Trump SMASH!
The cruel logic of Trump's Great Terror: we asked for it and we're getting it
Trump smash!
Trump smash on a level Reagan smash could only dream of.
Trump smash at a rate to make Steve Bannon smile with glee.
Trump smash to a degree that is nationally self-crippling.
Trump smash leaves America open for dangerous moves by others.
Trump smash displays the cruel logic of counter-revolutionaries like Stalin.
Trump smash allows the Tech Bros to run wild (Go Elon, Go!)
Trump smash is the inevitable inflection point for our evenly divided and highly polarized electorate.
Trump smash may lead to all manner of necessary breakthroughs.
Trump smash will lead to untold damage and suffering.
Trump smash is both thrilling and unforgivable.
Trump smash!
Trump smash!
Trump smash!
We have been an evenly and highly divided electorate for roughly two decades now, coming out of the weird in-this-together moment created by 9/11 (when government and the so-called Deep State were the heroes!).
It is an unprecedented situation in US history.
In the Before Time, when the Gilded Age (1870s-1880s) yielded to the Progressive Era (1890s-2030s), we suffered a deeply divided electorate, but, when either side won, they won big and ruled big and therein lay our true progress of developing and applying new models and new rules to radically changed realities (the Steve DeAngelis theory). There was this sense of urgency: fix things before revolution breaks out!
And so we fixed things at speed, birthing America the superpower in turn and capturing the “American Century.”
For the past two decades, America has matched that period’s deep divisions but has remained incredibly even in their relative strength: neither side can cobble together much of anything above 49% buy-in. So, we have suffered “transformational” Boomer leaders (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden) who transformed little, when you think about it. We’re still very much politically organized along agrarian grounds (reflecting our first century of history, to include slavery) and very much economically (and educationally) organized along industrial grounds (reflecting our second century of history).
In short, very little of what constitutes America today is optimized for the world we increasingly find ourselves navigating — thus, all those instinctive on-the-wrong-track poll numbers.
And thus the return of Trump: just enough fed-up-ed-ness within the system to again roll the dice on him.
Very much a What have we got to lose? mindset.
And, yeah, that should always scare you.
You know my take on the social side of Trump’s base — the White Christian nationalism driven by the looming specter of both groups losing their inherent privileges while lapsing into majority-minority status in a nation that has long defined itself along such lines but really cannot anymore — hence, the Ghost Dance-like quality of their doomed quest.
But the tech-economy side of his base — the so-called Tech Bros … they speak directly and with crazy confidence to that gap between
How we as a nation are organized and operate, and
That altered, rapidly digitalizing global competitive landscape that we find ourselves in now and moving forward.
If all Trump had was the MAGA base, he wouldn’t have won re-election.
The urgency of MAGA proper has been there for a long time, whereas the urgency of the Tech Bros is peaking right now: that sense that we need a revolutionary makeover to ensure this century is also America’s and not defaulted to China.
I am totally in favor of that logic, and always have been.
Better us than them.
The Tech Bros long thought the Dems were their deliverers but soured profoundly on Biden (too old to understand their vision), and so they signed up with Trump, seeing in his MAGA impulses the opportunity to move fast and break things amidst his vicious deconstruction of the Administrative State.
Now, the true MAGA wing wants that state destroyed largely for retrograde reasons (a back-to-the-future outcome along social, religious, and moral lines). The Tech Bros couldn’t care less about that and put up with its force and resulting damage merely because they spot unique and much-needed opportunities for the revolutionary makeover they seek.
As bedfellows go, then, this pair is totally strange and thus doomed to estrangement.
MAGA seeks a great leap backward while the Tech Bros seek a great leap forward, and, in this former Sovietologist’s eyes, this looks and feels very Stalin-like and very late 1930s like — or Trump’s version of the Great Terror.
In Stalin’s Great Terror, he simultaneously sought to regress social mores (he was an uber-Victorian in many ways and was determined to clamp down completely on the experimentalism of Soviet Russia in the 1920s) while radically advancing technology and industry (to catch up with the capitalist West). In this weird combination, a great deal of damage was done because Stalin needed to clear out the intelligentsia (such as it was) almost completely in a giant purge.
Kill all the experts!
Sound familiar? We’re watching it unfold in DC right now.
That great purge wiped out the vast majority of those people capable of running things, leading to untold disasters as the new Stalinist system was brutally enforced, but Stalin pursued this path because he was convinced it was his only way to stay in power: by making himself the center of all change and tumult and destruction and creation.
Thus, even after Hitler unleashed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and initially succeeded to a frightening degree, there was zero movement within the political system to depose Stalin: he was viewed by all (devotees and critics) as too central to be replaced in that great hour of national need.
Trump 2.0 displays much of the same logic: better to destroy as much of the government — and, frankly far too much of the military and intelligence community and federal law enforcement community — as possible in the near term so that the system and the people have no choice but to accept its radical replacement, almost out of sheer survival instinct (What choice do we have now?).
Why was this inevitable, in my opinion?
That deeply-but-evenly-divided electorate wasn’t changing, resulting in change election after change election (stretching back to 2006) with no real change ensuing even as the general angst and anger of the electorate ballooned over time.
As much as the Left wants to blame Trump’s win on his duplicity (like denying Project 2025 right up to the vote and then immediately implementing it upon inauguration), the scarier truth is that the majority of Americans are open to letting this Trump smash! dynamic unfold.
Don’t believe me?
The weakness of the “resistance” to date says otherwise, along with the quiet acquiescence of that mostly quiet majority. One needs to tap into a profound nihilism to gain such a writ or mandate when none exists, and Trump is doing that — the disaster movie that thrills even as we suspect that the plot is glossing over the pain unleashed and soft-peddling the scary, post-disaster reality we’ll all be left dealing with.
You know, such a disaster that even a Morgan Freeman president character can’t wisp it all away with some great lines and swelling soundtrack.
For now, much of America remains in suspended disbelief — and willingly so.
It was the same general vibe for most Russians during Stalin’s Great Terror.
When the Soviet Union finally recovered from all that tumult and sought to “thaw” the Stalinist system upon the great dictator’s death in 1953, it jettisoned a great deal of the social and ideological conservatism (no religion to be had, mind you) and instead recast the whole ordeal as worthwhile because it birthed this industrial behemoth then capable of “racing” with capitalist giant America along all manner of technologies (most famously, space).
So, when the Soviets looked back on Stalin, they ended with the same judgement that China developed of Mao once he departed the scene: he was 70% good and 30% bad — thus, all that pain was justified for the greatness achieved.
I think we’re heading down similar paths with Trump 2.0: the willingness to forgive — in the near term — all manner of destruction and oppression (but only of those people!) so that — over the long term — the great new constructs can be forged that radically upgrade our national capacity for the competitive global landscape now at hand.
Again, classic MAGA drives the former while the Tech Bros promise the latter.
And, you know, the Tech Bros are correct, by and large, which is a big part of why this is unfolding.
America does need to radically replace all manner of old constructs that no longer work, are technologically behind, and represent the mindless layering upon layering of old systems that result in a sediment build-up or deep inertia across much of our economy and polity (derided as the “deep state”) that cannot be fixed incrementally (the Biden approach).
Trump is talking this language of ripping up the roots of the old and out-of-date systems and starting over with “new and beautiful” replacements. We’re hearing this time and again as the destruction and deconstruction continues across the USG (also in Gaza).
Our air traffic control system is a good example: patched together over the decades, like so much of the USG’s IT systems, it is an ungodly mess greatly in need of upgrading. One can throw money at that existing problem set, like Biden did in the Inflation Reduction Act, but a lot will get wasted without fundamental reform. We cannot, in many instances, continue to improve old systems when new ones are demanded.
That is what Trump is promising and that is what Musk is delivering.
Is much of it entirely unconstitutional in its immediate execution?
Definitely.
But so long as Trump claims his mandate and the Resistance waits on the courts to push back, the Trump smash! show rolls on, breaking the cycle of incrementalism that has plagued our political system for two decades now — despite the widespread belief across the electorate that major change is needed (if only the other guys would get out of the way!).
Trump 2.0 is a Frankenstein alright, cobbling together two very different agendas (MAGA v DOGE) that seem similar on the surface but are most definitely divergent in the worlds and the Americas they seek to establish.
For now, that’s the great safety valve in our system — that internal contradiction.
Part of me says we collectively need to let Trump smash! go as long as it needs to go, and another part of me says stop the madness now!
As always, we Americans don’t do balance; we do hardcore swings of the pendulum in which all past “villainy” consecrates the “retribution” now being delivered (so explicitly by Trump himself).
Stalin’s rationale was cruel and comprehensive: You Russia made me do this! You world made me do this! You history made me do this!
Trump is similarly self-armed today, which is why the ideas being tossed out seem exponentially more radical by the day.
Burn baby burn!
It’s so Boomer, right? One last crazy, self-destructive “revolution” by that generation?
It was inevitable.
Enjoy the show.
There will be many commercial breaks and cliff-hangers galore.
What you say can most definitely unfold.
Your framing makes more sense than most. Your cold-hearted analytical "comfort" level with what is going on just exceeds my normie psyche such that the whole situation makes me want to puke.