Opinion
By Jeff Childers

2/1/25
Good morning, C&C, itβs Saturday! My goodness. Yesterday, amidst much other news, the Trump Administration piled on with a series of sackings that hysterical progressives are calling a βcoup.β I did my best to catch up. In todayβs roundup: BlueSky lefties think the sky is falling; we begin to learn what DOGE has been up to through bureaucrat leaks, and itβs good; Musk captures the Office of Personnel and Management; DOGE battles with Treasury; Trump fulfills tariff promise; bloodletting at FBI management spurs howls of far-left outrage; Trump considers completely pulling the plug on USAID; Pentagon kicks corporate media out of DOD HQ and invites conservative media; another mysterious plane crash; Trump signs Laken Riley Act; Secretary of State Marco Rubio declares new US foreign policy and the end of globalism; and thoughts about the three controversial cabinet hearings this week and what the optics say about a declining Democrat future.
The Democrats are freaking out. In a series of slightly-less-unhinged posts yesterday, Gizmodo reporter Matt Novak succinctly summarized how far-left progressives on BlueSky are feeling right now, which is leaderless and hopeless:

Whose fault is it the Democrats are leaderless? They could have offered an unbeatable ticket βRobert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbardβ but the ancient buzzards gatekeeping party purity refused to allow any new ideas to penetrate the DNCβs apparatus.
Now, merely two weeks into a Trump Administration that can be fairly described as manic, there is so much change coming down the pike that we are on the verge the waterfall, if not already over, tumbling in mid-air, having reached the over-saturation tipping point where non-partisan Americans just tune out and go back to living their normal lives.
Put simply, the 24×7 politics and the permanent outrage machine are simply too much emotional stimulation. We already lived through a year of apocalyptic predictions about the death of democracy. Nobody wants to go through that all over again. People canβt stay outraged about everything all the time.
As evidence Iβm right, Matt expressed frustration that the evening news isnβt covering Trumpβs latest outrages closely enough:

Increasingly, the tsunami of Trump actions appear to be a feature rather than a bug. Heβs fighting a war, and is overwhelming the enemy. Six ways from Sunday.
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Thanks toΒ leaks, we are getting a pinch more visibility into Elon Muskβs Efficiency operations under DOGE. Yesterday, Reuters ran a story headlined, βExclusive: Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency, sources say.β
Sources say? Leakers. Reuters sourced its story to βtwo officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.β
It is true thought that DOGE has not discussed its plan in public. Thus, the details from the story were thrilling.
On January 20th, the day Trump took office, a DOGE team including current and former Musk employees assumed command of the critical Office of Personnel and Management (OPM). DOGE delivered pull-out sofa beds to the fifth floor of OPM headquarters. The fifth floor is OPMβs top-management floor.
The sofa beds were installed so the DOGE team could work around the clock.
Meanwhile, OPMβs staff managers, like its CMO Katie Malague, were quickly and neatly moved out of their offices down to new offices on lower floors. It was a physical and psychological demotion, even if not any change in title or salary.
“It feels like a hostile takeover,” one of the leakers complained to Reuters.
Next, OPM employees were unceremoniously cut off from all administrative access to the systems. They can still log in and do their work, but they cannot access any management functions or data. All this change is making their jobs much more exciting than usual.
OPM staff were βsurprised,β for example, by the βFork in the Roadβ memo last week, since the first time they saw it was at the same time it was sent out to all federal employees.
Amusingly, the article was sourced from leakers, but failed to connect the obvious dot: the DOGE team cut the OPM staff out of the loop because they clearly think the career people will leak like rusty sieves.
Iβd hoped DOGE would do some good stuff, but I had no idea it would be like this.
π₯ We learned even more about Muskβs work from three other leakers and an internal Treasury memo. The Washington Post broke the story yesterday headlined, βSenior U.S. official exits after rift with Musk allies over payment system.β
The Treasury Department issues all payments on behalf of the United States. In that sense, every social security payment, every grant, tax refund, stimulus payment, Obamacare reimbursement, foreign aid, Fauciβs security detailβs strip club reimbursement, the whole worksβ if paid by the US, the check comes from Treasury. It issues more than 1.3 billion individual checks totaling over $6 trillion yearly.
In other words, Muskβs database engineers have been dying to dig into that Treasury data, to determine exactly what the US has been buying and who weβve been paying. For example, does their name end with β-ensky?β
This database is the mother lode leading to the deep state.
But for two hectic, fast-paced weeks, the Treasury Department has stubbornly refused to give DOGE any access to the payments database. The rift leading to the resignation referenced in the headline happened when newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ordered the highest-ranking career bureaucrat at Treasury to turn over the passwords.
Instead of doing, that he resigned. (It could be more accurate to say he was offered a chance to resign. We donβt know. After all, he can still take that 8-month deal.) The bottom line is, he refused to turn over the passwords.
Late in the article, the WaPo got around to admitting that DOGEβs request for access wasΒ completely legal. Trump ordered Treasury to do it back on January 20th when the President created DOGE. So if anyone is breaking the law, itβsΒ career Treasury officials:

Treasury officialsβ resistance looks more like bureaucratic defiance than lawful objection. Bureaucrats cannot just ignore a Presidentβs lawful order. If officials disagreed on the legality, they should have sought a court injunctionβrather than deploying rogue bureaucratic resistance.
Trumpβs executive order mandatedΒ transparencyΒ andΒ reform. DOGEβs charter is to expose entrenched waste, inefficiency, or even corruption within the government, including the Treasury payments system. There is no reasonable objection to allowing DOGE its access.
NBC ran a story yesterday headlined, βTrump to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China on Saturday, White House says.β He said he would do it, he is doing it, and yet the media is still freaking out. Clearly, the idea of a president who actually does the things he promised during the campaign is completely disruptive. We didnβt think heβd actually do it!

Yesterday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that, starting today (Feb. 1),Β as promisedΒ the U.S. will impose a 25% tariff on all goods entering the U.S. from Canada and Mexico and a 10% tariff on goods from China. The President stressed that he wants to encourage the three countries to doΒ moreΒ to stop illegal immigrants and fentanyl from entering the United States.
Even more broadly, President Trump has also promised additional tariffs on oil and gas imports, computer chips, and steel and aluminum, which he confirmed were coming soon, but didn’t offer any details. He also promised to build a “tariff wall” around pharmaceuticals designed to bring the whole industry back into the U.S., for obvious reasons.
President Trump also ominously said he planned βsubstantialβ tariffs on the European Union. More substantial than 25%?
The media has no idea how any of this will play out. Nobody does. Trump is making big moves, disrupting the old order, and it is probably impossible to predict exactly how things will go down. Assuming Trump doesnβt pull some kind of surprise rabbit out of his hat, like new trade deals with the three big trading partners, then there will be a period of economic adjustment.
Get ready for daily articles whining about how the tariffs increased the price of this product or that product.
Yesterday, Newsweek ran a story headlined, βTrump administration’s “purge” of FBI agents sparks backlashβ”Retaliation.ββ Itβs notΒ quiteΒ a purge, not yet, but yesterdayβs moves totally freaked out the already anxious Democrats.

CLIP: MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki hysterically cries about βFBI Purgeβ (2:32).
Yesterday, without warning, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove βformerly one of Trumpβs personal attorneysβ fired β25 to 30β DOJ prosecutors who worked on the Trump cases. They had always been temps, but Biden made them full-time employees right before the Inauguration.
Those sackings were unsurprising, but Democrats still complained worse than wet chickens.
According to MSNBC, the firings also included top FBI career leaders and βmore than 20β directors of various FBI field offices across the country, including Miami, Las Vegas, and the DC Field Office. David Sundberg, who championed the J6 investigations, was the DC Field Officer Director, and was fired.
But what really got Democrats stirred up was Boveβs request for a list of all rank-and-file FBI agents and personnel who worked on the January 6th casesβa list that could include thousands.
Thatβs when the fur truly started flying. It was an all-hands-on-deck moment for Democrats. Cory Booker, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, AOC, Jamie Raskin, you name it, they all issued hyperbolic, outraged statements from their offices and on social media.
It backfired horribly. It was incredibly bad optics. These politiciansβ support doesnβt help the FBI at all. The fact that all the Democratsβ most partisan members were screeching like barn owls only proved the point. Youβd think that if the FBI Agents were apolitical and totally unbiased and neutral and so forth, at least some Republicans would be sticking up for them (likewise, if they were really even-handed, some Democrats would be irritated with the FBI).
Has the FBI no friends left among the Republican Party? If not, it speaks volumes.
π₯ Perhaps sensing the political moment better than Hakeem, Schumer, and Schiff, the FBI Agents Association shot for a more conciliatory approach. It invoked political self-interest, by suggesting how firing so many FBI agents at one time could backfire on the Administration: βDismissing potentially hundreds of agents would severely weaken the Bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats, and will ultimately risk setting up the Bureau and its new leadership for failure.β
But thereβs a big problem with that argument. The argument is that firing these FBI Agents will weaken investigations into domestic terrorism and crime by understaffing the agency. But if these agents were so non-essential they could be assigned to January 6th cases for three years, itβs very hard to imagine we canβt somehow limp along without their particularly ignoble crime-fighting efforts.
In CNNβs story, one anonymous FBI employee said the January 6th case was the largest investigation ever worked by the FBI. βEveryone touched this case,β the employee explained helplessly.
In other words, imagine how much more efficient the FBI will run, once the βlargest investigation ever,β which distractedΒ everyone, is finally over. Speaking of efficiency, on Thursday, media began reporting thatΒ a DOGE team was now embedded on the Directorβs floor at FBI headquarters.Β The 4-man DOGE team reportedly includes two former FBI agents, a former aide to Representative Jim Jordan (R-Oh.), and an as-yet unidentified SpaceX employee.
Combine the OPM couch story, the Treasury takeover, and the SpaceX employee telling the FBI what to do, and you can understand why the BlueSky-ers are so aggravated they are tossing around inflammatory words like βcoupβ and βoligarchy takeover.β
Yesterday, the Hill ranΒ anotherΒ outrageous story headlined, βDemocrats slam Trump over reports heβll merge USAID with State Department.β Uh-oh. Itβs about to get real.

Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, 74, launched the rumor that Trump was trying to figure out how to shut down USAID altogether:

As Schumer correctly noted, USAID was created by John F. Kennedy through an executive order and later established by Congress. Itβs meant to be an βindependentβ agency overseen by the State Department to handle disbursing billions of dollars of βhumanitarian relief and economic development.β Those terms are squishy enough that Democrats and every sketchy deep state agency have coopted it as a money spigot. USAID is a tool to quickly splash cash around the world wherever it may be needed, like funding color revolutions and regime change operations, or Democratsβ congressional campaigns.
USAIDβs βindependenceβ frustrates oversight and shuts down scrutiny. But the agencyβs βindependenceβ is constitutionally dubious, entrenched only through statutory loopholes and bureaucratic inertia. The Constitution vests all power over foreign relations in the Executive Branch (Article II, Section 2). Foreign aid logically falls under his constitutional authority over foreign relations.
Over the years, lawmakers have created statutory authorities purporting to allow USAID to function semi-autonomously. This effectively gave unelected bureaucrats wide latitude to execute U.S. foreign assistance policyβ even if it contradicted the sitting Presidentβs policies. But Reaganβs unitary executive theory suggests that the President may fire USAID officials and override their decisions without congressional micromanagement.
It sure looks like President Trump is toying with a showdown with Congressional Democrats over his control of Executive Branch agencies and their employees. This is another developing front in the war with the deep state. If Trump can cut off the money, the deep state will wither away.
Trying to catch up here. Letβs do a few quick hits:
π₯ Whatβs not to like about our new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth? Yesterday, Mediaite covered the story under the headline, βPentagon Boots NBC, NPR, NYT, and Politico from Offices β To Be Replaced by Breitbart and One America News.β In what the DOD called a βrotation,β suggesting itβs no longer their turn, the military evicted corporate media from its permanent offices inside the Pentagon, inviting newer conservative media outlets to move in instead.

Corporate mediaβs eviction was more than just symbolic. Access gave corporate media a competitive news reporting advantage, which DOD just handed to conservative media. The irony is that if corporate media reported the news at all fairly, the DOD would be hurting itself by kicking them out. But since they knew corporate media would misreport everything, it was a win-win-win moment.
βοΈ Just days after the Reagan National Airport tragedy, we had to deal with another plane crash. The BBC reported the story headlined, βAll six passengers killed in Philadelphia medical plane crash, mayor’s office says.β The private medical Learjet took off from Philly airport en route to Tijuana, Mexico, but crashedΒ one minuteΒ into the flight. Obviously, there is no reliable information yet.

I can think of lots of good questions about this, but we are in the hot takes phase. Weβll wait for confirmed details. But it reminds me of the old saying:
βOnce is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.βΒ β James Bond.
This week, something good emerged from a different horrific tragedy. On Wednesday, ABC ran a story headlined, “Trump signs Laken Riley Act, setting up next phase of immigration crackdown.” Youβll recall this is the new law that requires illegal immigrants to be deported up, on their first brush with the law, before things escalate.

That much is already good enough. But what was arguably even better, the new law authorizes states to sue whenever the federal government fails to enforce immigration laws, which will prevent another Bidenic Border Catastrophe.
The Kyiv Independent reported one of the most important developments since the Inauguration, quietly headlined, β‘Dishonest’ to suggest Ukraine could have fully defeated Russia, retake Crimea, Rubio says.β Among other things, Rubio called the Proxy War βdishonest,β explaining that βthe dishonesty was that we somehow led people to believe that Ukraine would be able, not just to defeat Russia, but destroy Putin, push him all the way back to what the world looked like in 2012 or 2014 before the Russians took Crimea.β

Watch the whole thing. The Rubio upgrade installed in the State Department is a massive improvement. The new Secretary of State said that the U.S. has been “funding a stalemate” in a war that has “set Ukraine back 100 years.β Both of those critical, long-overdue admissions suggest the Trump Administration is taking a practical, honest approach to the Proxy War.
That is terrific news.
But Rubio went much further. He also explained a whole new policy approach upending fifty years of settled neocon theory. βItβs not normal for the world to have a single unipolar power; that was an anomaly of the Cold War,β Rubio explained. I wish I had more time to further explore the implications of this revolutionary declaration. Maybe tomorrow.
Either way, the Trump Administration just announced it will abandon the all-costs pursuit of American hegemony. The alternative is a practical, multi-polar world with at least three independent, cooperating superpowers (if not four).
In other words, the globalist era is over.
As a quick reminder, Rubio was the Senator who forced deep state diva Viktoria Nuland to admit that the U.S. built biolabs in Ukraine. So we can be confident Marco Rubio knows what time it is in Kiev.
π₯ NBC ran a story Thursday headlined, βSenate confirms Doug Burgum as interior secretary; Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. testify at confirmation hearings.β Social media and political forums lit up with frustrated moderates and independents who watched this weekβs triple confirmation hearings and concluded, correctly, that the Democrats have completely lost the plot.

The three hearings exposed the Democratsβ intolerance for independent thought, as former Democrats Kennedy and Gabbard and Republican Patel were hectored and pilloried βnot for corruption, incompetence, or ethical failuresβ but for refusing to march in ideological lockstep with a 1990βs-era Democrat policy litmus test.
Over the past decade, the Democratic Party has systematically purged its own party of all new talent. It drove its freshest voices out of the tentβ and into the arms of Republicans. Kennedy and Gabbard are only the highest-profile examples, but the trend is now undeniable.
Instead of embracing the massive energy of the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movementβtruly a set of traditionally liberal policies that could have revitalized the partyβs appealβ Democrats fumbled the healthcare ball, and Republicans happily snatched it up and are running it in for a 70-yard touchdown.
Like the Sleestacks in Land of the Lost, sputtering Senate Democrats appeared frozen in time. Or, like Titanic survivors bobbing in the freezing waters, they clung to the shreds of obsolete political strategies and past-dated policy positions that no longer move voters. Their furious βif not unhingedβ rejections of Kennedy and Gabbard underscored the partyβs stubborn refusal to evolve, prioritizing ideological purity over expanding its base.

We are nearing an unavoidable destination, a final stop that was perhaps always inevitable after Democrats fully embraced wokeness. Woke, after all, is a jealous political force tolerating no dissent and demanding unwavering allegiance through constant virtue-signaling.
It must be exhausting.
The Democratic Partyβs strategy of strict ideological purges and preserved conformity may have floated the partyβs boat for a time, but as the reaction to this weekβs hearings suggests, the tide is turning. Americans are sick and tired of the theatrics and the faux outrage.
America wants leaders willing to speak to uncomfortable truths and tell us like it is, regardless of how unpopular telling the truth may be among Washingtonβs octogenarian class.
If the Democrats keep slamming the door on their brightest voices, they will keep finding that increasing numbers of voters are slamming the door on them.
A final point. Kennedy and Gabbard in particular used the Senate floor to slam open the Overton Window on a whole range of topics once considered untouchable conspiracy theories. For example, Kennedy dragged into common parlance the ugly fact that Americans pay more for our healthcare than any other nationβ but experience the worst outcomes.
Nobody denied that now inarguable fact. Astonishingly, it became a mantra stolen by many of the Democrats, including socialist Bernie Sanders. (In one exciting exchange, Kennedy outed an apoplectic Sanders as a sold-out pharma shill.)
RFK also shone a spotlight on the autism epidemic, forcing a long-ignored but critically necessary conversation into the mainstream, in the process giving progressives permission to at least consider possible causes.
Gabbard, meanwhile, ripped the mask off the Iraq war. Whether intentional or negligent, the intelligence communityβs failures in Iraq cost thousands of lives and countless billionsβ and thereβs never been any accounting for that failure. Media this morning harped on Tulsiβs refusal to call Edward Snowden a βtraitorβ, like anybody cares about that.
And most significantly, all the Senators questioned the nominees about these previously off-limits issues, even if just to mock their ideas, but in the process proving the senators do know about the problems. Itβs just that until now, theyβve pretended to be unaware of them.
Never mind me, corporate media canβt keep up with the epic deluge of Trump Administration news. Trumpβs teams are working around the clock, while his adversaries remain on a 9-5 schedule. As the Presidentβs people continue taking more and more control, and as each new nominee is confirmed, the pace will only increase.
What we are all experiencing is, as advertised, shock and awe.
Have a wonderful weekend! Iβll catch you back here on Monday morning, where I am sure we will have plenty to talk about, since the Trump Team never sleeps.
Donβt race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nationβs needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: β Learn How to Get Involved π¦
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida