The Trump administration has reached the stage where Homeland Security is infiltrating political meetings, luxury jets are being purchased with taxpayer money and parked because nobody can fly them, and the president is asking the Supreme Court to recognize ballroom construction as a matter of national security. The federal government increasingly resembles one enormous home renovation being managed by a man who demolished the load-bearing wall, spent the emergency fund on chandeliers, and reported the neighbors to the authorities for asking whether he had a permit.
Meanwhile, here on the Homefront, we are conducting an actual renovation. Yesterday, we removed the 80-year-old chimney. Well, my brother, who has become our resident contractor, removed the 80-year-old chimney while the rest of us assisted by vacuuming out 80 years of soot. Here is something I learned about soot: It doesn’t respect boundaries.
You can vacuum it, contain it, and stand nearby holding the hose with the determined expression of a person who believes she is participating in a controlled operation. None of that matters, soot will still appear on every surface in the house, including surfaces that were not previously aware a chimney existed.
I spent the morning armed with Lysol, mops, foaming bleach, Magic Erasers, and the raw determination of a woman whose baby needs unrestricted crawling privileges. I scrubbed on my hands and knees until every surface at least mildly resembled something clean. The floors had to be done because Mister Boy cannot be expected to suspend his important crawling business merely because the family decided to release the ghosts of eight decades of woodstoves into the atmosphere.
By the end, the insides of our noses were black, the house looked as though it had survived a small industrial revolution, and every muscle in my body had submitted a written complaint. But the chimney is gone, the roof is patched, and the first obstacle in our attic renovation has been removed.
Forward we go, with as much momentum as we can muster. If there’s one thing I can say about this family, it’s that we aren’t afraid to do the work required to improve our situation. We assess the problem, gather the tools, call my brother, make an astonishing mess, and then clean it up. This isn’t a philosophy currently shared by the federal government.
Newly released court records show that the Department of Homeland Security conducted a sweeping surveillance operation targeting progressive organizations, labor unions, and people protesting the administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. The operation was called “Operation Puppet Master,” because apparently somebody at Homeland Security rejected “Operation We Are Absolutely the Bad Guys in This Movie” for being too subtle.
Federal agents infiltrated meetings held in churches, schools, and parks. They monitored communications, tracked license plates, and collected information about at least 18 organizations, including the AFL-CIO, SEIU, the Communications Workers of America, and the Sunrise Movement.
These weren’t clandestine paramilitary gatherings in underground bunkers. They were political meetings, protest-planning sessions, community gatherings, and training events attended by people exercising rights that the Constitution supposedly protects even when the president finds their opinions irritating. The surveillance grew out of the administration’s massive immigration operation in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area, where approximately 3,000 federal officers were deployed and protests erupted after two people were fatally shot.
Fifteen protesters were eventually indicted on allegations that they conspired to impede immigration enforcement. Those defendants will have their cases decided through the legal system. That doesn’t explain why federal agents compiled intelligence on major labor unions and advocacy organizations, attended lawful meetings undercover, and treated political opposition as something requiring a national security operation.
There is a difference between investigating a specific crime and mapping a political movement. That difference is democracy. The administration doesn’t seem especially interested in maintaining it. Political dissent is being treated as evidence of conspiracy, while the federal government’s power is being redirected toward identifying, monitoring, and intimidating people who oppose the president’s agenda.
It’s difficult to look at an operation like this and conclude that public safety was the only objective. When agents begin infiltrating union meetings and tracking the plates of people who attend protests, the message extends far beyond the people named in an investigation. The message is for everyone watching. We know where you meet, who you organize with, and we may be watching you, too. That’s not law enforcement maintaining public order; it’s state power teaching citizens to fear political participation.
While Homeland Security was locating the nation’s church-basement radicals and suspicious union members, the department was also struggling to locate enough personnel to operate the enormous fleet of airplanes it had just purchased.
DHS spent $464 million on ten aircraft through a no-bid contract that was justified as an urgent requirement for the administration’s deportation campaign. Seven were passenger jets capable of carrying roughly 200 people. According to reporting based on government records, those planes spent months parked at an airport in Louisiana, in part because DHS didn’t have sufficient staff to operate them. Nothing says “urgent national emergency” like spending nearly half a billion dollars on airplanes and then leaving them in long-term parking.
The purchase also included luxury aircraft. Two Gulfstream jets, which cost nearly $200 million together, were assigned to FBI Director Kash Patel and border czar Tom Homan. Another plane came equipped with televisions, a kitchen, a bar, a shower, and a queen-sized bed.
It was supposedly purchased to assist with deportations, although the presence of a luxury bedroom raises questions about how far deportation policy has traveled from cruelty and arrived at all-inclusive resort service for cabinet officials.
The chairman of the company that sold the planes had previously donated to a political committee supporting former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Federal contracting rules normally require competitive bidding, but the administration classified the purchase as urgent. DHS has not publicly identified the catastrophic injury that would have occurred if officials had been forced to compare prices before buying the flying bedroom.
Senators Patty Murray and Chris Murphy have asked the Homeland Security inspector general to investigate. They want contracts, flight logs, legal justifications, and an explanation for why money provided for immigration enforcement appears to have helped create an in-house private aviation service for administration officials. The same department that found the manpower to infiltrate political meetings couldn’t find the manpower to fly the planes it insisted it desperately needed. Priorities are revealing that way.
Then there’s the ballroom. Trump is asking the Supreme Court to allow construction to continue on his $400 million, 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom after an appeals court ruled that a project of this magnitude required congressional approval.
The original East Wing has already been demolished. Construction is reportedly 65 percent complete. The administration is now arguing that stopping aboveground work threatens national security because the ballroom sits above a planned underground security complex. The bunker may be related to national security. The ballroom above it is related to Trump wanting a ballroom. These are different things, even if someone places them on top of each other.
Trump has described the privately financed project as a gift to the American people, which is an interesting way to characterize demolishing part of their house without permission and replacing it with the world’s most constitutionally disputed event venue. Most gifts don’t require an emergency Supreme Court application.
The administration’s argument is essentially that the ballroom is already mostly built, therefore the courts should allow it to be finished. That isn’t a defense of presidential authority. It’s what a child says after being caught halfway through painting the dog.
The larger issue isn’t just architecture, though, it’s ownership. Trump behaves as though the White House belongs to him, federal aircraft belong to his officials, law enforcement belongs to his political agenda, and the Supreme Court exists to issue retroactive permission whenever somebody notices.
It is the same philosophy running through all three stories. Public institutions are treated as private possessions. Laws are obstacles, oversight is harassment, and dissent is suspicious. Taxpayer money is available for luxury aircraft, private travel, and monumental construction, while the people footing the bill are monitored for assembling in a church basement with protest signs.
Yesterday, my family removed an obsolete structure from our house. We did the work, absorbed the cost, cleaned every filthy surface, and patched the hole we created. The Trump administration is operating in reverse. It’s restoring obsolete ideas, creating new holes, and leaving the soot for everyone else. Still, forward we go. Some of us understand that improving a home, a family, or a country requires effort. It requires accountability and cleaning up the mess instead of declaring the mess a matter of national security and asking the Supreme Court to keep everyone away from the mop.
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I marvel, every time I have the pleasure of reading one of your pieces, at how you mange to gather all the threads together to produce such a thoughtful essay. This was with the best of them.
That was a huge and messy project you folks did. All that soot ... omg! Good for you!!!