Opinion: The month that shook our world
By William H. Freivogel >>
French publication Le Monde headlined this week that it was “The week the US shook Europe’s world.”
Americans could justifiably say it’s the month that shook ours.
There is no precedent for President Donald Trump’s massive restructuring of the government with a flurry of executive orders, pronouncements, firings and pardons that have overturned norms, violated laws and demoralized civil servants.
Renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Mt. Denali. Proposing real estate deals for Greenland, Gaza, the new Riviera. Threatening to retake the Panama Canal and to make Canada a 51st State, all as part of our Manifest Destiny. Who would have thought that ugly doctrine would be revived in the 21st Century?
And that doesn’t even include the administration actions that Le Monde said rocked Europe’s world. An American vice president actually went to Munich of all places to give comfort to right-wingers in the name of free speech, while back home the president blamed Ukraine for the war. “You (Ukraine) should have ended it three years ago,” Trump told reporters in Florida. “You should never have started it.”
Everyone else in the world knows Vladimir Putin started the war. No wonder Ukraine called Trump a Russian-made “disinformation space” on Wednesday.
A year ago, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a speech about the fabulous success of the post-World War II international order created by the United States in the form of NATO, international trade organizations and the support of democracy around the world.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance upended that seven-decade American project in just a weekend, sending Europe into chaos.
If anyone stands in the way of Trump’s bully-boy tactics, they are swept aside. The Associated Press had the temerity not to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico. So Trump banned them from his White House and his plane. He and his press secretary accused the AP of having its facts wrong. The facts he is talking about are the facts according to Donald Trump. If America’s new emperor is willing to embarrass himself by declaring the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, then everyone around him must claim it is true, even if the Gulf of Mexico is 425 years old.
Shockingly, the timid tech titans who paid millions for the privilege to grovel before Trump on the inaugural stand were only too happy to abandon the name of almost half a millennium in favor of one ruler’s whim.
Meanwhile, the biggest tech titan of them all, the richest man in the world, the owner of the information juggernaut X and master of 7,000 satellites whirling around the earth, has taken a wrecking ball to Washington, sending his Gen Z tech wizards prying into income taxes and Social Security information and running government numbers through their artificial intelligence machines looking for targets to fire.
The results are wild and false claims about millions of USAID money going to Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and Musk’s Monday claim on X: “Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as “ALIVE” when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem. Obviously. Some of these people would have been alive before America existed as a country. Think about that for a second….”
Well he must not have thought about it because it isn’t true.
It’s impossible, it turns out, to get a straight answer on what Elon Musk’s actual job is. Everyone thought he was head of DOGE. But the White House and its lawyers said in a court filing this week that he isn’t. Trump himself said the best title for Musk was “patriot.”
Tell that to the New York firefighters who found that DOGE had cut funding for a health study of firefighters who fought the blazes at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Musk’s team deemed the study “nonessential,” one of the few Trump actions that Republican members of Congress joined in criticizing.
What is certain about DOGE is that tens of thousands of government workers are losing their jobs.
Those poor souls assigned to DEI were just the low-hanging fruit. It almost went without saying that diversity, equity and inclusion was woke speak that threatened the meritocracy and had to go – even if each of those values had something to say for them. After all aren’t we all created equal?
It was especially ironic because Trump was eliminating DEI hires in the name of meritocracy even as he named the least meritorious cabinet in memory – a manager of the huge Pentagon who never had managed anything, an intelligence czar who often supported Putin, an FBI director who calls the FBI the deep state, an Attorney General who denies the 2020 election, a head of HHS who believes in anti-health conspiracy theories.
Before Trump took office, the United States was the unchallenged leader of the world when it came to medical and scientific research. But with each passing day this proud leadership role is being dismantled.
Federal support for the overhead infrastructure of medical research is being slashed, with Washington University in St. Louis one of the places that stands to lose the most. Young researchers at the National Institutes of Health are out as are young employees at the National Science Foundation and education researchers in the Department of Education.
There was a modern-day Saturday Night Massacre at the Justice Department when top Justice Department officials refused Trump’s demand to dismiss an indictment against Mayor Eric Adams of New York so that Adams could better cooperate in expelling immigrants. The acting U.S. Attorney who stood up for the rule of law, Danielle Sassoon, wrote in her resignation letter that she was making the decision based on her conservative mentors.
She wrote: “I clerked for the Honorable J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Both men instilled in me a sense of duty to contribute to the public good and uphold the rule of law, and a commitment to reasoned and thorough analysis.”
Meanwhile, Ed Martin, the St. Louis lawyer who was pushed out as chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt, has taken over the U.S. Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia and has fired lawyers who were involved in the Jan. 6 prosecutions while he pursues more federal agents involved in the case. Martin, an organizer of “Stop the Steal,” now is leading the Trump revenge tour.
On Wednesday, Martin sent out an all-staff memo announcing a new “Operation Whirlwind” investigation of those using strong and threatening language against Musk and public officials. The name comes from a 2020 speech Sen. Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer made predicting Trump had “released the whirlwind and…will pay the price” for rushing confirmation of justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. Schumer apologized for the strong language at the time and said he had meant a political whirlwind of opposition, not a threat to his person. But Martin insisted in a Feb. 11 letter that Schumer explain himself. Martin wrote that it was “a personal disappointment and professionally unacceptable” that Schumer had not responded his inquiries challenging the five year-old statement.
As for ethics, Trump dismissed the head of the Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger, whose office is to protect merit system employees and especially whistleblowers from retaliation. On the waste fraud and abuse front Trump also fired the inspector generals who try to make the agencies function efficiently.
Will the Supreme Court stand up to Trump? It’s an open question in that a number of the justices in the conservative majority are enamored of the theory that a unified executive should be able to dismiss agency heads even if Congress passed laws saying he couldn’t fire them without cause. One must wonder what is going through the heads of these justices as they see some of their best clerks standing up to the abuses of that unified, unleashed executive.
Trump says American culture will be great again now that he has fired the Kennedy Center board and appointed lackeys who agreeably made him the chairman.
Our family lived in Bethesda for the 12 years that we worked in the Washington bureau of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The notion that the president would make himself the head of the Kennedy Center would have been laughable, almost Stalinesque.
Our neighbors back then worked at the NIH, the EPA, on Capitol Hill. They were good, patriotic people who worked hard every day for the American people.
That was the 1980s and it was a time when the Reagan Revolution came to town. The Reagan Revolution is the closest comparison for what Trump is doing.
Reagan changed civil rights policies, including Justice Department support for school desegregation in St. Louis. He tried to give tax breaks to Bob Jones University, a segregationist academy. He tried to end affirmative action. He broke the air traffic controllers union and talked about welfare queens in Cadillacs as he cut taxes for those who actually drove Cadillacs. He campaigned in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to cultivate the southern white boys in the town where civil rights workers were murdered. And he too had talked about taking back the Panama Canal.
But Reagan was a different man than Trump. He didn’t throw out the norms of decency. He had a sense of humor instead of coining phrases to ridicule opponents. He often spoke humbly, not as a braggart. It’s safe to say the Reagan White House would never have released a “LONG LIVE THE KING” illustration showing Trump smiling with a crown on his head after overturning New York’s congestion pricing.
Reagan worked out an immigration compromise with Democrats instead of warring against immigrants. And he helped bring down that wall, that Iron Curtain. He’d be shocked that a Republican successor is helping Putin recreate a 21st century version of oppression.
William H. Freivogel is the publisher of GJR. He was deputy Washington bureau chief of the Post-Dispatch in the 1980s and 90s.
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