Chaos fascism
The good citizens of Gotham City elected the Joker as mayor. He appointed his friends to high positions in government. Batman is MIA. Things have gone about as you’d expect.
You’ve noticed? So has Michael Tomasky. Some headlines:
Trump Takes Government Secrecy Seriously. But Only When It Suits Him.
10,000 Federal Health Workers to Be Laid Off
Federal officials are preparing for agencies to cut between 8 and 50 percent of their employees
Trump-as-Joker would fire the police too, but why bother with AG Pam Bondi (as Harley Quinn) deciding which Trump enemies to prosecute and which Trump crimes to ignore? (All of them.) Besides, he needs police as enforcers. There’s little chance that Senator John Thune and Representative Mike Johnson will launch CapitolHill investigations into anything Trump.
“That’s a lot of mayhem, and it barely scratches the surface,” Tomasky explains:
Across human history, fascism has been imposed upon democracy mostly in one of two ways. First, by brute force—a military coup, that sort of thing. Second, a bit more stealthily, and legally—through legislation, executive decrees, and court decisions that hand more power to the leader.
Donald Trump is inventing a new way. Call it chaos fascism. Destroy the institutions of democracy until they’re so disfigured or dysfunctional that a majority no longer cares about them.
But they’ll care about this. Musk-Trump is degrading the Social Security system while propagandizing against it “with absurd and false claims about 140-year-olds cashing checks.” DOGE claims after being embarrassed by that that it can replace SSA’s archaic-but-functional COBOL software that DOGE coders don’t understand with Java in a matter of months. Experts say years. DOGE says trust A.I.
Then wreck the agency so that its service becomes crap. Let public anger at it build. And in time, they can just dismantle it and privatize the greatest social insurance system ever devised by this government and put people’s financial fate in the hands of rich cronies. If that’s not chaos fascism, I don’t know what is.
Then there is DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, shooter of dogs, sans jackboots, sans black uniform, looking into the camera and warning the world that if you come to the U.S. and transgress the unwritten law, well, its a Salvadoran hellhole for you.
For now it is left to the courts to attempt to put the brakes on Joker’s plans for mayhem. He’s already defying them, but hasn’t yet seen his SCOTUS buddies rule on his most blatant actions. For now, the country is whistling past the constituional crisis. Defying SCOTUS could backfire, Politico suggests, but may get something Republicans can regret at their leisure:
Trump is likely to get some of what he wants from the Supreme Court when all is said and done — maybe even a lot of it. But it is always useful to remember that when a president manages to devise new and more powerful tools for himself — whether legal or political in nature — he leaves them for his successors too. And there is no telling what will happen and how those tools will be used over the long haul.
That assumes there is a long haul.
With Batman MIA and the courts with no army, stopping the Joker’s chaos fascism may take Americans in the streets by the millions. Saturday, April 5 is your big chance!
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Have you fought the coup today?
National Day of Action, Saturday, April 5
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