There are, I know, a lot of readers out there horrified at every move the new Trump regime makes. There are also, I realize, many readers who may have voted for Trump-Vance, hoping they could shake the political system up and get attention paid to America’s forgotten men and women.
If you’re in that latter category, you almost certainly didn’t knowingly vote for much of what’s now going on—not least because Trump dissembled about his end goals in his epically dishonest and demagogic election campaign.
You may not be comfortable with the level of US involvement in supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, launched in early 2022. But, since my working assumption is most people are decent and honorable at their core, how many of you are really comfortable with the open selling out of Ukraine to Putin—the acceptance of all of Putin’s demands, including America no longer declaring Russia to be the aggressor, before any formal negotiations have occurred, in exchange for promises dangled of business ventures in Russia and Trump’s hope of being able to strong-arm Ukraine into ceding 50 percent of the interests in their mineral wealth to the United States?
Forcing a plundered, destitute, war-ravaged country to cede half its assets is not how allies treat allies; it’s how conquerors treat vassal nations. It may bring short-term financial benefits, but it will lead to America being loathed globally for generations.
SFR
I’m pretty sure you also didn’t sign up for a new age of imperialism—because on the campaign trail Trump was entirely silent about wanting to annex Canada, didn’t talk about his ambitions for Greenland, never mentioned that he wanted to control the Panama Canal again or “take” and “cherish” a depopulated Gaza Strip.
And even if you somehow intuited, and were fine with, Trump’s lurch into imperialism, I know you didn’t agree to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, taking over the entire US government in what by the day is looking more like a hostile take-over by the business tycoon and his unaccountable DOGE forces.
Drunk on his own power, the chain saw-wielding Musk isn’t just trying to trim government; like a super-villain in a James Bond movie he’s literally stopping vast parts of government from functioning and, in his fever-dream, conjuring up one humiliation ritual after the next for the demoralized federal workforce.
This past Saturday, Musk upped the ante. In a manic X posting, America’s new CEO demanded that each and every one of the federal government’s more than two million employees email in a note documenting what worthy work they did over the past week—and announced that failure to do so would be grounds for termination. Shortly afterwards, the Office of Personnel Management, now run by Russell Vought, the far-right architect of Project 2025, backed Musk up, sending out an email to the entire federal workforce demanding they detail their work this past week by 11.59 pm on Monday, February 24.
Just to clarify: the people being deliberately humiliated are your local mailman, your public health official working to prevent the next pandemic, your national park ranger, your forest service firefighter, your FBI agents working to protect communities from everything from bank robberies to terrorism, your Veterans Affairs hospital doctors and nurses, your tax collectors, your cyber security specialists, your FAA and TSA workers, your food safety inspectors, your nuclear weapons experts.
From the time we are toddlers we are taught not to deliberately treat other human beings badly. Yet, in our names, Musk-Trump are turning sadism into an art form.
This is, my friends, where the rubber meets the road. You may not like “Big Government.” You may, if you’ve been marinating in the right-wing media eco-system, be suspicious of the “Administrative State.” But unless you are literally a billionaire with the resources to live on one of the techno-utopian self-administered islands that Musk and his tech-bro Masters of the Universe fantasize will soon replace the traditional nation-state, you need government to function. And what the DOGE coup is pulling off is an epochal destruction of government functionality.
Will you personally gain from this? No, you won’t. Sure, you may, if you are lucky, receive a DOGE dividend, a one-off check, presumably with either Trump or Musk’s name on it, that represents a portion of the DOGE-generated “savings.” But the pay-off will be a gimmick, an exercise in three-card Monte designed to prevent you from seeing the scale of the losses, the diminution of basic government safety and security functions that you, your children and your grandchildren will have to bear as a result of the Musk-Trump duo’s gangster actions, and the vast profiteering that America’s new oligarchs will partake in as government services crumble and private companies step in to fill the void.
If you are having second thoughts about how you voted last November, now’s a pretty good time to step up and fight to remedy the damage. Or are you good just sitting back and watching as the power-crazed Musk and Trump light up their matches and slam dance with chainsaws while the country burns?
