Donald Trump Is The New Republic’s 2024 Scoundrel of the Year
This project began with a pledge to build a wall on America’s southern border. It is now centered on a promise to deport tens of millions. In 2016, Trump campaigned by promising to lock up his opponent, Hillary Clinton; he now plans to wield the Justice Department against dozens, if not hundreds, of political rivals. He also has the beleaguered mainstream media in his sights, filing a spurious suit this month against The Des Moines Register over a preelection poll that showed Trump losing Iowa. He has become more openly authoritarian and fascistic.
At the same time, Trump has never been less populist. There was a time when one could make the case—albeit credulously—that he represented a break from the economic policies that had defined the Republican Party for two generations. He was thought to represent the end of, or at least a challenge to, the GOP’s lockstep fealty to tax cuts and deregulation and commitment to the interests of the wealthy (typically the extremely wealthy) over those of workers. Trump’s movement theoretically tapped into the rage at that destructive economic ideology and would represent a new way forward, one built around protectionism and the interests of the tens of millions of (mostly white) working-class voters.
No one can make that case credibly now. Yes, Trump may or may not push to levy high tariffs against America’s rivals and allies alike. But, as with his first term, the clear aim that has emerged from the first weeks of his transition is yet another sizable corporate tax cut. Musk and the other barnacles who have successfully attached themselves to Trump’s rusted hull, meanwhile, have openly resuscitated all of the worst parts of the Republican tradition that so many declared dead after 2016. Musk’s core project is DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency, a characteristically cringy and stupid reference to an outdated meme—whose aim is to dramatically cut government spending. Its targets are familiar: social welfare programs, health care, Medicaid, even Social Security. Musk openly parrots Grover Norquist, and congressional Republicans are eager to do his bidding.
