Trumpism is a Death Cult

At its core, Trumpism is a death cult — no more, no less.

For a movement powered by evangelicals, it is ironically Darwinistic. The fittest and the richest will survive. Everyone else goes into the wood chipper.

More than 300,000 people have died thanks to Donald Trump’s decision to cut funding for USAID and other foreign and domestic programs — more than 200,000 of them children. That amounts to 103 deaths per hour.

He’s only been back in the White House for four months.

And this is all happening as Trump and his fellow death cultists in Congress work to slash Medicaid and Medicare by billions of dollars, leading to the closures of hospitals, depriving millions of elderly, disabled and poor people of healthcare and leading to much higher mortality rates.

They are also slashing food assistance by billions of dollars, which will lead to higher mortality rates, developmental delays for children and adverse health consequences for those children in adulthood.

Republican Senator Joni Ernst was confronted about this at a town hall meeting in Iowa yesterday. When her constituents told her that “people are going to die” as a result of these cuts, Ernst responded, “Well, we all are going to die.”

As I said, death cult.

Like any cult, Trumpism demands total obeisance to its authoritarian leader, thought control and indoctrination and an absolute, unquestionable belief system. All those constituents you used to worry about, Senator Ernst? Their well-being is irrelevant now, as long as Trump wants something done. After all, “we are all going to die.”

Ernst, of course, expects to die in ripe old age, because she, like Trump, has access to the very best care in the world. If she has a cough, the Attending Physician of Congress will be on call to treat it. If it’s something more serious, the very best doctors at Walter Reed will see her immediately. Her taxpayer funded healthcare insurance means that she will pay for almost none of it. The same goes for Trump and Marco Rubio, who has overseen this literal bloodbath abroad.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is busy waging his war on medicine, even in the face of a growing pandemic. The administration has canceled a contract with Moderna to develop a vaccine against the bird flu. Had it gone forward, the government would have purchased doses ahead of the pandemic. This, along with his refusal to do anything to stop the measles epidemic that has spread through parts of the country, his battle against COVID vaccinations and his purging of tens of thousands of HSS employees whose mission was to fight for public health will lead to unnecessary sickness and death.

It has even become terribly dangerous to bear children in the United States, despite the strange protonatalism movement pushed by people like Musk. Musk’s many baby mamas are not the ones forced to carry a fetus to term even as they lie in a hospital on life support. That fate is left to a less well-connected person, a woman named Adriana Smith. Smith has been brain dead since she was eight weeks pregnant but is kept on life support as an incubator for the fetus until the state decides her time is up — but only after the fetus is viable enough for the state to order doctors to cut it out of her. Her family has had no say in this but it is still forced to pick up the tab to keep her on life support because the state mandates it. Her mother is consigned to running a fundraiser to pay for her hospital bills and for the care of her son, who, if he survives, may face serious lifelong disabilities.

Only a death cult would treat a woman’s body as state property.

Yes, we are all going to die one day, as Ernst reminds us. But no one should die prematurely because that person was denied life saving medicine or because draconian anti-abortion laws prevent doctors from doing everything they can to save a woman’s life. Yet, that is what is happening right now as the United States becomes a nation that venerates death, so long as Trump, Musk and their other millionaire buddies get a massive tax break.

Cut through the noise that Trump throws our way every hour of every day and look at what he is really selling. Death, in all its dark glory.

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Further Reading:

Impact Counter: Impact Metrics Dashboard

The New England Journal of Medicine: Loss of Subsidized Drug Coverage and Mortality among Medicare Beneficiaries

National Institutes of Health: The Effect Of The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program On Mortality

UnidosUs: Children under attack: How congressional assaults on health and food programs are endangering the youngest Americans

Northwestern University: SNAP shields kids from future heart disease risks, study finds

The New York Times: U.S. Cancels Contract With Moderna to Develop Bird Flu Vaccine

NPR: They say they want Americans to have more babies. What's beneath the surface?

The Guardian: Fetus of brain-dead Georgia woman kept alive due to abortion ban is growing, says family