In the aftermath of this fall’s presidential election, some commentators argued that for a critical constituency of Trump voters, the second “A” in “MAGA” had referred to Trump’s first term. If, during the 2016 campaign, “Again” had evoked—however hazily—a midcentury idyll of professional stability and aggressively policed racial and gender hierarchies, in 2024 the gesture had become recursive: vote me back in for more of the same.
RETVRN . . . to that? It was hard to figure. The early Trump years were a frenzied and unproductive time, placid only in contrast to the pandemic that followed, but maybe this was what voters’ short-term nostalgia was really all about: a longing for a time before Covid, a transformative event that rapidly dispersed suffering across class and race (if still unevenly) and compelled everyone to endure the terrible hardship of having to think about other people.
Now that Again is here again, the exhausting, continuous controversies of the first Trump term register more clearly as a series of collisions with any number of opposing forces: a deep state’s worth of staffers, disagreeable fellow Republicans, combative Democrats, protesters and activists, and of course the left-liberal media, all of whom exploited every opportunity to maximize friction. Trump certainly didn’t lose all these fights—but they were always fights.
Nothing that took place back then was as flagrantly illegal as the administration’s actions over the past three weeks: unilaterally eliminating entire government agencies, firing employees en masse without due process, canceling or promising to cancel federal funding that’s already been appropriated by Congress, accessing the personal data of millions of Americans. The barrage is staggering. Yet the pronounced sense of emergency that defined the first term feels almost entirely absent in the midst of an actual emergency. In a just world, the Trump/Musk coup would receive the wall-to-wall coverage granted to James Comey’s firing or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton’s emails. Even as the urgency of the mainstream reporting has intensified over the past couple of weeks, it seems clear that the media environment that helped meaningfully constrain Trump is a relic of the past. Even the most openly criminal gestures and speech acts have been met with reflexive circumlocution. Jake Tapper on CNN the other day, responding to Chris Murphy: “for whatever it’s worth, the Trump team says that wasn’t a Heil Hitler salute—but I don’t think we’ve heard from Elon Musk on what exactly it was.”
“I have experienced the pressure, in ways subtle, blatant and even internalized, to sanitize atrocities proposed or committed by the powerful,” Spencer Ackerman wrote recently in his Forever Wars newsletter. “I know how reluctant editors, charged with representing the long-term interests of a news organization, can be to call something what it is.” The desire for news organization to “call something what it is”—to describe the destruction of United States Agency for International Development or the closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as illegitimate without resorting to avant-garde uses of passive voice or steady editorial de-escalation—may seem like a minor concern given the structural catastrophes facing newsrooms. After years of industry-wide contraction—already underway in newsrooms in the first Trump term—any media organization that’s not explicitly carrying water for the White House is now about to face radical hostility from the Trump Administration, if they aren’t facing it already.1 Still, if a reader is told that this or that attempt to destroy the federal government is “brazen” rather than “unlawful,” then the reader has been met with obscurantism rather than reporting. To fail to explain the gravity of the situation is to ensure that it won’t be clear until it’s too late.
In the absence of the 2017–2018 wall of sound, what we have to go on is the drumbeat of anecdote: the Trump-Musk-Vought ascendance as series of localized catastrophes united by a coherent set of themes (the assault on the state, the erosion of democracy, the absolute triumph of the unprecedently wealthy) but so far lacking in defining symbols, the way that by this point in the first term we had crowd sizes, “American carnage,” and the travel ban. The anecdotes are unceasing and unbearable whether they emerge from reporting or daily life. Where to begin? A Signal message from an acquaintance about the DOGEistes running amok inside the federal bureaucracy where they work, naturally targeting the people of color first. A Facebook post shared by an old classmate that describes the end of the President’s Malaria Initiative: “I have had no radical agenda other than the notion that no child should die from a mosquito bite. I have been so proud to tell my children about my work and the American greatness it represented. And now I have had to tell them that I no longer have a job, and I’ve had to explain why.” A Reddit post by a civil servant calling on others to “[hold] the line.” (“I’m here to serve, and I derive more pleasure from that service than I would sitting on a pile of private sector money. Being a federal civil servant is part of my identity.”) A relative’s message to the family group chat about mass absences from their high school because of fears about ICE raids. A post from the principal of my daughter’s school encouraging parents not to keep their kids home due to said fears. An email from the head of a nonprofit in West Virginia warning that despite the temporary injunction against the funding freeze payments have not resumed, putting senior citizens at great risk of not receiving dialysis. An email about a friend of a friend—a provisional employee at a government agency—who just got fired. A conversation moments later with another friend, whose girlfriend’s department of four hundred people just got wiped out. A local news report about 185 students training to be special ed teachers losing their scholarships overnight. A screenshot of a note sent to parents about the cancelation of a program for students with disabilities transitioning out of high school, presumably due to the presence of the word “transitioning.” A long list of keywords that can cause a National Science Foundation grant to be pulled, including “women,” “historically,” and “status.” A “DEI Watchlist” featuring names and photos of mostly Black government officials that warns that “the real power often lies with behind-the-scenes bureaucrats who push divisive DEI agendas that undermine merit, fairness, and accountability” and seeks to “[uncover] these hidden influencers and their failures.” (Influencers!) Anonymous accounts from IT officials inside the Department of Treasury and elsewhere warning of the extraordinary damage Musk’s DOGE minions don’t know they’re doing. A few sentences from a lawsuit filed against Trump by state Attorneys General:
One Washingtonian, as her parents describe her, was a bright and gentle soul who loved playing musical instruments, trying new things, and playing Magic the Gathering. She was excited to learn Japanese and the impact of gender-affirming care was immediately clear to her family. Her parents described that “her joy was clear with every new milestone in her transition. She was so happy to get to the next step, to get closer to presenting in a way that was true to herself.” But the day before the presidential election, she shared, “[t]omorrow I get to find out if I’m illegal.” After the election, she asked her parents if they could move to Canada because she was fearful of new restrictions on transgender youth and worried about losing access to gender-affirming care. In January 2025, she took her own life.
A frustration of the first Trump term was the argument that the President was always playing “four-dimensional chess,” wherein everything he was doing, no matter how self-defeating or random, was cited as proof of his political genius. This annoying and pervasive theory was a reminder of the limits of the heuristics we use to assess political behavior. Political leaders don’t always behave logically, and their grand gestures aren’t always acts of visionary strategy. Sometimes chaos is just chaos.
In 2017, Trump’s ignorance offered some solace. His tenuous grasp over the office—and the relative robustness of his rivals in and out of the administration—ensured that there were forms of destruction he couldn’t simply impose by fiat. Even at the nadir of his presidency, during the bleach-addled Covid months, US policy was guided by more than Trump’s whims. This time around, whim is law.
But whose? In recent weeks I’ve seen Trump tagged as a “mad king” in response to the harried recklessness on tariffs and the onrush of bizarre and quixotic early-term actions, like his order to uselessly dump 2.2 billions of gallons of water in California. As harmful as that decision was, and as ominous its implication that bureaucracies will bend, I question how kingly Trump really is at the moment. He’s still being managed, just like last time—it’s just the managers who have changed. Watching Trump in the Oval Office last week, powerless in the face of the Musk boys (Elon and X Æ A-Xii, 4-year-old Zelig of institutional collapse), it was obvious that the President’s very special government employee is running things. Here was the former main character of photo-ops and belligerent press conferences, now deferring at length to Musk with a degree of passivity I’ve never seen him exude before—not even when he was being driven around in a limousine while sick with Covid, high out of his mind on dexamethasone. “Also, could you mention some of the things that your team has found, some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about thirty million, et cetera?” Trump asked Musk, like an opening act teeing up the main event. Trump is older, slower, diminished, while Musk works nights and weekends to bring about the end of civil society.
In his near-instant seeding of DOGEistes across the federal government, Musk has shown himself to be far more goal-oriented than Trump, more zealous and more dynamic. He has done a spectacular amount of harm with a small group of people.2 Like the man who brought him into the fold, he is rabidly ignorant—but Musk’s ignorance is more solipsistic than his boss’s, and somehow even more antisocial. If Trump, Nielsen-aware from the start, still keeps half an eye on his crowd sizes and approval ratings, for Musk there really is no one outside himself, no public to hear the will of, no one who could credibly oppose his all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-doing intelligence. “There is no left wing voter base, all the elections are rigged and fake, all the liberal media outlets have no audience and are kept alive by USAID funding. All their politicians and political pundits are paid by USAID to say what the government wants,” posted a right-wing six-figure Twitter account earlier this month. Musk quote-tweeted this delusion with a simple “Yes.” There are so many posts like this: expressions of agreement with the most idiotic and most racist shit possible, but also with transparently nonsensical claims about everything from computer programming to tax policy. The bullshit flows freely and Musk slurps it up proudly. His beliefs are sincere, the product of being told again and again by rabid sycophants that his crappy cars, fraudulent tunnels, exploding rockets, lobotomizing tweets, and now wholesale capture of the federal government aren’t merely good, but virtuous and even world changing.
Also in the mix is Trump’s other main manager, Russell Vought, who appears to understand that his own positions are fringe and unpopular and thus seeks to empower a wholly unaccountable executive that no judicial or legislative branch can supersede (as long, of course, as the executive is a Republican). Vought has worked Washington with the stern confidence of a zealot, subsidized by years of lavish right-wing donor funding that has transformed that zealotry into political reality. “I want to be the person that crushes the deep state,” he told an undercover reporter last summer during two hours of otherwise prosaic monologues about how he would go about doing just that. He seemed to give no thought to the downsides, because for Vought there are no downsides.
Through a combination of ignorance and strategy, all three men have arrived at the conclusion that no punishment meted out to the citizenry is excessive, no risk of damage from meting out the punishment too great. If the courts tell us no, we will ignore them. If people protest, we will fire them (legally or otherwise). If constituents complain, we don’t have any.
And if airplanes fall out of the sky, we’ll blame Black pilots. If it had occurred during Trump’s first term, the spectacle of the President, vice president, and secretary of transportation dispensing entirely with condolences during a press conference the day after a tragic plane crash that killed a group of kids on their way home from a figure-skating camp would have been a massive story. If, after failing to make any perfunctory grief-adjacent gestures, the three men had then spent their allotted time blaming the crash on diversity, resignations would have followed. So here is yet another measure of how much things have changed. The sniveling, gloating, unconcealed racism of this administration is one of Trump’s most significant innovations, a stain on public life that certainly precedes him, but which has expanded rapidly since his entry into politics.
“It is easy to dismiss DEI programs as ineffectual, because in many ways they have been,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor recently wrote in the New Yorker. “But that raises the question of why the right is so determined to undermine and dismiss them. It is because these widely varied efforts represent a commitment to integration, to opposing bigotry and racism, to offering an invitation to belong.” The determination to undermine and dismiss has manifested in recent weeks in an orgy of activity. At times it seems that the new administrators of the federal government’s commitment to rooting out DEI undergirds all other efforts—it’s not clear, for example, if the new defense secretary has gotten up to anything beyond canceling Black History Month, ending military recruitment efforts at a Black engineering event, and renaming bases (Fort Bragg is back with an asterisk, now named after a World War II–era Bragg, rather than the Confederate one).
Like Critical Race Theory before it—but with a supercharged intensity, since each new campaign of right-wing hate has been more aggressive than the last—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has come to stand in for efforts and programs that have nothing at all to do with these words’ putative definitions or implications. The DOGEistes, in combing through personnel data on the hunt for “women,” “historically,” and “status,” have made it very clear that they’re not particularly concerned with workplace training programs or low-stakes capitalist proceduralism. Instead the claims made by Musk and Project 2025 are far more expansive: for them DEI refers to any effort that acknowledges the reality that people other than cis white men operate in society. Hence getting rid of scholarships for special ed teachers, hence ending longstanding recruitment efforts, hence blaming Black pilots. According to this worldview, suspicious groups of people cannot possess expertise, competence, and authority—they are merely vessels for suspicious and subversive ideas, which should naturally be eliminated. From this old-school idea dressed up in new garments (or at least bedazzled with new branding), the leap back to another old-school idea—that nothing good at all can come of government—is straightforward enough. Musk’s call to “delete entire agencies” should be taken literally. The goal is pure and simple destruction.
It’s a destruction so relentless, illegal, and comprehensive that, for all the guidance the past few years and decades have offered vis a vis the right-wing and not-so-right-wing aspiration toward nihilism, every element of the attack is still shocking. Trump’s announced war on bike lanes is of a piece with his petty cruelty and assault on anything civic, but the willful gutting of the FAA feels like a step beyond, even with Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers lurking in the background. The massive assault on the US’s scientific research edifice, cast as an attack on blue-state universities but clearly an equally large risk for public schools in the South—as Zeynep Tufekci pointed out in a Times column called, appropriately, “The Pharmaceutical Industry Heads Into Musk’s Wood Chipper”—is an own goal even cowardly Republican legislators recognize as such. Mass layoffs at FEMA, the CDC, the Forest Service, the IRS, and on and on: another set of anecdotes vaster in scale and in desperate need of coherence.
Coherence, however, requires an opposition that can articulate not just the lawlessness of the administration’s actions, but also their immoral effects, the way an unspeakable number of lives are being made worse: masses of Americans losing their jobs or finding themselves on the cusp of precarity; a larger group suddenly more vulnerable to exploitation at their workplace or in their roles as consumers, travelers, students; a still larger group susceptible to illness and immiseration.
So what about that opposition? From Politico, a few days after demonstrators started to gather outside USAID headquarters to protest its abrupt Musk-led dismantling, whose immediate implications for everyone from survivors of violence against women to children at risk of tuberculosis to war veterans are absolutely daunting:
“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’” [David Axelrod] said. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”
Rahm Emanuel—the former House leader, Chicago mayor and diplomat—told me much the same: “You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch. And my view is—while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador—that’s not the hill I’m going to die on,” he said.
Not all Democratic officials have been as wincingly pitiful as these two “strategists” [sic], but the response has been radically misaligned with the moment’s extremity. Not that this should be surprising. In recent years Democrats as a whole seem to have given up on the notion that they should actively respond to events, that the response itself can drive news and affect policy. Shut out of Congress and the presidency, the Party is indeed severely constrained, but its most senior officials speak and act as if they don’t have access to the media and have no ability to shape public opinion. Trump’s win wasn’t anything close to a blowout, and his campaign was aware that the contents of Project 2025 were so unpopular that any connections had to be emphatically denied. But now, on the other side of the inauguration, Democratic leadership proceeds as if this insanity reflects some kind of popular uprising, as if it serves a real constituency and not a few billionaires and their fanatical little helpers. Even this learned helplessness, of course, has its internal inconsistencies: when it came to the matter of supporting genocide, the Party was proud to be at the front of the line. A plainly illegal right-wing coup, though? That should be allowed to proceed at its own pace. To quote a former government employee who posted on a Reddit thread about the “2025 Valentines Probationary Purge,” “the thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my fucking firing. I make $50k a year and work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.” If this extreme and clarifying moment isn’t a straightforward political opportunity, why bother with politics at all?
Nowhere in Axelrod’s and Emanuel’s comments is there any indication that the fight over USAID has any implications for the well-being of millions of people. Perhaps this is because it’s been a long time since Democrats argued, without hesitation or caveats, for the importance of the state—for the power of government to actually improve lives. Reading Nathan Tankus’s reporting on Musk’s Nazi teens hacking into COBOL computer systems in order to (yet again, illegally) defund parts of the government Elon Musk doesn’t like, I thought about the longevity of these ancient mainframe computers, now under threat from a bunch of goons who have no idea how to operate them. My mom began her career in COBOL, so I sent her Tankus’s pieces. Her response was bitter familiarity. The DOGE takeover, she told me, resembles numerous reshuffles, realignments, changes of corporate priority she’s seen on the job over the past few decades: CEOs, middle managers, and whiz kids who have come along over the years to improve systems they don’t understand in the name of modernization and efficiency. As at the Department of Treasury, the COBOL is still there, while nearly all the COBOL expertise has been eliminated. And everything everywhere has gotten worse.
These enduring, midcentury systems aren’t worthwhile because they’re old—they’re worthwhile because they work. The bureaucracies that Trump-Musk-Vought are working so aggressively to dismantle deliver money to institutions that provide food and shelter, prevent corporations from exploiting workers, restrain financial institutions from operating with complete impunity, and on and on. They undergird civil society. The people harmed by Trump’s and DOGE’s assaults represent a group of people far larger than the handful of goons trying to bring everything down. For any of this to matter, that group of people will need to assert itself.
Taking up Trump’s cause, earlier this month Steve Wynn petitioned the Supreme Court to hear an appeal to New York Times v. Sullivan, which for the past six decades has provided journalists with libel protections, and which Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have shown an interest in what is euphemistically called “revisiting.” Wynn recently lost a libel suit against the Associated Press, which was—unrelatedly—banned from the White House and Air Force One last week for failing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. ↩
See ProPublica’s indispensable DOGE tracker, which includes the 25-year-old Gavin Kliger—who, according to the Washington Post last night, is “seeking access to a heavily-guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country”—but doesn’t mention that Kliger was inspired to join DOGE by a book called Our American Pravda, by the white nationalist and Holocaust denier Ron Unz. (This information comes from a post on Kliger’s own Substack, now deleted.) ↩
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