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. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s plans to install himself as Dictator For Life are proceeding at a breakneck pace and if you’re not infuriated by the dismantling of the American republic you are either kidding yourself or part of the plot.

2. One of the defining features of Fascist state is the fact that loyalty to the Dear Leader is the only criteria for any job in government, and Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has been cutting a path through the federal government firing anyone he sees as having any independent existence other than his will. For example, he recently fired the two Democratic commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission, in violation of the federal law governing appointees to that body and the 1935 Supreme Court precedent upholding that law. FTC appointees cannot be fired by presidents, period. The FTC enforces consumer protection and antitrust laws and cannot legally have more than three of its five commissioners of the same party, but laws and citizens mean nothing to Fascists and so here we are.

3. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has also declared that the pardons issued by Joe Biden at the end of his administration – pardons explicitly designed to shield Americans who had spoken out against the crimes of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves – were null and void because they were signed by an autopen, which is frankly the dumbest thing he’s said this year and there is some pretty stiff competition for that title. First of all, how things are signed is completely irrelevant. Biden declared they were his pardons, and that’s all that matters. Second, no lawfully given presidential pardon can be repealed under the Constitution. There are limits to who can receive a pardon – a president cannot pardon anyone for state or local crimes, only federal crimes, and no president can pardon himself as that is a bedrock foundation of Anglo-American law going back centuries – but such limits do not apply here. All that is happening is that a wildly out-of-control rogue president is claiming absolute power he does not legally have, and we’ll just throw that on the large and ever-growing pile of impeachable offenses that an actual Congress would have acted on by now.

4. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump continues to impound funds expressly approved by Congress, in violation of both multiple court orders and the entire Separation of Powers enshrined in the Constitution, which alone is reason to have him removed from office on a rail and dropped into a holding cell somewhere in the desert.

5. J. Michael Luttig – a former mentor to Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and one of the most conservative judges on the bench during his time as a federal judge, though now retired – has put it plainly. “The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America. In the past few weeks … the president himself has led a full-frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system, and the nation’s legal profession. … America is in a constitutional crisis. The constitutional role of the president is to faithfully execute the laws. Needless to say, the president is doing anything but that at the moment.” There is a difference between a conservative and a right-winger, and while I suspect that I would have disagreed with most of Luttig’s judicial decisions I respect him as a conservative mind and not a right-wing extremist. When people like him are sounding alarm bells, the situation is dire.

6. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump along with Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and their minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves, are following along the checklist of tyrants, as Robert Reich points out. Are we great yet?

7. And why is anyone surprised?

8. Another obvious sign of tyranny is the fawning sycophancy that it engenders among the gutless cowards to latch onto it as a way to protect themselves and promote their own ambitions and petty hatreds. This has been abundantly clear among the GOP faithful as a once-proud party has degenerated into a personality cult for the worst person on earth. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) last month introduced a bill to make Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s birthday a national holiday – something generally reserved for kings or the dead. Brandon Gill (R-TX) introduced a bill earlier this month to put Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump on the $100 bill, displacing Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. Legally, only dead people can be put on US stamps or currency, so this may be an idea I can actually support. And perhaps my favorite FAFO moment of all of this lunacy came when a bunch of GOP state senators in Minnesota led by Justin Eichorn introduced a bill to classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” – i.e. any criticism of the Dear Leader for anything regardless of objective evidence – as a mental illness, which would allow state Republicans to institutionalize anyone who dissents from the Dear Leader’s agenda. Later that same day Eichorn was arrested for soliciting sex with a minor, joining the long list of Republican pedophiles lecturing the rest of us on morality and patriotism. Eichorn resigned from the Minnesota Senate before he could be expelled.

9. Another sign of a tyrant trying to shift a country away from democracy is that they seek to control every aspect of elections so as to guarantee their power, and Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves are doing precisely that. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump fired Ellen Weintraub, one of the Commissioners of the Federal Election Commission, without cause – something no other president has ever done, probably because it’s illegal. This is an attempt to stack the FEC with loyalists and weaponize it against anyone who opposes him. He’s also planning to dissolve the independent leadership of the US Postal System – which handles mail-in ballots – and incorporate that into the Department of Commerce under his control. This administration has also gutted electoral security programs designed to protect against foreign (hello, Putin!) interference in American elections, stripped federal funding for systems that alert state and local officials of election threats, and disbanded the FBI special unit tasked with confronting foreign threats to elections. He has taken over control of the Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting equipment and determines what standards it should have for security. And he’s weaponized the Department of Justice into his own personal vendetta-pursuing machine, ordering it to drop voting rights lawsuits against Texas, Virginia, and Alabama (all red states) and withdraw from a lawsuit against Louisiana’s rampant gerrymandering. As we learned in Wisconsin during the reign of Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries), if you control the elections you determine the results. Watch your back.

10. If you think that’s hypothetical, notice what’s going on in North Carolina, which hasn’t been a democracy in over a decade. GOP candidate for State Supreme Court Jefferson Griffin lost the popular election by 734 votes – a result confirmed by two separate recounts – but has now decided that he deserves the seat anyway because he’s a white man and his opponent wasn’t and the best way to ratify that would be to retroactively disqualify 65,000 North Carolina voters because “the right to vote is not absolute.” Over 200 North Carolina jurists, attorneys, state government officials, bar leaders, and legal educators have publicly called on Griffen to knock this stupid shit off, grow up, and accept that he lost, but so far he has refused. The Republican National Committee has also refused and has its own separate lawsuit trying to do the same thing for the same reasons. Your vote only counts if it supports the GOP, apparently.

11. Perhaps the scariest feature of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s regime’s increasingly arrogant slide into dictatorship is their insistence that they can just disappear people from the streets. Remember, they tried this the last time, back in 2020, when faced with American citizens exercising their Constitutionally protected right to protest their government – jackbooted thugs were grabbing people off the streets and shoving them into unmarked vehicles that summer, which most Americans seem to have forgotten – and they’re back at it. Right now the most well-known example (and remember, the whole point of this exercise is that you, the American public, will NOT know when people get disappeared) is Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University who has a green card entitling him to all of the legal protections of American citizens, and yes I discussed this last time but it is worth revisiting his case just because it is that important. Khalil was a leader in the protests against the Israeli government’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza last summer, and this month ICE agents broke into his home and arrested him in front of his pregnant wife. It took days of intense media attention to determine that he had been taken to a holding facility in Louisiana where he faces deportation under the express orders of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. At no point has the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump accused Khalil of breaking any law – they simply objected to his position against war crimes and decided they could just make him disappear. They also decided that they could just randomly revoke his green card because Reasons – an outright lie and another indication that this rogue regime will not follow either laws or Constitution if they decide they don’t like someone. And if they can do that to him, my fellow citizen, they can do that to you. You are not safe. You should stop pretending you are.

12. This regime also insists that it can deport people anytime they want for any reason they want or even for no reason at all, a willful violation of law, morals, and Constitution. It leads them to do stupid and immoral things, such as deporting a 10-year-old American citizen recovering from brain cancer, on her way to an emergency visit to her doctors in Texas. Her family are not citizens, but with letters from lawyers and their daughter’s doctors they had been able to enter the country and take their daughter for medical treatment. Nobody in this story has any criminal record whatsoever, so the harpies and mouth-breathers who invariably try to make that case can fuck off now. Seriously, this is what happens when cruelty is the heart of your agenda.

13. They also deported a kidney transplant surgeon at Brown University – a highly specialized medical professional who had a valid visa to be in the United States – despite a judge’s order halting any such action. Defiance of court orders is a running theme here – keep it in mind

14. They also deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants despite another court order forbidding any such thing. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump asserts that he cannot be stopped from doing these things – a criminal assertion that should be added to the large and growing pile of impeachable offenses referred to earlier in this post. The administration has claimed that they were gang members – something Venezuela has confirmed is a lie – and therefore he can deport them under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the same law that was used to justify the forced incarceration of Japanese-American civilians in WWII. The Alien Enemies Act was passed by Federalists as a partisan effort to deny Democratic Republicans support and it has continued to be a favorite among lawless politicians ever since.

15. While we’re on the subject, ICE (“America’s Gestapo!”) rounded up 48 undocumented immigrants on March 12 and nobody knows what happened to them. The regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has not identified any of them or where they are or what conditions they are being held in. They have simply been disappeared, the way any unfortunate people who crossed a dictator would be. Folks, this is blisteringly immoral and violates both US and international law. And you could very well be next if you’re not careful.

16. Meanwhile, tourists – yes, there are still people brave enough to try to come here despite our Fascist government – are also being disappeared or just blocked from coming into the US. Becky Burke, a UK citizen on a backpacking trip, was held for 19 days, chained by her legs, waist, and wrist, without anyone being aware of her location for most of it. Jessica Brösche, a German tourist, was held for over a month – including 8 days in solitary confinement – despite having a valid passport, visa, and return flight booking. And a French scientist traveling to a conference in Houston was stopped at the border and had his phone searched, and when they found messages critical of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s science policies they refused to let him in. Read that again – they’re denying entry to people based on their opinion of the Dear Leader. Why France, Germany, and the UK haven’t cut diplomatic relations with the US is an interesting question. It’s been done for less.

17. Also, why people would want to keep coming here is another interesting question, because increasingly they’re not. Tourism is already down significantly since January 20, as many Europeans are canceling trips out of fears they might be unlawfully detained. Chinese tourism is down 11%. Canadian tourism is down by either 13% if you count air travel or 23% if you look at vehicle crossings – about 15% overall. Tourism overall is expected to fall by 5% this year, a total cost of $64 billion dollars in lost revenue – this from an initial outlook before Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump took over that anticipated a 9% growth in US tourism. That’s a turnaround of -14% if you’re not good with math. This happened during the first administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump too, but not so quickly and not with such obvious justification. Honestly, I don’t blame people at all for not wanting to take a chance coming here while this petit-Fascist regime is in power.

18. Meanwhile the oncoming economic recession means that Americans are not going to make up that difference by traveling around the US. Are we great yet? Asking for a friend in the hospitality industry.

19. One positive sign is that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are getting their collective ass handed to them by the courts. Federal judges – many of them appointed by the Convicted Felon himself in his first go-round, so you know they’re right-wing as hell – have blocked dozens of the illegal Executive Orders that our wannabe king has issues from his gold-plated throne, 46 of them as of March 21. They’ve overturned the attempt to suspend the US Refugee Admissions program. They’ve overturned the “blatantly unconstitutional” attempt to overturn the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship by fiat (“Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It boggles my mind,” said the judge in that case). They’ve overturned the order to fire every single female agency head. It’s pretty much been a massacre, and deservedly so.

20. The judge who shot down Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s plan to ban trans people in the military was particularly unforgiving of this illegal nonsense, it has to be said. “The military ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext,” she wrote. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.” The entire case presented by the regime “egregiously misquotes studies and ignores data.” If you’ve ever read a judicial opinion, you will know that they are almost always written with a restraint that requires you to read carefully to see any hint of anger but this? This judge is ready to burn them all down over such willfully illegal and immoral conduct, and it’s good to see.

21. This has also been the case regarding the regime’s illegal deportations, which have uniformly been ordered halted by judges hearing those cases – often scathingly. The chief judge for the US District Court in Washington DC has barred the administration from using the Alien Enemies Act and demanded that all such deportations be halted, which would bring the regime into compliance with the law and Constitution if obeyed.

22. But they’re not obeying, and that’s the problem. Chief Border Lackey Tom Homan actually stated publicly, “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.” And the rest of the administration has followed suit. Folks, this is a Constitution crisis of the first order. When one branch of the government refuses to recognize the Constitutional authority of another it is a direct assault on the republic. The Founding Fathers understood that the branch most likely to do that was the Executive, and that when the Executive stomped on the Legislature (by refusing to recognize that Congress and Congress only has the right to determine what federal money gets spent where) or the Judiciary (by refusing to obey court orders) that is tyranny. The Founders wrote the Constitution to prevent this, but it will only work if we make it work.

23. Naturally, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and their minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are calling for the impeachment of any judge who dares uphold the law and the Constitution because that’s what tyrants do. Tyrants, historically, don’t tend to end well, though.

24. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is also attacking the lawyers who work to defend the people he’s assaulting, a clear attempt to intimidate his opponents into silence by weaponizing the federal government against them. You know, folks, when Shakespeare wrote “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” it wasn’t meant as something a hero would say. It was the sentiment of a tyrant getting rid of any effective opposition.

25. Here in Wisconsin we’re having another election for our Supreme Court, and there are two candidates left – a far-right extremist and a Democrat. The extremist, naturally, has found a happy ally in Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk who has spent over $20 million to get him installed onto the court where he can block any number of lawsuits aimed at Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk. The Unelected One has also publicly offered $100 to every voter who would support his pet, which last time I checked is illegal. Wisconsin, do not let that soulless automaton purchase your Supreme Court as a trophy – not if you want to survive. Vote for Crawford.

26. Is it just me or is there a real whiff of 1935 Germany in the air here in the Land of the Free (tm)? PZ Myers, in his blog Pharyngula, has outlined the historical stage we’re in as Gleichschaltung, a term that usually gets translated as coordination or consolidation, as the totalitarians in power use the authority of the state to shift loyalty away from the constitutional state and toward the Leader. It’s designed to unnerve the institutions that have served the nation and force them to comply with the diktats of the Leader instead. It’s designed to isolate people, take them away from their support networks, and make them easy targets. To resist, we must stand firm and keep focused. As always, do not obey in advance, and if possible do not obey at all. If we wish to avoid the fate of Germany, we should heed the lessons it offers.  Thanks to Lucy for the head's up on on Myers' blog post, by the way.

27. In case you think I’m exaggerating, remember that Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk sent out something on his very own Xitter about how Hitler wasn’t to blame for the Holocaust – that was the public service workers. And it’s surely just a coincidence that public service workers are so far the most effective opposition to the radical agenda being pursued by Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, right?

28. A little history lesson.

29. If you want to institute a dictatorship, one of the first things you have to do is crack down on education because educated people are notoriously difficult to herd. And this is precisely what you are seeing now, as Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves engage in an all-out assault on American universities. They have cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money from universities to punish them for daring to hold differing opinions or do things the Dear Leader disapproves of – the University of Pennsylvania, for example, was denied over a hundred million dollars in grants it had already won because there had been a trans woman on the university swim team three years ago. Please note that this student doesn’t even attend Penn anymore. It is enough that she did at one time. They are cutting scientific research. And this past week they tried to destroy the Department of Education, which doesn’t do most of what people think it does (it has no control over state education curricula, for example). Instead it funds student aid through grants and loans. It funds programs that help students graduate from college so they can get better jobs. It helps universities create the kind of educated citizenry that the Founding Fathers understood was critical to the survival of the republic. Tyrants always crush education. When you see education under siege, you should get very worried and very angry.

30. The Department of Education also has an important role in protecting students’ civil rights and providing funding for poor districts, and if you think that’s not why they hate it so much you should think again.

31. Meanwhile the right-wing project of turning the US into an explicitly white supremacist state is continuing to move forward with this administration. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump recently lifted the ban on federal contractors having segregated facilities, so we can all move back to Jim Crow America with confidence. Don’t you want “separate but equal” facilities, citizen? Move along.

32. This white supremacist project has been most obvious in the extreme purges currently taking place on federal websites, notably the Defense Department’s pages. They took down Jackie Robinson’s page. They took down the page for the Navajo Code Talkers who were instrumental in the Pacific Theater – the US Marine Corps acknowledged that they could not have taken Iwo Jima, for example, without them. They took down the photos of the bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima because it was named after the pilot’s mother – Enola Gay – and the word “gay” was apparently too much for their tiny minds to handle. They took down all mention of the 442nd, the most decorated combat unit in the entire US military during WWII, because it was mainly composed of Japanese-Americans. They took down any evidence of women in the military, or blacks. And yes, this was deliberate.

33. They also took down all of the websites for the Medal of Honor soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The Medal of Honor is the highest award this country gives, and it is given to military personnel who have demonstrated extraordinary heroism under fire. For President Bone Spurs and his Chicken Hawk Brigade to dishonor these veterans like that is unforgivable.

34 Meanwhile the recession is coming. Remember, when 2024 ended the US economy was the envy of the world. Under Biden the US had rebuilt its economy more quickly and on a more stable footing than any industrialized economy in the world after COVID. The US economy was, according to such liberal rags as The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, “the envy of the world.” And it took Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk, and their minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves less than two months to destroy that. Every economic indicator is blinking red now. The stock markets are, depending on which index you look at, either in correction territory or in full-on bear market territory. Banks are pulling back on loans and other credit. Consumer confidence has tanked. Of course Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is saying that it won’t be a problem when the economy crashes. It won’t to him, of course. But for you? Yeah, probably will. You’ve been warned.

35. One of the key factors leading up to this economic crash is the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s policies have made the US such an unstable place to put money that investment money is flowing to other places. Bruce Kasman, JP Morgan’s chief economist, notes that “The US seems to have established itself as a place where people can be comfortable about the rule of law … comfortable about the integrity of information flow, and they can be comfortable that the government isn’t going to be, in unexpected ways, getting involved in the rules of the game. The term which has been in place for a very long time is that we have “exorbitant privilege.” That we end up paying a much lower cost for financing our deficits and debt, we have much greater capital flows and attractiveness of the dollar and assets because of these things. The risk that that stuff starts to come under pressure and becomes a structural issue in the markets is not something I would, by any means, underplay.” In other words, once investors lose trust in the US because of the erratic and harmful policies being implemented by the current regime, that trust will take decades to recover if it can recover at all and in the meantime investment will go elsewhere, our costs will go up, and our economy will suffer. And so will you.

36. And this is why the open assaults on Social Security are going to be so painful if they succeed. Right now Unelected Co-President Elon “Sieg Heil” Musk and his band of feral teenagers are demanding access to all of the data in the Social Security system, a catastrophic breach of federal law that would damage both the economy and US national security for decades. Their efforts have so far been rejected by the courts, and in response the current director of Social Security has threatened to shut down the entire program. Think about that. I hope your grandmother is independently wealthy, because this administration is working to steal all of the money she put into that system for her retirement.

37. And while that’s going on the measles outbreaks continue to spread. Measles is a highly contagious disease that is fully capable of killing people and we’d nearly had it eradicated before the halfwit antivaxxers reared their idiot heads and declared that they’d rather see their children die than get vaccinated against the disease. Which of course, given how contagious it is, means that they’d be perfectly happy to see your children die too. And that’s what’s happening. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert “Brain Worms” Kennedy Jr. advises you to do your own thing, which is at least consistent with a man who has been brain damaged. He needs to stop advocating cod liver oil, dietary changes, or other nonsense as preventatives. Seriously – is there any part of this administration that isn’t an embarrassment?

38. Remind me of their priorities again?

39. Of course this is the same administration that is currently working to halt all research into mRNA vaccines – you know, the ones that brought the COVID pandemic under control and the ones that are currently nearing breakthroughs in curing some forms of cancer? The cruelty is the point with these soulless assholes.

40. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy continues to be catastrophic for the US. NATO has formally told him to shove his plans for conquering Greenland up his ass, and at least one member of the French Parliament has demanded the return of the Statue of Liberty since the US was clearly no longer an appropriate place for it. When Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s amateur press secretary responded to that by chortling about how the French should be grateful to the US or they’d be speaking German right now, the French MP – Raphaël Gluckmann – noted the gratitude the French have and have always had regarding the US actions in WWII but pointed out that the current administration has more in common with the Nazis they fought than they do with the Americans who served in that war. “The America of those heroes fought against tyrants,” he said. “It did not flatter them. It was the enemy of Fascism, not the friend of Putin. It helped the resistance and did not attack Zelensky. It celebrated science and didn’t fire researchers for using banned words. It welcomed the persecuted and didn’t target them. It was far, so far, from what your current President does, says, and embodies.” Put some ice on that burn, Donnie. You’ve just been owned.

41. In these dark times, remember that false idols prey on the unwary and do not send your devotions to those who would harm you and everyone you love.