Politics
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January 31, 2025
This is what it is like to live through a revolution.
Members of the far-right militia group Patriot Front participate in the 2025 March for Life in Washington, DC, on January 24, 2025.
(Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP)
There are certain basic things an administration is supposed to do in a constitutional democracy: abide by the rule of law, not physically endanger its political opponents, fund government services, employ civil servants for their skills rather than their sycophantic willingness to swear loyalty to the leader, preserve international peace to the best of their ability, abide by treaty obligations, and take note of constitutional limits—even if those limits slow down an administration’s ability to implement its agenda. Less specifically, in terms of the tone set, it’s generally a good thing for an administration to avoid coming off in front of the whole world as callous to the point of being bloodthirsty.
By every measure, Trump’s first 10 days have shattered these norms: from the wholesale pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists to the firing of the prosecutors who investigated Trump’s myriad crimes; from the removal of Secret Service protection for Anthony Fauci, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and others he has deemed his enemies to the cessation of virtually all foreign aid; from the defunding of refugee services for those already in the country to the halting of entry for thousands of refugees ready to come into the country; from the now-rescinded order illegally freezing the disbursement of government grants that don’t comport to Trump’s ideological agenda to the entirely unconstitutional executive order ending birthright citizenship—right down to Trump’s dismal blame-DEI response to the tragic air disaster in DC, this is a full-on assault on the very notions of civility, decency, and the rule of law.
Hour by hour since January 20, the structures of the constitutional democracy have been corroded. As this calamity unfolds, the GOP in Congress is either silent or cheerleading, and the demoralized Democrats, heads down to avoid political shrapnel, are at best making milquetoast objections. This is what it is like to live through a revolution.
However improbable it might have seemed even a couple years ago, MAGA is now showing the political skills and ruthlessness to create a regime transformative, in the most grotesque way imaginable, of the most fundamental of US values.
One way to think of this is that Trump’s federal government is seceding from the American experiment. That experiment, if it lives on, will live on at the state and local levels, in the dreams and aspirations of ordinary, hard-working, kind, and generous people trying to navigate this swinish moment. But, for now at least, the federal government is AWOL from anything resembling the American Dream.
Some of the actions this past week, mainly involving poor and vulnerable people overseas, or poor and vulnerable people from overseas who have made it into the United States, are particularly gratuitous even by the sadistic standards of these made-men, kiss-the-ring stooges.
First, there’s the halting of the distribution of HIV/AIDS drugs to patients in poor countries. This one literally makes no sense other than as an act of wanton sadism: The drugs have already been paid for; the infrastructure to distribute them is already in place; the patients’ appointments with the clinics have already been scheduled. But as of midweek, foreign aid workers were entirely forbidden from distributing these life-saving medicines to patients in some of the poorest countries on Earth. Although this act was, under withering criticism, later reversed, the damage was already done: Many of the aid workers had been fired and the systems for distributing the drugs were eviscerated.
The provision of TB and malaria treatments was also pulled. This, too, is entirely destructive from a global public health perspective, and it’s entirely murderous in terms of its impact on patients. Quite literally, without these treatments over the coming years, millions of people will die. For doctors working in the field, there’s no way to square this monstrous order with the Hippocratic Oath. But that was already true, say, for American doctors in states with extreme abortion bans in the post-Roe world, having to wait for their pregnant patients to get close to death before they were able to treat them. The cruelty is the point—it’s a measure of absolute dominance and control—when it comes to acts like this.
Then there’s the cessation of funding for mine-clearing operations in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. A half century after one of America’s most unjustified and bloody of wars ended, a whole new generation of war victims is likely to be created as mines are left in the ground. To be entirely clear: When young children lose limbs to these mines, the fault will lie with the American government—and, by extension, with the American voting public that, eyes wide open, has given its imprimatur to this agenda.
Talking of US wars, thousands of refugees, already vetted and with travel booked, were summarily denied entry last week as the US abruptly closed its refugee programs. Many thousands of these men, women, and children are from Afghanistan—people who put their lives on the line to help the US in the post-9/11 years and who are now being locked out of the country that had promised them safe harbor. The word “shameful” doesn’t even begin to capture the immorality of this action.
Trump, Stephen Miller, and the other Third Reich–styled protectors of the Fatherland view refugees as vermin. In fact, as anyone who has ever bothered to spend time talking with and learning about refugees knows, they include many of the best, the brightest, the most courageous, and the most moral from around the world. Countries that admit refugees aren’t simply doling out charity and mercy—though those are fine things in and of themselves—but they’re also opening their doors to a vast pool of talent and human potential. Think of all the scientists and artists, the businessmen and writers, the musicians and the inventors, who in escaping the Nazis or the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communists or the Taliban or any number of ravaged countries, have made America their home over the past 90 years. Ending the refugee program isn’t just vastly selfish; it’s also extraordinarily shortsighted.
So, too, is the idea of barring refugee resettlement agencies from funding any services for refugees recently arrived in the United States. Again, under what mad vision does it make sense to deprive newly settled refugees of access to rental assistance, help with navigating the healthcare and school systems, ESL classes, mental health services to deal with the traumas they experienced in war, and so on? Unless you quite simply view these people as the enemy, as the front line of some mythical Great Replacement occupying force, why would you set up to fail and to fall into homelessness people who have already undergone unfathomable trauma?
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But that’s the rub. Trump is putting into positions of vast power white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and fascist sympathizers who do indeed regard outsiders as, definitionally, the enemy, and who don’t really distinguish between asylees or refugees and the “dangerous criminals” they repeatedly demonize in their anti-immigrant tirades. For them, the spectacle of cruelty, be it the televised ICE raids in immigrant neighborhoods of New York or Chicago, or the denial of rental assistance to refugees, or the blocking of the distribution of life-saving medicines, is precisely the point: If, since World War II, America has been a proud home to millions of refugees, and a proud disperser of aid to countries around the world, today they want it to be a foreboding place that bars entry to new refugees, humiliates existing refugees, and makes it clear that the rest of the world somehow “owes” America and that that debt will be repaid if not in money then in lives lost as American aid disappears.
After all, Trump is promising trillions of dollars in tax cuts to America’s wealthiest individuals and corporations; that money will have to be found somewhere, so, in the Trumpian imagination, why not start by stiffing some of the world’s most vulnerable human beings?
It’s the same impulse to cruelty that has resulted in undocumented immigrants being swept up, put onto military transports, their hands and feet shackled as if they were terrorism suspects being removed to Guantánamo Bay, and forbidden even to use the toilet or drink water, during long flights to countries around Latin America. It’s the same vile world view that led Gauleiter Trump to declare he would send 30,000 immigrants to what can only be thought of as a concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay.
And it’s the same will-to-dominate that led America’s 47th president to threaten Colombia, and its population, with economic ruin for daring to deny landing rights to the above-mentioned military transports.
Trump is a man who believes he has a God-given right to break whatever he wants to break and to harm whomever he wants to harm. And, as shown by the past 10 days, he is now in the process of making such sociopathic impulses official American policy.
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