How Trump And Musk Are Selling Destruction as Populism— The Nihilism Presidency

MAGA’s Final Act Is Burning Democracy To The Ground

The first time I figured out that the Democratic Party, despite the blather, might not be an actual vehicle for change was in 1966. I was president of my campus’ Young Democrats and I resigned when I saw that I was more aligned with the goals and tactics of the SDS. Funny enough, almost 60 years later, Catherine Rampell noted that The GOP has somehow backed Democrats into defending the status quo— and at a time when “Americans want change.”

Voters may be starting to sour on Trump and his agenda and they are certainly not feeling great about Musk or about the way the GOP is running Congress, but… Trump and Musk and their enablers “have managed to frame recent events as a binary choice: Either you like the ongoing mass destruction and trampling of the Constitution by the ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’ or you support keeping government as it is. It’s a false choice, obviously. But Democrats and other Trump critics have done a poor job articulating that failure in logic and the existence of a third option: actually fixing things.”

The problem starts with dissatisfaction with the status quo and more and more “normal” voters are just willing to “burn it all down” rather than just see everything stay the same. Still, Rampell, feels certain that Trump and Musk’s mindless destruction “in no way resembles an antidote” to the issues issues bothering people. “However bloated the government bureaucracy might be, the solution is not indiscriminately firing nuclear weapons inspectors, Head Start staff, law enforcement officers or air traffic controllers.  (Yes, mere weeks after multiple deadly airplane crashes, Trump is canning hundreds of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration.) Nor does it seem wise to grant Musk and his DOGE goons access to the Treasury’s sensitive payments system or your personal taxpayer date in order to cut ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’ Likewise, when American voters expressed frustration with health-care costs, they were presumably not seeking to cut funds for cancer research (as this administration has tried to do). They didn’t vote for public health agencies to suppress research on bird flu or to fire disease trackers, in the middle of bird flu and measles outbreaks. Or to remove seasonal flu vaccine campaign materials from government websites as hospitalization rates for the illness hit a 15-year high. As annoyed as some Americans may be about ‘DEI’ and speech policing, it’s hard to imagine that they thought rectifying the problem meant taking away sign-language interpreting services from deaf people or purging educators who assist children with speciual needs. Or, for that matter, tearing down school posters of Harriet Tubman, deleting taxpayer-funded data on adolescent suicidal ideation, and halting recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Pentagon.

Americans generally think we spend too much money on foreign aid (despite foreign aid representing 1 percent of total federal spending). Even so, Americans did not vote for allowing nearly $500 million in food grown by American farmers to spoil because Musk shut down international food assistance programs. Or giving China the opportunity to clean up our messes after we abandon allies. Or suspending anti-terrorism programs in West Africa and the Middle East.

And whatever the public blowback over illegal border crossings, Americans generally support  legal immigration. So, they might be displeased to learn that Trump has been working to rescind employment permits for immigrants working here legally, including those with jobs as farmhands and home health aides.

Apologies if this catalogue of destruction feels overwhelming. For Trump, that’s the objective. He “floods the zone” with so much chaos that it’s impossible for normal human beings— those with neither the bandwidth nor sufficient self-loathing to follow the news 24/7— to keep track. That enables Trumpers to compress the narrative into facile talking points: Trump is blowing a lot of stuff up! Given how unsatisfactory said stuff seemed before, that should sound awesome. Cathartic even. Rebuttals, by contrast, have been flattened into vague defenses of existing institutions and processes.

Thus, many Americans cheer the wrecking ball. The challenge for Trump’s critics is not merely that Trump’s destruction is exhausting to enumerate. It’s that voters have real gripes with government, and fixing those gripes is complex. It’s also rarely been a priority.

… Trump is shattering the status quo, but he’s not fixing the problems you care about. He’s creating new, much scarier ones.

On Monday, Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman reminded NY Times readers that, with congressional leaders not the slightest bit perturbed by Trump’s corruption, while Musk runs the government, Trump is busy brazenly lining his pockets. “Trump,” they wrote, “has re-entered the White House with a massively expanded portfolio of business interests, some of which require government approval or regulation, others of which are publicly traded, and still others involving foreign deals… [R]ecent actions underscore how emboldened Trump feels in his second term… The democratic system in United States never really anticipated what is happening in the Trump administration, said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department national security lawyer who is now a law professor at the University of Minnesota. ‘The presidency requires virtue— it requires a basic level of decency and loyalty to the country,’ Rozenshtein said. ‘If you don’t have that kind of person, there is not much one can do unfortunately at that point, especially if Congress is supine.’… Trump’s business ventures have created a climate for potential conflicts unlike any other U.S. president. And the list of matters sparking controversy in the second Trump administration is extensive.”

What makes the situation most worrisome, these lawyers said, is that so much of the system erected since the Watergate era to monitor and punish individuals involved in ethics violations has rapidly been dismantled since Trump’s inauguration.

“They are taking a wrecking ball to organizations across the executive branch that play a role in integrity, oversight and accountability,” said David Huitema, who was confirmed by the Senate as the new head of Office of Government Ethics in November for a five-year term, but then fired by Trump this month.

Trump not only fired nearly 20 inspectors general who investigate waste, fraud and abuse, he also fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, who examines public corruption, and the head of the Office of Government Ethics, which provides guidance to agencies across the government on what is right and wrong. (Trump has asked the Supreme Court to confirm his ability to dismiss the Office of Special Counsel director, Hampton Dellinger.)At the Justice Department, which can take up criminal violations of ethics laws even without referrals from separate federal agencies, Trump has appointed members of his former criminal defense team to top posts, including Emil Bove III, the acting U.S. deputy attorney general who helped defend Trump against charges in New York that he falsified business records.The Supreme Court ruling last July—  concluding that as president Trump has “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts”— only heightened his sense of impunity.

77,302,580 voters (49.8%) decided that’s what they wanted in the White House. They deserve all the worse that Trump and Musk serve up. The rest of us don't. And if you're a regular DWT reader, you already know that this isn’t just about corruption or incompetence. It’s about the wholesale dismantling of democracy for the benefit of Trump's and Musk's tiny cabal + enablers. Trump, Musk, and the sycophantic GOP have replaced governance with a Mafia-style protection racket— where loyalty to the boss determines who thrives and who suffers, who gets justice and who gets crushed. The system of checks and balances that was supposed to guard against tyranny is dissolving, not with a bang but with a shrug from spineless lawmakers too afraid— or too complicit— to challenge the destruction.

And that’s the real tragedy. Trump and his enablers aren’t just defiling the presidency or looting the treasury. They’re proving, day by day, that America’s democratic institutions were never built to withstand this level of bad faith. The Founders may have feared the rise of a demagogue, but even they did not anticipate a Congress so craven, a judiciary so corrupted or an electorate so conditioned to embrace nihilism that the outright demolition of government could be sold as “populism.”

History warns us what happens when democracies rot from within. The strongman consolidates power. The opposition grows weaker, not through outright suppression— though that, too, comes in time— but because people lose faith that resistance is even possible. Exhaustion replaces outrage. Apathy supplants action. The wrecking ball keeps swinging.

And yet, the story isn’t finished. Trump and Musk may believe they’ve rewritten the rules, but they cannot erase the past. The same people who fought for civil rights, for labor protections, for basic human decency in government— those people are still here. And history, when it turns, does so at the hands of those who refuse to accept that this is how it has to be. The question now is whether Americans will continue to cheer the destruction until there’s nothing left to save— or whether they will finally decide that, this time, the burning house is their own. Please consider supporting congressional resisters here; there aren’t many of them.