There was one delicious moment this week that gave me hope that the resistance to convicted felon-in- chief Donald Trump and his vulgar, immoral presidency is alive and well.
That moment came on Friday during the National Governors Association winter summit at the White House.
During the meeting in which Trump was discussing his executive order to bar transgender women from competing in women's sports at the college level, Trump goaded Janet Mills, the Democrat governor of Maine.
"Is Maine here, the governor of Maine?" asked Trump, knowing full well that she was and her stance on the matter. He was training his sights.
"Yeah, I'm here," replied Mills.
"Are you gong to comply with it?," asked Trump, referring to the executive order, which has no force of law.
"I'm complying with state and federal laws, Mills said.
"Well, we are the federal law," arrogantly – and ignorantly – replied Trump. "You better do it because you're not going to get any federal funding if you don't."
Wait. Was that a threat? It sounded very, umm, Mafia-like. The executive is not federal law. The judiciary is.
"See you in court," said Mills, clearly aware of the three branches of government and what checks and balances are all about.
Suddenly, in the midst of all the chaos that has fallen around us since Trump's inauguration last month, somebody stood up to him. Somebody grew a spine. Significant, perhaps, that she was a woman.
In the wake of Trump's cost-cutting slash-and-dash scramble through federal government bureaucracy these past few weeks, it feels like most politicians – the people who actually do wield the power – have mostly sat back and watched as our democracy gets stripped of its talent and intellect. Republicans, who control all three houses of congress, are complacent even though you know they know better. Democrats so far have been mostly disappointingly tepid and flaccid in their pushback.
Then Mills piped up. She spoke softly, but the room reverberated with her defiance. It was a welcomed, fearless spark in the resistance.
One of the greatest scalpels to American democracy has been the newly-invented Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which, as we shall see, is an oxymoron. Trump's MAGA world believes this agency is essential and it plays well to his base. The rest of us see it as mass murder.
The agency, headed by Elon Musk, the world's richest man whose companies (Tesla, Space X) are energized by government contracts. He walked into CPAC the other day waving around a chain saw like a child with a dangerous toy that he shouldn't be near, performing as a live metaphor to indicate how thorough his cuts have been.
It's not an office that was created by Congress, so it has questionable legality. Nor is Musk an elected official. He's an immigrant from South Africa who was not born in the United States and, as we can see, does not have a whit of American DNA in him. His cuts are soulless and stupid.
The mission of DOGE is to cut waste from government, which sounds great on the surface. But even in the short term, the cuts could be fatal to our democracy.
The hidden agenda behind DOGE is to slash as much money from the federal budget in order to free up funds to play for Trump's coming tax cuts for the wealthy. The last time Trump did this, in his first term, he added $8 trillion to the national debt. And don't you know that Musk and his companies will benefit from those tax cuts?
The thing is, there are 2.4 million government employees outside of the military and the post office. Those civilian employees, and the services they provide this country, are the ones being cut to ultimately feed the wealthy. If you fired all of them, it would represent just three percent of the federal budget.
In other words, we are killing ourselves to feed a mirage. This is Trump's biggest scam.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs dismissed more than 1,000 employees. Good luck getting your benefits processed in a timely way. If ever..
• The Defense Department will reduce its civilian workforce of 700,000 full-time workers by 5 to 8 percent. That should make us less efficient. And weaker.
• The Education Department has already lost at least 39 people in special education and student aid. We are becoming less smart. And less compassionate.
• Hundreds of employees were laid off from the Energy Department until it was pointed out to the clueless that this department deals with the nation's nuclear weapons. Their dismissals were rescinded. Efficient, that.
• Employees with public health agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were dismissed. Feel safer yet?
• The Internal Revenue Service is about to lose thousands of workers right in the middle of tax season. You might get this year's refund by Christmas.
• The National Park Service fired about 1,000 employees. These are the people that keep your national parks clean or offer educational interpretations at places like Gettysburg, the Grand Canyon, Pearl Harbor, Yellowstone and Yosemite.
• Like the Energy Department, the Agriculture Department had to rehire dismissed workers who were involved in the current bird flu epidemic. Once again, a display of DOGE's "efficiency."
I could go on: USAID, federal grants and loans, inspectors general, the Department of Justice are all falling under the knife, causing damage that might not ever be repaired by ensuing administrations.
What we are seeing is kind of a cultural, and maybe societal, suicide. It's unkind, it's malicious, it's ignorant, it's horrifying. The government is supposed to help us, not hurt us.
And it's all to satisfy the whims of a convicted felon seeking retribution from those who dared to defy him.
Show us the way, Janet Mills. Show us the way.
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