Trump’s war on children
Young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned into a nightmare
Under the authoritarian reign of Donald Trump, finance capitalism now drives politics, governance, and policy in unprecedented ways and is more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains.
More than willing to wage a war on America’s children, the Trump administration provides a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis. Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the tenets of a savage form of casino capitalism or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.
Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present, they are as the late Zygmunt Bauman has argued “the first post war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility (in which the) plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.” As the social state is decimated, youth, especially those marginalized by race and class, are subject to the dictates of the punishing state. Not only is their behaviour being criminalized in the schools and on the streets, they are also subject to repressive forms of legislation. How else to explain the fact that at least 25 states are sponsoring legislation that would make perfectly legal forms of protest a crime that carries a huge fine or subjects young people to possible felony charges? Increasingly, young people are viewed as a public disorder, a dream now turned into a nightmare.
While there is much talk about the influence of Trumpism, there are few analyses that examine its culture of cruelty and its effects on children. The most recent example is evident in budget and tax reform bills that shift millions of dollars away from social programs vital to the health of poor youth to the pockets of the ultra-rich, who hardly need tax deductions. As Marian Wright Adelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness. Nearly 13.2 million children are poor — almost one in five. About 70 per cent of them are children of colour who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.” The Trump administration is more than willing to pass massive tax cuts for the rich while at the same time refusing to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which supports over nine million children. When asked to defend the cuts, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch stated “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.” Remember he is talking about children who are poor, vulnerable, and at risk for a range of illnesses. Such statements are more than cruel, they represent as political and economic system that has abandoned any sense of moral and social responsibility.
Another under-analyzed example of Trump’s war on youth can be seen his cancellation of the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), instituted in 2012 by former president Obama. Under the program, 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children or teens before 2007 were allowed to live, study, and work in the United States without fear of deportation. In revoking the program, Trump enacted a policy that is both cruel and racist, given that 78 per cent of DACA residents are from Mexico — these are the same immigrants Trump once labelled as rapists, drug addicts, and criminals.
Trump’s contempt for the lives of young people, his support for a culture of cruelty and his appetite for destruction and civic catastrophe are more than a symptom of a society ruled almost exclusively by a marketdriven survival of the fittest ethos with its willingness if not glee in calling for the separation of economic, political, and social actions from any sense of social costs or consequences. It is about the systemic derangement of democracy and emergence of a politics that celebrates the toxic pleasures of the authoritarian state with no regard for its children.
Trump is the apostle of moral blindness, unchecked corruption, and revels in a mode of governance that merges a never-ending theatrics of self-promotion with a deeply authoritarian politics. He has unleashed a rancid populism and racially inspired ultranationalism that mimics older forms of totalitarianism and creates culture of cruelty that both disparages its children and cancels out a future that makes democracy possible.