Politics
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Hiding in Plain Sight
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April 29, 2025
This isn’t a authorities of, by, and for the individuals; it’s a authorities of, by, and for American oligarchs.
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President Donald Trump and White Home senior adviser andTesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shake fingers whereas attending the NCAA Division I Wrestling Championship on March 22, 2025, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Photos)
As we attain Donald Trump’s first 100 days in workplace (once more), two leitmotifs stand out. Primary is the in-your-face corruption of those individuals—Trump’s cupboard and inside circle of advisers, together with lots of the world’s wealthiest people, who know nothing about empathy however all the pieces about exploitation. Quantity two is the best way they revel within the spectacle of cruelty and humiliation. These are women and men with the withered, cankered souls of slave merchants, who’re turning the complete federal equipment into an atrocity-generating machine.
I would wish a Bible-sized quantity to listing each despicable, unconstitutional, illegal act this gangster authorities has carried out over the previous three months, and an entire part of a library to catalog all of the atrocities they’re prone to try over the approaching three years and 9 months.
Sooner or later, there’ll seemingly be complete museums devoted to the horrors they unleashed, each stateside and globally, on essentially the most deprived amongst us. However, till such a day arrives, I supply some highlights, first of the corruption, then the cruelty.
Earlier than he was inaugurated, the president arrange a $Trump meme coin, basically utilizing the wide-open crypto panorama to spin cash for himself and his household out of complete material. Sooner or later, there was no Trump cryptocurrency; the following, there was a Ponzi scheme—supported by the countless gullibility of the MAGA base and its willingness to ship ever more money to its cult chief—value billions of {dollars}. Weeks later, its worth cratered, however not earlier than the Trump household had made yet one more fortune. Then, in late April, Trump introduced an specific pay-to-play scheme, saying that the highest 220 meme-coin holders can be invited to a non-public dinner with Trump at his personal golf course close to DC. (It initially instructed a tour of the White Home, however that language has since been eliminated.) Inside hours, as patrons flocked to $Trump, its worth soared an astounding 58 p.c.
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In every other period, this habits would have resulted within the initiation of impeachment proceedings. However there are now not any guardrails within the govt department. The DOJ, for instance, is now not imposing the International Corrupt Practices Act, successfully giving a free cross to People who search to bribe abroad political figures, and US political leaders who’ve all however put up shingles in entrance of their places of work making it clear they’re on the market. Maybe that’s why the Saudis have lavished consideration on Trump in current months, as Trump and the Saudi management look to dealer a deal merging the US-backed and Saudi-backed skilled golf leagues, which may vastly profit Trump, who owns golf programs all over the world.
The administration has additionally neutered the Client Monetary Safety Bureau, giving lenders free rein to use essentially the most susceptible debtors. It has introduced plans to scrap an array of inspection companies, which can seemingly lead to extra harmful workplaces as employers see they will get away with taking security shortcuts whereas making it tougher for unions to prepare employees. Choose just about any office or environmental or well being requirements enforcement company, and it has been both weakened or destroyed previously 100 days, leaving the federal authorities in some ways much less of a regulatory actor than at any level because the Nineteen Twenties. That may be a huge reward to personal companies and an enormous invitation to corruption.
So intertwined are private and non-private pursuits on this notably American model of crony capitalism that Trump hasn’t even tried to decode whether or not his DOGE enforcer, Elon Musk (who’s planning to tug again his public presence in authorities beginning in Might, although will seemingly stay a behind-the-scenes power), is engaged on behalf of the federal government or just on behalf of his personal enterprise pursuits. When Musk met Indian chief Narendra Modi in February, Trump was requested during which capability the world’s richest man was assembly the Indian chief, and he punted, saying it was an official assembly however he anticipated Musk to speak enterprise as effectively.
In the meantime, Musk himself hasn’t made the slightest effort to disentangle his two roles, utilizing his distinctive insider-outsider standing to establish enterprise rivals after which safe a bonus for his corporations with regards to securing authorities contracts. Take, for instance, his use of X to criticize Verizon’s efforts to improve the FAA’s communications system—and the revelations that the FAA was exploring working with Musk’s Starlink as a substitute.
Critics fear that the unprecedented vacuuming up of information about nearly everybody dwelling in the USA in addition to each enterprise within the nation by DOGE engineers will, in the end, make Musk a kingmaker for many years to return. Musk now has the federal government information to bludgeon enemies and enterprise rivals in a means that may make them much less capable of compete pretty along with his corporations for presidency contracts.
Outrageously, after activists started protesting Tesla due to Musk’s function in destroying large swaths of the federal authorities and firing tens of hundreds of employees, Trump used the White Home garden to televise a cheesy gross sales pitch for Tesla automobiles. And, with Musk by his aspect, the president declared that those that protested in opposition to Tesla needs to be thought of “home terrorists.”
Talking of the White Home garden, Trump provided corporations sponsorship rights over the annual White Home Easter egg hunt, offering yet one more type of pay-to-play for corporations in search of the administration’s favor. No shock, Huge Tech was throughout this, with Meta, Amazon, and YouTube all being sponsors.
So apparent are the market manipulations round tariffs— with Trump elevating tariffs to absurd charges after which telling his TruthSocial followers to purchase inventory hours earlier than he paused those self same tariffs and despatched inventory markets briefly hovering—that it appears onerous to keep away from the conclusion that Trump is intentionally manipulating markets. Certainly, quite a few senior Democrats, together with Senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren, in addition to Consultant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have known as for SEC investigations into potential insider buying and selling and market manipulation. However the SEC, which is now instantly managed by Trump within the wake of an govt order taking away the independence of many authorities companies, has been silent. These crickets converse volumes to the place the nation is heading.
I may go on, however you get the gist. This isn’t a authorities of, by, and for the individuals; the primary 100 days have proven, past a shadow of a doubt, that it’s a authorities of, by, and for American oligarchs.
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As for the cruelty, it’s onerous to know the place to begin. Let’s start with Musk feeding USAID “into the wooden chipper,” within the grotesque phrasing of the world’s richest man. The harm? 1000’s of USAID employees left with out work; tens of hundreds of abroad consultants and contract employees left with out revenue; and tens of millions of individuals globally left with out entry to important, life-saving medicines and vaccinations for all the pieces from HIV to TB, diarrhea, malaria, cholera, and Ebola.
The estimated penalties, in lives misplaced, are nearly unimaginable. Infectious illness mathematical modelers at Boston College estimate that 103 individuals per hour are dying due to these cuts. As of late April, they estimate almost 43,000 adults and almost 90,000 kids have died as a direct results of the choice to finish USAID and its distribution of significant drugs, vaccinations, and its work on stopping famines. By the top of the 12 months, they estimate an extra 176,000 individuals can have died due to a cutoff of their HIV/AIDS drugs; 62,000 can have died of TB being left untreated. Inner paperwork from USAID analysts warned Trump that chopping off polio vaccinations and malaria therapies would result in 200,000 kids being paralyzed by polio over the approaching decade and 166,000 dying of malaria. Each one in every of these deaths is the all-too-predictable results of the demolition of USAID.
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Then there may be the deporting of lots of of Venezuelan and El Salvadoran males to indefinite detention in CECOT, the huge gulag in El Salvador. Amongst these males are Kilmar Armando Garcia, who was deported within the face of a choose’s order saying he couldn’t be returned to El Salvador—and who stays there regardless of lower-court and Supreme Court docket rulings that the federal government needed to “facilitate” his return to the states. Pouring salt into the constitutional disaster wound, the DHS then printed Garcia’s spouse’s residence deal with in social media postings, forcing her to enter hiding to keep away from violence from Trump-inspired goons. Then there may be Andry Hernández Romero, a younger, homosexual Venezuelan who was within the means of making use of for asylum when ICE brokers determined his tattoos marked him as a gang member. With no pretense of due course of, they flew the terrified younger man out to the mega-prison, and sat again whereas he grew to become a denizen of President Bukele’s compelled labor regime.
There may be the extraordinary choice this previous week to deport three US citizen kids together with their undocumented moms to Honduras, although one in every of these kids, a 4-year-old boy, had stage 4 most cancers and was being deported with out medicine or entry to his physician. This isn’t simply flagrantly unconstitutional; it’s additionally as vile an act of deliberate, wanton, indifference to life, as any ordered by a US authorities official or company in opposition to US residents that I’ve ever examine. For this motion, I hope Tom Homan, Steve Miller, and all the opposite ghoulish architects of this fascist anti-immigrant agenda spend the remainder of their depressing lives haunted by the destiny of this sick baby.
There may be the kidnapping of graduate college students in broad daylight by masked brokers of Trump’s authoritarian state, and their detainment in privately run immigration services hundreds of miles from residence. They’ve been slated for deportation, not for having dedicated crimes however for having dedicated ideas.
There are the more and more brutal encounters between ICE brokers and immigrant households, a lot of them with the paperwork to indicate they’ve filed asylum claims, none of which now function safety in opposition to the snatch-squads, these latter-day fugitive slave hunters. Take, for instance, the imagery of ICE brokers utilizing huge hammers to smash their means right into a automobile simply exterior of Boston, during which sat a terrified immigrant couple, at the moment within the nation on asylum, ready for the person’s lawyer to reach. I’ve watched this footage scores of occasions, however nonetheless typically I watch it the sense of disbelief that this may very well be taking place in America floods my thoughts.
All of that is accompanied by the cheers of state-level GOP leaders. Florida is deputizing campus police as de facto ICE brokers and ordering lots of of native police departments to coordinate with ICE in mass roundups. The early outcomes of this collaboration: a two-day haul of 800 individuals arrested within the Sunshine State this previous weekend alone. And Texas is constructing a unprecedented community of detention services to deal with the hundreds, after which the tens of hundreds of immigrants—together with kids—whom Trump’s thugs at the moment are rounding up across the nation and sending the Lone Star State’s means.
Lastly, there may be the torture-porn imagery of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in CECOT, surrounded by bare-chested, tattooed prisoners. That is on a par with the imagery of Nazi bureaucrats engaged in promotional excursions of the focus camps.
Nevertheless you parse it, this primary hundred days represents a shocking new low in American politics. The corruption and the cruelty are hiding in plain sight. Welcome to the thugocracy.
The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows every week.
Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economic system and arrange yet one more constitutional disaster at residence. Plainclothes officers proceed to abduct college college students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown overseas to a mega jail in opposition to the orders of the courts. And Signalgate guarantees to be the primary of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence on the core of the American empire.
At a time when elite universities, highly effective regulation companies, and influential media retailers are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is extra decided than ever earlier than to carry the highly effective to account.
In simply the final month, we’ve printed reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to different international locations, uncovered the administration’s attraction to obscure legal guidelines to hold out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of courageous pupil activists focused by universities.
We additionally proceed to inform the tales of those that struggle again in opposition to Trump and Musk, whether or not on the streets in rising protest actions, on the town halls throughout the nation, or in important state elections—like Wisconsin’s current state Supreme Court docket race—that present a mannequin for resisting Trumpism and show that Musk can’t purchase our democracy.
That is the journalism that issues in 2025. However we are able to’t do that with out you. As a reader-supported publication, we depend on the help of beneficiant donors. Please, assist make our important impartial journalism potential with a donation at present.
In solidarity,
The Editors
The Nation
Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky is The Nation’s Western correspondent. He’s the creator of a number of books, together with The American Means of Poverty, The Home of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Surprise: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Feminine Sports activities Famous person, and most not too long ago Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Towards the Far-Proper Takeover of Small-City America. Comply with him on Bluesky at @sashaabramsky.bsky.social.
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