Latest news with #DepartmentofGovernmentEvil
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Let's Start Talking About Jail Time for Trump and His MAGA Enablers
What's in the water in the state of Maryland? Whatever it is, it's certainly more invigorating than the sewage that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his grandchildren have been swimming in. A few weeks ago, one of the Old Line State's senators, Chris Van Hollen, dropped his gloves to take on President Donald Trump's unlawful banishment and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This week, his House colleague Kweisi Mfume was responding to an administration flirting with suspending the habeas rights of its citizens in stark, but welcome terms. 'It's a damn shame to continue to see what is happening to our nation under the guise of this Trump administration and his Department of Government Evil,' he said. 'He and Elon Musk, really in my opinion, deserve to be arrested and charged with assault on the Constitution.' One of the more unfortunate realities of the Trump era is that to speak the plain truth about it requires you to get over the feeling that you're being shrill or alarmist. 'I know that might sound crazy and ludicrous,' Mfume said, commenting on his call to arrest the president and his pet oligarch. As someone who's spent the past few years issuing Cassandra-like warnings only to watch so many of my ostensible industry peers take a dive, I can relate. But the thing about Cassandra is that she's correct, and so is Mfume. Trump isn't a president. He's the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power. Trump 2.0 has been a remarkable speedrun into lawlessness, a testament to the fact that there might have actually been some adults in the room during his first term. (During which time he still fomented an insurrection and got impeached twice!) Now, freed from those guardrails that were once upstanding, he's rocketed into a new level of infamy. I once held that George W. Bush's reign was much more costly than Trump's. No longer; his return has truly been a thing apart. As TNR's Alex Shephard documented this week, Trump's trip to the Gulf States has been a vertically integrated grift, in which the president has racked up more corrupt enterprises than most politicians manage in their whole careers. This week's skullduggery is, of course, just one brief crime spree among many. Over at The Nation, Jeb Lund lays down the lengthy rap sheet that Trump has written for himself in his first 100 days. The Trump administration has heisted the private data of millions of Americans, unlawfully terminated thousands of federal employees, extorted law firms and businesses and broadcasters; they're gaming the markets, raking in corrupt money with crypto-tokens, kidnapping people and exiling them to foreign prisons without due process, and much much more. As Lund notes: 'The question is not whether Trump and his people committed a crime while you read that last sentence but how many.' It shouldn't come as any surprise that the Trump administration is canceling the FBI's investigations into white-collar criminals. But if these sorts of crimes aren't dramatic enough for you, we could also simply stick with good old-fashioned manslaughter. As TNR's Matt Ford reported this week, one of the hallmarks of Trump's public health policies is that they will kill a lot of children—probably not a surprise given that the aforementioned Kennedy is well known for directing officials in Samoa to run an open-air eugenics experiment that killed 83 kids. 'The net effect of these policy changes,' Ford writes, 'is to make this country a more dangerous place for Americans to give birth and grow up.' Abroad, Trump administration policies have the same eugenicist bent. As TNR contributor James North chronicled, the gutting of PEPFAR—the Bush-era HIV/AIDS intervention that has saved countless lives in Africa and one of the most highly regarded U.S. policies the world over—'has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow.' The administration's approach to PEPFAR is of a piece with a range of policy decisions that will, in the best-case scenario, cede soft-power space to China and others to secure the developing world's regard for stepping into a vacuum and providing humanitarian assistance. The worst-case scenario is, naturally, millions of needless deaths. Back in March, The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof attempted to quantify the harms done by the Trump administration's decimation of foreign aid agencies in terms of lives lost. Here are his calculations: 1.65 million deaths from AIDS, 500,000 from lack of vaccines, 550,000 from lack of food aid, and approximately 300,000 each from lack of malaria and tuberculosis prevention, respectively. This all raises an interesting question: How many people have to die before the word holocaust is in play? I'm not gunning for shock value here, at least not solely. I want to suggest that there is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate. It's an undertaking that will require no small amount of courage, and it will break with a long-standing status quo that has favored the absolution of numerous mortal sins, from the Bush administration's unlawful torture network to Wall Street's ruination of the economy to the many costly foreign misadventures that have feathered the nests of the military industrial complex over the years. The 'look forward, not backward' ways etched into the civic firmament have served us poorly; in retrospect, what we had to look forward to was this exact moment with this perfidious administration. Real accountability is not something I expect will be popular with the rotted mass media and its grotesque aversion to good governance or the wholly out-of-touch pundit class, whose opinions on Trumpian corruption tend to lag years behind most functional adults'. This is where the avatars of 'Let the bad guys off the hook and move on' obtained their intellectual cover over the years. Suffice it to say, they'll like a better world wrought from taking these criminals down and locking them up just fine. But those who want to pursue justice for all those wronged by this administration should expect to be branded as heretical. We hear so much about the 'rule of law' these days. So many people are concerned about it! They just don't know what's going to happen to it. Even among the gravely worried, there is this sense that the 'rule of law' is like a machine someone turned on at some point in the past, which runs in the background of American life like some sort of ambient presence. What the rule of law really is, it turns out, is the sum total of our deeds—and our inaction. The rule of law lives or dies on our willingness to act—occasionally with grim resolve. It's time for people who value justice to screw their courage to the sticking place. This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
USA Today
11-02-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Rockford area residents gather to protest federal cuts, empowerment of Elon Musk
Rockford area residents gather to protest federal cuts, empowerment of Elon Musk Show Caption Hide Caption Indivisible Freeport holds protest against federal goverment's consolidation of power Area residents protested outside the Rockford office's of U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025. Activists in Rockford protested against former President Trump's use of Elon Musk and other tech leaders to oversee federal infrastructure. Protestors voiced concerns about cuts to government programs, access to personal data, and the lack of transparency in the decision-making process. Rep. Darin LaHood, who represents the district, was criticized for not meeting with the activists, and his office did not respond to requests for comment. The protest highlights growing concerns about the influence of private tech companies in government and the potential consequences of shrinking federal agencies. Activists gathered Tuesday outside the Rockford office of U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Dunlap, to protest President Donald Trump's use of an unelected billionaire to gut federal departments and gain access to personal data of Americans. Trump has enlisted Elon Musk and a cadre of his tech gurus to take over federal infrastructure in an apparent effort to shrink the size of government. Jody Coss, chairwoman of the Stephenson County Democratic Party and co-founder of Indivisible Freeport, organized the protest along with the Rockton-based Stateline Indivisible. She said there were multiple reasons for the protest. "I'm protesting the coup that's going on in Washington, D.C.," Coss said. "The fact that Musk is an unelected official that's been granted access to our personal records. The fact that they want to cut Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. The fact that they're hurting our farmers in our area. That's just the tip of the iceberg." More: Rockford mayor: Heating assistance, construction programs jeopardized by Trump freeze LaHood's district stretches from the Bloomington area and Peoria to the Rockford region, the stateline and about half of Stephenson County. Coss said the protest was meant to send a message to LaHood that his constituents aren't happy with the way things are going. There were about 65 activists at the protest. They carried signs that said things such as "Stop Musk, protect the Constitution," "Deport Elon Musk and his flying monkeys," "Department of Government Evil," and "Resist Fascism." Some departments that have been cut had oversight over Musk-owned companies, activists said. LaHood's office personnel refused to meet with activists and declined to schedule an appointment to hear their concerns, Coss told protesters. His office did not respond to an email from the Rockford Register Star seeking comment. At least eight Winnebago County Sheriff's Department deputies observed the protest and encouraged activists not to block the walkway to LaHood's office. The Rev. Violet Johnicker, executive director of Rockford Urban Ministries, said she went to the protest to voice her opposition to recent cuts. She also objects to allowing unelected people like Musk to have access to "much more information than our democratic process allows." "When we heard there were folks gathering to make public statements about the current administration and Congress' drastic and draconian cuts, I felt like I needed to be here," Johnicker said. "I am personally represented by Congressman LaHood, that's the district I live in, and so I have been sending letters and making calls just as many folks have to say that I really oppose the cuts that have been attempted and especially the injustices being attempted against LGBTQ folks." Jeff Kolkey writes about government, economic development and other issues for the Rockford Register Star. He can be reached via email at jkolkey@ and on X @jeffkolkey.
