Imagine this: as the Costs of War Project recently reported, Donald Trump's bizarre war in Iran, in part by closing the Strait of Hormuz, has already cost every American family on average more than $300 (and those costs are still rising). Of course, it undoubtedly hasn't cost Trump, his family, and his buddies a damn thing. And even if it has, no problem. After all, he's the president of the United States and can essentially do whatever he pleases, including recently preparing to use a mere $1.7 billion taxpayer dollars to set up a fund to compensate his buddies who were being investigated by the Justice Department under President Joe Biden. As the New York Times reported, "The Justice Department is modeling the program, in part, on a landmark $760 million settlement fund the Obama administration created to compensate Native American farmers and ranchers who were deprived access to federal subsidies for decades." In short, in Donald Trump's world the second time around, doing wrong is just so right!
And while he's sent this country to war in Iran, he's been making ever more money. It helps, after all, to be president if you're looking for a few tips on what's ever hotter in this world of ours (other, of course, than the weather). After all, as CNBC reported recently, he had the foresight (or do I mean foreknowledge?) to scoop up shares of the defense contractor Palantir -- between $247,008 and $630,000 worth of stock, in fact -- and then, cleverly enough, laud the company on Truth Social.
What could possibly go wrong or in any way be wrong with that? Okay, it's true that, given the increasingly mess he's making of this world of ours, the Republicans could have a few problems in the November elections, but big deal, right? He only recently purchased between $500,000 and $1,000,000 in Nvidia stock, too, and soon after, by utter happenstance -- believe me, there could be no possible connection -- the Commerce Department announced that it was permitting that company to sell chips to China!
And let me stop there, though I could obviously go on (and on and on), and let TomDispatch regular William Hartung, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine, explore the world of Donald (Disaster) Trump and our Silicon Valley saviors, our new "techno-gods," as they do their damnedest to" well, do their damnedest. Tom
Donald (Disaster) Trump
And the Fight for a Humane Future
Donald Trump's America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don't believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they're the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in White Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky.
Still, it's worth reflecting on whether such an odd coalition of allies can survive without Donald Trump, or even with a president whose policies have become so harmful and irrational that they're doing severe human and economic damage even to his most loyal supporters (not to mention the rest of us). And it's also worth considering whether the pillars of the MAGA movement can manage to stick together in the ever-grimmer Trumpian years to come, not to speak of the post-Trumpian ones, or whether the rest of us can organize a powerful, humane alternative to his politics of hatred and division that could transform this country and the world.
The Know-Nothings Meet the Know-It-Alls
As a start, we have the latter-day "Know Nothings," a term borrowed from a nineteenth century political movement. It's not that members of that group literally know nothing. Some of them are quite skilled in their given professions and astute at assessing certain kinds of situations. Some are intelligent but woefully misguided. Trump supporter and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, for example, is a brain surgeon.
Members of the anti-science crowd are also often very good at communicating their messages, however wrongheaded or offensive they may be. The problem isn't that they can't take in information; it's that they are distinctly anti-knowledge when it comes to, among other things, separating compelling conspiracy theories from well-documented facts.
The results of their ingrained antagonism toward basic knowledge are profound, making them a threat to public health and democratic practices. After all, we now live in a country where millions of people are against vaccinating their children to prevent potentially deadly diseases and don't believe that perhaps the gravest threat to continuing life on this planet -- climate change-- is caused, or even influenced, by human activity or perhaps is even happening at all.
The dangerous delusions of Trump Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now have the stamp of government approval and the power of the U. S. government behind them. There is no way to estimate how many people have already fallen sick or even died unnecessarily due to the implementation of his crackpot theories, but the numbers will undoubtedly be significant. The American Public Health Association captured the grim mood of our moment perfectly in an April 2025 press release entitled "Secretary Kennedy and His Policies Are a Danger to the Public Health."
On a different spiritual plane, tens of millions of Americans believe in the rapture -- the notion that they and their kind will be called up to heaven in the end days, while the rest of us will be left behind, presumably to burn in hell (but not a climate-change version of the same). A 2022 Pew poll found that 39% of Americans believe"we are in the end times." Already! And such a belief, of course, has an impact on how or even whether one wants to devote time and energy to fixing problems here on Earth.
Such an amalgam of opponents of science and skeptics about basic reality bears a distinct resemblance to the "Know Nothing" movement of the nineteenth century that thrived on anti-immigrant sentiments and half-baked conspiracy theories.
The anti-intellectual faction on the right has been propagandized for decades to believe that the biggest obstacle to a better life for them and their families isn't the predatory corporations hollowing out our economy and manipulating our democracy, but a group of liberal intellectuals clustered on both coasts who allegedly want to replace this country's bedrock beliefs with a set of "politically correct" prescriptions about how they should live their lives, especially when it comes to DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion. In such a rendering of reality, that "new class" is seen as sapping the country's strength and undermining the basic values that would make America great (again!).
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