Trump Officials Flee Into the Bunker

The Trump regime must be sensing something in the air — or are they planning it?

Russ Baker, Founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief, WhoWhatWhy. Photo credit: Russ Baker / WhoWhatWhy

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In the last few days, drones have reportedly been spotted over Fort Lesley J. McNair, in Washington, DC, where Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth live. Officials are worried, and so am I, though for different reasons.

Did you know our secretary of state and secretary of defense live on an army base?

And they’re not the only ones.

Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, and other senior Trump officials have moved into military housing. Tulsi Gabbard and Russell Vought are browsing the available housing, but have not moved yet. One more senior official, unidentified, has been advised to move by security officials.

The official excuse is that they face threats from a range of purported foes, including, we are told, cartels, foreign adversaries, and protesters.

But I can’t help feeling we’re not getting the real story. And, frankly, what that might be chills me.

Why does a king (and his courtiers) go into his castle and pull up the drawbridge?

Because they see themselves as besieged — or are planning to do something they know will cause them to be besieged.

Harvard professor Steven Levitsky — an expert on threats to democracies — made this sobering observation:

It is something you never see in a democracy. Government officials live on military bases or other sort of fortified zones [only] in authoritarian regimes.

In authoritarian regimes.

Coming at a time when fair elections are openly threatened and our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms challenged at every turn, when we see this group withdraw to a hardened inner sanctum, we’d better be paying close attention.

But thus far little attention has been paid to this matter, and what it may mean.

Plenty of factors do come to mind as potentially precipitating even more dramatic action on the part of Team Trump. You can surely think of many, but here are a few:

1. Cringeworthy descriptions of Trump’s vile behavior emerging from the Epstein files and into the light with every new day.

2. The consequences, potential and immediate, of Trump’s Iran war: the fear of a draft, the rising body count, and the mind-boggling expenditures. The Pentagon’s now put in for an additional $200 billion, with more requests to come if things drag on. As Hegseth said, “Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys.” He doesn’t talk about how many lives it will cost.

3. The specter of economic collapse, perhaps triggered by the jobs-crushing regulation-free rollout of AI.

4. The threat of a nationalized election, overturning our 250-year tradition of local control of state and local elections.

Any one of the above could — or, at least, should — spark such outrage that even the most indolent of MAGAs might eventually grab torches and pitchforks and join the masses storming the castle wall.

The Stench of Moral Decay

Despite massive evidence of self-dealing by the Trump administration and members of Congress (most of them Republicans), apparently some voters in swing districts somehow believe that Democrats are even more corrupt than Republicans. How can that be?

The essence of corruption is some combination of lying and stealing: turning public power to private ends. Can anyone seriously compete with Trump in that department? When was the last time any Democrat even came close? (If you’re thinking perhaps disgraced former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), his graft was microscopic compared with that of Trump and his family.)

Clearly, plenty of Americans are either oblivious or indifferent to the lack of honesty in the current government. Trump still seems completely immune to any consequences on this front, and, moreover, continues to routinely say any old shocking thing with impunity.

Here’s a recent example that illustrates both Trump’s grotesque insensitivity and a fundamentally corrupt mindset:

The president, at a recent press conference, mentioned the difficulty of pushing through legislation with a razor-thin margin — and revealed that one member of his GOP majority was likely to die soon. Then he prodded House Speaker Mike Johnson into disclosing that person’s private information: his identity and his diagnosis. Rep. Neal Dunn (R-FL), a Trump ally, has a possibly terminal heart condition — something the congressman had not made public.

And then Trump took credit for saving Dunn’s life by noting that he had personally gotten him into a military hospital.

After Trump gratuitously added, “He [Dunn] would [otherwise] be dead by June,” Johnson awkwardly tried to smooth over Trump’s callousness: “OK, that wasn’t public. But, yeah, OK. It was grim, that’s what I was going to say.”

Johnson went on to praise Trump’s miraculous intervention of referring the congressman to a military hospital for treatment, and claimed that the man now has “a new lease on life.”

Of course, Trump’s comments were right in character and typically inappropriate. But more importantly, they embodied the core GOP notion that self-interest is and should be one’s primary motivation. In the president’s case, it’s the cold, hard fact that Trump would not lift his finger to help someone in mortal peril if he didn’t need that person — their money, their vote, their something.

And this moral vacuity, too, seems to have become normalized. The same party that claims to be “less corrupt” also opposes universal health care but loves the idea of special treatment for the rich and powerful. .

You also get special help if you’re an oil company. Trump was only too glad to utilize his Iran war — and the resultant spiking of oil prices — as the justification to benefit a favored oil company, no matter the potentially disastrous consequences for the environment and public interest.

That oil company, now called Sable Offshore, was responsible for one of the worst oil spills in California history. A pipeline, now owned by Sable, had been shut down since 2015, after a rupture spilled more than 100,000 gallons of oil onto California’s Central Coast. State officials have kept the pipeline closed, saying the company has not sufficiently repaired the damage that led to the spill. So its owner got Trump to bypass state laws. Gov. Gavin Newsom said the amount of new oil coming from California would amount to less than 1 percent of global crude oil production — not much, given the environmental and health risks.

Meanwhile, of course, the Trump family helps itself, always, always, always.

It is becoming increasingly clear how First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner’s role as a key Mideast negotiator dovetails with his seeking lucrative private deals with exactly the same governments. Yet somehow this has not become a major issue, which, given how private greed is driving global policy on a massive scale that impacts billions of us, it certainly should be.

The incongruity of perceptions of which party serves the public interest continues on other fronts.

Fully 97 percent of public comments on Trump’s “big, beautiful” White House ballroom are negative. Even for Trump’s cultish supporters, the planned ballroom — now estimated to cost $400 million — seems to be a head-scratcher. In fact, a federal judge, who considers the project “brazen,” has indicated he may shut it down later this month.

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Reflexive dishonesty is obviously the default mode with this administration. Yes, Democrats too have been known to exaggerate their accomplishments, but one suspects that if everything were toted up on a balance sheet, the Trumpsters would be setting historic records on this front.

Just the latest: Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, like Trump and other Trump appointees, appears to have exaggerated his resume accomplishments, claiming war experience that he apparently did not have. Falsely ascribing heroism to oneself and delighting in violence is part of the Man-Child phenomenon I wrote about last week.

More and more people are, fortunately, sick of all this and speaking out. Just one example is retired NFL star Ryan Clark who has objected to the White House’s posting video glorifying war and interspersing footage of missile strikes with clips of NFL highlights, including his own. He said on his podcast The Pivot:

There are families here in our country whose loved ones have decided to give their life to fight for our rights and our freedoms, who don’t see war as a sport.

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Although Kristi Noem was pushed out of her post as secretary of homeland security by Trump, it was not because of the moral quagmire and apparent corruption on her watch. Indeed, it was more likely than not for telling the truth and thereby making Trump look bad.

Fact is, the corruption in today’s Washington is a feature, not a bug. Maybe even a requirement. And it’s part of a broader renunciation of moral values.

A Maggot-Infested Administration

For a truly sickening demonstration that this administration is bereft of morals, look at the kind of people Trump pardons, the kind of vileness that’s just fine with him.

This one is particularly odious: a nursing home kingpin pardoned by Trump while serving time for sucking his facilities of cash, stealing employee benefits, and endangering vulnerable elderly people in various ways, including a resident in Tennessee with maggot-infested wounds, who died in their own excrement.

Why was this miscreant released from prison? Because a group of “influencers” took cash from the convicted criminal to work Trump for a pardon and, possibly via the mega- MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, get him sprung.

The nursing home kingpin happens to be an avowedly observant Jew. It’s especially grotesque when a man with zero morality hides behind his professed religiosity and uses that smokescreen to argue for his release, and then Trump, devout pastor of the Church of Mammon, goes along with it — for whatever quid pro quo one might imagine.

Jews everywhere are justifiably outraged and alarmed at the way con artists like this fellow and Loomer feed antisemitism everywhere, just as most Muslims feel disgusted and alarmed when someone citing Islam commits a violent terrorist act.

It’s pleasantly discordant that Trump has put in charge of his pay-to-play operation as “pardon czar” Alice Marie Johnson, a Black woman who was — justifiably — granted a full pardon by Trump in 2020 after serving 21 years of a life sentence for a nonviolent drug conspiracy offense.

In just about any other administration, this would qualify as a genuine feel-good story; Johnson devoted much time in prison and after her release to advocating for the rights of the unjustly convicted who couldn’t afford to buy their way out of their sentences.

But it is hard to imagine Johnson personally going to bat for some of the super-high-rollers that Trump has pardoned this term, in deals ranging from subtle to glaring.

“Czar” usually implies complete control but, one would hope, for Johnson’s sake, that she is not the one negotiating with billionaires and scoundrels on the price of their Get Out of Jail cards.

What once might have looked like a rare Trumpian turn toward the light seems to be yet another case of everything Trump touches dies.

Meanwhile, even the Russians seem to “get it” about Trump. Or, especially the Russians. As Alexey Kovalev writes in “What Russia Really Thinks About Trump:”

Russian TV routinely features jokes about how Trump can be manipulated into doing things that clearly damage US interests

Of course, Trump damages US interests in so many ways, including our interest in preserving democracy — which may in part explain the MAGA-types’ bunker thing. It certainly explains his apparent willingness to do anything to preserve his power and thereby avoid any accountability for all the damage he’s done.

The Democrats want the administration to reveal precisely what measures it is taking in its purported quest to make elections “more secure.” In October, the DNC sent 11 Freedom of Information (FOIA) submissions to the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Defense Department seeking to know what steps they were taking — which unquestionably encompass voter suppression. Despite a congressional mandate that the government provide timely responses to FOIAs, the administration has simply ignored them. And now the DNC has filed suit.

This is a good move, because we know that the judiciary is one institution that has not entirely rolled over for the authoritarians.

At Every Moment…

While hubristic politicians and self-aggrandizing moguls continue to divide up the world up among themselves, we the public have little understanding of how this all impacts us.

But it surely does. Every day and in every way.

One chilling example: Trump’s US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP), ever overreaching, is now working with the largely unregulated online advertising industry to obtain real-time data on our precise movements.

If this sounds scary — yeah, it should. All those convenient and cool apps we use? Fitness trackers, dating apps, video games? They all can allow the government to know where we are at every moment.

Of course, CBP’s actions are supposed to be for the purpose of identifying and detaining “illegals” and “bad people,” but we all know where this is going — or can quickly go.

As 404 Media notes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is one step ahead of CBP, having already acquired the ability to monitor phones as they move around. And ICE has filed documents making clear it wants more “ad tech” data.

The End at CBS

CBS News, under the insanely rich Ellison family and Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, claims it must make “tough choices” and therefore has to shutter the iconic CBS News Radio. I fondly recall filing live stories to CBS Radio from Eastern Europe as the Berlin Wall came down and the brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was toppled. Will we see the sun shine again in America, and if so, who will be left to report its appearance?

As of March 2026, CBS Evening News dropped to just 3.83 million viewers for the week ending March 13, a strikingly low figure far behind NBC at 6.51 million and less than half of ABC at 8.48 million.

Since 2000, weekday TV network news usually stays above 4 million, with occasional weekend dips during slow news periods, but CBS’s collapse is unprecedented, falling below 4 million in the middle of an active war, something that has never happened before.

The numbers speak for themselves: If CBS News’s TV audience had been interested in the “fair and balanced” propaganda to which they’re now being treated under Ellison and Weiss, they would have been watching FOX.

Eyes on Epstein

Finally, I want to call your attention to a new feature over at WhoWhatWhy, the news organization I am proud to be part of. It’s “Eyes on Epstein” — a weekly roundup of the most striking and useful articles and revelations on the history-making Jeffrey Epstein saga. Click here to sign up for WhoWhatWhy’s mailing list.

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