One of my favorite cartoon characters from childhood is Angelica Pickles from “Rugrats.”
She was about three years old and was convinced that her baby cousins, Tommy and Dil, were plotting and planning against her. In contrast, Angelica would blame her cousins for things they didn’t do to maintain her authority over them.
She said often, “I finally got loyal suspects, and they had to be dumb babies.” Actually she was the master of undermining and manipulation.
It seems the Executive Branch under the second Donald Trump presidency has an attitude similar to Angelica’s. It is called the “deep state,” where a group of people– typicallyinfluential members of government agencies or the military– are believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy. The term originated in the 1990s as a reference to an alleged longtime deep state in Turkey.
In a recent interview, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) within the current administration, said he wants to inflict “trauma” on the federal workforce, destroy the elitist “regime” that he believes has long stifled conservatives, and shake the very foundations of American government he believes have been captured by an “administrative state.”
Over the past two decades, I have worked with youth and adults who have been traumatized in the mental health and gender-based violence fields. This statement mirrors a position made by an abuser or a perpetrator.
The future of the administration’s budgetary support of Office On Violence Against Women (OVW) and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is possibly in jeopardy. Their primary purpose is to provide federal funding to nonprofits and strengthen the capacity for national services for victims of domestic violence, sexual violence, and other forms of trauma.
The OVW budget for 2025 is slated at $800 million. This is down from the 2024 budget of $1 billion under President Joe Biden. How many people and how many lives that decrease affects is unclear. What is terrifying is the Department of Justice recently removed all funding opportunities under the VAWA from its website.
These realities along with emerging rhetoric are disturbing.
Vought is presumably driven to deconstruct the “deep state” within the cabinet outlined in his chapter, Office of the President (EOP), Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation.
In its opening words, Article II of the U.S. Constitution makes it abundantly clear that “[t]he executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”1 He states the lever of power is not vested in departments or agencies, staff or administrative bodies, nongovernmental organizations, or other equities and interests close to the government.
However, Article II 3.3 mentions, “the President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” which interprets no separation of power, which is not clarified in his chapter. Additionally, he states that the federal bureaucracy is implementing an “even worse yet” radical policy plan, which he describes as “woke.”
A simple definition of” woke” is the Black community being aware of discrimination and social crises, seeking to fix them, and demanding social equality.
A cultural war against Black Americans is waged by mischaracterizing and propagating the term “woke.” It is the 21st-century dog whistle similar to the war on drugs and states’ rights. The term has been weaponized and co-opted for election strategies.
In 2022 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act” legislation in June 2022. This restricted how race could be discussed in schools and workplaces in the Sunshine State. The politician made anti-wokeness their focal point during their election campaign. A judge revoked the law permanently in 2024.
The term “woke” emerged in 1938. Lead Belly, a Black American folk singer, sang a song about the “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of nine black teenagers and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. In the song, he says of Alabama, “I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go down there. Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.”
After Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” resurfaced in 2014 as a social media handle. Black Lives Matter activists warned, “Watch out for unjust police tactics and police brutality.”
Recently Trump promoted the idea that the “woke takeover” was why white Americans were victims of reverse racism. He eliminated all federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and challenged corporations to do the same.
Per his inaugural speech, ‘We’ll forge a society that is color-blind and merit-based.”
Conservatives report that Black people lack qualifications for attending educational institutions or acquiring high-level careers, only for illegal quotas.
However, a merit-based civil service exam was created in 1883, and it was a colorblind process. As a result of civil service exams, Blacks were somewhat shielded from racist employment practices and helped establish the middle class for Blacks.
The concept of meritocracy is disingenuous because it was not considered during slavery when exploited labor was free until 1865.
In his 2020 book, The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?, author Michael J. Sandel writes that “True equality cannot be achieved within a meritocratic framework that perpetuates inequality at its core.”
It is time to see what is real and not be confused by word games when history shows us the truth.