The Marx and Engels of the MAGA revolution.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
Much of the nihilistic destructiveness and rage unleashed by the second Trump administration has been understandably attributed to the intense and wide-ranging grievances of the 47th president. Donald Trump’s unlikely comeback from the failed post-election coup of 2021 was fueled by his determination to settle scores with the many individuals and institutions that had thwarted him as president and pursued him in the courts and in the media as ex-president.
But while it’s no surprise that some of Trump’s closest associates share his thirst for vengeance and desire to gloat over the supine figures of their vanquished enemies, there’s something deeply personal about the entire MAGA drive to destabilize the country that cannot really be explained by vicarious enjoyment of Trump’s comeuppance of his detractors. The targets of his veritable explosion of executive actions are much broader than any identifiable group of Democratic or Establishment Republican activists, or anyone complicit in the alleged “stolen election” of 2020 or the alleged legal persecutions of 2023 and 2024. And there’s a growing suspicion that an entire class of Americans is being targeted for political, cultural, and perhaps economic extinction as part of Trump’s vengeance tour, as Franklin Foer discussed in The Atlantic:
The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy. It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age.
In other words, there’s a pattern that connects the attacks on funding of university-based research, the shakedowns of white-shoe law firms, the ongoing threats to non-MAGA media, the effort to control corporate HR policies, the crackdown on inconvenient sources of data, and above all, the furious Elon Musk–Russell Vought assault on the federal employees and contractors. Indeed, the characteristic lawlessness of Trump 2.0 and the wild extremist rhetoric accompanying many of its actions is more consistent with a project of class warfare than any merely partisan or ideological agenda.
It’s no secret, of course, that there’s a long and terrible tradition in right-wing authoritarian politics of intense hostility to allegedly self-serving and disloyal “elites” that have to be demolished so that a given nation, race, or culture can thrive. In early 20th-century Europe, financial, academic, professional, and bureaucratic elements — which were thought to be disproportionately Jewish and “cosmopolitan” — were treated as the incorrigible enemy of truly productive capitalists, workers, and peasants alike. Thus they had to be crushed by any available means, legal or extralegal. And as Foer observes, there’s a less lethal but still distinctive U.S. conservative tradition of animosity toward the so-called PMC, often described as creating a government-dependent underclass in an unholy alliance of parasites feeding off the work of productive and patriotic Americans. That sort of thinking has gone viral in Trump 2.0:
Animosity to the PMC is a propulsive force in Trump’s second term. Rather than merely replacing its ideological foes—by installing its own appointees in federal agencies—the administration is bent on destroying their institutional homes, and the basis for their livelihood. That’s the lesson of the Department of Government Efficiency.
What gave this anti-elitism a lot of its political oomph is the working-class sense of betrayal at the financial experts’ bungling of the U.S. economy early in the 21st century, and the scientific experts’ overreach during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s not just elite-hating working stiffs who have made Trump’s enemies their own and turned his vengeance into a full-blown political agenda. There are Trump’s billionaire backers who see a heaven-sent opportunity to disable the bureaucratic restraints on their own wealth and power. And there are the technocratic engineers who view bureaucratic desk jockeys as useless cannon fodder in the coming transformation of all work by AI, notes Foer:
Elon Musk, for one, adopted a … disdain for the PMC as a business plan. When he took over Twitter in 2022, he laid off 80 percent of the workforce, including the Trust and Safety Council and a chunk of the company’s content moderators. As the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez put it, Musk was taking a stand against “the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise elsewhere dominates.” Not only did he treat this caste with disdain; he implied that it was doomed to the dustbin of history, because its members’ functions could be so easily subsumed by artificial intelligence. A shared hatred of the PMC drew Musk to Trump, and the Twitter purge foreshadowed Musk’s approach in government.
Closely connected to the Trump-Musk class war on pencil-pushers is the administration’s economic plans, focused currently on a tariff agenda designed to shift America’s productive center from services and “knowledge” products back to manufacturing. In many of the not-so-far reaches of MAGA-land, there is also envisioned a concomitant reallocation of human resources from the public sector, academia, and the media to factory work for men and domestic occupations for women. Some alarmed observers have compared the whole scheme to Mao’s infamous campaign to force students and other intellectuals to work on farms and in factories during China’s Cultural Revolution. Then as now the driving force was the belief that an entire class of citizens was inherently disloyal and engaged in work inimical to the regime’s radical goals. If it’s true or even half-true, it helps explain the peculiar savagery of Trump 2.0 and its disdain for both structural limitations on its power and for any downside consequences of poorly executed actions. As in a Marxist revolution, virtue is found in the class struggle itself.
What’s most worrying about this interpretation of events is that it doesn’t suggest there will be any self-correcting process for restraining MAGA excesses. A 78-year-old narcissist in the final stage of life aligned with a band of self-conscious revolutionaries seeking in their own fevered minds to save civilization are not going to be deterred much by public-opinion polls, midterm elections, or perhaps even court rulings. This is a very personal fight against people whose opposition to American Greatness cannot be tolerated for long.
