You mean like they’ve been doing?
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/05/nx-s1-5318687/usda-fired-federal-employees-probationary-osc-mspb
Oh my goodness. Both your citations support MY post and contradict yours.
From the first:
From the second:
Just as I said: judges have ruled against Mump. But enforcement of their rulings has not occurred.
Maybe it will occur. Maybe all those fired people WILL be getting paychecks.
But they are not doing so yet.
(Nice of you to put in the work to support my position; I remain a bit puzzled as to why you chose to do so, though.)
Don’t think of those examples as the courts enforcing their orders. Think of them as the Trump admin choosing to change course in a way that happens to be in compliance, sorta, but not really.
I know it’s a silly distinction, but I believe it’s important. Trump illegally fired hundreds of key officials, thousands of probationary employees, and thousands more are getting RIFed. How many has he rehired? A few dozen? Possibly, although as above, maybe not even?
Does this seem like a situation where the courts are being respected?
Eta: The DoD hadn’t started firing probies when the court order went into effect, and so technically that agency wasn’t bound by the ruling. It would have been, though. It even came up in the hearing. Did they stop firing DoD probies because a judge made it clear it wouldn’t be legal?
Nope.
We’ll see.
My understanding is that it’s not like Trump/Musk said “OK, we lost, we respect the court ruling, bring them back”.
They went to court and basically claimed that OPM never told these agencies that they had to terminate their probationary employees, they merely recommended it.
But then a court ruled that couldn’t do the thing they did but said they didn’t do, and ordered them to rescind the memo that told the agencies to do the thing it totally didn’t tell them to do. Team Trump is brazenly bullshitting the courts at this point.
Anyway, after all of this, the head of the NSF (who has more backbone than most of these guys), went ahead and reinstated his employees based on the court ruling, without any guidance from the Trump/Musk OPM.
I expect he will soon be fired and replaced with someone that will obey the totally voluntary guidance, and the employees will be fired again. If not, they still stand a good chance of being laid off in the upcoming Reduction In Force (RIF).
So, 6 weeks in we have a guardrail that is still hanging on by a thread after being assaulted for the first time. I fail to see this as evidence that they’ll hold for the next 4 years.
My apologies for the mixed metaphor.
My biggest issue with anybody looking solely at or toward either of the extremes:
- “He’s a competent and benevolent leader who’s well on his way to Making America Great Again!” vs.
- “He’s Godzilla on bath salts and this time he’s going to wipe out the entire globe and nothing and nobody can stop him!”
is that it tends to distract from the actual actions, actual Court decisions, actual policies, and the actual shift of both the Overton window and the continuum between Democracy and Autocracy.
Don’t miss the forest for the trees, and definitely don’t miss the forest because you think it’s cute that somebody carved “JM + DL” inside the shape of a Valentine’s ‘heart’ in the bark of a single tree.
It’s a bit like an NBA basketball game: no matter how good the dominant team is, the other team is gonna’ get some points on the board, too. It’s a fait accompli.
[Ann_Hedonia isn’t the only one who can mix mettaphors, dammit!]
“Yes, the base got overrun and destroyed but let’s focus on the Zergs we did kill along the way.”
He’s immediately alienated Canada by threatening, numerous times, to crush our economy, along with “jokes” (that we’re taking bloody seriously) about annexing us; and he’s rapidly alienating Europe (if he hasn’t already) and I suspect that that Europe and Canada are preparing to go it alone, without the US.
As well, in addition to doing this to protect our own interests, we will need to do this to support Ukraine.
There will be four years of this, by which point the damage could be irrecoverable:
Notwithstanding the Godzilla hyperbole, for those of us outside of the US, this is scary, unpredictable shit with unpredictable consequences.
You and I are in – as they say – ‘violent agreement.’
Putting the hyperbole aside is really the point. There is plenty going on right here, right now that merits our attention, consideration, and understanding.
And any who might believe that the worst of his ‘brain on speakerphone’ ideas … even if they never translate into action … don’t exact significant economic consequences and an unquantifiable-but-substantial human toll … really aren’t paying attention.
Same with endless threats followed by carrying out some measure of those threats followed by backing down on those threats.
I’ve posted elsewhere:
How I’m seeing Trump’s general approach to governing and foreign policy:
Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.
Does it ever yield results? Sure. And a blowtorch can be an effective treatment for athlete’s foot.
Some of you would make great magas with your unwavering faith in Trump’s omnipotence.
He does have half the bloody country on his side. And he doesn’t give a shit about rules, laws, standards, tradition, alliances, or reputation. Not a good situation. True, he’s not omnipotent. But he’s fucking things up pretty good.
And there’s the exclusive focus on the extreme again – the one that dismisses all the activity taking place in the middle.
And you do it by insulting others? Not cool.
Right. Pointing out that the courts rule against Trump all the time and that he ultimately complies with court orders makes me the extremist, not the people searching for a way to STILL call this a win for Trump and declare that he got everything he wanted and “only” lost a 5-4 ruling so it’s like he won anyway.
There are people on this board who believe in Trump more than the people who actually voted for him.
Actually, I’m one of these people that believes it’s not really about Trump at all.
It’s about a Christian facist takeover of the United States government and more that has been in the works for decades. They have massive funding and broad and deep support and they’ve captured huge vital sectors of the government, including the executive and legislative branches of the government. The judicial branch and the statutorily independent agencies are the last holdouts and they’ve been seriously breached.
The also have the whole-hearted support of a whole bunch of self-serving billionaires, libertarians and grifters of all stripes. Trump isn’t incredibly powerful on his own ( witness his 1st term ), his strength comes from the larger forces behind him. On his own, he’s a clown.
He’s not so much a leader as he is a mascot, working up the base while parroting policies he barely understands. He’s the face of the movement, the person that emboldened it and rallied the masses behind it, their Katniss Everdeen, as it were. (Apologies to Jennifer Lawrence).
But it’s not about Trump. Trump is old and on his own, he could be easily taken down. It’s the movement that’s propping his regime up that’s dangerous.
Perfectly said. Thank you.
Well said, @Ann_Hedonia .
Also (back to @Smapti )…
I’ll just refer you back to two of my recent posts:
I’ve taken Medicine to task for putting too much emphasis on mortality as the endpoint to be considered in their studies. Death. Putting an outsized focus on death excludes everything short of death that can be unimaginably and irreparably harmful.
You keep saying what sounds to me an awful lot like “Well. He’s alive, isn’t he?” Which glaringly excludes every horror and trauma short of death.
What puzzles me is … why?
I think you’re a person of good faith, so I presume you are well-intended. But I’d wager that you’re doing more harm than good.
People who don’t agree with you aren’t buoyed by your incredibly narrowly focused ‘points,’ and people who are legitimately anxious about the direction in which this President is taking our country, our continent and our world … aren’t likely to be mollified by your ‘assurances.’
And just to amplify what @Ann_Hedonia said:
Trump isn’t Project 2025. He is the vehicle by which – right before our eyes – it is being implemented.
He’s the tool. He’s the useful idiot. He’s the shiny (orange) object meant to distract our attention.
Because this country is doomed if people are convinced that there’s no point in fighting Trump. “The Supreme Court will take his side no matter what and if they don’t he’ll just ignore them anyway” is what he WANTS people to believe because it means that resisting him is pointless, and people here are playing right into it.
Every time his efforts are stymied it needs to be celebrated as a victory instead of plumbing it for reasons to act like he won anyway.
This is probably going even more unnoticed and is more dangerous. Those ‘TechBros’ have a plan, get someone they can exploit elected as a figure-head President and have them appoint one of theirs to actually be the string-puller behind the Oval Office.
Restructure the entire US government in their fantasy of what a technocracy should look like and PROFIT while they wait for the Singularity and immortality.
Oh wait, that’s what’s happening.
That seems to make a couple of statements that probably aren’t fact: 1) that it would be doomed if, 2) that were actually happening.
Having only 85% of one’s current level of pessimism and fatalism about this administration (vs. 100%) doesn’t magically give rise to hundreds of practical, workable, and effective avenues to fight this situation.
And I don’t think you’re bringing anybody in from any kind of proverbial ledge, though you may fancy yourself playing that role.