The Moral Hollowing Out of the United States

As I write this, the US government is in the early stages of another shutdown, this one triggered by the Republicans’ refusal to budge on funding healthcare subsidies^[4] that keep insurance within reach for tens of millions of low-income Americans.

Trump’s response has been confrontational—to say the least. Over the past week, in addition to posting racist memes^[5] about House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, the president has gloated at the chance a shutdown gives him to fire huge numbers of federal workers—this is on top of the 300,000 who have already departed federal government service since January. These won’t be temporary layoffs or furloughs, Trump told NBC News, but “on a permanent basis^[6].”

This isn’t a good-faith political negotiation; this is a hostage situation. Do exactly what Trump wants, the Democrats are being told, or hundreds of thousands of workers and their families will lose their careers, livelihoods, and means of putting food on the table.

For Trump, these families are collateral damage in his power games. But for the people who took an oath to serve the American people, it is a potential catastrophe. Despite what Trump and Musk claim about bloated bureaucracies and overpaid workers, the vast majority of federal employees aren’t wealthy. The average salary^[7] for a federal worker is $97,000, and most starting salaries pay far less. While researching my upcoming book on fired federal workers, I interviewed an IRS worker whose job it was to talk with taxpayers on the phone eight hours per day, a young USGS researcher, and a NOAA contracts specialist. Their salaries were closer to $50,000 than $97,000.

In other words, the sort of people whom Trump is sacrificing for power are precariously perched at the base of the American middle class. Like most Americans, they live paycheck to paycheck. Their savings, if they have any, are meager. Their ability to cover bills if they miss a pay cycle or two is dubious at best. If they are fired because Trump is using the shutdown to further eviscerate government, they will enter a souring labor market saturated with former federal employees and contractors all competing for the same jobs. Many of the people I talked with who lost their jobs in the first round of DOGE purges applied for hundreds of positions without success. Theirs is a story of downward mobility and growing insecurity brought to them courtesy of the US government.

But it isn’t only federal workers who will suffer. Every person in the United States who relies on government services—so pretty much every person in the country—will feel the consequences. Government agencies, already hamstrung by the DOGE cuts and by the assaults on science, diversity, and any effort to inject social-justice priorities into government, will be increasingly unable to deliver basic goods, whether it be FEMA responses to disasters or TSA checkpoints at airports that don’t come with hours-long delays.

And how did Trump spend the day in the lead-up to the government shutdown?

He and his Cro-Magnon buddy Pete Hegseth convened an unprecedented meeting of the military’s top brass from all over the world—an event that, at a conservative estimate, will cost US taxpayers many millions of dollars. Trump watched Hegseth spend the morning berating the generals and admirals^[8] about “woke” ideology in the military, “fat” soldiers, the need for troops to recommit to a “warrior ethos,” the urgency of freeing the military from rules of engagement that prevent it from committing war crimes, and the requirement for enlistees to meet the “highest level of male fitness.” He even found time to defend hazing rituals for recruits.

All of this bilious macho twaddle could have been said equally well—or, rather, equally offensively—in an e-mail or via a secure video conference. The only conceivable purpose of flying hundreds of top military commanders and their staff out to Virginia was so that the reality-TV defense secretary could strut his stuff on the small screen. Perhaps, with the money saved from not hosting this inane gathering, they could have paid some of the enlisted men and women who won’t be receiving their paychecks during the government shutdown.

Never one to cede the spotlight, Trump chose to speak^[9] at the summit too, and he again showed his disdain for the Constitution and the Posse Comitatus Act, this time by suggesting that he might use the country’s “dangerous cities” as a training ground for military recruits. (This would be so illegal that even this Supreme Court might have second thoughts about greenlighting it.) He urged troops in those cities to “hit” protesters, telling them they could do whatever they wanted against people who spat at them or damaged their vehicles. He threatened military leaders who disagreed with him, saying that if they refused to obey him and quit, “there goes your rank, there goes your future, but you just feel nice and loose, OK?” He teased the idea of building a fleet of cutting-edge, early-20th-century-type battleships. And he explained to the audience of four-star generals—including the African American brass whom Hegseth hasn’t yet gotten around to firing—that there were two “N-words” that he wasn’t allowed to bandy about; the first, he said, was “nuclear,” as if, somehow, the world’s largest nuclear superpower, and the only country to have ever dropped an atomic bomb in war, had misguidedly adopted a Japanese-styled pacifist foreign policy. The second… well, he left that word to his audience’s imagination.

Yes, Trump couldn’t hide his disappointment at not being allowed to use an offensive racial epithet in his public pronouncements. Nor, as his ridiculous, obviously senescent, “speech” dragged on, could he hide his disappointment at the fact that his applause lines were greeted mainly by an unrelenting, stony silence. The generals and admirals, it turned out, weren’t buying what he was selling; they didn’t think it was funny that the commander in chief was making jokes about the “N-word.”

No worries, though. It turns out there are plenty of other ways to inject racial animus into American life. In their quest to Make America White Again, Trump and his minions have made it clear that the deportation machine will continue humming along regardless of any government shutdown. In fact, while Trump was haranguing the generals and federal agencies were preparing to shutter national parks and cut off funds to food banks and health centers, ICE was busy deporting^[10] more than 100 people who had fled the Iranian regime back to Iran. It was, The New York Times dryly noted, a rare moment of détente between Trump and the mullahs. And so, in a break with previous US policy not to deliver dissidents into the hands of governments that will likely imprison, torture, or even kill them, the United States flew the unfortunate asylum seekers back to Tehran. Trump’s crowning achievement is morally hollowing out the United States. He and his defense secretary are fetishizing war crimes, and his administration is tearing down the non-security agencies of the federal government. It is a legacy of unremitting shame and degradation.

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