The Scum Manifesto

Or, How to Get a Job in the Trump Administration

I’m sure by this point we’ve all seen some horrific videos of ICE abductions of migrants. Something looks off about those guys: They don’t look like feds or even cops; they look more like Proud Boys or Jan 6ers. That makes sense, since DHS is using white nationalist propaganda in their hiring drive. Proud Boys in Ohio publicly brag about being “high on the hog” because of the new hiring spree. Many of the videos portray them not just as menacing thugs, but also as incompetents, clearly unprofessional, out of shape, and sometimes unable to make arrests. Commentator Adam Johnson had a sharp tweet about it: “There are many ways of looking at ICE’s recent terror campaign, but probably the most salient is a bunch of people who can’t get real jobs harassing and kidnapping people with real jobs.”

Another way to put this is that ICE is a central part of the Trump regime’s overall organization of the mob. They are drawn from what Marx called the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes,” Engels called “the depraved elements of all classes,” and what Arendt identified as “declassés of all classes.” In fact, a great deal of Trump’s political apparatus is drawn from those ranks. Arendt summed up the lives of mob leaders as characterized by “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life.” Semi or even open criminality and the adoption of mob attitudes and behaviors are practically job requirements for service in the administration. Just look at Paul Ingrassia, White House employee and, until some hours ago, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, whose leaked texts revealed a “Nazi streak.” He’s represented accused rapist and pimp Andrew Tate and had connections to the antisemitic demagogue Nick Fuentes.

If you needed any additional evidence that MAGA is more of a kleptocratic demimonde or criminal racket than a political movement, look at how Steve Bannon gravitated to Jeffrey Epstein just as the stench of disgrace became unbearable for most others. Or look at Trump’s otherwise inexplicable commutation of the sentence of fraudster George Santos. Marx wrote that the mob was drawn partially from “discharged jailbirds”—in Santos’s case, it’s literally true. The message there is clearly: “Support me, and I’ll take care of you.”

It’s important to understand that Trump’s sitting himself up as padrone to the mob is part of the political economy of Trumpism. The corruption is the point. Like Louis Napoleon in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, Trump is the chief of the lumpen elements. As Johnson noted, a career in MAGA is a pay-off system, a welfare state for the unemployable. This rabble is the central fighting force of Trumpism, more loyal and reliable than the old, bourgeois conservatives. But Trump must permit them to get theirs; they have to steal or leech in some way. They believe property is theft, and they are gonna get theirs. August Thalheimer puts it pungently in his essay On Fascism:

Marx sums up all this under the description “;la bohème”. Thus it is declassed elements of all classes from whom Louis Bonaparte founds his characteristic party organisation, and whom he gathers around himself as trustees and officials, etc. This, of course, is not by chance, but is in the nature of things. Economically and socially rootless elements, parasites from all classes who are excluded from direct production, are the natural material, the natural tools of the “independent executive authority”. In this social rubbish specific class characteristics are erased. They are free of ideological, etc, ties to the particular class whose rubbish they are, insofar as they can rise above them and manoeuvre between them. On the other hand, they show not the revolutionary, but the counter-revolutionary abolition of these class characteristics, the negation of bourgeois class principles which remains within these principles. For example, the thief carries out the abolition of bourgeois property on the basis of bourgeois property. He abolishes others’ private property by establishing it for himself, that is, individually. The well known phrase of Proudhon, “La propriété c’est le vol”, “Property is theft”, is equally applicable in reverse, “Le vol c’est la propriété”, “Theft is property”

….

Economically, these declassed elements, parasites from all classes, have a natural urge to secure for themselves a source of existence in the machinery of government and in the Bonapartist party machine. That is the cause of the huge expansion of the apparatus of the independent executive authority.

A contradiction within the Republican Party is between the mob elements and relatively respectable bourgeois conservatives who are still uneasy with the overt presence of these disreputable characters. This contradiction is partially resolved in the person of Trump himself as a figure who represents where the underworld shades into the mainstream of business. One can see the contradiction play itself out in Senate Majority Leader Thune’s rejection of Ingrassia. But Trump knows he can’t ever totally jettison the mob, since it represents his core supporters. And we’ve seen that he’s willing to sic them on cowering Republicans if need be.

Any strategy that takes on Trump must find a way to incorporate and exploit this truth: Trump and his key followers are criminal parasites on American society.