We Need A United Front To Take On Billionaire Rule

By Luis Feliz Leon, In These Times

President Donald Trump relishes deploying the ​“weave,” his vulgar stream-of-consciousness spiels in which his vengeful fantasies and antipathy towards a cast of enemies become punchlines in an insult-comic routine. His far-right former adviser Steve Bannon has termed the Trump administration’s psychological warfare approach ​“flooding the zone.”

​“Every day we hit them with three things,” Bannon told PBS’s Frontline in 2019. ​“They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

​“We want to put them in trauma,” said Russell T. Vought, Project 2025’s man in the Trump White House, who has returned to lead the Office of Management and Budget, in a 2023 speech. ​“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Since taking office, Trump and his effective co-president Elon Musk have mounted a frontal assault on workers through executive actions, aimed at rooting out disloyal workers in the federal workforce, illegally firing members of the National Labor Relations Board and and dismissing a member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and threatening to freeze funding for healthcare (especially gender-affirming care), education, transportation and other services, while also conducting immigration raids that have ensnared U.S. citizens and stoked fears of racial profiling.

Whatever you call it — a hostile takeover, a blitzkrieg — the effect is the same: overwhelm workers and befuddle the opposition as billionaires carry out a rolling coup. In terms of union organizing, you could liken the volleys of attacks from the Trump White House to bosses holding the country’s working class in a massive captive-audience meeting, using shock-and-awe tactics to divide us up.