Welcome to Trump's "controlled disintegration" of America
Look for the rebuilders.
There have been too many bad days over the last year, but August 1, 2025, stands out. Friday offered America some aching clarity, too much clarity to be honest.
Donald Trump is charging us into a “controlled disintegration” of everything that made America the envy of the world—that includes any appeal to equality under the law, rules-based order, and evidence-based science and economics.
Collateral explosions will smite anything that empowers children who aren’t heirs of the richest, especially poor or non-white kids who don’t fit a fundamentalist’s mold of a proper child.
Like everything Donald Trump has done over the last decade, his actions and words rhyme with what the American right has been after for at least the previous 70 years, when they first had to consider the terror of their child sharing a school water fountain with a Black kid.
But as always, these goals include both massive payoffs to rich white guys in general, along with unique, unconscionable spoils for Trump himself and anyone who pleases or appeases him.
Let us mourn a bit
August 1 was a day that Mr. Rogers saved us from for more than 56 years.
On August 1, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it would close following the cuts approved by the Republican Congress last month.
The same day, Donald Trump announced he would fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the job numbers that show how quickly his policies have wrecked what was the best job market for Americans in this century.
The same day, the Republican Supreme Court announced what looks like its intention to destroy what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.
The same day, we found out the Trump regime had broken the federal prison system’s rules to send Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in a massive child rape scheme to a cushy prison as part of Trump’s cover-up of his role in said scheme.
The same day, we learned we get to buy Trump a $200 million ballroom for the White House to go with the billion dollars we’re spending on his Qatari plane, which he’ll hopefully only fly for a year as president.
The same day, Trump wagged a nuclear weapon at Russia to rage against the weakness he’s feeling despite all his unchecked power.
The same day, Trump’s illegal tariff regime went into effect, smacking hundreds of millions of dollars in sales taxes on American consumers for imported products.
Meanwhile, we found out that there's a hunger strike going on inside the showcase concentration camp of the Trump regime.
This unfolding nightnmare should remind us that, as bad as all this purposeful confusion, doubt, and cruelty is for all Americans who don’t buy into the MAGA zero-sum-gain worldview, it’s the worst for the most vulnerable—those Trump is needlessly crowding into unfinished camps or sending to foreign countries to be raped, tortured, or both.
Yes, there’s a plan
One thing that should light that proverbial fire under our actual asses is to realize that there is a plan at play here. It’s hard to believe that when you watch Trump speak, post, and fumble in what seems to be a blathering and incoherent way. But get over that.
The last refuge of those who hate Trump the most is to believe he’s stumbled onto the shores of dictatorship by accident and has no idea what to do next. And I’m sad to report we can no longer afford that teething toy of a delusion.
It’s nice to believe that he’s senile or losing it. Yes, he’s almost 80, but he is—unfortunately—at the very top of his game. And his game is looting us and degrading American life.
Trump’s consistencies are pretty obvious to anyone who quell their enlightenment brain that expects logic and sense to recognize that authoritarians always have a plan. That plan starts with destroying our reality, any ballast we can cling to, any institution or law that might gird us.
Mr. Rogers asked children to look for the helpers. Mr. Trump only wants you to look up to him and contort yourself for his pleasure.
Controlled disintegration
To give you a little more sense of the larger plan that connects everything this regime is doing, I’m borrowing the term “controlled disintegration” from the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, who borrowed it from former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, who borrowed it from economist Fred Hirsch.
You should watch this video where Varoufakis explains how Trump is trying to do with his tariffs what Volcker did with high interest rates in the 70s and 80s, engineer a “controlled disintegration” of the global economy as a purposeful shock to reshape international commerce in America’s favor. And it worked.
Varoufakis says Trump’s team essentially wants to reverse that shock with these tariffs, to weaken the dollar simultaneously, yet maintain its hold as the world’s reserve currency. If this works, the result will be more—you guessed it—inflation that skyrockets the assets of Trump’s buddies in real estate and finance while immiserating the rest of us.
And the rich and the right of America can justify this all to themselves as moral, given that it reinforces all the hierarchies that define the GOP’s strict-father worldview.
Yes, it’s unbearable to consider our role in this purposeful assault on good.
Together, it’s all just another reminder, as Andrea Pitzer, who wrote a global history of concentration camps, says in the latest episode of her podcast, that we cannot wait. Trump isn’t, and our hesitancy and analysis paralysis have always been one of his most embarrassing advantages.
We have no idea what can and will work to prevent the horrors being done in our name. And if you watch this week’s Next Comes What, you’ll see I mean that in a positive way. Actions create surprises. The more actions, the more we can see the flickers of good that show that we will not let this disintegration prevail. We will prevent. We will repair. We will rebuild.
What do you do?
I want to close with the song Mr. Rogers quoted to the Senate when he made his fabled appeal for funding for television that seeks to nurture and respect children:
What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite. When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right. What do you do?
He was teaching kids about regulating their emotions even before anyone but experts knew what those words meant.
What do we do when the world feels like it’s crumbling around us?
Well, we’re not kids. Most of us still struggle with dealing with the mad we feel, but it’s important to remember that in Mr. Rogers’ famed “look for the helpers” quote, he’s talking to kids.
It’s on us. We must be the helpers we wish to see in the world. And we can’t wait because the disintegration is way ahead of us.
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