Further Dispatches From the Coup

With the psychotic Gish Gallop of unconstitutional, catastrophically stupid, and morally leprous things cascading out of the joint administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves these days it can be hard to keep track of it all. The last time this cancerous tumor on the American body politic was in office I posted running lists of things so they wouldn’t be forgotten – and to register the simple fact that I do not accept any of it – and it looks like I’m back to that again. MURCA!

My goal is to quarantine these things in these posts because they do need to be said but otherwise I will never write about anything else.

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1. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers randomly fired almost 400 nuclear weapons specialists who worked for the National Nuclear Security Administration the other day and now the Department of Energy is frantically trying to get them to come back to work because nothing says making America great again like getting rid of all of the people who understand how nuclear weapons function.

2. The CDC and other public health agencies have been banned from speaking out on any of the current challenges facing the US, such as the tuberculosis outbreak in Michigan, the increasingly deadly wave of bird flu that is sweeping the nation, and the rapidly spreading measles outbreak in one of the most unvaccinated regions of Texas, so you’re on your own with that. Measles outbreaks are very difficult to contain once they get started and right now the one in Texas has a hospitalization rate of 27% – a shockingly high figure in the world of epidemiology. COVID hasn’t gone away and the regular flu seems to be more dangerous than usual. Every nurse, PA, EMT, and CNA that I know is in full panic mode right now because they can see the system overloading. But Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump knows that one of the many reasons he was unceremoniously tossed out on his ass back in 2020 was because he botched the COVID pandemic so badly that he was personally responsible for over a quarter million excess American deaths and the lesson he got out of that was not to do better next time but instead just to try to hide it more effectively. Your death will help him politically, and that’s all he cares about.

3. Meanwhile the supine GOP Congress just folded like a wet paper tent and installed a rabid antivaxxer nutjob as the nation’s top health and science officer, so good luck with that.

4. RFK Jr., the aforementioned nutjob, announced almost immediately that people “addicted” to antidepressants and anyone even prosecuted for drug crimes would be send to government-sponsored “wellness farms” to produce organic crops for up to four years. “We’re going to re-parent people and restore connection to community” he said. Forced collective farming just sounds like Maoism to me but what do I know.

5. Apparently so many people have complained to Google about their craven capitulation to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s increasingly unhinged demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico that Google has had to turn off 1-star reviews and comments for it. Meanwhile the AP has been banned from press conferences because they actually have a backbone and have refused to bow down to the naked emperor on this matter.

6. 800 people were fired from the USDA and another 1000 from the NRCS which will cripple research and farm aid programs. Watching the rural areas that voted overwhelmingly for Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump get hammered like this provides some schadenfreude but not nearly enough to make up for the fact that this is hurting both them and the rest of us. The US will take decades to recover from this, if it can recover at all.

7. The ongoing destruction of USAID is also destroying American farmers, as well as halting a great deal of the AIDS prevention efforts that have succeeded in reducing the spread of that lethal plague, and foor and medical programs designed to keep children from dying across the globe. All so Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk can get a tax break. Welcome to the new Gilded Age, and if you study the social unrest of that period you know what’s coming next.

8. I hope you enjoyed having national parks because soon they won’t be there. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have slashed NPS staff, including rangers, firefighters, and EMTs, and taken down the reservation system people use for campsites. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is looking to sell off the land to wealthy speculators. And what was once the envy of the world collapses into dust, a fitting metaphor for the United States under this regime.

9. Keep in mind that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk was never elected to anything, heads a “department” that has no Constitutional legitimacy, and is ineligible for the office of president whose powers he is unilaterally exercising and exceeding.

10. The IRS is next on Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s hit list because we can’t have anything that impinges on his greed or power, now, can we. You can compile a pretty comprehensive list of the agencies that Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk’s roving band of feral teenagers have targeted just by looking for the ones that could conceivably stand in the way of that greed and power. Follow the money, folks.

11. Meanwhile the price of eggs is at near record highs and nothing that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is doing is going to change that for the better. A lot of it is just going to make things worse. But MAGA will still blame Biden. Possibly Obama. The ones that have read a book in the last quarter century might try to blame Jimmy Carter, but I suspect that will be a very quiet part of the chorus. In any event, the Dear Leader can do no wrong by them, so take your pick.

12. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has now officially installed himself as the head of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and even North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un thinks that’s a little excessive.

13. Junior Understudy JD Vance went to Germany and it did not go well for him. He met with neo-Nazi groups and then tried to lecture the German government about how they should obey his two bosses and then both the German Chancellor and the Defense Minister tore him a new asshole and began working on re-arranging European defense around the idea that the US is now a security threat. Well done, Junior! You’ve managed to upend three quarters of a century of hard work and concrete achievements by better people in just a couple of weeks.

14. Apparently we’re also abandoning Ukraine in particular and NATO in general. Defense Secretary Pete “One for the Road” Hegseth announced that the US does not consider the defense of an ally against naked aggression important and will not contribute further to its security, nor does the current regime regard NATO – the lynchpin of post-war security for the US and the West – to be of any value. So anyone out there thinking the US is a trustworthy ally, think again. I expect a future of isolation and pariah status for the US thanks to this crew of utter lunatics.

15. Don’t even get me started on the sheer mind-boggling evil of the proposals for ethnic cleansing in Gaza that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has made repeatedly this month. We executed people for that sort of thing at Nuremberg.

16. Do you think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will ever stop yammering on about invading Canada? Seriously – what an asshole.

17. If you think the Republican Congress is doing anything to limit the damage done to the nation both here and abroad you should seek counseling because you know damn well they’re only pouring gasoline on these fires and roasting marshmallows while the republic burns, right? Let’s see some of the highlights of what they’ve got cooking there:

     a. First, we have the intentionally misleadingly titled hellscape of the SAVE Act, a voter suppression tool that will accomplish two longstanding goals of the Republican Party by requiring all voters to produce birth certificates and passports in order to vote (how many Americans even own passports?) and denying the vote to anyone whose birth name does not match their current name. The main purpose of this is to deny the vote to trans people – cruelty to trans Americans being a foundational principle of the modern GOP – but it will also unofficially overturn most of the 19th Amendment by denying any married woman who has legally changed her name the right to vote as well. The GOP has been very clear that they don’t think women should vote at all – perhaps because women are smarter than men and do not vote for Republicans as a group – and this denial is a feature of the SAVE Act, not a bug.

      b. There is also HR1161, introduced by Republican Representative Earl L. Carter (R-GA), which proposes that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump buy Greenland and rename it “Red, White, and Blueland.” Folks, I couldn’t make that shit up if I tried. How much antifreeze does someone have to drink in order for this idea to make sense, let alone to think that you should say it in public?

      c. The GOP released its preliminary budget plan and it calls for a) zeroing out funding for Medicaid so poor people can’t get healthcare, adding $3,000,000,000,000 to the national debt, and giving billionaires a $4,500,000,000,000 tax cut. In case you weren’t aware of the priorities.

18. Junior Understudy JD Vance also publicly announced last week that he has never read the US Constitution and has no concept of the foundational principle of the separation of powers. Good for him for admitting his bone-deep ignorance, but man – the fact that this imbecile is a heartbeat away from becoming the second banana to Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk is unnerving. Yes, Junior – judges are in fact allowed to tell the executive branch what to do.

19. If you get the feeling that this administration is laying the groundwork for cutting out both the legislative and judicial branches and seizing all power for themselves, good for you for paying attention. I give them four months before they declare it openly. It’s going to be a long hot summer in the US.

20. Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have now accessed all of your health care data, so I hope you didn’t think that little things like federal privacy laws were going to protect you when he uses that against you. They’ve also downloaded all of your identity information, including your banking information if you’ve ever gotten a tax refund through direct deposit. MURCA!

21. Also, this week Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers ransacked the National Park Service’s websites, and among other things they deleted all references to trans people from the site dedicated to the Stonewall uprising – a pivotal event in gay rights in this country and one where trans people played central roles. This is how genocides start, with small erasures like this, before they ramp up. You either catch it when it starts or your regret it when it proceeds.

22. They’ve also fired 10% of the staff of the National Cancer Institute, because cruelty and waste is pretty much the only strategy they have.

23. In other national security news, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers forced the CIA to attempt to buy out its entire workforce, and if you’re wondering who would benefit from the crippling of American intelligence, honestly it’s not that hard to figure out.

24. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has also purged the entire boards of all four service academies (Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard) because apparently the US military is too “woke” or something like that. When a neo-Fascist starts purging the military and installing loyalists, it’s past time to worry.

25. The US imposed sanctions on South Africa for daring to undo decades of apartheid, which apparently counts as discrimination against rich white people. I wonder who benefited from that?

26. Office of Project Management Director Charles Ezell released a memo to all agency heads the other day claiming that “provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and unenforceable,” which is something that you’d expect to hear from someone who will likely be on the wrong end of the first labor unrest this country sees this year. Grab your popcorn!

27. We’re also no longer enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the law that prevents US companies from bribing foreign officials to secure or keep business deals. Given who the US government has devolved to these days, I suppose that’s not a surprise.

28. Did you notice that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his roving band of feral teenagers have gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fired the previous director who was known for rigorously enforcing consumer protection laws? Strange how that happens just as Elmo enters into a deal to process payments.

29. The first wave of assaults on American scientific research culminated in an across the board slashing of federal grants from the NIH. Grants come with money allotted for “indirect expenses” but which universities call “keeping the lights on and the plumbing working.” This nation became a world power on the strength of its scientific research, most of which happens at universities. I wonder who has an interest in seeing that destroyed.

30. Finally (because I could go on but there are only so many hours in the day) there is the legal fiasco of the Eric Adams case. If you’ve not caught this one Adams is the Democratic mayor of New York City who has been enmeshed in a bribery and corruption scandal for a while now. The new imperial forces at the Justice Department ordered his charges dropped explicitly so they would have leverage over him to get him to enforce their anti-immigrant hysteria on one of the most immigrant-populated cities in the world. This is transparently illegal and in a normal political environment would have resulted in serious charges being filed against everyone involved, but in a cult dictatorship such as the one we seem to be living in now it’s just part of the background noise. The acting Attorney General for the Southern District of New York – a conservative Federalist Society member appointed by none other than Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – told them that this was illegal and what Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove could do with his demands (hint: a lubricant would help) before resigning. Assistant US Attorney Hagen Scotten also resigned, but not after telling Bove that only a fool or a coward would consent to Bove’s demands. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s Attorney General – a disgraced lawyer named Pam Bondi – finally did get someone to do the deed, but the naked partisanship and illegal conduct is out there for anyone who wants to see it. We’ll see who cares.