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fascism
How Could Anyone Believe Trump Would Make America “Great”?
His first presidential term ended with a devastated economy and a huge body count. Yet, with smoke and mirrors and a whole lot of voter suppression, he’s been returned to office. And this time, it's so much worse.
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My progressive friends keep asking, with a searching agony in their tone, How are you doing …?
The unspoken part of that sentence includes a temporal marker: … since Donald Trump is back in office. We suffer moral shock—but not surprise—over his executive orders: a ban on birthright citizenship, U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, and pardons for seditious insurrectionists, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders pardoned and released from prison. Elon Musk has gained access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system and is also provoking Trump to slash USAID, which would deny billions globally for women’s health, HIV/AIDS care, natural disaster assistance, and anti-corruption work.
Shock this time is quieter. It has the quality of an anticipated full-body tasing.
At the dawn of Donald Trump’s first term in 2016, disbelief transmuted into rebellion. The resistance was rising and printing new protest T-shirts. I suspect part of the sting then for those who’d trusted President Obama and supported Hillary Clinton—and hoped America was starting to heal its deepest wounds of racism and sexism—was the sharp pang of learning we had it wrong.
It was painful to see a habitual liar with about two dozen sexual assault allegations become the most powerful figure in the country. Now, he’s a felon who believes that, with just less than half the American voters—not to mention a bottom-scraping post-inaugural approval rate—he has a mandate. The fact that so many voters did support him feels like a betrayal.
So, I don’t know how to answer the question How are you?, but I am developing a working theory of why so many of us feel disjointed. Donald Trump’s clique of billionaires and sycophants represents how American power truly flows, and in some ways, how it always has.
It is unnerving to see America as it is, not how we hoped it would be.
***
The toll of shattered illusions stretches as far back as humans have been misperceiving reality. I keep finding myself thinking about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which prisoners, captivated by shadows cast by a fire on a cave wall, became ensorcelled by false reality. They got used to seeing the flicker of vague shapes, impressions that they began to confuse with reality due to their repetition. (It’s almost as if Plato had seen FOX News or an X feed.) To confront the truth, a prisoner would have to be physically dragged away from the shadow show and out of his cave—he would not want to leave. Moving quickly from the dim firelight that created his illusions to the brightness of the sun would nearly blind him. For Plato, the sun represented the Form of the Good, the source of truth and goodness. Such a bright light is a lot to take in when you’ve been trapped in the dark.
A vast portion of our nation has for years been captivated by shadow, an endemic of misinformation and disinformation, fostered by Alex Jones, Rupert Murdoch’s holdings, and their ilk.
But I wonder now if another segment of the American populace may have been studying a different set of shadows, perhaps from more comfortable urban centers, blue dots whose shadow show promised progress was available to all, if they worked hard enough and got the right education. We loved America for different reasons and busied ourselves, entertained ourselves, believing our squabbles with the other set of shadow-watchers would help achieve a better nation.
Then we fought among ourselves in the comments.
Watch the shadows flicker. Refresh the feed.
***
There are many reasons Donald Trump won the 2024 election. President Joe Biden insisted on running when he was not up to the job and so VP Kamala Harris had a much-abbreviated campaign. Surely, racism and sexism played a role in Harris’s loss, as did the mounting death toll in Gaza, and perhaps some foreign states’ disinformation and interference attempts did some damage. Trump’s coziness with Christian nationalists and “manosphere” influencers helped. His dramatic survival of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, distilled his brand into mythic proportions with the mantra “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!”
And all along, he has tapped into a populist sentiment and here, I think Trump did stumble into an unavoidable and painful truth. Great swaths of Americans struggle in a nation that isn’t as good to them as it was to past generations. As millennials know too well, theirs is the first generation that is worse off than their parents. They are largely unable to buy an affordable home where they could build wealth. They are strapped by student loans and forego medical care due to high costs—and aren’t able to pay the bills if they do go to the doctor. Lower-income millennials and millennials of color also often find themselves supporting their elder family members; rather than receiving an inheritance, they go into deeper debt when a loved one dies in order to cover the funeral costs.
Rather than having to dwell in that pain, Trump gave his followers a balm, more shadows in the shape of someone else to blame: immigrants. Educators spouting critical race theory. Trans athletes. Non-Christians.
Trumpism feeds on Americans as we are, often financially struggling, discouraged, confused over how things got this way. It’s like a ray of sunlight diffused through a filthy window, because Trumpism shows a bit of what’s real but also occludes that reality with chaos, misplaced blame, and rage that severs the bonds between us as fellow citizens. It seeks, above all, to benefit itself.
Its promise of making America great again is a rich man’s illusion.
The America of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg is thriving, not really yours and mine. It’s far from ironic that those who have benefited most from economic inequality are the same men who run social media sites that spread falsehoods, that help create the turmoil that destabilizes our civil sphere. People can’t debate productively when they cannot agree to basic truths.
These “oligarchs” are not alone, but represent another front that has chipped away at our shared perception of reality, as trusted sources such as newsrooms have been carved out, consolidated and forced to bow to the whims of their owners.
The capitulation of America’s wealthy (et tu, Snoop) have exposed Trump’s populism as a ploy, but it also reveals the flimsiness of the American Dream. The trick is that regular people, vulnerable people, will not benefit from his fixes. Tariffs alone could cost the average American family more than $1,200 per year. Most of us can’t afford that.
We are a nation with a tattered social fabric, where most are at risk of falling through the gaps. Ours is an exhausted population. Only 2 in 5 Americans would (or could) use savings to pay for a $1,000 emergency and a growing number of Americans have no savings at all. Such people have a much harder time demanding reforms that will actually improve their lives, that would force those hoarding wealth to invest in the common good.
And now, Elon Musk has access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system, which processes Social Security payments, Medicare benefits, tax refunds, and payments to federal workers and contractors. In a letter, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), ranking member on the Committee on Finance, warned that any failure in these payment systems or politically motivated meddling in them “risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” and that he is “deeply concerned by the possibility that Elon Musk and a cadre of other unknown DOGE personnel are seeking to gain access to and potentially control the Fiscal Service’s payment systems in order to carry out a political agenda that clearly involves violating the law.” Given Musk’s business interests in China, which has hacked U.S. government systems before, Wyden also worried Musk’s access to Americans’ data could create a conflict of interest and danger of a cybersecurity breach.
Another truth, made most clear by the capitulation of Musk, et al: Trump is out to make America great for those who have always benefited most—the richest of the rich. America’s elite.
America’s billionaires, about 800 of them, now have more wealth than half the country (representing 65 million households). These billionaires’ wealth has nearly doubled since 2017.
This country celebrates and protects the billionaire class, those for whom no safety net is needed.
Our history shows that a person doesn’t need to have privilege themselves to excuse the stockpiling of resources at the top. For generations, millions of our ancestors clutched to much less, afraid to upturn the system, because they could lose what stability they had and risk what they hoped to possess (maybe) one day. They were manifesting destiny; the sorry state of some of their fellow Americans must be God’s will. This is how people who know what it’s like to suffer personally could also find ways to live alongside slavery and Jim Crow, deny women’s rights, accept the exile of Native Americans, and the rise of for-profit prisons.
The sting of Trump is that he has destroyed the illusion that Americans can all one day be good and wise and rich. By being craven and false and self-serving, the great liar has inadvertently illuminated some great truths. It’s no coincidence that the #MeToo movement that exposed sexual abuses within all our institutions corresponded with the last Trump term.
This isn’t to erase the many Americans who have fought daunting battles over racial equity and gender equality and LGBTQ+ inclusion, but it is to say there’s another fight also demanding our attention. The dirty rot upon which American inequality relies has only grown more entrenched over the last 50 or so years. It took a man with golden toilets to demonstrate how we are deeply corrupted by our own greed.
America has come to depend upon immigrants willing to work seasonally to pick and grow our food, while they are scapegoated by national figures as rapists and drug dealers. At the same time, the cost of groceries has exceeded inflation, while corporate grocery profits skyrocketed. The flicker of shadows directs our ire at the vulnerable instead of those on the take.
Over five decades of trickle-down economics, the majority of Americans have waited, mouths upturned for our drop, while the rich received tax breaks, and rather than sharing, they just got richer. What to do with all that wealth? One option has been flooding super PACs and making dark money investments in particular candidates. It wasn’t just Elon Musk’s $1 million-a-day voter sweepstakes. Since 2016, when shell companies and dark money organizations gave an estimated $71.1 million to federal political committees, the investment has grown exponentially. The 2024 presidential election drew $2 billion in outside money. Our politics is decidedly pay to play.
It’s no wonder our current crop of billionaires bent to kiss Donald Trump’s shiny ring.
I am starting to understand that a real, radical project is needed to secure sustenance across all our American identities, enough to go around for trans people and veterans and immigrants and women and farmers and people of all races. That sort of collective movement would show why the old American Dream of wealth-building was a convenient distraction that benefited those with plenty, when Americans today cling to more practical dreams of just having enough.
This is one of the reasons it hurts to be a progressive at the dawn of another Trump presidency. Because much as incremental strides have been made to protect important but also ever-shrinking rights, we can see starkly how we’ve lost the greater fight for the heart of the nation. The value of freedom-for-all is still losing to the deeper instinct to protect and preserve American wealth by those who have it and those willing to sacrifice their neighbors for a longer-odds chance at their share.
In the old allegory, the former prisoner’s eyes finally adjust to the light of the sun: the truth. I wonder, knowing what he knows, if the former prisoner could manage to free the other prisoners and drag them out into the light too. They wouldn’t trust him, wouldn’t want to leave their shadow show. Perhaps it would take a massive upheaval, some matter of shock and awe—like this moment in our fragile democracy—to rock their view inside the cave and send them rushing out before it collapses with all of them trapped.
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