Republicans Are Now The Party Of Appeasement, Chaos, And Betrayal

Trump and Musk Aren't Making The US Government Smaller, or More Efficient. They Are Breaking It.....

Afternoon and morning all. First, some good news. Last night a federal judge ruled life-saving American foreign aid must flow again:

The Trump administration must temporarily allow the disbursement of foreign aid, a judge ruled Thursday, dealing the latest blow to the administration's sweeping efforts to halt international aid.

The court order came in response to a lawsuit filed by nonprofit groups that work on international aid projects, as well as other organizations.

They had asked that the judge block the executive order President Donald Trump signed last month that implemented a blanket pause on U.S. foreign aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio subsequently ordered an immediate halt to nearly all U.S. foreign assistance.

Rather than rule against the entire executive order, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali made a narrower decision Thursday, saying the administration for now could not suspend or cancel foreign assistance that was in place before Trump took office…..

Global Health Council, one of the plaintiffs, praised the ruling in a news release. Its president, Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, said the ruling was "a vital first step toward restoring U.S. foreign assistance programs."

“It clears the path for organizations to resume their life saving work, showcasing the best of American values: compassion, leadership, and a commitment to global health, stability, and shared prosperity," Dunn-Georgiou said.

What is unclear this morning is whether there are enough people left in State or USAID with the knowledge and capacity to do so.

And that’s my big point today - Trump and Musk are not making the US government smaller or more efficient. They are breaking it.

There is something fanatical happening in Washington right now, a madness that I’m not sure we’ve all been able to capture in our commentary. First, the government funding that Trump and Musk have decided they can just take comes from a bill that passed passed the House 366-34 and the Senate 85-11 in late December. Over 200 Republicans voted for this funding six weeks ago. They know the President doesn’t have the power to just seize funding Congress voted for. They know what the President is doing is illegal, unconstitutional, deeply illiberal. For if a President or a leader of a nation could just decide to retroactively cancel laws passed by a legislature - and agreed to by an overwhelming majority of his own party - there would be no reason to have a legislature. There would only be a Mad King.

Which is why the Administration keeps losing in court, and why so many judges have written some form “what the fuck are you guys trying to do here?” For what Trump is trying to do here is on its face so unimaginable, so outside any understanding of the rule or law or how a democracy could work, that judges are windmill dunking on these guys, and as we saw yesterday with senior Trump appointees resigning in protest from the DOJ over the Administration’s lawlessness. Trump and Musk are acting lawlessly, as if laws in the United States and our entire Constitutional order does not exist.

Second, not only is what Trump and Musk doing to the US government illegal and unconstitutional, it is also reckless, fanatical and deeply dangerous for all of us and the world. If Musk wanted to really make the government work better and cost less, he would have followed the lead of the Clinton-Gore Reinventing Government initiative that I talked to Elaine Kamarck about a few weeks ago. They would have brought in accountants - not engineers - to review the books and work with Congress and the US government staff to find efficiencies and savings. Again, we did this 30 years ago very successfully. There is a model.

Instead, Musk is just burning everything down without any kind of strategic review. Hundreds of millions of dollars of food aid is rotting. People are dying across the world. We are burning relations with 100 governments who were dependent on USAID. People in charge of aviation security are forced out and we immediately suffer a deadly plane collision. Farmers are stiffed. People are forced back to work without space for them to work from while Musk is selling US government real estate to make back to work impossible. Senior staff with incredible expertise running complex departments and agencies are being fired with no one to replace them. They are breaking collective bargaining agreements. Terrorizing patriotic Americans with families, lives, careers who are serving their country. They are “moving fast and breaking things” but in this case what they are breaking, the US government, isn’t theirs. It is ours, and we should expect the President and his team to make these changes in a responsible and effective manner. Instead we get flame throwers burning everything down, ensuring that what is left behind is a broken, dysfunctional mess - the very opposite of efficiency.

Here’s the Washington Post this morning on how this fanaticism manifested in FEMA this week:

After suddenly firing four FEMA officials in charge of grants, the Trump administration quietly revoked $80 million in congressionally approved funds intended to help New York City house undocumented immigrants, the latest episode in President Donald Trump’s escalating confrontation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security said it had terminated four officials, including Mary Comans, FEMA’s chief financial officer, for “circumventing leadership to unilaterally make egregious payments for luxury NYC hotels for migrants.” DHS Secretary Kristi L. Noem then announced that she had “clawed back the full payment that FEMA deep state activists” made to New York City.

The “egregious payments” are part of a DHS grant program that houses migrants in hotels and other facilities, which Trump initiated during his first presidency and that FEMA now oversees. The program uses money from Customs and Border Protection, repays communities for shelter costs and has nothing to do with disaster relief.

And….

On Monday, Musk, who now heads the U.S. DOGE Service, posted on X that his staffers had “discovered” that the agency sent $59 million to “luxury hotels” to house undocumented immigrants. Musk claimed that FEMA had “violated the law and is in gross insubordination” of Trump’s executive orders.

“That money is meant for American disaster relief and is instead being spent on high-end hotels for illegals!” Musk wrote, repeating the false claim made after Hurricane Helene.

In response, Cameron Hamilton, FEMA’s new interim leader, tweeted that he was suspending all those grant payments, adding that Congress “should have never passed bills in 2023 and 2024 asking FEMA to do this work. This stops now.”

Firing essential senior administrative staff that help run one of the most vital and complex government agencies in America today for following the law, a law used by Trump in his first term. Clawing back money from NY State that already been allocated to them. The interim FEMA Director illegally suspending appropriated monies, and then declaring laws passed by Congress to be illegitimate. And of course Musk lying about it all, again and again and again. The level of fanaticism and madness - and danger - we are witnessing right now it hard to put into words. But let’s make one thing very clear - the American people are far less safer today due to Musk’s undermining of FEMA.

Last night we got word Trump was going to move to fire hundreds of thousands of new “probationary” hires. Firing hundreds of thousands of workers because they are new regardless of their strategic value has nothing to do with efficiency or improving how our government works. It is bloodthirsty fanaticism.

For space and time reasons today I won’t go into the obvious Muskian self-dealing and corruption we are already seeing, or the possibility Musk installed trap doors into the US Treasury that could allow him to cut off payments to blue states or turn over control of our money and financial system to a hostile foreign power. We will return to these matters soon.

But what is most remarkable about this moment is that those 200 Congressional Republicans who swore this oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

are just sitting back and cheering the Trump and Musk torching of our Constitution (as is the Department of Justice and the FBI). Those 200 Republicans have become complicit in fanatical, illegal, unconstitutional burning down of the US government and seizure of funds they voted to appropriate. I just don’t think we have focused enough on what a historic and unprecedented betrayal of the country this is, or their voting for the worst, most unqualified and extreme Cabinet nominees in our history.

On January 6th, 2021 Republicans returned to Congress and voted to maintain our Constitutional order. Four years later, facing another attack on our Constitutional order, they have abandoned it and have joined in tearing it down.

All of this is potentially world-altering appeasement of a madman trying to end our Constitutional order, an irremediable abandonment of the oath they took to protect the Constitution, our country and all of us. Their betrayal of our democracy will live on in history for potentially centuries to come.

Which bring us back to Musk and his serial dismemberment of our government. Is this Administration and Republicans trying to reduce the deficit, get our fiscal house in order? No. They are not. The new budget frameworks they are advancing through Congress would increase explode the deficit and add trillions of dollars to our debt. It would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from our health care system belying their claim they want to Make America Healthy Again. Their budget plans would harm America and Americans, make us weaker, not stronger. Like what Trump and Musk are doing to our government itself.

Finally, how are Democrats now supposed to engage with Republicans on the budget or any other legislative matter given that whatever is passed Trump can now apparently change on a whim? How can we ever enter in good faith agreements with Congressional Republicans given how profoundly they’ve abrogated the one they agreed to in late December?

For those who continue to wonder why we, Democrats, were not more ready for all this I think many assumed that Trump would seek to move his radical agenda through Congress, as they are doing with the current budget, rather than so clearly acting illegally and outside the Constitutional order; or certainly, that Republicans in Congress would not be so willing to give up their Constitutionally mandated power of the purse to this Mad King. Whether that was naive, or wishful thinking, we will be debating for many years. But it’s why Trump and Musk keep losing in court. For what they are doing is so obviously and egregiously unconstitutional, and why as I showed you a few days ago Republicans were cheering on the courts and asking Trump to please, please follow the law. For as historic cowards, appeasers and betrayers they desperately want someone else to reign in the monster they have created and who has now made them political eunuchs.

I’ve written this today because I think we need to make the cowardice of Congressional Republicans more front and center in our discourse; and because I think we don’t yet really know the Muskian endgame for his attack on our government. It isn’t about doing something good for America. He’s just breaking things, important things. So why then he is doing it, and what is he really doing? I worry that something far more sinister is at play here, and its why we need to keep fighting.

For more on Trump and his Republican enablers’ appeasement of another madman, Russia’s Putin, read Timothy Snyder’s two latest Substack essays (here, here). For more on the Muskian attack on our government read the great Anne Applebaum today in the Atlantic. In the first of these essays Dr. Snyder hits a theme that we’ve been hitting here, hard - that Trump is weak, not strong. More on all of this in the days ahead.

Our Daily Hopium Reminder:

Trump 2.0 is a profound, ongoing betrayal of America, and everything that has made this remarkable nation the most powerful and prosperous in the world. It is why we must fight. As dark as all this is, we cannot for one moment forget that what Trump is doing is wrong; he and his project remain deeply unstable and his coalition fractious; he is doing deeply unpopular things, going far beyond his narrow “mandate;” he is old, impulsive, reckless and clearly in decline; and extremists and ideologues are often far better at bread and circuses than governing.

Let’s Get To Work - Here are my current working recommendations for calls/contacts this week. Four today, and thanks to all of you who are busting your ass right now:

• Keep calling to stop Musk’s crime spree and assault on the US government. Encourage your Senators and Reps to file a criminal referral for him and his malicious posse to DOJ/FBI. Feel free to add that you would like funding for USAID restored so our government does not kill millions and millions of people this year in our name.

• Keep calling Attorneys General in the states. Ask them to protect you and your data/privacy, and to keep federally mandated monies flowing to your states and communities. For those in the 19 states that brought the successful Treasury suit this weekend thank them and encourage them to keep going. I still believe these 19 states should make criminal referrals of Musk/his posse to DOJ/FBI this week, and raise the stakes.

• Insist they fight to challenge and rollback Trump’s tariffs which will raise prices here, strain our alliances, undermine the rules-based global order and make us a rogue, pariah nation. This is all particularly true as new data tells us the American economy is slowing, inflation is rising and consumer sentiment is dropping. There is perhaps no greater Trumpian betrayal of America than these tariffs. For more background, see this post which includes my recent interview with leading economist Dr. Rob Shapiro.

• Lets your electeds know you are outraged by traitorous Trump’s selling out of Zelenskyy, abandonment of Europe and embrace of Putin; and that we cannot accept this level of appeasement of someone who is a clear enemy of America and the West, not an ally. Demand that Trump not let his Saudi meeting w/Putin become our Munich; demand that he not become our Neville Chamberlain.

Paid subscribers should self-report their actions today in our daily chat. So inspired by how hard so many of you are working. I want to make a special plea to all Hopium readers in states with Republican Senators - please make your calls, every day. Even 50 to 100 people calling every day in every red state can make a difference. We have hundreds of Hopium subscribers in every state in the country and it’s critical that we all do our part now.

A note - while physical protests and rallies are a vital part of how we build our new opposition movement, make sure you only attend or promote events by organizations you know and trust. In general please do not support any action - boycott, protest, rally - etc unless you know and trust the organizers. This is really important my friends.

For those wanting to do more traditional political/campaign work, we have three Hopium-backed efforts we're rallying behind right now:

Help Get Ken Martin Off To A Strong Start - In this time of extraordinary challenge we need a strong DNC. A week ago Saturday we set a goal of raising $100,000 by March 31st for our new Chair. Incredibly, over 1,000 of you have donated over $105,000 so far. Watch my interview with Ken about what he wants to do with the DNC, and chip in whatever you can to help Ken and the new exciting team at the DNC get off to a strong start. We now have a new stretch goal of $150,000 by March 31st after hitting our initial goal of $100,000 in just seven days!

Note that two other good friends of Hopium - David Hogg and Jane Kleeb - were elected Vice Chairs of the DNC this weekend (Jane was elected head of the ASDC which also makes her a DNC Vice Chair). You can watch my inspiring interviews with David here, and with Jane here and learn more about where they want to take the party in the days ahead.

Help Abigail Spanberger Win Virginia - Virginia will be one of the big battlegrounds of the November, 2025 elections and we have a great candidate for Governor, Abigail Spanberger. Watch my interview with Abigail, donate, volunteer, and learn more here. Given how many federal employees live in Virginia, this race is also now on the front lines of the Trump/Musk assault on the federal government. We’ve raised more than $34,000 so far towards our March 31st goal of $100,000 - thank you all. Let’s keep working it for Abigail!

Help Susan Crawford and Ben Wikler in Wisconsin - As a way of honoring our good friend Ben Wikler and supporting this critical April Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, I’m asking our community to donate to the Wisconsin Democratic Party today. The money raised here will make sure Ben has the resources he needs to keep his team in place so they can support this critical statewide race. I know many of you are already deeply involved here - thank you all. More on this critical election in the coming days. Our goal is to raise $50,000 by April 1st. We’ve raised $27,000 so far - thank you all!

More Things To Do - Dive into my recent interviews with folks who are making a difference. Check out our upcoming events. Come see me in Bethesda, Maryland next Tuesday. Review my 7 Initial Takeaways From The 2024 Elections and my watch my new video on the political moment, Standing Up For Our Democracy, Every Day.

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon