March 30, 2025
This country has been rendered unrecognizable and it has not even been 100 days. Trump and Musk have crippled or shuttered critical agencies, from USAID to the Social Security Administration to the Veterans Administration. They have fired almost 50,000 federal workers, pushed almost 75,000 others to take buyouts and have plans to cut almost 200,000 more, (Source: “What We Know About Cuts to the Federal Workforce,” by Elena Shao and Ashley Wu, The New York Times, 3/28/25). DOGE even attempted to abruptly cut funding for medical research, (including cancer!), but was temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
Speech has been criminalized. 200 Venezuelan men were rounded up and shipped to a slave labor camp in another country, without due process, for the crime of having tattoos, including one promoting autism awareness, (Source: “You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos,” by Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias, MotherJones.com, 3/26/25). Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student who is a legal green card holder married to an American citizen, was arrested in his apartment and shipped to a detention center in Jena, Louisiana, over a thousand miles away from his pregnant wife, (Source: “Immigration agents arrest Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University protests,” by Jake Offenhartz, apnews.com, 3/9/25). Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar and PhD candidate at Tufts University, was kidnapped off of the street in Somerville, Massachusetts by six masked plainclothes ICE agents and shipped to the same Louisiana detention center despite a court order mandating that she remain in Massachusetts. Ozturk’s offense, co-writing an Op-Ed in the student newspaper a year ago critical of the university’s stance on the war in Gaza, (Source: “Federal Government Detains International Student at Tufts,” by Jenna Russell, Safak Timur, Anemona Hartocollis, and Eduardo Medina, The New York Times, 3/26/25).
Yet this administration is not limiting itself to the low hanging fruit of foreign students and asylum seekers. Trump has issued an array of executive orders targeting law firms, ranging from efforts to control their hiring practices to deeming them national security threats. Trump, channeling his inner Louis XIV, has conflated efforts to prosecute him with attacks on the country, deeming firms that were affiliated with Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, and Mark Pomerantz as national security threats. Trump attacked Perkins Coie for its role in connection with the Steele dossier.
Trump targeted Columbia University, holding hundreds of millions in federal grant money hostage unless they acceded to his demands. Columbia caved, agreeing to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department into receivership. It was a stunning capitulation, an abdication of the principle of academic freedom that is central to the definition of a university. Unsurprisingly, the $400 million dollars of scientific research funding has not yet been restored.
Trump’s regime is following the playbook laid out by ultra right wing “thinker,” Curtis Yarvin, destroying the century old federal government bureaucracy that has protected ordinary citizens and attacking the pillars of civil society — the rule of law and the academy. They seek not only to erase constitutional democracy, but the Enlightenment itself, (Source: “The Interview: Curtis Yarvin says democracy is done. Powerful conservatives are listening,” by David Marchese, The New York Times, 1/18/25).
The cherry on this sh-t sundae is Signalgate, where top administration officials communicated detailed attack plans over Signal, a commercial messaging app that is not approved for government use because it is not secure, and included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in the chat. When Goldberg published the story on March 24th, all of the people involved downplayed the seriousness of the security breach, calling Goldberg a liar and denying that anything in the chat was classified. Goldberg responded by publishing the entire thread two days later, (Source: “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump Advisors Shared on Signal” by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, 3/26/25).
The full chat, which gave precise information about weapons and timing, included emojis and insults aimed at our European allies. It reads like the chat of a group of high school boys playing Call of Duty, not senior level national security officials. We are governed by a cabal of stupid criminals whose malevolence is only exceeded by their recklessness. With RFK Jr’s campaign to rid the country of an effective vaccination program and Trump’s effort to legitimize the long debunked theory of scientific racism by executive order, it is as if we are in a dystopian “Back to the Future” remake, hurtling back in time to the McKinley era and there is no DeLorean to bring us back.
War has been declared on us, the American people, by an unholy alliance of Christian nationalists and technofascists. They are not satisfied with immiserating Black people, trans kids, Latino immigrants, or pro-Palestinian graduate students. They are coming for everyone and we’d better recognize it. Protests and boycotts are proof that we aren’t complacent, but we are kidding ourselves if we think that will be enough. The stakes are really high and your privilege will not protect you. Even if you have the complexion for protection and enough money to ride out inflation and stock market losses, we all breathe the same air, drink the same water and rely on the federal government to make sure our food and medicine is safe. Like I said, they are coming for all of us.
That means each of us has a decision to make. Are we going to try to bargain with monsters, in the hopes of delaying the inevitable, to hold onto our privilege? Or are we going to channel our most noble ancestors and do what they did, take a risk for something bigger than themselves?
The Black and white Freedom Riders were violently assaulted, nearly burned alive when their bus was firebombed, arrested and jailed, merely for standing up for the simple principle that Black Americans were equal citizens entitled to ride on desegregated public transportation. The Eagle Squadron was a group of American pilots who snuck into the U.K. two years before Pearl Harbor to join the RAF to fight the Nazis. 89% of their pilots died in combat.
The conflict we are facing now is just as stark. It is whether 330 million Americans will be ruled by a group of amoral sociopaths who mistake hatred for a personality. They don’t believe in democracy, want to crash the economy, decimate public education, and eliminate the social safety net in order to have a ready supply of desperate people that they can enslave. They hope those of us too old or too sick to serve them will die. Given what we’re up against, avoiding risk is a fantasy. The question for each of us is what are we most afraid to lose— our comfort or our principles?