The era of Big Government is upon us

Trump and Musk are replacing the social safety net with an oppressive autocratic regime.

In just a few months, Donald Trump has referred to himself as “the king,” claimed to be above the law, and repeatedly suggested he might serve an unconstitutional third term.¹ He and his regime have threatened a global land grab, including the annexation of Greenland (“one way or another, we’re going to get it”) and Canada and taking control of Gaza and the Panama Canal. They have disappeared a student for writing an op-ed, and moved to deport academics for participating in political protests or merely causing a “ruckus” and issued an executive order to “remove improper ideology” from museums and zoos.²

The Trump regime has purged from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and Janet Jacobs’ “Memorializing the Holocaust” while retaining Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (two copies!) and Jean Raspai’s “The Camp of the Saints,” a favorite of white supremacists. It has attempted to re-write American history, purging from government websites information about Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, a Black Medal of Honor recipient, and the Arlington National Cemetery graves of Black service members. It has revoked with no reason the visa of a Nobel Laureate who has criticized Trump and waged war on the legal profession with a “campaign of retaliation against lawyers he dislikes” that “threatens to use government power to punish any law firms that, in his view, unfairly challenge his administration” as “the White House pursues vengeance against the profession he blames for his legal troubles.” They have shaken down some of America’s biggest law firms for nearly a billion dollars in free services.

Trump’s henchmen are “launching a disease registry to monitor Americans with autism” and “amassing private medical records from a number of federal and commercial databases” including records from pharmacies, insurance companies, smartwatches and fitness trackers.

Trump has described the cable news channel MSNBC as a threat to democracy that should not be allowed and blocked the Associated Press from events because it uses the phrase “Gulf of Mexico” to identify the Gulf of Mexico and his administration has hand-picked the journalists allowed to cover him and his FCC chairman has “ordered investigations into several media entities” including CBS News, Comcast (the parent company of NBC), PBS, and NPR, part of “a series of moves … to bring media companies under regulatory scrutiny.”

The Trump regime has deployed the IRS to track down immigrants it wants to deport, though IRS officials previously warned “that doing so could violate federal law,” shut down watchdog agencies responsible for oversight of his attacks on immigrants, sent immigrants to prisons in foreign nations to which they have no connection without due process, and tried to deny U.S.-born children the birthright citizenship guaranteed them by the United States constitution.

The Trump regime has acknowledged wrongly sending a man who was in America legally to an El Salvadoran prison due to an “administrative error,” defied court orders to return him to America, and declared that if “somehow he comes back” it will again detain him and return him to El Salvadoran prison.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to send American-born citizens to El Salvadorian prisons known for overcrowding, torture, and food deprivation, including a specific threat to send U.S. citizens who vandalize Teslas to El Salvadorian prisons. Trump’s administration has moved to investigate the Senate minority leader for criticizing a judge (during last year’s campaign, Trump repeatedly threatened to fine and imprison people for criticizing judges, an action Trump and his allies routinely engage in.) Just this morning Trump’s FBI arrested a Wisconsin judge for, allegedly, giving a defendant directions out of her courtroom — and then his FBI director offered a false justification for the widely-denounced move.

His regime has moved transgender prisoners into segregated prisons, “greatly restricting their movements and access to amenities given to other prisoners” and moved toward banning trans people from the military and taken steps to restrict health care for trans people and attempted to dictate to schools who is allowed to participate in sporting events.

He threatened tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, and imposed 25 percent taxes on cars, “a move that is likely to raise prices for American consumers and throw supply chains into disarray” and “could push up car prices significantly when inflation has already made cars and trucks more expensive for American consumers” and said he “couldn’t care less” if his tariffs cause increased car prices — and followed all that up by destabilizing the global economy with massive and arbitrary tariffs. He has threatened to impose taxes on medicine that could “spur rationing and lead to shortages of critical drugs.”

In “the latest step to expand the federal government’s role in the American economy,” Trump has suggested creating a $1 trillion “sovereign wealth fund” — presumably using tax money — to, among other things, buy the social media platform TikTok. He has pressured private companies to change policies he dislikes and moved to seize control of California’s water supply.

Trump’s regime has taken steps towards banning abortion medication.

His regime has usurped the legislative branch, unilaterally moving to shut down the Department of Education without congressional authorization, stormed the Institute of Peace, a congressionally charted nonprofit that isn’t part of executive branch, “issued an executive order … that seeks greater authority over regulatory agencies that Congress established as independent from direct White House control, part of a broader bid to centralize a president’s power over the government,” and unilaterally ordered the Treasury to stop producing pennies, though Congress, not the president, authorizes coin production.

Taken together, it’s enough to fill a bill of grievances — and it’s the most aggressive and sweeping big-government start to a presidency in modern American history, but I bet you haven’t seen it described that way. To the contrary, news headlines and reports have routinely portrayed Trump and his allies as dismantling “Big Government.”

How can Donald Trump routinely be described as waging war on “Big Government” even as he uses his government to control what women do with their bodies, to dictate what people can say and read and even think; to compile ever more intrusive information about its citizens and maintain lists of undesirables; to kidnap and disappear to foreign torture prisons disfavored legal residents; to unilaterally remake the American economy; and to attempt to crush the news media, academia, and the legal profession?

The answer helps explain how we got in this mess in the first place.

For generations of American political discourse, “Big Government” has referred to government that spends a lot of money and employs a lot of people. That money and those people built and maintained highways; ensured access to clean water for drinking and clean air for breathing; provided a social safety net for the elderly, the sick, and the poor; developed life-saving medical treatments and broadened access to health care. That’s what America’s political, media, and cultural elites referred to as “Big Government,” a label that was rarely applied to government limitations on abortion rights or to prohibitions on marriage between gay people, or to government surveillance of its citizens without judicial oversight, or to expanding the use of capital punishment and mass incarceration.

America’s elites (and, relatedly, much of the American public) held this narrow concept of “Big Government” in part because they couldn’t wrap their heads around the possibility of something much bigger — the possibility that there would be Americans who crave dominance and seek to use government to subjugate and terrorize others.³ Had they understood this, they would have seen the Republican Party’s decades-long efforts to control women’s bodies and gay people’s relationships, to make it harder for those they disfavor to vote, and to allow those they favor to exist above the law for what it was: A party that craves power and control above all — and that wants to use that power to hurt people. And so they helped a political movement that sought to impose big-government autocracy upon America portray itself a the party of “limited government.”

Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and 1984’s Oceania aren’t seen as cautionary tales about the perils of Big Government because they employed a lot of people and spent a lot of money building and maintaining roads and hospitals and schools and ensuring the poor were clothed, the hungry fed, and the sick cared for. Their infamy comes from their oppressive nature; from the their efforts to dictate what their citizens could say and even think, the faith they could practice, the people with whom they could associate, the books they could read. From the fear they instilled and the terror and torture they unleashed upon their own citizens.

“The era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton declared when government spending as a share of GDP fell to 33 percent, down from 34 percent at the beginning of his presidency.

Today it is clear that no matter how much Donald Trump and Elon Musk cut Social Security and FDA inspections, no matter how many air traffic controllers they fire, the era of really Big Government is upon us.

1. “I’m not joking.” (See previously.)

2. Zoos?!?

3. A nation built largely on slave labor and grown through decades of segregation should not have so soon lost sight of this.