Goodbye America
By 
For decades Tom Friedman has been the all but official voice of centrist conventional wisdom in this country, so when he talks this way you know things have gone very far indeed: (gift link fixed)
The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.
The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.
Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, the Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer and the U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs? . . .
One of America’s premier cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point revoked last week by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll after Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, posted that Easterly was a Biden-era mole.
Read that sentence again very slowly. The Army secretary, acting on the guidance of a loony Trump acolyte, revoked the teaching appointment of — anyone will tell you — one of America’s most skilled nonpartisan cyberwarriors, herself a graduate of West Point. . . .
That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.
I do think the firing of the BLS head for reporting bad economic numbers is something of a Rubicon moment, in particular because there was zero pushback from anyone in the Republican party in response to this moment of pure Orwellianism. That even somebody like Friedman sees this quite clearly illustrates how far things have gone already.
Getting the country back will require winning elections that Trump is doing his very best to rig, and then using the political power gained to purge the country of everyone associated with the criminal regime that currently controls it. I wish I could believe that the Democratic party is anywhere close to finding the resolve to undertake the latter task, assuming they even get the chance.