MAGA’s Death Wish

NEW YORK – Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the federal government has slashed approximately $2.7 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health, including a proposed 37% cut to the National Cancer Institute. The Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium – a network that has spent 26 years developing experimental treatments for the leading cause of cancer death in children – learned in August that it would lose its federal funding.

Clinical trials have stopped accepting new patients. Families whose children were weeks away from experimental treatments are scrambling for alternatives.

But much more than cancer research is on Trump’s chopping block, including the architecture of international peace. Trump has announced plans to halt security assistance programs for Europe’s eastern flank, even as Russian drones violate NATO airspace. His defense secretary, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has called European NATO allies “pathetic” and dismissed them as “freeloaders.” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s former foreign policy chief, recently declared that the United States “can no longer be considered an ally of Europe.” After 80 years of leadership in the transatlantic alliance, America is walking away.

Trump has also accelerated fossil fuel production while canceling $7.6 billion in clean-energy projects. On day one of his second term, he declared a “national energy emergency” – even though the United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer. And although 2024 was almost certainly the hottest year on record, with global temperatures on track to exceed 1.5º Celsius (the threshold scientists say will trigger catastrophic climate effects), Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has moved to repeal all emissions limits on power plants.

Nor has Trump spared American farmers, who gave him more than 75% of their votes in 2024. His tariffs have been devastating: soybean farmers are under extreme financial stress, and farm bankruptcies have reached a five-year high. As one Kansas rancher said when Trump floated the idea of buying Argentinian beef for US markets: “an absolute betrayal.”

Making matters worse in rural America, the Trump administration has frozen billions in renewable energy investments that were bringing steady income to rural counties. And by restricting visas for farm workers, it has pushed smaller farms to the brink.

There may be a simple explanation for all this wanton destruction. Perhaps Trump, who is nearly 80 years old, could not care less about a world in which he will not be present. This is a man who has always subordinated tomorrow to today and never built anything meant to outlast his own celebrity. When your time horizon is measured in years rather than decades, defunding cancer research and accelerating climate change cease to register as costs. They become, at most, abstractions.

But this explanation, while partly satisfying, cannot account for why Trump’s destructiveness resonates with a significant portion of the electorate. Something deeper is at work.

Part of the answer lies in a generalized despair about the future. The fertility rate has collapsed. Automation threatens to render vast categories of employment obsolete. Technological change appears to be accelerating beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend, much less control. And for millions of Americans, the country they grew up in has been transformed beyond recognition in a single lifetime by immigration, cultural upheaval, and the displacement of old certainties. When the future looks bleak, there is little reason to invest in it.

Yet this, too, is insufficient. The deepest explanation lies in the nature of the Trumpian project itself. Ask what success would look like for Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement and a vision emerges: a white Christian nation in which women are returned to the home, producing children, and all recent immigrants are expelled. MAGA wants an America that last existed, if it ever did, sometime around 1955 – before civil rights, before feminism, before the Immigration Act of 1965 opened the country to the world.

This vision is impossible – not merely difficult – to achieve. The demographic and cultural transformations of the past half-century cannot be reversed. The women who entered the workforce are not going home. The immigrants and their children – now tens of millions of American citizens – are not leaving. The sexual revolution cannot be annulled. The information revolution cannot be undone. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

Here we arrive at the crux of the matter. Because the future MAGA wants cannot be attained, the movement has no constructive program. It cannot build anything, because nothing it builds would satisfy it. All it can do is destroy – destroy the institutions, the programs, the alliances, the research, and the investments that might otherwise create a future different from the one it mourns.

Destructiveness is not incidental to MAGA; it is what defines the movement. The rage that animates MAGA is the rage of impossibility – the fury that comes from wanting something that cannot be had. The defunding of pediatric cancer research, the abandonment of allies, the acceleration of climate change, and the betrayal of farmers: these are not means to an end. They are the end. They are expressions of a nihilism born of frustrated nostalgia.

This is what happens when a political movement promises to restore an irrecoverable past. Unable to deliver, it can only demolish. The future did not die of natural causes. It is being murdered, daily, by those who cannot abide its existence – because any future that is actually possible does not include what they desire.

And so children with brain tumors lose access to experimental treatments. Farmers who voted for Trump watch their markets collapse. The alliance that won the Cold War unravels. The planet heats toward catastrophe.

None of this is building toward anything. It is destruction for its own sake, rage without purpose, the tantrum of a movement that knows what it wants can never be. The question for the rest of us is whether we will allow a venal octogenarian’s indifference to the future – and his movement’s furious longing for the impossible – to determine what that future will be.

Stephen Holmes, a professor at New York University School of Law and Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, is the co-author (with Ivan Krastev) of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Penguin Books, 2019).