It is striking that the Trump team’s constant refrain is that we
cannot afford to protect the vulnerable or provide for the people,
which is why the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, atop
Doge, destroyed USAID last year , which has already resulted in
tens of thousands of deaths from starvation and preventable
disease. The Iran war is creating a fertilizer crisis in Europe,
Africa and Asia that may also result in widespread famine.
Meanwhile, the former head of homeland security Kristi Noem
spent more than $200m on an ad campaign starring herself before
she was fired.
Although there are far worse things about the utterly
gratuitous and literally unjustified war on Iran, the fact
that it burns through billions a day is striking, given that
huge cuts are being made to environmental protection
and national parks, and the forest service is being
effectively sabotaged , while public lands are being
offered up to fossil fuel companies and mining interests .
The forest service headquarters are being moved across the country,
which will probably cause many resignations, like the similar move
of the Bureau of Land Management in Trump’s first term . More
than 50 forest service research stations are being cut, meaning
more loss of irreplaceable ongoing research, data, facilities and staff.
Trump said in his droning dullard speech last week:
“We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country ...
We’re fighting wars ... It’s not possible for us to take care
of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual
things.” Your money, our money, our public lands, our kids.
Trump even bribed the builders of offshore windfarms almost
a billion dollars to stop, just because he has a personal vendetta
against the clean energy systems. The US used to lead the world
in scientific research, including medical research, which had led
to important breakthroughs in disease treatment and health,
but all that has been slashed to the bone and beyond. This is
murder.
The old aphorism about how long it takes an aircraft carrier to turn
around might be why the nation seems relatively stable, and why
reactions have been inadequate; the full impact is yet to come. At
some point if the ship doesn’t turn around, maybe it will start
taking on water or listing badly or hit an iceberg, or perhaps the
iceberg has been there all along and is named Donald Trump.
He has started a war for no particular reason – the word fun was
deployed – that is further undermining the global economy he
already badly damaged with his ever-fluctuating tariffs. Enterprises
need to be able to plan, and tariffs that triple and melt away and
pop up again like his moods undermine the ability to do so. In
much the same way, threats that aren’t carried out, talks that
never took place, administration actions that the courts reverse
become forms of political whiplash, jerking everyone and everything
around, a show of force that is also a show of incoherence and
inconsistency.
We need to talk about the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality But the offensiveness may be a distraction from the destructiveness.
A whole sector of mainstream media now functions as spirit
mediums attempting to interpret Trump’s actions to try to fit
them into the context of competent leadership and coherent
and consistent agendas. If there was a coherent agenda,
it would be a destructive one, a malevolent one. The newly
popular slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” is useful
here, because what this system does is weaken, damage, corrupt
and harm. The idea that there’s a coherent agenda driven by
Vladimir Putin works in the sense that most of what Trump has
done is good for the ageing Russian dictator while also bad for the
US.
It’s also evident that Trump wanted to come back into office in
part to revenge himself on a country that in 2020 had rejected
him, the way an ex-partner sometimes becomes a murderous
stalker of the woman who dared to escape him, and specifically
revenge himself on the individuals and institutions that had
prosecuted him for crimes or otherwise thwarted him. Trump
at some level knows he’s failing politically, cognitively
and physically and wants to take it all down with him,
the way that ancient rulers were buried with their
slaughtered horses and servants. He’s also, as mortality
breathes down his neck, trying to grab some immortality
by sticking his name on buildings and park passes and currency.
But trying to understand motives is something of a hobby when
the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to
understand these criminals in order to try to contain
and ultimately remove them . They will not last for ever, and
we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk
about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the
first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged
and corrupted country has to go through to return to
functionality. But not to return to the way things were.
It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the
vulnerabilities that let this happen – the electoral college and voter
suppression that gave Trump a minority victory in 2016, the
gerrymandering that has given a minority party majority power
in Congress and statehouses, a grotesquely corrupted and
unaccountable supreme court and the corrosive influence of the
ultra-wealthy in a system that gives them power on a scale that
is a direct assault on democracy. We need to imagine a more
democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that
operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve
all of us – and nature and future generations too – rather than is
driven by the moral poverty of billionaires.
