She Connected the Dots before the Rest of Us Even Found the Pencil

Heather Cox Richardson just handed us the clearest, most unflinching blueprint of how the U.S. government is being dismantled under the second Trump administration—and she backed every word with receipts. Her March 27, 2025, dispatch isn’t analysis. It’s evidence. It’s a field report from the front lines of a soft coup.

The scale of what she wrote felt too outrageous to be real. Venmo payments with eggplant emojis tied to a Signal chat about bombing the Houthis? A Department of Government Efficiency that’s already cost the U.S. $500 billion? The IRS gutted. HHS torched. Social Security collapsing? Surely this was speculative—some dystopian metaphor.

It wasn’t. Every detail she cited came from real reporting by real journalists in Wired, The Washington Post, Reuters, NBC News, The New York Times, and more. Richardson didn’t theorize—she documented. And the result is devastating.

Here’s just a fraction of what she laid out:

• DOGE, Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” has cost $500 billion—10% of all IRS revenue from last year.

• 20,000 IRS employees fired, especially in enforcement. Billionaire audits? Gone.

• HHS cut $12 billion in mental health and disease tracking grants, then laid off 10,000 more workers, including 3,500 from the FDA and 2,400 from the CDC.

• Social Security’s website crashed 4 times in 10 days. New rules require in-person ID checks for people without internet.

• A Tufts student was detained by ICE after writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed.

• The Department of Education is being shut down.

• FEMA is next.

• Columbia University had $400 million withheld until it complied with Trump’s cultural directives.

• Mike Johnson is openly floating the idea of eliminating federal courts.

• Words like “climate crisis,” “diversity,” “segregation,” and even “peanut allergies” are being purged from federal communications.

• And J.D. Vance is now in charge of purging the Smithsonian of what the administration calls “anti-American ideology.”

This isn’t dysfunction. It’s doctrine. It’s Project 2025, written by Russell Vought, now head of the Office of Management and Budget, and championed by Vance, who once said: “Unless we overthrow [the current ruling class] … we’re going to keep losing." and “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.”

Heather Cox Richardson took that ruthlessness seriously. She traced it from the eggplant emoji to the ICE van. From the IRS to the Smithsonian. From the layoffs to the list of banned words. She didn’t write a warning. She wrote the truth. And she deserves our full attention. Read it. Share it. Archive it. Then ask what you're willing to do now that you know.

-Fear & Loathing: Closer to the Edge