by John Ambrosio
In 2001, Grover Norquist, the Republican anti-tax crusader, famously quipped in an interview that he did not want to abolish government, “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The radical shrinking of the federal government under Trump has happened at a speed and on a scale that is unprecedented.
This raises the question: Are Trump and the MAGA-dominated Republican Party willing to jeopardize the future viability of U.S. society in order to achieve their political and ideological goals? Has the Republican Party become a kind of death cult hellbent on destroying everything that enables ordinary people to survive and thrive? Does their hatred of liberalism, and desire for vengeance, override their instinct for national self-preservation?
In a recent podcast, Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Giat, two prominent historians of authoritarianism and European fascism, discussed whether the U.S. is being murdered or is committing suicide. That is, whether it is being deliberately destroyed by Trump and MAGA Republicans or if a significant part of the electorate is committing national suicide, whether the descent into authoritarianism is a self-inflicted wound.
The answer is clearly both. There is a deliberate and systematic effort by Trump and his MAGA allies to demolish liberal constitutional democracy and dismantle and eliminate federal agencies and executive departments that comprise the modern U.S. state, aided and abetted by Republican voters and others who continue to support Trump and who elect MAGA Republicans that mostly rubber stamp his cruel and dangerous policies.
As Snyder and Ben-Giat point out, Trump and his MAGA allies have systematically defunded significant parts of the national infrastructure for scientific, technological, and health sciences research and gutted federal agencies tasked with ensuring that people have access to clean air, potable water, and uncontaminated food, and that protect them from harmful chemicals, preventable diseases, predatory corporations, defective products, natural disasters, and climate breakdown, among many other vital functions.
While Trump’s baseless and lawless attacks on federal agencies is already being felt in recent outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, like cyclosporiasis, and preventable diseases, such as measles, the most damaging and destructive effects will likely unfold over the medium- to long-term as the social conditions that enable people to thrive are degraded over time. Despite varying degrees of corporate capture, federal agencies have historically provided some degree of protection from the vicissitudes of rapacious capitalism and imposed some limits, however inadequate, on the depredations of extreme wealth and corporate power.
There is no going home again. Even if portions of federal agencies and executive departments are reconstituted or partially rebuilt by future Democratic administrations, the massive loss of institutional knowledge and expertise cannot be easily replaced. Nor will it be easy to restore the trust of federal workers who were summarily fired without cause or due process, or to assure potential employees that their jobs will not be at risk when the political pendulum swings back. To obstruct efforts to reconstitute federal agencies, Trump is altering and destroying the databases they rely on to inform and make policy decisions.
Trump’s attack on the federal government is the latest iteration of a decades-long counter-revolution against New Deal and Great Society liberalism, and the cultural legacy of the 1960s that arguably began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In 1994, Republicans passed the “Contract With America,” a ten-point legislative plan that not only cut social programs and taxes, but marked a turning point in modern U.S. politics, ushering in an era of political combat in which bipartisanship and compromise were viewed as weakness, as a capitulation to their political enemies in the Democratic Party.
In the future, Republicans would take no prisoners and were all-in on doing whatever was necessary to achieve their political goals, even if it meant blowing up traditional democratic norms and violating legislative practices. Republicans were determined to play political hardball, to obstruct the legislative agenda and judicial nominations of the Democratic Party, regardless of its corrosive effects on democracy and the functioning of the federal government.
This political ethos was perhaps most dramatically illustrated in 2016 when Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican Majority Leader at the time, refused to meet with or hold hearings to consider Merrick Garland, president Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, which resulted in Republicans stealing a seat from Democrats. It was also manifest in numerous acts of political brinkmanship and skirmishes with Democrats over raising the national debt ceiling, approving budget appropriations, and inserting unrelated social policies into must-pass legislation.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the master plan for an authoritarian takeover of the country, aims to dismantle the architecture of liberal constitutional democracy and the administrative state. While candidate Trump claimed to have never heard of the project, and initially distanced himself from its policy recommendations, the White House nonetheless wound up implementing much of its political agenda.
Trump issued a raft of executive orders in 2025 that sought to exert control over the federal government by presidential fiat, reshaping federal agencies and executive departments through workforce reductions, the elimination of diversity programs, the redirection of regulatory priorities, and other changes without the advice or consent of Congress, whether or not he had the constitutional or statutory authority to do so.
To oversee the process of dismantling and demolishing key parts of the administrative state, Trump installed Russell Vought as his budget director, who was a contributor to Project 2025 and a strong advocate of the unitary executive, of an expansive view of presidential power. Vought’s anti-government crusade was given an important assist by the MAGA-majority Supreme Court, most notably in Trump v. Slaughter (2026), which gave Trump the authority to fire the heads of independent federal agencies at will, and in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), which stripped federal agencies of the power to interpret federal statutes, to promulgate rules and regulations that are not explicitly authorized by Congress.
The demolition of large parts of the federal government began in earnest when Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by executive order shortly after taking office in January 2025, which was neither an official government department nor concerned with efficiency. Trump gave his “co-president,” Elon Musk, free reign to take a sledgehammer (or woodchipper) to agencies whose missions conflicted with his ideological beliefs or business interests (which were often the same). Musk and his gang of twenty-somethings slashed and burned their way through federal agencies, indiscriminately firing tens of thousands of federal employees, cancelling contracts that contained prohibited words they associated with DEI programs, and rejecting research proposals that did not appear to align with Trump’s far-right political agenda.
One of Musk’s first targets was the Agency for International Development (USAID). Ignorant of what the agency actually did, and the vital role it played in sustaining some of the poorest people on the planet, he enthusiastically and glibly fired agency employees and eliminated programs that condemned millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of children, to an untimely and unnecessary death: what you might call homicide by budget cuts. Of course, the irony is that this horrific crime was inflicted on desperately poor people by the richest person in the world, who denied the consequences of his actions and refused to take responsibility for them.
Trump and MAGA Republicans have systematically defunded the national infrastructure for research not only because they associate science with liberalism, but to discredit science as an independent source of knowledge and expertise, because it provides an authoritative counter narrative to their false claims and politically-motivated policies.
Similarly, institutions of higher education are viewed as outposts of the political opposition, as incubators of liberalism and producers of knowledge that can challenge the lies, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and gaslighting of Trump and MAGA Republicans. The assault on science had the added benefit of enabling Trump, under the guise of combatting antisemitism, to strong-arm prominent universities, to extort payments and bully them into accepting unprecedented federal interference in their internal affairs by threatening to withhold or cancel funding for scientific research.
Trump’s cabinet secretaries took a similar approach, purging executive departments of senior military officers and civil servants who were deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump or potentially unsupportive of his political priorities. Knowledgeable and experienced career professionals were replaced with inexperienced and incompetent MAGA loyalists and sycophants. People who were associated with DEI programs or considered part of the “deep state” were sacked, including anyone involved with investigating or prosecuting Trump for his crimes.
Of course, the self-immolation of the U.S. is not confined to the domestic sphere, but extends to international relations as well. The Trump administration has successfully alienated much of the rest of the world, unwilling to consult or work with allies. Shunning diplomacy, Trump prefers to go it alone and impose his will by bullying other countries. To this end, he imposed senseless and punishing tariffs on friends and foes alike; unilaterally violated international trade agreements (the World Trade Organization and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement); withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), the Paris Climate Accord, and the World Health Organization; attacked the International Criminal Court; threatened NATO allies; and launched an unprovoked war on Iran. In doing do, Trump succeeded in blowing up the post-war international order, destabilizing the global economy and geopolitical relations.
Trump paid off the oil, gas, and coal industries for their financial support by denying the existence of the climate crisis and calling it a hoax, and by eliminating subsidies for renewable energy in the Inflation Reduction Act; cancelling leases for offshore wind farms and paying firms to abandon projects already under way; eliminating California’s emissions standards for cars and trucks; repealing the Endangerment Finding that underpins the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases and fossil fuel emissions; subsidizing coal-fired power plants and preventing the closure of others; opening up national parks, wilderness areas, and coastal marine habitats for oil exploration and mining operations; dismantling the National Renewable Energy Lab; and downsizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And the list goes on.
This raises the question: Why would Trump and his MAGA allies deliberately damage the U.S. in ways that jeopardize its social and economic viability? One answer is that the White House “operates in a cloud of delusion” that prevents Trump and his cronies from recognizing what is actually happening. Insofar as they are cognizant of the consequences of their actions, they are utterly indifferent to the costs they impose on others because they do not bear them and believe their wealth will shield them from their reckless behavior. They would rather blow up U.S. society than have to compromise with and accommodate liberal beliefs and values, than have to live in a racially diverse and pluralist society that places some limits on their ability to exercise power. In their eyes, burning the house down is preferable to the alternative.
The White House presides over a kind of smash and grab mafia-state authoritarianism that functions as massive grifting and looting (of the national treasury) operation. Trump does not care what he breaks (or tears down) in pursuing his personal and political priorities. To reward major doners and political allies, which include Silicon Valley billionaires, ethnonationalists, and evangelical Christians, Trump and his MAGA allies in Congress have reshaped the federal government to accommodate and promote their interests and political agendas, freeing Big Tech from government regulation, facilitating the mass deportation of (mostly black and brown) undocumented and legal immigrants, and empowering far-right evangelicals to imbue federal law and public policy with white Christian Nationalism.
While the MAGA faithful willfully blind themselves to Trump’s lies and distortions of reality, many Republican elected officials simply go along to get along, wary of opposing Trump, who will not only primary them, but signal his online mob of extremists to viciously attack anyone he considers disloyal, often with threats of violence. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the unflagging support of MAGA Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court who have largely abdicated their constitutional responsibility to serve as a check on the abuse of presidential power, enabling Trump to act with virtual impunity.
Republican elected officials are fearful of the consequences of departing from the group think and loyalty signaling demanded by Trump. This is reminiscent of totalitarianism, of a society in which people pre-emptively censor themselves because they fear the indiscriminate and arbitrary use of state power to harass, intimidate, and threaten them with violence. Trump’s cabinet meetings are a Stalinist spectacle of fear and fealty, a demonstration of the price people must pay, in humiliation and self-debasement, to seek the approval of the mad king and not become a target of his uncontrolled rage, childish vitriol, and peevish need for vengeance.
Add to this the savage cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), SNAP benefits (food stamps), and other social programs that are vital to the health and welfare of millions of people, which were passed with only Republican votes.
The cold hard fact is that the U.S. is a politically unstable country and unreliable ally that is capable of swinging sharply back and forth between two opposed and largely irreconcilable visions of America. Even if a wave election succeeds in defeating MAGA Republicans, it will likely not indicate a reliable shift in public opinion or a realignment of partisan identities. The 2024 election was not a vibe shift, but an expression of inchoate discontent and anger.
The U.S. is poised on a political knife’s edge, with an almost evenly divided national electorate and highly volatile undecided swing and low-propensity voters who can move in unpredictable ways that determine the outcome of elections, who are fearful and desperate to regain a sense of agency and control over their lives, and who want to push back against government corruption and the entrenched economic and political power of oligarchs and large corporations.
From a historical perspective, the current situation in the U.S. is a chronicle of self-destruction foretold. Stephen Marche argues that the current political crisis in America “has been there from the beginning.” What was “unique in the founding of the United States,” he insists, was the “capacity to turn the violence and idealism” of the American revolution “into mythology,” to create “a sense of the United States as a unique country, an exception to history.”
The notion of American exceptionalism has deep roots in national mythology and is an ideological pillar of national identity, of what Americans tell themselves about who they are, what kind of country they live in, and the role their nation plays in the world. That is, that America is not like other countries, that it occupies a special place among nations, preordained to lead the world and guided by divine providence. It’s a democratic beacon on a hill for others to aspire to, the north star of nations. But America is not exceptional, it emerged and developed under exceptional circumstances and historical conditions, but is susceptible to the same national delusions, mythologies, disremembering, and social and historical forces that other peoples and nations are subject to, which includes the capacity for self-destruction.
American exceptionalism has blinded many Americans to their own capacity for mass delusion, into believing that the country will respond differently to crises, in a more enlightened way, than other nations. This is a dangerous assumption that leaves people vulnerable and unprepared to deal with objective reality. Much will depend on the ability of people to change and adapt to new circumstances, and the cultural values and attitudes they bring to addressing national problems. If Americans remain mired in polarizing beliefs and conflicts over national mythology and identity they will be less able to seriously address the current social and political crisis.
What are the likely consequences of drowning large parts of the federal government in the bathtub? How will ordinary Americans respond to a steady decline in their quality of life, and likely their longevity, that the bulldozing of federal agencies will inevitably bring? That is, to their lives becoming increasingly onerous, insecure, and unsafe?
In the long arc of history previous societies that faced similar conditions led to their collapse, brought down by environmental exploitation and degradation, internecine violence, the short-sightedness of rulers, and an unwillingness or inability to adapt to new circumstances and conditions.
While it will be difficult to restore what has been destroyed by the reckless, foolish, and thuggish actions of Trump and MAGA Republicans, some of the functions that were previously provided by federal agencies are now being taken up by a parallel structure of state agencies and alliances in some areas of the country, but many of the problems they seek to address require national solutions: polluted air and water are not confined within state boundaries.
While states can pick up some of the slack, the reality is that there is no substitute for the institutional knowledge, the experience and expertise, the technical and financial resources that federal agencies and executive departments can bring to bear in addressing national issues. Nor is there any substitute for the national research infrastructure, for the innovation and productivity gains that are vital to economic growth and social cohesion.
If these conditions persist, Americans will become poorer, sicker, more divided, and less able to deal with the worsening effects of climate breakdown. The U.S. will likely limp along for quite some time, but the great unraveling of the “exceptional” nation may have already begun.
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