Trump and Musk Are Destroying the Basics of a Healthy Democracy
- Thread starter Knuckle Ball
- Start date
The military expense is madness. But for me, the absolute madness is their healthcare system. Americans enrich insurers like absolutely no country on earth. They have the most perfect hospital and research center yet a very bad mortality rate, worst then Cuba.
The absolute biggest travesty of America is convincing Americans that their healthcare system is great.
Most, if not all, saw biden as a feeble man, who could barely walk up a set of stairs. Many said trump's in cognitive decline when the exact opposite is true. Usa needed trump at this particular time as their cities were descending into lawlessness.
Libs also say the richest man in the world is an idiot when he builds a rocket better than nasa. Imagine if Harris was president right now, the chaos we'd be in.
Libs also say the richest man in the world is an idiot when he builds a rocket better than nasa. Imagine if Harris was president right now, the chaos we'd be in.
Biden could ride a bicycle. Can Trump can?
Musk is a wonderful businessman who will unfortunately lose a lot because he tied up with Trump. All who did lost. Remember Musk has 300 billion tied up to Tesla's stuck. Tesla sales are down 60% in Europe (huge market) in January. Down in China will continue.
Only you would come to a retarded conclusion like that.The will of the people is apparently that they hate immigrants and LGBQ's.
So any system that doesn't put lesbians in jail - or at least fire them from jobs - or allow immigrants in when Western birth rates are now well below replacement levels "completely ignores the will of the people".
I'm more thinking keeping Housing $ sky high for Old People's retirements, eliminating mandatory retirements so deadwood can't be fired, Health Care overwhelmed by old people so the young have to wait months, 100% OAS up to $90K (really? max $152K? You fucking kidding me) and so on and so on.
Keep the young locked out from the upper tiers of wealth and security right?
It's possible, just difficult to say in a two party system, as you know.
Ballots in first past the post are very limited in the expressiveness in general and in a two-party system you always have people voting for only part of the suite of things a candidate is claiming to want to do.
It is a thing we will see play out in public opinion as it goes on.
I expect so.
It isn't like Trump and Musk are going to back off of their attempts to impose autocracy and oligarchy.
As I've said repeatedly, whether Musk and Trump will respect the courts is up in the air.
You're leaving the violence out.
Yes! And when god sent Covid to help to get rid of old people the society hasn’t appreciated it!
I wasn't going to say it but EXACTLY!
Anyone under 45 wasn't in any real danger of dying from COVID. Shut down society so some 80 year olds could live another 4 months longer...
that's their opinion / view and they are entitled to it
Many vs some is your assessment and is open to debate
obviously blind unquestionable obedience to anyone or any ideology is messed up and suggests some mental health assistance maybe required
no doubt most of the loonie left would not choose ''tampons in the men's room'' as the hill to die on.
One must wonder about the sanity / motivation of the nutter that pushed that nonsense. and how nobody with authority said "hold on"
absolute blind unquestionable obedience to Trump or any politician is unhealthy as they will put you in a conflicting position on some issue, if you are capable of thinking for yourself
I agree with Trumps demand for border security as open borders is a ridiculous and dangerous policy.
No doubt some people will get hurt by mass deportations ,but illegal entry is against the law and breaking the law assumes risks
Applying common sense should not get anyone labelled as a traitor to ones country for agreeing with one of his policies, while obviously despising his tariff attacks
a few stupid pricks here jumped to the nasty and ridiculous conclusion: Agree with Trump on anything you must be a traitor
even pointing out Canada's weakness and vulnerability to Tariffs, they jumped to ' you are a traitor, we will put you on a list' " we will fight the invading marines in Canadian streets with Sherwood hockey sticks" , ''you are with me or you are a traitor''
when it comes right down to it, I expect people to apply some common sense
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Trump and Musk are destroying key departments and positions in the guise of cutting fat and saving people money. It was never about making the government more efficient. It has always about removing the checks and balances so that they would be free to do whatever they want to amass more wealth and power.
The bureaucracy is NOT apolitical, State dept, FBI, CIA and DOD are all infested with NEOCONS. Look at how they opposed first Obama and then Trump when they tried to end the Afghan wars or close GITMO. Trump wanted to withdraw from Syria and they flat out disobeyed him. Instead its now under Al Queda and doomed to disaster. Apoltical? NO SUCH THING in US bureaucracy. This is the deep state. Trump was voted in to take it down. He failed first term and came prepared this time. For better or worse, its what he said he will do.Trump and Musk Are Destroying the Basics of a Healthy Democracy
An apolitical bureaucracy run by public servants who respect the law is one of the greatest achievements a society can attain—and these two men have no respect for it.
By Tom NicholsFebruary 5, 2025, 11:46 AM ET
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Roberto Schmidt / AFP / Getty.
Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app.
The institutions of the American government are under siege by the president of the United States. Donald Trump claims that he is fulfilling campaign promises to slash the bureaucracy and reduce waste. But what he is in fact doing is weakening potential obstacles—especially the federal civil service—that might stand in the way of his accumulation of wide and unaccountable power.
No one likes bureaucracies, even if they must acknowledge that modern states cannot function without them. But Trump’s contempt for government employees is not driven by some sort of noble, reformist instinct: He distrusts public service because he does not understand it. The president has a solipsistic and binary view of the world in which everything revolves around him, and other people either support him or oppose him. He is unable to comprehend the principle of an apolitical service that must obey the Constitution and the law over the wishes of Donald J. Trump.
In Trump’s world, service—including military service—is for suckers and losers. Only saps forgo personal benefit and miss out on a chunky payday in order to be part of something bigger than themselves. The president and his MAGA allies, accordingly, have portrayed diligent government employees as schemers who are part of some nefarious ideological project. In a titanic act of projection, Trump has convinced millions of Americans that their fellow citizens are scammers just out for themselves.
I retired from the federal workforce in 2022 with more than 25 years of service in the Defense Department and on the staff of the U.S. Senate. I agree that plenty of agencies and deadwood employees should go gently into that good night, and sooner rather than later. But folding up federal agencies and firing their employees is a complicated business, requiring a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. Only someone with profound hubris would be willing to make such changes in a matter of weeks (especially if they lack any experience in the public sector), which may explain why Trump tapped Elon Musk for the job.
Read: Elon Musk is president
Trump’s project began with an executive order empowering DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” This is stilted hooey, but in any case, the unelected, unconfirmed, and unaccountable Musk took up the cause with gusto, barging into government offices, attempting to access classified facilities, and seizing control of information assets such as the Treasury’s payments system.
Some of this is constitutionally sketchy and probably illegal, as my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote yesterday. Some government employees may, of course, one day prevail in civil lawsuits, but with Trump now in control of the Justice Department and immunized for “official acts” by the Supreme Court, no one in his administration is going to stop him or Musk at this point.
Musk’s role in Trump’s efforts creates significant conflicts of interest. (He is a government contractor, after all.) His motives are somewhat opaque but likely come from both practical and ideological interests, especially because these days he sounds like a late-night caller to a MAGA talk-radio program. (The U.S. Agency for International Development, he posted on X, was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”) And if Musk can seize control of the federal payments system—as he seems to be in the process of doing—perhaps he thinks he is a step closer to fulfilling his dream of replacing the national financial system with some galactic payment app that handles everything.
But, like Trump, Musk also appears to just detest people who work in public service. Both men resent government agencies for two important reasons: They do not own these public institutions, and the employees do not instantly obey their orders.
Federal employees answer to their departments and to the president, but within the constraints of the law and the Constitution. Trump’s supporters will argue that the machinery of the federal government should, in fact, answer directly and completely to the president, but they’re trying to revive a settled argument:America already had the debate over cronyism and the spoils system in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is why the United States has laws specifically meant to prevent the abuse of public institutions for personal or political gain, including the Pendleton Act of 1883, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, and various iterations of the Hatch Act.
Indeed, even this administration seems to realize that what it’s asking is completely alien to the modern American credo of professional and apolitical national service. Trump has resurrected an order he issued back in 2020 (which was immediately rescinded by Joe Biden) with some careful edits. But the new language about “accountability” does not change the fact that Trump’s order reclassifies many civil servants as functionally equivalent to political appointees, removing their civil-service protections and making them fireable at will by the president. In other words, Trump is redefining public servants as presidential servants.
Trump learned the hard way during his first term that bureaucrats and other federal employees, with their pesky insistence on outdated concepts such as “the rule of law,” could be a consistent obstacle to his various machinations. When Trump tried to strong-arm the Ukrainians into investigating Biden by withholding U.S. aid, for example, federal whistleblowers sounded the alarm. Other federal agencies and appointees—including leaders of the United States military—were impediments to Trump’s most dangerous and unconstitutional impulses.
From the November 2023 issue: The patriot
The president appears to have learned his lesson. This time, he has prepared the ground for his attack on government institutions by demonizing the people who work in them at almost every level. He may not be able to disestablish entire organizations (although he might well try), but even short of that, he can make their employees so hated by the rest of the country that they can be terrorized into obedience or resignation. Trump’s campaign against the civil service, as one manager working in the federal government told NBC News, is “psychological warfare” on a daily basis.
Trump’s suspicion of the government he leads is also why he has sent shockingly unqualified nominees to head the Defense Department, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other agencies. Think of it as a kind of political pincer attack: At the top, Trump decapitates important organizations and removes their professional staff. He replaces them with people who do not know or care about what they’re doing other than carrying out Trump’s orders. At the bottom, Musk and the president’s new hires at the Office of Personnel Management ensure that whoever is left is either a loyalist who will support such orders or someone too scared to object to them.
President Trump regards people who take their constitutional oath seriously as, by definition, his political enemies. If he is going to rule as the autocrat he wishes to be, he knows he must replace career civil servants with flunkies and vassals who will serve him and his needs above all else. His attack on public service is not about reform; it’s a first strike against a key obstacle to authoritarianism.
Trump and Musk Are Destroying the Basics of a Healthy Democracy
An apolitical bureaucracy run by public servants who respect the law is one of the greatest achievements a society can attain—and these two men have no respect for it.www.theatlantic.com
The fascist takeover of the US continues; many embrace it.
There is no such thing as a deep state. There is no cabal of nameless, faceless bureaucrats blocking the direct orders of the POTUS.
Show me one single verified case of the “deep state” interfering with the will of POTUS or congress. The troops stayed in Afghanistan because Obama chose to keep them there.
Trump wants to create his own Deep State; that’s why he’s trying to fire everybody he can and replace them with loyalists who won’t rat him out the next time he tries to extort political dirt on an opponent from a foreign leader.
Trump wanted peace with NK.John Bolton goes on the news and suggests the Libyan Formula for denuclearization.. just a coincidence I suppose. lol. And Trump wanted to leave Syria, he issued orders, nothing happened.
The state dept had a 10M bounty on the head of the new Syrian leader, at the same time the CIA was arming him to attack Assad. How does that happen?
destroying key departments ?
so far are they have only been in one agency that focuses on sending money out of the country
long overdue
nobody including govts can continually run deficits and continuously borrow in perpetuity . The lenders start saying " no"
it is incredibly simple mathematics that the left refuses to to even talk about
wrong
so very very wrong
it is about applying checks and balances
check with the average US taxpayer if he / she wants his / her tax dollars being wasted on a transgender pottery and lesbian tree worship festival in El Salvador
the answer is "no" on balance
you keep forgetting / ignoring who's money this is
I believe that we may find out that was the Democrats objective behind their money laundering scheme at USAID
they freaked , but not about the waste, they freaked someone was looking at the money trail
Lets hold off judgment until Musk starts " checking" the "balances" on some other 'Key" departments
you will likely shit your pants when he starts following the ''climate change" money flows
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Who cares. Biden was far less dangerous than maniac Trump.But does Joe know he's riding a bicycle?
And one thing for sure if Trumpy was ever on a bicycle the tires would surely know! What a bad would it be for them!
who did he rape? there was no rape conviction...what was he convicted of felony about?
