Disillusioned or Deranged? Inside the Minds of the Trump-Era Civil Servant.
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It’s hard to assign much logic to the totality of Trump-era policies, largely because I don’t think there is any. A weird old queen with a disintegrating brain has many whims, whether it’s trying to annex Greenland, kidnapping the president of Venezuela, or sending an army of goons to terrorize a city for months because a rightwing griftfluencer went viral for trying to film inside a daycare. He does crazy shit because he wants to, and can.
An arguably more interesting drama plays out at a level just below the top, among the folks entrusted to carry out these half-baked whims. Even if most of Trump’s ideas seem to lack a unifying logic, someone out there often has to give them one, if only just to make them actionable.
It may not be particularly surprising, then, to learn that a group who has made their bones demonizing civil servants may be having some trouble recruiting good civil servants. Still, at the risk of being glib, it seems clear that the Trump-era civil servant is not okay. Even a true-believer podcaster like Dan Bongino only lasted 10 months in government. In the less prominent roles, a few stories this past week seem to indicate, things are even worse. Or at least… weirder.
Seymour Hersh profiled a Minneapolis district court judge named Jerry Blackwell, for instance, who was holding hearings to ensure that the government was actually complying with court orders. The whole thing seemed like a bit of a farce, though not because of Blackwell. Blackwell had ordered one detainee—a person with no criminal record, who was seized illegally—to be released January 15th. Instead, the detainee, referred to in court proceedings as “Oscar,” was transferred around the country, seemingly at random, until January 28th, and then released. Blackwell had called a few of the relevant lawyers into his court in order to try to figure out why. Why had ICE ignored his lawful orders, seemingly for no benefit?
ICE needed an attorney to represent them during this questioning, which turned out to be an attorney named Julie T. Le. Only it seems no one ever bothered telling her a “why” either, assuming there even was one:
It took Le, the newcomer, to give the judge an inside view of what can only be seen as the Trump administration’s utter lack of regard for those seized illegally and later ordered released by a federal judge. She explained that she arrived from Washington to Minneapolis with no idea of what she was supposed to do on issues of due process. The judge, with what I hope was a smile, interjected. “Are you telling the court,” he asked, “that you were brought in brand new, a shiny brand new penny into this role, and you received no proper orientation or training on what you were supposed to do?” The answer was yes.
The whole thing plays out like an I Think You Should Leave sketch. “They didn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do. Do you know?”
Asked to explain why the detainee was transferred around between Minneapolis, El Paso, and Albuquerque, she basically said “I don’t know and I’ve been trying to quit.” Several times she came about as close as it is to get to quoting the Dril, “I’m trying to remove it” tweet.
It was during this period, Le told the judge, that she put in her resignation but remained on the job because no replacement could be found. And now, she told the judge: “I am here with you, Your Honor. What do you want me to do? The system sucks. The job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.”
The NY Times later reported that Le was fired over her remarks in court, though it hardly seems like it should count as a firing when you were already openly begging to quit. In fact, Le essentially asked the judge to throw her in jail so that she could get some rest.
The full transcript is quite a read:
“I am here as a bridge and a liaison between the one that in jail, because if I walk out -- sometime I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep.
Quick aside here, but 24 hours seems like too much sleep.
“I work days and night just because people still in there. And, yes, procedure in place right now sucks. I’m trying to fix it. As you can see the e-mail that I sent to you, it has been improving, a great improvement.”
In case the “please put me in jail” thing seems like a one-off, she made sure to double down it later:
“And as you can see, I -- I would -- I would love to undo all of this stuff because no one want to be in jail. And actually, honestly, you know, being in jail a day to get -- catch up with sleep is not bad right now with all the hours I have to put in into this job.”
It’s a wonder reading it, because the more you go through it, the more it seems like they somehow got a normal-ish person with some recognizable sense of right and wrong in this job. That might, in fact, be the problem. No one told her that this is not a job for someone within spitting difference of normal. And now the experience seems to be broken her. This… does not seem sustainable.
Though perhaps Julie T. Le is not a representative example of the Trump-era civil servant. If being too close to normal will break one, what does it look like when you find one who seems like they’re thriving?
For that, we go to Talking Points Memo, who were able to identify and speak with a guy who works as part of some executive branch task force responsible for “cleaning up” our elections in Fulton County, Georgia. The job itself sounds dubious, acquired through dubious means. Some kind of election security whistleblower got himself a job doing election security. I don’t delve too far into what that actually means, for my own sanity.
Suffice it to say, the man’s name is Clay Parikh, and he gives the impression of a 55-year-old toddler.
Very untrustworthy haircut. Anyway, I say they were able to speak with Parikh, but it seems like the trouble turned out to be actually getting him to stop.
“I have no comment for any of that,” he said at the outset of the call.
However, after initially declining to comment, Parikh proceeded to hold forth for nearly two hours.
Yes, you know this one is going to be good.
Given the fact Parikh is now working with the Trump White House, TPM asked if he believes the president’s victory in the 2024 election was a legitimate one. Parikh said he believes some of the numbers were “screwed” with in that race. He went on to suggest “the freaking media” was eager to generate the false impression that former Vice President Kamala Harris was performing better than she actually was.
“You spread a narrative and you ran these crazy posts making it look like Harris was close. So guess what? You’ve got to try to pull it off and make it look like the narrative’s close,” Parikh said. “But you couldn’t do it, because then it would be totally bogus.”
They were eager to spread a narrative that the election was close, but actually stealing said election would’ve been a bridge too far, according to Clay. But hey, he’s not political.
“For me, I voted libertarian. I vote for a libertarian. I vote for a Democrat. I vote for whoever,” Parikh said, later adding, “I’ve viewed it this way: it’s the cabal, the oligarchs, whatever you want to call them — the deep state — against we, the people. … The R and the D is just a manufactured thing to cause division. Right? Those are my views on it.” […]
“You’re pushing the narrative and you’re about to make me say, whatever your freaking media is, then I’m gonna lump you like I do Fox, and CNN, and NBC, and CBS, and ABC, and the rest of them. Right? And MSNBC,” Parikh said, adding, “All those different letters, I just say ‘CIA.’” […]
You ever get the feeling that it was a mistake letting some people have the alphabet?
Parikh goes on like this for a while, talking about the Biblical evil, and the monumental forces arrayed against him, and how he’s a freedom fighter and blah blah blah, though of course it’s hard to pin him down on what he’s actually talking about. He’s a military vet who got a job working in the executive branch, so it doesn’t seem like all these cabals are doing so hot.
“Here’s what I’ll tell you, I think there’s a group of people, a small group of people in each one of the areas of the federal government, that are fighting hard to get it back,” Parikh said. “But … when they say deep state, it’s deep and it’s everywhere, and that’s why it’s just extremely hard.”
Despite those long odds, Parikh believes his cause can win.
“You can’t give up,” Parikh said.
He then launched into a laundry list of concerns, including “digital IDs” as a dire threat to freedom, “AI models that you see on the web searches,” and “chemicals” in foods.
“If you didn’t learn nothing off of this COVID stuff, they — if you go in the grocery stores they are literally trying to kill us,” Parikh said.
Okay, the food is pretty bad. I’m with him here, I think. Let’s see where he goes with this…
Parikh also said he was concerned they are no longer selling “real chicken” at Cracker Barrel.
Dammit.
“The food was going downhill before all their woke stuff,” Parikh said.
I guess he wants you to know he’s not like these Johnny Come Latelies complaining about the Cracker Barrel logo. He was complaining about the food since way before that.
Along with food, Parikh said he is concerned about soda and claimed he always mixes it with alcohol “to sanitize it.”
Well sure, the only way to ensure your body gets the important nutrients it needs from soda without all the poison and woke stuff is to put alcohol into it. I’m starting to like the cut of this guy’s jib. These are the kinds of bipartisan solutions our government could use more of. Specifically I mean a solution of alcohol and soda.
“People, just — they’ve got to wake up,” Parikh said.
After hearing Parikh’s long list of grievances, I pressed him once again on who exactly is in the “cabal” and “deep state.” He cited the longrunning NBC television thriller “The Blacklist,” which starred James Spader.
I don’t think everyone should have access to television. In the wrong hands it’s just too dangerous.
“I discovered ‘The Blacklist’ right? I’ve been watching that and I’m telling you what, I’m like that was the documentary done in the future,” Parikh explained. “They’re showing the corrupt CIA stuff and all this stuff. It’s both at the government level, and at the corporate level, and the banks.”
It’s amazing how wildly the obsessions of the average conspiracy-poisoned Americans can oscillate between Bircherite fantasies of homosexual blood-drinking Satanists and just regular TV shows.
“There are a group of people now that, they’ve gone off and they believe this stuff,” Parikh said, adding, “Controlling things and more power, that’s evil. That’s the devil’s work right there. And so, whether they’re actually bowing down, and drinking blood, and doing whatever Satanists will do, that’s irrelevant. When you do pure evil things that violate what God’s instructed us to do, you are evil, you are demonic.”
Parikh, who described himself as a “Baptist,” said there are “evil” elements inside churches.
“Some of the churches are wrong that have gay pride stuff in it,” he said. “That’s not a church. That’s obviously the devil trying to brainwash people. That’s my personal beliefs.”
Overall, Parikh said the country is “failing.” He suggested we could be headed in the same direction as Europe where there are issues that he attributed to “antifa” and “all these immigrants and migrants that are raping girls and stuff.”
*sees a gay pride flag * “This is obviously a cabal of evil Satanists trying to brainwash America.”
*sees The Blacklist starring James Spader * “Wow, this is like a documentary.”
I made one last attempt to understand how Parikh feels about working inside the system. He turned back to television.
“Did you ever watch ‘Parks and Recreation’?” Parikh asked.
“Ron Swanson was my hero, not because he just loved steak, and bacon, and everything else, but because I was a government contractor,” Parikh explained. “Now, I am temporarily with the government. Right? Working for the government, but hating them every bit. Right? That guy’s my hero.”
For all his insane and scattershot beliefs about rigged elections, biological warfare, and government psyops, his most animating conviction is that Ron Swanson is freakin’ epic because he loves bacon and steaks. I don’t even know what to say anymore. We’re all living inside a Connor O’Malley sketch.
In case it wasn’t already abundantly obvious, I was on a lot of cold medicine this past week. I’m hoping my brain gets back to some semblance of normal next week.
