Donnie Death
What Trump is doing will cause untold suffering and death at home and abroad.
I hesitate to give Donald Trump another nickname, since there are so many, including a bunch created by Jimmy Kimmel’s writing team, a list that unfortunately is still running. Most are clever and painfully funny, unlike the childish nicknames Trump has bestowed on others in his bullying attempts to belittle and “own” them.
With the likes of “’Lil Marco” and “Pocahontas” (the latter which he revived in his rambling lie-fest speech to Congress), Trump made it fair game to give him nicknames.
So, I’ll make use of one of Trump’s favorite rhetorical devices and say that I won’t call him Donnie Death. I won’t, even though that moniker has been bouncing around in my head for some time now. I’m mindful of Michelle Obama’s maxim about how Democrats should take the high road: When they go low, we go high. (Which, unfortunately, seems now to have morphed into When they go low, we go slow.)
In addition, I know the man busily jabbing a Sharpie on executive orders at the White House (while not cheating on a golf course at immense cost to taxpayers) would almost certainly think it sounds cool and tough and visualize a WWE version of himself in that role, later to be sold as an NFT or meme coin to further his reputation among his followers as an equal to his autocrat heroes.
I don’t want to be a part of his incessant parasitical grifting on his followers. And yet, given his record of creating discord and disinformation during the pandemic, his frequent encouragement of violence, and gleeful dismantling of our democracy, the name certainly fits.
He also earned it by shutting down the efforts of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian and economic development support to people in dire need around the globe at a cost to the taxpayers of less than 1% of the budget. This “America First” move is incredibly short-sighted and cartoonishly evil, belying all the conservative claims that we are a Christian nation.
Are we surprised? Donnie Death’s (oops, a mere slip) pathological need to be at the center of everything and his politicization of masks, vaccinations, and social distancing caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths during the pandemic he refused to take seriously in his first term.
He’s back doing his best to do the worst things to the American people — and to the world.
Vaccinating himself and his family first, he behaved like the despicable Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Well, he’s back doing his best to do the worst things possible to all Americans, young, working and retired — and to everyone in the world not a member of the despots’ or oligarchs’ club.
The humanitarian work of USAID professionals has made the United States a trusted partner in developing countries around the globe, helping them build sustainable economies that help people thrive and, thereby, thwart both terrorism and flight migration. Moving the United States out of this critical work opens the way for Russia and China to exert more of their malign influence around the globe.
As Caren Grown, senior fellow for Global Economy and Development at The Brookings Institution, writes about the implications of a USAID shutdown:
“People around the world have looked to USAID to champion the values of human dignity and respect for all. This administration damages that trust and makes it harder for the U.S. to be a reliable and influential partner in efforts to make the world safer and more prosperous.”
Here at home, the smirking so-called Christian occupying the White House is reneging on every campaign promise he shamelessly made to protect our already thin social safety net — Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition assistance, Social Security. This is also as un-Christian as can be imagined. The stock market is plummeting, along with workers’ pensions and 401Ks. Measles is back, though a very strange man who savors road kill tells us it’s just a nutritional thing and that the highly effective MMR vaccine is probably as dangerous as the infection.
Leave it to the cult leader of MAGA and his hand-picked team of incompetents and ideologues. Always the con artist, Trump endlessly says that what he is going to do is unbelievable. His supporters should have taken that literally because he and members of his ludicrous cabinet can never be believed.
When he and Musk say there will be unbelievable wealth, you better not imagine it has anything to do with your sharing in those riches. In fact, by cutting $1.5 trillion from the federal budget over 10 years to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and by undermining Social Security to privatize it, their unbelievable wealth will be coming from you and me — and our children and grandchildren.
Things are so bad that many Americans are considering emigrating to more civilized countries. Competitive sociopaths wielding federal power appear to want to outdo the brain drain Governor Ron DeSantis created in Florida by attacking education and all things “woke.”
It’s as if Republicans refuse to understand the multiplier effect, a simple economic concept. For example, for each dollar taxpayers give in food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), about $1.54 is generated in the community because when people spend that dollar there is a positive cascading effect at the grocery, the bakery, and so on.
Trump thinks that tariff is a “beautiful word,” but no one else in the world does.
I once looked into the notion that businessmen make good presidents. Not so much. How about self-described great businessmen who are just lifelong grifters? Absolutely not. Trump may think that tariff is a “beautiful word,” but no one else in the world does, not even the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Is he using the threat of tariffs as a tool for negotiations? Maybe, but while the so-called madman theory may or may not work in foreign policy, it certainly doesn’t in economics, where steadiness and predictability are key.
As the hive-mind memes have it, you’d almost think the economy was being run by a guy who managed to bankrupt casinos.
The punishing nature of this so-called administration is everywhere one looks. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which has since it was established in 2010 saved some 215 million people more than $20 billion in predatory loans, bank overdraft penalties, credit card late fees and surprise “junk” fees on things like concert and sports tickets, is just another thing that must be dispensed with to please Trump’s big money donors. Shadow president Elon Musk said he wanted to “delete” the agency that has (multiplier effect again) returned $4 to citizens for every dollar spent on it.
But the wannabe dictator’s desire for retribution — his psychological state of malign narcissism, a trait shared with the reliably adolescent and mean-spirited Musk — clearly doesn’t only apply to the people who didn’t vote for him. He has a long history of humiliating even those who submit to grovel and kiss the ring. Professional federal workers who may have voted for Trump have not only been summarily fired or threatened but have been publicly humiliated by Musk and Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s mean sorority girl press secretary, who happily humiliates working journalists and serves up disinformation every time she speaks.
They relish their sadism as they play the victim, while always blaming the real victims. One can see how much they enjoy it, how they are always playing to MAGA voters. But “owning the libs,” not governance, has been the battle cry on the right for decades now. Now, they are punishing everyone, including those who supported them.
Trump derangement syndrome has always been real, but it never described those who correctly called him on his endless lies and uninformed ideas. It has always only fit members of his cult following, brainwashed by disinformation spewed by Fox News and Joe Rogan and all the lesser members of the right-wing echo chamber.
Before the election, I wrote that Trump would love to inherit the Biden economy, which was called “the envy of the world,” so he could destroy it. Tens of thousands of non-partisan, professional federal employees in agencies critical to the functioning of our government — from the FBI to the Forest Service — are being summarily fired, their lives casually thrown into chaos and their towns and cities suffering the reverse of the multiplier effect.
Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims of Popular Information report on how the loss of federal workers will cripple Washington, DC. Call it the divider effect.
This Putin-swooning former reality show personality and current felon has insulted and pushed away our allies and turned his back on Ukraine in their desperate war to survive, crushing the entire Western Alliance, which will only bring further death and disorder around the globe. Trump is not content to dismantle every bit of our democracy at home, he is out to destroy the standing of the United States everywhere. Our national anthem is being booed on the regular by the famously polite Canadians.
Trump repeatedly lied about not knowing anything about Project 2025 (while also saying he disagreed with parts of it), but he promised to do much of this, and tens of millions of Americans still voted for him. It’s like they are cutting off their noses to spite my face.
Trump has repeatedly warned us that the enemy of America is within. We know he is always talking about himself.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly warned the MAGA faithful that the enemy of America is within. As we know far too well, he is always talking about himself. And that enemy within has always been at work, in those who refused to acknowledge that chattel slavery was a moral outrage, in those who sold the genocide of native Americans as “manifest destiny,” in those who championed the “Lost Cause” by building monuments to traitors, in those who named names during the McCarthy era, in those who set dogs on American citizens who asked for their civil rights, in Republican leaders who taught their colleagues to demonize political opponents, in those who pushed the so-called culture wars to divide us, in those who work to disenfranchise voters to create permanent minority rule.
Trump and Musk have spoken mildly about doing “big things” and a “period of economic pain” and “a transition period for the economy” for Americans to endure. Many, like Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic, have dark thoughts about what Trump and Musk really mean by that. Given that Trump has followed the autocrat’s playbook for all these years, those dark thoughts are more than reasonable. They are showing us precisely what they intend to do: break America’s ability to resist like Putin broke Russia’s.
Trump loves to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln, considered by historians our greatest president. But Lincoln, a devout Christian, called on Americans to forgive each other and appealed to “the better angels of our nature.” Here’s how he concluded his first Inaugural Address, on March 4, 1861, with the country on the brink of civil war:
“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
I would not be surprised if Trump signed an executive order to have his image carved next to Lincoln’s on Mount Rushmore because of his own dismal ranking by historians. (Americans would dub that pairing “First and Worst.”) Trump’s WWE villain–style appeal lies in encouraging his followers to do the opposite of what Lincoln called on his countrymen to do. Donnie Death (darn, it keeps popping up) encourages people to express their worst, most anti-social feelings while still calling themselves Christians.
Some trick, that.
In the same address, Lincoln said this:
“While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.”
Let’s pray that citizens of good faith and courage have the virtue and vigilance needed to save our democracy and begin to rebuild America’s critical place in the world.
