In 1954, attorney Joseph Welch looked Senator Joseph McCarthy in the eye and asked the question that helped dismantle a movement of fear and authoritarianism: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” It was a cultural gut punch— a moment when shame still had currency. But in 2025, that question lands differently. Today’s political arsonists — Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their orbit of enablers — don’t fear shame. They treat it like fuel, converting scandal into spectacle, outrage into fundraising.
This essay is not a story about bold leadership. It’s about the performance of power. Trump governs through grievance and optics; Musk dismantles accountability through branding and deregulation. Together, they’ve ushered in a new kind of arrogance — one with a lack of humility and a governing style built on self-worship, detachment, and witting incompetence. They don’t govern. They grandstand. And while they strut, the people they were elected or empowered to serve are left cleaning up the debris.
Donald Trump has never led a coherent administration — only a cult of personality. He doesn’t build policy; he builds grudges. Since returning to office, he’s burned through more than $85 million in taxpayer funds on golf. Yet, his programmatic ignorance deprives young, poor children of the opportunity to have decent meals served in school.
His economic blueprint is a grab bag of 1980s slogans and borrowed ghosts. Case in point: Trump recently invoked Lee Iacocca, the former Chrysler CEO who hasn’t been relevant since cassette tapes. This outdated recollection is not the basis for sound modern economic policy. It’s time travel — minus the logic or destination.
His latest tariff tantrums target everything from microchips to mangoes. But tariffs don’t punish China. They punish us — American consumers. The cost hikes imposed by these ill-founded tariffs get passed down — from importer to manufacturer to consumer — with those consumers on the lower end of the economic ladder footing the bill. Again. Trump’s strategy is like throwing a wrench into a car engine and blaming the wrench for not being American-made.
Then there’s Elon Musk, who was handed the keys to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — and immediately turned it into the Department of Government Evasion. Regulations slashed. Oversight neutered. Agencies decapitated. All these ill-advised actions are being taken in the name of ‘efficiency’ — which, according to his former allies, is Musk-speak for avoiding rules that apply to everyone else.
Musk built his empire on government contracts, subsidies, and federal grants and now tears down the very institutions that made his ascent possible. It’s not government reform — it’s libertarian cosplay with taxpayer cash. He’s not trying to fix the system — he’s trying to hollow it out and lease the shell back to us, with premium access available via an app.
The result? A slow-motion civic demolition. Budgets sabotaged. Civil service demoralized. Whole departments were rendered inoperable — not by incompetence, but by design. Trump and Musk don’t want to make government work. They want to make it irrelevant — or worse, auctioned off.
And what they hope to leave behind is something no audit can fully capture: a civic morale collapse: People will stop voting. Teachers will stop believing. Environmental scientists will leave for the private sector. By Trump and Musk’s uninformed reasoning, voters won’t just lose faith in candidates — they will lose faith in the idea that the system can still serve them. Meanwhile, MAGA governors and copycat mayors carry out this agenda like missionaries, gutting local protections in the name of ideological purity.
There’s no part of the Constitution they won’t ignore. No agency they won’t gut. No lie they won’t amplify. And no one in their inner circle will tell them the truth: their work to dismantle government, to make it more ‘efficient,’ is unwanted, unneeded, and anti-democratic.
This essay is not a warning. It’s a reckoning. Trump, Musk, and their cadre of sycophantic followers don’t lack decency. If they ever had it, they sold it off long ago — in exchange for applause, stock price bumps, and social media engagement.
For anyone who voted for Trump, it is now clear that he has no sense of decency. And we — the collective opposition who compose most of this nation’s voting population — have no more time to pretend that decency matters to them.
History, unfortunately, gave them power. They used it to strut. And now the people are sickened — disgusted, really — by what they see. Not because we expected nobility but because we got fooled — again — into expecting better.
~Dunneagin~
