Even with the midterm elections on the horizon, New Republic writer Jason Linkins says it’s not too early for the next Democratic White House to be considering how to sanitize federal agencies of their Trumpy stench.
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The New York Times recently broke the story of a Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division so hollowed out by politicization and a MAGA aesthetic that the department was forced to resort to hiring a rash of ethically challenged hacks and nonsensical goofballs.
This includes “a former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents,” a “onetime gambling executive” with a sideline in promulgating “conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017,” and a “Florida activist” whose “activism” included being jailed for several weeks for “hacking a local election system.”
And it’s not just the hackery, said Linkins. Staffing your administration with idealogues comes with certain caveats — like lawyers who can’t spell the word “north.”
“The long and the short of it is that the agency, once stocked with skilled professionals, is now chock-full of people who ordinarily wouldn’t pass the smell test for public service. Somewhere, a pool is missing its cess, and they might want to check whether it ended up at the DOJ,” said Linkins.
This isn’t going to be a temporary problem, insisted Linkins. President Donald Trump entered his second term bent on hiring a certain kind of hack more loyal to himself than the Constitution. And the idea that the Trumpers who’ve come to Washington might simply abandon the place when a Democratic administration takes control is too much to hope for.
“I worry that some of the true believers aren’t just here visiting; they intend to stay,” said Linkins. “That’s certainly the sense that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who’s gone to great lengths to stuff the agency under his control with all manner of cranks and quacks — strove to convey at last week’s MAHA Summit in Washington, D.C. As Mother Jones reported, Kennedy “proclaimed the changes he’s wrought to HHS are permanent, and praised his allies in the movement for helping to make them happen.”
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“Even if I got hit by a truck tonight,” he bragged, “HHS will never go back to what it was before,” Kennedy swore.
And the Department of Homeland Security, said Linkins, has deteriorated to “a hive of outlandish herrenvolk propaganda, pumping neo-Nazi memes into the social media bloodstream — the better to recruit the sort of person who might want to inflict terror on the streets of American cities.”
“For a future Democratic president, the challenge of righting the ship of state will not simply be a matter of reviving the federal workforce and bringing competent professionals back to the perches they once occupied. It will be a matter of fumigation,” warned Linkins.
A better term, coined by Yale Law professor Dina Francesca Haynes, is “lustration,” which is “the process of vetting and removing from public service those who engage in or support extremism or seek to undermine democracy.” And it will be a “necessary bridge back to a functioning democracy,” said Linkins.
The right way to think about the Trump administration and its wholesale operations across the federal government is to accept the fact that it is essentially a criminal syndicate, dedicated to self-enrichment and political corruption,” said Linkins. “The next Democratic administration should have accountability on its mind, and a commitment to rooting out the Trumpian rot that’s infected the civic architecture of this great nation.”
But, hey, look at the bright side of taking out the garbage, urged Linkins: “It might be that the most useful thing the Trump administration has accomplished in its odious lifetime is to provide the playbook to right its wrongs and dismantle Trumpism permanently.”
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