Author: vitalissuesbobsheak

I'm a retired sociology professor, who continues to collect and share information on a host of pressing issues dealing with inequality, the environment, war, corporate power, the right-wing and Trump, unfolding threats to democracy, and the limits and contradictions of capitalism.

An anti-worker administration

Bob Sheak Sept 12, 2025

The economy is not doing well for the majority

Brad Bannon nails it in his Sept. 10 report: “Jobs are down, prices are up and Trump is in trouble (https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5494559-trump-broken-promises-inflation). Brad Bannon is a national Democratic strategist and CEO of Bannon Communications Research which polls for Democrats, labor unions and progressive issue groups. He hosts the popular progressive podcast on power, politics and policy, Deadline D.C. with Brad Bannon.    

Bannon refers to a new jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that “paint an astonishingly bleak picture of the Trump economy.” He continues. “The nation created few jobs in August, and BLS added to the grim portrait by taking off the board almost a million jobs that had supposedly been created over the last year.”

And the economy is still affected by inflation. On this, Bannon points out that

“Prices in July were up by 2.7 percent over the year prior, and employers predict a big increase in the cost of health insurance.” A recent national survey of registered voters for The Economist by YouGov.com finds that “Inflation was the problem that the most voters worried about and Republicans were even more concerned about the high cost of living than Democrats.” He adds, “Less than 40 percent of voters approved of Trump’s handling of high prices.” Further, Trump’s “stiff taxes [tariffs] on imports and his deportation of immigrant farm and construction workers have placed a severe burden on hard working and financially hard-pressed American families.” 

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Stagflation concerns rise with rising inflation and jobless claims

Andrew Ackerman and Lauren Kaori Gurley report on this issue for the  Washington Post (https://washingtonpost.com/business/2025/09/11/august-inflation-trump-tariffs). Andrew covers the way Washington oversees Wall Street. follow on X@amacker. Lauren is the labor reporter for The Washington Post. She previously covered labor and tech for Vice for three years. follow on X@laurenkgurley

Inflation

“Inflation heated up in August at a 2.9 percent annual rate — a faster pace than in June and July as higher housing and food prices weighed on consumers’ wallets, according to the Labor Department.” On a monthly basis, prices rose 0.4 percent — a bit hotter than expectations, according to the agency’s consumer price index. Higher shelter costs was the largest factor in the monthly rise, though food prices also jumped 0.5 percent. The hotter figures are well above a low set in April.

“Earlier this summer, consumer prices began rising across a broader range of goods and services. June data pointed to notable increases in imports such as cosmetics, shoes and toys, as well as medical care. In July, furniture prices — heavily exposed to tariffs — jumped 0.9 percent, while tomato prices, hit by duties on Mexican imports, surged 3.3 percent.”

“Last month, apparel prices rose 0.5 percent and used car and truck prices rose 1 percent. And new vehicle prices ticked higher after four straight months of price declines or no changes.”

Unemployment

“In the labor market, fresh revisions to government data show U.S. employers added far fewer jobs over the summer than initially reported, underscoring a loss of momentum in hiring. The Labor Department said Tuesday that businesses created 911,000 fewer jobs from April 2024 through March 2025 than earlier estimates suggested — evidence the slowdown was already underway even before Trump’s sweeping new tariffs and immigration policies began squeezing business costs.”

“Separately, new applications for weekly unemployment benefits jumped to 263,000 last week, the highest level since October 2021, according to a separate report released Thursday by the Labor Department.”

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Anti-Union

Brad Reed writes on Trump’s attacks on unions for Common Dreams, Sept 01, 2025 (https://commondreams.org/news/trump-labor-day-unions).

“Although US President Donald Trump’s administration likes to boast that he puts ‘American workers first,’ several news reports published on Monday [Sept. 1] document the president’s attacks on the rights of working people and labor unions.”

Reed quotes the longtime labor reporter Steven Greenhouse who explained in The Guardian that “Trump throughout his second term has ‘taken dozens of actions that hurt workers, often by cutting their pay or making their jobs more dangerous.’” He gives these examples. 

“Trump’s decision to halt a regulation intended to protect coal miners from lung disease, as well as his decision to strip a million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.” He quotes Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO,

“‘His attacks on unions are coming fast and furious,’ she said. “He talks a good game of being for working people, but he’s doing the absolute opposite. This is a government that is by, and for, the CEOs and billionaires.”

Reed continues.

“Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, similarly told Greenhouse that Trump has been ‘absolutely, brazenly anti-worker,’ and she cited him ripping away an increase in the minimum wage for federal contractors that had been enacted by former President Joe Biden as a prime example.”

“NPR published its own Labor Day report that zeroed in on how the president is ‘decimating” federal employee unions by issuing March and August executive orders stripping them of the power to collectively bargain for better working conditions.’”

He continues. “So far, nine federal agencies have canceled their union contracts as a result of the orders, which are based on a provision in federal law that gives the president the power to terminate collective bargaining at agencies that are primarily involved with national security.

“The Trump administration has embraced a maximalist interpretation of this power and has demanded the end of collective bargaining at departments that aren’t primarily known as national security agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Weather Service.”

“The administration has weakened the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) so that even when workers successfully join or start a union, they may no longer get their grievances heard.” Moreover, the president is now able to fire NLRB administrative judges at will.

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The most anti-union president ever

Harold Meyerson argues that Trump is the most anti-union president ever

(https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-01-trump-celebrates-labor-day-as-most-anti-union-president). Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

Here are excerpts.

Donald Trump “chose to celebrate this year’s Labor Day by announcing last Thursday his unilateral abrogation of the federal government’s contracts with the unions that represent the scientists, engineers, and other staffers at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which includes the National Weather Service), the Patent Office, and the International Trade Administration. This follows his earlier contract terminations with the unions that represented 400,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as those at the Department of Health and Human Services, and other major departments.”

According to a study from the Center for American Progress (CAP), these Trump-imposed contract nullifications have cost 81.8 percent of civilian federal workers their right to collectively bargain—and that study came out before last Thursday’s new round of government fuck-you’s to its workers. The total number of workers whose contracts Trump has trashed now exceeds one million, which comes to approximately one-fifteenth of American workers covered by a union contract. Georgetown University labor historian Joe McCartin terms this ‘by far the largest single action of union busting in American history.’”

“What’s behind Trump’s union busting? At one level, he wants to destroy unions simply because they oppose him; opposition is all it takes for Trump to order a hit. At a deeper level, unions are a voice from below, and their autonomy poses a threat to autocrats. Even enfeebled unions have the potential to reawaken and join a battle to thwart despots. It’s no accident that every Western democracy has had—at one time, at least—a powerful union movement; just as it’s no accident that no autocracy—and no aspiring autocrat like Trump—can tolerate one. A core part of Hitler’s seizure of total power was the utter destruction of the German labor movement.”

“That said, labor has retained and even enhanced one form of strength: Today, in this populist age, unions are the only American institution whose popularity has been steadily rising, winning 68 percent approval ratings in Gallup’s polling. The gap between that level of approval and the 6 percent unionized share of private-sector workers, however, illustrates how completely the rickety remains of labor law have failed to enable a pro-labor workforce to go union—despite the best, though short-lived, efforts of Biden’s NLRB, and even before the havoc that second-term Trump has inflicted on unions. The 2026 elections may afford unions an opportunity to arrest some of Trump’s attacks; the 2028 elections, an opportunity to reverse them. Even then, the road to re-establishing workers’ rights will be steep.

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Concluding thoughts

In short, as documented, Trump has little concern for ordinary workers or the unions representing a minority of these workers. This is one important aspect of an unfolding autocracy.

Donald Trump demonstrates over and over again how he wants to transform the federal government away from one that reflects the Constitution and the law to one that  he can lawlessly dominate – to be a “king” or “dictator.”  If he is successful,

workers will become even less secure than now, with lower wages and job benefits, and with the demise of ever-more restraints on Trump’s power. For further information on such a future, check out Thomas B. Edsall’s column, “What Can’t Trump wreck? (https://nytimes.com/2025/09/09/opinion/trump-maga-government-future.html).

RFK and Trump attack scientists at the CDC

Bob Sheak, August 31, 2025

It’s likely that most Americans have never heard of the CDC, or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, until Robert F. Kennedy, Trump’s appointment to head the Department of Health and Human Services which includes the CDC, wanted the recently appointed director of the CDC, Susan Monarez, fired.

Kennedy asked her to resign because she refused to support his anti-vaccine agenda. She refused, and Trump supported Kennedy by firing her. In this post, I include the highlights of articles reporting on this scandalous issue.

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Washington Post journalists, Lena H. Sun, Dan Diamond, and Lauren Weber, help to clarify what happened (https://washingtonpost.com/health/2025/08/27/susan-monarez-cdc-director-ousted).

“Susan Monarez was confirmed as the CDC’s director in July [2025].” On Wednesday, August 27, the “White House…fired Susan Monarez as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after she refused to resign amid pressure to support [Kennedy’s] vaccine policy, which sparked the resignation of other senior CDC officials and a showdown over whether she could be removed. Her lawyers “accused HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of ‘weaponizing public health for political gain’ and ‘putting millions of American lives at risk’ by purging health officials from government.”

The journalists continue.

“When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda,” the lawyers, Mark S. Zaid and Abbe Lowell, wrote in a statement. “For that reason, she has been targeted.”

Soon after their statement, the White House formally fired Monarez.

“As her attorney’s statement makes abundantly clear, Susan Monarez is not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in an email. “Since Susan Monarez refused to resign…, the White House has terminated Monarez from her position with the CDC.” Her lawyer, Mark S. Zaid rejected this notion, saying that “Monarez never intended to resign, never told anyone that she intended to do so and legally remains in the position because President Donald Trump did not personally fire her.”

Monarez, who was confirmed in late July, was pressed for days by Kennedy, administration lawyers and other officials over whether she would support rescinding certain approvals for coronavirus vaccines, according to two people with knowledge of those conversations. Kennedy, who has a long history of anti-vaccine advocacy, and other officials questioned Monarez on Monday (Aug. 27] on whether she was aligned with the administration’s efforts to change vaccine policy, the people said.

“Kennedy and one of his top advisers, Stefanie Spear, also pushed Monarez to fire her senior staff by the end of this week, according to an administration official and another person with direct knowledge of that conversation.”

Monarez, who was a longtime federal government scientist before Trump nominated her to lead the CDC, declined to commit to support changing coronavirus vaccine policy without consulting her advisers, two people said. That prompted Kennedy to urge her to resign for “not supporting President Trump’s agenda,” one of the people said. Monarez still declined to resign, even though Kennedy wanted that. Trump supported Kennedy and decided to follow his recommendation and fired Monarez.”

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Mary Meyer, MD, MPH, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today, argues that the “The Evisceration of CDC Is a Disaster for All of Us” (https://www.medpagetoday.com/washington-watch/washington-watch/117188).

Meyer is an emergency physician with The Permanente Medical Group. She also holds a Master of Public Health and certificates in Global Health and Climate Medicine. Meyer previously served as a director of disaster preparedness for Kaiser Permanente Northern California. Here’s some of what she writes.

“For anyone who missed it, it’s been a whirlwind week at the CDC. Here’s the recap. After 6 months of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ — including layoffs, rescinded grant funding, and content censorship — the CDC descended into chaos on Wednesday [Aug 27].

 “First, CDC Director Susan Monarez, PhD, was fired after refusing to resign . Soon after, three longstanding CDC leaders announced their resignations, citing political interference and pressure to sign off on unscientific vaccine recommendations. A few other high-level departures were also reported earlier this week.” The impact on the CDC, the “nation’s leading public health institution will be far-reaching.” Meyer then offers an explanation on why we need the CDC.

“It’s difficult to exaggerate the role CDC has played in protecting the health of our nation. For nearly 80 years, CDC’s accomplishments have been nothing short of remarkable. In 1951, it presided over the elimination of malaria in the U.S. In 1980, it helped achieved the seemingly impossible — the global eradication of smallpox, a disease that killed a third of its victims and left the majority of its survivors disfigured or blind. A year later, the agency authored the first report of an unusual disease striking gay men in California. For almost 8 decades, CDC pioneered global vaccination campaigns , responded to numerous disease outbreaks    (SARS, Ebola, Zika), and assembled a national network of subject matter experts. Now, with its current leadership vacuum, both CDC and its vast safety net are at risk of collapse.”

Meyer considers why the administration’s attacks on the CDC are disastrous for the health of the nation.

Effects on state and local health departments

“To begin with, approximately 70% of CDC’s funding   goes to state and local public health departments, where it supports workforce training, lab capacity, and public health education. These local departments are the nation’s first line of defense against chronic diseases, environmental exposures, and infectious outbreaks. If their funding becomes compromised, it will undoubtedly lead to cuts in services and staffing, with a concomitant rise in various health conditions and further strain on already-taxed healthcare organizations. Furthermore, these impacts are likely to be greatest in rural and historically underserved areas — the places that can least afford it.”

Effects nationally

Meyer writes: “Nationally, the dysfunction at CDC could easily undermine its programs and trigger a rise in the nation’s overall burden of disease. CDC is the juggernaut of disease prevention. It operates numerous prevention programs aimed at chronic diseases (including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer), infant mortality, microbial resistance, and injuries. It funds programs to combat the tobacco, obesity, and opioid epidemics. It’s been estimated that CDC’s infection prevention guidelines for healthcare facilities save  and $3.3 billion. Its tobacco control program has prevented millions of people from facing the adverse consequences of smoking, and its HIV programs have prevented over 350,000 HIV infections.”

“Then, of course, there’s the role CDC plays in outbreak response, both within U.S. borders and internationally. The agency also serves a vital function in responding to man-made and natural disasters, acting as the national command center in disaster responses.”

Meyer concludes: “We must return to the principles on which CDC was founded: evidence-based policy shepherded by experienced public health leaders.

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Here is what CDC says about its mission and accomplishments (https://cdc.gov/about/cdc/index.html).

“CDC works 24/7 to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the U.S. Whether diseases start at home or abroad, are chronic or acute, curable or preventable, human error or deliberate attack, CDC fights disease and supports communities and citizens to do the same.

“CDC increases the health security of our nation. As the nation’s health protection agency, CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats. To accomplish our mission, CDC conducts critical science and provides health information that protects our nation against expensive and dangerous health threats and responds when these arise.”

A sample of the CDC’s accomplishments.

  • On the cutting edge of health security – confronting global disease threats through advanced computing and lab analysis of huge amounts of data to quickly find solutions.
  • Putting science into action – tracking disease and finding out what is making people sick and the most effective ways to prevent it.
  • Helping medical care – bringing new knowledge to individual health care and community health to save more lives and reduce waste.
  • Fighting diseases before they reach our borders – detecting and confronting new germs and diseases around the globe to increase our national security.
  • Nurturing public health – building on our significant contribution to have strong, well-resourced public health leaders and capabilities at national, state and local levels to protect Americans from health threats.

Further background

Tanja Popovic and Dixie E. Snider Jr. provide an historical sketch of the CDC’s 60 Years of Progress (https://pmc.mcbi.nim.nih.gov/articles/PMC3291076).

“Malaria Control in War Areas was formed in 1942 to ensure that the areas around military bases in the southern United States remained malaria-free. Initial facilities were modest, a few rooms on the sixth floor of the Volunteer Building on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. Hardly anyone could have foreseen the future of this small organization. But Joseph W. Mountin, who was charged with setting it up, was not just anyone. An architect of modern public health, Mountin quickly realized that malaria control operations serving the needs of the states (response to state calls for help, laboratory and epidemiologic investigations, training) could become the foundation for improving the health of the nation.

“…in 1946 the Public Health Service established the Communicable Disease Center to work not only on malaria but on typhus and other infectious diseases. The following year, a token payment of $10 was made for a 15-acre area on Clifton Road to house the operations. In the next 60 years, minor changes were made to the name (Center for Disease Control, Centers for Disease Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), but the initials, CDC, remained the same. The campus on Clifton Road grew to include 2 biosafety level 4 laboratories and other state-of-the-art facilities; operations were established in Morgantown, Cincinnati, Fort Collins, and overseas; and the work expanded to include all infectious diseases, as well as occupational health, toxic chemicals, injury, chronic diseases, health statistics, and birth defects.

“A magnet for gifted scientists and other professionals looking to serve in public health, CDC has attracted an exceptional cadre of talent over the years. Mountin was succeeded by leaders who pushed the agency to new levels of achievement, constantly probing new challenges and seeking new public health solutions. The thousands who work in laboratories and offices or trot the globe on epidemiologic investigations; the physicians, veterinarians, microbiologists, statisticians, economists, social scientists, other scholars, and support personnel; the many volunteers who serve on institutional review and other boards and committees; and CDC’s many partners in academia, industry, clinical practice, and state and local governments all share unequivocal dedication to public health.

“In this climate of idealism and dedication, the achievements have been many and span all areas. CDC scientists, typically working with like-minded colleagues, identified and characterized several infectious agents and emerging infectious diseases; invented devices, tools, and stains for diagnoses and systems for surveillance; demonstrated the value of combining laboratory practices and epidemiology; and through vision and leadership, worked closely with state and local health departments to increase their effectiveness as public health organizations. Some in its midst made such major contributions that microorganisms were named after them (Lee Ajello, Ajellomyces spp.; Dannie Hollis, Vibrio hollisiae; Don Brenner, Neisseria brenneri; Robert Weaver, Neisseria weaveri; Joseph McDade, Legionella micdadei).

“CDC led the US campaign to immunize all children against vaccine-preventable infectious diseases; efforts to ‘link’ states in search of foodborne disease outbreak causes by using molecular approaches to trace the causative organisms (PulseNet); efforts to translate science to practice, protecting women and children from such emerging infection-related conditions as toxic shock syndrome and aspirin-associated Reye syndrome.

“Achievements in international health have been major benchmarks. CDC contributions range from support for and leadership of the global effort to eradicate smallpox to the establishment of Project SIDA in Africa to initiate scientific research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic.”

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Concluding thoughts

The CDC is an outstanding example of how, over decades, the government has supported the health of the nation’s people. Now, under Trump and Kennedy, the agency is being reduced and compromised. If they have their way, the CDC will be unable to provide the scientific research and breakthroughs it has had for 80 years. As a result, the U.S. population will suffer. The actions of Trump and Kennedy are yet other examples of an administration based on extremist right-wing ideology and growing authoritarianism. It remains to be seen whether the American public will be able to vote them out in the 2026 midterms. Will it be the CDC of the past decades or will it be the Center of Disease.

Trump wants all the power and riches he can get out of the presidency

Bob Sheak, August 22, 2025

The record shows that Trump will do anything to get and retain presidential power, regardless of their effects.  

2020 Election

When he lost the 2020 election to Biden, he encouraged his supporters to intervene in the congressional certification process and to stop it, so that electors favorable to him would count the votes.

Thousands of his followers came to the Capitol on January 6, 2020, to carry out his wishes. Then, amid the rioting, he waited over three hours before telling his thousands of rampaging followers – he called them patriots – to stop their rioting and go home. Some 1,500 of them were eventually imprisoned.

2024 Election

When the electoral votes were counted after the 2024 presidential election, Trump ended up with a very narrow, and controversial, victory over the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.

The authors of the book titled 2024 argue that Harris lost primarily because then-president Biden took too much time before deciding to give up his presidential run, leaving her with too little time to put together an effective campaign. (Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America).

Trump ascendant

On Trump’s first day in the White House (January 20, 2025), he ordered outrageously that the 1,500+ rioters who were serving time in a federal prison for the Jan. 6 riots to be released. This is an indication of how he sees little value in the law. Indeed, Thom Hartmann argues that “Trump wants to turn America into a police state” with Trump as all-powerful leader who now even wants to use military forces to takeover Democratic cities, which he describes without evidence as crime-ridden places (https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-creating-police-state). Hartmann’s article was published on August 10, 2025. Here’s some of what he considers.

Trump has initially focused on Washington D.C., “despite the fact that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low and the city already has the largest police force, per capita, of any municipality in America.”

Hartmann continues. “A leaked memo from inside the Department of Homeland Security reveals what many of us feared but hoped we were wrong about: that the military is no longer a last resort in American governance. It’s now the first tool. A central player. A political weapon, just like in Russia.” The memo

“was written, circulated, and discussed at the highest levels of DHS and the Department of Defense and it spells out, in clinical, terrifying language, a plan to normalize and expand the use of the United States military within our own country, on our own soil, against our own people.”

“The memo, obtained by The New Republic, outlines a coordinated strategy to embed military forces into immigration enforcement not just at the border but across American cities. It calls for replicating the recent Los Angeles deployment ‘for years to come.’ It uses phrases like ‘homeland defense’ and paints immigration threats as akin to Al Qaeda or ISIS. It pushes for ‘new ideas’ on how DHS and DoD can work together on ‘national security’ threats inside the United States.”

For example, Trump ordered “4,000 National Guard troops — federalized, not state-controlled — into Los Angeles to back up ICE raids. He followed that with 700 active-duty Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines.”

The memo includes the following.

— Urges DHS to persuade top military brass to view immigration enforcement as a ‘homeland defense mission.’

— Seeks to embed armed, kill-trained military personnel inside ICE and CBP to ‘increase information sharing’ and support ‘nationwide operational planning.’

— Frames transnational gangs and cartels as equivalent to Al Qaeda, a dangerous, dishonest leap that pretends to justify extreme, deadly force.

— And it admits, in its own words, that due to the ‘sensitive nature’ of the meeting it documents, minimal written policy or background’ should be preserved.

Translation: They know what they’re doing is legally and morally criminal. So they’re minimizing the paper trail.”

Hartmann adds: “Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center warned that this could create a permanent ‘domestic Forever War,’ a campaign of endless militarization justified by fear and manufactured crises. Soldiers — including armed, masked ICE agents answerable only to the president — terrifying civilians on their own streets and in their own homes: a military occupation of The United States of America.

“This isn’t just Trumpism. This is textbook authoritarianism in the mold of Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary. It embodies the early stages of all the horror stories of 1930s Europe.”

“That’s not just a skirmish over jurisdiction. That’s an open attack on the sovereignty of states, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. That’s a president saying, ‘Your Guard is my army now.’”

Hartmann warns us, “unless we act — loudly, urgently, relentlessly — it will become a permanent force in American civic life. Not a protector of freedom, but a tool of control, just like in Orbán’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia.”

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Deployment of Troops into Washington D.C.

Nick Turse reports for the Intercept on August 12, 2025 on Trump’s use of Troops for policing in Washington D.C. and in other Democratic cities (https://theintercept.com/article/politics/trump-dc-military-deployment-civil-war). He notes that “Trump’s Use of Troops for Policing Hasn’t Been Seen Since America Was Ruled by a King.” Here’s some of what he writes.

“The United States crept closer to becoming a full-blown police state yesterday when President Donald Trump made good on a promise to further militarize the nation’s capital. Trump threatened to employ similar tactics in cities across the country as the Pentagon evaluates plans for a ‘Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force’ composed of hundreds of National Guard troops poised to surge into American cities.”

Trump’s made-up justification

Turse continues. “‘Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,’ Trump said at a White House news conference on Monday (Aug 11), painting the city [falsely] as a hellscape filled with ‘drugged out maniacs’ and ‘caravans of mass youth’ who ‘rampage through city streets’ day and night. ‘I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order and public safety in Washington, D.C.,’ he declared.”

Contrary to Trump, “Justice Department figures show violent crime in the nation’s capital is at a 30-year low.”

“‘If we look at both practically the way the Trump administration is using the military around the country and also formally, in what they are asserting about their authority — the ability to use the military anywhere, anytime, for any purpose — it’s absolutely unprecedented,’ said Joseph Nunn, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program who focuses on the domestic role of the U.S. military.”

“Approximately 800 National Guard soldiers were activated as part of the ‘D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force,’ with about 100 to 200 of them supporting law enforcement at any given time, according to a statement provided to The Intercept by the Army.”

“D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said she did not believe it was legal ‘to use the American military against American citizens on American soil’ at a press conference on Monday evening.”

Turse continues. “The National Guard deployment is one facet of Trump’s efforts to put the District of Columbia under federal authority; he also declared that he is temporarily taking control of the city’s police department. Hundreds of officers and agents from more than a dozen federal agencies — including the FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and the U.S. Marshals Service — have also fanned out across Washington in recent days.”

Trump “said Attorney General Pam Bondi would oversee the federal takeover of the capital’s Metropolitan Police Department and, with Hegseth at his side, added that he was prepared to send the military into Washington ‘if needed.’”

“In a Monday memorandum, Trump directed Hegseth to coordinate with governors of states and “authorize the orders of any additional members of the National Guard to active service, as he deems necessary and appropriate, to augment this mission.”

What will the courts decide?

Turse reports, “This is the second time this summer that Trump has deployed troops to a Democratically governed city. A federal trial began on Monday in San Francisco to decide whether Trump violated the law by deploying National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June without the approval of California Gov.r Gavin Newsom.

For now, it’s government policy

“In his first seven months in office,” Turse writes, “Trump has overseen the deployment of around 20,000 federal troops on American soil, including personnel from the National Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines, according to the Pentagon. But the true number of troops deployed may be markedly higher. U.S. Northern Command has no running tally of how many troops have been deployed around the country.

“These federal forces have been operating under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.

“Around 5,500 troops — Marines and California National Guard members — have also been deployed to Los Angeles since early June. The forces were sent to LA over the objections of local officials and Newsom.”

“‘Though the rhetoric is sometimes different, from Los Angeles streets to ICE detention centers to our nation’s capital, President Trump is repeatedly acting to turn the National Guard into the first-choice implementers of his authoritarian agenda,’ Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, told The Intercept. ‘Whether it is assaulting immigrant communities or seizing control of law enforcement in DC, his goal for these deployments is the same: using state violence to strip power, safety, and dignity from people. Members of the National Guard should be under no illusions about what they’re being sent to do in Washington.’”

“On Monday, Trump took aim at numerous cities led by Democratic mayors in states with Democratic governors, threating authoritarian power grabs similar to his effort in Washington. ‘If we need to, we’re going to do the same thing in Chicago, which is a disaster,’ Trump said. ‘You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore. They’re so far gone,” said Trump. “We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further.’” 

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Trump’s Worst Crimes, Dangers, and Destructions Are Yet to Come

Ralph Nader offers an overview of Trump’s effects of his anti-democratic plans and actions in an article for Common Dreams, Aug 9,2025 (https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-attacks-on-democracy-institutions).

“The worst crimes of Donald Trump and dangers to America from the unstable, monomaniacal, lying outlaw in the White House have yet to come. He is not satisfied with tearing apart our country’s social safety net for tens of millions of Americans (e.g., Medicaid and food program cuts); wrecking our scientific/medical systems, including warning people about pandemics. He is, by wrecking FEMA et al, failing to address the impact of mega-storms, wildfires, and droughts; and allowing cybersecurity threats to increase while giving harm-producing big corporations immunities from the law, more subsidies, and more tax escapes. Recall how he always adds to his attacks on powerless people that ‘This is just the beginning.’”

“He just took the next step in his march to madness and mayhem by announcing more concentration camps holding immigrants, arrested without due process, for deportation to foreign countries that want U.S. taxpayer cash for each deportee.”

Immigrants play a crucial role in the U.S. economy

Recent immigrants are crucial to millions of small and large businesses. Consider who harvests our crops, cares for our children and the elderly, cleans up after us, and works the food processing plants and construction sites. Already, businesses are reducing or closing their enterprises – a political peril for Dangerous Donald.

“If all immigrants to the U.S. from the last ten years, documented and undocumented, went on strike, our country would almost shut down. Yet Trump, who hired 500 undocumented workers for just one of his construction sites in New York, and had similar laborers at his New Jersey golf course, promises deportations of millions more.

“Always bear in mind the self-defined characteristics of corporatist Trump’s feverish, hateful, outlaw mind: (1) He has declared he ‘can do whatever he wants as President,’ proving his serial violations of law and illegal dictates every day; (2) He always doubles down when indicted, convicted, caught, or exposed, falsely accusing his accusers of the exact transgressions they are reliably charging him with; (3) He brags about lashing out at criticism with foul defamatory invectives; (4) He never admits his disastrous mistake; (5) He boasts that he knows more than leading experts in a dozen major areas of knowledge (see, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All”); and (6) He asserts that every action, policy, or program he launches is a spectacular success – the facts to the contrary are dismissed. He is gravely delusional, replaces realities with fantasies, breaks promises that are made to defer any reckoning or accountability, and, like an imaginary King, finds no problem with saying ‘I rule America and the world.’”

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Concluding thoughts

The evidence shows that Trump is a destructive and delusional force in the U.S. and worldwide, that is, when he can get away with such behavior. As one recent example, Steve Benen reports that Trump, who avoided the draft during the Vietnam War, has declared himself a “war hero” (https://msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/problems-trump-declaring-war-hero-rcna226096).

Currently, his poll numbers are low among Independents and Democrats, reflecting his counterproductive tariff policies, his past relations with Jeffrey Epstein and the criminal acts on very young girls (see

https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/07/inside-white-house-trump-epstein-strategy/683604), his support of cutting the staff of federal agencies and services, his reckless and often lawless anti-immigrant policy, and the unequal impacts of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, with its huge tax benefits for the rich.

It is good that the polls are against Trump but there is also a need for more people to combine their criticisms with political engagement.

Economic problems multiply under Trump

Introduction

In an earlier post titled “The Specter of Fascism,” I considered the fascist aspects of Trump’s rhetoric and plans (https://vitalissuesbobsheak.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=4124&action=edit). This was sent out on May 25, 2024. There I quoted  Federico Finchelstein, who has written extensively about fascism.

In his most recent book, The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy (publ. 2024 by the University of California Press), he identifies “the four pillars of fascism,” including: (1) “violence and the militarization of politics; (2) “lies, myths, and propaganda”; (3) “the politics of xenophobia” and racism; and (4) dictatorship (pp. 16-17). He argues that Trump is not quite a full-blown fascist, but rather a “wannabe fascist because he has not yet become a “dictator,” or a leader with unlimited power.

“Well before January 6, 2021,” Finchelstein writes, “Trump had already established (to some alarming extent) three of the four pillars of fascism: violence and the militarization of policies, racism, and lies. The element that Trumpism was missing was dictatorship. And then the attempted coup d’etat happened….Had this attempt succeeded, Trump would have most likely become a dictator. In that scenario, it would have been more appropriate to think of him as a fascist. Because he wavered and failed, I [Finchelstein] calls him a wannabe fascist” (p. 18). This could all change if Trump wins the presidential election in November, 2024 (as he did). The plans of Trump and the Republican Party are clearly anti-democratic and revolve around the idea of Trump as the permanent leader, a “one-person [with] absolute and permanent rule” (p. 152).

As we all know, Trump narrowly won the presidential election in 2024 under extraordinary circumstances. The authors of the book 2024, Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, document how Biden’s long delay in withdrawing from the presidential campaign, left Kamala Harris with too little time to mount an effective campaign. She almost managed to win the election anyway and would have won if not for so many gerrymandered elections and financial support from the rich and powerful, especially but from Elon Musk and other billionaires.

Now, well into his seventh month of his second term in the White House, Trump has striven to extend his power over more of the country’s institutions, advancing rightwing, often anti-democratic policies. His efforts are supported by his MAGA base, by the Republican Party, by many rich people and big corporations, by the Supreme Court, and by right-wing media.

In recent weeks, Trump’s popularity has been weakened by the economic dislocations and hardships on most citizens related to his firing of many thousands of federal workers and the related loss of services and jobs. These were exacerbated by Trump’s tariff policies, the arbitrary expulsion of law-abiding, employed immigrant residents, and the highly regressive tax policies in his Big Beautiful Bill. His low poll numbers now reflect how the majority of Americans are unhappy with what Trump is doing and attempting to do.

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Trump’s Tariff Debacle

John Feffer considers the effects of Trump’s tariff policies, August 6, 2025 (https://fpif.org/trumps-tariff-tsunami). He is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus. His latest book is Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response. Here’s some of what Feffer writes about in the article.

It’s not difficult to imagine that seasoned trade negotiators are squaring off against Trump’s team, which includes the unseasoned and frankly incoherent Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to make deals that contain holes big enough to drive a truck through (all the way to the United States). The early evidence is that Trump’s tariffs are backfiring in many ways, including the one statistic that obsesses the president. America’s trade deficit with the world is only increasing.”

China.

“Consider the administration’s approach to China, the third or fourth largest U.S. trade partner depending on the metric. In early April, Trump decided to apply tariffs of about 145 percent on Chinese products. The Dow tanked, and U.S. businesses freaked out at the prospect of huge price increases on components and finished products coming from China.

“Negotiations with the Chinese followed, during which Trump backpedaled like a prizefighter sustaining a series of body blows. The Chinese economy is doing pretty well, and they have natural resources like rare earth elements that the United States desperately needs. So, when China retaliated with high tariffs of their own and threatened restrictions on rare earth elements, Trump was forced to deal. He reduced U.S. tariffs to 30 percent (while China reduced its tariffs on U.S. goods to 10 percent).

“But here’s the kicker. Trump also approved the sale of sophisticated computer chips—Nvidia’s H20 chips, which are designed for artificial intelligence applications—that previous U.S. administrations had blocked. This kind of compromise has signaled to various economic actors that perhaps Trump is not so serious about his tariffs—or, at least, he can be negotiated with.”

The European Union

“Instead of fighting like the Chinese, the European Union accepted a 15 percent tariff rate. That’s ‘definitively better than the 30 percent threatened by Trump,’ writes Cecilia Malmström of the Peterson Institute. ‘But it is still a lot more than the status of trade before Trump’s second term, when the average tariff rate between the European Union and the United States was only a few percentages. Today we face the highest transatlantic tariffs in 70 years.’”

Canada and Mexico

Feffer: “Canada saw its tariffs rise from 25 percent to 35 percent, though this applies to a minority of goods crossing the border that don’t comply with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Trump was pissed off at the earlier reciprocal tariffs against U.S. products, which Canada hasn’t yet removed. A ‘Buy Canada’ campaign and a diversification of trade partners point to a longer-term reduction in Canadian dependency on U.S. markets and suppliers.

Hope that Trump will retract the tariffs

Feffer: “U.S. businesses are also hoping that Trump will eventually retract his tariffs. Although markets fluctuate with the same kind of volatility that characterizes Trump’s temperament, manufacturers don’t appreciate such unpredictability.

“They’ve responded by employing interim hedging measures that have so far not passed on the costs to consumers. One popular [but limited and short-term] tactic has been to stockpile.”

“Consumers, meanwhile, have adopted the tactic of hoarding: consumer electronics, auto parts, building materials, clothing. Even members of the Trump administration have been stocking up on bulk toilet paper in anticipation of price hikes. But pantries can hold just so many bags of Brazilian coffee beans. And worse is to come.”

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Mass Firing of federal workers

Lauren Kaori Gurley writes on the high unemployment in July

(https://washingtonpost.com/business/2025/08/07/unemployment-claims-rise). She

is the labor reporter for The Washington Post.

Gurly cites a Labor Department report that “claims for unemployment benefits jumped to 1.97 million in late July.” That is the highest level since November 2021. “A separate jobs report released last week showed that employers are hiring at close to the slowest pace in more than a decade, excluding the pandemic.”

“Federal layoffs have also accelerated and will continue to rise this year, which could spill over to other industries. A Supreme Court decision in July allowed the Trump administration to proceed with job cuts.”

Gurley refers to a government jobs report released Friday [Aug. 8] that “showed a much slower labor market than previously recorded, with lower-than-expected job gains in July and far fewer job gains in May and June, 258,000 less than previously reported for those months.” Trump responded angrily to the report by taking “the unprecedented step of firing the top official at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, hours after the data was released. Trump claimed, without evidence, that jobs data had been manipulated for political purposes.”

Rather, Trump’s own tariff policy has negatively affected many retail, construction and manufacturing employers “who have paused plans for hiring and expansion amid the expectation of the higher import costs.” That same is true for hiring in white-collar sectors, which has been stagnant for many months. Gurly’s sources say that if economic conditions continue to deteriorate, employers will increase layoffs even more than they have.

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The Bleak Future of Trumponomics

Ryan Cooper writes on the likelihood of a bleak future with Trumponomics for the American Prospect magazine (https://prospect.org/economy/2025-08-06-bleak-future-of-trumponomics). Cooper is a senior editor at the Prospect, and author of ‘How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.’ His central point is that “Donald Trump is destroying the world’s faith in America and the dollar.” That will cost the country dearly in lost foreign investors.

Cooper continues. “On July 4, Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law. It’s a hyped-up edition of the same old Republican dogma. It contains the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits in history, which do not even come close to compensating for giant tax cuts, mostly for the rich. It would increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion by 2034; if we assume that all the tax cuts will be made permanent (a certainty if Republicans have anything to say about it), the total is over $5.5 trillion.”

The global importance of the dollar is now threatened

“Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, turbulent economic times have reliably led to a flight to the safety of dollars and U.S. government debt. That creates a consistent demand for dollar-based assets, so countries and businesses can settle international transactions, and build up exchange reserves to defend against potential currency crises.

“That assumption is now being called into question. Trump’s wildly erratic behavior, abolishing whole federal agencies by fiat and yanking up and down tariffs at random via social media post, has created vast turbulence in the international economy. But instead of a flight to dollar safety, since Trump has taken office, interest rates on 10- and 30-year Treasury bonds are up modestly, while the dollar’s value has fallen about 15 percent against the euro, and about 10 percent against the pound and yen.

This suggests that a new economic order is taking shape, “after the keystone nation of the global economy decided to elect an unhinged maniac, again. Absent some kind of reckoning with MAGA …America will never live this down, and all future administrations will be burdened with Trump’s legacy of lower growth, lower employment, higher inflation, higher interest rates, and a dramatically higher cost of financing the national debt.”

The dollar’s role as global reserve currency

Cooper continues, “as the issuer of the global reserve currency, America has an obligation to provide dollar assets. As Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein argue in their book Trade Wars Are Class Wars, if the government won’t provide them in the form of Treasury bonds, demand for other dollar assets will drive up its value, tanking American exports and widening the trade deficit.

Indeed, the dollar’s reserve status is partly to blame for America’s chronically large trade deficit. As economist Paul Krugman points out, much of these deficits have been financed by foreign investment in the U.S. If those investors lose confidence in America, they might pull back, similar to a “sudden stop” crisis that countries like Argentina and Portugal have faced.

“There are built-in shock absorbers in place for a country as critical to the global economy as America. But those guardrails are buckling under Trump’s leadership. Cooper elaborates.

“Trump has regularly attacked Powell for not cutting rates and might fill the Fed board with toadies to do the job. But rate cuts, combined with other factors, would boost inflation even more. Tariffs are already spiking some prices. New home prices are likely to rise as Trump is deporting so many construction workers. The enormous tax cuts will drive up borrowing, as will the cost of rolling over existing debt, some $14 trillion of which must be refinanced over the next three years. IRS cuts carried out by DOGE, with the obvious goal of preventing audits of wealthy tax cheats, will further cut revenue by an estimated $500 billion this year alone; that’s more money out there to be spent. As a result of all of this, either interest rates will have to stay high, or prices will keep rising.”

International faith in the dollar has been jolted

Withal, the unquestioned faith in the dollar has been shaken by Trump’s erratic tariff policies.

So, while dollars will continue to be used around the world, Cooper expect[s] a steady erosion in the dollar’s hegemonic status, with a greater share of foreign exchange using a basket of other currencies—the euro, the pound, the yen, the Swiss franc, and so on.

“Trumponomics, by contrast, will produce the opposite: a poorer, weaker America, with structurally higher prices, dedicating a large and growing share of its economy to financing debt created by Republican tax cuts for the rich. And it will all be entirely self-inflicted.”

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Trump’s Unforgivable Sin

Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. delve into this issue in an article for The Atlantic, Aug 10 2025 (https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/trump-incompetence/683779)

Voters have proved willing to tolerate corruption, but there’s one thing they won’t ignore.

“Tens of millions of Americans voted for President Donald Trump in the belief that he would be competent. They might not have been thrilled that Trump is a convicted felon or pleased with his role in the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Many worried that he posed a threat to democracy. But enough were willing to overlook all that, because they convinced themselves that Trump would be an effective chief executive, that under his stewardship their lives would get better, and the country would prosper.

A little more than half a year into Trump’s second term, however, the public’s confidence in Trump’s skill as a chief executive is shattering. Wehner and Beschel cite a recent AP/NORC poll, which found that “only about one-quarter of U.S. adults said that Trump’s policies have helped them.”

“Roughly half report that Trump’s policies have ‘done more to hurt’ them, and about two in 10 say his policies have ‘not made a difference’ in their lives.

“Remarkably, Trump failed to earn majority approval on any of the issues in the poll, including the economy, immigration, and cutting government spending.

“As a result, a politically toxic impression is hardening. Trump’s approval rating in the most recent Gallup poll is 37 percent, the lowest of this term and only slightly higher than his all-time low of 34 percent, at the end of his first term. (Among independents, Trump’s approval rating is down to 29 percent.) Americans already understood Trump to be corrupt and proved themselves willing to tolerate that. But now they are coming to believe that he is inept. In American politics, that is an unforgivable sin.

Prices up, employment down

Wehner and Beschel continue. “On the economic front, Trump’s tariff increases—announced and then altered, often without rhyme or reason—are only now beginning to percolate through the economy, and the steepest hikes haven’t yet kicked in. The economy appears to be slowing down. Consumer prices are up 2.6 percent from a year earlier, which is keeping the Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates despite intense pressure from Trump. The jobs report for July showed a gain of only 73,000, a sign that the labor market is weakening. Perhaps more significant, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the jobs totals from May and June downward by more than a quarter of a million. Unemployment ticked up to 4.2 percent. Consumer spending is well below what it was last year. More than half of all Americans say the cost of groceries is a ‘major’ source of stress in their life right now. Many industries are postponing hiring, and the national hiring rate is near its lowest level in a decade. Customers appear to be holding off on large, long-term purchases. The Budget Lab at Yale University calculates that the American consumer is dealing with an average effective tariff rate of 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934, and it estimates that price increases will cost each household $2,400 on average this year.” General Motors reported last month that Trump’s tariffs have cost the company more than $1 billion. And the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said in a statement that Trump’s latest tariffs “would disrupt essential transatlantic supply chains, to the detriment of businesses, consumers and patients on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Cut backs in the Social Safety Net

Wehner and Beschel point out that the number of Americans without health insurance is going up, increasing by more than 10 million in less than a decade, “with particularly devastating impacts for vulnerable rural populations.”

Delayed tax refunds from the IRS – “Eliminating a quarter of the IRS workforce may well undermine tax collection and increase the wait time for Americans to receive refunds.

“Slashing the Social Security Administration, which is serving more people than ever before, with the fewest workers in half a century, will increase wait times for those needing help. It will lead to field-office closures that will hit seniors in rural communities the hardest and may well delay the processing of retirement, disability, and survivor benefits.”

National Institutes of Health have been devastated  — “The Trump administration has devastated the National Institutes of Health, one of the world’s foremost medical-research centers and the biggest sponsor of biomedical research in the world. Nearly 2,500 grants have been ended or delayed, disrupting vital medical research, reducing the pool of available researchers, and compromising public health and disease prevention.”

Massive cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, resulting in the loss of some of the weather service’s most experienced leaders and impeding the collection of data that are essential for accurate and timely weather forecasting, will place Americans at greater risk of experiencing extreme-weather events.

The upcoming elimination of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “As The Atlantic’s David A. Graham has written, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in disarray, headed by a person who is clearly out of his depth. Trump wants FEMA eliminated by the end of the year. It has already lost about a third of its permanent workforce, and its program dedicated to helping communities prepare for natural disasters such as floods and fires has been canceled.” What are the consequences?

“In the immediate aftermath of the recent Texas floods, FEMA’s earlier decision to lay off hundreds of call-center contractors resulted in thousands of unanswered calls for recovery assistance. (The administration dismissed reports about this as “fake news.”) FEMA didn’t deploy to St. Louis for several weeks after a tornado destroyed parts of the city, leaving people unable to apply for even basic payments for fresh food and medicine, let alone get help addressing uninsured losses from the natural disaster.”

Despite these cuts that national debt is expected to rise by over staggering $3 trillion, largely as a result of Trump’s tariffs and the reductions in federal government spending.

Concluding thoughts

Trump continuously claims that he and his administration are encouraging a strong economy, perhaps the strongest since the high-growth years of the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s. However, as the evidence considered in this post shows, the overall U.S. economy under Trump is doing poorly. It is not clear how this will impact the mid-term elections in November 2026, but poll data indicate that a majority of Americans are unhappy with Trump’s policies.

The future of democracy is in question. If the Republicans continue their control of both houses of the U.S. Congress, along with Trump in the White House and a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, then democracy’s future is dim.

The war on evidence. Trump makes up his own truth….

Trump makes up his own truth when facts don’t match what he wants

Bob Sheak, August 3, 2025

In this post, I identify 6 examples, there are more, that illustrate how Trump pays little attention to verifiable facts when it suits him.

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#1 – Attacks on Science

Brett Wilkins considers a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists [UCS], citing that Trump made 400+ unfounded attacks on science in his first 6 months of his second presidential tour (https://commondreams.org/news/trump-attack-on-science).

Wilkins notes that it is “part of a larger strategy to strip public protections, consolidate power, and remove scientific evidence from policymaking.” He continues. “The 402 attacks are nearly double the 207 UCS said that Trump oversaw during his first full term, and over four times the number committed during eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency. UCS said the Obama administration carried out 19 attacks on science, while former President Joe Biden oversaw just two attacks.”

The UCS defines an attack on science as “an action, statement, or decision that originates from an elected official or political appointee in a federal agency that results in the censoring, manipulation, forging, or misinforming of scientific data, results, or conclusions conducted within the government or with federal funds.”

Wilkens refers to the costs. “People are already paying the price of these attacks on science: children unnecessarily exposed to lead, families denied clean air, and lives needlessly lost in preventable disease outbreaks,” UCS noted. “Dismantling science harms every member of the U.S. public—but especially Black, Brown, Indigenous, rural, and low- and-moderate-income communities.”

To stop such attacks and “protect science and the public good, UCS offers two recommendations. One, pass the Scientific Integrity Act,  “introduced in February by Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.)—which would require federal agencies to uphold evidence-based policymaking free from political interference”; and. two, the Experts Act, “legislation proposed by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) to limit industry influence on science-based rulemaking.”

Wilkins also quotes Darya Minovi, the report’s lead author, who said that “the pace and severity of the administration’s attacks on science is extremely alarming.”

“‘These attacks are about power,’ she continued. ‘By silencing science that does not align with its agenda to line the pockets of polluters and billionaires, the Trump administration is stripping the public of its right to information, participation, and protection.’”

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#2- Attacking the science on global warming

Wilkins’s evidence is hardly unusual. Trump continues to judge news and federal agency reports, not according to their accuracy, but according to whether they conform to his particular self-interests. This hostile inclination toward facts is revealed in a report by Trump’s partisan Energy Department. Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer, write on this issue (https://nytimes.com/2025/07/31/climate/trump-climate-skeptics-science-report.html). Here is the title of the report, “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.”

Joselow and Plumer point out that the report, “which is meant to support the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to roll back climate regulations, contends that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.” The report makes the following wild assertions.

“Sea level rise is not accelerating. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be good for plant growth. The computer models used to predict global warming tend to exaggerate future temperature increases.”

“Climate scientists said the 151-page report misrepresented or cherry-picked a large body of research on global warming. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth​ and the payments company Stripe, called the document a ‘scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims​’ that ‘are not representative of broader climate science research findings.’”

Joselow and Plumer continue.

“The report demonstrates the extent to which President Trump is using his second term to wage a battle against climate change research, a long-held goal of some conservative groups and fossil fuel companies. While the first Trump administration often undermined federal scientists and rolled back more than 100 environmental policies, officials mostly refrained from trying to debate climate science in the open.”

However this time Trump officials have gone much further.

“The Environmental Protection Agency this week cited the Energy Department report in its proposal to repeal a landmark 2009 finding that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, pose a threat to public health. That determination, known as the endangerment finding, underpinned the agency’s legal authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other industrial sources of pollution.

“The new report also comes months after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship analysis of how climate change is affecting the country. That analysis, known as the National Climate Assessment, was set to explore how rising temperatures will influence public health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the economy.

“‘It is a coordinated, full-scale attack on the science,’ said Dave White, who directs the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University. ‘This was present in the first Trump administration, but it’s being exacerbated in the second.’”

A fringe argument

“The vast majority of climate scientists agree that carbon dioxide, which is released by the burning of fossil fuels, is accumulating in the atmosphere and raising global temperatures. This warming is increasing the risk of destructive storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves around the globe.”

“For instance, the report suggests that solar activity may be an ‘underestimated’ contributor to warming, citing a recent paper that has been sharply criticized. In contrast, a 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was compiled by hundreds of scientists, determined that human activity is responsible for essentially all of the global warming seen to date, while natural factors like sunspots have played little role.”

“Experts said they were struck by how quickly the Energy Department’s report was put together. When the federal government has previously compiled National Climate Assessments, it has convened hundreds of scientists who spend years gathering research and go through several rounds of peer review.”

“In contrast, the five scientists assembled by the Energy Department began work in early April and finished by a May 28 deadline, according to the report. ‘The short timeline and the technical nature of the material meant that we could not comprehensively review all topics.’”

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#3 -Trump and his administration attack the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Ashleigh Fields reports that “Statisticians blast Trump over BLS firing: ‘Dangerous precedent’” (https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5433583-trump-bis-firing-precedent-controversy). Here’s some of what she reports.

“Statisticians railed against President Trump on Friday following his decision to fire Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer for ‘inaccuracies’ and ‘incompetence’ after presenting a low job growth report for the month of July.”

Fields quotes former BLS chief William Beach, who

“slammed the ‘totally groundless’ rebuke alongside the Friends of BLS, an organization that advocates on behalf of the agency which he co-chairs.”

“Trump objected to the BLS report because “the agency lowered May and June job growth numbers by the initial 258,000 positions reported.

The organization also published a strongly worded statement condemning the shift in leadership at BLS, denying Trump’s accusations that McEntarfer deliberately reported “fake” numbers to tarnish his administration’s standing. 

“This baseless, damaging claim undermines the valuable work and dedication of BLS staff who produce the reports each month,” a Friday statement on the organization’s website reads.

“This escalates the President’s unprecedented attacks on the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system. The President seeks to blame someone for unwelcome economic news,” they added. “The Commissioner does not determine what the numbers are but simply reports on what the data show.”

Here’s what Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “No one can be that wrong? We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY.”

Trump added, “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. But competence and qualification have nothing to do with Trump’s decision. He is especially annoyed that the stock market responded negatively to this news and as of Saturday morning [Aug 2], the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 542 points, Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.3 percent and the S&P 500 decreased 1.6 percent of its value.” 

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#4 -Trustworthy US Jobs Info Is the Latest Victim of Trump’s War on Facts

Robert Reich also writes on “Trump’s War on Facts, Common Dreams, Aug 2, 2025 (https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-attack-bis).

Reich was U.S. secretary of labor during much of the 1990s. One part of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He recalls,

“I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.

“Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May. Revisions in monthly jobs report are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time.”

“Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, ‘rigged’ the data ‘to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.’”

“Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else—presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.

“How can anyone in the future trust the data that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot. Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily important source of information.”

Additionally, Reich comments on how Trump’s attempts to purge truth is not limited to just one agency.

“Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that climate change isn’t a ‘hoax,’ as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency. It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy, and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of Indigenous people. He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and disease and how we can guard against them.”

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#5 – The Gilded Lie: Trump’s Ballroom

Jesse Mackinnon reports on this “lie” in an article in Common Dreams, Aug 03, 2025 (https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-s-ballroom).

Here are some details. “U.S. President Donald Trump’s $200 million plan to construct a new golden ballroom at the White House is not just a monument to narcissism. It is statecraft by spectacle, financed by national rot. The timing is not subtle. It arrives alongside his ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill,’ a federal budget that slashes Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, and climate programs, all while inflating the national deficit past $40 trillion. In this juxtaposition—architectural self-glorification for the ruling executive, fiscal starvation for the governed—we are not witnessing innovation.”

Mackinnon writes,

“The ballroom is a symptom. A projected $200 million marble-and-gold performance space, modeled loosely on Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, will sit at the center of Trump’s renovated West Wing. It will host foreign dignitaries, Republican fundraisers, and presidential photo ops. This is how kleptocracy dresses itself—in borrowed grandeur, gilded walls, and florid illusions of permanence.”

“A president calls himself ‘king’ on social media and receives thunderous applause from his base. He designs a ballroom while communities lose clinics. He throws gala dinners while food pantries see record demand. The White House is not a palace, but it is being remade into one.”

“Trump’s defenders will call the ballroom symbolic. They are right. It symbolizes a state that has abandoned the moral obligations of government and replaced them with architecture. It is the spatial embodiment of policy by spectacle. The Roman emperors built circuses. Louis built Versailles. Trump builds ballrooms. The continuity is not ideological. It is psychological.”

“The question is not whether America can afford another ballroom. The question is whether it can survive the regime that thinks it should build one.”

————

#6 – The Golden Dome fantasy

Melvin Goodman considers Trump’s whacky proposal for a golden dome national missile defense system (https://counterpunch.org/2025/07/21/the-waste-and-futility-of-the-golden-dome-national-missile-defense-system).

Goodman reminds readers that (1) the U.S. is responsible for half of global spending on defense, committing more than $1 trillion dollars on defense, and (2) an addition hundreds of billions

The United States is responsible for half of global spending on defense.  The Trump administration is committed to spending more than $1 trillion dollars on defense, and this figure doesn’t include the hundreds of billions “devoted to the intelligence community, the Department of Energy, the Veterans’ Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security.”  There is huge waste in the defense budget, and the major culprits in this department are the unneeded modernization of U.S. strategic weaponry and the so-called Golden Dome national missile defense.  The enormous cost and technological deficiencies of the U.S.-supplied, European-based missile defense system adds to the huge bloat in U.S. defense spending.

“The Golden Dome missile defense system, as proposed by President Trump, is estimated to cost $175 billion. This cost is just for the initial three-year period, with ongoing operational and sustainment costs potentially pushing the total figure much higher. Some estimates from organizations like the Congressional Budget Office suggest a total cost between $161 and $542 billion over two decades. Since programs were first launched in the 1950s to build systems capable of intercepting incoming nuclear or conventional weapons, the United States has spent more than $400 billion on various missile defense programs.

“Over the years, NMD [National Missile Defense] has been a technical flop, having failed most of its tests.  The NMD system has flaws such as an adversary’s ability to use shorter range ballistic and cruise missiles that could ‘underfly’ NMD.  The U.S. system could be defeated by numerous unsophisticated countermeasures and decoys that would overload the NMD system and create confusion.  Moreover, the U.S. system will never be tested in a realistic battle environment, and there is no assurance that a U.S. system could be effective against all of the many varieties of countermeasures.

“Even a flawed NMD system will create instability in the nuclear community.  Russia would fear that the United States would feel protected by the so-called shield, and China would fear that its smaller nuclear arsenal would be compromised.  The level of instability could lead such non-nuclear states as Japan and South Korea to pursue nuclear weapons and thus weaken the Non-Proliferation Treaty that has kept the number of nuclear states to nine.  If unchecked, proliferation would have no logical stopping point.”

Goodman refers to alternatives to national missile defense, particularly the pursuit of arms control and disarmament.  The United States missed a major opportunity in the 1990s and 2000s, when Russia was weak and open to a strategic dialogue and China was still committed to minimal strategic deterrence. Moreover, the last arms control agreement between the United States and Russia—the New Start Treaty—is scheduled to expire in January 2026.

“The U.S. retreat from arms control and renewed commitment to NMD will only worsen the problem of nuclear proliferation as nuclear nations will pursue greater deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles and non-nuclear states, such as Japan and South Korea, could consider the deployment of nuclear weaponry.  The absence of any nuclear dialogue at present and the strained relations between the United States and both China and Russia are major contributors to the current state of international instability.  The Trump administration’s cut backs at the Department of State and the National Security Council as well as the politicization of the intelligence community will make it more difficult for the United States to enter a serious and substantive dialogue on any aspect of arms control.”

————

Concluding thoughts

There is little doubt that Trump is not limited in his rhetoric and policy-making by the best evidence. It is bad for democracy. It may indicate, for example:

The intrigues of right-wing government

Bob Sheak, July 24, 2025

Introduction

As a result of Trump’s razor thin victory in the 2024 presidential election, a victory that was abetted by Elon Musk’s massive donations of $250 million or more to Trump’s campaign and the contributions of other billionaires, along with Republican gerrymandering in many states, we now have a president who is again advancing policies that conflict with and threaten to destroy democratic values, constitutional mandates, and services that are important to most Americans. For example, with the help of Musk and his young inexperienced team, there have been major reductions in agencies throughout the federal government, reducing or eliminating people, experts in their fields, and services to millions of Americans.

There have already been cuts in education, health care, regulatory agencies, clean energy policy (climate-change deniers), veterans’ benefits, and foreign aid.

Wikipedia reports

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mass_layoffs).

 “More than 275,000 United States federal civil service layoffs have been announced by the second Trump administration.[1][2] As of June 26, 2025, CNN has tracked at least 128,709 workers laid off or targeted for layoffs.[3] As of 3 June 2025, The New York Times tracked more than 58,500 confirmed cuts, more than 76,000 employee buyouts, and more than 149,000 other planned reductions; cuts total 12% of the 2.4 million civilian federal workers.[4] In limited cases, the administration has rescinded layoff notifications.[5]”

The public justification, lacking evidence, is that there is waste and abuse throughout government that needs to be eliminated. Trump has also naively supported rising tariffs to discourage imports. This has caused shortages in the U.S. economy, rising prices, and the potential loss of trade with even previously allied countries.

Concerned about the negative effects of these actions, including Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill,” Trump and his Republican allies in the Congress have deceptively postponed some of the cuts until after the 2026 mid-term elections or later in hopes of retaining Republican majorities in both chambers of the Congress.

———–

The one big not-so beautiful bill

Amy B Wang reports on what to expect from Trump’s “big tax law”

(https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/14/trump-tax-bill-takes-effect).

“President Donald Trump signed his massive tax and immigration bill into law on July 4 in a White House ceremony full of patriotic pomp and circumstance. The legislation extends the tax cuts enacted in Trump’s first term and directs hundreds of billions of dollars of new spending to defense and immigration enforcement. To offset those costs, the bill also makes historic cuts to spending on social safety-net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Nonpartisan estimates have said cuts in the bill will cause at least 17 million Americans to lose their health coverage.”

Wang continues.”

The key provisions in Trump’s law, which he called the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’ will take effect at different times over several years. The facets of the law have varying degrees of popularity with the American public, according to a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll. Many of the more unpopular policies in the legislation will not kick in until after the 2026 midterm elections, possibly minimizing the political damage to Republicans that some in their party previously warned the bill could inflict. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan agency that vets the cost of major legislation, projects the bill will add $3.4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.”

Here’s a look at when certain provisions from the legislation are scheduled to take effect.

“Effective right away, the new law permanently extends trillions of dollars of tax cuts enacted in 2017 during Trump’s first term that otherwise were set to expire at the end of this year. Those included cuts for corporate businesses and for all income levels, though the highest-earning households saw the biggest benefits. The new law also raises the limit on how much people can deduct in state and local taxes — known as the SALT cap — from their federal returns, from $10,000 to $40,000 a year.

“Under the new GOP bill, the standard deduction will increase to $15,750 for an individual ($31,500 for a married couple filing jointly) and the child tax credit will increase from $2,000 to $2,200 per child, to be adjusted for inflation each year. However, some noncitizens are now barred from claiming the latter, even if their children are American citizens.

“Also essentially kicking in right away are many of the policies Trump promised during his campaign, such as no taxes on tips, overtime compensation or car-loan interest. A worker earning less than $150,000 a year can exclude up to $25,000 of tip income and up to $12,500 of overtime compensation from being taxed. People age 65 and older earning up to $75,000 a year can deduct an additional $6,000, with lower deductions for those earning more. The deductions are all retroactive to Jan. 1 and can be claimed when filing taxes next year.

“‘Finally,’ Wang writes, ‘the law mandates new, more stringent work requirements for those on SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. Adults aged 19-64 who don’t have dependents must prove they are working, volunteering or going to school for a certain number of hours each month to qualify for federal food assistance. (SNAP’s previous work requirements apply to adult recipients up to 54 years old, without dependents.) Requirements will be phased through 2029, depending on how states look to supplement the program without federal help. Groups that are likely to see benefit changes this year are veterans, parents with children 14 to 17 years of age, foster youths and people between 55 and 65 years old.”

“What’s getting cut this year? The legislation ends several green- and clean-energy initiatives enacted under President Joe Biden. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in 2022, certain electric vehicle purchases qualified for a tax credit for anywhere from $4,000 to $7,500. That incentive is now set to end on Sept. 30, instead of in 2032.

“Other credits for green home improvement projects — including the Residential Clean Energy Credit and the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit — are also due to sunset on Dec. 31 because of the GOP law. Those credits have been offered for the purchase and installation of things like household solar panels, home batteries and solar water heaters, as well as for homeowners to upgrade to more energy-efficient appliances or improve insulation.

2026 changes

“As the new coverage year starts for health insurance plans purchased on the Affordable Care Act marketplace, people are likely to see new restrictions and higher premiums because of Trump’s law that allows pandemic-era enhanced subsidies to expire at the end of 2025. The CBO estimates that 4.2 million people will lose insurance as a result of losing those subsidies that made coverage affordable.

“Several new restrictions and changes to federal student loan programs are set to kick in on July 1, 2026. Being eliminated are the Graduate PLUS student loan program, as well as the SAVE, PAYE and ICR student loan repayment plans, which are based on income level. New student loan borrowers must choose between one of two repayment plans approved under the new GOP legislation. Parent PLUS loans — which previously allowed parents to borrow up to a student’s full cost of attendance — also will be capped at $20,000 per year, or $65,000 total per student.

Throughout the year, both parties are expected to use the changes enacted in the law as campaign fodder for the midterm elections on Nov. 3, 2026, with Republicans likely to tout the tax cuts that will have already gone into effect.

Wang continues.

2027

“With midterm elections in the rearview mirror, this is the year that the least popular aspects of the law are set to take effect. Jan. 1, 2027, [and] is the deadline for most states to implement new Medicaid work requirements for people who became eligible for Medicaid under the 2010 Affordable Care Act’s expansion of the program, though some states may get exemptions for up to two years. Similar to the new SNAP work requirements, adults 19-64 will have to prove they are working, volunteering or going to school for a certain number of hours per month to qualify for Medicaid.

“The bill provides exemptions for certain groups, including those who are pregnant, disabled or taking care of dependent children 13 or younger — but those recipients could still lose their health insurance if they don’t submit paperwork proving their exemption. The bill requires that states conduct an extra eligibility check every six months, starting in 2027, which could open the door to people losing coverage midyear.

“On Oct. 1, 2027, most states will begin to be required to cover some SNAP benefit costs previously covered entirely by the federal government.”

2028

“This is the year that most permanent funding changes to Medicaid kick in, namely the gradual reduction of provider taxes and state-directed payments that experts say are likely to cause states to have to make cuts to their programs. The Trump administration has cast the cuts as ‘strengthening Medicaid by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse,’ but the CBO projected the nearly $1 trillion cuts to Medicaid alone will result in 11.8 million more uninsured Americans by 2034.

“July 1, 2028, is the deadline for student loan borrowers to change to one of the two new repayment plans approved under Trump’s law.

“Starting Oct. 1, 2028, those who became eligible for Medicaid under the ACA’s expansion of the program in 2010 — and whose income is from 100 percent to 138 percent of the federal poverty level (roughly $32,000 to $44,000 for a family of four) — will begin to pay new out-of-pocket costs of up to $35 per service, which experts have said is likely to lead low-income recipients to avoid seeking care.

“Possibly the changes that will affect the largest swaths of the population will take place at the end of the year, after the election of a new president. On Dec. 31, 2028, the temporary tax provisions for tips, overtime compensation, seniors, car-loan interest and state and local tax deductions will expire. However, the extension of the 2017 tax cuts — including for corporate businesses and higher-income households — will remain because the law made them permanent.”

————-

The creation of a Police State

Rob Wallace ,Joe Sexauer , Rita Valenti  argue that “Trump Is Trying to Dismantle Public Health — and Replace It With a Police State”

 Truthout, July 16, 2025 (https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-trying-to-dismantle-public-health-and-replace-it-with-a-police-state).

“The Trump administration is fighting to remain a step ahead of the growing popular backlash to its draconian cuts to social programs that millions of Americans depend on — at least until the administration operationalizes enough of the police state it’s practicing on immigrants to put down any such objection.

The deeply unpopular White House is confronted with a second problem of its own making. It’s a trap already apparent during Donald Trump’s first term. In letting go federal employees or replacing them with incompetent sycophants, the administration is having difficulty running its political relay to the fascist finish line.”

“Under the ‘ budget signed into law July 4, all that will be removed from Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans will be reallocated nearly dollar-for-dollar to the Pentagon, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and subsidies and tax cuts for the rich.”

“As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s failure to deploy federal search and rescue until more than 72 hours after the recent deadly Texas floods underscores, the incompetence on display is likely to blow back upon the administration time and again. Within only the last month:

“Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ team used artificial intelligence to write a report plotting out a new vision for health policy that strips out childhood vaccines, ultra-processed foods, and pesticides. The report included false information and fake citations.

“David Richardson, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) new head, shocked FEMA staff when he shared his surprise there was a hurricane season.

“Casey Means, a wellness influencer and Trump’s pick for surgeon general, never completed her medical residency.

“Against their Hippocratic oaths, Veterans Affairs doctors are now allowed to refuse to treat Democrats, the unmarried, or people of any characteristic not presently protected under law.”

“The U.S. has long suffered the consequences of failing to offer access to well-run federal programs to all Americans. But the new administration’s rollbacks reach another order of abandonment, rejecting any notion of our shared fate.”

————

Trying to limit clean energy

Zack Colman and Josh Siegel report on a Trump administration memo that could strike a fatal blow to wind and solar power (https://politico.com/news/2025/07/18/definitely-playing-favorites-interior-memo-could-strike-dire-blow-to-wind-and-solar-projects-00460801). Here’s some of what they report.

“As POLITICO first reported on Wednesday, the Interior Department issued a directive requiring Secretary Doug Burgum’s personal approval for even the most routine activities related to wind and solar projects on federal lands. The directive could have a much broader impact, affecting scores of projects on private land that must pass through or connect with projects on Interior-managed federal land, according to industry officials, financiers and lawyers.

“The memo comes as President Donald Trump has sought to squelch new wind and solar projects through executive orders and limit use of federal tax credits that moderate Republicans fought to preserve in their megalaw earlier this month. Trump has decried those energy sources as harmful to the power grid’s reliability and said those industries ultimately benefit China, which controls a sizable chunk of the world’s wind and solar supply chains.

“Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, warned the move would hamstring the U.S. economy by delaying additions of readily available power.”

“‘The president and Secretary Burgum will then be responsible for raising electricity prices on every state in this country because that will be the end result of that kind of abuse of permitting,’ he said. ‘I would warn them if they create this as a precedent and it survives, a future administration could play the same game with oil and gas pipelines and leases.’”

“The department’s new policy requires Burgum’s office to weigh in on virtually every aspect of or permit for solar and wind projects with a nexus to Interior. That includes siting, navigating threats to endangered species, road access and right-of-way permissions.”

“Solar, wind and battery storage accounted for 93 percent of power capacity added to the grid last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.”

“American Clean Power Association CEO Jason Grumet called the new policy ‘obstruction’ and an ‘intentional effort to slow energy production.’”

“‘In stark contradiction to the Administration’s commitment to tackling bureaucracy, this directive adds three new layers of needless process and unprecedented political review to the construction of domestic energy projects,’ Grumet said in a statement.”

“Harry Godfrey, managing director of Advanced Energy United, who leads the clean energy organization’s federal engagement efforts, said in a statement it is ‘deeply disappointing to see the Administration yet again singling out affordable energy sources for added scrutiny, particularly at a time of rising demand. This is the antithesis of expedited permitting that the Administration supposedly favors.’

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), put it bluntly: ‘It sounds blatantly political on the face of it.’”

————–

Trump exempts more than 100 polluters from environmental standards

Rachel Frazin reports on Trump’s exemption of more than 100 polluters from environmental standards, July 18 2025 (https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5408714-trump-epa-polluters-environmental-standards-clean-air-act).


She points out, “The Trump administration is exempting dozens of chemical manufacturers, oil refineries, coal plants, medical device sterilizers and other polluters from Clean Air Act rules.

“On Thursday, the White House announced it would exempt more than 100 plants from pollution limits established by the Biden administration.

“The limits are aimed at reducing the releases of toxic chemicals, including those that cause cancer. One rule that the Trump administration is exempting about 50 polluters from would have been expected to reduce cancer risks of people living within 6 miles of a chemical plant by 96 percent.

“The Trump administration touted its decision as being supportive of fossil fuels and manufacturing.” Trump rejects any policy that might “undermine America’s energy reliability, economic vitality, and national security, according to a White House fact sheet.” Frazin notes the move also stands in contrast with the administration’s pledge to “make America healthy again.”

The consequences are likely to be insufferable. Frazin gives the following examples. “Trump’s action on behalf of big corporate polluters will cause more cancer, more birth defects, and more children to suffer asthma. The country deserves better,” Patrice Simms, vice president of litigation at Earthjustice’s Healthy Communities Program, said in a written statement.”

———-

Ignoring global warming

Donald Trump’s Greatest Failure

Tom Engelhardt consider this issue, July 15 2025

(https://tomdispatch.com/donald-trumps-greatest-triumph). Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture.  A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth book is A Nation Unmade by War.

“‘My guess,’ Engelhardt writes, “is that you haven’t read much about it recently, despite the fact that a significant part of this country, including the city I live in, set new heat records for June. And Europe followed suit soon after with a heat hell all its own in which, at one point, the temperature in part of Spain hit an all-time record 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit. And oh yes, part of Portugal hit 115.9 degrees as both countries recorded their hottest June ever. Facing that reality, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said (again all too appropriately): ‘Extreme heat is no longer a rare event — it has become the new normal.’ The new normal, indeed! He couldn’t have been more on target!”

“And why am I not surprised by all this? Well, because whether you’re in the United States or Europe (or so many other places on this planet) these days, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ve noticed that June is indeed the new July, and that, thanks to the ever increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that continue to flow into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, heat waves have grown more frequent and more intense. After all, we’re now on a planet where, without a doubt, heat is at an all-time-record high. After all, 2024, was the hottest year in history and the last 10 years, the hottest decade ever known.” Worse yet, in the age of Donald Trump, this is clearly just the beginning, not the end (though somewhere down the line, of course, it could indeed prove to be exactly that).”

—————

An Ongoing Act of Global Terrorism

Engelhardt continues. “In short, despite everything else he’s doing in and to this world of ours, there’s nothing more devastating (not even his bombing of Iran) than his urge to ignore anything associated with climate change, while putting fossil fuels back at the very center of our all-American world. Yes, he can no longer simply stop solar and wind power from growing rapidly on this planet of ours, but he can certainly try. And simply refusing to do anything to help is — or at least should be — considered an ongoing act of global terrorism.

Fewer forecasts

“And don’t think it’s just that either. For example, Trump administration cuts to the National Weather Service have already ensured that, when truly bad weather hits (and hits and hits), as it’s been doing this year, whether you’re talking about stunning flash-flooding or tornadoes, there will be, as the Guardian‘s Eric Holthaus reports, ever fewer staff members committed to informing and warning Americans about what’s coming or helping them once it’s hit. Meanwhile, cuts to the government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network will ensure that we’ll know less about the effects of climate change in this country.”

Engelhardt concludes his article, “Of all the wars we shouldn’t be fighting on this planet of ours from Ukraine to Gaza, Iran to Sudan, there is indeed one that we all should be fighting, including the president of the United States, and that’s the war against our destruction of this planet (as humanity has known it all these endless thousands of years) in a planetary heat hell.” 

————

Monitoring and suppressing dissent

John W. Whitehead – Nisha Whitehead consider this issue

(https://counterpunch.org/2025/07/17/thewearables-trap-how-the-government-plans-to-monitor-score-and-control-you). Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books The Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield America: The War on the American People are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

The Whiteheads make their key point: “Under the present Republican-dominated government, ‘bodily autonomy—the right to privacy and integrity over our own bodies—is rapidly vanishing.

“‘We are entering a new age of algorithmic, authoritarian control, where our thoughts, moods, and biology are monitored and judged by the state.

“This is the dark promise behind the newest campaign by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, to push for a future in which all Americans wear biometric health-tracking devices.

“Under the guise of public health and personal empowerment, this initiative is nothing less than the normalization of 24/7 bodily surveillance—ushering in a world where every step, heartbeat, and biological fluctuation is monitored not only by private companies but also by the government.”

“‘According to Kennedy’s plan,’ which has been promoted as part of a national campaign to ‘Make America Healthy Again,’ wearable devices would track glucose levels, heart rate, activity, sleep, and more for every American.

“Participation may not be officially mandatory at the outset, but the implications are clear: get on board, or risk becoming a second-class citizen in a society driven by data compliance.”

“Devices like Fitbits, Apple Watches, glucose trackers, and smart rings collect astonishing amounts of intimate data—from stress and depression to heart irregularities and early signs of illness. When this data is shared across government databases, insurers, and health platforms, it becomes a potent tool not only for health analysis—but for control.”

“Once health tracking becomes a de facto requirement for employment, insurance, or social participation, it will be impossible to ‘opt out’ without penalty. Those who resist may be painted as irresponsible, unhealthy, or even dangerous.

“This is not merely the expansion of health care. It is the transformation of health into a mechanism of control—a Trojan horse for the surveillance state to claim ownership over the last private frontier: the human body.”

“The goal is no longer simply to monitor behavior but to reshape it—to preempt dissent, deviance, or disease before it arises.”

————

 Trump’s angry, erratic behavior explains his lowball poll numbers, except among his MAGA base

Stephen Collinson reports for CNN on Trump’s low poll ratings

(https://cnn.com/2025/07/17/politics/trump-powell-epstein-poll-numbers-analysis).

Collinson focuses on Trump’s views toward Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, and his relations to Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide while serving a prison sentence for enticing young girls into sex acts with him and his wealthy friends, including, as the Wall Street Journal has reported, Trump.

On Powell

Trump’s inclination to fire Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve would represent, Collinson writes, “the riskiest power grab yet of Trump’s expansive second term, since it would traumatize markets by obliterating an assumption that made the US the world’s most powerful economy — that presidents don’t emulate developing world dictators by cooking the books for political gain.”

Trump later insisted it was “highly unlikely” he’d dismiss Powell after markets shuddered. But given his volatile nature and obvious desire to exact revenge on an official who has refused to bow to his autocratic impulses, few will take such assurances to the (central) bank.

Notably, “Powell is praised by many economists for doing the impossible — taming the worst inflation crisis in 40 years without setting off a recession or surging unemployment. But unlike the Fed chief, whom he appointed in his first term, Trump acts on hunches. If he gets this wrong and ignites contagion in the financial markets, the savings and livelihoods of millions could be on the line.”

On Epstein

Meanwhile, in an extraordinary outburst on Truth Social, “Trump blasted some of the most vocal MAGA personalities as ‘weaklings’ over their criticism of his administration’s refusal to throw open files on the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s defensiveness supercharged a furor simmering for more than a week — and is likely to spur more claims he’s got something to hide and to encourage Democratic calls for more transparency.”

Trump sues the Wall Street Journal

Amid the controversy, Nandita Bose and Jonathan Stempel report for Reuters that Trump has sued the Wall Street Journal seeking $10 billion (https://apnews.com/article/trump-epstein-wall-street-journal-b006f3ef25e6b4ab910cc3b41c865227). Here’s some of what they write.

“U.S. President Donald Trump sued the Wall Street Journal and its owners including Rupert Murdoch for at least $10 billion on Friday, over the newspaper’s report that his name was on a 2003 birthday greeting for Jeffrey Epstein that included a sexually suggestive drawing and a reference to secrets they shared.

The lawsuit filed in Miami federal court names Murdoch, Dow Jones, News Corp (NWSA.O), opens new tab and its Chief Executive Robert Thomson, and two Wall Street Journal reporters as defendants, saying they defamed Trump and caused him to suffer “overwhelming” financial and reputational harm.”

Bose and Stempel continue. “A spokesperson for Dow Jones said in a statement: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”

Low poll ratings, except among many in his base

Bottom of Form

Collinson (cited previously) refers to a new CNN/SSRS poll that sheds light on Trump’s unruly presidency.

“In the CNN poll, Trump’s approval rating was largely unchanged from the spring, at 42%. But less than a year after an election that turned in part on frustration about the cost of groceries and housing, only 37% of those polled say Trump is concentrating on the right issues — down 6 points from March.”

And his “biggest-ever domestic triumph — the just-passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which contains much of his second-term domestic agenda — is opposed by 61% of Americans. And his approval among independents is an anemic 32%.”

Still, “the CNN/SSRS findings show that Trump’s standing with Republicans is rock-solid at 88%.”

———–

Does Trump have a plan to avoid becoming a lame duck?

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post considers Trump’s plan, July 11, 2025

(https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/11/trump-third-term-legacy-era).

Members of the Editorial Board: Deputy Opinion Editors Mary Duenwald and Stephen Stromberg, as well as writers Robert Gebelhoff, James Hohmann, Megan McArdle, Eduardo Porter and Keith B. Richburg.

They write,

“Trump cannot lawfully seek a third term, but he may continue to dominate U.S. politics, according to the Washington Post’s editorial board.

“One especially ostentatious way that Trump has sought to avoid becoming a lame duck is by flirting with seeking a third term in 2028. Usually, Trump is clearly joking. At other times, he has acknowledged that he will be a two-term president.”

But the Board writes that some of Trump’s policies will have a negative effect on his future.

“His tax cuts promise to add trillions to the debt, risking a fiscal crisis the likes of which Americans have never experienced.”

“The president’s erratic tariff policy risks stoking inflation and promotes corrosive uncertainty for businesses trying to plan and invest.

“His war on undocumented immigrants, marked by a provocative, militarized federal presence in Los Angeles, could bring more economic pain.

“…as Trump rolls out a new, massive tariff seemingly every hour, the bigger he goes, the higher the risk to the nation’s fortunes.”

————-

Is it about his psychological instability and incapacity?

There is concern in some circles that Trump’s erratic behavior is affected by a growing mental instability and incapacity.

Bandy X. Lee, the author and editor of the bestselling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (publ. 2017), has written another book about Trump’s psychological state. The title: The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind (publ. 2024). Lee writes that “mental incapacity” occurs when “a person does not possess the rationality and mental stability to be able to make reality-based, sound decision, so that one can perform a task or a job” (p. 62).

Here are two examples from Lee’s book. One, “Donald Trump became the source of almost half the world’s disinformation on Covid-19, at a time when public education was the most critical defense against the disease” (p. 62). Two, he encouraged his supporters to gather in Washington D.C., to stop the certification of Biden’s presidency on January 6, 2021, where at least 2,000 of them engaged in a violent insurrection at the U.S. capitol, and “injuring 174 police officers and killing four (p. 63).

Lee points out that trump waited hours to intercede while the rioters ransacked the capitol and unleased their damage and harm. Lee writes: “Donald Trump himself never telephoned the National Guard, and never contacted any federal law enforcements agency to order security assistance to the Capitol Police. Instead, during the attack’s first three hours, Trump was transfixed on the violence shown on television, ignoring pleas to call off the mob” (p. 68).

Trump continues to this day to claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him. It has become known as the “big lie.” However, the overwhelming evidence conclusively denies his claim. Sixty-three lawsuits brought by Trump or his supporters failed to change the election results against him. To top it off, and as an illustration of Trump’s unhinged views, one of Trump’s first executive orders in his second presidential term was to pardon over 1,500 of the incarcerated rioters, viewing them as “patriots” rather than the law-breakers they are.

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Concluding thoughts

Trump’s actions and policies indicate that he has a poor judgment on the policies he supports and opposes and on the people he selects for important posts in hisadministration. Consequently, the majority of Americans are being negatively affected and their future is of concern, from global warming to loss of government services Polls show that majorities of American reject his policies on tariffs, immigration, and on his overall performance. If his erratic and harmful behavior continues, the Republican Party may lose their control of at least one of the Congressional houses in the midterm 2026 midterms. That would be beneficial for the country.

Trump and his party care less about global warming

Bob Sheak, July 15, 2025

Introduction

This position is revealed in many ways. They favor energy from fossil fuels, even coal, and want to produce more oil, gas, and coal for domestic and foreign sales. They are skeptical that fossil fuels are the major cause of global warming. It is a position that puts the U.S. and the world at grave risk at a time when global warming is accelerating. Here are recent articles that identify this myopia and stupidity.

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Slashing clean energy

Marianne Lavelle, et. al.,  report on how Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is set to slash efforts to clean up the US energy system (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03072025/big-beautiful-bill-will-hurt-clean-energy-environmental-justice). The article was published on July 3, 2025

The $4 trillion, 887-page legislation “erases the landmark investment in cleaner energy, jobs and communities that a Democratic-led Congress made only three years ago in the Inflation Reduction Act. 

“It stomps out incentives for purchasing electric vehicles and efficient appliances. It phases out tax credits for wind and solar energy. It opens federal land and water for oil and gas drilling and increases its profitability, while creating new federal support for coal. It ends the historic investment in poor and minority communities that bear a disproportionate pollution burden—money that the Trump administration was already refusing to spend. It wipes out any spending on greening the federal government.”

Lavelle et. al. cite “Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who called the bill ‘a massive hit to both our clean energy economy, the US economy as a whole, and to our future from a climate perspective.’”

Boosting Fossil Fuels

“While the Biden administration had restricted oil and gas leasing in Alaska, the bill reinstates fossil fuel lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with Alaska receiving a majority of the royalties from this new production.”

Lavelle and her colleagues point out,  

“An analysis by the REPEAT Project from the Princeton University ZERO Lab and Evolved Energy Research showed that the bill is expected to contribute an additional 470 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year by 2035, the annual equivalent of more than 100 million gas-powered cars on the road.”

“Already Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency had terminated funding for grants awarded under the program, for initiatives aimed at disaster preparedness, workforce development, air quality, flood control and high energy costs. The projects involved things like installing pollution notification systems and replacing lead pipes and were designed to strengthen communities against more damaging weather events while including community members in decision-making that affected their environment and health. Environmental groups had filed a class-action lawsuit to try to reinstate the canceled grants.”

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Trump’s Gutting of Weather Science and Reducing Disaster Response

Lisa Friedman, Maxine Joselow, Coral Davenport and Megan Mineiro consider this issue (https://nytimes.com/2025/07/13/climate-trump-cuts-disaster-preparedness-fema-html).

The journalists point out that experts have warned Trump not to go on “dismantling the government’s disaster capabilities.” They continue.

“In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say.

“Staff reductions, budget cuts and other changes made by the administration since January have already created holes at the National Weather Service, which forecasts and warns of dangerous weather.

“Mr. Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year would close 10 laboratories run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that research the ways a warming planet is changing weather, among other things. That work is essential to more accurately predicting life-threatening hazards. Among the shuttered labs would be one in Miami that sends teams of ‘hurricane hunters to fly into storms to collect critical data. The proposed budget would also make major cuts to a federal program that uses river gauges to predict floods.

Friedman et. al. continue.

“The president is also envisioning a dramatically scaled-down Federal Emergency Management Agency that would shift the costs of disaster response and recovery from the federal government to the states. The administration has already revoked $3.6 billion in grants from FEMA to hundreds of communities around the country, which were to be used to help these areas protect against hurricanes, wildfires and other catastrophes. About 10 percent of the agency’s staff members have left since January, including senior leaders with decades of experience, and another 20 percent are expected to be gone by the end of this year.”

“National security and disaster management experts agreed that FEMA — or any federal agency — could be improved but they said the chaotic changes the Trump administration is making to FEMA, as well as other parts of the government, are harmful.

“The federal government’s retrenchment arrives at a time when climate change is making extreme weather more frequent and severe. Last year, the United States experienced 27 disasters that cost more than $1 billion each.”

“For months, experts have warned that cuts to the National Weather Service, part of NOAA, could endanger local communities. Those fears have grown since the deadly flash floods in Central Texas earlier this month.

“By all accounts, the Weather Service issued the appropriate warnings for the region that was inundated by the Guadalupe River on July 4.

“But the agency had to move employees from other offices to temporarily staff the San Antonio office that handled the flood warnings, and the office lacked a warning coordination meteorologist, whose job it is to communicate with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn residents and help them evacuate. The office’s warning coordination meteorologist had left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration has offered to reduce the number of federal employees.

“Since Mr. Trump took office, the Weather Service has shed about 600 jobs from its work force of roughly 4,200 people. They are part of a greater exodus of nearly 2,000 employees from NOAA. Nearly half of the Weather Service’s 122 forecast offices had lost at least 20 percent of their staff as of April. Thirty offices were lacking their most experienced official, known as the meteorologist-in-charge, as of May.”

“Some forecast offices are no longer staffed overnight, and others have been launching fewer weather balloons, which send data to feed forecasts. The Weather Service has said it is preparing for “degraded operations.”

“The president is preparing to deal another blow to weather forecasting in his spending plan for next year, which would cut funding for NOAA by another $2 billion, or 27 percent. On the chopping block would be the agency’s entire scientific research division, one of the world’s premier weather and climate research centers, preventing the creation of new weather forecasting technologies.”

“Mr. Trump’s sweeping domestic policy and tax law, which Congress passed this month, also rescinds about $60 million in unspent funds at NOAA for atmospheric, climate and weather research. That money had been part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law.”

“FEMA has lost about a quarter of its full-time staff in the past six months, including 20 percent of the coordinating officers at the agency, who manage responses to major disasters, as well as the head of FEMA’s disaster command center. Also gone: the deputy regional administrator in the agency’s Region 6 office in Texas.

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Unsurprisingly, Global warming worsens

Climatologist Michael Mann makes the connection between global warming and fossil fuels explicit (https://democracynow.org/2025/7/1/heat_dome-climate-crisis). Mann is the Presidential distinguished professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Here is some of what he had to say in an interview on Democracy Now with host Amy Goodman.

Links to articles by Mann.

“Heat domes and flooding have nearly tripled since the ’50s”

“Science Under Siege”

“Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis”

Goodman: “Scientists say the burning of fossil fuels by humans is the primary cause of global warming. This week, the Senate is debating measures to include in Trump’s so-called big, beautiful budget bill, is set to shape U.S. fossil fuel policy in ways expected to accelerate fossil fuel extraction, in part by cutting hundreds of billions of dollars of clean energy incentives — in fact, taxing more clean energy incentives.

MICHAEL MANN: “‘you know, at some level, this isn’t that complicated. You make the planet hotter, you’re going to have more frequent and intense heat extremes. And we are seeing that. Our climate models capture that, and they predict that that will get much worse in the future if we, you know, as you allude to, continue to burn fossil fuels and warm up the planet.

Altering the jet stream

At the same time, there are some subtle mechanisms when it comes to how the pattern of warming of the planet is changing the Northern Hemisphere jet stream.”

“And some of our own research suggests that that pattern of warming, in particular, the fact that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, is actually changing the jet stream in such a way that it’s more likely to get stuck in one of those very wavy patterns that you see on a weather map. And those waves are associated with big high- and low-pressure systems, that alternatively mean heat, drought and wildfires in one place, or excessive floods in other places. Those wiggles in the jet stream are tending to get larger, and they get locked in place, so the same location is under a heat dome day after day, like we’ve seen in North America this summer, like we’re seeing in Europe right now.

“And that mechanism is actually not very well captured in the climate models. It’s an important point, because critics of climate policy like to say uncertainty is a reason not to act. It’s just the opposite. Our models may, in fact, be underestimating the impact that climate change is already having when it comes to these damaging and deadly weather extremes.”

The consequences

MICHAEL MANN: “‘History will not judge them kindly, because at a time when we need to be accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels towards clean energy, they’re doing just the opposite. They’re doing everything they can to block, you know, the continued expansion of wind and solar and geothermal and clean energy solutions. And the rest of the world is moving on. So, what we have to recognize here is that this is — even if you don’t care about the climate, even if you don’t care about the human health consequences, any of that, if you care about the economy, this is the worst possible thing for American competitiveness, because the rest of the world recognizes that clean energy is the future, and right now we’re doubling down on antiquated fossil fuel energy in a way that is making us less and less competitive.”

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Big, Beautiful Bill ‘closes remaining pathways to limit global warming to 1.5°C’

Sustainability Online considers how Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is disastrous for the environment (https://sustainability.net/news/big-beautiful-bill-closes-remaining-pathways-to-limit-global-warming-to-1-5c). The report was published on July, 2025. Here’s some of what they write.

“The Trump administration’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’, which has now been passed by the US Senate and House of Representatives, cuts off any chance of limiting global warming to below 1.5°C, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute has said.

Responding to the Bill, which promises to phase out tax credits for renewables and ramp up support for fossil fuel producers, EESI president Daniel Bresette said, ‘A little less than three years ago, we applauded the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act because of all the benefits it promised to deliver.

“‘Unfortunately, the opposite applies to the reconciliation bill just passed by the Senate and House of Representatives, so we have to condemn it. This legislation will increase household energy bills, put people out of work, and stall investments in clean energy technologies. Greenhouse gas emissions will increase as a result of this bill becoming law, essentially closing off the few remaining pathways to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change.’

‘An irresponsible plan’

Sustainability Online cites Joanna Slaney, vice president for political and government affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDA), who said that the Bill ‘will raise household utility bills, take away job opportunities and threaten people’s health with more pollution’”.

Describing the Bill as “an irresponsible plan hatched at Mar-a-Lago banquet tables”, Slaney said that by making it “‘much, much harder to build new clean energy projects, the bill is effectively cutting off supply of cheap energy right when the U.S. needs it the most. It’s families and small businesses who will pay the price.

“The largest polluting oil and gas companies, meanwhile, would receive a 10-year reprieve from paying a fee on wasteful methane pollution, which would cause irreversible harm to our climate and public health. It’s clear that this deeply unpopular bill favors burning more fossil fuels while ignoring the damage it will do to people’s lives.”

Dr. David Widawsky, director, World Resources Institute US, added that while other countries are “benefitting from accelerated investment in the clean energy economy, the US is taking a step backwards.

“‘Working families, business owners and local governments will bear the brunt through higher electricity bills, fewer jobs, and reduced energy resilience to extreme weather. Billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure, manufacturing, energy savings will be lost; failure to keep pace with growing energy demand will make brownouts and blackouts more likely; air will become less breathable; and American economic growth will be at risk.”

Earlier in the week, Greenpeace USA deputy climate program director, John Noël, described the Senate’s vote on the Bill as one that will “live in infamy”, adding “This bill is what happens when a major political party, in the grips of a personality cult, teams up with oil company CEOs, hedge fund donors, and climate deniers.

“The megabill isn’t about reform—it’s about rewarding the super rich and doling out fossil fuel industry handouts, all while dismantling the social safety nets on which millions depend for stability. It is a bet against the future.”

Concluding thoughts

Trump puts the economic interests of the big corporations and the rich before other interests, including that of most Americans. This bias is revealed in many ways but certainly in his views and policies toward energy. In this regard, he and his administration prioritize fossil fuels in the U.S. energy system. This inevitably means that the existential problem associated with global warming will not only continue but accelerate.

A regime of hate and division

Bob Sheak, July 8, 2025

Trump has a great capacity for expressing hatred for his opponents. He is anything but a “unifier,” which he often falsely claims to be.

Here are 5 examples.

#1 – Hatred of Democrats

He has called his political opponents “vermin.” (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-compares-political-opponents-vermin-root-alarming-historians). This was published on Nov. 13, 2023.

Leigh Kimmins reports on Trump declaration of hatred for Democrats (https://thedailybeast.com/trump-kicks-off-celebration-of-america-by-declaring-his-hatred-for-democracy). The article was published on July 5, 2025. Here’s some of what Kimmins writes.

“President Donald Trump declared his hatred for his political opponents during a supposedly bipartisan celebration of the 250th anniversary of America’s independence.

“Taking to the lectern behind thick bulletproof glass in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, Trump immediately started firing off political potshots. ‘They wouldn’t vote only because they hate Trump, but I hate them, too, you know?’ Trump said, referring to Democrats who voted against his “Big Beautiful Bill, which the House sent to the president’s desk after a tight vote.”

“I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”

“With all of the things we did with the tax cuts and rebuilding our military, not one Democrat voted for us, and I think we use it in the campaign that’s coming up the midterms, because we got to beat them,” he said.

“We’ve saved our country,” he boasted as his favorite MAGA singer, Lee Greenwood, pumped out his campaign anthem “God Bless the U.S.A.”

“‘We got great marks in the first term, and this is going to blow it away,’ Trump said at one point, ignoring a recent AP-NORC poll showed that six in 10 Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance as president and other surveys showing him with negative approval ratings.”

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#2 – Targeting opponents

Trump is not just talking. Tom Dreisbach and Inskeep report for NPR that “Trump has targeted more than 100 opponents and institutions for retribution in his second term (https://npr.org/2025/04/29/nx-s1-5379979/trump-has-targeted- more-than-100-opponents-and-institutions-npr-analysis-finds). The reporters write

“During that campaign, critics and supporters alike warned that it’s wrong for a president to go after people he doesn’t like. So Trump downplayed his promise, saying his retribution would merely be success. Now Trump is president. In his first 100 days, the president has ordered the U.S. government to target his personal political opponents, as well as law firms, universities and others. An NPR analysis finds Trump has taken action against more than 100 people and institutions.”

For example, DREISBACH points out the following. “Well, we found the administration using more than 10 different agencies in various ways, not just the Justice Department, which we should say is also announcing criminal investigations into the Democratic governor and attorney general of New Jersey over immigration policy. Trump has also pulled secret service protection for two of President Biden’s children, Hunter and Ashley. Media companies that Trump dislikes are facing investigations from the FCC. That includes NPR, we should say. Universities are facing investigations from the Department of Education, international students who protested the war in Gaza have also faced ICE detention and deportation.”

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#3 – He is relentless in going after “enemies”

David Smith considers this issue (https://theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/02/trump-social-media-threats).

Smith refers to “Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington” which has documented even before he was re-elected. The organization analyzed “more than 13,000 messages published by Trump on his Truth Social platform and found him vowing revenge, retaliation and retribution against his foes.

“The presumptive Republican nominee has threatened to use the federal government to go after Biden during a second Trump administration 25 times since the start of 2023, the study found. These threats include FBI raids, investigations, indictments and even jail time.

“He has also threatened or suggested that the FBI and justice department should take action against senators, judges, members of Biden’s family and even non-governmental organizations.

“‘He is promising to go after what he perceives to be his political enemies,’ said Robert Maguire, vice-president for research and data at Crew. ‘He is promising to essentially weaponize the government against anyone he sees as not sufficiently loyal or who is openly opposed to him.’”

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 #4 – Politicizing the F.B.I. and making Americans Less Safe (https://nytimes.com/2025/07/05/opinion/trump-fbi-politics-safety.html).

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

“Only 11 days after President Trump was inaugurated for a second term, his administration began a purge of the F.B.I. that now threatens some of the bureau’s most important missions. His appointees ousted eight of its most experienced managers, including the division heads overseeing national security, cybersecurity and criminal investigations. Several had worked on prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters or had assisted in the various investigations of Mr. Trump, and Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, said they could not be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda.

“That was just the beginning. Over the past five months, many F.B.I. agents, including other top managers and national security experts, have been fired, pressured to leave or transferred to lesser roles. Hundreds have resigned on their own, unwilling to follow the demands of the Trump administration. Their absence has left a vacuum in divisions that are supposed to protect the public. These losses have “obliterated decades of experience in national security and criminal matters at the F.B.I.,” Adam Goldman of The Times wrote.

“Mr. Trump’s playbook for the F.B.I. is plain to see. He is turning it into an enforcement agency for MAGA’s priorities. He is chasing out agents who might refuse to play along and installing loyalists in their place. He is seeking to remove the threat of investigation for his friends and allies. And he is trying to instill fear in his critics and political opponents. Among his many efforts to weaken American democracy and amass more power for himself, his politicization of the F.B.I. is one of the most blatant.”

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#5 – The “big beautiful bill” represents “a massive transfer of wealth upward”

This is the title of an interview of John Nichols on Democracy Now (https://democracynow.org/2025/7/7/trump_spending_bill). Nichols is the national affairs correspondent for The Nation.

Amy Goodman, the host of the program, offers these highlights of the Trump/Republican bill.

“President Donald Trump and his allies are celebrating the passage of his sweeping tax and spending bill, which he signed into law on July 4 after a monthslong effort to shepherd it through Congress. Ultimately, just three Republicans in the Senate and two in the House voted against the legislation. The so-called Big, Beautiful Bill includes about $1 trillion in federal cuts to Medicaid and could kick 17 million people off their healthcare. It makes the largest-ever cuts to food assistance benefits, could cause the closure of nursing homes and rural hospitals across the country, raises housing and energy costs, and supercharges the Trump crackdown on immigrants — all while delivering massive tax benefits for the wealthiest people in the country. ‘This is the most massive transfer of wealth upward in American history,’ says John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation.

“President Donald Trump signed his sweeping tax and spend bill into law on July 4th, after a monthslong push that saw just three Republicans in the Senate and two in the House break away to oppose how it slashes the social safety net while extending tax cuts to the rich and ballooning the deficit. That left room for the measure to pass with the final vote mostly along party lines.”

And yet, this is the bottom line: In states across the country, not according to liberal Democrats, not according to progressive think tanks, but according to Republicans who are on the ground in these states, and one Republican in the U.S. Senate, Thom Tillis, this is going to have a devastating impact on Medicaid, on access to healthcare, so that we will get to a point where roughly 5% of Americans are at threat of losing their healthcare. That’s a massive, massive shift. In addition, you’ve got roughly 11.8, 12 million people at risk of losing SNAP anti-hunger benefits. And when we look at all the numbers here, because of the way the tax cuts are massively weighted toward the wealthy, you have members of Congress, who are pretty serious analysts of all this, telling us that roughly 40% — going to underline that, 40% — of Americans will end up worse off under this. They won’t get a significant tax cut. They will lose health benefits. They will lose anti-hunger benefits and a lot of other benefits, as well. This is the most massive transfer of wealth upward in American history, and yet it’s designed to create a circumstance where Republicans can run in 2026 and claim that they didn’t do the damage.

“I’ll give you one more set of facts that are just useful. This comes from Governor Andy Beshear in Kentucky. Kentucky is a state that votes quite Republican in federal elections. Beshear is a Democrat, but he’s had to work with a Republican Legislature. He’s a very kind of facts and numbers guy. He says this is the worst piece of federal legislation in his lifetime. He says that 200,000 Kentuckians — this is just one state — 200,000 Kentuckians will lose healthcare, 20,000 healthcare workers will lose their jobs, and as many as 35 rural hospitals are now in danger of closing in that one state. And that doesn’t even take in the devastating impact to nursing homes, especially in small towns.”

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Concluding thoughts

This is a time in US history that democracy is under assault

From what we know, Trump and Republicans in Congress areusing their power to advance their own anti-democratic interests and doing harm to  the country (See Marjorie Cohn’s article (https://truthout.org/articles/by-ruling-against-nationwide-injunctions-scotus-affirms-the-imperial-presidency).

Cutting Health Care

Bob Sheak, June 30, 2025

Introduction

Trump’s actions show that he wants to reduce federally supported health care programs. This post documents what he is doing in this respect and what he hopes to do. If successful, it will not be good for citizens or people around the world, many of whom will lack access to health care or only to inadequate health care.

Trump uses Executive Order to end US support for the World Health Organization (WHO)

The Blumberg School of Public Health delves into this issue (https://publichealth.jhu,edu/2025/the-consequences-of-the-us-withdrawal-from-the-who). Trump used executive action to withdraw from WHO in January, 2025. It was one of his first actions as president. As a consequence, the U.S. will lose a host of benefits, such as, detecting, monitoring, and responding to emerging health threats, pandemics, and diseases of importance; gathering and evaluating data and information from all over the world in order to understand the status of health globally and detect emerging problems; setting standards and developing guidelines that help people around the world, including here in the U.S., deal with various health threats and crises—not only infectious diseases, but all sorts of health issues. At the same time, as WHO is already struggling financially, it will lose somewhere between 12% and 15% of U.S. contributions. Additionally, according to Blumberg,

“Health provides an entryway for us to engage with countries, many of whom we may not agree with, and to have diplomatic conversations and other conversations. If that is lost, it will have tremendous consequences for the U.S.’s security and long-term economic and political outlook.”

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Trump reduced the number of workers in health agencies

Rachel Roubein, Lena H. Sun and Carolyn Y Johnson assess Trump’s firing of workers in the nation’s health agencies

(https://washingtonpost.com/health/2025.02.18.trump-health-firings-fda-cdc).

They write: “Many of those terminated worked on issues critical to consumers, from improving health care to regulating food packaging to responding to infectious-disease outbreaks.”

“Several thousand probationary employees across the Department of Health and Human Services were notified they would be terminated after four weeks of leave — fired in what some are calling a ‘Valentine’s Day massacre.’ The termination notices, which arrived over the weekend, capped a chaotic week of speculation about when the cuts would come and who would be affected.

“The terminations had a swift impact. The Food and Drug Administration’s top food official resigned Monday, citing the “indiscriminate firing” of 89 staff members from the agency’s food program and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rhetoric toward staff.”

“I was looking forward to working to pursue the Department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food,” Jim Jones, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods, wrote in a letter — reviewed by The Washington Post — to the agency’s acting commissioner. “It has been increasingly clear that with the Trump Administration’s disdain for the very people necessary to implement your agenda, however, it would have been fruitless for me to continue in this role.”

“Overall, several thousand people from the more than 80,000 workers employed at HHS agencies were told they were terminated. All were probationary, meaning they had just a year or two on the job or had recently been promoted. Many worked on issues critical to consumers, such as improving health care, regulating food packaging or responding to infectious-disease outbreaks.”

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The GOP health care bill threatens bad outcomes

Margot Sanger-Katz, reporting for the New York Times, informs readers that “[a]nalysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that Republicans’ new version of the legislation would make far deeper cuts and lead to more people becoming uninsured than previous proposals” (https://nytimes.com/2025/06/29/us/politics/trump-policy-bill-health-insurance-cuts.html).  Specifically, The G.O.P. Bill has “$1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, C.B.O. Says”

Sanger-Katz: “According to a report published late Saturday night, the legislation would mean 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034. Federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare would be reduced by more than $1.1 trillion over that period — with more than $1 trillion of those cuts coming from Medicaid alone.” These are unprecedented cuts. The bulk of the cuts come from two features of the legislation.

“One would establish a new, strict national work requirement for some people on the program, who would need to demonstrate they had worked at least 80 hours the month before they sign up, or qualified for an exemption. The Senate version applies this provision to the poor parents of children older than 14 in addition to childless adults without disabilities, the group targeted by the House version. The budget office estimated that that provision alone would reduce federal spending by more than $325 billion over the decade.

“The second big source of savings comes from new restrictions on a strategy many states use to finance Medicaid, by imposing taxes on medical providers to leverage a larger federal contribution. The bill’s restrictions on provider taxes and a related mechanism known as state directed payments would cut spending by a combined $375 billion, according to the report. The House bill would freeze the tax rate for most states, but the Senate version would require many states to lower their existing taxes, beginning in 2027.”

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Doctors Warn Medicaid Cuts in Senate Budget Bill Will Kill Their Patients

Mike Ludwig reports on doctors who warn that cuts to Medicaid and Snap will lead to some patients unnecessarily dying (https://truthout.org/articles/my-patients-will-die-doctors-slam-gop-budget-bill-as-senate-rushes-to-vote). Here is some of what he reports.

“The Senate GOP is looking to make $1 trillion in cuts to federal health care programs over the next decade, including Medicaid, which provides health insurance to lower-income families and people with disabilities. Deep cuts to food assistance for millions of people are also on the table as lawmakers look for ways to cut spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by pushing costs onto states.”

“Senate Republicans are under mounting pressure from doctors and medical associations to reject massive cuts to health care and food assistance as they rush to complete a draft of the budget reconciliation bill designed to implement President Donald Trump’s agenda. Despite an ongoing debate over deep cuts to Medicaid — cuts experts say would devastate already underfunded health systems especially in rural areas.” But the Republican-controlled Congress is going ahead with the cuts anyway.

Ludwig quotes an expert on the damage the bill will do.

“‘If Medicaid is cut, my patients will die. I realize I am being dramatic. It is a dramatic situation,’ said Helen Pope, a physician in Louisiana and assistant professor of medicine at Tulane University, in a statement to Senate staffers. ‘[T]hey are humans who are doing their best. Please don’t allow them to suffer more.’”

Republicans hit a snag on Thursday after the Senate parliamentarian ruled that a proposal to change how states can tax Medicaid providers — a bid to pass on more costs to states — does not adhere to the rules for fast-tracking and passing legislation with a simple majority. Democrats hailed the decision as a win, but Republicans are still determined to make the desired cuts.

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Trump Medicaid cuts would devastate rural health services and hospitals

Andy Sullivan and Richard Cowan focus their attention on how the Medicaid cuts “would devastate rural health services” (https://reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/trump-medicaid-cuts-could-devastate-rural-health-services-hospitals-2025-06-13). Here are excerpts from the article.

“Rural hospitals are sounding the alarm over proposed healthcare cuts in President Donald Trump‘s sweeping tax-cut and spending package, warning the changes could force them to scale back services or close their doors.

“The bill would reduce federal spending on Medicaid, the health program for low-income Americans, by tightening enrollment standards and limiting federal aid to states.

“That worries rural providers, who rely heavily on the program to serve a population that tends to be poorer and sicker than the nation as a whole.

“‘We can’t sustain serving our community the way we are with additional cuts,’ said Carrie Lutz, CEO of Holton Community Hospital in Holton, Kansas. The independent nonprofit hospital, which serves a farming community of 13,000, is asking voters for a quarter-cent sales-tax increase to help cover its costs, which outpace annual revenues in many years.”

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Cuts in Veterans Administration

Abby Vesoulis reports on the harmful effects of Trump’s VA cuts  

(https://motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/these-veterans-fought-for-the-us-now-theyre-fighting-trumps-va-cuts).

“The Trump administration has proposed eliminating 15 percent of the Department of Veterans Affairs workforce.”

“Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has moved to slash and burn the federal workforce—and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is no exception. Already, the sprawling agency serving America’s 16 million military veterans has fired 2,400 probationary workers and proposed eliminating an additional 15 percentof its workforce—about 80,000 people.

“Veterans rely on the VA for help with critical needs like counseling for addiction and PTSD, prostheses, senior services, and treatments for cancer stemming from exposure to toxic chemicals. Medical research by VA doctors and scientists not only saves veterans’ lives, but benefits civilians; over the years, the breakthroughs have included pacemakers and CT scans.”

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RFK Jr. falsely disparages vaccines

Lauren Weber and Caitlin Gilbert consider RFK’s harmful impact on the US healthcare system (https://washingtonpost.com/health/2025/01/28/rfk-jr-disparaged-vaccines-dozens-times-recent-years-misled-race).

Specifically, they report on Kennedy’s false statements linking vaccines to autism and on alleged racial differences in vaccine impacts. Here’s some of what they have uncovered.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee [now appointed] for the nation’s top health post, has repeatedly disparaged vaccines, falsely linked them to autism and argued that White and Black people should have separate vaccination schedules, according to a Washington Post review of his public statements from recent years.

“In at least 36 appearances, Kennedy linked autism to vaccines, despite overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the use of vaccination to protect people from deadly infectious diseases and refuting any ties to autism, The Post found in a review of more than 400 of Kennedy’s podcast appearances, interviews and public speeches since 2020.

“He criticized vaccines more broadly in at least 114 appearances, calling them dangerous, saying the risks outweigh the benefits and making misleading claims about vaccine safety testing or discrediting vaccine efficacy.”

“A dozen vaccine experts, physicians and public health leaders said they were alarmed that someone who could shape vaccine policy as health and human services secretary failed to recognize reams of scientific data showing vaccines are safe and effective. Kennedy, who has been critical of vaccines for years, founded Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.

“False statements about the safety of vaccines pepper Kennedy’s appearances on podcasts, TV, radio and the website of Children’s Health Defense (Kennedy’s ethics disclosures note he resigned his position as chairman of the board and chief legal counsel in December after Trump picked him for the HHS job). He asserts vaccines ‘poisoned an entire generation of American children’ and that doctors have ‘butchered all these children’ by administering shots recommended by federal authorities.

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The harms are multiplied

“The Department of Health and Human Services,” under RFK Jr., “has terminated thousands of grants, including funding for pandemic prevention, and research grants related to cancer, vaccines and chronic diseases. The loss of research funding will delay medical discoveries. Though the agency publishes a weekly list of terminated grants, the full scope of funding cancellations has been obscured, especially at the National Institutes of Health, the major funder of medical research. A database created by Harvard researchers, Grant Watch, has helped to fill in the gaps (https://nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/opinion/hhs-cuts-harming-american-health.html).

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Democrats challenge RFK Jr. on vaccines.

Carmen Paun considers the controversy for Politico, June 24, 2025

(https://politico.com/news/2025/06/24/rfk-jr-isnt-hiding-his-plans-for-vaccines-democrats-say-it-will-cost-lives-00421525).

“The health secretary resurfaced anti-vaccine claims at a House hearing, alleging collusion by pharma companies, public health experts and politicians to mask the truth.”

“The health secretary and longtime vaccine skeptic pledged during his Senate confirmation earlier this year to leave that alone. But at a House health panel hearing Tuesday, Kennedy said there was ample reason to worry some vaccines aren’t safe and gave no ground to Democrats who pointed out that most scientists and public health experts vehemently disagree.”

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RFK Jr. says U.S. will stop funding global vaccine alliance Gavi

Niha Masih reports on this (https://washingtonpost.com/health/2025/06/26/rfk-jr-vaccine-gavi-funding-cut).

“The United States will halt its contributions to Gavi, the global alliance that works to expand access to vaccines for children in some of the world’s poorest countries, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday — a move that public health experts said would have deadly consequences.

“Kennedy — who has a history of spreading vaccine misinformation — announced the decision in video remarks made to a Gavi summit in Brussels, during which he accused the group of neglecting ‘the key issue of vaccine safety.’

“In his remarks, Kennedy cited a study linking the DTP vaccine — for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis — to increased child mortality. He also said Gavi should “consider the best science available.”

“‘Until that happens, the United States won’t contribute more to Gavi,’ he said.

“In a statement, Gavi pushed back against Kennedy’s allegations, saying decisions over its vaccine portfolio are guided by recommendations from World Health Organization experts who review all available data through a “rigorous, transparent, and independent process.”

“Gavi says it has helped vaccinate more than 1.1 billion children in 78 low-income countries since its founding that year, preventing 18.8 million future deaths.

“The Washington Post reported in March that the U.S. planned to terminate more than $1 billion in funding for Gavi. The U.S. was the third-largest contributor to the group, accounting for 12 percent of its overall funding as of last year, behind Britain and the Gates Foundation, according to KFF.”

Experts decry the RFK decision, maintaining that it will cause children to die, as  Prabhat Jha, a professor in global health and epidemiology at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health, said in an email.

“‘The suggestion that Gavi ignores science is pure nonsense,’ he said, pointing out that the alliance has a ‘robust science committee, draws experts from around the world’ and maintains a high level of scrutiny on manufacturing.

“Atul Gawande, the former head of global health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, said in a social media post that the withdrawal of funding was a ‘travesty and a nightmare.’

“‘This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children’s lives a year — and RFK Jr will be personally responsible,’ he wrote.”

“Billionaire Bill Gates, whose foundation helped create Gavi, urged Congress to rethink the decision. He said on social media that the funding cuts would have ‘devastating consequences: more sick kids who fall behind in school, more overcrowded hospital wards, and eventually more grieving parents.’”

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Concluding thoughts

Trump wants to reduce government personnel and services in healthcare and everywhere in the federal government budget, in order (1) to increase the chances of getting his tax for the rich included in the Republican budget and (2) to undermine health care services in the public sector so that he can be better able to justify reducing the size of the federal government, “the administrative state.”

The acceleration of the climate crisis under Trump and the Republicans

Bob Sheak, June 17, 2025

The current administration is not a supporter of “clean energy” alternatives

Brad Plumer and Harry Stevens report on the Trump/Republican aim to end the “clean energy boom” that occurred during the Biden administration (https://nytimes.com/2025/05/13/climate/ira-republican-tax-bill-clean-energy.html).

“The party’s signature tax plan would kill most Biden-era incentives,” they write. Overlooked by the Republicans, “G.O.P. districts have the most to lose.” They refer to “wind farms in Wyoming, to a “huge solar factory expansion in Georgia. Lithium mines in Nevada. Vacuums that suck carbon from the air in Louisiana.”

The funding for such project comes from Biden supported tax credits for clean energy provided by the 2022 Inflation Adjustment Reduction Act. The act authorized more than $843 billion for the creation of such projects. However, Plumer and Stevens write, “only about $321 billion of that money has actually been spent, with many projects still on the drawing board, according to data made public on Tuesday by the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project of the Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

The Republican dominated Congress and Senate and are unlikely to allocate the remaining $522 billion as they search for ways to pay for a multi-trillion-dollar tax cut favoring the rich and wholly supported by President Trump.

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It’ not surprising that under Trump, Republicans show no inclination to spend money on clean energy or to reduce support for fossil fuels, the most important drivers of global warming. Historically, the U.S. has led the world in spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and remains only second to China today. China is also the largest producer of clean energy.

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The U.S. as a leader in causing the planet to get ever-more warm

Robert Hunziker writes on the U.S.’s major role in causing global warming and how Trump and the Republicans ignore or deny this growing existential problem (https://counterpunch.org/2025/05/16/americas-impact-on-the-global-thermostate).

The energy and environmental policies of the Trump administration and Republican controlled Congress and Senate assure that in the meantime this climate-denying or -evading will go on. Hunziker points out that the Trump administration’s “push for 100% fossil fuels and as much coal burning as possible while trashing mitigation of climate change, which is characterized by the right-wing White House and U.S. Congress as an expensive hoax, a farce, a threat to the U.S. economy, plus massive roll backs of environmental regulations that force American businesses to spend more to keep America’s environment clean.”

Consistent with this position, Trump is pulling the U.S. “out of the Paris ’15 climate accord.” Consequently,

 “Under the Trump administration, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions levels are estimated to rise up to 36 percent higher than current policy by 2035.” (The Trump Administration’s Retreat from Global Climate Leadership, Center for American Progress, Jan. 21, 2025). This certainly helps guarantee a hotter planet.

There is more from Hunziker. The Trump administration is also signaling “its intent to go one step further and withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, est. 1992). This is the underlying framework, “the father of international cooperation on climate change” that led to meetings such as Paris ’15. Abandonment will freeze-out the U.S. from any future global climate change negotiations and set a dangerous precedent. This could trigger a domino effect among nations questioning climate obligations and destabilizing the global consensus the Paris Agreement represents.”

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Fossil fuels take priority

Bill Mckibben offers other examples of how the Trump administration “[c]ares More About Growing Fossil Fuel Profits Than Shrinking Your Energy Bill,”

(https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-waste-energy). The article was published on May 20, 2025. His central point: “Many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil.”

McKibben continues, “the ultimate customer for the Trump administration is the oil industry. And really for the GOP as a whole: It became increasingly clear this week that the Republican congressional majority is all too willing to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, even though that will come at a big price to consumers, in its effort to help Big Oil.”

The DOE put their strategy pretty plainly in a filing to the Federal Register last week: Their goal, they said, was “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” If you’re a foreign government, that about sums it up: Either you can rely on the sun and wind which shine on your country, or you can rely on the incredibly unreliable U.S. China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security, in the form of clean energy tech.

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Trump is the only climate denier among national leaders

David Gelles writes on Trump as the only climate denier internationally (https://nytimes.com/2025/05/14/climate/trump-climate-denial.html).

Gelles notes, “The administration is not only allowing more greenhouse gases. It is undermining the nation’s ability to understand and respond to a hotter planet.”

The evidence.

“When the Trump administration declared two weeks ago [early May] that it would largely disregard the economic cost of climate change as it sets policies and regulations, it was just the latest step in a multipronged effort to erase global warming from the American agenda.

“But [Gelles adds] President Trump is doing more than just turning a blind eye to the fact that the planet is growing hotter. He is weakening the country’s capacity to understand global warming and to prepare for its consequences.

“The administration has dismantled climate research, firing some of the nation’s top scientists, and gutted efforts to chart how fast greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and what that means for the economy, employment, agriculture, health and other aspects of American society. The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.”

“‘By getting rid of data, the administration is trying to halt the national discussion about how to deal with global warming,’ said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The notion of there being any shared factual reality just seems to be completely out the window,’ he said.”

“At the same time, through cuts to the National Weather Service and by denying disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration has weakened the country’s ability to prepare for and recover from hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather that is being made worse by climate change.”

“The president is also moving to loosen restrictions on air pollution, which experts say will lead to more planet warming emissions, and to overturn the government’s legal authority to regulate those gases.”

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Cutting rules on energy efficiency

Rachel Frazin reports on May 12, 2025 that the Energy Department is proposing to cut 47 rules on energy efficiency and other rules as the “largest deregulatory effort in history” (https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5296169-energy-department-proposes-to-cut-47-rules-in-largest-deregulatory-effort-in-history/?tbref=hp).  Frazin offers the following examples.

 
“The department plans to ax a long list of efficiency regulations, including those pertaining to stoves, ovens, showerheads, clothes washers, dishwashers and microwaves.

“The rules also apply to a smattering of other policies ranging for guidelines under which the department buys oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to nondiscrimination requirements for grant recipients.”

“‘While it would normally take years for the Department of Energy to remove just a handful of regulations, the Trump Administration assembled a team working around the clock to reduce costs and deliver results for the American people in just over 110 days,’ Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a written statement.” 

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Trump’s Order to Expand Logging Threatens to Increase Climate-Fueled Wildfires

Curtis Johnson considers the implications of Trump’s order to expand logging and how it will increase climate-fueled wildfires in an article published on May 17, 2025  (https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-order-to-expand-logging-threatens-to-increase-climate-fueled-wildfires).

“On March 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production.” The order claimed “onerous Federal policies have hindered domestic timber production and that expanding logging was a matter of protecting “national and economic security.”

It ordered the secretary of the Interior and head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), who oversee the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) respectively, to develop a plan to expand timber targets and streamline permitting “to suspend, revise, or rescind all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, settlements, consent orders, and other agency actions that impose an undue burden on timber production.”

The responsible departments and agencies were instructed to find categorical exclusions to the National Environmental Policy Act and use “emergency regulations” to circumvent the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

In April, USDA head Brooke Rollins directed the stripping of forest protections on more than half of all national forests and called for expanding timber production by 25 percent to address a ‘wildfire emergency,’ and restore forest ‘resources.’ A report from the Associated Press says the directive “exempts affected forests from an objection process that allows outside groups, tribes and local governments to challenge logging proposals at the administrative level before they are finalized.”

“A map of forests Rollins has targeted includes all national forests in Washington State and California, and large sections throughout the west and other parts of the country. It even includes some wilderness areas. These forests contain some of the most cherished old-growth and mature forest ecosystems remaining in the U.S.

“In the Pacific Northwest, millions of acres of older and mature forests and old-growth dependent species like the northern spotted owl were finally protected by the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) in the 1990s after a century of logging that had reduced the forest to about a fourth of its historical extent. The NWFP happened as a result of intense forest defense and protest by Earth First! and many other environmental groups, studies by forest ecologists and court injunctions. The idea that these forests of immense trees, stunning natural beauty, rich biodiversity and crucial reserves of carbon sequestration could now, once again, be opened to logging is stomach-turning.”

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Trump Guts FEMA and NOAA?

Robert Kuttner writes in the American Prospect on Trump’s gutting of FEMA and NOAA, The American Prospect, June 4, 2025

(https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-06-04-why-would-trump-gut-fema-and-noaa).

Today on TAP: Destroying American weather science will create a perfect storm of disaster.

“June 1 marked the beginning of hurricane season, a period whose existence was news to Trump’s head of FEMA, David Richardson, who had no prior experience managing disaster relief. Richardson was appointed to replace FEMA acting chief Cameron Hamilton, who was fired summarily after telling a congressional subcommittee that he didn’t think FEMA should be shut down.

“Trump’s attack on FEMA goes beyond even the Project 2025 design, which proposed to cut FEMA and turn some of its functions over to the states. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in March that she wanted FEMA shut down entirely (she later backpedaled and spoke of shrinking and reforming it). But most states have nothing like FEMA’s capacity or experience, and don’t want FEMA reduced or closed.

Kuttner – “Due to actions early in Trump’s term, FEMA has lost an estimated 2,000 employees out of about 6,100, according to The Wall Street Journal. Many of these were nominally probationary employees, but due to the agency’s need to quickly staff up in an emergency, these tended to be experienced staffers who work for FEMA part of every year.

Kuttner – “More damage is coming in the Big Beautiful Budget Bill. Trump’s budget request called for cutting FEMA by $646 million.

Kuttner – “This is occurring as FEMA’s much-depleted sister agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is predicting as many as 19 hurricanes this summer and fall, including three to five major ones likely to cause massive damage. To add injury to insult, Trump has rejected bipartisan requests to continue the Biden policy of covering 100 percent of the costs of relief and recovery operations after major disasters. The usual split is 75 percent federal, matched by 25 percent state.”

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The economic costs of rolling back clean energy

Marianne Lavelle refers on June 12, 2025 to a study that finds clean energy rollbacks will cost the economy $1.1 trillion by 2035 (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12062025/clean-energy-rollbacks-will-cost-trillion-by-2035). Here are a few excerpts from Lavelle’s article.

“In a week when the Trump administration moved forward on multiple fronts to repeal U.S. climate policies, a new analysis quantified the potential costs for public health, households and the economy—including a stunning $1.1 trillion reduction in U.S. gross domestic product by 2035.

“The study by the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability found that any economic benefits to the policy retreat—which Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin placed at $1.2 billion a year from the power plant regulatory rollback alone—would be overwhelmed by the negative effects of greater air pollution and contraction in new manufacturing and jobs associated with an energy transition.

“‘Overall, there are more GDP losses if we roll back clean energy policies,’ said Alicia Zhao, research manager at the center and lead author of the report. ‘It means even if some of the states are getting gains from the fossil fuel industry, it’s being offset by the losses in clean energy benefits.’”

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Millions of American breath unhealthy air

Rebecca Dzombak reports on research that finds almost half of Americans breath unhealthy air (https://nytimes.com/2025/04/23/climate/american-lung-association-air-report.html). Here are excerpts from her article.

“At least 156 million Americans, about 46 percent of the population, live with unsafe levels of ozone, particulate pollution or both, according to the American Lung Association’s annual State of the Air report.

“Plans by the Trump administration to loosen environmental regulations and cut funding for air quality research would make matters worse, the report says.”

“Air quality in the United States has been generally improving since the Clean Air Act was enacted in 1970, with levels of key pollutants dropping by nearly 80 percent. But millions of Americans still breathe polluted air every day, leading to both acute and chronic health conditions that, in some cases, increase the risk of early death.”

“The Biden administration aimed to improve air quality with measures like tighter rules for vehicle emissions and on mercury and carbon emissions from power plants. The Trump administration is already working to reverse those regulations.”

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Concluding thoughts

The evidence clearly indicates that the Trump administration is doing its best to undermine efforts to develop and expand clean energy sources, especially those based on solar and wind and expand our use of climate-destroying fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases. Trump not only wants to expand domestic production of gas, oil, and coal but also to export liquified natural gas to other countries.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis worsens and the ability to reverse it is limited and being reversed.

Ben Noll reports on the high rates of high temperatures and humidity to come across the U.S., Washington Post, June 17, 2025 (https://washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/06/17/extreme-humidity-heat-city-forecast-maps). His major point:

“Over the next two weeks, extreme levels of humidity are forecast to hit around 40 states, with the first wave of very muggy weather building in central and eastern states through Thursday. Across the country, around 170 million people will also experience temperatures above 90 degrees.”