One Year of Trump 2.0
Most people are good when given the chance
Somehow we are only one year into the second Trump administration. It feels impossible to keep up with everything they are doing; seemingly every day, new depths of depravity and stupidity are plumbed. Scandals that would have ended previous administrations are just another day in Trump 2.0. The corruption has been shameless, the lawlessness flagrant, the cruelty relentless. There are too many violations to even list here, but the most directly evil example is the hundreds of thousands of deaths (and counting) due to the illegal dismantling of USAID facilitated by Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Marco Rubio. Any aspect of government perceived to serve any pro-social function—public education, public health, public media, diplomacy, research, civil rights, environmental regulations, disaster aid, unions—is under assault from Trump’s malevolent viziers, and any that inflicts violence has been emboldened and unleashed. They have cracked down on free speech, dissent, and Trump’s perceived enemies with the full power of the state.
To most of the rest of the world, the administration has been belligerent and oppressive while doing the same internally to “blue” states and cities by both attempting to cut off federal funding and sending in official terror squads. Trying to follow what is happening on social media, the horrifying evidence of Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza is now interspersed with videos of anonymous federal agents brutalizing immigrants, people they racially profile as potential immigrants, and anyone doing anything to impede repulsive shadow president Stephen Miller’s ethnic cleansing campaign. The Lidless Eye of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a source of flagrant injustice since its inception in 2002, has been fully turned inward and is now bulking up with a hiring spree after a massive funding increase from the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol have gone from very bad to full-on Gestapo slave patrol, treating seemingly everyone they encounter with contempt and menace, violating basic laws and judicial rulings on a regular basis with total impunity, and generally acting like an occupying force. They are masked and heavily armed, roving from city to city as MAGA’s secret police, kidnapping landscapers, construction workers, delivery drivers, teachers, and cooks; grandparents, parents, and children; people who have been here for decades and prospective citizens dutifully attending court hearings via the legal process. They target schools, daycares, hospitals, restaurants, and neighborhoods. They beat and snatch people and ship them off to deadly concentration camps. They smash windows, crash cars, blanket neighborhoods in chemical weapons, threaten and beat bystanders, and point and shoot their guns at people with “less-lethal” and maximally lethal ammunition alike.
In one such incident on January 7th, veteran ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good, in Minneapolis around a mile from where George Floyd was killed in 2020. After dropping her son off at school, Good was, alongside her wife and others, trying to help protect her neighbors from a hostile invading force, armed with nothing but whistles and cell phone cameras and presence. She was executed by state agents because she tried to drive away as they threatened her. She was still alive as a physician bystander asked to check on her, but he was refused by the agents, who seemingly did not perform any first aid themselves. When the medics arrived, she barely had a pulse and it was too late.
Good’s murder captured national attention; sports podcasters, fitness influencers, and normally apolitical friends have been decrying it—and even the larger racial terror campaign it spawned from. The Trump administration and its lackeys and remoras have, predictably, doubled down in justifying Ross’s actions through a combination of contradictory lies, victim-blaming, homophobia, and misogyny. She hit him with her car; she tried to run him over; she was a terrorist; she was interfering in law enforcement activities; she was a professional agitator; she was a crazy, communist, liberal, queer woman who had it coming. In Ross’s cell phone footage, immediately after the shots are fired you can hear him call her a “fucking bitch.”
Katie Britt, one of my state’s two terrible US senators, defended the Trump administration’s actions on right-wing network Newsmax by saying, “This is what America voted for.” It is true that Trump ran on conducting mass deportations, and I do not doubt that some portion of his followers, hooked on the “wages of whiteness,” relished the idea of something like this happening. But Trump also constantly said that he was going to be targeting “the worst of the worst” like “murderers, rapists, and gang members,” and the administration continues to repeat this despite its clear and brazen untruthfulness. The idea that there is a large group of violent criminal immigrants roaming around this country is a racist conspiracy theory that now pervades the Republican Party. Unfortunately, it is clear now that many people who voted for Trump, including many immigrants and people of color, believed that not only is this a real and significant population, but that the US government could and would easily target and deport them.
Nonetheless, powerful Democratic elected officials like Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar are still, even now, essentially reinforcing this lie by saying that immigration enforcement is not focusing on violent criminals like they said they would. Many others have blamed poor training. To be clear, the training is quite poor, and they are arresting the most innocent people imaginable, but this is where “tough on immigration” leads. You will not out-reaction the reactionaries, but that would be unacceptable even if you could. Why can’t these ostensible leaders take real moral stands? Why can’t they offer an unconditional defense of immigrants and immigration? What happened to the “No human is illegal” yard signs and the Statue of Liberty—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”?
Our immigration system is clearly quite broken and needs to be fixed, but in ways that provide pathways to citizenship. Immigration is good, and diversity is good. It enriches my life to know and live in community with people of different backgrounds and ethnicities, and I do not give a single fuck if someone came here illegally. But to foment a backlash, Republicans subtly shift between the “violent illegal immigrants” lie and blaming general (Black and brown) immigration for every possible social and economic ill that the (white) public might be facing: unaffordable housing, skyrocketing healthcare costs, difficulty finding a good job, a supposed decline of social cohesion, etc. Of course this is all nonsense, a racist release valve to try to get working-class people to vote for the GOP by accepting a zero-sum worldview and ignoring the fact that the rich are the ones actually immiserating and fleecing them.
Trump’s superpower is that, for some reason, people project all sorts of fantasies on him and hear whatever they want to hear when he talks while ignoring the copious evidence of who he is, what he does, who he surrounds himself with, and what the Republican Party is now. This is facilitated by an endless stream of subtle and overt propaganda and lies, now supercharged by algorithms, AI, and the destruction of journalism. But some people also like at least some of what he is actually selling and maybe compartmentalize the rest, which is now especially true of the ruling class, who, as the late Mike Davis diagnosed, seemingly have a collective brain tumor.
Previously a bulwark against some of the worst impulses of MAGA, many elites in various positions of power across civil society have responded to Trump’s second win by pretending like the entire country is now permanently reactionary. Even many who are critical of Trump have been advocating for politics that meet him halfway, on immigration policy, climate policy, trans rights, and otherwise. But Trump did not even get a majority of the popular vote (49.8%) and edged out Kamala Harris by just 1.48%, one of the closest margins in US history. Harris lost Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by a combined ~230,000 votes, which if swung in her direction would have given her the Electoral College (not to mention that Republicans won the House of Representatives by a mere ~7,500 votes). And this is in a system that is structurally undemocratic in many ways and favors the GOP.
A presidential election, especially one this tight, is a complex event with basically infinite variables that defies monocausal explanations. It is also a snapshot in time; events and conditions start changing the terrain immediately afterwards. People are full of contradictions and do not have a static or coherent set of political beliefs; many who voted for Trump also voted for diametrically opposed democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the same time or Zohran Mamdani a year later.
Nonetheless, the rich and powerful have in general rolled over in Trump 2.0 out of fear or short-term profit motive, or—for those radicalized further rightward by some brain-damaging combination of wealth, insularity, group chats, and/or social media—they are outright collaborating. Not content with merely being wealthy beyond imagination, some of the most Trumpist billionaires have bought up huge media corporations, both legacy and social, seemingly to further their ideological project.
The legendary CBS News is becoming pathetic regime propaganda courtesy of the world’s fifth-wealthiest man. The editorial arm of the once-venerable Washington Post, owned by the fourth-wealthiest man in the world, has embraced MAGA. Musk, currently Earth’s wealthiest man, has completed his transformation of Twitter into X, basically an online Superfund site that, as Max Read recently noted, has become a key piece of infrastructure for the global right. It is where Musk regularly promotes the most flagrant white supremacy and absurd conspiracies, and where official US government accounts are now run by neo-Nazis and hopelessly addicted cabinet members desperately vie for attention by propagating the Mad King’s fantasies and fictions.
Reactionaries lie all the time, about everything. They are first and foremost lying to themselves, scared of everything and furious that nothing can fill the sad void inside, desperate to make everyone else as hateful and fearful as they are. To justify their actions, they must on some level believe that human society is an amoral struggle where might makes right and exploiting anyone weaker than you is not only the natural order, but laudable. They lie because this is not actually normal or inevitable; it takes a great deal of artifice and work and energy to propagate a meaningful constituency for bigotry and terror, a lot of poison streamed into a lot of hearts and minds that must be constantly refilled lest reality or morality make their way in.
There is a common notion that, when faced with natural disasters, humans will resort to base selfishness. We have a massive industry built around selling the idea of doomsday prepping with gold, guns, and bunkers (they run a lot of ads on conservative media). But, contrary to the individualized, hypercompetitive, and exploitative structures of our society, how most people actually act when dealing with broad-based calamity, time and time again, is by cooperating in the most radical ways.
The reign of terror that the Trump administration is inflicting on the Minneapolis area right now is something like an ongoing man-made tornado, chaotic and violent and ruthless, unnaturally hurting the most vulnerable the worst. The thousands of roving bandits are wreaking havoc and basically turning the city into a war zone. Many schools and businesses have been forced to close to protect students, parents, and workers. The videos of abuse and terror are seemingly endless. I just saw one where an agent tackled a kid in the freezing snow as he heartbreakingly repeated “Soy legal,” then they put him in handcuffs and took him away. They abducted a five-year old boy named Liam, tried to use him as bait, and immediately shipped him off to a squalid detention center in Texas with his dad, separating them from Liam’s mom and older brother, despite the family having an ongoing asylum case. Look at these fucking pictures.
It is hard to fathom how you could do what they are doing and still sleep at night, but many seem to even relish it. However, most people are not like Trump or Miller or ICE thugs and that clearly enrages them, because not only does the resistance foil their plans, it is a mirror. Like in Los Angeles and Chicago and DC before it, large swaths of Minneapolis-area residents are responding to catastrophe the way they always do, with selflessness and courage, but on an even greater scale requisite to that of the incursion. Many thousands of regular people are organizing mutual aid systems, rapid response networks, and neighborhood watches. They are volunteering their time and effort and often putting themselves at great risk to help people they may or may not even know. They are standing on street corners in freezing weather, tracking and following the demonic convoys, and running errands for neighbors who can’t go outside for fear of abduction. This flies in the face of every single story that conservatives tell about Minneapolis, this country, and humanity in general.
In some sense, Trump 2.0 is both a continuation and a new mutation. The United States was built on genocide and slavery, its expansive wealth and power facilitated by imperialism to this day. It has long been a source of great misery for many at home and abroad, with stated values full of hypocrisy. This is in fact often a driver of immigration from the countries our policies destabilize, and even the “nation of immigrants” history is riven with racism, exploitation, and nativism. But the actual human beings who live here are capable of so much, and so many have over and over again struggled against injustice. Like they are now.
According to a recent New York Times poll, Trump’s approval on immigration is -18, and ICE is at -27. Even authoritarianism requires a certain level of consent from the governed, and I think that—contrary to the ruling class and despite all the lies and propaganda—ordinary people believe in human rights and dignity, feel outrage at moral transgressions, and will help each other when given the chance. When that happens at scale, the experience can change you in the process. You see yourself differently, you see your neighbors differently, you feel your agency and see what we are capable of. You maybe even see through the cracks a vision of what a different, better arrangement of society might look like.
Today Minneapolis organized a massive general strike and protest of the occupation. The entire city council and a number of unions supported it, and over 50,000 people turned out in subzero weather.
This storm will not blow over on its own, nor will its damage be remedied without heroic effort, but as philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò likes to say, we are going to win.
