Let them eat bullets...
February 9. 2025
“Retribution” isn’t just a campaign slogan. And it is not just for Americans
If, a week ago, you could have condensed the second coming of a Trump presidency in order to observe it through a microscope it may have looked like a hydra-headed paramecium, squirming with hair-like cilia, dotted with menacing vacuoles and barking in all directions through an over-sized oral groove.
In real-life, of course, the organism was much larger, extending over horizons, behaving more like a plague of locusts, or an epidemic, spreading chaos and fear.
Donald Trump corkscrews reality at such a frenetic pace that it’s hard to take him seriously about anything. But one true-enough declaration came nearly two years ago, at the outset of his third campaign for the presidency.
In what the Texas Tribune described as “a signature incendiary performance” Trump said this to his raucous supporters at a campaign rally in Waco, Texas: "I am your warrior, I am your justice…For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution."
A discerning listener would note that—in Trump’s telling—the person most grievously wronged was him, the same person several federal judges concluded had instigated the assault on the Capitol. Unlike the rioters whom these judges were sending to jail, Trump has neither been arrested nor charged. Federal judges who presided over the convictions were eloquent in their outrage, forcefully pushing back on Trump’s unrelating campaign to re-write history.
The new Trumpian outrages—most planned but some in response to tragedies (the California fires, the air disaster on the Potomac)—kept coming in all forms. They were verbal, issued in writing (including 50 executive orders as of Friday) or in unlawful commands. Many had a vitriolic component to them in that Trump—and his unleashed billionaire backer and unofficial co-president, Elon Musk—were injecting baseless allegations along with vicious slanders and other cruelties.
For Trump, it wasn’t enough to promptly dismiss Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan, a four-star admiral and the first woman to lead one of the services. (The President’s team told reporters she had exhibited “excessive focus” on diversity, equity and inclusion—DEI). So much for ‘thank you for your service’: Admiral Fagan was given just three hours notice to vacate her government-provided residence. To wrap up the week, Trump summarily fired Colleen Shogan, the head U.S. archivist, no doubt because Shogan had sought to reclaim, for the nations archives, the classified documents Trump was storing unlawfully (some in a bathroom) at his retreat in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
“Not only can it happen here,” The Economist’s Ed Luce told MSNBC’s Ali Vitali from a studio in New York early Tuesday, “it is happening here…This is a coup that’s happening, It is happening here. It’s happening now.”
Then there were the two wholesale purges—one aimed at the thousands of FBI agents who were assigned to investigate Trump and others connected with the attempted insurrection. The other was the lightening-quick razing of the U.S. Agency for International Development, (USAID) a humanitarian initiative that, for six decades, has been supported by presidents and Congresses alternately controlled by both parties.
Come what may, the Trump/Musk USAID plundering demands our attention on account of the purposeful emotional violence packed into it and the lasting effects it will have on people (and the U.S.’s image) globally. Maybe USAID was an easy target because it was created under a Democratic president (John F. Kennedy in 1961). It’s central purpose has been to provide humanitarian assistance to struggling and often traumatized people (notably people of color) around the globe—something a considerable swath of Trump supporters reflexively abhor as a waste of their tax dollars.
Ghanaian children at a USAID health fair in 2012 (photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Trump had telegraphed the FBI purge for months. But the heavy-handed eviction of USAID from its quarters was as swift and devastating as the LA fires. A week ago, without offering any evidence whatsoever, Trump boisterously smeared USAID leadership, falsely accusing them of fostering corruption and being led by “a bunch of radical lunatics.”
Musk, a designated “special government employee,” was leading the demolition of USAID and boasting about it on his “X” (formerly Twitter) platform early on Monday: “USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple,” he wrote. “And when there is no apple you just need to get rid of the whole thing.” Later he wrote: "Spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
On Friday, the Washington Post published a remarkable photograph. The image was of workers using a cherry picker to remove the stainless steel letters atop the entrance to USAID’s former headquarters a short walk from the White House visitors center. A second poignant photo showed the letters jumbled in a pile on the ground near the truck.
USAID mandatory administrative leave notice on Feb. 6th
Brittany Brown—until recently a top USAID official—offered an account to a “Pod Save America” interviewer of what happened as Musk and his so-called DOGE team splintered the agency. It wasn’t just that “new money” was being halted, Brown said, but that funds already in place for overseas operations were frozen.
What’s “really scary to me,” Brown said, “is the guy who is in charge of holding together the humanitarian portion of the ceasefire with Israel in Gaza, he cannot access his email or computer. He's the one who's supposed to be like actually making sure the humanitarian portion of that is working and he can't get into his email. The woman who is running the humanitarian response in Sudan, where we just declared a genocide, she can't access her email or get into her systems to try and move money, to try and move commodities so that we actually can support the people who are now without any international support. These are all people that I know.”
Stop the Stupor
For a party that’d campaigned by warning Americans that Trump’s return to power would pose an imminent threat to the Constitution and rule of law, the initial responses from his political opponents seemed lethargic, at best. Before the sun had risen Tuesday morning the highly regarded British journalist Ed Luce, said the seeming lack of urgency from Democrats brought to mind Sinclair Lewis’s book, It Can’t Happen Here. The 1935 novel is about the rapid rise of a fictional Senator (“Buzz” Windrip) who wins the presidency as a Trump-like champion of the “forgotten man” but then eliminates Congress and uses a paramilitary force to violently quell the protests.
“Not only can it happen here,” Luce told MSNBC’s Ali Vitali from a studio in New York, “it is happening here.” “This is a coup that’s happening,” he said, raising his voice and spacing his words in order to drive his point home. “It is happening here. It’s happening now.”
Until this past week, the only coup I’ve been proximate to was in Panama in the fall of 1968 when the Guardia Nacional (the Panamanian police and army) overthrew a recently-elected president, Arnulfo Arias. The coup was largely bloodless but a major military operation nonetheless. Upon the first rumor, we turned our TV dial to one of the main television stations broadcasting from Panama City. Instead of the usual programming (e.g. Bonanza, and Lost in Space, in Spanish) there was just the Panamanian flag waving and the Panamanian national anthem playing. That was unsettling to be sure, but at least the coup leaders weren’t trying to bullshit anyone about what was taking place.
In the run-up to the 2024 election, Trump had been bullshitting everyone about a lot of things for months, including his encouragement to the Heritage Foundation to compile what turned out to be the highly controversial “Project 2025” report. At over 900 pages long, Project 2025 is a blueprint for reshaping the federal government in line with longstanding conservative goals, including plans to replace career civil service workers with partisan loyalists, bulldozing existing state and federal laws, and repealing the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. An NBC poll last September found only 4% of registered voters had a positive view of its goals, and support even among Republicans was less than 10%. But despite the evidence of his involvement with Heritage president Kevin Roberts and a speech he’d given at a conservative gathering hailing the project, Trump pled ignorance when the dismal poll results surfaced. He insisted he knew nothing about the plan and who was behind it.
Even though Project 2025 was notorious for its unpopular policy proposals it didn’t explicitly reveal the brass knuckles attitudes of its key creators. That came in other ways. In early July, last year, Kevin Roberts made news when he ominously boasted he and the Heritage Foundation were at the forefront of “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
And then there is Russell Vought, a principal architect of Project 2025 and the author of its proposals for empowering the presidency and aggressively politicizing the executive branch. An unapologetic Christian Nationalist Vought served Trump’s first administration as the head of the powerful Office of Management & Budget (OMB). He was re-confirmed for the post last Thursday on a party line vote in the Senate.
Vought gives the bookish appearance of a career bureaucrat. But among conservative allies he comes across as a fierce partisan. As New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall wrote recently, “Vought views American politics as a life-or-death struggle between the God-fearing right and a malevolent, secular left.”
Today’s post is free to all readers, but please consider supporting this project with an annual subscription to The Daily Rhubarb at the link above. tx, tc
Russell Vaught, Trump’s top federal budget director and conservative firebrand in a video obtained by the Pro Publica and Documented journalism teams.
Last year, a joint project, entitled: “Put them in trauma,” Inside a key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda” was jointly published by the independent investigative reporting teams at ProPublica and Documented. Central to the piece were videos the reporters had obtained videos of two impassioned speeches Vought gave last year to a pro-Trump think-tank. In the lectures, Vought advocated (among other things) for the use of force by the U.S. military against domestic protestors, stigmatizing scientists and other experts hostile to Republican policies, and transforming the federal bureaucracy by purge and re-seeding it with obedient, ultra-conservative acolytes. Here is part of what Vought said:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so…We want to put them in trauma.” —Trump’s federal budget director Russell Vaught
A leap forward to the aggressive, opening salvos of the new Trump Administration and the slanders and pain Vought promised he would help deliver to the federal workforce are being felt not just in the Capitol but—as USAID employees and contractors could attest—all around the world. And, of course, by extension the pain was being felt by innocent people who—as Brittany Brown has described—are in dire circumstances due to armed conflicts in places like Gaza and Sudan.
(Photo courtesy Wikimedia images)
Among those most outraged was Andrew Natsios. Natsios is a former head of USAID, a life-long conservative Republican who served under George W. Bush. When a journalist asked him about the “takeover” of USAID by a Trump-authorized cadre led by Elon Musk, Natsios quickly corrected her: “It’s not a takeover. It’s a destruction of the agency.”
“(T) he people I talk to are appalled by what's happening,” Natsios told the PBS New Hour. “And I'm talking about people in the developing world and people certainly within the agency. The agency is shut down.
“We can't field DART teams, Disaster Assistance Response Teams, which we created 35 years ago, and I was the director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. [DART teams] go to disasters all over the world—in civil wars, in famines, in refugee emergencies, and earthquakes. We can't field those DART teams anymore. Our anti-polio eradication program is not functioning right now because the missions are shut down. They're going to close all 80 missions? That's the stupidest idea I have ever heard. The most powerful thing we have going for us in the developing world are the USAID missions, two-thirds of whom are local people.”
As I was listening to audio of Natsios’s protests, the phrase “let them eat bullets” came to mind, about the implicit memo Trump and Musk were sending to those in ravaged places where the ammunition for conflicts will keep flowing but the food for refugees and others in dire need won’t arrive.
One of the ironies Natsios noted in talking to other news outlets is that overseas USAID resources are administered both by staff and contractor services consisting of devoted Christians, many working for Protestant and Catholic relief organizations. He was trying to make the point that their motivations arose from their faith, not their politics. And yet they were being treated like hostile, political enemies.
In less dramatic fashion, a freeze in the flow of federal funds to agencies and non-profit organizations throughout the U.S. was also underway []. Closest to home, I visited last Tuesday with a friend of mine who’s several years for a non-profit service organization in Spokane. Like many other such entities it relies on federal grant funds to help low-income families and individuals with basic needs. He was facing a serious cut in his paychecks but more concerned about his co-workers and the people he and they assist. Although Senator Patty Murray’s office was working to restore the flow of funds in the short-term, my friend pointed out that—given Trump’s executive orders barring “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and chilling civil rights advocacy—his agency, like several others, is facing long-term cutbacks.
This is not politics as usual, nor was it intended to be. The attack on DEI—billed as a campaign to restore “merit” in government hiring—is nothing more than a racist dog-whistle. It attacks the basic foundations of our democracy and, particularly, the hard fought reforms secured by the American civil rights movement. It is unmistakably part of the rise of a white authoritarian movement (that steals the word Christian to define it) that would like us to hide our courage and principals under our desks and bend our knees in fear.
Three days ago, the Seattle Times reported the Mayor of the City of Bremerton (here in “blue” Washington) had put on hold the planned hiring of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion manager out of concern that it might jeopardize close to $20 million the city expects to receive from the federal government for a variety of municipal projects.
Five days ago the National Football League confirmed it would remove it’s now familiar “End Racism” motto from the end zone touchlines at the Super Bowl. This news came a day after the league was informed that President Trump would be in attendance.
I have more sympathy for the mayor than I do for the incredibly wealthy owners of the NFL, who have virtually nothing at risk to justify such a callow decision.
In our hearts and bones, we should all know better, and be prepared to to do the right things—to resist and speak truth to power, even if our wallets are empty and our hands are trembling.
—tjc
