I’ve noticed a lot of talk about 2004. After G.W. Bush won re-election he talked expansively about his “political capital” and how he was going to spend it. And he spent it promoting his stupid scheme to privatize Social Security, which flopped miserably and set the stage for a huge Dem win in the 2006 midterms. Many fingers are now being crossed the next couple of years will be a similar story.

The two headlines that stood out for me today were both at WaPo. One is Trump is coming for the executive branch. Does he know what he’s doing? by Dan Balz. The subhead is “The president-elect has signaled he will be destructive, but he seems motivated by retribution rather than saving money.” Seems?  A WaPo headline from yesterday said Trump plans to fire Jack Smith’s team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election. I understand Smith is dismantling his team and plans to leave before Trump is sworn in, so Trump may not get to fire him. The subhead to that story is “The plans show how president-elect Donald Trump wants to use the Justice Department to address his own personal grievances.”

I don’t doubt he intends to use massive amounts of government resources trying to prove the 2020 election was stolen from him. That brings me to the other headline from today, Pam Bondi, Trump’s AG pick, said ‘prosecutors will be prosecuted.’

Bondi said the Justice Department’s special counsel investigation into whether Trump associates coordinated with Russian interference in the 2016 election needed to be dissolved. She declared that the 45th president’s first impeachment in 2019 was a “sham.” And when Trump was indicted four times after leaving office, Bondi was blunt about who deserved legal scrutiny — and it wasn’t the former president.

“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Bondi declared on Fox News in 2023, soon after Trump’s fourth set of criminal charges. “The investigators will be investigated.”

You might recall that the 2020 election was already investigated up the wazoo. But maybe now Trump has found people who will fabricate new evidence. Whether this will turn out to be Privatization 2.0 probably depends on how it gets covered by the media, however. In other words, don’t count on it.

Here’s a rather alarming story I’ve seen only in Rolling Stone, for example — Trump Refuses to Disclose Who Is Funding His Transition, by Peter Wade. I knew about some of this, but not all of it.

True to character, Donald Trump is already flouting ethics laws and norms even before he takes office as president in 2025. The president-elect is accepting secret donations to fund his transition while refusing to sign ethics pledges or deliver an ethics plan mandated by the Presidential Transitions Act. The transition also has not signed an agreement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that would allow the agency to do background checks on Trump nominees.

The transition has missed deadlines in September and October despite transition team leaders Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon promising to sign memorandums of understanding with the Biden White House that would facilitate the outgoing administration’s collaboration with Trump’s transition team. According to The New York Times, the Trump transition has privately created an ethics code and conflict-of-interest guidance for transition staff, but those documents do not include a legal requirement — a statement regarding how Trump will handle conflicts of interest while in office. ,,,

… Historically, presidential transitions — including Trump’s 2016 transition — have signed an agreement to receive financial assistance from the General Services Administration, which is responsible for monitoring the transition process. By accepting the funds and signing the agreement, transitions are agreeing to abide by certain conditions that would limit individual donations to $5,000 and mandate transparency regarding donors. Without disclosing donors, foreign influence is also a concern since there are no restrictions on international donations to transitions, unlike presidential campaigns. …

… Instead of allowing the F.B.I. to investigate Trump administration nominees’ backgrounds, the transition is conducting private background checks. According to CNN, Trump and his acolytes believe that the F.B.I.’s process is too slow and could get in the way of the work Trump wants to do to implement his agenda. Sources told CNN that behind closed doors, Trump has questioned whether background checks are necessary.

Are we alarmed yet?

And then there are the DOGE boys, Musk and Ramaswamy, who are supposed to be in charge of “government efficiency.” See Matt Ford at The New Republic, The More You Learn About Elon Musk’s DOGE, the Less Sense It Makes. They’re merrily taking a sledgehammer to government bureaucracy. Right now they’re working on smashing muc of the regulatory system and firing the workers maintaining that system. I understand their long-term plans include gutting things like housing assistance (which might put me out of my home) and Medicaid, which among other things pays for most old folks in long-term care facilities. How that goes over with the public may depend on how widely the pain is spread. A lot of the damage done might not be evident right away.

The mass deportations could get very ugly and messy and could cause concern among the not-deported. And the anticipated hit on the economy, especially food prices, should be noted. The bleeping Trump had damn well better notice. And we’ll see how much damage he does with tariffs.