Burnout America

Why do Trump, Musk, and their allies want to crater the U.S.?

Yesterday we learned that Trump intends to put a huge amount of US Treasury money into a “U.S. Crypto Reserve” as part of his plan to fleece — I mean, Make Amerikkka Great Again.

Trump is already using his $TRUMP coin as a means of receiving unregulated bribery from criminals and pariah states. Crypto billionaire Justin Sun — who bought artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, his infamous banana duct-taped to a wall, for $6.2 million — just invested $75 million in $TRUMP and received instant “relief” from a civil fraud case in return. As NDTV World reports: “According to the SEC, Justin Sun's alleged strategy began in August 2017. Court documents claim that Justin Sun illegally made $31 million by directing staff members to execute hundreds of thousands of Tronix trades between two accounts under his control, giving the false impression that the trading was legitimate.”

worth $6.2 million

I think it is clear, at this point, that Trump’s function is to destroy America as he ruined his past enterprises. As a reminder, Trump's business failures and bankruptcies include six corporate bankruptcies: Trump Taj Mahal (1991), Trump Plaza Hotel (1992), Trump Castle (1992), Plaza Hotel (1992), Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts (2004), and Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009)—all Chapter 11 restructurings where he ceded control to creditors to avoid personal bankruptcy. Other notable failures include Trump Airlines (shut down in 1992 due to debt), Trump University (closed in 2010 after lawsuits for fraud), Trump Vodka (discontinued in 2011), Trump Steaks (failed shortly after launch in 2007), Trump Mortgage (collapsed within a year in 2007), Trump Magazine (folded in 2009), Trump Network (a failed multilevel marketing scheme), and Trump Ice (his bottled water brand, which quietly disappeared). His involvement in the USFL (United States Football League) contributed to its demise in the 1980s. Torpedo-ing the US will be the crowning achievement of Trump’s illustrious career.

Obviously, it is a different thing to ruin an entire, big country. It might take an extra year or two.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s DOGE — run by 20-year-old hackers and cybercriminals — continues to dismantle the government. As this Wired article explores, the near-shutdown of federal agencies will have severe consequences. Gutting USAID means fewer vaccines and more infants born with HIV/AIDS. Ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau leaves millions vulnerable to predatory lenders and financial scams. Mass firings at DOGE — more still to come with the help of AI — have wiped out experienced workers with many decades of experience and inherited institutional knowledge. National Science Foundation and NIH cuts will cripple American scientific research for decades.

USDA layoffs have thrown farming support programs into chaos. The FDA’s decision to cancel flu vaccine guidance leaves public health at risk. The Social Security Administration is set to lose half its workforce, while HUD faces cuts of up to 84 percent, ensuring a housing crisis with no safety net. The firings of power grid workers in the Pacific Northwest nearly caused one disaster already. The National Parks Service and IRS have been hollowed out. "So don’t make any long-term bets on getting your checks on time, keeping your lights on, buying a home for the first time, or enjoying Yosemite,” Wired writes. “Don’t assume all the things that work now will still work tomorrow.”

Among the programs terminated by DOGE include the Ready to Use Therapeutic Food program that delivers MANA, a paste made of peanut butter and milk, that feeds hundreds of thousands of malnourished children in Africa suffering from “wasting disease.” The end of this program also harms farmers in Georgia who produce the peanuts. According to The New Republic, “It comes in foil packets that don’t need refrigeration, making it easy to distribute in regions suffering extreme deprivation. RUTF is widely hailed as an extraordinary innovation in feeding children facing starvation and death… Now it’s piled up in a warehouse in Savannah, unshipped and uneaten.”

If you are like me, you may find it difficult to understand the ideology behind this rapid dismantling of the US Government, which, while imperfect, maintained a large, peaceful, heterogenous country in good working order. Under the old system, the US was also an immensely powerful presence on the global stage. One would think that the billionaires and corporations orchestrating this dismantling were among those who benefited the most from the United States’ leverage and competence around the world, including the “soft power” projected through aid organizations and charities. I discussed the current crisis with systems theorist Nafeez Ahmed here:

Among the corporations that contribute to the Heritage Foundation, which has over $300 million in assets and assembled Project 2025, we find ExxonMobil, General Motors, Walmart, Coors, Pfizer, Dow, Koch Industries, and so on. We should still find it extraordinary that this internal destruction of the U.S. happened at a time when the country was under no immediate threats; with an economy that, while viciously inequitable, was still the envy of the world, outpacing other nations.

The well-paid ideologues running the Heritage Foundation, aligned with formerly liberal tech billionaires like Musk and Marc Andreessen, claim that minimizing government intervention will promote individual “freedom” and economic efficiency. Freedom, here, means freedom for the wealthy to amass more resources, with the elimination of social programs that help poor people survive within a predatory system based on ruthless exploitation. Musk calls Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" due to its unsustainable financial trajectory. Andreessen whines about regulatory overreach stifling innovation — in fact, Biden wanted to break up the stagnant tech monopolies in order to foster a more innovative and competitive environment here.

For the tech broligarchs, another layer is their belief that the nation-state, in itself, has become irrelevant and should be destroyed to remove any impediments on “sovereign individuals” with transnational wealth and no territorial affiliation. The old nation-state model of sovereignty, based on a system of laws, will be replaced by hypermodern “network states,” bounded physically or virtually, where AI surveillance and blockchain-based enforcement control and micro-manage the serfs, while sovereign individuals enjoy their lucre free of media scrutiny or public oversight.

I’ve been trying to convey to people that what’s happening now is the second “American Revolution,” and what that means…