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.
Should Democrats attend Donald Trump's address to the joint session of Congress Tuesday night? The party can't decide what to do. Some Democratic senators and representatives want to boycott the event, to deny Trump's frenetic and lawless program of misrule any of the ceremonial trappings of the presidency. Others want to show up and participate as a rebuke to Trump—including the party's leaders in both chambers, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, who, Axios wrote, "want members to attend and bring special guests who have been negatively affected by the administration."
Six weeks into the intentional catastrophe of the Trump administration—six weeks into the gutting of the federal government by Elon Musk, with the president's vague but vicious encouragement, and into the various other purges carried out by other Trump henchmen—the opposition party and the rest of the constitutional system are still flummoxed by the question of how one goes about opposing a runaway presidency. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are being threatened or forced out of their jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in spending is unlawfully frozen, pushing essential operations and programs past the breaking point. Musk is snatching a multi-billion contract away from its assigned contractor to award it to himself. Trans people's existence is being outlawed bit by bit. The litany never stops growing.
And Democratic officials have no idea what to do about it. The Senate minority threw itself into the unanimous confirmation of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, to set a high-minded and collegial example of supporting a supposedly decent and well qualified cabinet nominee. Rubio turned out to be a shameless Trump loyalist, cutting deals to send asylum seekers to overseas concentration camps and joining in the ambush of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy—and the polite bipartisan approval of Rubio did nothing to stop Trump from ramming through the most depraved, unqualified, and hyper-partisan people he could find for his other appointments. Some Democratic senators lined up to support those other ones, too, straining to seem constructive, chasing some phantasm of normal governance.
Even as unvetted Musk underlings illegally rake up everyone's personal information, and the Social Security payment system wobbles under the strain of aggressive mismanagement, and law enforcement is suspended for Trump supporters—as judges issue one order after another and Trump and Musk ignore them—nobody in government shows any impulse to make the destruction stop. Republicans go along with things they personally would have called abhorrent four months ago; Democrats talk about the cost of living, or announce they are planning to talk about the cost of living.
Three years ago, the news from Uvalde, Texas, seemed impossible to comprehend. A teenager armed with an assault weapon attacked an elementary school, shooting 38 people and leaving 21 of them dead, and an army of police arrived on the scene and spent more than an hour doing nothing, while the killing continued. The country was used to mass murder, even the mass murder of schoolchildren, but the moral atrocity committed by the people who were supposed to respond to it—the hapless indifference in the face of terror and desperation and urgency—was a whole different kind of shock.
Now here's the United States government. Everybody knows what's going on in there, even though nobody can know how bad it really is. The people inside have sounded the alarm and called in the emergency. They're telling the people outside as much as they can see of what's happening, whichever piece of the devastation is in front of their eyes. People are trying to gather on the scene.
And the authorities, the people hired and paid to respond—what are they doing? Some of them are right up beside the destruction, some of them are hovering out on the edges. Some of them are executing what they think is the protocol for this type of situation even though it's obvious to their own eyes and ears that the protocol and the situation are a mismatch. Some are waiting to get word from the chain of command. Someone somewhere is looking for the right tools, the appropriate key.
Is the analogy insensitive? Is it even an analogy? Here's how Matt Bai of the Washington Post described what happened after Musk's Department of Government Efficiency set out to completely annihilate the United States Agency for International Development, cutting off funding for essential medical care around the world:
Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs—such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa—would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.
But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, [Luke] Farritor and [Gavin] Kliger would veto the payments—a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries such as Congo. A pregnant woman in an undisclosed country has sued the Trump administration because she was denied a medevac helicopter. In another case, I was told, an employee in southern Africa who needed chemotherapy was also denied a chopper because no one would authorize the money.
Farritor and Kliger, reportedly ages 23 and 25 respectively, are part of the team of young, unseasoned Musk loyalists tearing apart federal agencies. Kilger has a history of sharing racist material on social media. Their blocking of AIDS treatment meant that hundreds of infants ended up with preventable HIV infections.
Despite Rubio's supposed waiver, late last week the State Department killed the entire operating budget of the organization that coordinates tuberculosis treatment worldwide and cut off funding to other groups fighting polio, starvation, malaria, and other debilitating or fatal conditions among millions of people. Trump and Musk's minions are in there killing people, out of sheer malice and fanaticism.
No one has driven them out, despite their open lawlessness. The House minority has not bothered to commemorate any of Trump's new impeachable acts with articles of impeachment. No senator has blockaded the Trump administration's appointments to demand Musk be removed, investigated, and prosecuted. No judges have locked anyone up for contempt yet, despite a stance from the administration of unbroken contempt toward the courts.
The horror of Uvalde was that the people who did nothing were there in uniform. Their cowardice was not just the sum of their individual moral weakness, but of what they had been organized into, supposedly on the public's behalf. With their badges and their guns, they were not simply people who were merely personally afraid to face the danger themselves, but who would institutionally, forcibly interfere with other people who did want to face it.
Outside the secure perimeter, protesters have filled the streets and swarmed Tesla dealerships and national parks. Republicans are fleeing town-hall meetings to avoid angry constituents. Millions of people understand how urgently dangerous the moment is. None of the system's appointed leaders agree. After Uvalde, people talked and talked, in rage and disbelief, about what they would have done if only they'd been there. Here we all are. Now what?
