Trump’s Turbulent Journey Towards Privatization

It must have been around October or November with my shoulders up head down in the trenches of work as the country was staring down the barrel of a possible second term with Donald Trump (he won, by the way) that I came across a curious “economic plan” in one of likely thousands of Trump's pitches after he won. I have no idea where the exact link is now but I distinctly remember sending it to my dad and saying, they are going to crash everything and then slowly privatize it all with billionaires on both sides to seize even more control.

I've been sending him these harrowing messages and depressing link after depressing link ever since.

Donald Trump is not an original man. I’ve heard him equated to Nero to Hitler to Scrooge McDuck and looking over his life, purposeful or not, he’s following these narratives quite well. So this “plan” of privatization (whether it's his or not is not really the point), resembles quite eerily that of the Russian oligarchs in the 1990s, especially with lines that read, “The failing Soviet state left the ownership of state assets contested, which allowed for informal deals with former USSR officials as a means to acquire state property.”

Shoutout Wikipedia.

Now…where have we seen this? Let’s start with the latest from Wired’s recent story unpacking Elon Musk’s and the Lost Boys of DOGE slowly flipping the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) code…“off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.” Throughout the article, you'll see variations of marketing phrases/tactics of verbal manipulation urging productivity for the sake of the greater good (the greater good of them via privatization) with lines like "it's time to modernize America" and “hyper efficiency” knowing full well, anyone who's using this techno-witchcraft, is aiming to privatize. They said they’re not planning on it but once SSA crashes and burns (it will, read the story) that will simply give them a reason to follow through with their plans as they've been doing since they got in.

Onwards … we’re seeing with this trend of privatization with the postal service, with Republicans looking to get rid of the TSA with the subtly named “Abolish TSA Act” and replace it with private “security solutions.” And of course, there is the ongoing cuts going on with federal workers, a plan to push them into the private sector where they will be beholden to the oligarchical systems Trump/Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg/etc. all benefit from to the fullest. 

The line is clear but they muddy the waters by making the present systems look dysfunctional as they are the ones throwing in the wrench.

To close, there is an economic angle to all of this and it’s been eluded to by Trump himself and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick with Musk tagging along stating on X reported by Washington Post, “…a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending.” We all say things but Musk does and, being the richest man in the world...people listen. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick parroted this idea that following weekend stating, “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP…They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.” This, to me, couldn't be clearer.

I’m not an economist though but the guy (@brunoblockchain) has a great video giving a pretty solid explanation. Overall, this all feels like a weird, tortured, blender mission to try and turn everyone, be it working for the government or a citizen of the United States, into some kind mutated iteration of a gig worker but, instead of it delivering food or fixing someone's shelf part-time via TaskRabbit, it's all of you.