The Trump Administration Aims to Weaken America
At a recent democracy summit I had a conversation with someone who was displaced from his homeland by civil war. After arriving in Kenya and living in a refugee camp, he came to the United States and made a new life, becoming a presidential appointee in the area of international aid. Now everything he had worked for was in ruins, victim of an order by the new Donald Trump administration to pause foreign aid.
All day I had been haunted by this New York Times headline and the myriad tragedies it conjured:
The summary beneath the headline describes a universe of care made possible by humanitarian assistance, medical research that follows scientific protocols, and fact-based messaging to vulnerable populations.
All of this must now be cancelled as Trump reorients the U.S. towards an autocratic axis dedicated to the nullification of democratic internationalism, solidarity, and human rights. How powerful and grandiose the American strongman feels as he issues edict after edict designed to instantly void the world of American power and influence. Trump and his unelected co-president, Elon Musk, are targeting agencies, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy among them, that carry forth the democratic values of assistance and solidarity abroad.
Musk has called USAID (which was founded by President Kennedy to combat Soviet influence abroad, and fought apartheid in Musk’s native South Africa) a “criminal agency,”
“I am everything and you are nothing,” the authoritarian tells us, as he wrenches the country and the world into another reality with bewildering speed. It is so satisfying to be able to decree, with a flourish of the pen, the erasure of one version of the country in order to jump-start another; to decide which groups are worthy of protection and which are enemies. The megalomania of the current occupant of the White House, and his obsession with leaving his mark on the world, is nothing new.
From the years of Fascism and early Communism, strongmen have seen people as assets to exploit for their demographic, labor, or military expansion schemes. That’s why so many of them engage in biopolitics, or social engineering and population management programs founded on the idea that some groups should thrive and multiply and others must be ejected from the nation, or decline or be eliminated.
This latter course of action can be actively pursued —think mass deportation, detentions and persecutions—or passively engineered by removing “lifesaving treatment and prevention programs,” thereby increasing the potential for disease and death.
Il Duce's 1927 Ascension Day speech provided a blueprint for Fascist biopolitics. He cast himself in the role of a “clinician” who undertook “necessary hygienic actions” to defend good and loyal Italians from internal enemies, whether drug addicts, Slavs, LGBTQ people, or leftists and other political dissidents. “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person,” he concluded chillingly. While some people were deported or forced into exile, many more were “quarantined” in a network of penal colonies, confinement zones, and prisons.
Nazi Germany took biopolitics to a different level. The Nazis claimed the right to curtail life “as the welfare of the people and the state demand,” in the German biologist Hans Weinert’s formulation. This mentality prepared the German population to accept escalations of the persecution of Jews, the disabled, LGBTQ people, and other targeted groups and encouraged complicity in euthanasia and wartime genocide.
Trump’s America will have its own version of biopolitics, and mass deportations will be part of that. So may the creation of circumstances for diseases to circulate among ordinary Americans (the elites he really cares about will always have state-of-the-art medical care). Autocrats tend to act in a self-interested fashion during a crisis to maintain themselves in power, as happened during the 2020 Covid pandemic. The most kleptocratic leaders may also reallocate public health funds to enrich themselves and their cronies.
As signaled by the nomination of conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer RFK, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Trump administration may restrict access to vaccines and other proven methods of disease prevention, knowing this sets the stage for the U.S. population to be more susceptible to illness and in the long run less productive and prosperous. Stopping research into cancer and other diseases, even for children, is the opposite of investing in the future of the American people: it is cruel and uncaring by design.
Harming American influence externally and weakening Americans internally will benefit our adversaries. Another New York Times headline tells us what we need to know about the allegiances of those now in power in America.
I have but one question. Who do these greedy billionaires think will serve them when they have gutted the whole US government eliminating critical services and compromising national security just so they didn't have to pay taxes? Are they really so short sighted that they miss the long term (like one year out) consequences of what Musk is doing?
The striking similarity of the two signatures is enough to make one believe in reincarnation.