This Ain’t The Apprentice. Stop Calling Them Firings. They’re Purges.

INSIDE: Donald Trump ... Elon Musk ... Ed Martin

NEW YORK, NY -May 16: ( MANDATORY CREDIT Bill Tompkins/Getty Images ) Donald Trump, Donald Trumpr, Jr and Ivanka Trump during the Celebrity Apprentice livre season finale on May 16, 2010 in New York City. (Photo by Bill Tompkins/Getty Images)

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

A Purge By Another Name Is Still A Purge

As we come to the end of the third century week of the second Trump presidency, I want to highlight a failure of language that is subverting the coverage of the lawlessness. It’s so pervasive that you may not have noticed it, and it may already have creeped into the conceptual framework you’re building in your own mind to help explain what is happening in Trump II.

It’s about the purges of civil service employees throughout the federal government.

There is really no such thing as unilateral mass “firings” or “layoffs” in the federal government, and yet most of the coverage headlines Trump’s purges using exactly those words. Unilateral is the key there. Congress can pass laws to cut funding, to eliminate positions, to zero out programs, but it hasn’t. The president is doing this on his own in contravention of the laws Congress has already passed to fund these positions and to give them civil service protections.

Calling them “firings” or “layoffs” when Congress hasn’t voted on them in any way shape or form isn’t just imprecise; it concedes way too much. It bestows a powerfulness and a decisiveness on Trump that he neither has nor deserves. It gives the purges a conclusory gloss of lawfulness when the lawlessness is the whole point.

“Firings” and “layoffs” belong to a different body of language. They’re imported from business and pasted haphazardly on what is going on here. You may have also seen “hostile takeover” imported from the business world. Likewise, the misnomer “buyout” has been used to describe the dubious effort to encourage government workers to retire immediately even though no business would recognize the offer terms as amounting to a buyout.

Business terms provide a totally wrong conceptual framework for the purges underway. The misuse of the terms in turn makes the outcries over what is happening seem to casual observers like what you’d expect with corporate downsizing – self-interested parties decrying what is happening to them – instead of a broader reaction to the multi-front assault of the rule of law.

We may not have an alternative body of language that offers terms as striking and clear in our own minds as firings and layoffs. But if we focus on the power dynamic, on the unilateral component, and on the lawlessness, it may help us refine the language we use which in turn fine tunes our thinking.

In the meantime, “purge” is a splendid word.

The Purge Spreads Across Government

Among the latest developments:

• WSJ: EPA Begins to Put Environmental-Justice Workers On Leave
  WaPo: Trump moves to shutter environmental offices across the government

• WSJ: White House Preparing Order to Cut Thousands of Federal Health Workers

• NYT: “The Trump administration plans to reduce the number of workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development from more than 10,000 to about 290 positions, three people with knowledge of the plans said on Thursday.”

Trump Purports To Fire FEC Chair

Trump is not empowered to fire the FEC chair, but he’s trying to do so anyway. FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub says she’s considering her options.

Judge Blocks Trump-Musk Bogus Retirement Offer

A federal judge in Massachusetts has temporarily blocked the Trump-Musk push to encourage the immediate retirement of federal workers.

The New Symbol Of The Resistance: 🥄

Workers at GSA mocked the “Fork in the Road” email – Trump’s bogus immediate retirement offer – by raining down spoon emojis in a group chat during a video meeting. By the next day, they noticed that the spoon emoji had been removed from their videoconferencing platform.

Trump Does Not Have The Authority To Abolish USAID

In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says very clearly what we already know about Trump’s unlawful attack on USAID: “Because Congress established USAID as an independent establishment within the executive branch, the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.”

America’s Epic Self-Own

Samantha Power, who may go down as the last real administrator of USAID, on Trump’s lawless dismantling of the independent agency: “We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in U.S. history.”

Real World Impacts Of Trump’s USAID Sabotage

Again, we know the destruction is the point:

• NYT: Foreign Aid Freeze Leaves Millions Without H.I.V. Treatment

• WaPo: Gutting USAID threatens billions of dollars for U.S. farms

• NYT: The stop-work order on USAID-funded research has left thousands of people around the world with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care.

Who Let The DOGE Out?

Despite the public outcry, Elon Musk’s DOGE team continues to fan out across government:

• DOGE team spotted at the EPA, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Energy.

• CNN confirmed and advanced NYT’s previous reporting that the target of Musk’s team at Treasury was USAID payments.

• TPM’s Josh Marshall: Here’s What Treasury and DOJ Mean By ‘Read-Only’ Access

• WaPo: Elon Musk’s DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts

100% On Brand

WSJ:

A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central-payments system resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics.

Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending, resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

Quote Of The Day

John Ganz, on groyperfication:

… every single person under say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in discord chats, etc. Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right. While mainstream media is still chasing after master figures and hidden intellectuals shaping elite consensus, the real story is that young righties look at the opinions and trends among the groypers as being far more interesting and important than respectable intellectuals. Many young righties in staff and media positions are essentially groypers or seek to emulate them as much as possible.

The Hackiest Hack Who Ever Did Hack

DC acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin never disappoints for sheer buffoonery. After the colossal fail of dismissing Jan. 6 charges against a defendant he was still representing, the court clerk notified him that he can’t withdraw from the case because he failed to renew his admissions and is not in good standing in DC federal court.

TPM On TV

Making Sense Of It All

Brian Beutler offers a structured approach for how to triage the Trump transgressions.

A House Called Tomorrow

At the end of another hard week, perhaps you’ll find some solace as I did when a friend sent me this soul-nourishing poem by Alberto Rios. An excerpt:

You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.

You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward

Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise.

…

All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.

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