Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter, examining the apocalyptic politics, coverage, and consequences of Campaign 2024.
When I lived in Beijing, our apartment had two front doors on it. There was a regular, sturdy wooden apartment door, and outside that was a thick steel door, with heavy deadbolts mounted not only on the side but at the bottom. Up and down our entryway were various other steel apartment doors, apparently add-ons by the owners, in different styles and finishes.
This apartment was a sublet in middle-class worker housing, in a compound with a guardhouse at the entrance, in a neighborhood that included embassies, a fancy patisserie, an upscale Japanese mall, and a Pizza Hut. Now and then there might be a drunken scuffle in the alley outside, but the interior courtyard was never troubled by anything worse than grimy stray cats. Daily life was peaceful and secure. Yet there were those steel doors, subtle monuments to the proposition that things could—someday, quickly—be very different.
On Thursday, six federal prosecutors—including Danielle Sassoon, Donald Trump's own appointee as acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who'd been on the job all of three weeks—quit their jobs because the Trump Department of Justice was trying to make them drop the government's fraud and bribery charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. By the Trump administration's own account, the prosecution is supposed to be ended not on the merits of the evidence, but because Trump wants Adams to help him round up migrants in New York City. "Because the law does not support a dismissal," Sassoon wrote in her resignation letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, "and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations."
When Richard Nixon forced out his top two Justice Department officials because they wouldn't fire the Watergate special prosecutor, it was the beginning of Nixon's downfall. The country then was not prepared to tolerate such a flagrant abuse of power. But the current Supreme Court has already certified that Trump was "absolutely immune from prosecution" when he allegedly ordered the Justice Department to open bogus investigations into 2020 election fraud and threatened to fire an official who wouldn't comply. The president, the majority wrote, has "exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department," and his "power to remove 'executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed' may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts." Even as the prosecutors were resigning in protest, Mayor Adams was announcing, after consultation with Trump's border czar Thomas Homan, that he planned to override the city's sanctuary law and allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers into Rikers. A deal was a deal.
This is how things work, right now, in a city where the voters elect Democrats and where Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Earlier in the week, the administration hooked $80 million out of the city's bank accounts, taking back an already authorized and delivered batch of funding for sheltering migrants—because Elon Musk, who now has direct if illegal control over federal spending, signed onto a conspiratorial fantasy that disaster funds were wrongfully diverted to pay for luxury accommodations for migrant criminal gangs. Four FEMA employees got fired over the imaginary scenario.
The news comes in from all over the country and world, but it's all one version or another of the same story. In a legal affidavit filed Tuesday as part of a lawsuit against the administration's peremptory and unauthorized shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development, a USAID worker—or former USAID worker—described fleeing riots in Kinshasa, with each family member carrying "only what would fit in their lap," while officials in Washington fretted that paying for their evacuation "would be met with accusations of subverting the executive order and swift retribution." The worker described ending up in a month-to-month lease on a furnished apartment and facing the prospect of losing even that, leaving "no home to live in and no income to procure one," while being "harassed through a combination of malignant, violent rhetoric and threats of financial ruin from the officials effecting this shutdown."
Along with the frustration and alarm, the filing had a note of horrified grief to it. However you may personally feel about the imperial projection of force and influence, being a United States citizen abroad meant that ultimately, you had the mightiest power in the world at your back. This USAID worker—sent overseas to directly represent America—had thought they could count on their country.
Now they can't. Nobody anywhere can: not the elderly refugee kicked out of a suddenly closing clinic, to die without access to oxygen; not the hundreds of babies infected with HIV because the preventative medicine was taken away; not the young trans New Yorkers who found their gender-affirming care appointments canceled. Not the other NATO members or Ukraine seeing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put out advance remarks announcing that the United States would no longer be "the primary guarantor of security in Europe," only to hear Hegseth skip that line in his speech, or then hear Hegseth rule out Ukraine joining NATO, rule it in again, and have Trump rule back out what Hegseth had ruled back in.
In the original memo ordering prosecutors to abandon the Adams case, Emil Bove, Trump's acting deputy attorney general, declared that turning Adams loose to fully enforce the president's immigration orders was as important "as the objectives that the prior Administration pursued by releasing violent criminals such as Viktor Bout, the 'Merchant of Death.'" This seemed weirdly off-topic, but it was a swipe at the successful prisoner swap that brought Brittney Griner home from her nine-year drug-possession sentence in Russia. The message was that the new administration wouldn't have seen Griner as worth it.
The United States handled its affairs with plenty of brutishness and hypocrisy before, abroad and at home. Now, though, everything the government sets out to do is mercenary, vicious, and slapdash by design. It is no longer trying to operate as a great power—even a cynical great power—but only as whatever feels epic to Musk or gratifying to Trump in the moment.
What's striking about the current round of destruction and betrayal is how gratuitous it all is. If he wanted to, Elon Musk could not only have flown every overseas USAID worker home, he could have personally bought each one of them their own Bombardier Challenger 650 private jet. It wouldn't have even knocked him out of the top five in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Instead, he's treating the government like a simulation game, moving the control sliders toward privation and disaster just to watch the little figures scurry.
No one can rely on anything. More than 200,000, maybe 300,000, government workers in their first or second years—people who thought they were settling into steady careers doing something useful for the public—are being targeted for summary firings, merely because it's easy, because their civil service protections haven't kicked in yet. Thousands of IRS workers are due to be dumped in the middle of tax-filing season; the National Cancer Institute is reportedly losing 330 people; the Forest Service is planning to fire 3,400. People with job offers from the Justice Department have had them yanked away.
The chaos spreads out from the government offices, as the courts keep telling Trump to lift his spending freezes and the funds keep not arriving. People studying to become special education teachers have had their scholarships revoked. Farmers who bought equipment under the promise of government reimbursement are stuck with the payments. Head Start programs couldn't pay their bills. Agricultural research programs on soybeans are shutting down.
The legal system may issue correctives to some of this, and the administration may or may not even eventually obey some of those correctives. No incremental repairs, though, can change the underlying situation. The personal information everyone entrusted to the government—tax figures, bank accounts, Social Security—is being rifled through by barely adult, unvetted Musk loyalists with racist or legally sketchy histories. Law enforcement is strictly optional, on the president's say-so; the attorney general is shutting down anticorruption operations; and migrants are being shipped into an extraterritorial, extralegal detention camp. The FDIC is in line to be slashed and reorganized. The bribes and scams are flourishing.
Somewhere behind it all is a political program, like the agenda of the Second Ku Klux Klan refracted through tech supremacy and meme-space. Trump and his square-jawed, alcoholic, white TV-host-turned–Secretary of Defense have issued race-baiting orders and targeted women in military leadership. Musk and his junior computer-goons appear to be lashing out at whatever people and programs they suspect, or a crude keyword search suggests, might represent Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, or any sort of racial or gender integration, or merely the sort of humanities-educated softness that makes someone care about consequences.
After years of complaining that bias trainings and pronouns in bios were the equivalent of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, America's aggrieved reactionary class has brought about its own version of the actual thing: Bands of juvenile ideologues and agitators, invested with the authority of a senile but absolute tyrant, have been turned loose to smash the load-bearing structures of society, guided by pure spite and ignorance. Experienced professionals are being hounded out of their jobs for the crime of knowing and caring about how things work. People and programs and archives are being purged in the most stupid and capricious ways possible. On Friday, the Musk team was frantically trying to undo hundreds of firings from the Department of Energy, once they belatedly figured out that the "National Nuclear Safety Administration" meant not some OSHA-type inspectors of the kind who annoy Musk by trying to prevent worker injuries, but the people who keep the country's nuclear arsenal up and running. "Move fast and break things" now applies to everything, right up to the things that could annihilate life on Earth.
