Trump and his enablers have launched an unprecedented assault on American society and values.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk looks on before US President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 11, 2025.
(Jim Watson / AFP)
In 2017, I penned a column for The Sacramento Bee borrowing a phrase from Emile Zola. “J’accuse,” I wrote of Trump 1.0, and then proceeded to list the myriad ways that Trump and his lickspittle cohort were making the country more grubby, more enmeshed in his sordid actions, by the day.
In Trump 2.0, it’s looking more like a reality-TV version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Government worker purges have dominated this first month on a scale and at a pace that outstrips those that occurred even at the height of McCarthyism. We’ve also witnessed a politicization of the justice and security systems; the creation of an Elon Musk–led shadow government, coupled with DOGE’s unlawful power grab; an assault against both the concepts of, and the language behind, diversity, equity, and inclusion, a weaponization process that increasingly looks like it’s intended to reimagine the federal government as the heterosexual white man’s preserve; and the nomination—and confirmation—of a who’s who of grifters and extremists to Trump’s cabinet.
Every day, there’s another Onion headline that turns out to be real news. There is Trump ordering that the Justice Department disband its anti-corruption units and no longer enforce the Federal Corrupt Practices Act; and there is the headline about Trump announcing that he is making himself chair of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—and then, in a truly Stalinesque moment, getting the newly constituted board of directors to unanimously vote him into the position. There is Trump not only pardoning 1,500 violent January 6 insurrectionists but then having his DOJ fire the people involved in investigating that day and then scrubbing its records about January 6 without informing the National Archives. I haven’t even gotten to his defiance of international law: It’s now US policy to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its 2 million residents in order to turn it into an upscale resort and office park, and to close the United States to all refugees except white South Africans.
With the heirs of the John Birch Society and its conspiracy-mongering theorists taking over the US government and seizing their moment to stamp a foul, irrationalist, authoritarian image on American society, what is the apt phrase to describe it? Is it treason? Not in a classical sense, since the plurality of voters who elected Trump were in essence endorsing his vision for the country. Is it profoundly un-American? Absolutely. It flies in the face, and spits in the eyes, of the untold millions who, cumulatively, have created the American story over the centuries. It takes the clay of possibility and with an iron fist molds it into something truly brutalist and exclusionary.
With Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures either supine in the face of MAGA’s takeover of the party or fully on board with that takeover, and with Democrats paralyzed by fear and indecision in the wake of Kamala Harris’s electoral loss, no one in the upper echelons of US politics is crafting a coherent message about exactly what is happening in the shock-and-awe opening act of this lawless presidency.
It’s a profoundly un-American moment.
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While Congress fiddles, Trump, Musk, Vance, and their congressional enablers are doing what generations of terrorists have failed to do, what the Soviet Union failed to do, what the Japanese, Italian, and German armies in World War II failed to do. Draped in red, white, and blue, and ostensibly espousing an America First nationalism, they are knocking down not only buildings but the very pillars of US government and civil society, and empowering not ordinary Joes but centi-billionaire oligarchs. On a scale that would make the participants in President Warren Harding’s Teapot Dome Scandal blush, they are opening up the entire country to corruption and kleptocracy by dismantling anti-corruption units, firing government inspectors general, getting rid of ethics ombudsmen, and embracing an explicit quid pro quo foreign policy. Trump’s mobster-like shakedown operation now includes telling Ukraine that if it wants continued US support to defend itself against Russia’s invasion of the country, it will need to give the US access to its rare-earth minerals.
Meanwhile, Musk, the world’s richest man, has been accumulating huge amounts of additional wealth since the November election. In late December, Barron’s reported that Musk’s worth had increased by more than 80 percent in the past three months. Now, installed as Trump’s enforcer and operating as arguably the most powerful man on earth, the business tycoon is stating that he will self-police to ensure that he won’t be committing ethics violations while on his DOGE mission. So if Musk doesn’t think he’s running afoul of the law, then, apparently, he isn’t. Who knew that was how things worked? Moreover, Musk’s financial disclosures will not be made public. Not surprisingly, ethics scholars aren’t impressed.
DOGE hacker-squads under Elon Musk’s exclusive control are accessing the most sensitive financial details of organizations, of businesses (including Musk’s rivals), and of private citizens. They are breaking down, or putting into deep freeze, entire government agencies and eviscerating government employment with no hearings, no congressional or public input, no respect for the consultation periods codified by law, and no consideration of the damage that is all but certain if vital public service agencies end up being understaffed to the point that they cannot maintain services or safety. The end result will be that tens of thousands of government workers accept buyouts, and tens-to-hundreds of thousands more are likely going to be fired. Musk argues that one can simply “delete” government agencies and programs that he, as sole arbiter, deems to be wasteful, rife with fraud, or politically ill-fitting with the Trump-Musk agenda, and that government departments and spending decisions should be put under the watch of what are essentially political commissars.
Methodologically, all of this resembles the sort of hostile takeover of government function that occurred in Iraq when US-led forces attempted to de-Ba’athify the country, or when Lenin’s Bolsheviks took over Russia and bent it to the will of a Marxist revolutionary agenda, or when Hitler’s forces won election in, and then proceeded to dismantle, the Weimar Republic. It also looks not too dissimilar to a high-tech, at-speed version of the forced structural readjustment programs that the West has routinely imposed, to devasting effect, on one debt-ridden less-developed country after another over the past half century. MAGA voters don’t realize it yet, but they are as at risk of losing basic social protections as is anyone else in this unfolding, profoundly un-American moment.
The list goes on and on, each mad act making the United States that much weaker or that much more vulnerable to harm.
You don’t have to be a Middle East expert to realize that if Trump does, indeed, follow through on “taking” Gaza and forcing 2 million residents out into the deserts of Egypt and Sinai, he will not only make the US an international pariah but also turn the country, and Americans in general, into magnets for every fanatical terrorist group on earth. How is that conceivably good for American interests?
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If Trump really does put the squeeze on Denmark to cede Greenland, or on Canada to become the 51st state, he will be engaged in hostile acts against fellow NATO members—not that that seems to concern him, as his disregard for NATO in his impromptu negotiations with Putin to end the war in Ukraine and, it seems, carve up the world into spheres of influence, makes abundantly clear.
Meanwhile, in the stampede to impose tariffs on allies and foes alike, in unilaterally scrapping international trade agreements painstakingly negotiated over years, Trump is showing the US to be at best a fickle partner and at worst a presumed enemy.
In eviscerating USAID, Trump has created an international soft-power vacuum that China and other rising powers will be only too happy to fill, further weakening America’s global position.
In using the Federal Communications Commission to pressure broadcasters to toe the party line, and in withholding White House press access from the AP for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Trump-declared “Gulf of America,” the White House is making a vast play to weaken the First Amendment. We like to think that free speech is as American as apple pie. Turns out, those in power don’t like apple pie.
In attempting to massively curtail government funding of vital scientific research—a move temporarily put on hold by the courts—the administration is, in the interests of appealing to its anti-expertise base, sacrificing the country’s preeminent role in medical and other critical scientific research. Again, in the long run, that’s music to the ears of China, Russia, and every other power that hopes to one day be the world’s next global behemoth.
In neutering public health agencies and imposing gag orders on what the CDC and NIH can and cannot discuss, the administration is making it more likely that old diseases will run rampant and that new ones won’t be detected in time to stop their spread.
In demonizing transgender Americans, immigrants, and other groups deemed “enemies of the people,” the administration is attacking America’s greatest strength—its diversity—and its willingness to continually reinvent itself. Rolling back decades of progress that have extended the definitions of who is “American” and who merits inclusion in the American story won’t make the country stronger again, but it will certainly make it crueler.
Taken as a whole, this is an unprecedented assault on American society and values, one intended to blow up the country’s alliances and its civil fabric, one contemptuous of the political processes of democracy, and all too likely in the end to corrode its economic foundations and to replace constitutional governance with imperial rule.
This past month hasn’t been the normal rough and tumble of democratic politics. Nor has it been merely a reset, kept copiously within constitutional limits, of government priorities. Via executive diktat, we are seeing a plundering of the American dream.
All told, it is a profoundly, monstrously, grotesquely un-American moment.
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