I gotta be honest here...
This shit is looking pretty bleak.
It’s the Year of the Cheeto, and an odd, existential dread looms over this ongoing administrative coup. All of it—the ham-handed threats of firings, various agency websites crudely scrubbed or taken down entirely, an “AI-first strategy” to government, and oafish attempts to slash $2 trillion in federal spending—proceed from a sense of impunity that Donald Trump and Elon Musk share. Moment by moment, the world’s wealthiest private citizen and his strike force of clammy wreckers operate as rats in the walls, gnawing hideously through the copper wires in search of public money. As that roiling program of hostage-taking and looting is underway, our president is threatening trade wars with allies, blaming a deadly plane crash on DEI, pardoning the January 6th rioters, and announcing his intention to take over Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” In all this headlong flipping of switches and pulling of plugs and fiddling with knobs, there is a smug and seething certainty that none of this smash-and-grab vandalism could have any consequences for the people doing it.
This assumption, which scans as more of a taunt, remains the same: That Congress or the courts or the Democrats or the public, or all of them together, simply do not have the right or the capacity to stop them from doing any of it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded with a robust helping of dense Democratic fudge, thundering about people being “aroused” and climaxing with a rousing bill titled the Stop the Steal Act. Corporations have dropped the post-George Floyd pretense of social responsibility, and a swelling tranche of servile brain-fried freaks seem to have lost their grasp on what constitutes a Nazi salute. A genocide was basically streamed on TikTok for over a year, and liberals are only now discovering their deep concern for Palestinians, proving the longstanding point that they’d be up in arms about these 15 months of violence once Trump became the public face of it. So far, in virtually every instance, this administration seems primed to get away with anything.
The most important thing to know about both the chittering Reinfields sledgehammering the pillars of the American administrative state and the billionaire sociopath they serve is that they don’t care. They don’t know anything about what they’re wrecking, and they are too erratic, impatient, grandiose, prissily paranoid, amphetamized, and whimsical to try to understand how the public sector works or why it’s important. Their crabbed and curdled anti-ethos is the logical conclusion of a decades-long agenda of burn-it-all-down deregulation, reflecting libertarianism’s signature balance of ideological resentment and pure childish certitude, that the delineation between legitimate and illegitimate government is an arbitrary separation of things they don’t like and things they take for granted. The public spending they view as “waste, fraud, and abuse” is inherently inefficient and unjust because they’re deployed for social services and because who is deploying it, which is not them. Redirecting all those institutions built to serve the public into something like their opposite is more or less what “conservative governance” is, and what it reliably does.
Given our current political predicaments and longstanding political derangements, America is big enough and depraved enough that the people supporting this or are willfully ignorant of it have their own media ecosystem. The Fox News Cinematic Universe exists to make sure they never calm down or get less upset about anything, especially they/them pronouns. Right-wing media is strange in the way these people are, and it’s hard to distinguish chicken from the egg in this case—do these pundits run stories like Lena Dunham seen gorging on Green M&Ms in gender-neutral bathroom because these seething dorks want to read something like that, or do they want to read stuff like that because their news diet consists of rat poison. Their viewers whipsaw between blustering triumphalism and raw panic, their fetish for star-spangled Americana as a narrow concept and an evident distaste for everyone and everything about America, which is alternately the greatest country on earth and a revolting wad of shit that should be obliterated from orbit. This news model of dumping toxic reactionary sludge into the water supply is fundamentally not in the business of answering any questions of our place in the national order so much as rephrasing it in progressively more ominous ways. This kind of anti-news is not here to misinform people as to keep people who refuse to learn basic shit in their preferred state of furious unknowing—not just uninformed, but vigorously counter-informed and convinced that something both terrible and vague is being done to them. They’ll dare you not to believe it, or just to check their work.
Any sort of critical thought vanishes under all that dread, and while most of them are preparing for the apocalypse, their simple acts of destruction are enough of a motivating force. The only energy in American politics currently is on the right because they have accepted that their organizational conflict with the state will reach an apocalyptic conclusion. They furiously type THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE and know they will never truly accept whatever it is that they have given themselves up to not-accepting. Their paranoid fixations with birth rates and the Great Replacement Theory and fighting wokeism are an aesthetic representation of their narrow libidinal politics as they consecrate a holy regime of domination. This desire for apocalyptic intervention will reveal, in their minds, who deserves to survive. They believe they will persist as eternal Clint Eastwood-types in a cyberpunk version of the Western masculine ideal because of their guns and self-regard, even as the collapse of liberal democracy would sever their capitalist social relations. The Jeffersonian yeoman fantasy only ever came to fruition because these were embedded in a capitalist social network of state-subsidized railroads and state-subsidized military security that allowed them to have their little log cabins and to bust their sod. It’s all a jumble of contradictory and self-negating anti-logic, of course, but that’s the nature of a whole belief system that vibrates at the frequency of cable news. There is nothing for them to share but a schizophrenic list of demands.
MAGA is a movement of hyper-online antisocial weirdos willing to entrust fanatics with their goal of doing whatever the opposite of virtue signaling is. They feel unfettered by cultural demands, that they have transcended the fake morality of contemporary liberalism, but they have replaced it with a funhouse mirror that warps the polarity but brings the same sadism into focus. They can correctly point to the Democratic Party as fraudulent and feel transgressive for violating its attendant norms, but they’re only putting a different mask on the same regime of repression, a matter of white grievance and white power in service of oligarchy.
In a system designed to run on heavily qualified but quantifiable systems of consent, Trump and Musk have repeatedly refused the premise at every turn; that cocksure smugness and annihilating lack of care are behind everything they have ever stolen or conned or bought. The central conceit of American governance, from the nation’s founding, was partially a recognition of this kind of existential threat: Some asshole who was unwilling to abide by or even acknowledge any of the clever failsafes or load-bearing social obligations whenever and wherever they inconvenienced or just annoyed him, and who had become powerful enough to make that rejection everyone else’s problem. These pig-stupid beings of appetite have an inability or a refusal to believe that nothing could be more important than them getting exactly what they want, and none of the Americans they’d immiserate or incinerate will ever matter to them.
Trump and Elon are working in tenuous harmony to replace the American republic with their own visions of how a state should notionally run to their benefit. One is something like Mar-a-Lago, a gilded ballroom accessible to dues-paying members, and the other resembles the remains of the Twitter shipwreck, a machine that exalts and serves only its owner while service delines and subscription prices climb in tandem forever. They will gut the NLRB and crack open Social Security and slap on all those tariffs, and we will get a glorious era of boss-friendly libertarianism with a captured domestic market and a servile American worker. The silver lining here is MAGA voters are disinclined to hold Trump responsible for the policy decisions made by his administration, so as DOGE automates the federal government and turns it into the UnitedHealthCare AI albatross, Elon Musk could eventually absorb that unpopularity; given his cloying desire to be liked and the unpredictable elements of his personality, it could cause some kind of volatility to this agenda of gutting the government regardless of the consequences or legality. The increasingly visible division line in political leadership will delineate those who care about the U.S. as a concept from those who are just in it for their enrichment and self-aggrandizement.
The American system of checks-and-balances could only last for as long as the people in charge of it and the population it represents remained serious about and committed to caring for it. It would be rational to feel like all of this is doomed, as we are forced to watch entirely preventable and utterly illogical horrors that stem from Trump and his minions going about their campaign of coercion and demolition. I have accepted the transient nature of life, not so far that I do not care about the clowns and grifters and sociopaths taking control of the levers of power, but it has become less startling to my emotional register to watch culture churn, powerful men muck about, and technological “advancements” supercharge this widespread idiocy. Nothing is permanent: No system, ideology, or man reigns forever. Over the last few weeks, I believed wholeheartedly that economic ruin was imminent, only for it to fall away in the Maya of the approaching present. Musk is an uncertain variable, but he is a ketamine-fried fool who is liquefying into a slurry of his defects. Everything is inevitable, and I’ve learned to surrender to the great mystery of that inevitability. You will only be grounded when you stop trying to understand all this sickness and madness. All that is solid melts into air, all things flow, nothing abides.