| Image by Elaine J.E. Degale
Quietude of thoughts, a privilege of the ordinary, is a distant memory in Trump 2.0. I am fascinated by the happy lives of those afforded the great opportunity to refuse to cultivate their intellect and regard them with great envy, for they could afford the silence orchestrated by the current administration. What stroke of irony has allowed a country like the United States, which has more incarcerated people per capita than any country in the world, to allow its most powerful felon to walk free and assume a second term in the presidency? As Colin Jost said in SNL last week, “Trump has been president for 82 days, and it feels like a decade.”
If I was never concerned with progress and the uplift of my people who have been historically deprived of the elite ascriptions in the globalized world, I would have submitted to the cultural norms demanded by my conservative Filipino upbringing, found a mediocre American man with money, and bore him just enough children to demand the necessity of needing hired help. With my katulong or maid, I would have cruised through life knowing nothing and being nothing. I would bear a toothy, white, gummy smile in every picture without considering anyone else’s world, unless they exist to serve my own ego.
I would be free in the way I’ve been conditioned to think of freedom.
Filipinos fought for freedom for 431 years. The U.S. crowned itself champion of democracy, yet simultaneously colonized the Philippines after “liberating” it from Spain in 1898. That occupation ended in 1946, but the American hand never left the puppet strings. After 431 years of fighting for freedom, Filipinos handed over former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte to the ICC so that Western nations can condemn strongmen abroad while electing their own at home. That’s not a double standard—it’s a double helix of hypocrisy encoded in the DNA of Western democracy.
The United States justifies foreign interventions in the name of “democracy,” yet gives supreme reign to a man who brazenly tried to overturn an election, holding a dagger to democracy’s throat, and leading his minions to vandalize the Capitol under the fallacy of Making America Great Again. America’s obsession with Trump is not rational. It idealizes his life as a tall, wealthy white man with a supermodel trophy wife. Never mind that the first lady can’t be her best around him – she can’t stand him.
But such are the freedoms we sacrifice when a golden toilet and billions of dollars are at stake.
Similarly, Ivy League universities see their freedoms assaulted with every stroke of his frumpy pen. At the height of the pandemic, I began to recognize a neoconservative agenda taking root in the Ivy League curriculum. I wrote numerous emails to my advisors, fellow students, and campus leadership, asking, “What is happening to our home?” My most significant concern was my observation of pseudoscience research being validated as academic truth. I was told that within the purview of “academic freedom,” research similar to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Culture of Poverty has space in the Ivy League for expression. And when I complained, my concerns were dismissed as alarmist, reactionary, and vindictive. I was encouraged to be silent. I last told the administration that “colleges are places of state capture”. Alas, this was five years ago, when we were all imprisoned by a virus that learned virulence in a laboratory.
My alma mater gambled away the freedom of every single Ivy League school when they arrested Mahmoud Khalil to secure 400 million dollars from the current authoritarian regime. The current battle between the Trump administration and Harvard University is a reckoning on the longstanding tradition in society writ large that has commodified values like truth, freedom, and democracy. And while the battle between the Trump administration and the wealthiest university in the United States is a moral contention over $2bn, the ideological fabric and mores of the democracy that Americans flaunt to the world has been stained by the agonizing psychological warfare that has succeeded in convincing Americans that being anti-war somehow equates to antisemitism.
“The neoconservative ideology, born from disillusioned liberals who traded moral conviction for capital gains, believes in American power through military might, privatization, and the slow erosion of public services. In Trump’s version, it’s militarized austerity: less money for education, more tanks on the streets; fewer Pell Grants, more Pentagon contracts.”
Innocent Palestinian people are not the same as the internationally funded Hamas group, sustaining the war. NBC News reports that “much of Hamas’ money is public and legal, including large sums of financial aid from Qatar via the United Nations, an arrangement encouraged and approved by Israel.” It’s a shame that as a society, we are funding the side of the war that has impoverished, mangled, and annihilated the impoverished 80% of Palestinians in Gaza while enriching Hamas leaders at a rate of as high as $500 million for each year that the war is in full sway.
Much like COVID, wars would never end because there is just too much money for us to make. In 1935, Smedley D. Butler, a United States Marine Corps major general who oversaw U.S. imperialist conquest in the Philippines, famously wrote a speech called War Is a Racket, which explains that war is a global business venture disguised as patriotism. In it, he says war exists to enrich a powerful few at the expense of others. This ruthlessly utilitarian approach to politics and wealth accumulation is very much aligned with Trump’s neoconservative agenda today.
The neoconservative ideology, born from disillusioned liberals who traded moral conviction for capital gains, believes in American power through military might, privatization, and the slow erosion of public services. In Trump’s version, it’s militarized austerity: less money for education, more tanks on the streets; fewer Pell Grants, more Pentagon contracts. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. spent $916 billion on military expenditures in 2023, accounting for 68 percent of total NATO military spending. And while Congress can’t agree on student debt relief or universal healthcare, they sure can agree on war.
Let’s call it what it is: organized crime.
The moment a few more dollars than anticipated are siphoned off to some social program that empowers single women living outside the prescriptions of the nuclear family, American capitalism suddenly needs an emergency operation—a revitalization of for-profit mechanisms that excise the social good aspects of our democracy that have the nerve to uplift the poor.
It is no coincidence that the recent onslaught against Harvard shortly occurred after they announced that tuition would be free for undergraduate students from families with annual incomes of $200,000 or less. The Trump administration’s assault on higher education is completely un-American because the most significant American exports are higher education and Hollywood.
So why is Trump still palatable? Because Trump is not the disease. He is the symptom. The cancer began long ago—some say with Nixon, others say Reagan. But I say 1619, the moment the first enslaved Africans were brought to colonial Virginia. The American experiment was always a paradox—liberty for some, chains for others. Trump is merely its most grotesque iteration.
It is what democracy looks like when it’s gutted, bought, and sold to the highest bidder.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elaine Joy Edaya Degale is a Black-Filipina writer and lecturer at community colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY) and has an Ed.M. and M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.
She graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, where she studied International Relations and Development, and continues to support literacy and food programming efforts in Indigenous communities through her Community-Based organization, OperationMerienda.org.
