Newt Gingrich urged Trump to revive Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC Committee, but it appears Trump means to do better than that.
The Trump transition team is already building a blacklist at the Department of Energy.
The transition team has asked the agency to list employees and contractors who attended United Nations climate meetings, along with those who helped develop the Obama administration’s social cost of carbon metrics, used to estimate and justify the climate benefits of new rules.
Don’t expect the Congress to be any help in heading off Trump’s climate McCarthyism.
The questions about the social cost of carbon dovetail with similar, so-far-unsuccessful requests from Republicans on Capitol Hill, who have also sought information about the analysis underpinning that policy and the people who helped develop it.
Are you now, or have you ever been, a believer in climate change?
Let’s make a quick visit to the how to tell if your president is a dictator checklist. Hmm. Is this just #3) politicizing the civil service?
One of the obstacles to a democratic breakdown is the government bureaucracy, whose permanent members are insulated from political pressure by existing civil service protections that make it hard to fire senior officials without cause. … But if the president or his lieutenants can gut government agencies more or less at will, the fear of being fired will lead many experienced public servants to keep their heads down and kowtow to whatever the president wants, no matter how ill-advised or illegal it might be.
Or is it also #5, Using state power to reward corporate backers and punish opponents:
A hallmark of corrupt quasi-democracies is the executive’s willingness to use the power of the state to reward business leaders who are loyal and to punish anyone who gets in the way.
Sometimes it can be so hard to tell.
But even in transition, the Trump administration is sending witch hunters to sniff out those who stepped over the line by practicing actual science in the public interest. Trump may not be able to bring back the manufacturing jobs of the 1950s, but he can bring back the atmosphere of fear and distrust, the era of loyalty tests, and blacklists.
For his followers, that may be enough.
