The Paradox of Trumpism

How Trump is killing millions of people and why few people care

Democracy tends to be a pretty decent system for averting profound disaster. If Trump tomorrow went to war with Spain, made it illegal to eat food, or randomly detonated a nuclear weapon in New York City, his approval ratings would take a considerable and profound dive. Catastrophic presidential actions are typically met with fierce resistance from voters.

But this is only true of some kinds of catastrophic action. If tomorrow the president enacted a disastrous but very complicated push for inefficient and growth-killing anti-trust regulation, he would not face backlash from voters. Voters only punish politicians when the politicians do bad things that are obvious. In fact, a president faces more political backlash for simple misfortunes they didn’t cause than for disastrous but complicated policies.

This is one of the things that makes the Trump administration so insidious. When it does things that are bad in obvious ways, that negatively affect voters, Trump typically chickens out. Despite grand proclamations that his new tariff regime would reshape the global trading system, when the stock market imploded, Trump got rid of most of his tariffs. Because he chickens out whenever his bad policies produce immediate disaster, his popularity ratings remain low but not super low. But when he does bad things that hurt non-voters, his terrible policies don’t get rolled back—when his primary victims are overseas or only likely to be known about years down the line, Trump never chickens out.

This is what we might call the paradox¹ of Trumpism: despite his terrible policies, his approval ratings never get too low, because the horrific policies he sticks with aren’t the ones voters care about.

Cutting off foreign aid is a disaster, vastly worse than the Iraq war. It is unequivocally the worst thing a president has done in recent memory, a catastrophe of almost unfathomable proportions. Millions will die because of Trump and Elon.

One study estimated that USAID prevented about 92 million deaths in the last two decades. PEPFAR, one of the programs Trump mostly eliminated, saved around 25 million lives. One study estimated that if the cuts aren’t reversed, they could cause an extra 7.9 million children to die by 2040. Tens of millions fewer kids will get vaccinated because of RFK Junior’s anti-vax lunacy—particularly insidious in its global ramifications—and of these people, more than a million will die. In the next 15 years, USAID dismantlement could likely cause around 25 million extra deaths, according to one study, and one lower-end estimate guessed the death toll from eliminating foreign aid would likely cost over 3 million lives per year. And while I wouldn’t be shocked if some of these numbers were inflated, and USAID hasn’t been entirely dismantled, even the low-end estimates mean the death toll will likely be in the tens of millions.

It’s hard to fathom the sheer extent of the devastation. The human brain is not able to intuitively grasp numbers like 25 million or 8 million or even 3 million. So to grasp the scale of the devastation, think about some young child that you know and love. Imagine the horror of that child succumbing to a fatal disease—a horror for which it seems the world could never produce adequate compensation, a tragedy leaving a hole in the world where the child used to be. The death of a child leaves the world empty, hollow, no longer containing their laughs, their cries. When a child dies, they never learn to walk, never learn to read, never have their first kiss, never become an adult, never fall in love, never have kids of their own, never get to experience the myriad things that make life wonderful.

Now multiply that by 25 million.

Of course, you can’t actually do that. Your brain can’t grok how much worse it is for 25 million people to die than for 1,000 people to die. Your brain just reads both as “big number of deaths.” But though none of us can intuitively grasp it, that is the extent of the tragedy. There really are millions fewer children who will ever grow up because of the actions of this president. Millions of extra parents will have to face the greatest conceivable tragedy—the loss of a child to a cruel disease.

But foreigners do not vote in U.S. elections. Because the people who will die are distant, this crime beyond comprehension goes unnoticed. Trump’s poll numbers suffer more from a slight increase in egg prices than from him deliberately killing millions of people, all because he’s not willing to spend well below 1% of the federal budget on lifesaving medical care. The cries of the faraway mothers and fathers who will lose their children are too distant to be heard.

The Iraq war only killed a few hundred thousand people. The action that gave Bush the title “the butcher of Washington,” that made him almost universally hated, caused only around 1% as many deaths as some estimates of Trump’s foreign aid cuts. If the Iraq war is a reason for Bush to go down as a war criminal, how must we think of Trump?

And no, the excuse that failing to save is different from killing doesn’t hold any sway here. If you stop providing aid to someone who needs it when they have no ability to provide it themselves—abruptly, without giving them any time to find another source—you have killed them. If an aid facility is feeding infants, and you cut off all funding to it so that the infants starve to death, what you have done is far more akin to homicide than failing to save. And even if it were only failing to save, it is deeply evil to refuse to spend a few bucks per American to avert a death toll greater than that of the Nazi holocaust.

And that’s not even to speak of the other devastating consequences of Trumpism. The slow erosion of norms, in, for example, people working for the FBI having to verify they never said anything mean about Kash Patel. Chucking immigrants with no other criminal record into brutal detention facilities and carrying out sweeping and economically corrosive mass deportations. Shutting down legal immigration, detaining foreign students over bullshit charges and statements made that were critical of Israel in their college paper. And while immigration is quite visible, its victims are not voters and their interests are not taken seriously by most voters.

Pam Bondi’s DOJ just filed a suit to strike down a state-level law that made it illegal to confine pigs in tiny metal crates too small for them to turn around in. If the suit succeeds, this would effectively wipe out all animal cruelty laws on a state level—leading to hundreds of millions or billions of chickens and pigs living their entire life in a cage.

Trump has also eliminated a sizeable portion of funding for basic medical research—a decision likely to cost around 8 trillion dollars long-term. The NIH plays a key role in the development of around 99% of new drugs. Despite innovation being responsible for nearly all increases in global wealth, Trump has been carrying out a targeted war against the primary vehicle of medical innovation. The profound reduction in new drugs could cost 82 million life-years in the next 25 years, shortening American lifespans a quarter of a year on average. And that’s not even taking into account the devastating and far more significant effects that razing medical innovation could have internationally.

Trump has been carrying out disastrous policies almost too quickly to keep track of. I haven’t even mentioned tariffs or the strikes on Iran, for instance. The cataclysm is too severe and widespread to be fully described in any text shorter than the King James Bible. But despite that, the cataclysm is invisible. Voters do not pick up on it because the millions of people and hundreds of millions of animals negatively affected by these policies aren’t American citizens.

Trump is a failure mode of democracy. He is burning the commons, destroying all the best things America has ever done, but doing it in a way that is subtle. He is destroying the invisible engines of progress, while walking back every policy that produces immediate and obvious negative effects. The Trump administration is causing millions of people to die, including children—but this has almost no effect on his poll numbers.

There’s something surreal about this. The scale of death by many conservative estimates from his policies could surpass the Nazi holocaust. Yet this isn’t much of a news story. It feels like most people have moved on. The deaths of millions is far less interesting than whatever the story of the day happens to be.

But we should not forget this. We should not forget the tens of millions of people who will perish because of a ketamine-addled psycho and a mentally-incontinent ochre buffoon who are too apathetic to care about the impacts their policies have on people overseas. Trump, Musk, and the rest of his enablers ought to have an indelible black mark next to their name, the way Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and Mao do—as the killer of millions.

1. If we’re willing to use paradox in the hackish way it’s used by non-philosophers, to simply mean two things that seem to work in opposite directions existing in tandem.