Democracy, we are told, allows people a voice in politics. But only, it seems, if they have a few million to give to a political party. As the political scientist Prof Martin Gilens notes in his book Affluence and Influence: âUnder most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesnât adopt.â GDP growth was strong under Joe Biden, but as the economics professor Jason Furman points out: âFrom 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose.â GDP and social improvement are no longer connected.
All those good things? Sorry, theyâre not for you. If you feel an urge to tear it all down, to burn the whole stinking, hypocritical, exclusive system to the ground, Trump is your man. Or so he claims. In reality his entire performance is both a distraction from and an accelerant of spiralling inequality. He can hardly lose: the more he exacerbates inequality, the more he triggers an urge for revenge against his scapegoats: immigrants, trans people, scientists, teachers, China.
But such killer clowns canât pull this off by themselves. Their most effective recruiters are centrist parties paralysed in the face of economic power. In hock to rich funders, terrified of the billionaire media, for decades they have been unable even to name the problem, let alone address it. Hence the spectacular uselessness of the Democratsâ response to Trump. As the US journalist Hamilton Nolan remarks: âOne party is out to kill, and the other is waiting for its leaders to die.â
Mentions Donald Trump
Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature
in The GuardianTrumpâs Tariffs Arenât Economics. Theyâre a Cultural Purge
in Washington MonthyTo be clear, Trump himself remains motivated by the same half-baked economic ideas heâs always had: a fixation on trade deficits, rooted in the zero-sum notion that if we buy more from a country than we sell to them, weâre being âripped off.â Heâs been told repeatedly that trade deficits arenât inherently bad. He doesnât care. The misunderstanding is the point. And heâll drag the global economy into a ditch rather than learn how it works.
But those around himâthe far-right think tanks and political operatives shaping this agendaâare playing a longer, darker game. Trumpâs tariffs arenât just bad economics. Theyâre a declaration of economic war on the half of America that didnât vote for him. This is deliberate and strategic. Itâs a cultural counter-revolution disguised as industrial policy. And we know itâs not about economic leverage because Trump isnât even pretending these tariffs are a negotiating tacticâhe intends to make them permanent.
As I said last month, the project is about deskilling America: reducing white-collar work through AI and remote job cuts, destroying universities, starving higher education, using tariffs to wall off the country as a manufacturing-and-extraction island, gutting the cities, and pushing men into manual labor while nudging women into domestic roles. Itâs not incoherentâitâs a plan being implemented methodically.
This isnât about economic efficiency. Itâs about political control. Education has always been a democratizing force. It creates citizens who are harder to intimidate, likely to demand fair treatment, and less willing to obey autocrats. It delays childbirth, disrupts patriarchal family structures, and builds civic coalitions that threaten right-wing hegemony. Thatâs why itâs under attack. The goal isnât to elevate the dignity of manual workâitâs to eliminate choice, to collapse the pathways that allow people to escape precarity and assert autonomy.
A key pillar of this reactionary movement is masculinity politicsâan obsession with control over women and the restoration of a pre-modern vision of gender roles. Right-wing pundits are now proudly declaring that Trumpâs tariffs will âend the masculinity crisis.â Fox News chyrons bluster that his âmanlyâ economic policies will âmake you more of a man.â The idea is that factory jobs and closed borders will somehow restore a lost sense of masculine authority that was never actually economic but cultural and social.
âImproper IdeologyââTrump Demands Womenâs History Museum Remove Trans People or Lose Funding
in Erin in the MorningâOver the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nationâs history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,â reads President Donald Trumpâs March 27 executive order.
He then declared that the accomplishments of trans people, and trans women in particular, must be removed from the Smithsonian American Womenâs History Museum because they constitute an âimproper ideology.â
The order condemns a planned exhibit at the Museum that would feature trans athletes. Now, Vice President J.D. Vance, alongside members of the presidential cabinet and staff, will lead the way in a sweeping overhaul of Museum exhibits, programming and leadership by blocking funding unless the Museum promises it will ânot recognize men as women in any respect.â The language is a thinly veiled directive to remove trans women from the museum entirely.
Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement that the order was nothing less than âfascismâ at work.
[âŠ]
Meanwhile, in a troubling echo of Trumpâs policies on trans people, the executive order condemns the Smithsonian for framing race as a âsocial constructâ rather than what Trump thinks it is: a âbiological reality.â
In Your Face: The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA
in Mother JonesIn the early morning hours of January 28, as dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrived in New York to round up undocumented immigrants, a shimmering Kristi Noem appeared in the Bronx. She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings. âWe are getting the dirtbags off these streets,â the new Homeland Security secretary said in a three-second clip she posted to social media.
[âŠ]
Noemâs anti-immigrant politics might have been familiar to South Dakotans. But did they recognize their former governor? Noem is one of several figuresâa few men, but mostly womenâin President Donald Trumpâs orbit to undergo striking physical transformations as the boundaries that once delineated celebrity and political power fully disintegrate. The resulting look has since sparked satirical backlash online, with critics mocking âconservative girl makeup.â
But the most jarring aesthetic in this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is the unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectables like Botox and fillers. (As one Daily Mail headline declared, âPlastic surgery was [the] star of [the] showâ at the Republican National Convention in 2024.) The overall look has since been disparagingly referred to as âMar-a-Lago face.â
[âŠ]
The lack of discretion within the current GOP might feel strange today when manyâeven Kim Kardashianâappear to prize confidentiality. But for the MAGA-verse, todayâs tweaks seem intended to signal membership with Trump, a man notoriously obsessed with the literal pageantry of beauty, and his broader efforts to force strict gender norms onto the electorate. The aesthetic is, like Trumpâs politics, ridiculously blunt.
âI read it as a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters,â says Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College. âIn a way, these women are performing a key part of Donald Trumpâs whole political persona.â
[âŠ]
At a time when the GOP is viciously exploiting transgender Americans as a cultural scapegoat, Schreiber notes, hyper-femininity also helps reinforce the ânorms and differences between femininity and masculinity.â In this way, women in Republican politics show their male counterparts that they are committed to the same conservative goals, but are not threatening. âIt reaffirms the femininity of women,â she adds, âeven if they have power.â Here is the gender-affirming care the right can celebrate.
Weâve Officially Entered the Next Phase of Trumpâs Dictatorship Era
in SlateThe Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judgeâs Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judgeâs explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadnât yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawiehâs removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrantsâand that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.
Taken on their own, these claims would be chilling enough. But they were coupled with another novel late-night claim of presidential power: On Monday, Donald Trump purported to reverse President Joe Bidenâs pardons of Jan. 6 committee members. In a Truth Social post that came just after midnight, Trump claimed the pardons are now âVOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,â asserting the power to undo their clemency because Biden allegedly signed it âby Autopen.â (It is the official position of the executive branch, unchallenged by the courts, that autopen qualifies as a valid presidential signature.)
Taken together, these actions and declarations amount to a significant escalation in Trumpâs transformation of his own presidency into an autocracy or, perhaps more accurately, a monarchy. His Justice Department has taken vague claims of âArticle II authorityâ to new extremes, ascribing to him an unchecked right to expel immigrants with no semblance of due processâand as his defenders have asserted all weekend, to ignore lawful court orders that stand in his way. Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that this extreme and dangerous new vision of executive power does not apply to the presidency, but only his presidency: It is not a set of neutral principles, but an ever-evolving pretext for his own personal whims and cruelties, dressed up in legalese concocted by the conservative legal movement for precisely this purpose.
The Soil, Not Just the Harvest
Trump is not a political anomaly. He's not a disruptive force that came out of nowhere. And contrary to the column inches of pearl-clutching pundits, he didn't hijack the Republican Party - he unmasked it. His presidency is the product of decades of strategy, ideology, and deliberately nurtured, festering decay.
[âŠ]
Republican voters bear direct responsibility. They are active participants in Americaâs political apocalypse, not passive victims manipulated against their interests. After witnessing years of his break-it-without-buying-it governance and hearing his promises of harm, the Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 weren't deceived. They were convinced. They didn't hold their noses while voting for mass deportations and stripping transgender people of their civil rights. They huffed the scent and loved it.
Blaming Trump alone offers psychological comfort, by localizing a systemic problem in a single figurehead. It legitimizes the false promise that removing one man solves the underlying condition. It absolves millions of their responsibility while leaving intact the machinery that produced Trump - and will create future authoritarian leaders.
How the Republic Falls
Thomas is the single best commentator on the theology that drives these people.
Where does this end? Who is at risk? Anyone who stands in the way of the MAGA vision of purging the nation. âHe was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,â Stephen Miller lied about Kilmar Abrego Garcia last week: âThis was the right person sent to the right place.â Who cares what the law says: To the MAGA ideologues, Garcia is outside the boundaries of âreal America,â he does not â and must never â belong to the Volk, the ârealâ people. This is a core tenet of the vision that animates the Trumpist Right. âIâm still gonna call them an illegal alien,â JD Vance proclaimed last September, when he was trying to incite a pogrom against the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio based on vile lies and conspiracy theories he was instrumental in propagating. He knew the people he was targeting were in the United States legally. Yet for blood-and-soil nationalists like Miller and Vance, there is a âHigher Truthâ that overrides all else: The âhomelandâ is under siege, overrun with enemies who âpoison the blood.â The allegiance to the âreal Americanâ homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional.
The MAGA rage wonât be confined to migrants either. A regime that so aggressively curtails and ignores fundamental rights for one group today will not hesitate to violate and suspend them for others tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Itâs never far from âillegal aliensâ and âalien enemiesâ to âthe enemy within.â In the MAGA imagination, America is simultaneously threatened by outsiders and by insidiously subversive forces on the inside. The âenemy withinâ â those Un-American forces of radical leftism and âglobalistâ elites â are as acutely dangerous as the invaders from without. In order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make America Great Again, it has as to be âpurifiedâ â the enemies have to be subjugated and purged. That is the core promise of Trumpism as a political project.
This is how the attempts to detain, deport, and disappear foreign nationals are directly connected to both the escalating attacks on universities as well as the assault on state institutions and the civil service. To the Trumpist Right, all of these institutions have been taken over by the âglobalistâ enemy within, they function as power centers for the âwokeâ elites, they fund and propagate their campaign to subvert and weaken the nation.
This Is Wrong
in London Review of BooksThere are two significant problems with using gametes to define sex. First, no one checks gametes at the moment of sex assignment, let alone at conception (when they donât yet exist). They are not observable. To base sex assignment on gametes is therefore to rely on an imperceptible dimension of sex when observation remains the principal way sex is assigned. Second, most biologists agree that neither biological determinism nor biological reductionism provides an adequate account of sex determination and development. As the Society for the Study of Evolution explains in a letter published on 5 February, the âscientific consensusâ defines sex in humans as a âbiological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex.â They remind us that âsex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.â Interplay, interaction, co-construction are concepts widely used in the biological sciences. And, in turn, the biological sciences have made considerable contributions to gender theory, where Anne Fausto-Sterling, for example, has long argued that biology interacts with cultural and historical processes to produce different ways of naming and living gender.
The language of âimmutabilityâ belongs more properly to a natural law tradition in which male and female kinds are established by divine will and so belong to a version of creationism. They are immutable features of the human, as Pope Francis has affirmed. Trump speaks in the name of science, but the cameo appearance of the gamete theory notwithstanding, he does so effectively to insist that God decreed the immutable character of the two sexes, and that he, Trump, is decreeing it once more, either to echo the word of God, or to represent his own word as the word of God. Religious doctrine cannot serve as the basis for scientific research or state policy. But that what is happening in this executive order.
[âŠ]
When authoritarians promise a return to an imaginary past, they stoke a furious nostalgia in those who have no better way to understand what is actually undermining their sense of a durable and meaningful future. We find this in the discourse of the AfD in Germany, the Fratelli dâItalia, Bolsonaroâs followers in Brazil, Trump, OrbĂĄn and Putin. But we also see the anti-gender animus among centrists hoping to recruit support from the right in order to stay in power. When diversity, equity and inclusion become âthreatsâ to the order of society, progressive politics in general is held responsible for every social ill. The result, as we have seen in recent years, can be that popular support ushers in authoritarian powers who promise to strip rights from the most vulnerable people in the name of saving the nation, the natural order, the family, society, or civilisation itself. Ideals of constitutional democracy and political freedom are regarded as dispensable in the course of such campaigns, since the preservation of the nation must be put before all else: it is a matter of self-defence.
The End of Days Inn
For over half a century, Trump has operated within a transnational organized crime network whose goal is to strip the US down and sell it for parts, much like the oligarch raids after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They have been aided in this endeavor by institutions, in particular the DOJ, which has long protected Trump, and by members of the Democratic Party serving as controlled opposition.
Many Americans did not want to believe this final twist. It is harder to reckon with betrayal than with a straight liar.
But the footage of a grinning Joe Biden with Donald Trump â the man who Biden claimed is a fascist who will destroy America and then handed the keys to the country, promising to accommodate him â seems to have finally woken folks up.
I warned you for nine years, because I wanted you to be prepared. Biden was a Placeholder President designed to fill the four years between two terms of Trump while plutocrats shifted American political culture sharply to the right. Media gutted, Twitter decimated, activism destroyed, books censored, minorities demonized, public health annihilated, victims blamed, empathy scorned.
That is the main thing they are after now: your empathy. They want you to hate each other so you donât hate them first.
They want you to buy into every cheap cliché and every manipulated poll. They want you to hate each other so much, you agree to their plan of tearing this country into warring fiefdoms for oligarchs to plunder. They want you to prey on the vulnerable, even though you are vulnerable too, so that the powerful can escape scrutiny.
They want you to cheer your own demise, mistaking it for someone elseâs.
Political reporters are actively covering up Trumpâs racism
Trump said at his Thursday news conference that his conclusion that diversity had something to do with the crash was âcommon senseâ.
But common sense tells us he was being racist.
â âItâs probably a black personâs fault this bad thing happenedâ as a reflexive explanation is just a racist statement, thereâs not a level of substantiation that makes it not racist,â Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer posted on Bluesky.
âHe's not blaming DEI, he's blaming women and non white people,â wrote MSNBCâs Chris Hayes.
âThese people are segregationists and their position is that no one who isnât a white man is qualified to do skilled work of any kind,â New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote on Bluesky. He then added: "i think it is important to say that the open and explicit racism of the president and the vice president isnât just uncouth or âcontroversialâ but a direct attack on tens of millions of americans and a dereliction of their duty to represent the entire country."