At the red line of tyranny

February 18, 2025

Red sky at Wilbur (2017)

Hagan Scotten’s poetic defiance

If journalism is the first draft of history, the reporting in recent days may have located the hours during which America slipped from being a stable, constitutional democracy to something other than that. Whether it is now an emerging autocracy or a kleptocracy, or portions of both, is a question time may answer more fully. What we do know is it’s no longer credible to posit that Donald Trump’s larceny and purges are relatively harmless provocations—forms of entertainment to own the libs, to have his ego fed in every news cycle; to be the scene-stealing Penguin in every Batman film.

This is no movie. But if it were it would bear some resemblance to an early scene in the 1986 comedy The Three Amigos. This is when “Lucky Day” (played by Steve Martin) realizes he’s been grazed by a real bullet in what he thought was a festival performance. The idea was that he and his Hollywood silent-movie companions, “Ned Nederlander” (Martin Short) and “Dusty Bottoms” (Chevy Chase) would be firing blanks at an acting troupe of banditos to the delight of the villagers of San Poco. With blood seeping through his sequined costume onto his fingers, his voice trembles when he tells Dusty and Ned “it’s real.” Whereupon the two begin to cry. When I think of all the late-deciding Trump voters, who chuckled at the rhetorical thuggery but didn’t think he was serious about being a dictator on day one, I think of Dusty and Ned, sobbing in their saddles.

The promises to immediately lower the price of eggs and end the war in Ukraine are falling flat. But the moves to dismantle a non-partisan civil service, replace it with a loyal Praetorian Guard, and stare down the nation’s judiciary have been remarkably swift—less than a month.

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

This is what Trump posted Saturday morning. The quote is apocryphal; ascribed to Napoleon Bonaparte. But Trump’s authorship is unabashed and clearly aimed both at judges who may thwart and worshipping supporters who will encourage him no matter what.

There’s no single reason to explain how easy it has been for a career con man (now a convicted felon) to twice ascend to the presidency. His famous “I alone can fix it,” pledge in the 2016 campaign incorporated the quicksilver logic that because he was familiar with the corruptions of politics he could, and would, use his knowledge to the benefit of the masses. (Try that on your resumé.) It played to an easy cynicism. If government was inherently corrupt then Trump would at least use his familiarity with corruption for the public good, on behalf of god-fearing white people.

By these rules, anybody who opposes or criticizes him is a subversive threat to the commonwealth. The formula has worked so well that it has effectively purged dissent from the ranks of Congressional Republicans, leading them to say preposterous things, and behave in preposterous ways—witness their obeisant rubber-stamping of clearly unqualified gadflies to crucial cabinet posts.

Perhaps it is in the nature of things that, sooner-or-later, something as foul and un-moored as the Trump garbage scow collides with a Coast Guard cutter. Or, in the case of Danielle Sassoon and, now, Hagan Scotten, Trumpism collides with people who have both sterling Republican credentials and unshakable integrity.

Until last week, Ms. Sassoon was the Trump-approved U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY). She resigned after refusing to approve a motion to dismiss the pending federal corruption indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams. Sassoon was clear she saw the motion to dismiss as an unethical quid pro quo whereby the DOJ would dismiss the charges against Adams in exchange for the mayor’s active cooperation with federal Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officials.

New York’s sanctuary city law limits its cooperation with ICE, but Adams has already issued an executive order opening the city’s Riker’s Island jail complex to federal immigration officials. While both Adams and Trump Administration officials have denied the charge of a quid pro quo, the denials fly in the face of a truly bizarre segment on Fox & Friends last Friday in which Trump ‘border czar’ Tom Homan—sitting right next to Adams—not only spoke about the “agreement” but promised to “be in his [Adams’s] office, up his butt” if he didn’t follow through on his commitment. As Homan was saying this, Adams was laughing along with him.

Today’s post is free to all readers, but please consider supporting The Daily Rhubarb with a paid, annual subscription at the link above.—tjc

Danielle Sassoon’s refusal to sign off on what she interpreted as the unethical quid pro quo was outlined in an 8-page, Feb. 12th letter to the new U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi. Sassoon was the first among six attorneys assigned to SDNY to resign rather than agree to defend the agreement before a federal judge. Then came number 7—Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten—the lead federal prosecutor in the Adams case. Like Sassoon, Scotten leans Republican and previously served as a clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts. Scotten is also a combat veteran, a former Army special forces officer who earned a pair of Bronze Stars serving in Iraq.

In his one-page letter to former Trump attorney—now acting Deputy Attorney General—Emil Bove III, Scotten surmised he would be next in line to be asked to file the motion (to dismiss the case against Adams) that Sassoon and the five other attorney’s refused to file. He also refused, adding:

“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.”

He used his next sentence to convey his resignation.

The DOJ motion to dismiss the case against Adams came on Friday and was signed by Bove and two other DOJ officials. The dismissal still has to be reviewed and approved by Federal District Court Judge Dale Ho. (This morning Judge Ho scheduled a hearing for tomorrow to have the DOJ explain its decision) Meanwhile, half of New York’s eight deputy mayors, including the deputy for public safety, have announced their resignations.

The process will play itself out. But, thanks to Sassoon and Scotten, the morality tale is already drawn into focus. Trump’s success is built upon layers of salesmanship to the most energized blocs within his MAGA coalition—the fundamentalist Christians who abhor abortion and gay marriage, the AR-15—toting militia movement who can’t imagine liberty without assault-style firearms, the anti-vax and Q-anon fabulists who demonize Anthony Fauci and the Obamas, and life-long conservatives who reflexively perceive Democrats as so alien to their culture that they’ll vote for any Republican who can fog a mirror. What they all share is a bristling certitude that Trump always reinforces—that they are the victims of a changing America, and because they’re innately smarter and morally superior than the rest of us, the ends justify the means: America can only truly belong to them.

It’s not true though, and the plain-spoken rebukes from Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotten illuminate the moral rot at the very core of Trumpism, the attitude that Trump, along with his servants and enablers, deserve power to abuse people who won’t defer to them, who won’t bend the knee.

Demonstrators protesting Elon Musk and the Trump regime, at Monday’s gathering in Spokane’s Riverfront Park

Musk runs amok….

I left my desk late Monday morning to walk to the large “Residents Day” protest in Riverfront Park. Snow was falling upon the hundreds of people gathered to protest the new Trump administration and the un-elected prince of DOGE, Elon Musk. I don’t have an exact ratio, but there were at least three times the number signs denouncing Musk as there were signs bearing the word “Trump.”

The acronym “DOGE” is rooted in Musk’s years-long fascination and sometimes promotion of the crypto-currency Dogecoin, which, itself, derives from a decade old meme about an exotic dog owned by a Japanese kindergarten teacher. Fast-forward to 2024, when the world’s wealthiest person a) chooses to pour nearly $300 million into Trump’s bid to re-take the White House and, b) chooses to become a big fish in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago goldfish bowl and a leaping, stiff-arm saluting cheerleader for Trump’s election.

On January 20th, Trump signed an executive order creating the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” and, two weeks later, the press learned that Musk, without ceremony, had been designated a “special government employee” to lead the DOGE project.

And what is the DOGE project? According to the executive order the purpose of DOGE is to “implement the President’s DOGE agenda by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and transparency.” Under Sec. 3 (b) of the order DOGE will be a “temporary organization” chartered for 18 months, terminating in July of next year.

What’s wholly missing from the order is the broader and much more powerful role that Musk is undoubtedly playing—that of targeting and gleefully demolishing entire federal agencies by firing the lion’s share of their employees.

“USAID is a ball of worms,” Musk wrote on social media in early February, adding later that: “We [the DOGE team] spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could have gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

As the Washington Post’s Michael Kranish pointed out in a recent column, the Musk-led demolition of USAID occurred only days after Marco Rubio, now Trump’s Secretary of State, told a Senate confirmation hearing that his main complaint about USAID is that it didn’t “brag” enough about the work it was doing to advance other societies around the world.

Gate at one of Hanford’s high-level radioactive waste tank “farms”

Musk and his already infamous DOGE squads are by no means alone in spurring the rapid, sweeping purges of the federal workers. Rachael Maddow led her hour-long broadcast last night focusing on the sudden firing of Department of Energy officials overseeing the cleanup of the Hanford site in Washington state. Hanford is commonly regarded as the largest and most dangerous “Superfund” site in the U.S., given the vast stores of radioactive wastes that accumulated during decades of plutonium production near the banks of the Columbia River northwest of the Tri-Cities. (My mother grew up only a few miles downstream from Hanford, and she was among the thousands of vulnerable children exposed to secret radioactive iodine emissions from the plutonium plants during the 1940s and early fifties. Her thyroid disease was likely the result of that exposure.)

I’ll try to keep you posted on how the Hanford cuts may affect the massive cleanup but it already begs questions that are playing out nationwide under the corrupt, transactional ethos of the Trump regime. We got a preview of this when Trump openly raised the prospect of forcing California to add a needless layer to its voter identification procedures in exchange for federal disaster relief following last month’s disastrous wildfires near Los Angeles.

Washington state is ripe for such mischief, not just at Hanford but at the federal Bonneville Power Administration (managing the regional power grid) where 600 employees were fired over the weekend.

Washington is a “blue” state whose voters have thrice voted to reject Trump’s presidency and whose leaders are not shy about filing federal lawsuits to protect the state from his manipulations. But Hanford is situated in the solidly Republican Fourth District, east of the Cascades. It is an intensely agricultural area that relies, heavily, on immigrant farm workers (asparagus, orchards, etc.) and foreign markets for wheat and fruits. A nuclear accident (e.g. an explosive fire at one of Hanford’s underground high-level waste tanks) could easily contaminate farm products throughout the lower Columbia basin. Just imagine what that would do to the state’s economy. True—the Fourth District is represented by a Republican Congressman, Dan Newhouse, a Yakima valley farmer. But Newhouse has a measure of integrity and is one of only two remaining Republican Congressmen who voted to impeach Trump in 2021. It’s not the sort of thing that would escape Trump’s attention.

But back to Elon Musk. Come what may the DOGE teams have already inflicted damage on federal agencies that may take decades to repair—and only if the nation can recover and rebuild on a commitment to non-partisan civil service, one that can be protected from political purges like the one presently underway.

Musk’s involvement in DOGE is fraught with questions about its legality, especially given Musk’s well-documented conflicts of interests. All seven of his companies have federal contracts that by one estimate, have already accrued $20 billion in federal payouts. As the New York Times’s Eric Lipton noted a couple weeks ago, there is federal law that makes it illegal for “special government employees” to be involved in decisions in which they may have a direct financial interest.

Lipton and his colleague Kirsten Grind have also extensively reported on how Musk positioned himself, through DOGE, to effect several regulatory actions that could affect his companies’ profitability.

Here’s part of what they wrote in a piece published last week.

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.

As yet, there is no signal that Musk has recused himself from any DOGE action, including the dismantlement of the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau, which Musk celebrated by posting “CFPB RIP” alongside an emoji of a tombstone. The White House press secretary, Karoline Levitt, has assured reporters that President Trump “will not allow conflicts, and Elon, himself, has committed to recusing himself from potential conflicts.”

In what is arguably the most troubling Musk development to date, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, has resigned in protest of DOGE’s effort to obtain highly sensitive information about Social Security recipients. . The effort to obtain the sensitive SSA data parallels DOGE’s efforts to access sensitive tax information from the Internal Revenue Service. Yesterday, the Center for Taxpayer Rights and several other organizations filed a federal lawsuit to prevent the release of the IRS data.

—tjc