I scurried in and out of Washington, D.C., over five days last week. The glum mood which pervades the nation’s capital was only aggravated by its first cold, snowy winter in more than a decade. Fear roams the hallways of our federal government. Rumors “the muskrats are coming” spreads terror. Though most job cuts have been targeted at probationary employees without civil service protections, there is little doubt DOGE will soon aim for career employees. The only cheerful observation I heard was from a realtor who guessed a few hundred thousand apartments dumped on the market might help drive down D.C.’s runaway rental rates. Visiting a Safeway for incidentals it was apparent groceries are 30% to 40% higher there than Denver.

It will be a few months before the DOGEsters finish gutting the city’s target-rich agencies, departments and bureaus. Sooner rather than later, however, they will begin to look at regional offices like the Lakewood Federal Center. As the provincial capital for the Rocky Mountain States, Colorado is sure to secure attention, particularly the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) headquartered in Boulder. Project 2025 includes a recommendation to close this internationally admired operation in favor of privatization. Why waste tax dollars providing free weather forecasts to the public when a Mar-a-Lago member owns the largest private weather reporting service in the nation and can turn stunning profits marketing his forecasts without government competition?

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

There is a droll incompetence to the Muskovites’ reckless sacking of bird flu specialists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) during a bird flu epidemic as well as the elimination of nuclear safety teams at the Department of Energy (DOE) responsible for the security of our nuclear weapons stockpile. I’m reminded of former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, whose presidential primary campaign floundered when he failed to remember the three cabinet departments he was promising to scuttle if elected, forgetting DOE. After then-President Donald Trump named him Secretary of Energy kin 2017, Perry acknowledge  his ignorance of the fact 60% of his department’s budget was required to maintain our atomic arsenal.

When you turn a squad of teenage geeks loose, it doesn’t take long before you get reports of $50 million dollar condom budgets for Hamas fighters. One wag pointed out this would deliver 350 condoms daily to every Gazan soldier for the next 30 years, a fiendishly clever scheme to distract them from burrowing tunnels. The truth is $47,000 were used to purchase condoms for women’s health centers. There is considerable irony MAGA acolytes, who fulminate over the “political correctness” edicts of lunatic-left “woke activists” have imposed multiple vocabulary restrictions across the federal government. No mention of diversity, equity or inclusiveness is permitted, which extends to include climate change, gender, vaccinations and who knows what else that may soon perturb the fragile conservative ego.

Perhaps most disturbing were my conversations with several national security employees I met in Annapolis. Among these military and intelligence professionals there were no illusions Vladimir Putin could be a misunderstood apostle for peace in Ukraine. Only President Trump seems to apprehend this version of a man who sells himself to Russians as an inheritor of the mantle from Ivan the Fourth as, “Gatherer of Lands and People” — better known to history as Ivan the Terrible. It’s not mere coincidence Dutch, German, Finnish and Swedish defense ministers have recently warned their citizens to ready themselves for a European war with Russia. These are American allies who dispatched troops to assist the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, following Sept. 11, 2001.

President Trump’s thanks to them has been to declare Ukraine their problem — that Americans will not regard troops serving outside their national boundaries, fighting in Ukraine for example, as an article-5 event requiring our assistance. One security veteran predicted to me NATO members will decide to expel the United States from the Alliance it created before the president pulls us out on his own. The developing Russian-American strategy is demanding a sudden election in Ukraine, with hopes of elevating another pro-Russian Quisling to replace Volodymyr Zelensky — a trick Paul Manafort helped Putin accomplish before. The White House accusation Zelensky is a dictator and conniving perpetrator responsible for launching an ugly war with Russia are so transparently false you wonder whether the President has been lured by promises of riches to be earned in Russia.

A more likely explanation was offered by the British journalist, Nick Cohen, after returning from the recent NATO Security Conference in Munich, “…the radical right in the U.S. is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia, but liberalism. The U.S. culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”

The president, the vice president and Secretary of Defense have denounced “the enemy within” as the greatest threat to NATO. I must assume this includes Democrats like me. Time is running short for Republicans who know better to step up in defense of the truth. Sadly, the priority for Dave Williams, current chair of the Colorado Republican Party, is to pursue litigation against the heretics he discerns within his own ranks.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.