But just as a sanity check: yes, this is pretty bad, particularly co-president Elon Musk's ketamine-fueled raid through the inner sanctum of American's private data and his move-fast-and-break-things purges of what he deems overly liberal agencies like USAID without a shred of legal basis or standing.
My mind is also boggled by the prospect of RFK, Tulsi, Hegseth and Patel let loose on gigantic institutions for which their lack of qualification is the good news. The alcoholism, Putin affiliation, and extreme views are much more insidious. Organizations can run competently under idiots, but not under vindictive crazies.
It's odd, though, that so many knowledgeable people are failing to recognize how old-school a lot of this is. So old-school that it's not the least bit MAGA. I asked Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson:
“Obliterate the federal bureaucracy and privatize everything” is 90s conservatism. Reaganesque, even. When the hell did that re-arise? And why so sneakily? Can you trace it? Or are you as blindsided and confused as I am? There’s nothing harder than to parse tectonic shifts 'in situ'!The trick to being friends with super busy and/or famous people is terseness.
He agreed, noting that the difference this time is the desire for regulatory capture by Elon and the tech bros. I wrote back that it was no more "idealistic" in the 90s, when the purpose was regulatory capture for the Koches. As a true believer back at that time, he may not have appreciated the cold water splash. No reply as yet.
But that's old litigation. The point to remember is that this stuff isn't Trumpian twitchy impulse writ large, like his first term. This is Trump-as-puppet. Project 2025, it seems, is happening, and not as a tangy ribbon, but as a wholesale revolution based on ideas that 80s and 90s movement conservatives barely dared to toy around with.
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