You Say You Want a Revolution!?!
Part I: The Doomed Fate of Donald Trump’s Second American Revolution
"We are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts ominously proclaimed last summer, sending Democrats frantically imploring everyone they knew to google his organization’s Project 2025. With the turning of the new year and the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency, Project 2025 has gone from an aspirational framework of future action to a living document guiding the reckless trajectory of our country. No one, not even Donald Trump, has played a larger role in making Project 2025 a reality than Elon Musk. When asked on X if his DOGE hackers’ infiltration into the gears of the federal government amounted to a Second American Revolution, Musk replied emphatically “Yes. And much needed.”
Judging from the unchecked glee on the right and a growing panic on the left, we can justifiably call the first month of the second Trump presidency revolutionary. If we compare the goals of 1776 to 2025, it would be more accurate to classify this movement led by Trump and Musk as a counterrevolution against the aspirations of our Founding Fathers. While John Adams fought for “a Government of laws, not of men,” Trump declared on February 15th, “He who saves the country does not violate any law.” While George Washington said, “The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon,” MAGA diehards are exalting Trump as “the living Constitution” who can do no wrong. While Thomas Jefferson stated in the Declaration of Independence that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” Trump has willingly turned over the keys of unprecedented power to Musk, a foreign-born agitator running roughshod over the actions of Congress despite never winning an election or even running for office. No one consented to be governed by Elon Musk. While Thomas Paine maintained, “Law is king,” Trump and Musk are both spoiled princely children of wealth governing like tyrants without any respect for law, attempting to revolutionize our country along autocratic lines that would be much more pleasing to the likes of George III than to any of our Founding Fathers.
MAGA Patriots of 2025 working to dismantle the democracy created by the Colonial Patriots of 1776 is not the only contradiction lurking within this second revolutionary moment in American History. As we will see, both the right and left wing of this country will find themselves mired in contradictions that prevent either side from winning a political standoff if this revolution reaches a stage when it can no longer remain bloodless.
Austerity and Autocracy Don’t Mix
Autocracy is not an operation that can be done on the cheap. To cement their grip on power and maintain legitimacy in the eyes of a critical mass of people, autocrats must spend lavishly to achieve military triumphs, build stunning monuments, construct feats of infrastructural engineering, and give their subjects the bread and circus perks needed to keep them docile. Hitler grudgingly offered generous social welfare programs to Aryan Germans and oversaw massive public works projects like the construction of the Autobahn. Mussolini, as the saying goes, made the trains run on time. The Soviet premiers pushed Russia from an impoverished, “orientalized” backwater to become the first country to launch a human into outer space. Louisiana Governor and Senator Huey Long, supposedly the closest thing we’ve seen to a dictator on American soil, secured the loyalty of Depression Era Louisianans by building out the state road system, giving away free books to all school children, and initiating monumental building projects at the State Capitol of Baton Rouge and on the campus of LSU. Dictators on both the left and right have used many tools to gain control over their subjects, but austerity (the combination of cuts in public spending and the raising of taxes) has never been one of them.
Unfortunately for Donald Trump, his entire Second American Revolution is doomed by two contradictory goals: (1) seizing autocratic control of the government; while (2) recklessly cutting public spending on social services and gutting administrative oversight in health, transportation, and education. Crashing planes, canceled government contracts, frozen government websites and pediatric measles outbreaks are not the kind of “deliverables” subjects want to see from their aspiring dictator. Mass layoffs of hundreds of thousands of government employees combined with AI-driven white collar cuts by Trump’s oligarch tech buddies in the private sector will not create the kind of economic momentum autocrats need to legitimize their grip on power. Neither will $7.50 for a dozen eggs when your campaign was based on having a magic cure for inflation. Trump hasn’t even been able to bring about a Golden Age to those who hoped the post-election Trump Bump in stocks and crypto was just a preview of riches to come. Anyone who invested in the $TRUMP meme coin or its parent chain Solana has endured devastating losses since Inauguration Day. Scamming your most devoted followers has never been part of the successful autocrat playbook. Autocrats flourish when they bring plenty, order, and clarity to the people. One month of Trump has brought us mainly austerity, chaos, and confusion.
DOGErs for Tax Dodgers
Of course Trump and his MAGA faithful will claim it’s too early to expect the fruits of this Second American Revolution to ripen. They’ll gladly blame the previous administration for DEI-induced plane crashes and persistent “Bidenflation.” The grand conceit underlying Elon and DOGE’s cost-cutting, contract canceling and bureaucratic firing is the promise that once these “fraudulent” uses of government funds are shut down, tax dollars will be returned to the people. When Russ Vought took over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and announced the agency had $711 million available, Musk tweeted, “That money should be returned to taxpayers.” Never mind that when you crunch the numbers, this payout provides around $2 per citizen, not exactly a windfall for those who will now be more vulnerable to financial scammers looking to drain their life savings.
The devil is in the details and there are no more damning details than in the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts proposed by the House GOP, a staggering increase in the national debt dwarfing DOGE’s $55 billion in “taxpayer savings.” DOGE’s rampant, illegal cost cutting will not go to balancing the budget, curbing inflation, or putting money back in the pocket of the average family, it will go toward lightening the tax burden of the wealthiest Americans. For Trump, Musk, and all the other billionaires spearheading this Second American Revolution it is a case of austerity for thee and not for me. Cutting rather than raising taxes on the rich will place even more pressure on eliminating government spending to advance the cause of fiscal austerity. Average Americans will see their public services, their infrastructure, their healthcare, and their personal financial position continue to erode. A citizenry stricken by ever-worsening financial precarity isn't exactly a firm foundation for Trump and Musk to build their Thousand Year American Reich upon.
The Deep State Strikes Back
The one thing we can be sure Project 2025 and the DOGE-led cuts will lead to is an unprecedented thinning of the ranks of federal employees. This fulfills the dream of conservatives who regard federal employees as a subversive Deep State standing in the way of the interests of the American people. MAGA’s euthanasia of the administrative state may result in an ironic twist, a self-fulfilling prophecy that casts hundreds of thousands of highly-educated, aggrieved bureaucrats out into the wilderness, vulnerable to become the radicals that the GOP erroneously believed they were while working their boring government office jobs. Under their terms of employment and the Hatch Act, federal workers are banned from overtly partisan political activity. If anything, the government agencies currently being dismantled by DOGE acted as shock absorbers, channeling the energy of politically-minded intellectuals whose jobs gave them a vested interest in maintaining a bureaucratic status quo rather than agitating for radical change. Now, having been callously and suddenly fired, these supposed Deep State operatives are free to actively and aggressively challenge the regime that kicked them to the curb. If there is one thing that poses a threat to aspiring autocrats, it is masses of over-educated, underemployed intellectuals with too much time on their hands and a score to settle with those in power.
Offering little to improve life for the general population while creating enemies to the regime by the hundreds of thousands, there is little doubt that Trump’s Second American Revolution will fail. But Trump’s doomed revolution should not make the Democrats comfortable or complacent. Failed revolutions can inflict just as much suffering as successful ones. A failed revolution unleashes frustration and chaos, potentially mutating the movement into something more hideous than its original form. Will the Democrats position themselves to capitalize on the inevitable disappointment that millions of Trump voters will feel when they realize they are the victims rather than the beneficiaries of his Second Revolution? Or will Democrats indulge in the smug schadenfreude of watching Trump voters get what they have coming to them? Will the Democrats tap into the righteous rage of fired civil servants to push for an even more perfect union where all Americans have guaranteed healthcare, guaranteed employment, and a distribution of wealth that is compatible with democracy? Or will they simply promise to give federal workers their jobs back as part of an effort to rebuild the status quo ante of Washington bureaucracy? We will answer these questions and more in Part II of You Say You Want a Revolution!?!
Trump could never find that sort of uniform to fit him.