Interesting Times

Yeesh, but this timeline keeps taking turns for the worse. And by "timeline" I mean "Trump administration." Trump just nominated right-wing podcaster Don Bongino as the deputy director of the FBI. Federal employees face an uncertain Monday after Musk's government-wide email demanding that they list five things they accomplished last week or lost their jobs ("failure to reply is taken as resignation" or some such). Ukraine looks to Europe, which now charts a path ahead with America as adversary rather than ally. The wave of universities suspending PhD applications keeps growing.

 "I would just like to live in less interesting times for a while," one of my friends on Discord said. 

I concur. 

Someone on Bluesky posted that it's like Musk has fixated on the "What do you do here actually" scene from Office Space--and taken it ask a true guide to what most government employees do. That is, they're lazy and/or incompetent wastes of space. Viewing the world through that lens, why not take a machete to the employee rolls? 

We keep seeing and hearing about good, hardworking, and often irreplaceable people losing jobs to the detriment of basic government function. But I don't predict Musk recognizing an error and correcting course. 

I do foresee public outcry growing to the degree that Trump finally throws him under the bus. It would constitute the latest in that signature Trump maneuver: threaten to create a crisis, back down from the threat, and then loudly crow about having solved the crisis. Musk's doing all of this via DOGE serves Trump well. He's coated in plausible deniability for if/when DOGE goes belly-up. (Though how it has avoided getting stalled or stopped after dozens of stories ripping apart its so-called "wall of receipts" about how much it's saved, I don't know.)

I wonder what the tipping point will be? What volume or quality of public outcry would be sufficient to either move the GOP majority into reclaiming Congress's power or--miracle of miracles--cause Trump to flip on Musk? So far, I don't sense the level of "here's how he's causing pain to the people you hate" propaganda necessary to overwhelm the "I voted for Trump, but now my daughter's out of a job!" stories bubbling on social media. But then--I'm not the audience for such propaganda. I'm sure there are lots of useful idiots happy to sing praise hymns to Trump/Musk's genius.

 But still. I know that the competence of totalitarian regimes ("they made the trains run on time") is largely a myth. But I'm still struck by the sheer chaotic amateurism that seems to define Trump 2 so far--amateurism spiked with pettiness, cruelty, and (a Trump constant) whining. To be sure, Trump 2 has already delivered crushing blows to vital sectors of government, research, outreach, and diplomacy. I don't know how our international reputation recovers. We'll be decades repairing the destruction he's wrought in just a month. But it's not hard to imagine a smarter, more coordinated coup rather than the clumsy toddler-smashing-the-tower-of-blocks-and-crying-that-it-falls performance we've witnessed so far.

What really remains to be seen, I guess, is whether a clumsy coup is still coup enough to topple us as a democracy. The stopgaps that we rely on to prevent such collapse--well, they seem muted or absent (with some strong exceptions). 

Interesting times continue, alas.