March 7, 2025

Owl in America is a series of letters tracing the actions of the current U.S. administration from the perspective of an environmental lawyer. These notes follow how, in a time of rapid political and ecological change, governmental decisions are felt in the living world.

Hi all~

Probably all writers have heard the hackneyed advice to “write what you know.” I’ve enjoyed doing that over the past year and a half here, and in other venues before starting this newsletter in 2023. Sometimes, when my knowledge of environmental law and ethics needed to move in a new direction, I had to jump across a little stream to an opposite bank hidden in fog. Yet I always knew there would be solid ground to meet my foot, followed by a path toward an expanded understanding of the world. 

Since Trump returned to power on January 20, though, solid ground is lost. My mind stands isolated on a tiny island surrounded by endless ocean, heavy waves buffeting me, heavy clouds gathering above, and heavy quakes from the deep threatening to sink my little rock for good. I imagine many others—American and otherwise—feel something similar. 

Complicating matters is that the opposition from the right has been purged in the intervening years since Trump I, while the left is still reeling and stunned as it realizes the depths of the disaster America is facing. Lawfare—comprising dozens of lawsuits against blatantly illegal actions—is in full swing, and independent writers (and some in the mainstream press) are sounding the alarm. Yet things are moving so quickly that these past six weeks have seen Americans and our institutions on the back foot, struggling to understand what’s happening and to formulate a response. 

I used to work for a brilliant judge who told me she didn’t always know how she was going to rule on a tough case until she’d written up a proposed order for the parties. Her deep study of the relevant statutes, regulations, and case law created a framework on which she’d hang the facts of the particular case before her. Only after doing that preliminary work would she reason toward her decision through writing. 

Once, when we’d been going back and forth on a hard case and couldn’t see a clear choice on how she’d rule, she said, “Well, we’ve gone as far as we can, talking. Go see how it writes.” 

I did that a lot when I worked in the courts, and I do it a lot, here. I read and study an issue to death, then I let thoughts swirl around for a few days or weeks. Finally, I just start typing and see how it writes.

Since the new presidency began, it’s been, to put it mildly, a challenge to build a framework to hang any logic on. We’ve seen unconstitutional impoundment of federal funds, illegal firings of agency heads, Musk’s forays into federal payment systems and Social Security, mass firings of federal employees, very public withdrawal of support for Ukraine concurrent with very quiet increases in missile and bomb sales to Israel, removal of military top brass, closure of U.S. foreign aid, dismantling of environmental regulations, moves toward selling off public lands as called for in Project 2025, a plan to deport 240,000 Ukrainians, muzzling free-speech activists at universities . . . and I could go on.

Take tariffs, for example. Not my area of specialty, or something I pay much attention to, usually, but it’s plain to see that policy experts in that arena must be completely frazzled. First, tariffs were issued. Then, after the market quaked and foreign leaders conversed, they were paused. Then they were reissued, and then they were paused again. The chaos may be the point. Or it may just be chaos.

More likely, there are threads tying together all these disjointed chaos bombs into an emerging coherence. 

First, there are three major groups who wanted this administration: 

(1) MAGAs, which include among others the Christian Right, the right-to-bear-arms libertarian types, and large parts of the farming and business communities. MAGAs wanted the price of eggs to go down, regulations on business operations to be removed, abortion to be criminalized, and so on.

(2) The Project 2025/Heritage Foundation/Koch Brothers/Fox News/Federalist Society right-wing think-tank coalition, which also overlaps strongly with the Christian Right, has killed us with their long game, laying the groundwork for this current mess over decades. This bunch is into ‘small government’ and minimal regulations, they believe in privatizing most government functions, and their wackadoo fringe wants to usher in a Handmaid’s Tale vision for American women.

(3) Opportunistically throwing their considerable weight behind Trump later in the day, the billionaires we saw on the inauguration stage—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Shou Zi Chew—as well as those we haven’t seen much publicly, like Peter Thiel and members of the more shadowy international network of oligarchs. This group broadly wishes to cannibalize the cash flow and residual power of the richest nation ever to have existed on planet Earth. It’s all a competition to them, and Elon Musk looks to be in the lead for now. 

The first group, the MAGAs, are finding out the hard way that Trump rode their votes into power but will no longer be much interested in appeasing them. He does not appear particularly concerned about his party’s ability to get their votes again, which in itself is quite concerning. 

The Project 2025 group, newly installed at the heads of all of our most important governmental ministries, is busily working away to achieve exactly what they so kindly laid out for us in their playbook. If you want to figure out what this bunch is up to, and what they’ll do next, just read the relevant sections of Project 2025. While doing so, it’s wise to remember the Heritage Foundation drafted Project 2025 in consultation with Hungarian autocrat Victor Orbán’s people; Heritage and Hungary’s English-language think tank had a memorandum of understanding. And keep an eye on what kinds of laws red state legislatures are floating. They are test cases for the wider restrictions on women’s rights that will eventually be proposed in D.C., along with a raft of attacks on people of color and the LGBTQ+ communities.

The billionaire gang is up to something that involves hollowing out public institutions in such a way that either their own businesses will have to take over and profit from providing those functions, or those functions will cease to be provided and the monies allocated for them will disappear in a cloud of zeroes and ones that may later be traced but unlikely ever recovered. 

They have also quietly insinuated themselves at the center of essential government functions over the past few years; take these quick examples:

• Thiel’s Palantir which provides our defense software (including AI targeting); 
• Musks’ Starlink which provides our satellite capabilities and his SpaceX which is doing NASA’s job and his X which is angling to become the official voice box for the U.S. government as well as a centralized payment system; and 
• the billionaire owners of newspapers and cable networks on the right and left who craft the majority of media messaging.

And Musk in particular, as the face of the billionaire takeover—the world’s richest person does not need a job with the U.S. government. Nor is he helping it root out fraud from the kindness of his heart. One does not become the world’s richest person without an immense talent for seizing opportunities (there are other terms for that). He is only spending his precious time firing federal employees and digging around in the Treasury payment system, which routes north of six trillion dollars each year, because he sees an incredible personal advantage there. 

Case in point: Trump and Musk fired hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration employees amid a worrying rash of plane accidents and then, just a week thereafter, the agency announced it had contracted to pay Musk’s Starlink at least $2 billion for internet services. Further, CNN Business reported yesterday that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has rescinded a Biden-era requirement that $46 billion in federal grants for rural internet go only to fiber optics companies. Now, Starlink is eligible for the funding. Musk has also recently targeted the U.S. Postal Service and the Amtrak train system for privatization.

Unlike Trump and the Project 2025 crew, Musk and the other oligarchs don’t broadcast their moves so openly. Their motivations are clear—follow the money and power—but their plans are more murky, and may move beyond financial wealth. Musk, in particular, has mused openly on X about what it feels like to be in control of more human data than any person before him, and that has only increased as his young lackeys have hacked into the Social Security database. The agency’s former chief resigned after failing to block Musk’s team from accessing Americans’ data. The new acting commissioner, installed by Trump, admitted today that Musk and DOGE, rather than himself, are in charge of Social Security cuts. The timing of Musk’s most recent attempt to purchase OpenAI is not likely coincidental; his own xAI is not great, and he needs the world’s best AI program to make something of the further mass of information he has just acquired.

So those are the major groups that wanted a Trump regime, with all their disparate but often overlapping wishes. But there’s still the man himself, who is content to allow these others their dominion so long as they don’t interfere with him getting what he wants. Sure, he’s a malignant narcissist, and what he wants is adulation and much bowing and scraping. Being the President gets him all that, especially when he fires all the career employees and agency heads and installs loyalists at every level of government—including, most alarmingly, in the U.S. military. 

But he’s more than just an out-of-control ego. I hope by now those who voted against him (and maybe some of those who voted for him) are starting to see the outlines of his thinking. Sarah Kendzior has written about the international network of which Trump is a part for years; her books They Knew and Hiding in Plain Sight are required reading for understanding what’s happening here as we see the shadowy denizens of the borderless big-money world emerging into the daylight. 

Trump and Musk biographer and attorney Seth Abramson has dug into both men’s deep backgrounds and presented his case like the seasoned trial lawyer he is. He believes that Trump’s father taught him the only worthwhile men were ‘killers’—and if you weren’t a killer, you were a loser (and if you weren’t a man, you didn’t count at all). He traces Trump’s strange fascination with Putin and Russia to a desire to equal the biggest killer of all—a desire born during a 1987 visit to Moscow to discuss opening a Trump hotel there. 

Whether Trump walked away a new KGB recruit as some have recently alleged, or not, is beside the point. What matters is that he came straight back to the U.S. and published a full-page ad in three major U.S. papers, the Post, the Times, and the Boston Globe, which advocated for an end to the Marshall Plan delineating the allied world order after the end of WWII. Abramson dug up and republished the ad, which asked why our allies were not paying us back for the American lives lost and billions spent in their defense. I got a bit of a shock reading its text, written almost 40 years ago, considering Trump still says the same thing every time the subject of NATO or Ukraine arises. That’s a remarkable consistency across several decades.

It contains the germ of what future historians might call the Trump Doctrine, laughable as that sounds to us now. If Trump is truly envisioning an end to the post-WWII world order, as he seems to be, then what is he aiming toward? Abramson and others are clear that a restructured, multi-polar world is in the offing, with the U.S. in control of North America (which explains all the rhetoric about Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal), China left to its own devices in the East and Oceania, and Russia’s sphere covering the rest of Eurasia. South America would, in this game plan, likely be dominated by Brazil, with whose autocratic leader Trump has tried to forge relationships for 20 years. The African continent, one presumes, is viewed as a vast resource trough for the major powers to divide amongst themselves.

Taking a different tack at Trump’s thinking, Supreme Court attorney Jay Kuo has analyzed the on-again, off-again tariff situation, asking, as so many observers are, what can possibly be behind these actions which amount to an unconstitutional grab of Congress’s taxing power. He proposes it may boil down to one or some combination of the following theories:

(1) Trump has frequently expressed admiration for President McKinley, whom he sees as a bold consolidator of the Republican Party and the incipient American empire: McKinley’s late-1800s administration saw territorial expansion to Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and more. Trump apparently seeks a retrenchment in North America to include an expansion—physical or economic—into Canada, Greenland, and Panama. One of Trump’s first acts in office was to order Denali in Alaska renamed to Mt. McKinley. In Trump’s view, McKinley was a ‘strong man’ like Putin. Notably, McKinley applied 50% tariffs to Canada, then a British colony, in an effort to force it to become the 51st state. Most Americans never learned this; most Canadians are well-informed on the subject.

(2) Perhaps meshing with the above, Trump’s tariffs look like a second feint at wresting control of Congress’s constitutionally delegated power of the purse. Ordering a freeze on all federal funds was the first. Issuing massive tariffs on imports, which amount to taxing the people without Congressional action, is the second. Musk’s tinkering in federal payment systems plays into this. The executive now holds an almost unlimited power to levy tariffs in times of ‘national emergencies.’ The first round of tariffs issued in February included a statement of national emergency due to the “extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl.” This is why Trump bangs on and on about fentanyl crossing our borders from the chief tariffed parties, Canada and Mexico, even though both border crossings and fentanyl deaths are down. He’s backstopping his justification for onerous import duties. 

(3) In what is perhaps the most cynical, but likely clear-eyed possibility, Kuo says these extraordinary tariffs may represent the consolidation of an ‘extortion racket’ trialled during Trump’s first term, now reaching its full fruition. After levying 20% tariffs on China in 2018, he set up an exemption system that Chinese companies could apply for. He withheld significant leeway to determine which companies would receive the tariff exemption, meaning he held a powerful carrot and stick for those who wished to do business in U.S. markets. A 2024 study found that those companies who’d donated to Republicans prior to Trump’s first term were more likely to receive a tariff exemption. He has now given companies a month to make the necessary contributions to the GOP (and/or Trump’s crypto meme coin) to secure an exemption rapidly when the tariffs go into effect in April. Not coincidentally, those in the inner circle, with foreknowledge of the timing for each yoyo-ing on tariffs, and thus foreknowledge of stock market reaction, stand to clean up massively. Trump’s appointees, excluding Musk, have a combined net worth of well over $50 billion and are the wealthiest political cadre in history. With Musk, the combined wealth of our new leadership is estimated at nearly half a trillion dollars. These are people who know how to work the markets.

I lean toward viewing this as a combination of all of the above. To repeat, I am not in any way an expert on trade policy or geopolitics, so I illustrated Kuo’s tariff theory and Abramson’s proposed ‘Trump Doctrine’ (a multipolar world) to make the point that we underestimate the man’s seemingly insane pronouncements at our peril. There’s a through line linking it all: a consolidation of oligarchical power that requires a detente between the three major world powers, with each leaving the others to their business within their respective geographical spheres of influence. Trump has for decades said what he wants and what he will do; so much of it sounds, in isolation, so loopy that too many of us tuned it out as mere raving. That was a mistake. 

So where does this leave us? Here are the titles of recent pieces by an array of foreign and geopolitical policy experts, historians of autocracy, and journalists with expertise in dictatorial regimes:

• “The Path to American Authoritarianism”
  —Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way
• “Is American Democracy Doomed?”
  —Brian Klaas
• “Trump’s America Is in a Free Fall—Not a Slippery Slope—to Tyranny”
  —Larry Diamond
• “Apocalypse Now”
  —Timothy Burke
• “How Did America Not See This Apocalypse Coming?”
  —Alex Shephard
• “Call It What It Is”
  —Joyce Vance
• “It Is a Coup”
  —Carole Cadwalladr
• “Hostile Takeover” and “Regime Change: let’s call it what it is”
  —Anne Applebaum
• “How Trump’s Lawyers Are Trying to Make Him a King”
  —Lisa Needham
• “Preparing Trump’s Military Purge”
  —Ruth Ben-Ghiat
• “The Purge of the U.S. Military—its purposes and consequences”
  —Peter Frankopan
• “The Empire Self-Destructs”
  —Chris Hedges

Reading those in order sounds like the chapter titles in a history of these fraught days. I feel sick again, typing them, as I did when I first read these articles. Brian Klaas, a professor of global politics at University College London, wrote yesterday that “a major political science democracy index was quietly updated. The ‘Polity IV’ index—which measures levels of democracy and authoritarianism in every country—decided to re-classify the United States as a non-democracy. The official notice read as follows: ‘The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy.’”

I sense that my mind is trying to scab over the ongoing horror of seeing the American empire and its vast power—never an unalloyed force for good in the world, even at its best—fall into the hands of those who barely even try to pretend that they are working for the people (much less for our nonhuman cousins and the natural world). 

Eventually, without keeping that wound open, it will heal over and leave a numb scar. This is part of the strategy behind the assault of terrible, chaotic news, day after day: make those who are still paying attention so distraught that they tune out, scab over, scar up, go numb, fall silent. Withdraw to the self-care of video games or cozy craft projects (both of which I have done in the past month). Get used to the new normal. Give up.

Given that a substantial mass of analysts from across the spectrum agree that America is now very close to reaching autocracy, what is left to us? Well, as I’ve mentioned before, this administration’s actions have already proven a dire test of judicial restraint on executive power, and that will only continue. 

For now, the courts are holding. This week, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld a lower court ruling requiring the administration to restart foreign aid funds. This is a temporary win while the battle plays out in the lower courts. 

Will the administration comply today? Will it comply with upcoming Supreme Court rulings? What if it doesn’t? Well then, that’s the constitutional crisis. The federal courts can enforce their rulings against the administration with contempt proceedings, which would allow the judges to order U.S. marshals to arrest the offending officials. But I have my doubts whether the Justice Department under Trump appointee Pam Bondi would allow marshals to arrest anyone in this administration. 

The last guardrail is holding. It’s Trump and Musk’s move now. Will they obey the courts?

Talk to you soon,
Owl

Sources:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/business/musk-faa-starlink-contract/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/business/musk-usps-amtrak-privatization/index.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/03/06/heres-what-we-know-about-trump-and-musks-social-security-plans-as-agency-head-reportedly-says-theyll-make-mistakes/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/06/doge-is-driving-social-security-cuts-will-make-mistakes-acting-head-says-privately/

https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/trump-tariffs-mexico-canada

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/03/nx-s1-5272753/why-trump-loves-former-president-mckinley-so-much

https://news.lehigh.edu/politically-connected-corporations-received-more-exemptions-from-us-tariffs-on-chinese-imports

https://www.citizen.org/article/trumps-billionaire-cabinet-represents-the-top-0001-percent/

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/19/trump-first-moscow-trip-215842

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-birth-of-the-trump-doctrine-lies

https://web.archive.org/web/20250224213509/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/doge-civil-servant-purge/681671/

https://archive.is/2025.02.16-140256/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-crypto-reserve-grifting-corruption

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/from-orban-to-trump-part-ii

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/is-american-democracy-doomed

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/trumps-america-is-in-a-free-fallnot

https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-news-apocalypse-now

https://newrepublic.com/article/192315/trump-economy-recession-ukraine-russia-world-war-apocalypse

https://peterfrankopan.substack.com/p/the-purge-of-the-us-military-its

https://anneapplebaum.substack.com/p/regime-change

https://joycevance.substack.com/p/call-it-what-it-is

https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/it-is-a-coup

https://lucid.substack.com/p/preparing-trumps-military-purge-what

https://newrepublic.substack.com/p/musks-attack-on-social-security-takes

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-empire-self-destructs

*Inspired by historian Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American

Owl in America will remain free to all readers. Paid subscriptions help make possible the time it takes to track agency notices, court filings, specialized reporting, and environmental stories that can be easy to miss. If you can support this work with a paid subscription, thank you; if you can’t, thank you for being here. Please share these letters, speak up where you can, and keep paying attention to the living world. 🦉