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Rebecca Gordon, On Not Going Gentle

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I want to say: When it comes to the Trump administration, it never ends, does it? But of course, it does end. In fact, these days, Trump and crew seem to have a knack for endings.  You could even say that, in the age of You Know Who, death is preparing to become this country’s middle name. After all, we now know that the one government agency that actually provided life-saving help globally, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, has essentially been shut down. Or rather, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 83% (and yes, that is not a misprint) of its programs have now been terminated and the rest moved to the State Department.

We’re talking about global programs to combat everything from AIDS to starvation. As the Associated Press recently reported, “Even some life-saving programs that Rubio and others had promised to spare got the termination notices, such as emergency nutritional support for starving children and drinking water serving sprawling camps for families uprooted by war in Sudan.” And don’t just think this is some distant thing that won’t affect Americans.

As Apporva Mandavilli of the New York Times recently pointed out,

“Dangerous pathogens left unsecured at labs across Africa. Halted inspections for mpox, Ebola and other infections at airports and other checkpoints. Millions of unscreened animals shipped across borders. The Trump administration’s pause on foreign aid has hobbled programs that prevent and snuff out outbreaks around the world, scientists say, leaving people everywhere more vulnerable to threatening viruses and bacteria. That includes Americans.”

After all, the Covid pandemic didn’t start anywhere near the U.S. but that didn’t mean it didn’t devastate this country.  In fact, in the end — if I can even use that phrase — Donald Trump may prove to be the president of death (and not just because he appointed a vaccine-doubter to run the Department of Health). But let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon introduce you to the man who is preparing to ensure that so many of the rest of us may not go gentle into some future night. Tom

Trump Rages to Snuff Out Democracy’s Candle

Will We Rage Against the Dying of Its Light?

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Allow me to stipulate that I do not wish to die. In fact, had anyone consulted me about the construction of the universe, I would have made my views on the subject quite clear: mortality is a terrible idea. I’m opposed to it in general. (In wiser moments, I know that this is silly and that all life feeds on life. There is no life without the death of other beings, indeed, no planets without the death of stars.)

Nonetheless, I’m also opposed to mortality on a personal level. I get too much pleasure out of being alive to want to give it up. And I’m curious enough that I don’t want to die before I learn how it all comes out (or, for that matter, ends). I don’t want to leave the theater when the movie’s only partway over -- or even after the credits have rolled. In fact, my antipathy to death is so extreme that I think it’s fair to say I'm a coward. That's probably why, in hopes of combatting that cowardice, I’ve occasionally done silly things like running around in a war zone, trying to stop a U.S. intervention. As Aristotle once wrote, we become brave by doing brave things.

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Engelhardt, Trump First, America Last

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As always, I’ve been so appreciative of (and, after all these years, continue to be amazed by) the contributions that you, the readers of TomDispatch, have made in recent weeks. You quite literally make all the difference. And as ever, sadly, to cover the costs of this site, I need more. Anything any of you can do to continue to help out will truly mean the world to me. Do visit our donation page and see what you might do and many, many thanks in advance. Tom]

Shock and Awe

Making (Non)Sense of Donald Trump, or the Success of Failure

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Yes, "shock and awe" is back in the second age of Donald Trump. His border czar, Tom Homan, used that very phrase to describe border policy from day one of the new administration and, whether the president has actually said it or not, it's now regularly in headlines, op-eds, and so much else. If you remember, it was the phrase used, in all its glory, to describe America's massive bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003. (You remember! The country that supposedly threatened us with nuclear weapons but, in fact, didn't have any!)

We Americans were, of course, going to shock and awe them. But from that moment on (if not from the moment, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when, rather than simply going after Osama bin Laden and crew, President George W. Bush launched a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan), you could say that it was we who were truly shocked and awed. After all, in their own disastrous fashion, our post-9/11 wars prepared the way for... yes!... Donald Trump to take the White House the first time around (shock and awe!) -- and then blame the final disastrous retreat of the American military from Afghanistan in 2021 on the Biden administration. ("Kamala Harris, Joe Biden -- the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world.") And of course, four years later, his reelection on a functional platform of Trump First, Americans Last, was distinctly a double shock and awe!

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William D. Hartung, A Manhattan Project for AI Weaponry?

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Yes, the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., was promptly fired as, on the very first day of the second age of Trump, was the first woman to lead the Coast Guard Admiral Linda Fagan, as only days later was Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to head the Navy. So, give Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth full credit. They swore they would cut back on government and they’ve begun doing so remarkably quickly. They’ve clearly decided to run a pared-down military focused on versity, quity, and exclusion, or VQE. But count on one thing: despite all President Trump’s and RME (Richest Man on Earth) Musk’s talk about cutting back everywhere, including the Pentagon, in a world where, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung suggests today, Musk’s psychic doubles running Silicon Valley military tech firms are preparing for a new (and wildly expensive, as well as wildly dangerous) world of artificial intelligence weaponry, cutbacks there will be anything but the name of the game.

It’s already clear enough that, while Musk has been eager to cut the U.S. Agency for International Development and so strip funding meant to deal with Polio, H.I.V., Malaria, and nutrition globally, weaponry — especially high-tech weaponry — is another matter entirely. In fact, amid all the cuts now underway, Republicans in Congress seem eager to add at least another $100 billion to the Pentagon budget in the years to come, bringing it close to the trillion-dollar mark. I mean, why in the world would you ever want to cut the biggest source of contract spending in the federal budget when you can easily begin slashing the government agencies that already spend the least?

So, peace? Cut it dead! Diversity? Clip it off! Help for veterans? How about getting rid of 80,000 or more employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs? Medical research? Who needs it? Education? Shut it down! But I don’t really have to go on, do I? You get the point and so, with all of this (and so much more) in mind, let Hartung take you into a world in which the funding for what could prove to be the most dangerous weapons on Earth is essentially guaranteed to, all too literally, head for the heavens. My suggestion is: Duck (and don’t quack or they might notice you)! Tom

The New Age Militarists

And Their Threat to Our Common Future

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Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.

As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping, and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.” His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence. He argues, in fact, that Americans face “a moment of reckoning” in which we must decide “what is this country, and for what do we stand?” And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands -- in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry, and designed to preserve America’s “fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries.”

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