The power to create federal agencies resides exclusively in Congress. Leaders of these agencies must be confirmed by Congress, after FBI vetting, conflict of interest checks and public hearings. The power of appropriating tax dollars and spending them is exclusive to Congress. Congress holds the power of the purse. Yet Trump creates a fake agency, cutely named DOGE, appoints an unelected, unvetted billionaire disrupter, with multiple conflicts of interest and many investigations into his shady business practices, experienced only in slashing his workforce, spreading racism (“free speech”), setting a modern record for buying access to power ($270,000,000 and growing) and creating chaos to head the “agency”. The president’s lawyers deny in a sworn statement to the court that this unhinged maniac is in charge, as he illegally mass fires government workers, closes agencies, withholds funds Congress has voted to disburse.
Everyone acts as though this clear violation of multiple laws, and the constitution itself, is all perfectly fine, or at least a matter for the courts to sort out. The NY Times, and virtually everyone else, refers to this fake agency as The Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) as though it’s an actual, legally created government department with unlimited power over every other department. It’s all perfectly normal, by the looks of it, insane and arbitrary as it also clearly is.
A group of reactionary billionaires, in their most recent manifesto, Project 2025, begs to differ with the constitutional order. They regard efficient, elected government as “majoritarian tyranny” that persecutes the billionaire class. They are persecuted by regulations on how they may treat their workers, how much pollution their factories can emit, how safe their products must be. So they prefer an all-powerful CEO with the power to make all these persecutions vanish.
They played the long game, orchestrating the capture of the Supreme Court, achieving a 6-3 majority of ideological purists, “Originalists”, from a far-right judicial fraternity called the Federalist Society, funded the by the same folks who fund the Heritage Foundation and all other reactionary “think tanks”. This majority ruled that unlimited, dark money is political speech (for corporations and the super wealthy, anyway), that racist voter suppression laws and racial gerrymandering are fine unless made with explicit racist intent, announced explicitly during the hearings for the law in question, that anti-bribery laws only apply in certain specific scenarios, that government scientists don’t get the last word on scientific decisions, white Christian legislators and judges do, that the president may sometimes have to commit criminal acts in the course of his core duties (how about a hypothetical there, boys?) and that these criminal acts may not ever be prosecuted. They added a cherry to this shit sundae (which also, of course, abandons the fate of raped, pregnant girls and women to their individual state legislatures) by ruling that no presidential pardon, even if sold outright in public, may ever be questioned in court.
Granted, MAGA is absolutely a cult and Trump has been vetting it for loyalty with extreme zealousness since his loss in 2020. The Republican party has rid itself of any elected officials who defy the cult leader. They are as spineless, and infinitely flexible in their views, as they are punitive and driven by a thirst for vengeance. But where is the opposition party? Outside of a small handful of elected Democrats, and a group of Democratic attorneys general, there is barely a peep from the corporate Democratic leadership. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tx) is great, we hear from Jamie Raskin (D-Md), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) but rarely a murmur from anyone else.
How is it that DOGE is not denounced daily as an illegal “agency”? It was not created by Congress, it was pulled out of Charles Koch’s crusty nonagenarian ass. How is the illegal shuttering of USAID, the decimation of Medicaid, the mass firing of IRS, Veterans Affairs (thanks for your service, assholes) Department of Education civil servants, and thousands of others, just subject matter for law suits? How is a hopped up, unelected oligarch’s idiotic refrain of ridding us of “unelected bureaucrats”, not routinely and regularly slapped down as the simpleminded self-contradictng bullshit that it is?
I understand that rage is not amenable to reason. Strong emotion beats a beautifully articulated logical argument in the court of public opinion, but still — how about a little fucking truth and clarity once in a while?
Has America really succumbed to an irrational narrative? This narrative is perpetrated by corporate media, for profit. There are two sides to every story, and almost half of Americans polled approve of the insane two year-old whose vocabulary has shrunk to the level of an eight year old. Fine people in the Nazi party (führerwortes haben Gesetzeskraft, sure, but don’t call us Nazis, those are Roman salutes!) and among those enemies the Nazis target. False nuance swallows a very clear narrative: one side relies on constant lies, the stoking of rage and flagrant violations of law to fire up their angry base, the other side believes good policies, fairness in law enforcement and acknowledged equality and respect for human dignity win the day among their reasonable supporters (and wealthy/corporate donor base).
In the battle between lies and truth, there is no middle ground. What the fuck, America? The truth ain’t that threatening, call out the lies every single time, put the proof on the table. Trump failed to rig the 2020 election and incited a riot to culminate a seven tentacled conspiracy to cling to power. It appears he did a much better job in 2024, the first ever election in the Trump era that was not “rigged”. His “mandate” is the narrowest in decades, his approval rating, at this point in his presidency, the lowest on record (breaking his own record from 2017). Plus, he’s clearly insane. What the fuck, America?
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