In the first three weeks of his administration, President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely.
It’s all being done with a stop-me-if-you-dare defiance by a president who the first time around felt hemmed in by watchdogs, lawyers and judges tasked with affirming good government and fair play. Now, he seems determined to break those constraints once and for all in a historically unprecedented flex of executive power.
Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer is quoted: “The end goal is to avoid accountability this time. Not just being protected by his party and counting on the public to move on when scandals or problems emerge, but this time by actually removing many of the key figures whose job it is to oversee. .... It’s a much bolder assertion than in his first term, and if successful and if all these figures are removed, you’ll have a combination of an executive branch lacking independent voices that will keep their eye on the ball and then a congressional majority that at least thus far isn’t really going to cause problems for him.”
Ethics in the federal government is now a true oxymoron. Ethics is dead and buried.
Musk is quoted as saying “We are actually trying to be as transparent as possible. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.” Musk was referring to some postings by his team on X as evidence of transparency. But as the NYT points out, Musk’s team operates in secrecy. They surprise federal employees by barging unannounced into agencies to get access to vast amounts of sensitive data.
In all of this, DJT claims that he is just delivering the radical overhaul of the federal government he promised in his campaign. What he fails to say is that his intended radical overhaul was authoritarian and kleptocratic. His dark free speech rhetoric subtly led people to believe that his reforms would be pro-democracy and anti-corruption. This is somewhat like DJT claiming he mentally declassified all the classified government documents he stole and refused to return.
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The NYT reports (not paywalled) about another deeply troubling blast of MAGA damage to respect for truth, democracy and transparency in government:
The billionaire Elon Musk said in an extraordinary Oval Office appearance on Tuesday that he was providing maximum transparency in his government cost-cutting initiative, but offered no evidence for his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been corrupted by cheats and officials who had approved money for “fraudsters.”
The goal is to “restore democracy,” Mr. Musk said. “If the bureaucracy’s in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?”
Among Mr. Musk’s claims, which he offered without providing evidence, was that some officials at the now-gutted U.S. Agency for International Development had been taking “kickbacks.” He said that “quite a few people” in the bureaucracy somehow had “managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position,” without explaining how he had made that assessment. He later claimed that some recipients of Social Security checks were as old as 150.
Musk is quoted as saying “We are actually trying to be as transparent as possible. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization.” Musk was referring to some postings by his team on X as evidence of transparency. But as the NYT points out, Musk’s team operates in secrecy. They surprise federal employees by barging unannounced into agencies to get access to vast amounts of sensitive data.
In another act of secrecy, since Musk is a “special government employee,” DJT says that his financial disclosure filing will not be made public. That is the opposite of transparency. But, it is the epitome of corruption.
In all of this, DJT claims that he is just delivering the radical overhaul of the federal government he promised in his campaign. What he fails to say is that his intended radical overhaul was authoritarian and kleptocratic. His dark free speech rhetoric subtly led people to believe that his reforms would be pro-democracy and anti-corruption. This is somewhat like DJT claiming he mentally declassified all the classified government documents he stole and refused to return.
So, what MAGA delivers so far is secrecy, corruption and allegations of vast criminal activity in government. The allegations are yet not supported by one shred of evidence. That is just like DJT’s completely unsupported allegations of vast vote fraud and criminal activity in the 2020 election. We're still waiting for the Pillow Guy to release all the evidence.
Qs: If Musk’s allegations of vast criminal activity in government are true, should we expect that the DoJ would start dozens or hundreds of investigations and then criminal prosecutions of the criminals? If few or no prosecutions happen, would that constitute solid evidence that Musk is lying? Do MAGA elites lies to the public no longer matter because denying or ignoring inconvenient facts and truths no longer matter because most people still like what DJT is doing?
