Sasha Abramsky discusses his recent Nation and TruthOut commentaries that have tracked Donald Trump’s increasing depravity and erratic behavior which the nation has witnessed in recent weeks. Abramsky also talks about his new book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the U.S. Government, which follows 11 federal workers from 8 agencies for the first half of 2025 as their lives were upended by the Trump regime’s mass layoff of government workers and assault on the government.
SCOTT HARRIS: We begin our program this evening by welcoming to our show Sasha Abramsky, a journalist and author of books including The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives; The House of Twenty Thousand Books; Little Wonder; and Chaos Comes Calling: the Battle Against the Far Right Takeover of Small Town America. Sasha’s newest book is titled, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the U.S. Government, which will be published next month. Sasha, thank you so much for making time to come on our program this evening.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Good evening, Scott. How are you?
SCOTT HARRIS: I am good and I want to get into the book in a little bit, but I thought we would take account of some of your writing on the recent nightmarish 10 months we’ve been living through with the Trump regime. And if you don’t mind, I’m just going to take a couple of minutes.
I don’t know why I do this, but I think we need to remind ourselves once in a while of the width and breadth of what we’ve experienced over these past two months. It seems like two years, right? So in this second term, there seems to be really no debate among many people. I speak to even Republicans that this twice impeached convicted felon president is aggressively pursuing a hardline authoritarian agenda that was laid out in detail in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Trump and the Republican party have blatantly defied the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the rule of law by dismantling large parts of the federal government, such as the Department of Education, USAID, FEMA.
And they’ve defunded cancer and Alzheimer’s research as well as who the hell knows what’s going on with vaccines right now. And Trump has deployed a mass ICE secret police force to abduct non-citizens and citizens alike, denying many their due process rights and is prosecuting and indicting his own perceived political enemies. He’s abused his presidential power to repress free speech by using the Federal Communications Commission to threaten media companies to cancel Stephen Colbert’s show that he succeeded at; Jimmy Kimmel, which he didn’t succeed at. Seth Myers has been targeted as well as a long list of other TV programs and journalists who criticized Trump. And Trump, and the Republican Congress had defunded all U.S. public broadcasting, TV and radio—PBS, NPR—and Trump has censored the U.S. history of slavery and the Jim Crow era at the Smithsonian Institution and other museums. Censored books across the federal government. Fired hundreds of federal workers associated with diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
All this as he’s deployed National Guard troops first to Los Angeles and then Washington, D.C. and plans to do the same in Portland, Oregon, Memphis and as well as Chicago if he can get through the courts. On top of all that, Trump has issued executive orders labeling his critics, progressive activists and political opponents as domestic and foreign terrorists. And most recently called for the execution of Democratic lawmakers who advised active duty U.S. military men and women not to obey illegal and unconstitutional orders.
Sasha, as you’ve been following this second Trump administration and their increasingly lawless and often incompetent and malevolent governance of the country, where are we in terms of a constitutional crisis, the destruction of democratic institutions and the loss of our civil and constitutional rights? That’s a big question to throw at you right at the beginning
SASHA ABRAMSKY: I’m happy to answer it. Look, we’ve been in a constitutional crisis since Day One of this presidency because Trump came into power as a convicted felon. He came into power with the Supreme Court ruling basically saying he could do anything and as long as he said it was in his official capacity, he was outside the scope of the law. And he has the temperament of a tyrant. So if you put all of those things together and you then look at his agenda, you look at what he’s done, as you said with the secret police. You look at what he’s done with his assaults on the universities and the free media. You look at what he’s done with his prosecution or persecution of political enemies. I mean, this is not a democracy that Trump is trying to implement. This is the creation of an authoritarian state.
You look at what rights and what constitutional amendments Trump is trampling on. Well, the First Amendment, he has scant respect for if any respect for. The Fifth Amendment, the right not to self incriminate. The Fourth Amendment, the right against illegal search and seizure. The Eighth Amendment, the right against cruel and unusual punishment. He sent hundreds of people to a super maximum security prison in Venezuela with no trial in El Salvador, with no trial, no due process where he knew they would be tortured. So bang goes the Eighth Amendment. You can go down the list and you find pretty much the only constitutional amendment Trump respects is the Second Amendment—the right to bear arms, which he not only respects but fetishizes.
So we’ve been in a constitutional crisis from Day One. I was sort of half joking with a friend of mine a few weeks ago that if the Democrats regain control of Congress, they should basically set aside two hours every afternoon to hold a new impeachment hearing because we know that on a daily basis there are going to be impeachable offenses committed by this regime—whether they’re crimes, whether they’re corruption and cronyism, whether it’s violence, whether it’s the illegal deportation of people with no due process, whether it’s the breaking up of families, whether it’s the arresting of people with green cards not because of crimes they’ve committed, but because of thoughts that they’ve had.
We know that this is an extra-legal regime and we have to discuss it that way. This is not normal governance. This is not the normal rough and tumble of politics. This is something different. This is something that America has never experienced before. It is a full-on authoritarian assault on the pillars of democracy.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that summary of what we’re experiencing, Sasha. I would ask you this, in your view, how has the Democratic party responded to this crisis? And maybe more importantly, how have the people of this country responded given we’ve seen enormous outpouring of opposition in the streets all across the country with the No King’s Day—two events and an earlier event—the latest of which on Oct. 18th brought out more than 7 million people in thousands of locations all over the country.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: We are seeing a flowering of creative political opposition in a way we haven’t seen in years. And it’s spotty. It’s not happening universally. It’s not happening in all the places one would expect it to happen. The universities, for example, seem to have been beaten into submission. The students are remarkably quiescent at the moment.
But if you go out onto the streets as you said, 7 million people protested in October at the No Kings protest. You go to Chicago, you go to Portland, you go to New York, wherever ICE is mobilizing, you are seeing massive community counter-mobilizations. You are seeing community self-defense committees being set up. I mean, this is an extraordinary thing that thousands, if not millions of American citizens have realized that they have to organize and they have to bind themselves together into self-defense committees because the federal government has made it clear that it is their enemy.
It is sending the army. It is sending the National Guard into U.S. streets. It is breaking up families with no due process. It is doing things that are entirely outside the realm of a sort of moral compact of citizen and government or resident and government. And so people are responding in kind.
Yes, there are gaps in this protest movement, but anyone who says that America is just sitting back and sort of passively watching as its rights are destroyed is missing what’s going on on the ground. And I think it’s fascinating that all over the country, people are working out ways to try and push back against this irrationalist, cruel, authoritarian Trump regime. Now you ask how the Democrats are doing. That’s a work in progress. It depends which Democrats. It depends whether you’re talking about federally or at a state level. Federally, the Democrats in Congress seem to be lost still.
You look at the leadership, especially in the Senate with Charles Schumer, this is not an effective leadership to push back against authoritarianism. They haven’t worked out a strategy that is anywhere near forceful enough to meet the needs of the moment. But I’m sure they will. I mean, look, this is one of those moments where creative politics are welling from the ground up. This is not one of those moments where it’s going to be a sort of top-down political opposition. It’s going to come from the streets. It’s going to come from organizing efforts of good, decent Americans all over the country who realize that what is going on is wrong. And I think that’s going to pull the Democrats with them. And that going into the midterms in 2026, you are going to have a pretty forceful Democratic message emerging. It’s going to take a bit of time, but it is emerging as a counter-narrative to what Trump is doing.
SCOTT HARRIS: Sasha, given the fact that we have our federal government, our federal government appears to have been captured almost entirely—the legislative executive and the judicial branch captured by authoritarians. Our protests in the streets—as massive as they’ve been every eight weeks on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Is that going to be enough? And what lessons can we learn from other countries whose liberties and democracy have been threatened by authoritarians? I think you can recount some of the different strategies that we haven’t seen sort initiated here yet.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think as I said, we’re still sort of stumbling our way towards a coherent opposition. Look, I talk to people all the time. I’ve been speaking to a lot of trade union people in the last few weeks and I ask that exact same question. Is it enough to come out onto the streets, however joyous and creative these protests are? Is that enough? And they say, “No.” And they say, “We’ve got to learn to use our economic might as workers, as consumers and so on.” So what does that mean? What it means is we have to have conversations about whether or not we can move towards the withholding of labor against this administration. General strike. Then you can say that “sort of pie in the sky.” But look, there have been general strikes in France, in Israel, in Korea, in many other countries that we like to compare ourselves to.
Labor has used its muscle and flexed its muscle against political changes it thought were destructive. We can have economic boycotts. There are companies that are making millions and in some cases billions of dollars with contracts with ICE, with the Department of Homeland Security, with all of these agencies that are sort of turning America into this mass experiment in mass detention.
Well, we are consumers. We can say, “Look, you can have those contracts with the federal government. We can’t stop you having those contracts, but we can make it economically painful for you. We’re not going to buy your produce. We’re not going to shop in your shops. We are not going to give you our money.” Look, the most obvious example of that is the consumer boycott against Tesla. So there’s Elon Musk doing his fascist thing, doing the Nazi salute, all the things that Musk has done in the last year, these grotesque gargoyle-like behaviors from the world’s richest man.
And Tesla’s sales tanked. They tanked in America, they tanked overseas. This is consumer power flexing its muscles. And so I think we’re going to have to have a conversation on all kinds of fronts. And it’s not just a few people saying this. I read David Brooks, he’s a conservative columnist for the New York Times. He’s an anti-Trump conservative columnist. And David Brooks on a weekly basis now, is saying that if we want to save this country from authoritarianism, we have to have a mass movement, the likes of which we have never seen in this country before.
Well, if someone like David Brooks has come to that realization, you’d think it was a no-brainer that the Democratic leadership would come to a similar conclusion. That we cannot just assume this is politics as normal and that everything will get better in two years or three years or four years because the stakes are too high and there is no evidence that the Trump administration would be willing to give up power easily. And there’s a lot of evidence that they’re playing for keeps, that they believe they can fundamentally reshape America, turn it into this sort of ethnonationalist fortress and then force the rest of the world to go along with their ghastly ideas.
Well, if that happens as a world, as a globe, we are entering a new dark age, a new barbarian age. I mean, these guys are playing not just for sort of petty local politics. They’re playing big and they’re playing globally and we have to think just as big as they’re thinking.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said. And it is apparent that the way they’re acting—lawlessly in many cases, the heads of these Cabinet positions, they act as if there will never be any consequences for what they’re doing. I mean, that’s frightening.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Absolutely. Look what Peter Hegseth has done. He’s been ordering these bombings of what may or may not be small vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific carrying drugs. All we know is we’re getting photographs of these light speedboats and then we’re seeing them blown out of the water.
And we’re being asked to take it on faith that these are the bad guys. And then we’re being asked to take it on faith that it’s okay for our government to act as judge, jury and executioner without a trial. And then we are hearing reports that Hegseth ordered in at least one of these strikes for the survivors of the initial strike to be killed by a SEAL team.
Well, that’s illegal, however you look at it. Even if you give the government the benefit of doubt and say they have a legal rationale for blowing up the ships, which they don’t, you can look at a slew of international law experts and they say that America is committing war crimes by bombing these boats. But even if you accept the initial rationale that they can bomb boats, there is no earthly legal rationale for killing survivors.
That breaks every code of conduct. It breaks the esprit of corps of the military. It breaks international treaties and obligations on how to treat prisoners of war or how to treat combatants or ex-combatants. There is no rational argument that you can make for killing the survivors of those initial strikes. But Hegseth apparently ordered it according to reporting by CNN, by the Intercept, by the Washington Post.
According to those reports, Hegseth gave verbal orders to kill survivors. Well, that is a man acting with complete impunity, someone who just doesn’t give a damn for international law, for international human rights obligations or for international public opinion. And I think you can go down the line. You’ll find the way that Greg Bovino has behaved in his Homeland Security raids in Chicago. The way that Tom Holman has behaved, where he allegedly received a bag of cash in a sting operation in order to funnel contracts towards favored groups. You can go down the list and you find a culture of complete impunity that this is a government that thinks it is beyond the law. This is a government that believes it is untouchable and it is our job as a public to say, “Not on our watch. You don’t get to behave that way as the government of the United States of America.”
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Sasha. We are speaking this evening on Counterpoint here on listener-sponsored WPKN in Bridgeport with Sasha Brosky, a journalist and author. And his newest book is titled American Carnage, how Trump, Musk and DOGE butchered the U.S. government. We’re going to get to that in a couple of minutes, but I did want to ask you this, Sasha.
Trump now has the lowest public opinion approval ratings of his second term, about as low as after Trump incited the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 that took several lives. Americans it appears, are unhappy with most of Trump’s authoritarian agenda, but most of all, they disapprove of his handling of the economy and rising prices. The very reason a very slim majority of voters cast their ballots for Trump in November, 2024. Sacha, is this the beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency, at least in terms of being a lame duck, which he’s labeled by many now—at least in terms of the Republican party who have followed his every order out of fear. Are they losing that fear and do you think things are falling apart or is that just wishful thinking?
SASHA ABRAMSKY: I think it’s probably too early to say that. Look, there are many leaders, some left-wing, some right-wing, some populist, some non-populist around the world who, when they come into power initially right away for popularity, and then very quickly the public gets disillusioned. That almost seems to be a sort of crisis in modern politics around the world. The fact that Trump’s underwater politically doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not powerful. He is powerful. He still has a lock on the Republican party. He’s got this extra-legal agenda that we’ve just spent the last 15 minutes talking about and he’s perfectly willing to push every constitutional boundary he can push to implement that agenda. But where I think you are right is that as his popularity fades—and it’s going to get worse and worse and worse—there’s no evidence that he’s suddenly going to rebound and become a hero.
He’s going to get more and more unpopular. And as he does so it’s going to become possible for at least some Republicans to sort of at first gingerly and then maybe not so gingerly stand up to him and say,”You know what? You can’t do this.”
And you’re starting to see this a little bit. Sen. Rand Paul has been pretty good in calling out the administration for this assassination campaign of fishermen in the Pacific and the Caribbean. You are starting to see people who are expressing their displeasure. Again, a little bit timidly, but they’re starting to express their displeasure with the sheer battiness of Robert Kennedy Jr. at the health department. You are starting to see people who are sort of pushing back again ever so slightly against Trump’s plans to essentially carve up Ukraine with Russia, whether or not that coalesces into a sort of strong anti-Trump movement within the Republican party.
I doubt it. And the reason I doubt it is he has been very, very good at making the Republican party complicit in his crimes, which means they rise or fall with him if he goes down for naked, brazen corruption, which he should go down for.
The Republican party will go down with him if he goes down for breaking the economy, which he could well do with this idiot policy of tariffs that he’s implementing. The Republican party has twisted itself into pretzel not supporting that tariff policy. They go down with him. So I think they’re too complicit to be able to make a clean break.
But I do think what’s going to happen is you’re going to have increasingly loud voices within the MAGA movement sort of angling to be the heirs apparent, because everyone knows Trump’s not going to be around forever. He’s an old man. He is not terribly healthy. He’s giving every sign of being increasingly senescent. At some point, we’re going to be in a post-Trump world and you are starting to see all of these players within MAGA positioning themselves, trying to be the next hotshot. And that’s sort of both fascinating and also kind of nauseating at the same time. But I think that’s more likely than an absolute break within the Republican sort of Senate and Congress away from Trump. I don’t see that happening.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Sasha, I briefly wanted to ask you about Donald Trump’s welcoming Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammad bin Salman to the White House with great fanfare despite his brutal regime’s violence, suppression of dissent and his documented assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s comment about Khashoggi’s murder in the Oval Office in response to a reporter’s questions could be interpreted as an endorsement of Khashoggi’s murder. It was just an insane moment, right? It was just a crazy moment.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: It was one of, there’s so many dishonorable moments in the last year, but this ranks up there. He berated a reporter for asking a question about Khashoggi’s murder. He then said that Khashoggi was a very controversial man. A lot of people didn’t like him and he followed it up by saying “Things happen.” Well, let’s remind the audience what things happened to Khashoggi. He was kidnapped. He was taken prisoner inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, in Turkey. He was drugged. He was either suffocated or in some other way killed, we’re not sure which. And he was then dismembered and body parts of his were distributed around to try and hide the crime. That is not “things happen.” That is a state-sponsored assassination in a government embassy clearly approved at the highest levels by the Saudi regime. And Trump thinks that’s absolutely A-OK.
SCOTT HARRIS: Spoken like a true mafioso, right? It’s insane. Well, just final question here, an important question. You have a new book about to be published this January titled, American Carnage How Trump, Musk and DOGE butchered the U.S. government. You’re looking at the consequences of the mass firings of federal workers. I think there were some 300,000 to date, closing of entire government agencies and departments. And you look at the impact on individual lives, their families and certainly it spreads out to the community, too. This is a preview. We only have a few minutes left and love to have you back about the new book exclusively. But tell us a bit tonight about this book and how our listeners can get a copy.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Well, the book came about in January. I started realizing that this was going to be one of the extraordinary stories of our year. Trump started firing people almost at random in the federal government. Or I should say it wasn’t entirely at random. He had areas of the government around health, around the environment, around workers’ rights and around foreign aid that he particularly disliked. And he set Elon Musk’s DOGE to work to dismantle those agencies and departments and thousands upon thousands of federal workers, good men and women who had worked for years for the federal government, but had been demonized by the right and called these sort of corrupt, useless, unproductive bureaucrats. They were summarily fired and they were fired with no advanced warning. They were given no severance pay. In some cases, they were cut off from their health insurance, their pensions were eviscerated. And I thought, this is an extraordinary story.
And I started rooting around looking for people to talk to and I found 11 workers spread across 8 agencies and departments living in all corners of the country. And I followed them for a few months as their lives were upended. So it’s this sort of really intimate portrait of despair basically and of a government betraying its promise, not only to its own workers, but to the millions of Americans who rely on the services that those workers provided.
And so it’s a short book, but I think it’s a book that really lays bare the savagery at the heart of this administration, the willingness to humiliate, the desire to inflict cruelty on people it perceives as it being its enemies. So that’s the book. It comes out in January though. It’s actually available if you buy it directly from the publisher’s website. They are shipping it at the moment. It’s O/R Books. O-R Books. The title is American Carnage and the subtitle is How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the U.S. government. I’ll be doing readings around the country on this, but I’d love it if your audience could start circulating this and paying a bit of attention to some of the stories in there.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah, we’ll feature it on our website when we post this interview. And I’ll just say the ripple effects from all those mass firings and closing the agencies, including the closure of USAID, millions will die. In fact, there was a Lancet story that they estimate by 2030 as a result of cutting off vital medications, AIDS drugs and a whole list of other treatments and drugs the U.S. had sponsored for decades. They estimate by 2030, 14 million people will die.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: I mean, these numbers are impossible. They’re so big. They’re impossible for us to visualize. But we are as a country, essentially giving the green light to public policy changes that are going to impact millions upon millions of people—already have impacted millions of people.
And there’s data out there, which has been collated by modelers in Boston and various other places on the numbers who’ve died and it’s already hundreds of thousands. Many of them are children and many of them could have been saved by a few dollars’ worth of medical intervention that USAID used to provide, and that Trump and Musk decided it was no longer affordable or in our national interest. It’s scandalous. It’s shameful. And I wake up every day and I think about this, and I think what a world we are living in that the most powerful country on earth could deliberately withhold medication from starving children.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. It was deliberate because they could have had a transition period for other agencies to take over these drugs. They said, “No, let ’em die.” It’s insane. And thank you so much for sharing your thoughts about this crisis we’re living through Sasha. And we’ll look forward to our next discussion about your book and much appreciation for making time for us on a very busy night for you. Thank you.
SASHA ABRAMSKY: Alright, I appreciate it. Talk to you soon.
SCOTT HARRIS: Goodnight. Bye-bye. That’s Sasha Abramsky, a journalist and author. His newest book is titled American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the U.S. Government. Subscribe to our Weekly Summary
