“March of the Fuckheads” is track six on Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 album The Downward Spiral. Trent Reznor wrote it thirty-two years ago. He was not writing about anything specific. He was writing about everything specific.
The parade has already lost some marchers, which is appropriate, because a parade organized by this man cannot maintain its own formation. Four women have been fired or resigned in three months. Kristi Noem is gone. Pam Bondi is gone. Tulsi Gabbard is gone. Lori Chavez-DeRemer is gone. The attrition rate of a cabinet assembled specifically for loyalty and personal devotion is extraordinary and clarifying: even the people who wanted to be here are leaving. The parade continues regardless, because the music is still playing and the man at the front has not noticed the gaps, and noticing gaps requires looking backward, which is not something he does.
Let us review the remaining units.
JD Vance, Vice President of the United States. He is the intellectual of the formation, which is a title he earned by being the only person near the front who has read a book, and which he carries with the specific discomfort of a man who knows what the book says about the man he is marching behind. He called Trump America’s Hitler in a private message to a friend in 2016. He is now the second most powerful person in the government that Hitler is running. He broke the tie that confirmed Pete Hegseth, he convened in the Situation Room to manage the Epstein exposure, he floated the idea of having Tucker Carlson interview Ghislaine Maxwell as a PR strategy, and he has described all of this as service to the American people. He is very smart and he is doing this anyway, which makes him the most damning entry in the parade because the distance between what he knows and what he does is the distance the rest of them do not have the intelligence to measure.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense. He was confirmed 51 to 50, requiring the Vice President to break the tie, which means the United States Senate was one vote away from not giving this man control of the most powerful military in human history, and that vote was cast by the man who privately called the president Hitler. Hegseth is a Fox News host who served in the National Guard and has been credibly accused of alcohol abuse by members of his own family, which he denies. He fired the Joint Chiefs. He shared classified information about military strike plans in a Signal group chat that included a journalist. He is currently overseeing a military conducting strikes on boats in the Pacific and a war in Iran that just “ended” with a two-page document and a lot of open questions, and he has done all of this with the specific confidence of a man who has learned that confidence is a substitute for competence in rooms where nobody is checking.
Todd Blanche, Acting Attorney General. He spent eight years as a federal prosecutor and then left to become Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney through the cases that ended in thirty-four felony convictions. He is now the Attorney General of the United States, which means the man who defended the president against federal charges is now running the agency that brought them. He personally conducted a two-day interview with Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. Maxwell was subsequently transferred to a minimum-security facility. He has stated publicly that the DOJ did not protect Trump in its handling of the Epstein files. The DOJ pulled sixteen Epstein files from its own website hours after posting them, including one containing a photograph of the president. Blanche has stated that the DOJ did not protect Trump. The files were pulled. These two facts coexist in the public record without apparent discomfort.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services. He oversees the agency responsible for public health in a country that lost over a million people to a pandemic a few years ago and is statistically likely to face another one. He believes vaccines cause autism, a claim that has been studied, refuted, and restudied more times than any claim in modern medical history and has been refuted each time by the same amount. He has suggested that antidepressants cause school shootings, that fluoride in the water causes cognitive decline, and that a worm ate part of his brain, which he disclosed himself, in court documents, as a fact about his own medical history. He runs the Department of Health and Human Services. He was confirmed by a Senate that knew all of this. The parade did not slow down.
Stephen Miller, Senior Policy Advisor. He is not a cabinet secretary but he is in the formation and he is more dangerous than most of the people who are, so he marches here. He has been the architect of the immigration policy, the Muslim ban, the family separations, the deportation apparatus, the anti-DEI executive orders, the legal framework for every cruelty the administration has institutionalized, for nearly a decade across two administrations. He is small and pale and speaks in a monotone and has a genuine ideological commitment to a vision of America that requires the removal of people who do not look like him, and he has spent his career converting that commitment into policy with a precision that distinguishes him from the opportunists around him. He is not in the parade for the money or the access. He believes in it. That is the scariest sentence in this essay.
Marco Rubio, Secretary of State. He called Trump a con artist during the 2016 primary and said he was unfit for the presidency and then endorsed him within months and has been endorsing him ever since with the specific exhausted compliance of a man who knows what he did and has decided the only way forward is to keep doing it. He was confirmed 99 to 0, the first Secretary of State confirmed on Inauguration Day in modern history, which means every senator including the ones who knew better decided Marco Rubio was fine, which is the Senate’s judgment call, and the Senate’s judgment calls are the reason we are here. He expressed concerns about the Iran deal. The deal was signed anyway. He is currently the nation’s top diplomat, conducting foreign policy for a president who conducts foreign policy by Truth Social post and congratulates himself on deals that his own CIA director doubts will hold.
Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury. He is the adult in the formation, the Goldman Sachs man, the hedge fund manager, the person the markets are supposed to look at when they need reassurance that someone in the building understands how money works. He has been reassuring the markets while the tariffs were applied and retracted and applied again and the dollar wobbled and the credit rating was downgraded and the bond market had episodes and inflation climbed to 4.2 percent and the administration described all of it as winning. He nods. He reassures. He remains. He is the most normal person in the parade and his normalcy is doing the most work.
Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior. He manages the federal lands, the national parks, the natural resources, the public patrimony of a nation that has 640 million acres of land held in common for its people. He is a former software executive and governor of North Dakota who was confirmed to oversee Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and the wilderness that belongs to every American regardless of wealth or zip code, and he is doing so in an administration that has opened federal lands to drilling, withdrawn from international climate agreements, gutted the EPA, defunded the science agencies, and watched Paris turn chartreuse while issuing statements about the economic benefits of fossil fuel production. The parks remain open. The drilling has begun. The parade marches over the grass.
Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy. He ran a fracking company called Liberty Energy before taking the job overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, energy grid, and climate research programs. He has called the energy transition a “fatal conceit” and described fossil fuels as a gift to humanity. He oversees an agency whose scientists have been producing increasingly urgent climate projections for decades. He has not been reading them. The parade marches past the thermometer.
And then, at the front, alone, the grand marshal.
He is wearing the orange foundation that does not match his hands. His tie reaches his knees. His hair is doing what it does. He is holding a flag he cannot fold and a bible he has never read and he is standing in front of a formation that has already lost four members in three months and will lose more because he fires people the way he throws away silverware, which is to say when he is done with them and it is easier than whatever the alternative is.
He did not plan this parade. He does not plan anything except revenge. The parade happened because parades are the things that happen around him, because power accretes to the willing and he has always been willing, because the people who could have said stop decided, at each junction, not to, and the decision compounded, and the compound interest of not stopping him is currently standing at the front of a formation of fuckheads reviewing itself in the reflecting pool.
The reflecting pool is green.
The parade continues.
The music Trent Reznor wrote thirty-two years ago is still playing, and it was never that kind of song, and nobody is dancing, and the formation is one vote, one decision, one moment of collective courage away from stopping, and the moment keeps not arriving, and the march goes on, and the fuckheads march with it, and the man at the front has not looked back once to see who is still there.
He never does.
"The Downward Spiral" is an apt soundtrack for America in 2026....
Just look at Liddle Marco’s side eye seeing trump sound asleep. And, that would mean he perjured himself to Congress last week when he said he’s never seen it. 🤬🤬