Trump’s Blitzkrieg
I’d love to be asleep right now. But it finally came to me…the word I have been looking for to describe Donald J. Trump’s actions since he took office, and by extension the actions of all of his crew. I mean, are you also having trouble keeping up with the pace? Do you also find your head spinning with how they dismantle institutions and long held safeguards, pull apart support programs, fire trusted staffers, freeze necessary funds, unfreeze those funds and then freeze them again without admitting it?
Oh wait, and what’s this about Musk and the Treasury? Borrowing a snippet of Heather Cox Richardson’s February 1, 2025 update: “R Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”
Ah okay, cool. So that’s happening too? Check. Got it. Let me catch my breath. Guantanamo what now? Trump’s fucking up everything at the White House and Musk has his finger on the Federal money button? Wait, what? USAID had funding interrupted and Trump says DEI hires by Obama and Biden crashed two planes in one week?
Even if you didn’t already hear about Tennessee Republican Andy Ogles and his proposal for a resolution that would allow President Donald Trump to run for a third term…even if you didn’t…are you having a hard time keeping up? OMG when does it stop?
So, here is my word–
Blitzkrieg.
It’s a political blitzkrieg.
Designed to shock, surprise, disempower. The method of delivery is the point. It’s got to be fast, pell mell, chaotic, delivering confusion and making oppositional organization well nigh impossible. It’s all happening so fast but how? Actions this broad have likely been in the works for a very long time. The core group who led this, most people can probably guess their names. They were ready. They had a gameplan. And I am convinced that speed was part of their strategy.
Blitzkrieg is also an appropriate word because it’s about a kind of bombardment that immediately disrupts and scatters. Knock it all down before anyone even knows what’s happening. But instead of imposing a new kind of order for a surprised population…I get the sense that these political bombs are solely about destroying order. It’s about a small group of people, who convinced a large group of voters to get them into the White House…so that they could centralize power, money and control for themselves. It’s a long con job that will be written in history books. Sorry blue collar voters, he never had any intention of helping you. I don’t think people like Trump care one whit about gender politics, race, tariffs or how society is really organized. I think those are just talking points they use to rally and infuriate everyone on both sides. These are just levers Musk pulls on daily via X posts to keep support high from those that favor might over behaving with a conscience. It’s what fearful people do when they’ve been convinced that they are out of options. Oh wait…let me clarify that. “Fearful people” refers to Musk/Trump and their supporters. Because at the end of the day it’s all about fear. People who live in unexplored fear, want others to feel afraid. It’s an odd thing isn’t it? But it gives us humans an awful sort of relief when we can make others afraid. It’s a twisted sort of balm for us at times. It’s like “you are the ones who are afraid now, not me!”
The long con here has been to create fear in people and stoke it.
Gameplan:
-Devise who the enemy might be.
-Who can we blame repeatedly?
-Now divide a population against itself so they have less people to organize on either side.
-Turn them on one another while we gather the money and the control, insulating ourselves from them all.
Hey, I am just one guy with a gut feeling who watches closely…but my sense is that Trump’s view of the world truly orbits around one idea only: “how can I become the biggest and baddest man anyone has ever seen-with tons of disposable dollars at my command?”. I describe it simplistically that way, like the way a child would, because that’s really how he behaves. A child that wants to run the playground, hoard all the toys, set a very basic menu in the cafeteria for his classmates while he has a limo drop-off Chris Ruth Steakhouse “to go” at the edge of the playground for himself. Trump is in this for him.
The people of Germany were totally shocked to watch Hitler rise to power. I am not saying Trump is Hitler. But you really have to ask…who wants to control other people this damn badly anyway? We know on a fundamental level that it’s not how we are supposed to treat one another. And it’s unconstitutional and morally corrupt.
The feeling you have is intentional. And the worst thing you can do with that awful feeling is stay silent about it. Get your people around you. Talk it out. Get ahead of it. Not knowing what to do about it right away doesn’t mean you are defeated. But identifying it for what it is, I think, is really important.
So that’s my word of the day: Blitzkrieg. Now maybe I won’t feel so blindsided when 10 new things happen tomorrow. The fact is that now, quite suddenly, I live in a country that is experiencing a coordinated blitzkrieg style political attack on democracy…check. For some reason that allows me to not be so confused by it all.
Now we just have to avoid the phase that follows blitzkrieg: exhausted compliance.
Heather’s full article here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-1-2025