The Climate Change Resource Center page on the USDA’s website on Thursday. Photograph: USDA
Forest service website among many sites affected as agencies scramble to comply with president’s orders
On Thursday, the Trump administration ordered the US agriculture department to to take down its websites documenting or referencing the climate crisis.
By Friday, the landing pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources, research and adaptation tools – including those that provide vital context and vulnerability assessments for wildfires – had gone dark, leaving behind an error message or just a single line: “You are not authorized to access this page.”
The government website was one of many that were affected on Friday by new directives from the Trump administration on what information federal agencies can publish.
Several went dark on Friday as agencies scrambled to comply with Donald Trump’s executive orders declaring his administration would recognize only two genders and ordering an end to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The changes at the Forest Service website followed a directive issued by the United States Department of Agriculture’s office of communications. In the memo, which was reviewed by the Guardian, officials instructed website managers across the agency to “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” . It also included a Friday deadline to list the mentions in a spreadsheet for further review.
Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office building in Washington D.C., United States of America is shown on July 12, 2024. (Photo: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“Trump’s outrageous attack on the DOJ and FBI is a clear and present danger to public safety, and a wrecking ball swinging at the rule of law,” Rep. Jamie Raskin said.
The Trump Department of Justice made moves on Friday to fire FBI employees and prosecutors who were involved with the government’s cases against U.S. President Donald Trump and the participants in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
First, on Thursday, several senior FBI officials—stationed both at headquarters and in the field—were told to either resign or be fired. Then, at 5 pm Eastern Time on Friday, dozens of DOJ prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases received an email saying they had been fired. Also on Friday, an email sent to FBI employees told them that acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who previously represented Trump in the cases against him, had requested a list of everyone who had worked on January 6 cases “to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
“Firing the FBI agents who investigated violent attacks against police officers on January 6 would set a dangerous precedent and make all of us less safe,” Stand Up America executive director Christina Harvey said in a statement. “This is a shameless act of political retribution that weakens federal law enforcement and the rule of law.”
“This is a massacre meant to chill our efforts to fight crime without fear or favor.”
The FBI higher-ups forced out included the agency’s six most senior executives as well as more than 20 directors of field offices including Washington, D.C., Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Seattle, and Las Vegas. The targeted officials had been promoted by former FBI Director Christopher Wray, according to The New York Times. The Washington, D.C. field office worked extensively on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and involvement in the January 6 insurrection, as well as the investigations of the rioters themselves, NBC News reported. One source told The Hill that agents who had worked on the cases were physically escorted out of the D.C. field office on Friday.
NBC reported that several of the senior officials had chosen to retire, even though they could have challenged their dismissals as nonpolitical appointees subject to civil service regulations.
Many of the agents received the ultimatum the same day that U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, Kash Patel, promised in his Senate confirmation hearing that he would not retaliate against any agents who worked on the Trump cases and was not aware of any attempts to do so.
“All FBI employees will be protected against political retribution,” Patel told the Senate.
Trump, meanwhile, said on Friday that he was not aware of the firings, but added, “If they fired some people over there, that’s a good thing, because they were very bad. They were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”
Another memo sent by Bove to acting FBI Director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. laid the groundwork for more firings, as Driscoll was asked to submit a list of all agents and employees “assigned at any time to investigations and/or prosecutions” related to January 6, as The New York Times reported. Field offices received a similar request from the FBI’s counterterrorism division. Bove also asked for a list of agents who worked on a case against Hamas leadership, though it is not clear why.
One employee told CNN that the January 6 case was the largest case the bureau had ever worked on, observing that “everyone touched that case.”
In an email to staff on Friday reported by NBC, Driscoll noted, “We understand that this request encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts,” adding, “I am one of those employees.”
“This is a massacre meant to chill our efforts to fight crime without fear or favor,” another anonymous agent told CNN. “Even for those not fired, it sends the message that the bureau is no longer independent.”
The FBI Agents Association, which represents over 14,000 active and former agents, issued a scathing statement on Friday.
“If true, these outrageous actions by acting officials are fundamentally at odds with the law enforcement objectives outlined by President Trump and his support for FBI Agents,” the association said. “Dismissing potentially hundreds of agents would severely weaken the bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the bureau and its new leadership for failure. These actions also contradict the commitments that Attorney General-nominee Pam Bondi and Director-nominee Kash Patel made during their nomination hearings before the United States Senate.”
The group added that Patel had promised association members in a meeting that “agents would be afforded appropriate process and review and not face retribution based solely on the cases to which they were assigned.”
Finally on Friday, DOJ prosecutors received an email from Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, telling them they were being fired and including a memo from Bove. The fired prosecutors had been hired to work on the January 6 cases and were made permanent by the Biden administration following the November election. In his memo, Bove suggested the prosecutors had been made permanent in an inappropriate attempt to protect them from being fired.
“I will not tolerate subversive personnel actions by the previous administration at any U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Bove wrote, as POLITICO reported. “Too much is at stake. In light of the foregoing, the appropriate course is to terminate these employees.”
One of the impacted prosecutors told POLITICO that 25 to 30 people were let go.
“This attack on the Justice Department and particularly on the FBI is the beginning of America’s first true era of dictatorship.”
The latest round of DOJ firings comes days after the Trump administration already fired a dozen lawyers who had helped bring Smith’s two cases against Trump. They also come a week after Trump’s firing of 12 inspectors general. Trump also pardoned all approximately 1,500 people involved in the January 6 insurrection on his first day in office.
News of the FBI and DOJ firings sparked ire from Democratic lawmakers.
“Trump’s outrageous attack on the DOJ and FBI is a clear and present danger to public safety, and a wrecking ball swinging at the rule of law,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, in a statement. “Trump wants to send the message to the police and federal officers that the law doesn’t apply to Trump and his enablers. It’s also part of his campaign to replace nonpartisan career civil servants with political loyalists and incompetent sycophants. Trump’s moves have already left the Justice Department and the FBI rudderless and adrift by ousting their career senior ranks. Now, these unprecedented purges of hundreds of prosecutors, staff, and experienced law enforcement agents will undermine the government’s power to protect our country against national security, cyber, and criminal threats.”
“The loyal friend of autocrats, kleptocrats, oligarchs, and broligarchs, Trump doesn’t care about the requirements of democracy, national security, and public safety,” Raskin continued. “His agenda is vengeance and retribution. If allowed to proceed, Trump’s purge of our federal law enforcement workforce will expose America to authoritarianism and dictatorship.”
Sen. Dick Durbin, (D-Ill.), who serves on the Judiciary Committee, called the firings “a major blow to the FBI and Justice Department’s integrity and effectiveness.”
“This is a brazen assault on the rule of law that also severely undermines our national security and public safety,” Durbin continued. “Unelected Trump lackeys are carrying out widespread political retribution against our nation’s career law enforcement officials. President Trump would rather have the FBI and DOJ full of blind admirers and loyalists than experienced law enforcement officers.”
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) also decried the firings and cast doubt on the integrity of Bondi and Patel, whom Trump had tapped to lead the DOJ and FBI respectively.
“Pam Bondi and Kash Patel both committed to protecting the Department of Justice and the FBI from politics and weaponization. If these reports are true, it’s clear they misled the Senate,” Himes said. “As ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, I have repeatedly asked the FBI for more information about these reports and will insist on answers.”
Fellow Connecticut Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro wrote on social media: “Priority #1 for the Trump administration: Protect the lawless and purge those who uphold the law. The firing of FBI agents and federal prosecutors without cause is an assault on the rule of law and law enforcement. It leaves Americans vulnerable and less safe. We will push back.”
As Democrats promised action, Harvey of Stand Up America also called on Republican lawmakers to respond.
“This is not about public safety—it’s about revenge and control,” Harvey said. “Removing experienced law enforcement professionals and replacing them with political loyalists puts all of our safety at risk. If there are any Republican senators left who care about protecting the rule of law and public safety, they should oppose this dangerous purge and reject Kash Patel’s nomination as FBI Director.”
Progressive political commenter Thom Hartmann urged U.S. citizens to call their representatives.
“Let’s just call these mass firings at Justice and the FBI what they are. Donald Trump is a lawless man who is ripping apart the FBI to turn it into a banana republic-style group of enforcing thugs who will only do his will,” Hartmann wrote on his Substack Saturday morning. “They will spare his friends and persecute his enemies. We’ve seen this over and over during the past century in countries all over the world; it’s nothing new. It’s just that we never expected to see it here in America.”
“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin dreamed for most of his life of destroying America; he now has a friend who is doing it for him. This attack on the Justice Department and particularly on the FBI is the beginning of America’s first true era of dictatorship. The only question now is how long and how far Democratic and Republican politicians and career government employees will tolerate this, and, when their resistance comes, whether it will be too late. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121.”
U.S. President Donald Trump addresses the 2025 Republican Issues Conference at the Trump National Doral Miami on January 27, 2025 in Doral, Florida. The three-day planning session was expected to lay out Trump’s ambitious legislative agenda. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“The overwhelming support for impeachment shows that the American public is not willing to accept King Trump,” said Alexandra Flores-Quilty, Free Speech for People campaign director.
The nonprofit Free Speech for People is leading a new nonpartisan campaign to drum up support for U.S. President Donald Trump’s removal—“Impeach Trump Again”—and reported Thursday that the effort has already garnered over 100,000 petition signatures.
The campaign is calling on Congress to launch an impeachment investigation into Trump and says that the signature numbers signal “widespread support” for a probe.
“The overwhelming support for impeachment shows that the American public is not willing to accept King Trump,” said Alexandra Flores-Quilty, Free Speech for People campaign director, in a Thursday statement. “We need bold leaders in Congress willing to stand up and hold Trump accountable for his abuses of power and initiate an impeachment inquiry.”
The petition, which was launched on Inauguration Day, calls on Congress to initiate an impeachment investigation into Trump based on potential violations of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clauses, his pardoning of insurrectionists who took part in the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, and his “unlawful” and “corrupt” campaign practices.
Free Speech for People also launched a campaign to build public support for Trump’s impeachment on the day of his inauguration back in 2017.
The emoluments clauses require that Trump “fully divest himself from any businesses receiving profits, gains, or advantages, beyond his official compensation, from the federal government or the individual states,” according to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Trump’s business empire—which, as far as the public knows, he has not divested from—now includes not only real estate, but also a social media platform and a cryptocurrency token.
The campaign also lists other alleged impeachable offenses.
Trump was impeached twice by the House of Representatives during his first term, but in both cases he was acquitted by the Senate. Both chambers of Congress are now controlled by Trump’s Republican Party.
U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a signed copy of the Laken Riley Act in Washington, D.C. on January 29, 2025. (Photo: Pedro Ugarte/AFP via Getty Images)
“The Laken Riley Act capitalizes on a horrible tragedy in order to advance President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda by scapegoating people seeking safety,” said one campaigner.
Human rights defenders decried U.S. President Donald Trump’s signing of legislation Wednesday that critics warn will strip due process rights from millions of people while harming some of the most vulnerable members of society, including migrant children, victims of sexual violence, and survivors of domestic abuse.
Trump signed the Laken Riley Act—named after a young woman murdered last year by a Venezuelan man who, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), entered the United States illegally—calling it a “landmark law” that “will save countless innocent American lives.”
“The Laken Riley Act is based upon false, xenophobic narratives that dehumanize and criminalize an entire group of people due to the actions of one person.”
However, Amy Fischer, director of the ACLU’s Refugee and Migrant Rights Program, said in a statement Wednesday that “the Laken Riley Act capitalizes on a horrible tragedy in order to advance President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda by scapegoating people seeking safety and stripping away their right to due process.”
“This legislation mandates the arrest and detention of our undocumented neighbors for being convicted or charged of any theft, shoplifting, burglary, or larceny offense,” Fischer noted. “Mandatory detention solely for being accused of theft strips people of their right to due process and constitutes arbitrary detention under international human rights law.”
“The Laken Riley Act is based upon false, xenophobic narratives that dehumanize and criminalize an entire group of people due to the actions of one person,” Fischer added. “It will separate families and make our communities less safe. It is simply unconscionable for Congress to create a new mechanism that gives people the power to falsely accuse immigrants of theft knowing their detention is mandatory.”
As the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the Bay Area, which called the law “shameful and unconstitutional,” noted Wednesday: “This bill does not require a conviction—simply being accused of a crime is enough to force individuals into mandatory detention without review by any judge. In doing so, the law strips due process protections and allows for discrimination against vulnerable immigrant communities.”
The group continued:
The federal government already has the power to detain and deport individuals who commit criminal acts. But in our legal system, judges act as a constitutionally required check on police actions. This new law removes that check. It is a direct attack on the constitutional rights of immigrants and communities of color, and it erodes the civil liberties of American society at large. It will incentivize racial profiling and divert law enforcement resources away from real threats, making our communities less safe.
“Lawyers’ Committee and our partners vow to challenge this unconstitutional law in court,” Bianca Sierra Wolff, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. “We will not stand by while the rights of immigrants and communities of color are trampled for political gain.”
Writing for Common Dreams Wednesday, National Center for Youth Law senior director Neha Desai and NCYL attorney Melissa Adamson lamented the Laken Riley Act’s passage and urged Congress, both chambers of which passed the law with bipartisan support, to “do the right thing” by introducing “new legislation to protect children from this draconian law.”
“Policymakers on both sides of the political aisle seem all too eager to support legislation that ignores that immigrant children are human beings, worthy of the same care and protections that their own children enjoy,” Desai and Adamson contended. “It is deeply disheartening to see lawmakers shift with the political winds rather than hold true to fundamental values. Congress must not acquiesce to a country in which the rejection of children’s rights is the norm.”
Shares in private prison companies have skyrocketed since Trump won last November’s election, partly in anticipation of a boom in business due to the Laken Riley Act and the broader campaign of mass deportations now underway.
On Wednesday, Trump also said he would instruct the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to prepare a detention facility—some critics called it a “concentration camp“—capable of holding 30,000 migrants at the notorious offshore Guantánamo Bay prison run by the U.S. military in Cuba.
US president Donald Trump is surrounded by a new cohort of politicians and officials. While one of his campaign promises was to overthrow the “corrupt elites” he accuses of flooding the American political arena, his second term in office has elevated elites chosen, above all, for their political loyalty to him.
The media’s focus on Trump’s comments on making Canada the 51st US state and annexing Greenland and billionaire Elon Musk’s support for some far-right parties in Europe has obscured the ambitious programme to transform the federal government that the new political elite intends to implement.
In the wake of Trump’s inauguration on January 20, the Republican elites most loyal to the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) leader, who staunchly oppose Democratic elites and their policies, are operating amid their party’s control over the executive and legislative branches (at least until the midterm elections in 2026), a conservative-dominated Supreme Court that includes three Trump-appointed justices, and a federal judiciary that shifted right during his first term.
However, the political project of the Trumpist camp consists less of challenging elitism in general than attacking a specific elite: one particular to liberal democracies.
Castigating democratic elitism
Typical anti-elite political propaganda, along the lines of “I speak for you, the people, against the elites who betray and deceive you,” claims that a populist leader would be able to exercise power for and on behalf of the people without the mediation of an elite disconnected from their needs.
Political theorist John Higley sees behind this form of anti-elite discourse an association between so-called “forceful leaders” and “leonine elites” (who take advantage of the former and their political success): a phenomenon that threatens the future of Western democracies.
Since the Second World War, there has been a consensus in US politics on the idea of democratic elitism. According to this principle, elitist mediation is inevitable in mass democracies and must be based on two criteria: respect for the results of elections (which must be free and competitive); and the relative autonomy of political institutions.
The challenge to this consensus has been growing since the 1990s with the increased polarization of American politics. It gained new momentum during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, which was marked by anti-elite rhetoric from both Republicans and Democrats (such as senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren). At the heart of some of their diatribes was an aversion to “the Establishment” on the east and west coasts of the United States, where many prestigious financial, political and academic institutions are based, and the conspiracy notion of the “deep state”.
Trump’s populism from above: a revolt of the elites
The idea that democracy could be betrayed by “the revolt of the elites”, put forward by the US historian Christopher Lasch (1932-1994), is not new. For the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, it is a particular feature of contemporary populism, which comes “from above.” Indeed, if the 20th century was the era of the “revolt of the masses”, the 21st century, according to Appadurai, “is characterized by the ‘revolt of the elites’.” This would explain the rise of populist autocracies (such as those currently led by Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Narendra Modi in India, and formerly led by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil), but also the election successes of populist leaders in consolidated democracies (including those of Trump in the US, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, for example).
As Appadurai explains, the success of Trumpian populism, which represents a revolt by ordinary Americans against the elites, casts a veil over the fact that, following Trump’s victory in November, “it is a new elite that has ousted from power the despised Democratic elite that had occupied the White House for nearly four years.”
The aim of this “alter elite” is to replace the “regular” Democrat elites, but also the moderate Republicans, by deeply discrediting their values (such as liberalism and so-called “wokeism”) and their supposedly corrupt political practices. As a result, this populism “from above” carried out by the President’s supporters constitutes an alternative elite configuration, the effects of which on American democratic life could be more significant than those observed during Trump’s first term.
Beyond the idea of a ‘Muskoligarchy’
The idea that we are witnessing the formation of a “Muskoligarchy” –in other words, an economic elite (including tech barons such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen) rallying around the figurehead of Elon Musk, whom Trump asked to lead what the president has called a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) –is seductive. It perfectly combines the vision of an alliance between a “conspiratorial, coherent, conscious” ruling class and an oligarchy made up of the “ultra-rich”. For the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, it is even a sign of the development of “pluto-populism”. (It is also worth noting that former president Joe Biden, in his farewell speech, referred to “an oligarchy… of extreme wealth” and “the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex.”)
However, some observers are cautious about the advent of a “Muskoligarchy.” They point to the sociological eclecticism of the new Trumpian elite, whose facade of unity is held together above all by a political loyalty, for the time being unfailing, to the MAGA leader. The fact remains, however, that the various factions of this new “anti-elite” elite are converging around a common agenda: to rid the federal government of the supposed stranglehold of Democratic “insiders.”
An ‘anti-elite’ elite against the ‘deep state’
In his presidential inauguration speech in 1981, Ronald Reagan said: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” The anti-elitism of the Trump elite is inspired by this diagnosis, and defends a simple political programme: rid democracy of the “deep state.”
This conspiracy theory has been taken to the extreme by Kash Patel, the candidate being considered to head the FBI. In his book, Government Gangsters, a veritable manifesto against the federal administration, the former lawyer writes about the need to resort to “purges” in order to bring elite Democrats to justice. He lists around 60 people, including Biden, ex-secretary of state Hillary Clinton and ex-vice president Kamala Harris.
Government Gangsters, Kash Patel’s controversial book. Google Books
The appointment of Russell Vought as head of the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, a person who is known for having sought to obstruct the transition to the Biden Administration in 2021, also highlights the hard turn that the Trump administration is likely to take.
Reshaping the state around political loyalty
To “deconstruct the administrative state”, the “anti-elite” elites are relying on Project 2025, a 900-plus page programme report that the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation, which published it, says was produced by “more than 400 scholars and policy experts.” According to former Project 2025 director Paul Dans, “never before has the entire movement… banded together to construct a comprehensive plan” for this purpose. On this basis, the “anti-elite” elite want to impose loyalty to Project 2025 on federal civil servants.
But this idea is not new. At the end of his first term, Trump issued an executive order facilitating the dismissal of statutory federal civil servants occupying “policy-related positions” and considered to be “disloyal”. The decree was rescinded by president Biden, but Trump on his first day back in office signed an executive order that seeks to void Biden’s rescindment. As President, Trump is also able to allocate senior positions within the federal administration to his supporters.
The “anti-elite” elite not only want to reduce the size of the state, as was the case under Reagan’s “neoliberalism”, but to deconstruct and rebuild it in their own image. Their real aim is a more lasting victory: the transformation of democratic elitism into populist elitism.
