TRUMP 2.0 WILL BE EXTREMELY CORRUPT
What are Trump and Musk REALLY doing with DOGE?
Americans were encouraged by Republicans to believe that government is corrupt and bloated and is spending our tax dollars on garbage that isn’t what Americans want the money spent on, namely stuff that makes their lives better. There was corruption. That is true. The government always has to police itself and those who feed on government funding to keep corrupt actors from getting away with fraud. That calls for government watchdogs and for honest government workers, a strong judiciary and support for whistleblowers. Trump supposedly brought Musk and his tech bros in to clean up the mess and shrink government to save taxpayers money. But that’s the cover story.
What’s really happening is a hostile takeover, a coup, that benefits Trump and his loyalists. Trump is trying (and succeeding so far) in becoming our first American dictator – without oversight or guardrails unlike his first term. As with every other autocrat in history, Trump is also ushering in a whole lot of corruption that benefits himself and his loyalist billionaires club.
Think of Trump as the mob boss with a gang of loyal flunkies who all want to get on the good side of their boss by carrying out his orders and getting rewarded for doing that. Musk is a co-leader currently and also Trump’s hit man- tasked with assassinating the federal government. Like Michael Cohen, Musk is doing Trump’s dirty work by taking a wrecking ball to our government agencies. Musk also has huge conflicts of interest. Musk controls six private companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and X – formerly Twitter. He gets billions of dollars from federal government contracts. Many of Musk’s companies had run afoul of these agencies’ rules and were being investigated for violations. These are the very agencies Musk is now empowered to shut down. [NPR]
DOGE’s purposes appear to range from shutting down government agencies that interfere with certain business interests to harvesting personal information of millions of Americans to taking control of government payment systems. [Joyce Vance on Substack]
As Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind have just reported in in New York Times, Musk is corruptly benefitting from the removal of agencies and oversight that had his businesses in their regulatory crosshairs.
President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting — or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given enormous power by the president, have been dismantling federal agencies across the government. Mr. Trump has fired top officials and pushed out career employees. Many of them were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.
Mr. Musk has also reaped the benefit of resignations by Biden-era regulators that flipped control of major regulatory agencies, leaving more sympathetic Republican appointees overseeing those lawsuits.
At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies, according to a review by The New York Times.
Trump firings hit agencies with oversight of Musk’s companies
Staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, have affected agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Elon Musk’s companies.
TRUMP REMOVES INSPECTORS GENERAL, THE WATCHDOGS REPORTING GOVT CORRUPTION
Trump has, so far, removed 18 inspectors general whose job it is to act as neutral watchdogs investigating and then reporting corrupt practices in the government agencies they oversee. In the past, these watchdogs have uncovered millions of dollars worth of corruption. Now that window into corrupt practices in our government will go dark. Even if Trump decides to replace these inspectors general, they will be loyalists on the side of Trump instead of on the side of the American people.
Trump also made it official that there is no longer a bar on American companies that want to pay bribes or engage in other corrupt practices abroad. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act will no longer be enforced by this administration.
Crime on, everyone!
MAYOR ADAMS CASE DISMISSAL? MORE CORRUPTION by Trump
And speaking of crime-ing on… let’s talk about Mayor Adam’s corruption case that the Trump administration wanted dismissed prompting this administration’s first Saturday night massacre at the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.
The Mayor of New York was indicted for accepting bribes from the Turkish government in exchange for allowing the Turkish government to evade safety regulations and get other perks. The case was developed by the SDNY and Mayor Adams was indicted. Adams then cozied up to Trump and now that Trump is in power, his Justice Department has demanded that SDNY dismiss the charges. Instead of complying, Assistant US Attorneys in that office have been resigning in protest. In the process it was also revealed that a superseding indictment was going to be brought alleging additional charges that included destruction of evidence by Mayor Adams.
Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. Attorney for SDNY, resigned in protest. Then others in her office followed. And when Trump’s people tried to shift the case to the Public Integrity Section in D.C., the acting head of that unit, John Keller, and his boss, Kevin Driscoll, also resigned.
This is a mass exodus of legal professionals saying, Enough is enough.
And here’s the kicker—Trump’s goons literally admitted to the corrupt quid pro quo on Fox News. Former ICE Director Tom Homan basically threatened Adams on air, saying if Adams didn’t do what Trump wanted, they’d “revisit” his case.
This is open, brazen criminality. They aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. [Meidas Touch]
Sassoon was a Harvard Law graduate and clerked for Justice Scalia, a right wing Supreme Court justice. She was a member of the right wing Federalist Society. She and other Assistant US Attorneys stood up, refusing to be used by the mob boss in the White House to do his dirty work by dismissing a well founded corruption case against Mayor Adams.
Hagan Scotten, also an Assistant US Attorney in SDNY wrote these memorable words in his resignation letter:
“[N]o system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges or the stick of threatening to bring them back again to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.” “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
Emil Bove, second in command at the Dept of Justice, then called a meeting of the assistants in the public integrity division and threatened all of them with being fired en masse unless someone agreed to appear in court to request dismissal of charges. A senior lawyer agreed (under duress) to request dismissal Bove was demanding in order to save the jobs of his co-workers.
This saga is not over, however. The judge could and should call for an evidentiary hearing to get the testimony of all of these attorneys under oath. If an attorney lies under oath in a courtroom, he or she can be held in contempt of court and risk disbarment. If the government lawyers don’t lie, the frank corruption of the DOJ will be exposed. And one more thing…Governor Kathy Hochul has the power to remove Mayor Adams. At some point Trump might decide that removing Adams would save his administration from being exposed as corrupt, assuming the judge does decide to hold an evidentiary hearing. On the other hand, Trump would relish having a compliant mayor of New York so that he can get control and seek revenge through his puppet. That’s how mob bosses roll.
WHY IT MATTERS THAT TRUMP AND MUSK ARE A TWO MAN CRIME WAVE
When dictators (autocrats) take over a country they try to set up a new order in which the laws and rules no longer apply to everyone, only to their enemies. Only what the dictator says matters. The dictator’s will becomes the law. If you lick their boots you are on the right side of the law because they become the law. That is a bad sign for democracy when laws only apply to the people who cross the dictator and the law is used to punish their enemies who won’t go along. But that is where we are heading today- literally at the edge of that precipice.
There are strong voices in the Democratic Party that are speaking out and standing up to this hostile takeover. One of them is Jamie Raskin, who says this:
“Given that I was marching at age three, you know I’m not letting any coup-plotting, election-denying, insurrection-supplying autocrat, kleptocrat, plutocrat or theocrat, or any techno-feudalist Silicon Valley broligarch aspiring dictator, turn me around now. I am going to honor and participate every day in this urgent national fight for strong constitutional democracy, personal freedom and social progress.”
There are other strong pro-democracy voices emerging: Ruben Gallego, Jasmine Crockett, Chris Murphy, Ro Khanna, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Adam Schiff, Governor Pritzker, Maxwell Frost, David Hogg, Pat Ryan, Chris Coons, Katie Porter, Adam Kinzinger, Jamie Raskin, Liz Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, and many others. Groups like the ACLU, State Democracy Defenders and many others. On social media: Meidas Touch, The Bulwark, Brian Tyler Cohen, Jennifer Rubin, Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Heather Cox Richardson, Sidney Blumenthal (The Guardian), Jim Acosta and many others. We can help lift up those voices by sharing their content as widely as possible and by taking what Jamie Raskin says to heart.
If this country is going to regain a constitutional democracy, Americans must first understand the threat from Trump and Musk. We will know that is happening when Trump’s approval ratings go down. We need to regain control of the House and also the Senate if possible in 2026.
There must be another presidential election if we hope to extricate ourselves from this dictatorship that’s coming (you know when you have lost your democracy if there are no more truly free and fair elections and instead of the free press you get propaganda). Are you aware that Trump just did away with the CISA (cybersecurity election protection) system that is the backbone of fair elections? Are you aware that Trump just lied about who started the war in Ukraine? He blamed the Ukrainians for starting it using Russian talking points. This is propaganda.
We will need to win the 2028 presidential election, which we could do with a strong centrist like Governor Andy Beshear who is the popular Democratic governor of red state Kentucky.
Above all we must work to create a stronger, better version of our country, one that insists on fairness, telling the truth not tolerating propaganda, and impartial justice because implementing those ideals is central to a true democracy.
A true democracy works for everyone, not just the dictator and his rich buddies.