The nihilism of the regime is its most terrifying attribute.
With most of the Trump Show — which began in 2015 — now in the rearview mirror, and his mind and body rapidly decaying before our eyes, one might think Trump would be thinking about the “legacy” he will be leaving behind in a few years.
Other presidents have been consumed with the idea of
building institutions that survive their presidency — such as Wilson’s League
of Nations, FDR’s New Deal, and LBJ’s Great Society — but Trump’s singular
focus has been on tearing down the government, even as he sucks the nation dry
with his corruption.
And while Trump rushes to place his name on monuments
throughout DC before he leaves office, he’s given every indication he’s fine
leaving behind a trail of utter and complete destruction.
In short, Donald J. Trump is a nihilist.
Over the past 13 months, Trump has waged a multi-front war
on the United States. The kinetic part of that war, consisting of literal
invasions of American cities, is the most open and notorious element of that
assault. But the scope of it is far broader and includes schemes to make
children more malnourished and sick, Americans far more insecure, and the
American economy systemically weakened while our place in the world is
diminished.
The war within
In each case, under the pretense of apprehending what
Trumpers talismanically describe as the “worst of the worst,” phalanxes of
masked, pot-bellied militiamen bearing assault rifles and chemical weapons have
invaded what they perceive as “enemy territory.” It’s now clear that disruption
and the creation of an atmosphere of fear and disorder is not merely a
byproduct of these massive invasions, but their purpose.
In cities invaded by DHS agents, the lifeblood of society is
being drained in the wholly pretensive name of ridding the nation of criminal
undocumented immigrants. Children are now afraid to attend school because their
classmates have been kidnapped. Restaurants are shuttering because employees
are afraid to leave their homes.
Furthermore, while Trump and his cronies make vague promises
of deescalation, DHS has been spending upwards of $1 billion to acquire a
network of warehouses for the purpose of storing thousands upon thousands of
new captives across the nation, thus indicating that the scope and frequency of
the invasions will increase.
Trump’s assault on the nation’s municipalities is part and
parcel of a set of economic “policies” that, in part by design and in part as a
result of sheer recklessness, are undermining the foundations of America’s
economic success.
This week, Trump’s “economic” advisor Peter Navarro
celebrated one of the starkest negative impacts of the regime’s full-bore
assault on immigration. Trumpers’ mass deportation campaign has been calculated
to induce immigrants who escape the dragnet to withdraw from the workforce, and
in many cases leave the country, out of fear. This will inevitably lead to a
medium- and long-term loss of productivity in an economy that has long relied
on younger, immigrant workers to grow at rates that other Western countries
have envied.
But for Navarro, the inevitable damage to the economy due to
the loss of productive immigrant workers is a good thing, because Americans
should be willing to sacrifice prosperity in the cause of expelling the
foreign-born. As Paul Krugman put
it, “it’s not about jobs, it’s about: They want fewer brown people in
America.”
This celebration of destruction and decay epitomizes the
regime’s nihilism.
Trump’s tariffs reflect a similar impulse to assault the nation’s economy in order to “save” it. His trade “policies,” which have increasingly been guided by the gyrations of his demented and angry mind, are no longer even putatively connected to the economic interests of the US. They’ve created chaos, especially in the domestic manufacturing sector Trump claims to want to promote, and they’ve particularly hurt smaller firms that are unable to economically procure materials from abroad.
US manufacturing employment has been in a dramatic slide
since last spring,
when Trump announced the first set of his “Liberation Day” tariffs. As of
January, the nation had already lost over
100,000 manufacturing jobs, with every indication the slide will
continue.
Corruption and the assault on the rule of law
Trump entered office months after a Supreme Court ruling
that effectively granted him judicial license to engage in wholesale corruption
while in office. Since returning to the White House, he’s made maximum use of
it, selling off government favors to the highest bidders. Informed guesstimates
of the profits the Trump family has already derived from these open and
notorious corruption schemes run well into the multiple billions.
In addition to the unprecedented corruption of his
cryptocurrency schemes, the president has harmed the national security
of the United States by seeking to sell sophisticated weaponry to dictatorships
who could well end up using them against allies.
Trump has also opened what amounts to a pardon bazaar in
which criminals or their associates can buy themselves out of crimes. By way of
example, the most recent pardon purchasers include the former dictator of
Honduras, who was a kingpin in the South American drug markets that Trump
claims to be targeting, and the daughter of a Trump contributor who just
received her second pardon from him.
Because of Trump’s now open and notorious nihilism, his
regime no longer even sees the need to offer false justifications for his sale
of government favors. His corrupt dealings now include the selling of his
blessing for the mergers and acquisitions of major companies, and the
auctioning off of other regulatory (and deregulatory) favors to those with the
deepest pockets, such as crypto speculators.
Trump’s singular focus on accumulating personal wealth is as
utterly irrational as his assaults on the nation’s cities. A man of his age
and rapidly
deteriorating health and mind could not even hope to spend a fraction
of the billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains he is rapidly accumulating. But,
in his egoism, Trump exhibits an overarching desire to squeeze the nation dry,
including by converting as much of America’s wealth to himself regardless of
the consequences. What Trump can’t take with him, he would just as soon ruin.
Like his erratic tariffs, Trump’s ostentatious
transformation of the US economy into an instrument for corruption will drive
out investment from within and abroad, to the benefit of the economies of
countries Trump has demonized — including those of our now former Western
allies, where investors see far fewer corruption-related risks.
The assault on Americans’ health
The regime’s assault on the nation’s health is one of its
pernicious aspects. Trump has effectively handed over the nation’s public
health and medical science infrastructure to be gutted and repurposed as a
vector for transmitting disinformation and increasing the prevalence of
preventable disease, even as the availability of healthcare for the most
vulnerable among us is ever more greatly constrained.
With Health and Human Service Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
having free rein to turn junk science into federal policy, a nation which was
among the first in the world to virtually eliminate a host of previously fatal
and crippling childhood and adult diseases — including measles, tuberculosis,
whooping cough and polio — is being degraded into a hothouse for the
transmission of them, particularly among the young and otherwise vulnerable. At
the same time, the Trumped GOP has succeeded in beginning the process of
crippling the greatest public policy success of the last several decades, the
Affordable Care Act’s expansion of health coverage.
The assault on the ACA has been accompanied by a GOP scheme
to pay for tax cuts by massively cutting the scope of Medicaid coverage for the
poor. In a telling moment, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst defended her party’s
priorities by pointing out that “we are all going to die.”
Trump Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who’s
responsible for overseeing SNAP, the primary federal program for preventing
childhood malnutrition, has instead taken on the role of threatening to starve
poor children to gain political advantage. With Trump’s encouragement, she went
to court to attempt to cut off food to desperate children and has recently
taken to threatening to deny essential nutrition to children who happen to live
in blue states under the guise of “fraud prevention.”
The consequences of Trumpers’ assault on the health and
wellbeing of millions of Americans will inevitably be gravely negative, not
only for the direct victims of these sadistic “policies,” but also for the
future of the entire country, which will have a sicker population for years to
come.
The Putin model
Since January 2025, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s
destruction of Ukraine and of Russia itself has increasingly appeared to offer
a chilling preview of where the Trump regime might take the United States.
We are all familiar with the cover Trump has provided for
Putin’s war of terror and mass destruction against its neighbor, and the fact
that Trump’s putative pursuit of “peace” has provided Putin with license to
expand his war against the civilians of Ukraine, which is currently focused on
freezing them to death. Trump’s year of “peace” talks, during which he has
pressured only the Ukrainians, has been one of the deadliest for Ukrainian
civilians since Putin began his full-scale invasion in 2022.
But what may be most darkly relevant to Trump’s nihilistic
ambitions is Putin’s heedless destruction of his own country in pursuit of a
pointless war that has gutted Russia’s prospects for the future.
Putin’s war has resulted in the mass slaughter of Russian
soldiers, who are treated as animals being sent into meat grinder battles;
since 2022, Russia has incurred nearly 1.2
million casualties. The war has also destroyed much of the Russian economy
and will threaten its social cohesion for years to come. Even if Russia emerges
from Putin’s war of conquest with a claim to “victory,” it is all but certain
to be a hollow one.
In the face of Putin dragging Russia into what amounts to
national suicide, one might expect Trump to lose his longstanding admiration
for the blood-soaked dictator — but the opposite is true. Trump makes little
effort to hide his admiration for Putin’s demonstration of “strength” through
national destruction. He even placed a photograph of himself smiling next to
the mass murderer in a place of prominence in
the White House.
Trump plainly admires Putin precisely because the dictator
has obtained such complete and total control of Russia that its population
cannot effectively protest his destruction of the country. Trump’s adulation,
even jealousy, of Putin could hardly offer a starker warning of just how far he
may be willing to go, and how much more damage he may be willing to impose on
our nation, to maintain his own grip on power, particularly if — as seems
likely — that grip begins to flag.
While Americans should welcome Trump’s rapidly increasing
unpopularity and must do everything they can to constrain him, including by
going to the polls to vote against his GOP stooges, realism requires a
recognition that Trump is not just likely, but all but certain, to take every
possible step to cling to power — even if he brings the country down with
himself.
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