Destroying America was the plan all the time

In his first 100 days, President Donald Trump has taken a blow to the government, civil society, civil rights laws, the efforts of degregation, foreign alliances, laws and anti -corruption norms, the entire global economy and the very self -concept of the country born of the idea that “all men are created the same.”

But despite all Trump’s questions he knows what he is doing, this is not an accident or a byproduct of other objectives: destroying the United States as we know was always the point of Trump’s second administration. That country was born in the twentieth century, and the Trump second term, led by a group of ideologues and oligarchs that supported their re -election, aims to repeal the twentieth century.

The twentieth century brought to the United States the greatest wealth and success he had seen and in his global influence pinnacle. After World War II, the country created the best university system in the world that worked together with the government on scientific research and development, positioning it as an academic and intellectual power. The country also saw a revolution of rights, with legislators and judges that extended the promise of the declaration of independence to more people than ever and consolidating the State of the United States as the moral leader of the “free world.”

This regret of the country, which extended from the new Franklin Roosevelt agreement through the civil rights movement, made the country more richer, more equal, more educated and more successful than ever. But not everyone accepted progress at that time, and pressed to go back.

Manadel and through images

“We will break the clock of the Great Society. We will break the welfare state watch. We will break the New Deal clock. We will repeal the twentieth century,” said Paleoliberian scholar Murray Rothbard at an annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in 1992.

Rothbard, who died in 1995, was an influential and influential libertarian activist in his time, but has been much more successful in his future life as a muse for the extreme right in the Trump era. Trump and his Maga ideologues are now receiving Rothbard’s call by moving quickly and breaking things while seeking to destroy America created in the twentieth century.

The conservative movement of the time was born from an opposition to the New Deal of FDR, framing it as a great tyranny of the government that arose from the tradition of the country of small government and states rights. The opponents of the New Deal merged with the South whites after the approval of the Civil Rights Law to form a majority coalition opposed to the great government’s dictates on how to administer their businesses and who could exclude from society.

This coalition put Ronald Reagan in the position in 1980, but Reagan, who never had the total control of the Congress, could not completely reverse the achievements of the New Deal or the civil rights movement. The conservatives followed a path of judiciary to promulgate these changes, but the ability of the Democrats to win presidential elections and social movements, whether gay marriage, transgender rights or black lives, demonstrated a too dangerous threat to these conservatives to wait for the judges to rule.

The Republican Party must lead “a realignment along the populist national lines that forces the left to moderate,” wrote Trumpist writer Michael Anton in his 2020 book, “The Stakes: America at the point of no return.” “Then, real policy: vote, govern and be governed in turn, commitment, acceptance of the legitimacy of the other side) can return.”

The conservatives would pursue this “post-constitutional moment”, as expressed by the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, in 2022, where the ordinary rules of democracy and the rule of law must be swept to retreat the clock before the New Deal put the United States on its way of greater equality.

This is what Trump’s second term represents. Its objective is to crush the country built during the twentieth century and replace it with a country that is insular, less equal, less rich, less educated and antidemocratic. His followers are quite explicit about this.

“We are living in FDR’s personal monarchy,” said Maga Risk capitalist Marc Andresen, citing Silicon Valley’s favorite philosopher, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that the country should abolish democracy and be directed by a monarch CEO. “You need another FDR type figure, but in reverse.”

Saul Loeb through Getty Images

Trump wants to be that figure, except that this time he wants to ignore the Congress and the Constitution, something that FDR did not do. Trump’s bet to redo the country requires dynamiting it first.

The appointment of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, to lead the Government Efficiency Department (Doge) on day 1 began the controlled demolition of the federal government that conservatives have longed for. Musk quickly got to work by destroying the United States agency for international development, “Feeding [it] In the wooden shipyard, “as he said, before spending his view to the Department of Education, the Office of Financial Protection of the Consumer, the Center for Disease Control, the National Foundation of Sciences, the National Institutes of Health and many other agencies.

Dege went even more to Social Security, limbing their operations, while Musk and Trump lied to the benefits that were to undocumented immigrants and dead people.

None of this was legally done, and many of these actions are now linked in the courts, where the judges have found that many Doge actions are probably illegal. Whatever the result in the courts, Dege has already fired thousands of workers, has put more of them on administrative license, demolished entire agencies, precipitated the death of millions by reducing the help of foreign crucial health and undermined the financing of basic scientific research throughout the country for the foreseeable future. None of these things is easy to go back.

The destruction of Doge’s scientific research is also part of Trump’s efforts to destroy higher education in favor of an intellectual worldview that he can control, that he and his team announced before assuming the position.

“[I]For any of us, we want to do the things we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to attack honestly and aggressively universities in this country, ”said Vice President JD Vance in a 2021 speech at the National Conservatismo Conference.

The United States Higher Education System was born effectively following World War II. The GI bill increased registration, meanwhile, the creation of the National Science Foundation initiated an association between the Government and the universities to carry out scientific research. The birth of the University of Research in the 1950s led countless scientific, technological and medical advances.

But schools and universities have also been centers for cultural change and political protest. Trump wants to destroy the existing association to intimidate universities and schools to allow the Trump administration to eliminate wrong thinking and choose what can be taught and what research can be done. To do so, its administration is using false pretexts, such as anti -Semitism or discrimination in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, and transgender rights, to threaten to retain research subsidies that finance scientific work in universities in an assault open to the right of the first amendment to free speech.

To Drago/Bloomberg through Getty Images

On the 10th, Trump ordered the attorney general PAM Bondi to create a work group anti-Semitism to investigate and punish universities and colleges for alleged anti-Semitism on the campus, often focused on pro-Palestinian student movements that emerged in 2023 Amid Israel’s Milisty Campion in Gaza. Similarly, on day 1, Trump issued executive orders that prohibit federal funds go to organizations that participate in DEI practices or recognize the existence of transgender people.

The task force against semitism announced below the cancellation of $ 400 million in research grants to the University of Columbia on the 47th day. Fourteen days later, Columbia said that he would acquire the demands of the administration that amounted to an acquisition of the partial government of the university in exchange for a release of the $ 400 million in funds.

Then, the administration froze $ 800 million in subsidies to Johns Hopkins University, $ 175 million to the University of Pennsylvania, $ 1 billion for the University of Cornell, $ 790 million to the Northwestern University and more than $ 2 billion for Harvard University.

Trump’s Anti-Dei order is not only used as a pretext to attack universities, but as an opening save to illegitimately repeal the civil rights law and re-register the country.

Some of Trump’s first acts included members of military leadership that turned out to be black or women. When a military helicopter crashed into a passenger plane only nine days in Trump’s new mandate, killing everyone on board, Trump and the members of his cabinet falsely blamed Dei for the accident.

“They actually left with a directive:” Too white, “Trump said about the Obama administration policy for the Federal Aviation Administration at a press conference on January 30.

When asked how to blame Dei, Trump replied: “Because I have common sense.”

The involvement here is that anyone with a government work that is not a white man must be suspected of being inferior or reaching his position without merit.

This has been seen throughout the administration by eliminating the websites and public screens that commemorate military service or the achievements of black people, women, natives, Latinos, etc. A web page that celebrated Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, was even eliminated before a uproar of sports media forced its restoration. Military schools have eliminated photos of black historical figures from the classrooms. And the United States marine band was even forced to cancel an performance with high school musicians because the students were black.

Hu Yousong/Xinhua news agency through Getty Images

Trump’s attacks against the Civil Rights Law and the Disaggregation Law have continued and have become more explicit as their term progresses. On the 2 of his administration, he revoked an executive order issued by Lyndon Johnson who prohibited federal government contractors from participating in labor discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin, and demanded that they establish programs to ensure that workers from all careers will recruit.

Three weeks later, on the 27th, the General Services Administration repealed a regulation that prohibits contractors from operating segregated workplaces.

In one of his greatest attacks against the Civil Rights Law, Trump issued an executive order on the 94th that ordered the Government to “eliminate the use of disparate impact responsibility in all contexts as much as possible.”

Discounted the impact of the rate considers policies that can be indirect or not perfection discriminatory, and explains the way they can affect private communities. For example, employers list the height or education requirements for hiring that are not necessary for the position, but act as a screen for certain groups of people. The use of disparate impact is a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Law, and its elimination would allow and encourage resection throughout the country.

Trump’s efforts to dismantle the civil rights law and destroy progress towards equality are not limited to the twentieth century. He has also changed his sights to one of the greatest achievements that will leave the civil war: the 14th amendment.

His executive order of day 1 that tries to rewrite the granting of citizenship of birth law of the 14th amends all persons born in the United States is perhaps their greatest act of destruction. Birth law citizens underlie the meaning of America rooted in the declaration of independence, which all men and women are created the same. Birth law citizens ensure that all those born here are also born citizens under law.

In his 2024 campaign, Trump obtained his effort to rewrite US history as one of blood and soil instead of an idea, rooted in the declaration and written in the Constitution, of progress towards equality. The United States is not a democracy, nor an idea, but a mass of earth that will be governed by the people of that land, Trump believes.

This is perhaps the part of the Trump agenda that is addressed more directly to the professors of the United States: the image of the nation as a “melting” of races, nationalities and religions. While the original myth of the “melting boat” saw the boat as the alchemy of assimilation to make immigrants into Anglo -Saxons, John F. Kennedy wrote in his 1958 book, “a nation of immigrants”, that the “melting power” does not need to mean the end of the particular ethnic identities or traditions. ” [American] dream.”

Michael M. Santiago through Getty Images

But Trump has taken these notions with a massive deportation campaign, which have scheduled not only undocumented migrants, but also Immigrants in the country legally And even American citizens.

This vision seeks the elimination of immigrants and anyone who does not look or thinks like the ones Trump believe they are from the earth. It is an insular vision of a walled state that does not allow entry, power or even influence to strangers, and that oppresses the difference and retreats from the world.

Such a vision also encourages the only area of ​​Trump’s country destruction that was not exactly central to the conservative movement that gave birth to its movement: tariffs.

The Trump tariff policy provides its most explicit demand to repeal the twentieth century. In the campaign, he routinely praised President William McKinley, elected in 1896, by the strict tariffs he implemented as a senator.

“Go back and look at the 1890s, 1880, McKinley, and take a look at tariffs,” Trump said. “That was when we were in ours, proportionally, the richest.”

This is, of course, very false. The United States was much poorer than now, and the The average person was much worse. (Ironically, then McKinley tariffs contributed largely to the catastrophic economic recession in 1893 that raided the way for his election as president).

In 2025, Trump emulated McKinley and his disastrous tariffs with his own “Liberation Day” tariff. When tagging all countries in the world with tariffs based on a defective premise, Trump changed the entire global economy and detonated the credibility and stability of the United States. A few weeks later, he stopped most of these tariffs after the Collapsara stock market, but maintained a 145% tariff on China, a movement that will soon lead to a great shortage of goods throughout the country.

The chaotic rate launches and the recoil is not only destroying supply chains, markets and, soon, small businesses, but also destroyed Trump’s political position.

If there is any comfort in Trump’s 100 days of destruction, it has been destroyed in the process.