Conservatism is an unworkable grift. This week proves it.

When the shock and awe backfires

Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.

It’s been a hell of a week and there’s so much to report, write, and discuss. Today, I’m examining the two major calamities that happened in DC this week, what really caused them, and how together they made it clear to the public, in a way that I didn’t think so immediately possible, that Trump and his cohort are incompetent scam artists who will hurt them and their communities.

The next issue will be the big news digest — with some original reporting — for paid subscribers.

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The first week of Donald Trump’s second term as president was a shock-and-awe campaign designed to assert the far-right’s dominance on the nation. This second week of Trump’s return to office has exposed the cruelty of their vision and fraudulence of their ideology.

Now they’re in damage control mode, responsible for mass public panic, a historic tragedy, and maybe even the first rumblings of an opposition.

The DEI Lie as Key to a Hostile Government Takeover

When Trump blamed DEI for Wednesday night’s tragic and deadly collision over Washington, DC, it was an attempt to both deflect responsibility and turn the tragedy into another cultural flashpoint to advance the conservative agenda.

DEI — Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity — has become the right-wing’s not-so-secret omnibus slur, reflecting the constellation of people they hate (ie everyone but straight white men). Both noun and adjective, it’s a taunt meant to imply someone’s natural inferiority and diminish their accomplishments. It’s also increasingly key to the conservative mission to redefine universally accepted concepts such as religious freedom and racial discrimination, both colloquially and constitutionally.

For example, white conservatives are currently suing over Louisiana’s Congressional map because two of its six districts are drawn to have a majority Black voters. The district was ordered by a judge so that the state complies with the Voting Rights Act, but the plaintiffs insist that using race in any way, even to ensure equal access, is discriminatory.

Conservatives portray DEI programs as a social sickness, at the center of what they suggest is a deep state conspiracy to tear down America from the inside. Below is an excerpt of an alternate 2023 federal budget proposal published by the Center for Renewing America, the far-right think tank founded by Trump’s once-and-returning Office of Management and Budget director.

The nation is just beginning to wake up to and meet the threat of a century-long cultural revolution that divides the country on the basis of race and “identity,” disintegrates the institutions of western civilizations from within, teaches rising generations to hate their country and each other, and encourages the destruction of neighborhoods and cities which by extension are not worth saving. This revolution started in left-wing universities but has long since become the central worldview of the regime’s governing elites. As the rioting and destruction in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death revealed, “woke” went mainstream, and a multitude sought to tear down its own society.

Included in this supposed scheme is an all-powerful Affirmative Action system that has taken root in every college, corporation, and government agency. In their story, the pernicious wokeness forces institutions to value diversity over merit and reward race and gender identity over an individual’s qualifications, and not only is that antithetical to American values, it actually harms the country.

Trump, JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth all leaned into that narrative on Thursday, responding to the shocking collision with promises that the FAA will have smart employees now that they’ve eliminated DEI virus that hired minorities instead of white people.

“The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department,” Hegseth said, “and we need the best and brightest — whether it’s in our air traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government.”

JD Vance was just as blunt: “When you don't have the best standards in who you're hiring, it means on the one hand you're not getting the best people in government. But on the other hand, it puts stress on the people who are already there.”

In short, they want people to believe that the collision happened because the FAA was hamstrung by DEI and stuck with a bunch of unqualified and incompetent minorities working as air traffic controllers, so there was nothing the White House could have done about it.

But because the federal agencies are leaking like sieves, it quickly become clear that they weren’t just full of shit, but they were also lying. It turns out that the FAA was so short-staffed that air traffic controllers were doubling up on responsibilities, a dangerous situation that nearly led to a crash a night earlier.

The White House had been briefed on the problem before Trump and Vance spoke to the press, so the racism now looks like an overt cover-up, not stupid muscle memory. It wasn’t low standards for air traffic controllers that caused the crash, but the federal government not spending the money to hire enough of them.

Federal aviation safety has for years been riddled by short-staffing, including suboptimal numbers of air traffic controllers. The dark irony is that it was Ronald Reagan’s firing of unionized air traffic controllers that kicked off the gutting of both labor unions and the federal government, a project that Trump and his Heritage Foundation acolytes plan to send into permanent overdrive — using DEI, of course, as a way to justify the massacre.

The day he was inaugurated, Trump signed an executive order that called for the end of all federal DEI programs and initiatives in hiring, performance reviews, and compensation.

To carry out this directive, the Director of OPM, with the assistance of the Attorney General as requested, shall review and revise, as appropriate, all existing Federal employment practices, union contracts, and training policies or programs to comply with this order. Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.

The end effect is to make it easier for Trump and Musk and the rest of them to hire ideologically aligned and diehard loyal federal agency staffers. It also gives them a way into breaking commitments to federal worker unions, which would crush the most independent workers willing to thwart corruption and the manifold abuses that this administration has in store. Beating the unions would also eliminate steadfast opponents of huge cuts to the budget.

The Freezing Wakeup Call

When the news broke that the White House had issued a full freeze and review of federal grant money allocation, it quickly became clear that what may have sounded like a wonky policy shift was actually a five-alarm fire that could bring down large swaths of functioning American society.

Vought, who moved closer to confirmation as returning OMB director, is the visionary behind much of Project 2025 and the central player in the budget freeze. He is a vocal champion of federal impoundment, or the belief that the president has the ability to withhold at their discretion. It’s against the law, but that hasn’t changed his mind.

Vought has made it his life’s work to bring down the federal bureaucracy, and though he looks like a mild-mannered accountant, he views himself as a cultural warrior in a civilizational battle against the forces of wokeness — which is to say, diversity.

The make-believe budget he published through his Center for Renewing America drips with animosity toward modern America, raging against racial integration in the suburbs, pride parades, community development organizations, and disease prevention. Here’s another part of the introductory screed:

Why should billions be spent on thousands of interwoven nonprofits, all with a vested interest in furthering multiculturalism through an open border strategy and engaging in lawfare against any effort to control the border? Why should billions be spent on Section 8 vouchers that spread crime and disfunction into safe neighborhoods as part of “affordable housing” activism hostile towards single-family homes? This Budget is an effort to separate the spending the nation desperately needs (a massive Navy, a completed border wall, infrastructure, etc.) from spending that is not just simply unaffordable but ruining communities and funding organizations that hate the country.

The bombastic language and cherry-picking of expenditures that offend Vought’s church group may have psyched up the right’s neo-Bircher intelligentsia and aroused the blood thirst of the MAGA voter, but when the real-world applications of the White House’s budget freeze began to emerge, chaos and fear erupted across the country, irregardless of ideology and partisanship.

There was no part of the economy that the proposed freezes did not touch. Freeze funding for housing and construction workers immediately lose their jobs; take an axe cut off food aid and people in red states starve just as much as people in blue states. Freezing health research would devastate universities and pharmaceutical companies, leading to the loss of countless jobs in the labs and exponentially more elsewhere. Killing Head Start would close daycares nationwide, directly causing further job losses as well as forcing parents to find other childcare — or not go to work at all. That prospect alone caused mass panic.

One community development worker in the Midwest who helps locals access grants for economic projects told me that not only was he in danger of losing his job, but the entire funding infrastructure for working class people who want to start small businesses would be doomed. Commercial landlords in these communities would experience the fall out.

People all over the country have spent the week on Zoom calls, terrified for their jobs and their communities. Budget cuts are cheered by conservatives when they’re proposed for other people, but when they’re staring down the barrel of a lost job or an end to the programs that feed their kids and parents, they go into defensive mode.

The judge’s pause on the budget freeze will last until February 10th, but there is still a good chance that the federal coffers seize up once it expires. And failing that, this will not be Trump and co.’s last attempt to gut the federal government and abandon the people it serves. Many of these programs could be on the chopping block in budget reconciliation, I’ve been told, and Republicans have already proposed cutting $2.3 billion from Medicaid.

Conservatives have too much hubris to take the hint from this week’s catastrophes and back off their long pursuit of bringing down the federal government from within. But as this week showed, their ideology does not work as anything but a rallying cry. It is hollow and unworkable, down to how it destroys the basic infrastructure required to run a functioning society. Now they’re on the defensive, and maybe America has begun to wake up to the crude reality of their plans.

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