Nina-Bytes: Only the Able Count in Trump’s America
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The Other Fascist Crusade Trumpism Is Fueling
If you want to know the truth, the thing that scares me most about the Trump administration is not the bald authoritarianism, brazen lawlessness, or even the way Downmarket Mussolini and his minions seem hyper-focused on constructing a sort of patchwork Enabling Act out of the Unitary Executive Theory. As awful and horrifying as these things are, and as difficult as it is for these conversations to break into the mainstream discourse, we’re still talking about Trump’s plot to make himself a dictator through the application of state terror, and what this means for our society going forward. The things that keep me up at night, are the openly nazi things the larger Trumpenreich says and does that our opinion makers don’t understand, and don’t talk about enough.
For example, one of the most horrifying things about the fascist Trump regime that nonetheless remains just below the surface of our mainstream discourse, is the objectively eugenicist undercurrent that runs through most of the government’s public health and spending decisions. This ablest ideological plank is built around the idea that Americans who can’t work are not valid members of our society and represent an active drain on limited public resources, which by implication makes them irrelevant, if not an active hinderance to the capitalist order. None of this is metaphoric in nature; you can find numerous recent examples of the Trumpenreich openly acknowledging this relationship between the ability to make a rich person money and human worth. Consider HHS Secretary RFK Jr’s dehumanizing rants about autism and autistic Americans, as well as ongoing GOP attempts to defend the homicidal class war budget reconciliation bill they’re trying to ram through the Senate. These openly eugenicist declarations are always hidden behind a purely symbolic commitment to somehow protect society’s “most vulnerable people” in undefined ways, but the proof is in the policy pudding, and everything about the Pork Reich’s agenda seems to either ignore the existence of, or actively harm, anyone who cannot work even through no fault of their own – including aging and disabled Americans in the labor class.
Now the Trump administration has released a comprehensive report on its own proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year, and the callous and counterproductive cuts they’re proposing to some of the most effective disability assistance programs makes it unmistakably clear that this targeted neglect and rampant ableism is woven directly into government policy. As Marianne Dhenin writing for Truthout reports, the Trumpenreich plans to defund “the Administration for Community Living (ACL) and related grant programs” in a heartless decision that seems likely to harm up to “one in five older Americans” and over 17 million disabled Americans who depend on ACL programs to lead fuller, happier, non-institutionalized lives.
Trump’s Budget Would Limit Investigations Into Abuse, Neglect of Disabled People
“If these programs are not funded, experts warn that an increasing number of disabled and aging Americans could be institutionalized with little oversight to ensure their rights are protected against abuse and neglect. The National Disability Rights Network (NDRN) called the plan to eliminate the programs “a direct and deliberate attack on people with disabilities, their families, and the systems that protect their rights, health, and independence.”
Alison Barkoff, who served as ACL’s acting administrator and assistant secretary for aging during the Biden administration, is now director of George Washington University’s health law and policy program. “The dismantling of ACL combined with the elimination of programs and these big Medicaid cuts are literally going to roll back decades of progress,” Barkoff told Truthout. “In terms of people with disabilities, the default [could become] people in institutions that are very unsafe with huge rights violations.”
There are two stories going on here simultaneously, and both of them are horrible fascist atrocities. In a purely material sense, the Trump regime plans to force your grandparents, and millions of people with disabilities, off of effective and vital assisted living programs that allow our loved ones to remain vibrant and valued parts of our everyday lives, so they can give billionaire nazi broligarchs more cash to buy everything that isn’t tied down in our society. The end result of these budget decisions will be more Americans who, and I cannot stress this enough, are capable of living happy, healthy, and cherished lives in our homes and communities, being warehoused in often abusive, dehumanizing institutional settings with little to no regulatory oversight. Trump intends to slash the budget for the protection and advocacy agencies that monitor for abuse and neglect now, in an already sketchy system that frequently fails to protect disable people in institutional settings. What I’m saying here isn’t my ideological position, it’s just the bottom line, and it fits seamlessly within a larger pattern of disdain and neglect towards poor and marginalized people displayed by Trump, his administration, and the wealthy donors who own them; after all, rich people and well compensated politicians can afford the private living care necessary to keep their family members from being warehoused and left to die.
As the article goes on to note however, this horrifying decision to purposely rewind time to a darker era of American disability rights and standards of care isn’t entirely financial in its motivations. Indeed, whatever savings the government is hoping to accomplish here are purely paper artifacts because public institutionalization of elderly and disabled Americans is going to cost the state a lot more money in the long run. No, the bald truth here is that this decision is rooted deeply in the Pork Reich’s open disdain for the American people, and ideological belief that the labor class in this country is nothing more than a commodity; useful at times in terms of economic inputs, but an active blight on society to be eliminated once we can no longer serve our purpose of extracting wealth for the ruling classes. This is a eugenicist government presiding over the evolution of the “liberal” capitalist Pig Empire into its final fascist form, so that the truly rich people who actually own our society can continue extracting profit even as the world burns and billions of disproportionately poor people die. The billionaire nazis running this global far right political project are planning for a planet with far fewer humans. Their multi-millionaire puppets, including the Trump regime, are helping sort out who gets to survive long enough to see the brave new world they envision.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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