Blue States Will Not Be Safe in Our Corrupt, Clownish, Authoritarian Future

Politics / Column / Blue States Will Not Be Safe in Our Corrupt, Clownish, Authoritarian Future The Trump administration will seek vengeance against any state that tries to resist the spread of crony capitalism.

Donald Trump walks onstage for a campaign rally on October 12, 2024, in Coachella, California.

Last week, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warned of the encroachment of crony capitalism into every corner of Trumpified America. It’s easy to imagine companies cozying up to Trump and the GOP to curry favor and be exempted from tariffs, economic powerhouses indulging in pay-to-play agreements (organizing conferences in Trump resorts and so on), and corporations asking immigration detention squads to turn a blind eye to their particular group of undocumented workers.

And that’s not to mention the conflicts of interest involved in putting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—the Abbott and Costello of inflicting pain on federal workers (Who’s on first? Nobody’s on first, you fool. We cut that base. You can only play if you’re born on third base)—in charge of a regulation-cutting and government-budget-slashing effort from which this billionaire duo stands to benefit handsomely. Witness Musk’s opposition to extending the $7,500 federal credit for the purchase of electric vehicles, and his stated belief that eliminating this subsidy will hurt Tesla’s competition far more than it will hurt Tesla.

In a normal political moment, such explicit conflicts of interest wouldn’t even begin to pass muster. But in this moment, with the Department of Justice about to be tamed, the regulatory agencies soon to be neutered, and congressional oversight reduced to something between a joke and a prayer, nobody’s going to step up to the plate to block such self-dealing.

The same day as Krugman’s column was published, the news broke that one of Trump’s close aides, Boris Epshteyn, was being investigated for a shakedown scheme in which he demanded hefty “consultancy fees” from would-be administration nominees in exchange for pushing their candidacies with Trump. It would almost be comical if it weren’t so utterly depressing.

Then, in the middle of the night, Trump announced on social media that on day one of his presidency, in clear contravention of the free trade deal that his previous administration negotiated, he would impose a 25 percent tariff on goods coming into the US from Canada and Mexico. This will assuredly set off a scramble for exemptions, most likely involving backroom deals between individual companies and Trump’s team—since, if policy with global repercussions can be announced by diktat, surely exemptions from that policy can also be decided by diktat. And since the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, has preemptively granted Trump immunity for breaking the law in any way that can even remotely be linked to “official acts” of the presidency, it’s not exactly a leap to see how favors could easily be channeled the Trump syndicate’s way as part of the boss’s “official actions” in negotiating the new regime of international tariffs.

All of this is exhausting, and we’re still the better part of two months out from Inauguration Day. Apart from Trump’s absurd desire to return US economic policy to 18th-century mercantilism and the bidding wars for high office, MAGA-man’s pre-Thanksgiving blitz of cabinet nominations gives every indication of tipping large and critical parts of the US government into perhaps terminal dysfunction. These include the Department of Health and Human Services, which now looks set to cannibalize its own public health assets just at the moment when avian flu is looming as the next pandemic threat—roughly one-third of California’s dairy farms are now reporting its presence amongst their herds, and the virus was recently found in raw milk sold in the state—and the EPA, which will be neutered just as Trump pulls the United States out of the Paris climate change agreements for the second time and when climate scientists estimate that global temperature increases will soon reach the point of no return. We are careening toward disaster here.