The “MAGA Thanos” Conspiracy

A Future Historian’s Analysis

Excerpt from Decline and Fall of the American Empire, Vol. IV: The Slow Genocide of the 2020s (2075) – In retrospect, the early 21st-century United States experienced what some historians now term the “MAGA Thanos” conspiracy: an alleged slow, distributed genocide carried out under the guise of policy and bureaucratic mishap. Unlike the snap of Marvel’s infamous villain Thanos, which instantly erased half the population, this strategy operated by a thousand cuts – death by deliberate neglect. Policies that curtailed social programs, weaponized bureaucracy, and quietly disappeared “undesirable” people created a patchwork of cruelty so extensive that later generations would ask whether it was truly accidental. This chapter examines how a democratic republic, under the sway of authoritarian populism, emulated history’s darkest regimes through subtler means, allowing mass suffering and early death without ever building a single gas chamber.

Policies of Mass Neglect as a Weapon

One hallmark of the MAGA Thanos era was the systematic rollback of social safety nets, particularly healthcare. Early in President Trump’s second term, officials moved swiftly to gut healthcare subsidies and programs that millions depended on. The administration and its allies in Congress let enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire and pursued “massive” cuts to Medicaid and ACA funding, mirroring a failed 2017 repeal plan that would have left “tens of millions” without affordable health coverage . In parallel, new work requirements and eligibility hurdles were proposed to thin out the rolls of Medicaid recipients . The cumulative effect was clear: fewer people with insurance, higher costs, and vulnerable lives on the line. Even before these cuts, lack of health coverage was associated with nearly 45,000 unnecessary deaths per year in the U.S. . Stripping away healthcare wasn’t just budgeting – it was condemning countless Americans to suffer or die for lack of medicine and treatment. Like a slow poison, the withdrawal of public health support disproportionately hit the poor, the sick, and the elderly, a cull by design in all but name.

Other social supports faced similar assaults. Programs for food assistance, housing, and disability benefits were curtailed or tangled in red tape. During this period, administrative “errors” and policy choices often manufactured deadly delays. Nowhere was this more literal than at the Social Security Administration (SSA), where a bizarre trend emerged: living people found themselves marked as deceased in the government’s databases. It sounds like a dark farce – Americans figuratively turned into the walking dead by a computer – but the consequences were chillingly real. “Being declared dead ‘impacts their bank account… their insurance… their ability to get anything done in society’” one SSA employee explained, as suddenly-functional citizens were erased from systems of commerce and care . Without warning, seniors and disabled people lost access to bank accounts, prescriptions, and livelihoods. “They are terminating people’s financial lives,” a former official said bluntly . Internal agency directives in 2025 revealed that millions of Social Security numbers were flagged as dead as part of an aggressive purge – and in a sinister twist, “thousands of numbers belonging to immigrants” were deleted to cut those individuals off from banking and encourage “self-deport” . In the name of fighting fraud or modernizing records, people who were very much alive were bureaucratically assassinated on paper. The paperwork genocide didn’t draw blood, but it left victims destitute, unable to pay rent or obtain life-saving medications. Being “officially dead” meant you slowly, and quite officially, could die for real.

The Living Dead and Lost Angels

This slow extermination by neglect especially preyed on society’s most vulnerable – the poor, the ill, the marginalized. Consider the chain reaction triggered by these policy choices. A diabetic man in West Virginia loses his Medicaid due to new work requirements; without insulin, his condition worsens and he becomes one more statistic in the rising death toll. A single mother in Texas, cut off from food stamps and evicted after pandemic-era moratoriums ended, faces homelessness and danger. A cancer patient in Philadelphia spends weeks fighting a Social Security “death” designation just to restore her disability checks for chemotherapy . Tens of thousands of Americans were dying a quiet death each year from policy-driven lack of care – essentially sacrificed on the altar of small-government ideology. MAGA politicians shrugged off these casualties as collateral damage or denied they existed at all. Future scholars, however, have connected the dots as part of an intentional pattern: thinning the herd of those deemed “burdensome.” A dark joke circulated in those years that the administration had found the Six Infinity Stones of Austerity – Healthcare, Food, Housing, Income, Justice, and Hope – and with each one shattered, another segment of the populace faded away.

In fact, during the MAGA Thanos period, U.S. life expectancy which had been rising for decades stagnated and even declined for the first time in generations. While a global pandemic (COVID-19) contributed to the drop, analysts noted that America’s decline was exceptionally sharp compared to peer nations. The virus thrived in the cracks of an unequal society – and those cracks had been widened deliberately. Low-income and minority communities, already suffering from “decreased life expectancy” due to historical inequities like redlining, were hit hardest . Instead of mending these gaps, the government often exacerbated them. For instance, in 2020 the administration repealed the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, a policy meant to counteract decades of housing discrimination . By abandoning such protections, leaders effectively said the quiet part out loud: they had no interest in saving those lives that structural racism and poverty were grinding down. Why interfere with a slow genocide that was doing its work for them?

Camps, Cages, and Disappearances

Beyond neglect, the MAGA Thanos conspiracy also entailed active removal of “undesirables.” In the years surrounding Trump’s presidency, the U.S. saw the rise of detention sites and harsh enforcement that many compared to history’s concentration camps. Immigrants, in particular, became targets of an unprecedented campaign of round-ups and secretive detention. In a document dubbed Project 2025, the administration’s ideologues laid plans for mass arrests and deportations that bypassed judicial process. They would “expand expedited removal, allowing for rapid deportation without a hearing before a judge” – exactly the kind of extra-judicial machinery that underpinned the worst camps of the 20th century . The blueprint also called for deputizing local police as de facto immigration enforcers and conducting large-scale raids on workplaces and communities, sweeping up people en masse without individualized cases . The goal was efficiency: to make inconvenient populations vanish quickly, with minimal fuss about rights or due process. To house the expected influx of detainees, the administration proposed new mass detention centers (possibly on military bases) where those caught could be held indefinitely with no access to lawyers or courts . In essence, they envisioned an archipelago of modern gulags on American soil, a network of black holes where migrants and other labeled “others” could be disappeared out of sight and out of mind. It was cruelty by design, concentration camps in everything but name.

Image: Federal agents in unmarked vehicles detaining a protester in Portland, Oregon (July 2020). These extrajudicial tactics, used under the pretext of quelling unrest, drew comparisons to kidnappings and signaled a broader erosion of civil liberties .

Nor were immigrants the only “undesirables” treated this way. During the summer of 2020, as nationwide protests for racial justice rocked the country, unidentified federal agents in combat gear roamed city streets like Portland in unmarked vans. They grabbed protesters off the street with no explanation, whisking people away to undisclosed locations . In what observers likened to secret police tactics, Americans exercising their constitutional rights were suddenly being disappeared for hours or days, without charges or names given – behavior one normally associates with dictatorships, not democracies. “When we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street, we call it kidnapping,” an ACLU director remarked at the time, aghast at scenes straight from the playbooks of Pinochet or Stalin. These extrajudicial abductions were sanctioned at the highest levels; President Trump himself cheered on the federal crackdown, promising “law and order” by any means necessary. For those targeted – whether asylum-seekers at the border, Black Lives Matter activists, or simply the homeless swept up in city “clean-up” drives – America in the MAGA era could feel like a police state. The nation that prided itself on freedom was now operating secret detention sites where detainees had no rights. It was as if the ghost of Generalissimo Franco or J. Edgar Hoover had donned a MAGA cap and taken the helm of Homeland Security.

While exact numbers were hard to ascertain, by the late 2020s investigative reports suggested thousands of people had been caught in these dragnets. Migrant children separated from their parents at the border languished in cages; protesters and journalists found themselves on watchlists or facing unmarked cars tailing them at night. The machinery of the state, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to local police with military gear, was increasingly arrayed against any group defined as an enemy. In its cold efficiency and deliberate dehumanization, this apparatus echoed some of the most notorious regimes in history – a point we explore in the next section.

Cumulative Harm and the Body Count

The combined impact of these actions was nothing short of catastrophic for America’s most vulnerable. By weaving together neglect and direct oppression, the MAGA Thanos strategy created a multifaceted assault on life itself. People denied healthcare succumbed to illness; those marked “dead” on paper slid toward genuine death as aid vanished; those rounded up faced indefinite detention, trauma, or deportation to deadly conditions. To the casual observer at the time, these might have appeared as disparate policy failures or bureaucratic bungles. But as the body count mounted, a grim pattern became visible. It was almost as if someone had calculated exactly how to trim the population in slow motion – targeting those least likely to fight back or be noticed.

Historians today estimate that by the end of the 2020s, hundreds of thousands of premature deaths could be attributed to this constellation of policies. Some were directly measurable: for instance, experts note a spike in mortality in states that aggressively cut social programs. Other deaths were diffuse – spread out in lonely apartments, back alleys, detention cells – recorded only in statistics of rising suicide rates, drug overdoses, untreated disease, or infant mortality in poor communities. America’s poor saw their life expectancy stall or drop, even as the wealthy enjoyed medical advancements. Diseases once kept in check (like tuberculosis or HIV) resurged in marginalized pockets denied services. Homelessness swelled; tent cities became common from California to Florida, with many residents effectively left to die of exposure or violence. On the fringes of society, the culling by neglect resembled a war – but one side was unarmed and often unaware a war was being waged at all.

International observers began to ask pointed questions. Was this “genocide by stealth”? The U.N. definition of genocide includes acts intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” – usually through killing or serious harm. The MAGA-era policies were ostensibly race-neutral on paper, but in practice they hit minority communities far harder. Black and Latino Americans were more likely to lose insurance, to be marked “dead” erroneously if they had immigrant family ties, or to be caught in police dragnets. Indigenous people, already suffering from lack of healthcare and infrastructure, saw federal funds shrink further. Transgender and LGBTQ individuals, demonized by the administration, lost specialized health protections and often ended up homeless or self-harming. Every vulnerable group was bleeding. It was not a single Holocaust, but rather a constellation of smaller holocausts – each slow, each “plausibly deniable,” but together devastating. Future generations, with the benefit of distance, began to see in these events a cohesive narrative of intentional cruelty.

Historical Parallels: Echoes of Atrocities Past

The MAGA Thanos conspiracy did not arise in a vacuum. History is replete with regimes that destroyed populations through a mix of direct brutality and calculated neglect. Indeed, to truly understand the 2020s, one must recognize the eerie parallels with earlier atrocities and oppressive systems, both abroad and on American soil:

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany (1933–1945): The Nazi regime incrementally isolated and exterminated those it deemed “undesirable” – Jews, Roma, disabled people, political dissidents and more. They started by marking people, bureaucratically and socially, as outsiders, then escalated to concentration camps. By the end, the Nazis had created an “enormous network of concentration camps” (over 42,500 camps and ghettos across Europe) to imprison and eliminate their targets . What began with legal discrimination (Nuremberg Laws) and denial of basic needs culminated in gas chambers. The slow strangulation of rights and resources in the U.S. 2020s echoed Hitler’s stepwise “Final Solution,” albeit in a less overt form. The very term “undesirables,” used in internal American policy debates, rang of Hitler’s language for those outside the Volksgemeinschaft (national community) . The lesson: genocide can wear a bureaucratic face; one doesn’t jump straight to mass murder without first making the victims non-persons.
Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union: Stalin engineered horrors not unlike a slow genocide through policy. His forced collectivization and grain requisitions led to the Holodomor (Ukrainian famine of 1932–33) in which at least 3.9 million Ukrainians perished of hunger . Stalin didn’t need gas chambers; he used the weapon of food, or its absence, to eradicate perceived enemies (in this case, independent-minded Ukrainian peasants). Simultaneously, Stalin’s Great Purges sent millions to the Gulag – brutal forced labor camps where neglect, overwork, and abuse killed untold numbers. During the purges of the late 1930s, mere suspicion or bureaucratic quota could land a person in a Siberian camp, effectively a slow death sentence. The MAGA-era detention centers and the indifference to whether prisoners lived or died had a Stalinist flavor: life became cheap, a mere statistic in service of ideological goals. As one Soviet official chillingly put it, “Death of one man is a tragedy; death of millions is a statistic.” The American slow genocide turned people into statistics as well, stripping them of individuality or importance.
Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy: While Mussolini’s Italy did not industrialize murder on the scale of Hitler or Stalin, it provided a blueprint for authoritarian cruelty and xenophobia under a modern state. Mussolini’s regime persecuted political opponents (imprisoning or exiling dissidents), and in its colonial wars – notably the invasion of Ethiopia (1935–36) – it committed war crimes including the use of chemical weapons on civilian populations. The Italian army’s gas bombings and concentration camps in North Africa (Libya) resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, reflecting a belief that certain lives (African, Slavic, etc.) were expendable for the glory of Italy. During the 2020s, the fascist playbook of identifying internal “enemies” (whether communists, immigrants, or anti-fascists) and cracking down on them mercilessly was reborn in the U.S. The proud boys in power might not have quoted Mussolini’s mantra of “pleno potere” (full powers) openly, but their actions – ignoring court orders, demonizing minorities, glorifying violence – were straight out of his handbook.
Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic): The Caribbean strongman Rafael Trujillo offers a lesser-known parallel. In October 1937, Trujillo ordered what became known as the Parsley Massacre, a genocidal slaughter of Haitian immigrants and ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Over the course of just a few days, Dominican soldiers executed more than 20,000 Haitians at Trujillo’s command . The method was brutal and direct – people were asked to pronounce “perejil” (parsley in Spanish); those whose accent gave them away as Haitian Creole speakers were shot or bayoneted. Trujillo’s motive was to “whiten” and purify his country, removing those he saw as racially and culturally inferior. While the U.S. in the 2020s didn’t carry out mass slaughter in the streets, the extrajudicial deportations and camp detentions of migrants rhyme with Trujillo’s ethos: define a group as undesirable and eliminate them from society. That the American campaign was slower and cloaked in legality (immigration law technicalities rather than overt ethnic hatred) does not erase the similarity in outcome – families destroyed, a population terrorized, and thousands dead or gone.
King Léopold II of Belgium: In the late 19th century, King Léopold II turned the Congo Free State into his personal hellscape of profit, presiding over forced labor and punishments so barbaric that it’s estimated as many as 10 million Congolese people died under his rule . Léopold’s agents maimed workers (famously cutting off hands of those who failed rubber quotas) and let whole villages starve if they didn’t meet colonial demands. This was genocide by exploitation – the ruthless extraction of wealth at the cost of human life on a massive scale. The MAGA-era United States was not a colonial regime in Africa, but it displayed a similar willingness to sacrifice human lives for power and profit. Corporate interests and billionaire donors pushed for rollbacks of regulations and social spending, knowing full well that meant poorer health and shorter lives for the underclass. One could say America’s ultra-rich in the 2020s treated the poor rather like Léopold treated the Congolese: as fodder to be used up and discarded, invisible except as a line on a ledger.
American Slavery and Jim Crow: The United States’ own history provided a template for slow, distributed atrocity. Chattel slavery (1619–1865) was a centuries-long crime against humanity that killed millions of Africans and their descendants through the Middle Passage and brutal plantation conditions. Historians estimate that between 1.5 and 2.4 million Africans died during the Middle Passage alone – their lives lost in chains, below the decks of slave ships, from disease, starvation, and abuse. Those who survived lived under a regime of systematic violence: beatings, rape, family separations, and overwork that led to countless early deaths. After slavery, the reign of Jim Crow laws (late 19th to mid-20th century) continued the oppression. Thousands of Black Americans were lynched – often openly, with law enforcement complicity – to enforce white supremacy. A comprehensive report documented 3,959 lynchings of Black people in the U.S. South from 1877 to 1950 , acts of terror that targeted a community and culled its members at will. Those not killed outright by lynch mobs suffered legal segregation that curtailed their health and economic well-being. The redlining of neighborhoods (formalized in the 1930s) further acted as a slow choke: by denying Black families home loans and investment, it trapped generations in impoverished, polluted districts where life expectancy could be 10–15 years shorter than in white neighborhoods . This was a sort of slow-motion genocide spread over decades – not killing all at once, but ensuring that many would die sooner and live poorer. Fast-forward to the 2020s, and one sees the MAGA-era policies as a continuation of these domestic precedents. Voter suppression, biased policing, environmental deregulation (which let industries poison poor and black communities) – these were new bottles for the old wine of racism and inequality. It is no coincidence that those hit hardest by the MAGA neglect and abuse (reduced healthcare, social security errors, harsh policing) were the same groups America has long history of oppressing: Black, Indigenous, people of color, the poor, and the mentally ill. The future historian’s verdict is damning: the United States had already practiced slow, distributed genocide on its own soil through slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining – the MAGA movement merely revived these tactics under a different slogan.

The Banality of Intentional Cruelty

One of the most disturbing aspects of the MAGA Thanos conspiracy is how banal it appeared in real time. Unlike the dramatic imagery of past genocides – soldiers herding people into camps, piles of bodies, fiery pogroms – this modern American version unfolded in spreadsheets, quiet legislative markups, and late-night ICE transfers on empty highways. In public, officials insisted these were separate issues: bureaucratic mistakes, budget concerns, law-and-order policies. The cruelty was never announced as cruelty. Indeed, part of the strategy (if one believes it was a deliberate conspiracy) was to maintain plausible deniability. A senator could vote to cut food stamps by billions and later claim he never intended anyone to starve; a health secretary could slash ACA outreach because of “efficiency,” not because she wanted fewer poor people to get cancer treatment. This is what philosopher Hannah Arendt, in analyzing Eichmann, called the “banality of evil.” Normal people in offices, shuffling papers, can perpetrate enormous evil simply by following flawed orders or perverse incentives. In the MAGA era, evil was often couched in technocratic language: “program integrity,” “fiscal responsibility,” “securing the border.” But the effect was methodical misery.

Future historians combing through archives did find evidence that the harm was not merely a side effect, but in many cases the intended outcome. Emails and memos from the period (many revealed in whistleblower accounts decades later) showed chilling calculus: discussions about how cutting benefits would make certain populations “self-deport” or how lower census counts in urban areas (achieved by scaring off immigrant respondents) would be “beneficial.” In one reportedly jocular exchange, a political appointee referred to the Social Security purge of immigrants as “Operation Living Dead”, quipping that it was cheaper than mass deportations and “just as effective, if we’re patient.” Another document from a senior adviser gleefully tallied how many fewer people would be on welfare rolls after new restrictions – not because they got jobs, but because they’d be kicked off or discouraged from applying. “Not all need to die,” one note read, “some will just never be born.” This cryptic line made sense when cross-referenced with the administration’s push to ban abortion and even restrict contraception for the poor; combined with cuts to child welfare, it ensured higher infant and maternal mortality among those deemed “undesirable” (primarily low-income women of color). The cruelty was the point, hidden behind sanctimony and statistics.

Conclusion: A Slow Snap in American Memory

Looking back, the “MAGA Thanos” period stands as a bleak illustration that genocidal outcomes can be achieved in democratic societies without dramatic atrocities on the evening news. A future historian cannot help but see a unified pattern of intentional neglect and oppression connecting these events. Whether or not there was a literal smoky backroom where architects of the plan twirled their mustaches and clinked glasses to a job well done, the end result was the same: countless lives shortened and stunted, specific groups devastated, and a society coarsened to suffering.

The chapter’s title, “MAGA Thanos,” is of course satirical – a mordant nickname citizens would later coin to make sense of their trauma. But it captures the essence. In the comic book, Thanos believed he was bringing balance by wiping out half of all life, a horrific salvation. In reality, the MAGA-aligned leaders claimed they were “making America great again,” but the policies they pursued suggest a darker purpose of thinning the population in ways that favored one class and race over others. It was a slow-motion cataclysm, spread out so that many didn’t realize it was happening until years later.

What remains shocking is not just the cruelty itself, but how many Americans went along with it or looked away. Like frogs in slowly heated water, the public adjusted to each new norm: a little more poverty here, a few more dead there, a new prison camp opening somewhere else. The press, fatigued and harried by constant scandal, often failed to connect the dots in time. By the time the alarm was truly raised – with headlines decrying “American Dark Age” and UN observers using the word “atrocity” – the damage was done.

In summing up the MAGA Thanos conspiracy, this historian finds a grim irony: genocide in the land of the free came not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic whimper. The slow snap of neglect achieved what no invading army could. It’s a cautionary tale for future republics – that grand evil can wear a business suit, quote policy, and pass itself off as governance. Only with hindsight can we see the full, ghastly picture and say never again… even as we remain vigilant that “never again” must include the subtle deaths, not just the obvious ones.

Sources:

KFF Health News (2024) – Analysis of Trump Administration plans to cut ACA subsidies and Medicaid, potentially leaving tens of millions without health coverage .
Harvard Gazette (2009) – Study linking approximately 45,000 annual U.S. deaths to lack of health insurance .
CBS News / KFF (2025) – Report on SSA errors marking living people as deceased, noting “they are terminating people’s financial lives” and purging of thousands of immigrant records to force “self-deport” .
Michael West Media (2023) – Overview of Project 2025 plans to expand rapid deportations “without a hearing… extra-judicial… without due process”, and establish mass detention centers with limited legal access .
NPR News (2020) – Coverage of federal agents in Portland using unmarked vans to detain protesters with “no explanation”, an escalation of force backed by President Trump .
Michael West Media (2023) – Historical comparison of Nazi Germany’s camp system, noting 110 camps in 1933 expanding to 42,500+ across occupied Europe for “political opponents and other undesirables.” .
Britannica (2023) – Article on the Holodomor famine, confirming at least 3.9 million Ukrainian deaths by enforced starvation under Stalin .
Zinn Education Project – Account of Trujillo’s Parsley Massacre (1937), in which over 20,000 Haitians were executed in a government-led genocide .
Britannica – Biography of King Léopold II, noting as many as 10 million Congolese died due to his regime’s atrocities in the Congo Free State .
Wikipedia (via archival research) – Data on the Atlantic slave trade’s Middle Passage, estimating roughly 2 million Africans died during transport due to inhumane conditions .
TIME Magazine (2015) – Report on EJI’s findings of nearly 4,000 lynchings of Black Americans in the Jim Crow-era South (1877–1950), illustrating the terror and violence of that period .
NCRC Report (2020) – Study on redlining’s enduring impact, showing life expectancy in historically redlined neighborhoods up to 14.7 years shorter, and noting the Trump administration’s cancellation of fair housing rules (AFFH) aimed at addressing these inequities .