As many of us tried to warn for years, the second Trump administration has so far been a nightmarish project of punitive vengeance on multiple fronts. It's a form of political terrorism designed not just to steamroll and demoralize the GOP's political opposition in Congress and spread fear and paranoia on the left nationwide, but to destroy entire industries and force their workforces into either unemployment or a terrified crouch within institutions under permanent siege. It is simultaneously despicable and ham-fisted, but also potentially effective at its core goal of eroding the institutional basis for liberalism in the United States.
If you work for the federal government in any capacity including as a contractor, or in non-profits, K-12 schools or higher education—fields that collectively employ about 24 million Americans, your experience of the past week has been sheer pandemonium. Add to that the legions of state employees, contractors and other workers whose work has been gratuitously threatened or interrupted, and the real number of Americans worried about their livelihoods, families and future right now is probably closer to 50 million, to say nothing of the undocumented immigrants and their loved ones and communities who are preparing to have their lives forever upended by the merciless retribution of the president and his movement of grievance-addled goons.
President Donald Trump has issued executive orders pausing almost all federal grants and loans, halting medical research, and gumming up payment systems for Medicaid recipients in the states. He threw the passport system into complete mayhem by rescinding designations for trans and non-binary Americans and halted all foreign aid—except of course to Israel and Egypt, the foreign policy equivalent of busting all public sector unions except cops and firefighters. All medical communications from the federal government have been temporarily axed, presumably so that they can be brought into line with the new anti-vaccine, anti-expert, anti-science ethos of the MAGA crowd.
He has sewn confusion and panic among doctors and health systems by signing an executive order banning gender-affirming care for minors. In one of the more insane maneuvers in living memory, he has offered virtually everyone working for the federal government a buyout package if they don't want to return to work in person full time—to offices where people are now being encouraged to snitch on one another if anyone engages in any DEI wrongthink or otherwise speaks words that contradict the edicts of our new MAGA overlords. And hats off to everyone currently trying to figure out if their newborn babies are American citizens or not after Trump tried to rewrite the Constitution, repealing birthright citizenship via executive order.
These actions go well beyond ordinary policymaking. The experience for the millions of ordinary Americans threatened by Trump's lawless, depraved rampage has been like a sudden flood after a dam bursts. There is barely time to think about which bag to grab on your way out the door to safety and no real way to sort the credible threats from the bluster and theater. Quite literally everyone I know is trying to piece together a backup life plan under massive emotional duress as the reality of this hellish onslaught and what it might mean sinks in.
And that is by design. The policy blitz is intended to demoralize and disorient ordinary Americans and force them into resignation—either literal or figurative—to the far right's designs for American government and democracy. The GOP knows that it cannot get away with shrinking government down to the size that the zealots in the House Freedom Caucus dream of via the regular legislative process. They are trying to sneak the same outcome through the side door by creating as much unhappiness, anxiety and confusion among the federal workforce, and anyone who depends on federal funding, as possible.
And this is all before the new Congress gets in on the action. Republicans have floated industry-destroying ideas like taxing college and university scholarships as income, which would instantaneously blow up thousands of budgets in higher education and impoverish millions of students. They have proposed gargantuan cuts to the safety net, which would not only harm recipients but also send thousands of workers who oversee and distribute the assistance to the unemployment rolls. They even sent daycares and early childhood education centers that depend on Head Start money into crisis mode. That's the far right's "culture of life" at work terrifying little kids and their parents.
The crime that such people have committed is working in industries where people tend to lean left or vote Democratic. The Trumpian theory of politics is about indiscriminate retribution and the use of coercion and humiliation to force far-right policy down the throats of an unwilling public.
It means crushing educators under the weight of threats, legal harassment, and budget cuts until they choose to do something else with their lives. Trumpian politics means your state doesn't get any disaster relief unless your leaders agree to extremist, right-wing policy changes. It means targeting marginalized groups like trans-Americans by squeezing them from all sides – eliminating their medical care, their autonomy, their workplace protections, and their dignity at the same time.
Trump's minions want trans folks to ask themselves, "Wouldn't it be easier just to go back to pretending to be someone I'm not?" and answer in the affirmative.
So, if throwing much of the country into total mayhem and panic was on your wish list in November, congratulations, you have gotten exactly what you wanted. Trump and his allies have ensured that countless Americans are lying awake at night wondering where their next paycheck is coming from and fretting about how they will feed their kids or make payroll or plan for the future or even simply exist in safety and security with so much of the world that they have taken for granted suddenly on the chopping block or on fire.
Even trying to get a handle on what the hell is happening from moment to moment is impossible because the Trump White House is not only bottomlessly cruel but also mind-bogglingly incompetent, issuing edicts, including some they know to be illegal and unconstitutional, and then walking them back hours or days later.
Welcome to the new normal and enjoy the ride while you can. Because this much is for certain: the backlash to this sick barrage of attacks on human decency and American normalcy is building quickly and will be fierce.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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