For Those About To Doom

There’s a firehose of shit being sprayed in your face every waking minute of every day. I get it, and I’m not here to tell you the shit actually smells fine, or that there is no firehose at all. You're going to be gaslighted enough over the next few years.

I spent ninety minutes in bed last night tossing and turning, trying to stop thinking about the anti-American insurrectionist who might become our next secretary of defense. Sometimes, when I’m struggling to get back to sleep, I’ll go to the bathroom as a kind of reset. That didn’t work. Sometimes I’ll turn my pillows over – again, as a signal to my body that I’m resetting and ready for sleep. That didn’t work. My anxiety was overwhelming all the little tricks I play on myself when sleep becomes a task. 

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I lay there and concocted scenario after scenario in which Pete Hegseth – a Fox News host who has written plainly about ending diversity within the military ranks – uses the might of the American military against anyone and everyone who opposes Donald Trump’s unraveling of the constitutional order. 

Terrible scenes of mass violence flashed through my head in the wee hours of the morning as I projected myself and the country into a deeply uncertain future. I eventually drifted off and woke up a couple hours later, groggy and irritable and once again thinking of Pete Hegseth, an enjoyer of right-wing coffee. Such is life in an era of ascendant fascism.

Like you, I feel the effects of the fascist firehose. I am hardly immune to the series of announcements and analyses and social media takes – both wild eyed and sober – that flood our consciousness in the days and weeks after an anti-democracy candidate takes control of the republic. 

This is not to dismiss the anxiety swirling within your head in these final days before the United States government is turned against its people. I understand and very much feel that anxiety (I try to remember the somewhat revolutionary truth that we don’t have to feel anxiety if we don’t want to, which I know can sound dismissive to lifelong anxiety havers like myself). What we can’t do in the weeks before the administration takes hold is take a fetal position and embrace the hopelessness and fear they want us to feel. We cannot and should not engage in doomerism.

It’s a tried and true strategy of every far-right regime in history: Storm into power, make a never-ending series of announcements designed to invoke panic and despair among your enemies, and watch as critics unplug and, eventually, retreat. Trump – who, weirdly and without explanation, had been missing in action since winning the election before Wednesday's White House visit – and his handlers have firehosed us all at once with outrageous selections for his Cabinet and other government positions, and they have done this on purpose. The counter-revolution is here, they want us to believe, and there’s no use in fighting it. The war is over. You have lost and there’s nothing that can be done. 

This is, of course, not true. It wasn’t true the first time around and it’s not true today. Unless the new administration plans to dissolve Congress or use military violence (or the threat of violence) to implement its changes to the federal government, there’s a lot of ballgame left before the Deathstar can be built. 

Please remember as the shit firehouse sprays everywhere all the time that presidents and administrations only have so much political capital to spend, unless, of course, they are prepared to go all the way and end the other branches of government along with free elections. I found this piece helpful in grasping what can and cannot be done in the next two years, before Republicans once again face unspeakable headwinds in the midterms. These people can and will do a lot of damage, no doubt, but we do not exist in a movie. This is the real world, and manipulating the leviathan that is the federal government is not easy and can't be done quickly.

The Hegseth nomination is going to bring major political heat

Unless the U.S. Senate complies with Trump’s demands to make recess appointments, his band of freaks and fascists are going to need congressional approval. That includes Hegseth, who was deemed too extreme to serve in Joe Biden’s inauguration and may or may not have white supremacist tattoos. The opposition research has surely started in earnest in preparation for Senate hearings in which Hegseth will face an onslaught of questions about the shockingly racist and sexist shit he wrote about a couple years ago. This man is a True Believer, and before long, the country will know just what it is he believes. None of it will be palatable to anyone outside X, the Everything App formerly known as Twitter. 

Maybe Senate Republicans ignore the political heat and get Hegseth through the chamber by a vote or two. Hegseth, a talk show host, then has to cow the entire United States military if he’s going to do the worst shit imaginable (the stuff that kept me up last night). I’m not sure that’s likely. There’s also the little matter of Trump claiming he will purge the military brass of anyone insufficiently loyal to Dear Leader. A short history of coups will tell you that military purges are a quick path to an overthrown government (this is not a desired outcome, but it has been reality in many authoritarian regimes). Good luck to Big Boy.  

President Elon’s new side quest 

Like a child at recess, Elon Musk is pretending he’s the president of the United States. I guess pouring a half billion dollars into getting the president elected will land you on a few prominent presidential phone calls with world leaders, including Musk’s close friend Vladimir Putin. It’s nice of Trump to let Musk cosplay as president-elect before their inevitable fallout in which Trump calls Elon a fat nerd or something equally stinging. 

Musk, along with equally pathetic Trump loyalist Vivek Ramaswamy, will head something called the Department of Government Efficiency. Except that it won't be a department and it won't have any real power of which to speak beyond Musk's ability to threaten the federal agencies that have failed to keep him in check.

The richest man on earth deciding who can and cannot have government benefits is straight out of the the worst, most ludicrous dystopian novel you've ever read. This is, at best, a nightmarish development that will be studied by democracy historians in the distant future, where everything is fine and Elon Musk's head is on a robot strolling around a suburb on Mars.

It's clear what's happening here. Trump needed to reward Musk for operating a propaganda arm of the Trump campaign and shoveling resources into the operation throughout the summer and fall. Giving Musk a cute little job will also keep him out of Trump's hair. It's like when I ask my kids to make a pile of leaves for no particular reason so I can read a few more pages of my book.

This efficiency "department" – dubbed DOGE, because everything is a game for Musk the nihilist – will do nothing of note, if it even happens at all (like I said, Trump is probably loading up on body-related insults to hurl at Musk the second he grows tired of him). Then there's the political blowback. Musk and Ramaswamy announcing recommendations to raise the Social Security age to 105 or eliminating Medicaid for Americans who voted for Kamala Harris is going to be extraordinarily unpopular. Political gravity still exists, even if it doesn't feel like it when Trump is in office. Having Musk – who everyone hates – make the call on who should and should not benefit from American largesse is a disastrous political decision.

The Department of Education isn't going anywhere

Trump, like almost every Republican president over the past four and a half decades, wants to kill the Education Department. He released a video this week saying the department was all but dead on arrival. The big, beautiful department buildings would be cleared out within hours of his inauguration. This announcement was made in a lab to maximize your feelings of doom and helplessness. It got me. I was left reeling, wondering what would happen to my wife's job in the local public school system – along with my kids' education, small matters like that.

Sadly for the Big Boy, eliminating the Education Department would require congressional approval. That's not going to happen; members of Congress like keeping their jobs. Trump will damage the department as much as possible, naturally, but he can't unilaterally end it. This is not common knowledge. It needs to be.

I'll be terribly wrong about this if the Trump people plan on ending the department by force. I suppose this is not outside the range of outcomes for an administration that is so openly hostile to democratic norms.

Kremlin-friendly Tulsi Gabbard gets in the mix

Gabbard, who, like everyone in the Trump orbit, is incredibly friendly with the Russian government, could be named the director of national intelligence. It would be a big win for the Kremlin, which again, controls much of the Republican apparatus and has worked with Gabbard for years to chip away at the edges of Democratic support. I can only hope fascism pays well for Gabbard.

I don't know what to say about this one because the director of national intelligence serves as the pleasure of the president. I would guess, however, that open coordination with a hostile foreign government will create some politically unfriendly conflict for Gabbard and the administration.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social