SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
trumpism
Dear Europe: Time to Confront Your Hypocrisy on Trump's America
If we want to understand the political and material conditions that make anti-democratic movements like Trumpism possible, then we must openly and honestly confront how our own apathy in the face of eroding rights for society's most vulnerable.
Apr 16, 2025
The United States is witnessing a collapse in travel and tourism from Europe, often based on a fear of what could happen when the U.S. border is reached. Many Europeans are refusing to purchase U.S. products and services in protest against the Trump administration. Solidarity is also being expressed for U.S. university professors and students in the wake of crackdowns on academic freedom and free expression on campuses across the country.
As an American in Europe, and as someone who has consistently and publicly pointed to Trump’s obvious anti-democratic ideology, I completely understand these reactions. There is justified outrage over what is happening right now in the U.S.
This justification, however, cannot hide an uncomfortable truth. Namely, that Europeans (and many of my fellow Americans) have for decades been more than happy to ignore state violence and the abuse of human rights committed by the United States so long as the victims were poorer people in “other” parts of the world, or poorer people in marginalized sections of U.S. society.
The U.S. has the death penalty, the application of which had been proven to be overtly discriminatory and racist. The U.S. has a long history of supporting regimes engaged in human rights abuses, including the suppression of academic freedom. The U.S. has for decades interfered with democratic elections across the globe, often subverting the will of the people. The U.S. destroyed Iraq in the interests of oil. The Obama government convicted more whistleblowers than all other U.S. administrations combined, and he also engaged in the wide-scale use of “extra judicial” drone warfare that led to the deaths of large numbers of civilians, including children. During his first administration, Trump passed a “Muslim Ban.”
Trumpism was made possible, at least in part, by a political and cultural environment where commitments to democracy and human rights—the supposed core of “Western values”—proved to be little more than flexible PR slogans.
These things, it seems, were tolerable to many European democrats. But when U.S. actions impacted Europeans coming to the U.S., caused damage to the European stock market or led to Europeans being denied jobs or research grants? Well, you have to draw the line somewhere.
And therein lies an even more uncomfortable truth. That Trumpism was made possible, at least in part, by a political and cultural environment where commitments to democracy and human rights—the supposed core of “Western values”—proved to be little more than flexible PR slogans.
I was a PhD student in Texas on September 11, 2001. I witnessed how my country (and the UK) engaged in the destruction of Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis as U.S. media (and many U.S. citizens) cheered the grotesque killing. As would become apparent, these were citizens who not only had nothing to do with September 11, but their country wasn’t even involved.
The Western reaction? A collective shoulder shrug.
Did European travel to the U.S. collapse? Did European universities call for an academic boycott of U.S. higher education and academic journals? Was there a call to end research collaboration? Did academics stop attending conferences in the U.S.? Did citizens boycott U.S. products? No. Europeans were happy to travel to the U.S. as soldiers slaughtered civilians in Iraq and the government passed the Patriot Act (allowed for mass surveillance).
Why? Because the people being killed, surveilled, stopped and searched at the airport were Muslims or other minorities, not Christian families from London, Stockholm, or Frankfurt on their way to New York or Disneyland. The Iraqi stock market crashed, not Spain’s. The slaughter in Gaza is a stain on global humanity, only made possible by U.S. weapons and financing. I have yet to hear a call for cutting cultural or political ties with the U.S. over this ongoing atrocity. If we are being completely honest with ourselves, we should at least admit that, because of its massive global reach, boycotting the U.S. would have a major impact on our daily life in ways that boycotts of other nations simply do not. So we do not do it.
My argument is simple. If we want to understand the political and material conditions that make anti-democratic movements like Trumpism possible, then we must openly and honestly confront how our own apathy about the violation of the rights of the weakest in society can be exploited and expanded to later violate the rights of groups usually seen as “safe” from such exploitation.
There is plenty of blame for Trumpism to go around. That sometimes means a painful look inward.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Musk, Social Security, and the Ponzi-Scheme Boomerang
Dismantling the most prominent social welfare program of the last century is undoubtedly an extremist undertaking and Musk is employing Trumpism as a discourse to help make that happen. Whether he succeeds is dependent in no small part on our ability to call out and resist his verbal jujitsu.
Mar 03, 2025
In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, the world’s richest person Elon Musk late last week called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” It was yet another “pot calling the kettle black” moment in the run-on sentence called Trumpism.
I say run-on sentence because it is important to highlight Trumpism as featuring a nefarious discourse self-consciously deployed by Donald Trump and his acolytes to normalize their extremism. Trumpism as a discourse obfuscates so as to legitimate what has become its extremist threat to the existing political system, the rule of law and U.S. Constitution. It is a distinctive way of speaking that facilitates highly questionable action. We see this repeatedly in the Trump era.
Trumpism as a discourse most prominently features three verbal maneuvers: gaslighting, coopting, and boomeranging. All three are intertwined in the disingenuous effort to overturn our liberal democracy and further the move toward a more illiberal autocratic political system, where Trump and his followers get to claim they are saving us from the failures of the current political system. Gaslighting is where you deflect a criticism by saying that the problem is something other than what the critic alleged, thereby insulating yourself from that criticism. For instance, the January 6th attack on the Capitol was actually an inside job perpetrated by the FBI. Coopting is where you adopt the language of your critics so that you are the one with the just cause and they are the one who is deserving of condemnation. The January 6th attack on the Capitol was an instance of Trump supporters standing up for democracy, not trying to undermine it. Boomeranging is where you send criticism directed at you right back at your critics. In this case, the claim is that the critics of the January 6th insurrection are actually the ones who are threatening democracy. These are all lies, aided by disinformation, consciously deployed to pollute public discourse and open the door to allowing Trump and is supporters to overthrow the existing constitutional order.
Why toss the Ponzi scheme boomerang now? Perhaps either because you do not know how Social Security works, or you don’t care because you are so keen to legitimate your extremist actions of illegally decimating the cornerstone of the U.S. welfare state.
With Trump’s second term as president beginning, the discourse of Trumpism has now become commonplace in American politics. It had worked effectively to help Trump regain the presidency. He now is abusing the powers of that office to among other things unleash Musk as a temporary advisor to the president to illegally and unconstitutionally begin without congressional authorization dismantling the federal bureaucracy and the programs its implements.
Musk has been recruited by Trump to take on the role of special advisor for allegedly seeking to root out waste, fraud and abuse from the federal bureaucracy, even as Musk’s private companies continue to profit in the millions of dollars from contracts from that bureaucracy. For some reason, Musk’s own contracts have been exempted from his investigations, but Social Security has not. Dismantling the most prominent social welfare program of the last century is undoubtedly an extremist undertaking and Musk is employing Trumpism as a discourse to help make that happen. Whether he succeeds is dependent in no small part on our ability to call out and resist his verbal jujitsu.
Dismantling Social Security would be very significant, for it not only provides major benefits to over 70 million retirees and persons receiving disability and survivor benefits (about one in five Americans). The program was enacted by Congress during the Great Depression with the Economic Security Act of 1935 (which quickly came to be known as the Social Security Act). It has become the cornerstone of the American welfare state, limited as it is compared to its counterparts in the rest of the developed world. It is nonetheless the most effective anti-poverty program in the history of the country, basically reducing the poverty rate among the elderly by half once its benefits started getting adjusted annually in 1972 to keep up with inflation. It has long been considered the “third rail” of American politics for any politician who tries to tamper with it usually ends up getting repudiated, just as President George Bush did when he tried to privatize it after winning re-election in 2004. Now Trump is going down that road but using the discourse of Trumpism to legitimate undermining this bedrock foundation of the U.S. welfare state.
Calling Social Security the “biggest Ponzi scheme in American history” is pure Trumpism. It is a boomerang. Many people have pointed out the Ponzi-scheme nature of Musk’s own preferred cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Dogecoin was the source for Musk calling his anti-federal government initiative “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency). Musk’s response was like him saying “no Dogecoin is not a Ponzi scheme, but Social Security is,” thereby redirecting the criticism of Dogecoin (and all cryptocurrencies) toward the government’s largest and most effective social welfare program. Cryptocurrencies, like Dogecoin, but also even more prominently Bitcoin, have been, for the last decade or so, very popular, especially with people who want to be free of having to rely on government-backed currency like the dollar. Cryptocurrencies have an anti-government elan that attracts all kinds of people, including libertarians and even anarchists. Calling Social Security the biggest Ponzi scheme in history is an anti-government boomerang perpetuated in the name of speculators who want to be free of government regulation.
Strictly speaking, a Ponzi scheme is where those who initially invest in some initiative reap profits from those who subsequently invest, and those subsequent investors will gain only if there are further investors. People are lied to in that there is no actual productive activity that is being invested in, contrary to what they were told. There is only a system of forwarding investments forward to the people who came before you. Once no new investors appear, the flow of profit stops and people are left with no returns on their investment. The largest Ponzi scheme ever was conducted by Bernard Madoff who for decades told people he successfully invested their money in stocks and other investments but actually just forwarded new investments to his clients until the flow of money stopped and he was revealed in 2008 to have defrauded people of tens of billions of dollars.
Actually, neither Social Security nor cryptocurrency is necessarily a Ponzi scheme. Crypto investors are not usually lied to that there is some supposed productive enterprise they are investing in, and Social Security recipients are told that will receive government guaranteed benefits regardless of how their contributions are invested or not. In both cases though, current contributions are used to pay out benefits to people who paid in previously.
In an attempt to make Social Security seem all-American, individualistic and capitalistic, it was originally sold to the American public as a “social insurance” program making it seem like it was no different than private insurance where people pay in to finance their own benefit. This sleight of hand was called the “insurance myth,” for people were never really financing their own benefit but contributing to a collective funding of the program overall. Social insurance is simply not the same as private insurance. It is more a collective than individual effort.
Yet, what is important here regarding the boomerang is that Social Security is in fact superior to cryptocurrencies just because it provides government backed, guaranteed benefits. The anti-government posture of cryptocurrencies, including Musk’s preferred Dogecoin, makes them vulnerable to being seen as way riskier than Social Security. Musk’s boomerang fails, Dogecoin is more like a Ponzi scheme than any government guaranteed benefit.
It is true that Social Security periodically needs tweaking by Congress to ensure that contributions keep up with what is needed to pay out to retirees and others. But that has consistently been done for almost a century. Why toss the Ponzi scheme boomerang now? Perhaps either because you do not know how Social Security works, or you don’t care because you are so keen to legitimate your extremist actions of illegally decimating the cornerstone of the U.S. welfare state. Is it because Musk as an adult immigrant never bothered to learn American public policy while in college or later, or because Musk just wants to destroy the government in the name of his libertarian fantasy? In any case, his Ponzi-scheme boomerang might to some degree work with segments of the public. For that reason alone, we need to highlight this particularly pernicious instance of Trumpism as a dangerous discourse.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Fighting Strongman Trump With Our Vision for a More Beautiful Nation
Do we want to let Donald Trump rob us of our capacity for happiness for the next four years?
Dec 05, 2024
Count on one thing: the next four years are going to be tough. If you can muster the energy for political action while Donald Trump and his minions rule Washington, it will have to be channeled in two ways: first, resisting the worst excesses of him (and his party of billionaires); and second, keeping up the effort to make life truly better for everyone, especially the most vulnerable among us.
Or wait. Should it be the other way around? Could a good offense be the best defense?
At the moment, it’s a question that’s not getting much attention. It may seem all too obvious right now that resistance has to be the top priority. Who could have been surprised by the impassioned pleas to resist when Trump won?
That reflex couldn’t be more natural. No matter how old you are, for as long as you can remember, every president’s critics have focused on resisting the dangers they saw in him, while his supporters hailed him as strong enough to resist the dangers they saw threatening the nation.
Such strength was apparently just what voters wanted in 2024, too. As a New York Timesheadline summed up the outcome right after Election Day: “America Hires a Strongman.”
Why?
As former President Bill Clinton once explained, “When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd made the point in a more colorful fashion: “When Americans are scared,” she wrote, they want their president to be “the strong father who protects the home from invaders.”
What dangers? What invaders? Every winning candidate for president gets to fill in those blanks in whatever way he (and yes, it always has been a he) thinks will get him the most votes, any connection with reality being purely optional. So, while Kamala Harris offered quite realistic warnings about threats to democracy, Trump traded on fictional images of “illegal” immigrant murderers and rapists, “big bad” transgender girls threatening oh-so-pure “real” girls, and the “Marxists” heading up the Democratic Party. And, of course, we know who won.
Many voters were clearly scared and insecure. In a recent survey, roughly 80% of Harris’s supporters chose “we must find a way to embrace each other” as their highest priority, while about 70% of Trump’s chose “to protect ourselves.” As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom put it, Trump voters have “a deep wellspring of anxiety about their ability to predict their security into the near and distant future. Trump has given [them] a way to direct that anger and that anxiety… in a toxic direction.”
As political scientist Bruce Cain noted, “In the choice between safety and every other policy goal, safety usually wins. In the choice between hope and fear, fear has proven to be more powerful even when the basis for it is grossly exaggerated.” Many reports showed that Trump voters were indeed angry, but after talking to hundreds of people in focus groups, the New York Times’s Patrick Healy concluded that anger and anxiety “were one and the same” emotion.
So, as usual, many fearful voters chose the candidate they saw as strong enough to protect them. Reporter David Corn heard one message over and over from crowds at Trump rallies: “The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost.” And Corn sensed what increasingly fearful Americans want: a version of “strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior.” Trump typically claimed that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” When he listed the ways he would change America in his speeches, making it “strong” and/or “safe” usually came before “great again.”
But it wasn’t just the policies he proposed like “peace through strength” or even the words he used that his voters cared most about. (Trump consistently outperformed Republicans running for Congress who took similar positions and used similar language.) It was the way he projected a mean and nasty personality. When he first ran for president, Trump said, “Every time things get worse, I do better. Because people want strength. We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty.” And that was indeed the image his campaign projected in its advertising. Since the hunger for a strongman only grows in wartime, the Trump campaign happily made the election look like a war, while he even posted a prayer and picture on social media identifying himself with St. Michael battling the demons.
Pundit William Galston notes that the Trump campaign was “convinced that Trump’s intense personal bond with his supporters would do most of the mobilizing work.” GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini thinks that he forged that bond not with his policies but through “his unique style, his unique aesthetic.” (Yes, ugly can be an aesthetic.)
Of course, gender played a role, too. Every dictionary includes the word strongman, but when was the last time you saw strongwoman? And that tells you so much. One study showed that a belief in “hegemonic masculinity” — the idea that men are stronger than women and so should dominate — was the most accurate predictor of who would vote for Trump.
From FDR to Trump
Trump is perhaps the ultimate American politician who has traded on fear and insecurity to look strong and get votes. But the sad fact is that American presidents have been teaching the public to feel threatened and insecure for a long time — at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 and made it a command center for resisting catastrophe in the midst of the Great Depression.
FDR admitted privately that his New Deal aimed to protect the capitalist system by resisting the threat of socialism, but he couldn’t say that out loud. He felt he could win the public’s confidence by staving off immediate disaster (as he indeed did). In the 1930s, that meant keeping as many Americans as possible out of dire poverty. Two prominent historians have labeled his approach “crisis management,” though he favored the word “security,” which is why the checks we retired folks now get from the government are called “Social Security.”
Once Hitler’s armies had conquered most of Europe, FDR announced that the great threat to national security was no longer the Depression at home but the enemy abroad, though he faced a public reluctant to get involved in war until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Throughout World War II, he would be seen as the strong father protecting the home from invaders.
Ever since, presidents have tried to take on that role. Lyndon Johnson warned that if we didn’t fight the communists in South Vietnam, we’d end up fighting North Vietnamese invaders in San Francisco. George W. Bush warned that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear arsenal that, if we didn’t take out Iraq first, could someday be used on American homes.
Almost every president since FDR has made the mantra of “national security” the nation’s highest value and insisted that staving off the threat of evildoers was the path to such “security,” no matter the price.
In 2016, Donald Trump paved his way to victory with similar language. His innovation (and it was a big one) was to refocus on the “enemy from within” — the immigrants, the transgendered, and above all, the liberals.
When Kamala Harris began her abbreviated campaign, it looked like she might break out of that mold. Her “politics of joy” seemed like a politics of confidence. She spoke and looked like a woman who was afraid of nothing, certainly not Donald Trump.
Yet in the last weeks of the campaign, as hers seemed to be stalling, she turned to the same old story: there’s a danger out there named Donald Trump and you’d better vote for me to protect yourself. Harris was, of course, correct, but the election results tell us that Trump did a better job of convincing voters that he was the one who could best protect our homes from invaders.
If Harris had focused more on bringing positive improvements to the lives of all Americans… who knows?
The Perils of Resistance
On Election Night, as the depressing results rolled in, the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart cautioned that those of us who see Trump as a great danger should move beyond resistance: “We have to continue to fight and work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible.” That’s good advice for a lot of reasons.
It may be that simply resisting the world of Donald Trump and trying to prevent the very worst will indeed seem like a full-time job over the next four years, but do we really want to exhaust ourselves that way? Worse yet, the message resisters send is ultimately a negative one: Whatever we may be, we are not that. So, in the years to come, a politics of resistance runs the same risk that befell the Harris campaign. As Harvard pollster John Della Volpe put it: “’Not being Trump’ was never going to be enough.”
What’s more, resistance is all about stopping change. Yes, sometimes change is dangerous and needs to be stopped, but that still makes such resistance inherently conservative. A devotion to preventing the worst will allow the other side to look like the force for change and so define the terms of debate.
Yet, by definition, liberals and progressives are supposed to be that force. Do we really want to cede that to — yes! — Donald Trump?
For now, at least, the lesson of Election Day 2024 is that, in a contest over which party can best protect Americans, the current version of the Republican Party is likely the winner. We’ve learned in the hardest way possible that the Democrats can’t “out-Republican the Republicans,” as Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put it.
A politics of resistance could end up merely reinforcing the fear driving MAGA-ism’s longing for a strongman. It’s simply not the right message to send to Trump voters if you wish even a small slice of them to change their minds two to four years from now.
It may feel good to focus on Trump’s evils and exclaim, as poet Walt Whitman did about President Franklin Pierce: “Such a rascal and thief in the presidency. This poor scum — the shit-ass! God damn him! — eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on the states.” But to focus solely, or even primarily, on such anger means making Trump the center of our attention. (Exactly what he wants, of course!) Hasn’t he gotten enough attention already?
And do we want to carry all the anger that full-time resistance is likely to breed? Do we want to let Donald Trump rob us of our capacity for happiness for the next four years? We could at least balance our outrage with the sentiment Whitman expressed about President Benjamin Harrison: “I think him mainly a gas bag, the smallest potato in the heap. As long as he remains in office, the aura of the presidency will give him prominence — but after that — oh! what will be his oblivion — utter!”
As the Italian revolutionary philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously put it, in the years to come we could use more “pessimism of the mind and optimism of the will.”
Alternative Vision and Action
Of course, we need to keep up some significant degree of resistance. (I’m definitely not among the astounding 28% of Democratic voters who claimed, in a post-election poll, that they would “support” Trump’s presidency.) But we should heed the words of Barack Obama’s former speechwriter Ben Rhodes: “Democrats must reject the impulse to simply be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says. While confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on what we stand for. We need to articulate an alternative vision for what kind of democracy comes next.”
Even the New York Timeseditorial board, hardly the most progressive group around, got the point: “A threat to democracy does not exempt leaders from giving voters a plan for the future that reflects the America they want to live in.”
And we can do more than envision a better future and plan for it during the next four years. Though things may be dreadful in Washington, state and local governments still have significant power to pursue policies to make life better. In my Colorado town, for example, there’s a strong effort to push the city council to raise the minimum wage, a measure our county commissioners, under public pressure, already endorsed. Denver is not only preparing to resist the deportation of undocumented residents but offering them access to city services, modeling what a humane government, one that cares about all its people, actually looks like. And even when politicians won’t act, many states allow citizen-initiated referenda like the ones that secured abortion rights in my state and many others.
Then there’s an endless list of things we can do as individuals. Think of it as “prefigurative politics.” As Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day put it, the energy we would burn up trying to tear down an oppressive government can be better used by ignoring that government and building “a new civilization within the shell of the old” — new institutions that genuinely serve people.
It also means building new feelings and attitudes. As we face a nightmarish four years of a federal government built on fear and intent on keeping all Americans (other than billionaires) afraid, anything we do to bring more confidence and happiness into our lives is a step in a better direction — for ourselves and the country.
To repeat: Resistance to Trump will certainly be necessary, especially to protect the most vulnerable among us. But any way we can look to a better future and turn that into a present reality is, in a sense, an act of resistance not only to Trump and the Republicans but to the strongman model of politics that led to his recent victory.
Making beautiful art and music, making delicious meals, making friends, making love — those are all ways to preserve the energy we’ll need for political action. They are also ways to show not just the world but ourselves that, whatever the evils from Washington in the next four years, we can continue building the more humane and happier world we want for everyone.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular