America Sets Itself On Fire Just As Voters Asked Us To Do

Over the past generation, a politics of rage has consumed the American people, provoked by the tribalism of our fragmented media landscape and the monetization of bitter division, all coupled with the predictable postindustrial decline in American communities where the middle class had always been the most fragile.  It's been a toxic brew and the electorate has been flirting with self-immolation a little more with each passing election cycle.  It's increasingly clear that on November 5, 2024, a near majority of American voters in states worth 312 electoral voters pulled the trigger, convinced that burning the country to ashes to "own the libs" was a winning proposition.  Smaller numbers of voters had been flirting with the politics of self-immolation for some time, but last fall, a critical mass decided that the most dangerous people the country has ever witnessed aspire to power should be given that power, completely unchecked.  They promised it would be fun to set the country on fire and then stand back and watch it burn, and the people decided that burning to death didn't sound so bad as long as liberals were the first ones doused in gasoline.

And now, nearly four months later, here we are.  We elected a bull in a china shop and, just as promised, the china is us.

Go back to last fall and read some of my past columns.  I predicted it would be very, very bad when an emboldened autocratic aspirant took the reins of power under dramatically different conditions than was seen in January 2017.  But honestly, even I wasn't mentally prepared for it to be as bad as it has in just five nightmarish weeks as literally nobody has inclination to stand in the way of this madman.  The Democrats are as terrible at politics as they've always been and can't even seem to find their way out of the La-Z-Boy let alone articulate a cogent counteroffensive.  People that know better in the Republican Party are scared to death about their own careers and quietly pretend to agree with positions taken by the new administration that run counter to everything they've ever feigned caring about in the past.  Rome is burning and hundreds of Congressional Neros are content to fiddle away.

Rather than going through a laundry list of everything Trump and his team are breaking, it's more useful for me to sniff out what's likely to come on the other side of all of this scorched-earth wreckage.....and that's a geopolitical climate where every other country on the globe decides it's in their best interest to work around the United States rather than with us.  Trump and his disciples are convinced the U.S. economic might is so overpowering that we can behave like a gangster on absolutely everything and the world will fall in line.  But does the rest of the world really need us the way Trump and his voters think?  Particularly if we raise the cost of business with supersized tariffs while cutting off their foreign aid and letting it be known that we'll thuggishly steal their mineral rights just for the privilege of having us in the room?

The question certainly becomes what the U.S. has to offer that's worth enduring the expense and humiliation that Trump insists upon, particularly as we make it clear that our military might is no longer gonna be accessible or available to the former allies and would-be trading partners being forced to eat the shit sandwiches.  What's in it for them?  And what do we have that they can't live without?  Are the legacy brands that we're coasting on (General Motors, McDonald's, Walmart) really that irreplaceable? Is our tech sector really at the cutting edge of innovation as it was a quarter century ago, or are the Chinese poised to show us up at every stage of the tech development of the future?  And as we've allowed our economy to be centered around financial industry three-card monte with increased regularity, will we continue to lead the rest of the world by the nose with Wall Street's gimmicks and Ponzi schemes when everybody else has an active interest in working around us if they're gonna be treated like enemies? 

For those keeping score, here's where things stand in America in March 2025.....

At the very time when the advancement of artificial intelligence is poised to allow the tech billionaires to erase trillions of dollars of human capital from the economy, these same tech billionaires have a literal front-row seat to secure the sweetest deal possible for themselves at the behest of the narcissistic puppet they bought and paid for.  Not only will these tech barons be purging millions of American workers from the ranks of the employed, they'll be raiding the public coffers for trillions of dollars in debt-financed tax cuts to pay for it.

The promised budget cuts will percolate through the American economy and dramatically increase the risk of a recession even before the AI revolution is fully rolling.  The Medicaid cuts alone run the risk of manufacturing crushing deficits for the states, and their balanced budget requirements threaten a domino effect of further cuts that will almost certainly be enough to instigate a recession.

And perhaps most ominously for the interest of national security, Trump and Musk have created an environment so toxic where nobody will find a career in national service attractive.  Who in their right mind would look at what's happened since January 20 and believe that a career in any capacity with the federal government would be worth the risk of instantaneous discharge and financial ruin at the hands of megalomaniacs?  Federal jobs are at the forefront of national security protection and, in just six weeks, we've created an environment where zero people would ever consider doing them moving forward.  America's smartest people who've done this work up until now are guaranteed to seek alternative options.  And this is happening at the same time as we're creating enemies out of everybody else on the planet.  It won't be long at all before the national security implications of these impulsive choices will reveal themselves in the form of tangibly diminished national safety.

And given that Trump has already gotten his license for four years of unchecked power and the promise of unlimited lawlessness to come, the possibility of buyer's remorse isn't particularly relevant, but as a  student of public opinion, I'm still curious how many people ultimately abandon him.  Ultimately, I just don't see Trump declining to the depths of his public opinion nadir as seen in late 2017 and 2018.  Too many people have gone down a rabbit hole of radicalization since then, and to be fair, the Democrats' pandemic-era consensus on immigration, crime, and race served up no shortage of kindling to accelerate that radicalization. 

Furthermore, cruelty to "those people" is popular in American politics.  This is nothing new either.  I came of the age in the Reagan era, and while contemporary MAGA Republicans are much different in so many ways compared to the Reagan-era GOP,  the clearest connecting tissue is the elation they get from watching other people's lives be destroyed.  As meatpackers, steelworkers, autoworkers, and small family farmers were chewed up and spit out during the Reagan years, the Gipper's base got a visceral masturbatory thrill observing the ensuing wreckage of the people who they didn't believe deserved their one-time middle-class lives.  Fast forward 40 years and, ironically, it's the steelworkers, autoworkers, and farmers at the front lines of the MAGA base, getting their own visceral masturbatory thrill watching a wrecking ball delivered upon the lives of the college boys (and former military people....wave that flag!!!) on the payroll of the federal government or of those receiving Medicaid.  In 1985 and again in 2025, no matter who makes up the coalition, enjoying the suffering of others has been the essence of Republicanism, and the voters who ascribe to it will have to go through a lot personally to offset the euphoria they feel from hurting people they perceive as their rivals.  And Trump and Musk have plenty of hurt to deliver upon to gratify these voters' basest urges to "own" these people.

In other words, I wouldn't believe the polls showing Trump's popularity increasingly underwater or the Congressional townhalls full of enraged constituents representing a mass backlash to the status quo.  If it was real, you'd be seeing lethargic Democratic lawmakers rising from their slumbers and Republican lawmakers more likely to distance themselves from Trump's most controversial positions, neither of which is happening.  If you go to a diner in Kenosha, as CBS News did earlier this week, you can expect to see tables full of former blue-collar Democrats who can't find anything to oppose in all that Trump and Musk are doing.  While I have no doubt that suffering will befall these people as a consequence of Trump's choices, until that suffering is impossible to ignore, the overwhelming majority of the 77 million people who voted for Trump, along with a nonzero number of the 78 million people who didn't vote for Trump, are gonna be content to enjoy watching the fire they started consume the country.  Arsonists like to stand back and watch what they've destroyed right until the point that it burns their own home, and America's MAGA arsonists can be counted upon to do the same.