Dictatorship Takes Shape
It's not meant to be in the foreground
Dominance and Submission. Photo by Reuters/Jonathan Drake via Hawaii Tribune-Herald.
There's way too much going on. Two bogus emergencies formally declared, the one at the border and the "energy emergency" about Trump's weird belief that the US doesn't mine enough natural gas, and then I think what you might call a "woke emergency" signaled by his actions in the Justice Department: seen, for instance, in the canceling of ongoing civil rights cases and police department consent decrees.
An ominous restructuring of the department's procedures was reported in today's Guardian in a piece on the DOJ's investigations of the Biden administration, of its "weaponization" of the federal government (read: its investigations of Trump's criminal participation in the January 6 insurrection and in the theft of government documents) and of its "censorship of speech" in the 2020 campaign--the Twitter Files stories attempting to suggest that when Twitter's trust and safety department blocked users from sharing the New York Post's October 14 Hunter Biden laptop story for a full 24 hours before allowing it was what James Comer called
a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents...
in which the company was obeying the dictates of the FBI (it wasn't).
The new wrinkle in these two orders is in the reporting requirements: instead of directing investigators to direct the final reports to the department's office of personal responsibility or its inspector general, which would be the normal procedure, they will go to a political appointee at the White House—the deputy chief of staff for policy, who happens to be Mr. Stephen Miller, resuming the job he took with the first Trump administration in December 2016.
Basically, he's the one who manages the writing of the executive orders in the department of xenophobia, as he was eight years ago (when he managed the new administration's first big fiasco, the Muslim ban), and I don't know what other particular subjects. Then, the attorney general was going to be Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who Miller had served in the Senate for the previous seven years, especially with reference to immigration policy in the ideological framework "nation-state populism" (fascism, basically), helping to stop the 2013 comprehensive immigration bill associated with Marco Rubio; this time, Rubio will be ensconced in Foggy Bottom as secretary of state, Sessions is retired, and the attorney general will be Floridian Pam Bondi, and Miller seems, literally, to have written himself into the key role of mediating directly between DOJ and the president himself, and presumably also between the president and DHS, whose nominal head will be South Dakota's pretty puppy killer Kristi Noem, famous for her hostility to the Indigenous people of her state (she's been personally banned from all nine of SD's Tribal reservations) and a level of corruption and mendacity that are pretty stark by SD standards. But hardly anybody has noticed what a terrible nominee she is, because compared to Pete Hegseth she seems almost normal.
Speaking of Stephen Miller, it would be so much fun to be writing about the literary stylings of the Second Inaugural Address of our 47th president:
As we gather today, our government confronts a crisis of trust. For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair. We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad. It fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens, but provide sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.
"Continuing catalog of catastrophic events"! That's Miller, putting his characteristic mark on the opening, and so is the clunky meaninglessness of the "pillars of our society" getting pictured as actual architectural pillars, "broken, seemingly in complete disrepair." But Trump is there too, with his fantasy "dangerous criminals...from prisons and mental institutions," which Miller is happy to reference (though avoiding the word "asylum").
Then there's this on the Los Angeles wildfires,
raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don’t have a home any longer. That’s interesting, but we can’t let this happen.
No, no, not to the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country! That's so disrespectful! Those wildfires had better learn their place!
And
Today is Martin Luther King Day and his honor, this will be a great honor, but in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.
I thought the Supreme Court said King's dream came true years ago and that's why it would be OK to trash the Voting Rights Act. Note one of those reading disability disasters, as he missed the first word of "in his honor" on first reading, heard himself referring to an imaginary mayor, interpolated "this will be a great honor" to cover it up, and then went back to read it correctly, though without trying to explain what would be a great honor and for whom (sounds like he thinks King should be grateful that Trump deigns to notice him). If I notice more examples, I'll let you know.
But there’s too much going on, as I was saying.
And anyway, it isn't just Miller. He's only the Dapertutto engaged in bringing Trump's fantasies to some simulacrum of reality in his own fields, while Russell Vought, principal author of the Project 2025 document, will do the same for budgetary and tax issues, and former Trump caddy Dan Scavino for presidential memes, I guess. Perhaps John Ratcliffe will be doing a similar job for national security—foreign intelligence and the military—it certainly won't be Tulsi Gabbard who exercises any power. But I bet you ten dollars we'll see the return of Ezra Cohen-Watnick to some quieter position in the Defense Department or the Council on National Intelligence before too long, .
We're watching how a dictatorship is put together, with a cabinet of flashy characters serving as lightning rods, central casting as Trump the TV producer likes to say, whose escapades will attract all the attention, wild misfits like Kennedy and Hegseth, cute girls like Noem and Bondi and Gabbard, true kayfabe celebrities like Oz and Duffy and McMahon, politician-celebrities like Rubio and Stefanik, but what they really have in common is weakness; and the subterranean army of the dictator's own made men, diligent and determined in the service of the capo di tutti capi, Stephen Miller drafting the order that gives him power independent of Bondi and Noem.
Good writeup. About the best I've seen yet in response to a man whose every 15-word sentence begs for a 200-word explanation of the ways in which it is a lie that reveals a dangerously broken psychology. And whose moronic policies and appointments will have endless bad effect.
Did you know he said of Adam Schiff today that the man looks like someone took a baseball bat to his face? Seems to me that one purpose of saying that is to greenlight some lunatic with a baseball bat. This is some real two-bit movie gangster shit.
But for every worrisome development in front of a camera, there's more going on that is not getting attention. A friend of mine in the sciences has reported that since the inauguration, her world has been buzzing with stories of grant panel meetings abruptly ended mid-meeting without explanation, indications that grants will be pulled. Nothing concrete yet -- but then, uncertainty is a key ingredient of dictatorship. I'm hoping *someone* in the CinC's orbit can persuade him that science is crucial to our GDP and global power. The mood, though, among research university professors, is currently one of fear for livelihoods and fear that studies with practical benefits for the country are going to be halted.
"Dictatorship takes shape" should be hyperbole, but you look at the chaos and incompetence taking root, and -- it's just the facts on the ground.
We're all waiting for the rubber to meet the road, for soldiers at the border being given the order to fire, for the show trial indictments, the SCOTUS ruling on the 14th Amendment. For blatantly illegal orders and decisions that force others outside this administration to make a decision. There is no mystery what the Trump administration will do, the mystery is how the country will react.