Fridays in Trumpland: 2.21.2025
What Makes a King, or Let Them Eat Rot
It was back in October 2024, a scant five months ago that feels like a century, that Elon Musk first explicitly announced that in the event that Trump was elected, Americans would suffer “hardship” to ensure “long-term prosperity.”
“I’ll probably need a lot of security, but it’s got to be done," he said.
And here we sit, unable to say we weren’t warned.
We’re one month in to the reign of DOGE. So far, at least 220,000 federal workers have been affected by Musk’s widespread illegal terminations, with more dropping every day.
I find myself saying on a daily basis over on YouTube that no one, and I mean no one, voted for Elon Musk. And perhaps no one in Trump’s base yet realizes the nationwide impact of what’s to come as a result of what Trump has empowered Musk to do.
This week, we saw multiple news reports of local economies cratering due to Musk’s actions. Kansas City doesn’t have enough open jobs to absorb all the federal workers who have been laid off there. The elimination of federal grants has ended financial support for non-profits and NGOs, further widening the destruction beyond the Federal government. Scientific and technological research: gone. Educational research: gone. Experimental medical treatment research: gone.
And worse still, thanks to Musk, US farmers have no way to make up the sales they were counting on for food sent to hungry people overseas, now that USAID, which routinely bought those crops, has been shuttered, and the EU is threatening to stop buying US exported food. More than $500 million in food aid lies rotting now.
Over on Reddit, economists are predicting a recession, a deep one, in the immediate future.
On top of that, Musk and the GOP are threatening cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP benefits and social security. If they get their way, our social safety nets will contain gaping, ever-widening holes, just as mass unemployment and the economy crash down upon us.
Not content to simply await the looming blood and tears of everyday Americans, Musk is celebrating all the chaos he’s wrought in real time. This sad, sad man spent last night on stage at CPAC, wielding a fake chainsaw and dressed like an aging Backstreet Boy who’s had too much plastic surgery, next to the wannabe fascist President of Argentina.
As for Trump himself, despite all of his promises as fulfilled by the actions of his kingmaker (reminder that Musk sank tens of millions into Trump’s campaign monthly in the final run up to the 2024 election) and his return to the most powerful elected office in the world, he’s still worried about his own liability. He admitted this week that he would have had “a very nasty life” had he not been reelected, making clear what we already knew: that he ran again to escape prison rather than out of a desire to actually be president again.
Plainly afraid for his future criminal liability, he took to TruthSocial on Sunday with the wildly monarchical statement that “he who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
And then, as the shining lid on so much weekly destruction, Trump sent New York Governor Kathy Hochul a message: he was eliminating the incredibly successful and lauded congestion pricing program that had cut traffic and increased air quality in New York City in the space of a few weeks.
But rather than make another announcement of yet another illegal unilateral action, Trump again took to TruthSocial on Wednesday and, in announcing what he had done, went one step further: he declared himself King, complete with an AI generated photo of himself in a crown on the cover of a fake “Trump” magazine, with the words “Long Live the King” splashed across the front.
Let us just be clear: no matter what Trump says about who he, in all his sociopathic narcissism, perceives himself to be, he is not invincible.
Indeed, history is packed with men who thought they were invincible– kings and their kingmakers, sneering down on the masses, unaware of the rotted and crumbling pillars beneath their feet– until it was too late.
I lived in France for the better part of a year, in 1991 and early 1992, in a town south of Paris in the Loire Valley. While there, I took courses at the local university, including one that went deep into the history of the French Revolution.
Two French kings haunted my thoughts this week as we watched Trump march into his own delusional monarchy.
Louis XIV, who reigned over France from 1643 to 1715, was the first king to proclaim “l’etat, c’est moi”- I am the state and the state is me, his very own 17th century version of “he who saves his country does not violate any law.” He governed through the early days of the Enlightenment, when everyday folks became emboldened by philosophers advocating for new forms of government, particularly democratic republics, and as the people grew gradually more and more enraged at the aristocracy’s excess and waste while they worked themselves to the bone and died in the dirt.
The second king I’ve been thinking about this week is the grandson of Louis XIV, Louis XVI, who became king at the ripe age of 19 in 1774, and reigned until the French Revolution. That era was characterized by obscene wealth in the aristocratic classes, lavish, decadent parties at the royal court at Versailles, and extravagant royal spending on such things as small, pretend villages on the grounds of castles for the court to cosplay as poors– all while actual peasants literally starved to death in front of those castles, begging for bread.
The desperation of the masses became so unavoidable that Louis’ infamous wife, Marie Antoinette, was rumored to have proclaimed in response: “let them eat cake.”
In 1789, the Bastille– a prison where political prisoners were held under orders of King Louis– was stormed by rebels, the prisoners freed, and Marie Antoinette nearly murdered when Versailles was invaded. It took two more years, and consistent erosion of the monarchy in the public eye, before revolutionaries arrested the King and Queen and declared a new French republic.
Neither Louis XVI nor Marie Antoinette survived much longer. Both were dead by the end of 1793 with the swift fall of a guillotine.
History teaches us thus: even those who declare themselves to be the state, even those who surround themselves with such obscene wealth that they believe themselves to be untouchable, even those who claim to wear the crown as the people they are supposed to serve starve and die before them, will meet their fate in the end.
(And here is one more lesson: the French Revolution led to the Reign of Terror, wherein 17,000 people were executed by guillotine, before Napoleon rose just a few years later to declare himself Emperor of France. Nonviolent revolutions arrive a lot faster than violent ones and generally create longer lasting, more democratic change, notwithstanding the unadulterated rage at injustice that generally precipitates them all.)
It’s been just a bare month since the inauguration as I sit here writing this. Over the past month, I have found myself wondering at least once a day how much longer this can go on.
As 220,000 federal workers are fired, agencies that serve the people are gutted, our foreign allies become our enemies and our actual enemies get all they wanted and more, I wonder how much longer this can go on.
As our most confidential data is hacked, lifetime civil servants quit rather than break the law under orders from Trump’s regime, and corrupt deals to end indictments live right out in the open, I wonder how much longer this can go on.
As food sits rotting, SNAP benefits are on the GOP chopping block, and Medicare and Medicaid are threatened so the rich can get richer, I wonder how much longer this can go on.
As Musk and Trump lose in court over and over and over again– 25 times at this writing and counting, as those who have been harmed seek to stop this train, and as protests spring up all over the nation, I wonder how much longer this can go on.
It feels in my gut like this pace can’t last, but then again, in the first term, I thought he’d be gone before his first August as President.
Here’s the answer to all my wondering: it will go on for as long as it takes for the remainder of America (or at the bare minimum, 3.5 percent of us) to decide that it can’t go on anymore.
I’ve spent the last fifteen years working in some version of leadership and political consulting (when I’m not organizing for change). A few truths are apparent after all this time:
True leaders aren’t kings.
True leaders share power, admit what they don’t know, and listen before they act.
Respect for a leader has to be earned.
Ruling through fear eventually topples those who choose that path, and sometimes the fall is as hard as it gets.
Kings and kingmakers don’t survive (professionally and sometimes in their personal lives) when they exploit, ruin, and harm vulnerable people, and especially when they do it just to make themselves richer.
And lastly: even the most terrifying tyrants eventually lose it all.
We have yet to experience the full brunt of what Trump and Musk are doing to the American people.
We have yet to see how it will feel as people lose their medical care, their livelihoods, their towns, their children’s schools and special education teachers, their safety nets, their rights, and their faith in the man who was their god.
The end of kings and kingmakers will come eventually though.
As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s King George sings so eloquently in Hamilton:
“Oceans rise, empires fall.”
And lest we forget:
we have toppled kings before.
I woke up with this thought about this very topic. He and his toadies have spent the month shredding the capacity of the government he would use as a weapon against us. It is a vast armor, but with millions of chinks, and we who resist are finding and exploiting them. HE has weakened it as a weapon in his war on us, perhaps fatally. There will be pain, we will hurt, and some of us will die, but we will end his misrule. Him and EVERYONE who aids and abets him, without exception.
I propose that we the people resolve to strip him and Musk of all of their assets, liquidate those assets, and pay those assets as reparations to the people he and Musk have directly harmed, as we build back what he sought to destroy, this time better. Without the patriarchy, racism, and misogyny.
Wow! Well said! I keep thinking of Revolutionary France, too. The parallels are so apt. I keep hearing from those around me, "When will this end?" I keep telling them the cavalry isn't coming so we have to save ourselves. " It will go on for as long as it takes for the remainder of America (or at the bare minimum, 3.5 percent of us) to decide that it can’t go on anymore." YUP. I hate that people are hurting but so many ignored our warnings and kept saying it's just his bluster. Some are finding out and some still have their heads stuck in the sand.