“October 3, 2025 (Friday)
Although President Donald J. Trump has not appeared in public since Tuesday, his social media account has been posting up a storm. Just three weeks ago, administration officials were insisting that Democrats were responsible for hateful political speech. Trump’s account last night posted images of prominent Democrats, including former President Joe Biden, with the heading “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN.” It went on to say: “The Democratic Party is Dead! They have no leadership! [N]o message! [N]o hope! [T]heir only message for America is to hate Trump!”
The Trump account posted another AI video last night, as well. Set to the music of Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” the video shows Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance as band members—Trump on cowbell and Vance on drums—and features Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought as the Grim Reaper.
As the video shows the U.S. Capitol, changed song lyrics say: “Here the power’s gone.” Under Vought, they say: “Russ Vought is the reaper. He wields the pen, the funds, and the brain… Dems you babies… gonna tie your hands… won’t be able to fly… cry baby end your plan.” The video shows people as zombies walking past an unemployment office, then shows Democratic leaders behind a chorus of “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” before ending with a Halloween-nightmare image of AI ghouls trick-or-treating in MAGA garb.
Veterans of the U.S. national security community posting as The Steady State noted that “a president posting a video depicting his opponents as prey for the Grim Reaper and zombies outside the ‘unemployment office’ is the opposite of what we expect in a healthy democracy.”
Russell Vought is not an elected official. He is best known for his contributions to Project 2025, a plan for gutting the U.S. government and installing a theocratic dictatorship. Project 2025 was so unpopular when it came to light last summer—only 4% of voters who knew about it wanted to see it enacted—that Trump insisted he had nothing to do with it. Trolling the American people with the idea that Congress has no power and Russell Vought is running the government to destroy it is an odd choice for a president who is already deeply unpopular.
But turning the government over to unelected individuals who ignore the law is a theme for this presidency. First, billionaire Elon Musk, who ran the “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE) apparently with the help of Vought, impounded congressionally appropriated funds and fired government workers. Then reports surfaced that deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller was in charge of deportations, detentions, and the attempt to get rid of diversity programs, while also exercising influence over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Now Trump appears to be turning the reins of the government over to Russell Vought.
Turning the powers of the government over to unelected bureaucrats has not been going terribly well. On September 25, from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC), top-ranking Democrat Gary Peters (D-MI) and his staff issued a report on the actions of DOGE, which slashed through government funding and fired employees on a crusade to combat what they called “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
The hurried actions of those working for DOGE collapsed vital services, leaving government officials backpedaling. On September 24 the Associated Press examined the effect of DOGE on the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency established in the 1940s to manage the thousands of workplaces used by federal employees. DOGE employees targeted the GSA as a prime example of waste, fraud, and abuse. They abruptly canceled almost half of the leases for government space—without telling the tenants—and called for generating savings by selling off federally owned buildings. They also cut staff at headquarters by 79%, portfolio managers by 65%, and facilities managers by 35%.
The Associated Press reports that 131 leases expired without the government actually leaving the office space, costing the agencies steep fees. Now officials are asking hundreds of GSA workers to come back after what the Associated Press says “amounts to a seven-month paid vacation.” Chad Becker, a former real estate official with the GSA, told the Associated Press: “Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed. They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”
The report from Senator Peters suggests that DOGE was efficient in at least one way: individuals associated with DOGE created databases that “contain highly sensitive personally identifiable information on every American” and that “can be manipulated with little to no oversight.” The report found even more concerning that administration officials “were unable or unwilling” to say who was “functionally in charge of significant policy changes at these agencies.”
Some agencies couldn’t say what data DOGE had accessed or what the DOGE teams were doing. Some agency officials would not directly acknowledge they had DOGE teams, although Executive Order 14158 required each agency to have at least four DOGE people. And agency officials refused to show investigators offices or the infrastructure of Starlink, the satellite internet service controlled by Elon Musk.
The report concluded that DOGE has violated the law and created unprecedented privacy and cybersecurity risks, while the secrecy surrounding DOGE prevented congressional oversight and public accountability. The report called for shutting down the accessible database DOGE created, revoking DOGE access to private information, reasserting agency control, identifying DOGE employees, and conducting a comprehensive audit of what sensitive data DOGE compiled.
The escalating raids on undocumented immigrants are also running afoul of the law. Tuesday’s raid on an apartment building in Chicago, in which residents, including U.S. citizens, were detained, has galvanized opposition. Today, after reports that children were zip tied, separated from their parents, and detained for several hours, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker directed state agencies to evaluate the treatment of children during the raid and to “determine any formal steps or investigations that the state should initiate to hold federal agents accountable.”
Today in Nashville, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw rebuked the Justice Department and its top officials for prosecuting Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant, on federal charges in what appears to be a vindictive prosecution. Crenshaw said officials from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security might have prosecuted Abrego for filing a successful lawsuit challenging his unlawful deportation to El Salvador. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes that vindictive prosecution motions are very hard to win, and the fact that the court is even considering it is “a hugely embarrassing blow to the Trump administration."
A second federal court today rejected the administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, saying it is unconstitutional.
On Monday, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Stephen Miller has directed the administration’s strikes on Venezuelan boats, taking precedence over secretary of state and national security advisor Marco Rubio.
Today, Defense Secretary Hegseth announced he had ordered a strike on another boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing four people Hegseth called “narcoterrorists.” Both Hegseth and Trump posted a video in which a small speedboat was blown to fragments by a strike. Trump declared that the boat was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE.” The administration declared yesterday that such strikes are justified because it considers the U.S. in an armed conflict with drug cartels. Legal experts reject this assertion.
If Trump’s reliance on unelected bureaucrats to run his administration has led officials astray, another video posted by the Department of Homeland Security today seemed to offer a different window onto what the president is trying to accomplish. The video shows a bar with words in a font that mimics that of early video games, saying: “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED.” Behind the bar runs a series of images of the United States in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. It shows Trump himself as a young man and what appears to be the Trump Tower in New York City in the early 1980s.
The nostalgic hope for reclaiming Trump’s glory days has tucked within it the McDonalds Mac Tonight moon image, an image used by white supremacists.
The world depicted in that video reflects the period before Trump met convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but that story is not going away. The House of Representatives was supposed to be back in session on Monday, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has sent members home until October 14. Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) noted today that Johnson appears to be delaying the swearing-in of newly elected Arizona representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.
Grijalva says she will sign the discharge petition that will require the speaker to bring to the House floor a vote on instructing the Department of Justice to release the files from the investigation into Epstein’s actions, which needs only one more signature to force the vote.
Regarding Johnson’s declaration that the House will take another week away from the Capitol rather than coming back to negotiate a way to end the government shutdown and preserve Americans’ access to healthcare, Pingree asked: “Is this about the shutdown, or is this about the Epstein files?”
Heather Cox Richardson
