Appearing on an anti-feminist podcast in 2021, JD Vance compared his ambitions for a conservative takeover of America to U.S. policy in postwar Iraq. “We need like a de-Baathification program, but a de-wokeification program in the United States,” he said, referring to the campaign to root out members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. If and when Donald Trump returned to the White House, Vance argued, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
Vance’s words were prophetic, because the first days of the second Trump term have a distinct Coalition Provisional Authority vibe. For those lucky enough not to remember, the Coalition Provisional Authority was the administration that George W. Bush and his team put in place after charging heedlessly into Iraq, convinced that it would be easy to remake a government about which they knew next to nothing. It was full of right-wing apparatchiks, some barely out of college, who were given enormous responsibilities. Six people initially hired for low-level administrative jobs after sending their résumés to the conservative Heritage Foundation were assigned to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. A social worker who’d served as director at a Christian charity was put in charge of rebuilding the health care system.
Meanwhile, 50,000 to 100,000 Iraqi government workers, many of whom had joined the Baath Party only to get their jobs in the first place, were fired. Schools went without teachers. As Syrus Solo Jin wrote in Time, budget blunders by overwhelmed novices meant that the police weren’t paid on time. The de-Baathification that Vance wanted to emulate is widely seen as a disaster that contributed to the deadly chaos and instability that followed America’s invasion.
The United States government, of course, has yet to be dismantled to the same extent as Iraq’s, though not for lack of trying. During the transition, Trump’s allies used the phrase “shock and awe” — another throwback to the Iraq war — to describe his plans for the first 100 days.
Soon after taking over, they created a crisis by shutting down huge segments of federal government spending, though they restarted at least some payments after a judge slapped them with a court order. Late Friday, Elon Musk seized control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, which disburses trillions of dollars and houses sensitive data about millions of Americans. Some of the people helping him take over the government — who include, as Wired reported, a half dozen engineers between the ages of 19 and 24 — appear to be even less experienced than the neophytes who staffed the C.P.A. in Iraq.
Employees at the General Services Administration, which manages office space, transportation and technology for the federal government, told Wired that Edward Coristine, a recent high-school graduate who spent three months at Musk’s company Neuralink, has been on calls where “workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs.” Another young member of Musk’s team, a software engineer named Gavin Kliger, set out an email to USAID employees informing them that the headquarters has been closed and they shouldn’t come in; Musk said that he’s “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
At the Department of Education, employees have been put on leave for doing diversity training sessions that their managers recommended, and The Washington Post reports that Trump will soon begin dismantling the department altogether. More than a thousand people at the Environmental Protection Agency who work on issues like climate change and reducing pollution have been told they could be fired imminently.
Trump’s lackeys are purging the security services. Thousands of F.B.I. agents are being scrutinized for their work investigating and prosecuting the Capitol rioters, and according to The New York Times, scores or even hundreds of agents could be forced out. Meanwhile, leading administration jobs are going to cranks and fanatics. Darren Beattie, whom Trump reportedly plans to tap to be under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, wrote last year, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
Many are describing Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy as a coup, which isn’t quite right. Trump was, alas, elected, and delegated outsize power to Musk voluntarily. But the reason it feels like a coup is that we have no precedent for an administration treating its own government like a hostile territory to be conquered and exploited. In his memoir of America’s war on Iraq and its aftermath, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad described being ruled by “young, naïve zealots who held unchallenged powers to reshape Iraq the way their masters wanted. They represented the worst combination of colonial hubris, racist arrogance and criminal incompetence.” We’re now getting a taste of that experience.
It’s as if we’ve come full circle. America’s war in Iraq, in addition to killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destabilizing the Middle East, also set the stage for Trump’s rise by fostering a widespread sense of distrust and betrayal in the United States. Trump, in turn, is imposing on us a milder version of the careless, unaccountable governance we installed there. As he does so, jingoist mobs and craven elites are cheering him on, just as many cheered George W. Bush. (Before there was the “Gulf of America,” there were “freedom fries.”)
Eventually, the destruction wrought by this new regime will be undeniable, even to some of its supporters. But breaking a country, unfortunately, is a lot easier than putting it back together.
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