It all sucks.

I knew it would hurt even worse this time around. But I didn’t expect the visceral gut punch, ripping out of my appendix, cutting off the blood supply to the limbs it would be. It isn’t like everyone who knew what this would be like, including myself, hadn’t warned, and warned, and warned. Somehow enough people memory-holed the first term and thought well, it won’t be so bad for me and decided to toss the rest of us to the oligarchs and fascists and well, here we are.

“You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.” – Donald Trump, 2014 on Fox News as quoted in Sarah Kendzior’s book Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America.

I keep wondering: when will everyone else catch up to it all? The ones who are just going about their day to day lives, who don’t watch the news or claim they aren’t political, or even the ones still glued to Fox or OAN or god-knows-what-other-disinformation-stream-they-are-addicted-to. I struggle to understand why people don’t see that an unelected billionaire, one who has made much of his billions by suckling off the teat of the federal government, dismantling federal agencies because he’s disgruntled with the fact that some of the agencies were investigating him and his companies. Meanwhile, he’s made billions since the election, though more recently Tesla sales are down in much of Europe due to his electioneering in Germany and other countries of extreme-far right, Nazi-aligned parties. This isn’t the use of Nazi as a denigrating term to tell someone when you disagree with them. This is literal Nazis. Do people even know this? I suspect many do not. Musk is not a good person. Truthfully, has never been a good person, and now he walks around in public with one of his 14 kids on his shoulders as a literal human shield because he knows he’s a target for Luigi types. That Trump has given Musk free reign to do whatever he wants to the United States federal government while our Republican dominated Congress, many of whom Republicans don’t want any of this but are too cowardly to stand up to Trump or Musk, just rolls over and lets the constitutional crisis unfold.

And don’t even get me started on the absolute disgraceful treatment of President Zelenskyy at the White House last week. That was beyond abhorrent and even ‘Little Marco’ knew it was completely fucked up as he waited for the couch to swallow him whole and take him away from what was essentially a trap for Zelenskyy. I don’t see how people can’t understand that the US is now aligning with Russia (Putin), China, North Korea, and it’s TBD on Iran because, you know, history and Israel and such, but Iran is aligned with Russia…so.

I haven’t even gotten to the tariffs, the desperation to make Canada and Greenland states or territories of the US, which is just colonial nonsense from a different era. The reality is, of course, both have lots of either rare earth minerals or oil and gas to exploit! Many have been theorizing that the on/off threats of tariffs are just a way for them to short the economy and stock market to make money when things inevitably rise again. Meanwhile, the public is losing thousands of dollars in their own investments and retirement accounts so that the ultra rich can get even richer. It’s a race to see who can become the first trillionaire! It seems to me, the more money you have the more evil you become. What good is all of that money other than to buy your way into the government and change regulations….oh, hmmm, wait…that sounds so familiar.

Of course, the worst of it for me as an environmentally minded person is the gutting of federal agencies under the guise of “saving money”. Saving money is not what is happening here. The end goal is and has always been privatization of many of these agencies and especially the removal or privatization of our public lands. Iconic writer of western landscapes, Wallace Stegner once wrote, “The national parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” We are at our worst right now, that’s for certain. Here’s the reality: there are people who are actively working against conservation, against public lands, against all environmental regulations. These people, well, I can’t explain them. When President Biden’s 30×30 plan was revealed, it quickly had opposition from staunch anti-conservation groups. These are people who would like to continue milking the land for all its got so they can of course, make more money. At the heart of it, they are also anti-government, which is honestly hilarious when getting down to it because for how much they want the federal government to stay out of people’s business, they are really good about inserting themselves into people’s business when they think it suits them. Many of these people are conspiracy theorists and insurrectionists at heart, too. Extremists, basically, with a pulpit to reach more moderate folks to sway them to their side.

The gutting of USFWS, EPA, USGS, NOAA, NMFS, and others will be felt for a generation at least. It’s extremely hard to come back from that. When you detonate a bomb instead of taking a scalpel, you inevitably blow up things you didn’t intend to. But then again, maybe you did intend for these things to happen. I don’t think Musk or Trump or many Republicans actually care about the tool used at this point. They’ve been clamoring for much of this for decades and there were too many ethical people around Trump in his first term that he couldn’t do all of this but they learned enough to know they could do it the “right way” if given the opportunity a second time (by getting rid of all of the ethical people). And enough citizens were morally outraged about egg prices in November they decided Trump would fix all of that but instead we’ve gutted our agencies that would protect from things like, H5N1, which would help resolve those egg prices, and, well, have you looked at egg prices lately? Good job, y’all! Pats on the back for everyone! We’re really going to Make American Healthy Again—but first we need to kill off all of the unhealthy people, apparently. Who’s unhealthy? Well, I guess we’re about to find out! Measles for everyone. Maybe some TB, too! And since we destroyed USAID, maybe some HIV will become drug resistant and cause a resurgence in that epidemic.

Nate Swick is the host of the American Birding Podcast and does digital communications for the ABA and is an author of birding field guides.

Closer to home, the environmental agencies hit my heart the most right now. When I heard about the firings at USFWS I wondered about Matt Buckingham here in Texas. Matt is probably one of the better known and best naturalists in the state right now and he’d recently moved from a state agency to USFWS last year. He’d been doing a lot of work with the endangered Louisiana pine snakes in Kisatchie National Forest. He posted a few days after firings, after he’d digested everything, that he had indeed been fired 10 days shy of his 1-year probationary period. All over there are stories and more stories of federal workers who were working dream jobs, often for not great pay, who were fired. Most were lied to about why they were being fired, told they had failed to do their duties, that they hadn’t done a good job, when many have paperwork and awards to prove otherwise. And it wasn’t just people who were new to the agency, it was anyone who’d moved around in an agency, changed positions, but had been there for many years—if you changed positions you start your probation period over. It’s a brain drain. I think many people assume park rangers just play with animals all day but many wear a lot of different hats, from cleaning pit toilets, public education, trail maintenance, report writing. Sometimes you’ll go to these many thousands of acres parks and there’s a tiny handful of staff to manage all of that land. They sometimes have support from volunteer groups but sometimes not. I’ve been reading a lot of books from 30-60 years ago about the Big Thicket and all of our environmental agencies have been underfunded and understaffed for ages. I’ll hear about a potential trail on one page, realize the book was written two decades ago and know that the trail was never built because funding or staffing was never realized. Y’all, it isn’t the environmental agencies with the bloat on the federal budget.

With H5N1 (avian flu) raging, I’m most concerned about whooping cranes going extinct in the next few years. It could certainly happen when you have the perfect storm of decreased federal agency capacity and a pandemic killing birds across the world, beginning to spread to other mammals and even to humans. An Instagram acquaintance who lives in Kentucky recently wrote about a mass of dead sandhill cranes at a natural area near him. Whoopers are often found intermingling with sandhill cranes. It’s only a matter of time. So the screenshot above from Nate Swick really isn’t far off. There will be extinctions because of Trump and Musk. Because of the American people.

We’re in a dark, dark age. It started in 2016, though in reality it had been festering for years before that. And unfortunately enough people don’t see things for what they are and we’re still months to maybe a year away from it hurting enough folks for them to wake up to the reality. By then it will likely to be too late.

This crisis is not a matter of Democrats versus Republicans, or “red” versus “blue.” The crisis is a matter of people who seek to protect the United States versus elite operatives who want to destroy it. The latter are stripping down the country and selling it for parts and trying to convince ordinary Americans that it was their own idea. – The Knew by Sarah Kendzior (2022)