On the Violent Disruption of Community
How Trump and Elon Musk are trying to keep us from each other.
As part of their project to wholly remake our society in their own violent, corrupt, and somehow also utterly pathetic image, Trump and Musk have been systematically shredding our sense of community.
Even before Trump was reelected, we could feel the frayed edges of our social fabric coming apart. Divisions were sharp and ever growing - between people who pay attention to politics, and people who don’t; between people on the right and the left; between family members who fell into the conspiracy ridden trap of Fox News and Facebook and the family members who couldn’t pull them away. The highly individualized and often creepily accurate algorithms of social media designed to keep us on our phones staring at advertisements also make it seem like whatever we’re seeing is the whole world, that everyone agrees with us, that our worldview is the dominant one, and that too keeps on our phones and away from other people where we can stress test those assumptions.
But Trump and Elon Musk are absolutely making it worse. For one, people are exhausted and angry all the time. We are all stressed, and a system that was arguably a bit broken, but still a) load bearing and b) helping some people quite a bit, is now crumbling beneath our eyes - not just not helping, but actively making life worse for many more people than the previous version. And because the news is scary and overwhelming, and global conflict, costs of living, and extreme weather are all rising higher and faster than previously imaginable, we’re all turning away from each other, focusing on ourselves, retreating into a cocoon of rugged individualism. And before you suggest that this might just be my highly individualized algorithmic social media, I’ll just add that I actually got a presentation about this at work last week.
Additionally, the power and might of the federal government is currently concentrated on excluding people from our communities. From prohibiting trans girls from playing sports, to disrupting access to gender affirming care, to attempting to remove trans people from the military and allowing discrimination against trans people in jobs and housing, the goal is to remove trans people from public life - from our schools and grocery stores and neighborhoods and rec centers and governments. Now, there have always been trans people, and there will always be trans people. The government can’t actually stop that. But what they can do is make it incredibly difficult for trans people to live full, affirming, fulfilling lives, and they can make it incredibly difficult for people everywhere of all gender identities to get to experience the full diversity of human life, to learn from people who have different ways of seeing not just gender and sexuality, but the whole wide and often wonderful world.
This too has been their project for decades when it comes to women - in fact has been their project where it concerns women since women first started leaving the home to do stuff besides cook and clean and raise children. That is the impact of things like abortion bans, and making contraception harder to get. But it’s also the impact of things like normalizing rape culture by electing a man to be president who has several accusations of sexual assault against him, or putting one on the Supreme Court. The normalization of patriarchal violence against women is a mechanism of control, a way to tell women they don’t belong in the halls of power, and they don’t get to make decisions about their lives and bodies.
But one of the scariest places we see this currently is the Trump administration’s violent regime of extrajudicial deportations, and the use of deportations as a punishment for speech in direct violation of the first amendment. After the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student with a green card, for his participation in protests last year, “International students have largely retreated from public life, fearing they may be next. Before this week’s spring break, visa and green-card holders hunkered down in dorms or fled the Upper West Side altogether,” reported the Intelligencer. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, rather the government has made clear that his arrest is due solely to exercising his first amendment right to protest. But it’s not just protesters at Columbia. All over the country the government is picking up people who they think look like Venezuelan gang members and, without a trial or hearing, shipping them off to an El Salvadoran mega-prison known for torture and other human rights abuses. So far in their sweeps, it looks like they’ve caught a professional soccer player, a barber, a teenager, a tattoo artist and probably many others who could have proved that they are not gang members, and are still somehow stuck in a foreign prison with almost no hope of release.
Personally, I don’t think we should be shipping anyone off to any mega-prisons known for their human rights abuses, but I definitely don’t think we should be deporting people who have never been accused let alone convicted of a crime. And of course the impact of this is that people are afraid to travel, afraid to leave their homes, afraid to go to work or the store, for fear that they’ll never make it home.
And if this wasn’t enough, the wholesale destruction of public programs here in the U.S. and abroad is only making this worse. From cutting funding for cancer and Alzheimer’s research to dismantling programs that address tuberculosis and that feed children, to cutting library funding and closing down the Department of Education, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are systematically cutting our ties to each other, our sense of a national and global community that pools resources to support each other, that chases big dreams and solves big problems together.
In their version of the world, the only interest in curing diseases is how much money can be made from those cures. We never learn new things about each other or ourselves. We never get to experiment with new ways of being in the world. We don’t feed people who are hungry and we don’t give shelter to people who are unhoused. There is no such thing as the public good - there is only extraction and exploitation. There are only winners, and losers, and guess which ones we’re going to be?
The United States has never really been a full fledged democracy. Discrimination and exclusion were written into our founding. In some literal ways, like slavery, the 3/5s compromise, and the Electoral College, and also with the genocide of indigenous people and our own colonialism. But with every passing decade we’ve gotten closer - the doors have opened wider as we keep pulling ourselves and each other up. And it has in fact made us stronger - it means there are more ideas in circulation, that we are hearing all the best options instead of just a few of them. It means that we are all healthier and safer, because we all have recourse against disease and recourse against violence. It means we all have the opportunity to try new things, to find ways of being that work better for us, to be loved and supported and encouraged by more and more people.
Of course, democracies can also suck. That’s how we ended up here. More people voted for Trump’s blatant authoritarianism, racism, misogyny, and willingness to defer to dictators and billionaires stripping our society for parts in pursuit of their own enrichment. In spite of this unfortunately democratic result, however, Trump and Elon Musk would love nothing more than to get rid of democracy entirely - the rules will be what Trump and Musk say they are, and they will only apply to those that Trump and Musk say they will. Today that’s queer people and immigrants and protesters. Tomorrow it might be someone who read a book they don’t like or bought a Kia electric car instead of a Tesla or made fun of Trump’s spray tan on instagram.
The people cheering this on don’t think that they will ever fall into that group - they don’t believe that Trump and Elon Musk’s laws will ever apply to them. They assume that something keeps them safe - their loyalty, their identity, their ideology. But, under fascism, nothing and no one keeps you safe. At any moment the whims of power might turn on you, and you will have no recourse because you cheered when that recourse was stripped away from someone you didn’t like.
Our democracy has never protected everybody, and so it makes sense that some people might want to blow it up. And as our social fabric has frayed, it might even make sense to some that if democracy doesn’t work, then some kind of enforced hierarchy where you can see both the people that hierarchy places beneath you and a mechanism by which you might force your way higher might make more sense. But that’s not the answer - the answer is more democracy. It was choices that got us here - the choice of who to vote for, or whether or not to vote, the choices made by presidents and CEOs and billionaires and TikTok influencers and people who tweet and journalists and New York Times readers. The bad news is that we chose this. The good news is, that if we protect and expand our rights and ability to make choices, we can choose something else.
I could leave it there. In fact, I usually do. But here’s the thing - I have no idea what to do next. I spent most of the past week in a state of rolling despair. We’re in a really dangerous moment - every time Trump circumvents the courts, denies their rulings, ignores Congress and the rule of law, the democratic order disintegrates further. The next few years are really dangerous, and even the best version of what comes next is just as fraught and difficult. And without some kind of mass mobilization, without each and every one of us choosing to do something difficult every day - to have hard conversations, to give up time and money and mental space to this work, I don’t know how we get to what’s next, let alone the best version. And I only say this because it’s one thing to talk about the fact that we can choose something else, and another to figure out how we get enough people to make that choice. I don’t know what to do and none of us alone can figure it out. But I hope we’re all thinking about what we’re willing to do, and I hope we’re all getting ready to do it.
What You Can Do With Your Outrage This Week
Donate or volunteer in the Wisconsin election. Elon Musk is trying to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In 2023 we were able to flip the balance of the court, ensuring that our swing-iest swing state was unable to undo the extreme gerrymandering that made this 50/50 states one of the most conservative in the country. Let’s make Elon Musk sad about wasting all that money, yes?
Check out the Hands Off 2025 protests that are lining up around the country on April 5 and see if there’s one near you.
Check out this article from Vox on three ways you can help people who have been impacted by the gutting of USAID.
Thank you Sara