In the clusterfuck of Trump’s seemingly random outpouring of statements, EO’s and policy threats, we lose perspective – who will muddle through and who will be obliterated? As a retired outreach mental health worker, I now am forced to imagine the harms that will rain down on those with no power, who have a life or death dependency on the meager programs of an eternally shrinking, uncharitable government. The people that I worked with for 35 years, who often lived in public housing projects and clung to the frayed strands of the US safety net will be the most invisible victims of fascism.

In the US, government policy on behalf of the most disenfranchised people has, at best, an obligatory, performative and wholly inadequate quality. Poverty, for those dependent on the so called safety net, resembles a Rubik’s cube done with a blindfold. How do you you support yourself and two children on an $800 monthly social security disability check? Where will you find temporary refuge while working for a minimum wage and waiting for your name to come up on the local housing authority wait list (a process that averages about five years)?

I am thinking of a 60 year old grandmother with diabetes and an ongoing risk of amputation, caring for one grandchild and often giving shelter, in a section 8 apartment, to those less fortunate than herself. In the poorest communities in the US there are people who share their living space with those who have been rebuffed by layers of bureaucratic restriction. Poor people frequently take their own unravelling threads of the public safety net and stretch them a little further.

Not every disabled person can live under their own roof – millions are dependent on their slightly luckier peers. Some people have languished for years (nearly a decade for many) on government waiting lists to get SSDI and housing, and these multitudes often – at great personal risk to their hosts from vigilant bureaucrats and housing officials – hide in the available corners of other people’s apartments. If a person not-on-the-lease is discovered existing, surviving, sleeping on makeshift pillows, the cascading ire of the authorities might initiate eviction proceedings against the lease holder.

A few words about being poor – your life conforms to a set of predicaments that most of us never even think about. You spend hours waiting your turn in bureaucratic settings – the Housing Authority, the Social Security Administration, the office of Transitional Assistance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Department of Children and Families (in some states, called Department of Social Services DSS), and the office (often at a local hospital) to determine Medicaid Eligibility. Any stranger seated behind a desk in an office cubicle can dismantle your life on a whim.

The largest person in the room is usually the armed security guard and every government office dealing with poor folks has at least one. Poor people sometimes get angry, frustrated – even loud in a way suggesting that the boundaries of civility might be breeched. The preferred mood in any government office favors rows of stolid, resigned faces. If someone loses their shit, one can depend on the tightening, averted eyes of collective discomfort.

I once had a client body up to a security guard during an intake for a psychiatric placement at a local hospital, and the officer suddenly took him down. My client screamed at me, “Phil, get this fucking pig off of me.” He hoped (he later confided) that I would kick the security guard in the head, but I did manage to convince the intake person to let me take my client outside to calm him down. Unfortunately, he refused to go back inside and spent the night drinking one Natty Daddy after another in an abandoned factory. (He would die months later of a fentanyl overdose – there are no programs designed to provide housing for actively using addicts.)

Intakes of every sort brought out the worst in my clients – crying, shaking, pacing, and sometimes leaving and forfeiting any chance for life saving services. Security guards provoke a subconscious, gestalt understanding that the industry of poverty rests on the institution of violence. Waiting passively in a government office is a rite of passage, a repeating ritual that reminds the least powerful people just how indifferently fate looks down on them. Some people simply refuse to engage with the system and either rough it on the streets or kill themselves.

The institutional spaces that financially comfortable people visit – the estate planner, the financial advisor, the real estate agency, the car dealership – have no muscular security guard to circumvent formal interactions with the reminder that we politely defer to threats. If you want to understand the power of class delineation, follow the security guards.

The bureaucracy of poverty, in addition to providing all poor people with a lingering reminder that noncompliance summons beatings and armed violence, also teeters on a famously arbitrary sort of absurdity. For example, a woman on my case load had become life threateningly obese. Her public medical insurance paid for bariatric surgery, but when she lost over a hundred pounds, the same insurance refused to pay for cosmetic surgery to correct for the tangled folds of loose skin dangling from her arms, legs and torso. “They have stranded me here for the rest of my life as ugly as a toad,” she told me.

Most of my clients, by their early thirties, had no teeth. Medicaid dental pays for extractions, but not for restorative treatment. A toothless smile is a badge of underclass membership.

A man on my case load collected $300 a month from Transitional Assistance while his disability claim was being processed by Social Security, but the office discontinued his payments after his aunt passed away. He had been living in her apartment and paying her almost his whole check for rent. I spoke with his case worker by phone: Now he is homeless and needs to pay acquaintances to couch surf, I told the worker, who replied, we deal in verifiable figures not hypotheticals. In what logical system does a man grieve, get evicted and lose his entire income as a matter of official protocol? Homeless people don’t need income because they don’t pay rent, I was told.

Another of my clients made the unwise decision of marrying his girlfriend, and lost his SSI immediately. She had a minimum wage job working the counter at Cumberland Farms, but without his disability check (he had severe cognitive damage after being struck by a vehicle at the age of 9) they could not pay rent and wound up sleeping in their car, on and off, for some two years. Their homelessness was – as it usually is – punctuated by episodes of respite spent in the apartments of other poor people. To this day, I have not been savvy enough to comprehend the legalisms that assaulted this couple once marital vows were exchanged. I knew just enough to advise my disabled clients not to get married in the eyes of the state. Have a private ritual to acknowledge your connection, it’s none of the government’s business.

The things I saw happened to poor people under the Bushes, Clinton, Obama and during Trump’s first failed fascist regime. Now we have a fully empowered and mobilized fascist coup that is busily dismantling the “deep state.” Chris Hedges is one of a few writers who recognize that the “deep state” being smashed and discarded prepares for the new fascist deep state that will feature censorship, cruelty and violence that will be startling to most of us. Revolutionary and reactionary coups, Hedges writes, always replace the previous government structures with new institutions:

“All revolutionary movements, on the left or the right, dismantle the old bureaucratic structures. The fascists in Germany and the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, once they seized power, aggressively purged the civil service. They see in these structures, correctly, an enemy that would stymie their absolute grip on power. It is a coup d’état by inches. Now we get our own.”

What will the fascist coup d’etat mean for my people struggling and subsisting in the quasi concentration camp-like institution of public housing projects? The very poor are merely a burden to the transactional, plundering, heartless ambitions of Muskian fascism. They, like undocumented migrants and career government bureaucrats are surplus pieces to be discarded without humanitarian concern (although deporting migrants will be a huge economic blow). The poor are an expense without value to Elon Musk’s quest to hoover cash from the bottom to the top. Trump has already revealed his goal of gutting “the welfare state.” He will gut Medicaid, affordable housing construction and subsidized programs like SNAP, Section 8, Head Start and public education in general. The gathering fascist state has no interest in humanitarian gestures.

The victims, once Trump and Musk consolidate the coup and no longer have to fight off hostile judges and an oppositional press, will be designated and targeted according to priorities. If Nazi Germany is a template, as Chris Hedges suggests, we know via history that disabled people, alcoholics and those with difficulty holding onto employment (the work-shy in Nazi parlance) will be punished relentlessly. We should all anticipate an escalating war on the poor (I use the word “escalating,” because America has always been at war with the poor) that will almost immediately result in an unsustainably enormous spike in homelessness and medically uninsured masses dying in the streets.

Every dark, pessimistic piece I write summons up the paradox that encompasses everything. One cannot resist the enormous and violent powers of the fascist state, and yet it is morally reprehensible to succumb to acquiescence and passively observe the torture of those less blessed than ourselves. Fortunately, we have Chris Hedges to articulate the dilemma of our time:

“Censorship and state repression will expand. Those with a conscience will become an enemy of the state. Resistance, when it happens, will be expressed in spontaneous eruptions which coalesce outside the established centers of power. These acts of defiance will be met with brutal state repression. But if we do not resist, we succumb morally and physically to the darkness. We become complicit in a radical evil. This, we must never allow.”

Attend every local protest, be aware of mass protests, general strikes, boycotts and opportunities to resist. You do not need false hopes to be true to yourself. I expect to soon get anxious calls from my former clients and I have to answer to them.

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