0.03158% of Literally Adolf Hitler

What is Donald Trump doing, and what outcome does he have in mind? My bet is that no description you’ve read so far is even a little bit correct, and we’ll need more than thirty days to find the whole answer.

For an easy example this week, Chris Hedges is both way to my left and someone I’m willing to listen to. I don’t tend to agree with him, but I’ll usually hear him out. But his latest is a prime example of the literally insane claim inflation that plagues the opening month of the Trump administration:

Trump is purging the whole government, emptying it all out so he can seize all the marbles. Hitler Hitler Hitler, etc., insert own invasion of Poland here.

But go through the claims, sentence by sentence, and test them. The fourth paragraph dumps a bunch of alarming sentences like this one: “Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and Homeland Security, are being purged of those deemed hostile to Trump.” See, my goodness, Trump is driving out all the federal law enforcement, so they can’t stop his march to power.

So. The FBI website says the bureau employs about 38,000 people. About 13,700 of them are special agents, with badges and guns. CNN, January 30: “At least six senior FBI leaders have been ordered to retire, resign or be fired by Monday, according to sources briefed on the matter, extending a purge that began last week at the Justice Department across the street from the FBI headquarters.”

Some senior agents in field offices were also removed, bringing the number up to…at least a dozen, but maybe a few more than that. A similar news story at NBC News says that all but one of the senior agents who were supposedly fired were “eligible for retirement with a full pension, and many decided to retire.”

So Trump’s brutal fascist purge has so far driven somewhere around a dozen to maybe twenty people into retirement, with pensions, from a total number of 38,000. That’s a brutal Nazi eradication of 0.03158% of the FBI. “The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship,” Chris Hedges says.

In fairness, if Trump fires another thousand people from the FBI, the bureau will plummet to just 37,000 employees, and then there won’t be anyone left to stop Trump, somehow.

Hedges continues, with a typo you’ll be able to spot on your own:

Courts, as they are stacked with complaint judges, will be mechanisms for the persecution of state “enemies” and protection rackets for the powerful and the rich. The Supreme Court, which has granted Trump legal immunity, has already reached this stage.

Yeah, no. A long list of federal judges has enjoined Trump policy moves in the opening month of his administration, and Trump has pledged to comply with court orders, even the dumb ones. Federal judges have life tenure, so the sudden transition to courts across the country being “stacked with compliant judges” — I fixed the typo — seems like an unlikely goal for the next few weeks of Literally Adolf Hitlering. And the Supreme Court didn’t simply grant legal immunity to Trump, for crying out loud, as everyone over the age of four should already know. There’s not a single true word in either of those panicked sentences.

Note also what Hedges keeps conceding as he complains about Trump firing people and implementing changes in the executive branch. Here’s one of several comparable examples:

We are repeating the steps that led to the consolidation of power by past dictatorships, albeit with our own idiom and idiosyncrasies. Those naively lauding Trump’s hostility towards the deep state — which I concede did tremendous damage to democratic institutions, eviscerated our most cherished liberties, is an unaccountable state within a state and orchestrated a series of disastrous global interventions, including the recent military fiascos in the Middle East and Ukraine — should look closely at what is being proposed to take its place.

Government institutions are a disaster, they’ve eviscerated our liberties, they’re unaccountable, they’ve blundered into a series of ghastly fiascos, WHAT THE HELL IS TRUMP DOING TRYING TO CHANGE THE GOVERNMENT HE MUST WANT TO TURN INTO ADOLF HITLER. It’s just silly. I don’t know what to do about this, other than to roll my eyes. If you’re driving around Pasadena, California this week, be aware that I sometimes listen to NPR on the road, which has been very focused lately on describing the fear that all the immigrants feel as they prepare to be sent to the special new racism gulags for everyone who is at all darker than Casper the Friendly Ghost, and I may pass out from acute irritation while I’m driving. Dark green Toyota.

There’s a lot of dramatic performance, right now, the details and outcomes of which remain entirely TBD. I don’t agree with every single thing Trump appears to be doing, though most of it is exactly what I would have hoped for, and some of the doors he’s walking through were opened by other presidents, like the one who said he didn’t need Congress because he had “a pen and a phone.” I make no argument that Trump shouldn’t be criticized, because I don’t think anyone is above criticism. But notice that most of the criticism verges on the form of a psychotic episode, completely detached from the substance of the events. Worry if you must, but don’t listen to professional hysterics.

Hedges: “The target is the laws, regulations, protocols and rules, and the government civil servants who enforce them, which hinder dictatorial control. Compromise, limited power, checks and balances and accountability are slated to be abolished.”

We have about three million civilian federal employees. The headline at the Washington Post warns that Trump has fired “thousands.” At the rate we’re going, we may plummet from 3,000,000 civil servants to somewhere in the neighborhood of just 2,900,000 of them. And then, of course, Hitler, because no one will be left to hinder dictatorial control.

On second thought, maybe RFK Jr, shouldn’t ban all those psychiatric drugs.