Let me start with the fact that I hate WaPo, it is ground zero for the waste that mainstream news has become. It started with Woodward & Bernstein. It changed Reporters into Journalists. A Reporter reports the facts with as little bias as possible. A Journalist supplies only the information they want in a manner to get the reader to reach the conclusion the journalist wants, instead of the reader viewing the facts and reaching their own conclusions.
The following is a hissy fit by one of the Karen’s employed by this rag on President Trumps recent actions. Let’s review her whine.
Trump 2.0: The most damaging first two weeks in presidential history
Trump’s second term is all about curtailing government’s power and reach.
Which is something that is in desperate need of taking place.
No president in history has caused more damage to the nation more quickly. As we enter Week 3 of President Donald Trump’s second term, the chaos and disruption of his first look quaint by comparison. The country survived Trump 1.0. Now, it faces a real threat that the harm he inflicts during his second term will be irreparable. The United States’ standing in the world, its ability to keep the country safe, the federal government’s fundamental capacity to operate effectively — all of these will take years to repair, if that can be achieved at all.
Just the opposite, Trumps 1st term saw the highest workforce participation rate the country ever experienced. Never before had minorities and women reached a greater level of prosperity. The economy was booming and we were entering an age of prosperity that we had never experienced. Our standing in the world hadn’t been as strong or safe since the end of WWII.
This column will concentrate on the third piece of that trifecta: efforts to undermine the basic functioning of government. A unifying theme of much of Trump’s activity since Jan. 20 has been his unrelenting and broadscale assault on the federal workforce. In his first term, Trump railed about what he termed the “deep state” and its seeming ability to frustrate his plans. In his second, he has unleashed a no-holds-barred attack on career employees — one designed to punish those who dared to counter him or his allies, to oust or neuter those with years of expertise, and to set the stage for a new spoils system, replacing seasoned, nonpartisan career workers with compliant loyalists.
This is the underlying delusion of the left. The basic function of government is to serve the will of the people as reflected through who the people voted for. They are never supposed to have their own agenda. They are the tools of the Politicians period. The “Deep State” does exist, and not only worked against Trump, it has worked for decades against the will of the American People. As for years of expertise, it’s more like years of corruption. Fauci is a perfect example, he got multi-million dollar rich as a government employee, and needed a “Preemptive Pardon” due to his crimes against the people.
Trump “is destroying whatever gets in the way of what he wants to do,” Max Stier, the normally mild-mannered president of the Partnership for Public Service, told me. “That includes having loyalty be the primary screen for choosing his direct lieutenants and crushing the civil service and converting it into a tool for his private agenda, as opposed to a force for the public good and the rule of law.”
Max Stier is a liar, he lied about Brett Kavanaugh saying “he saw him with his pants down at a drunken dorm party, where friends pushed Kavanaugh’s penis into the hand of a female student”, a proven lie. He runs a group the Partnership for Public Service which grooms leftists for high level government positions loyal to his ideology, not to the American people. The Civil Service she cries for has also been proven to be working against the rule of law, and the good of the people. That is what is being fixed.
Contempt for civil servants — sneering at “unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.” — is not unique to the Trump administration. But Trump 2.0 is unrivaled in its willingness to barrel through the guardrails that have protected government workers since 1883, ignoring legal requirements in its quest to retaliate against some employees and intimidate the rest.
Civil Servants have not had legal protections since 1883, ask all the blacks that were ejected from government service by Woodrow Wilson in the early 1900s, or everyone fired by every President which has been the tradition by the majority of the Presidents when they take office. The Clinton’s and Obama fired 1000s. Even FDR said Government workers should never be allowed to Unionize. This Karen is delusional, and totally lacks historical knowledge.
Trump “is the executive of the executive branch, and, therefore, he has the power to fire anyone within the executive branch that he wishes to,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted. This is manifestly incorrect, like so many other proclamations since Jan. 20, but that does not make it any less bone-chilling.
No it is not incorrect. Everyone in the Executive Branch works and acts under and with the authority of the President. The only proviso to that is Senior Positions go through advise and consent by the Congress. All Power of the Executive Branch resides in the President. That is what it says in the Constitution. There has been no legal challenge to that. The President can hire or fire anyone they choose in the executive branch except the few that go through advise and consent. No Legal Case or Precedent states otherwise.
And it is a piece of a larger presidential power grab. As I laid out shortly after the election, Trump had a detailed road map to enhance executive power: challenging congressional authority to control spending, putting independent agencies under his thumb, seizing control of the civil service, and abusing his authority to install officials through recess appointments rather than having to endure the inconvenience of Senate confirmation.
There is no such thing as an “independent agency”. Every agency in the government works for either the President or Congress for the service of the American People. The authority for Recess Appointments is spelled out in the Constitution. As for spending, I ask where were the columns by this Karen about Biden and Obama’s illegal attempts to create spending such as student loan relief ?
We knew this was coming. Trump and his allies trumpeted their plans during the campaign. Still, I had expected this revolution would take months to unfold. Astonishingly, all but the last of these has already come to pass — and we haven’t seen a showdown over recess appointments for the simple reason that the Senate, with the sole exception of the failed effort to install Matt Gaetz as attorney general, has caved to Trump’s desire to install evidently unqualified candidates in many of the most sensitive positions in government.
This Karen missed the whole point of Trump Trolling everyone with the Gaetz Nomination. Everyone of President Trump’s nominees has been more than qualified for each of their positions, sorry Karen.
The onslaught against government itself has been the most alarming. Some of it involves the operations of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” operating with unclear legal authority as a kind of roving strike force to terrorize the bureaucracy.
An audit of Government waste and efficiency at serving the American People is NOT terrorizing the bureaucracy. It is a task long overdue.
Over the weekend, DOGE operatives forced out a senior Treasury Department official and gained access to the government’s highly sensitive centralized payment system, potentially exposing vast amounts of personnel data. They executed a hostile takeover and the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development, an agency that was established by Congressand that can’t be disappeared without congressional action. “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” the unelected Musk asserted about an entity that provides humanitarian assistance abroad. Reuters reported that DOGE officials “have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.” And, in an echo of Musk’s “fork in the road” email to Twitter employees after he bought the platform, federal workers have been encouraged to resign en masse, with an email offering inducements of questionable legality.
USAID… Created in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, the U.S. Agency for International Development emerged from an effort to separate military and non-military assistance and revamp how the U.S. distributed foreign aid.
Kennedy argued that the U.S., as the wealthiest country on Earth, had a moral and financial obligation to provide foreign aid. It was also politically advantageous to the U.S. to fund projects in poorer countries, he said, to try to prevent the collapse of “existing political and social structures which would inevitably invite the advance of totalitarianism.” It answers directly to the Secretary of State who answers to the President. It is in the Executive Branch, Congress has nothing to do it except providing it funding. This Karen is truely lacking in any knowledge of how our government works.
It’s not just the world’s richest man running amok. Trump wasn’t satisfied with a pair of Day 1 executive orders asserting new authority to fire certain civil servants. And so:
- Trump fired two of three Democratic commissioners on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Democratic chair of the National Labor Relations Board, setting the stage for a constitutional challenge to independent agencies.
- He dismissed at least 15 inspectors general, most of them appointed by him, ignoring the legal requirement that he provide 30 days’ notice to Congress, along with an explanation for his action.
- The Education Department put on administrative leave at least 50 employees who didn’t work directly on diversity, equity and inclusion but belonged to “affinity groups” or attended voluntary training sessions.
- At the Justice Department, the acting attorney general fired more than a dozen career prosecutors who had worked for former special counsel Jack Smith on prosecutions of Trump, crossing a dangerous red line. “Given your significant role in prosecuting the President, I do not believe that the leadership of the Department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” acting attorney general James McHenry informed them.
- Acting at the instructions of the acting deputy attorney general, previously Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an election denier who has represented Jan. 6 defendants, fired about 30 prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the insurrection. The department earlier transferred senior officials in the divisions that oversee civil rights, environmental enforcement, national security and public corruption to a newly created office to take action against sanctuary cities.
- And the acting deputy attorney general ordered the firing of eight senior officials and told the FBI’s acting director to compile a list of all bureau employees assigned to investigate the Jan. 6 attack “to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.” This despite a confirmation hearing pledge from Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to run the bureau, that “all FBI employees will be protected from political retribution.”
None of this is normal. Little of it is legal. All of it is misguided, and that’s a mild term. The damage to the federal workforce is incalculable. Years of expertise down the drain. The ability to recruit talented employees: same. Why would anyone join an operation that treats its workers this way?
All of this is normal with every President except Trump’s first term. Hell the Clinton’s even fired the Travel office to put their own people in place, people who had worked for both Democrat and Republican Administrations. Every bit of it is legal and based on historical precedent. It will be challenged in the Courts due to Karen’s and leftists like Ms. Marcus. It will be interesting to see how SCOTUS rules, since they will have the final say.
The reason to worry about this is not because of unfairness to federal employees, although there is that — it’s because of the debilitating, even dangerous, impact on government operations. Disruption is one thing in Silicon Valley, where the stakes are merely profit and loss. It is quite another when you are talking about a government charged with ensuring the safety of its citizens.
“What is happening right now,” Stier said, “is the destruction of the institution itself.”
And if you think that can be repaired four years from now, ask yourself: If Trump is successful in purging the government of perceived opponents and putting loyalists in their place, would a new Democratic administration politely play by old-school rules — or would it be justified in engaging in a tit-for-tat response?
The damage has already begun, and it will be difficult to reverse.
Poor poor Ms. Marcus. A lunatic leftist Karen working along with all the other hacks at the Post are foaming at the mouth as the Federal Government gets set back into it’s Constitutional limitations. Somewhere the worlds smallest fiddle is playing a lament for her, and her ilk.
By Ruth Marcus Ruth Marcus is an associate editor and columnist for The Post. follow on X@RuthMarcus
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