Governing by Terror

You can't have an effective state under conditions of intimidation

Trump has normalized unfounded attacks on lots of people, but public servants in particular. We have seen this at every level of government, whether it be librarians, school teachers, public health or election officials.

Whether Trump wins or loses, I worry that this practice will remain a feature of the contemporary American state. Trumpism has fed an era of sustained harassment of public officials even when he was not in power, and for state and local officials that the federal government has no control over.

This is happening while we are seeing an interesting conversation happening about how to revitalize American state capacity. But I don’t see how we can have that conversation while ignoring that more and more American public servants are being asked to live under conditions of terror.

Previously, I wrote about the attack on federal employees by Tom Jones and his slime machine, the American Accountability Foundation, funded by the Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute. Jones is conducting opposition research on civil servants with the intent of identifying those that Trump should fire once he returns to office. He has since started releasing the names of “targets”, starting with Department of Homeland Security. “Targets” is not exactly subtle.

God help me, I read through the website. What can we learn?

A nothingburger case for firing federal officials

The site posts the civil servants name, picture, title and salary. But the actual accusations are weak tea. This is the evidence for firing the “top 10 targets” who we must assume are the worst of the worst, providing the most damning cases:

• Worked for American Bar Association, Catholic Charities or other “far left” organizations which help immigrants

• Praised Anthony Fauci in a tweet

• Worked as an immigration lawyer or public defense attorney

• Has credit card debt

• Worked for immigration advocacy groups

• Said that “homegrown extremism” and “misinformation” were homeland security threats, or served on a disinformation board

• Supports DC statehood

• Has donated to Democratic politicians in the past - including $10 to Elizabeth Warren in 2019

• Donated to LGBTQ supportive groups

• Spoke on a diversity panel, spoke on a panel called “The Role of Social Workers in Immigration Legal Services Organizations.”

• Was listed on DHS press releases as a point of contact to provide more information about administration policies

• Implemented Biden era policies, like setting up virtual screening processes for immigrants, or adding third gender option on citizenship documents

• Social media posts critical of Trump and his immigration policies, supportive of immigrants, acknowledging systemic racism

• Wrote a law review article critical of the treatment of mentally ill immigrants in detention facilities

• Guilt by association: “is on good terms with notorious bureaucrat”

• Won an award for excellent performance in her job (I’m not kidding, see below), which means she can't be trusted. Another won an award for helping Afghan and Ukraine refugees resettle in the United States.

So, no actual scandals!

The officials are criticized in many cases for simply doing their job, or expressing generic liberal opinions. (If you think I am misrepresenting anything, here is the link to the profiles). Having job-relevant experience is bad, if its suggest any empathy with immigrants. Being good at your job is bad (so much for the claim that Schedule F is there to weed out poor performers). Sharing the same views of homeland security threats that the FBI does: also bad!

In no case is there any claim that the actions are illegal, or the statements the employees made were wrong. Without Schedule F, no career official could be fired for these actions. With Schedule F, they are gone.

Imagine being fired because you posted something praising Anthony Fauci!

Another contextual point that will be easy for casual readers to miss: Some of these are not career officials, but political appointees. Political appointees are clearly going to be political! They usually work for advocacy groups or political parties with a clear ideological focus. Thats their role. They do not have career job protections. So it is completely misleading to present them as “career bureaucrats are that implement their orders” as AAF does. (The $100K grant from the Heritage Foundation did not cover a copy editor apparently).

Of the 10 people listed as “top 10” DHS targets, eight are women and two are Hispanic men. Of the 31 DHS officials identified overall, I counted 20 women and 11 men. AAF plans to expand the project to other areas of government.

The conservative media co-produces the intimidation

It turns out that some parts of the right-wing information ecosystem were really hungry for a giant nothingburger. Conservative media picked up the story, publishing the name, identity and salary of several employees, including in Murdoch outlets like Fox and the New York Post.

The federal official who drew the most attention was one who had used his social media to share interviews of immigrants, some undocumented, some now citizens, who had come to the US, earned money, and were not the violent criminals. The American Accountability Foundation posted that the employee:

posted a video on TikTok with a written statement in Spanish, claiming that undocumented immigrants are crucial contributors to US infrastructure, that 1.6 million illegal immigrants work in construction, and that drivers can make up to $28 an hour – high pay that could encourage more illegal border crossings.

There is no claim that anything he shared was not factual, or that he misused government resources. Indeed, the claims in his videos are more representative of reality than the claims of the Trump campaign. Most immigrants are not actually rapists and murderers. Sharing stories that humanize them, or suggests that they are contributing to American society in positive ways, should not be a fireable offense, let alone national news.

In some respects, it is a category error to treat these media as distinct entities from organizations like Heritage or Jones, They are fellow travelers in a unified cause. The right-wing media media, in this case, is not critically assessing the claims made, but simply reposting them, including hyperbolic headlines like “utter betrayal.” They are not providing context that might cause the reader to question the claims made, like: should federal employees lose their jobs for posting factual claims on social media, or for donating money to political parties? Is this fair, given that the same media have railed against cancel culture for years? They quote Jones and his report, but do not ask for comment from anyone that might contradict him.

They are performing the role assigned to them by the broader far right movement, which is to facilitate intimidation of individuals by publishing their names and identities, treating them as national figures, and encouraging harassment.

This is partisan media, but it is not journalism.

Until it happens to you, I don’t think it is possible to understand what it is like to be subject to a smear campaign picked up by national media. I communicated with one person who was included as a “target” in the list. They suggested that while pursuing public-facing political appointees “seems in-bounds,” it is “pretty over the line for the careers, some of whom I believe are quite alarmed.”

Terror and formal power go hand in hand

It is also a categorical error to distinguish between formal powers (in this case, the proposal that Trump use Schedule F to fire the employees) with informal modes of intimidation. When I talk with people studying government, both journalists and researchers, they focus a great deal on the formal authority. But I don’t think MAGAworld sees it in those terms. They see the use of intimidation as central to their goals.

Jones is already well connected with Project 2025, and people who will staff a second Trump administration. He could simply hand them a list of names of the people he thinks should be fired. But the publicity is part of the point. They can’t fire everyone, but they can scare a lot of people into submission. For terror to work, it needs public executions. It needs guillotines. It needs fear. They can weaponize the conservative information ecosystem — from the more respectable media like Fox, to followers who will leave threatening emails and voicemails for people they are told are their enemies — to achieve their full effect.

Jones is not an outlier. Likely Trump appointees have been explicit in threatening career officials. Robert F. Kennedy, the anti-science kook who has said that Trump promised to give him control over health policy, with oversight of HHS, CDC, FDA, NIH “a few others” and the USDA, told FDA officials to “pack their bags.” In the real world, RFK would not be trusted to run a school lunch program. In Trumpworld, he will not just have the ability to impose his whackdoodle ideas on real scientists; he can fire the ones who dare to call him on his bullshit.

We all live on campus now

The idea is that “campus politics is coming to your organization” has become a sort of conventional wisdom. The high water mark for this is probably Andrew Sullivan’s “We All Live on Campus Now” from 2018. The implication is that identity-obsessed students were forcing their organizations to adopt woke concepts.

Setting aside that argument, I think it misses a more profound way in which campus politics has been applied more broadly, where experiments on universities become adopted elsewhere. These campus politics are not those of woke students, but organizations involved in a project of surveillance, control and threat.

For example, the same people who brought down Harvard President Claudine Gay, and who specialize in accusing Black scholars of plagiarism, recently went after Kamala Harris with the same accusations.

The project of surveillance, control and threat includes encouraging students to engage in snitch culture, in the hope of getting their fellow students or faculty into trouble. Charlie Kirk’s operation started with creating a watchlist of “radical professors” before Turning Point became a huge organization fueling campus surveillance. Some states have changed the law to encourage students to record professors to report ideologically suspect comments (they do this in China too). American Accountability Foundation encourages people to send in reports about rogue bureaucrats to its tipline.

Surveillance is facilitated by institutional commitments to transparency. We are increasingly seeing the practice of open records requests for faculty being applied to federal employees, whose emails are sought by name. The hope is to find some damning information to discredit or remove them.

More broadly, the tactics central to this project include the weakening of tenure protections, the use of specialist media to expose and threaten faculty members, the co-operation of more mainstream media outlets in laundering stories, and increased politicization of governing bodies to enforce punishment. These are exactly the tactics we see being applied to federal employees now.

The project of surveillance and control also includes threat, turning anonymous professors into public figures designated for their two minutes of hate. I’ve seen friends being featured in national stories that falsely portrayed them as radical leftists. If they keep their job, they prepare for what follows: shutting down their social media and turning off the office phone to manage the barrage of threats (harder to do with email), and communicating with campus or local police to determine which threats should be taken seriously. I imagine a number of career civil servants are doing the same right now. This should not be part of the job of being a public employee.

What the attacks on public servants and professors have in common is a profoundly anti-institutionalist politics, one fed by conspiracy theories. It is also fueled by wealthy donors, who have created an incentive structure that weakens and undermines American institutions, where people like Tom Jones or Charlie Kirk compete for dollars by painting the most dismal picture of picture of those institutions.

At this point, the machinery is so well developed that someone can construct a website showing that some federal officials have normie liberal opinions, or are good at their jobs, and a series of media organizations will treat that as damning national news. Whether or not Trump wins, and is able to fire these employees, this politics will remain, and will remain profoundly damaging.