Elie Mystal: This Executive Order Reveals the Trump-Musk Endgame [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/executive-order-independent-agencies-trump/

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https://archive.li/z7Y3z

The orders and actions of Donald Trump and his co-president Elon Musk are all part of a piece. The most obvious goal is to establish authoritarian, single-party control in the United States of America, and we know that because they wrote down their plan in Project 2025 and have been executing that plan every day since they took office. But we should understand why they want such power.

It’s not just so they can win the culture wars; Trump and Musk are misogynists and provable racists, but their hatred of women and Black people (and gay people and trans people and Latino people and Muslim people and truth and science and journalism and fact-based reality) are all just their means to an end. The thing Trump and Musk value most of all is money. Their entire regime is best understood as a criminal junta whose end goal is to redirect the wealth of the nation into their own pockets. They are running a kleptocracy, and they’ve figured out that facism is actually the quickest path to riches. They’re the encapsulation of Alan Rickman’s portrayal of Hans Gruber, the villain in Die Hard, taken to its logical conclusion. They talk like megalomaniacal populists, but they’re really just common thieves—or, well, exceptional thieves, given their success rate.

If you understand the thievery that underpins this entire administration, you’ll understand that Trump’s recent executive order aimed at destroying independent regulatory agencies is an essential part of the overall plot. Independent regulatory agencies are things like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Elections Commission. These institutions were set up by Congress and are made up of commissioners appointed by the president. They are authorized to promote regulations over the industries and business sectors they oversee. They are the parts of the federal government most businesses interact with. They are the only real day-to-day check on unrestrained capitalism in our system of government.

Predictably, Trump and Musk want to destroy them, and the executive order accomplishes that by mandating that every single one of the agencies’ regulations and proposals must be routed through the Office of Management and Budget. That may sound like a bunch of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, but what it means is that these independent agencies will no longer be “independant.” It means that every single regulation in the country—from what disclosures have to be made to shareholders to how much broken glass is allowed to be in your childrens’ toys—are subject to the whims of the president, and the president alone. No hearings, no panel of experts, no opportunity for public comment, it’ll just be Donald Trump and a Sharpie deciding which regulations he feels like getting rid of today. And when Trump is too lazy or busy with his golf outings to do the work, it will fall to OMB director Russell Vought, who is literally the guy who came up with Project 2025.

*snip*