Breaking the machine

Immigration crackdowns and dismantling of government agencies are part of an ideological purge. Elections are next.

ICE agents conduct an immigration raid dressed as commandos for some reason. Credit: Hyoung Chang, Denver Post

This weekend, much of the nation will be sucked into a contest between two football teams that are pretty well-disliked. I would say this is a perfect metaphor for our politics but that’s not really the case anymore. One side of the aisle is very well liked, even if the people supporting the Republican Party do so at their own peril—and might be bringing us down with them.

The average ticket to the Super Bowl is around $5,000 and it will be a sellout, which it always is. This isn’t enough on its own to tell you that what happened in November was never really about the economy, but luckily we’ve got elected officials like Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas to remind us that Trump supporters will gladly pay higher prices if it means they can call themselves “patriots.”

The national political press fell for it once again when white America told them they were voting for Trump because he would fix the economy. While reporters filed dispatches from across the country about how the American people just wanted a better economy and were willing to make a devil’s bargain to ensure economic prosperity, I was documenting an election denial movement comprised of everyday people who will go to their graves thinking that Donald Trump is so overwhelmingly popular that he is simply not capable of losing an election unless the other side cheats.

This voting bloc includes the same people who we were supposed to believe just wanted cheaper gas and groceries—and not all the madness a second Trump presidency promised.

They were either stupid or lying. If they were stupid it’s partly the media’s fault for portraying Republicans as “better on the economy” for, oh, my entire lifetime. If they were lying, they’re now enjoying every bit of the chaos of the first few weeks of Trump’s reign. They love owning the libs even if it means paying higher prices. They love what Elon Musk and his crew of 20-somethings is doing even if it opens us up to cyber attacks from our enemies. They love Trump for shutting down entire government agencies because this was never about voting for someone who would make their lives better; it has always been about voting for someone who would make other people’s lives worse. That’s exactly what will happen with the shuttering of USAID, which will cost actual human lives in places like Africa where millions depend on life-saving drugs provided by American generosity—which is to say, American diplomacy and power.

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Elon Musk and his crew of racists and tech-y fumblers are tearing up as many government agencies as they can get access to because they are part of an American right that wants to test all of our systems to see what they can break. It doesn’t matter if things like USAID don’t stay fully broken because a court says that what Musk and Trump are doing is illegal. The pain they’ve caused thus far is the point.

Pain, vengeance and ideological cleansing is their goal. If they can actually get away with it, even better. That’s the stage we’re entering now—will our machine hold? As David Roth at Defector so perfectly lays out, this machine was “elegantly designed, enjoyed a good long run, and was commendably prescient about the greatest threat it would face: some asshole who was unwilling to abide by or acknowledge any of those clever rules or load-bearing social obligations whenever and wherever they inconvenienced or just annoyed him, and who had become powerful enough to make that rejection everyone else's problem.”

Trump and Musk are engaged in an experiment that could break the whole thing, asking the question, “What if we just did whatever we wanted to see if anyone will stop us?”

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For me at least, being an American in this moment has taken on the feeling of spinning ever faster on a merry-go-round. When it finally stops, we’ll all be flung off. Some will be thrown in different directions than others, but make no mistake, we will all be flung. The only question that remains is when the ride will stop, and what will stop it. American troops in the Middle East? Military and law enforcement factions siding with Trump over the courts? Widespread civil unrest and resulting violent crackdowns? Secession of states or a hot civil war? It has only been a few weeks but it can’t continue at this pace, I’ve thought. Something will stop this. Maybe it will be good for democracy—like Republicans finally coming to their senses—or maybe it won’t. Maybe they’ll continue to speed up the merry-go-round even as smoke starts billowing from the gears. Eventually, the machine will break.

Below are a few ways that the machine of democracy—slow and imperfect as it is—is being broken by the people that Americans elected to run it. Speaking of running for office, Trump is again joking-not-joking about a third term.

• ICE and DHS agents—covering their faces to conceal their identities—raided an apartment complex in Aurora, CO to supposedly go after members of the Tren de Aragua gang. It’s unknown how many immigrants the agents took and who they even were—and ICE isn’t responding to questions. (Meanwhile, Fox News’ Bill Melugin aided agents in concealing their identities by helpfully blurring their faces in his report—which is not something that is typically done when conducting journalism around members of law enforcement!)

• In that same raid, ICE agents went door-to-door committing what sounds like en masse civil rights violations and asking folks to turn in their neighbors. After the raid wasn’t as successful as ICE had planned—they were met with sneering neighbors as well as activists advising migrants of their rights—Tom Homan blamed the media. Sure, it was either the media’s fault for reporting on the raid or, perhaps the migrants knew it was coming because Trump himself has been one of the many Republicans talking about conducting raids in Aurora throughout the final months of the election. Arturo Dominguez of Decolonized Journalism succinctly breaks this down. Or, perhaps the migrants knew about it because ICE was making a big fucking show all over town so everyone knew what was coming.

• The FCC is also mad with the press for doing its job. Last week, Trump’s lackey on the FCC, Brendan Carr, announced he would launch an investigation into a San Francisco radio station that reported on ICE raids, saying the station had endangered officers’ safety. This is a very old line from law enforcement, and one that every cops reporter like myself knows well. Problem is, it just isn’t true. Never have I hard of an officer being killed or injured because a criminal read a news report about police activity and knew the cops were coming.