Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Season 12 Episode 1
Aired on February 16, 2025
Main segment: Department of Government Efficiencyand influence ofElon Muskoversecond presidency of Donald Trump
Other segment: —
John Oliver discusses the first four weeks of Donald Trump’s second term as president, the strategy behind some of the choices his administration has made and why it is indeed fuck time. You heard us: It’s fuck time.
* * *
JOHN: We have to dive straight into our main story tonight: the fact that Donald Trump is once again President of the United States. Sorry if this is how you found out. Honestly, I’m not nuts about it either. Incredibly, it has been less than a month since Trump’s inauguration, but it already feels like an eternity. In just the past four weeks, he’s pardoned or commuted the sentences of January 6th rioters, withdrew the US from both the Paris Accords and the WHO, announced plans to take over Gaza, issued an executive order trying to undo Birthright citizenship, blamed the fatal DC plane crash on DEI, renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, responded to fires in LA County by releasing billions of gallons of water to California’s Central Valley 150 miles away, replaced a four-star general with the host of Fox & Friends as Secretary of Defense, and announced 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, a move prompting Canadians to do this.
[Music]
Crowd: Booooo! E
Excellent. I think the only thing more quintessentially Canadian than booing the US national anthem at a hockey game is the fact they waited politely for the right time to do it. Part of Trump’s rationale for his tariff threat was that Canada wasn’t doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl into the US, even though the total amount intercepted at the Canadian border last year was just 43 pounds, or roughly 0.2% of all US border fentanyl seizures. Trump quickly paused those tariffs after claiming that he’d won concessions from Canada, but when a Republican congressman tried to repeat that talking point on CNN, he ran into a slight problem.
He called this off, saying that he had won concessions from both of them. But… but is there a tangible concession in your view?
Yeah, absolutely. He won the concessions, and part of it is… part of it… part of his… well, it’s a… it’s a commitment from Trudeau that wasn’t there to help with fentanyl, to help with the black market, to secure the border.
He announced that plan, though, six weeks ago. Back in December.
Well, at least he’s reiterated it and formalized it.
JOHN: “Yeah, Kaitlan… yeah, what are you getting at about this?”
Trump got Canada to agree to what they’d already agreed to, and it didn’t cost us anything—except for any goodwill between our countries whatsoever. He pissed off an entire country of the most difficult-to-piss-off people in the world, and in exchange, we got them to resend an email. It’s called leadership, Kaitlan.
One of the most striking, if unsurprising, things over the last month has been the extent to which Trump seems to have prioritized active cruelty. He’s issued multiple EOs aimed at trans and gender-nonconforming people, including one declaring the federal government would only recognize two sexes—male and female—and another banning federal funding or support for youth gender-affirming care.
And then there were his multiple attacks on government diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which were pretty extreme.
The four-page memo, obtained by CBS News, instructs federal agency heads to cancel any DEI-related trainings and close all DEI offices. The memo went out just one day after President Trump signed an executive order giving agencies 60 days to terminate all DEI positions.
[Trump] Our country is going to be based on merit again. Can you—can you believe it?
JOHN: No. No, I actually can’t. And that is, frankly, a wild thing to say in front of a portrait of your dad, who you inherited a real estate empire from.
And the assault on DEI has been sweeping and sometimes very petty. An employee at one government agency told reporters unidentified outside staffers arrived to sweep the office of anything they felt was related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—which included a plaque confiscated from a supervisor’s desk that read “Be kind to everyone.”
And at that point, I’m just surprised they didn’t replace it with a poster of Calvin pissing on a copy of White Fragility.
Then there were the ICE raids, with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, taking Dr. Phil, for some reason, on a ride-along around Chicago—in perhaps the single worst version of Carpool Karaoke ever made.
It has all been total mayhem. And to some extent, that may be by design. Because it’s worth remembering, during Trump’s first term, Steve Bannon openly laid out what their thinking was back then.
So what we gotta do is just hit, hit, hit, and keep it—it’s momentum, momentum, momentum. The—the—the opposition party is the media. And the media can only—because they’re dumb and they’re lazy—they can only focus on one thing at a time. I said all we have to do is flood the zone. Every day, we hit them with three things, they’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover. But we gotta start with muzzle velocity. So it’s gotta start, it’s gotta hammer—Muzzle velocity.
JOHN: Okay. Set aside that “muzzle velocity” sounds like a straight-to-streaming vehicle starring Steven Seagal and six to ten dog extras who definitely died on set—that is a pretty accurate description of what we’re all witnessing right now.
Though, as a member of the media, I take issue with the claim that we can only focus on one thing at a time. It’s my ability to multitask that allows me to focus not just on how Bannon sounds like he’s trying to Monday-morning quarterback the football team of a high school he’s not allowed within 500 feet of, but also on how he somehow always looks like he was just recently pulled out of a wet hole.
But it is true that if you try and focus on everything, you’ll focus on nothing. So tonight, we thought we’d try and pull back and focus on one major theme of the last month, and that is the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the federal government from within. And to do that, we’re going to try and answer a few basic questions: what they’re doing, who it’s hurting, and what can be done about it.
Let’s start with exactly what is happening right now.
You might remember last year we talked about Project 2025, the playbook for Trump’s second term. In that story, we mentioned one of its main architects, Russell Vought, was hellbent on decimating the Civil Service. Here he is in 2023, laying out exactly what he hoped to do once Trump returned to power:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want—when they wake up in the morning—we want them to not want to go to work because they are so… they—they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
JOHN: You know, when I pictured the evil masterminds who would be taking down the American government from within, I pictured comic book villains standing over the city as lightning struck—not Russ from Budgets in history’s worst polo shirt, clicking through his slide deck and saying he wants to give bureaucrats clinical depression.
Newsflash, Russ: they already have it.
That man is now Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget and has begun carrying out his plans for a systemic purge of government workers. But he’s had a lot of assistance in that from the fact that Trump’s also brought in this guy—Elon Musk, seen here looking like a scrotum dressed for a funeral. He looks like a witch from Dutch folklore.
Musk’s self-invented Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has been trying to eliminate federal workers, sometimes in alarmingly blunt ways. One of the administration’s early moves was to send out an email offering many a deferred resignation, where they could quit their jobs and get paid through September or stay and risk being laid off. Which is already bizarre. And setting aside whether it’s even a real or legal offer, “Take this money now or risk being eliminated” isn’t how you run the federal government—it’s how you run Beast Games.
But for some workers, it’s gone well beyond just getting an email. There have been mass firings, and Musk has hired a team of young aides to assist in downsizing the government—some of whom have physically stationed themselves in government offices, as this federal worker explains:
“My colleagues are getting 15-minute one-on-one check-ins with 19-, 20-, and 21-year-old college graduates asking to justify their existence. One of Musk’s top lieutenants and his wife and young child have shacked up on the sixth floor of our agency and are living there.”
JOHN: Yeah, it is madness. Imagine being a federal worker and having to listen to a guy who wasn’t alive for 9/11, Shrek 1, or Shrek 2 say to you, “You’re being downsized. Please leave this office, which is now my bedroom. Also, can you please buy me a beer?”
And all of this is bad enough before you get to the fact that Musk’s team includes members with, shall we say, checkered employment histories.
“Another DOGE worker, Edward Corine—who called himself ‘Big Balls’ on social media—was fired from an internship with a data security firm called Path Network in 2022, accused of leaking information to a competitor. A spokesperson told CNN his contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure.”
JOHN: What a fun time to be alive this is. I’m so glad our country is based on merit again. Otherwise, candidates like Big Balls the Fired Intern might have been overlooked.
And it gets worse. Because it’s been reported that Big Balls at one point started a website allowing users to redirect to content on the site by creating shitposting URLs—including names like child-porn.store and kkk-is-cool.club.
And I never thought I’d say this, but… I expected better of Big Balls.
Or, as he’s now known, Senior Advisor at the State Department and Department of Homeland Security.
And the thing is, some of Musk’s team have had an extraordinary amount of access to sensitive data.
Another DOGE staffer, a 25-year-old named Marco LZ, was given access to Treasury Department payment data—basically, the checkbook for the entire federal government. Which was worrying even before it emerged that, within the past year, he tweeted things like ‘Normalize Indian hate,’ ‘You couldn’t pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,’ and ‘I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask?’
And those are some bad tweets.
And not even the fun kind, you know, like when Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris tweeted out sex gifs. Or the Pabst Blue Ribbon account tweeted out: “Not drinking this January? Try eating ass.”
Which, honestly, isn’t even a bad tweet. That’s just—That’s just pretty good advice.
And there have been claims and counterclaims over whether LZ had read-on access or the ability to actually change data. But either way, it is insane that he had access in any form—especially given what’s inside that database.
I file my taxes electronically. Does that put me inside this database the Bureau?
It does. And your bank account information—that’s how you get your refund electronically.
Not just who I am, where I live…
How much you made, how much your refund is.
All of that is in there.
Absolutely the most private, sensitive data about American citizens all sits in the Bureau of Fiscal Service and the Treasury payment ecosystem.
JOHN: That is definitely not information I want in the hands of Elon’s gang.
But if I may, a little correction there: the most private, sensitive data about Americans isn’t their bank account information—it is their Google search history.
Although, having said that, I am pretty sure that most Americans’ search history over this last month was a mix of:
- What the fuck is happening?
- What is a DOGE?
- Why is everyone so sad about Luka?
- WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?! (all caps)
- What to do when country go ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh???
It’s frankly no wonder an internal email from the Treasury Department’s threat assessment unit said allowing Elon’s team access was the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.
And when pressed on the obvious risks here, Kristi Noem, Trump’s Director of Homeland Security, had a weirdly blasé answer:
I remember a time when Republicans were very careful about, and—and worried about, uh, the government, particularly unelected people—
We can’t trust government anymore…
—access to personal data?
Yeah, oh, absolutely—
You are the government.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying, is that the—the American people now are saying that we have had our personal information, uh, shared and—and out there—
Musk has access to it.
Elon Musk is part of the administration that is helping us identify where we can find savings. His information that he has is looking at programs, not focusing on personal data and information.
Not focusing on it, but he has access to it.
Uh, you know, we’ll be continuing to talk to him about what all he has access to.
JOHN: Respectfully, what the fuck are you talking about?
“We can’t trust the government.”
But you ARE the government!
“Says who?”
Says you!
“That’s what I’m saying!”
What about data?
“Don’t know her.”
What about Elon?
“Yes, chef!”
What about Elon having access to personal data?
“We’ll continue talking to him about it.”
Are we absolutely sure that Kristi Noem shot her dog, or did she just talk to it and its head exploded?
And look, we are still in the early days of DOGE’s incursion into agencies. They’ve reportedly just begun to mess around at the Department of Education and the EPA. But to see where things could be heading, it’s worth looking at one place they’ve already done a fuckload of damage—and that is USAID.
It’s an agency that provides humanitarian and development assistance in over 100 countries, and it’s been described as the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. But as soon as USAID found itself in Elon’s crosshairs, it got butchered.
“Sources tell us USAID, the relief agency that brings food, water, and health care to victims of natural disasters, will soon have its global workforce reduced from roughly 14,000 people to fewer than 300 employees. An internal email shared with ABC News shows just 12 employees to be assigned to the entire continent of Africa.”
JOHN: Twelve employees. Twelve.
That is not even enough people to fully staff a Chili’s.
And to be clear, those cuts will have real consequences. People are going to get badly hurt because of what we’re doing right now.
Which, honestly, is a pretty good slogan for Chili’s itself.
And look, you can think there’s waste in the USAID budget. I’m sure that there is. And you can think a review is necessary—that is why most presidents undertake one. But this is different.
And while they’ve claimed that this is merely a 90-day pause while spending is reassessed, you might want to tell that to Elon, who tweeted last Monday:
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could’ve gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
Which—first of all—no, you could not. Because any party you attend is definitionally terrible.
And second—don’t you have, like, a hundred kids? Go hang out with them on the weekends, you parasitic freak.
Already, USAID workers have been recalled from postings overseas, and the agency’s name has been physically removed from its headquarters in D.C.
They even went so far as to tape a black garbage bag over the logo on the glass.
And I guess we’re all just lucky that it’s not October right now—otherwise, they’d have already turned it into a Spirit fucking Halloween.
And I know in some ways, USAID is an easy target with some populist appeal. Many Americans think we spend too much on foreign aid. Opinion polls have repeatedly shown that the public estimates that a quarter of the federal budget goes to foreign assistance and that they’d prefer it to be just 10%.
Although, all that really shows is that Americans have no idea how much we actually spend on foreign aid, given that the actual share is less than 1% of the federal budget.
And never has a poll shown such distance from reality as the one where one in eight men genuinely thought that they could score a point off Serena Williams in tennis.
And let me just say this—as a man of above-average height and some knowledge of sports: if I played tennis against Serena Williams, I would die.
And look—to be clear—we get a lot in return for that minor investment. First, it’s the right thing to do. But on top of that, it’s also in our self-interest. Just one of the things they’re involved in is disease prevention overseas, and you may remember, a few years ago, it emerged that viruses don’t tend to respect borders.
Also, spending to gain goodwill in other countries tends to make diplomacy easier.
But if you listened to Trump’s press secretary, you’d think that all we were doing with USAID money was complete nonsense:
“If you look at the waste and abuse that has run through USAID over the past several years, these are some of the insane priorities that that organization has been spending money on—”
“$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces.”
“$70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland.”
“$47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia.”
“$32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”
“I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap. And I know the American people don’t either.”
JOHN: Okay. If that sounds like mostly bullshit and spin to you, it’s because it is.
Though, will say—a DEI musical in Ireland, a transgender opera in Colombia, and a transgender comic book in Peru all sound like her best guesses for what Amelia Pérez is.
But the thing is—not only is she wildly mischaracterizing some of those projects—the last three that she listed weren’t even funded by USAID, but by grants from the State Department.
Again and again, the Trump administration and Elon Musk have boosted misinformation about where USAID money has gone—from Elon retweeting a fake E! News segment claiming it had paid to send celebrities to Ukraine (which it didn’t), to Trump posting that Politico had received $8 million from the agency (which it hadn’t), to his press secretary saying that the agency spent $50 million on condoms in Gaza (which it did not).
That claim set off an absurd game of telephone—with Elon excitedly retweeting her remarks, Trump bumping it up to $100 million on condoms for Hamas, only for a Republican congressman to go on TV to announce that it was actually $15 million for condoms for the Taliban.
But I guess Trump and Musk being outraged at any money being spent on condoms shouldn’t be that surprising—these are two men who seem like they’ve said, “But it just doesn’t feel the same” more often than they’ve said their own fucking names.
But again—none of that was real.
And when a reporter confronted Musk about all of this, his answer was infuriating.
“How can we make sure that all the statements that you said were, uh, correct so we can trust what you say?”
“Well, first of all, uh, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and—and should be corrected. So, nobody’s going to bat a thousand. I mean, any—you know, we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”
JOHN: Now, to answer your first question: who is that child?
That’s the new Under Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Or… or… it’s one of Elon’s kids.
Or possibly both.
But it is noticeable there—his answer to “How can we trust what you’re saying is true?” is basically “You can’t.”
Also, for the record—Trump isn’t even pretending to care anymore, is he? He is so restless and bored—he’s making the exact same face as a four-year-old at the exact same time.
But the thing is—those mistakes have had real consequences, especially for an agency that provides critical, life-saving aid overseas.
The suspension has reportedly halted national food programs that serve millions of people and disrupted critical aid deliveries of food and medicine. The impacts are already being felt on the ground, as you can see in this report from South Africa.
This is just one of the sexual health clinics that have been shut down since the USAID funding freeze. This one, in the heart of Johannesburg, has been catering for women with sexually transmitted diseases like HIV. Now, completely closed. We’ve seen people try and enter and be turned away.
“Are you trying to go to the clinic?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s closed.”
“What happened?”
“I mean, the USAID funding has been frozen, so they’re closing down clinics.”
“Do you have alternatives?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to ask next door—hopefully, they’ll be able to assist me. If they can’t… I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. Serious. What will I do? There’s nothing.”
JOHN: Yeah, it’s awful.
And it is somehow made even worse by the We Value You message on the shuttered window, which they should probably now change to:
“We Value You, But Unfortunately, We Can’t Help You—Thanks to One of the Worst White Guys South Africa Has Ever Produced (Which Is Really Saying Something).”
Now, after blowback to all this, the Trump administration announced that they’d given limited waivers for some life-saving programs. But unfortunately, thanks to sheer confusion over who is even eligible, the waivers have not resulted in the resumption of many vital programs.
And that is what they don’t seem to get about shutting down work like this.
Even if the faucets get turned back on completely—which they almost certainly won’t—huge damage will still have been done.
For instance, USAID funds things like antiretroviral treatments that prevent HIV from being transmitted to babies before, during, and after birth. As one agency employee put it:
“Just a few days into the pause, already at a minimum, 300 babies that wouldn’t have had HIV… now do.”
Which is terrible, especially given that without treatment, up to 30% of HIV-infected children die by their first birthday.
Another worker characterized this as:
“The richest person in the world taking away from the poorest people in the world.”
“People will die from this—like, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.”
But don’t worry, everyone—the person proudly feeding this agency into the wood chipper has admitted that he’s not batting a thousand—so it’s fine! He definitely gets it!
And even as Elon and the White House run like a buzzsaw through multiple agencies, it is worth noting that Musk has an active interest in what does and doesn’t get cut.
His companies have as many as 100 contracts with 17 different federal agencies. SpaceX alone holds about $22 billion in government contracts. And his companies are regulated by some of the very agencies now under attack.
At least 11 agencies have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints, or enforcement actions into Musk’s companies.
But don’t panic—the White House has reassured everybody that there is nothing to worry about here:
“If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, um… then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.”
JOHN: Oh, well that is great to hear! Thank goodness for that! Although, I will say—as a public policy professor pointed out:
“Self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”
Which is both true and something you probably shouldn’t need a professor to tell you. I could have told you that, and I’m not even a public policy professor—I just look like this.
This all feels incredibly fast, head-spinningly corrupt, and it is genuinely hard to summarize how overwhelming all of this feels. And honestly, the best encapsulation I’ve seen of this particular moment so far didn’t come from an academic or a reporter. It came from this guy:
“We’re in the middle of a hostile government takeover. I want to talk about it, but I’ll be late for work.”
And if you’re saying, “Wait a minute! Who? We have to stop this!”
“We had one! But you didn’t want the lady in office! Now that we’re a part of a Nigerian Prince SC—surprise, surprise! It ended up being a white man!”
“Oh! I just wanna know… what the hell do I do?!”
“Probably drink.”
JOHN: Excellent. Absolutely excellent. Put this man and his pink Fabletics sweatshirt in every NBA arena within a 500-mile radius—because this should be the new national anthem. No Canadian in their right mind would be able to boo that. And I’m not alone in loving that song. There are already multiple remixes of it online—all of which are very good. And one of which… is my favorite:
“We’re in the middle of a hostile…
[Music plays.]
JOHN: I’m calling it now—Song of the Summer. But in that excellent song, that guy actually addresses our final question tonight:
Namely: What the hell do we do? Is anyone going to stop this?
And let’s start with the people that you would naturally expect the least from, and that is Congressional Republicans. Technically, what Trump is doing right now is usurping Congress’s power of the purse, but they don’t seem that upset about that. Mike Johnson has punted, saying:
“If they are executive branch agencies, the executive branch is in charge of them.”
And others, like Senator John Kennedy, have actively cheered on Trump and Musk in the grossest possible way:
“Let me try to put all this in context for you… um, I like omelets. I mean, I really like omelets. I could eat an omelet at every meal. Um, I like omelets better than sex. Um—Not—not—not really, but you get the point. I like omes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
JOHN: Ok… Um… there’s just so much to unpack there.
First—we got that you liked omelets when you said “I like omelets.”
We also got it when you said “I really like omelets.”
And were made even further aware of it when you said “I could eat an omelet at every meal.”
All three perfectly effective ways of conveying your weird affinity for hard egg soup.
There was absolutely no reason though for you to bring up sex at all, except for the fact that you clearly wanted to. And now I am very mad at you because I haven’t had to think about you having sex since you famously said this during a Senate hearing:
“I can’t wait to have your cock in my mouth.”
Really? That’s, um… that—that’s a lovely offer. But as we’ve already established, there’s probably half a dozen eggs in there. How on Earth is it going to fit?!
But to be fair, it is hardly surprising that Republicans have been so quick to fall in line. Democrats, though, are supposed to be the opposition—and some, like AOC, have made it abundantly clear how unacceptable all of this is. And others have attempted to match her energy, even if that meant straying out of their comfort zone:
“We do have to—I don’t swear in public very well, but WE HAVE TO FUCK TRUMP!“
JOHN: Excuse me…We most certainly do not have to do that. I believe that law doesn’t take effect until at least his third term. And I’ve got to say, there is something genuinely charming about a non-cursor deciding that this is the moment to start. It’s a pretty moving distillation of where we are right now—that a reserved 52-year-old Oregonian is like:
“You know what? It’s fuck time.”
[Applause.]
But unfortunately, when it comes to Congressional Democratic leaders, they’ve sometimes shown far too little stomach for the fight.
In the early days of the Trump presidency, when a reporter asked Dick Durbin who’d be leading the charge against Trump, he replied:
“I can’t answer that. Give us a little time. This is brand new.”
But the thing is—it is definitionally not new. The presidency is not new. This man is not new. All of this was possible to prepare for. We’ve literally known there was going to be a 2024 election since 1789.
But maybe the clip that sums up Democratic leadership the best right now is this:
Representative Hakeem Jeffries citing New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge in arguing it’s better to pick and choose their fight and focus on a clear message:
“One of the reasons that he’s a great hitter is that he does not swing at every pitch. He waits for the right one, and then he swings. We’re not going to swing at every pitch. We’re going to swing at the ones that matter for the American people.”
JOHN: Okay—first, and least importantly—are you sure you want that to be your example? A guy who hit 184 in the postseason as his team lost the World Series in five games because he played bad defense? Is that really the analogy that you want to use here?
“Don’t be mad at us—we’re just like a baseball player on the most hated team in America, who absolutely shit the bed in the most high-stakes situation imaginable!“
But much more importantly—”We’re going to swing at the ones that matter for the American people.”
Who is that, exactly?
Is it trans people getting denied healthcare and bullied out of public existence?
Is it immigrant families being terrorized by ICE?
Or thousands of civil servants being harassed out of jobs?
Please, just let us know who you think is worth swinging for. Because it looks to me like you are striking out looking right now.
And look, if you have a representative who’s dragging their feet, I do think calling to yell at them has some value. At the very least, it shows them that their inaction isn’t going unnoticed. And if Democrats continue not to react— We should be primarying the shit out of them. And groundwork for doing that actually needs to be laid pretty soon.
But so far, the best backstops for all this have been outside of the legislative branch. In some cases, Democratic state attorneys general have banded together to file lawsuits, and courts have stopped or slowed some of Trump’s most damaging moves—with even judges appointed by Trump pushing back.
Just this week, the DOJ announced plans to drop their case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, saying if charges were dismissed, he’d be better able to help with immigration enforcement. They denied it was a quid pro quo, despite it doing a pretty good impression of one. But most federal prosecutors flat-out refused to go along with it. Several even quit in protest, with one writing a letter saying:
“I expect you will eventually find someone who would be enough of a fool or enough of a coward to file your motion, but it was never going to be me. Please consider this my resignation.”
And while—and while he didn’t technically write “Bitch” at the end of that letter, I would be amazed if Clippy didn’t pop up to suggest to him that he do it.
And that’s not the only moment of courage that we have seen. A doctor here in New York told his patients:
“I’m willing to go to jail to continue to provide your gender-affirming care.”
And in many cities, groups fighting for immigrants have coordinated responses to ICE raids. In fact, remember Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, taking Dr. Phil and a bunch of cameras out on raids? In Chicago, which he said would be Ground Zero for their mass deportation plans. Those raids were less successful than he wanted them to be—and he was pretty open about why:
“I mean, uh, sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago—very well educated. Uh, they’ve been educated how to—how to defy ICE, how to—how to—how to hide from ICE. And, uh, I’ve seen many pamphlets from many of the NGOs: ‘Here’s how you escape ICE from arresting you. Here’s what you need to do.’ They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it ‘How to Escape Arrest.’ There’s a warrant for your arrest, and—and they tell you how to—how to hide from ICE. ‘No, don’t open your door. Don’t answer questions.’”
JOHN: Right. And that is good advice. Also, if you’re relying on people not knowing their rights in order to do your job, it seems like you might be part of the problem here.
And all else aside—I fully get why people are not letting you in particular into their home. You are a thumb-headed weirdo with terrible vibes. You look and sound like J.K. Simmons choking on a marble. And I am rooting for the marble.
Look, the next four years are going to feel incredibly shitty. The potential for pain is devastating, as is the sheer amount of it that’s already been doled out. We’re seeing wealthy, powerful men use the levers of government for their personal advantage as well as their personal grievances.
And we’re being governed by people who think good public policy consists of:
- “Cut off funding to anyone who isn’t me.”
- “Make it illegal to mention people who are different from me.”
- “And fuck it, let’s steal Canada while we’re at it.”
Meanwhile, many of those that we’ve elected to fight back seem to be resting on their heels, waiting for their pitch. This is all bonkers, terrifying, and darkly absurd. It is worse than we thought—and we thought about it a lot. To put it mildly, things aren’t looking great right now. But defeat is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As much as we rolled our eyes at some of “The Resistance” in Trump’s first term—Some of which was very annoying. Some of which I am annoyed by too. Please tell your aunt to stop saying it.
Some of that energy did make a real difference. Remember those early protests at the airports over Trump’s proposed travel ban? A former prosecutor recently wrote about how seeing those protests helped others like him, who were fighting within the DOJ to rescind or limit the order, saying:
“Public outrage gave us courage and the knowledge that we were, in fact, working in the public interest. And advocacy on the outside made advocacy on the inside possible.”
So for all those federal workers going through it right now—support and solidarity really matter.
The point is—now is absolutely not the time to be looking away and saying:
“This is what you fuckers voted for.”
And turning your backs—especially when there are many good people doing important work out there who you can both join and support.
What’s ahead of us is going to be exhausting. And to get through this, we’re going to have to find a balance between acknowledging the hell of what is going on and finding the joy that can sustain us. And sometimes—if we are lucky—finding both in the exact same place. In the form of the single catchiest song ever written.
We’re in the middle of a hostile government takeover…
I mean—we are—he’s just—straight upright.
