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TRUMP-THREE DAYS OF WANNABE PRESIDENCY OR DICTATORSHIP  
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Heather Cox Richardson
January 23, 2025
Letters from an American
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_ Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of all the
January 6 rioters convicted of crimes was a spur of the moment
decision designed to get the issue behind him quickly. “Trump just
said: ‘F*ck it: Release ‘em all,’” an advisor recalled. _

Trump's 2025 vision, revealed (Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios.
Photos: Mandel Ngan (AFP)/Getty Images),

 

Marc Caputo of _Axios_ reported today that Trump’s decision to
pardon or commute the sentences of all the January 6 rioters convicted
of crimes for that day’s events, including those who attacked police
officers, was a spur of the moment decision by Trump apparently
designed to get the issue behind him quickly. “Trump just said:
‘F*ck it: Release ‘em all,’” an advisor recalled.

Rather than putting the issue behind him, Trump’s new administration
is already mired in controversy over it. NBC News profiled the men who
threw Nazi salutes, posted that they intended to start a civil war,
vowed “there will be blood,” and called for the lynching of
Democratic lawmakers. These men, who attacked police with bear spray,
flag poles, and a metal whip and choked officers with their bare
hands, are now back on the streets.

That means they are also headed home to their communities. Jackson
Reffitt, who reported his father Guy’s participation in the January
6 riot and was a key witness against him, told reporters he fears for
his life now that his father is free. Jackson recorded his father’s
threat against talking to the authorities. “If you turn me in,
you’re a traitor,” his father said, “and traitors get shot.”
“I’m honestly flabbergasted that we've gotten to this point,"
Jackson told CNN. “I’m terrified. I don’t know what I’m going
to do.”

The country’s largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police,
has spoken out against the pardons, as has the International
Association of Chiefs of Police. The _Wall Street Journal_ editorial
board wrote: “Law and order? Back the blue? What happened to that
[Republican Party]?” “What happened [on January 6, 2021] is a
stain on Mr. Trump’s legacy,” it wrote. “By setting free the cop
beaters, the President adds another.”

Mark Jacob of _Stop the Presses_ commented: “Republicans—the
Jailbreak Party.”

One of the pardoned individuals is already back in prison on a gun
charge, illustrating, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance said, why
Trump should have evaluated “prior criminal history, behavior in
prison, [and] risk of dangerousness to the community following
release. Now,” she said, “we all pay the price for him using the
pardon power as a political reward.” On social media, Heather Thomas
wrote: “So when all was said and done, the only country that opened
[its] prisons and sent crazy murderous criminals to prey upon innocent
American citizens, was us.”

MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin reported that Stewart Rhodes of the Oath
Keepers, who was convicted of sedition and sentenced to 18 years in
prison, met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill this afternoon.

For the past two days, the new Trump administration has been
demonstrating that it is far easier to break things than it is to
build them.

In his determination to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion
(DEI) measures, Trump has shut down all federal government DEI offices
and has put all federal employees working in such programs on leave,
telling agencies to plan for layoffs. He reached back to the American
past to root out all possible traces of DEI, calling it “illegal
discrimination in the federal government.” Trump revoked a series of
executive orders from various presidents designed to address
inequities among American populations.

Dramatically, he reached all the way back to Executive Order 11246,
signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in September 1965 to stop
discriminatory practices in hiring in the federal government and in
the businesses of those who were awarded federal contracts. Johnson
put forward Executive Order 11246 shortly after Congress passed the
Voting Rights Act to protect minority voting and a year after Congress
passed the Civil Rights Act, both designed to level the playing field
in the United States between white Americans, Black Americans and
Americans of color.

In an even more dramatic reworking of American history, though, the
Trump administration has frozen all civil rights cases currently being
handled by the Department of Justice and has ordered Trump’s new
supervisor of the civil rights division, Kathleen Wolfe, to make sure
that none of the civil rights attorneys file any new complaints or
other legal documents.

Congress created the Department of Justice in 1870…to prosecute
civil rights cases.

Today, Erica L. Green reported for the _New York Times_ that
Trump’s team has threatened federal employees with “adverse
consequences” if they refuse to turn in colleagues who “defy
orders to purge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from their
agencies.” Civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill commented: “Can’t
wait until these guys have to define in court a ‘DEI hire’ and
‘DEI employees.’”

Trump’s team has told the staff at Department of Health and Human
Services—including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National
Institutes of Health (NIH)—to stop issuing health advisories,
scientific reports, and updates to their websites and social media
posts. Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Rachel Roubein of
the _Washington Post_ report that the CDC was expected this week to
publish reports on the avian influenza virus, which has shut down
Georgia’s poultry industry.

Trump has also set out to make his mark on the Department of Homeland
Security. Trump yesterday removed the U.S. Coast Guard commandant,
Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, and ordered the Coast Guard to surge cutters,
aircrafts, boats and personnel to waters around Florida and borders
with Mexico and to “the maritime border around Alaska, Hawai’i,
the U.S. territories of Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana
Islands, American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands,”
to stop migrants. The service is already covering these areas as well
as it can: last August, the vice commandant of the Coast Guard,
Admiral Kevin Lunday, told the Brookings Institution that the service
was short of personnel and ships.

As Josh Funk reported in the Associated Press, Trump also fired the
head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), responsible
for keeping the nation’s transportation systems safe. He also fired
all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, mandated
by Congress after the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie,
Scotland, to review safety in airports and airlines.

Hannah Rabinowitz, Evan Perez, and Kara Scannell of CNN reported that
Trump has pushed aside senior Department of Justice lawyers in the
national security division, prosecutors who work on international
affairs, and lawyers in the criminal division, all divisions that were
involved in the prosecutions involving Trump.

Trump has also suspended all funding disbursements for projects funded
by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act,
laws that invested billions of dollars in construction of clean energy
manufacturing and the repair of roads, bridges, ports, and so on,
primarily in Republican-dominated states.

Breaking things is easy, but it is harder to build them.

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly teased the idea that he had a
secret plan to end Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day. This
morning, in a social media post, he revealed it. He warned Russian
president Vladimir Putin that he would “put high levels of Taxes,
Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United
States, and various other participating countries.”

In fact, President Barack Obama and then–secretary of state John
Kerry hit Russia with sanctions after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine,
and under President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the U.S. and its allies have
maintained biting sanctions against Russia. At the same time,
Russia’s trade with the U.S. has fallen to lows that echo those of
the period immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Making a ridiculous post about tariffs on Truth Social was his
secret plan to end the war in 24 hours?” wrote editor Ron
Filipkowski of _MeidasNews_. “What a ridiculous clown show.
Idiocracy.”

Yesterday, Trump held an event with chief executive officer Sam Altman
of OpenAI, chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison of
Oracle, and chief executive officer Masayoshi Son of SoftBank to roll
out a $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence, although
Ja’han Jones of MSNBC explained that it’s not clear how much of
that investment was already in place. In any case, Trump’s sidekick
Elon Musk promptly threw water on the announcement, posting on X,
“They don’t actually have the money.” He added “SoftBank has
well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”

Musk has his own plan for developing AI tools and is in a legal battle
with OpenAI. Altman retorted: “this is great for the country. i
realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal
for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put
[America] first.” As Jones noted, the fight took the shine off
Trump’s big announcement.

As for turning his orders into reality, Trump has turned that
responsibility over to others.

Mark Berman and Jeremy Roebuck of the _Washington Post_ noted today
that Trump’s executive orders covered a wide range of topics and
then simply told the incoming attorney general to handle them. A key
theme of Trump’s campaign was his accusations that Biden was using
the Justice Department against Trump and his loyalists; Berman and
Roebuck point out that Trump “appears to want the Justice Department
to act as both investigator and enforcer of his personal and policy
wishes.”

This morning, Meryl Kornfield and Patrick Svitek of the _Washington
Post_, with the help of researcher Alec Dent, reported on Trump’s
first meeting with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate
majority leader John Thune (R-SD). Trump frequently repeated,
“promises made, promises kept,” but offered no guidance for how he
foresees getting his agenda through Congress, where the Republicans
have tiny margins. Both Johnson and Thune pointed out that it will be
difficult to get majorities behind some of his plans.

According to Kornfield and Svitek, Trump stressed “that he doesn’t
care how his agenda becomes law, just that it must.”

—

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Bluesky:

kylegriffin1.bsky.social/post/3lgee7yfujc24
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ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3lgdrmdy2ok2p
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heatherthomasaf.bsky.social/post/3lgctmmqb7c26
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sifill.bsky.social/post/3lgdzmufwa227
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kenklippenstein.bsky.social/post/3lgej4q2g3s2j
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joycewhitevance.bsky.social/post/3lgdyjgpnwk2u
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markjacob.bsky.social/post/3lgdxr3oglc22
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* Donald Trump
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* executive orders
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* Trump 2.0
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* Resistance 2.0
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* Trump Pardons
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* Jan. 06
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* Jan. 06 Capitol Insurrection
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* Capitol riot
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* Capitol coup
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* Proud Boys
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* Oath Keepers
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* MAGA
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* GOP
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* birthright citizenship
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* citizenship
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* deportations
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* DEI
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* Justice Department
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* Justice Dept.
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* Coast Guard
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* WHO
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* Food and Drug Administration
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* FDA
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* Centers for Disease Control
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* cdc
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* National Institutes of Health
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* NIH
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* Lyndon B. Johnson
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* civil rights protections
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* Equal Employment Opportunity Act
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