Wreckage, Rapists, and Resistance: Week Six of the Coup
The Wreckage
They used to say war is how Americans learn geography. This civil war as Team Trump lays waste to most federal institutions is how Americans are going to learn what their federal government did. Specifically what it did for us, and for the world, for air safety and mail delivery, for campgrounds and cancer research and for manatees, salmon, farmers, seniors, poor children, veterans, people with AIDS, people in ebola outbreaks, people in malaria-plagued regions, people in famines, people in need of clean water, people whose neighborhoods are on fire or under floodwaters.
I'm cognizant of all the bad things the federal government has done and have since the 1980s protested some of them; the left has done a very good job of talking about them throughout my lifetime, while the right since Reagan has pretended that government was just bloated bureaucracy spinning its wheels and rewarding the undeserving. (This right-wing parsimony is why people in surveys routinely overestimated the percent of the federal budget spent on foreign aid and aid to the poor.) It was uncool to sing the government's praises, and that made the government an easy target for this attack.
The federal government is also scientists and the weather information they produce that helps farmers, fishermen, air travel, outdoor recreation, and public safety. The federal government is also scientists preventing and managing diseases, including AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and ebola, and working to find new ways to do so. The federal government is also funding for independent scientists doing crucial research on climate change and human health and everything else.
The federal government is a whole lot of things and millions of workers inside the country and around the world, and most of them have just been radically destabilized and demoralized; they now live in fear of doing losing their jobs if they didn't already, and they've lost colleagues, been given orders to participate in corruption and destruction, had hostile idiots sworn in as heads of their departments. "We're watching psychological warfare against a workforce that has been committed to furthering the lives of other people," Dean Karlan, USAID's former chief economist, told NPR.
The carnage from this attack will spread across the country and around the world, will be death from disease, hunger, lack of medical care, lack of basic services. If the federal government is social security and the veteran's administration, Trump/Musk is a conspiracy to murder seniors and veterans. Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen, Woody Guthrie sang, and this is death by executive order and by DOGE hijacking. Their hands won't have literal blood on them, but the violence is everywhere.
The Rapists
It is easy to break things and hard to fix things. But the radical right likes to break things, including women, and the Republican Party is why more women are dying of sepsis from pregnancies gone wrong, and Musk/Trump likes to harm women in more direct ways. Trump has been accused of many sexual assaults and found liable in civil court for one. Pete Hegseth was credibly charged with rape by a woman he settled with for a large sum of money, and further allegations of mistreatment of women have surfaced. Matt Gaetz who seems to have trafficked a minor he paid for sex did not become attorney general because of popular outcry. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "has apologised to a former family babysitter who accused him of sexual assault," the BBC reported in 2024.
As for Elon Musk, CBS has reported, "Eight former employees sued SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk, alleging that Musk ordered them fired after they challenged what they called rampant sexual harassment and a hostile "Animal House"-style work environment at the company. Among other workplace concerns, the open letter called on executives to condemn Musk's public behavior on X ... Musk's actions included making light of sexual harassment allegations against him — charges that the billionaire denied." In 2022, SpaceX paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who charged Musk with indecent exposure and sleazy propositions.
This is all consistent with what appears to be Trump regime interference on behalf of notorious misogynist influencer Andrew Tate and his brother, who just arrived in Florida. (I don't understand why Romania has been so slow in prosecuting them and wonder if it ever will now.) For those who aren't familiar with them, they scammed boys and young men who followed them on social media into sending money and soaking up their swill about how to degrade and exploit women. As CBS News put it, the brothers "set up a criminal enterprise in [Romania] and in Britain in 2021, along with two women, and used it to sexually exploit multiple people. Andrew Tate was charged with rape and trafficking offenses in Romania, while his brother and two female associates faced trafficking and other related charges."
The impact of embracing these singularly awful and influential haters is minor compared to, say, defunding USAID or abandoning Ukraine. But it clarifies the callous destructiveness at the core of this regime, the enthusiasm for harm and hate, the disregard for consequences. And the way that the men now in charge live in a juvenile fantasy of hypermasculinity. For example conspiracy theorist and new FBI director Kash Patel has declared he's thinking of bringing in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) competitors to train FBI agents, which seems like the result of watching action movies in which hunky actors playing spies simulate winning exciting hand-to-hand fights with the bad guys, which is to say it too seems like the result of being stupid. I'm pretty sure that most of what the FBI does, good or bad, does not involve sweaty unarmed combat.
But that notion that masculinity is belligerence showed up in the shameful White House meeting yesterday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It's clear that Vance and Trump thought being insulting and bullying to this war leader was what strong men do and that they are strong men. But their spiteful antics weakened themselves and the US's standing and alliances, and strengthened Europe's and much of the free world's support for Zelensky and Ukraine. In the aftermath of the sordid ambush, leader after leader of European nations vowed support for Zelensky personally on social media and in recorded talks. Ordinary people and world leaders vented their disgust with Vance and Trump and admiration for Ukraine's president.
We, the American people and also the world and life on it beyond the human, are hostage to a small cadre of emotionally stunted and intellectually deranged men driven by hatred underwritten by stupidity (and manipulated by Vladimir Putin). But you already knew that.
The Resistance
They used to say war is how Americans learn geography, and maybe we could say that political upheaval is how people learn history, as the lesson that a nation can change suddenly in the worst and the best ways. Most nations on earth have a collective memory of invasion, revolution, decolonization, or coup within the last century. Their people live with the awareness that things can change suddenly for the better or the worse, and that if they live in a decent democracy they need to protect against its loss That's a lesson I'm not sure most of us learned in this country, which got through more than two centuries without this kind of upheaval, much of it with a "it can't happen here" mentality. Until now.
Americans often seem to me to be complacent or despondent about the idea of radical change--complacent if they deny threats such as Trump, despondent when they deny the possibility of participating in change for the better. How change works and how civil-society organizing has succeeded again and again in this country from the abolition of slavery to immigrant rights and environmental protection is not nearly well-enough known. Mainstream narratives disempower us when they portray power as something possessed by a small elite and change as something handed down from above, and when they depict ordinary people organizing for change as foolish rabble or annoying interference.
But we're in an emergency. The urgent question is: what can we do about it? I think the short answer always was and will be: a lot. And just as Trump and Vance recruited European support for Ukraine and Zelensky, so their abuse of power and destructiveness is recruiting Americans to opposition. People across the US are looking for something they can do that will counter the destruction underway. The eagerness with which people got on board with Friday's boycott, despite its vague targets and goals, is a reminder that people want to exercise power, and they want to participate. Against this regime.
They are in town after town, state after state, participating, in petitions, boycotts, protests, marches. We know that Congress has been deluged with calls and congresspeople coming home on recesses have had fiery town hall meetings with their constituents. We know that protests are having an effect--and while they're only being reported on in a scattershot way, I can note that yesterday there were protests in the nation's capital in support of USAID workers and then after the meeting with Zelensky in support of Ukraine. Ohio State students protested the decision to close the diversity and inclusion program there. Today there are actions from Utah to Alaska in support of national parks, which are in trouble because DOGE has hacked away at their staff.
There's a March 5th action by clergy in Washington D.C. organized by Repairers of the Breach, and on March 7 there'll be nationwide Stand Up for Science demonstrations. On April 17, there's a Day of Action for Higher Ed. Tesla Takedown protests continue to happen regularly at Tesla salesrooms across the country and may play a role in the company's sharp decline in sales and value. Indivisible, founded by two former congressional aides in the aftermath of the 2016 election, has resurged, with hundreds of new chapters forming and a lot of people looking to their skillful strategy and coordination for leadership (Indivisible also puts out useful guides on how to pressure your elected officials, and Choose Democracy has excellent "what can I do?" material as well). I'm proud that Third Act, the climate and democracy group Bill McKibben founded a few years ago to orchestrate the power of people over 60 into impact, has been doing good work (proud because I'm on the board and sometimes part of those actions). In addition to protests called by these organizations, there have been independent protests in many places.
I share the feeling so many I've spoken with have that it's not enough. It is not, but it is a beginning we can build on. No one knows what will happen in this suddenly destabilized country, but I do know we can choose to have a role in what happens, and it's possible we can determine what happens. "Don't ask what will happen. Be what happens" I once got a few hundred climate protestors to chant. To be what happens means that millions of us need to start organizing to participate, gathering up our friends to form affinity groups, joining the kind of organizations and actions mentioned above, or staging our own protests (a handful of people with signs in the right time and place can have an impact). To create pressure as shareholders or employees or congregations or members of the public or experts who can speak up on the impacts.
Speaking up is part of building momentum--to your elected officials, in letters to your newspaper, online, and conversations with the people around you. Speaking up to affirm human rights, the rule of law, the value of NOAA and the FAA and the other federal institutions under attack, to speak against the corruption and destruction. Using your voice to not let this stuff get normalized or forgotten, to encourage others to stand up and speak up, to remind them we don't have to accept this and we do have power. Courage and hope are as contagious as their opposites. As the idiots in charge crash the economy, people who are affluent and consider themselves safe will be impacted. Many who formerly supported the administration or ignored politics are reeling from the impacts to themselves, to people they know, to services they depend up, and we have a choice about whether to recruit or revile them. In a sense the breadth of the attack is offering the possibility of the broadest coalitions this nation has seen. If we build them.
Great uprisings are often both carefully prepared for and essentially unpredictable. It's as if the fuel has been gathered for a bonfire but a lightning strike suddenly ignites it. You can gather the wood, but you can't predict the lightning. We can gather wood. And perhaps we can be lightning.
