It was Saturday night in Washington DC. The nation's capital is a hopping place these days. There are nightclubs and bars and restaurants all over the place and not just in Georgetown. Capitol Hill is stuffed with them, and coffee joints and all manner of places where you can hang out and meet your friends from work. Northwest Washington is similarly packed. Suffice to say on a Saturday night, Washington DC is a very busy place.

Yesterday we learned it was also busy at headquarters of the United States Agency for International Development. Two officials, if that's what you can call them, from Elon Musk’s White House office of DOGE arrived at the USAID headquarters and demanded entrance. It wasn’t business hours for USAID or any other federal agency in Washington DC. It was Saturday night, for crying out loud.

The Musk Gophers were met by USAID director of security John Voorhees and his deputy Brian McGill. When the two USAID security officers wouldn't let the Musk’s functionaries into the headquarters building, they were threatened with arrest by the United States Marshals Service. Sources at USAID told CNN that Musk’s people wanted access to personnel files and security systems that contained classified information. Musk’s people did not have government ID, nor did they have the security clearances necessary to access highly classified information held by USAID or anywhere in the United States government.

After a brief standoff, Musk’s shut-it-all-down Brownshirts were allowed access to the building. That same night — after the close of business for the entire U.S. government, the two security officials from USAID were put on leave, which is the latest buzz-phrase for fired in Washington DC. It is not known what systems the Musk people accessed at USAID and is not clear that we will be told anytime in the near future.

Today, Reuters reported that nearly 30 career staff in the USAID legislative and public affairs branch were also put on leave after the set-to at the headquarters on Saturday night. They join more than 60 others who were put on leave on January 27 after Trump ordered all foreign aid to be shut down. CNN is reporting that the total number of USAID officials who have been fired or let go or suspended or put on leave or whatever you want to call it is over 100 at this point. Donald Trump held a press conference today and announced that USAID “has been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we're getting them out.”

Similar firings have taken place across the government. Reuters reports that 160 career staff in the National Security Council have been suspended or fired or sent home. More than 20 career attorneys at the DOJ have been suspended. It's been announced that anyone who worked on January 6 cases at the DOJ will be fired. Firings of agents and officials at the FBI who worked on January 6 cases are taking place as I write this.

On Sunday, Trump's raiders hit the Department of Education and put dozens of employees on paid leave -- that's another aphorism they're using for the rape of the entire United States government. What was the justification for this move? There are reports that that the federal employees at the education department were let go because they attended a single diversity training course that was offered as a volunteer option while Trump was president. That's not to mention the 55 department employees who were let go on Friday. “The affected workers included a public affairs specialist, civil rights attorneys, program manager analysts, loan regulators and employees working to ensure schools accommodate special needs children with individualized education programs,” NBC reported on Sunday.

The employees in the Department of Education are being punished for something they did during Trump’s first administration as part of a program that was being run by Trump's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, at a time when Trump was overseeing not only the Department of Education but the entire federal government.

I have to tell you that I've been sitting here tonight going on Google and typing in the title of various government departments to access stories about the rape of the federal government that Trump is committing, and it's endless. Nobody knows quite how to report this stuff because it's never happened before. Only a few of the stories have the names of the people who have been fired. Maybe the most remarkable thing about reading these stories tonight is how flat and dispassionate is the description of this terrible thing that's being done to our government. Most of the stories are just a list of the job titles and numbers fired -- 100 here, an unknown number there -- you can almost feel the reporters at their computers trying to keep up with this. The word insane comes to mind, but it's worse than that.

Earlier tonight I spent some time trying to find something in our political past to compare this with. There was really nothing. I found a story from 2017 about Trump firing all the US Attorneys around the United States; I think it was 92 of them. Down in that story, it was reported that this was fairly common with new administrations. When there's a change in political parties in the White House the new president comes in and wants to put in his own people, so he orders the firing of the people that were working in the previous administration.

But that's not what's happening this time. What's happening right now was advertised in black and white in the 900 pages of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that Trump studiously distanced himself from throughout the campaign. We all knew that was a lie. We all knew as soon as he took office, they would haul out the big book and get to work. But we didn't know until right now what it would look like. That's why reporters are having such a hard time keeping up with this. The firings are wholesale. None of the people in the DOJ were given a reason for their firing even though all of them knew what was going on. Trump was cleaning house.

Federal civil service rules say that government workers cannot be fired without cause. That even applies to the senior officials in the DOJ and the FBI and in other departments like USAID and the Department of Education who have been let go in the last few days. I've seen several stories that say that many officials who have been put on leave have already resigned in an attempt to hang on to their retirement benefits. One story today said that several people who have been fired are planning lawsuits, but I haven't yet seen that a lawsuit has been filed.

So, my search through the history of recent changes in administrations and political parties continued. I found a few reports about firings that took place in the first Trump administration by his first rondelay of incompetent cabinet officials. The EPA administrator who took all the private flights on business jets and charged them to the government fired some top officials in the agency, and at least a couple of them sued and got their jobs back later. And then he himself was removed for misuse of government funds with all his flights on private jets.

So an hour or so ago I gave up. Then it came to me. Trump has become an American Chairman Mao and this is his Cultural Revolution. This time it's not a little red book they're following, it's the big book that was prepared by the Heritage Foundation for exactly the purpose of what's happening right now all over Washington DC.

It was said that Chairman Mao launched his Cultural Revolution to purge his government of people who clung to traditional Chinese ways and practices that smacked of so-called capitalist elements. Every dictator who sees himself as a supreme being entitled to absolute power has his own reasons for what he does. Mao was obsessed with creeping capitalism that he thought infected Chinese society.

With Trump -- and you hear it every day coming out of his mouth and the mouths of Co-Chairman Musk and the rest of Trump's MAGA lackeys -- the obsession is liberalism, which they cover with the rubric of DEI and something they call but never quite define: wokeism. They don't have to define it. They've got their MAGA base and the Republicans in Congress trained at this point to react exactly the way they want them to react when they hear the word woke or wokeism or DEI or Marxist any of the other catch phrases they've warped for their own purposes.

Chairman Mao used cadres of Red Guards to carry out his revolution. I remember reading stories back in the late 60s, after the Cultural Revolution had taken hold, of young members of the Red Guards going to their own homes in places like Beijing and Shanghai and arresting their own parents, whose crimes were being university professors senior researchers in government health agencies and the like. Does that sound familiar?

I haven't seen anything yet about purges at the NIH but just wait until RFK Jr. moves into his office at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Reporters may have to use numbers with quadruple digits to write the stories about the firings that'll take place there.

Trump isn't following the Mao playbook of using young people and college students to do his dirty work. No, he's got Elon Musk and his battering ram of functionaries --who are unelected and do not hold government jobs -- to tear through the government for him.

But Trump is not without his own Red Guards. He just let their leaders out of prison with pardons and commutations. Enrique Tarrio is a free man now, ready to retake his position running the Proud Boys. So is Stewart Rhodes, free as a bird, back at the helm of the Oath Keepers. Stunningly, MSNBC aired a documentary on February 2, with the glorifying title “King of the Apocalypse” about Rhodes. I didn't watch it and probably you didn't either, but you didn't have to if you tuned into MSNBC this week where they ran trailers around the clock advertising their documentary with a shot of Rhodes wearing camouflage, picturing him as a kind of twisted Patton.

Be ashamed of yourself, MSNBC. You're playing right into these fuckers’ hands.

It's scary to contemplate, but there is probably a whole panoply of right-wing militias that are in one stage or another of forming as we speak. Trump told his violent extremists to “stand back and stand by” during the 2020 election campaign. Little did we know that they were just waiting for his orders on January 6. I think it's safe to say that we're not going to hear those words from Trump this time around, because Trump appears to have learned a lesson on January 6: Don't wait until the last minute.

This time, Trump is moving with lightning speed. His stormtroopers have their headquarters in the White House Executive Office Building. Their leader, the odious Musk, has been welcomed into the West Wing where he has an office upstairs from the Oval Office.

Dear readers, this is a nightmare I don't think we're going to wake up from anytime soon. The Founders of our country described the democratic system they sought to form as a “government of laws, not of men.” With Donald Trump's January 6 pardons and commutations, with his appointment of the likes of Kash Patel to run the FBI, with Hegseth ready to put the military in the street anytime Trump orders him, we have lost that noble dream of our Founding Fathers.

One day in the not too distant future, unless some lawsuits are filed by brave civil servants and groups like the ACLU and the Democratic Party gets its act together, we won't have the federal government anymore. We won't have school lunch programs and Head Start and research for new cures for cancer and development of plans to be ready for the next pandemic. I could go on with what will be missing from our government and our lives, but you get the picture.

I don't know what our country will become, but it won't be recognizable as the United States of America we have loved for 240 years.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.