Pearl River I’ve stumbled onto another term for the current Trump attack on the US government: “whacking the beehive.” I’m not sure if this is original to the editor of The New Yorker or not, but it seems an accurate description of the current strategy and tactics that Trump II has initiated in the first furious two weeks of his reign. In a cold opener, David Remmick wrote, “One of Trump’s most effective political maneuvers might be called ‘whacking the beehive,’ a propensity to unleash so much buzzing menace into the air that it’s impossible to maintain calm, much less focus.”
I’m not sure this is all that much different than the earlier sports metaphor of “flooding the zone,” but there is a distinction, which we’re seeing – and feeling – in the daily onslaught. A zone is a circumscribed, delineated area, in this case of a particular part of government, like his attack on the EEOC and NLRB in order to eviscerate employment opportunity and worker’s rights, and if he gets lucky, their organizations like labor unions as well. “Whacking the beehive” is a more generalized, chaotic assault, where, if we continue the metaphor of bees, everyone anywhere gets stung. Immigrants, federal workers, environmentalists, and many others feel this pain. Not everyone has played football, but almost everyone has been bitten by a bee. The sudden sting and spontaneous dancing away from wherever it came from fit this situation as well. People, pundits, organizations, the general public are all wrong-footed and trying to jump out of the way. Worse, there’s a level of defeatism. People can’t catch the bees, so they are just heading for the baking soda.
There’s a short-term response, and a better long-term reaction that’s needed. For now, it seems part of what people are doing is duck-and-cover. More than that, people are going to the mattresses. It was interesting to not only read about federal workers’ unions going to court, but to see new responses being created. One called Justice Connection being founded by a recent Justice Department worker is being set up as an alternative, resistance human resources department for other Justice Department workers to advise on everything from talking to press to whistle blowing to providing assistance in looking for other jobs. The group thinks something like this is needed in all agencies, and they are probably right.
On the other hand, it’s kind of shocking to see how unprepared and inept the Democratic Party and their representatives in Congress have been in dealing with this onslaught. They seem to have believed, despite everything they had heard from Trump and all the uproar and dissembling about Project 2025, that they were flying the wayback machine and it was 2016
Trump, not 2024 Trump. There was an item in the paper where Democrats were essentially hand wringing that the entire foreign aid program and the Agency of International Development (AID) might be completely dismantled. Are you kidding me? Something this big and important in our dealing with the world is not protected by actual statute? Any president can simply destroy an entire agency at their wish and whim? What have they been doing at the various Congressional Committees on Foreign Relations? Maybe this is just a move to the State Department, but is that discretionary as well? Any high schooler in civics class knows there is a difference between what comes from an executive order compared to an actual law.
Seems like our elected officials on both side of the aisle have been just asking for someone to come along with this “whacking the beehive” strategy, while they waited flatfooted. That being the case, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.