Things Fall Apart: The February 10, 2025 Kook Roundup

Today's roundup will feature brief updates on the Treasury crisis, some random kookery, corruption, and outright fascism. It also previews a number of topics and views of mine that will need more long-form treatment here.

This format will likely evolve, but I think today demands a roundup-style summary from my BlueSky feed. I'll organize this in a few key areas, and make an effort to point to complete and more detailed accounts of what's going on than I could even aspire to offer here. My aim is to bring attention to key issues, miss as little as possible, and connect the dots where that seems applicable.

Treasury

Kookery

Corruption

Outright Fascism

What you won't find here:

Litigation updates - more on where to get those soon
Interesting minor observations - how even this DOJ isn't presuming regularity anymore
The fate of Ric Grenell and Dear Leader's new art project
50,000 words on the hypocrisy of the propagandists on nationwide injunctions

Treasury

In the world of the January Treasury Coup, Nathan Tankus' Notes on the Crises remains indispensable, and really this post is a reminder of how illegitimate the whole mess is. Other reporting makes it fairly clear that hollowing out the US Digital Service (leaving the normies there just sitting around in the dark) to create the DOGE anti-agency exists on the thinnest of pretexts, and remains an existential danger to the full faith and credit of the United States and the existence of the entire legislative branch created by Article I.

Here, 5 former Treasury Secretaries and Don Moynihan point out the obvious – the Elon Musk and his coterie making absurdist claims about "fraudulent" Treasury bonds and coyly hinting at not paying them is an epochal threat to full faith and credit, and destructive of massive amounts of Americans' wealth.

Kookery

A bit of shameless self-promotion here, but I really don't know what else to say. This isn't the first time we've seen a literal Trump/calf idol make an appearance, but its patent absurdity hints at a dark underlying reality in the cult, and a reminder that this crazy isn't going away anytime soon.

There's a lot more to say here – on American Evangelical Christianity in particular having become little more than a set of socio-political preferences, on how political cults work, and on moral/civic nihilism more generally, but that will have to wait.

I'm filing this under kookery, but Judd Legum's great scoop is a bit more interesting than that. Yes, the NSA has to remove the government's list of forbidden words from all its stuff, affecting its core duties, and showing the censorious people behind these lists to be the hypocrites I've insisted they are for years. And this is insane for more reasons than I can count. But what's notable is that someone in the NSA is leaking – and the NSA (sans Snowden) really doesn't leak.

The "annex a bunch of allied countries" kookery continues apace, and here is an observation relevant to a lot of Trumpian kookery – that the doing of the thing is totally absurd and counter-productive politically, but the performative lunacy and drama is itself the objective for people with no policy objectives, and only a thirst for one more season of Sun-downing in the Oval.

And no kookery section would be complete without a hat tip to Elon - who is about 3 ketamine binges away from making it the official position of the Treasury that all money is a hologram. Here, we're apparently in a Truman show, constructed by USAID of all things - the kooks' big bogeyman this news cycle. The lies told about this are legion of course, despite the existence of USASpending.gov. I forget whether we're at 15 million or 50 million condoms, and whether they are currently for Hamas or the Taliban, but I think that's enough about the crazy.

Corruption

This could be under a number of sections, but I'm going to say that demanding civil servants not perform their legally mandated and funded jobs is simply corruption in that it robs the public of a service they have lawfully procured through Congressional representation, bill passing, presentment, and all the other steps from SchoolHouse Rock that have been dispensed with this week.

Even the pretense of guardrails gets laughed out of the room as Elon, a person who makes his living from government subsidies and contracts, decides if he's conflicted or not.

Performative boutique immigration cruelty in Lousiana – we all knew that meant corruption taken to an art form. And here is Louisiana's governor handing out a no-but contract of $17.5 million to house 100 people for 3 months. Mind, the $2,000 per person per day could have them Uber'd to the Ritz. But one must assume that the performative cruelty and menacing goose-stepping of the contracted help comes at a high price indeed.

What would have been a Presidency-ending scandal anytime in the last 80 years – the insistently deliberate outing of probationary CIA agents, remains a footnote in the week of fascist lunacy. All the Republicans who would rant and rave on national TV about protecting sources and methods, and being guardians of our covert services are nowhere to be found.

Very little of the performative Elon/Trump crazy isn't for some pecuniary reason, and here, billions in USAID's stolen money went down a traceability black hole – likely to be found (if ever) in the hands of some no-bid Trump crony for corrupt lunacy I can't even predict at this juncture.

The evening ended with the most blatantly corrupt document issued in the entire history of the Department of Justice (a department not always headed by the most quality of individuals). The document simply proclaims that without reference to the evidence or the law, Eric Adams gets his incredibly damning foreign corruption case dropped. It goes on to detail the quid-pro-quo that that administration has received for this action. I almost wonder if this wasn't done as a pardon simply to avoid teeing up the legal question of "a pardon so corruptly quid-pro-quo that the courts cannot fathom it." On the same day, the lawless announcement that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act would be suspended in its enforcement dropped. Oh, and Rod Blagojevich gets his long-awaited pardon, just so we're crystal clear that no corruption laws are in operation and that anyone can buy the President's shitcoin for express bribery without even a phony legal settlement as a bribe.

Outright Fascism

While the New York Times and its ilk continue to search every thesaurus in the building for synonyms to the clear and obvious words, the lawless consolidation of power outside any constitutional or legal framework continues.

George Conway, who could have been head of DOJ Civil Division during Shitshow 1 (his catchy name for Trump's first term), and a premier never-Trumper ever since, sounds the gravest of alarms here and in his excellent chat with Sarah Longwell. When the level-headed lawyers unbothered by most anything who are both small-C and big-C conservative in their temperament, start talking about "the streets," it's hard to overstate what an absolute existential crisis the country finds itself in.

Here-what sounds like a tactical question is actually an existential one about why Congress sits, what their appropriations do, and what law means to the lawless. As someone who has for years rang the periodic alarm bell about the crisis of a default and its profoundly horrible effects, I'm now forced to confront it as the possible only way out of our current crisis.

Cutting to the chase - Democrats must not vote for to continue government funding or for a budget until the Musk kooks are removed from government offices and the court orders (which will be contempt orders by the time most read this) enforced. This is non-negotiable, and holding the entire global economy hostage on that basis - on the basis of whether to continue under the Constitution of 1791 - is not only permissible, but mandatory.

"FOIA Terrorist" Jason Leopold brings a compelling story to life with the death blow struck at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by the DOGE kooks. This story could just as well be written for any government department this week, and the read makes it clear how lawless and insane the whole thing really is.

It almost seems quaint to point out at this point how the closest thing the Trumpers have to a political paramilitary - the CBP - are hand-in-glove with the serially criminal Proud Boys gang - the ones who just lost their trademark to the historic black church they vandalized.

Speaking of people with no rights, Ken White (aka Popehat) reminds us that this is one of the central tenets of Trumpism (and of right-wing faux-conservatism more generally). We have a lot of people screaming the silent parts out loud this week, and it's now clear who thinks they're above the law.

The Trump agenda that isn't (and could not be) is Patrick's focus here. It's darkly funny in light of the clips of Trump talking about "signing bills" that are just lawless executive orders. Aside from having a house majority that would fit in a breakfast nook, there's not even the pretense of legislation or an agenda, or anything but lawless power consolidation and violent cruelty to disfavored groups. As during Shitshow 1, the only sign we have of a legislative agenda is the $5 billion hole Trump wants to blow in deficit spending.

While we're on the topic of fascist hypocrites, the positions by loud kooks on nationwide injunctions and whether we should obey judges flip yet again, and we have the receipts here on Stephen Miller - one of the darkest figures in Trumpworld. Steve Vladeck has written essentially an entire book about how the right abuses their one-kook judicial districts and emergency relief more generally, but it's worth noting that these nearly always serve the kooks.

The American Bar Association finally finds a voice and points to the obvious point that legal practitioners of any valid political belief can and must back the courts as the arbiter of our legal disputes. We're well past the point where oaths, constitutions, laws, civics, or morals are taken seriously by the delusional power-hungry fascists holding the levers of power, but this is a reminder that we are fast approaching a moment where every citizen will have to decide for themselves what to do in a world where the Constitution (to say nothing of the norms of human decency that went out the window years ago) is no longer in effect.