No doubt.
Meanwhile, Trump’s co-president believes he is a god. He’s impregnating as many women as possible (through IVF so he doesn’t have to engage in the dirty work apparently) in order to spread his seed to create some sort of master race. That’s not hyperbolic. He really is that nuts.
He has no idea what he’s doing with the US Government and neither does Trump, obviously. (He has never understood how government works.) They are simply taking a wrecking ball to all these government agencies and if somebody dies or people’s lives are ruined by doing that they say they’ll take a look at how they might fix the problem. That’s what he did with his companies and that’s what he thinks will work now.
If you don’t care about people at all then this actually makes sense. They are just guinea pigs in your experiment and if they die you learn from what you did wrong. All the years of trial and error, research and implementation are tossed out the window so that a group of teenage coders can “fix” the problems that didn’t exist in the first place.
Krugman has some thoughts on all this today:
Last month SpaceX carried out a test launch of its in-development Starship rocket. Liftoff was achieved, but as the company later announced, “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn.” In other words, it exploded.
It would be wrong to think of this explosion as a disaster; new products often experience failures during testing. That is, after all, why we test them. Still, the euphemistic language reeks of unwillingness to take responsibility and admit that things didn’t go as planned. But then again, what would you expect from a company owned by Elon Musk?
And here’s the thing: If a rocket blows up, you can build a new rocket and try again. “Move fast and break things” is sometimes an OK approach if the things in question are just hardware, which can be replaced. But what if the object that experiences “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is something whose continued functioning is crucial to people’s lives — say, something like the U.S. government?
This isn’t a hypothetical question: Musk, with backing from Donald Trump, is blowing up significant parts of the U.S. government as you read this. And we can already see the shape of multiple potential disasters.
He runs down a long list of the atrocities which I’m sure most of you have read about. It’s comprehensive and dangerous. The damage to scientific research alone is overwhelming.
And they have no idea what they are doing.
So what is this about? Think of it as austerity theater: suddenly getting rid of thousands of federal workers looks strong and decisive to people who don’t understand what it will do. Remember, just a few weeks ago workers all across the federal government received a mass email urging them to take a buyout offer and “move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” The new wave of layoffs probably reflects the fact that not many workers took the offer, realizing, correctly, that it was almost surely a scam.
Well, it seems all too likely that Americans are about to learn the real costs of austerity theater. Many of the suddenly laid off workers were providing essential services. Nor should we underestimate the demoralization the vindictive layoffs have created even among those workers who still have their jobs (so far.)
So when we experience our next wave of devastating forest fires, when significant numbers of Americans begin dying from preventable diseases and faulty medical devices, remember: These disasters will be partly the fault of arrogant, ignorant men who decided to smash up a reasonably functional government.
I suspect that’s true although I’m not entirely convinced. It’s possible that all the suffering will end up being popular with enough people that there won’t be the backlash we might expect. There is a sickness running through our culture, a joy in hurting others, and I’m not sure we have the antibodies to fight it anymore.
But assuming we do, the backlash should be as severe as possible. One of the reasons we are where we are is because people who know better have clung to the norms and rules the other side threw into the garbage heap. They are completely useless if only one side believes in them.