As the Musk-Trump duo rampage through American government and key cultural, economic, and political institutions, let me open with two assumptions: First, the vast majority of those who voted for Trump aren’t billionaires and don’t have the same agenda as Elon Musk; and second, while I vehemently disagree with the reasoning behind people voting for Trump, most Trump supporters aren’t self-consciously and deliberately sadistic.
So, it’s time for a conversation:
If you voted for Trump because you were fed up with the high price of eggs under Biden, why aren’t you outraged by the current empty shelves in the eggs sections of supermarkets; and why aren’t you dismayed by the rapid-fire dismantling of public health surveillance systems, and the suppression of information about the spread of bird flu (which has already decimated the nation’s chicken supplies—hence the shortage of eggs—and which is now showing of every sign of mutating in ways making it more likely there will soon be a human pandemic)?
SFR
If you voted for Trump because you felt there wasn’t enough respect for Christian morals in public life, how in holy hell are you ok with Trump and Vance demonizing the Lutheran church for ministering to immigrants, and the Catholic church for feeding the hungry? How do you live with yourself in tolerating Elon Musk’s despicable comments about those religious institutions working with the poor and the exiled as being simply “money launderers?”
If you voted for Trump because you had been hoodwinked by right-wing commentators into thinking a quarter of the US federal government’s budget was spent on overseas aid—it isn’t; it’s just over one percent of total federal spending— can understand how you might want to rein some spending in; but how do you square that with declaring USAID workers, some of the best, brightest, and most idealistic of federal employees, to be “criminal,” as Musk did, or “radical left lunatics,” as Trump did? How do you justify terminating the distribution of vital life-saving drugs to some of the world’s poorest people? How do you morally accept leaving people without access to medicines or doctors or vaccines midway through medical experiments that your country enrolled them in on the promise they would be cared for until the experiments ended? Look in the mirror. Is this what you want to see?
If you voted for Trump because you were sick of “forever wars,” how do you square that with Trump’s Empire-building ambitions to annex Canada and Greenland, to take over the Panama Canal, and to depopulate Gaza and turn the blitzed enclave into an upscale holiday resort?
If you voted for Trump because you felt it was time the little man’s voice was heard, how do view the empowering of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to trample legislative and Constitutional protections, to enter government agencies with his DOGE shock-troops of young hackers, and to suck up the most personal financial details of every American resident? I guarantee you that Musk, who believes that controlling data is the gateway to ultimate power, isn’t doing this to benefit the ordinary Americans whose data he now controls.
If you don’t believe me, how about you listen to Steve Bannon, the intellectual architect of Trumpism, who has declared Musk and his project to be “truly evil?” Or how about you listen to the voices of Silicon Valley whistle-blowers who recently penned a detailed memo explaining how Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and a handful of other techno-bro oligarchs subscribe to a “neo-reactionary” ideology aimed at entirely sidelining the democratic process. If you wanted small government, you may instead have accidentally empowered the most authoritarian project in American political history.
If you voted for Trump because you believed in respecting the constitution, how do you align that with JD Vance’s statements last week all-but-declaring the administration would ignore court rulings that it disagreed with?
If you voted for Trump because you felt government spending was out of control, how do you square the legitimate policy goal of slimming down bureaucracies with the entirely atrocious way in which hard-working public servants have been treated the past week: agencies gutted, despite having Congressional mandates, men and women fired with no notice, their benefits terminated immediately—not because they have done anything wrong on the job but because the Musk-Trump oligarchy has to show it’s serious about cracking down on the “Deep State.” I don’t care if you’re left wing or right wing, that’s simply not democracy in action, rather it’s a totalitarian power-grab with at least some similarities to what the Leninists did in Russia after they took control, and the Nazis did in Germany in 1933.
Musk’s slash-and-burn strategy is not how American government has historically operated; rather, it’s what you do when you engineer a hostile takeover of a company. In fact, it’s precisely what Musk did when he bought Twitter, fired three quarters of the staff, and made life extraordinarily miserable for the rest of the employees.
The thing is, if that strategy bellies up with Twitter, a few people can’t post for a few hours, a few trolls have to go silent, and a few live interviews go offline. Ultimately, who cares? But when government systems glitch, when workers are replaced wholesale by AI systems inserted by unaccountable DOGE staffers into payment and service processes, and ultimately into fundamental decision-making structures, really bad things could start to unfold really fast.
If huge numbers of federal employees are dismissed, or driven to resign through email campaigns such as DOGE’s “fork in the road” offer, sent via the Office of Personnel Management to two million federal workers, if entire government departments are shuttered literally overnight, or in Musk’s grotesque term, “deleted,” without proper audits and without investigations into the potential consequences, safeguards start to collapse like dominos. It might not happen this week or next week, but at some point in a Muskian America, there will be catastrophic failures. And if that happens with, say, Social Security, suddenly grandma and grandpa have no income; if that happens with the TSA or the FAA, planes fall out of the sky; if that happens with nuclear and chemical safety teams, industrial accidents on an epic scale could take the lives of thousands. If it happens with the disbursement of Medicaid and Medicare payments, millions of people are denied access to vital medical care. If it happens with debt payments, the US dollar could crash.
Last week, Musk’s team forced the CIA to out 2,000 operatives by naming them in unsecure emails. It is entirely inconceivable to me that the grandees of the GOP, the party that loves to drape itself in Red, White, and Blue, could sit silently by as this unfolded. But they did. Last week, the names of thousands of FBI operatives who were connected with the January 6th investigations were handed over to Trump’s people, presumably so retribution could be enacted against them. Last week, the Department of Justice disbanded its elite anti-corruption unit. I really don’t think Joe-Sixpack thought he was voting for a free pass for kleptocrats when he cast his ballot for Trump; turns out he was. Last week, the NIH announced it was slashing by billions of dollars the science grants that it disburses to the nation’s top universities to ensure that the country remains at the cutting edge of scientific discovery and invention. That will, quite simply, mean fewer new medical breakthroughs, and fewer investments in other vital technologies. As a result, America will be massively the worse off.
Last week, too, the Washington Post reported that in the security agencies, would-be-employees are now being given loyalty tests. If they answer “yes” to the questions of whether they think the violent acts of January 6, 2021, were an inside job and whether they agree the 2020 election was stolen, they move forward in the hiring process; if they answer “no,” they are blocked from being hired. Using the vast powers of the state like this so as to rewrite history is an entirely Orwellian project.
Orwellian, too, is Trump’s firing of the board members of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and his ludicrous declaration on social media that he would make himself the chair. I’ve read enough history to know that democratic leaders don’t appoint themselves cultural arbiters; that’s the sort of thing Stalin did—giving the thumb’s up to composers, playwrights, novelists, scientists; or giving the thumb’s down, as he did to modernist composers such as Shostakovich, with potentially life-changing, or life-ending, ramifications.
So, Trump voters, let’s get serious. You cast your ballots out of anger and frustration, maybe thinking you would get smaller, less intrusive government, one more responsive to the needs of ordinary people. Instead, you’ve given unlimited power to two billionaire megalomaniacs with an unabashedly totalitarian vision of America’s future and a contempt, shown again and again and again, for the ordinary man and woman in America and overseas. You’ve eviscerated the American constitutional system of governance. And you’ve given the green light to purges and imperial rule. Oh, and you still haven’t gotten cheaper eggs at the supermarket. Happy now?
