No Return
It increasingly appears that we have passed the point of no return for our constitutional system and our role in the world. Yes, the resistance is building and will continue to grow as the actual impacts of the destruction of our government finally filter down to the average Americans and not just the newly unemployed workers who used to be employed by the government or businesses that relied on government support. But, in many areas, the damage already done is probably irreparable and the carnage and the danger that lies ahead is incalculable.
Our Constitution is in tatters. The government is curtailing the right to speech, dissent, even inquiry, and engaging in an effort of mass censorship. Words, books, even ideas are banned on the basis of race, gender, and belief. The rule of law has disintegrated to such a degree that it is being used to attack those who try to use it to hold the administration to account and to intimidate the administration’s critics in government, media, and the general public. Corruption is rampant with the President and senior public officials openly receiving bribes directly or through the businesses they continue to own in contravention of ethics and open records laws. The administration continually demands career officials engage in illegal or unethical actions and then fires them when they refuse. Government workers, including military officers, are being purged and replaced by administration cronies. Others are required to take loyalty oaths. US citizens and legal residents are being detained unlawfully simply because of their ethnicity or beliefs. Imprisoning people for their political beliefs and labeling peaceful protestors as “domestic terrorists” are pretty much the hallmarks of autocratic regimes.
The separation of powers is being obliterated. Whole agencies are being shuttered and programs defunded in direct contravention of laws passed by Congress. Both Musk and OMB Director Vought have declared that the President has the power of impoundment, in direct violation of the Article 1 powers of Congress. Trump has fired both immigration judges and military lawyers, both commonly understood to be part of the judicial system even though technically under the executive branch. For Trump and his administration, there is no law that needs to be obeyed until the Supreme Court reaffirms it, and, even then, it is unclear whether they will comply. Administration lawyers constantly lie to courts and continue to defy court orders. The administration treats executive orders that violate existing law as superseding law. Judges that rule against the administration are demonized by Trump and Elon’s attack dogs who threaten impeachment. Judges and legislators privately admit they fear for their own and their family’s safety if they go against Trump. Congress appears to be willing to just hand over chunks of its power of the purse to Trump/Musk and has consistently given the executive branch emergency powers that gut their own, while four Supreme Court Justices agree that the President could decide whether or not to pay bills for work that the government had already received and which were authorized by Congress.
The government is engaged in a mass erasure of history and knowledge. Enormous government datasets are simply disappearing, some of them containing over a century and a half’s worth of information. With Musk’s minions reportedly downloading data from government systems, the obvious concern is that this data “returns” under the control of a private entity. Similarly, there are massive privacy and security concerns about such access as well. Other agencies’ personnel are being instructed to destroy documents. Women and other minorities are simply being erased from governmental history, while at the same time being written out of future history simply because they are not allowed to participate. Hugely important and successful public/private partnerships in health and science are being dissolved, threatening the preeminence of US universities. Other educational institutions are engaging in mass self-censorship and censorship of their faculty and student body in the hopes of not being targeted by administration. Media are paying bribes either directly or indirectly in order to curry favor with the administration and censoring their reporting for the same reason. The administration is preventing other disfavored media from effectively covering what the government is doing. Lastly, the opposition party seems to be in full collapse, unable to mount any kind of coordinated opposition and seemingly open to cooperating with the administration in the destruction of our government.
What all of the above describes is not the descent into fascism, autocracy, authoritarianism, or whatever name you want to give it. It IS fascism, we are living it every day, and we get additional proof every day, almost every hour. Yes, the courts may demand some workers get reinstated and some programs get re-funded. But eventually the administration will have the time to build the legal framework for eliminating government workers using its powers for Reduction in Force. With federal agencies gutted, the administration will claim that it’s impossible to fully manage the mandatory programs required by congressional legislation. It has taken decades to build the capabilities of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, USAID, NOAA, and so many other important sources of research, science, health, and knowledge. We are not going to be able restore them to what they were before Trump any time soon, and probably never to that level. Similarly, the constitutional rot that Trump/Musk has exposed is not going to be repaired any time soon. Each new violation of laws and norms sets new precedents for those that come after.
While our focus is rightly on our collapse domestically, it is easy to miss the similar collapse of our global standing which will eventually make us more isolated and the world a more dangerous place for everyone, including and maybe especially Americans. It used to be that most of the rest of the word may have hated American policy but liked Americans and American products in general. That is increasingly no longer the case. It is unsurprising that Trump’s policies of abandoning Ukraine, encouraging the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, threatening allies, even bordering countries, with insane economic blackmail and military annexation, and aligning the US with pariah states like Russian and North Korea makes us unpopular around the world. Add to this, the US withdrawal from international organizations like the WHO, UNHCR, UNESCO, and TPP, the abrogation of international agreements like NAFTA, USMCA, and the Iran nuclear accord, and the continual threats to NATO, it has become reluctantly but unavoidably apparent to the rest of the world that any agreement with the US isn’t worth the paper it is written on. While they might have thought of the first Trump administration as a mistaken aberration, it has become clear that the American people cannot be trusted either. As one European leader said, “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every 4 years”.
Unsurprisingly, our allies are beginning the process of unwinding from their relationships with the US. France is offering their nuclear umbrella to Europe, while other countries explicitly commit to considering getting their own bomb and increasing their military capabilities. Countries with which we share intelligence are now limiting what they will give us. Increasingly, countries are looking to China for both trade and international cooperation as it presents more stability, despite its restrictive domestic policies, than the chaos of Trump’s US. China is already filling the gap left by the destruction of USAID. More importantly, with the destruction of US capacity, China will be the dominant force in innovation and technology going forward. Eventually, the pace of de-dollarization that has already begun will quicken. All of this will make the US poorer and more isolated.
The bonds that held the American Century of the postwar world are shattered, never to be restored again. What we are facing is not just the implosion of American democracy but the end of the American “empire” as an economic and moral leader. History has shown that the dissolution of empires brings dangerous instability as its leaders often act irrationally which forces other countries to react recklessly. The rest of the world is much farther along in understanding this reality than most Americans who have yet to realize we have passed the point of no return.