Another week in Trump 2.0, another litany of ghastly policies and clearly illegal actions. So much choice in this feast of obscenities.

I could write about Elon Musk’s DOGE (which, in my mind’s eye, I keep translating as SLORC, the Orwellian-named State Law and Order Restoration Council that ruled Burma as a junta for decades) and how it is rampaging through the federal government. It is shattering institutions and, in monkeying around with funding streams even after the federal spending freeze was supposedly lifted, it is destroying carefully built-up community infrastructure, reliant on the steady flow of federal cash, for everything from transporting elderly people to dialysis appointments to training disabled people for work at local companies.

An administration that even pretended to give a good-goddamn for older Americans wouldn’t be so cavalier about whether the services they depend on were funded. But this gangster-government can’t even be bothered to gin up the crocodile tears. As Melania Trump’s jacket logo stated back in Trump 1.0, after the story of immigrant children being kept in cages along the border broke, “I really don’t care. Do u?” I guess that’s on a par with hubby-Don’s grotesque response, when asked if he would visit the crash site where an American Airlines plane recently went down in the Potomac River after a deadly collision with an Army helicopter: “The water? You want me to go swimming?”

I could describe Donald Trump’s approach to foreign affairs as combining elements of the Third Reich fantasy of a permanently dominant country presiding over a willingly prone world along with a protection racket. It is a mafia vision that threatens to wreck economies and displace populations unless overseas governments deliver the goods—rare minerals, oil, uranium, lithium, and so on—to Trump and his acolytes. And it is a smash-and-grab operation that works on the premise that entire countries and territories, like the Gaza Strip, exist simply to provide wealth for American corporate raiders.

I could focus on the brewing legal battles over everything from birthright citizenship to protections for federal workers and transgender military service members.

I could write about how it’s generally a bad idea to fire, or offer to buy out, thousands of highly trained law enforcement and security personnel, as the Musk-Trump administration has done this week, both at the FBI and the CIA. After all, you never know when you might need all of this expertise. And, as happened when the Soviet Union imploded and a whole bunch of skilled government employees ended up out of work and without a steady salary, people with marketable skills like these tend to be snapped up by bad players—mercenary organizations, cartels, arms and drugs and people smugglers, terrorist networks—willing to cough up cash for their knowledge. It’s a scenario that never ends well.

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February 2025 Issue

I could write about the idiocy of wrecking government to the extent that vast swathes of the population become something akin to reluctant doomsday preppers, scrabbling just to survive in a nasty and brutish environment in which the federal programs of the New Deal, the Great Society, and more recent expansions of the safety net are being shredded, or at the very least DOGE-targeted, at warp-speed.

But none of that’s the ultimate focus of this week’s column. Instead, I want to highlight the relentless efforts to dehumanize one group after another: immigrants, transgender Americans, DEI workers, Palestinians and their supporters, climate scientists, public health workers, and so on. The sadism is, quite simply, hiding in plain sight. It is also breathtaking. If I were a painting these days, I would be Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Let’s start with government officials, who have been demonized by Elon Musk, the world’s richest, and apparently also the most powerful, man as “criminal,” as people to be ridiculed and browbeaten, and, ultimately, hounded out of their jobs and benefits packages. There may be no viler sign of this regime’s contempt for decent, trying-to-do-good people than the way in which Musk and Trump have bulldozed USAID and its humanitarian aid workforce into non-existence over the past two weeks. To go after people who have spent careers distributing life-saving medicines and building up infrastructure in the most economically disadvantaged countries on earth, and to gloat about eradicating their jobs ought to be enough to qualify the Nazi-saluting megalomaniac for the lowest circle in Dante’s hell. So, too, should the cavalier way in which Musk and his tech bros are going through government spending files and simply “deleting” those expenditures that they don’t like, regardless of the fact that that money has already been lawfully appropriated and that DOGE has absolutely no constitutional power to ransack federal funds, let alone to access classified information and personal data on millions of Americans.

It’s truly egregious, but it’s hardly alone. Consider the vicious policies and enforcement strategies being unleashed since January 20. Last week, Trump promised that he would send 30,000 immigrants convicted of crimes to Guantanamo Bay. When I ran that notion by Holly Cooper, a top immigration attorney who was involved in numerous class action lawsuits against Trump 1.0, she scoffed and dismissed it as little more than shock-and-awe theater. It takes years to build camps on that sort of scale, she explained; there are no commercial flights in and out of Guantanamo, there’s no infrastructure for the staff that would be needed to police 30,000 inmates, and no infrastructure for those 30,000 inmates. To provide constitutionally mandated levels of care, of food, of housing, and so on would, she said, be prohibitively expensive. “I think it’s going to take two-to-three years at least, and that’s assuming you use tents,” Cooper stated.

A few days later, the first military transport plane carrying 10 migrants left El Paso and headed for Guantanamo Bay. Defense Secretary and Trump loyalist Pete Hegseth promised to ramp up preparations for a tent city, and soon DoD planners were saying the entire facility could be up and running within weeks.

Build a prison camp for 30,000 people that fast, and conditions are almost guaranteed to be primitive, violent, chaotic, cruel. But, of course, that’s exactly the point. It’s to send a message to immigrants that they don’t count as individuals—that their communities, their proximity to loved ones, their ability to contact lawyers, their jobs and lives and homes don’t matter. It’s about sending a message that, if you dare to come to the US fleeing poverty and violence, and you have the misfortune to be caught, you will be treated as Al Qaeda terrorism suspects were treated. Your rights will be as easily trampled as were those hundreds of suspects held for two decades, out of sight out of mind, without trial at Guantanamo after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

It’s that same impulse that led the administration to negotiate a deal with its current favorite authoritarian, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, that would allow it to send undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions, not just from El Salvador but from any country, to be housed alongside convicted gang members in that country’s notorious super-max prisons. Even more astoundingly Bukele said he would be willing to imprison there US citizens convicted of violent crimes, and Trump gleefully declared that, if he could, he would “in a heartbeat” deport US criminals to El Salvador.

As if that weren’t enough, GOP legislators in red states are racing to match Trump’s theater-of-the-grotesque, anti-immigrant federal actions. In Missouri and Mississippi, for example, GOP legislators are pushing bills that would empower bounty hunters to go hunting for undocumented immigrants, and that would reward those who give tips about where to find immigrants with $1,000. It’s legislation right out of the anti-abortion playbook. In Texas, months before the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion, legislators passed an abortion bounty law that awards $10,000 to civilians who are successful in suing private citizens for performing or aiding a patient in breaking the state’s near-total abortion ban. Suffice it to say, the United States has a long history of suppressing rights in this exact manner. The fugitive slave act, it seems, is being updated for Trump’s America.

You know things are really, really bad when you end up nostalgic for Trump 1.0. In that iteration, Trump repeatedly tested the democratic guard rails, and those guard rails just about held. This time around, he and Musk are engaging in a blitzkrieg intended to rout what they see as the “deep state” over the course of a few frenetic weeks. As a result, what we are witnessing is a full-frontal assault on the constitutional order, aided by a quiescent Congress and empowered by a MAGAfied Supreme Court and its Trump v. United States ruling on presidential immunity.

At an anti-Trump rally outside the California State Capitol in Sacramento this Wednesday, I saw a sign that read “Fascism is no longer ‘what if?’ It’s happening now.” A core part of the fascist project has always been to create a rolling roster of dehumanized “others,” easy marks to blame for society’s woes, easy targets at whom to aim the brutal jabs of the iron fist. That’s as true today as it was in the 1930s. It is the darkest of paths that Trump and Musk now threaten to take America down.