The battle brewing inside Trump’s fascist clown car

Trump’s for daylight savings. Trump’s against daylight savings. Trump’s against mail ballots. Trump’s for mail ballots. Trump’s against Electric Vehicles. Trump’s for Electric Vehicles. Trump’s for ending abortion. Trump’s for leaving it to the states. Trump created a beautiful vaccine. Trump’s against vaccines.

His Department of Government Efficiency (nicknamed by a clever wag Department of Oligarchs Getting Everything) will immediately trim 3 trillion dollars from the federal budget…or maybe 2 trillion, or maybe half a billion, which, by the way, would involve cutting student loans, Medicaid, food stamps, and federal workers’ pay. And oh yeah maybe some waste and fraud, too.

Some of this is just Trump’s endless whining. But it’s more than this, and it is important to understand how fascism ascends and maintains power: through spectacle, not policy. Nothing Trump commits to as a matter of policy means a damn thing, and never will—other than the goal of consolidation of capital and power in the search of profits.

Like totalitarians everywhere, Trump has systematically undermined the independence of the courts through intimidation and packing them with sycophants. Like all fascists, he bullies and humiliates the legislative branch of government, with the goal of making it irrelevant. He will threaten and even jail elements of the press who expose his and his cronies profiteering and personal degeneracy.

Bloodsuckers and Criminals

But layered over the consolidation of power and repression of popular movements is obfuscation, constant chaos, and a revolving clown show of bloodsuckers and criminals, clamoring for attention and favor.

Those of us who grew up watching war movies of goose-stepping Nazi soldiers and old newsreels of tens of thousands of Germans screaming for the blood of the Jews may still think of fascist movements as a unitary, disciplined social phenomena. Everyone is blond and square-jawed (at least the boys).

But fascist movements are not like that. David Broder in his book Mussolini’s Grandchildren delineates the conflicting trends in Italian Fascism, then and now: “eclectic ideological references, strategic outlooks and forms of activity, not to mention local particularities.” These include skinhead soccer thugs, anti-LBGTQ and anti-abortion fanatics, traditional anti-Semites, and even left fascists (or “roast-beef Nazis”) who wanted to socialize the means of production (lifted from Marx), and those who promoted an anti-neoliberal “communitarian” economic model.

Hitler’s murderous assault on his loyal SA stormtrooper brownshirts and other factions of the Nazi party in 1934 was another example: the Night of the Long Knives, which assassinated scores of Nazi leaders and arrested perhaps a thousand. The SA was useful to battle communists in the streets, but entertained notions of a redistribution of wealth, and had to be brought to heel so Hitler could consolidate the Prussian elites of the German military.

Musk and Bannon: Silicon Psychos and Pseudo-Proletarians

Some of the factional battles of the fascist swamp creatures do actually matter, not so much as policy disputes but as conflicts between elements of the fascist social base. At some point some choices may need to be made.

In the main ring, the bell sounds and the Silicon Psychos circle the Pseudo-Proletarians.

Musk and his crew are beyond what Minnesota Governor Walz called “weird”; they have moved on to bizarre. They truly believe they are an intellectual and even physical elite, a race above the rest of us, as coded in their DNA. Musk, with 11 or 12 or maybe 13 children by three wives and other blessed recipients of that DNA, uses them as props in the Oval Office, and has been described by a daughter as “cold,” “uncaring,” and “narcissistic.” He has been described by friends (and Bannon) as a sociopath, and as a “transhuman,” that is, someone who has the goal of “eternal life,”—in a physical, not spiritual sense. His co-parents have begged him to pay just a tiny bit of help and attention to his spawn.

Having survived as a failed businessman off of California state subsidies to rescue Tesla, he moved on to $38 billion dollars of government contracts. His DOGE crew dismantles anything that might regulate his brilliance. As someone who has run typical corporate dictatorships, he applies the same blunt force trauma to government, and his super-race self to governance, and revels in the glorious cruelty of it all.

One of my children lost employment this year due to a corporate buy-out and was given 36 hours to accept a new job with no idea of the responsibilities of benefits that came with that offer. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric where I worked for decades, bragged about firing the “low performing” 10% of his employees every year. This is what it means to “run the government like a business,” with all its cruelty and yes, inefficiencies. Make the government a plaything of dictators, without regard to merit.

In the other corner are the Pseudo Proletarians led by Steve Bannon. Bannon is like the HR people who sit across from the union and tell you again and again about how they came from ten generations of coal miners. He neglects to mention his time at Goldman Sachs, and believes that you look a lot more working class if you haven’t showered in a month. He stole from a phony fund to which some willing fools donated their hard-earned dollars to build a border wall–which makes him a convicted criminal alongside Trump.

Musk bought his influence with $270 million of campaign lies about immigrants and trans folks, who have apparently moved a notch above gays and lesbians as a mortal threat to the workers. That’s the kind of moral exchange that Trump understands and is unlikely to want to jettison. Besides, Trump just gets off on power and money. In the short run, Musk will do untold damage. But Musk also has already become a lighting rod for resistance. People are actually more interested in counseling and health care for veterans and Medicaid, than in sending a billionaire on a tourist trip to Mars.

Bannon, on the other hand, represents an Ivy League cohort with an actual strategy to gain and maintain power and wealth. His blue-collar bullshit, along with that of his less clever co-thinkers like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and the clumsy Vice President Vance, will have more staying power. Hawley has even earned nervous criticism from the anti-union rat contractors Association of Building Contractors and the Right to Work Foundation for supporting things like mandatory contract arbitration. If you underestimate this, you have not listened to Bannon rant about “capitalists who always try to suppress wages.” He is harder on billionaires than most Democrats.

If, as I have argued before, the fight against fascism is essentially a fight for the working class, Bannon is the bigger problem.

Even for a sociopath like Musk, with zero capacity for self-reflection, attacking “capitalists” would be a bit of a stretch. If, as I have argued before, the fight against fascism is essentially a fight for the working class, Bannon is the bigger problem. Although Trump won the popular vote by 1.2% he acts as though he won with 90% of the vote. To consolidate sustainable control, he will need a strong social base in the working class majority. And resistance to Trump from more elite sections of society, from the other Tech Bros to the Washington Post to the ephemeral reasonable Republicans, has collapsed. Bannon offers a path to this working class base–Musk does not.

I am using here a broad and I think accurate definition of the working class as defined by “power–power at work and power in the larger society, rooted in our role in the production of goods and services, “in terms of relations to others.” Michael Zweig, in his definitive book The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, figures this comes to about 62% of us, despite all the changes in the types of work people do.

On Friday nights, if I am not busy with essential activities like going to a meeting or hanging out on the couch with my wife watching reruns of “Homicide” or “Call the Midwife,” I catch a beer with an old friend and fellow union guy named Fuzzy at a local bar, the Lido. We review the state of the world and get ready for the next round. “All Trump cares about is money,” says the Friday night Muse. “None of the rest of it means anything.”

Fuzzy is right, or maybe it’s money and the power that brings more money. The throughline beneath the Trump royal court conflicts, both serious and ridiculous, is power and money, and various strands of virulent white supremacy and patriarchy that will get them there. All the rest is fluff and distraction.

The good news is there is a united front building which can defeat the Silicon Psychos and the Pseudo Proletarians both. But that is for another column.

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Originally ran on Liberation Road Notes