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Here's a tough and obscure question that recently proved challenging for President Donald J. Trump: when asked during an NBC News "Meet the Press" interview whether he believed that, as president, he needed to uphold the Constitution (forget the pledge in his oath of office to "preserve, protect and defend" that document), his answer couldn't have been more strikingly clear. "I don't know," he said.
If, of course, he had been asked the more obvious and relevant question -- do you believe that, as president, you need to uphold the rule of Donald J. Trump, even if his wishes play havoc with the Constitution? -- you couldn't for a second doubt that his answer would have been a definitive "Yes!" A "Yes!" that might almost instantly have appeared on a Trump meme coin and made him a fortune.
The real question, of course, is whether, by the time his second term in office is over (if it ever is), there even is a Constitution of the United States of America. After all, despite the fact that it was written in the era of slavery, he might still classify it as a DEI document and disappear it as he and his confederates (oops, excuse the misuse of that historical term!) seem right now to be disappearing so much of the American past, including, for instance, the very fact that Benjamin Franklin had once been a slaveholder.
In fact, as TomDispatch regular and historian Karen Greenberg, author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, makes clear today, President Trump (or do I mean an AI-generated Pope Trump?) is intent on making mincemeat of the American past -- and, undoubtedly, any aspect of the American present -- that doesn't please him. And that (sur)reality, in case you hadn't noticed, leaves us in a distinctly new world. Tom
Poof! It's Gone
Disappearing the America We Once Knew
In these first 100-plus days of the nation's 47th presidency, President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk have cast a frightful spell over the country. As if brandishing wands from inside their capes -- poof! -- offices and their employees, responsibilities and aims, norms and policies have simply disappeared. The two have decreed a flurry of acts of dismantlement that span the government, threatening to disappear a broad swath of what once existed, much of it foreshadowed by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for drastically reorganizing and even dismantling government as we know it during a second Trump administration.
To my mind, the recent massive removals of people, data, photos, and documents remind me of the words of Czech novelist Milan Kundera in his classic novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
Dismantling the Institutions
By the middle of March, the new administration had already eliminated dozens of departments and offices, as well as thousands of staff positions, with the supposed goal of "government efficiency." Buyouts, layoffs, reassignments, and a flurry of resignations by those who preferred not to continue working under the new conditions all meant the elimination of tens of thousands of government workers -- more than 121,000, in fact, across 30 agencies. The affected agencies included the Department of Energy, Veterans Affairs, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service, as well as multiple offices within Health and Human Services, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. The Department of Education lost nearly half its staff. And then there was the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). By the end of March, the administration had closed its offices and reduced its staff from approximately 10,000 personnel to 15.
The gutting of such offices and their employees is -- I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn -- expected to cripple significant government services. At the Department of Education, for example, billions of dollars of institutional aid as well as student loans will be affected. Cuts at the Office of Veterans Affairs, which faced one of the largest staff reductions, are predicted to deprive veterans and their families of healthcare services. USAID's end will cut programs that addressed poverty, food insecurity, drug trafficking, and human trafficking globally. At the Department of Health and Human Services, the availability of vaccines, the tracking of infectious diseases, and all too much more are threatened and could, according to the executive director of the American Public Health Association, "totally destroy the infrastructure of the nation's public health system."
But, as novelist Kundera reminds us, the toll won't just be to government officials and the positions they're leaving in the dust of history. The cuts also include a full-scale attack on the past.
Records Gone Missing
As part and parcel of this bureaucratic house-clearing, an unprecedented attack on the records of government agencies has been taking place. Basic facts and figures, until recently found on government websites, are now gone. As I wandered the Internet researching this article, such websites repeatedly sent back this bland but grim message: "The page you're looking for was not found."
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