AMERIKA
This Wrecking Ball Must Be Stopped
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Trump and Musk aren’t ‘saving money’ by ‘slashing a bloated budget’.
They’re taking a wrecking ball to the United States of America.
Even if you believe we should be reducing the size and scope of the federal government, consider this: the shock doctrine approach is reckless, incompetent and dangerous. The Trump Administration is smashing its way through our federal government – and the nation is crumbling fast.
If Trump and Musk truly cared about this country, they’d roll out their policies with consideration for the impacts of their actions. From hiring freezes to federal employee layoffs to funding seizes to gaining access to sensitive data to tariff trade wars to shuttering public health websites, the wrecking ball approach has been endangering hundreds of millions of people.
The Trump Administration is using its anti-DEI executive orders to upend the federal agencies, halting DEIA programs and scrubbing out anti-discriminatory policies with a 50-year legacy of success. They’re threatening to fire federal employees who do not comply and to cut off funding for those agencies that do not fall into line.
First of all, if they truly cared about this country, they’d affirm policies that help us become “a more perfect union” by building understanding of diversity as strength. (Which is what DEIA programs are designed to do.) Secondly, they would honor and respect civil servants who have dedicated their careers to upholding rule of law, their duties to this country, and the well-being of the United States. Instead, they’re firing them in purges, going on witch hunts, making chilling threats, mocking them, and dismantling the institutions that serve the country.
For those who think shrinking “Big Gov” is sensible, Trump’s administration is not actually downsizing anything. It’s consolidating power into the executive branch in alarming ways that should concern people on all sides of the political spectrum. It’s a classic example of federal power run amok. Under the unelected leadership of Elon Musk, the newly formed DOGE is amassing levels of authoritarian control that this country has never seen before. Their illegal actions constitute one of the worst constitutional crises in decades as the executive office oversteps its purview in unprecedented ways.
The wrecking ball isn’t just smashing through domestic agencies, though. It’s also wreaking havoc with international relations.
Trump’s blundering tariffs policy caused international alarm and concerns of a global economic crisis. Though he backed off with a 30-day reprieve in exchange for minor concessions from Canada and Mexico about troops along US borders, the insulting, offensive manner in which the tariffs were announced has caused serious harm to our relationship with our nearest neighbors. And for what? In the end, it seems that Trump might settle for tariff deals that were not significantly different from before.
And the damage is done.
The fiasco soured relationships with Canada to the point that the notoriously friendly and goodwilled Canadians are booing the US National Anthem at sports games. It also led to far-right Governor Doug Ford to threaten to rip up Elon Musk’s $100 million SpaceX contract. Canada is not for sale hats soared in sales and international relations are at an all-time low after Trump’s alleged jokes about Canada becoming the 51st state set off triggered concerns over Canada’s sovereignty.
If you’re pissing off the Canadians, you’re doing something wrong.
To make international matters even worse, Musk abruptly cut off funds to USAID, impacting thousands of workers and threatening global stability. Aid funds are one way that the US has exercised ‘soft power’, leveraging it to stop human rights abuses, rein in dictators, lean on authoritarians, and more. We can critique the use of USAID as a leverage point for diplomatic negotiations, but halting those programs overnight is like taking a chainsaw to a cow. Carnage is unfolding. USAID is responsible for 42 percent of the world’s humanitarian aid. Millions of lives are at risk because of it, along with international relationships worldwide.
It is impossible to list all of the detrimental actions that have unfolded in the past weeks and are slated to happen in the coming weeks and months. It is equally hard to imagine how the United States will withstand four years of this chaos and destruction.
It doesn’t matter if you voted for or against Trump in the last election. This chaos isn’t what any of us voted for. Musk with unlimited powers isn’t something we voted for. The destruction of the United States isn’t something we voted for. This illegal, unconstitutional, anti-American authoritarianism isn’t something we voted for.
The wrecking ball must be stopped.
A Constitutional Crisis: Can the Rule of Law Survive This Presidency?
Photo by Sebastian Pichler
“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
This has all the makings of a constitutional crisis.
According to law professor Amanda Frost, “a constitutional crisis occurs when one branch of government, usually the executive, ‘blatantly, flagrantly and regularly exceeds its constitutional authority — and the other branches are either unable or unwilling to stop it.’”
Consider for yourself.
The president has gone rogue, doubling down on his belief that “I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The vice president believes the president should be a law unto himself, i.e., unaccountable to the other branches of the government.
The Republican-controlled Congress appears to be deaf, dumb and blind to the Executive Branch’s blatantly unconstitutional overreaches.
The courts, which have in recent years largely rubberstamped the government’s power grabs, are ill-prepared to rein in a sitting president who is determined to do whatever he wants, the Constitution be damned.
In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court preemptively gave future presidents the green light to engage in all manner of criminal activitieswhen it ruled 6-3 that presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution, provided the lawbreaking is related to their official duties.
Meanwhile, the Constitution is still missing from the White House’s website.
This last point is not an oversight.
Rather, it speaks volumes about the priorities of the current presidential administration, which operates as if the rule of law does not apply to itself.
Indeed, while President Trump’s predecessors paid lip service to the rule of law while sidestepping it at every opportunity, Trump has been unapologetic about his intentions to set aside whatever legal, moral or political barricades stand in the way of his end goals.
Rule by fiat—when presidents attempt to unilaterally impose their will through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements—is an offense to the Constitution.
It was offensive when Biden did it. It was offensive when Obama did it. And it is just as offensive when Trump does it.
Already, Trump has signed more executive orders in his first month than any other president in their first 100 days.
This is not a sign of strength and leadership. This is a red flag.
In bypassing Congress in order to carry out his ambitious agenda to “make America safe again,” “make America affordable and energy dominant again,” “drain the swamp,” and “bring back American values,” the Trump Administration risks transforming the executive branch into something akin to the very entities it often criticizes: an overreaching surveillance state, a nanny state that dictates individual choices, and a police state that prioritizes compliance over freedom.
It is particularly telling that while Trump and his Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are pledging to lay off huge swaths of federal employees and replace the workforce with artificial intelligence, the police state’s martial law apparatus will remain largely untouched.
This is how you prepare to lock down a nation.
This danger transcends party lines and tests the resilience of our constitutional framework.
How far will “we the people” allow the Executive Branch to continue to expand its power at the expense of established legal principles and the rule of law?
As much as past occupants of the White House and Congress would like us to believe otherwise, winning an election is not a populist mandate for one-party rule.
This way lies totalitarianism, by way of authoritarianism, and those who insist it can’t happen here need to pay better attention.
It’s happening already.
The following are 15 benchmarks of a totalitarian regime, according to Benjamin Carlson, a former editor at The Atlantic.
1. Media is controlled.
2. Dissent is equated to violence.
3. Legal system is co-opted by the state.
4. Power is exerted to prevent dissent.
5. State police are directed to protect the regime, not the people.
6. Financial, legal, and civil rights are contingent on compliance.
7. There is a mass conformity of behaviors and beliefs.
8. Power is concentrated in an inner ring of people and institutions.
9. Semi-organized violence is permitted.
10. Propaganda targets enemies of the state.
11. Whole classes of people are scapegoated and singled out for persecution.
12. Extra-legal action against internal enemies is condoned.
13. Unpredictable and harsh enforcement is used against unfavored classes.
14. The language of the constitution serves as a facade for the exercise of power.
15. And all private and public levers of power are used to enforce adherence to state orthodoxy.
To guard against these pitfalls, we must start by understanding the rule of law, and how it functions within our system of checks and balances.
The rule of law is the principle that everyone, including the government—and the president—must obey the law, which is embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
In a nutshell, the Constitution is the social contract—the people’s contract with the government—which outlines our expectations about the role of the government and its limits, a system of checks and balances dependent on a separation of powers, and the rights of the citizenry.
America’s founders established a system of checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in any single branch. To this end, the Constitution establishes three separate but equal branches of government: the legislative branch, which makes the law; the executive branch, which enforces the law; and the judicial branch, which interprets the law.
As constitutional scholar Linda Monk explains, “Within the separation of powers, each of the three branches of government has ‘checks and balances’ over the other two. For instance, Congress makes the laws, but the President can veto them, and the Supreme Court can declare them unconstitutional. The President enforces the law, but Congress must approve executive appointments and the Supreme Court rules whether executive action is constitutional. The Supreme Court can strike down actions by both the legislative and executive branches, but the President nominates Supreme Court justices, and the Senate confirms or denies their nominations.”
Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat, nowhere in the Constitution is the president granted unilateral authority to act outside these established checks and balances, no matter how well-meaning his intentions might be or how worthy the goals (a balanced budget, safety, economic prosperity, etc.).
Writing for The Washington Post, Alan Charles Raul, general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warns that not only is Trump acting extra-constitutionally, i.e., beyond the scope of the Constitution, but he lays out the case for why DOGE itself is unconstitutional:
“The protocols of the Constitution do not permit statutorily mandated agencies and programs to be transformed — or reorganized out of existence — without congressional authorization… The radical reorganization now underway is not just footfaulting over procedural lines; it is shattering the fundamental checks and balances of our constitutional order. The DOGE process, if that is what it is, mocks two basic tenets of our government: that we are nation of laws, not men and that it is Congress which controls spending and passes legislation. The president must faithfully execute Congress’s laws and manage the executive agencies consistent with the Constitution and lawmakers’ appropriations — not by any divine right or absolute power… [T]here is no reading of the Constitution that allows any president to claim that a political mandate, or a political promise made, obviates or supersedes the role for Congress… Even under the most aggressive view of the president’s ‘unitary executive’ control over the entire executive branch and independent agencies, it is Congress’s sole authority to appropriate and legislate for our entire government… [I]n the end, the president is constitutionally stuck with the policies for the federal government that Congress enacts and appropriates. No one man in America is the law — not even a Trump or an Elon Musk.”
Allowing the president to bypass established legal procedures in order to prioritize his own power over adherence to the rule of law ultimately undermines the principles of a constitutional government.
Which brings us to the present moment.
With Congress on the sidelines, the momentum is building for a constitutional showdown between the White House and the judiciary.
This is as it should be.
The job of the courts is to maintain the rule of law and serve as the referees in the power struggle between the President and Congress. That delicate balance between the three branches of government was intended to serve as a bulwark against tyranny and a deterrent to any who would overreach.
So for anyone, especially someone who has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, to suggest that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power” constitutes either an appalling admission of civic illiteracy or a bold-faced attempt to sidestep accountability.
When all is said and done, however, it is supposed to be “we the people” who hold the real power—not the president, not Congress, and not the courts. As the Tenth Amendment proclaims, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The government’s purpose is to serve the people, not the other way around.
Those first three words of the preamble to the Constitution say it all:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
This is not a monarchy with an imperial ruler. It is not a theocracy with a religious order. It is not a banana republic policed by a junta. It is not a crime syndicate with a mob boss. Nor is it a democracy with mob rule.
So, what’s the answer?
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, America’s founders were very clear about what to do when the government oversteps.
Bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution, advised Thomas Jefferson.
Take alarm at the first experiment on your freedoms, cautioned James Madison.
And if government leaders attempt to abuse their powers and usurp the rights of the people, get rid of them, warned the Declaration of Independence.
A Trumpian Fascistic Coup is Underway—Stop It Before the Terror Starts
Image by Mike Von.
Rise up people and fast. Tyrant Trump and his Musk-driven gangsters are launching a fascistic coup d’état. Much of everything you like about federal/civil service for your health, safety, and economic well-being and protections is being targeted.
To feed Trump’s insatiable vengeance over being prosecuted, being defeated in the 2020 election, or now just being challenged, this megalomaniacal, self-described dictator is harming the lives of tens of millions of Americans in need and millions of Americans who are assisting them.
In his demented lawless arrogance, convicted felon Trump is nullifying the freedoms and protections of the American Revolution (King Donald is today’s King George III), and rejecting the Declaration of Independence (which listed the rights and abuses against the British Tyrant that Trump is shredding and entrenching). He is defiantly violating the U.S. Constitution, its controls over dictatorial government, and its powers exclusively given to Congress. The Constitution demands that we live under the rule of law, not the rule of one man.
While Trump enjoys Mar-a-Lago and his golfing, Madman Musk, a South African, is literally living in the Executive Office Building next to the White House, with his heel-clicking Musketeers, seven days a week (they brought in sleeping cots) guarded by a large private security detail.
Consider, people, that the world’s richest man, with billions of dollars of federal contracts, is unleashing his henchmen to wreck the daily work of public servants committed to providing critical services that have long and bi-partisan support. Assistance to children, emergency workers, the sick and elderly, public school students, and people ripped off by business crooks. He is firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat – whether at the FBI, the EPA, or the key Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which Trump/Musk are gutting.
Some headlines: “Laws? What Laws? Trump’s Brazen Grab for Executive Power” by the great reporter Charlie Savage (New York Times, February 6, 2025). Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.
Or “Searching for Motive to Musk Team’s Focus on ‘Checkbook’ of U.S.” by Alan Rappeport, February 6, 2025, New York Times.
Or “White House Billionaires Take on the World’s Poorest Kids” by the super-reporter Nicholas Kristof (February 6, 2025. New York Times) shutting down The Agency for International Development’s distribution of AIDS medicines, and crucially stopping U.S. health agencies from countering rising, deadly pandemics in Africa that could come here quickly without U.S. defensive actions abroad. Already the devastating effects on children missing healthcare and food are erupting.
Kristof concludes that all this (and the dollar amounts are very small compared to their benefits) may seem like a game for Trump/Musk, but “… it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.” It is also criminal!
When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk. He is not a properly appointed federal official. He has no authority to send his wrecking crews into one agency after another, demanding private information about Americans, pushing people out, and shutting down operations.
Musk, whose next target is the federal auto safety agency that has been enforcing the safety laws against Tesla and has not surrendered its regulation of self-driving cars (Musk’s next big project). Musk refuses to disclose his sweetheart contracts with the federal agencies nor has he disclosed his tax returns. Demand them.
What is very clear in the first 20 days of Trump’s lawless madness is that he is moving fast for a police state along with deepening the corporate state with and for Big Business. His prime victims are not the vast military budget at the Department of Defense, nor the big budgets of the Spy Agencies or of Musk’s lucrative fiefdom – NASA, the Space Agency. No, like the bullies they are, Trump/Musk are smashing people’s programs. They hate Medicaid (provided to over 80 million Americans) or the food programs for millions of children. Crazed Trump is pushing to shut down many clean wind power projects and cut credits to homeowners installing solar panels while booming the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. He wants many more giant exporting natural gas facilities near U.S. ports which could accidentally blow up entire cities.
Musk’s poisoned Tusks have even reached Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam where mine-clearing efforts have been cut off. These are the U.S.’s Vietnam War era unexploded ordinances and bomblets that have killed tens of thousands of innocent residents, mostly children, in the past fifty years.
The Washington Post headline on February 6th, “Musk Team Taking Over Public Operations” understates the carnage. They are brazenly shutting down agencies, taking down thousands of government websites helpful to all Americans, and telling conscientious civil servants to obey or be driven out.
The Republicans in Congress, to their future shame and guilt, are surrendering their constitutional powers in the very branch of government our Founders assigned to check any rising monarchy in the White House.
The Democrats in the minority are just starting to protest, some in front of shuttered federal buildings. But they have not yet initiated unofficial public hearings in Congress to give voice to the surging anger of Americans (now flooding their switchboards) whose narrow majority of Trump voters are sensing betrayal big time. Demand unofficialhearings now! Federal judges are starting to uphold the violated laws.
The media, itself threatened by Trump’s attacks, censorship, and who knows what is next from this venomous liar (see the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s January 26, 2025 piece “The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID spending” or “Trump’s gusher of misleading economic statistics at Davos”) will cover protests and testimony by people all over the country. The rallies and marches have begun and will only get larger as Trump and Musk sink lower with their tyrannical abuses.
The career military does not relish the reckless buffoon that Trump put over them as Secretary of Defense. American business cannot tolerate the chaos, the uncertainty, the tumult. Thirty-nine million small businesses are already feeling the oncoming Trump tsunami.
Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup. Take it back fast, is what our original patriots of 1776 would be saying.
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