King Trump - Part 1
(There’s simply been too much breaking news to keep up with but I want to start getting stories out so I’m breaking this into chunks until I’m caught up.)
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, shortly after the World Trade Center towers collapsed, Donald Trump gave a phone interview about the attack. He used that time to brag that one of his buildings was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan. Aside from the moral and emotional implications of making such a statement in the midst of the worst terrorist attack in American history, this was a lie. It was not the tallest building. Trump would go on to lie about helping out at Ground Zero, witnessing people jumping to their deaths from his apartment four miles away, and about seeing Muslims celebrating in the streets. It was this last lie that led him to mock reporter Serge Kovaleski’s arthrogryposis, a joint contracture disorder. Kovaleski had reported about investigations into a small number of people celebrating - investigations which did not find any evidence this actually happened. Trump said Kovaleski’s account backed his claim that thousands of Muslims were celebrating. Kovaleski pointed out that his article didn’t say that. Trump responded by mocking his memory and his physical disability.
A great many of us assumed our conservative friends and family would not support a man who would mock someone’s physical disability.
We were wrong.
If nothing else, the last ten years have exposed exactly what Republican voters are morally opposed to in their candidates. Nothing.
Two years after the 9/11 attack, Donald Trump memorialized the day with the following tweet, “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.”
Among his many abhorrent flaws, Donald Trump is incapable of empathy or even understanding why other people have it.
Last month, a military helicopter and civilian airliner collided in Washington, D.C., killing 67 people.
Donald Trump was not capable of showing any empathy for the victims or their families.
Asked if he would be visiting the crash site, as most presidents would do, Trump sarcastically responded by asking if the reporter if he was supposed to go swimming in the river as that’s where the plane had crashed.
Before any evidence of the cause of the accident was revealed and as divers were still working to recover bodies, Donald Trump knew exactly who was to blame for the accident:
People with hearing problems
People with vision problems
Those missing limbs
Those with partial or complete paralysis
Epileptics
People with intellectual disabilities
Dwarves
These are direct quotes. The president of the United States of America blamed hiring dwarves as a possible cause of a plane crash. (A reporter asked him how he knew not hiring enough white men was the cause of the crash and Trump said it was “common sense.) For Donald Trump, this crash was not a human disaster with people who needed an emotional response from their leader. For him, this was a perfect opportunity to attack women and minorities - the formal launching of a crusade the right has been yearning for for years against diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility hiring practices. Chris Rufo, Elon Musk, and now Donald Trump argue the reason things like plane crashes happen is that not enough able bodied white men are working as opposed to, well, anyone else at all.
These claims are bullshit and not even how DEI policies work. I recently had the privilege of hearing a speech from former NASA administrator and Marine Corps Major General Charles Bolden. Bolden was trying to enter the Naval Academy which, though integrated, was almost entirely white. As the entire Congressional delegation from South Carolina was racist at the time (Strom Thurmond included), he could not find a sponsor and wrote directly to then Vice-president Johnson. It worked. A few weeks later, a recruiter came to his house as part of an effort to recruit black students to the Academy and Bolden went on to a distinguished Naval career.
This is how DEI policies work. No one’s standards were lowered. The playing field was not unbalanced. It HAD been unbalanced for decades as it was almost impossible for qualified black men to attend. The standards weren’t lowered for black men. They were lowered for white men. Seeking out qualified black candidates put everyone on EQUAL footing.
I do not believe that Musk and Rufo fail to understand this. Trump may. Regardless, the entire war against DEI, like their war against immigrants and transgender people are based on animus and lies.
With an absolute storm of news the last few weeks, I’m going to try and summarize what’s been happening. If I have left something out, please know there’s more going on than what is listed here.
United States Digital Service
You know this as DOGE, Elon Musk’s committee which is currently wrecking the government. As I find it idiotic to name an office of the United States after a meme, I will hereby be referring to it by the former name of the office.
What’s happening with USDS is at the heart of the primary way The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, and Russell Vought want to change the government. The executive branch does not make law and outside of a few explicitly delineated areas does not even make policy. Bills come from Congress. Control of US spending is explicitly given to Congress in the Constitution. When Congress passes a law that says “The United States shall form an agency to give every good dog a hug and this will be funded with X” this is not a suggestion. This is a law telling the executive branch they must do this.
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump do not believe this to be true. They have been pushing, for years now, the idea of a “unitary executive.” In their view, the president has TOTAL control over the executive branch and Congress may not bind his actions via law. The courts so far have soundly rejected this idea as it is BLATANTLY unconstitutional.
There is a legal process for firing government employees. They are ignoring that because they don’t believe Congress can control the president.
When Congress wants to give spending discretion to the executive branch for an item, they do so. Otherwise the executive does not have legal authority to stop spending money the law says must be spent. They are ignoring that because they don’t believe Congress can control the president.
As they are currently cutting off payments, committing mass firings, and in general taking a blowtorch to the United States government, Musks’s team are acting illegally. They’re also wildly incompetent.
Several now high ranking government officials Musk has installed are recent college or even HIGH SCHOOL graduates. Several of them also have a history of extreme racism:
Edward Coristine is a NINETEEN year old former intern from Neuralink. He was fired from an IT security company for leaking internal data. Mr. Coristine goes by the name “Big Balls” and just a few years ago was hiring hackers to attack networks. He is now embedded in the US agency which combats computer threats, including election security.
Marko Elez is a 25 year old Musk pulled from SpaceX and Twitter. Marko Tweeted openly about being a racist saying he was a “racist before it was cool” and that we needed to “normalize Indian hate.” Elez was given access to the Treasury Department’s payment system before a court stopped this. He resigned after his Tweets were reported on. Vice-president Vance lamented that we shouldn’t let mistakes made by “kids” ruin someone’s life and Elez has since been rehired. He made the statements in September, as in five months ago.
You can read more about some of the other new USDS employees here, but there is a common trend. None of the people looking for “fraud” and infiltrating government systems know anything at all about how these systems work. They are coders. The people who are supposed to examine these accounting systems are ACCOUNTANTS. In fact there is an entire field of accounting dedicated specifically to this task.
What happens when you send in coders who don’t know what they’re looking at to examine accounting systems?
You get claims of 150 year olds collecting Social Security payments because Musk and his team don’t understand that COBOL uses 1875 as a reference date. When an entry is missing year data, it defaults to 1875. They hadn’t uncovered evidence of 150 year olds getting SS payments. They’d uncovered an innocuous incomplete database record.
This has happened over and over again. Musk claimed we were sending $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza. The actual number of condoms sent to Gaza is zero. Musk was misreading a budget line about reproductive aid to the Gaza province in MOZAMBIQUE. This money was not only for condoms and it was not $50 million.
USDS is claiming to have “saved” far more money than they’re publicly listing. The latter figure is currently $16 billion but they’ve made another massive mistake. They misread an ICE contract as being worth $8 billion. The contract they canceled was for $8 MILLION. 50% of the cuts USDS has publicized so far come from Musk not being able to understand units.
Along with the GOP Twitter account, they’ve “discovered” $2 billion spent on what they say is a “Stacey Abrams-linked group.” This was funding for a large coalition of groups which includes incredibly non-controversial organizations like Habitat for Humanity. Both right wing press and USDS are acting as if they have uncovered a giant secret here which is ridiculous as the organization ANNOUNCED THE GRANT when they received it.
There are more examples but these are the sorts of things they’re uncovering - run of the mill spending they don’t understand because they are not qualified to do anything they’re doing.
Onto the firings, Musk is utilizing the EXACT same playbook he used at Twitter - fire everyone first and then find out what they did to see if they were needed. If you want a great explanation of this, Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac is a must-read.
Again, there are laws dictating how and when federal employees may be fired. Musk is ignoring all of them which is why there are now numerous lawsuits taking place, far too many to list here. It isn’t legal for the government to fire probationary employees without cause. Their solution is to fire all of them for cause, despite glowing performance reviews. We fired key people who oversee the safety of our nuclear arsenal. The government is having difficulty unfiring them as they shut them out of their government emails and didn’t bother tracking down any other contact information. They fired the team working on combating bird flu without realizing they had fired the team working on combatting bird flu. They’re trying to rescind THEIR terminations as well now.
The man currently overseeing the illegal firing of large swaths of the federal government is a conspiracy theorist with no understanding whatsoever of who he is terminating. He has called multiple people “retarded” just in the last few days, including a former commander of the International Space Station who disagreed with him. Musk went on to fight multiple other astronauts.
Just recently, Musk reposted an image claiming to be migrants attacking a hospital in the UK. The picture was from a scene in The Dark Knight Rises. Musk simply has no information filters or ability to identify disinformation. Someone like that should not have as much power as he does.
As his “agency” is now involved in multiple lawsuits, we are seeing an issue of what exactly the group IS and what Musk’s role is. As there are legal requirements to running a department that Musk doesn’t meet, the government is arguing in court Musk is not running it. That may be news to President Trump who has at multiple times identified Musk as running the group.
Musk sent out an email today, a Saturday, demanding to know what every single federal employee has done for the past week. He did the exact same thing at Twitter. He says anyone who doesn’t reply by Monday will be viewed as resigning. This is not legal. Federal employee resignations must be voluntary therefore cannot be some sort of “gotcha.” This email was sent to MILLIONS of employees. There’s simply no way they can actually read through the responses which means they’re going to be feeding this to some sort of craptacular AI. The email is not properly configured which means some agencies’ mail servers are rejecting it as spam.
As the richest man in the world, and CEO of a company which is one of the largest government contractors, Musk presents possibly the largest conflict of interest in history. Musk has already made cuts both in funding and personnel to agencies which are investigating his companies. He is in a position to directly change government spending to benefit himself. The White House has maintained that the person in charge of tracking Musk’s conflicts of interest is Elon Musk, which in of itself is a conflict of interest. Twitter is now vaguely threatening advertisers to spend more. This would be unethical on its face, but the threat is now backed by the possibility of the government taking disfavorable actions on things like merger approval. Musk is using his government position to get people to advertise on the social media site he ran into the ground. Strangely opening the floodgates to Nazi material and telling advertisers to “go fuck themselves” has not been conducive to growing ad spend.
This has by far been the fastest moving area I’ve been working on so it was difficult to get out in a timely manner as everything keeps rapidly changing. I have seen a lot of people who are understandably not doing ok right now. This past week I attended two protests here in Dallas. They were taking place nationwide. If you want to be informed about such events, sign up for Indivisible and 50501. People are fighting back. There are numerous court cases and several victories. A governor told Trump to his face she would not be complying with what he says, but rather with the law. Lean in on your social networks. Stay informed, but make sure you’re taking time for yourself as well.
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