Criminaloids Take Over The Government

The criminaloid is really a borderer between the camps of good and evil, and this is why he is so interesting. To run him to earth and brand him, as long ago pirate and traitor were branded, is the crying need of our time. . . . Every year that sees him pursue in insolent triumph his nefarious career raises up a host of imitators and hurries society toward moral bankruptcy.

These words, written well over 100 years ago by the American economist and sociologist Edward A. Ross¹, speak to our present moment in ways that he would not even have been able to imagine, to a time that he could not ever imagine.

He was writing about what later would become known as white collar criminals, people who broke the laws to their advantage in their professional work in business, politics, the law itself, and elsewhere.  He noticed the way they played subtly between virtue and vice, presenting themselves as avatars of leadership and merit while grossly preying upon others–and even the nation–to further grow both their wealth and power.  And long before his peers and later generations, he saw the connection between uncontrolled “criminaloids” and the end of morality.

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Uncontrolled criminaloids are one thing.    Criminaloids in control of the U.S. Government is another level entirely of corruption and moral decay. 

That the least of the problem is that the newly inaugurated U.S. president is the nation’s first convicted felon in the Oval Office suggests its enormity.² No, the problem is that the President and his people are turning law inside out at a shockingly rapid pace.  They are routinely breaking laws, eliminating the law enforcers, and violating the Constitution.  They aim to remove the checks and balances on the President’s powers.  They mean to enable corruption at the highest levels of government and business.

That is, they are working to eviscerate the rule of law and, hence, American democracy itself.  They do so for self-enrichment at the expense of all other citizens.  Less than a month in office, Trump claimed that he is above the law: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”  No irony intended there.

This is the talk of autocrats.  Of monarchs.  Of dictators who would solely determine what the law is to be.

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Trump’s first move in office was to go after the law itself.  On his first day in office in January, he pardoned some 1500 people who had been convicted of or charged with federal crimes for their Jan. 6, 2001, assault on the nation’s Capital in efforts to keep him in power following his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.  He called them patriots and hostages.  Those so absolved included persons who had assaulted Capitol police officers and dozens of others who had been convicted earlier of serious crimes.  One hundred and forty officers were injured.  Some died.

Having long asserted that the Biden Administration had weaponized the law against him in prosecuting him for crimes in his first term in office,³ the returning president has made it his business to truly weaponize the nation’s law enforcement.

Just days after he took office, Trump fired the Department of Justice prosecutors who had participated in the investigations that led to his indictments for serious crimes against the nation.⁴  He appointed loyalist and 2020 election denier Pam Bondi to be the Attorney General overseeing the Justice Department.  On her first day in office, she disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force which fought secret campaigns by China, Russia and other adversaries to influence and sow chaos in American elections.  This appears to be Trump’s response to former Special Prosecutor’s Robert Muller’s findings in 2018 that his 2016 campaign had colluded with Russian interests to influence the presidential election that year.

The same day Bondi created a “Weaponization Working Group” within the Department of Justice to identify situations during Joe Biden’s presidency in which Justice Department attorneys investigating and prosecuting Donald Trump engaged in corrupt conduct that “appears to have been designed to achieve political objectives.”  There is no evidence that federal prosecutors did anything but follow the law and facts in indicting Trump for what were, on their face, crimes.  Not surprisingly, the only party interested in weaponizing law enforcement–and doing so in the most corrupt and obvious ways–is Trump and his loyal appointees.

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Trump’s next step was to root out those responsible for identifying corruption, abuses of power and inefficiencies in the federal government.  Late on the Friday evening of January 25, he fired some 17 inspectors general (IGs) whose job it is to investigate potential incidents of wrongdoing and corruption within federal agencies, as well as to promote agencies’ effectiveness and efficiency.  Among other agencies he fired the IGs in the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services.  He gave no reasons for the firings, nor have the IGs been replaced.  In firing the IGs, Trump violated the federal law requiring him to give Congress 30-days’ notice before any such firings.⁵

He then repeated this nasty exercise in the U.S. military.  In mid-February, and without giving reason, he fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Charles Q. Brown, Jr.  In his first term as president Trump himself had nominated Brown to be the first African American to head a branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.  Even more insidiously, Trump fired the military’s top lawyers, the Judge Advocate Generals (JAGs) of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.  These three leaders oversee the military’s groups of lawyers whose mission includes advising commanders on the legal and ethical limits of what they can do in defense of the nation.  Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of Defense–appointed only for his fealty to his President–said the quiet part out loud:  To reporters he said the deposed JAGs could be “roadblocks” to Trump’s orders to the military.  Trump wants more compliant generals in charge of the military’s legal decisions, for example, people who could green-light unlawful orders to–say–invade American cities to quell protests, or neighboring allies to seize their territories.

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And there is more than one way to skin the legal cat.  In what in a rational world would be ironic–but not at all in Trump’s–he single-handedly invented a new entity, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and appointed the wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, to lead it.  As an official government organization DOGE is an illusion, and Musk is a man without a formal portfolio, a title, or legitimacy in the “role” that he has undertaken.

Trump and Musk claim that  DOGE’s mission is to eliminate government waste, fraud and inefficiencies, thereby lowering federal government expenses by a projected $2 trillion.  In fact, the central purpose of Musk’s budget freezes and major layoffs at numerous agencies and departments  is not to improve government efficiency.  It is instead:

1. 1. To reduce the federal budget so as to make way for new tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
   2. To cripple agencies’ abilities to make and enforce rules that protect against abuses of power by business interests and that provide for citizens’ health and welfare (e.g., environmental protection, financial fraud against consumers, worker safety, nuclear weapons safety, health science research).
   3. To make deep cuts in funds for such purposes as scientific and medical research, health care for military veterans and America’s poor, financial support for the nation’s public schools, and to make much more difficult their access to the social security payments older Americans have earned and many millions need to survive.⁶
   4. In all, to make back-door policy that advances Trump’s authoritarian agenda for the nation without the inconvenience of checks and balances against it.

DOGE’s budget cuts also presumptively violate the U.S. Constitution, which gives sole authority over government spending to the Congress.

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“It’s more like a drunk operating a wrecking ball.”  So observes Jason Fichtner, a former deputy commissioner and chief economist at the Social Security Administration.  How do we know that rooting out government efficiencies is not the aim of Trump, Musk, and DOGE? We know this because, well, Trump fired without cause the very people charged with the task of rooting out government waste and fraud: the independent inspectors general.

We know this because Musk’s efforts have found nothing but small levels of fraud or spending errors while offering wildly inflated lies about them.  He said that the Social Security Administration (SSA) was paying benefits to tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old.  In fact, in recent years less than one percent of the SSA’s payments have been found by audits to have been improper–often as a result of mistakes rather than fraud–and more than two-thirds of these payments have been clawed back by the agency.

We know this because DOGE’s layoffs at numerous federal agencies–numbering more than 60,000 planned for February alone, aimed at achieving hundreds of thousands of layoffs in all–have been often executed with letters of dismissal that gave federal employees the false reason that their job performances were subpar, when in fact many had recently had favorable performance appraisals by their superiors.

We know this because Trump and Musk plan to cut the Internal Revenue Service’s 90,000 employees by half, markedly reducing the Government’s efficiencies in collecting taxes and punishing those who file false income tax returns, thus costing the nation billions of dollars in income and rewarding criminal tax fraud.

And we know it, too, because many of these orders to cut federal agency jobs have been halted at least temporarily by federal judges suspicious that they are illegal (and, I suspect, also suspicious of their motivations).

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The pattern of Trump’s and Musk’s cost-cutting efforts is also at least remarkably suspicious.  For one thing, close examination of the federal government contracts that Musk/DOGE has cancelled to “save money” shows that 40 percent of them have not saved the nation any money at all.

For another thing, the cutting of costs and personnel at federal regulatory agencies has an uncanny overlap with the government’s efforts to rein in wrongdoing by Musk’s own companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.  Over the past decade, his companies have been granted $18 billion or more in federal contracts with NASA, the Department of Defense and other agencies.  Over roughly the same period six of his companies have been fined or investigated by 11 federal agencies some 32 times.

It would seem, then, that it is no coincidence that DOGE has ordered cuts at such agencies as the Securities and Exchange Commission (presently seeking a $150 million fine from Musk companies for securities violations), the Federal Aviation Administration (which has fined SpaceX many times for safety violations), and at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (which has recalled Tesla Cybertrucks for manufacturing and safety defects eight times since the vehicles were first introduced in late 2023, and which over the past six months has opened two separate investigations involving millions of Tesla cars after crashes associated with their self-driving technology.)

Musk’s manifest conflicts of interest in DOGE and his companies are not only rife and self-serving.  They are also likely criminal.

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Trump’s is a Gangster Government.  There are no alternatives to this conclusion.  He and Musk have clearly established this in little over two months in office.  His gangster government is familiar in world history.  It is a prelude to autocracy, to dictatorship, to fascistic rule at the whim of the ruler.  Its enemy is democracy, which it wishes to expunge.  Trump and his people have violated laws, disobeyed judicial orders, and assaulted the Constitution.  They have only just begun.

The People, in whose name Trump was elected president, are the final bulwark against his mission.  For while he runs riot against the nation’s founding ethic of liberty, equal rights, and the rule of law, the Republicans in Congress stand as just so many neutered sentinels at the outposts of Trump’s mendacious plans, while Democrats are left to fume and fret at the gates of his destructive domain.

We the People built this nation and defended it with blood, toil and tears.  If it is to be saved, We must act now to save it.  To mildly paraphrase Gandhi, we must be the change we wish to see in the world.

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1. In his book, Sin and Society, 1907.[↩]
2. In May 2024 Trump was convicted by a New York State jury of 34 felony counts of falsifying his business records to cover up money he paid to the porn actor Stormy Daniels for her silence regarding an alleged sexual encounter between the two of them.  He did so in the months just prior to the 2016 presidential election, which he won.[↩]
3. Federal prosecutors had indicted him for his role in the January 6 (2021) riot at the Capitol and for illegally taking classified documents to his Florida home when he left office in 2021.  Neither case had come to trial before the 2024 fall election of Trump for a second term as president, effectively ending the cases.[↩]
4. Special counsel Jack Smith, who led the investigations, resigned prior to Trump’s inauguration.[↩]
5. Several of the former inspectors general have sued the Trump Administration for unlawful termination of their positions.[↩]
6. By closing many local Social Security Offices around the country, by increasing requirements for gaining access to the monthly payments, and by making the reduced office staffs much less efficient in serving clients.  A Washington Post headline on March 25th was blunt:  “Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes: Social Security is breaking down.”[↩]