Trump Is Moving Fast And Breaking Things, A Lot Of Things, Already - And We Need To Get Loud, Very, Very Loud

Gabbard, Kennedy and Patel are on the Hill today - keep making calls everyone!!!!!

Greetings from Los Angeles. I have a full day on the USC campus today so a slightly shorter than usual Hopium post. For those in LA learn more and register for the conference I’m part of here at USC. It is a pretty remarkable gathering of political folks and journalists. It is also being streamed for those wanting to dive into a spirited discussion about what happened and where the nation goes from here.

Here is a sunset shot of the beautiful USC campus I grabbed from my hotel room last night:

In prepping for my panel today I keep coming back to a basic set of questions - would Trump’s early assault on everything work politically? Was this early blitzkrieg smart, or has he already destroyed his Presidency? Was there a plan, a real plan, not “concepts” of a plan, or are people just out there doing crazy shit? He is a mad genius or just mad? Is all this wildness, chaos and disruption really what people thought they were voting for? He is kicking ass, or he is already in trouble?

We all wake up to the news of the horrible collision of a Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial airliner at Reagan National Airport, the airport most Members of Congress use to fly home dozens of times a year (I flew out of Dulles Airport yesterday). The hard, cold reality for the Trump Administration is that their early, fanatical blitzkrieg included removing and forcing out those in charge of aviation security for the United States. The entire system was disrupted, employees and air traffic controllers threatened with firing and harassed. And over 60 people died.

In a new series of threads on Bluesky a long serving public health official, Atul Gawande, details how the various actions by the Trump Administration to freeze US global public health activities and coordination will lead to far more people dying here in the US and around the world. To repeat - Trump’s team, in their early frenzy - has already taken steps that guarantees Americans will die.

In a new Substack post the great Anne Applebaum does a round up of articles and interviews detailing the damage Trump’s savage assault on the US government has and will cause. It is worth spending time with in the coming days. In the post she writes:

In February 1895, Theodore Roosevelt, who had not yet become president, wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled “The Present Status of Civil Service Reform.” At that time, the American government’s civil service operated according to the spoils system, also known as patronage, meaning that whoever is in power gets to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even to menial jobs. Patronage systems, which still exist in much of the world, are both corrupt and corrupting. Officials take bribes in exchange for job appointments; unqualified people, appointed because they are someone’s cousin, produce bad government and bad services; partisan people, appointed because they toe the party line, facilitate graft.

Roosevelt was part of a movement to create an independent, merit-based civil service, which is what we have today. Though hardly perfect, the American federal government does at least try to employ actual scientists to monitor water pollution or predict the weather; air traffic controllers or grant managers are promoted in the federal civil service based on their job performance, not on their political connections. As I wrote in 2018, we take this system for granted but it is one of the foundational elements of good government. Some date Venezuela’s economic decline from Hugo Chavez’s decision to arbitrarily fire 19,000 people from the Venezuelan state oil company in 2002-3.

This week, the Trump administration issued a slew of executive orders attacking the federal civil service, as well as some of the programs those civil servants run, in the US and around the world. The most damaging measure, an order to stop funding billions of dollars of federal programs (money already allocated by Congress) has already been rescinded. Although this order was illegal as well as chaotic, I will not be surprised if some version is revived later. But there were also orders specifically intended to damage the Department of Justice and USAID, as well as a possibly illegal attempt to persuade all federal civil servants to resign.

A new Washington Post story, “Musk team’s push to gut federal workforce bypassed key Trump officials,” details how Elon Musk, a civilian, is now frenetically operating and making decisions for the US government outside the White House’s chain of command:

Billionaire Elon Musk’s influence over a traditionally nonpartisan agency that oversees the federal workforce culminated in the government’s stunning proposal Tuesday offering employees an inducement to resign, according to four people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal talks.

The proposal, emailed late in the day to many of the nation’s 2.3 million federal workers, blindsided some advisers to President Donald Trump, including officials in the budget office and agencies that typically would be consulted in advance of such monumental changes to personnel and spending policies, the people said.

Since Trump took office, Musk has moved quickly to exert control over the Office of Personnel Management, the small independent agency that acts as a kind of human resources department for the federal government, issuing policy for agencies to implement. Musk personally visited the OPM’s offices Friday, and several of his longtime surrogates — including Anthony Armstrong, who helped Musk buy Twitter; Brian Bjelde, who ran human resources for Musk’s firm SpaceX; and Amanda Scales, who worked at Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, xAI — have been installed in senior leadership roles at its offices in downtown Washington, the people said.

Musk’s team also was critical to building the system that sent an email from “hr@opm.gov” to most federal employees across a dizzying array of agencies — a capacity that had not existed before last week. Musk touted the offer on X soon after it hit employees’ inboxes, arguing it was a crucial first step in reorganizing a federal bureaucracy he has long characterized as lazy and disloyal. The email emphasized the importance of a “reliable, loyal, trustworthy” workforce.

The Post also has this report this morning:

In his first week in office, President Donald Trump moved swiftly to deliver on a signature campaign promise, signing an executive order to take effect with little lead time.

Government agencies, service groups and ordinary citizens struggled to understand how the abrupt changes would impact them, leading to chaos, legal challenges and a court order. White House officials rushed to clean up the confusion and regain their footing.

That chaotic story that unfolded eight years ago with Trump’s ban on travel from Muslim-majority countries repeated itself in his second term with an abrupt clampdown on federal spending this week that spiraled into a quasi-government shutdown.

By the time the White House rescinded the freeze on Wednesday, the scare had briefly disrupted Medicaid payments, senior meals, special education and housing stipends. It also punctured the sense of accomplishment among Trump officials eager to take the levers of power in a more orderly and effective manner than last time.

“Trump is back, and so is the blowback,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Trump appointee to the State Department during the first term. “You didn’t know what was coming in 2017. You absolutely knew this was coming in 2025.”

Trump blamed the reporting on media coverage. But Republican lawmakers said a surge of constituent concerns created pressure for the reversal. And Democrats — who spent their first week locked out of power struggling to keep up with the onslaught of executive actions and upheavals — declared victory for dealing the new president his first setback (our phone calls matter everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

“I think it’s good to have the clarity,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said. “To be honest, it was very unclear when that memo came out, what exactly, what was covered, what wasn’t covered, and you saw the White House start to clarify that immediately. But again, I think a lot of people, myself included, initially, were under the impression that this was a new EO that somehow mandated an across the board freeze for using all these programs, which is not the case.”

I mean who the fuck knows what Trump and his team are thinking, or who the team even is, at this point?

But the chaos, fuckery, malevolence, idiocy and buffoonery doesn’t end with these wild assaults on the United States government. In my discussion with immigration attorney David Leopold we talked about the incredible chaos and disruptions Trump’s assault on immigrants is already bringing to our communities across the country and to our reputation and standing throughout the world. In my discussion with Rob Shapiro we talked about the global chaos and higher prices Trump’s tariffs and broader economic agenda could bring. Trump has promised to implement chaos and inflation bringing tariffs to Canada, China and Mexico as early as this weekend. So as bad and batshit crazy as things are right now they could get a whole lot worse on Saturday.

Everywhere we look there is chaos, people being hurt, lives disrupted, laws broken, our reputation damaged, alliances strained and now, ten days in, people have already started to die.

So, as I prep for my talk today, I come back to our early mantra:

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.

Today, three of the very worst and most dangerous of Trump 2.0 are on the Hill, testifying - Gabbard, Kennedy and Patel. Keep making your calls. Be outraged at what Trump is doing to do us. Demand they do everything within their power to block these three outrageous nominees. Our family is waking up to the threat we face. And we need to keep fighting.

So, as I try to make sense of these early days for my remarks today I have begun to settle on something I had not really thought before - it is possible that the recklessness, overreach, insanity of this early blitzkrieg - particularly if Trump follows along with this plutocratic tax plan and chaos-making tariffs - are mistakes so significant that if we are loud, and if we make our case, that Trump may have already set in motion the de-legitimization and destruction of his Presidency.

Keep working hard all. Here we take the wins when they come, celebrate them and build on them for the next set of battles. We had some wins this week, good and important wins, and we just need to keep our head down and keep fighting - Simon