Trump 2: The weaponization of government
Watch for infrastructure spending and disaster relief to shrink in states with pesky governors. Everything Trump does will be about entrenching power.
Having been wrong about our chances in the election means I might also be wrong about its consequences. I sure hope so. But I doubt it. From where I sit, American democracy may be the stuff of nostalgia by the time we celebrate our 250th birthday in just two years.
Mr. Trump and his gang want to remake America as Viktor Orban remade Hungary. Trump has powerful tools at his disposal and very few who will stand in the way.
Listen to Mark Paoletta, who is planning the Trump Administration’s staffing for the Department of Justice. Here’s what he said last week.
“The President has a duty to supervise the types of cases DOJ should focus on and can intervene to direct DOJ on specific cases. He is the duly elected chief executive and he has every right to make sure the executive branch, including the DOJ, is implementing his agenda.”
Photo Credit: AP
All those GOP hearings about the weaponization of government were just preparation for the actual weaponization now underway.
Trump plans to spend billions to create an internal system of prisons to house immigrants and anybody else accidentally rounded up. It’s not surprising that private prison companies were among the biggest market winners last week. The stocks of CoreCivic and the Geo Group, both just had five day rises of close to 60-percent.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk will be tasked with cutting $2 trillion. That’s basically the entire discretionary budget. So say good by to Medicare and Social Security. Or not. Certainly the investors in the private prisons don’t believe it.
I suspect all this talk of spending cuts is just a ruse to gain corrupt control of the biggest pot of money imaginable. It’s all about entrenching power.
Now I don’t want to get too in the weeds here, but I predict one of the first acts of the new Republican Congress will be the repeal of the Impoundment Control Act that was enacted to check Richard Nixon’s overreach. Repealing that law will allow a president to refuse to spend money that Congress appropriates. You remember when Trump withheld money from Ukraine unless he got an investigation into the Bidens? Well, that wouldn’t be illegal anymore. This Congress will gleefully neuter itself so that it has the authority only to deny funding, not to require it.
As a Chicagoan schooled in the politics of power, I know what this means. In the old days, if an alderman didn’t sing to the Mayor’s tune, the garbage would pile up. Now, name of cutting waste, Musk can do the dirty work. Watch for infrastructure spending and disaster relief to shrink in states with pesky governors. Instead of taking the heat for repealing labor laws, watch for them to decide not to spend the funds appropriated to enforce them. And, of course, expect them to get rid of the IRS agents tasked with auditing the returns of the richest Americans.
Corporate America is already lining up to get on board. This happens in state governments all the time. Political corruption is just the cost of doing business after all. Never mind that it raises the price of everything.
Which brings me back to mass internal arrests, expanded internal prisons, and this new American gulag. It needs to be shocking and cruel in order to draw attention away from the efforts to remake America as dictatorship.
But Americans did not vote for any of that. They hired Trump because they are tired of working hard and not getting ahead. That’s the real problem and Trump was hired to fix it. Poll after poll makes that clear. Voters didn’t like his position on abortion. We aren’t in favor of an American gulag. What we do want is a piece of America’s economic success.
I have one more lesson from Chicago that might be valuable. Lori Lightfoot won all 50 wards to become Mayor in 2019. Four years later, she did not even make the runoff. In between, she governed as if her large victory was something other than a plea to just get the job done.
It is a lot to ask after all we have been through. Take a break. Hug your kids. Grieve. Then get back to work. If we pay attention, we might actually make our 250th in two years a rebirth rather than a funeral.