Government by death cult

Everyone’s been very busy these days! Markets were held hostage by the threat of tariffs then forced to jump out of a plane at 42,000 feet and go skydiving. Looming counter-tariffs bode badly, while intermittent finance rumors sparked intermittent rebounds and flickers of hope that some mystical solution might prevent a global trade war.

During these same days, the Supreme Court is anonymously scribbling strange graffiti in the shadow docket that seems to suggest they don’t have any issues with deporting people to third-country gulags, though they might ask the administration to hew to a few procedural niceties when it kidnaps people.

Meanwhile, millions of people showed up at protests around the country last weekend. Today I’ll write about where we’re at, discuss some precursors to this moment, and explain why I think we’re spiraling toward a death-cult situation (this term does not mean we are all going to die!). Keep in mind that there are definitely actions we can take to derail further momentum in that direction, and I’ll address those, too.

Hands Off across America

First, let’s start with the Hands Off protests nationwide last weekend. More than 1,400 protests took place from coast to coast, including Hawaii and Alaska, with millions of attendees showing up. I went down myself to check out the event on the National Mall.

On my way to the Washington Monument Saturday, I ran into someone I trained with back when I was teaching karate. I have yet to go to a protest where I don’t see people I know, though some of them were people I hadn’t seen in decades.

Of course, I also met new people. One man named Will told me, “I am here because I’m dismayed with the way my government is treating people, when it’s destroying institutions that support people.”

I met a mother and daughter originally from Massachusetts who share a birthday, and it happened to be the day of the protest. The mother explained that she had come to the protest because of “the video of the lady from Tufts that was abducted by those masked men, and the assault on the law, and the tariffs, the lies.”

The daughter pointed to her mother, saying “Her father fought in the resistance in France and went to Mauthausen concentration camp.”

She was proud of what he had done. “By the time it affects you, it’s too late,” she said, meaning that many people had waited to act until it was too late to do anything.

A circle of protesters marched around the base of monument itself, while another set of demonstrators circled the larger ring hundreds of feet away. Tens of thousands more scattered along the Mall nearby, playing songs and raising call and response chants from the crowd.

Across the street, I ran into Pikachu, too.

I knew he’d had a very dramatic role in Turkish protests recently.

But then I wondered what he was really doing in D.C. that day. I asked whether he just liked to show up places and be Pikachu, or if he had come out to protest. “Protest! Protest!” came a voice from somewhere deep inside the head.

I’ve been to a lot of events at the Mall, and my spidey-sense of crowd counting on the scene—fine-tuned with opinions from others there that day—estimated that probably more than 100,000 (but definitely less than 200,000) had shown up.

Where does that fall on my four decades of National Mall-going crowd spectrum? Saturday delivered far more people than had shown up downtown in arenas and on the street for Inauguration Day earlier this year, after outdoor events were cancelled due to the cold. Yet it was noticeably less than I’d seen at any prior inauguration.

And it was tremendously less than had shown up for the Women’s March in 2017, which was so crowded it triggered countless medical events over more than a mile of terrain because the lack of room to move at points meant that there was sometimes not enough space to breathe normally.

People who came on Saturday were fired up, though, with signs about seeing better cabinets at IKEA than we currently have in the White House, or denouncing the “Turd Reich.” Still, I wondered where some of the crowd I was accustomed to seeing at big events had gone instead.

An answer came soon after I returned home and saw what was going on around the country. The people who normally would have come to the District had caused good trouble at home. Tiny Keyser, West Virginia, managed to get out dozens of people, as did large cities and small towns, from Maine to Montana. It was a great showing overall with total estimates landing around three million demonstrators.

My sense is that over time, those numbers will need to triple or quadruple, and be coupled with more marches and a demand for very specific concessions. The country needs to move quickly to build that kind of participation, but Saturday showed strong progress in the right direction.

And remember what I wrote about last week: research seems to be showing that protests out in Trump country disproportionately have an effect in winning people over, even on a strongly polarized issue. The smaller, whiter, and less-educated the county, the more significant the effect seems to be.

More malicious incompetence

And we have plenty of bones to pick with the Trump White House. On Friday, I mentioned the role of malicious incompetence in the administration—from Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador by mistake, to the tariffs that have been an obsession of Trump’s since the 1980s and which are now threatening to tank the economy. There are countless more examples, like the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health lab in Morgantown, West Virginia, whose research animals had to be mass euthanized, many of them shortly after arrival, simply because after massive layoffs, there would be no veterinarian to care for them.

Humans aren’t thriving under Trump either. The U.S. saw its second measles death this year, a school-age child hospitalized in Lubbock, Texas. Not content with abetting the first two measles deaths in ten years, RFK Jr. is also hoping to remove fluoride from the U.S. water supply.

Though Republican representatives deny there will be any cuts to Social Security, its site has gone down repeatedly in worsening spirals, at for most of a day at one point. Offices are being closed, and firing more than 7,000 workers at the Social Security Administration has been deemed inadequate. Thousands more layoffs are planned.

But the two biggest elephants among the herd of them currently in the room are the massive damage to the global economy threatened by Trump’s frivolously calculated, enormous tariffs, and the plans to massively expand domestic detention facilities holding U.S. immigrants. We seem to be on the cusp of a death cult that is focused primarily on destruction and punishment above all.

Extinction spiral

At some point, we have to acknowledge that the administration isn’t capable of stopping itself. Wherever the imaginary line that people cross before they’re trapped in a cult they’re unable to exit, the Trump administration itself has already passed it. The people the president has appointed to his cabinet, the advisers he’s surrounded himself with, are either delusional or focused on sunk costs and making no moves to turn back.

Trump is likewise incapable of stopping himself. He’s certainly morally and legally responsible for what happens. But he’s also only doing what he’s done before, wrecking everything he’s touched in the 34 years since his first bankruptcy. There’s no reason to expect he’s capable of doing anything differently.

Trump destroys functioning things, grifts from them where he can, and lies about it. He ran on exactly the policies he’s now undertaking—dismantling government, imposing tariffs, and punishing the people he’s portrayed as enemies.

While his actions are still shocking, there are no surprises here. Any distress from his own camp comes only from people who wore blinders let themselves see only his manufactured, public persona.

Some voters pulled a lever for him to persecute minorities they disliked, while many CEOs believed he would act only in their interests. Now some of them are realizing he has no interest in their needs at all. The Washington Post reported this week that Elon Musk himself—whom some have portrayed as dictating policy to Trump or even as the real president of the country—has been unable to convince Trump to reverse the tariffs imposed this month. Instead, Musk has been relegated to insulting Trump’s point person on trade, Peter Navarro, on Twitter.

Murder power fantasies

America has a history of death cults—in terms of a cult-like celebration of death. Think about the lynching parties in early twentieth-century America that included picnics and postcards made of the murder. A willingness to do harm to outsiders and people of color, at home and abroad, has been an American tradition.

But another tradition post-World War II was a trade the country made, providing material support, technology, and food to a lot of places in exchange for its dominant position in the world. Sometimes these programs were political competition with the Soviet Union as the two countries vied for influence. At other times they were closer to outright gifts, though they might come with economic strings and sometimes were structured to foster ongoing dependence in ways that were hard to shake over time. Nevertheless, they helped the U.S. keeps its superpower status, and helped keep people alive.

Now, the Trump administration is ending almost all of that. I mentioned last week that tens of thousands have already died as a result of the termination of various USAID programs for those living with HIV or countries fighting chronic diseases like tuberculosis. Yesterday, the United Nations announced the White House was cutting American support for the World Food Program, which feeds millions. The many deaths that will result from this decision is one more step in Trump’s embrace of a cult of destruction.

Looking to history

But today in thinking about death cults, I want to focus particularly on the kind that involve not only targeting marginalized groups, but self-immolation of a whole society, small or large.

From the history of concentration camps I wrote, the example of the Khmer Rouge is the one that comes to mind. In brief: a revolutionary group that seized power in Cambodia in the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge committed the country to a radical restructuring of Cambodian society. They did so in such a way that the government sparked a genocide of its own people through murder and starvation, wrecking the nation. The entire country effectively became not only a police state, but a forced-labor camp.

The American example

And as usual, it’s not even necessary to look overseas for parallels to the kind of death cult in which we find ourselves. The more relevant and influential precursor for an American death cult is the advent of Covid on U.S. shores in 2020.

At first, the country grew alarmed at the arrival of a new, lethal and highly contagious virus, and responded with basic emergency health plans that had been put in place earlier. Before long, the potential toll the disease would take on the American public became clearer.

During the spring, it became evident that first responders, medical staff, food-service workers, and low-wage earners would be on the front lines of exposure to the virus. For a time, then-President Donald Trump pretended the coronavirus would go away while still wanting credit for the development of any effective vaccine that emerged before the end of his presidency. In the end, he would turn people against public health measures, promoting an anti-vaccination agenda that caught fire with his followers, sabotaging the national response.

Along with the stunning death toll of well over a million people, the main result in the U.S. was the refusal to reckon with what had happened. The president had made the pandemic into a political tool and demanded his followers ignore reality. The pump was primed for significant parts of the population to avert their eyes or even to disbelieve in the deaths of a staggering number of their friends, family, and neighbors.

Even among those of us who acknowledged what had happened, and understood the role political leaders played in increasing that death toll or ignoring best practices for political expediency, there was a strange sense of simply moving on without acknowledging everything that had been lost: an ability to tackle public health crises, a leading government role in it, and so many citizens that were gone.

This recent history leaves us as inheritors of a death cult and keeps us mired in a very bad place to assess and respond to the current threat.

How to respond

Trump’s flexibility and willingness to backtrack is almost nonexistent. What a Goldman Sachs executive said about Trump’s economic bonfire is true across the board: Someone has to stop him.

As a result, we shouldn’t expect the Trump to willingly change his tack. This administration is currently is an out-of-control container ship headed right for the bridge pier. While some staffers may have more complex agendas and focus strategically on one area (like trade with China, or gutting federal programs), Trump eventually humiliates most of his associates. And in the end, Trump’s id usually determines policy.

Still, we have a lot of levers to use to redirect that ship headed toward the bridge. Seeing the damage that’s already being unleashed, some Republican senators are willing to co-sponsor legislation on tariffs, but we’ll need two thirds to block a possible presidential veto. Representatives in the House are even more vulnerable than senators, with less prospects of a cushy post-government perch, and more immediate fury directed at them which could remove them from government altogether in 2026.

The lower courts are still, as noted before, largely holding the line against lawlessness from the Trump administration. A unanimous decision from the Fourth Circuit appellate court on Monday refused to stay a decision demanding the government return Abrego Garcia, who was here lawfully and sent to prison in El Salvador by mistake.

Yet the current makeup of the Supreme Court is likely to deliver more losses than wins when it comes to protecting individuals and civil liberties. On Tuesday, the Court blocked an earlier order requiring Trump administration to return thousands of federal employees to work. On Monday, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, the Supreme Court also authorized the administration to send people to gulags in third countries under the auspices of the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law intended for use in armed conflict.

We now have fewer options on this front. Lawyers will have to try to use the procedural guarantees the Supreme Court is claiming it will enforce for those the administration wants to deport as a wedge, to try to show how arbitrarily and unconstitutionally the administration is carrying out these renditions.

We have more options when it comes to Congress, where we’re likely to get further sooner by pressing the House and Senate to reclaim their Constitutionally-assigned role of imposing tariffs. But we must also pressure Congress to stand up for the civil rights and human rights of non-citizens, though historically both Democrats and Republicans haven’t wanted to risk the political exposure that comes from doing so.

But these rights are ones we have to demand across the board for everyone. We’ve already seen the government commit grave harm against people in the U.S. legally, people who were taken by mistake, people who had no criminal records.

The Department of Homeland Security hopes to get $45 billion to expand detention in the U.S. Any part of that it actually receives will likewise surely be used to hold at least some people the government targets illegally or by mistake or whom it aggressively but unconstitutionally detains. And with the White House “floating” sending U.S. citizens to these same overseas gulag, it’s in our own self-interest to protect everyone from extrajudicial actions.

We’re living in the ashes of a Covid death cult building the machinery of an even greater one. But as the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit noted on Monday, “Contrary to the government's position, 'upholding constitutional rights surely serves the public interest.”

It’s important to remember that those additional billions for detention haven’t even been allocated yet, let alone spent. We can do a lot to prevent all these machinations of death. Call your representatives about tariffs and about immigrant rights. Tell Congress to stop tariffs and these massive expansions of facilities to lock up undocumented U.S. residents.

Go to demonstrations, so that we the people can build power and pressure to carry out the public will. Donate to organizations that provide for or protect the rights of the most powerless among us, because they’re standing on the front lines for all of us right now. We have to continue to nonviolently push in every direction, through one small action at a time, to stop Trump, because he will not—he cannot—stop himself.

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