Yet another bad thing.

A new map and data from The Wilderness Society illustrate the potential reach of executive and secretarial orders issued to fulfill President Trump’s fossil fuel-centric “energy dominance” vision. 

Places at risk include Bears Ears National Monument, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the watershed of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Trump’s day-one executive orders and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s secretarial orders from two weeks later positioned drilling and mining interests as the favored users of America’s public lands and threatened to scrap existing land protections and conservation measures. Following those orders, assistant secretaries were supposed to have submitted action plans to Secretary Burgum on Feb. 18 with steps to review, revise and rescind protections for potentially hundreds of special places nationwide. The department has not yet commented on the content of these plans or committed to any public input or transparency around the process. 

In the absence of that transparency, the new Wilderness Society map gives a sense of some of the places that could fall under the Trump administration’s punitive microscope, including natural and cultural treasures like Bears Ears National Monument, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the watershed of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.  

“As we speak, the Trump administration’s Department of the Interior is deciding which of our treasured places to sell out for drilling and mining. Our analysis shows that their plans could end up removing or reducing protections for tens of millions of acres’ worth of wildlife habitat, ancient cultural sites and outdoor recreation areas,” said Dan Hartinger, senior director of agency policy at The Wilderness Society.  

There’s more. It’s all horrifying.

Of course he did.

Federal agencies must develop plans to eliminate employee positions, according to a memo distributed Wednesday by President Donald Trump ‘s administration that sets in motion what could become a sweeping realignment of American government.

The memo expands the Republican president’s effort to downsize the federal workforce, which he has described as an impediment to his agenda. Thousands of probationary employees have already been fired, and now his administration is turning its attention to career officials with civil service protection.

…

“The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public,” said the memo from Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, which functions as a human resources agency. “Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hard-working American citizens.”

…

Specific targets for reductions were not included in the memo, but Trump said the Environmental Protection Agency could cut its workforce by 65%.

Of course. Who the hell needs an environment? Environments are just a politically correct invention by weirdo left-wing weirdos. Get rid of it!

Male First Minister says he’s fine with men invading women’s spaces. It’s always inspiring to see people cheerfully giving away other people’s rights.

Scotland’s First Minister has backed the right of trans people who self-identify as women to use female toilets and changing rooms.

Do note the carefully confusing and euphemistic wording. Asshole has backed “the right” of MEN to use female toilets and changing rooms. Men. Not people, not trans people, not trans people who self-identify; MEN. The word is “men.” MEN.

John Swinney, the leader of the SNP, said he supported Scottish Government guidance for its trans employees, which states they “should choose to use the facilities they feel most comfortable with”.

Except women of course. Women should just shut the fuck up. Women don’t get to “choose to use the facilities they feel most comfortable with” because men like Swinney make it impossible for them to do so. The facilities women “feel most comfortable with” are the ones with NO MEN IN THEM. Swinney’s moronic (or vicious) generosity to men rules that out, so there you go, women: sucks to be you.

Rachael Hamilton, the Scottish Tory deputy leader, said: “Women and girls will be dismayed that John Swinney continues to ignore their rights and safety by remaining wedded to Nicola Sturgeon’s reckless self-ID policy.

“His insistence that trans women are women totally undermines his follow-up claim that this shouldn’t come at the disadvantage of other groups. Gender self-ID, by its very definition, comes at the expense of the right of biological females to access single-sex spaces – and the First Minister knows it.”

Sorry to agree with the Tory, but when the non-Tories lose their damn minds we don’t have a choice.

A throwaway line from the BBC’s live reporting of the Musk-Trump cabinet meeting:

After a prayer led by former NFL player and US housing secretary Scott Turner, Donald Trump starts addressing the cabinet once more.

Hahaha that’s funny – former football player turned housing secretary – and he “leads a prayer” at a secular meeting of a secular government.

Here, let me lead a prayer. Dear Easter Bunny: please make Musk and Trump disappear, amen.

In another part of the forest:

The Doge congressional subcommittee in the Republican-led House of Representatives is meeting today to discuss the sweeping cuts to the federal government, and to defend them as necessary in order to stop wasting taxpayer money. The hearing is titled “America Last: How Foreign Aid Undermined US Interests Around the World”.

Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican closely aligned with Trump, said in a statement released ahead of the hearing that it will address the “shocking” amount of money that has been spent overseas to “to push left-wing ideology, fund radical extremist groups, and usurp the will of the people abroad and here at home”.

Witnesses at the hearing include a former employee of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) who now works for the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, another conservative think tank expert from the Middle East Forum, and a right-wing journalist from The Daily Signal.

The Daily Signal. Awesome.

How did Musk get so rich, anyway?

The Feds lavished money on him.

Over the years, Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments, a Washington Post analysis has found, helping seed the growth that has made him the world’s richest person.

The payments stretch back more than 20 years. Shortly after becoming CEO of a cash-strapped Tesla in 2008, Musk fought hard to secure a low-interest loan from the Energy Department, according to two people directly involved with the process,holding daily briefings with company executives about the paperwork and spending hours with a government loan officer.

…

DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, has sought to cut staff, slash budgets or cut contracts at all seven of the agencies where Musk’s companies have ongoing contracts. That includes the General Services Administration, Defense Department and Transportation Department.

Ungrateful fella, isn’t he.

“Not every entrepreneur at this scale has been this dependent on federal money — certainly not Nvidia, not Microsoft, nor Amazon, nor Meta,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor at the Yale School of Management, who noted that much of the funding has come during Democratic administrations. “With DOGE, there does seem to be a paradox there. He has been a big beneficiary of national industrial policy, especially Democrat industrial policy, through government funding.”

Paradox is one word for it. I can think of others.

John Helveston, a professor at George Washington University who studies electric vehicles, said Tesla is a prime example of the success that can come from government investment in nascent industries, though government assistance alone is not a guarantee for success.

By pushing to cut subsidies across all industries, Helveston said Musk is strangling a potential lifeline for smaller companies — and his competitors.

“Pretty much every aspect [of Tesla] has benefited from direct government subsidy or financing,” he said. “It’s not a weird phenomenon for Tesla to benefit from this, but it is certainly hypocritical.”

Yeh that’s one of the words.

Erm…whose tits are those?

He looks as if the tits are anchors pulling him forward, so that he can’t for the life of him stand up straight. He’s tilted awkwardly forward, and struggling not to topple. His shoulders are hunched, his arms look as if they don’t belong to him, it’s obvious his bum is sticking out, the skirt is wrinkled, his legs and feet look even more as if they don’t belong to him. The bangs are ridiculous. The jacket is too tight, and wrinkled like the skirt. The nail polish looks stupid and ugly. The lipstick is ok I guess.

What’s the point of any of this other than mocking women?

BBC “LGBT & Identity Reporter” reports:

An American who wanted to be formally recognised as non-binary in the UK has been told by the Court of Appeal their gender identity does not legally exist in this country.

So much drivel in that one sentence. What is it to be “formally recognized”? What is “non-binary”? What is genner idenniny? What kind of damn fool goes to court to demand to be “recognized” as something nonsensical?

The Beeb includes a winsome photo of him. Wannabe winsome anyway. Pronounced head tilt, so that we’ll perceive his Special Idenniny instantly. He has head-tilt genner, aka broken neck genner.

Ryan Castellucci previously lost a High Court challenge to have their gender recorded as non-binary on a gender recognition certificate – a document which changes someone’s legal sex – after moving to the UK in 2019.

They had obtained legal recognition as non-binary in California in 2021, and were issued an American passport in 2022 listing their sex as ‘X’.

He had. He was. He’s just one guy, not a they.

At an earlier hearing, the court heard how Castellucci, a cyber security expert from California, uses the title “Mx” and refers to themselves using they/them pronouns.

Really? Instead of “I” and “me”? That must be massively confusing.

Non-binary is an umbrella term for those those who do not identify as exclusively male or female.

Talk gibberish, end up repeating your words words. It doesn’t matter what people “identify as” when it comes to brute facts. “Identify as” is for fictions and abstractions, not for humdrum bio realities like what sex you are.

Nope.

More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.

The mass resignation of engineers, data scientists and product managers is a temporary setback for Musk and the Republican president’s tech-driven purge of the federal workforce. It comes amid a flurry of court challenges that have sought to stall, stop or unwind their efforts to fire or coerce thousands of government workers out of jobs.

It’s tricky doing a tech-driven purge without engineers and data scientists.

The staffers who resigned worked for what was once known as the United States Digital Service, an office established during President Barack Obama’s administration after the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov, the web portal that millions of Americans use to sign up for insurance plans through the Democrat’s signature health care law.

All had previously held senior roles at such tech companies as Google and Amazon and wrote in their resignation letter that they joined the government out of a sense of duty to public service.

I think we can be pretty confident it doesn’t pay more. Or as much.

Trump’s empowerment of Musk upended that. The day after Trump’s inauguration, the staffers wrote, they were called into a series of interviews that foreshadowed the secretive and disruptive work of Musk’s’ Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

According to the staffers, people wearing White House visitors’ badges, some of whom would not give their names, grilled the nonpartisan employees about their qualifications and politics. Some made statements that indicated they had a limited technical understanding. Many were young and seemed guided by ideology and fandom of Musk — not improving government technology.

And the ideology in question is the rather crude Spending Taxpayer Money Bad. We can’t all build our own roads or power plants or airports.

“Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the staffers wrote in their letter. “This process created significant security risks.”

All sent by Musk who doesn’t even have a government job and is not even from here. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Trump regime people are quarreling over who can be most absurd.

Donald Trump has stepped in to defend Elon Musk from a mounting backlash in his own administration after some cabinet members told US federal workers to ignore the billionaire entrepreneur’s demand that they write an email justifying their work.

…

Newly confirmed cabinet officials, including the FBI director, Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, the national intelligence director, told underlings not to comply with a weekend order from Musk for all staff to send an email detailing their past week’s work by midnight on Monday or face termination.

Uh oh uh oh – if underlings can just disobey Musk then what’s next?

With his wealthiest and most high-profile lieutenant threatened with loss of face and authority, Trump used a meeting with the French president, Emmanuel Macron at the White House on Monday to deliver a vote of confidence.

Of course he did, because that’s totally the point of meetings with foreign heads of state.

A more audacious sign of dissent was on display at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud), where television monitors played what appeared to be AI-generated false images of Trump sucking Musk’s toes in a loop, with “long live the real king” written over the footage, according to the Washington Post, citing people working at the department.

Musk doesn’t take hints though.

Despite the backlash, Musk took Trump’s comments as a signal to again threaten workers with the sack.

“Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” he posted on his own social media platform, Twitter/X, on Monday.

A later post mocked the resistance to his original email. “Absurd that a 5 min email generates this level of concern!” he wrote. “Something is deeply wrong.”

Wut? You can send a 5 min email that orders the military to install Trump as dictator and kill anyone who resists. What difference does the brevity of the email make?

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing about 800,000 of the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce, said Musk’s original email was a cynical ploy aimed at intimidating workers into resigning.

“If we took the time to comment on each and every ridiculous thing that Elon Musk tweets out, we’d never get any work done,” Brittany Holder, a union spokesperson said.

He does tweet a lot. Those five minutes add up.

Never mind, at least Russia is happy. (Same article; part 2.)

Russia’s UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, acknowledged what he said were “constructive changes” in the US position on the conflict. US allies in Europe on the 15-member council – France, Britain, Denmark, Greece and Slovenia – abstained from the vote.

Ya “constructive changes” to side with Russia instead of Ukraine and most of Europe.

The UK’s ambassador to the UN, Barbara Woodward, said after the vote that while London shared the “ambition to find a lasting end to this war”, there should be “no equivalence between Russia and Ukraine in how this council refers to this war”.

She added the UK regretted “our proposals making these points clear were not taken onboard, and as such we could not support this resolution”.

In other words the US is now the enemy of the liberal democracies.

It was the first security council resolution to pass during the war. The council had been unable to take any action because Russia holds a veto.

Russia did not veto the Trump administration’s resolution.

In contrast, and highlighting the US and Russia’s global isolation, the 193-member UN general assembly earlier backed a resolution drafted by Ukraine and the EU condemning Russia.

While security council resolutions are considered binding, general assembly resolutions are not. However, general assembly resolutions carry diplomatic and political gravity as they illuminate the global consensus on issues.

The US, Russia, Israel, Belarus and North Korea all voted against the EU-Ukrainian resolution, underlining an extraordinary shift since the election of Donald Trump, who has largely absolved Vladimir Putin of responsibility for the invasion.

North fucking Korea.

Yeah sometimes you don’t want “balance.” Some things are worse than other things, and there’s no need to take a more “balanced” view of the matter.

Kremlin welcomes ‘more balanced’ US stance on Ukraine after UN vote

Or to put it more honestly, Kremlin welcomes pro-Kremlin stance on Ukraine after UN vote. What the invaders call “balance” is in fact pro-invasion. No doubt the Nazis would have welcomed a more “balanced” stance on genocide; no doubt slaveowners in Georgia and Alabama would have welcome a more “balanced” stance on enslavement.

Moscow praises Washington for siding with it at UN, as European countries abstain in sign of deepening rift with US.

Good Washington [pat pat pat] Good boy [pat pat pat]

The Kremlin has welcomed what it said was a “much more balanced” US stance on Ukraine after the Trump administration pushed through a UN security council resolution on the war that included no criticism of Russia.

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the move was evidence of Washington’s willingness to try to find a peaceful settlement. Moscow backed the resolution, which was passed late on Monday, although European countries abstained, in a sign of a deepening rift with Washington.

In a simple three-paragraph motion on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion, the US took a neutral position on the war and called for a “swift end” to the conflict and “lasting peace”. It presented a sharply different tone to that of the Biden administration, which had supported Ukraine throughout.

Bullies and thieves hang together.

Well, they’re getting one thing right. Only one, but it’s That one.

Stonewall could be forced to cut up to half of its staff after President Trump’s decision to freeze foreign aid, The Times understands. Workers at the LGBTQ+ charity were told on Thursday that restructuring would take place, and that only roles with dedicated funding would be safe.

Simon Blake, the chief executive of Stonewall, made the announcement in an office-wide Teams call, which was said to have left its 114 staff “shellshocked”.

Sources said they believed up to half of the workforce could be made redundant in the move, which they were told would “secure the future of Stonewall for the long term as a significant LGBTQ+ organisation able to deliver impactful campaigns and legislative change across the UK and further afield”.

Of course they use silly (and American!) jargon like “impactful,” the dorks. “Campaigns that have an impact” will do just fine thank you.

Funding from the US came to Stonewall through the Global Equality Fund (GEF), administered by the US state department, which has given the charity more than half a million pounds in the past three years. The GEF focuses on “advancing LGBTI rights around the world” and is a pooled fund with contributions from numerous countries and private businesses, but it has not published accounts since 2015.

Plus it duct-taped the T to the LGB. Never duct-tape the T to the LGB.

There aren’t enough planks in the world to measure how thick Ash Sarkar is.

And I’ll tell you the sort of classic example of this, which I’ll go into some detail, you know that whole can a woman have a penis thing. [compliant host says yes] Right [hands up in dramatic gesture] fuuuucckkkin hell, can a woman have a penis – overnight it became theeeee preferred line of questioning for basically every political interviewer on British television – and I wondered where had this come from – like where had this line of questioning emerged from.

Golly gee, yes, where on earth could such a question possibly come from????

I will suggest, with all due respect, that it came from the sudden flood of men announcing that they were women and the flood of people cheering them on. It came from an effort to understand how people could believe such absurdity, and much more, how they could try to bully other people into saying we believe it too.

That’s where.

The scorching shame of it.

The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries Monday on a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for its occupied territory to be returned that passed overwhelmingly in the U.N. General Assembly.

The stench will never go away.

The U.S. delegation also abstained on its own separate resolution that called simply for a negotiated end to the war after European-sponsored amendments inserting new anti-Russian language also passed the 193-member body by a wide margin.

No anti-Russian language for us, no sirree. We love our Vlad.

Mike Bendzela asks:

I’m toying with a semi-autobiographical piece that I would like to publish at 3 Quarks Daily. It’s a “what-if” look at a kinda-effeminate boy (me) who grew up in the 1960s and what would happen if he were transplanted into the present with its trans mania: Would he be allowed to grow up to be a normal gay male adult?

I suspect many of these young “trans girls” are effeminate gay boys so full of internalized homophobia that they would do anything (with the support of parents and churches, of course) to avoid the dreaded fate of growing up to be gay.

I’m wondering if there are any clear, citable instances of young gay boys who were either transed or partially transed much to their regret and who learned late (perhaps too late) that they are simply normal gay boys?? These would give my speculative autobiography more authority, I think.

Thanks!

Doc Stock is on fire here:

When a doctor announces to colleagues that he wishes henceforth to be known as the opposite sex, it seems he is offered a new GMC number to go with the new name and pronouns, wiping out his past. Wes Streeting has raised concerns that this could be hiding the adverse findings of any previous disciplinaries from the public, supposed to be traceable via the same number.

In other words that’s part of the purpose of the GMC number, so it should be obvious that it should stay the same throughout a doctor’s career regardless of adjectival changes.

The health secretary’s point about safeguarding is so blindingly obvious you’d think it might have been raised when number switching was first mooted among GMC bigwigs — except, of course, that we are talking about an ineffable but highly potent substance, gender identity, known to paralyse even high-functioning minds upon first contact. 

As I said: on fire. “an ineffable but highly potent substance” is genius.

A belief in miraculous transformations also continues to bewitch the brains of some at the BBC hell-bent on using the preferred “she/her” pronouns of violent males no matter how lurid or criminal their back story. Last week on the corporation’s news website, the newly arrested leader of an allegedly murderous “vegan cult” in the US, Jack LaSota, was referred to as “she” throughout, despite the fact he is listed as male in the local sheriff’s database.

I missed that one. Gotta wonder how people manage to combine veganism and murder.

It has long been obvious that a declaration of a sex-mismatched gender identity will make trusting souls act as if a whole new person has suddenly been born — even better for public rehabilitation than being ritually humiliated in a jungle. Under normal circumstances it would be quite unusual for a woman who was also a former Ukip candidate, had admitted to strangling her wife and said publicly that Camden had “too many gays” to get onto Woman’s Hour or Celebrity MasterChef, but exceptions were happily made for the boxing promoter turned LGBT ambassador Kellie Maloney after transition.

…

We are not as naive as we once were, and the taste for Hollywood-style redemption arcs about finding your inner womanhood somewhere between arrest and the prison cell is dissipating. The public doesn’t seem as misty-eyed as back when a man putting on a dress was generally treated as a kind of secular canonisation.

On fire, I tells ya.

Still, there remains a general reluctance in polite society to spell out a point that grows more obvious with every news story about a “woman” arrested for paedophilia, voyeurism or sex attacks. So I’ll say it. We need to responsibly face the fact that certain men are attracted to identifying as women because they are already psychologically unstable; and the stories about how any subsequent predatory behaviour or aggression comes only from “societal transphobia” or “repressing who I really was” is a load of, well, balls.

It’s almost a tautology to say that people who identify as the sex they’re not are psychologically unstable.

I was going to run with this but then I paused. It could be fake. I think it might be fake. It’s just that little bit too much.

It’s that very last bit that overdoes it. Asking them to limit their own concerns to one day out of three or four a week so that he can feel happy is just that little bit too much. Just that little bit too Wally Smith, if you remember him.

USAID still being wiped off the map.

The Trump administration said Sunday that it was placing all but a fraction of staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave worldwide and eliminating at least 1,600 U.S.-based jobs.

The move was the latest and one of the biggest steps yet toward what President Donald Trump and cost-cutting ally Elon Musk say is their goal of gutting the six-decade-old aid and development agency in a broader campaign to slash the size of the federal government.

The move comes after a federal judge on Friday allowed the administration to move forward with its plan to pull thousands of USAID staffers off the job in the United States and around the world. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols rejected pleas in a lawsuit from employees to keep temporarily blocking the government’s plan.

“As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAID direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally,” according to the notices sent to USAID workers that were viewed by The Associated Press.

They’re keeping on a few people to arrange the plane trips home for the others, then it’s byebye to them too.

The move escalates a monthlong push to dismantle the agency, which has included closing its headquarters in Washington and shutting down thousands of aid and development programs worldwide following a freeze on all foreign assistance. A judge later temporarily blocked the funding freeze. Trump and Musk contend that USAID’s work is wasteful and furthers a liberal agenda.

But is it really a liberal agenda to buy global good will? However pricey it is it’s nowhere near as expensive as world wars.

How lucky for Musk that he just happens to be in a position to fire federal employees at will.

Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is eliminating jobs at the vehicle safety agency that oversees his Tesla Inc., regulates the autonomous vehicles he says represents its future and has launched investigations into deadly crashes involving the Texas-based company’s cars.

Deadly crashes are the price we pay for other people having dangerous cars. Aren’t we lucky?

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has cut a “modest” amount of positions at the agency, which is tasked with ensuring safety on U.S. roads, it said in a statement Saturday.

The loss of three of the seven members of the specialized unit overseeing autonomous vehicles is part of a 10% overall workforce reduction at the agency enacted by Musk’s advisory group on shrinking the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.

Almost half the people overseeing autonomous vehicles are no longer overseeing automated vehicles. Fancy that.

The Tesla CEO has accused the agency of holding back progress on self-driving technology with its investigations into crashes and recalls of vehicles. 

You are holding back PROGRESS with your pesky investigations into crashes, you filthy Marxists. Go get a job at Pizza Hut.

On Friday, Tesla recalled more than 375,000 vehicles due to a power steering issue. The safety administration said a circuit board may become overstressed, causing a loss of steering assist after a stop.

Ah, just a loss of steering, so nothing dangerous at all.

It turns out Trump doesn’t actually have the power to do what he’s doing. It looks as if nobody’s going to stop him all the same. I have to wonder why there are no enforcement mechanisms built in to all these rules and limits.

President Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that seeks greater authority over regulatory agencies that Congress established as independent from direct White House control, part of a broader bid to centralize a president’s power over the government.

If Congress established the regulatory agencies as independent from direct White House control then Trump should be unable to get greater authority over them. Why are there no guardrails?

The order requires independent agencies to submit their proposed regulations to the White House for review, asserts a power to block such agencies from spending funds on projects or efforts that conflict with presidential priorities, and declares that they must accept the president’s and the Justice Department’s interpretation of the law as binding.

“This is a power move over independent agencies, a structure of administration that Congress has used for various functions going back to the 1880s,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law.

It’s as if everyone has been bribed to stand back and let him do whatever he wants all the time.

The order follows Mr. Trump’s summary firings of leaders of independent agencies in defiance of statutes that bar their removal without cause before their terms are up. Collectively, the moves constitute a major front in the president’s assault on the basic shape of the American government and his effort to seize some of Congress’s constitutional power over it.

Or to put it another way, the moves constitute a coup. Not a metaphorical coup or a rhetorical coup but a real one.