A Superpower Commits Suicide and Fascism Triumphs Part 5
Introduction
This is part 5 of a series I began immediately following the 2024 US election. The goal has been to trace the ways in which the second Trump administration will simultaneously usher fascism into America with waves of increasing oppression and destroy America as a global superpower. This is being written in late February 2025 after a month and a half of depressing, frightening, and confusing chaos that has been unleashed since Trump was inaugurated. Even if the entire administration resigned tomorrow and was replaced by sane and rational people the damage that’s been done would still take more than a decade to repair domestically. The damage done to the US’s reputation abroad among its allies is mortally wounded already and will never recover (a topic which will be discussed more below). The speed at which the Trump administration has siphoned power from the other branches of government is shocking, and the obsequiousness with which the other two branches have allowed the loss of their own power is pathetic. What’s more, the Republican party has already by the time of this writing begun the process of making voting so difficult and so exclusionary as a way to ensure they will maintain their grip on power indefinitely. It’s a frightening and exhausting experience to watch all of this happen and be unable to do anything about it. Even writing these words feels like shouting into a void. That’s probably been the experience of countless reasonable people throughout history. Feeling as if they were going insane, but really it was the world around them that was insane. It’s not exactly comforting to know this, but I do try to remember that none of this is new, not really. Humanity is just repeating the mistakes it has always made.
Anti-Educating Our Way to “Greatness” Part 2
To start I’ll quickly summarize what I wrote in part 1 of this subsection. The hatred of science, intellectualism, and education in general brought by the second Trump administration is part of an old tradition in the United States. The people elected into power in 2024 might take that strain of anti-intellectualism farther than anyone previously, and eliminate the federal department of education altogether. Attacking education and lionizing willful ignorance isn’t exactly a great way to make your country stable or prosperous. In fact it will achieve exactly the opposite.
This leaves an important question, why? What rationale was Trump and his cronies making to justify their attacks on education? Again and again the administration deployed the vague euphemism of “leaving education to the states.” What does that mean exactly, what do they want to leave to the states? Re-segregation of schools is what they mean, if they can get away with it. Racists in America never got over the fact that they were forced to integrate public schools in the 1960s and continually worked on ways of undoing that progress. They were also smart enough to realize it would look bad to state their real goals in public (that was the case for a while, the Trump era saw them become increasingly bold and shameless). Racists hid behind arguments that federal education was so flawed that they needed a new solution, like religious private schools for instance that also were conveniently monochromatic.
The second Trump presidency began immediately with attacks against the very idea of diversity in the federal workforce. As the latter half of the 2020s rolls on, Trump’s administration will continually see what they can get away with. If their attacks on trans people, diversity hiring, undocumented immigrants of color succeed without enough resistance, then they will push further. Maybe they will attack more people in the LGBTIA+ community, maybe they’ll outlaw interracial and gay marriage, maybe they’ll attack the voting rights of even more people. I’m not even speculating, these have been the stated goals of the far right for decades, it’s only now that they have the chance to carry it out on a massive scale. Education is just one battleground in this war against diversity. Some people might read this and think “Re-segregation can’t happen in the United States.” Why not? A lot of people probably thought fascism would never take control here either. In fact, that kind of complacency is one of the reasons why fascism was able to come to power. Unfortunately, people of the extreme-right are patient, tenacious, dedicated, and they never get discouraged. They will keep trying over and over until they find a weakness somewhere, by whatever means will work. That could be through violence like an insurrection, or it could be through mass appeal and winning democratic elections. The only way to stop fascism from succeeding is to be just as tenacious. Giving up or growing complacent and saying “it can’t happen here” only makes the jobs of fascists easier.
Which brings me to a particular pet peeve I have towards the attitudes of leadership in both education and journalism. In the US during the early 21st century major media outlets and education officials were obsessed with proclaiming their “neutrality.” The idea is that somehow people can exist without bias and that it’s a good thing to sit on the sideline and never get involved in political disputes. Which I can understand to a point. Getting involved in politics is depressing and exhausting, there is no denying that. On the other hand, acting and thinking without bias is literally impossible, and not getting involved in politics is still a political stance. When journalists and education policy makers say “We’re neutral,” what they really mean is “We stand for nothing.” Which is terrifying to consider, because if the Trump administration decides to re-segregate schools a lot of school districts have preemptively acquiesced.
How to Lose Friends and Influence No One
FYI: I finished writing this on February 28th 2025, the day of a press conference in the White House where JD Vance and Trump berated and ranted at Ukrainian president Zelensky. Trump and Vance were pathetic and shameful, and the conference was a complete disaster for US foreign relations. Below I describe the US stabbing Ukraine in the back, but even that is being charitable.
Along with the rapid fire repression, collecting power in the executive branch, and causing chaos in the federal government, Trump also began his second term by suggesting America carry out a genocidal colonial project (really playing all the American highlights of the past), and nuking strategic alliances with Western Europe (when I write this I’m using “nuking” figuratively, it could become literal in the future). It’s a bizarre fusion of America’s worst isolationist tendencies to pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist and its imperial chauvinism.
Early in Trump’s second term he suggested that the US would take control of the Gaza Strip and displace all the Palestinians living there to build a resort city. Even if this is just an insane idea that Trump blurted out that ultimately goes nowhere even the suggestion of it is absolutely damning for the United States. Trump suggested that a global superpower carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing to build a vacation destination literally built on the bones of genocide victims. I can’t even describe how fucking evil that is. Aside from creating the most cursed vacation spot in history, the US potentially seizing Gaza, or letting Israel take control helps set an awful precedent. The “rules” based international order that apparently existed after the Second World War was always a sham, wars and genocides remain just as prevalent as they always have been. In addition, the United States always proclaimed itself to be a bastion of liberty to the world while overthrowing democracies that might be unfriendly to American interests. In short, American foreign policy has always been hypocritical. Supporting Israel as they carry out a genocide for the world to see, and then potentially joining in on that genocide to seize land is a signal for what is acceptable behavior on the global stage. I’m in no way trying to downplay the crimes being done to Palestinians, but the damage from the US’s foreign policy will not be limited to the Palestinian people. It’s not unreasonable to fear that a new era of violent colonialism is being born in the 21st century, thanks in part to Trump and the United States normalizing and sanctioning it.
This point is further emphasized by Trump stabbing Ukraine in the back. Right around the time that the war in Ukraine was celebrating its third terrible birthday in February 2025, Trump transformed into a dog that barked Kremlin talking points. He accused the Ukrainian president of being a dictator (depressing irony there), he blamed Ukraine and NATO for starting the war, and he tried to bully Ukraine into signing over mineral resources in exchange for a peace deal in which the Russians would concede nothing. The President of the United States blaming Ukraine for unprovoked Russian aggression is pathetic and shameful. Demanding Ukraine give the United States access to mineral resources while at the same time Russia gets to keep seized Ukrainian territory is even worse. It would be like seeing someone being mugged in the street, with the thief demanding the victim’s wallet. The United States instead of intervening or calling for help, jams a knife in the victim’s back and says that the victim should hand over their shoes while they’re at it. I’d call the Biden administration’s support of Ukraine lukewarm at best, but even that is infinitely better than Trump’s total betrayal.
Trump’s support for Russia is a disaster for Western Europe and NATO too. Coupled with Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and Canada, I believe we will see old allies pivot away from the US and form new security guarantees as fast as they can. This won’t be an overnight process, trying to untangle relationships formed over decades is no simple process for large bureaucratic states. It will happen though, Trump has proved that the United States is too unstable, unreliable, and violent to be counted on. If Trump and the people in his orbit weren’t so committed to ending democracy they might recognize the fact that destroying strategic partnerships that are close to a century old is a terrible way to keep your position as a global leader.
Yet another way in which the Trump administration permanently kneecapped the US’s global position is the dismantling of USAID (a federal agency tasked with distributing foreign aid all over the globe). As of this writing it’s still unclear what the agency’s ultimate fate will be. There were court orders ordering the administration to release funds that had already been allocated by Congress to the agency. Whether through incompetence or deliberate snubbing the administration ignored these court mandates and created yet more uncertainty. USAID became an early target of Trump and Elon Musk in January and February 2025 for a couple of reasons. The first is that they had no idea what it was that USAID actually did worldwide. The second is that Trump and Musk were appeasing the part of the American electorate that vastly overestimated how the US spent on foreign aid. Trump and Musk’s dismantling of the department was a crime in the legal sense (but when has legality ever mattered?) and a crime in the figurative sense for all the good USAID did with what little money it was given.
An agency like USAID is also one of those things that makes life so complicated. The US is a rapacious empire that ignores its own rules and standards to cynically further its interests. The US has been that way for its entire history. At the same time, the US can and has done a lot of good in the world, often through organizations like USAID. Both of those things can be true at the same time. To make matters even more complicated, USAID can be an entity that does a lot of good in the world while at the same time furthering the interests of the United States. How can that be possible? Let’s pretend for a moment that developed post industrial countries are hungrily eyeing natural resources in developing African countries (there’s absolutely no possibility this could happen in real life). The goal is to extract as much as possible while giving back as little as you can get away with. The question is how? As luck would have it there is an entire toolbox of ways an empire can loot a country that can be used in any combination. Some examples include: outright military conquest and occupation, bribing local government officials to hand over resources for next to nothing, taking the raw material and selling back the finished product creating a trade imbalance, or use an institution (it can be secular or religious) to genuinely help people while simultaneously creating goodwill and establishing a national presence in the place you want to take resources from. USAID is one of the latter examples. By gutting the agency the Trump administration hurt a lot of people worldwide while at the same time eliminating an inroad into countries the US could extract resources from. So if your goal is to maintain the might of the American empire, getting rid of USAID is a confoundingly stupid move. Unless all the talk of American greatness was a sham and the real goal was to dismantle the US so it could be carved up by oligarchs into their own fiefdoms.
Earlier in this series I wrote a subsection called “Ignorance Isn’t an Excuse.” The gist of it is that I don’t think we should forgive anyone who voted for Trump because they did no research and had no clue what they were voting for. There were mountains of news articles, videos, and commentary warning about the dangers of another Trump presidency. Everything Trump and his supporters said on the campaign trail should have been warning enough. American voters in 2024 had so much responsibility, whether they were aware of it or not. The decisions made by leaders in a global power obviously have global consequences. Therefore the people who vote for leaders in a superpower have a responsibility to the entire world. I’m confident saying that America let the rest of the world down badly. The foreign policy of the never to be Harris administration likely wouldn’t have been great, but it would have been far better than what we got. I know it’s unreasonable to expect people to care about the lives and fortunes of others in faraway places, most people are close minded and selfish. That is an inescapable fact, but it is not an excuse. How many Ukrainians, Palestinians, and a whole lot of other people will suffer because Americans were selfish morons?
Coda Collection
There are a couple of topics I wanted to mention that don’t warrant their own subsections. The first is the “astonishing” speed with which US businesses and corporations abandoned their diversity efforts (with only a few notable exceptions). I put “astonishing” in quotes because corporations shedding their principles like a snake shedding its skin could surprise only the brainless. Capitalism has only one god: money, and only one objective: make money. Corporations by and large will say and do whatever is necessary to make money. If attitudes change for better or worse they will change themselves to match. In the early days of Trump’s second administration his efforts to end diversity were focused on the federal government and the military (that could easily change in the future). As of this writing Trump doesn’t have the power to dictate to state and local governments or private businesses how they should conduct themselves. So corporations that ended their diversity efforts preemptively caved to the whims of the administration. What sparked this proactive end to social progress? It could be simple cowardice. It could be that businesses feared future pressure or new legislation and thought their interests were better served by being ahead of the curve. Or, a lot of corporations never gave a shit about diversity to begin with and were happy to stop pretending.
The second topic I wanted to mention is a flaw I think most societies around the world share: we shame the wrong people. Too often in hierarchical societies with wealth disparity people on the margins or those who do essential working class jobs are the ones who are shamed. Some of this is by design, poor people keeping each other down helps keep the system working. We should all be criticizing the extremely wealthy more, but that shouldn’t be the end of it. The number of groveling sycophants eager to court favor with Trump by showering him with outlandish praise is proof that humanity isn’t inherently good. Business leaders, “news” anchors, Republican legislatures, foreign leaders and more were all willing to debase themselves at the altar of Trump. These are the kind of people we should be shaming. Anyone willing to prostrate themselves at the feet of a tyrant and a con artist should have rotten fruit thrown at them anytime they show their faces in public. The fruit throwing should continue until the offending bootlickers retreat to a faraway woodland cabin to escape society’s just wrath.
Conclusion
I knew the second Trump administration would be a disaster. I said as much in part 1 of this series that I published two days after the election. Even when you accurately predict the worst, lived events always have a way of surprising and depressing you. It would be like knowing you’re about to be punched in the face repeatedly. No one expects that experience to be pleasant, and you plan for a lot of pain and suffering in your future. However, what you didn’t know is that the person that would be punching in the face would be wearing spiked knuckles, which makes the experience more painful and damaging than you anticipated. When I write this the entire world is taking a pair of spiked knuckles right to the teeth. All because a lot of Americans hated immigrants (hatred of immigrants fueled the far-right all over the globe too) and because they thought fascism would mean cheaper groceries. Americans are certainly earning their place in history, an ignominious and stupid place, but it’s the attention that counts right?