Trump’s America Is a Cult of Violence, Billionaires, and Betrayal — And It’s Just Getting Started
#MAGAterrorism #TrumpDictatorship #ElonMusk #DanBongino #Project2025 #AmericanFascism #GOPExtremism #BanLibsOfTikTok #DemocracyUnderAttack #NoMoreCivility
Donald Trump isn’t running a government. He’s running an empire of delusion, violence, economic sabotage, and revenge—and dragging the rest of the country down with him. The tariffs aren’t economic policy. They’re punishment. The DOJ isn’t a Justice Department. It’s a loyalty test. And the MAGA movement isn’t a political faction anymore—it’s a homegrown insurgency, empowered by billionaires, mainstreamed by media cowards, and weaponized by a population addicted to conspiracy and rage. This is not business as usual. This is a slow-motion collapse of American democratic order, orchestrated by a movement that doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of elections, laws, or even basic reality.
Take the tariffs. Trump has imposed a 10% blanket tariff on virtually all imports into the United States. China? Double that. Steel, solar panels, car parts, medical components—slapped with a tax so broad and aggressive that even George W. Bush’s inner circle would’ve choked on the scope. This isn’t strategic. It’s economic vandalism dressed up in nationalist cosplay. The result? The S&P 500 has lost over 10% of its value since the tariff announcement. Inflation is spiking again, fueled by higher import costs passed down to consumers. Food prices are up. Car prices are up. Anything that involves lithium, nickel, cobalt, steel, copper, silicon, or semiconductors—up.
This isn’t just a bad policy decision. It’s economic warfare against the American middle class, and no one seems to care that the man launching the assault is still facing multiple criminal indictments. And while families try to figure out how to keep groceries in the fridge or fill their gas tanks, Elon Musk is being handed the keys to the kingdom. Through his sham "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE), Musk has embedded handpicked operatives into multiple federal agencies. Some of them are barely vetted. Some aren’t even official employees. They're technically contractors, or worse—"consultants" with direct ties to Musk’s companies. That means someone who stands to profit from federal deregulation now has their people reviewing internal EPA protocols, DOE infrastructure reports, and—yes—classified documents.
This isn't paranoia. This is happening. While the press sleeps through the latest Trumpism outrage cycle, Musk has quietly assumed real, tangible influence over federal processes—hollowing out departments, slashing staff, and creating direct channels between his companies and U.S. government infrastructure. It's not efficiency. It's corporate colonization. SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla have all benefited from these pipelines. Billions in government contracts flow through Musk, while his people help rewrite the rules that determine how that money is spent. And because DOGE is supposedly outside the traditional structure of government, it operates with a level of opacity that is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
The judiciary, meanwhile, is being treated like a minor inconvenience. Trump has made it clear: he doesn't care what the courts say. If a ruling goes against him, he'll just "let it ride" to the Supreme Court, where he knows the conservative majority will bail him out. That’s not a theory. He said it. Out loud. Multiple times. And with each time, what was once a radical notion—that a president can openly defy the courts—becomes more accepted. The Supreme Court only has power if people agree to honor its decisions. Remove that agreement, and you remove the last institutional brake on authoritarian rule. The Court becomes a rubber stamp, and law becomes nothing more than a suggestion.
While the economy burns and federal agencies are cannibalized, political violence is escalating. MAGA isn’t a political movement anymore. It’s an insurgent force. Armed mobs have become a normalized part of the American political landscape. We’ve seen them surround state capitols, storm the U.S. Capitol, threaten election workers, and stalk school board meetings. The response from the right-wing media? Justified outrage. The response from law enforcement? Usually silence. And from the courts? Slaps on the wrist unless the violence becomes too public to ignore.
The Proud Boys didn’t disappear after January 6. They evolved. They got smarter. Some shaved, put on suits, and started running for office. Others kept the batons and Kevlar but found new targets: libraries, LGBTQ centers, teachers, clinics, museums. They've rebranded the war. It's not about 2020 anymore. It's about punishing anyone who doesn’t submit to their worldview. And while they arm themselves and prepare for confrontation, the Democrats finally—finally—are starting to show signs of learning how this game is played.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t a call for violence. But it is a recognition of what happens when one side plays by the rules and the other side plays by the jungle. The rules break. And that’s exactly where we are. Democrats have begun to adopt pieces of the Republican playbook—not because they want to, but because the MAGA movement has poisoned every political well in this country. You can’t compromise with people who think you're a pedophile just because you voted blue. You can’t negotiate with cultists who think God chose a bankrupt con artist to bring about the End Times. You can't govern with people who openly cheer the idea of a civil war.
What happens when the courts are ignored, the economy is destroyed, the government is gutted, and the rule of law becomes a partisan joke? What happens when people have nowhere left to go for justice or protection? They fight back. Sometimes that means lawsuits. Sometimes that means whistleblowers. Sometimes that means leaking internal memos, sabotaging systems, refusing to comply with MAGA supervisors, or taking action into their own hands. It’s messy. It’s dangerous. It’s what happens when you shove a boot on the neck of half the country and laugh about it on YouTube.
And speaking of YouTube, let’s talk about Dan Bongino—the man who used to scream into a microphone about liberal tyranny, and is now the Deputy Director of the FBI. Yes, seriously. That happened. A man who used to fundraise off of fake FBI conspiracies now controls the FBI. A man who peddled birtherism, “deep state” paranoia, COVID lies, and Jan 6 apologetics is now overseeing federal prosecutions. And we’re supposed to believe that this is legitimate? That the country should just accept that one of the loudest, most poisonous MAGA influencers is now in charge of federal law enforcement?
It’s insulting. It’s terrifying. It’s a direct insult to every American who still believes in equal protection under the law.
Dan Bongino’s appointment as Deputy Director of the FBI isn’t a political move—it’s a declaration of war on the idea of justice itself. The FBI, once flawed but still anchored to legal precedent, is now being overseen by a man who made his fortune poisoning the public’s understanding of how justice even works. Bongino’s entire career has been dedicated to destroying institutional trust. Now, he’s in charge of the very institution he tried to burn to the ground. That’s not irony. That’s fascism with a podcast mic. He spent years on air spitting bile at federal agents, calling the FBI corrupt, calling judges activists, calling Democrats traitors. And now he expects everyone to forget that just because he’s traded his leather jacket for a suit?
No. We don’t forget. And we don’t forgive. Especially not when federal policy is being written by former YouTubers and Twitter trolls whose primary job qualification was loyalty to Trump, not competence or law. You cannot rehabilitate a propagandist by giving him the power to prosecute. That’s not how justice works. That’s how authoritarian regimes launder their goons into bureaucratic respectability. And it’s working—because too many liberals are still playing by the old rules. They think if they just scream “hypocrisy” loud enough, the other side will feel shame. But you can’t shame people who believe power itself is proof of righteousness.
Meanwhile, lives are being destroyed—literally. LGBTQ individuals are being hunted across the country. Trans youth are being forced to detransition by law. Books are being banned in more than 30 states. Teachers are being fired for showing students murals that include Black or gay people. This isn’t just a “culture war.” It’s a purge. And at the tip of that spear is a new kind of digital brownshirt: accounts like Libs of TikTok, deliberately feeding outrage mobs false narratives designed to dehumanize, intimidate, and ultimately erase anyone who isn’t a straight, white, cisgender conservative. They don’t want debate. They want dominance. And they’re getting it because no one’s stopping them.
Libs of TikTok is not a satire account. It is not a joke. It is a political weapon being used to put teachers in danger, shut down medical clinics, and harass families. Every time a video gets posted by that account, someone in real life gets a death threat. Sometimes many. Sometimes bombs are called in. Sometimes armed people show up. And still, the mainstream press tiptoes around this, too afraid to say what’s obvious to anyone paying attention: this is stochastic terrorism. It’s not a side effect. It’s the point. They want liberals afraid to speak. They want minorities too scared to gather. They want public education dismantled and replaced with ideological indoctrination. And they’re doing it—one tweet at a time.
At the center of all this is the belief that violence is justified. That “the other side” is not simply wrong, but evil—and therefore must be eliminated. It’s not a fringe belief anymore. It’s the base. Former members of Congress, sitting governors, online influencers, and Trump himself have openly flirted with or encouraged violence. “There will be blood,” they say. “We have the Second Amendment,” they sneer. “It’s us or them,” they chant at rallies. And all the while, federal agents are being forced to walk a tightrope—half of them wondering whether the people above them will use their own powers to target whistleblowers or dissenters next.
We are not just looking at a violent movement. We are looking at a movement that has institutional power, armed militias, corporate backing, and a propaganda apparatus that spans cable news, social media, and now the DOJ. The call isn’t coming from outside the house. It’s inside the house. And while Democrats have spent the last decade clinging to norms and precedents and precedents-of-precedents, the other side has thrown the rulebook into a bonfire. That bonfire is now reaching the foundations of the country.
But there is something else happening, too. People are snapping. Not just MAGA people. Not just Trump cultists. Ordinary Americans. Center-left citizens. Disillusioned independents. Even some on the center-right who realize they signed on to a nightmare they can’t control. These people are starting to wake up and understand: the institutions will not save you. The courts can’t stop what they refuse to enforce. The media will only tell half the story. And Congress is too broken to act. So some are turning to more direct responses. Anonymous leaks. Mass resignations. Organizing campaigns. Digital retaliation. Financial divestments. Lawsuits. And yes, sometimes, force.
This is how democracy breaks—not all at once, but through exhaustion. The people who should be fighting the hardest get tired. They lose faith. They stop showing up. And when that happens, the fanatics win. That’s the Republican playbook: grind the system down until people give up. Replace election workers with loyalists. Replace judges with ideologues. Replace journalists with YouTubers. And then, when the machine is rusted and smoking, claim it was always broken—and take over completely.
Trump isn’t brilliant. He’s barely functional. But what he does understand is the value of spectacle. The tariffs aren’t about trade. They’re about dominance. He doesn’t care if the market crashes, because a collapsed economy just means more desperate voters who’ll cling to the biggest voice in the room. He’s deliberately destabilizing the system so that he can present himself as the only one who can fix it. Classic strongman play. Break it, then say “only I can fix it.” And while we laugh at his spelling errors or his rambling speeches, he keeps stacking the deck.
He’s not trying to fix the system. He’s trying to break it beyond repair. Because once it’s broken, there are no rules—just power. And Trump knows that in chaos, the loudest, meanest, most shameless man usually wins. That’s why he surrounds himself with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who parades around Congress in cosplay uniforms threatening journalists and demanding the mass arrest of political enemies. That’s why he elevates people like Stephen Miller, who makes white nationalism look like a policy platform. That’s why he tapped Dan Bongino, a man who spent years screaming “deep state” into a microphone, to now head the very law enforcement agencies he used to accuse of treason.
This is not the return of law and order. It’s the total collapse of moral legitimacy in American governance. Every single institution that was once supposed to be impartial is now being bent toward one goal: loyalty to Trump. Not to the flag. Not to the Constitution. To him. That is not democratic governance. That’s what you get in failing republics right before they slide into dictatorship. And let’s be crystal clear: this isn’t a drill. Trump has already said the quiet parts out loud. He’s not interested in being a president for all Americans. He’s interested in vengeance, retribution, and erasing any trace of resistance to his rule.
Even the Supreme Court is now treated as a political asset. He brags about how his appointees will protect him. He openly taunts judges, threatens prosecutors, and mocks the legal system, knowing that if he can drag things out long enough, his people on the bench will take care of it. And if they don’t? He’ll unleash the mob. He’s done it before. January 6 was not a one-off. It was a test balloon. And the Republican Party didn’t just fail the test—they decided to jump into the basket and float away with him.
There’s no adult supervision left in the conservative movement. It’s been hijacked by people who don’t care about democracy, don’t understand governance, and don’t even want to solve problems. They want blood. They want dominance. They want revenge. And now that they’ve tasted power without accountability, they want it permanently. That’s what Project 2025 is about. That’s what the conservative think tanks are planning. The Federalist Society isn’t just picking judges. They’re mapping out how to dismantle the administrative state itself—so that it never again stands in the way of a white nationalist, corporate-theocratic coup.
This isn’t hypothetical. The playbook is out in the open. Install loyalists in every agency. Purge civil servants. Replace generals. Give ICE and the DOJ carte blanche. Declare protests unlawful. Use the Insurrection Act to federalize law enforcement. Strip away the power of independent courts and regulatory agencies. Deregulate the media. Criminalize dissent. The only reason this hasn’t already happened is because Trump was too incompetent in 2017 to pull it off. Now he’s got the blueprints. And now he has an army behind him that no longer bothers with subtlety. They’re not hiding what they want. They’re proud of it. They post about it. They wear it on their hats. They scream it in school board meetings and church pulpits and CPAC speeches. They want a Christian nationalist America run by billionaires, ruled by men like Trump, Musk, and their cronies.
And Musk isn’t just playing tech savior. He’s playing kingmaker. His takeover of Twitter—rebranded X, because of course it was—isn’t about freedom of speech. It’s about shaping the battlefield. The minute he took over, he restored far-right accounts, dismantled trust and safety teams, killed off moderation infrastructure, and opened the floodgates to election disinformation, hate speech, and stochastic terrorism. Anyone who pushed back? Fired. Banned. Shadowbanned. Doxxed. It’s not free speech when it’s rigged in favor of fascists. It’s not free speech when billionaires get to decide who gets a voice and who doesn’t.
And what has the left done in response? Too little, too late. Too focused on “reaching across the aisle” while the other side is arming up and redrawing the aisle with blood. Too worried about being called “uncivil” while the GOP calls for mass arrests, re-education camps, and state-level bans on speech, books, and identity. Too afraid of “alienating moderates” while the so-called moderates have already fled or flipped.
But there are cracks forming. The same cruelty that brought the MAGA cult together is starting to turn inward. The extremists are eating each other alive in purity tests. Musk is alienating allies in the business world. Trump is bleeding independent voters. Bongino and the rest of the media hate machine are getting more unhinged by the day, desperate to keep the rage machine spinning. Even some Republican governors are quietly pushing back—too cowardly to do it in public, but terrified of what happens if this beast they’ve fed for ten years finally turns on them.
And it will. That’s the inevitable result of building a movement on hate, lies, and delusion. Eventually, the center cannot hold—not because the left pulled it apart, but because the right built it on sand. There is no policy framework in MAGA world. There is no governing principle beyond loyalty to the cult leader. Remove the leader, and the whole structure collapses. That’s why they’re terrified of a world without Trump. That’s why they’ll burn the country to keep him in power.
That fear of collapse is why they’re willing to destroy every institution of American life before they let go. The MAGA movement doesn’t want to participate in democracy—they want to dismantle it and replace it with a permanent, unaccountable regime. The rule of law? Only when it benefits them. Courts? Only if they rule their way. Elections? Only if they win. Free speech? Only for them. Everyone else is a threat. A danger. A target. They don’t see Democrats as fellow Americans—they see them as enemies to be punished, erased, or jailed. That’s not rhetoric. That’s not hyperbole. It’s doctrine. Watch any Trump rally. Listen to any right-wing podcast. Read any GOP donor memo. The enemy isn’t foreign. It’s domestic. It’s half the country.
This is where we are: a nation where a sizable chunk of the population wants authoritarian rule, and the rest of us are just trying to survive the constant gaslighting, the legal whiplash, the political shell game. And if you’re poor? Disabled? Queer? A person of color? You’re already under siege. You’re not reading about threats in the future. You’re living them. Doctors are fleeing red states because they can’t safely perform legal medical procedures. Families are being forced to leave school districts because bookshelves are being emptied of anything that reflects real life. Trans people are being driven out of states like refugees. This is not freedom. This is forced obedience at the end of a boot.
And in the midst of this collapse, the Biden administration is still being pressured to “meet them halfway.” Meet them where, exactly? In the trenches of insurrection? On the courthouse steps with Proud Boys and pipe bombs? With Elon Musk smirking at congressional subpoenas while manipulating global speech platforms to benefit his crypto portfolio and Trump’s campaign? There is no halfway point between democracy and fascism. That line does not exist. And pretending it does is what got us here. The country gave these people a chance to prove they could govern. What did they do with it? They tried to hang the Vice President, smear feces on the Capitol walls, and declare that Trump is above the law. They don’t want unity. They want submission.
The MAGA cult is a dead-end ideology, and the more power it gains, the more dangerous it becomes. You can’t debate a cult. You can’t vote a cult out when it’s gerrymandered and lawsuit-proofed the playing field. You can’t shame a cult. You expose it. You dismantle it. You drain its power by refusing to legitimize its leaders, its tactics, and its delusions. But to do that, Democrats and their allies have to stop treating this like an episode of The West Wing. You’re not going to “logic” your way out of authoritarianism. You don’t win against fascism with a well-worded tweet and a mid-tier podcast. You win with pressure. With numbers. With mass mobilization. With ruthless focus and refusal to concede an inch to those who openly call for your eradication.
And if the courts side with them? If SCOTUS decides that Trump can’t be prosecuted for trying to overthrow the government? Then the court itself loses legitimacy. The Founders did not put nine unelected monarchs in robes above the will of the people. Judicial power only works when it’s respected, and you do not have to respect a court that declares dictatorship is legal. That’s not disobedience. That’s self-defense. The MAGA right loves to cry about tyranny when someone taxes their yacht. But if your rights are stripped, your body is policed, your vote is canceled, and your dissent is criminalized—what do you call it? What do you call it when your government installs a domestic propagandist as Deputy Director of the FBI and invites tech billionaires to purge civil servants and privatize law enforcement?
We are living in an American twilight zone where a twice-impeached felon can rerun for president, a podcaster can take over the FBI, and a billionaire manchild can rewrite the terms of national debate with no oversight. This is not how a functional republic behaves. This is not democracy. This is what it looks like when a nation loses its spine. And we’re seeing it play out in real time, while half the media pretends it’s a horse race and the other half sells pillow ads to fund open insurrection.
And let’s not forget this: none of this happened in a vacuum. The people who created this moment profited from it. Dan Bongino made millions on fake outrage. Elon Musk made billions gaming the stock market and manipulating public contracts. Trump used the White House like a casino chip. Tucker Carlson built a media empire feeding MAGA rage until it wasn’t profitable anymore. And every step of the way, they told their followers the same thing: you’re the victim. Not the poor. Not the exploited. Not the sick. You. The white suburban man who thinks mask mandates are oppression. The Facebook aunt who thinks drag queens are the apocalypse. The ex-cop who believes George Soros controls the moon. They sold victimhood to the privileged, and the result is a political cult with guns, grievances, and a God complex.
We cannot out-civility this. We cannot out-hope this. The solution is not kindness. It is clarity. The enemy is not hidden. It is bold, visible, violent, and in power. And it will stay there until someone forces it to leave.
The tipping point is here, and anyone pretending otherwise is lying to themselves—or worse, lying to everyone else. The United States is in a full-blown legitimacy crisis. Half the country does not believe in the institutions that govern it. The other half is watching those institutions get hollowed out by fascists who figured out how to use democratic mechanisms to destroy democracy itself. You don’t need tanks in the streets for authoritarianism to take hold. All you need is for enough people to stop believing that truth matters, that laws apply equally, or that power should be restrained by morality.
What we are witnessing is a regime coalescing in real time. Not a single-party dictatorship. Not yet. But a federation of right-wing billionaires, Christian nationalists, fascist LARPers, grievance-addicted influencers, and white-collar oligarchs who have figured out how to co-parent a police state in public view. Each group plays its role. The billionaires provide the cover and capital. The politicians ram through the laws. The trolls run the propaganda machine. The militias stand by, ready to enforce with AR-15s what the courts can’t quite get away with. And behind them all is Trump—a man so incompetent he couldn’t run a steakhouse, yet so dangerous he could end the American experiment just by refusing to concede a loss.
They don’t even have to win elections outright anymore. They’ve rigged the battlefield so thoroughly with voter suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, election boards packed with loyalists, and court cases pre-selected for MAGA judges that the illusion of democracy is just that—an illusion. Trump didn’t destroy trust in the system. He revealed how weak the system was. He showed his followers that if you push hard enough, if you lie loud enough, and if you’re white and rich enough, the rules don’t matter. You can storm the Capitol and still run for president. You can incite a riot and get a campaign bounce from it. You can mock a judge, threaten a jury, sabotage a trial—and half the country will cheer while the rest waits for Merrick Garland to blink.
We are at the end of the line. Either people wake up and confront this movement for what it is—a coordinated, multi-front fascist attack—or we watch it take permanent root. The danger isn’t just Trump. It’s the infrastructure that now exists to replace him if he falls. It’s the Bonginos and the Millers and the DeSantises and the Bannons and the Mercers and the Federalist Society and every person who quietly supports this regime because they think it will protect their stocks, their whiteness, or their illusion of control. These people are not patriots. They are collaborators. And they must be treated like the enemies of democracy that they are—not with civility, but with consequence.
Because at some point, Democrats will have to make a choice. Not between two competing policy platforms. Not between centrism and progressivism. But between resistance and surrender. Do you try to salvage institutions that are being used to kill you? Or do you fight fire with fire—refusing to honor verdicts handed down by illegitimate courts, rejecting laws written by gerrymandered traitors, and removing fascists from power by any non-violent means necessary? There is no neat answer. But there is a right answer. Because we’ve seen what happens when you wait too long. The 1930s are not that far away. The lessons are not that hard to learn. You either put your body between the machine and the victims, or you become one of them.
This is where we are now: watching the Republican Party celebrate violence, sabotage the economy, defile public institutions, and dare the rest of the country to stop them. And as their god-emperor campaigns for a second term under indictment while promising mass purges and state revenge, they’re not hiding what comes next. They’re posting it. Saying it on air. Chanting it at rallies. Planning it in courtrooms and committee meetings. The coup didn’t fail. It metastasized. And it’s going to happen again—unless someone puts a stake through the heart of this movement before it devours what’s left.
You cannot reform this. You cannot appeal to its better nature. It has none. The MAGA cult doesn’t want compromise. It wants conquest. And if the Democratic Party, the press, the courts, and the American people don’t start acting like that’s the case, there won’t be another chance to get it right.
There’s no more time to waste. No more middle ground. No more deference to traditions that are being used as weapons against us. The house is on fire. And the people who lit the match are asking for your vote.
Sources (because they are important):
https://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/trump-tariffs-2025-impact/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tariffs-expected-hurt-clean-energy-sector-2025-04-01/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-29/s-p-500-plummets-on-tariff-announcement
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/us/politics/elon-musk-doge-government-takeover.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/department-of-government-efficiency-doge-staffers
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2024/12/18/extremist-violence-linked-trump-rhetoric-maga-movement
https://www.justsecurity.org/96700/project-2025-trump-transition-legal-analysis/
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-maga-violence-2024-election-rcna139321
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/12/dan-bongino-attorney-general/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/libs-of-tiktok-hate-crimes-harassment_l_65c2a1b2e4b0e832b344c9c5
Author’s Note: I wrote this back in Oct 2024. I added information to it and posted it as is. There may be inconsistencies and that is fine. I’m not a professional journalist and I feel writing is a good way to express anger, fear, sadness with our current political situation. America should not have elected Donald J Trump.