friends so they can continue the crime ring with their own friends running the show.
The final billions and billions of government spending and giveaways after COVID was basically over just kept fueling the flames of inflation. Prior to COVID, the economy was humming -- a rising tide lifts all boats and the vast majority of Americans were better off than they were in 2016.

Again, I don't expect anyone to agree with me but when you look at the voting results, it's not that Americans suddenly became Fascists and voted for Trump because they agreed with him. Democrat elites can continue to ignore the plight of hard working American families and see the same results in the future. A moderate Democrat, such as Joe Manchin would have had a much better shot at defeating Trump. A liberal coastal elite, not so much.
 
Democrat elites can continue to ignore the plight of hard working American families and see the same results in the future.
A sentiment shared by many people, including Senator Bernie Sanders.

I would love to think that this has been a learning experience for the party, but if 2016 wasn't, and 2020 wasn't (even though they somehow managed a win), I dont think 2024 was.
 
Frightening. From Heather Cox Richardson, historian:

February 1, 2025 (Saturday)
Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.
The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.

Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”
Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump.

Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”

That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.”

Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.
Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn't know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025.

You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868.
It shows in the new administration's persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.”

The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.”

Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.

And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.

Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion.

Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X.

Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect.

The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution.

But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.

According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.

Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China—a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.”

This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”

All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”

But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”

Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump's MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.

Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.”









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And they're already seeking a constitutional amendment to let him go for a third term. It all makes me sick. But what more did the American people expect, electing a convicted felon to the presidency?
 
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