Mentions Donald Trump

This:

Amassing authoritarian power depends in part on a willingness of the people to believe in the power exercised. In some cases, Trump’s declarations are meant to test the waters, but in other cases, the outrageous claim is its own accomplishment. He defies shame and legal constraints in order to show his capacity to do so, which displays to the world a shameless sadism.

The exhilarations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life (freedom, equality, justice), but enact these as forms of “liberation” from false ideologies and the constraints of legal obligations. An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.

The sadistic glee at issue here is not just his; it depends on being communicated and widely enjoyed in order to exist – it is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty. Indeed, the media attention it garners feeds the sadistic spree. It has to be known and seen and heard, this parade of reactionary outrage and defiance. And that is why it is no longer a simple matter of exposing hypocrisy that will serve us now. There is no moral veneer that must be stripped away. No, the public demand for the appearance of morality on the part of the leader is inverted: his followers thrill to the display of his contempt for morality, and share it.

A transaction is a two-way process, an exchange where a party agrees to do a thing in return for another party agreeing to do a thing.

To use old-style language, a transaction is a bargain, an exchange of promises.

And for the business people concerned in a commercial transaction, that contract has sanctity. So if a party does not comply or even breaches the contract there are remedies which are intended to place the injured party in the position they would have been had the agreement been properly performed. Often these are “money” remedies, but sometimes they can be injunctions or other court orders.

The court will enforce what the parties had agreed, for the agreement is the thing.

But for Trump, the agreement is not the thing.

An agreement is there to be opportunistically repudiated, and not to be performed.

An agreement offers an opportunity to gain leverage, for a new negotiation. for a new exertion of power.

The White House will now allow retirement savers to invest in extremely risk and opaque crypto and private equity assets in their 401(k) retirement accounts. These sorts of investments had previously been banned. Why? Because they are risky and opaque and that is bad for retirement savers. Why will they now be allowed? Because both the private equity industry and the crypto industry are always in danger of suffering declines when enough money stops flowing into them, and opening the door to 401(k) money is a faucet of many hundreds of billions of dollars that will continue to keep valuations in those industries high. The shit that the smart investors would not pay for will now be packaged, branded, and sold to regular people who do not know any better. Who will benefit? Private equity firms, dumping their shitty stuff onto the public, and crypto firms, with a bigger pool of buyers for their worthless products. Who will lose? The public. 

These predatory industries have paid the Trump administration enough money to win support for this. That’s about it. Longer explanations are mostly bullshit.

Major banks have now decided to allow crypto to be used as collateral for loans. This sets the stage for a rapid collapse in crypto prices to spread its harm much more broadly throughout the financial system. Do you remember when, shortly before the 2008 financial crisis, the CEO of Citigroup famously said, “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance”? I don’t know why I just thought of that. 

Actually, the Kimmel story mattered quite a lot – both diagnostically (meaning: as a window into the state of American politics) and politically (in terms of how it is impacting the ongoing struggle). Regardless of its outcome, it pointed to what is one of the key differences between the first Trump administration and his second presidency. While the Trumpists were never defenders of free speech, there was no systematic attempt during Trump I to nullify the First Amendment or use the levers of state power to suppress protest and public dissent. They simply didn’t know how to use the government in that way, and they didn’t have the people in place who could have systematically used the state machinery as an instrument of repression. This led to a pervasive frustration within MAGA, and it is precisely what animated the big planning operations the Right launched during the Biden era – most infamously Project 2025. In fact, Brendan Carr literally wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025’s policy agenda – in which he envisioned using the agency exactly the way he has since taking over as chairman in January: As an instrument to put pressure on business and media, threatening regulatory action or lawsuits against anyone not sufficiently deferential to Trump’s will.

The FCC’s attempt to coerce ABC into canceling Jimmy Kimmel was a reminder that the Trumpists intend to use the federal government as a machine that serves only two purposes: To impose Trump’s will and desire for retribution – and to impose a reactionary societal order against the will of the majority. It was also a demonstration of how an authoritarian transformation of a democratic society tends to work in the twenty-first century. Kimmel’s cancellation sits right at that intersection of open state repression – and pre-emptive self-censorship and complicity by businesses and civil society actors. No need to send the thugs in boots and brown uniforms to rough the place up, or to send the secret police to arrest everyone, if you can also “nudge” these institutions to comply by… less untidy means.

Why is this happening now? The Right itself offers two contradictory answers simultaneously. On the one hand, they are constantly trying to project strength: They want us to believe they represent a vital, virile alternative to anemic liberal democracy – and a cohesive vision far superior to weak, divisive pluralism. Liberal democracy, in this tale, is destined to surrender to the far right. On the other hand, rightwingers are also obsessed with their own weakness. The Trumpist imagination is defined by a sense of besiegement: Powerful enemies everywhere, anti-American forces both from without and from within conspiring to destroy the nation, “real Americans” constantly victimized by a society they believe owes them eternal adulation and deference, made to suffer under the yoke of crazy leftist politics.

Relentless self-victimization – a veritable persecution complex – has been a defining feature of modern conservatism since its inception. The heightened version of this type of siege mentality we are seeing now points to something that is diagnostically important: Until very recently at least, the Right was indeed losing the fundamental struggle over what kind of country “America” should strive to be. The idea of a “crisis of liberal democracy” has dominated the political and broader public discourse over the past decade. But in crucial ways, it is the conception of “real America” as a white Christian patriarchal homeland that has come under enormous pressure. Socially, culturally, and – most importantly, perhaps – demographically, the country has moved away from the rightwing ideal since the middle of the twentieth century. It is not just a figment of the reactionary imagination that America has become less white, less religious, and more pluralistic in basically every dimension. As a result, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous. In a narrow political sense, they may be in charge right now – in the White House, in Congress, at the Supreme Court. But it is not just political power the Right seeks. They desire cultural domination and affirmation. In the cultural sphere, the public square, and across many societal dimensions like the family, the shift in power away from white male conservatives has been more pronounced. The Right has engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization in response – a radicalization fueled not by a feeling of strength, but by a sense of weakness.

[…] Clinging to the idea that “The Right won’t go THAT far” is futile because they have convinced themselves that their leftist enemies have already gone *much further*.

Someone starting from the assumption that America has been a stable, consolidated democracy for two and a half centuries must struggle to adequately understand the current political conflict: The contortions necessary to explain why so many millions of Americans are now embracing a blatantly authoritarian leader when they had supposedly been fully on board with liberal democracy until quite recently will quickly lead you to strange, unhelpful places. And if you depart from such a premise, you have no chance of developing a proper response to the current crisis either: If there had been a broad consensus around democratic ideals until Trump came down the golden escalator, it would be reasonable to assume that the restoration of the pre-2016 status quo ante might be an adequate solution. But if the rise of Trumpism is a manifestation, rather than the cause, of forces and ideas that have always prevented the nation from living up to the egalitarian aspirations it has often proclaimed, then restoration is not enough. If our existential crisis is the latest iteration of a conflict that has defined the nation since its inception, America needs a truly transformative effort to propel the country closer to the kind of multiracial, pluralistic democracy it never has been yet and finally establish a stable democratic consensus that has so far eluded these United States.

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: “Under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.” GDP growth was strong under Joe Biden, but as the economics professor Jason Furman points out: “From 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose.” GDP and social improvement are no longer connected.

All those good things? Sorry, they’re 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 can’t 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 Democrats’ response to Trump. As the US journalist Hamilton Nolan remarks: “One party is out to kill, and the other is waiting for its leaders to die.”

To be clear, Trump himself remains motivated by the same half-baked economic ideas he’s 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, we’re being “ripped off.” He’s been told repeatedly that trade deficits aren’t inherently bad. He doesn’t care. The misunderstanding is the point. And he’ll drag the global economy into a ditch rather than learn how it works.

But those around him—the far-right think tanks and political operatives shaping this agenda—are playing a longer, darker game. Trump’s tariffs aren’t just bad economics. They’re a declaration of economic war on the half of America that didn’t vote for him. This is deliberate and strategic. It’s a cultural counter-revolution disguised as industrial policy. And we know it’s not about economic leverage because Trump isn’t even pretending these tariffs are a negotiating tactic—he 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. It’s not incoherent—it’s a plan being implemented methodically.

This isn’t about economic efficiency. It’s 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. That’s why it’s under attack. The goal isn’t to elevate the dignity of manual work—it’s 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 politics—an obsession with control over women and the restoration of a pre-modern vision of gender roles. Right-wing pundits are now proudly declaring that Trump’s tariffs will “end the masculinity crisis.” Fox News chyrons bluster that his “manly” economic policies will “make you more of a man.” 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. 

“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” reads President Donald Trump’s 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 Women’s History Museum because they constitute an “improper ideology.”

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 “not recognize men as women in any respect.” 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 “fascism” at work.

[…]

Meanwhile, in a troubling echo of Trump’s policies on trans people, the executive order condemns the Smithsonian for framing race as a “social construct” rather than what Trump thinks it is: a “biological reality.”