In Defiance of Monsters: Resisting the Trump-Musk Kleptocracy

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."—Antonio Gramsci

Over the weekend, an avalanche of emails buried the careers of countless workers in the federal government. The wave of mass layoffs, dubbed the Valentine's Day Massacre, is the latest and perhaps most far-reaching attack on the civil service since U.S. President Donald Trump's inauguration, targeting probationary employees across the federal government whose ranks include some 200,000 workers. While families across the nation were reeling from the crippling blow to their very livelihoods, a small man—a monster, really—gleefully celebrated the mayhem. Signaling his cruel pleasure at the suffering he inflicted, he reposted himself as a gladiator destroying the "woke mind virus."

The United States' descent into full-blown kleptocracy, as the new Trump regime unleashes the fangs of fascistic oligarchs into seemingly every inch of government and society, has been a surreal and horrifying spectacle. Each day brings a barrage of devastating executive orders and headlines. Elon Musk, the billionaire sociopath who commands a vast cult of petty techno tyrants with dangerously fragile egos, has gained unprecedented access to the inner workings and data of agencies across the federal government. His team of unelected bureaucrats has swarmed offices like a flock of rapacious vultures picking at the carcass of government, devouring all vestiges of racial and gender equality, all acknowledgment of the very existence of transgender people—all in the name of ending the scourge of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Predictably, after masquerading as a champion of working-class Americans alienated by the Democratic Party, the new Trump regime has put the rights and regulations that protect working people in its cross hairs.

Throughout human history, tyrants have believed they could use their wealth and power to kill ideas. In its war on the "woke mind virus," the new regime's delusional hubris is no different than that of so many despots before it. Likewise, Trump's politics of distraction is nothing new. Since the time of chattel slavery in America, and perhaps before, the ruling classes have exploited cultural distinctions among workers to keep them divided, focusing their grievances against one another instead of their common oppressor: the rich.

Today, the assault on DEI is more than an ugly war against people of color, women, and other marginalized groups. While engineering a reversal of civil rights in the U.S., Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" is using the cultural grievances of white America as cover to roll back nearly every institutional means designed to protect the working class from the parasitic impulses of Musk and other billionaires.

Under the guise of attacking woke politics, a total siege has hit communities across the nation and the world, with draconian cuts shutting down essential programs and services that working people rely on.

Predictably, after masquerading as a champion of working-class Americans alienated by the Democratic Party, the new Trump regime has put the rights and regulations that protect working people in its cross hairs. The administration quickly gutted the National Labor Relations Board, the single most important government agency charged with enforcing the rights of workers against greedy and abusive bosses. Anti-union zealots are being installed in key posts across the government to execute the billionaire agenda of Trump and Musk. And while Musk's henchmen set out to cut jobs and government waste, the Tesla CEO was set to rake in $400 million from a pending State Department contract for armored Tesla vehicles until public attention forced the department to put the deal on hold. Still, the purchase would have only added a fraction to the roughly $20 billion of taxpayer money from federal contracts awarded to Musk's companies.

Downsizing government with the aim of handing off essential services to profit-driven private enterprise has long been the vision of America's corporate elite. Only now, the corporatists have a perfect moment and a pair of big business moguls to make it happen. Not even so-called "free speech" is spared from the onslaught, as anyone who dares criticize this fleecing and grift of public resources faces the wrath of Musk's cyber sycophants, activated by snide barbs spewed from the megaphone of Musk's personal social media platform.

Alongside Musk's federal rampage, the regime's new war on undocumented immigrants further feeds the flames of cultural tensions meant to divide workers and criminalize anyone deemed unworthy of Trump's definition of America. And if the process of terrorizing immigrant communities with the promise of deporting "millions and millions" of their lot doesn't offer sufficiently swift gratification for his supporters, Trump has usurped the Gulf of Mexico with the stroke of a pen, albeit in name only. Trump's second regime indeed intends to expand its racist cultural crusade far beyond U.S. borders. From its arrogant posturing across the Atlantic to boost far-right xenophobic parties in Europe to its colonial dreams of wholesale ethnic cleansing and conquest of Gaza, neoconservative U.S. imperialism is being slowly reborn under Trump, despite the many so-called right-wing isolationists influencing the new regime.

If it seems we are living in what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called "a time of monsters," we must examine the conditions that got us here and what kind of future we should fight for in which those monsters are forever buried. We must understand the old world that spawned the Musk monster virus and have a sense of the new world that struggles to be born free from the contagion.

As much as villains like Musk are the product of America's capitalist decay, Musk's new throne atop the highest government offices is a product of a rotten political system. This system has empowered the richest man in the world to effectively withhold food, healthcare, and other vital resources from the poorest people on the planet.

Each day, the establishment entities that exist to counter the power of Trump and Musk demonstrate their feebleness. The tepid pushback from the courts, the Democratic Party, and most of the media make it clear that the heart of resistance only beats beyond the strictures of these institutions, at the level of militant community organizing, mutual aid, and collective disobedience.

Only there at the grassroots, in defiance of monsters, will the struggle be sustained and the new world be born.