Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed.
Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposely creating with the volume and speed of executive orders; the effort to dismantle the federal government; the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people and the very concept of diversity itself; the demands that other countries accept Americans as their new overlords; and the dizzying sense that the White House could do or say anything at any moment.
All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power, so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. …
Three weeks into the second Trump term, here are a handful of the places where Americans can’t afford to turn away:
• Elon Musk’s Executive Takeover.
The problem is not that Mr. Musk is unelected, it’s that he is breaking the law.
Not even a full-time government employee, he is trying to unilaterally shut down or dismantle entire federal agencies and departments, ignoring congressional mandates — this is prohibited by the Constitution.
He and his team are behind the announced buyout offers to millions of civil servants — including the entire C.I.A. work force — and have effectively forced out top officials whom he has no power to fire.
He is on a mission to rampage through the government’s confidential payment systems with an anarchist’s glee, deciding on his own which aspects of federal spending are legitimate, and substituting his instinctual embrace of conspiracy theories for any effort to understand the government functions he’s undermining.
Both the president and Mr. Musk seem to relish that most of their actions are plainly illegal, daring the courts to step in and stop them, on the theory that these laws are flawed to begin with.
At the same time, you have the richest man in the world leading this effort, still holding interests in his private companies, which do billions of dollars in business with and are regulated by the federal government.
It’s a level of conflict of interest unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era.
• The Administration vs. Public Officials.
Along with terminating more than a dozen members of the U.S. Attorneys Office in Washington who’d worked on cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, the Trump administration began collecting the names of thousands of F.B.I. personnel who helped to investigate crimes associated with the attack on the Capitol.
Several top-ranking officials at the agency have already been fired.
The move offered an early glimpse at how Mr. Trump and his nominee to run the F.B.I., Kash Patel — who published a literal enemies list of “Executive Branch Deep State” members — might use federal law enforcement against the president’s political opponents.
