Laurence Tribe on Trump "seeking to erase America as we know it" [View all]

[Tanuki]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/24/trump-us-constitution

"As staffers of the newly minted so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) raided congressionally created independent federal agencies and foundations without warning and slashed entire programs without thought, the Trump administration stuttered when asked by the courts to explain who was in charge of the “department” that no Congress had created – and how the leader of that enterprise had somehow acquired the power of the purse that the constitution clearly delegated only to Congress.

More than just stonewalling courts and refusing to provide basic information on government activities, the Trump administration has waged war on history itself. Having first debilitated our capacity to act, it is now coming after our capacity to think. The same day Boasberg directed the administration to explain why it had seemingly failed to comply with his order, Doge staffers marched into the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency responsible for funding many needy public museums, libraries and historic repositories across the country.

Like Julius Caesar besieging and burning the Library of Alexandria, the Doge officials descended upon the IMLS to begin the process of gutting the public institutions dedicated to preserving and making widely available the shared memory of our past. It was none other than Benjamin Franklin whose conception of public libraries democratized knowledge and made it accessible to ordinary people. What used to be the private province of the few became the public province of the many.

The attack on the IMLS is only the latest episode of the Trump presidency’s attempt to privatize information while replacing authentic history with a version more to its liking. As internet archivists race to back up the nation’s files and records, Trump administration officials have been systematically purging government websites in real time of the tools, concepts and language we need to act as informed citizens. In response to secretary of defense Pete Hegseth’s order to remove “diversity” content from the department’s platforms, the Pentagon took down pages about the Holocaust, September 11, cancer awareness and suicide prevention. So too, the Department of Agriculture deleted entire datasets and resources that farmers relied on to identify ways of coping with heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires. Websites belonging to the Small Business Administration and Arlington National Cemetery scrubbed their platforms of photographs and references to women, LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color, including facts about American heroes such as Jackie Robinson or Gen Colin Powell.

Taken together, these events of the past few weeks reveal an alarmingly rapid collapse of what gives the United States constitution life and meaning. Its words may remain unchanged, but its role in our lives is crumbling before our eyes. Looking for a decisive explosion or a moment of crisis – what physicists call a singularity – in the chaotic onrush of presidential provocations is a fool’s errand, one calculated to disarm the resistance without which we will surely be doomed.

The seeds of our ongoing disintegration long precede Trump’s rise to power. They were planted decades ago by strategic politicians who dressed rightwing ideologies in conservative garments, permitting the darkest angels of our nature to take hold and to reach a climax in fake claims of a stolen election that led to an insurrection in our country’s capital, followed first by the Senate’s abdication of its duty in Trump’s second impeachment trial (on the bogus ground that the trial had begun too late to give the Senate jurisdiction) and next by the US supreme court’s gifting of Trump – and every future president – with a nearly absolute immunity transforming the office from one restrained by law to a source of virtually limitless power."...(more)