Trump and his minions (and perhaps his masters?) have been busy. If there was anyone left who still took him “seriously but not literally” then a mere glance at a random smattering of recent headlines with the word Trump in would likely be enough to disabuse them of such a notion. Some events surprised even me, doomy as my mood has been for a some time.

Here, in the interests of creating a horrifying partial collection of the damage one man, and his devoted, wannabe or scared-of-not-being-seen-as adherents, can seemingly do to a country in just a few days - even one whose systems of power were explicitly designed to prevent a single lunatic trashing it all - are a few such occurrences, summarised. It is not exhaustive. There are many others I have missed or skipped.

This time, being about the fifth time I’ve started this post before giving up in an unproductive pit of despair, I’m going to try and restrict myself to a single sentence or two per inanity. Obviously, read the linked stuff for the context. And disclaimer, the US is not even the country I live in or have citizenship of, no doubt dramatically limiting my understanding of the practicalities. Right now I feel a great sympathy for those who do.

There’s a mix of truly bad stuff, stuff that solves no problem anyone ever had and is basically just for show, with a smattering of entries that support that the premise of the “the cruelty is the point” folk.

Let’s start with some grotesque geopolitics.

Next up, we see moves that appear to have the aim of eradicating the idea of a safe and inclusive education, free to teach a wide range of important facts, ran by those with the professional capacity, knowledge and training to do so.

  • Blocked funding for any schools that try to teach certain facts about gender or race. A lot of facts, to be clear, including anything that “that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups”.
  • And federal funding for schools who teach history in whichever way his cadre doesn’t personally like is also threatened. Instead of any mild critique of the sometimes horrific history of the US, teachers must engage only in “patriotic education” that includes an “inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding”.
  • At one point he sounded like he was saying that schools that teach about slavery were on the chopping block. This isn’t entirely unprecedented for him. Back in 2020 he threatened any schools that mentioned that Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 project with defunding.
  • Directed the attorney general to prosecute any teachers that have been “unlawfully facilitating” a student adopting a gender identity that doesn’t match their sex. We’re not talking about the ludicrous conspiracy theory that teachers are lopping off sex organs at random or whatever the latest claim is, but rather such things as counselling by trained school counsellors, acknowledging that a child is non-binary, using a trans student’s preferred name or pronouns, or allowing them to use bathrooms, locker rooms or participate in activities “specifically designated for persons of the opposite sex”.
  • And it’s not like you can work around the latter issue by introducing gender neutral facilities. They “investigated” at least one high school from the committing the potential atrocity of…introducing a gender neutral bathroom.
  • Wait, they’re apparently going to try and close the entire Department of Education. He can’t actually do that without Congress' approval so in the mean time his team is trying to diminish its existence as much as possible. Starting off with the staff: some employees have been put on leave, others pressured to quit.

Now for some “DEI means people DIE” 🤡🤡🤡 entries.

  • Legislated that there are only 2 sexes, or perhaps it was 2 genders, if his inauguration speech is to be believed? In any case, all federal government output is now supposed to refer to sex and not gender. Not that hot takes from rabid political extremists should be the deciding factor on matters of fact but there we go.
  • Your state-designated sex is to be defined by whether you have eggs or sperm at the moment of conception which scientists say makes no sense - humans have neither at that point.
  • Decided that all diversity, equity and inclusion programs are “illegal”, stopping all related “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities” that refer to them within the federal government. This included putting all employees engaged on such topics on administrative leave.
  • In what feels like a re-enactment of the Red Scare of the 1940s-1950s, Government agencies had to send in a list of the names of everyone involved in such work, then plan to lay them off asap. Websites and social media accounts that mentioned the topic had to be deleted. Trainings cancelled. Contractors terminated.
  • And you didn’t even have to explicitly work in DEI to be targeted with the above. The employee purge apparently included, for instance, those with entirely unrelated jobs who turned up to a diversity training in the past. WaPo writes “The purging underway suggests that the agency is not just seeking to eliminate DEI but also to remove people who have expressed interest or participated in programs related to it”. I write: these snowflake babies now want to punish “thoughtcrime”.
  • As an example of how far these scared little boys will go to avoid seeing the letters D, E and I in close proximity to each other, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has ordered the total destruction of 18 workplace safety publications. Seemingly because they happen to include a banned keyword such as “diversity”. Even though most of them are entirely unrelated to anything anyone could consider wokery.
  • These include such radical brainwashing documents as the “Small Entity Compliance Guide for the Respiratory Protection Standard” which features this offending sentence: “the new computer software reflects the concept of government leadership through collaboration with diverse technical organizations”.
  • The Department of Justice’s civil rights division was ordered to stop pursuing any new cases. These cases would include those enforcing the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which is the legislation that prevents, for instance, government contractors discriminating against employees on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. Re-legalising discrimination; that’s novel. This follows the now standard order that mandatorily puts any of their staff involved in DEI programs on leave, with a view to shutting those programs down
  • Yet more DEI panic as Trump et al. blame the recent devastating Los Angeles wildfires on, you guessed it, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Not the weather, climate change et al - Trump of course is a strong supporter of vastly expanding the use of heat-inducing fossil fuels. Nothing to do with building houses in dangerous fire zones, not to a flawed water distribution system. DEI, always DEI. Musk adds: “DEI means people DIE”. The people who actually do the work of fighting such fires of course vehemently disagree .
  • He also thinks the recent tragically deadly crash of an American Airlines jet and a US military helicopter was down to DEI. His evidence? Because “I have common sense” and “It just could have been.”

Of course, there’s a particular prejudice to be seen against the very existence of trans folk.

Then we move on to doing their best to make the lived experience of immigrants even worse.

  • Set in motion the expansion of Guantanamo Bay, of all places, to prepare a “huge detention facility” to hold up to 30,000 immigrants.
  • Granting staff at a wide range of departments unrelated to immigration - e.g. the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service - the power to deport immigrants; forming an “an expanded army of deportation officers”.
  • If any US state or local officials get in the way of the ever harsher enforcement action, well, they are to be investigated and charged.
  • Whilst we’re at it, 1,500 active-duty military troops are being sent to the southern border to “seal” it.
  • Ending policies put limits on the abilities of agents to go around arresting immigrants in “sensitive locations” like schools and churches. Not that it couldn’t be done before, but until now, officers had to get approval to carry out operations in these types of places. The fear is that this will deter immigrants and their children, “legal” or otherwise, from getting medical help, attending school and the like.
  • Attempted, counter to the very constitution the Trumpista type all pretend they love, to end birthright citizenship - although this was later blocked by a federal judge (for now).
  • Promoted, via Executive Order, the (famously ineffective) death penalty, including instructing that the Attorney General must seek it in every federal capital crime committed by an undocumented person regardless of other factors. That the death penalty still exists is an atrocity; the US remains in the top 5 countries by number of executions. That the decision to apply it should be in any way based on where the person is from and whether they have certain documentation…I have no words. The National Immigration Law Center headlines their review of Trump’s orders “Unconstitutional, Illegal, and Cruel”.

Time to weaken America by deliberately diminishing the state.

  • Offered money to almost all of the 3 million US federal employees if they leave their jobs right away, irrespective of who they are or what they do for their country - a move which is probably against the law as well as stupid. The email sent to everyone about this naturally had the same subject line - “Fork in the road” as the similar Twitter offer did.
  • Fired at least 12 independent federal government watchdogs, which is likely against federal law.
  • Proposed cutting $10.5 trillion from the federal spending budget over the next 10 years.
  • Another section of employees targeted for forced dismissal: the many thousands of government employees currently in probationary periods. “Probationary” generally refers to tenure rather than performance, meaning only they started within the last year or two. Why these folk? Nothing to do with their suitability, skill or whether they’re doing jobs that are critical to good functioning of government - they just have even fewer employment rights than the average American employee so it’s just easier for these lazy wannabe-kings to ruin their livelihoods. At least 100 were terminated immediately following via a one-way group Microsoft Teams call.
  • How to justify these firings? At least in some cases they did so by telling them that they’re being fired for poor performance, even when their actual performance review explicitly said they were exceptional performers with no issues whatsoever.
  • All in all, as of February 15th, about 10,000 federal employees had been fired, with thousands more expected to be given their notice the next week. Thankfully, there’s been some pushback, judicial and otherwise.
  • Unsurprisingly, some mistakes were made by the clowns involved in this mass random firing effort. Someone finally realised that actually the US would benefit from having some employees working the National Nuclear Security Administration, so tried to “unfire” them. But unfortunately, having shut down their email accounts, they found they don’t actually know how to contact some of them any more. Whoops. The US Department of Agriculture is similarly desperate to rehire a bunch of employees it fired that work on the H5N1 avian flu outbreak; a raging disease that has so far affected 23 million birds and 68 humans. Whether or not any of these people want to come back is of course a different story

They then attempted to utterly destroy USAID.

  • Attempted to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau almost entirely.
  • USAID was particularly hard hit. This is an aid agency with a budget of nearly $40 billion responsible for all sorts of global aid programs. The US government funds nearly half the world’s humanitarian initiatives - even whilst spending under 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, rather less generous in proportional terms than some countries. Its remit includes humanitarian crises, food security, public health, economic development, democracy and human rights.
  • The chaotic and arbitrary overnight shutdown of USAID of course brought immediate devastation. Medical centres closed, displacement camp staff stopped work, a HIV program that has saved more than 20 million lives is gone, millions of dollars of medications are stuck in ports, programs providing education to Afghanistan’s girls, those that monitor Ebola outbreaks, anti-famine programs, the list of tens of thousands of programs goes on.
  • “It’s not only a gift to our adversaries… it is plain illegal” says Senator Chris Van Hollen.
  • Musk’s absolutely deranged reason for doing shutting down USAID? Well, USAID is a criminal “radical-left political psy op” he said, whilst busily spreading already-debunked disinformation about how it funded a trip for Hollywood stars to Ukraine, which it didn’t. Stop it with your radical-right political psy ops please.

The unelected megalomaniac Musk has been let loose.

  • Appointed Elon Musk to head the made-up non-government non-department henceforth to be known as the Department Of Government Efficiency - chosen only because it acronyms to DOGE, Elon’s favourite memecoin of course, oh so hilarious these big strong men are - seemingly in order to speed up the absolute destruction of the last useful vestiges of American governance.
  • What is DOGE? Well, no-one else knows, the administration having refused to make information about its spending and operations public. Overall it’s supposed to “trim fat” from the state. See above and below for what that actually ends up meaning.
  • But what is it? Schroedinger’s Federal Agency. Trump treats it as federal agency, allowing it to embed with other agencies and order them as to what they must do, which only an agency could do. DOGE certainly thinks it has agency-level authority. However, they won’t respond to Freedom of Information requests or reveal anything about its funding, which agencies are obliged to do. Judge John Bates summarises as “we’re not an agency where we don’t want to be an agency, but we are an agency this one instance where we want to be”.
  • The fat they’re trimming appear to be greedily gobbled up by themselves. It’s thought that they’ve received around $40 million of tax-payers' money. Where from? We don’t know. But there’s a good chance under the “purpose statute” it’s technically illegal.
  • Musk himself is appointed as a “special government employee” so that he doesn’t have to divest himself of relevant financial interests before deciding to award more of the same publicly funded contracts that kept his companies alive in the past to himself again.
  • This triggered a proposal for the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy, or ELON MUSK, Act.
  • Had Elon Musk’s ridiculous “DOGE” team access a load of sensitive computer systems and feed some of their private data, including people’s personal details, into some random AI, to decide who and what to cut next.
  • Presumably also his team’s doing - inadvertently (?) exposing critical government computer systems - including those in nuclear labs - to the public internet: “adversaries such as Russia and China are dancing for joy.”
  • Given “Big Balls” and the rest of Musk’s small team of recent high school graduates access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, the system that disburses trillions of dollars of payments across the government each year. The system is chock full of sensitive personal information about the millions of individuals who receive payments or refunds from the federal government.
  • They also took over an Office of Personnel Management system containing the personal details of millions of federal employees, after revoking the access of the officials that actually did have authorisation and reason to use it - “There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications” says one.
  • Let’s not forget just one of Musk’s companies receives $8 million per day from the US state. Trump of course fired the inspectors who “who traditionally oversee internal investigations into executive branch operations”.

Now it’s time to Make Americans Unhealthy Again.

  • Frozen many of the activities carried out by the US National Institutes of Health, including requiring them to cancel grant reviews, cancel advisory council meetings, pause communications (which means they can’t recruit into trials for one, and it’s not clear whether publishing results will be OK), stop hiring people, rescind job offers already made as well as an “indefinite ban” on travel. A small part of this is apparently normal when a new administration comes in, but not to this extent: “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating” says one NIH employee.
  • My mistake, the travel ban is governmentwide, not just the NIH.
  • The Department of Health and Human Services ordered to stop publishing “regulations, guidance documents, grant announcements, social media posts, press releases, and other communications” as well as cancelling speaking engagements.
  • Started the process of withdrawing the US from the World Health Organisation - ‘“Oooh, that’s a big one,” the newly inaugurated US president said as he signed the document concerned.

In yet more examples of the MAGA right carrying out the precise behaviours that they falsely impute with horror to their more liberal opponents, state censorship is back with us with a vengeance.

Finally, onto a grab-bag of unthemed garbage.

  • Respecting the dignity of the office just as George Washington would I’m sure- the Trump family created and started selling a $TRUMP cryptocurrency meme-coin
  • This enabled a handful of people to make a vast profit, but over 800 thousand other folk suffer a cumulative loss of an estimate $2 billion. Worry not for the big guy himself though, who guaranteed himself a cool $100 million income from the trading fees.
  • Renamed the “Gulf of Mexico” the “Gulf of America”, and “Mount Denali” as “Mount McKinley”.
  • Unilaterally pardoned 1500 people who had been successfully charged for criminal offences around January 6th 2021 attack on the US Capitol - and commuted the sentences of 14 of his other supporters.
  • Full pardons were given to many, including those found guilty of assaulting police officers. Police Unions are amongst the many groups who are not pleased by this. As a reminder, more than 140 police officers were injured, and several people died that day. And it could have been so much worse.
  • Some of the pardoned folk above include those involved in the despicable “Proud Boys” and “Oath Keepers” groups and had been successfully convicted of seditious conspiracy. Harrowing sentences like “Now that he is out, the Proud Boys leader wants revenge, he told Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist host of Info Wars” tells us all we need to know about the wisdom of releasing some of them into the public domain.
  • Tried to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico (later rescinded, or at least delayed), and 10% on China. The stock market fell. Prices will inevitably rise. The whole idea is “the dumbest trade war in history” according to the WSJ.

Folk aware of “Project 2025” might feel familiar with some of the above. Trump did disavow himself of that particular enterprise. But whilst it’s certainly not hard to believe he hasn’t read the extremely lengthy final report from the team concerned (although some folk claim do his supposed lack of knowledge about this is ‘preposterous') some of his policies sure do happen to align nicely.

Not all, but some. Forbes gave a run-down of Trump’s executive orders vs the 2025 folks’ desires - as far as the latter could be determined from the 2025 crew’s apparently extremely internally inconsistent document.

“Rustic Gorilla” has set up a handy Project 2025 tracker if you want to follow along with the progress towards that world, which at the time of writing claims that 35% of Project 2025’s policies have been effectively put in place, with another 41 in progress.

He’s certainly appointed some of the Project 2025 folk to powerful places in his administration - quelle coincidence! - so whether or not Trump cares about said project, the people around him surely do.

Some would say that it’s pointless to have constructed the above list, at least if the intent is to actually do something to reduce the existence of all this Bad Stuff (which, much as I wish I could, I’m not sure is my intent here. Something closer to personal therapy perhaps). After all “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism” says 404 Media. “Blogging is a poor tool for political resistance; clicktivism is not activism” says Ajay. I suspect they’re right for the most part.

Others would say there’s perhaps even an amount of dangerous folly in writing about this stuff. “The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them” says Katherine Cross.

Stop believing Trump Ezra Klein implores us, lest we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. He has only the powers of the presidency, which are not infinite.

Whilst I’m not sure I buy the latter sentiment 100%, undoubtedly Trump has been stopped from doing some of what he wanted. The birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge, as was his desired spending freeze. Some of the fired employees are being unfired, if they can be tracked down. His tariffs on Mexico and Canada have been, at the least, postponed. Some of the deleted health datasets and information were ordered to be put back, albeit with stupid warnings about them being “extremely inaccurate” and “not reflect[ing] biological reality”.

So maybe there is some hope to stop the most illegal and least humane stuff, if not the ideas behind it. Trump’s abject fear of appearing weak, of encountering someone influential who has the boldness to say no to him, might just keep him away from pursuing the most audacious of unlawful and harmful stuff.

In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true.

…

Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The idea is to not make it seem like Trump can and is doing everything he wants to do, that he’s powerful enough to defy all reason and law - including the very constitution that some of his adherents pretend they value above all else, in order to satiate his whim of the day. To do so risks making it true; if we feel like we can’t stop him running roughshod over decades of civilised progress then in fact we may not even try to stop him when he tries.

It is true that some of his wilder actions have already failed, been pushed back, forcing this “uncompromising strongman” to compromise, to give up. If we lose faith in our ability to constrain his action then he surely will get away with doing what he wants. Or perhaps rather the bidding of what those around him want him to do, given his status as a uniquely thin-skinned and manipulable figurehead of power.

“Manipulable” feels to me like a key word here. Much as it’d be satisfying to discover a smoking gun of genuine conspiracy, I personally doubt he is, for instance, a (knowing) secret Russian asset - even whilst his lily-livered approach to “solving” the Russia/Ukraine conflict is absolutely going to make Putin smile as he repeats exactly what an actual Russian secret agent would say.

But my guess is that Russian Plutocrats are probably not bribing him directly, not meeting him in smoky rooms to decide how to further the geopolitical interests of Putin. Trump may well not be aware that he’s doing their bidding, dangling on their puppet-strings. Why would the Russian oligarchy waste their time and money when Trump’s greed, delicate ego and admiration of perceived “strongmen” makes him so easy to manipulate for free?

After all, a single tweet appears to have the power to send him over the edge - his masculinity so fragile, the Platonic ideal of a snowflake - that the mildest challenge to his ill-earned dominance, or the gentlest hint that you admire him, is enough to push him in a wild new direction. Last time he held the office his aides knew to only show him the subset of polls that were favourable to him. It has been claimed that - brace yourself for an unfortunate image - Trump’s Ego Is so Fragile, His ‘Fluffer’ Secret Service Agents Have to Tell People to Say Nice Things to Him.

Perhaps the severest of danger then comes from the people around him. Several people have described what’s going on as a kind of coup, mostly on the basis of Mr Elon “never won an election, never told a funny joke” Musk’s apparent dominance.

After all, given the Republican’s control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and, to all intents and purposes, the Supreme Court, they could surely get a lot of what they supposedly want to see in the world done via the standard US political machinery using “normal” methods, for want of a better description. But, as Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.

The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup.⁠⁠

There is no respect whatsoever for the fundamentals of the American political system, from the party who traditionally would likely have defended much of the system, including such venerated documents as the US Constitution even to a fault.

Mike Brock writes:

This isn’t just another political crisis—it’s an existential threat to the constitutional order that has secured human liberty for over two centuries. Every American who understands the value of this inheritance has a duty to resist its destruction. The Constitution doesn’t defend itself—it requires citizens willing to stand for the principles of democratic governance against those who would replace the rule of law with the rule of men.