Opinion

Since arriving to the White House, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has been on a destructive whirlwind through the federal government. At the behest of President Trump, the South African billionaire and chief of the Department of Government Efficiency has led an effort to illegally gut numerous federal agencies, fire tens of thousands of federal workers, and perpetrate fraud while claiming to root it out.

Regarding the seemingly intentional turmoil of Musk’s actions, Trump bragged at the Conservative Political Action Conference that his administration had “effectively ended the left-wing scam known as USAID. The agency’s name has been removed from its former building, and that space will now house agents from Customs and Border Patrol.” Taken alone, these actions have the makings of an oligarchic heist or a coup that cripples the government’s capacity to provide and protect public goods.

But within a wider aperture of the administration’s priorities — ripping apart families, hoping to establish concentration camps, offering refugee status to white Afrikaners, attacking trans people, and engaging in a “war on woke” across institutions — a coherence comes into focus amid the chaos. These are men who destroy to build a racial hierarchy in service of their own wealth and profit. Or as political commentator Elie Mystal of The Nation has framed it, they are bringing a “a neo-apartheid economic agenda to the US government.”

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order setting up a task force to counter “anti-Christian bias.” Trump claims that the task force is necessary to fight discrimination against Christians. But in practice it seems designed to enforce a very narrow version of conservative Christianity. The task force will counter efforts to prosecute demonstrators who block access to abortion care and to allow for discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on campus. It will encourage the federal government to elevate right wing Christianity as a national ideology.

Imposing Christian morality on the U.S. seems out of step with the separation of church and state. But it’s not exactly out of line with American tradition. For example, at the height of the postwar Red Scare in March 1953, leftist poet and activist Langston Hughes was hauled before Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. PSI was looking to root out communist influence. But in that regard, many of the questions centered on religion — and on a poem which the subcommittee believed showed that Hughes was anti-religious and therefore pro-communist.

The poem in question was “Goodbye, Christ,” which Hughes wrote on a trip to Soviet Russia in 1932.

These first few weeks of President Donald Trump’s administration have already been grueling, with a blizzard of executive orders that run the gamut from trolling to hurtful to alarming. We all remember this feeling from the last time around — there are so many shiny objects of outrage for us to chase that after a little while it’s easy to just throw up our hands, admit defeat, and decide to wait out the maelstrom by streaming our favorite television series. So many people are hurt and scared; many are just exhausted.

During Trump’s inauguration in 2017, many responded by attending one of the hundreds of Women’s Marches around the country. Those who participated in these marches set the record for the largest single-day protest in United States history. During Trump’s inauguration this January, the protesters were sparse. It’s easy to feel isolated, alone, and hopeless. For us to get through Trump 2.0 together, we need to figure out new ways to organize.

In the halls of empire, men sit at gleaming tables untouched by war, they speak of peace as though it is theirs to grant. But they have never gathered their children into one room to sleep at night so that if death comes, it takes them together. They have never watched the sky split open with fire, felt the air convulse after the blast, felt the wind howl past — hot, violent, and thick with the dust and scent of obliteration. And yet, they sign their names to ceasefires, shake hands, and expect the world to applaud. They do not blush as they bankroll the demolition of homes, the bombing of hospitals, and the erasure of entire families .

During the first week of February, U.S. President Donald Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whois the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. This meeting took place as the fragile ceasefire agreement between the Israeli occupying forces and the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, hung in the balance. Trump, never one to concern himself with the nuances of international law (or any law, really), originally floated the idea of the U.S. “owning Gaza” on Feb. 4 and then has since doubled down on this colonial fantasy, one so crude and reckless that his own administration scrambled to downplay it.

Autocracies begin at the ballot box. Donald Trump is the legitimately elected president of the United States who, in his first weeks in office, has used illegitimate and illegal actions to solidify his power. He has brazenly declared, “He who saves his country does not violate any Law.”

But while he is the first U.S. president to display such public contempt for the structures, institutions, and civil servants he has been elected to lead, his tactics aren’t unique. 

In June 2023, Metropolitan AME successfully sued the Proud Boys, winning a $2.8 million judgment through default judgement for trespassing and vandalizing our property. But because they have yet to pay, our church creatively sought to ensure payment by stripping the hate group of its trademark, meaning they can no longer sell merchandise to fund their hate — unless our church allows it. Any profits the Proud Boys earn from using the trademark must be paid to Metropolitan to help fulfill the multi-million-dollar default judgment.

I’ve been caring for the dying since I was 22 years old. Before the rise in death doula work, I was a caregiver for my mother, who died of primary peritoneal carcinoma at 58 –years old. I sat with her during her chemotherapy appointments. I took notes at appointments with doctors. I created a rapport with her medical team so that I could be in the best position to advocate for her up until the very end.

With Trump’s blessing, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has created an unprecedented crisis at an agency that oversees lifesaving assistance to some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. Despite issuing limited humanitarian waivers, the administration has frozen nearly all new foreign assistance funding for the next 90 days, fired many senior leaders, and put the entire agency’s staff of more than 10,000 people on leave, two-thirds of whom work in field locations around the world.

In an interview with Fox News, Vice President JD Vance claimed that the old Christian teaching of "ordo amoris" justifies the Trump Administration's treatment of immigrants. But a closer look at the writings of Augustine show that "ordo amoris" doesn't mean what Vance claims it does. In fact, it teaches almost the exact opposite.