Spies, secrets and sabotage: America’s enemies couldn’t have scripted a better betrayal

Donald Trump and Elon Musk have created a national security nightmare. On purpose.

An unelected billionaire and his merry hacker band are rooting through our nation’s secrets, poking around in your personal financial and medical records, and reportedly altering the computer code involved in paying our nation’s bills.

Most recently they gave a 23 year-old working for Musk access to our Department of Energy, which manages America’s nuclear weapons arsenal. One of his teenage colleagues who is also rummaging through our nation’s secrets reportedly runs websites in Russia.

This is being managed by the same billionaire Trump donor the press reports was in regular contact with Putin for the past two years, and is said to have cut off Starlink internet service to Ukraine to prevent them from attacking the Russian fleet in Crimea.

Musk was never elected to anything, doesn’t appear to have submitted to background and security checks, and the people he’s put inside multiple federal agencies aren’t even Civil Service-vetted government employees.

Remember back in 2016 when Republicans — and the Director of the FBI and editors at The New York Times — were so flipped out that Hillary Clinton used a private server in her home for her personal email and, as a result, a few dozen government emails ended up on it?

Just a few months after Trump won that “national security election,” he secretly met with the Russian ambassador and the foreign minister in the Oval Office and handed them the name of a spy working for us and Israel in Syria.

He then stole thousands of Top Secret classified documents — including our nuclear information — and left them in a publicly-available bathroom for over a year as multiple alleged spies wandered through Mar-a-Lago.

This week the CIA, responding to an executive order from Trump, sent an unclassified email to the White House with the names of all the new employees the agency has hired in the past two years. Former intelligence officials are freaked out, according to The New York Times, which reported:

“Some former officials said they worried that the list could be passed on to a team of newly hired young software experts working with Elon Musk and his government efficiency team. If that happened, the names of the employees might be more easily targeted by China, Russia or other foreign intelligence services.
“One former agency officer called the reporting of the names in an unclassified email a ‘counterintelligence disaster.’”

Ya think? Gutting the CIA? Putting Tulsi Gabbard in charge of our intelligence agencies? Shutting down the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force?

Putin and Xi must be laughing so hard each risks a hernia. And that’s just the beginning of the gifts Trump and Musk are handing them.

Both dictators have hated the US Agency for International Development (USAID) forever; Putin shut down their operations in Russia in 2012, and Xi has already been through this once, upping aid to third world countries after Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organization in 2020.

While the USAID budget to keep poorer countries within the US orbit was a mere $30 billion last year, China has spent over a trillion dollarssince they started their Belt and Road initiative in 2013 to compete with us. President Xi is shrugging off Trump’s puny 10% tariffs, knowing that his having Musk shut down USAID is a gift worth far more than his country will lose to US-based business.

And, of course, Trump is openly defying a law Congress passed to allow China to continue to operate TikTok in America, so long as the platform’s algorithm amplifies his supporters and mutes his detractors.

Further endangering our national security, Trump has alienated Mexico and Canada, our two closest allies and trading partners.

Trudeau and Sheinbaum both played him for the sucker, promising to deploy troops and make efforts that they were already making as a result of prior deals with Obama and Biden. Trump didn’t care; he just wanted to act tough and then declare victory for his low-information base. And the rubes are lapping it up.

And then indicted war criminal and international fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House with a big problem: he’s destroyed most all of Gaza and knows he can’t afford to rebuild it — and doesn’t want angry Palestinians shooting at or suicide-bombing Israeli soldiers and construction workers in an occupation and rebuilding effort.

So, he flattered Trump with praise so thick it would have embarrassed any normal person and suggested he’d give him first shot at the real estate deal of the century. “Just take over Gaza,” he must have said, “and have American taxpayers and American soldiers provide the money and blood to rebuild the region. You’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize!”

Trump bought it hook, line, and sinker, moving the target Netanyahu and Israel had on their backs to every American citizen in the world. If you think it’s safe to travel now, particularly outside the US, I have a bridge to sell you.

And remember Osama Bin Laden? He attacked us on 9/11 because, he said, we’d failed to shut down the US airbase in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War and women were driving cars with their elbows showing and male GIs were watching porn. It was a desecration of the holy land on which the base was built, and he wanted to send us a message about how intolerable that was.

In a “letter to America,” Bin Laden wrote that he was going to strike against our country because:

“Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.”

This was, he said repeatedly, the reason why he ordered America struck in what we now refer to as the 9/11 attacks. He wanted us to remove daddy Bush’s troops from the Bin Sultan Air Force Base in Saudi Arabia. George W. Bush got the message; he withdrew those US troops just weeks after 9/11: he was no dummy. At least compared to Trump.

Bin Laden is gone, but there’s no shortage of pissed-off Muslims in the world; if you liked 9/11, you’re going to love what comes next.

And then there’s the deconstruction of the administrative state, aka the American government.

Democrats appear to believe all of Musk’s federal-agency-destroying efforts are just being done to cut government spending by a few trillion so Republicans can fund another $4 trillion tax cut for billionaires like Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, and the billionaires in Trump’s cabinet.

They’re right that the only way they’ll be able to pass it is to either raise the debt ceiling — something Democrats and a handful of Republicans won’t go along with — or use “reconciliation,” which can’t be filibustered in the Senate. Bills pushed through with reconciliation (like Trump’s last tax cut) cannot, however, increase the national debt. Thus, the need to fire thousands of federal workers to free up dollars to fund the tax cuts.

That makes sense, but I’m convinced this coup is something far more sinister. Trump and Musk both come to the job with the perspectives of CEOs. There’s no democracy in the corporate world; a CEO is as close to a king as you can get in today’s world.

Thus, the executive orders, the illegal break-ins at Treasury, USAID, OSHA, FDIC, NOAA, Medicare, etc., and Trump’s functional shutdown of the Department of Labor. Both want to be able to rule by decree, and Republicans in the House and Senate — particularly Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Thune — say they’re just fine with it. Democracy was a pain in the ass, anyway.

There are only three forces that can stop them now: Public opinion, independent media, and Democrats. (They’re already ignoring the courts, although it’s still possible federal judges will back them down.) And they’re moving so fast to convert our government into a dictatorship that we may only have days or, at most, weeks to stop them before the damage is irreversible.

Remember, it only took Hitler 53 days to end democracy in Germany; Trump is trying to beat that record.

So, show up, speak out, and demand that our Democratic politicians raise holy hell and do something to stop this process.

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