Waste and Cruelty: The Ledger Behind Trump’s War on Government

How Profit-Driven Logic Is Gutting the Public Good and Redefining Humanity as Overhead

Reality check: If you think Trump cares about you, he doesn’t. He cares about his billionaire friends. And they don’t see the world the way we do—how could they? Compared to their vast fortunes, our worth comes with so many zeros in front of it, we barely register. In their economy, value is measured by what can be extracted, sold, or monetized. Everything else—public health, clean air, affordable housing, even basic human care—is written off as waste. That’s the logic behind Trump’s war on government. He’s not eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse. He’s eliminating anything that doesn’t turn a profit for people like him.

Trump and his allies see the world as one big balance sheet. That’s their moral compass. If it doesn’t generate revenue, it’s dead weight. If it can’t be owned, sold, or turned into capital, it doesn’t count. This isn’t a misunderstanding—it’s the worldview.

In that view, workers are valued only by what they produce. A paycheck might be earned, but healthcare, sick leave, and retirement? Those are liabilities. Labor protections are overhead. Safety nets are indulgences. And environmental regulations? Pure waste—because they protect something that can’t be bought.

When they look at a forest, they don’t see an ecosystem—they see lumber. A river isn’t a source of life; it’s a commodity stream. If nature can’t be extracted, it might as well not exist. Pollution is the cost of doing business. Climate change? Either a hoax or someone else’s tab.

This isn’t incompetence. It’s intention. In this logic, anything public is a threat. Public schools compete with private profits. Public healthcare competes with insurance markets. Public oversight competes with private power. So it all has to go. Privatize the profit. Socialize the risk. That’s the model.

The same ledger sees the elderly, the poor, the disabled as cost centers—unless they can pay. Care without return is irrational. Kindness without a profit margin? A mistake.

What we call cruelty, they call discipline. What we see as abandonment, they call efficiency. And compassion? It doesn’t even have a line on the spreadsheet.

And yet, this way of seeing isn’t just brutal—it’s corrosive. A society that treats care as waste, nature as profit, and people as inputs doesn’t just shred budgets. It shreds the fabric of belonging. It hollows out what binds us: the idea that we owe something to one another simply because we share space, breath, and time.

It’s not just public services they’re cutting. It’s the principle of public good itself.

The antidote to this moral bankruptcy isn’t just better policy—it’s a different ethic. One that values people over profit. That sees a forest as more than timber, a person as more than their productivity, and care not as charity, but as infrastructure.

We need to recover a sense of worth that isn’t pegged to wealth. We need to defend the idea that government exists not to serve markets, but to serve people—especially those left out, pushed down, or priced out.

Because the real waste isn’t what’s being cut. It’s what we’re allowing to be lost.

Suggested Readings:

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park, eds. Terrestrial Transformations: A Political Ecology Approach to Society and Nature. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007.

Lewis, Michael. The Fifth Risk. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Viking Press, 2017.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.