The Brooklyn Rail

Seventy-seven million Americans voted for Donald Trump for President in the last election, but more people than that voted for someone other than Trump. And right now, a sizable majority of Americans say they do not want to live under the control of his authoritarian regime. Some people say only the Supreme Court can stop Trump, but the court wouldn’t be able to enforce their own ruling, even if they made one, because they have already granted Trump preemptive and complete immunity. Both parties in both houses of Congress are currently incapacitated by fear and confusion.

So it’s going to have to be The People—leaving behind all their online aggressive ignorant meanness, and atomized, polarized selfishness and arrogance—to stand up to Trump. Democracy is, simply, government by the governed. We have seen that it can be destroyed very easily, with a little putsch-push of a little man, if the governed turn away from self-governance, in anger and disgust. It is chilling to see it happening now in America, as unreality overtakes reality and the death drive rises.

On February 24, the US delegation to the United Nations, directed by Trump, voted against a resolution condemning Putin’s Russia for its attack on Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. The US voted with Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and fifteen other countries friendly to Russia. The measure passed overwhelmingly, in spite of the US capitulation.

The next day, on February 25, Trump announced that he will begin selling a “Gold Card” for $5 million—a kind of rich person’s Green Card, giving the holders privileges of citizenship in the US. He’s selling US citizenship for $5 million at the same time that he is rounding up and deporting people who do not have the money to pay for immigration lawyers. When he made the announcement, a journalist asked him if these new Gold Cards would be made available to Russian oligarchs, and Trump replied, “Hey, I know some Russian oligarchs that are nice people. It’s possible.” There are, that is, “very fine people, on both sides,” if they have the money.

Also on February 25, the House of Representatives passed an omnibus spending bill that included massive tax cuts for the rich (the top 5% will get about half of the 3 ½ trillion allocated) and massive cuts to Medicaid for the poor, shutting off needed medical treatment.

Elon Musk’s DOGE troop was forced to re-hire a number of federal workers they had fired when it became clear that these workers were performing absolutely critical tasks. It was also revealed that the DOGE math geniuses had made a number of basic math mistakes in their “Wall of Receipts” touting the money they’d saved taxpayers.

It seems that Musk and his minions do not understand the IRL effects of their reckless moves to cut necessary social services. The wealthiest man in the world does not really live IRL, and hasn’t had an address there for a long time.

Addressing Trump’s cabinet on Wednesday, Musk said that everything DOGE is doing is designed to address the enormous deficit. “We simply cannot sustain as a country [this deficit]. If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt. It’s not an optional thing. It is an essential thing.”

From the founding of the United States of America to 2001, in its first 220 years, the government accumulated $5 trillion in debt. Over the next 24 years, we’ve increased that debt to $36 trillion. And it is estimated that amount could rise another $23 trillion over the next decade. In his first term as President, Donald Trump added more to the national debt than any president before him had done. Twenty percent of the revenue currently going into the treasury goes to service our debt. We are now spending more money to service the debt than on defending our country.

The US government is a $7 trillion a year operation. As they say, it is a military attached to an insurance company. Sixty percent of the budget is locked in to mandatory programs. Thirteen percent goes to defense. Another thirteen percent to interest payments. Any cuts must be made in about 14% of the federal budget. Trimming the fat and going after waste, fraud, and abuse is much harder than it looks, but it still needs to be done.

What Musk and Trump are now doing with the DOGE spectacle is not serious. It’s all performative. The MAGA base appears to like performative actions more than substantive ones. And they especially like performative actions that irritate or enrage the libs. And in this case, the cruelty of these actions, in real terms for real people, is the point.

To pay for a $4.5 trillion tax cut for millionaires and billionaires and huge corporations, the Musk/Trump administration is now proposing the largest Medicaid cut in history, amounting to about $880 billion. This will hurt middle-class and lower middle-class people, many of whom voted for Trump. It will cut 15% of the budgets of rural hospitals and other rural health care providers. People will die. Cutting people’s benefits like this is not going to do anything to decrease the national debt.

As Steven Bannon pointed out, “A lot of MAGA is on Medicaid. Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. You just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.”

Henry Giroux, who is carrying on the work of the great Paulo Freire, just published a piece on the LA Progressive that approaches Trump’s re-election as “the ascendance of a corpse-like order, a nation stiffening under the weight of its own decay.”

This is not simply the return of authoritarianism; it is its evolution—leaner, more technologically adept, more deeply enmeshed in the fabric of corporate and digital power. Trump does not rule alone. He is merely the frontman for a brutalizing oligarchy that has abandoned even the pretense of democracy. The billionaire class—those slick architects of social media monopolies, the digital overlords of surveillance capitalism—have found their perfect vehicle in his shamelessness. Spoiled boys in men’s bodies giving Nazi salutes, orgasmic over their new-found power. This is the oligarchy of fools now kissing the ring of the grifter immune for his past and future crimes. Unfettered capitalism has reached its final stage, where wealth no longer hides its contempt for the masses but wears it like a badge. . . .

It is a fascism that has learned to entertain, to seduce through spectacle, to smuggle its violence beneath the skin of amusement. . . . It is not just the politics of fear—it is the politics of death itself, an orgy of annihilation masquerading as renewal.¹