The Trump Administration just celebrated one year of America being back. I’d like to reflect on that year, and what I expect in the three years remaining. The pursuit of victory over the other side at all costs has persisted in this administration, particularly in its use of force and the increasingly inescapable fact that when it comes to the judicial power of the current president, cruelty is the point. We’ve made it one year through the Donald Trump retribution tour and all signs point to the worst still being ahead of us.
Minneapolis
I had originally started writing this post about the cruelty of Trump 2.0 in early September but scrapped it in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. I returned to this post and its ideas because of the shooting in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. An American citizen was shot in the head by federal agents. You can argue about who did what incorrectly, and I will further on, but the basic fact of the matter is impervious to speculation. An American citizen was shot in the head by the agents sent into her city to protect her.
I’m not going to split hairs on what happens in the video, because if you’re reading this you’ve probably already seen it and formed your own opinion. What I will spend my time on is the blatant lying put out by President Trump and his administration before the sound of the gunshots had stopped ringing in anyone’s ears. The administration chose to escalate the situation with information they knew was untrue, and instead of addressing the issue as a stop gone wrong, chose to frame it as a protester attempting to run down ICE agents with her car. In other words, this administration responded with the same dishonest voracity they give to every other situation.
Minnesota
Cruelty is the brand of this administration but its vision is retribution. Trump has scores to settle with anyone who has run against him, pursued charges against him, turned coat, or looked at him funny. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Rep Ilhan Omar are high value targets, and the recent amping up of threats inside Minnesota have just been the latest in a long line of smear campaigns against any who’ve questioned the cyanide inside the MAGA kool-aid.
That’s why the Trump administration has pursued the idea of billions missing in a Somalian daycare fraud network cooked up by a conspiracy theorist YouTuber. It’s why Trump has decided that Somalians are now the largest threat to the country. It’s why ICE has been fixated on Minneapolis/St. Paul with the same intensity as the eye of Sauron on Minas Tirith. As with every Trumpian scheme, it is everyday people who are paying the price for the things he says that he knows are untrue.
Herein lies one of my biggest issues with the supporters of this administration; at what point do you acknowledge that telling the truth doesn’t matter?
Lying for Sport
It would be far easier to list the truths that come out of Trump or Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s mouths than the lies, because the later far outweigh the former. While I take issue with the lying itself, to me the more disturbing thing is how truculent they are in doing so. These people know they are lying, and they choose to continue doing so with a smile permanently etched into their face. They do so with an air of hostility at anyone who dares even consider disagreeing with the things both parties know are blatantly untrue.
The White House has made every attempt to discredit and disbar anyone who doesn’t swallow their drivel wholeheartedly. The administration accepts sycophants only in their media circle, and the American public is all the worse for it. You can swallow their dishonesty and stay in the circle or pursue the truth and be cast out of the golden gates.
It reminds me of an opportunity I had my first semester of college to “start my own business” with a painting company. There was a group interview, a one on one, and then the next step before the offer was made I had one task from the recruiter; to contact people from a personalized list of former participants. My spider senses kicked in immediately and I set out to do my own research instead. What I found was that this company was not popular among social media or the BBB. What they would do was underwrite a painting company with $20,000 of equipment and leave you on the hook for that as you did your own recruiting, marketing, and painting. In other words, it was just a hair’s breadth away from being a run of the mill MLM. The recruiter grew frustrated that I hadn’t talked to his sources and eventually I just walked away.
This administration feels a lot like that painting company. They instituted a rule of no outside sources within the five walls of Pentagon journalism and kicked out every outlet that wasn’t drunk on Trump juice. The aforementioned Press Secretary berates people who ask questions that probe or contradict whatever vile spews from her mouth. Truth doesn’t matter to these people, so much so that they’re not even trying to hide the fact that government websites are just propaganda factories now.
Jan 6
The President’s biggest and most famous lie, is of course the result of the 2020 election. Five years later he still hasn’t been held accountable for his deception, his indecency, and the violence they created. On the fifth anniversary of January 6th, I was flabbergasted to see the following posted by the official White House account:
There’s not even the slightest attempt to pretend like they’re spewing anothing but propaganda. People died and the president continues to profit off of the lies that ended their lives.
“The character of the leader defines the character of the movement.”
David French
You cannot have a leader so uncommitted to honesty and insistent on malice, and expect the movement to skew anywhere else but that direction. If there’s anything we’ve learned from MAGA’s hold on Christianity it’s that there are few values Christians aren’t willing to abandon for a morsel of political power. That includes the call to care for the poor, the downtrodden, and the sojourner. It is nowhere more evident than in the upscaled Immigration and Customs Enforcement division.
ICE
There’s been a lot of discussion since Charlie Kirk’s assassination about the rise of left wing violence for the first time in decades. Traditionally, political violence has been a tool of the right, but we’re starting to see an overall increase in political violence rising on both sides. The President and his allies have used this real data to create mythical shadow organizations, to instill fear, and to call their base to arms. My problem with this data isn’t that they’re tracking left wing extremism, which they absolutely should, but that state sponsored violence gets a pass in these data sets.
ICE violence is right wing violence, regardless of whether or not it’s state sponsored. The President, Vice President, and Homeland Security all know it, which is why ICE is targeting people prone to violent right wing rhetoric to join the cause. They’re recruiting people with minimal training, and offering them $50,000 cash if they’ll gear up. We’re breeding a homegrown terrorist organization in the name of deportation. I say terrorist organization because fear is the goal of ICE, not just to deport those who are here but to scare off those who might come after.
Terrorism
There are many, many liberals out there referring to ICE as the Gestapo, and they’re completely missing the point. Not only can a vast majority of these people not tell you what Weimar Germany is, but they fail to see ICE for that it really is. They aren’t some secret police out to steal political enemies in the middle of the night, they’re a masked group of vigilantes out to instill fear in the name of justice. Don’t call ICE the Gestapo, call them the Klan. Trump’s rhetoric mirrors Hitler’s on a great many levels, but the worst sources of inspiration within this administration are all home grown.
Our police officers don’t get to wear a mask, our soldiers overseas still have to wear a nametag, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement is uniformed for identification concealment. The Trump administration is breeding its own cadre of warpups and promising them riches in the Valhalla they’ll create by humiliating and eliminating minorities.
In the past year of Trump’s American we’ve seen ICE officers laughing at children they’ve zip tied and left naked in the street, we’ve seen wrongful deportations, people with legal status seized in courthouses and churches, guidelines that encourage racial profiling, and not the slightest increase in violent criminals being deported. America slips back into the open arms of Jim Crowe and it does so through the invisible empire of Christian nationalist armed forces.
The Administration of Cruelty
Cruelty is the point. It is most evident with the tactics and crimes of ICE, but it permeates through everything this administration does. You can see it in Trump’s words as he says “I hate my enemy.” You can hear it between the flared nostrils and pursed lips of Karoline Leavitt as she bashes the journalists and outlets who question their dishonest narratives. Being an asshole is the goal of this administration, and the cabinet is filled with cabinet members and secretaries no more mature than an internet troll.
It’s true that Trump did not create ICE. It’s true that the division was armed and removing illegal immigrants long before Trump was even on a ballot. The difference is that the number of violent criminals which Trump claims are ICE’s primary target has not increased despite massive spikes in ICE arrests and deportations. What has increased greatly are the number of wrongful arrests, deportations, and violent incidents. Terror has grown and this administration’s sense of victory grows with it.
Minnesota and the killing of Renee Good is just the tip of the iceberg. Arguments can be made whether she was right to pursue civil disobedience, but when the agent’s immediate response to danger is to shoot her in the head and call her a “fucking bitch”, the problems of empowering and arming these masked vigilantes have no grounds to be ignored.
Civil Disobedience
The irony of the “Don’t Tread on Me” party whose roots lie in the failed Tea Party of 2012 becoming the party of masked government agents is not lost on me. I’ve lived and grown up, worked and played, in mostly Conservative circles. I remember in 2020 working at a church being surrounded by rampant fears that COVID protocols were the first step in the government coming for the churches. In 2025, when the government did indeed come for the churches armed to the teeth and masked up, those same circles were silent.
The party of rightfully bearing arms in the name of opposing the government is startlingly in opposition to what practical second amendment rights are for. Churches, courthouses, and school rooms can be freely infiltrated or smashed with brute force if it’s in the name of hurting the illegals. The same party that tours Kyle Rittenhouse around the country wants you to believe that Renee Good deserved to be shot in the head for failing to comply with conflicting commands at a traffic stop.
Disobedience is the most American ideal perhaps of any since our founding. Its history is often brutal, as in the cases of the Sons of Liberty tarring and feathering tax collectors or John Brown raiding Harper’s Ferry. It can be militant like Malcom X or the Black Panthers, or it can be civil like Rosa Parks or the Dockum Drug Store. Often times even when that disobedience (civil or not) is right, it still comes with legal and judicial consequences. John Brown paid for his attempts to end slavery at the end of a noose. It’s nearly impossible to find a Civil Rights leader who wasn’t jailed at least once.
Our nation is one that loves to celebrate standing up to the law when we know it’s wrong, but illegal immigration is the fuel that keep Trump’s Fire alight. It brought him back to power, and with him in power the treasure chest is wide open for anyone looking to plunder. If there’s plunder to be had, then there is money to be made normalizing whatever idea Trump has Truth Socialed, and therein lies the rot that has corrupted not just the conservative movement of this country, but the nation as a whole.
The Money Problem
Ultimately Donald Trump will pass, his cabinet will either cannibalize itself in his lame duck era or fade when he no longer has coattails for them to ride. When that happens, the problems that elevated this administration will be no less present. Trump and MAGA are mere symptoms of a much more terminal illness that plagues this country; political profit motives. As long as money can be made by hating immigrants, by humiliating victims, and by living contrary to Christian charity; all of those behaviors will continue to be rewarded. When profit is the political incentive, that end will be justified by any means.
I am by no means an anti-Capitalist, but I am firmly against the de-regulated and unrestrained capitalism at the heart of MAGA and the Republican Party as a whole. It is a corrupt system, and it drags the world down with us as we give ourselves over to its excesses.
Venezuela
A recent example of these excesses comes with Trump’s takeover of Venezuela. There is no argument for former Venezuelan President Maduro being anything but a corrupt and barbaric leader. That said, the United States doesn’t have the legal or geo-political right to insert itself into regime change in any foreign nation. Think of it this way. If your next door neighbor was beating his children and you had hard evidence; is the appropriate thing to do to walk over, shoot him in the head, and assume patrician status of the family? No. You’d gather your evidence and call the police. Only when judge, jury, and executioner work in balance can justice be truly served.
The United States has tried intervention and regime change before, and it has always ended in American lives lost, billions in un-recouped expenditures, and failure. You need only look back to August ‘21 when the US left Afghanistan after two decades, only for the government to crumble and US military hardware to fall into terrorist hands. Imperialism, colonialism, puppet states, whatever you want to call them; our European allies learned long ago that they do not work. And they especially do not work when ulterior motives are in play.
We deposed the leader of an independent nation for access to their oil. As Trump’s tariff tantrums and self-regulation strategies continue to flush the economy down the toilet, he went with a Hail Mary. Oil executives were keyed into the Venezuela op before it occurred, and even as his cabinet lied about their motives, Trump was happy to express his corporate interest in Venezuelan oil. The argument back has been “well Russia and China are doing it.” Are we five? That excuse wouldn’t cover you at the age of five, so why should it excuse the nation now?
In the wake of his “success” with Venezuela, Trump has returned to his earlier desire for Greenland. The President of the United States threating military intervention against an ally is not something to joke about and the slippery slope that the Donroe doctrine leads down will cripple our global alliances and force us to either align with fascist regimes in Russia and China or throw us to the wolves.
In this interventionism, there is profit to be made and Donald Trumps needs a marketable win so he can keep selling non-existent Trump phones, raking in bribes from foreign governments, and renovating the White House into a Presidential Palace. Where there is profit to be made for the President, then there are profits to be made by the cronies and institutions that uphold him. This is nowhere easier analyzed than in the right wing media ecosystem.
Fair and Balanced
When will speaking truth become profitable? Probably never, as Fox News continues to be the most watched “news” channel in America. Conservative politics exists on the proposition that it is the underdog, a silent majority that is being pushed out of the public eye. I do believe their cry that there is a liberal bias among major news channels, but there is a critical difference between an institution having a bias and an institution created to maintain a partisan identity. The broadcast networks may have anchors or hosts with partisan slants, but the network corporations are still driven primarily by profit. Their allegiance is to shareholder value, not private interests with partisan goals.
Even the liberal institutions are forced to play ball with conservatives. NBC practically created the Trump brand and was instrumental in promoting him during the 2015-2016 election cycle. CBS is currently re-orienting itself into the Dollar General version of Fox News. ABC temporarily took Jimmy Kimmel off the air for quoting Trump’s own rhetoric back at him. The rot corrupts them all, but they are none as insidious as Fox News.
Fox News wasn’t formed just to make money, it was formed to make money by playing on the fears of conservatives. No other network has had to keep forcing out its prime time anchors at their rate either. Bill O’Reilly, Glen Beck, Tucker Carlson, all of them once the face of the network until dishonesty and sexual harassment ousted them. Even the big wig of the brand, Roger Ailes was ousted for similar reasons. How many golden eggs have to go rotten before you accept that something is wrong with the goose that keeps laying them? As long as the price of gold still sells, it doesn’t matter how rotten the embryo inside has become. When profit is the motive behind journalism, the standards and responsibilities of factual reporting and journalistic integrity will always come second. The sheep are leading the shepherd and Fox News isn’t the only thing corrupted by this kind of political profitization.
Fiscal and Political Populism
There is money to be made in supporting Donald Trump, but there is even more money to be made in exploiting the American people. In the unregulated gunslinger world of MAGA, the mines of Erabor are overflowing for any dragon looking to nest. Donald Trump ran for president in 2015 as a way to pull himself away from bankruptcy, he rules in 2026 with the intention to leave no financial opportunity behind.
He’s managed to get a private jet from the Saudi royal family. He’s sold only God knows how many Trump branded products that he’s happily hawked from the Presidential podium, and he’s happy to exchange financial opportunities to anyone who’ll help him consolidate and exercise power. That’s why bets were being made on Venezuelan oil right before President Maduró was captured. It’s why Trump allies in congress seem to have precognitive knowledge of when Trump chooses to exercise or recant tariffs on specific nations and corporations. It’s all a money game, and none have played it quite as profoundly as Donald Trump than Elon Musk.
D.O.G.E.
Elon Musk’s DOGE was a post-election promise that immolated upon itself in less than a year. Its fire burned hot and it burned fast, and while it destroyed much it also gave its mastermind unfettered and unlimited access to government records and information. Without even a whiff of oversight, Musk and his crack team of teenagers with names like “Big Balls” were allowed into every nook and cranny of the government. Conveniently they only seemed to find supposed waste in foreign aid and domestic programs. They didn’t find much if anything in any department that oversaw military spending with one of Musk’s companies, or any of those other pesky conflicts of interest. But they decided that supplying medication, food, water, and shelter to the nation and the world’s poorest was too much.
The good news is that even if they only ended up cutting a fraction of a percent of government expenditure, that Trump’s proposed 50% increase in Department of War spending will more than undo their hard work. It’s a shame there’s not some sort of religious figure or book warning of the dangers of serving a nation that values itself over its poor and downtrodden.
The Banking Klan
A couple weeks ago I read Ron Chernow’s The Death of the Banker about the decline of the banking elites in times past. One thing that stuck out to me in particular was Chernow’s commentary on the wayward behavior of the shareholder market compared to the smoke filled rooms of Morgans and Rothschilds. When banking was exclusively the sport of the most powerful, it was in certain regards more accountable for its product. A business’ value wasn’t derived from the gambling halls of the New York Stock Exchange, but from what it could produce. Bankers didn’t want the stock price to rise so they could get their $20 back, they wanted a stake in the company and for it to keep making money over their initial ROI. Bankers had more patience, and were influenced more by what they knew of the company rather than the whims of bull and bear markets.
The industrial economy was far from perfect, and robber barons did more than their share of plundering, but it was a system where value was measured in material gain not by market manipulation. One key feature of the banking system that did work was that corporations couldn’t form monopolies atop their own pool of capital. There was a fiscal separation of powers between banks that held the resources and corporations which had the capacity to use them. Corporations still tried and often did form monopolies, but they were hardly ever truly financial independent. There was a flawed system, but at least a balance of conflicting interests. That balance doesn’t exist anymore, and corporations are now drawn to cannibalizing themselves to achieve success. America used to be a country where things got made, now it’s a country where things are merely bought or sold; and we can all thank Thomas Edison.
General Electric
While Thomas Edison is best known for inventing the lightbulb and electrocuting elephants, his most generous contribution to Americana is the formation of General Electric. In Edison’s day and through much of the 20th Century, General Electric was a powerhouse in home appliances and equipment. That all changed, however, with a CEO by the name of Jack Welch.
Welch was one of the first CEOs to realize that company profitability had shifted as the industrial age gave way to the modern world. A company’s profitability wasn’t in what it could make, but in how it balanced its budget. Welch turned GE from a company that made quality appliances into a company that bought and sold subsidiaries, performed mass layoffs to shrink the budget, and prioritized making its profits appear greater than its losses. He started the hack and burn strategy of creating shareholder value and most industries have become the worse for it. Jack Welch ushered in an era of populism where it was best to appease the disinterested masses by gutting a company for its share price rather than for consumer good. The DOGE arm of the Trump administration has operated in that vein.
Like a Business
For years a mantra of the conservative wings of this country has been that “the government should be run like a business”. And if the government functioned like an entity that made goods and services to meet consumer needs, I’d be on board with that. Donald Trump runs the government just like Jack Welch ran GE, indiscriminate of what the country produces he seeks solely to increase his own stock within the market. It doesn’t matter that he’s stripped funding from Christian organizations, stifled the cash to AIDS research, or increased spending that separates children from families, because the populist shareholders that carried him to office care more about the appearance of winning than they do the actuality of the business.
We’re the Best
This administration’s attitude reminds me a lot of my time in a fraternity. Not just because a solid 60% of those guys definitely voted for Trump, but because the same arrogance in everything attitude pervaded it. When I joined Phi Delt we were legitimately the best house on campus. We had best grades almost every semester, members in student government and every club on campus, and we constantly won in competitions. By the time my pledge class was ready to graduate best grades were a fever dream, we had almost no on campus presence, and our reputation had diminished. To our credit we still brought home competition trophies. I don’t want to make it sound like those guys sucked, I was a part of that lack of campus presence too.
The problem wasn’t that we didn’t have guys capable of doing great things, it’s that we all became comfortable resting on those laurels. We became arrogant and the mantra of “we’re the best” was intoxicating long after it had been proven untrue. A year or two after I left when the house got in trouble, they didn’t have the standing or relationships to weather the storm very well. The chapter was cut in half and the inebriation of “we’re the best” came down with a crippling hangover.
Winning Bigly
I’m watching the country go through the same period of arrogance without standing. As the President continues to wage trade war after trade war, to pull us out of longstanding agreements, and to threaten Denmark and the EU with threat of invasion if they don’t hand over Greenland, America teeters on the brink of finding out what happens when the shots come back up the way they went down. We have a President not just adamant on showing the world our worst face, but of dropping his drawers and letting the world see the US ass first.
I’m afraid that the worst consequences of returning Trump to power won’t be seen during the remainder of his term, but in the fragile state he intends to leave both his country and world. It’ll be a world absent of US foreign aid that has stopped outbreaks, sustained famined populations, and incentivized peace where all roads lead to war. It’ll be a world where US allyship in trade, diplomacy, and war will be taken at the same value of the loyalty of Benedict Arnold. It’ll be a nation stripped of its guardrails and safety nets, adrift in a world that no longer views it as friend. A nation where ICE threatens not just illegals but “all of yours”, where media ecosystems serve no purpose save to dial up the tension. A nation where ceilings continue to rise while floors remain stagnant. It’ll be a nation where Trump and predators just like him needn’t bother with sheep’s clothes because their constituents have been trained to idolize the wolves. It’ll be a nation taught to value winning more than it values the kind of nation it chooses to be, where evil will be called good and good evil. It’ll be a nation grown from the seeds that are being sown now. And it’ll be a nation that claimed Jesus with its lips and denied Christian charity and virtue at every opportunity.
Collin Willis 