"They Are Taking Over the Government"

 “They are taking over the government.” That's the story you are hearing out of Washington. In between self-insert interviews from the oval office where Elon brandishes his meat shield son and Trump swoons drunkenly over his desk like it's nap time, Elon is sending squadrons of racist undergrads to fire civil servants and jettison charitable aid (oh, and fraud protection) "into the wood chipper." That's what it looks like. Of course, they're not as effective as they want you to think: courts are blocking some of these efforts, wrists are getting slapped, and they’re walking back unpopular moves — but still. These particularly sweaty hands are too quick. The cookie jar is getting ransacked.

But you go on twitter, and it's a different story. I've made a habit of lurking, trying to understand the Trumpist mind. I've prided myself on being a centrist for most of my life. I don’t call myself that anymore, but I still try to be unswayed by dogma from anyone.

Trumpist twitter is at war. Not with itself yet, though that could happen. But they are at war with a grand enemy -- an enemy so powerful that Trumpists are willing to demolish the government, give the middle finger to our allies, and curse into oblivion their neighbors, families, and fellow Christians.

(To be clear, when I say Trumpists here, I'm trying to piece together a sense of worldview from what I am seeing and hearing. I think a majority of people who voted for Trump are not pure 'Trumpists,' but I am opposed to what the movement is doing, and I think you should be too.) 

Trumpists describe leftism with metaphors of mind control. Elon tweets about deleting the Woke Mind Virus with code so bad that it reveals, yet again, that he has never been an engineer except in his fantasies. Power users sitting on algorithmic thrones of provocation bemoan the grey intellectual block of mindless NPCs. Other witch-hunters revel in the "pronouns in bio, opinion discarded" meme -- purity tests and wagon-circling efforts to keep any hostile idea from getting in. They posture as if they are strong men fighting tyrants; in practice they preen like prissy hikers terrified of mosquitos. I know what cultlike, exclusionary language looks like. This is textbook.

To the mind of the Trumpist, the country has caught a case of the mind virus. Attending a corporate DEI training, speaking female pronouns for a person they were in a fraternity with three years ago, they see a nation kowtowing to ideological tyrants. In their minds, an anti-white, anti-male, human-hating ideology bent on self-destruction and obsessed with an impossible absolution has infested its way into the heart of the American experiment. It is transforming good kids into anxious wrecks and then commanding them to make irreversible changes to their bodies. Mixed in with this fear -- and it is a deep, horrified, pearl-clutching -- is suspicion of the complicit media, suspicion of corrupt Democrats profiting off of the misery of good Christians and the oppression of brave men who could have been heroes in days past. It is a grand conspiracy, and a tent big enough to fit most of the grievances anyone could have. This is their vision of America: a dark-skinned, feminine face looming over the nation, telling you in a foreign accent that your myths are lies and your country is despicable while it gorges itself on the fruits of your labors. They believe the Wokeness called for by this visage is, in fact, the opposite of wakeful understanding -- it is a hypnotic sleep that only the brave can resist.

To fight this gruesome enemy, unlikely heroes emerge. Donald J Trump is an American -- down-to-earth but successful (on TV), truth-talking but savvy (enough to defraud thousands of people over his checkered career), courageous but calculated (enough to worm his way out of infinite missteps). He's wealthy, but not elite. God chose David for Israel despite his flaws, and God chose Trump because the enemy is so evil that it deceived anyone who would want to be "respectable."

Elon is a little confusing as a hero, but he's made enough of a pivot to be believed. The media painted him as Iron Man even though he's never invented anything, and suddenly he's based. He hates the elites who made his daughter trans. Trumpists see Elon as a wealthy man who became wealthy enough to fight the mind control, who got F*** You Money and has decided to save the world with it. In order to accept Elon, the Trumpists have had to pivot to being pro-social media, pro-internet -- a move that has already collapsed half of their anti-establishment vision.

The hatred is a massive cloud without a clear shape -- a miasma of fearful possibilities. Trumpists do not distinguish transgender advocates from protestors who oppose the genocide in Gaza, or affirmative action in universities from immigrants who, they imagine, pose an existential threat to Americans, their skin color and accent. Anyone who complicates the worldview is suspect. So desperate is the fight that Catholic Trumpists — goaded on by the Pharisee-in-Chief, JD Vance — berate the Sin of Empathy while claiming to represent the wandering prophet who spoke The Parable of the Good Samaritan. They are ballooning into a parody, into a party that is proudly and explicitly pro-hatred, gleefully anti-cooperation, intentionally destructive. All this is justified in their minds because of the Evil they face -- an Evil that is enfeebling intellectualism, robbing us of any chance at human goodness or triumph, infecting video games with ugly women, and that hates us and how we live. When Elon says he is saving humanity, that is what he is saving it from -- the woke miasma.

Anyone who has been in left-leaning spaces for the last fifteen years can recognize the seed from which this has germinated. For a moment there, identity politics did overtake us like a fever. Legitimate, overdue strides towards racial and gender equality got co-opted and twisted into a new hegemonic spirituality of self-hatred, self-policing, and purity tests. We could have fought deliberately for Fair Shake policies. Instead hucksters hucked, well-meaning people changed their profile pics to black squares, and training programs emerged that ran the gamut from helpful teaching to hellfire preaching. The window of reasonable disagreement snapped shut. Proponents of equality correctly identified America’s wounds -- but their only cure was lemon juice. Remembering the pain was all we were allowed to do.

But the thing is, the monolithic enemy the Trumpists believe in is not in charge. Kamala Harris left identity politics untouched while right-wing sources twisted some minor question about transgender medicine in prisons as signs of “radical wokeism.” The cultlike fervor of identity policing is losing popularity and was losing it before the right’s war on wokeness. Common sense, newly empowered with more knowledge, is already prevailing, even if there are hiccups here and there. But Fox News and One American News Network would make you think that the President is wearing e-girl cat ears while standing at gunpoint in front of a DEI-subsidized cartel. The Trumpist puppeteers are necromancers, and good and smart Americans are becoming unwitting thralls.

But right now it’s hard to find too much sympathy. They are taking over the government, right? But here’s another problem: Elon and Trump aren’t finding the NPCs or the Woke Sleepers who have infiltrated the federal bureaucracy they are currently purging. Sure, they're cutting off medicine that will save African children in the womb from being born with AIDs. I have a friend who is leading a lab working to destroy tuberculosis once and for all -- a project that could make Americans the heroes they dream of being. Elon slashed it and shared a lie about condoms. He screeches that there is deep systemic fraud over tweets, fails to prove it, and moves to the next door like the Grim Reaper meme, but instead of death it’s the Most Divorced Man in the World who tanked Twitter's value by 90%. The Twitter mob in the cesspool laps up Elon’s tweets of fake victory as long as they can be interpreted to resemble their foe. They always think that the monster is hiding behind the next rock. It cannot be hunted easily but it’s there.

The blind spots are obvious to the left, although the Democratic Congress appears to be going to work wearing sleep masks that say "Wake me up for midterms.” If Trumpism is anti-elite, why is Trump cozying up to the oppressive tech companies? Government efficiency is a worthwhile cause, but if Trump is for the people, why is Elon destroying a fraud protection bureau that has saved everyday Americans millions of dollars? If Trump is strong, why is he nakedly turning coward — kissing Putin’s ring, quoting kremlin propaganda, and abandoning the free world?

 Outside the Trumpist bubble, it's crystal clear that Trump is the greatest cronyist ever born -- an OG New Yorker straight outta Tammany Hall. His flurry of executive orders, the flimsy flailing of a man who knows he couldnt pass real legislation, appeased the saps who put him in office, and now he can give favors in exchange for favors, rewarding the rich and powerful who kowtow and pressuring those who don’t. Trump’s quid pro quo with Eric Adams is one of the most blatant and corrupt actions since Watergate. If we had a Congress and not a bowl of limp spaghetti, he would have been impeached in less than three days. Trumpists imagine that Trump is freeing a mind-controlled Adams and putting the liberals to shame once again, never mind how unpopular and corrupt Adams is. Blind spots like this ignore morality in favor of identity, a sense that corruption is only corruption if transgender or non-white people are involved. Look at the leering at Kamala, who the right agreed was a dangerous alcoholic on little evidence, and then look at Pete Hegseth, with a storied history of alcohol problems, drinking mysterious brown liquid from a glass at a press conference in Belgium weeks after his selection. The difference is only hard to distinguish if you “don’t see color.”

The point here is not to dunk. I sympathize too much with the everyday American to be hostile beyond a few jokes. Every person of intelligence believes that there are deceptive forces in the world — but it’s hard for anyone in any political party to perceive and admit how they are being influenced, and I include myself. The truth is that Americans overwhelmingly want similar things, and neither political party is offering those things. No political party is trying to overturn Citizens United and pull government’s mouth off of the dribbling corporate tit. No political party wants to tackle the new slavery of gig-based work, the slightly less new slavery of prison labor, or the soul poison of bullshit jobs. No political party is readying Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick to break up the tech oligarchies, defang the algorithms, and free us from the cigarette smoke of toxic social media. No political party is fixing the housing crisis, truly taxing the billionaires, or building infrastructure and incentives to create a bright American future.

Trumpists envision Trump as a righteous wrecking ball slamming into the narrow elite class of ivy leaguers and bank executives. Sadly, Trump is only sledgehammering out enough space so that he, Elon Musk, and a parade of grifters selling vaccine-alternative supplements can set up shop. It’s the most obvious populist play in the book to use the legitimate, earned grievance of the masses in order to enrich the strong man and his corrupt friends. For all of their out-of-the-box thinking and supposed main character energy, Trumpists don't seem to notice the bait and switch.

The truth that Trumpists recoil from like vampires recoil from sunlight is this: doing good is complex, governing is complex. The world is too complicated to be fixed with a sword, a Bible, or a tweet. Mainstream Democrats know this, and have chosen an equally stupid answer — to not try. The Trumpists want you to believe they are doing something, while enriching a man who already has 400 billion dollars.

We need a country where we can find the complex path to doing good. We want a country that can triumph, lifting up ourselves and being strong enough to help others. American excellence is possible, and it’s multi-pronged, and it isn’t dogmatic. It’s wide-ranging, it’s inventive, it’s empowering. It has real nerds instead of attention oligarchs, real grown ups instead of posturing trolls, real politicians instead of spineless sycophants. There are no kings in America — not Biden or Mark Zuckerberg or Trump or Elon or Bezos — and no resorting to temporary kingship to “fix” it. 

Let’s get our heads out of the sand and stop fighting zombies and shadows. The real villains are easy to spot if you can set aside the veil of tribalism. In general, Americans have learned how to protest against what they don’t like — and politicians are much more responsive than we imagine. Look at McCormick being shouted down at his own town hall. But we need to learn how to protest for what we want. Ranked-choice voting could transform our system to be more representative. That can happen at the state level first. Let’s demand it.

We could go further than that. Congress is the most representative Democratic institution we have — it should be more powerful, and less vulnerable to partisanship. I personally want to see a movement devoted to strengthening democracy, a No Kings movement. I think it’s already happening.

And right now, courage can be infectious. Legitimate Republican folks are resigning and speaking boldly out against what’s being done here. You can speak out too.

They are taking over the government. If you believe them, I think I might understand why. But these are not the heroes you’re looking for. We’re all Americans. Let’s act like it. Let’s make America better than great. Let's make America good.