Day One

There was the traditional pomp and circumstance. The Democrats joined in because they are currently the party of “respecting norms,” still pretending this is an ordinary transition of power. The representatives of the oligarchy sat in the front row seats they had bought, so trump could feel like maybe he was part of their clique. trump loves a good ceremony with himself at the center, but maybe he believes in some god just a little (or maybe just in case), because when it came time to falsely swear his oath of office, he “forgot” to place his hand on the two Bibles Melania brought forward for that purpose. (If you’re not going to swear on a Bible, you might as well have two of them, I guess.)

There was a flurry of the expected Executive Orders, repealing all Biden Executive Orders, withdrawing us from the Paris Climate Accords (not officially a treaty, which would have been ratified by the Senate, like the Panama Canal Treaty was, and then not subject to the whims of the Executive Branch) and pardoning his insurrectionist private army. He renamed Denali to Mt. McKinley (because he found out that McKinley liked tariffs too!) and suggested maybe we could find other things to name for Native Americans instead, and renamed the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. (That actually happened by Executive Order today. But I still call X Twitter, so I figure I will stay with the names I grew up with.) He suggested extraordinarily repressive actions would be taken against immigrants while surrounded by his children, whose mothers are immigrants, flanked by his Vice President whose wife is the daughter of immigrants, and citing in his inaugural speech great accomplishments of Americans that were in fact mostly reliant on the accomplishments of immigrants or non-Americans (“harnessed electricity [Thomas Edison, son of Canadian father, and Nikola Tesla, Serbian immigrant], split the atom [largely the work of Ernest Rutherford of New Zealand, Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, Albert Einstein of Austria and Enrico Fermi of Italy], launched mankind into the heavens [thanks to the pioneering work of Wehrner Von Braun of Germany] and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand [relying on the technology of the World Wide Web, invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee].”

But there were three other things he did that will get less (or maybe no) attention that he did by Executive Order to seize power or consolidate power under him, so let’s look at those:

1. In creating the actual “Department of Government Efficiency”—Elon Musk’s foothold in the administration—he gave it one very interesting power. He required that the heads of all agencies in the federal government give this newly created department “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” That is what he is giving Elon Musk access to—all of the information contained in any government agency or department. If I were Elon, I would consider the millions spent on getting to that position well worth the price. What other private citizen, with no public accountability, gets unfettered access to all government information, including, perhaps, information about the various government investigations pending against him….

2. Several of the Executive Orders institute “states of emergency”—like at the southern border or with respect to the energy sector. Pay attention to these. The reason for declaring them are pure pretext (there is no “invasion” at the southern border—illegal crossings are at a five year low, and there is no national security issue regarding energy—we are a net exporter of oil and gas.) But once a “state of emergency” is declared, it gives the President extraordinary power to do all kinds of things: deploy troops and the National Guard, seize private bank accounts, take control of public transportation and national communications systems. Every President has declared various states of emergency during their term, but it is worth paying attention to how a self-proclaimed wannabe dictator uses them.

3. He issued an Executive Order regarding the Senior Executive Service, which could prove interesting. As might be expected, virtually all of the workers in government agencies are career civil servants. They serve over multiple terms and act independently of party politics. The most senior of these people are usually just below the agency heads and deputy or assistant heads (whom are generally appointed by the President) and act as sort of liaisons between the political appointees and the lower level workers. During the Carter Administration, the laws organizing the federal civil service were revised and updated, creating the Senior Executive Service in order to “ensure that the executive management of the Government of the United States is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of the Nation and otherwise is of the highest quality.” These senior career officers were insulated from political whims that their agency heads, as political appointees, were subject to, receiving the protection from arbitrary or political dismissal by an incoming administration. By Executive Order, trump is attempting to remove those protections, claiming instead that “[b]ecause SES officials wield significant governmental authority, they must serve at the pleasure of the President.” This is a first (and very important) step in eliminating competent rule-followers from the federal bureaucracy and filling it instead with more sycophants and bootlickers who are either incompetent or corrupt.

So, let’s see where these all go. It’s only Day One. How far can he, and will he, go?