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With the United States federal government shutting down over a funding dispute in Congress even as POTUS Donald Trump sends troops into more U.S. cities and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claims to be remaking the U.S. military, is it possible to tell clampdown from clownshow?
And that’s not even mentioning increasing signs of expanding threats of war in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and possibly South America.
I’m going to try to apply the lens of deliberate deception, delusion, and dipshittery that I’ve recently applied to Israel’s hasbara war on its 8th front and the European powers’ attempts to control popular opinion to the Trump administration’s recent actions, propagandistic, kinetic, and financial.
Let’s put things in context before we dive in. Trump and his administration are moving fast because it is clear the current financial bubble may be about to pop. That is the kind of pressure that drives desperate moves.
Philip Pilkington put it well, quoting from John Authers’ Bloomberg column “Assume an AI Bubble. What Difference Would It Make?”
This comment on the AI bubble from @johnauthers is 100% on the money. The recent stock market bubble is less an “excitement” bubble and more so a “lifeline” bubble. It feels like everyone knows something is coming to an end – USD hegemony – and they are just trying to hang on.🫧 pic.twitter.com/V7f70jFbEd
— Philip Pilkington (@philippilk) October 1, 2025
Now let’s look at team Trump’s immediate attempts to capitalize on the shutdown.
Trump is leading into the shutdown clampdown with bluster, as usual.
Trump: We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible and bad for them like cutting vast numbers of people out. Cutting things they like, cutting programs they like.
We can do things medically and other ways including benefits. We can cut large numbers of people. pic.twitter.com/hGFE4F2FoL
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 30, 2025
Trump’s blather is easy enough to dismiss, but Russ Vought, one of the more formidable members of Trump’s administration, is already applying very targeted cuts to make the shutdown hurt Democrats where they live.
Specifically, the Hudson Tunnel Project and the Second Ave Subway. https://t.co/pR3W4JWmh2
— Russ Vought (@russvought) October 1, 2025
Vought is Director of the Office of Management and Budget and has immense power at his discretion.
Vought recently got the New York Times supervillain treatment:
pic.twitter.com/plr63X5LFa
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 1, 2025
The article has some bits worth excerpting:
(Vought) had carefully analyzed mistakes from the first term. And he had laid out steps to achieve the long-sought conservative goal of a president with dramatically expanded authority over the executive branch, including the power to cut off spending, fire employees, control independent agencies and deregulate the economy.…Vought has at last begun to put his plans into action — remaking the presidency, block by block, by restoring powers weakened after the Nixon administration. His efforts are helping Mr. Trump exert authority more aggressively than any modern president, and are threatening an erosion of the longstanding checks and balances in America’s constitutional system.
Now, as the government heads toward a shutdown when federal funding lapses on Tuesday, Mr. Vought, 49, is leveraging the moment to further advance his goals of slashing agencies and purging employees, with his office telling agencies to prepare for mass firings unless Congress can strike a deal to keep the government open.
The ultimatum follows a string of achievements for Mr. Vought.This summer, he pressured lawmakers to enact his plan to cancel $9 billion for foreign aid and public broadcasting that they had previously approved — an unusual bow by Congress to the White House. The new law claimed another prize for conservatives: the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And a deal Mr. Vought cut with House Republicans helped secure passage of Mr. Trump’s domestic policy law that slashed spending on Medicaid and food stamps.
He has spearheaded a push to erase hundreds of regulations on the environment, health, transportation and food and worker safety, telling Mr. Trump at an August cabinet meeting that his efforts had led to 245 deregulatory initiatives this year. He has asserted White House power over independent agencies like the Federal Reserve, championing an executive order that forced them to submit their regulatory actions to his office for approval.
As the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency charged with enforcing rules to protect people from predatory financial practices, he halted nearly all of the agency’s work, and sought to fire 90 percent of its staff.
At the heart of Mr. Vought’s plan, associates say, is the intentional engineering of a legal battle over Congress’s power to decide how government money is spent, potentially creating a new legal precedent for the president to block spending on any programs and policies he dislikes.
The article also contrasts Vought’s deliberate methods with the sheer dipshittery of Elon Musk’s DOGE, which while it succeeded in terrorizing many government departments and slashing thousands of jobs, was neither a sustained or well-thought out effort.
Vought is also playing hide-the-pea with billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated, per Notus:
Across federal agencies, the Trump administration’s aggressive slash-and-burn approach to federal programs, grants and contracts has repeatedly challenged Congress’ power of the purse. The administration has claimed it has the discretion to redirect funds to programs aligned with Trump’s agenda — and Republican congressional leaders have largely let them do it.
The outcome: Billions in taxpayer dollars have become virtually untraceable — a level of opaqueness in government funds that’s raising questions around the legality of the administration’s actions. Some of these taxpayer funds expire on Sept. 30. If they’re not spent by then, like all funds Congress appropriated specifically for 2025, they disappear.
NOTUS attempted to trace the money appropriated for more than 100 government programs to understand where taxpayer dollars are going, only to hit dead ends repeatedly. Data is outdated or conflicting, agencies have been vague in their explanations, and in many cases, there’s no publicly available evidence that appropriated money is being spent at all.…The Government Accountability Office has opened more than 40 investigations into whether the administration is illegally withholding funds in violation of Congressional instructions. GAO has already found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the Department of Health and Human Services are among the many agencies violating the law.…
The Trump administration is “really pushing the limits of what the executive can do without the consent of the legislative branch,” Appropriations Chair Susan Collins told The Wall Street Journal in July.
She escalated her language at the end of August, when the White House made clear that OMB Director Russell Vought intended to pursue a controversial method of withholding funds called a “pocket rescission.”
Now let’s look at Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and his attempt to remake the Pentagon via jawboning.
It’s easy to dismiss Hegseth’s big speech as ridiculous culture war nonsense:
this speech is about fixing decades of decay, some of it obvious, some of it hidden, or as the chairman has put it, we are clearing out the debris, removing the distractions, clearing the way for leaders to be leaders. You might say we’re ending the war on warriors. I heard someone wrote a book about that.
For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniformed leaders for the wrong reasons, based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts. We’ve pretended that combat arms and non-combat arms are the same thing. We’ve weeded out so-called toxic leaders under the guise of double blind psychology assessments, promoting risk averse go along to get along conformists instead. You name it, the department did it.
Foolish and reckless political leaders set the wrong compass heading and we lost our way. We became the woke department. But not anymore. Right now, I’m looking out at a sea of Americans who made a choice when they were young men and young women to do something most Americans will not, to serve something greater than yourself, to fight for God and country, for freedom and the Constitution.
Hegseth’s apparent anti-woke drive has gotten the usual anonymous bitching to the press, and from enough significant players that we must ask how unified the U.S. military is behind Trump’s initiatives, from the Washington Post:
Military leaders have raised serious concerns about the Trump administration’s forthcoming defense strategy, exposing a divide between the Pentagon’s political and uniformed leadership as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summons top brass to a highly unusual summit in Virginia on Tuesday, according to eight current and former officials.
The critiques from multiple top officers, including Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff come as Hegseth reorders U.S. military priorities — centering the Pentagon on perceived threats to the homeland, narrowing U.S. competition with China, and downplaying America’s role in Europe and Africa.
But there may be more significant things happening behind the scenes, things that are not surfacing via outraged leaks.
Larry Johnson quoted a private correspondence with Naked Capitalism’s principal that explains what may be going on:
…it’s ludicrous to have called so many senior guys in for such a silly agenda. A stern memo and/or video sessions would have done.
So the big stoopid meeting, IMHO was to cover for a smaller gathering that had to be done in person. And where whoever was summoned would be a big tell as to what the focus was.
Johnson expanded on that notion:
Besides the massive US naval force parked off the coast of Venezuela, we are now hearing that US tanker aircraft are flying to the Middle East via England. We saw the same phenomena in the days preceding the June 24 attack on Iran.
If the Trump administration is planning a coordinated attack on Venezuela and Iran, the commanders of USCENTCOM and USSOUTHCOM would be involved. While the plans for such attacks could have been discussed over a SVTCS (i.e., Secure Video Teleconferences), those sessions usually have dozens of straphangers watching. If you want to keep close hold on such planning, you do it in person. If the CENTCOM and SOUTHCOM commanders had been called to Washington alone, the odds are high that someone would have reported this. With the presence of the US naval force off the coast of Venezuela and the movement of US aircraft towards the Persian Gulf, this likely would have attracted unwanted attention.
Trump’s statements on his domestic military deployments are also alarming, from the Chicago Sun-Times:
“I told [Defense Secretary] Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon,” Trump said. “That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor. Stupid.”
Trump again criticized crime in Chicago, despite violent crime and murder rates having dropped in the city, saying, “They need the military desperately.”
Mobilization of the National Guard has begun in Oregon, which Trump called “a war zone.”
Trump then addressed whether the military could retaliate against protesters, saying, “I say they spit, we hit.”
He also told military leaders that he signed an executive order to establish a National Guard quick reaction force last month “because it’s the enemy from within.”
“We have to handle it before it gets out of control,” Trump said.
Tyler Hicks at Inkstick wrestles with whether or not the U.S. military is ideologically ready for the kind of clampdown Trump is envisioning in his piece “‘Let’s Go Bash Some Skulls’: Inside the Militarization of Trump’s America:”
“The American right conceptualizes their political enemies and the Democratic Party as a powerful hostile foreign insurgency,” says (a California-based military officer called Michael). “Now with the clear path to escalation they have already been on, I definitely see a reaction where they take this National Guard and ICE energy and pivot it towards people of left-leaning ideals.”…Kris Goldsmith, an Iraq War veteran who founded Task Force Butler to investigate and counteract extremist groups, says the “MAGA-fication” of the military has been an overlooked trend. When the National Guard deploys to US cities, “generals aren’t fucking on the line holding a shield or baton,” Goldsmith says. “The young people who would be in those positions grew up in the era of Trump, many enlisted while Trump was president, and all of them enlisted in the last 10 years knowing that Trumpism exists and that it’s a political force.”
Michael, the military officer based in California, has seen that “MAGA-fication” up close and personal. He worries sending the National Guard to more cities poses serious risks, especially since, in his experience, military personnel are “softened at the idea of abusing their fellow people.”
Trump and Hegseth have been cultivating a new outlaw warrior ethos in the U.S. military, as chronicled in an ambitious multi-part series in The New York Times magazine called “America’s Vigilantes: A Four-Part Investigation of the Culture of Impunity in the U.S. Special Forces.”
All four parts are worth reading:
But I’ll limit myself to quoting the NY Times’ 5 take aways from the series:
The Special Forces’ culture of rule-breaking emerged from the pressures of an unconventional war.
Special Operations commanders overlooked evidence of what might have been one of the worst war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
The Army’s aggressive prosecution of Maj. Mathew Golsteyn reveals how it could pursue Green Berets, if it chose to.
This wartime culture of lawlessness has reverberated in a wave of domestic crimes committed by soldiers with Army Special Operations.
The operators’ vigilante ethos has been embraced by leaders like Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, rose to prominence in part through his vociferous defense of Golsteyn and other service members accused of war crimes. “They’re not war criminals; they’re warriors,” he said in 2019, shortly before Golsteyn and others received a pardon from President Trump.
In the current administration, Trump and Hegseth have pushed to loosen legal restraints on the armed forces, both abroad and in the United States, and to expand the role of the military at home. They have purged the military’s top lawyers, deployed active-duty troops to patrol American streets and authorized lethal strikes on those they designate as “narco-terrorists,” summary killings that experts say violate international law.
Trump and Hegseth’s remaking of the military has not yet reached all the general officer corps, however.
Brig. Gen. Alan R. Gronewold, head of the National Guard unit currently deployed to Portland plays a little bit of Hamlet in a letter reported by Ken Klippenstein, who also points out the troops are no longer under the command of Oregon governor Tina Kotek:
“I know some of you may have strong feelings about this mission. That’s okay. You are citizens first, but you’re also service members who took an oath to support and defend the Constitution and follow the orders of the President and the Governor. That oath doesn’t come with an asterisk that says, “only when I agree with the mission.”
“I’ll be honest with you — I know this isn’t easy. Some people in Oregon won’t understand or won’t support this mission. Some might even be hostile about it. But we’ve been through tough situations before. We are professionals who do our duties, regardless of how it’s received.”
Klippenstein has also been beating the drum over Trump’s alarming National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, a national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence.
So far NSPM7 has been ignored by Democrats in Congress and downplayed by the media, but I agree with Klippenstein that it is more alarming than the Executive Orders Trump has been issuing at record rates.
It seems clear that Trump 2.0 is a very different, and all-together more dangerous and alarming entity than Trump 1.0 ever was.
In my next piece, I’ll dive into Trump’s attempt to prosecute former FBI head James Comey for his role in hamstringing Trump’s first term via Russiagate and how those efforts may have only succeeded in radicalizing the President.
