What Do These Ghouls Even Want
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The least interesting answer to the above question goes for the president himself. He wants, as always, to be on television as much as possible portrayed in as glorious and adoring light as possible, to have the people surrounding him tell him, again and again, how amazing everything he has done and is doing and will do really is, and to, of course, make more money, regardless of its effect on his ability to buy or have any different stuff than he already has. In a sometimes-abstract/sometimes-explicit sense, he would like to win. That's more or less it.
Downstream of all that is some really bad stuff, of course, because he is largely agnostic about how the goals are achieved and who gets hurt along the way. It is the people around him, the ones enacting all the various policies that the boss is aware of in broad, vague strokes only so as to be sure they are advancing his own goals — attention, money, victory — where the question of "want" becomes more directly relevant to the rest of us. From last week's Tylenol-autism meltdown to the ongoing murders of civilians in the Caribbean to Tuesday morning's embarrassing Pentagon spectacle through the impending shutdown of the federal government — those hangers-on are offering some solid demonstrations of their gnarled, misshapen desires.
The more dangerous of Trump officials are the true believers — rather than the strivers, the Pam Bondis or Marco Rubios or JD Vances, always oozing, slime-mold-like, into whatever ideological nooks and crannies get them closer and closer to power. But those believers — what does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., want? In a word, eugenics. He has convinced himself that he and he alone has answers to health-related questions that don't, in large part, exist, and those answers involve culling the "weakest" members of society in favor of the "fittest" among us. He will backfill whatever pseudo-scientific nonsense he can dig up in order to get there, as was on display last week.
Stephen Miller's dark heart isn't far afield, though he is demonically, singularly focused on non-white immigration. It was reported recently that he has "played a leading role" in the extralegal killing of now 17 Venezuelans aboard boats in the southern Caribbean — acts the New York Times helpfully placed into context on Sunday: "Some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily kill civilians." Indeed; thank you, some legal experts.
Any time Trump's deputy chief of staff appears on cable news he makes clear that nothing less than a white ethnostate headed by a "unitary executive" with literally no check on power is the goal. It is a bizarre exercise to imagine the monster's inner monologue; he already gets to press the button on missile strikes to kill random brown people and face zero consequences. For Miller, what more, exactly, is there, if not a society free of any of those people he is now apparently allowed to murder?
For Pete Hegseth, there is plenty more: there are still women and non-white people inside the military ranks, and so his work is not done. On Tuesday morning, he spoke to an essentially unprecedented gathering of 800-odd generals and admirals, recalled from around the world in order to hear a failed Fox News host complain about "fat" troops, tell them to shave their beards, and say things like "No more dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship.... We are done with that shit."
For anyone capable of shame, genuinely embarrassing stuff! For Hegseth, just the start of a project to rid the military ranks of anyone who can't do some arbitrary number of pushups. He said he would implement the "highest male standard" for fitness for combat roles. "If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it." Well!
And then there's OMB director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought. He has said, explicitly, that he wants to "bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will." He wants federal employees "in trauma." He wants, more or less, a Christian nationalist autocracy run by people like him, without meaningful input from Congress or the judiciary, and is happy to let the weird reality show guy redecorate the Oval Office with gaudy gold trinkets if it gets him there.
It is a safe bet, then, that Vought is downright giddy as he watches the shutdown clock count down toward Wednesday at 12:01. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that a shutdown would lead to a furlough for 750,000 federal employees each day. The OMB director has threatened to use a shutdown as pretense to fire many of them outright, likely destroying many functions across the government such that the bureaucracy "can't reconstitute itself later in future administrations." This is, to this particular brand of true believer, Christmas.
We could do this sort of thing at any point during the Trump presidency, of course. Every week there is some cabinet member or other official or striving red state governor laying bare their grotesque yearnings to the world, or more likely to the television they hope the big guy is currently watching. These past few days though have felt at least somewhat accelerationist, though, if only for the various examples' unprecedented nature. The ghouls have repeatedly shown what they want; they are, increasingly, starting to get it.
