They Want to Break Us

Trump may think he can consolidate his power by making us poorer, more powerless and silent. It won't work.

Americans are rejecting the destruction of liberty. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

Donald Trump’s trade advisor, Peter Navarro, promised 90 trade deals in 90 days. His boss insisted his administration’s tariff policies would make America “very rich again, very soon.” Now—as leaders around the world are refusing to do business with a madman—Trump’s saying the deals don’t matter. He’s telling parents they should plan on giving their children two dolls, not 30, and paying more for each one. While he’s loaded up the Oval Office with his gaudy gold knick-knacks, he’s now the voice of frugality and advocate of austerity. Five pencils for the kids, he weirdly proposes, not 250.

As the economic downward spiral beckons, Donald Trump, referred to by some now as Donny 2 Dolls, is spinning out a series of lies. The price of groceries are way down, he says with a straight face, while the government’s food and drug report noted that the price of eggs, beef, poultry and nonalcoholic beverages all rose in March.

Trump insisted last month that egg prices had dropped 87 percent, a real whopper of a lie, since the retail price of a dozen eggs hit a whopping $6.23 in March, up from the previous record of $5.90 in February. Said Trump, congratulating himself over the pretend price drop at the White House Easter egg hunt, “So we did a great job.” Guess who’s likely never stepped foot in a grocery store.

The lies, the chaos, the shifting positions and uncertainty—all this might seem like the Mad Hatter doesn’t know what he really wants or how to deliver it. Yes, we can take strength from the fact that Trump’s abject failure at helping bring down prices and managing the economy will cause more Americans to turn against him. Even some of his own voters are finally grasping the foolishness of his tariff policies and his unnecessary infliction of pain.

But allow me to suggest that we can cut through the subterfuge and the distractions to clearly see his goal. He wants to break us. He wants us powerless. He wants us afraid to speak out. He wants us to be like the vendors he’s stiffed who never got paid fairly—or at all—for what they did. There’s a reason why he wants to hide the history of slavery—and his white nationalist racism is only part of it.

This became clearer to me with two comments from Howard Lutnick, the sycophantic billionaire and Commerce Secretary, who has been running as fast as he can to justify Trump’s trade policies and the dismantling of the social safety net system. In March, he addressed Americans who would dare to question their mishandling of the Social Security payment system.

“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain,” Lutnick said a little over a month ago. “She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.” As for those who would speak up? They obviously can’t be trusted. “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” he said.

A passive and silent public sounds good to Lutnick (whose 94-year-old mother-in-law is not about to end up on the street if she doesn’t get her Social Security check). He elaborated his warped viewpoint by explaining how great it would be when Americans can no longer rely on Chinese workers to produce their products at cheap prices. In this picture, the manufacturing has all returned to America and American workers can land “the great jobs of the future,” he said last week.

Sounds good, right? Not really. This is what appeals to the guy ostensibly in charge of securing the nation’s prosperity: “This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here.”

In other words, so much for social and economic mobility. So much for greater control over your life and the opportunity to make your own free decisions. Sounds a lot like Medieval Europe and serfdom, where you were bound to a plot of land by birth—or enslavement.

I’ve been reading Been in the Storm So Long, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the aftermath of slavery by historian Leon F. Litwack. In a moving chapter titled “How Free Is Free?,” Litwack chronicles the views of formerly enslaved people as they struggled to sort out how to live without a master’s ever-present lash. “Even as slaves, black people had often tried to conceptualize for themselves a life outside of bondage and beyond the plantations and farms which constituted the only world they knew,” he writes, adding, “To talk about the possibilities could be downright exhilarating, even infectious.”

After the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War in 1865, “freed slaves began the arduous process of ascertaining the boundaries of freedom,” he explains, noting that even the slightest exercises of freedom mattered with a common essential objective: “to achieve some recognition, even if only grudgingly given, of that new sense of dignity and self-respect which emancipation encouraged in them.”

Litwack describes that ongoing struggle to determine the meaning of freedom. “Whatever remained vague about their new status, every freedman realized that he was no longer an article of merchandise subject to sale at the whim, bankruptcy or death of his owner,” he writes. “If the freedman could not immediately support his wife and children, he at least had the satisfaction of knowing that any income or property he henceforth accumulated from his labor would be his to retain. That realization was in itself immensely gratifying.” A former Arkansas slave, after earning his first dollar working on a railroad, said that he “felt like the richest man in the world!”

Litwack also describes how even those who had been treated comparatively well by their masters vividly understood what it means to be free from bondage:

“I was brought up with the white folks, just like one of them,” declared a slave refugee who had fled to the Union lines; “these hands never had any hard work to do. I had a kind master; but I didn’t know but any time I might be sold away off, and when I found I could get my freedom, I was very glad; and I wouldn’t go back again, because now I am for myself.” That same point was made by a South Carolina freedman…“all I made before was Miss Pinckney’s, but all I make now is my own.”

Every American who pays into Social Security and expects to receive that hard-earned insurance money later in life knows that the dismantling of the system to help pay for tax cuts for billionaires is theft, plain and simple. Anyone who hears Trump’s commerce secretary wax poetic about Americans being stuck in a factory, generation of generation, can grasp that he does not care about their desire to live freely.

I hope that more and more Americans comprehend that we are being held hostage by a narcissistic sociopath in the White House who revels in his delusions of brilliance and does not care if his tariff agenda causes their livelihood and savings to disappear. Donald Trump wants to break us. He wants us powerless. He wants us afraid to speak out about what he’s doing to our country.

He won’t succeed, even if he continues to stoke fear across the land and inflict financial hardship in every household. His hateful agenda is knowable, and the more its effects are felt, the more I’m counting on millions of Americans joining together to say with one voice that they’ve had enough.

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