Tag Archives: Trump

The Pro-Death Administration

One of the outcomes of Trump’s “culture war” approach to the pandemic during his first administration was the documented excess death rate of the MAGA partisans who refused to wear masks or get vaccinated. Although I’m unaware of research into the survival rates of the even more hard-core cult members who imbibed bleach and/or Hydroxychloroquine per Trump’s suggestions, I assume those outcomes were similarly unfortunate.

This time around, Trump is doubling down on his “angel of death” approach. 

Thanks to his “Big Beautiful Bill,”  health care costs are poised to go through the roof. As a recent essay in the New York Times put it, health spending in the United States since 1975 “has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills.” The essay’s author, who teaches public health and economics at Yale, says the administration is making it worse, and that  rising health care spending is killing the American dream.

The imminent sharp rise in health insurance premiums has been front page news for several months, but unaffordable costs are just one of the health threats faced by the vast majority of Americans who cannot pay exorbitant costs out of pocket. The installation of Mr. Brain Worm as Secretary of Health and Human Services has turned America’s public health agencies over to cranks who elevate conspiracy theories over vetted medical science.

Lincoln Square recently enumerated the threats. For example, as we’ve just seen, the CDC just voted to end universal Hepatitis B vaccine recommendations for newborns, despite the fact that the mandate has demonstrably saved lives.

Now, under Trump guidance, only infants of mothers who test positive (or whose status is unknown) receive the recommendation. Everyone else? Optional. Delayed. A ‘maybe’ if the parents decide to go that route in two months.

And here’s the thing RFK Jr. and the Trump regime aren’t talking about:

Medicare and Medicaid only cover vaccines that are recommended by federal bodies like the CDC. If you cut the recommendation, you cut the coverage. And when you cut the coverage, vaccinations become a commodity. The wealthy will pay out of pocket to protect their kids. The poor will hope and wait – and hope doesn’t prevent liver cancer.

As the article points out, this most recent assault is part of a pattern that has emerged during Trump’s second term. Health protections have been shifted from a public good to a private luxury, and preventative care is being turned into something you buy, not a human right. The wealthy get immunized; the poor get sick.

The Trump administration has raised healthcare costs, reduced Medicaid access, and increased premiums and deductibles. Working individuals can’t keep up with the costs–and fewer Americans are working. 

Americans have now watched 1.1 million jobs vanish in 2025 – the most since 2020 – with Amazon alone cutting as many as 30,000 corporate positions. Not part-time workers, but white-collar analysts, engineers, and project managers who were told they would be insulated from the automation. And rather than sounding the alarms, the Trump regime has been covering for their billionaire buddies. Jobs reports? Non-existent, because the truth is politically inconvenient when corporations are firing workers in droves during the holidays.

And in a country where healthcare is tied to employment – where those who lose work fall back on Medicaid, and Medicaid only covers vaccines recommended by the CDC – the consequences compound quickly. If parents can’t access affordable healthcare, can’t find work, can’t afford fresh food, and can’t protect their children from preventable disease, then the future looks less like a safety net and more like a prison shiv. A slow attrition of the working class. A world where the wealthy live longer, healthier lives while everyone else is riddled with disease, hungry, and desperate.

For much of my adult life, I have marveled at the idiocy of America’s approach to healthcare. We pay far more–and get far less–than other first world countries, countries that long ago recognized that healthcare is a human right, and incidentally, that national coverage offers efficiencies leading to very substantial cost savings.

Trump and his MAGA GOP are rolling back Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act–America’s incremental “baby steps” toward more universal coverage–and substituting magical thinking for medical science. They are also ensuring that only the rich will be able to protect their health and that of their children.

As the linked article asks, “Is this the collateral damage of incompetence, or the blueprint of a ruling class preparing for a future where most of us just aren’t needed?”

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The Aftermath

Those of us outside the MAGA cult see Trump’s steady deterioration. Granted, he’s always been mentally ill, intellectually deficient,  massively ignorant, and a purveyor of ugly rhetoric, but his daily descent–both mental and physical– from even that very low bar is impossible to miss.

So what happens when he’s gone? What happens when the cult loses its Jim Jones?

In an essay in Lincoln Square, Rick Wilson revisits the aftermaths of other strongman regimes, and makes several predictions. (My favorite: an aside suggesting the inevitability of his grave becoming “the largest public all-gender restroom in history.”) Snark aside, Wilson notes that the public discussion has yet to address the chaos and bloodshed that so frequently comes after the collapse of systems built around a single man. As he warns, that’s when a supposedly unified movement turns into a feeding frenzy among the sycophants who have been rewarded not for competence but for “fealty, loyalty, public and private obeisance.”

Autocrats are very good at seizing power and holding it. They are very bad at leaving it behind without blowing something up on the way out. Political scientists have long argued that personality cult regimes are especially fragile at succession because the leader spends his life eliminating rivals rather than training successors.

Wilson points to a long succession of cult figures, beginning with Nero and extending through Mussolini, Stalin and Mao. The more a system is in thrall to one man,” the less prepared it is for the day that man disappears. “The court that spent years flattering him is suddenly full of men who see an empty chair they crave beyond words and reason.”

Franco’s Spain. Romania’s Ceausescus. Libya’s Ghaddafi. Dozens of cases exist in the modern era, including, of course, the Austrian Guy. Some age out. Some lose wars.

In each case, the same thing happened. The autocrat spent his life telling the country that he alone embodied the nation. He hollowed out institutions, punished independent power centers, and promoted flatterers over equals. When he left the stage, he did not leave behind a constitutional order; he left behind a mob of ambitious men in the same room.

If you zoom out, scholarship on personality cults and personalist regimes boils it down to a few core truths, and in the age where Trump is dying before our eyes, we’d better get ready to watch them play out…and exploit the chaos to slap autocracy back into its hole.

Wilson tells us that the more central the person has become, the more dangerous the aftermath. He describes three possibilities: the movement may fracture into rival factions (in which case, he predicts a Vance/Cruz/Rubio/DeSantis knife fight); the cult converts into a dynasty (Donald Jr. is already ramping up–as Wilson says, “you don’t think the Trumps are giving up all this money, do you?”); or the movement is forced into a larger “transition” because it’s too weak to carry on without its human idol.

Donald Trump has spent almost a decade turning the Republican Party from a political party into a cult. The party platform literally dissolved into “whatever Trump says.” Candidates run on loyalty to him more than any coherent ideology. The conservative media ecosystem revolves around his moods, his grudges, and his need for constant adoration. If that is not a proto-cult, it is a full-dress rehearsal.

Wilson says the sycophants who aspire to follow Trump come in three factions: the zealots who picture Trump as some kind of quasi-religious figure, and who won’t move past him will be the core of Don Jr’s 2028 campaign. Then there are the courtiers– the family, money men, and figures like JD Vance who’ve been cultivating their ties to billionaires and Silicon Valley reactionaries, who claim to be the only people who can keep the base and the money together. Finally, there are post-Trump aspirants like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz.

Wilson’s conclusion? “When Trump finally fails to answer the bell, either politically or biologically, do not expect a solemn passing of the torch. Expect the Roman script with better lighting and worse hair.” There will be competing Right wing factions fighting for the same base, scapegoating and accusing each other of treachery (a la Mao’s “Gang of Four”). And he predicts “historical rewrites that would make a Soviet propagandist blush.”

Bottom line: MAGA won’t disappear when Trump does.

The energy that once ran vertically, from base to Leader, will start to run horizontally, between camps and claimants. That is where movements get creative, and reckless, and violent.

You really need to click through and read the whole essay.

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An Immoral Slum Of An Administration

I’ve posted several times about the misuse of political labels and the unfortunate effects of that language misuse. It is especially misleading to call MAGA and Trump “conservative.” They are the antithesis of genuine conservatism, and the ranks of the Never Trumpers are filled with pundits and political figures who are conservative, just not neo-Nazis.

If you need any confirmation of that assertion, read this recent column by George Will.

I almost never find myself in agreement with Will. I not only disagree with a majority of his policy prescriptions, I’m put off by the arrogance and pomposity of much of his writing. That said, when a Republican administration has lost George Will, they’ve lost any connection to intellectually respectable conservatism.

Will doesn’t pull any punches. His first sentence is: ” Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” And he proceeds from there. After repeating the facts that have emerged, he writes that “the killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.”

Will then turns to the “peace” proposal that Trump demanded Ukraine accept, noting Rubio’s initial confession that the proposal had been delivered to an American official by Russia–and that he told members of the Senate that the proposal didn’t represent America’s peace plan. Mere hours later, he reversed himself, taking to social media to assert that the United States had “authored” the plan.

Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are indeed at risk.”

Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight. This probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!” Americans are the deceived.

If there was any doubt of the accuracy of Will’s analysis, publication of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) should confirm it. As Heather Cox Richardson has written, it represents a dramatic retreat from the foreign policy goals the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

After a brief introduction touting what it claims are the administration’s great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II Allies put in place after that war to prevent another world war. The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined “the character of our nation.”

And the document makes it very clear what this administration believes is the true “character of our nation.”

Their vision of “our country’s inherent greatness and decency,” requires “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” “an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age,” and “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”

Observers referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and “fourteen words” to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan…

The document is a White supremacist manifesto. It rejects immigration, denounces “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies” that it claims have harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and operated to subsidize our adversaries. It further distances the U.S. from NATO.

The upshot is that the document “reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia.” It characterizes Europe’s current course as one leading to “civilizational erasure” and calls for reassertion of “Western identity,” (by which it clearly means White.)

It may be the most shameful document produced by this “Immoral slum” of an administration.

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Bring Me A Pitchfork

A recent, lengthy screed from Lincoln Square argued that voters in 2024 had “signed up for the myth of the businessman president,” an assertion with which I take issue. I do, however, agree with the ensuing observation that what those voters got was the guy who “bankrupted casinos and decided the solution for a hurting country was to blow up the economy for a jacked-up economic theory from the 17th century, build a ballroom, and hide the books.”

I also agree that Trump’s economic incompetence is enraging voters, and that “None of the culture war crap, the performative yelping about the Deep State, the liberal media, or whatever else tickles MAGA Twitter’s happy place” will save Republicans in 2026, when they will encounter “the oldest rule in politics and business: eventually, the mark realizes he has been conned.”

And when that happens, it is not just the con man who pays the price. It is everyone foolish enough to stand next to him when the lights come up, and the check arrives.

Trump is too old to pay that bill…and doesn’t pay his bills in any case.

But the MAGA GOP sure as hell will. That sound they hear in the distance is a mob, hungry and furious, approaching their palace.

With pitchforks…

I am increasingly convinced that the author is correct about voters’ current fury, but I am equally confident that Trump’s narrow victory in 2024 was not founded on his economic promises. Political science research overwhelmingly points to a different–and very depressing–reason people voted for Trump: racism.

Adam Serwer addressed that racism in the Atlantic, in an article titled “Why Doesn’t Trump Pay a Political Price for His Racism?” The article was triggered by Trump’s publicized rant, during a Cabinet meeting, calling Somali immigrants “garbage” that we don’t want in our country. Serwer noted that no one in the Cabinet reacted negatively to this latest expression of gutter racism, and worse, that “Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table.”

This expression of animus toward all Somali immigrants came in response to the shooting of two National Guard officers by a Somali, and a fraudulent episode involving some Somalis living in Minneapolis. Rather than decrying the criminal actions of those individuals, Trump reacted with his usual racist stereotyping.

Serwer points to the obvious: we don’t hold White Americans as a whole responsible for Trump’s dismantling of the federal  capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, for his “doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering.” Most Americans don’t look at Donald Trump or the collection of clowns and grifters with whom he’s surrounded himself and conclude that their behaviors are due to something inherent in White culture. We simply–accurately–see them as reprehensible individuals.

Watching Trump’s repeated attacks on Somalians—the latest group of Black immigrants to be targeted by the president—I can’t avoid the conclusion that the government of the United States of America is in the hands of people who believe that they can apply a genetic hierarchy to humanity, and that American laws and customs should recognize and serve that hierarchy…

The logic of this racism is relatively simple—the individual bears the guilt of the whole, and the whole bears the imprint of some alleged crime that deserves collective punishment. Blaming the egregious behavior of men such as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on their German or Norwegian backgrounds would sound comical to the same people who treat the president vomiting out similar generalizations about Somalis as sound observation.

This reaction is consistent with Trump’s constant Hitler-like accusation that immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. As Serwer concludes, the fact that he’s paid virtually no electoral price for his very overt racism says something shameful about today’s America.

The U.S. abolished immigration restrictions based on nationality in 1965, recognizing that such restrictions were inconsistent with who we purport to be as a country. Until that change, promising scientists from Asia would be rejected in favor of illiterate farmers from Germany, because immigration laws considered race, national origin and culture to be immutable traits inherent in the populations of entire countries. Accordingly, entire (usually non-White) nationalities were deemed unfit for American citizenship.

Trump wants these racist (and ridiculous) assumptions to once again govern U.S. immigration policy, and his MAGA voters enthusiastically agree.

I’m ready to buy my pitchfork and march on the castle. Metaphorically speaking, of course…

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War On Drugs? Give Me A Break!

Will the administration’s obvious war crimes finally motivate Congressional pushback? We can only hope.

As I write this, the media is filled with stories about the attacks on fishing boats ordered by Trump and Hegseth, and evidence of their illegality. Trump has been ordering these vessels blown out of the water, and Hegseth has reportedly ordered survivors murdered, in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war.

These actions are being investigated by Congress, and we can only hope that partisanship will not distort that investigation, because the purported reason for these attacks is patently phony. 

Trump insists that the attacks are efforts to stop drug trafficking–that the boats that have been blown out of the water aren’t really fishing vessels. Of course, as is typical for this administration, the boats have been attacked and their occupants killed with absolutely no evidence offered or due process occuring. We’re supposed to take Trump’s word for it (despite ample evidence that when Trump’s lips are moving, he’s lying.)

What makes these allegations even more suspect than other Trump lies is the enormous hypocrisy of Trump’s claim to be against the importation of drugs. As Charlie Sykes–among others–has pointed out, his attacks on these fishing boats and his threats to invade Venezuela come at the same time as his pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, a Honduran ex-president convicted of cocaine trafficking who has boasted about stuffing drugs “up the gringos’ noses.”

The American public is evidently supposed to believe that Trump blew up fishing boats and is threatening  a military campaign in an effort to deter drug trafficking–at the same time he is ordering the release of a man convicted of taking “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels–a man convicted of using the full power and strength of his state — military, police and justice system–to protect drug traffickers, a man who–as prosecutors convincingly demonstrated– allowed “bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.”

As Sykes summed it up:

  • Trump declares war on drug kingpins.
  • Trump’s uses the war on drugs as the justification for extrajudicial murders on the high seas; and calls for the execution of six Democratic members of Congress who tell members of the military they do not need to follow illegal orders.
  • As part of Trump’s war against drug kingpins, SecDef Pete Hegseth orders Seal Team 6 to “kill everybody,” including unarmed survivors.
  • We are inching toward the invasion of Venezuela, because its president is allegedly a drug kingpin.
  • Trump pardons notorious drug kingpin.

Paul Krugman also addressed the obvious hypocrisy,

At first glance, the juxtaposition seems bizarre – Trump is either murdering or committing war crimes against people who are at worst small-time drug smugglers, and may be innocent fishermen, while pardoning a drug lord who was responsible for thousands of American deaths while savaging his own country, Honduras. But there is a pattern to this murderous madness, once one connects the dots between Trump’s mob-boss persona and the billionaire crypto/tech broligarchy.

According to Krugman, Trump’s vendetta against purported penny-ante drug smugglers is intended to set the stage for an invasion of Venezuela. And he reminds us that Trump “positively revels in his association with big-time criminals, whether it’s Putin or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman” or Ross Ulbricht, whose underground e-marketplace is known for drug trafficking, and whom Trump pardoned immediately after assuming office.

Still, why would Trump, whose poll numbers are cratering, generate even more negative headlines by pardoning Hernández, who was duly convicted of conspiring to send more than 400 tons (!) of cocaine to America?

The answer is the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy. In fact, many of Trump’s pardons of the most egregious criminals are closely linked to their influence.

Krugman points out that Peter Thiel was a supporter of Ulbrict and that the ex-president of Honduras is also connected to  the titans of crypto-currency. Those ‘crypto-bros” were also behind Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, formerly the CEO of  cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao pled guilty to charges of violating U.S. laws against money-laundering and was personally fined $50 million, in addition to Binance’s fine of $4.3 billion.

The revelations of wrongdoing go on. And on.

In one of the recently disclosed emails from Jeffrey Epstein, the predator wrote “I have met some very bad people … none as bad as Trump.” In several others, he referred to Trump as insane–and a danger to America.

Believe the predator. 

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