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Trump’s ridiculous tariff plan, based on non-existent facts and nonsense equations, has caused markets here and abroad to crater. $11 trillion vaporized in eleven weeks. People’s hard-earned retirement savings have been depleted at an astonishing rate since Trump’s “Liberation Day” on April 2. As the markets in the US and around the world plunged, Trump played golf. He is clearly willing to persist indefinitely in this shambolic attempt to reset the global order in his image at the expense of American workers, while intentionally crashing global stock markets and causing widespread panic and pain.
Trump has been talking about this massive ill-starred tariff plan since the 1980s, but no one, I think, thought that he would actually do it, and certainly not in this slapdash, insouciant, incoherent way.
One in four Americans have less than $1000 in savings. Fifty-four percent of Americans only have about three months of emergency expenses built up. But six in ten Americans own stocks, and this includes one-third of the lowest earners in the country. So the tanking of the stock markets is having a devastating effect on millions of ordinary Americans. And Trump obviously doesn’t care.
At the same time, fifty-two million elderly Americans (nine of ten people over 65) are currently receiving retired worker benefits that they paid into for their entire lives through Social Security. It’s their money. Many of them depend on these Social Security checks alone for their livelihood in retirement. Elon Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” and has repeatedly said it needs to be drastically cut. His minions in DOGE have made unsustainable cuts in the SSA workforce and are now disabling much of the digital infrastructure of the agency that administers the funds, making it unable to maintain its day-to-day workings.
Most of the people who elected Trump and remain supportive of him watch Fox News as their primary news source, and Fox News remains resolutely behind Trump no matter what he does. But the man behind Fox News, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has often been more critical of Trump, and his other media properties, especially The Wall Street Journal, have lately been very critical. An editorial in the Journal in February said Trump’s trade proposals would lead to “the dumbest trade war in history.” What happens if Fox News becomes less of a propaganda arm of MAGA? How long would Trump remain in power post-Fox?
Elon Musk has also called Trump’s tariff plan “stupid.” He knows that these absurd tariffs will set the tech industry as a whole back at least ten years. Musk himself has lost $100 billion, so far. His brother went after the tariffs on X, and Musk has gone after Trump’s trade and manufacturing advisor Peter Navarro (“Navarro is truly a moron.”). And on April 7, Musk posted an instructional video from 1980 against tariffs, featuring Ronald Reagan’s favorite free-trade economist, Milton Friedman, explaining how materials from all over the world go into the manufacture of a simple pencil. This educational video was obviously intended by Musk for the edification of one particular viewer. So the Musk-Trump co-presidency may be nearing its end. Unfortunately, this probably does not mean the end of the DOGE debacle.
The New York Times has identified and published the mug shots of more than 60 individuals who are working for the Department of Government Efficiency under the leadership of Elon Musk, Steve Davis, Brad Smith, Amy Gleason, and Chris Young, to dismantle parts of the US government Trump doesn’t like. The DOGE minions have done all of their damage in the dark, with almost no public transparency. Trump moved the entire operation from the US Digital Service (a tech support group set up by President Obama), within the Office of Management and Budget, into the White House so that its draconian actions would not be subject to open records laws. The only way we know anything about what DOGE is doing is through more than 170 lawsuits that have been filed to force them to reveal some of their sources and methods.
And again, I ask, what will these DOGE insurgents do with all of the personal information on US citizens that they stole from the Social Security Administration’s database? Will this data be used against these citizens in the future?
As the apostle/prophet Paul (Virilio) figured out some time ago, speed has its own politics. Trump and Musk have moved so rapidly to ransack the US government and wreck the US economy and the existing global world order that it is soon going to be too late to save much of it. It’s happening too fast for the institutions to react to it. Only the people can stop it, but they have to move quickly.
And the unholy alliance between the Trump/MAGA regime and Silicon Valley tech billionaires has been at the heart of this take-over. Mark Zuckerberg’s motto “Move fast and break things” has been taken up by Trump and Musk and applied to democracy and the rule of law, and now, by Trump, to the US and global economies.
Millions of Americans hit the streets on April 5 to protest Trump’s policies, in 1400 rallies in all 50 states, and the mainstream press mostly ignored it. There were so many people in the protests in New York—well over 100,000—that the police were blindsided by the turnout. Consequently, there were very few police officers anywhere to be seen at the demonstration on Saturday. Luckily, it turns out they weren’t needed, because the protesters were unfailingly peaceable. And that was the case around the country.
Elon Musk pronounced the protestors paid “puppets.”
As these protests proliferate and grow larger, the Trump regime will be compelled to respond to them with force. When they do, we should make them do it in public, in plain view, so people can see what they’re doing. So far, Trump is mostly able to control the news with his soundbites from the Resolute Desk or the doorway of Airforce One. He is a master of Attention Control and disinformation, and he is currently getting away with murder while deflecting all the blame onto others. It’s important to break this spell, with signs and symbols, and words and images.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.