Perhaps, in retrospect, the most important turning point in the evolution of the contemporary far-right elite occurred in April 2020, just a month into a pandemic that would ultimately become a mass extinction event, killing more than seven million people worldwide. Condemning public health restrictions, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said, “There are more important things than living.”
Patrick, who has proudly stood by that ghoulish statement, meant that the government had a higher obligation to keep the capitalist economy moving than to save any of its citizens from premature death. This sounded shocking to many people at the time, but it’s a philosophy that Trump, Musk, DOGE, and company have now fully embraced.
Our nation’s founders would not have agreed. The point of human society and government, wrote John Locke, the seventeenth-century Enlightenment theorist from whom Thomas Jefferson and other American founding thinkers got many of their ideas, was that people need to band together in community to protect each person’s “life, liberty and property.”
Screw that—especially the “life” bit, is what the political right has been saying for a while. Contemporary conservativism has largely jettisoned the notion of a government’s “duty to protect” its citizens, a phrase that goes back to the Reconstruction era. But never has the rejection of the “duty to protect” found such vivid and chilling expression as it has in Trump’s second term. The Trump–Musk administration has morbidly committed itself to an enthusiastically pro-death agenda.
Let’s take fatal illnesses. On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he was cutting 10,000 HHS employees, including those tasked with responding to disease outbreaks. (Another 10,000 employees already took “voluntary” buyouts.) Agencies affected by those cuts include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which will lose an estimated 18 percent of its staff—the National Institutes for Health, the Food and Drug Adminstration, as well as Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, bird flu rages among the nation’s poultry and experts fear that it could turn into a deadly human pandemic. Yet the Trump administration has not even staffed the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, established by Biden in 2022, and his administration is reportedly rethinking a contract with Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine, as RFK Jr. publicly floats just letting the virus run wild among the nation’s flocks.
Speaking of deadly diseases, this administration seems to have a special vendetta against cancer research, a priority that has long enjoyed bipartisan popularity. Trump–Musk cuts have abruptly ended lifesaving research supported by the Defense Health Research Consortium on pancreatic, kidney, and lung cancers and left much other cancer research—and cancer care centers—in the lurch. Cancer kills more than 600,000 Americans a year, but the mortality rate for the disease has been steadily decreasing for decades, due in part to improved research and treatment, mostly funded by the government. That’s progress that RFK, Trump, and Musk are working hard to undo.
Another major cause of untimely demise for Americans is car accidents, and these deaths too have been declining. Yet that may change: The agency charged with researching, tracking, and finding solutions to traffic safety problems, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has been targeted aggressively by Musk, perhaps related to the agency’s investigations into deadly Tesla crashes and its efforts to monitor the safety of “self-driving vehicles.” He’s cut 5 percent of the NHTSA’s staff, including people who research prevention of auto deaths. Experts agree these cuts could kill people.
Perhaps that should be the new tagline for 2020s America: Come for the bird flu and deadly self-driving cars, but don’t miss the looming apocalypse. Can’t imagine why tourism is on the decline.
Nuclear war—or some kind of nuclear disaster—is likewise becoming an increasingly alarming possibility, with Musk’s firings and buyouts also hammering the National Nuclear Safety Administration, the agency that oversees the nation’s nuclear weaponry. The NNSA struggles to maintain staff, and those departing include scientists, engineers, and people trained to transport dangerous materials securely. Last month, many of those fired were rehired after some members of Congress objected to the cuts. But some of the most important experts there are gone for good, having left for better-paying private-sector jobs. Not to mention, the instability of Trump’s foreign policy is inspiring more countries, including South Korea and Germany, to consider getting nuclear weapons of their own, increasing the risk of nuclear holocaust even more.
This seeming indifference to the risk of mass extinction also sheds light on this administration’s catastrophically destructive approach to climate policy: It’s not that they are climate denialists, or foolish yokels who don’t “believe in science.” Instead, perhaps Trump and Musk simply don’t care if any of us live or die. Perhaps that’s why they are working to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, exit the Paris treaty, and undo the Biden administration’s best climate policies, including the green energy projects—mostly in Republican districts—funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Not satisfied with ensuring that the government won’t address any root causes of climate change—or even mention the words—Trump–Musk doesn’t even want to protect us from the climate disasters that are already coming: This week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would be eliminated. As with so many of these changes, it’s not clear that the administration has the authority to do that. But given the increase in deadly climate disasters, from superstorms to wildfires, the effort to kill FEMA seems almost certain to also kill people.
It’s ironic that the tech bro class is seeking to live forever, while at every turn divesting the government of its responsibility to save lives. Although Musk has in the past distanced himself from this childish quest, he seems to be coming around; hawking his weird brain-chip implant start-up on Monday, he said immortality through brain implants was “definitely possible.” Just as with all other resources, billionaires are trying to hog longevity—living absurdly long lives, and even talking about abolishing death altogether (for themselves).
But for the rest of us, what a challenging time to try to stay alive! One can imagine delightful and fitting ends to this story—Trump and Musk drive off together, to their doom, in a unregulated self-driven car, a 2025 version of Thelma and Louise. But most likely, things won’t conclude in such a simple and satisfying manner. This regime won’t last forever, but political change will take time. Meanwhile, be careful out there.
