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.
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