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Burn it all down

We’ve been building to this moment for a long, long time. The moment when the political right in America literally tries to destroy the federal government.

One way to understand this moment is to understand that “slashing government” has been a rallying cry of the far right for decades. But until lately little happened, even when Republicans held the White House and Congress.

To cite just one example: Then House Speaker Newt Gingrich had a small bore run at eliminating the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities in 1995, and he failed, even while creating a good deal of chaos in the process. Still the urge to “burn it all down” has continued, often featured in conservative rhetoric that specifically targets low income, elderly, minority and health care challenged Americans.

Yet, until Trump’s second term Republicans largely rejected the the idea of killing off much of the federal government. When they actually had the chance to make big cuts by enacting reduction in congressional spending bills they blinked after discovering that every program has a constiuency and ever line in the federal budget is there by virtue of a vote of Congress.

Still, many Republicans never grew tired of feeding the message to their voters that there was way too much government drowning in “waste, fraud and abuse.”

So now we have cut the Forest Service, lay off Social Security workers, cancel grants funding research on disease, stop support for the food banks that feed hungry Americans, deny FEMA assistance to states managing natural disasters, end funding for NOAA that provides storm warning information.

So much waste, fraud and abuse.

It is a lie, but a powerful lie. And an old one, too.

A search for an origin story of the modern Republican Party - and the party’s eventual embrace of Donald Trump and the politics of “burn it all down” - could rightly focus on a conservative young firebrand named Terry Dolan. Dolan was one of the founders, in 1975, of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). He became a power in the post-Nixon conservative movement at the tender age of 25.

I published a book in 2021 - Tuesday Night Massacre - about NCPAC’s aims and tactics, tactics that now constitute much of the playbook of the modern Republican Party.

NCPAC exploited the Supreme Court’s interpretation of post-Watergate campaign finance law that allowed “independent” expenditure committees to raise and spend unlimited money on federal campaigns as long as a committee did not coordinate its efforts with a party or a candidate. Dolan succeeded - barely - in skirting the legal lines around illegal coordination. Yet as I documented in my book on NCPAC’s efforts in several 1980 Senate races, the skirting that had more to do with the failure of the Federal Election Commission to enforce the law than any effort by Dolan to follow the law.

Earlier DOGE Bros

Another NCPAC founder was Roger Stone, Trump pal, convicted felon and self-proclaimed dirty trickster. Charles Black, who became a prominent D.C. lobbyist and later partnered with Paul Manafort, the one-time Trump campaign aide convicted of illegal foreign lobbying, was involved in the creation, as well.

In a way these guys were early versions of Elon Musk’s twenty-something DOGE Bros except that Dolan and his associates were hard core political operatives, not tee-shirt wearing coding geeks. They were determined to do nothing less than take over the Republican Party.

For the most part, with 2016 being the critical election, they succeeded.

Dolan was the front man of NCPAC, attractive, articulate and at times outrageously outspoken. Dolan wisecracked in soundbites. He was available to reporters. And seemed to love the limelight.

When asked about the potential danger of a group like his, Dolan said this in 1980:

“We could be a menace, yes. Ten independent expenditure groups, for example, could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics.”

Dolan understood, long before many others, that independent expenditure campaigns could attack a political target to the benefit of a favored conservative candidate and in doing so allow that candidate to stay above the nasty name calling.

“We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn’t have to do anything, A group like ours could lie through it’s teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.”

Independent expenditure campaigns have become so prevalent in our politics that it seems almost quaint to realize that they barely existed until Dolan and a few like-minded New Right conservatives shaped them into a fundamental tactic of almost every political contest.

In four Senate campaigns in 1980 Dolan perfected the independent expenditure attack, laced with just the kind of conspiracy, grievance and fear that now makes up the overriding message of American conservatism.

As I wrote in Tuesday Night Massacre:

[Dolan] disdained “elites,” was anti-abortion and pro-school prayer, and he discovered that by calling a Democratic politician “an out of touch liberal” and then repeating the phrase often enough, he could turn a once proud political label into a damning slur.

Perhaps the feature Dolan and his running mates share most with the modern GOP is a visceral hatred for government. Long before Trump talked about the “deep state” and all the waste and fraud that he imagines, Dolan was peddling the same line.

As Washington Post reporter Myra MacPherson noted in a profile of Dolan, “his theories often have an interesting simplicity.” His theories, like Trump’s, weren’t smart, but they were simple.

After slashing the federal budget, Dolan proposed that government should spend “99 percent for defense - keep America strong - and 1 percent on delivering the mail. That’s it. Leave us alone.”

Every Democrat, in Dolan’s view, was a free spending radical, every government program was “wasteful,” the social safety net was a “handout” to someone unworthy.

So, “burn it all down.”

At the hight point of his influence, Dolan attacked Democratic senators in 1980 with a toxic mix of anti-elitism, character assassination and flat out lies. George McGovern, the South Dakota Democratic senator, was a decorated World War II bomber pilot, so Dolan impugned his patriotism. McGovern was also a wasteful spender.

Frank Church, an anti-abortion Democrat from Idaho who refused to support a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion, was labeled by Dolan (and others) “a baby killer.” Dolan boasted that Idaho voters would be casting a ballot against Church and not even remembering why. Church was also a wasteful spender.

Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, first elected with Dolan’s help in 1980, is now 91 and chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee. When the influence of NCPAC began to become an issue in Grassley’s campaign against Democrat John Culver, Grassley asked Dolan’s group to leave Iowa, but not until after Culver had been pulverized by an aggressively negative campaign. NCPAC lied through it’s teeth, Grassley largely stayed above the fray and won easily.

Echoing Trump, a major issue in Dolan’s 1980 attacks involved the Panama Canal. Treaties returning control of the canal to Panama were ratified by the Senate in the late 1970’s with bipartisan support, but to hear the New Right - and Ronald Reagan - tell it the treaties were a disgusting concession by sell-out American politicians who were helping advance a Marxist agenda. A give away to a third-rate country.

Above all the NCPAC storyline pushed the evils of government by stoking the grievance of what the group’s pollster called “low information voters.”

Dolan was also instrumental in bringing evangelical Christians firmly into the Republican camp where they have remained, and indeed substantially expanded their influence since 1980.

Today perhaps more than any segment of the American electorate self-described evangelicals embrace the politics of “burn it all down.”

From the latest Pew Research Center survey:

Three-quarters of White evangelicals approve of Trump’s actions to end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in the federal government. The same share approve of Trump’s cuts to federal departments and agencies. And two-thirds of White evangelicals support substantially increased tariffs.

Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican Party is based on a very old playbook. What is different with Trump, however, is that until now not one Republican president, not even Reagan, has so broadly implemented the “burn it all down” approach to government.

While so much of this approach is based on recycled, simple and baseless theories about how government really works that reality apparently matters little to many conservative Americans who seem convinced all government services are a sham that they find terribly unfair.

These voters have long been radicalized by the white hot grievance that Trump and Musk and their enablers are fanning right now - all those lazy, overpaid federal workers doing jobs that don’t need to be done; all that waste and fraud; all those freeloaders on Social Security or Medicaid; all the Marxist indoctrination at liberal colleges; all the fear of people who aren’t like us.

Burn it all down, even if the reasoning doesn’t add up.

Case in point: USAID funding that has been decimated. As yourself - why?

Terry Dolan, the New Right “pit bull,” died in 1986. He was 36 years old. Having grown skeptical that Ronald Reagan, a one-time idol, would push the conservative movement far enough to the right Dolan finally dismissed the Republican Party as “a fraud … a social club where rich people go to pick their noses.”

Language not too far removed from the rhetoric of the House Freedom Caucus or hard right activists who complain of RINO’s - Republicans in Name Only.

Officially Dolan’s cause of death was congestive heart failure, but the underlying cause was AIDS. The irony in that is both profound and sad.

A deeply closeted gay man who almost certainly would have publicly supported the current slashing of AIDS funding at home and around the world, Terry Dolan contributed as much as anyone to the “burn it all down” climate that in the hands of the Trump Administration is today destroying large parts of the federal government.

 

Disappearing delegation

Idaho, that oddly shaped state up in the northwestern corner of the United States, has long been a conservative stronghold. Republicans have dominated the state with minor exceptions since statehouse in 1890.

Although, as my old boss, Cecil Andrus, the last Democratic governor of Idaho, liked to say, “Idaho borders on six states and a foreign country,” politically the state would more comfortably fit in the deep South.

In fact, some Idahoans have long bemoaned the state as “the Mississippi of the northwest” with limited support for public education, perhaps the most dystopian anti-abortion law in the country and ever more cranks and conspiracy theorists in the state legislature.

At the same time the state has a theoretically powerful congressional delegation that could assert itself, but won’t out of fear - fear of the pushback from the White House and fear of the next election.

Here’s a brief case study of a state captured by the politics of Trumpism.

Idaho makes national news for all the wrong reasons, including a bizarre incident recently where a woman was carted out of GOP town hall meeting by six private security guards who were subsequently charged with battery and false imprisonment.

The Idaho GOP has supported the private security guards.

In another recent case a young elementary school teacher in Meridian, Idaho was told to remove an “Everyone is Welcome Here” banner from her classroom. The school board thought the banner was not “neutral.” The story went international.

The outstanding former president of Boise State University, Marlene Tromp, was attacked by the far right from her first day on the job even as she grew enrollment, improved the school’s academic standing and kept BSU football on the national radar. Tromp recently decamped to Vermont, a state likely to embrace her competence and decency. As Kevin Richert wrote in Idaho Education News, Tromp left just as the Idaho Legislature was taking a wack - again - at higher education budgets not to save money but for ideological reasons.

The debate over that budget — and a proposed cut targeting Boise State — offers a fitting epilogue to Tromp’s six years at Idaho’s largest four-year university. Tromp is going out where she came in: at the center of controversy over higher education politics.

On Tuesday, a divided Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee voted to cut Boise State’s budget by $2 million (the University of Idaho faces an identical cut). The cuts are not driven by fiscal necessity. Instead, they are ideological, driven by hardliners hell-bent on extracting a pound of flesh from the universities.

Meanwhile, an Idaho judge recently ordered the state’s showboating attorney general, Raul Labrador, to sit for a deposition related to a lawsuit brought for a whistleblower who alleges wrongful termination. As the Idaho Capital Sun reported:

The judge, in a separate ruling, also sanctioned the Idaho Attorney General’s Office for Labrador’s failure to appear for his previously scheduled deposition. Hours after the deposition was set to occur, the Attorney General’s Office filed a motion for a protective order that sought to stop Labrador from being deposed.

The judge required the office to pay expenses, including attorney fees, related to Labrador’s deposition. He also required the Attorney General’s Office to pay plaintiff’s expenses, including attorney fees, associated with their motion for sanctions.

Labrador, who served in Congress before being elected attorney general, has designs on the Governor’s Office, so, of course, he’s mastered the far right art of performance politics and disruption.

You won’t be surprised to recall that Labrador, while in Congress, lead the far right Republican ouster of then-Speaker John Boehner. In his book about the dysfunctional Congress in that period - American Carnage - journalist Tim Alberta places Labrador in the center of the dysfunction.

And there’s more.

The recently adjourned legislature cut taxes and then redirected state funding from public to private schools, an initial $50 million hit that everyone knows will grow exponentially at the expense of mostly small, rural schools. And to put a bow on the session the legislature declared that a firing squad is the state’s preferred method of execution.

Oh, and the legislature decided it should prescribe the flags that could legally be flown from public buildings, a law apparently aimed at a pride flag flying in front of Boise city hall. The attorney general wrote the mayor of Boise a strongly worded letter about the offending flag. The mayor told him to pound sand.

White supremacists and Christian nationalists increasingly influence Idaho politics, while the always very conservative core of traditional Republicans are marginalized. 1

I could go on, but you get the drift. Idaho is the deep south bordering on Canada. The Idaho governor’s name is Little, but it could easily be Huckabee Sanders or Landry.

To paraphrase the great Civil War historian Gary Gallagher, “Idaho joined the Confederacy after the Civil War.”

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Idaho once elected independent minded Democrats as governor (Andrus elected four times), to the Senate (Frank Church for four terms) and to the House of Representatives (Larry LaRocco, Richard Stallings and Walt Minnick) in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

No more.

The Trumpified Republican Party is fully in charge of Idaho and no where does that influence show more than in the state’s all-Republican congressional delegation.

The delegation features three long-tenured lawmakers - two Senate committee chairs and a House appropriations “cardinal” - who could exercise real clout if they chose to do so.

That they don’t is really the story of the Republican Party in Congress, complete acceptance of what the White House offers up on a daily basis and genuinely cowed into never questioning let alone challenging Trump and the MAGA gossip.

So, do a thought experiment with me and consider what has been happening over the last 10 days or so and then consider just how completely the Idaho congressional delegation has vanished.

Poof.

President Donald Trump’s madcap tariff policy, complete with the daily reversals and contradictions, has caused wild gyrations in world and U.S. markets. The S&P 500, as a result, is down nearly 15% since Trump took office. The dollar is weaker. Recession fears are stronger. This week, CEOs from stores like Home Depot, Target and Walmart warned Trump that tariff chaos is affecting supply chains and soon many store shelves will be empty. Trump attacked — again — Jerome Powell, chairperson of the Federal Reserve, before backing off when the attack further spooked the markets.

The market fits and starts have created, as numerous news organizations have reported, enormous opportunities for insider trading. A quiet heads up that Trump is going to post a change in direction on social media is a signal to act in the markets. Trump himself issued such an advisory recently before pausing some of his tariff actions. Some folks undoubtedly, and illegally, made out like bandits.

Trump is personally benefiting from the increasingly unregulated crypto market. Now he’s inviting the biggest owners of his own memecoin to an exclusive dinner at his Virginia golf club, followed by tours of the White House. In short: Buy the Trump crypto, put money into the president’s pocket and get direct access to him.

“This is really incredible,” Corey Frayer, who oversaw crypto policy for the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration, told the New York Times. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.”

It’s an unprecedented level of presidential corruption that makes Bill Clinton’s invitations to spend a night in the Lincoln Bedroom look almost quaint by comparison.

News also broke this week that Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News weekend host who now occupies a big office in the Pentagon, shared operational details of a U.S. military strike in Yemen with his wife, his brother and his lawyer, again using an insecure Signal messaging app. Some of the information was originally transmitted to Hegseth by secure channels, as is appropriate, by the top U.S. general in the Middle East. The president again defended Hegseth.

A NATO official was quoted by Politico as saying: “Did Putin write this for him?” when Trump unveiled his latest “peace” plan for Ukraine. The plan is widely seen in Europe is a gold-plated gift to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, Trump bashed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for refusing to accept Putin’s demand that Ukraine accept Russian annexation of Crimea, while handing Russia its territorial gains and removing sanctions against the brutal regime.

“The Trump ‘peace’ plan is no such thing; it is an instrument of surrender, and the Ukrainians are unlikely to accept it,” says conservative writer Tom Nichols. All this foreshadows a total U.S. capitulation to the Kremlin.

That’s just a portion of a week’s worth of utter chaos. I will leave for another day what a federal judge termed the “willful” and “bad faith” disregard of court orders related to illegal deportations, the shakedowns of major law firms, threats to Social Security and Medicaid, the administration’s growing efforts to sell off public lands, the ongoing efforts to intimidate American colleges and universities and the widespread — and often illegal and unconstitutional — executive branch dismantling of the federal government.

Amid this vast executive branch disruption — even destruction — of international trade and foreign and domestic policy you might wonder what has happened to the first branch of government, the Article I branch that the Founders believed would be the most important of three co-equal branches of the federal government? The question begs: Does Idaho even have a congressional delegation anymore?

By virtue of longevity if not capability or accomplishment, the all-Republican Idaho delegation, theoretically, has a lot of power and could exercise real influence. That it doesn’t even try explains a great deal about the state of American democracy.

Sen. Mike Crapo is uniquely positioned as chairperson of the Senate Finance Committee to exercise influence over trade policy. What has Crapo done? Well, he did recently say it was a good thing that people were asking questions about tariffs, a response that in a different context might get a young athlete a participation medal. The Constitution gives Congress power over trade policy.

Crapo has punted his power.

Is Crapo happy with the administration’s increasing war on Idaho industries, including agriculture and computer chips? Does the Finance Committee chairperson have any concerns about an unregulated crypto market? Crapo’s committee has broad jurisdiction over many targets of the current administration, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid policy and the Federal Reserve.

How does Crapo feel about a policy that seems certain to replace the U.S. with China as the world’s champion of international trade and stable markets? Does he have anything to say about these issues?

Anything at all?

Sen. James Risch’s position of influence is as chairperson of the Foreign Relations Committee. Risch, once a staunch supporter of Ukraine in its existential struggle against Russia, has gone totally missing other than to twice recently stop consideration of Senate resolutions condemning Putin’s brutal war of aggression. Big change is afoot at the State Department, including a determination to reduce American diplomatic and humanitarian influence across the globe. Does Risch care? Will he even stir himself to conduct a hearing on the administration’s policy? I think we know the answer.

Rep. Mike Simpson has roused himself, more or less, to push back against the sale of public lands. Yet despite his senior position as an appropriator, Simpson seems perfectly fine with executive branch domination over spending.

Does Simpson have anything to say about widespread layoffs of U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management personnel? Does Simpson care that the agricultural college at the University of Idaho had a $59 million grant designed to assist Idaho farmers — the largest in school history — cancelled by the Trump Administration?

Idaho’s other congressman, Russ Fulcher, should really be on milk cartons. He’s not even reached the status of a replacement level backbencher in the House. In his increasingly rare public comments, Fulcher toes the Trumpist line, but must be feeling some heat around the tariff chaos and much else.

As Fulcher told the Coeur d’ Alene Press this week:

“I don’t know if there really is a solid plan,” he said. “That’s not a criticism. But it is creating some uncertainty. I have talked to the president, and I think I know what he’s looking at. It’s a valid vantage point, somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 trillion in foreign investment committed to the U.S.”

From the Trump administration’s perspective, it’s a “huge win,” Fulcher said. But tariffs are putting pressure on Idaho businesses.

That’s “not a criticism” is the weak gruel of a man without a clue or a real reason to be in Congress. But, hey, that’s Idaho.

Co-president Elon Musk has been demanding federal employees provide weekly accountings of what they are doing to earn their salary. Idaho constituents might ask the same of their disappeared congressional delegation.

An honest answer would be: nothing.

Idaho is a case study: Republicans members of Congress in thrall to an increasingly unpopular president supporting presidential policies that are hurting their own voters.

These are not stupid people. But they are frightened people, afraid of a dangerous leader of their own party, afraid of being targeted for speaking out, so afraid that they literally won’t go out in public. None of these elected officials have had a real public appearance in months, even years, afraid they might be asked an awkward question about about our time of chaos, turmoil and unlawfulness.

There is a moral and intellectual rot here deeper than Hells Canyon.

Marc Johnson's column and comments can be found on Substack.

The constitutional crisis is here

The New York Times Sunday night:

The Trump administration on Sunday evening doubled down on its assertion that a federal judge cannot force it to bring back to the United States a Maryland man who was unlawfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador last month.

So this is the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador who the Trump Justice Department admits was illegally deported last month - to El Salvador - and is now being held in a notorious prison in that central American country.

Federal Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland originally ordered the government to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States, presumably so that the U.S. Justice Department could provide evidence that he deserved to be deported rather than merely abducted and then spirited away to a gulag.

That’s the way the system is supposed to work.

The government believes an immigrant, refugee, etc. has done something to warrant deportation so they go to court and make that case. The person in question has a right to “due process” to defend against the government’s charge. None of that happened in the Abrego Garcia case.

When the Trump Administration told Judge Xinis to effectively pound sand the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court then ruled unanimously last week that the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, but cautioned Judge Xinis to act “with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

This less than precise Supreme Court language has become a serious problem in the case, but only because of the incredible bad faith and the willful embrace of illegality by the Trump Administration.

After first essentially telling the judge they couldn’t do anything to get Abrego Garcia out of his Salvadoran hell hole, the administration’s lawyers now say the District court has no power to interfere with the president’s authority to make U.S. foreign policy. This seems to be a suggestion that somehow the president of the United States has determined that holding a man illegally in a foreign jail in a country with a brutal authoritarian leader is all in keeping with the responsible conduct of American foreign policy.

And, of course, an administration that confirms the timing and scope of air attacks on Middle East targets over an insecure Signal app that just happened to include the editor of The Atlantic conjures up some fresh BS about the judiciary interfering “with ongoing diplomatic discussions” that might result in the release of “classified documents.”

Furthermore, the administration argues - very convincing, right - that when the lawyers for Abrego Garcia’s request for more information concerning their client that request amounts to “micromanaging” U.S. foreign relations.

Good lord.

As Politico reported:

The administration continued Sunday to flout a Friday order from Xinis to deliver “daily updates” to the court describing its efforts to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. Sunday’s update from Evan Katz, the assistant director of removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the administration had “no updates” for the judge. A day earlier, in a similarly threadbare update, the administration turned to Michael Kozak, the State Department’s senior bureau official in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, who said Abrego Garcia was still alive in El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

The administration is also bucking demands from Abrego Garcia’s attorneys that officials detail the arrangement to ship hundreds of foreign nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador. One of the Sunday filings insists those details are classified and could be subject to attorney-client and state secrets privileges.

Judge Xinis has a hearing on Tuesday. Wonder how she spent her weekend?

Like so much with the Trump Administration the basic and essential facts of this tremendously disturbing case tend to get lost in a reeking pile of bad faith, gaslighting and malicious intent. The lawyers piling up the bad faith, we should remind ourselves, are charged with representing the American people, but in this case they are actually micromanaging the dictatorial whims of our commander-in-chief and his many enablers.

To wit on the bad faith front:

  • The government admits Abrego Garcia was illegally deported.
  • The administration, it is reported, is paying El Salvador’s government $6 million to lock up around 300 individuals who have been deported in the last month or so. That means the administration has all the contacts, all the leverage, all the authority it needs to do what is simply the right thing and bring Abrego Garcia back.
  • Abrego García, who has three children and has lived in the U.S. for a decade, has never been arrested or accused of a crime and denies any affiliation with the MS-13 gang.
  • Yet, the administration - and it’s lawyers (you really wonder how they live with themselves) - concoct an entirely bad faith argument to do nothing.

The administration is clearly challenging the judicial branch to either back down or ratchet up. What comes next? Nobody knows.

I’m no constitutional lawyer, but I would suggest if we really are headed for a “constitutional crisis” let’s have it out over a man wrongly imprisoned in a foreign country by a government that admits it’s error and then gives the middle finger to what almost any fair minded person would say is a reasonable demand that helps ensure the rights of every individual under our Constitution and laws.

I also don’t know - and suspect the administration doesn’t either - if Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a really bad guy. May he is, may not. But that is not really the pressing issue.

What is clear - and this is a hugely important bedrock principle of our Constitution and the rule of law - is that the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments to the United State Constitution guarantee “due process” to “any person.”

Any person means any person. You, me, Abrego Garcia, Donald Trump, Martha Stewart - anyone. No exceptions. Period.

If it acts like a Constitutional crisis it really is one.

 

Oh, the humanities

The president of the United States is destroying the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a tiny federal agency that has existed since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

The defunding of state humanities councils, including in Idaho, is a pathetically short-sighted move. Even worse it’s part of a comprehensive effort by the administration to further “dumb down” a nation where Donald Trump condescendingly celebrates “the poorly educated.”

Who cares, you might ask, if Elon Musk trashes a little federal agency that people who love history and anthropology value? And what are humanities anyway?

The NEH was created along with the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 by an act of Congress. The legislation said, in part:

“An advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.”

The legislation passed with strong bipartisan congressional support because there was broad agreement with the kind of thinking embodied in the act.

“Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”

Those members of Congress were really “woke” back in 1965.

Full disclosure: I served on the Idaho Humanities Council years ago, chaired the board for many years and also chaired the Federation of State Humanities Councils, the organization that represents the NEH’s state affiliates in Washington. In that capacity I testified – my only time doing so – before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee chaired by Idaho Congressman Mike Simpson. In those days Simpson was a big supporter of NEH (and the Arts), but that was pre-Trump. I can’t guess whether Simpson will oppose the administration’s budget chainsaw.

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My brief remarks back then supported the tiny NEH budget, and I tried to provide a sense of how the Idaho Council – and other state councils – use their federal funding.

For decades, for example, Idaho has sponsored an annual institute for teachers who are provided a modest stipend to do a week-long deep dive into a big subject. The institutes offer mid-career opportunities for teachers to spend time, typically on a college campus, with other teachers learning more about subjects as diverse as Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and the origin and importance of American roots music. The institutes feature fine scholars with deep understand of the subject on offer and the teachers leave the experience with new ideas about how to teach history, literature, religion, art history, law and philosophy.

State councils often sponsor traveling exhibits developed by the Smithsonian. Idaho has always tried to get those exhibits to rural communities in cooperation with local libraries or historical societies.

Councils, including Idaho’s, make small grants to scholars to help defray the cost of research often leading to an advance degree. Teacher can apply for a modest “incentive” grant to develop a class on a particular subject. The Idaho Council organizes a speaker’s bureau that matches speakers with local audiences, a service club, library of senior citizens center, for example. Former Idaho Lt. Governor David Leroy is listed as a current speaker.

A memorable part of my time on the Idaho Council were the annual lectures devoted to the humanities. The lectures began in Boise in 1997 when the celebrated historian of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Stephen Ambrose spoke about his book Undaunted Courage. The great David McCullough came to Idaho to talk about the importance of founding father John Adams. Novelist John Updike read some of his work before a packed house and insisted on visiting the old Idaho penitentiary during his Boise visit.

It's worth noting that the law creating the endowments specify that the governor of each state with a humanities council appoints 25% of the board, which has meant for the last 30 years Republican governors have appointed pretty conservative folks to the board, many who have been involved in GOP politics. Typically board members are educators, community volunteers, business people and folks like me who love history and literature and enjoy the opportunity make meaningful humanities-based opportunities available to everyone.

My experience at the national level provided an opportunity to visit several state councils. The NEH has long required state councils to conduct reviews of their programs and have those programs evaluated by outside observers. I’ll never forget a trip to Jackson, Mississippi for a site visit to the Mississippi Council, where a superb state director, Barbara Carpenter, showed off programs ranging from the history of southern cooking to the state’s fraught racial history. Civility and respect for different views are always at the heart of these efforts.

And the NEH’s inspector general has always been something of a legend given the agency’s scrutiny of state council spending. This is not the place to search for waste, fraud and abuse. It just doesn’t exist.

So, why has the Trump Administration stopped all NEH grant funding to councils in Idaho and every other state? State councils are creating close to home educational and enrichment options for millions of Americans who have, for more than 50 years, enjoyed access to such a rich and broad menu of humanities programs. So why kneecap this very American institution dedicated to learning and civility?

Here’s the New York Times:

The moves at the NEH came a day after all employees at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, another independent federal agency, were put on administrative leave, setting the stage for a potential shutdown. That development drew widespread condemnation from public library supporters in particular, who noted that the agency, which has an annual budget of roughly $290 million, provided a third to half of the budgets of many state library boards.

I admit to being baffled by this action. Why? What constituency benefits? And remember these are dollars specifically authorized by Congress.

The most recent NEH budget was $207 million, less than the cost of three F-18 fighter jets. By contrast, the Washington Post recently calculated that Elon Musk’s various business entities have, over the last 20 years, pulled in $38 billion in federal funding.

So go our priorities.

I’m left to conclude the obvious – the administration is waging a war on intelligence and learning. How else to explain attacks on libraries, colleges, research, the Department of Education, and state humanities councils? No great nation has ever celebrated poor education or a lack of learning.

Sadly, oh so very sadly, we now do just that.

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Send in the clowns

It was inevitable.

The idea that the administration of the federal government could be entrusted to a group of demonstrably unqualified Dunning Krugerites selected only for their ability to display servile loyalty was always a disaster in waiting.

“Signalgate,” the unbelievably incompetent use of unsecure text messaging by Trump administration national security figures who ended up sharing secret information about a military strike in the Middle East with a prominent journalist, is precisely the kind of thing — amazing as it is — that zealous, incompetent hacks are wont to do.

This world-class screw up thankfully didn’t end with the loss of American lives, at least that we know of. But this fiasco will prove to be just the first of a cavalcade of arrogant buffoonery that will ultimately define not the “golden age of America,” as the chaos commander-in-chief calls it, but something resembling a battered bedpan holding our nation’s lost international respect, influence and moral authority.

And because this is the Trump administration, the response was not to accept responsibility for an extremely serious mistake — or to fire someone — but rather to gaslight. By Wednesday afternoon, the administration was still claiming that nothing of operational importance had been shared on an insecure messaging app by the former Fox News weekend host who now sits atop the military chain of command.

“These were sensitive and detailed bits of information that if they had fallen into the hands of the Houthis would have caused them to move in offensive weapons against our pilots,” Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the New York Times in an interview.

Perhaps it’s not all that surprising that an administration headed by a guy who stored state secrets in his bathroom in Florida and once shared secret information with top Russian officials in the Oval Office would so cavalierly treat the safety and security of American fighter pilots.

There is so much in this incredible incident that says so much about not only the individuals on that insecure chat but also underscores the broad free fall on the American far right, a free fall into utter incompetence tightly wrapped in deceitful malevolence.

As the historian Garrett Graff notes, Signalgate provides evidence of at least five scandals that should sink any administration:

1) There was, of course, a massive leak of very sensitive information.

2) Clear evidence of perjury, particularly by Director of National Intelligence Telsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe, who brazenly lied to congressional committees this week.

3) Obvious violations of the law relating to the Federal Records Law. The Signal app was set to erase messages after 30 days, a violation of the law.

4) A federal government information technology failure of the first order. Who else not yet known to us was listening in or, thanks to this mess, now has greater insight into how these clownish people handle decision-making and sensitive information?

5) Likely war crimes violations. As Graff wrote, “Reporting at the time last weekend estimated that the U.S. attack discussed in the Signal group chat killed about 31 people, and now the new group chat screenshots (released by The Atlantic) gives us some fresh perspective, including this: We have clear documentary evidence of U.S. officials targeting an entire civilian building to kill a single target.”

If you study the documentary evidence carefully — evidence we have because the president’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, added a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to the group chat — you’ll be struck by the shallowness of the decision-making that launched airstrikes that killed civilians and put American military personnel in harm’s way.

The chat reads like a bunch of hormone-raging teenage boys talking macho while playacting at incredibly serious jobs. Rather than snapping towels in a locker room, these MAGA Bros are launching drones and dispatching F-18s.

On the afternoon of the U.S. attack on Yemen, the national security adviser to the president responded to Vice President JD Vance: “Typing too fast. The first target — their top missile guy — we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

Vance responded a minute later: “Excellent.”

Earlier in the exchange of messages, it wasn’t altogether clear that these profoundly unserious people really knew the intent of the president, who naturally initially denied any knowledge of the entire screw-up and then quickly pivoted to more gaslighting.

The Republican senators who voted to confirm people like Gabbard and Ratcliffe and continue to whistle past the national graveyard own this unfathomable chaos. Saying, as most of them did, that incompetent, unserious, careless and unqualified people were suitable for such important responsibilities because “the president is entitled to his team” looks increasingly like a death wish, a political death wish and we can pray not a death wish for all that America has stood for in the post-war world.

In the 71 days he’s been in office, Donald Trump has caved to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, displayed utter disdain for our NATO allies, precipitated a profoundly stupid fight with Canada, threatened Greenland and Panama, floated the idea of forced relocation in Gaza in order to build a resort, set off a global trade war that has shaken markets and driven down consumer confidence, destroyed — or tried to destroy — vast parts of the federal government, shut down world-class health research, worsened a measles outbreak, caused numerous countries to issue travel warnings about visiting the U.S. and complained about his portrait in the Colorado state Capitol.

I’m just not used to the United States being the laughingstock of the world.

I’ve long thought this second version of the Trump administration would unravel very quickly and in very many ways. But frankly, the speed and scope of the unraveling is a surprise. And I can’t help but think how much the boys in the Kremlin and in Beijing are enjoying the unraveling. Every day they laugh at this chaos and, of course, benefit from it.

Send in the clowns. Don’t bother, they’re here.

 

From Church to Risch

On Feb. 17, 1965, Frank Church, a 41-year-old United States senator from Idaho, became one of the first senators to openly question U.S. policy in Vietnam. On that same day, George McGovern, a 42-year-old senator from South Dakota, expressed similar reservations. The Senate speeches were reported, among other places, on the front page of the New York Times under a headline “Johnson Asserts U.S. Will Persist in Vietnam Policy.”

In their Senate speeches, Church and McGovern warned against the administration of President Lyndon Johnson becoming involved in what each correctly viewed as a post-colonial war of national liberation. Vietnam was, in fact, of little strategic importance to the United States. As the war intensified over the next 10 years, criticism of Church and McGovern increased, even as others joined their critique of what famed journalist David Halberstam pronounced at the time “a quagmire.”

The Senate action by Church and McGovern, Democrats from traditionally Republican states, marked the beginning of what became a sustained debate in Congress of Vietnam policy. That debate ultimately spilled over to street protests in many cities and on the campuses of its colleges. Pursuing the war would eventually claim more than 58,000 Americans and as many as 2 million Vietnamese.

Sixty years later, the historical consensus holds that Church and McGovern were right about both the war and Vietnam’s lack of strategic importance to the United States. Yet, political prescience aside, and measured against the fraught and divided politics of the country today, what remains fundamentally important about the stands made by the two was their principled criticism of the policy of a president of their own party.

Privately and with selective leaks to reporters, Johnson berated both senators for their stand. “But Frank Church spoke out,” as the Washington Post noted in Church’s obituary in 1984, “even as joking staffers wondered when President Johnson would send the Army Corps of Engineers to begin dismantling Idaho’s dams.”

Johnson viewed the young Idaho senator as a protégé and had engineered Church’s appointment to the Foreign Relations Committee, a plum assignment then that has become less plummy in our time. Johnson used the celebrated “Johnson treatment” on both the senator and his wife, Bethine, flattering, cajoling, praising, threatening, while always angling for public support.

When Johnson campaigned in Boise in 1964, he laid it on particularly thick, calling Church, “your eloquent and able young senator and his charming wife who helps Frank do such a good job.”

“I have always agreed with the people of Idaho on your choice of Churches,” Johnson said. “There is no senator that Washington respects more, and none that the nation needs more, and none that your president values more, than Frank Church.”

Yet, weeks later Church was pointing out the flaws in Johnson’s Vietnam policy and suffering for doing so. As his dissent became more intense, Vietnam became a central issue in Church’s reelection in 1968. His Republican challenger, Congressman George V. Hansen, slashed Church for being a “dove” providing “aid and comfort” to Communists.

Church biographers LeRoy Ashby and Rod Gramer detail the almost slapstick story of a St. Maries dogcatcher, Gene Mileck, who led a recall campaign against Church. Mileck’s efforts were supported by the John Birch Society, the far right of the Idaho Republican Party and wealthy out-of-state millionaires, in large part because of Church’s stand on the war. The recall effort was clearly unconstitutional and eventually collapsed, but the constant attacks on Church took a political toll, even as he proved he could fight back. Using language that might well resonate with some in Idaho today, Church said, “I think the people of Idaho have too much sense to allow this state to be taken over politically and economically by carpetbaggers from California.”

Church would go on to win four terms in the Senate — he defeated Hansen in 1968, winning 60% of the vote — becoming a leading advocate for a foreign policy based not on military intervention in the world’s revolutions but squarely focused on the nation’s vital interests. Church’s historic investigation into the abuses of the nation’s intelligence agencies remains his enduring legacy. Late in his last term, Church assumed the chairpersonship of the Foreign Relations Committee, a lifelong ambition.

Today, the United States faces a foreign policy challenge as existential as Vietnam proved to be in the 1960s: How does the country confront the ambitions of a brutal Russian dictator who aims to recreate much of the former Soviet empire and end American leadership of the most successful military alliance in the history of the world?

While the circumstances of America’s role in Vietnam and its posture in Ukraine are vastly different, the role of the United States Senate in helping shape American policy — or at least demanding debate of foreign policy issues — has all but disappeared. And today, another Idahoan helms the Foreign Relations Committee, a position that — would Sen. James Risch use it — could help define and shape U.S. policy in central Europe and elsewhere.

Risch has been silent as the Trump administration has demanded concessions from Ukraine while browbeating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. While Trump wages a tariff war against Canada and threatens Canadian sovereignty, the leader of the Foreign Relations Committee says nothing. Threats to NATO, senseless posturing on Greenland or Panama, nothing prompts the least bit of pushback from Risch.

Risch, who seemed steadfast in support of Ukraine before Trump’s return, might use his position to conduct hearings on U.S. policy, drawing on the expertise and experience of diplomats and military leaders, much as then-Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright did in the 1960s or Church did in the 1970s.

Instead of hearings or speeches or even an interview with a reporter, Risch actually blocked a Senate resolution last week that condemned Russian action and demanded an immediate end to the war. In doing so the Idaho senator’s particular brand of arrogance was on full display, lecturing Sen. Bernie Sanders – the sponsor of the resolution – that he didn’t know what he was talking, while make the preposterous claim that the only person “on the planet” who can end the war in Ukraine is “Donald J. Trump.”

Watch the video of the exchange, but you might consider doing it on an empty stomach.

The senator’s posture is a case study of the dreadful decline of influence of the U.S. Senate as an essential institution shaping the nation’s foreign policy. When Idaho and the nation requires a Church, it has a Risch. History will remember one for independence and another for carrying the briefcase of a president apparently determined to hand Vladimir Putin the first of what is likely to prove to be many victories in the heart of Europe, while frightening and alienating allies that have been with America for decades.

It would be sad if it were not so dangerous.

 

The Putinization of America

Vladimir Putin has the United States right where he wants us.

Putin, who learned his brutal craft as a top KGB operative in East Germany before reunification, long ago identified Donald Trump as an easy mark. You don’t have to believe the conspiracy notions that Putin has something on our American authoritarian to see — if you care to see — that the one-time Russian spy has orchestrated Trump as well as Dmitri Shostakovich ever orchestrated a symphony.

Putin helped elect Trump the first time in 2016 and again in 2020, assistance that Trump gladly accepted, constituting an act of betrayal of democracy rivaling any other in American history. The Russia hoax, as Trump likes to say, wasn’t.

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee reported in 2020 — confirming the essential findings of special counsel Robert Mueller — that there was “unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” all designed to boost Trump. While much of that Senate report remains secret, it contains clear and compelling evidence of Russian interference then and now. Of course, the beneficiary of Russian help has repeatedly sided with Putin against the evidence of American intelligence agencies, while his then-attorney general, William Barr, wildly mischaracterized Mueller’s report.

“It’s Russia, Russia, Russia all over again,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin last year. “But they don’t look at China and they don’t look at Iran. They look at Russia. I don’t know what it is with poor Russia.”

Poor Russia.

Remember, before it recedes further in the avalanche of Trumpian disinformation and lies, the Helsinki summit with Putin in 2018. “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” Trump said during an infamous news conference where he sided with a dictator against his own government.

“No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant,” the late Republican Sen. John McCain said at the time.

Never before, until that recent meeting in the White House.

“You’ve got to be more thankful because let me tell you, you don’t have the cards,” Trump ranted at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. “With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don’t have any cards.”

That meeting will be recorded as the moment the United States of America joined the enemies of democracy; a reality confirmed by the Kremlin.

“The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. “This largely aligns with our vision.”

“Even though anyone with eyes could see this coming, Donald Trump’s recent moves with regard to Ukraine and Russia come as a huge blow,” writes political scientist Francis Fukuyama. “We are in the midst of a global fight between Western liberal democracy and authoritarian government, and in this fight, the United States has just switched sides and signed up with the authoritarian camp.”

The online site Political Wire tallied the Putinization of America:

“The last two weeks alone offer a damning case study:

“The U.S. voted with Russia and other authoritarian-leaning nations to oppose a U.N. resolution condemning Russia’s ‘aggression’ in Ukraine.

“Trump openly called for elections in Ukraine — despite the ongoing war — and he floated the idea that Zelenskyy might need to be replaced.

“After already slow-walking military aid, Trump outright suspended weapons shipments to Ukraine.

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly ordered U.S. Cyber Command to halt offensive cyber and information operations against Russia.

“The White House directed the Treasury and State Departments to identify Russian sanctions that could be lifted under the guise of ‘improving relations.’

“And that’s just the last two weeks.”

And what concessions has Trump demanded of Putin?

The international affairs think tank Chatham House says zero: “In sum, Putin has ceded nothing — territory, claims on territory or force posture. He has denied everything, and been blamed for nothing.”

The real issue here is not the disgustingly boorish Oval Office behavior of Trump and Vice President JD Vance, and certainly not the pushback provided by Zelenskyy, but rather what national security interest is being served by the U.S. joining the bad guys.

Some Americans, particularly among Trump supporters, may be unaware that something very similar to Trump’s capitulation to Putin happened in the run-up to World War II.

Adolf Hitler, like Putin today an equivalent 1930s threat to Europe and the United States, demanded in 1938 a sizeable chunk of neighboring Czechoslovakia. With bluster and threats of military attack, Britain and France bargained away the area known as the Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslovakia with an ethnic Germany population. The “negotiations” with Hitler took place in Munich without Czech participation — the same formula Trump is pursuing with Putin.

Returning from Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared “peace in our time,” believing that sacrificing a country in the heart of Europe was an easy price to pay to placate a brutal dictator. Less than six months later — March 15, 1939 — Hitler occupied what remained of Czechoslovakia, confident that European democracies would not stop him. Six months later — Sept. 1, 1939 — World War II began when German invaded another neighbor, Poland.

Historical analogies are never perfect, but the symmetry of Britain and France coddling Hitler and Trump empowering Putin is impossible to miss, unless you want to miss it.

Trump says he wants to end the war. Doesn’t everyone? But to what end? Handing Putin a territorial victory after his war crimes? Emboldening China to attack Taiwan? Force longtime European allies who can no longer trust the U.S. to develop their own nuclear deterrent?

As former U.S ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul correctly says: “We need to focus on what America’s national security interests are. And our interests are to be with our European allies. This is catastrophic. What we’re doing by alienating our allies, because as Churchill once said, there’s nothing worse than going to war than going alone. And if we are not with our allies in the long run, it has dire consequences for us, not just in Ukraine. But in Asia as well.”

As Winston Churchill said after Munich, with words that chill the spine yet: “And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup, which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

 

Lies and corruption

A friend recently shared that he’d written Idaho Republican Senator Mike Crapo asking how Crapo had managed to justify Donald Trump’s pardons of every single individual involved in the attack on the U.S Capitol in 2021.

Crapo’s answer to his constituent was so wildly fictitious, so wrapped in the conspiracy of lies around January 6 as to qualify the career politician for a dishonored place in the Tin Foil Hat Hall of Fame.

So permit me to annotate Crapo’s letter before we all slip down the memory hole where he and Trump want us to live.

Crapo wrote:

“Thank you for contacting me about the pardoning of the political prisoners from the protests at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond.


“On January 20, 2025, President Trump pardoned over 1,500 protestors who had been convicted and held in prison following the protests on January 6, 2021.”

This is a bald-faced lie. And the words “political prisoners” and “protests” are Orwellian.

In August 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia – the lead office in investigating and prosecuting individuals involved in the events of January 6 – updated the status of those arrested and charged in nearly all 50 states, noting that 140 police officers had been injured in what Crapo calls a “protest.”

The report included this: “Approximately 547 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 163 individualswho have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.”

The report detailed other charges: assaulting reporters, destruction and theft of public property, “entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds” and being in such space “with a dangerous or deadly weapon.”

At the time of that 2024 report nearly 900 individuals had pled guilty, hundreds more had been judged guilty by a jury and more than 560 had been sentenced to incarceration. More than 125 were on pre-trial release and the U.S. Attorney noted: “The limited number who are detained are generally charged with other felonies; serving sentences in other criminal matters; or have failed to comply with the terms of their pre-trial release.”

The essential details of all this have been confirmed by other reporting, with the New York Times, for example, reporting on a visit to the DC jail by several members of Congress in March 2023 finding that about 20 individuals were incarcerated there.

I should also note that these numbers are not as current as they might be because the Trump Administration has removed this kind of information from government websites.

More from Crapo: “These individuals were often victims of overzealous political prosecution from the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ), which sought to jail political enemies.”

This is sweeping fiction, a lie of monumental historical absurdity. What career federal prosecutors and FBI agents have been investigating was a violent effort to impede an official government action, the counting of Electoral College votes. Contrary to Crapo’s fiction, January 6 was not about jailing political enemies, but rather holding to account hundreds who committed violent acts directed against police officers and government officials, including Crapo.

More from Crapo: “The entire prosecutorial process utilized by the DOJ weaponized judicial power and thus undermined the legitimacy of these arrests.”

Here’s the truth: the only thing undermining “the legitimacy of these arrests” are the lies that politicians like Mike Crapo continue to peddle. Crapo, a Harvard-trained lawyer, even though he hasn’t practiced for years, is technically “an officer of the court,” and as such should be held to account for such blatant misrepresentation of the legal process following January 6.

If Crapo were to use such fictions in defense of a client he could expect to be sanctioned by a judge or the state bar. It need hardly be said, but hundreds of hours of videotape exist that document what happened on January 6, including the vandalizing of the office of Idaho’s other senator, James Risch. The only undermining of the legitimacy of the arrests are lies from politicians.

Crapo continues: “During the 119th Congress, I look forward to working with my colleagues in Congress and President Trump’s DOJ to reinstall confidence in our judicial system. Justice that is not blind to political favor is not justice at all.”

Crapo was writing this demagoguery at the precise moment career federal prosecutors in New York and Washington, DC were resigning en masse to protest a blatantly corrupt “political favor” to the current mayor of New York, Eric Adams.

Adams was indicted in September 2024 for abusing “his position as this City’s highest elected official, and before that as Brooklyn Borough President, to take bribes and solicit illegal campaign contributions. By allegedly taking improper and illegal benefits from foreign nationals—including to allow a Manhattan skyscraper to open without a fire inspection—Adams put the interests of his benefactors, including a foreign official, above those of his constituents.”

But the Trump Justice Department dropped the charges in a patently corrupt quid pro quo with Adams who promised to assist Trump’s plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. The prosecutors who resigned refused to be part of the corruption, but Crapo is, it seems, all in with such corruption.

One prosecutor who quit rather than countenance corruption was 38-year-old Danielle Sassoon, a former clerk to conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a member of the very conservative Federalist Society. Sasson said dropping the case against Adams would set a “breathtaking and dangerous precedent.”

So, the very “confidence” in the justice system that Crapo says he wants to reinstall – he probably meant reinstill – has been torn asunder by a breathtakingly corrupt administration that has installed a cast of government managers whose only important qualification is to be, like the senator, blindly loyal to a convicted felon.

In 2016, as the BBC reported, Danielle Sassoon wrote a tribute to her former boss, Justice Scalia, in which she praised his character, and his legal approach. But she said such qualities were not universal.

“Sometimes, when you peek behind the curtain of power, you suffer a rude awakening,” Sassoon wrote. “What you find is corruption, ego, or a lack of ideals and intellectual heft.”

Indeed.

 

Small, fearful men, and one woman

Donald Trump’s inaugural this week had some of the trappings of the dozens of other times an American president has assumed office, but swearing on a Bible wasn’t among them. Nor was the almost immediate violation of his oath to uphold the Constitution, a solemn promise that lasted about as long as some of his first-term Cabinet members.

It is not constitutional to “suspend” a law passed by Congress and signed by the president, as Trump has done with the TikTok ban. It is not constitutional to effectively suspend a portion of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, which is what Trump has done with an executive order regarding “birthright” citizenship.

Trump, as the writer Jonathan Last observed, began the week acting like a wartime president: “It’s just that he’s going to war against America.”

Or, as political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wrote: “Donald Trump’s biggest campaign promise was to govern as a lawless authoritarian, and on his first day of office he showed everyone that he intends to keep that promise.”

Every authoritarian in the history of the world — and Trump certainly qualifies — requires for his success a cadre of little, characterless, fearful men — always overwhelmingly men — who willingly debase their reputations, their sense of morality, indeed their very identity in service to the authoritarian.

This was a week of behavior and action egregious even by Trump’s authoritarian standards, including especially the unconditional pardons of more than 1,500 Americans convicted or charged for their roles in the Trump-inspired Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. Still, his little, fearful men snapped smartly to attention or, in many cases, simply acted as though pardoning a crowd of police-assaulting thugs was somehow within the mainstream of American democracy. It’s not.

You’re not among the crazy ones if you believe this is appallingly, horribly wrong.

One American who had every possible reason to be outraged was former Washington, D.C., Metropolitan police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and brain injury after being shocked with a Taser by one of the rioters Trump pardoned.

“The only thing going through my mind is that this is what the American people voted for,” Fanone told CNN. “I have been betrayed by my country, and I have been betrayed by those who supported Donald Trump.

“Whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming. And here we are.”

Speaking of small, characterless, fearful men, let’s talk about Idaho Senator James Risch. The criminal who used a Taser on Fanone — his name is Daniel “D.J.” Rodriguez — is the same man who vandalized Risch’s Senate hideaway office on our national day of infamy.

Rodriguez, as the New York Times summarized, “fired the stun gun at Fanone’s neck, twice. He also sprayed a fire extinguisher at the police and shoved a wooden pole at a line of officers.”

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who sentenced Rodriguez to 12 years in prison, called him a “one-man army of hate, attacking police and destroying property” at the Capitol.

Trump pardoned Rodriguez and Risch said not a word, signaling to all the world that the current chairperson of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a ranking member of the Intelligence Committee is nothing more than a fearful, toadying apparatchik for our American authoritarian.

By way of reminder, when NBC reported on the videotape of rioters trashing Risch’s office, the senator was asked why he hadn’t said a word about the personal affront to him – and democracy – from the rioters. “I don’t do interviews on January 6, but thanks,” Risch said.

Imagine an earlier Risch: “I don’t do interviews on South Carolina seceding from the Union,” or “I don’t do interviews on presidents who resign to avoid impeachment, but thanks.”

You can count on one hand the Republicans who, even mildly, expressed disapproval of the Trump pardons. The rest know that criticism would bring down the wrath of Trump just as they know that pardoning leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers markedly increase the chances of more political violence.

If you believe, as Risch has always said — he began his 50-year life in politics as a prosecutor in Idaho’s largest county — that strong laws deterring bad behavior are the foundation of our legal system, then pardons of violent lawbreakers who beat and kill cops is an especially heinous abuse of power.

And before you fall for the false equivalency of “Biden issued pardons, too,” consider the vast difference between what Trump has done and what former President Joe Biden did with protective pardons of people who have been charged with nothing beyond standing up to Trump. Both men have abused the pardon power but for hugely different and not equivalent reasons.

With his pardons Trump has empowered his own “Brownshirts.” Risch and so many other little, fearful men know that with one social media post, Trump can sic his mob on them. And they know he would do just that. So they cower and refuse interviews that might touch on the abysmal abuses of our authoritarian.

Few voices were raised this week in defense of decency, but one slight and very courageous woman did speak. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the leader of the Episcopal diocese of Washington, D.C., spoke directly to Trump at a prayer service: “Let me make one final plea, Mr. President,” Budde said as Trump looked on in apparent discomfort. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and (transgender) children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”

The bishop went on to say that “the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.”

But the cowardly little men of the GOP can’t speak truth to power; indeed they hardly speak at all. Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, to cite just one example, was asked for his reaction to Trump’s pardons. “We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” Thune said.

Thune didn’t bother to add that we have now seen what forward looks like.