Study Your History

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

So, Trump went to West Palm Beach to speak at the TPUSA annual shingdig, or CPAC 1.1, if you will. It was, as one can expect, the same narcoleptic boilerplate that Trump trowels out on a nearly daily basis, the same horseshit of which his mushroom-brained supporters never seem to tire. There were the usual lies: I built 500 miles of border wall (it was more like 47, according to Chris Christie), that Mexico "gave" us 28,000 of their troops ("gave" us 28,000 troops?!), that he spoke with Putin just days ago (Putin may be a lunatic, as well, but he's smart enough not to take calls from a guy who can't do him any favors), etc.

     But there was a special fillip to this one speech. Pundits are calling it his most deranged speech yet, quite an accomplishment, given his political history. And the reason people are calling it so especially deranged is because Trump basically put out a contract on American democracy and the Civil Service itself.

 

     The NY Times, in its typically supine way, is defining this as a call to "increase presidential power". If they're trying to portray this as a legitimate expansion of the powers of the Oval Office, they're doing it wrong. What Trump was proposing was nothing more or less than a fascist takeover of the government, an attempt to quell any and all dissent from within the government even to the point of being able to fire wholesale any civil servant who disagrees with his agenda.

     This would, naturally, upend reforms to the Civil Service that go back to when Teddy Roosevelt ran it in the late 19th century. This isn't a new thing, though. Trump flirted with the idea years ago in the twilight of his purloined office. It was the start of a Civil Service purge that was only stopped by getting fired by over 81,000,000 voters. It would involve a litmus test that obviously would involve questioning the loyalty to whomever is in the Oval Office, in this case, Trump.

     It's a concept that makes Republicans wet and it's called Schedule F, the "F" obviously standing for Fuck You, America. And, according to Trump's original Executive Order, it would “overhaul federal departments and agencies, firing all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus.” Which sounds exactly like some off the cuff remark that Trump would make in a speech at, say, Turning Point USA.

     And this isn't just a Trump wet dream. Ron DeSantis, as one can expect of a book-burning Nazi, is also on board with it. In his book, You're Woke If You Don't Buy This Fucking Book, DeSantis wrote, 

    “Many had hoped that the administration of Donald Trump would rectify this by implementing a plan known as Schedule F, which would recharacterize about fifty thousand federal employees who are engaged in ‘policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating’ as being effectively at-will employees who serve at the pleasure of the president. Thus, the president would be able to terminate federal employees who frustrate his policies, thereby dealing a blow to the idea that the bureaucracy is the fourth branch of government.”

 

I'm Not Fired, You're Fired!

As the 26th president, Teddy Roosevelt, once wrote,

     “Civil service reform is of marked business benefit to the country; it can stand on its merits as a business proposition. But it is much more than a business proposition. Its prime importance lies in the fact that it is the most powerful implement with which to work for the moral regeneration of our public life. No other force so strongly tends to increase the political weight of decent citizens, and to minimize the political activity of the bad.”

    In that succinct paragraph, President Roosevelt shows how and why he still stands head and shoulders above those who only profess to be of his party. Unlike what DeSantis said, no one considers the Civil Service a fourth branch of government because it doesn't legislate, it doesn't adjudicate and it doesn't sign bills into law. In effect, the Civil Service doesn't write high end transformative policy.

    In his brazen promise to destroy our democracy to his mouth-breathing supporters, Trump essentially said if you're a business owner, there won't be a Federal Trade Commission that'll look out for your interests if a monopoly is threatening you. And that's just the start.

   So, you're probably wondering by now, aren't there any guardrails that would keep Trump from essentially taking over the entire federal government? Well, we would hope but, the plain fact is, no one knows what those guardrails would consist of or even if they exist. Remember, in 2019 Trump singlehandedly removed the Bureau of Land Management from Washington to Colorado and told the affected employees that if they wanted to keep their jobs, they'd have to relocate. About 87% of them chose to resign and that was the big idea. Otherwise, there was no earthly reason to move the BLM to Colorado.

     As Nicolle Wallace recently said on MSNBC, she looked and looked and couldn't find one Republican on Capitol Hill who'd called Trump out for his fascist boilerplate at TPUSA. That's attributable to several reasons, starting with fear of his clearly insane base. But they'll once against hitch their wagons to Trump's falling star because they cynically see him as the instrument of their most deeply cherished ambitions. Taking down the Civil Service and turning it into a mere instrument of a strongman's will is just one of them.

     When the aforementioned Teddy Roosevelt had died in January 1919, we'd just ended WWI. A then-unknown German enlisted man named Adolph Hitler, angry and bitterly disillusioned with the war's outcome, had just begun his career in far right activism. Just 14 years, a failed putsch and a brief prison term later, Hitler has risen to the top of the National Socialist Party and became Chancellor through a free and fair election.

     It didn't take Hitler long to burrow and hollow out the German government and press, stuffing it with ideologues and making it subservient to his will and his will only. He, too, took a democratic government, exploited grievance, antisemitism and economic instability to forge the mightiest military force Europe had seen since Napoleon.

     Study your history and vote accordingly. It still has many unlearned lessons to teach. After all, even though he's not renowned for his reading skills, Trump has learned certain lessons of history, lessons we'd all love to forget but, obviously, cannot afford to.