The tectonic truth is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk could stop their chainsaw rampage through the federal government, foreign alliances, and the US Constitution immediately, and it would take years to undo the cumulative damage they’ve already wrought to democracy, the federal government, and the reputation of the US as a reliable ally.
Then, there is the human cost. Lives are being cut short and made infinitely worse by the precipitous actions of the presidential duo and its administrative and congressional enablers.
With no warning, overseas aid recipients have been suddenly and cruelly denied food and medicines critical to even the meanest existence. With little or no warning, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are being let go and kicked on their way out the door – in the ovewhelming majority of cases, for having done what was asked of them.
Promises made, promises kept – Messrs. President?
With no warning, billions of dollars of “shovel-ready” Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) investments and infrastructure projects under the IIJA (Infrastructure, Investment, and Jobs Act) have been stopped dead in their tracks. They are now mired in the uncertainties of today’s culture wars – risking the hundreds of billions of public and private investments already committed to new power and manufacturing projects, bridges, highways, other parts of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, and the tens of thousands of new jobs that would be added to the economy by their completion.
Promises made, promises kept – Messrs. President?
Judging from Trump and company’s actions, it’s clear that for (presumably) thoughtful people, Trump’s anguine advisors and Elon’s young Muskovites have remarkably little understanding of the interconnectedness of the world around them.
Consider artist Georges Seurat’s painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The method of painting employed by the artist is called pointillism. As the name suggests, it involves a series of dots – jots of paint like the tiles of Byzantium that the mind’s eye blends into a coherent mosaic-like picture.
Hardly random, each dot of color is deliberately chosen and placed to the maximum effect – to shine light and cast shade. And, when the artist is done, each jot has joined another to create a painting of much greater import and stature.
Where the artist sees a picture, Trump and the Muskovites just see a dot – each possibly valuable in itself but much less valuable than if it were strategically placed as part of a greater whole.
Because of their haste and missed understanding, the Muskovites and Trumpsters are making mistakes. They are the kind of mistakes that kill people and threaten the security of the nation and the sustainability of the environment. The tag team of Don and Elon fired nuclear safety engineers and have canceled the lease on the only group monitoring and responding to leaks or other issues at the nation’s lone deep nuclear waste site in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
Promises made, promises kept – Messrs. President?
By algorithm, FAA personnel, who are or support air traffic controllers, have been fired. When there are daily reports of increasing plane crashes – including one on the White House’s doorstep – reductions in force seem ill-advised. They undermine the safety and welfare of the nation.
Muskovites and Trumpsters speak of truth, free speech, and their God-given and constitutional right not to wear a mask to limit the spread of contagion while banning books about a freckled little girl who doesn’t like being teased by classmates and limiting – in some cases criminalizing – a woman’s own healthcare decisions.
With all the chest beating of white supremacists, Christian nationals, and other MAGA-minded Trumpsters about the system being weaponized against them, you’d think they’d recognize it in themselves as they do unto others.
Trump has turned words like decency, equality, and integrity into accusations and grounds for dismissal from government positions – no matter how vital or well performed. He’s fired all the inspector generals at the agency and says his administration is the most transparent EVER!
Even if their actions aren’t transparent, their motives are and they do the nation a great injustice.
Trump is crucifying America on an altar of lies, revenge, and the good opinion he has of himself and his buddy Elon – while the Trump-fearing members of a Republican Congress toady to him for fear of being primaried in their next election. Only one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski (AK), has had the backbone and integrity to call Trump’s and Vance’s attack on Ukrainian President Zelensky what it was – sickening.
Trump’s deliberate disregard or intellectual incapacity to see the relationships among and between things guarantees systemic inefficiency, robbing the nation of the greater potential wealth possible when pieces work together as part of an integrated design.
Promises made, promises kept – Messrs. President?
Trump’s incessant talk about rare earth minerals and their value shows little understanding of their worth as part of 21st-century energy technology. Unless the lump of lithium in your hand is put to some purpose, it’s just a rock.
How can Trump and his advisors fail to understand the value of lithium as a part of electric vehicles and large battery banks for standby electricity generated from solar and wind? Technologies, the commercial value of which he’s willing to cede to China and India.
Trump wants to sell the rare earth minerals but fails to grasp how and where they are used. More EVs, more batteries – what’s so hard to understand? But you have to be willing to look. Whatever else Musk is doing, it’s not increasing government efficiency or the value of the nation’s natural resources.
Promises made, promises kept, Messrs. President?
I would hardly call it good populist governance to fire nearly all of the staff of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation responsible for administering more than $8 billion in programming to help people lower their energy bills – especially since Trump’s trade actions are likely to lead to higher energy costs for the average American.
What of the Muskovites slashing USAID food assistance programs that fed millions abroad and the products of American farmers those aid dollars bought?
Acting first and saying “oops” later is becoming a habit of the DOGE. According to Politico, “USAID has reinstated contracts for a Georgia company that makes peanut butter paste to keep malnourished children alive.” The CEO of the company that manufactures the product said he was “’thrilled’ to restart sending hundreds of thousands of boxes of the food aid that would have otherwise gone to waste.” Why not think more strategically in the first place?
And what of other programs – the type that bring money into the treasury, despite Trump believing that solar, wind and other clean energy alternatives are as feckless as many of his cabinet secretaries? The right’s culture warriors are fond of pointing to the failed company Solyndra as a poster child of the woke.
Promises made, promises kept, Messrs. President?
Indeed, the Solyndra deal didn’t work out. However, the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office (LPO) has an enviable overall record when it comes to its support for clean energy projects. According to Representative Sean Casten (D-IL), the LPO has, to date, “made $34 billion of investments and collected nearly $5 billion in interest income … the LPO has realized just 3% in losses but earned back five times that number just on the interest income from the remainder of the portfolio.” (Emphasis added)
No “greater good” can come out of the way Trump has allowed Musk and the DOGE pack to “reform” the federal government in hopes of improving its efficiency and effectiveness. As Dan Farber at Berkeley’s Legal Planet has written:
“Trump has marginalized economic analysis and wants to bulldoze environmental science. Thus, we are likely to get policies that are bad for the environment without being cost-justified while ignoring policies whose environmental benefits outweigh economic costs.”
In Trump 1.0, someone always seemed to be around to temper Trump’s extreme desires. Someone able to get him to step back and see beyond his own point to the bigger picture. This time around, the cabinet is bare of possibilities.
The Muskovites are indeed at the gates, can the republic survive? In the end, it will take more than hope and Trump’s promises.
Un-economic growth.
A lens I am finding useful in understanding these times is the concept of Un-economic growth, which I learned reading Herman Daly
"uneconomic growth occurs when increases in production come at an expense in resources and well-being that is worth more than the items made."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uneconomic_growth
When a catalytic converter thief does $1000 worth of car damage to cut away and steal a converter and sells it for $100 that is economic activity. But the common good just took $900 worth of damage. The thief justifies doing it because they don't pay the damage. We setup an administrative state (criminal justice system) to punish (or regulate) this behavior because it makes economic sense to prevent that damage.
But what happens to a society that has hit the Limits to Growth? What happens when the only way to increase your income is to shrink the income of someone else? What happens when the common good is the only "natural resource" left to exploit? When it becomes the only way to get rich?
The administrative state is the main institution that society sets up to defend the common good. So it makes perfect sense that in a Limits to Growth world that the economic class would be waging a war to destroy the administrative state. No different than a drug gang bribing or killing police officers or elected officials.
This is just normal tribalism in a zero sum economic game. But what I think is shocking people is when they suddenly finding themselves on the "outside" of the tribe. Former allies are seen as weaklings that made the mistake of turning their backs. Best put the knife in quick before they can put up their guard. The weak and sick (outside the tribe) are to be cut off to starve while those inside the tribe get gold toilets.
What I think is happening in the US is the "tribe" is the 0.5% wealthiest and their direct white christian nationalist supporters. And that is a very small tribe. It leaves a lot of commons to be exploited. All of Europe and Canada, for example. If they can pull it off, they will be trillion-airs. If they don't? … Either way, I predict the common good is going to take a lot of damage.
I don't endorse this kind of smash and grab approach to decline. I think protecting the commons and rationing the declining resources while reducing the total human population would be a much more humane (and safe) way to go about this. It would preserve a lot more freedom, dignity and hard won knowledge. But the elite seldom tolerate a wealth decline without a civil war, and I am guessing this is the first stage in a very violent and bitter struggle. It saddens me because there are so many better choices.
well written thank you
The fact that "the republic" is not so likely to survive Musk/Trump is about the only good thing about their ascendance. The US government is the greatest purveyor of violence and evil in the world, by a large margin, and the #1 block to useful progress in human rights, environmental defense and peace. It will clearly never be reformed, so if it crashes–probably taking most of the "advanced" countries with it–this will open space for the survival of more species and ecosystems through the coming bottleneck. Also, if it happens soon, it can forestall some of the awful ideas of King Musk from becoming reality–inserting chips in everyone's heads (voluntary at first), having glitchy AI run everything and discarding the humans who do the job better but are expensive and annoying, setting up space-based weapons systems for both wars and responding to reports from their Panopticon about resistance, playing with AI-generated GMO experiments, wasting Earth's precious resources on an attempt to go to Mars, and no doubt other incredibly dangerous, "innovative" ideas these reckless, adolescent megalomaniacs are fantasizing about.
George Monibot of The Guardian has written several analyses of TFG and its black hole of energy-sucking ennui. Precisely because our society has myriad distractions and addictions, it challenges our capacity to grok the 'primal reasons' for this human artifact to be allegedly wreaking havoc on biotic systems far and wide.
I have followed Monibot and Mary Trump, and some other analysts of human behavior since 2015 as it relates to the leadership of neo-parasite king TFG. With both firm rhetoric and more nuanced psychological analysis, all have concluded what I intuited empathetically since I first heard of this human caricature in the mid-1980s – it is a tapeworm, a being that exists only to consume detritus, defecate, add segments to its corpus, and repeat.
We make a grave mistake if we assume we are dealing with a human, even an evil one. This entity is empty, vacuous, soulless, non-contemplative, non-reasoning, boorish, un-exploratory, in-curious, and above all else, terrified of its isolation. The outcome of these lacks is a paranoia that can only grieve by projection, flailing helter-skelter about the landscape like a plastic bread wrapper in a sirocco.
So starved for affection is this ghoul that it must create pain and suffering, damage and destruction upon all around it in order to gain fearful flattery. One pix from the 3/4/25 sermon on the altar says all – a swooning smile of near-orgasmic satisfaction as the crowd of sycophants bleated and beat their palms together in chronic adulation.
I cringe a bit to use this image, but it fits to a tee – this is Satan swimming in the carnage of perversion. This fiend will not go away on its own unless its corpus breaks biologically. It must be forced out of society, back deep into the boiling desert from whence it emerged, by any and all means necessary. Hartmann's analysis of Wallace's visceral definition of fascism gives us the impetus needed to focus all our energies, constantly, in every thought and action, as a united citizenry, into a psychic lightning bolt riding on the wings of Fury. Every action, from this day forward, must be focused on driving out and destroying this evil being.
Alone, we will fail. Distracted or discouraged, we will fail. Fearful, we will fail. Detached, we will fail. Selfish, we will fail. Hidden, we will fail. Analytical and logical, we will fail. Flippant, we will fail. Sarcastic, we will fail. Arrogant, we will fail.
Steel your mind, protect your heart, generate boiling Fury in your belly, and do not quit, ever.