Ezra Klein: Stop Funding Trump's Takeover [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/opinion/trump-senate-democrats-shutdown.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/eXMeB

*snip*

I want to be very clear about what I am saying here. Donald Trump is corrupting the government — he is using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the Mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under Mafia rule, get the trash picked up or buy construction materials. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the Mafia’s power and wealth. This is what Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop.

Just in the past few months, we’ve watched Trump fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the jobs data. We watched him fire the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency after it suggested that the administration’s strike on Iran set its nuclear weapons program back by only months.

We watched him muse about firing Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, and now we’re watching him try to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, for alleged mortgage fraud. We’ve watched Trump sic his government on Senator Adam Schiff of California and Attorney General Tish James of New York — again, allegations of mortgage fraud. I will note that this is not coming after an exhaustive review of the mortgage documents of every person serving across the executive branch under Trump. This is what authoritarian governments do: Look hard enough, and all people have done something wrong, and even if they haven’t, you can cause them a lot of trouble by just saying they have.

We’ve watched Trump’s F.B.I. raid John Bolton’s house — Bolton, whom Trump hates because he became a critic of him after serving in his first administration. We’ve watched Trump threaten to investigate Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor, after Christie criticized him on television. We’ve watched the Trump administration force the resignations of Republican prosecutors who would not drop their case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York after the administration seemed to decide it would be more convenient to have Adams in its pocket than defending himself in court. We’ve watched Trump suggest that the Federal Communications Commission should pull the broadcast licenses for NBC and ABC. Trump has an enemies list, and he is using the power of the federal government to punish and harass his foes.

*snip*

Shut. It. Down.