Just overnight I got a dozen posts in my newsfeed and in my email inbox suggesting that I shouldn't be doom scrolling through the horror show in Washington. But how do you avert your eyes from Donald Trump announcing he wants to takeover the Gaza Strip and dislocate all the Palestinians in Gaza by moving them into “beautiful” housing developments in nearby Arab states, and meanwhile back in this beleaguered country, Elon Musk and his tech minnows are swimming amok through our government?
Last night it became known that the CIA, under White House orders, sent an unclassified memo via regular email to the White House listing at least 2000 of its most recent hires naming them using people's first names and last initials. Intelligence experts interviewed on cable news last night said this is like handing over part of the CIA phone book to Moscow and China, because public email is so insecure.
But that's just one bad dream the nation suffered overnight. There was video coverage all day of ICE raiders continuing their rampage across the country arresting and detaining undocumented migrants, as many as 1000 to 1200 a day. This morning it was announced that the Department of Justice is suing the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois over their sanctuary policies.
The Washington Post reported yesterday that Elon Musk’s tech mice, as part of their romp through the Treasury tried to shut down USAID payments all over the world. This included payments that support the PEPFAR program that distributes aid to governments and clinics in Africa that are fighting AIDS and HIV. A portion of the funds from USAID goes to support programs that treat pregnant women in Africa so that their babies are not born with AIDS. One of Trump's first executive orders ordered the shutdown of all foreign aid payments by the United States government around the entire world.
What this means when you get down in the weeds is that programs like PEPFAR and programs to feed hungry children in Sudan are going without money, and people and babies are dying. Meanwhile, the MAGA faithful cheer him on.
In this country, the new brutal strain of the flu from which you are apparently not protected by the new flu shot has killed 8,300 people during this flu season, and hospitalizations as of last week stand at 190,000 according to the CDC. That's amazing in and of itself isn't it, that the CDC is still functioning and still keeping records and still reporting the terrible things that are going on with threats to American health? It makes you wonder how much longer that's going to happen as the Senate vote to confirm RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services gets closer.
Out on the farms of America's South and Midwest, chickens are dying by the millions from bird flu, knocking out entire flocks and shutting down chicken farms for months so that chicken houses and processing plants can be disinfected. The spread of bird flu has egg prices in the supermarket over $5 a dozen, and they are $9 a dozen in California already.
Musk and his utterly illegal minions have been creating chaos in the Treasury Department for nearly two weeks and they've gotten into the highly secret Treasury payment system that contains the private records of the Social Security and tax systems, not to mention Medicare records and other private data. Do you remember how secret Donald Trump's tax records were? He refused to release his taxes when he ran in 2016 and 2020 and 2024 with the utterly spurious excuse that he was being audited.
Well, I'm sure Trump's records are still secret, but we learned this morning that Musk’s tech teenagers have been feeding highly sensitive records into an insecure artificial intelligence system accessed through the Microsoft cloud to “analyze” data for waste and fraud. I think we can assume that privacy rights have been cancelled for everyone who is not an oligarch and a signed-on-the-dotted-line Trump loyalist.
While the rest of this madness has been happening at warp speed in nearly every department of our government, the Trump administration announced that they will be opening a razor wire-topped Club Med to house 30,000 deportees at Guantanamo. Some sort of shady deal involving cash payments has been worked out between our new alleged Secretary of State, the cretinous Marco Rubio, and the corrupt president of El Salvador, so that we can create space in our prison system by sending violent convicted felons who are American citizens, to be held in Salvadoran prisons.
This is of course unprecedented -- deporting American citizens to prisons in a foreign country -- but then, is there anything that has been done by Trump and Co-President Musk over the past two weeks that has not been both illegal and unprecedented?
All of this began on the night of Trump's inauguration when he made a big show of signing his executive order banning DEI throughout the government. What is this virulent hatred that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have for programs that promote diversity, equality, and inclusion, you might ask. Well, it didn't just appear out of thin air like a hologrammatic right wing boogeyman.
No, the demonization of DEI began in the feverish brain pan of Christopher Rufo, he of the Manhattan Institute who got his start toiling in the vineyards of the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, and the Discovery Institute, a little known Christian think tank that has long championed the teaching of so-called “intelligent design,” a bogus fundamentalist anti-evolution “scientific theory” based on biblical scripture.
Rufo was almost single handedly the author of the anti-critical race theory panic that gripped the right wing around 2020 when Rufo discovered to his horror that the city of Seattle was conducting anti-racism seminars based on the theories of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, whom Rufo quickly branded as Marxist radicals. When Donald Trump got a whiff of the controversy around critical race theory that was bubbling out of the right-wing fever swamp, he invited Rufo to Washington to pitch his ideas to Trump's reelection team. Before he knew it, Trump had signed an executive order banning racial and sexual stereotyping by the federal government.
“‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote in a political treatise published by the Manhattan Institute. In 2024, Rufo found himself at Mar-a-Lago surrounded by Trump's MAGA minions, this time pitching his new anti- DEI messaging plan, and they were off. It became a theme of the Trump campaign and then it became a promise, that he would “end DEI in America on day one.”
Democrats failed to come up with a rationale defending something that should have been part of their playbook, and Trump rode the anti-DEI mania he had whipped up into the White House.
But what is DEI exactly? Linda Hopper, a friend of ours from Washington D.C. who has spent her lifetime working in human resources wrote me recently lamenting the way that Republicans have been able to demonize programs that simply try to “ensure people in the workplace are treated with dignity and respect.” DEI isn’t understood by what she calls “the rightie tighties” as anything more than initials that stand for values they're against.
“Diversity training programs pissed off white men because their values were questioned especially about women and Black and Brown people,” according to my friend the HR veteran. The truth is, the DEI “dragon they're trying to slay is basically what we were taught in vacation Bible School…value each other; red and yellow black and white all are precious in His sight; be polite; seek to understand first and be kind to others.”
I'll take Linda Hopper’s definition of DEI any day over the bull crap being pushed by Trump and Vance and Hegseth and the rest of the little boys now running our government who are too frightened to look at the world with soft eyes and listen to others with open ears.
What the MAGA obsession with DEI really represents is a covert plan to turn back the clock to segregation and sexism. If you want evidence, you need look no further than to what West Point has just done. A memo was issued on Tuesday signed by Deputy Commandant Chad Foster ordering that a dozen cadet clubs be closed and “cease all activities.”
Among the clubs ordered closed are the Latin Cultural Club, the National Society of Black Engineers Club, the Spectrum Club which was organized by L.G.B.T.Q. cadets, the Society of Women Engineers Club, and the Corbin Forum, a club that was founded in 1976, the year that women were first admitted to West Point, and the Vietnamese-American Cadet Association.
Let me explain to you about cadet clubs at West Point, a subject about which I know a few things, having been a founder of what we called the “Culture Club” as a cadet. Most clubs are organized by cadets to have fun. Because it's the Military Academy, they have to have officer sponsors and certification by the Academy and they have to follow certain rules, but basically it's cadets wanting to get together during their time off and shoot the shit and complain about the tactical department and lament the fact that they've got so little leave time and none or few of the privileges enjoyed by regular college students. So, they form clubs and have meetings and lunches and they go on trips that are marginally connected to their stated purpose but are really just to get off the post at West Point and put on some civilian clothes and relax and maybe even do some extracurricular stuff with others of the same or opposite sex.
Got that? It's young people being young people, and now for the young people at West Point who have brown skin or black skin or are gay or female, that simple urge to get together in a club and be who they are is illegal.
Pete “take a look at all my white supremacist tattoos” Hegseth, in one of his first acts as Secretary of Defense, ordered that the Pentagon and the United States military would no longer celebrate what he called “identity months,” such as Pride Month, celebrating gay pride, and Black History Month.
There you go folks. That's how far they'll take their hatred of DEI. That's how afraid they are, how disdainful they are, and how little respect or just plain human feeling they have for anyone who is not a straight white male.
If they're shutting down cadet clubs at West Point, how long will it be before civilian colleges receive memos from the Trump government threatening to cancel their federal grants and loans and money for research if they don't shut down their clubs that are associated with minorities and women?
What will be next? Programs to feed hungry kids; anything that smacks of helping or being kind to the homeless; providing shelter to the unhoused -- the next thing you know, billionaires Donald Trump and Elon Musk will go after the law that requires emergency rooms to treat people in distress whether or not they have health insurance.
First they came for the immigrants.
Then they came for the foreign aid.
Then they came for the clean air and water.
Then they came for the schools.
Then they came for the sick and the elderly.
They'll come for the children next, and it won't end unless we can stop them.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.
