Post by MightyMousehttps://www.instagram.com/p/DFrGwTkJp5z/
Here's some of his "Good", the public service is supposed to be
non-partisan, Trump is loading it with his supporters, so much for
democracy.
Appearing on an anti-feminist podcast in 2021, J. D. Vance compared his
ambitions for a conservative takeover of America to US policy in postwar
Iraq. “We need like a de-Ba’athification program, but a de-wokeification
program in the United States,” he said, referring to the campaign to
root out members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party.
If and when Donald Trump returned to the White House, Vance argued, he
should
“fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the
administrative state, replace them with our people”.
Vance’s words were prophetic because the first days of the second Trump
term have a distinct Coalition Provisional Authority vibe. For those
lucky enough not to remember, the authority was the administration that
George W. Bush and his team put in place after charging heedlessly into
Iraq, convinced that it would be easy to remake a government about which
they knew next to nothing.
It was full of right-wing apparatchiks, some barely out of college, who
were given enormous responsibilities. Six people initially hired for
low-level administrative jobs after sending their resumés to the
conservative Heritage Foundation were assigned to manage Iraq’s $13
billion budget. A social worker who’d served as a director at a
Christian charity was put in charge of rebuilding the healthcare system.
Meanwhile, 50,000 to 100,000 Iraqi government workers, many of whom had
joined the Ba'ath Party only to get their jobs in the first place, were
fired. Schools went without teachers. As Syrus Solo Jin wrote in Time
magazine, budget blunders by overwhelmed novices meant police weren’t
paid on time. The de-Ba’athification that Vance wanted to emulate is
widely seen as a disaster that contributed to the deadly chaos and
instability that followed America’s invasion.
The US government, of course, has yet to be dismantled to the same
extent as Iraq’s, though not for a lack of trying. During the
transition, Trump’s allies used the phrase “shock and awe” – another
throwback to the Iraq War – to describe his plans for the first 100 days.
Soon after taking over, they created a crisis by shutting down huge
segments of federal government spending, though they restarted at least
some payments after a judge slapped them with a court order. Late last
Friday, Elon Musk seized control of the Treasury Department’s payment
system, which disburses trillions of dollars and houses sensitive data
about millions of Americans. Some of the people helping Musk take over
the government – who include, as Wired reported, a half-dozen engineers
between the ages of 19 and 24 – appear to be even less experienced than
the neophytes who staffed the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Republicans cave to Trump, endorse contentious picks for cabinet
Employees at the General Services Administration, which manages office
space, transportation and technology for the federal government, told
Wired that Edward Coristine, a recent high-school graduate who spent
three months at Musk’s company Neuralink, has been on calls where
“workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their
jobs”. Another young member of Musk’s team, a software engineer named
Gavin Kliger, set out an email to USAID employees informing them that
the headquarters had been closed and they shouldn’t come in. Musk said
he’s “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”.
At the Department of Education, employees have been put on leave for
doing diversity training sessions that their managers recommended, and
The Washington Post reports that Trump will soon begin dismantling the
department altogether. More than 1000 people at the Environmental
Protection Agency who work on issues such as climate change and reducing
pollution have been told they could be fired imminently.
Trump’s lackeys are purging the security services. Thousands of FBI
agents are being scrutinised for their work investigating and
prosecuting the January 6 Capitol rioters and, according to The New York
Times, scores or even hundreds of agents could be forced out. Meanwhile,
leading administration jobs are going to cranks and fanatics. Darren
Beattie, whom Trump has tapped to be undersecretary for public diplomacy
and public affairs, wrote last year: “Competent white men must be in
charge if you want things to work.”
Many are describing Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy as a coup,
which isn’t quite right. Trump was, alas, elected, and delegated outsize
power to Musk voluntarily. But the reason it feels like a coup is that
we have no precedent for an administration treating its own government
like a hostile territory to be conquered and exploited. In his memoir of
America’s war on Iraq and its aftermath, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad described
being ruled by “young, naive zealots who held unchallenged powers to
reshape Iraq the way their masters wanted. They represented the worst
combination of colonial hubris, racist arrogance and criminal
incompetence.” We’re now getting a taste of that experience.
Trump tells advisers to ‘obliterate’ Iran if he’s assassinated
It’s as if we’ve come full circle. America’s war in Iraq, in addition to
killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destabilising the Middle
East, also set the stage for Trump’s rise by fostering a widespread
sense of distrust and betrayal in the US. Trump, in turn, is imposing on
us a milder version of the careless, unaccountable governance we
installed there. As he does so, jingoist mobs and craven elites are
cheering him on, just as many cheered Bush. Before there was the “Gulf
of America”, there were “freedom fries”.
Eventually, the destruction wrought by this new regime will be
undeniable, even to some of its supporters. But breaking a country,
unfortunately, is a lot easier than putting it back together.