Trump II Went On A Weekend Bender The Likes Of Which America Has Never Seen Before
INSIDE: Emil Bove ... Elon Musk ... Brian Driscoll
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
The Calamity Is Upon Us
The lawless events of the past 72 hours accelerated what has since Trump’s second inauguration been the most rapid tear-down of the nation’s constitutional structure that Americans have ever witnessed.
And yet … there’s no reason to think that we have anywhere near a full accounting of what has transpired over the last two weeks. The free and transparent flow of government information to the public is being strangled, making any such accounting increasingly difficult. Fear and uncertainty contributed to a degraded information environment in which rumors were rampant.
At this crucial moment, it is not at all clear that there is sufficient institutional or structural might anywhere in government or the private sector to counter the Trump-Musk anti-constitutional rampage. The Republican-controlled Congress is a cipher; business and industry continues to be a Trump patsy even in the face of an unprovoked trade war that he started over the weekend with devastating tariffs against close allies Canada and Mexico; the federal courts are a question mark at best.
We might get a read as soon as today on whether President Trump will go even more renegade by defying the federal judiciary and daring it to do something about it. Early but incomplete indications are that the Trump administration is at least partly abiding by a federal court injunction blocking the unprecedented spending freeze that OMB purported to initiate a week ago. As ordered, the administration seems to have distributed notice of the injunction throughout government; but there continue to be reports on the ground that the funding spigots remain shut off, especially at USAID and for its contractors.
Priority No. 1: DOJ
Morning Memo continues to be most focused on the purges at the Justice Department, including the FBI. They are part of broader plan to neuter and then co-opt federal law enforcement and prosecutors. Without independent, non-partisan enforcement of the law (both criminal and civil), there is little possibility of accountability for all of the degradations being committed by the Trump administration in other departments and agencies and in the wider world.
Oy, When The FBI Is The Resistance
The developments Friday and into the weekend extended the most serious crisis in the history of the Justice Department:
More than two dozen federal prosecutors in DC who worked on the Jan. 6 cases were terminated by Acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, a political hack brought in from Missouri.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, a member of Trump criminal defense team, ordered the sacking of career FBI agents in top leadership positions both in DC and in select field offices around the county.
Bove also demanded a list of FBI personnel who worked on the Trump criminal cases. A questionnaire was sent out, purportedly bureau-wide, asked FBI personnel to self-report the specific roles they played in the Trump criminal case cases.
The acting FBI director distinguished himself by resisting the most egregious of the moves and communicating transparently to bureau personnel. More on that in a moment.
Real World Harms: USAID
While sacking of the Justice Department is our main focus, it is not where the most immediate harm is being done to the most people. That dubious distinction goes to USAID, which funds programs that project American soft power around the world with health care, education, economic development, and civil society programs, to name just a few of the many categories of USAID work.
USAID funding appears to be cut off either in whole or in part. Reports continue to come in that nonprofits, both at home and abroad, whose work is funded by USAID have had to not just cease providing services but begin to layoff workers due to the funding shutoff.
USAID abruptly closed its DC headquarters today after Elon Musk announced that Trump had agreed to shutter the agency.
President Trump is reportedly planning to exceed his lawful authority by folding USAID into the State Department, without any action from Congress approving such a move.
Elon Musk and his DOGE minions ran amok through USAID all weekend. More on that in a moment.
Real America Harms: HHS
Like at USAID, the spending freeze at HHS is having acute real world impacts on an array of health services and the vendors that provide them. Services have been shuttered, layoffs by contractors have reportedly begun, and the time frame for when funding will resume remains uncertain. We’ll be keeping a close eye on whether the court injunction blocking the spending freeze may start to unlock funds here.
Headline I Could Not Have Imagined 6 Months Ago
Last March I wrote about the unholy alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but I can’t say that I anticipated Musk and his minions having free reign across government, including apparent access to classified and to some of the Treasury Department’s most sensitive processes and procedures. The WSJ, perhaps inadvertently captures the dynamic in a headline that feels like it came from a developing nation: “Musk Moves With Lightning Speed to Exert Control Over the Government.” It’s not that different from the spoof headline Garrett Graff came up with as he pretended to write about the weekend’s news as if it were happening abroad.
Elon Musk’s Deranged Weekend
In an unprecedented development, the world’s richest man turned the federal government into his own personal plaything. Using his perch at DOGE to target the Treasury Department’s payment processing system and to threaten to USAID with closure, Musk seemed to be taking his playbook for destroying Twitter and applying to key components of the federal government:
Musk and his team were given unprecedented and legally questionable access to Treasury Department payment systems, with the hare-brained notion that they could cut government spending at the payment processing level.
Spewing disinformation, Musk falsely accused USAID of being a “criminal organization” and said it must “die,” among other things. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk bragged on X/Twitter.
The two top security officials at USAID were put on administrative leave after trying – unsuccessfully – to block Musk’s team from accessing internal systems.
Musk’s team has reportedly locked career staff at OPM out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.
It Takes Guts To Make A Stand
I’m not much for performative resistance, but I’m damn near weepy when people risk their own lives, careers, financial security, and reputations to do the right thing. In the coming weeks, I want to highlight these profiles in courage without mythologizing them, which tends to make it seem like a vainglorious exercise rather than a tough choice made reluctantly:
FBI HQ: Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll sent out a message to the bureau that made clear the purge orders were coming from Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove.
FBI NY: The top FBI agent in NYC, James Dennehy, vowed in an email to staff to “dig in” as he called the FBI’s acting director and acting deputy director Robert C. Kissane “warriors” for defending bureau employees. ““Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy,” Dennehy wrote in the email.
USAID: Director for Security John Vorhees and Deputy Director for Security Brian McGill were both put on leave Saturday night after trying to block Musk’s team from accessing classified information in restricted areas.
So Much More …
The pace of news precludes Morning Memo from flagging every major development. It is painful to have to leave out what’s happening at the National Science Foundation, or the way transgender Americans have been singled out for particular targeting, or the way even government workers who simply attended DEI training have been swept up in the anti-DEI purge.
The Logic of Destruction
Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.
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The criminal intrusion into OPM systems is worse than you stated. Not only does it contain personal information on all federal employees and retirees, it also includes information on anyone who ever applied for a position through USA Jobs, even if they were not ultimately hired.
How about restricting reporting at the Pentagon to OAN and FoxNews? The Pentagon is completely opaque now. I have questions: Are Elon and his college aged techies writing check? Does anyone know? 2. Is Guantamano really being set up for undocumented immigrants? Or for "non patriots," non compliants, etc. 3. Should we stop paying federal taxes? I don't want to be sending money to the college kids and Musk.