Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

Let’s go for a drive through Washington D.C. No, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s get in a helicopter and take a flight over the ruins of Elon Musk’s newly gutted nation’s capital. We’ll start by taking a pass down the grand tree-lined thoroughfare that is Constitution Ave. Look down there at the smoking hulk of the Frances Perkins building on the corner of Constitution and 3rd Street.

That was once the Department of Labor before Elon and his mini-mes stormed the place, taking over its computer systems so he could access investigations into his own companies and his competitors. The AFL-CIO sued in federal court to keep Musk out of the Department of Labor, but they lost back in early February because the judge said they couldn’t establish how they had been harmed.

Not far up the street, just at the corner of 7th and Constitution, is the Federal Trade Commission, where Trump fired its two Democratic members today, creating a regulatory agency that he now completely controls with all of its members being Republicans. So, in terms of fairness, that nice triangular shaped building is a smoking ruin.

Two blocks down Constitution between 9th and 10th Streets is the Department of Justice, what’s left of it anyway, after Pam Bondi and her gang moved in and started firing entire divisions, like the Civil Rights division and the National Security division and the part of the department that has overseen agreements between the DOJ and corrupt police departments that have had the federal government overseeing them.

On the corner of 12th Street is the Environmental Protection Agency, now led by that disgusting little worm Lee Zeldin, who just announced plans to fire most of its scientific research division, where according to The Associated Press, 1,500 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists will be laid off as part of Zeldin’s plan to cut 65 percent of the agency’s budget. Because clean water and clean air and reducing the accumulation of plastics and everything else that’s contributing to pollution around us is so yesterday, or liberal, or radical, or socialist, or whatever they’re calling good works these days.

They may as well do to the EPA what they did to the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, a little further up Constitution Avenue off the corner of 14th Street. They completely shut down USAID and took the name off the building right after Trump took office. A federal judge ruled today that Musk’s closing of that department “likely violated the Constitution” and ordered Musk to submit a plan restoring employees to their jobs in the USAID building, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon because the judge also gave Secretary of State Marco Rubio 14 days to permanently close down the functions of USAID, which he now controls. So, there’s another building that after Elon Musk had his way with it is a hollow shell.

If we fly down 14th Street in the other direction, we pass over the Department of the Treasury where Musk and his minions sought control over the department’s multi-trillion dollar payment system. A judge was convinced to step in and stop that, but now Trump has his puppet Secretary Bessent installed, and they’re busy imposing tariffs willy-nilly on every friendly country they can find. That’s another government building whose purpose has been either emptied out, corrupted, or flipped upside down and stomped on.

Right across the street from where USAID used to be is the Herbert Hoover building, headquarters of the late lamented Federal Bureau of Investigation, now being run as a clearinghouse for Donald Trump’s grievances and Kash Patel’s enemies list. Patel has done his best to clean out anyone who had anything to do with the Mueller investigation, Trump’s stolen documents case, or the indictment of Trump for trying to overthrow the results of the 2020 election—you know, all that stuff he was charged with doing but he didn’t do because he said he didn’t do it, and that’s the rule we’re living by in Washington DC these days, where every street is lined with emptied out and defenestrated federal agencies and departments that once spent their time working for the American people.

In fact, the only place where you won’t find hollowed out buildings, fired employees, and the occasional demonstration against the destruction of our government is Capitol Hill. There, in all its glory, stands the United States Capitol and the offices of the House of Representatives and the Senate, and just across First Street NE stands the building housing the Supreme Court, over which Chief Justice John Roberts presides.

These are the only buildings that we can see as we fly over Washington DC that haven’t been touched by Elon Musk and his coterie of teenage crumb bums. None of them have walked in, as they did yesterday at the United States Institute of Peace, disembarking from three black SUV’s full of private security guards and FBI agents to tell the employees of that rather distinguished non-governmental organization to pack up their stuff and get out, because you know, there’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or whoever’s banging their way around D.C. with jack boots on giving orders and firing people and emptying out buildings that once proudly stood for something in this country.

The other buildings that haven’t been visited by Muskovites and emptied are the E. Barret Prettyman courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue and the DC Circuit Court of Appeals located in the middle of grassy Judicial Park a couple of blocks away. None of Musk’s little teams of Nazi Youth have been walking into congressional offices and the offices of federal District Court judges or judges on the Court of Appeals and saying, you know what? We think you could use a few less clerks and secretarial and research staff, so we’re going to cut your budget, and we’re going to throw some of your people out on the street and take away their e-mail privileges and give them a chance to resign and take a payout before we fire them and then impeach the judges they work for.

Even though Musk’s minions haven’t taken over any courthouses, a couple of right-wing Republican members of Congress have come up with the idea of impeaching some of the judges that are getting in the way of Trump’s rape of the rule of law. One of them filed articles of impeachment against Judge James E. Boasberg today, because he had the gall to ask a few questions of the DOJ lawyer who was lying his way through a lame explanation of why the judge’s order on Saturday to stop the deportation of two plane loads of Venezuelan migrants had been defied by the Department of Justice.

It was apparently the word “impeach” that woke Chief Justice Roberts from his slumber. There had been a violent insurrection at the Capitol across the street from his courthouse and it didn’t rouse him from unconsciousness. Not even Trump’s so-called immigration czar saying that he didn’t care what federal judges ruled, he was going to go ahead with his deportations mattered to Roberts. And it wasn’t any of Trump’s nasty statements about the judges overseeing his cases, or his allegations that the justice system had been “weaponized” against him that got the attention of the man who runs the Supreme Court.

Washington D.C. was coming apart at the seams around the Chief Justice, but he only awakened when the job of one of the members of his branch of the government, the judiciary, was threatened.

Roberts and his court are charged by the Constitution and by the court’s decision in Marbury v. Madison with interpreting the laws upon which this country was founded and by which it is supposed to be governed. But last year, Chief Justice Roberts decided he had a better idea. He would give absolute power to the President of the United States by making him immune from prosecution for any official actions he takes in office.

Apparently, Roberts thought that the norms and traditions that have been respected by every other president in the history of this country would be respected by Donald Trump as well. How wrong he was may have come to his attention this week. We won’t know for sure unless Roberts regenerates what’s left of the shriveled skeleton of his conscience and convinces his brethren to join him in overturning the decision he wrote last year.

Unless justice Roberts decides to help bring to an end the dark cascade of lawlessness that Trump has wrought upon this land, we will be left with the disemboweled corpse of what used to be our government now occupying the ruins of Washington D.C.