A World Without Accountability

As the felonious Trump removes all guardrails, it's our battle to save democracy

When no one will say no. (Photo on Feb. 14 by Andrew Harnik via Getty Images)

The thing is, most of us already assumed Donald Trump was living in a world where he could do just about anything without consequence. Lest we forget, Chief Justice John Roberts and his right-wing supermajority on the Supreme Court made sure of that by handing Trump near-total immunity if he got back into office. Criminal prosecution, oligarchy’s handmaidens worried in their 6-3 ruling, means “the President would be chilled from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive” and cause “hesitation to execute the duties of his office fearlessly and fairly.”

And now, day by accelerating day, without fear or hesitation, Trump and his henchmen have been working to strip away the last of the guardrails and remove the watchdogs and other professionals responsible for minimizing illegal and unethical behavior. We can talk about it in terms of authoritarian control. But this unraveling of controls also fulfills Trump’s sociopathic need to act out his every whim.

The latest display of his commitment to free himself from watchful eyes and criticism came Friday night when he had his obedient Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fire the judge advocates general, better known as JAGs, at the Army, Navy and Air Force. These are the top lawyers, whose work includes prosecutions for war crimes and ensuring the military does not break U.S. law or the rules of battlefield conflict. “If you're going to break the law, the first thing you do is you get rid of the lawyers,” Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed said yesterday on ABC’s This Week.

This move got less attention than Hegseth’s replacement of Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., the über-qualified chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with an obscure retired Air Force three-star general named Dan “Razin” Caine.. It should be no surprise that Caine, a white man, will be replacing Brown, a Black man—demonstrating this regime’s commitment to extinguishing “woke” culture and so-called diversity hires.

That and inserting political stooges who will carry out his will. “Trump wants to make sure that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are 100 percent loyal to him,” Rep. Adam Smith from Washington state told The New York Times, adding, “It is about control and power…What Musk and Trump want more than anything is to be able to do what they want to do, whenever they want to do it, without any check on that power.”

This plan to politicize the military—to strip away top leaders with deep combat experience and battle-tested insights—should be alarming for anyone who worries about national security, troop morale and soldiers carrying out illegal operations. A continuing campaign “to purge talented officers for politically charged reasons,” Sen. Reed said, “would undermine the professionalism of our military and send a chilling message through the ranks.”

Not that Trump cares. He’s got a more important mission to pursue. How can he be a real king if there are people in the government doubting him or, worse, blowing a whistle? The military purge is just the latest elaboration of his plot to squash the possibility that naysayers will question him, including the removal a month ago of some 18 inspectors general at virtually every key government agency.

It’s worth reading what 37 Democratic senators said in a statement about that purge because it came just as Elon Musk and his operatives began rampaging our government’s computers, payment systems and personal databases with the supposed justification that they are looking for waste, fraud and abuse.

The fired inspectors general, wrote the senators on Jan. 31, “collectively conduct oversight of trillions of dollars of federal spending and the conduct of millions of federal employees. Removing these non-partisan watchdogs without providing a substantive and non-political reason is not lawful, and undermines their independence, jeopardizing their critical mission to identify and root out waste, fraud, and abuse within federal programs.”

It seems almost quaint, doesn’t it? After all, we’ve now gotten an ugly blast of what oligarchic, kleptocratic rule includes. These members of the United States Senate understood that we need highly skilled, experienced and independent civil servants to ensure that federal spending and the conduct of federal employees is legal and ethical.

It’s almost hard to grasp that barely three weeks later we would be witnessing the careless dismantling of our government operations by the farcical Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the current pace and level of destruction. This is not to even mention that Musk, clad in sunglasses and a black MAGA hat, seemingly hopped up on ketamine or some upper, was hoisting a chainsaw over his head this weekend at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee conference. “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” Musk yelled, then made some strange, screeching, guttural sound as the CPAC crowd cheered.

Never mind that all Musk and DOGE have done is run roughshod over actual laws and protocols and the power of Congress to determine spending—in short, trampling the Constitution and the rule of law. Never mind that they have also failed to prove they are actually saving the government money by identifying waste, fraud or abuse. The DOGE release of its “Wall of Receipts,” ostensibly showcasing $55 billion in “estimated savings,” is riddled with mistakes. As a team of New York Times reporters found, the math “is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.”

It’s not as if “slapdash accounting” or “a pattern of recklessness” would slow Trump’s real purposes here. He has been making noise about sending taxpayers dividend checks paid for by Musk’s remarkable work. Better to distract the public with ill-gotten gains than reveal his intent to extend his 2017 tax cuts for his ultra-wealthy cronies and corporations, adding more than $4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. These “billionaire tax cuts,” Sen. Chris Murphy said, “just separates the rich from the poor. It is a scam.”

Yes, the circus is back in town. Pretend dividend checks and chainsaws. Complaints about “DEI hires” and “woke culture.” Cries of fraud and abuse while committing fraud and abuse. Whatever it takes to dismantle the government, cut programs that help those most in need, and further enrich the richest among us.

Meanwhile, Trump is busy posting on his Truth Social “Long Live the King” along with an image of himself wearing a crown, firing thousands of civil servants trying to do their jobs, turning the world upside down by abandoning America’s democratic allies, threatening our neighbors with mad, imperialist plans of invasion or takeover, renaming the Gulf of Mexico and banning reporters whose media companies refuse to go along with his name change, calling Ukraine’s courageous president a “dictator”—all while making a list of every concession that he thinks will please the murderous thug in Moscow and end the war in Ukraine.

Recall the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor back in July in her dissenting opinion to the Court’s immunity ruling. “Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law,” she wrote.

But now—thanks to 77 million voters and all the others who stayed home—Donald Trump does. And we shouldn’t doubt that he and his enablers will continue to work aggressively to make it as hard as possible to know when and how often he crosses the line.

Let me leave you with a full picture of Justice Sotomayor’s warning:

The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation…The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sociopath who’s dedicated his life to self-dealing and evading the law, heard the Supreme Court’s message loud and clear. That places the pressure on each of us to do our part to be the guardrails through our voices and our demonstrations and possibly our national strikes in the months that lie ahead.

Please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $50 a year or just $5 a month, if you’re not already. This helps sustain and expand the work of America, America, keeps nearly all the content free for everyone and gives you full access to the comment sections. Building our community has never been more important.