Trump Is Ripping Off America And Calling It “Anti-Woke”

The Trump team has hit on what it thinks is a winning formula: every time it wants to rip Americans’ health care away or let a predatory corporation off the hook, it just says it’s fighting “wokeness” or “DEI.” It’s lazy, cynical stuff.

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

One month in, the basic gambit of the second Trump administration seems to be that it thinks you’re stupid.

Donald Trump’s team seems convinced it can ignore the long-standing problems that have made normal life insecure or impossible for average people in the United States — even that it can make those problem worse and create whole new ones — and that you won’t notice it’s doing so if it carries out the political equivalent of jangling keys in front of a baby.

It thinks it can cut regulations that stop corporations from preying on Americans or endangering them by cutting corners; as long as it says it was “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or “critical race theory” (CRT), you’ll nod along gamely. It thinks that as long as it shouts “wokeness,” it can take your health care away, put you out of a job, and turn a blind eye to predatory firms price gouging you, and you won’t realize you’re being screwed over — that you’ll be happy about it, in fact.

Look at US air travel. Earlier this week, Trump — or, technically, DOGE, his “Department of Governmental Efficiency” — purged nearly three hundred personnel from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), which does the invisible but vital work that ensures you don’t have to worry about dying when you fly somewhere.

He did this even though there have now been four US plane crashes in the month since he took office, including the deadliest aircraft crash in twenty years and one just this week, when a Delta plane that took off from Minneapolis flipped upside down upon landing in Toronto, mere hours after Trump’s purge of FAA workers. We’re still waiting to find out exactly what caused that incident, but it’s inarguable that one of the underlying issues in the spate of major plane accidents we’ve seen the past few years is both regulatory capture by the airline industry and chronic understaffing in aviation, something Trump’s reckless FAA purge is going to make worse.