Trump and Musk in process of smashing the EPA


Bob Sheak, April 1, 2025

The Environmental Protection Agency (epa.gov) ) website includes a short history of the agency. Here’s some of what you can find there (https://epa.gov/history/origins-epa).

“The American conversation about protecting the environment began in the 1960s. Rachel Carson had published her attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides, Silent Spring, in 1962. Concern about air and water pollution had spread in the wake of disasters. An offshore oil rig in California fouled beaches with millions of gallons of spilled oil. Near Cleveland, Ohio, the Cuyahoga River, choking with chemical contaminants, had spontaneously burst into flames. Astronauts had begun photographing the Earth from space, heightening awareness that the Earth’s resources are finite.

“In early 1970, as a result of heightened public concerns about deteriorating city air, natural areas littered with debris, and urban water supplies contaminated with dangerous impurities, President Richard Nixon presented the House and Senate a groundbreaking 37-point message on the environment. These points included:

• requesting four billion dollars for the improvement of water treatment facilities;
• asking for national air quality standards and stringent guidelines to lower motor vehicle emissions;
• launching federally-funded research to reduce automobile pollution;
• ordering a clean-up of federal facilities that had fouled air and water;
• seeking legislation to end the dumping of wastes into the Great Lakes;
• proposing a tax on lead additives in gasoline;
• forwarding to Congress a plan to tighten safeguards on the seaborne transportation of oil; and
• approving a National Contingency Plan for the treatment of oil spills.

“Around the same time, President Nixon also created a council in part to consider how to organize federal government programs designed to reduce pollution, so that those programs could efficiently address the goals laid out in his message on the environment.
“Following the council’s recommendations, the president sent to Congress a plan to consolidate many environmental responsibilities of the federal government under one agency, a new Environmental Protection Agency.”

A short history of the EPA can be found at (https://epa.gov/history/origins-epa). Here are a few excerpts.

“From regulating auto emissions to banning the use of DDT; from cleaning up toxic waste to protecting the ozone layer; from increasing recycling to revitalizing inner-city brownfields, EPA’s achievements have resulted in cleaner air, purer water, and better protected land.”

The EPA’ accomplishments are extraordinary. Though, for all the efforts of the agency, the major problem has been a lack of resources and insufficient government support for regulation, especially when Republicans have had power.

One main obstacle has always been whether or how much environmental regulation negatively affected the economy. Of course, we know that Trump puts the economy first and is a climate change or climate crisis denier. As a result, the evidence on global warming and other environmental harms have continued more than they had to and the dangers have become existential in scope. Indeed, Elon Musk and his young team called DOGE want to further reduce the EPA’s resources, if not eliminate them.

The evidence on global warming is terrifying

Eloise Goldsmith reports for Common Dreams on March 19, 2025 on the World Meteorological Organization’s global temperature records
(https://truthout.org/articles/world-meteorological-organization-last-10-years-have-been-the-hottest-on-record).

“A report released by the World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday [March 18, 2025] found that not only was 2024 the warmest year in a 175-year observational period, reaching a global surface temperature of roughly 1.55°C above the preindustrial average for the first time, but each of the past 10 years were also individually the 10 warmest on record.

“That’s never happened before,” Chris Hewitt, the director of the WMO’s climate services division, of the clustering of the 10 warmest years all in the most recent decade, told The New York Times.

“All told, the agency’s State of the Global Climate 2024 adds new details to the public’s understanding of a planet that is getting steadily warmer thanks to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Goldsmith continues.

“The report from the WMO, a United Nations agency, includes ‘the latest science-based update’ on key climate indicators, such as atmospheric carbon dioxide, ocean heat content, and glacier mass balance. Many of these sections report grim milestones.

“The trajectory is just incredible,” the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Friday.

“In 2023, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide reached the highest levels in the last 800 000 years, for example, and in 2024, ocean heat content reached the highest level recording in the over half-century observational period, topping the previous heat record that was set in 2023.

“As of 2023, two other greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, also reached levels unseen in the last 800,000 years.

“‘Over the course of 2024, our oceans continued to warm, sea levels continued to rise, and acidification increased. The frozen parts of Earth’s surface, known as the cryosphere, are melting at an alarming rate: glaciers continue to retreat, and Antarctic sea ice reached the second-lowest extent ever recorded. Meanwhile, extreme weather continues to have devastating consequences around the world,’ wrote WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo in the introduction to the report, which drew its findings from data drawn from dozens of institutions around the world.”

Don’t give up, Goldsmith implores

“As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.

Another sign of the unfolding climate crisis is that major glaciers around the globe are melting and won’t survive this century, according to scientists and as reported by Jessica Corbett on March 21, 2025 (https://commondreams.org/news/melting-of-glaciers).

Corbett writes, “Scientists on Friday spent the United Nations’ World Water Day and first-ever World Day for Glaciers warning about how fossil fuel-driven global warming melts ice across the planet, endangering freshwater resources and causing seas to rise, with implications for ecosystems, economies, and billions of people.

“In a Friday statement, World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Celeste Saulo pointed to a publication that the U.N. agency released earlier this week: ‘WMO’s State of the Global Climate 2024 report confirmed that from 2022-224, we saw the largest three-year loss of glaciers on record.’”

“The WMO report was followed by the Friday launch of a 174-page document from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that stresses how ‘billions of people depend on the fresh water that flows from increasingly fragile mountain environments.’”

“The document, The United Nations World Water Development Report 2025—Mountains and glaciers: Water towers, notes that ‘major cities that have been critically dependent on mountain waters include Addis Ababa, Barcelona, Bogotá, Jakarta, Kathmandu, La Paz, Lima, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Mexico City, New Delhi, New York, Quito, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo.’”

“‘Globally, up to two-thirds of irrigated agriculture may depend on mountain waters,’ the report states, ‘while the number of people in lowlands that strongly depend on water from mountains increased worldwide from around 0.6 billion in the 1960s to some 1.8 billion in the 2000s. An additional 1 billion people in the lowlands benefit from supportive mountain runoff contributions.’”

“‘Most of the world’s glaciers, including those in mountains, are melting at an accelerated rate worldwide,’ the publication adds. ‘Combined with accelerating permafrost thaw, declining snow cover, and more erratic snowfall patterns… this will have significant and irreversible impacts on local, regional, and global hydrology, including water availability.’”

Corbett cites Michael Zemp, a professor at Switzerland’s University of Zurich and director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, pointed to that finding and others on Friday, noting that from 2000-23, glacier melt caused global seas to rise 18 mm or about 0.7 inches. He said, “This might not sound much, but it has a big impact: Every millimeter [of] sea-level rise exposes an additional 200,000 to 300,000 people to annual flooding.”

Earth’s Land Masses Are Drying Out Fast, Scientists Warn

Bob Berwyn delves into this issue for Inside Climate News, March 27, 2025
(https://insideclimatenews.org/27032025/earth-land-masses-drying-out-fast).

Berwyn makes an astounding point. “Earth has lost enough soil moisture in the last 40 years to change the planet’s spin and shift the location of the North Pole, according to a new study published today in Science that tracks how human activities have disrupted the global water cycle.

“The persistent loss of water from land to oceans has dried out huge portions of every continent and may be irreversible, scientists describing the new research said this week.

“‘Large regions in East and Central Asia, Central Africa, and North and South America show pronounced depletion,’ between 2003 and 2007, the authors wrote.

“When they extended the timeframe to 2021, the depletion of soil moisture grew large enough to cover those areas and also included Europe and the Eastern U.S.

“This study provides robust evidence of an irreversible shift in terrestrial water sources under the present changes in climate,” said Luis Samaniego, a hydrology researcher at the UFZ Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.

“The continents are drying out over time,” said Samaniego, who was not involved in the new study but wrote a related Perspective article in Science.”

“The findings suggest that this decline is primarily driven by shifts in precipitation patterns and increasing evaporative demand due to rising temperatures. As of 2021, soil moisture had made no recovery, the authors noted, adding that they saw little likelihood of recovery under current climate conditions.”

Clean Water? Not If Musk and Trump Get Their Way

Mary Grant considers how Trump and Musk are espousing policies that will compound the water access problem for a growing number of people
(https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2025/03/21/world-water-day-trump-musk).

Grant identifies five ways that Trump and Musk are “making our water less safe and less accessible.” They have (1) “unconstitutionally canceled clear water projects; (2) Illegally eliminating core functions of the EPA; (3) allowed lead poison in our water; (4) cancelled protections against PFAS in our water; and (5) eviscerating protections that keep water safe from corporate pollution.”

Appointing a pro-Trump, anti-Environmentalist to eviscerate the agency.

Lisa Friedman reports on how Lee Zeldin, Trump’s appointee to head the EPA, is cutting support for the agency (https://nytimes.com/2025/03/29/climate/lee-zeldin-epa.html).

“Over the past nine weeks, Mr. Zeldin has withheld billions of dollars in climate funds approved by Congress, tried to fire hundreds of employees, recommended the elimination of thousands more E.P.A. scientists, and started trying to repeal dozens of environmental regulations that limit toxic pollution. He has filled the leadership ranks at the agency with lobbyists and lawyers from industries that have fought environmental regulations.”

Anti-environmental actions by Zeldin

“Mr. Zeldin’s other priorities at the E.P.A. have little to do with the agency’s half-century mission of protecting public health and the environment. They include increasing fossil fuel use, fast-tracking permits for energy projects, increasing jobs in the auto industry and advancing artificial intelligence.”
“The E.P.A. is one of the most disliked federal agencies among conservatives, according to a Pew Research Center poll, with only 32 percent of Republicans having a favorable view of the agency.

“So far, Mr. Zeldin appears to be adhering to Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a government overhaul that was published by the Heritage Foundation. It recommends deep cuts at the E.P.A. and an end to the agency’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other gases that are heating the planet. It also calls for weakening the agency’s independent science office.

Mike Ludwig reports on former EPA employees warning about how reductions of personnel will heighten environmental devastation and human harm in an article for Truthout, March 21, 2025 (https://truthout.org/articles/former-epa-employees-warn-of-polluted-skies-ahead-under-trump).

“Experts and former employees say the Trump administration’s moves to fire key scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and dismantle clean air and water protections will make the United States a ‘sicker and poorer place’ to live while demoralizing the next generation of environmental investigators and public health researchers.

“The rollbacks could lead to a significant increase in hospitalizations and premature deaths from illnesses linked to air and water pollution, public health experts warn. For example, new analysis by former agency researchers at the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network (EPN) estimates that 16 major air pollution rules updated by the Biden administration between 2021 and 2024 would save at least 200,000 lives by 2050.

“Air pollution rules also reduce the pollution driving climate change, which is now widely recognized as a major public health threat.

“However,” Ludwig continues, “last week EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the clean air rules are among 31 environmental protections that will be weakened or eliminated by the Trump administration. According to documents reviewed by House Democrats and reported on by the New York Times, Zeldin also plans to eliminate the EPA’s scientific research office, “firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists” who investigate environmental health threats at federal labs across multiple states.

The public supports tougher environmental rules

A nationwide poll of 1,000 voters taken by EPN shortly after the November elections that found the vast majority of voters — including 76 percent of Trump voters — want the EPA to be strengthened or remain the same. Only 14 percent of all voters agreed the EPA should be weakened. However, environmental groups say Trump’s rollback of EPA regulations alone threatens to reverse more than a decade of progress toward reducing highly toxic pollutants.

Trump acts to worsen environmental harms

Ludwig points out, “President Donald Trump does not appear to be concerned about the consequences of unleashing toxic pollution, including political blowback — or even willing to acknowledge the reality of the environmental issues the EPA is tasked with handling.

On his Truth Social platform earlier this week, Trump claimed he is opening “hundreds” of power plants that will produce energy by burning “BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL” (emphasis is Trump’s). However, Trump does not own any power plants or have the authority to compel companies to burn coal. The term “clean coal” is an oxymoron pulled from a defunct greenwashing campaign largely abandoned by the industry years ago.

Ludwig cites “Patrick Drupp, the director of climate policy and advocacy at the Sierra Club, a group that has pushed for years to retire the dirtiest coal plants, said Trump’s statement is “completely delusional” in 2024.

“There is no such thing as clean coal,” Drupp said in a statement. “There is only coal that pollutes our air and water so severely that nearly half a million Americans have died prematurely from coal in the last two decades.”

Ludwig continues: “Scientists know that coal pollution is linked to asthma and respiratory illnesses, heart attacks, cancer and premature death, but the Trump EPA is still poised to roll back regulations known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that require power plants to limit dangerous air pollution for burning coal.

“Thanks to these rules, mercury emissions from power plants dropped by more than 81 percent from 2011 through 2017, according to analysis by the Center for American Progress. The EPA estimates the regulations prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks and 130,000 asthma attacks each year.

“Technology for removing from smokestacks the mercury and particulate matter that lodges in human lungs and leads to asthma and premature death has existed for years, but some utilities complain that installing and operating these “scrubbers” is too expensive. Last year, 23 GOP-led states sued the EPA over the Biden administration’s air standards, and last week Zeldin announced the EPA would consider granting power plants a two-year exemption while the agency reconsiders the rules, which could lead to an immediate increase in toxic air pollution.”

“Drupp said Trump’s ‘clean coal’ comments are baseless but reveal that he does not care about the ‘health or economic well-being’ of his constituents. While Trump and Zeldin claim onerous regulations are holding the U.S. back economically, EPN estimates that EPA’s air pollution regulations deliver over $250 billion in net benefits to the public annually, with savings on health care and climate spending exceeding regulatory costs by a six to one ratio.

“‘He is only concerned with helping out his billionaire buddies in the fossil fuel industry,’ Drupp said. ‘In exchange for their loyalty and political dollars, he will lie to the American people and sacrifice their lives.’”

Concluding thoughts

There is a groundswell of opposition to much of what Trump and Musk are doing generally and to the environment and most other policies they are supporting. Some federal courts have ruled against their actions; however, Trump and his allies have almost unlimited funds to use in trying to sway the courts. If they are ultimately successful, people around the globe and in the U.S. will be the victims of more and more devastating environmental disasters, economic calamities, and the loss of constitutional rights. Children will be most affected (https://www.unicefusa.org/media-hub/reports/UNICEF-Air-Pollution).

Trump, a climate-crisis denier, will as president exacerbate the problem and give open-ended support to fossil fuel production and consumption and the industries that benefit from them. Rising emissions and the rising temperatures they produce represent an existential realty that will likely threaten to generate massive dislocations of people and threaten the survival of millions, if not billions, of people in America and around the globe. Trump apparently could care less.

Trump’s costly and disruptive policies

Bob Sheak, March 26, 2025

Trump’s anti-democratic response to losing the 2020 presidential election

Trump has long been an authoritarian. Anne Gearan and Josh Dawsey report that “Trump has been fixated on overturning the [2020] election for weeks, making hundreds of calls to allies, lawyers, state legislators, governors and other officials and regularly huddling with outside lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and others” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-election-capitol-building).

According to The January 6 Report of The House January 6th Committee,

“the Trump complaint about a rigged election involved ‘62 separate lawsuits between November 4, 2020 and January 6, 2021, calling into question or seeking to overturn the elections results. Out of 62 cases, only one case results in victory for the President Trump or his allies, which affected relatively few votes, did not vindicate any underlying claims of fraud, and would not have changed the outcome in Pennsylvania” (p. 210).

Making no headway in the courts, Trump called for his followers to gather at the Capitol to stop the presidential certification process.

Gearan and Dawsey continue.

Trump fed “his base through twitter that the election was rigged against him, even before he lost the election on November 3. He asked his right-wing supporters to come to Washington for a rally on December 6, when a joint-session of Congress was convening to take the final step to sanctify Biden’s victory.” It was at this rally, including some 30,000 people, that Trump told the crowd to march to the US Capitol building.

The costs of the Jan.6 riots

Trump’s crowd broke into a riot not long after getting to the Capitol. Emily Cochrane and Luke Broadwater report on the costs of the January 6 attacks on the Capitol (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/politics/capitol-riot-damage.html).

“The top operations and maintenance official of the United States Capitol told lawmakers on Wednesday that the costs of the Jan. 6 attack will exceed $30 million, as his office works to provide mental health services, increase security and repair historical statues and other art damaged in the riot.”

They also write: “Far more difficult to ascertain is the psychological burden on the hundreds of Capitol Hill staff members, many of whom sheltered in place as the mob broke through doors and windows and ransacked the building.

“…counseling and consultation services in 2021 would increase by 65 percent over 2020 and by 200 percent as compared to more typical recent years,”

Trump embraces the rioters

Immediately after the Jan. 6 attack, Trump sought to distance himself from the attack, saying those who broke the law should be held accountable. But over the next few years, a new narrative emerged, and Trump soon began openly signaling his support for Jan. 6 rioters, calling them ‘hostages.’” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/us/politics/trump-jan-6.html).

Trump in the White House again – the pardons

One of Trump’s first acts after barley winning the 2024 presidential election with the help of voter suppression and with less than 50 percent of the popular vote was to pardon over 1,500+ prisoners who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, claiming falsely that they had acted peacefully and that any violence was carried out by left-wing provocateurs.

Ryan J. Reilly refers to some of the evidence (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-set-pardon-defendants-stormed-capitol-jan-6-2021-rcna187735). Here’s some of what he writes.

“Trump commuted the sentences of individuals associated with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who were convicted of seditious conspiracy. He then issued ‘a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021’ a category that included people who assaulted law enforcement officers.”

Reilly quotes Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was speaker of the House during the attack.

“‘It is shameful that the President has decided to make one of his top priorities the abandonment and betrayal of police officers who put their lives on the line to stop an attempt to subvert the peaceful transfer of power,’ she said in a statement. ‘Despite the President’s decision, we must always remember the extraordinary courage and valor of the law enforcement heroes who stood in the breach and ensured that democracy survived on that dark day.’”

Now, as President again, Trump wants to compensate the rioters

Martha McHardy reports on Trump’s comments on March 26, 2025 to create a “compensation fund” for Jan.6 rioters (https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-january-6-riot-compensation-2050582).

Efforts to reduce the size and impact of government

At the same time, Trump, his partner Elon Musk. Along with DOGE (Musk’s young team, The Department of Government Efficiency) are rampaging through agencies in the federal government with the alleged goals of ridding agencies of waste and fraud and to reducing the national debt. But this goal of reducing the national debt is unachievable as long as they don’t increase taxes on the rich. And they are doing just the opposite, by planning to reduce such taxes. The implicit rationale is called “trickle-down economics” in which government spending and regulation are reduced, while big corporations are supposed to fill the subsequent employment gap.

Widespread protests and court actions have forced the Trump government to order some federal workers to return to their offices. However, as Shannon Bond and Jena McLaughlin report for NPR, workers are finding “shortages of desks, Wi-Fi and toilet paper” (https://www.npr.org/2025/03/26/nx-s1-5338945/federal-workers-return-to-office-chaos).

“Earlier this month, a Department of Agriculture employee who works remotely was given a list of possible locations for their upcoming mandatory return to office. One location was described as a ‘storage unit.’”

“Confused, the employee drove to the address, which turned out to be, in fact, a storage facility. When the employee asked the facility’s owner why it might show up on a list of federal office spaces, the owner laughed and told the employee that the federal government does rent a unit there — to store a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service boat. It doesn’t have heat, windows or power.

“The USDA employee notified their supervisor, but hasn’t heard back. NPR spoke to 27 current employees at more than a dozen federal agencies for this story. All of them requested their names be withheld for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration for speaking out.

“Federal workers have been ordered back into offices only to face shortages of desks, computer monitors, parking and even toilet paper. Others are still waiting to find out if they will be assigned to a building near where they live or asked to relocate across the country in the coming weeks.

“Some civil servants say the return-to-office mandate feels like an indirect way to get them to quit, and flies in the face of a years-long push by the federal government, predating the COVID pandemic, to encourage teleworking.”

“Cumulatively, the rush to bring workers into federal offices is taking a toll across the country, federal employees told NPR, with few apparent benefits for efficiency, cost savings or productivity.”

“Many employees at agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Land Management have turned up at offices that don’t seem equipped for the influx, they told NPR.”

The great economy will have to wait after all

Once in office, Trump reversed his promises of a great economy. He admitted that the problem was more difficult to solve than he anticipated and that it would take time to solve the inflation and other economic problems that beset the country.

But is the wait worth it?

Ben Casselman, writer for the New York Times, disputes the views of Trump and his administrators who claims that any costs of a bad economy will in time be worth it (https://nytimes.com/2025/03/18/business/economy/trump-recession-tariffs-inflation.html).

For example, “Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has said Mr. Trump’s policies are ‘worth it’ even if they cause a recession. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has said the economy may need a ‘detox period’ after becoming dependent on government spending. And Mr. Trump has said there will be a ‘period of transition’ as his policies take effect.”

Casselman continues. “Such comments may partly reflect an effort to align political statements with economic reality. Mr. Trump promised to end inflation ‘starting on Day 1’ and declared, in his inaugural address, that ‘the golden age of America begins right now.’

“Instead, inflation has remained stubborn, and while Mr. Trump has been in office less than two months, economists warn that his tariffs are likely to make it worse. Measures of consumer and business confidence have plummeted and stock prices have tumbled, attributable in large part to Mr. Trump’s policies and the uncertainty they have caused.”

More on Trump’s economy

Economist Dean Baker thinks that Trump’s economic policies on tariffs and also on closing government agencies will hurt the economy, contrary to what Trump promised his constituents (https://counterpunch.org/2025/03/13/the-trump-musk-recession-because-they-can). Here’s some of what Baker writes.

The dire effects of Trump’s tariffs

“‘While a recession may not be fully baked into the cards at this point,’ Baker writes, ‘the risk is evident and it’s almost entirely coming from Donald Trump’s policies. First and foremost are the costs associated with his import taxes (tariffs), or at least the threat of tariffs.”

Baker continues. “The impact of Trump’s threats should not be underestimated. If you were an auto executive trying to decide whether and where to expand capacity right now, what would you be doing? Would you look to continue to take the lowest cost route and further integrate your operations with Canada and Mexico? That would be a pretty bad choice if we have high taxes on imports from these countries….”

“Alternatively, you could go the MAGA route and invest in the United States. This would mean you would have far higher costs and likely be wiped out if the tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports came down at some future date. Alternatively, it is possible President Xi, or some future Chinese leader, would make a visit to Mar-a-Lago and we would be able to buy high quality Chinese EVs for $17,000. Again, you would be wiped out.

“Needless to say, the smart move here is to put off any major new investments until Donald Trump figures out what he wants to do with tariffs. And even then, it would probably be smart to limit investments, since we know Trump can change his mind at any time, depending on who shows up at Mar-a-Lago. Most industries are not as thoroughly integrated into the world economy as the auto industry, but almost all have some degree of integration, so we can expect many companies putting off investment plans to see where things go. This means that even without actually imposing new tariffs, Trump is already hurting the economy.”

The Smashing Government Route to Recession

Baker continues. “Donald Trump’s tariff games are just one possible route to recession; the other is Elon Musk’s DOGE team attack on the government. If there was ever any doubt, it is now clear that this outfit has nothing to do with increasing government efficiency.

“They show up at government agencies without even knowing what the agency does. They then do large-scale layoffs without knowing what the fired workers do. When they find out what they do, they often have to hire them back, as happened with air traffic controllers and workers keeping our nuclear weapons safe. There is no evidence that Musk or his ‘super-high IQ’ DOGE boys have ever spent five minutes reviewing the evidence of waste and fraud that has been assembled by Government Accountability Office or the various agency inspector generals, most of whom have been fired by Trump.

“But the direct impact of Musk’s job cuts on both the budget and the economy are likely to be small. The bigger impact is the uncertainty they have created in large sectors of the economy. This is most evident with medical research and universities more generally. Their funding streams through fiscal year 2025 (which ends October 1) and later have been called into question by Musk and Trump’s actions. Many of them are cutting back hiring, and even retracting job offers now that funding streams are no longer secure.

Hits on health care

“The uncertainty is also hitting the larger healthcare sector,” Baker points out, “which has been the major source of job growth in the last two years, accounting for more than one-third of the February job growth. Hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers can no longer be sure of their funding streams going forward, therefore they are likely to be far more cautious in hiring.

“This will also be true for state and local governments which now have no idea when Donald Trump will arbitrarily decide to cut off a flow of federal money. These cutoffs may be illegal, but no one knows what the courts will decide and when and if Trump will respect the Constitution. As a result, state and local governments also have to be careful in their hiring and spending more generally.”

Fewer tourists to America

“‘Most immediately,’ Baker notes, ‘we are likely to see many fewer foreigners coming to the United States, as it comes increasingly to be seen as a ‘shithole country.’ Foreign tourists spent almost $170 billion in the United States last year (line 339). This is likely to fall sharply as foreigners can no longer count on any of the rights that they would have been accorded in prior years. This applies not only to darker-skinned people, but even to lighter skinned types who for whatever reason run afoul of immigration officers.

“The United States is also likely to be a less attractive tourist destination more generally as our national parks get run down due to large-scale layoffs, air travel becomes less reliable, and even weather forecasts become more uncertain due to mass layoffs at the weather bureau. Most people probably didn’t think of park
rangers as the ‘Deep State,’ but apparently Donald Trump did.

Foreign students will go elsewhere

“Foreigners spent almost $60 billion on tuition at US colleges and universities (line 341) last year. We can expect this also to fall sharply as schools can no longer promise their foreign students protection against arbitrary actions by immigration officers.

Investors will go elsewhere

“Also, the rule of Mar-a-Lago will make the United States a much less attractive place to invest more generally. Businesses will look to invest in Europe, Japan, Latin America, India, and possibly even China, as countries that have greater respect for the rule of law. This should further dampen investment in the United States.

Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable

Peter Wehner considers this issue in an article published by The Atlantic, March 20, 2025 (https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/political-enemy-retribution-efforts/682095).

“During his first official campaign rally for the 2024 Republican nomination, held in Waco, Texas, Donald Trump vowed retribution against those he perceives as his enemies.

“‘I am your warrior,’ he said to his supporters. ‘I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.’”

In the first sixty days of Trump’s second term, we have begun to see what Trump’s retribution looks like.

“The president fired the archivist of the United States because he was enraged at the National Archives for notifying the Justice Department of his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office following his first term. (The archivist he fired hadn’t even been working for the agency at the time, but that didn’t matter.) He also fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, a traditionally independent regulatory agency, in violation of Supreme Court precedent and quite likely the language of the statute that created it. (Both members plan to sue to reverse the firings.)

Wehner continues. “Trump stripped security details from people he had appointed to high office in his first administration and subsequently fell out with, including General Mark Milley, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the former diplomat Brian Hook, and the infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci. The National Institutes of Health, where Fauci worked for 45 years, is being gutted by the Trump administration. The environment there has become ‘suffocatingly toxic,’ as my colleague Katherine J. Wu reported.
Trump has sued networks and newspapers for millions of dollars. His Federal Communications Commission is investigating several outlets. And he has called CNN and MSNBC ‘corrupt’ and ‘illegal’—not because they have broken any laws, but simply because they have been critical of him.”

“Trump has also come after the legal profession, expanding his attacks on private law firms and threatening the ability of lawyers to do their job and private citizens to obtain legal counsel. U.S. Marshals have warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels as Elon Musk and other Trump-administration allies ‘ramp up efforts to discredit judges,’ according to a Reuters report. On his social-media site, Musk has attacked judges in more than 30 posts since the end of January, calling them ‘corrupt,’ ‘radical,’ and ‘evil,’ and deriding the ‘TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY.’”

“Earlier this week, Trump targeted a federal judge, James E. Boasberg, who ordered a pause in deportations being carried out under an obscure wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Trump, who ignored that court order, called the judge a ‘Radical Left Lunatic’ and demanded his impeachment. (Chief Justice John Roberts responded to the president’s attack with a rare public rebuke.) Trump and his supporters are clearly looking for a showdown with the judicial branch, which could precipitate a constitutional crisis.”

Wehner continues.

“But that’s hardly where the efforts at intimidation end. Trump’s antipathy for Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was on vivid display a few weeks ago, when the president berated Zelensky in a televised Oval Office meeting.

“Trump’s hostility toward the Ukrainian president, whom he referred to as a ‘dictator,’ is explained in part by his long-standing affinity for totalitarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine three years ago. But it almost surely also has to do with Trump’s embrace of a conspiracy theory that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 presidential election in an effort to defeat him. (In fact it was Russia, not Ukraine, that interfered in the election, and on behalf of Trump.)

“Last Friday, in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, the president described his adversaries as ‘scum,’ ‘savages,’ and ‘Marxists,’ as well as ‘deranged,’ ‘thugs,’ ‘violent vicious lawyers,’ and ‘a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government.’”

Trump controls the Justice Department, just as he has control over other agencies in the Executive Branch. “As if to underscore the point, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who called Trump ‘the greatest president in the history of our country,’ said she works ‘at the directive of Donald Trump.’ The Justice Department is Trump’s weapon for revenge. And his appetite for vengeance is insatiable.”

The threat

“The threat this poses to American democracy is obvious…. They can target innocent people, shut down dissent, intimidate critics into silence, violate democratic norms, act without any statutory authority, sweep away checks and balances, spread disinformation and conspiracy theories, ignore court orders, and even declare martial law.”

Concluding thoughts

While Trump acts like a dictator, and while his administration and Republicans in Congress and across the country support what he does, there are innumerable anti-protests erupting in red states and blue states, against the Trump/Musk policies. Their effects are not yet known. Nevertheless, they are occurring and generating widespread opposition.

Sarah D. Wire documents the widespread protests against Trump and Musk (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/20/activists-ramp-up-rallies-opposing-trump-administration/82237839007). She writes:

“In just two months since Trump took office and began a sweeping effort to restructure government by firing tens of thousands of federal employees, closing entire departments and shutting local offices for agencies like Social Security, activists have ramped up their efforts as well, with lessons learned from a fight that began in Trump’s first term. Protests have accelerated across the country as Trump has rolled back protections for green card holders, asylum seekers, transgender people and federal workers.”

“In February alone, more than 2,085 protests took place nationwide, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut. That’s an increase from 937 protests in February 2017, the first full month of the first Trump administration….

Trump’s anti-worker policies and their effects


Bob Sheak, March 15, 2025

Trump’s views on workers are not new

Lawrence Wittner, Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany who has written extensively on peace movements, foreign policy, and economic inequality, considers Trump’s record on American workers (https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-working-class). The title of his article, published on May 21, 2024, says it all: “Trump Didn’t Lift Up the Working Class. He Stepped on Its Neck.” Here’s some of what he writes.

“Although Donald Trump, as president, proclaimed in his 2020 State of the Union address that he had produced a “blue-collar boom” in workers’ wages, the reality was quite different. Using his control of the executive branch of the U.S. government, Trump repeatedly undermined the wages of American workers by blocking raises and imposing wage reductions.

“Only the preceding year, Trump derailed vital wage legislation. In July 2019―with the pathetically low federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 per hour for a decade and some 13 million workers holding two or more jobs to support their families―the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the Raise the Wage Act. If enacted, the legislation would have gradually increased the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour over a six-year period. But, instead of supporting the legislation or proposing an alternative, the Trump White House announced that, if the Senate passed the House bill, Trump would veto it.

“Consequently, the measure died in the Republican-controlled Senate. According to the AFL-CIO, the legislation would have raised the pay of 40 million American workers.

Wittner continues.

Also in 2019, “Trump’s Department of Labor succeeded in rolling back planned wage increases for millions of workers by restricting eligibility for overtime pay. In 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, the Labor Department had issued a rule substantially raising the income level below which workers were paid time and a half for work done beyond 40 hours per week. But the Trump Labor Department, seizing on a delay in implementation occasioned by a judicial decision, lowered the level by more than $20,000, thus depriving 8.2 million American workers of the right to overtime pay secured under Obama.

“In August 2018, Trump canceled a scheduled 2 percent pay raise for millions of civilian federal employees, leading to criticism even from some Republicans. This action, plus other administration assaults on the rights of public employees, led to a massive flight of workers from government service. By the fall of 2019, there were 45,000 vacancies in the Department of Veterans Affairs alone. To fill these vacancies, the Trump administration hired large numbers of temp workers at low wages and with minimal benefits.

“Yet another administration policy that undercut workers’ wages emerged with the Trump Labor Department’s issuance of a “joint-employer” rule. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been fashioned to ensure that businesses using staffing companies or subcontractors would be accountable for complying with basic workplace protections. Even so, the Trump administration’s joint-employer rule substantially limited liability for wage and hour violations, thereby making it harder for workers to hold all parties accountable. As a result, U.S. workers lost an estimated $1 billion annually thanks to subcontracting or wage theft by employers.

“Of course, not all Trump administration attempts at holding down wages succeeded. In 2017, the Trump Labor Department proposed that employers could simply pocket workers’ tips, as long as the workers were paid the minimum wage. Economists estimated that this policy would lead to the loss of $5.8 billion per year in tips for workers, 80 percent of whom were women. But after the discovery that Trump’s Secretary of Labor had gone to great lengths to hide his department’s findings about how harmful the new policy would be, Congress stepped in and amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to prohibit employers from seizing the tips of their employees.

“Another Trump administration failure occurred in connection with reducing the wages of farmworkers, some of the most exploited, lowest-paid workers in the United States. In mid-2019, the Labor Department proposed a new regulation that would change the rules of the H-2A visa program, used by agricultural employers to hire migrant farmworkers for seasonal work―for example, by President Trump’s wineries. As one of the rules changes would lower wage rates for H-2A farmworkers and, consequently, for their U.S. counterparts, the United Farm Workers challenged it in federal court and, ultimately, prevailed.”

Ten of Trump’s more recent, pre-reelection, anti-worker statements

Steven Greenhouse, a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace,
delves into this issue (https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/23/trumpanti-worker-union-statements).

Greenhouse writes, “Many people failed to realize that Donald Trump has a long, ugly history of making anti-worker and anti-union statements. He has at times insulted workers, saying their wages are too high, saying their work is so easy that a child can do it.” He also “sought to sabotage labor by saying union members shouldn’t pay their dues and successful union leaders should be fired.”

Greenhouse identifies “Trump’s 10 most shocking anti-worker and anti-union statements.” Here are a few examples. (1) “Trump actually said that the wages of US workers are ‘too high’…even though corporate profits and the stock market were booming at the time.” (2) “Trump praised the idea of firing workers who are on strike, even though that is illegal under federal law.” (3) “Trump insulted the nation’s factory workers by saying their jobs are such a cinch that children can do them. By saying that, he showed he has very little understanding of blue-collar jobs and how hard, exhausting and sometimes dangerous they are.” (4) “Before he became president, he was notorious for paying construction contractors and workers late and for refusing to pay them the amount he had promised to pay; sometimes he would pay tens of thousands of dollars less than he was contracted to pay. Hundreds of contractors and workers had sued Trump after he failed to pay them or after he insisted on paying them far less than what the contract called for.”

A Union documents Trump’s Anti-Worker Record

CWA [Communication Workers of America] also looks at Trump’s anti-worker record (https://cwa-union.org/trumps-anti-worker-record).

The union makes this point: “At every turn Donald Trump has made increasing the power of corporations over working people his top priority. The list of the damage done to working people by the Trump Administration is long.” Here are a few examples.

“Trump packed the courts with anti-labor judges who have made the entire public sector ‘right to work for less’ in an attempt to financially weaken unions by increasing the number of freeloaders.

“Trump stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees who side with employers in contract disputes and support companies who delay and stall union elections, misclassify workers to take away their freedom to join a union, and silence workers.

“Trump made it easier for employers to fire or penalize workers who speak up for better pay and working conditions or exercise the right to strike.

“Trump changed the rules about who qualifies for overtime pay, making more than 8 million workers ineligible and costing them over $1 billion per year in lost wages.

“Trump reduced the number of OSHA inspectors so that there are now fewer than at any time in history, and weakened penalties for companies that fail to report violations.”

Trump rips up the Government’s agreement with its workers

Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, considers some of the actions taken by Trump and his administration, plus Musk, on government workers
(https://prospect.org/labor/2025-03-10-trump-rips-up-governments-agreement-with-workers).

“Airport security screeners had a contract, signed just last year. On Friday [March 7, 2025], Trump trashed it.” “…Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, told the roughly 45,000 airport security screeners (of both passengers and their luggage) who work for the Transportation Security Administration that it would no longer honor its contract with their union, which the government signed last year and was to be in effect until 2031. That contract gave the nation’s airport screeners the right to parental, sick, and bereavement leave, and also raised their wages to levels comparable to the wages of other federal employees with similar jobs.

Meyerson continues. “One of the ostensible reasons Homeland Security gave for its going back on its word is that the 193 security screeners are on leave to the union to represent the screeners when they have issues on the job. The vast majority of those union reps work in the field, covering the 430 U.S. airports where federal screeners are employed. Somehow, having 193 worker representatives covering work issues at 430 vitally important worksites doesn’t strike me as excessive, much less grounds for unilaterally abrogating a contract that the government is legally obligated to honor.”

There is more.

“There are two regulatory bodies charged with adjudicating disputes between federal employees and the government: the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Not coincidentally, however, Trump has fired Democratic members of both those boards, effectively leaving them incapable of ruling on any cases brought before them. These boards, like the National Labor Relations Board, were established by Congress to have members serving for fixed terms who can’t be terminated mid-term by a president save for misconduct, which hasn’t been alleged in any such Trump firings. For that reason, one federal district judge temporarily reinstated one such member earlier last week, just as another reinstated Gwynne Wilcox, an NLRB member whom Trump had fired, to her seat on that board.”

Meyerson adds, “Today, the rate of unionization is so low—just below 10 percent among all workers and just below 6 percent among private-sector workers—that there’s not much room for it to descend any lower. Ironically, unions’ approval rating, at a little more than 70 percent, hasn’t been this high since the 1960s, and towers above the approval ratings of corporations, the government, and Donald Trump. Employers’ determination to crush unionization drives, however, is also at a near all-time high, with Amazon and other companies now in court contesting the constitutionality of the 90-year-old National Labor Relations Act.”

Bernie Sanders on pending legislation that cuts or eliminates programs that address the needs of workers

The CR [continuing resolution] Would Cut Taxes for Billionaires and Slash Funding for the Working Class

Bernie Sanders, Counter Punch, March 14, 2025
(https://counterpunch.org/2025/03/14/the-cr-would-cut-taxes-for-billionaires-and-slash-funding-for-the-working-class). Here’s some of what Sanders writes.

“Today, at a time when we have more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had in the history of this country, 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck.”

“So given that reality, what does this bill do? The bill written by right-wing extremists in the House of Representatives without any bipartisan discussion at all.

“What does this bill do? Well, let me count the ways that it makes their financial struggles of working people even more difficult than they are today. And it does all of that to lay the groundwork for massive tax breaks for Elon Musk and the billionaire class.”

Here are a few of Sanders’ examples.

“…some 22% of seniors in this country are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or less. Half of our seniors are trying to survive on $30,000 or less. So what does the Trump/Musk administration do to address the terrible economic pressures on seniors all over America? Well, they have a brilliant idea: they illegally fire thousands of workers at the Social Security Administration, with plans to cut that staff in half.”

“In America today, 30,000 people die each year waiting to receive their Social Security disability benefits because of a grossly understaffed and under-resourced Social Security Administration.”

“When you have the President lying about millions of people who are 150 or 200 years of age receiving Social Security benefits – a total lie – everybody should understand what’s going on. Trump and Musk are laying the groundwork for the dismantling of the most successful federal program in history, a program that keeps over 27 million Americans out of poverty. And, by the way, over 99% of the more than 70 million Social Security checks that go out each month are going to people who earned those benefits.”

The continuing resolution passed in the House is also “an attack on the veterans of our nation – the men and women who put their lives on the line defending our country.

“While we made some progress under the Biden administration in improving veterans’ health care, the truth is that the VA has remained significantly understaffed. In the fourth quarter of 2024, there were 36,000 vacancies at the VA.

“We needed 2,400 more doctors, 6,300 more registered nurses, 3,400 more schedulers, 1,800 more social workers, and 1,200 more custodians. So what has the “Trump administration and Mr. Musk done to address this very serious workforce shortage?

“Their answer is that they are threatening to dismantle the VA by firing 83,000 employees. In other words, you have a shortage today, and their solution to the shortage is to fire 83,000 workers.

“Not only does the CR do nothing to stop that, but it cuts more than $20 billion in funding needed to provide care for veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances next year.”

“Just the other day, they fired half of the staff at the Department of Education. That means that it will be far harder to administer the Title I program that helps 26 million low-income kids get the education they need and pays the salaries of some 180,000 public school teachers throughout the country.”

“Well, at a time when our primary health care system is completely broken, when we don’t have enough doctors or nurses or mental health counselors, this proposal cuts community health center funding by 3.2%, cuts the National Health Service Corps by over 5% and cuts funding for Teaching Health Centers — a program which helps train doctors in rural and underserved areas — by almost 13%.
In the midst of a horrific primary health care crisis in Vermont and all over rural America, this proposal will make it that much harder for people to get the health care they desperately need.”

“But it’s not just health care. Everyone in this country from Vermont to Los Angeles understands we have a major housing crisis. And it’s not just all the homelessness we are seeing. Over 20 million of our people spend more than 50% of their limited income on housing.

“How in God’s name do you pay for anything else? How do you buy food? How do you take care of health care if you’re spending 50% or more for your housing.

So how does this CR address the housing crisis? It cuts rental assistance for low-income families in America by $700 million, which could lead to more than 32,000 families in our country being evicted from their homes. Well, that is a heck of a solution to the housing crisis.”

“And on top of all this, the administration is already indicating that they will simply ignore the provisions of the spending bill they don’t like.”

“And let’s be clear: the House CR and the Trump administration are doing everything they can to lay the groundwork for more tax breaks for billionaires paid for by massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance, housing and education.

“So you’re looking at a 1-2 punch: a very bad CR and then a reconciliation bill coming down which will be the final kick in the teeth for the American people.

“This legislation that the Republicans are working on, the reconciliation bill, will cut taxes for billionaires and the top 1% by $1.1 trillion over the next decade.”

“According to a recent study, if all of Trump’s so-called ‘America First’ policies are enacted, the bottom 95% of Americans will see their taxes go up, while the richest 5% in our country will see their taxes go down. Way down.

The reconciliation bill which Republicans are working on right now “would also cut Medicaid by $880 billion.

“Tax breaks for billionaires. Throwing low-income kids off health care. Decimating nursing homes all over America, because nursing homes receive two-thirds of their funding from Medicaid. Making it harder for community health centers to survive, who provide health care to 32 million Americans because 43% of their revenue comes from Medicaid.

Further, the reconciliation bill proposes to cut $230 billion from nutrition. Today, nearly one out of five children in America rely on federal nutrition programs to keep them from going hungry.

There is no world, no universe, no religion that would not believe that that is grossly immoral and unacceptable. You don’t give tax breaks to the rich and take food away from hungry children.

The firing of thousands of government workers

Chris Walker reports in an article for Truthout on March 13, 2025 on how “Trump Baselessly Suggests Fired Federal Workers Were Incompetent at Their Jobs”
(https://truthout.org/articles/trump-baselessly-suggests-fired-federal-workers-were-incompetent-at-their-jobs). Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles.

Walker writes, “Contrary to the administration’s view, ‘a multi-year survey finds that those working at federal jobs tend to be among the hardest working in the country.

“Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Donald Trump expressed little remorse over his administration’s firing of thousands of government workers through Elon Musk’s so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE), baselessly suggesting that the people who have been fired thus far were incompetent at their jobs.

“Trump offered no evidence to back up his claims. The president’s words contradict what data about federal workers has shown — that they are oftentimes more productive than their private sector counterparts.”

Evidence belies what Trump says.

“According to data recently examined by The Washington Post, federal workers, on average, are much more hardworking than the president gives them credit for.

“The Post examined data from the American Community Survey, which looked at 13 million workers’ habits over the past decade and found that federal workers are more productive than any other class of worker.

“The survey then broke down different types of federal workers, and still found that those working in the public sector tended to work beyond the typical 40-hour work week.

“Workers within the armed services worked 48.4 hours per week, the survey found, while postal service workers performed around 41.6 hours per week. All other civil servants worked the same amount, 41.6 hours weekly.”

“The survey also found that a higher proportion of federal workers tended to work at least 40 hours per week. Among those in the military, 94 percent worked that long or longer; among postal workers, the rate was over 87 percent, and among all other federal workers, it was over 91 percent, well above the 74.4 percent of private sector workers who tended to work over a 40-hour week.”

Mass Firings of Federal Workers Were Done Illegally, Two Judges Rule

Anita Hamilton considers this development in an article for Barron’s, March 14, 2025
(https://barrons.com/articles/federal-workers-reinstate-court-california-ruling-40c2b920).

“Most federal workers who lost their jobs as part of the Trump administration’s move to shrink the federal workforce are poised to get rehired. On Thursday, two federal judges ruled that the mass firings were conducted illegally and workers must be reinstated.

“The orders affect employees at nearly 20 agencies, comprising the vast majority of the 30,000 workers still in their probationary periods who were dismissed in February.

“The first ruling, from Judge William Alsup in Northern California district court, found that the firings at six agencies—including the Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs departments—were illegal because the Office of Personnel Management didn’t have the authority to direct them.

“In the second ruling, which came late Thursday night, Judge James Bredar of Maryland district court said layoffs of probationary workers across 18 agencies were conducted without proper notice. ‘There were no individualized assessments of employees. They were all just fired. Collectively,’ Bredar wrote in a memorandum accompanying his temporary restraining order.

“These big government layoffs were actually ‘Reductions in Force’ or ‘RIFs.’ And, because they were ‘RIFs,’ they had to be preceded by notice to the state that would be impacted,” he wrote.

“Deadlines for reinstating workers are either immediate in the Northern California court ruling or by March 17 in the Maryland court ruling. The rulings are preliminary and could change once a final decision is made. Both judges were appointed by Democratic presidents: Barack Obama appointed Bredar and Bill Clinton appointed Alsup.”

“Previous efforts have had mixed results, with most reinstatements only temporary. Thousands of Department of Agriculture workers terminated in February were reinstated March 12 after they were granted a 45-day stay by the federal agency that reviews employee complaints. They will receive all back pay, and the department “will work quickly to develop a phased plan for return-to-duty,” according to a USDA statement.”

“There has been an onslaught of lawsuits pushing back on Trump’s executive actions, with more than 100 filed since Inauguration Day. On Thursday, 21 attorneys general—most from the same states that filed suit over probationary worker firings—filed a new suit over mass firings at the Education Department.”

Trump Set to Whack US Working Class With Historic $2,000 Tax Hike

Dean Baker, co-founder and the senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), considers another aspect of Trump’s actions related to taxes and workers (https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-tax-hike-working-class). The article was published on March 4.

“The waiting is almost over, Donald Trump is about to hit America’s workers with the largest tax increase they have ever seen. Trump’s taxes on imports (tariffs) from Canada, Mexico, and China will cost people in the United States somewhere around $260 billion a year or around $2,000 a household.

“This is far larger than any tax increase we’ve seen in the last half-century, and unlike tax increases put in place by Clinton and Obama, it will primarily hit low and middle-income households.”

Trump Is Sending the Economy in the Wrong Direction

Christian E. Weller and Emily Gee report on this in an article for the American Progress, March 9. 2025 (https://americanprogress.org/article/trump-is-sending-the-economy-in-the-wrong-direction).

“The Trump administration appears to be sending the U.S. economy into a period of slower growth and higher inflation. In the past few weeks, the administration enacted steep tariffs on a wide range of imports from America’s top trading partners and threatened more; has laid off tens of thousands of federal government workers; and has frozen payments already appropriated by Congress for farms, Head Start facilities, economic development programs, and more.

“The administration’s sudden moves have raised uncertainty about what will happen next. What programs will they cut—and by how much? What regulations will the administration enforce or roll back? Will critical government services that help everyday Americans cease to function? The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index—maintained by researchers at Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University—was 161.9 percent higher in February 2025 than a year earlier. Massive uncertainty makes it harder for households and businesses to plan, invest, and spend. Put differently, even President Donald Trump’s threats to further undermine Americans’ economic security can hurt both economic growth and the stock market.

“Over Trump’s first two months in office, some aspects of the economic outlook for typical Americans have become clearer, even as policy uncertainty escalates. At the urging of President Trump, Congress approved plans to make deep cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs to fund tax giveaways for wealthy households. And, over the past few weeks—amid the chaos of federal funding freezes and layoffs—the stock market has become more volatile, directly impacting the savings of millions of American households.”

Trump’s tariffs

Weller and Gee continue. “The Trump administration’s tariffs on Mexico and Canada are expected to put upward pressure on prices and sticky inflation. The 25 percent taxes on goods coming from the United States’ biggest trade partners will raise costs for American businesses and households. Production costs will rise as firms pay more for energy, agricultural products, and intermediate goods such as car parts.

“American consumers pay for higher tariffs—not foreign countries, as Trump has claimed. Indeed, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee—which makes interest rate decisions—observed in January that “firms would attempt to pass on to consumers higher input costs arising from potential tariffs.” Some major retail chains have already said they are poised to hike prices, passing on all or some of these higher costs to American consumers.”

A recession?

“The Conference Board’s U.S. Consumer Confidence measure—a prominent indicator of consumers’ outlook for the economy—dropped “sharply” in February, falling “below the threshold of 80 that usually signals a recession ahead.”

“Conference Board senior economist Stephanie Guichard noted that “comments on the current Administration and its policies dominated the responses” in the survey.
Consumer confidence is not just about vibes, to use recent vernacular. Consumer confidence has fallen substantially in 2025. The University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment stood at 64.7 in February 2025, the lowest reading of the composite index since November 2023. Consumer sentiment dropped 12.6 percent from December 2024—the index’s last peak—to February 2025, largely driven by consumer expectations of tariff-induced price increases.”

The labor market is softening

Weller and Gee: “The U.S. economy added 151,000 jobs in February, marking the 50th consecutive month of job growth. While the overall unemployment rate remains low by historical standards—at 4.1 percent—it increased for white men; for workers without a high school diploma; and for those with a college degree. The number of people who worked part time because their hours were reduced or they were unable to find full-time work jumped by 460,000 in February. These data points were consistent with other signals of a weakening labor market with less favorable conditions for workers. For example, the labor-leverage ratio—a measure of quits to layoffs and an indicator of workers’ ability to secure better jobs—has been trending down.”

“While it is still too early for the full effect of federal layoffs to show up in employment data, unemployment claims rose nationally and were up sharply in the District of Columbia in late February.”

“A volatile policy landscape can be a harsh climate for business, making it difficult for companies to forecast returns on investment and assume contracts will be fulfilled. Such uncertainty has increased since Trump was elected in November 2024. As one measure, the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index stood at 234 in February 2025, its highest reading since December 2020. This newly, highly unstable and uncertain policy environment is bad for business. Periods with above average increases in policy uncertainty have also been associated with slower industrial production growth—a reflection of less investment and other economic activity.”

Concluding thoughts

Donald Trump and his close adviser, Elon Musk, want to transform the federal government from one that reflects the Constitution and the law to one that they can lawlessly dominate. The largescale firing of government workers is one example of how they hope to accomplish this. If they are successful, the federal workforce would become smaller than it is, workers would have little security, and loyalty to Trump and Musk would become essential for jobholders. We would be left with an increasingly privatized workforce, lower wages and benefits, the loss or diminution of services, higher levels of inequality, and the demise of constitutional restraints on Trump’s power.

Trump’s subversion of Social Security

Bob Sheak, March 8, 2025

The Lies

Convicted felon Trump and, in practice, his co-president Elon Musk are engaging in efforts to radically transform the federal government, with the support of billionaires, the Republican Party, and his increasingly shaky “base” of millions of right-wing citizens. The Supreme Court gave him “immunity” while he is president. He thus has been given a judicial “mandate” to say and do just about anything while in office without any fear of punishment. So, he stretches the truth and lies.

For example, here’s what Linda Qui reported for the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/us/politics/trump-election-lies-fact-check.html).

“Before the 2020 election had even concluded, President Donald J. Trump laid the groundwork for an alternate reality in which he was declared the victor, falsely assailing the integrity of the race at nearly every turn.

“Those lies are now central to two criminal indictments brought against him by the Justice Department and in Georgia, and formed what prosecutors have described as the bedrock of his attempts to overturn the election.

“Draining the swamp”

“In public, he made more than 800 inaccurate claims about the election from the time the polls began closing on Nov. 3, 2020, to the end of his presidency, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Dozens of times, he simply characterized the election as ‘rigged,’ ‘stolen or ‘a hoax,’ and flatly and falsely declared he had won — even as a mountain of evidence proved otherwise. Other falsehoods were more specific about the voting and ballot-counting process, contained unproven allegations and promoted conspiracy theories.’”

As Trump has long proclaimed, he wants to “drain the swamp,” that is, re-focus, diminish, or end the parts of government that provide benefits and security for everyday people. And unelected Musk, anointed by Trump arbitrarily as a special adviser, has his team busily and arbitrarily firing tens of thousands of federal government workers. Musk’s team, dubbed DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) includes a handful of inexperienced and young subordinates who are identifying those in government jobs who are being fired. Thus, federal government workers are being fired for made-up reasons, regardless of how well they have performed in their jobs or how important the services they provide.

Trump views himself as “great”

There is another aspect of the anti-democratic and socially and politically destructive shenanigans. These efforts reflect Trump’s self-aggrandizing conceptions of himself. He sees himself as the best or second-best president of all time, even as God’s choice, a messiah, a king, deserving, he sometimes crows, a third presidential term or even one lasting until his death. He rarely if ever acknowledges mistakes.

———————-

Gutting Social Security

The focus of this post is on delving into one example, that is, of how he and Musk are laying the groundwork for the privatization of Social Security. If they have their way, the program will end up favoring upper-income groups, with the reduction if not elimination of benefits for millions of Americans. Bear in mind that this is only one example of how Trump/Musk are taking America toward what Ralph Nader calls “corporate fascism” (https://counterpunch.org/2025/03/03/trumps-autocratic-moves-toward-corporate-fascism),

The benefits for people from Social Security

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington State provides an overview of Social Security in a “fact sheet” she put on her Senate website on Feb. 28, 2025. She is Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
(https://murray.senate.gov/fact-sheet-trump-and-musk-plot-to-make-it-harder-for-americans-to-get-their-social-security-benefits).

Murray warns “of the Trump administration’s plans to gut the Social Security Administration (SSA)–and to make it harder for Americans who’ve paid into Social Security to get the benefits they have earned.” She informs readers of why it is an important government program, dating back to its creation in 1935 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. SSA has not missed a payment to beneficiaries in all the time since the first recipient received benefits in 1940. (See evidence in the book, Social Security Works! by Nancy J. Altman and Eric R. Kingson.)

Murray writes: “People need help getting Social Security at some of the most vulnerable points in their lives—whether that’s the death of a spouse, the onset of a disability, or the loss of income that comes with retirement. Americans pay into Social Security their entire lives–it’s a promise they should be able to count on.

Why the SSA has been so important in the lives of untold millions of Americans

How they have served citizens

She continues: “Each year, SSA:
Receives 80 million calls to its 1-800 number.
Receives 57 million calls to its 1,200 field offices nationwide.
Receives 30 million visitors to its 1,200 field offices.
Processes 9 million applications for benefits.

“Without adequate customer service provided by SSA,” Murray points out, “Americans will be cheated out of receiving the benefits they have earned.”

“90% of SSA staff work across the country outside of the agency’s headquarters. SSA staff who are not providing direct service support perform critical work that keeps the agency and Social Security system operational, including supporting SSA’s IT infrastructure.

“SSA staff ensure 73 million Americans get their Social Security benefits each month–which is more beneficiaries than ever before. They do so even though SSA’s 57,000 staff level is already at the lowest level in 50 years.”

As noted, SSA has 1,200 field offices in communities all across the country that help Americans:
Apply to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Apply to receive Supplemental Security Income and SNAP.
Get or replace a Social Security card.
Get assistance and address problems with benefits.

In 2023, SSA field offices had nearly 120,000 Americans visit per day.
Elon Musk and his DOGE crew are eager to close SSA field offices across the country that Americans count on.

“Closing field offices will force people to drive hours farther to get the basic services they are entitled to. For many–particularly beneficiaries who are disabled or who live in rural areas–the closures could mean losing out on assistance from SSA–and even benefits altogether.”

Americans want the benefits from Social Security

Kelly Kenneally and Tyler Bond of the National Institute on Retirement Security provide documentation on the American views of Social Security (https://nirsonline.org/report/socialsecurity2024). Here’s some of what they write.

“Social Security has evolved to become backbone of the U.S. retirement savings system, particularly for middle-class Americans, and often is referred to as one of the nation’s most popular government programs. Nearly all workers participate in Social Security, which means nearly all retirees receive at least some income from Social Security each month. Despite the popularity of Social Security, federal policymakers have yet to craft a long-term Social Security funding fix to address the impending depletion of the trust fund. In the coming decade, the funding challenges will force the nation into a debate and decisions about the future of Social Security.

“In anticipation of this coming debate, the National Institute on Retirement Security surveyed Americans on their views regarding the Social Security program. The survey asked Americans what they think of the program generally and what are their views about specific ideas on how to reform the program and shore up its financing. Stay tuned to learn the results!

“Americans’ Views of Social Security finds Americans want action now on a long-term funding solution for Social Security. When asked about the timing for Congress to act on addressing Social Security’s funding shortfall, Americans don’t want leaders to kick the can down the road. Eighty-seven percent say Congress should act now rather than waiting another ten years to find a solution. This sentiment holds strong across gender, age, and party affiliation.

“This nationwide survey also finds that 87 percent of Americans agree that Social Security should remain a priority for the nation no matter the state of budget deficits, and this support holds strong across party affiliation. Ninety percent of Democrats, 86 percent of Republicans and 88 percent of Independents support keeping Social Security a priority. Americans also support increasing employer and employee contributions to ensure the long-term sustainability of Social Security.”

The Trump/Wald plan for undermining Social Security

Murray’s Fact Sheet emphasizes that “Trump and Musk plan to demolish SSA and make it much harder for Americans to get answers about their benefits, file for benefits, get a new Social Security card, and much more.”

Making it harder to get service

Murray continues: “Trump and Musk will cause wait times to soar for seniors calling in to sort out issues with their benefits. They will force Americans in rural communities to drive hours to get the help they are owed, and their reckless plans will cheat Americans out of the benefits they have earned.

“Americans need to be able to talk to real people, often in person, to make sure they get their Social Security check—but Elon wants to shutter field offices people count on to apply for benefits, get a new Social Security card, and talk to someone who can help.”

Cutting an already under-staffed system

Murray: “Trump and Musk are working to erode customer service provided by SSA–service that Americans have earned–despite the fact that SSA’s administrative expenses already represent less than 1% of total benefits paid.”

Murray: “Reports indicate SSA may eliminate up to 50% of its workforce in what the agency calls ‘massive reorganizations,’ and SSA has now offered all employees incentives to leave the agency.”

Murray: “SSA is already very short-staffed, with 57,000 employees nationwide. There is simply no way to significantly reduce staff further without seriously jeopardizing customer service for tens of millions of Americans.”

Ashley Lopez and Jenna McLaughlin report on how Trump plans to cut some 7,000 jobs at the Social Security Administration (https://npr.org/2025/02/28/nx-s1-5296986/trump-worker-cuts-social-security-administration).

The effects of what Trump/Wald plan will have. Murray provides the following list.

• Wait times to get help on the phone will inevitably increase.
• Processing times for retirement and disability benefits will significantly worsen.
• Customer service at SSA has long suffered from historically low staffing levels and inadequate discretionary funding, which Democrats have pushed to increase each year while congressional Republicans push to cut non-defense funding.
• Currently, fewer than 40% of people who call SSA seeking to speak to a Social Security agent are able to get through to talk to someone.
• The average time someone waits to talk to someone on SSA’s 1-800 number is 30 minutes, but that excludes people who hang up because the wait is too long.
• This wait will increase under Trump and Musk’s plans.
• It now takes on average 240 days to process a disability claim–up from the recent historical average of approximately 110 days.
• Last year, an estimated 30,000 Americans died while waiting on a decision for their disability benefits.

Trump is mistaken about the real problem besetting Social Security

John Nichols reflects on Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in an article published on March 4, 2025 and how the president inanely justifies his threats to Social Security (https://thenation.com/articles/politics/trump-social-security-threat).

“Glossing over issues such as resurgent inflation, stalling job grown and the fact that trade-war jitters had just caused the Dow to drop 1,300 points in two days, Trump instead devoted inordinate amounts of his speech to fawning remarks about billionaire Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn assault on federal agencies, objections to transgender athletes, and gripes that Democrats didn’t want to clap for him. As a USA Today headline announced, ‘Trump’s Speech Was All About Dodging Responsibility for the Economy He’s Crashing.’ Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett complained that, in a 99-minute-long address, ‘Trump spent 1 minute and 25 seconds on inflation and prices—and used the entire section to blame [former President] Biden. Zero solutions, zero policy announcements,’ while Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said, ‘I did not hear one word from Trump tonight about the economic reality facing 60 percent of our people [who live paycheck to paycheck], or the enormous stress that they are living under.’”

“But Trump did find time to speak,” at considerable length,” Nichols points out, “about how he thinks the nation’s Social Security Administration is a chaotic mess of waste, fraud and abuse. Claiming to have uncovered ‘shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program,’ the president repeated disproven assertions and outright lies in a speech that suggested that millions of Americans must be gaming the system. “Believe it or not,” Trump said, “government databases list 4.7 million Social Security numbers for people aged 100 to 109 years old,” Trump claimed. [Trump also said erroneously and absurdly claimed that there are tens of thousands of 160-years old getting Social Security benefits.] CNN fact checkers immediately explained, “The vast majority of these people do not have dates of death listed in Social Security’s database. But that doesn’t mean they are actually receiving monthly benefits. Public data from the Social Security Administration shows that about 89,000 people age 99 or over were receiving Social Security benefits in December 2024, not even close to the millions Trump invoked.”

Concluding thoughts

The Social Security program was one of the great achievements of FDR’s New Deal. Passed into law in 1935, it has since 1940 provided important benefits to people up to the present, without once missing a payment despite a limited staff in recent decades.

It is a “public good.” Trump/Wald want to reduce or eliminate public goods, while advancing a huge tax break for billionaires and other rich folks as one part of an anti-democratic agenda. They wrongly insist that the program is wasteful and full of fraud and ignore potential reforms. Given the present political advantages of the Republican Party, there is not much yet that Democrats can do to protect and reform Social Security. One hope is that in the mid-term elections in 2027 a majority of voters will switch sides to the Democrats and Congress will be able to reverse course on Social Security. Meanwhile, protests against what Trump/Wald are doing.

Trump-Musk attacks on democracy


Bob Sheak, Feb 24, 2025

Officially, Trump won the presidential election. He did so by the smallest margin in decades. However, he acts as though voters gave him an unprecedented “mandate.” He even says that he now has King-like power, that is, he is above the law, the Constitution doesn’t matter, and he and his partner, the billionaire Elon Musk, can do as they please in accessing government records, firing government workers, and reducing or eliminating government agencies and programs. There is some opposition. Their actions incite legal actions against what they are doing, polls go against them, and voters who supported Trump now gather to express their dissatisfaction with the mindless and harmful firing of thousands of government workers and the impacts on programs people care about. Trump and Musk do this seemingly without any concern about the consequences for communities and people. They appear set on creating a society without Constitutional guardrails, rather they want a society that reflects the arbitrary power that exists in authoritarian governments like Russia and Hungary. Indeed, Trump’s friendly relationship to Putin is well known. Craig Unger wrote a book about it: “The House of Trump House of Putin (publ. 2018).

Here are some examples, as of Feb 24, 2025.

1 – Many of Trump’s early actions are unpopular.

Dan Balz, Scott Clement and Emily Suskin report that a Post-Ipsos poll finds many of Trump’s early actions are unpopular (https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/20/trump-poll-unpopular-post-ilpsos). Here’s some of what they report.

President Donald Trump has opened his second term with a flurry of actions designed to radically disrupt and shrink the federal bureaucracy, but reviews from Americans are mixed to negative on many of his specific initiatives, and 57 percent say he has exceeded his authority since taking office, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

Overall, 43 percent of Americans say they support what the president has done during his first month in office, with 48 percent saying they oppose. Those who strongly oppose outnumber those who strongly support by 37 percent to 27 percent.
Trump’s initiatives have drawn numerous lawsuits attempting to block or slow his progress, along with claims from critics that he lacks the authority to do many of the things he has proposed. While most Americans agree with the view that he has exceeded his authority, 40 percent say he has the power to do what he’s doing.

About 2 in 3 say Trump should have to get approval from Congress to freeze funding for programs previously approved by Congress and past presidents.
The best and worst things Trump has done, in respondents’ own words:
“Hiring Elon Musk to gut the government. Elon Musk may be a brilliant man, but he is not good working with people and does not know what he is doing quite frankly.”

2 – Trump believes he is above the law

Check out Benjamin Oreskes article for more on Trump’s self-conception as being a “king” (https://nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/trump-king-image.html)

The Common Dreams’ staff cite Trump’s “quoting Napolean,” as the president “Openly Declares He’s Above the Law” (https://commondreams.org/news/trump-quotes-napolean). The article was published on Feb. 16, 2025. They write,

“Fears that the United States is in the midst of a constitutional crisis—or something significantly worse—intensified Saturday after President Donald Trump wrote in a social media post that “he who saves his country does not violate any law,” a variation of a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.” They may be, the staff write, “[t]he single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.”

The president’s post appears on X, “the platform owned by billionaire shadow government leader Elon Musk—[and] came as his administration continued its sweeping and destructive assault on the federal government and workforce, running roughshod over the law in the process.”

They continue. “Trump, his handpicked Cabinet officials, and Musk have also disregarded or openly attacked the other two co-equal branches of government, accusing judges who have moved to halt or limit the new administration’s actions of being Democratic partisans.”

3 – Trump’s Executive Orders Build Toward Dictatorial “Unitary Executive” Power

C.J. Polychroniou argues in an article on Truthout, Feb 21, that Trump’s flood of executive orders build toward “Unitary Executive Power,”
(https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-executive-orders-build-toward-dictatorial-unitary-executive-power). Here’s some of what he writes.

“During his first month in office, President Donald Trump has signed a plethora of executive orders that have proclaimed a dramatic expansion of the powers of the executive branch. In his latest, issued on February 18 and entitled Ensuring Accountability for all Agencies, Trump aims to bring all independent federal regulatory agencies under the direct control of the chief executive.” He seems to have little concern with the law in this regard.”

Polychroniou continues.

“David M. Driesen, university professor at Syracuse University College of Law, says that Trump’s executive order to curb the authority of independent agencies is illegal and that the president is using unitary executive theory to establish a dictatorship. In the interview that follows, Driesen addresses Trump’s recent actions as well as the debate over unitary executive theory — a legal theory which says that the U.S. president can rule over the executive branch with absolute power. In two recent cases the far right Supreme Court has signaled increasing openness to this theory, once considered a fringe interpretation of the Constitution. Legal scholars and advocates, including Driesen, are now sounding the alarm that Trump’s seizure of dictatorial executive power may succeed with the court’s approval.”

4 – Trump and Musk fire thousands of workers in the Executive Branch

Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein and Emily Davies report that “the Trump administration fires thousands for ‘performance’ without evidence, in messy rush”
(https://washingtonpost.com/nation/20-25/02/17/trump-fires-federal-workers-performance).

“This account of how the Trump administration’s firings played out over the weekend, sowing pain and chaos, is based on interviews and messages with more than 275 federal workers, as well as dozens of government records and communications reviewed by The Post.”

“Contrary to Trump’s claims, the Washington Post journalists find that “many probationary employees targeted in latest Trump cuts across agencies had excellent ratings; legal challenges are expected.”

They continue. “Many federal government employees were dismissed over the holiday weekend as managers confronted a Trump administration demand to fire workers by Tuesday. In group texts and in online forums, they dubbed the error-ridden run of firings the ‘St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.’”

“The firings targeted new hires on probation, who have fewer protections than permanent employees, and swept up people with years of service who had recently transferred between agencies, as well as military veterans and people with disabilities employed through a program that sped their hiring but put them on two years’ probation. Most probationary employees have limited rights to appeal dismissals, but union heads have vowed to challenge the mass firings in court. The largest union representing federal workers has also indicated it plans to fight the terminations and pursue legal action.”

All of this mayhem reflects an administration racing “to execute a vision Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have touted for a leaner, reshaped government. The latest wave of personnel actions already prompted an administrative complaint on behalf of workers at nine agencies, adding to more than a dozen legal tests of Trump’s power filed one month into his term.”

“Firing employees en masse with the same claim of poor performance is illegal, said Jim Eisenmann, a partner at the Alden Law Group, a law firm specializing in litigation by federal employees. It violates federal law covering career civil service employees, he said.” Meanwhile, federal workers in an increasing number of agencies are being terminated, including “at the Interior Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Energy Department” as well as at Education, the Small Business Administration, the FAA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Transportation Department, the Veterans Administration, and more. This means that vital government services will become less available.

This can have catastrophic effects. With fewer workers in Air Control, the next airline disaster is more likely (https://commondreams.org/news/federal-aviation-administration). Access by vets to health care is being reduced (https://prospect.org/health/2025-02-19-va-secretary-doge-middle-finger-to-vets). Access to nuclear weapons data is less secure (https://counterpunch.org/2025/02/19/a-whole-lot-of-nuclear-madness-in-one-week).

5 – Trump’s foreign policy shifts toward Russia and other autocratic states and fascist political parties

Patrick Healy, a NYT Opinion columnist, interviews Masha Gessen and Bret Stephens on Trump’s first month in power, focusing on his “use of power on the world stage, “how Trump would like to pursue a foreign policy with imperialistic implications, and in close relations with Vladimer Putin (https://nytimes.com/2025/02/21/opinion/trump-putin-ukraine.html). Here are excerpts.

Patrick Healy: Bret, Masha, you’ve both written powerfully for years about Russia and the West, totalitarian states, Vladimir Putin, the Ukraine war and Donald Trump’s use of power. We are one month into Trump’s presidency, and the West seems at the beginning of a potentially significant realignment: Trump is starting to align with Putin over Europe; Trump is repeating Putin’s lies about Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky being a “dictator” who caused the war; and foreign allies and Republican leaders seem weak or pliant in the face of Trump. What is all of this adding up to? Are we seeing a realignment among the United States, Russia and Europe?

Bret Stephens: It might be premature to draw firm conclusions. But, for now, I’d say the word “realignment” feels much too weak. “Reversal” comes closer to the mark. A reversal in our vision of who counts as a democrat or a dictator. A reversal in who counts as a friend or an adversary. A reversal in our approach to the domestic politics of allied states. A reversal in the overall direction of our post-World War foreign policy, which was about supporting embattled or enfeebled allies, promoting economic liberalization, embracing democracy (or at least non-totalitarian states), favoring open societies over closed ones. It’s a world turned upside down.

“Another thing: It feels that Trump is seeking to turn America into a predatory state. The casual demand that Denmark relinquish Greenland. The not-so-casual demand that Ukraine hand over much of its mineral wealth. The surly threats to Panama, whose president is as pro-American as they come. The deal to return desperate Venezuelan refugees to the socialist dictatorship from which they fled in hunger and desperation. The joking (or not) about turning Canada into a 51st state; the unilateral and unprovoked trampling of trade agreements, like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement he negotiated in his first term as a replacement for NAFTA.”

6 – Resistance of the Trump/Musk attacks on Democracy

Meanwhile, there is resistance to the Trump/Musk attacks. Here are two examples.

Bernie Sanders tour to “fight oligarchy.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders is on a tour of the country to expose the anti-democratic moves of Trump and Musk. Julia Conley reports that thousands are attending Sanders gatherings (https://commondreams.org/news/bernie-sanders-donald-trump).

“After addressing more than 3,400 Nebraska residents in Omaha Friday evening, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday made his second stop on his National Tour to Fight Oligarchy—telling Iowa City, Iowa residents that “Trumpism will not be defeated by politicians inside the D.C. Beltway.”

“For better or worse, that is not going to happen,” said the Vermont Independent senator, whose broadly popular policy proposals have long been dismissed by Democratic leaders as unrealistic and radical while President Donald Trump has increasingly captured the attention of the working class Americans who would benefit most from Sanders’ ideas.

“‘It will only be defeated by millions of Americans in Iowa, in Vermont, in Nebraska, in every state in this country, who come together in a strong grassroots movement and say no to oligarchy, no to authoritarianism, no to kleptocracy, no to massive cuts to programs that low-income and working Americans desperately need, no to huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country,’ said Sanders.”

“Today in America,’ Conley writes, ‘we are rapidly moving toward an oligarchic form of society where a handful of multibillionaires not only have extraordinary wealth, but unprecedented economic, media, and political power,’ said Sanders in Iowa City, which like Omaha is represented by a Republican U.S. House member who narrowly won reelection last November and has faced pressure to reject the GOP budget plan. ‘Brothers and sisters, that is not the democracy that men and women fought and died to defend.’”

“Jeremy Slevin, a senior adviser to Sanders, reported that in Iowa City, the senator gave ‘not one, not two, but three different speeches to overflow crowds,’ with 2,000 people lining up to see him speak ‘on a freezing cold day in a Republican district.’”

State Attorney Generals fight back

Here are excerpts from a statement by Wisconsin’s Department of Justice.

“MADISON, Wis. – Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul today announced Wisconsin is joining a coalition of 19 states in filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration to stop the unauthorized disclosure of Americans’ private information and sensitive data. The lawsuit asserts that the Trump administration illegally provided Elon Musk and the so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’ unauthorized access to the Treasury Department’s central payment system, and therefore to Americans’ most sensitive personal information, including bank account details and Social Security numbers. This expanded access could allow Musk and his team to block federal funds to states and programs providing health care, childcare, and other critical services. With this lawsuit, the coalition is seeking to stop the Trump administration’s new policy that illegally grants DOGE, Musk, and others access to Americans’ confidential information and the U.S. Treasury’s payment systems.

“‘Wisconsinites expect the federal government to treat their Social Security numbers, bank account information, and other sensitive personal details with the highest level of protection and confidentiality—and that obligation doesn’t go out the window just because Elon Musk says it should,’ said Gov. Evers. ‘Giving political appointees access to our most personal information like this is illegal. That’s plain as day.’”
Concluding thoughts

Trump, Musk their rich and ideological allies, have taken control of key pillars of government and want to use their power to curtail or destroy opponents. Their vision appears to be of a country under autocratic control, where the rich and big corporations benefit from low taxes, minimal regulation, and the privatization of everything from which they can profit. It’s not clear how far they will go in their efforts to destroy democracy and increase the profitable opportunities for their rich and powerful allies, but as of now it appears they have few if any limits. Whether citizens can mount effective social movements and political campaigns and stop the Trump/Musk shedding of the Constitution, the laws that protect ordinary citizens, and the programs that offer necessary services remains to be seen.

At the same time, polls indicate dissatisfaction with what they are doing, state governors and other state officials and citizens are speaking out against the Trump/Musk attempts to replace arbitrary and corporate efforts to reduce government’s independence and resources.

Trump signs order to fight “anti-Christian Bias”

Bob Sheak, Feb 12, 2025

Erica L. Green, a White House correspondent, covering President Trump and his administration, reports on Trump’s task force to “prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism” (https://nytimes.com/2025/02/07/trump-anti-christian-bias.html).

Green writes: “President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday aimed at eradicating ‘anti-Christian bias’ in the federal government by having agencies review policies and practices that he says have tried to squelch religious activities and activism.” Trump “announced the order at the National Prayer Breakfast,” where he “appointed his new attorney general, Pam Bondi, to lead a task force at the Justice Department to spearhead the effort.” Green continues: “Mr. Trump said the task force would ‘fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society’ and ‘move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide.’”

Trump criticized former President Biden for supporting the convictions of anti-abortion demonstrators for blocking access to abortion clinics. In doing that, he implicitly identifies one extreme right-wing Christianity as being under threat. He refers to “conservative Christians as being the unfair targets to government actions.”

Critics of the order have a concern that Trump’s order is mistaken to single out a particular version of Christianity, involving right-wing, evangelical religious practices and beliefs. This runs counter to the First Amendment and decades of laws and Supreme Court decisions, which do call for the general separation of church and state. Green quotes Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. who is concerned that Trump’s order ‘will misuse religious freedom to justify bigotry, discrimination and the subversion of our civil rights laws,’ because it seems to privileges one type of Christianity.

Green adds, “If Trump really cared about religious freedom and ending religious persecution, he’d be addressing antisemitism in his inner circle, anti-Muslim bigotry, hate crimes against people of color and other religious minorities,” not attempting to create a state religion.”

A presidential commission and new faith office in the White House

“Mr. Trump said,” Green reports, “he would also convene a new presidential commission on religious liberty, which he called ‘a very big deal.’ He also plans to create a new faith office in the White House led by the Rev. Paula White, a televangelist and longtime faith adviser to Mr. Trump whose populist interpretation of the Gospel has proved divisive among Christians.”

The alleged principal culprits

Mr. Trump accused the Justice Department, the I.R.S. and F.B.I. of being key perpetrators of religious persecution, in line with long-running claims by conservatives that the Biden administration had used those agencies to carry out an agenda biased against conservative Christians.

Congressional Republicans have complained particularly about a 2023 memo issued by the F.B.I.’s Richmond office that said far-right extremists might be attracted to Catholic churches or groups. That led to a contentious hearing with the F.B.I. director.

F.B.I. officials withdrew the memo, and an internal investigation found no evidence of “malicious intent” behind it.

Nandita Bose and Doina Chiacu also report on Trump’s concerns about Trump’s claim of anti-Christian bias and how it is initially focused on the federal government (https://reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-he-will-sign-order-targeting-anti-christian-bias02025-02-06).

They write:

“U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would create a White House faith office and direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to lead a task force on eradicating what he called anti-Christian bias within the federal government.” He delivered this message at two prayer breakfasts. First, “Trump delivered remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast at the U.S. Capitol and used his speech to call for ‘unity’, telling lawmakers his relationship with religion has ‘changed’ after a pair of failed assassination attempts last year.

“At a second prayer breakfast in Washington, Trump struck a more partisan tone, took a victory lap for getting ‘rid of woke over the last two weeks’ and announced steps to protect Christians from what he said was religious discrimination.”

“The mission of this task force,” as reported by Bose and Chiacu,‘will be to immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including at the DOJ, which was absolutely terrible, the IRS, the FBI and other agencies,’ Trump said.”

Bose and Chiacu point out, “The president did not cite specific examples of anti-Christian bias during his remarks but has previously claimed that the Biden administration used the federal government to target Christians specifically.”

There are concerns that Trump’s order violates “the separation of church and state, with the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment limiting government endorsement of religion.”

Trump as conservative religious leader

Bose and Chiacu continue. “Trump, who has become the de facto figurehead of conservative American Christianity, has repeatedly invoked a religious anointing since he survived an assassination attempt last year. ‘Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,’ Trump has told supporters at events around the country.” Thus, “White evangelical Christian voters, who make up a critical piece of the Republican base, have supported Trump in the last three elections. He has embraced the conservative Christian world view and policies that speak to the bloc’s anxiety about changing gender norms and family patterns.

A White House Faith office

The president also on Thursday announced he will create a White House Faith Office, led by Rev. Paula White, who has served as a religious adviser to him for many years.

Trump established a similar office at the White House during his first term and regularly consulted with a tight group of evangelical advisers.

Trump additionally said he would create a new commission on religious liberty, and criticized the Biden administration for the “persecution” of believers.

“If we don’t have religious liberty, then we don’t have a free country,” he said.
In 2023, the National Prayer Breakfast split into two events, the one on Capitol Hill attended by lawmakers and a separate private event for thousands at a hotel ballroom after some lawmakers sought to distance themselves from the private religious group following questions over how it was run and funded.”

What kind of Christianity?

Jacques Berlinerblau, professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University and author of numerous books about the subject of secularism, delves into the dangerous intent of Trump’s prayer breakfast remarks in an article published on Feb. 7, 2025, arguing how it conflicts with the US Constitutional provision regarding the separation of state and religion (https://msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-national-prayer-breakfast-christian-task-force-rcna191020).

“At 8:15 a.m. Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke at the Congressional Prayer Breakfast. A few hours later he spoke again at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton. Berlinerblau cautions that “America’s non-conservative Christians, non-Christians and nonbelievers should take heed, as should all of those who believe that some form of secular governance is necessary for the well-being of any liberal democracy.”

Trump said “that he was appointing Attorney General Pam Bondi to head a task force to ‘eradicate anti-Christian bias’ within the federal government. Specifically, the president said:

“The mission of this task force will be to immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including at the DOJ, which was absolutely terrible, the IRS, the FBI … and other agencies. In addition, the task force will work to fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society and to move heaven and Earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide. You never had that before, but this is a very powerful document I’m signing.”

But, Berlinerblau reminds us, as noted earlier, the word “Christian” refers in Trump’s language “to what we might call MAGA Christians, or the types of Christians who voted for him (i.e., evangelicals, Pentecostals, conservative Mormons and traditionalist Catholics). He is not referring to Christians who did not vote for him, such as liberal Catholics, mainline Protestants, members of various African American churches and so forth.”

Trump’s dual breakfasts help us grasp how far we have moved from JFK’s ringing “I Believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

The Christian Right’s opposition to secularism

Berlinerblau offers this summary. “From the late 1970s forward, the Christian right has waged a masterly judicial campaign to dismantle a form of political secularism known as “separationism.” The wall of separation between church and state was burned down to the ground decades ago. This is evident in a string of Supreme Court decisions that have completely upended the separationist status quo that was set in place during the Warren and Burger courts and peaked in the Kennedy era (see, for example, Justice William Rehnquist’s dissents in Wallace v. Jaffree, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District; and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissents in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Gavin Newsom, The American Legion v. American Humanist Association and Shurtleff v. City of Boston).

Trump’s dual breakfasts help us grasp how far we have moved from JFK’s ringing “I Believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Compare that with this president’s revival tent proclamation: “Let’s bring religion back. … Let’s bring God back to our lives.”

“The question is no longer how secularists can rebuild the wall of separation. It no longer exists. The new question is: What kinds of innovative judicial approaches and cultural activism can be advanced to stave off the imminent establishment of a certain form of Christianity in the American government?”

The Bishop calls for unity

The Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., offered the following homily at a national prayer service held Tuesday, Jan. 21 at Washington National Cathedral. Trump was in attendance and was unhappy with what she said. Budde has served as Bishop of Washington since 2011.

Her message “drew international attention as she asked President Donald Trump to show mercy to those who may be impacted by his administration’s policies. Trump later demanded an apology.” Here are excerpts from her sermon. (https://northjersey.com/story/opinion/2025/01/29/trump-bishop-budde-sermon-transcript/78002821007).

O God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your Son: Look with compassion on the whole human family; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; that, in your good time, all nations and races may serve you in harmony around your heavenly throne; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Jesus said, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell — and great was its fall!” Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.
— Matthew 7:24-29

Budde calls for “unity” amidst diversity

“Joined by many across the country, we have gathered this morning to pray for unity as a nation — not for agreement, political or otherwise, but for the kind of unity that fosters community across diversity and division, a unity that serves the common good.

“Unity, in this sense, is the threshold requirement for people to live together in a free society, it is the solid rock, as Jesus said, in this case upon which to build a nation. It is not conformity. It is not a victory of one over another. It is not weary politeness nor passivity born of exhaustion. Unity is not partisan.

“Rather, unity is a way of being with one another that encompasses and respects differences, that teaches us to hold multiple perspectives and life experiences as valid and worthy of respect; that enables us, in our communities and in the halls of power, to genuinely care for one another even when we disagree. Those across our country who dedicate their lives, or who volunteer, to help others in times of natural disaster, often at great risk to themselves, never ask those they are helping for whom they voted in the past election or what positions they hold on a particular issue. We are at our best when we follow their example.

“Unity at times, is sacrificial, in the way that love is sacrificial, a giving of ourselves for the sake of another. Jesus of Nazareth, in his Sermon on the Mount, exhorts us to love not only our neighbors, but to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us; to be merciful, as our God is merciful, and to forgive others, as God forgives us. Jesus went out of his way to welcome those whom his society deemed as outcasts.”

….

“Given this, is true unity among us even possible? And why should we care about it?

“I am a person of faith, and with God’s help I believe that unity in this country is possible—not perfectly, for we are imperfect people and an imperfect union — but sufficient enough to keep us believing in and working to realize the ideals of the United States of America — ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of innate human equality and dignity.”

“The first foundation for unity is honoring the inherent dignity of every human being, which is, as all faiths represented here affirm, the birthright of all people as children of the One God. In public discourse, honoring each other’s dignity means refusing to mock, discount, or demonize those with whom we differ, choosing instead to respectfully debate across our differences, and whenever possible, to seek common ground. If common ground is not possible, dignity demands that we remain true to our convictions without contempt for those who hold convictions of their own.

“A second foundation for unity is honesty in both private conversation and public discourse. If we aren’t willing to be honest, there is no use in praying for unity, because our actions work against the prayers themselves. We might, for a time, experience a false sense of unity among some, but not the sturdier, broader unity that we need to address the challenges we face.”

“A third foundation for unity is humility, which we all need, because we are all fallible human beings. We make mistakes. We say and do things that we regret. We have our blind spots and biases, and we are perhaps the most dangerous to ourselves and others when we are persuaded, without a doubt, that we are absolutely right and someone else is absolutely wrong. Because then we are just a few steps away from labeling ourselves as the good people, versus the bad people.

“The truth is that we are all people, capable of both good and bad. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn astuely observed that “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties , but right through every human heart and through all human hearts.” The more we realize this, the more room we have within ourselves for humility, and openness to one another across our differences, because in fact, we are more like one another than we realize, and we need each other.”

“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are transgender children in both Republican and Democratic families who fear for their lives.

“And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.

“Have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.

“May God grant us all the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, speak the truth in love, and walk humbly with one another and our God, for the good of all the people of this nation and the world.”

Jim Wallis maintains that Trump’s views are not reflected in Jesus’ example.

Wallis is Georgetown University’s inaugural holder of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice and the director of its new Center on Faith and Justice. He served on President Obama’s first White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships and is the author of many books.

In his book, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming the True Faith, and Refounding Democracy (publ. 2024), Wallis criticizes the false religion that is embodied in Christian Nationalism, the religion of the MAGA movement, and, as we have seen, publicly espoused by Trump. What’s at stake? Wallis answers:

“The importance of the faith factor in this battle for the soul of the nation cannot be underestimated. When religion is in fact being used to support the rise of totalitarian rule, as it has been also been in past history, true faith must rise over bad religion. That bad and dangerous religion is now put forward as white Christian nationalism [in the U.S.] and it is the single greatest threat to democracy today” (p. 234).

Wallis issues a call for action, writing:

“This book is a call to action, a manifesto for a moment of crisis and opportunity. There is much ahead that we cannot either predict or control. We will face great challenges and many dangers and with sighs of deep discouragement and encouragement all along the way. Our optimism will go up and down, but hope must remain our choice. The path to fulfilling the promise of democracy must be walked by all of us now. And through the actions of believers and nonbelievers alike, I believe that God, and we, can save America” (p. 240).

Concluding thoughts

As Wallis says, we must hold onto “hope” that the opposition to Trump will grow as Trump, his partner Elon Musk, the Republican Party dominated by Trumpism, and their support by the rich and powerful support an economy based on the failed trickle-down myth, misbegotten tariffs, tirades blaming immigrants for the society’s problems, and a desire to replace government with private and corporate power.

Amidst all that, they marshal propaganda forces to legitimate their un-democratic policies with Christian Nationalism, the adherents of which represent the largest segment of MAGA. Their chances of getting what they want is not written in the winds. When – not if – their policies cause serious problems for people, the religious ruse may not be sufficient for them to hold onto power.

It’s a dangerous time, epitomized by the President


Bob Sheak, Jan 25, 2025

Trump intended his second inaugural address to be uplifting and unifying, though it is riddled with questionable claims, downright lies, and is hardly unifying. (See a transcript of the address at: https://nytimes.com/2025/01/20/us/politics/trump-inaugural-speech.html.)

As of Jan. 20, his first day in office, he began implementing many of the policies to which he referred in the address as well as in speeches during the presidential campaign, and, in some cases, over many years. There are some issues that he avoided discussing; for example, whether he will issue a federal ban on abortions. By the end of his first days in office, he issued hundreds of “executive actions,” many of which will be contested in courts (https://apnews.com/article/what-has-trump-done-trump-executive-orders-f061fbe7f08c08d81509a6af20ef8fc0). Here are some examples of Trump’s actions and anticipated actions and the effects. They threaten to destroy the tenuous democracy that we know, and replace it with a authoritarian system that is the antithesis of democracy.

He has not unified the country

He asserts in his inaugural address, for example, “National unity is now returning to America” and “I [Trump] want to be a peacemaker and a unifier.” His rhetoric and actions belie such claims. Rather, his views have been and continue to be disruptive and anti-democratic, more to generate fear and ignorance rather than relief or understanding.

The vote count does not support Trump’s claim that his victory reflects national unity. The 2024 presidential vote indicates that the presidential vote was close and that there are 75+ million Americans who voted against him, 77+ million who voted for him, and, according to data from the University of Florida Election Lab, “an estimated 89 million Americans, or about 36% of the country’s voting-age population [who] did not vote in the 2024 general election” (https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-11-15/how-many-people-didnt-vote-in-the-2024-election#google_vignette).

His bizarre notion that he is the country’s savior

With respect to the earlier attempt on his life, he says, “I was saved by God to make America great again.” In Trump’s view, he is America’s savior. If people do what he wants, America will thrive. This pseudo-religious self-characterization is arrogant and even psychopathological. But millions of Americans voted him into the White House. Indeed, the largest segment of Trump’s base are Christian Nationalists who believe America should be viewed as a right-wing evangelical Christian country, disregarding the constitionally-based separation of religion from politics (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/07/christian-nationalists-embrace-trump-as-their-savior-will-they-be-his).

Here’s another report on Trump’s beliefs by Ken Bensinger of the New York Times (https://nytimes.com/2024/01/11/us/politics/trump-god-video-pastors-iowa.html).

“A viral video praising former President Donald J. Trump has offended a key Iowa constituency in the lead-up to next week’s critical Iowa caucuses: faith leaders.
The video, which Mr. Trump first posted to Truth Social last Friday and then played before taking the stage at several rallies in Iowa over the weekend, is called ‘God Made Trump.’ In starkly religious, almost messianic tones, it depicts the former president as the vessel of a higher power sent to save the nation.
“God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump,” begins the video….”

Trump wants to increase US production of fossil fuels, ignoring or denying the climate effects

Trump notes in his inaugural address that America “has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth and we are going to use it.” As is well known, he has long rejected the scientifically-proven realty of a growing climate crisis that is caused mostly by fossil fuels (80%). Nonetheless, if he has his way, there will be more fossil fuels extracted and utilized in America and liquified natural gas exports will go up.

In an in-depth article for The Guardian, Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor report on the Trump’s executive orders boosting fossil fuels (https://theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/22/trump-big-oil-energy-priorities-explained). Here’s some of what they write.

“Through a flurry of executive orders, a newly inaugurated Donald Trump has made clear his support for the ascendancy of fossil fuels, the dismantling of support for cleaner energy and the United States’ exit from the fight to contain the escalating climate crisis.

“‘We will drill, baby, drill,’ the president said in his inaugural address on Monday [Jan. 20, 2025].

‘We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have – the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it. We’re going to use it.’

Milman and Noor continue. “Trump has promised to cut Americans’ energy costs in half within a year and he claimed removing all restraints on drilling for ‘liquid gold’ will achieve this, even though the US is already producing more oil and gas than any other country in history.”

There is little place for climate treaties, wind or solar energy, and electric vehicles in Trump’s energy plans.

Milman and Noor write: “Climate treaties, wind energy and electric vehicles are not part of this vision, with Trump signing orders to ditch or stymie them.” Trump ignores scientists who say “the world must urgently move away from fossil fuels to avoid the ever-worsening impacts of the climate crisis, as evidenced by last year being the hottest ever recorded and Los Angeles suffering ruinous wildfires.

The energy oligarchs invested in Trump’s presidential campaign and are now being rewarded, as Milman and Noor point out.

“It was a good day, though, for the fossil fuel executives who poured tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s election campaign. Some celebrated a few blocks away from the inauguration in Washington at a party where they sipped champagne and nibbled on pastries with Trump’s face on them.

“Trump declared a “national energy emergency” on Monday – part of a spate of actions meant to boost the already-booming fossil fuel industry. Invoked under the National Emergencies Act, the order aims to unlock an array of executive powers to fast-track the production and distribution of energy.”

Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the green non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council, says there is no energy emergency. Rather, there is a “climate emergency.”

And despite the existential threat of fossil-fuel-driven climate disasters, “Trump has again initiated the U.S. exit from the Paris climate deal, a non-binding agreement to avoid the world hitting temperatures that would deliver disastrous heatwaves, floods and storms upon societies and economies already strained by extreme events. In joining just three other countries – Yemen, Iran and Libya – outside the Paris process, the world’s second-largest carbon emitter is walking away from this shared goal while also halting funding for poorer countries at most risk of climate-driven calamities.”

Trump also overturned two of Joe Biden’s attempts to restrict fossil fuel development. One, which the former president put forth earlier this month, meant to withdraw swaths of the US coasts from future oil and gas drilling, including the entire US east coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, parts of the Pacific coast and portions of Alaska’s Bering Sea. Another 2023 order limited drilling in nearly 3m acres of the Arctic Ocean in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska….”

Make the U.S. military ever more globally dominant

Trump points out in his inaugural address that America has the world’s ‘strongest military’ and he plans to make it even stronger by increasing military spending. It is well known outside of Trump’s circles that we have an inflated and wasteful military budget that needs to be reduced.

William Hartung, an expert on military spending and its effects, substantiates this point in many articles, including this one in Counter Punch
(https://counterpunch.org/2024/02/28/war-is-bad-for-you-and-the-economy). Here’s some of what he writes.

“…the opportunity costs of throwing endless trillions of dollars at the military means far less is invested in other crucial American needs, ranging from housing and education to public health and environmental protection. Yes, military spending did indeed help America recover from the [1930s] Great Depression but not because it was military spending. It helped because it was spending, period. Any kind of spending at the levels devoted to fighting World War II would have revived the economy. While in that era, such military spending was certainly a necessity, today similar spending is more a question of (corporate) politics and priorities than of economics.

“In [recent] years Pentagon spending has soared and the defense budget continues to head toward an annual trillion-dollar mark, while the prospects of tens of millions of Americans have plummeted. More than 140 million of us now fall into poor or low-income categories, including one out of every six children. More than 44 million of us suffer from hunger in any given year. An estimated 183,000 Americans died of poverty-related causes in 2019, more than from homicide, gun violence, diabetes, or obesity. Meanwhile, ever more Americans are living on the streets or in shelters as homeless people hit a record 650,000 in 2022.

Extending and sealing off US territory

Trump is hardly a unifier or peacemaker in the U.S. or abroad. He wants to acquire Greenland and retake control of the Panama Canal. He wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. He has even said that he would like to annex Canada as the 51st state. And he has toyed with the idea of using the military to invade Mexico to stop the flow of immigrants into the U.S. He will withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Peace Accord. And has opened up the door to removing the U.S. from NATO.

In an article in Foreign Policy, Alexandra Sharp delves into what we know about Trump’s foreign policy (https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/01/21/donald-trump-executive-orders-day-one-us-immigration-who-tiktok). Here’s some of what she writes.

“U.S. President Donald Trump hit the ground running for his first day in office on Monday, signing 26 executive orders and issuing a slew of other promises intended to prioritize Washington’s interests on the global stage. ‘The golden age of America begins right now,’ Trump vowed at the start of his inaugural address.

“Among his first acts, Trump declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, fulfilling a key campaign pledge to curb migration. To address border security, he ordered the deployment of troops; resumed construction of the border wall; reinstated the ‘Remain in Mexico’ program, which forces asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico during immigration proceedings; and shut down the CBP One app, a Biden-era program that allowed some migrants to enter the United States legally through an appointment lottery system. Trump also designated cartels and foreign gangs as ‘global terrorists’ in an effort to expand government efforts to combat human trafficking and drug smuggling.”

“To drive home his America First approach, Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” implemented a 90-day pause on U.S. foreign development assistance, and signaled his intention to leave the World Health Organization within 12 months” [He has already pulled America out of WHO.]

Trump also ordered the United States to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement in a major blow to global efforts to limit climate change.”

Attempting to end birthright citizenship

Sharp continues.

“In addition, Trump directed federal agencies to stop recognizing birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented migrants, a right guaranteed under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Attorneys general for 18 states, the city of San Francisco, and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit on Tuesday challenging the order.

A Line-by-Line Breakdown of Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Executive Order

Elie Mystal offers a “line-by-line” breakdown of Trump’s birthright Citizenship Executive Order in an article for The Nation, Jan 22, 2025
(https://thenation.com/article/politics/trump-birthright-citizenship-executive-order).

Mystal starts out arguing that “Almost every sentence of the order is wrong, misleading, or flagrantly unconstitutional.” Here’s more.

“I cannot tell you the worst thing Trump did in his first hours—“the worst” is a subjective assessment largely based on how close you are to the people Trump would like to harm. There is, however, one executive order that attempts to nullify an entire constitutional amendment by fiat, so that is the one I have decided to focus on.”

“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”—better known as the birthright citizenship executive order—attempts to cancel the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. Getting rid of constitutional amendments via executive order is new, and, for me at least, “the worst.”

“Nearly every line of this order is wrong, misleading, or flagrantly unconstitutional. To appreciate the depths of racism and lawlessness embedded within it, you need to read every line. Lawyers have done that, and a lawsuit has already been filed attempting to stop the order. But I believe every single person in this country who is not a mouth-breathing racist deserves to understand just how despicable this thing is. I want you to be able to fight the racists in your family, chapter and verse, on this unmitigated piece of trash.”

Mystal considers Trump’s order in depth. Here are highlights.

“Section 1. Purpose. The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift.”

“This is simply wrong. Citizenship is a privilege, but it is not a “gift.” It’s not bestowed by individual benevolent white folks when they happen to be in a good mood. Birthright citizenship is a right, one that has been enshrined in the organizing document of our country.

“There is a legal process for taking away rights, but that process has nothing to do with the bigoted orders of an aging despot. Taking away the right to birthright citizenship requires nothing less than a constitutional amendment. Trump wants you to forget that by pretending that citizenship is a gift.”

“The Fourteenth Amendment states: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’ That provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.”

Mystal continues.

“Even if the courts do get around to ‘stopping’ the order, Trump controls the military. He controls the State Department and the Justice Department. He controls the Social Security Administration. I don’t have a lot of belief that he will follow a court order on this, even if the courts order him to stop.

“All I can do is tell you that the order is unconstitutional, and racist, and obviously so. The people who support this order are wrong, and racist. The journalists who promote and normalize the order are wrong and racist. This order violates one of the fundamental principles of the United States, and people should react to it like it does”.

Pardoning insurrectionists

On January 20, 2025, his first day as president, Trump pardoned 1,500 or 1,600 people who were imprisoned for their violent participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection. This is a reflection of Trump’s “big lie,” that is, despite the overwhelming evidence, he denies that they engaged in destructive actions on Jan. 6 and continues to insist they were wrongly punished and incarcerated.

Dan Barry and Alan Feuer analyze “How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6 (https://nytimes.com/2025/01/05/us/politics/january-6-capitol-riot-trump.html).

“In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump’s volatile political career seemed over, his incendiary words before the riot rattling the leaders of his own Republican Party. Myriad factors explain his stunning resurrection, but not least of them is how effectively he and his loyalists have laundered the history of Jan. 6, turning a political nightmare into a political asset.

“What began as a strained attempt to absolve Mr. Trump of responsibility for Jan. 6 gradually took hold, as his allies in Congress and the media played down the attack and redirected blame to left-wing plants, Democrats and even the government. Violent rioters — prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned — somehow became patriotic martyrs.”

The violence

The facts tell a different story. Barry and Feuer give this well-documented account of events.

“That day [Jan. 6, 2021] was an American calamity. Lawmakers huddled for safety. Vice President Mike Pence eluded a mob shouting that he should be hanged. Several people died during and after the riot, including one protester by gunshot and four police officers by suicide, and more than 140 officers were injured in a protracted melee that nearly upended what should have been the routine certification of the electoral victory of Mr. Trump’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Trump explains away the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, pardons the insurrectionists, and wants to punish those who investigated those who were incarcerated

“But with his return to office,” Barry and Feuer write, “Mr. Trump now has the platform to further rinse and spin the Capitol attack into what he has called ‘a day of love.’ He has vowed to pardon rioters in the first hour of his new administration [which he has done], while his congressional supporters are pushing for criminal charges against those who investigated his actions on that chaotic day.”

When asked about the reframing of the Capitol riot, and whether Mr. Trump accepts any responsibility for what unfolded on Jan. 6, his spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, instead referred in a statement to the “political losers” who tried to derail his career and asserted that “the mainstream media still refuses to report the truth about what happened that day.” She added, “The American people did not fall for the Left’s fear mongering over January 6th.”

“The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him of incitement, but its leader, Mitch McConnell, declared him ‘practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day’ — a sentiment apparently shared by most Americans, with nearly 60 percent saying in polls that he should never hold office again.”

The denial

Barry and Feuer write, “Before the Capitol had even been secured, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, was asserting on Twitter that the events had ‘all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation.’ Hours later, the Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham was telling viewers that ‘there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.’ And by morning, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, was claiming on the House floor that some rioters ‘were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.’ (Mr. Gaetz would become President-elect Trump’s first choice for attorney general before being derailed by scandal.)

“According to M.I.T. Technology Review, this fabrication was repeated online more than 400,000 times in the 24 hours after the Capitol attack, amplified by a cast of MAGA influencers, Republican officials and members of Mr. Trump’s family.”

Through the spring and summer of 2021 [and into the present], Mr. Trump’s Republican allies sought to sow doubt and blame others.

Glorifying the rioters

“Amid the conspiratorial swirl of antifa agitators and deep-state plots, a related narrative was gaining traction: the glorification of those who had attacked the Capitol. Instead of marauders, vandals and aggressors, they were now political prisoners, hostages, martyrs. Patriots.”

“At a mid-January rally in Florence, Ariz., he [Trump] described the Jan. 6 defendants as persecuted political prisoners. Later that month, in Conroe, Texas, he promised that if he was re-elected, and if pardons were required, ‘we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.’”

“His efforts seemed to be working. By mid-2022, an NBC News poll found that fewer than half of Americans still considered Mr. Trump ‘solely’ or ‘mainly’ responsible for Jan. 6.”

Indictments

“In August 2023, Mr. Trump was indicted twice on charges of interfering with the 2020 election results: at the state level, for illegally seeking to overturn the results of the election in Georgia, which he had narrowly lost; and at the federal level, for conspiring to impede the Jan. 6 certification of Mr. Biden’s election.

“A subsequent court filing by Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the federal investigation, cited Mr. Trump’s steadfast endorsement of the rioters and of the prison choir, ‘many of whose criminal history and/or crimes on January 6 were so violent that their pretrial release would pose a danger to the public.’ The former president, it continued, ‘has financially supported and celebrated these offenders — many of whom assaulted law enforcement on January 6 — by promoting and playing their recording of the national anthem at political rallies and calling them ‘hostages’”

Promising Payback

“An emboldened Mr. Trump has already indicated that his presidential agenda will include payback for those who declared him responsible for the Capitol attack. He has said that Mr. Smith ‘should be thrown out of the country,’ and that Ms. Cheney and other leaders of the House select committee — ‘one of the greatest political scams in history,’ his spokeswoman, Ms. Leavitt, said — should ‘go to jail,’ without providing evidence to warrant such extreme measures.

Creating a paramilitary force

Joan Walsh reports in an article for The Nation on Jan. 23, 2025 on how Trump liberates his own paramilitary force (https://thenation.com/article/politics/trump-january-6-pardons-paramilitary-force).

She writes: “Convicted felon Donald Trump, also known as our 47th president, unleashed such tyranny, cruelty, and idiocy on his first day in office that I can’t tell you which of his moves is ‘worst.’

“Trump’s quick move to pardon or commute the sentences of roughly 1,600 January 6 prisoners has to be at the top. It’s like he just liberated his own paramilitary force. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 and 22 years in prison, respectively, got out Tuesday. They and others who helped plan the violent insurrection [of Jan. 6, 2021] are now back on the streets.”

If I were being charitable, I might say this is one rare example of Trump showing loyalty to others. Just as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts made sure Trump didn’t have to pay for inciting the January 6 riots, so did Trump bestow his own special form of ‘immunity’ on his followers who were charged for that bloody day. He continued to call them “hostages.”

Trump declared at a Tuesday night news conference, “they have already served years in prison and they’ve served them viciously,” Trump declared at a Tuesday night news conference. “It’s a disgusting prison. It’s been horrible. It’s inhumane. It’s been a terrible, terrible thing.”

Walsh continues her report. “At least three Jan. 6 defendants pleaded guilty to assaulting Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer Michael Fanone, who reportedly “suffered a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury during the attack” and was forced to retire from the police force. Daniel Rodriguez pleaded guilty on Feb. 14, 2023 to tasing Fanone, as well as other charges. Another defendant, Kyle Young, pleaded guilty on May 5, 2022 to assaulting Fanone, as he ‘held the officer’s left wrist’ and ‘pulled’ Fanone’s arm away from his body.’ During the attack on officers in a Capitol tunnel, Young also ‘held a strobe light toward the police line and pushed forward a stick-like object.’ A third man, Albuquerque Head, pleaded guilty to dragging Fanone into the crowd of rioters, yelling ‘I got one!’ Rodriguez was subsequently sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, while Young received more than seven years and Head was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison.”

“The Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police… criticized the pardons and commutations, not only those of the January 6 prisoners but also of individuals whose sentences President Joe Biden commuted, saying they were “deeply discouraged” by both presidents’ actions. “The IACP and FOP firmly believe that those convicted of [killing or assaulting law enforcement officers] should serve their full sentences,” the groups said in a joint statement.
Maybe the most poignant testimony on Tuesday came from former Capitol Police sergeant Aquilino Gonell, who shared the messages alerting him when every convicted felon he’d testified against got released.

“Each email and call log is a different violent rioter who assaulted me in the tunnel. If you are defending these people who brutally assaulted the police, maybe you ARE NOT a supporter of the police and the rule of law to begin with. If you did you would want accountability.”

“On Patriots.Win, a Trump-boosting website, at least two dozen people hoped for the executions of Democrats, judges, or law enforcement linked to the January 6 cases, Reuters reported. “They called for jurists or police to be hanged, pummeled to death, ground up in wood chippers or thrown from helicopters.

“Gather the entire federal judiciary into a stadium. Then have them listen and watch while the judges are beaten to death,” one wrote. “Cut their heads off and put them on pikes outside” the Justice Department.

“Jacob Chansley, known as the Q-Anon shaman, had already served his three years in prison. But he celebrated his pardon this way: ‘NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!’”

Concluding thoughts

We are now at a moment in history, when Trump and his allies are in control of many of the pillars of government, both houses of the U.S. Congress, many courts including the Supreme Court, and the White House. He has even been bestowed by the Supreme Court with legal “immunity” while he is president. Trump and his allies can, so it seems, act with impunity and not suffer any penalty. It remains to be seen whether they will succeed.

In his book, The Reactionary Spirit, Zack Beauchamp suggests that Trump’s forces can be stymied, diverted, or slowed down. He writes:

“The contest for democracy’s future is…different in some respects from the one previous generations faced, but at its heart the struggle is the same. It is a conflict over whether democracy’s champions are as committed to equality as its rivals are to hierarchy. Previous generations of democrats showed that they were up to the challenge. The great question facing all of us today is whether we are” (p.246).

Examples of genuine reforms

Timothy J. Heaphy also offers a hopeful statement in his book, Harbingers.

“To fix our broken democracy, we should pursue three basic goals. First, we should do all we can to encourage people to participate and make it easy for them to vote, stay informed, and voice their concerns.

“Second, we need to find ways to teach and model constructive engagement, giving people the tools to sift information, pursue and consider alternative points of view, and listen to and learn from their fellow citizens. This should start early in public schools that help young people navigate the systems by which they receive information and encourage them to pursue the first goal of participation.

“Finally, we need to create systems for Americans to come together in common purpose – working together in service to their communities and finding ways to help one another” (p. 226).

The turmoil and human suffering to come in 2025

The turmoil and human suffering to come in 2025
Bob Sheak December 3, 2025

The Presidential Election

Trump barely won the presidential election in November. Although he claims that his victory gave him a mandate to implement an extreme right-wing agenda, the numbers say otherwise. His margin of victory was the smallest of any presidential election since 1900. And we should bear in mind that Trump’s vote is unfairly buttressed by widespread right-wing gerrymanding in “red” states. James M. Lindsay cites the following “official” numbers in an article for the Council for Foreign Relations (https://cfr.org/article/2024-election-numbers).

“Early election coverage described Trump’s victory as a landslide. But whether you go by the Electoral College vote or the popular vote, it was anything but. The 312 Electoral College votes that Trump won are just six more than Joe Biden won in 2020, twenty less than Barack Obama won in 2012, and fifty-three less than Obama won in 2008. Trump’s Electoral College performance pales in comparison to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936 (523 electoral votes), Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 (486), Richard Nixon’s in 1972 (520), or Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 (525). In terms of the popular vote, more people voted for someone not named Trump for president than voted for Trump in 2024, and his margin of victory over Harris was 1.5 percentage points. That is the fifth smallest margin of victory in the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900.”

Despite such a narrow victory, Trump’s claims he won a massive victory and continues to promise to implement an extreme right-wing agenda once he is in office.

Trump’s top agenda items

They include the following: (1) tariffs, (2) the deportation or detention of all undocumented residents, (3) tax cuts for the wealthy, (4) pardons for many (if not all) who participated in the insurrection, and (5) revenge on his political and media “enemies.” Under the influence of Elon Musk, Trump appears now to be open to allowing some high-skilled foreign workers to enter the country under the H-1B program. The present article will consider #s 1 and 2. But note, first, that he has the support of Republicans, large swaths of the rich and powerful, and his unquestioning base of tens of millions of Americans. But the billionaires play a disproportionate role.

Trump’s inner support team

Trump is being influenced by wealthy advisers and by those who support his right-wing extremism. One of his chief advisers in the presidential transition, ending on January 20, is multi-billionaire Elon Musk. Musk supported Trump’s presidential campaign with contributions of 200-250 million dollars. He is not the only billionaire in Trump’s entourage. New York Time’s journalists, Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, identify “the Silicon Valley Billionaires Steering Trump’s Transition (https://nytimes.com/2024/12/06/us/politics/trump-elon-musk-silicon-vallley.html). The journalists tell us that the “article is based on interviews with more than a dozen people with insight into the transition, including people who have participated in the process. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve their relationships with Mr. Trump.”

Here’s some of what they report.

“The week after the November election, President-elect Donald J. Trump gathered his top advisers in the tearoom at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, to plan the transition to his second-term government.

“Mr. Trump had brought two of his most valued houseguests to the meeting: the billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk and the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison.”

The journalists continue.

“Mr. Trump has delighted in a critical addition to his transition team: the Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires who have been all over the transition, shaping hiring decisions and even conducting interviews for senior-level jobs. Many of those who are not formally involved, like Mr. Ellison, have been happy to sit in on the meetings.”

“Their involvement, to a degree far deeper than previously reported, has made this one of the most potentially conflict-ridden presidential transitions in modern history. It also carries what could be vast implications for the Trump administration’s policies on issues including taxes and the regulation of artificial intelligence, not to mention clashing mightily with the notion that Mr. Trump’s brand of populism is all about helping the working man.”

“The tech leaders in Mr. Trump’s orbit are pushing for deregulation of their industries and more innovative use of private sector technologies in the federal government, especially the defense industry. About a dozen Musk allies took breaks from their businesses to serve as unofficial advisers to the Trump transition effort.

“Broadly, the group is pushing for less onerous regulation of industries like cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, a weaker Federal Trade Commission to allow for more deal-making and the privatization of some government services to make government more efficient. Mr. Musk himself has called some executives at major public companies and asked how the government is thwarting their business — and what he can do to help.”

“These tech leaders have played a far broader role than simply contributing to the nascent Department of Government Efficiency — the Musk-led effort, abbreviated as DOGE, that is intended to effectively audit the entire government and cut $2 trillion out of federal spending. Mr. Musk’s friends are also influencing hiring decisions at some of the most important government agencies.”

“Inside the Trump transition team’s headquarters in West Palm Beach, Fla., the billionaire Marc Andreessen, a tech investor who decades ago founded one of the first popular internet browsers, has interviewed candidates for senior roles at the State Department, the Pentagon and the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Jared Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office with no experience in foreign affairs, has interviewed a few candidates for jobs at the State Department. Mr. Birchall has been involved in advising the Trump transition team on space policy and artificial intelligence, helping to put together councils for A.I. development and crypto policy.”

“Shaun Maguire, another Musk friend, is now advising Mr. Trump on picks for the intelligence community. Mr. Maguire, a brash Caltech Ph.D. in physics who is an investor at Sequoia Capital, has been a staple of the Trump transition over the last month, including interviewing potential candidates for senior Defense Department jobs.”

These examples represent just a small slice of Trump’s rich supporters.

“The transition offices have been crawling with executives from defense tech firms with close ties to Mr. Trump’s orbit, such as Palantir, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, and Anduril, the military technology startup led by Palmer Luckey. Several SpaceX executives have been asking questions about matters that go well beyond space policy, and interrogating federal spending across government agencies, people with direct knowledge of the talks say.”

1 -Trump on tariffs

DeArbea Walker, assistant editor at Forbes, reports on Trump’s proposed tariffs and their effects on consumers (https://forbes.com/sites/dearbeawalker/2024/12/26/how-consumers-can-prepare-for-trumps-new-tariffs).

Walker writes that “A tariff is a tax on imported goods that companies pay to the government when they import products to the U.S….”

“‘That extra cost has to get covered one way or another, either by coming out of the importing company’s margins or by being passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices,’ Forbes contributor Joe Moglia says. ‘If the tariffs are too high, there may be no choice other than raising prices.’

Trump’s tariff proposals

Tariffs on China,, Canada, and Mexico

“Trump has proposed 25% tariffs on all goods coming from Mexico and Canada, to stop the flow of fentanyl and migrants across the U.S. borders.

“During the presidential campaign, Trump said he’d impose at least a 60% tariff on imports from China. After the 2024 election, he said he’d add 10% “above any additional tariffs” on all goods coming from China until they stop fentanyl production.”

“Trump’s rationale for his proposed tariffs includes restoring manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and, some experts say, using tariffs as a trade negotiating tool. In addition to the economic motivations, Trump cites security: He has insisted that Mexico and Canada stem the flow of illegal drugs and migrants over the border.”

Tariffs on EU

“Trump recently threatened nonspecific tariffs against the European Union if the trade bloc didn’t step up U.S. oil and gas imports.”

Effects of tariffs on consumers

“Weekly grocery bills are likely to get more expensive if President-elect Donald Trump follows through in imposing tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and China. Everything from avocados to garlic will go up.

“That new car you’re eyeing—or even your next grocery run—could cost more after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Trump plans to sign an Executive Order on day one that would impose 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and threatens additional tariffs on products from China and elsewhere.” He initially claimed that domestic consumer prices would not go up, but later acknowledged they could (https://truthout.org/articles/trump-reneges-on-promise-that-tariffs-wont-raise-costs-for-consumers).

“Tariffs on raw materials like steel or aluminum could send the prices of cellphones and laptops through the roof, according to True Tamplin, a Forbes personal finance contributor. A 10 percent tariff on a $1,000 laptop would add $100 to its prices.”

Walker also refers to a list of goods compiled by Forbes contributor Frank Holmes, that could become more expensive as a result of Trump’s tariffs.

“Groceries, like avocados, tomatoes, garlic, and other produce from Mexico.
Electronics and appliances, including washing machines, laptops, phones and TVs, which are made from imported parts from Canada and China
Clothing, shoes and other everyday goods made abroad
Home improvement supplies like wood, steel and paint
Cars like the Nissan Sentra and Mercedes-Benz GLB are assembled in Mexico.”

In addition, Walker writes, “Industries with lots of exposure to imported goods—retail, electronics and even agriculture—could face significant headwinds.”

Spillover effects

Walker notes, “There’s also the risk of the spillover effect. Retailers importing the goods will increase the price to absorb the cost of the tariff, however, domestic producers, who aren’t impacted by the tariffs, will feel emboldened and may raise their prices too.” This was the case during Trump’s first term when dryers, not subjected to tariffs, rose 12%.

On balance, tariffs are costly for domestic residents and businesses. Mark Williams summarizes this point (https://bu.ed/articles/2024/would-trumps-tariffs-send-prices-soaring).

“Tariffs increase the cost of imported goods, temporarily protecting domestic markets, and they can raise incentives for onshore manufacturing and sales. Short-term, there could be some production gains. However, as Trump proved during the 2018 tariffs on imported steel, they did little to materially increase the number of jobs in US steel plants. Moreover, once tariffs were slapped on China, they quickly retaliated by making many US products more expensive; this eventually led to a reduction in the number of US export jobs.”

Tariffs are not popular among Americans

In a Newsweek magazine article, Suzanne Blake reports that a majority of Americans do not like tariffs, specifically Trump’s proposal (https://newsweek.com/donald-trump-bad-news-tariff-plan-inflation-poll-2001523). Here’s the crux of what she writes.

“A majority of Americans are bracing themselves for President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, according to a poll that was published on Monday.

“In a WalletHub Fed Rate survey of 200 Americans this month, 74 percent of Americans said Trump’s possible tariffs would likely lead to more inflation down the line as it remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.”

2 – The deportation or detention of all undocumented residents

Trump’s plans for his first day in the White House includes the mass deportation or detention (and eventual deportation) of virtually all eleven plus million undocumented residents. Here are some facts from Pew Research (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us).

“Unauthorized immigrants live in 6.3 million households that include more than 22 million people. These households represent 4.8% of the 130 million U.S. households.

“…some facts about these households in 2022 [the latest available]:
 In 86% of these households, either the householder or their spouse is an unauthorized immigrant.
 Almost 70% of these households are considered “mixed status,” meaning that they also contain lawful immigrants or U.S.-born residents.
 In only about 5% of these households, the unauthorized immigrants are not related to the householder or spouse. In these cases, they are probably employees or roommates.”

“Of the 22 million people in households with an unauthorized immigrant, 11 million are U.S. born or lawful immigrants. They include:
 1.3 million U.S.-born adults who are children of unauthorized immigrants. (We cannot estimate the total number of U.S.-born adult children of unauthorized immigrants because available data sources only identify those who still live with their unauthorized immigrant parents.)
 1.4 million other U.S.-born adults and 3.0 million lawful immigrant adults.”

Clarissa-Jan Lim considers Trump’s plans for day one of his presidency in an article for MSNBC, Dec 27, 2024 (https://msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-day-one-deportations-jan-6-pardons-tariffs-rena185019). Here’s some of what she reports on Trump’s “immigration” plans.

One of Trump’s most extreme campaign promises was to carry out “the largest mass deportation program” in the country’s history beginning on Day 1 of his presidency. It’s unclear how such a such a large-scale operation could be executed, but immigration officials have said it would be a huge logistical and financial effort. Economists have also warned that such a program would cause an “economic disaster” for the U.S., which relies heavily on migrant labor.

“Trump told NBC News in November, Lim notes, that there would be ‘no price tag’ for his mass deportation plans.” That is, Trump insists he will have the government spend as much as it takes to effectuate his mass deportation plans.

Trump wants to end “birthright citizenship”

Lim continues. “In a move that could face a prolonged legal fight, the president-elect has also said that he wants to end birthright citizenship through executive action on his first day to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Birthright citizenship is a protection enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but Trump has said that he would consider changing the Constitution to rescind the rule.” It will take more than Trump’s assumption that he, as president, can change the constitution. Why? Amending the Constitution is a power that lies with Congress, not the president. Trump’s plan would result in children being separated from their parents or, in some cases, ending up in the foster care system, in the care of other family members, or even incarcerated.

Using the military to assist in mass deportation

Nonetheless, Trump seems determined to push ahead on mass deportation, even to use the military in such a massive effort.

Charlie Savage and Michael Gold report on Trump’s plan to use the military to assist in the deportation (https://nytimes.com/2024/12/16/us/politics/trump-military-mass-deportations.html). They report as follows.

“President-elect Donald J. Trump confirmed on Monday that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

“On his social media platform, Truth Social, Mr. Trump responded overnight to a post made earlier this month by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, and who wrote that Mr. Trump’s administration would ‘declare a national emergency and will use military assets’ to address illegal immigration ‘through a mass deportation program.’”

According to Savage and Gold, “In interviews with The New York Times during the Republican primary campaign, described in an article published in November 2023, Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build ‘vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers’ for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

“The Homeland Security Department would run the facilities, he [Miller] said.
One major impediment to the vast deportation operation that the Trump team has promised in his second term is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, lacks the space to hold a significantly larger number of detainees than it currently does.”

The Trump team believes that such camps could be built expeditiously and thus enable the government to accelerate deportation process of undocumented people who fight their expulsion from the country. The assumption is that more people would voluntarily accept removal instead of pursuing a long-shot effort to remain in the country if they had to stay locked up in the interim.

“Hard-right members of Congress and staunch supporters of Mr. Trump have expressed broad support for his proposal for mass deportations. Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, chimed in on social media on Monday to back using the military for such an effort, saying Mr. Trump was ‘100% correct.’
Mr. Miller has also talked about invoking a public health emergency power to curtail hearing asylum claims, as the Trump administration did during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Deportation without Congressional action

“Mr. Trump’s team said it had developed a multifaceted plan to significantly increase the number of deportations, which it thought could be accomplished without new legislation from Congress, although it anticipated legal challenges.
Other elements of the team’s plan include bolstering the ranks of ICE officers with law enforcement officials who would be temporarily reassigned from other agencies, and with state National Guardsmen and federal troops activated to enforce the law on domestic soil under the Insurrection Act.

“The team also plans to expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal, which is currently used near the border for recent arrivals, to people living across the interior of the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years.

“And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.

“Mr. Trump has already signaled his intent to follow through on his promises with personnel announcements. He named Mr. Miller as a deputy chief of staff in his administration with influence over domestic policy. And Mr. Trump said he would make Thomas Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants, his administration’s ‘border czar.’”

“Mr. Homan told The New York Times in 2023 that he had met with Mr. Trump shortly after the now president-elect announced that he would seek office again. During that meeting, Mr. Homan said, he ‘agreed to come back’ in a second term and would ‘help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.’ In response to a question on the problem of separating children from their parents, Homan said parents who lose their immigration cases “are going to have to make a decision what you want to do: You can either take your child with you or leave the child here in the United States with a relative.”
That is, if there is a relative available and one who can afford the responsibility of caring for an additional child or children.

Questions about Trump’s deportation plan

“Asked about the proposal, Sabrina Singh, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, declined to comment, calling it ‘a hypothetical.’ In general, she added, such a plan would typically undergo ‘a rigorous process’ before being enacted, but she declined to elaborate.”

Critics

Savage and Gold cite immigrant advocates who have assailed Trump’s deportation plan, raising alarms about the potential fallout.

“‘President-elect Trump’s dystopian fantasies should send a chill down everyone’s spine, whether immigrant or native-born,’ said Karen Tumlin, the director of the Justice Action Center, an immigrant advocacy organization. ‘Not only is what he is describing in all likelihood illegal, this move would be the exact opposite of the legacy of service in which my family members were proud to participate.’”

“Robyn Barnard, the senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First, asserted that the consequences would be far-ranging. ‘Families will be torn apart, businesses left without vital employees, and our country will be left to pick up the pieces for years to come,’ she added.

“Congressional Democrats responded with a similar level of incredulity, asserting that such a move was all but certain to violate federal laws preventing the use of the military on American soil.

“‘We’re pursuing whatever we can do to make clear that the Insurrection Act should not permit that use of the military,’ said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, referring to the 1807 law that grants presidents emergency power to use troops on domestic soil to restore order when they decide a situation warrants it. Under that law, ‘if there is no threat to public order of a fundamental, far-reaching kind, it would be illegal,’ he added.”

Separations

Jacob Soboroff, who visited detention sites during Trump’s first presidential term, published his finding in a book titled Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. Here is part of an article reviewing the book on July 7,2020, by Kirkus Reviews (https://kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jacob-soboroff/separated-tragedy).

“Separating migrant minors from their families has been a hallmark of the current administration—and, writes the author, ‘an unparalleled abuse of the human rights of children.’ His narrative begins in June 2018 in Brownsville, Texas, where he toured a former Walmart that had been converted into a ‘shelter’ to house some 1,500 migrant boys, many of them caught with their families trying to enter the U.S. By virtue of the administration’s vaunted ‘zero tolerance’ policy, these children represent what Soboroff calls ‘an avoidable catastrophe.’ His sketches of the detention centers are consistently affecting and haunting. As he noted at the time, ‘this place is called a shelter, but effectively these kids are incarcerated.’ The policy of separation was foreshadowed in Trump’s blustery rhetoric during the 2016 campaign—but more by his lieutenant Stephen Miller, who loudly voiced ‘vitriol for undocumented immigrants.’ It was up to Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen to enact it, even after she was warned that family separations would constitute a violation of the constitutional principle of fair treatment. Miller’s faction won the day, and family separation became policy. Startlingly, when a federal judge ruled against the policy and ordered the government to reunite detained families, Customs and Border Patrol admitted that it had planned to separate ‘more than 26,000 children between May and September 2018’ alone. Naturally, the administration has denied the policy even as, Soboroff notes, the principals involved who remain in the administration are now the very people who are coordinating the government’s bungled response to COVID-19. And even though the policy has theoretically been terminated by executive order, thousands of migrant children are still detained in tent cities and other facilities across the border, in some cases without their families for years.”

Concluding thoughts

Trump wants to transform the US in ways that will give him incomparable presidential power. However, his plans, flawed and undemocratic as they are, will generate opposition as well as support. Who knows which side will prevail. But his ambitions are inherently flawed and, if implemented, likely to cause economic chaos and suffering among large segments of the population. The big question is whether such effects will lead to the buildup of opposition forces strong enough politically to prevent Trump from succeeding in pushing his extreme economic and immigration plans.

The 2024 presidential election, troubling prospects for the country


Bob Sheak, Dec 6, 2024

Trump won despite his poor record

The final vote count gave Trump 77,232,887 votes, or 49.9% of the total votes. Kamala Harris received 74,935,796, or 48.4%. Trump’s 1.5% advantage was lower than recent presidential winners received. Nonetheless, it gave the presidency to Trump, a convicted felon with a long record of indictments. His dismal record in dealing with the Covid pandemic is a not-too-distant example of his ineptness. Helio Fred Garcia writes in his book, The Trump Contagion:

“In December 2021 NPR broadcast a report that Trump supporters were far more likely to die of Covid-10: Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from Covid-19 as those who live in areas that went or now President Biden” (pp. 224-225).

Overall, Trump has accumulated 91 criminal indictments, according to a detailed account in Ali Velshi’s book, The Trump Indictments. Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissman have also compiled this outrageous record in their book, The Trump Indictments. These charges will most likely be vacated or postponed, which would ultimately mean that he may not ever be held accountable for his lawless behavior.

He lies. Washington Post journalist Glenn Kessler and his colleagues identified 30,753 false and misleading statements from Trump during his first presidential term (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years).

He pushed and got lower tax rates for the rich and corporations, while increasing the national debt by over 8 trillion dollars. According to US Budget Watch 2024, the national debt increased by $8.4 trillion during Trumps first presidential term (https://www.crfb.org/papers/trump-and-biden-national-debt).

Inequality rose during the Trump presidential years. Jeffrey Kucik reports on this (https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/535239-how-trump-fueled-economic-inequality-in-america). The article was published on Jan. 1, 2021. Kucik writes:

“It is difficult to select just one issue that defines President Trump’s legacy. There is his tragic mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is his alienation of America’s allies. There are even his wars on science and the rule of law. Any of these disasters would provide a suitable byline for the history books.
But we need to add something equally important to this list: Four years after Trump took office, income inequality continues to grow. And it is growing at a faster rate than during any of the last five administrations.”

Now Trump wants complete power

Trump Is Using “Unitary Executive” Theory in His Bid to Amass Supreme Power

Marjorie Cohn considers this issue in an article published on Dec 3, 2024
(https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-using-unitary-executive-theory-in-his-bid-to-amass-supreme-power). Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Veterans For Peace and Assange Defense, and is the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.

Here’s some of what she writes.

“Trump is claiming total executive power that would eclipse the legislative “co-equal” branch of government.

“In the weeks since the presidential election, president-elect Donald Trump and his allies have made a series of moves that indicate their intent to dangerously consolidate executive power under the controversial ‘unitary executive’ theory of the Constitution.

“During the presidential campaign, Trump posted a video on Truth Social that referred to his second administration as a ‘unified Reich,’ invoking Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich in Nazi Germany. As president-elect, Trump’s cabinet selections have corroborated his campaign pledge to be a dictator on day one.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority decided to grant Trump absolute immunity while in office. On this, Cohn writes: “With the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s decision granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his core ‘official’ functions, and the 920-page ‘Project 2025’ right-wing blueprint for an autocratic government, Trump is positioning himself to change the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over all aspects of the executive branch — and thereby becoming a ‘unitary executive.’”

Cohn continues. “Proponents of the unitary executive say that Article II establishes a ‘hierarchical, unified executive department under the direct control of the President’ who ‘alone possesses all of the executive power and … therefore can direct, control, and supervise inferior officers or agencies who seek to exercise discretionary executive power.’”

Cohn points out that “Project 2025, the right wing’s roadmap to an imperial presidency, is anchored in the unitary executive scheme. ‘This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI….’”

Furthermore, as revealed in Project 2025, “Trump would circumvent Congress by taking complete control of all administrative agencies that protect our health, safety, food, water, climate and labor rights. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a federal agency doesn’t have the last word on protecting these rights. When a statute is ambiguous, an agency must now defer to courts (many of which are staffed by judges appointed by Trump) instead of following interpretations of agency experts.” For example, Project 2025 will reinstitute Schedule F that
“would reclassify 50,000 of the 2 million merit-based civil service employees as political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president with no civil service protections.”

Cohn offers a summary of how Project 2025 could undermine the constitutional checks and balances.
– Curtailing the independence of independent agencies;
– Weaponizing the Department of Justice to serve Trump’s political agenda;
– Replacing civil servants with political supporters;
– Impounding funds Congress has appropriated and using them for other purposes;
– Neutralizing the press and independent media;
– Misapplying the Insurrection Act to suppress protests and deport undocumented immigrants;
– Misusing the recess appointment process to confirm executive branch nominees without Senate approval; and
– Deconstructing the administrative state to help corporations maximize profits.

The creation of a “king” in the White House

Cohn writes: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” and quotes Sonia Sotomayor who wrote in dissent. ‘The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.’ The immunity the court established now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any president to use for his own political gain or financial interests, with the knowledge that he is inoculated from criminal liability.”

“As a result of Trump v. U.S., Trump’s election victory, and the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, Trump’s criminal cases — comprising 91 charges — are evaporating.”

Trump’s appointments to his administration: examples

His appointments emphasize loyalty over competence. Trump wants people in advisory or cabinet positions who will implement his right-wing agenda, basically, in various ways, to support a fossil-fuel energy system, to allow liquified natural gas exports to continue, to open up public lands to private investors, to ignore or deny the climate crisis, to drastically cut spending by the federal government on programs that benefit wide swaths of the population, to cut taxes on the rich and corporations, to begin the deportation of millions of undocumented residents, to impose ill-considered tariffs, especially on China, Canada, and Mexico, and to use the FBI and other executive branch agencies to punish Trump’s critics, viewed as “enemies.”

Consider three

Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense

One of his least defensible picks is Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense. Jane Mayer has written at length about Hegseth, and how he was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job (https://newyorker.com/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history). Here’s just two paragraphs from Mayor’s article.

“But Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

“A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the ‘party girls’ and the ‘not party girls.’ In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

Kash Patel to head the FBI.

Chris Lehmann argues in a Dec. 3, 2024, article that “Kash Patel is Trump’s Scariest Cabinet Appointment Yet (https://thenation.com/article/politics/kash-patel-trump-cabinet). Lehmann identifies Patel as “a deep state conspiracy theorist” who Trump has appointed to head the FBI.

“Patel has…duly minted his battles over control of the deep state into a book, Government Gangsters, which derides the agency he’s now charged with administering as ‘one of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State,’ where rampant corruption has become ‘an existential threat to our republican form of government.’ He has also vowed, should he be entrusted with overseeing the agency’s operations, to shut down its Hoover Building headquarters in Washington on day one, and convert it into ‘a museum of the deep state.’”

Patel complains that the FBI is “overrun with self-protecting raging liberals—another plaint cribbed entirely from the persecution fantasies of Trump. Patel’s own history with the agency dates from his tour at the House Select Committee on Intelligence, where he reportedly penned the ‘Nunes memo,’ which castigated FBI officials for approving a baseless FISA surveillance order on former Trump campaign official Carter Page. That caught the eye of Trump, who appointed Patel to the National Security Council after the GOP lost its House majority in the 2018 midterms, and then promoted him to serve as the NSC’s senior director of the agency’s counterterrorism directorate.”

“…as with Trump himself, the conspiratorial logic behind Patel’s advancement has curdled into additional shocking and dangerous breaches with reality. Patel is a champion of the Trump-aligned QAnon cult and conspiracy theory, announcing in a 2022 podcast appearance that the mythical figure at the center of Q ‘should get credit for all the things he has accomplished.’ He’s also joined Mike Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser, for the Q-promoting ReAwaken America tour. In his role as all-purpose MAGA hustler, Patel has hawked a dietary supplement that supposedly reverses bodily damage wrought by the Covid vaccine, dubbing it ‘a homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax.’”

“Patel’s conspiracy-mongering finds a frequent outlet in his broadsides against the press—an especially troubling penchant for the leader of an agency like the FBI, which has stood stoutly athwart basic civil liberties. ‘We’re going to put in all-American patriots from top to bottom,’ Patel announced in a 2023 appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. ‘We will go out and find the conspirators not just in the government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly—we’ll figure that out.’

What Kash Patel Could Do to the F.B.I.

Garrett M. Graff, a journalist, a historian and the author of “The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War” and “Watergate: A New History,” among other books,
also considers the implications of Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel to head the FBI (https://nytimes.com/2024/12/02/opinion/kash-patel-trump-fbi.html).

“It goes almost without saying that Kash Patel, whom Donald Trump picked over the weekend to lead the F.B.I., is supremely unqualified to direct the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.

“That’s what even those who know Mr. Patel well are saying. ‘He’s absolutely unqualified for this job. He’s untrustworthy,’ his supervisor in the first Trump administration, Charles Kupperman, told The Wall Street Journal. ‘It’s an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature.’ Mr. Kupperman’s view is hardly an outlier. In Mr. Trump’s first term, Bill Barr, then the attorney general, and Gina Haspel, then the C.I.A. director, went to great lengths to prevent Mr. Patel from being installed in senior intelligence and law enforcement roles.”

“Unlike Mr. Patel, who has never been nominated for a Senate-confirmed position, every F.B.I. director in modern times has been vetted and confirmed (often repeatedly) by the Senate to another position first. Three F.B.I. directors were federal judges before being selected. Robert Mueller had been nominated by both Republican and Democratic presidents and confirmed by overwhelmingly bipartisan votes in the Senate; James Comey, Barack Obama’s nominee, had been in front of the Senate twice for confirmation. Mr. Wray had been the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, a role that earned him the department’s highest award for leadership and public service.

“Moreover, the idea of appointing a Trump loyalist like Mr. Patel goes against the fundamental approach all recent presidents have taken, which is that they’ve appointed nonpartisan figures, known for their independence. Directors, in turn, usually go out of their way to demonstrate clear independence from the presidents who appointed them. Bill Clinton’s relationship with his choice, Louis Freeh, was so tested during the Clinton scandals that the two men weren’t even on speaking terms, and Mr. Freeh turned in his White House pass to avoid even the appearance of familiarity with the president. Mr. Comey infamously took it upon himself to excoriate Hillary Clinton publicly over her handling of emails as secretary of state to demonstrate his independence from the Obama administration and Justice Department.

“What this independence illustrates is that the F.B.I. is not, as many MAGA loyalists believe, some liberal bastion of wokeness. No Democrat has ever served as an F.B.I. director. Even Democratic presidents appoint Republican officials to head the bureau, as Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton did in their presidencies.

“Mr. Trump has been clear in what he is trying to do with a nominee like Mr. Patel: He wants to bend and break the bureau and weaponize it against those he sees as his political enemies and domestic critics. Mr. Patel said last year that he hopes to prosecute journalists.”

“…a Patel directorship of even a few years could cause grave, lasting harm to the institution. One of the key ways a director shapes the bureau is through the promotion of top agents, from section chiefs to unit chiefs to special agents in charge to assistant directors and executive assistant directors. His choices of those leaders would shape the bureau for decades.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to head HHS

Lauren Weber, Lena H. Sun and David Ovalle, Washington Post journalists, assess 10 of RFK Jr.’s “conspiracy theories and false claims” (https://washingtonpost.com/health/2024/11/15/rfk-jr-views-conspiracies-false-claims).

“The ascension of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, to the nation’s top health post has alarmed medical experts, who point to his history of trafficking in conspiracy theories as disqualifying to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Kennedy, whom President-elect Donald Trump selected as health secretary on Thursday, will be charged with a massive portfolio overseeing Americans’ insurance, drugs, medical supplies and food if the Senate confirms him.”

“This is troubling. ‘He is one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the United States and globally, and he has been at this for 20 years,’ said Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

“Here are 10 false health claims Kennedy has publicly made over the years:
Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism
Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made’
Kennedy promotes raw milk, stem cells and other controversial or debunked medical treatments
Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public
Kennedy has falsely linked antidepressants to mass shootings
Kennedy incorrectly suggests AIDS may not be caused by HIV

“Kennedy, who founded a prominent anti-vaccine group, has repeatedly linked the childhood vaccine schedule to autism — a claim that has been debunked by scientists. Kennedy has falsely blamed autism on thimerosal, a compound safely used as a preservative in vaccines, and decried the number of shots on the childhood vaccination schedule.

Weber and her colleagues continue. “‘I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,’ he [Kennedy] said last summer in an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters.”

“A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine concluded there is no link between autism and vaccination. Dozens of studies published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals have also disproved the notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism.

“Hotez and many other public health experts say they worry that Kennedy, as health secretary, will do irreparable harm to already declining confidence in vaccines.

“Hotez pointed to the fivefold rise in pertussis, or whooping cough, in the past year; the 16 measles outbreaks reported by the CDC so far this year, compared with four in 2023; and the detection of polio in New York in 2022.

“‘So our baseline is a fragile vaccine ecosystem that could be on the brink of collapse,’ Hotez said. ‘I worry that now with this appointment, that could actually happen.’”

“Kennedy promotes raw milk, stem cells and other controversial or debunked medical treatments.”

Consider the reasons why milk is pasteurized.

“Raw milk is unsafe to consume, and the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC have strongly advised against consuming it because it can contain dangerous bacteria, such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria. It can also contain viruses, including the H5N1 bird flu virus that is causing an outbreak in dairy cattle and has sickened at least 46 people in the United States. Unpasteurized milk from infected cows can contain high levels of infectious H5N1 virus.”

“Kennedy argues government employees have an interest in ‘mass poisoning’ the American public.

“‘The agency, the USDA, the FDA have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate, and they all have an interest in subsidies and mass poisoning the American public,’ Kennedy told Fox News in August.

“Kennedy has repeatedly spoken about wanting to eliminate industry interests from the government, but public health experts say it is slander to imply that government employees are purposefully harming Americans.

“That’s just an inflammatory statement that has no basis in reality,” Hotez said. “I’ve worked with the scientists at the [health] agencies, at CDC and FDA, at the National Institutes of Health, and they are the most dedicated civil servants the nation has ever seen.”

Kennedy has also falsely linked mass shootings to antidepressants and video games and asserted that AIDS is not caused by HIV. His views on covid-19 follow his dangerous and untrue claims.

“Kennedy falsely claimed in a July interview last year with Fox News that fewer people would have died of covid-19 if the United States had deployed ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Multiple studies have concluded that the antiparasitic and antimalarial drugs are ineffective against covid-19, despite the promotion of the drug by right-wing media.”

Initial responses from the Left to Trump’s election

Calls to action

1 – John Nichols emphasizes Trump’s narrow victory over Harris and that he does not have a mandate (https://thenation.com/article/politics/donald-trump-vote-margin-narrowed). He points out:

“Why make note of all the presidents who ran better than Trump? Why discuss the narrowness of his advantage over Harris? Why consider, in addition, that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate will be among the narrowest in modern American history? Because it puts the 2024 election results in perspective—and, in doing so, gives members of both parties an understanding of how to respond when Trump claims that an unappealing nominee or policy should be accepted out of deference to his “powerful” mandate.

“Trump’s victory was not of ‘epic’ or ‘historic’ proportions. There was no ‘landslide’ for the once and future president, as Fox News suggested repeatedly in postelection headlines. The election did not produce the ‘decisive victory’ for Trump that the Associated Press referred to in the immediate aftermath of the voting. Nor did it yield the “resounding defeat” for Harris that AP reported at the same time.”

Nichols continues.

“We now confront a second Trump presidency.

“There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country.

“We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

“Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance.”

2 – Kamala Harris say we must continue the fight for democracy

In her concession speech, Harris urged her supporters to “continue ‘the fight that fueled this campaign” (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-election-loss-speech-howard-university). The following quote from her speech captures her commitment to continue the fight for America.

“Let me say my heart is full today. My heart is full today, full of gratitude for the trust you have placed in me, full of love for our country, and full of resolve,” Harris said. “The outcome of this election was not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for, but hear me when I say the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

3 – New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is concerned about what Trump will do with the power of the presidency, but hopes there will be resistance

(https://nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-future-mourn.html).

“Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also [the popular vote]. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.”

“But eventually, mourning either starts to fade or curdles into depression and despair. When and if it does, whatever resistance emerges to the new MAGA will differ from what came before. Gone will be the hope of vindicating the country from Trumpism, of rendering him an aberration. What’s left is the more modest work of trying to ameliorate the suffering his government is going to visit on us.”

“There’s no point in protesting his inauguration, as millions did in 2017. But hopefully we will take to the streets if his forces come into our neighborhoods to drag migrant families away. We will need to strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions, especially if Trump’s Justice Department cracks down on the mailing of abortion pills or his F.D.A. withdraws approval of them. In state and local elections, I’ll want to know how candidates promise to protect us from the MAGA movement’s threats to reshape our public health systems and our schools.”

“Ultimately,” Goldberg writes, “Trump’s one redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will come to despise him. He will not give people the economic relief they’re craving. If he follows through on his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, dreaming of imposing aggressive austerity on the federal government, has said that Americans will have to endure ‘some temporary hardship.’ We saw, with Covid, how Trump handled a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will perform any better in handling another. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will come to regret it.”

“The question, if and when that happens, is how much of our system will still be standing, and whether Trump’s opponents have built an alternative that can restore to people a sense of dignity and optimism. That will be the work of the next four years — saving what we can and trying to imagine a tolerable future. For now, though, all I can do is grieve.”

Others see a grim future for the country

1 – Elie Mystal argues that “Trump is Not a Fluke – He’s America” (https://thenation.com/article/politics/trump-is-america-not-a-fluke). The article was published on Nov. 7.

“America deserves everything it is about to get. We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better world for not just ourselves but our sisters and brothers in at least some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better, safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance….”

“Like I said, Trump is the sum of our failures. A country that allows its environment to be ravaged, its children to be shot, its wealth to be hoarded, its workers to be exploited, its poor to starve, its cops to murder, and its minorities to be hunted doesn’t really deserve to be ‘saved.’ It deserves to fail.
Trump is not our ‘retribution.’ He is our reckoning.”

2 – Peter Baker, New York Times journalist, analyzes how Trump’s threats and language sometimes are linked to a fascist past (https://nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/politics/trump-fascism.html).

“While presidents have pushed the boundaries of power, and in some cases abused it outright, no American commander in chief over the past couple of centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while so openly embracing and envying dictators abroad. Although plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their opponents, none has been publicly accused of fascism by his own handpicked top adviser who spent day after day with him….

“Mr. Trump does not use the word to describe himself — in fact, he uses it to describe his adversaries — but he does not shrink from the impression it leaves. He goes out of his way to portray himself as an American strongman, vowing if re-elected to use the military to crack down on dissent, to use the Justice Department to prosecute and imprison his foes, to shut down news media outlets that displease him, to claim authority that his predecessors did not have and to round up millions of people living in the country illegally and put them in camps or deport them en masse.

“He has already sought to overturn a free and fair election that even his own advisers told him he had lost, all in a bid to hold onto power despite the will of the voters, something no other sitting president ever tried to do. When that did not work, he spread demonstrable lies about the 2020 vote so pervasively that he convinced most of his supporters that Mr. Biden’s victory was illegitimate, according to polls, eroding faith in the democratic system that is key to its enduring viability. He then called for the ‘termination’ of the Constitution so that President Biden could be instantly removed from power and himself reinstalled without a new election.”

“Gen. Mark A. Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, was quoted in Bob Woodward’s new book, ‘War,’ calling Mr. Trump ‘fascist to the core.’ In recent days, 13 other former Trump aides released a letter backing Mr. Kelly’s assessment and warning of the former president’s ‘desire for absolute, unchecked power.’

“Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Trump has fueled concerns about fascism since the day he first descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid in 2015. As he kicked off his campaign that day, he demonized Mexican migrants as rapists and within months he vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country.

“He fashioned a foreign policy around the themes of isolationism and nationalism. When told by New York Times reporters that it sounded as if he were talking about an ‘America First’ approach, he happily appropriated the term. The fact that it was a term discredited by history because of its association before World War II with isolationists, including some Nazi sympathizers, did not matter to him.

“Nor did he mind citing fascists like Benito Mussolini. When Mr. Trump retweeted a quote that ‘it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,’ NBC’s Chuck Todd told him that it was from Mussolini. “I know who said it,” Mr. Trump replied. ‘But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?’ He also came to use language familiar to victims of Joseph Stalin when he declared journalists who angered him to be ‘enemies of the people,’ a phrase used to send Russians to the gulag.
“While he was president, Mr. Trump told staff members that “Hitler did a lot of good things.” At another point, he complained to Mr. Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals,” meaning those who reported to Hitler. In interviews with The Times and The Atlantic in recent days, Mr. Kelly confirmed those anecdotes, first reported in several books over the last few years. Mr. Trump denied this past week that he ever said them, and last year he denied ever reading “Mein Kampf.”

“The former president has likewise affiliated himself with the modern world’s autocrats. He has praised some of today’s most authoritarian and, in some cases, murderous leaders, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia (‘genius’), President Xi Jinping of China (‘a brilliant man’), Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea (‘very honorable’), President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt (‘my favorite dictator’), Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (‘a great guy’), former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines (‘what a great job you are doing’), President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (‘a hell of a leader’) and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary (‘one of the most respected men’).”

Mr. Trump during his four years in office regularly asserted the most expansive view of presidential power. “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he once said, referring to the article in the Constitution that deals with executive power, ignoring the limits built into the document.”

“An early sign of the tension came during a meeting when Mr. Trump was pushing the generals to stage a military parade down the streets of Washington, the kind of spectacle not typically seen outside of a moment of wartime victory. General Paul Selva of the Air Force, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, objected, explaining that it reminded him of his childhood in Portugal when it was a military dictatorship. “It’s what dictators do,” General Selva told him. Mr. Trump was undeterred and brought up the idea dozens of times again, officers later said.

“The rift grew over time and culminated in Mr. Trump’s final year in office. When some of the protests over Mr. Floyd’s murder turned violent, the president’s first instinct was to use the armed forces. He repeatedly pressed his team to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 so that he could send active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted 10,000 troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne Division called up.

“Mr. Trump demanded that General Milley personally take charge, but the Joint Chiefs chairman resisted, saying the National Guard would be sufficient. Mr. Trump shouted at him in a meeting. “You are all losers!” he yelled and then repeated the line with an expletive. Turning to General Milley, he said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

“Over the past four years, Mr. Trump has escalated his threats to use the power of the presidency to punish his antagonists. He has vowed to prosecute Mr. Biden and other Democrats if he wins the election and threatened prison time for election workers who he deems to have cheated in some way.

“He promoted a social media post saying that former Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, should face a military tribunal for investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He calls Democrats ‘the enemy from within’ and suggested that he would order the National Guard or active-duty military members to round up American citizens who oppose his candidacy.

“He has signaled that he would go after the news media as well. After ‘60 Minutes’ edited an interview with Ms. Harris in a way that Mr. Trump did not like, he said that “CBS should lose its license.” He said similar things this year about NBC, ABC and CNN. While in office, aides have said he pressed them to use government power to punish corporations affiliated with CNN and the owner of The Washington Post, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.”

“He has called for the summary execution of shoplifters and ruminated about unleashing the police to inflict ‘one really violent day’ on criminals or even ‘one rough hour — and I mean real rough’ to bring down the property crime rate.
In a 2021 podcast, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, now Mr. Trump’s running mate, said that if the former president won again he should ‘fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,’ in effect turning the nonpartisan government work force into a partisan cadre of loyalists.

Concluding thoughts

Nearly half of all voters registered support for Trump and gave the Republicans slim leads in both chambers of the U.S. Congress. They voted for a man and a political party that will try to destroy American democracy, ignore the US Constitution, create a king-like president, and find justifications for their extremist agenda. Trump and his administration are committed to capturing, detaining, and deporting millions of undocumented residents, and, in the process, separating many children from their parents. He will look for ways to compel local officials to go along. He will, as emphatically promised, impose inflation-driving tariffs, and thus increase the costs of goods to American consumers and many businesses. He and his administration will go after their domestic “enemies.” These efforts will likely be supported by a right-wing Supreme Court and many federal courts across the country.

Alternatively:

In his new book, On Freedom, historian Timothy Snyder describes what a real democracy entails.

“A large representative democracy works only when people are in fact represented. Democracy is rule by the people, so nonhuman entities (algorithms, corporations, and foundations) should neither vote nor pay for political campaigns. No American should count for more than any other American. Campaigns should be transparently and publicly financed. Candidates should be publicly financed; voter registration should be automatic; voting stations should be plentiful; ballots should be paper; gerrymandering should be outlawed” (p. 241).

Trump will likely pay little attention to the climate crisis, and it will get worse


Bob Sheak, Nov 14, 2024

Introduction

The U.S. remains the second largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, behind China. The Biden administration has done some things in attempts to reduce such emissions, but, despite these efforts, emissions in the US have continued to increase. Indeed, 2024 is the hottest year on record.

Trump, a climate-crisis denier, will as president exacerbate the problem and give open-ended support to fossil fuel production and consumption and the industries that benefit from them. Rising emissions and the rising temperatures they produce represent an existential problem that will likely threaten to generate massive dislocations of people and threaten the survival of millions, if not billions, of people in America and around the globe.

There are plenty of books that tell this cataclysmic story. Here are a few examples. Mark Lynas’ book examines in detail the effects of rising temperatures (Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency). Abrahm Lustgarten focuses on the “uprooting of America” and the millions of people who will be forced to move, as their communities become too hot to continue (On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America). Jeff Goodall zeros in on the effects of Americans of rising heat levels (The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet).

I – Biden’s record on the climate crisis has bright spots

Mike Ludwig reports that Biden made steady progress on climate, but adds that Trump is poised to dismantle it (https://truthout.org/articles/biden-made-slow-but-steady-progress-on-climate-trump-is-poised-to-dismantle-it). On Biden’s climate record, Ludwig writes:

“While politicians and the media obsessed about the economy and immigration under President Joe Biden, his administration has been running the most robust Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a generation, making modest but steady progress on vexing problems such as environmental racism, toxic chemical contamination and updating infrastructure to run on cleaner energy.

“Flush with nearly $29 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding, the EPA is stewarding billions of dollars in grants for upgrading water infrastructure, reducing climate-warming pollution and expanding renewable energy.

Other government agencies are involved in climate-related work. Ludwig points out,

“The climate work goes beyond the EPA, with multiple agencies implementing an expansive plan to drastically reduce industrial releases of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. For the first time, federal regulators are questioning whether permitting private companies to export vast quantities of fossil gas produced in the U.S. — including on publicly owned land — could be harmful to both the environment and consumers struggling to pay energy bills.”

Wikipedia has further details on Biden’s Inflation Adjustment Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate-change-policy-of-the-United-States).

“The Inflation Reduction Act was a reconciliation bill that was the largest investment in climate change mitigation in US history to date, setting out provisions to invest in increasing renewable energy and electrifying areas of the US economy. The legislation, signed into law by Biden on August 16, 2022, invests approximately $400 billion to climate-related projects, primarily in the form of tax credits for consumers and private businesses. The majority of these investments is intended to increase the amount of wind and solar energy in the United States grid by providing tax incentives to renewable energy producers, as well as companies that manufacture batteries and wind and solar power components.[145][146][147][148] The Act may also invest $28–48 billion in building retrofits and energy efficiency, $23–436 billion in clean transportation, $22–26 billion in environmental justice, land use, air pollution reduction and resilience, and $3–21 billion in sustainable agriculture.[149][150][151]”

II. Withal, Global warming continues to rise

Despite the efforts of the Biden administration, Austyn Gaffney reports that researchers find that 2024 temperatures are on track for a record high (https://nytimes.com/2024/11/06/climate/2024-temperatures-hottest-year.html). He writes,

“This year [2024] will almost certainly be the hottest year on record, beating the high set in 2023, researchers announced on Wednesday [Nov. 6].

Gaffney cites the research done by “the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the European Union agency that monitors global warming,” and has forecast “that 2024 would be the first calendar year in which global temperatures consistently rose 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

“That’s the temperature threshold that countries agreed, in the Paris Agreement, that the planet should avoid crossing. Beyond that amount of warming, scientists say, the Earth will face irreversible damage.

“Greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are dangerously heating up the planet, imperiling biodiversity, increasing sea level rise and drought and making extreme weather events more common and more destructive.

Gaffney quotes Samantha Burgess who refers to recent storms like Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the flooding in Spain to exemplify just how devastating weather intensified by warming can be.”

“A report issued by the United Nations last month found that the world’s current climate plans are inadequate, only providing a 2.6 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared to 2019 levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that reduction needs to be an order of magnitude larger: at least a 43 percent reduction by 2030 and 60 percent by 2035.”

“The reality is, every fraction of a degree matters,” Dr. Burgess said. “The sooner globally we cut emissions, the sooner our climate will stabilize.”

“If President-elect Donald J. Trump withdraws the United States from the Paris accord, as he has promised and as he did during his first administration, it would be ‘very bad news,’ according to Diana Urge-Vorsatz, a professor at Central European University and vice chairwoman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body that provides governments with scientific information to develop climate policies.”

The US and most world governments are not doing enough

Zia Weise and Lucia Mackenzie provide more details on global warming and how, according to the UN, the world is on track for catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius warming (https://politico.eu/article/united-nations-emissions-gap-global-warming-data-climate-change-report). The article was published on Oct. 24, 2024. Here’s some of what they write.

“The world is already 1.3C hotter than before the Industrial Revolution.

“Current plans and policies will lead to 2.6 to 3.1 degrees Celsius of global warming this century, with zero chance of limiting the temperature increase to the totemic 1.5C target agreed in Paris in 2015, according to a new report out Thursday.

“In fact, existing measures are falling so far short of what’s needed that the world even risks blowing past 2C, the Paris accord’s upper limit, the U.N. warned.

“The severity and frequency of dangerous heat waves, destructive storms and other disasters rises with every fraction of warming. At 3C, scientists say, the world could pass several points of no return that would dramatically alter the planet’s climate and increase sea levels, such as due to the collapse of polar ice caps.

Weise and Mackenzie continue: “If nations do not implement current commitments, then show a massive increase in ambition in the new pledges, followed by rapid delivery, the Paris Agreement target of holding global warming to 1.5C will be dead within a few years and 2C will take its place in the intensive care unit,” said Inger Andersen, the U.N. environment chief.”

“Andersen said that worldwide, measures to reduce emissions will require a ‘minimum six-fold increase’ in investment, ‘backed by reform of the global financial architecture and strong private sector action.’” Such investment is not in the cards during a Trump administration.

“In general, the G20 — which comprises industrialized countries such as the EU and U.S. as well as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia — were responsible for 77 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2023.
In stark contrast, all 55 African Union countries accounted for just 6 percent.”

“After all, while the entire G20 accounted for 77 percent of last year’s global emissions, the largest six polluters among them were responsible for more than 60 percent. The U.N. report doesn’t name and shame, but authors are referring to China (30 percent), the United States (11 percent), India (8 percent), the EU (6 percent), Russia (5 percent) and Brazil (2 percent).”

“Progress among the G20 is a mixed bag: China’s emissions grew 5.2 percent in 2023, while the EU’s fell 7.5 percent; and while China is much more populous, its per-capita emissions in 2023 were 11 tons to the EU’s 7.3 tons.

“U.S. emissions fell by 1.4 percent, but American per-capita emissions remain the second-highest at 18 tons after Russia’s 19 tons. India’s are just 2.9 tons — even though its emissions rose by 6 percent last year.”

U.N. environment chief Andersen urges rich nations like the US to phase out greenhouse gas emissions at a much faster rate than at present.

III. Trump and his administration will reverse the limited achievements of the Biden presidency on climate.

One of Trump’s signature slogans is “drill baby drill,” which means, as he has told us, his upcoming government, once installed after January 20,2025, will (1) increase government support for fossil fuels, (2) reduce support for solar, wind, and geothermal, (3) encourage more export of fracked natural gas, (4) eviscerate or close the Environmental Protection Agency, (5) open up public land to drilling; and (6) serve as an international model for other countries to follow his example.

Mike Ludwig (cited previously) reminds us that “Trump is threatening to unleash pollution, increase emissions and incapacitate the most robust EPA in a generation (https://truthout.org/articles/biden-made-slow-but-steady-progress-on-climate-trump-is-poised-to-dismantle-it). And he will have the power to do it, as result of being chosen to be president by millions of American voters in the recent election.

“…efforts to meet international climate commitments,” Ludwig writes, “seem certain to stall, if not end abruptly, after Donald Trump is reinstalled in the White House and Republicans take over the Senate if not all of Congress. According to the most recent information, as of Nov. 12, Republicans will control the White House, both branches of the U.S. Congress, and the Supreme Court when Trump and his party come into power after January 20, 2025.”

With such political power, Ludwig continues, “[t]he damage will go far beyond global warming. If Trump’s rhetoric and first-term record are any indication of what is ahead, the president-elect and the industries willing to curry his favor are poised to make the U.S. a more polluted and dangerous place to live.”

Trump will move to make “steep budget cuts” in the EPA, and perhaps move the agency out of the capitol, “as enforcement of clean air and water standards plummets. Career public servants are expected to be replaced with loyalists from the private sector. Back in 2017, Trump appointed a former coal lobbyist to lead the EPA.” Trump is also expected to dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the “agency tracks climate change for policy makers and the public.”

Climate scientists at the United Nations are worried. They view the climate crisis with words like “catastrophic” to describe our future without swift action.

“Trump and the Republicans have told a convenient lie to voters, accusing the Democrats of throttling domestic oil and gas production and sending gas and energy prices through the roof. In reality, fossil fuel prices are set by global forces the U.S. president has little control over. The U.S. is already the world’s top producer of oil and gas, and domestic prices would likely come down if the industry didn’t export so much overseas.

“The consequences of this election are clear for those on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” said Jennifer Krill, executive director of the environmental justice group Earthworks, in a statement. “Low-income communities and communities of color will bear the brunt of impact, from poisoned air and water to extreme weather events and rising sea levels, all within our lifetimes.” But the effects will be everywhere.

Fossil fuel companies will profit

Evan Halper, Maxine Joselow and Chico Harlan delve into this issue
(https://washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/06/trump-win-climate-change-oil-gas).

The journalists report, “Trump’s plans have the potential to send fossil fuel companies’ profits soaring while threatening the world’s climate goals.”

“President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House could reverse the gains the United States has made in fighting global warming, experts said, by cementing his plans to unleash domestic fossil fuel production, dismantle key environmental rules and scale back federal support for renewable energy and electric vehicles.

“It has also raised fears among U.S. allies and even some major energy executives who warn that a U.S. exit from global climate efforts will hurt American industry as the rest of the world shifts away from fossil fuels.

“Trump’s election creates ‘a very long pathway for fossil fuels,’ Ben Cahill, an energy scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a phone interview Wednesday. ‘Investors will feel the outlook is brighter. The industry will be under less pressure.’”

“He (Trump) is expected to ease a suite of restrictions on the oil industry’s emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And he will probably cancel the Biden administration’s pause on permits for new liquefied natural gas export projects, clearing the way for the industry to build billions of dollars worth of infrastructure that could increase U.S. emissions and keep gas flowing to other nations for decades to come.”

“Trump is expected to take aim at these investments by targeting President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which he has repeatedly called a ‘green new scam.’ But he would likely need Congress to repeal the law, and some Republican lawmakers may balk.

“Cahill said that the law’s tax credits for consumers, including those for EVs, rooftop solar panels and heat pumps ‘will definitely be on the chopping block’ but ‘the investment incentives for wind, solar and battery storage have proven to be quite popular with big business.’”

Nonetheless, “[t]he incoming president will have much more latitude to reverse dozens of environmental rules that oil and gas executives find burdensome. During an April dinner at his Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump asked oil executives to steer $1 billion toward his campaign while promising to relax industry regulations.

“The oil industry responded by donating tens of millions of dollars to his campaign and crafting a playbook for the new administration. It includes draft executive orders that would end restrictions on drilling on public lands and shift the Interior Department’s priorities away from protecting vulnerable species and ecosystems.”

“Trump has argued that unshackling oil companies from environmental rules could drive the price of gasoline below $2 per gallon. But energy analysts are skeptical. Prices at the pump typically have little connection to White House policies, and are largely driven instead by the coalition of oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. And Trump will take office at a time when the United States is already producing more oil and gas than any country ever has.

Trump’s record is bad. “During his first term, Trump weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and policies touching everything from toxic chemicals to endangered species.”

When Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement for the first time, a group called America Is All In announced that dozens of states, cities and corporations were still committed to the pact. Gina McCarthy, the former White House climate czar under Biden and the managing co-chair of America is All In, vowed in a statement Wednesday to continue that fight.

“‘No matter what Trump may say,’ she said, ‘the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back.’

“If Trump pulls the United States from the Paris agreement, it will deal a symbolic blow to the international efforts, given America’s place as the largest historical emitter of planet-warming pollution. Under Biden, the United States has produced record amounts of oil, but it had also positioned itself as a climate leader. Last year, minutes after nations agreed to a historic pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, then-climate envoy John F. Kerry addressed delegates, touting a moment of ‘multilateralism’ and unity, and expressing a sense of ‘awe.’ His remarks drew loud applause.

“Collins Nzovu, who served until recently as Zambia’s green economy and environment minister, said in a recent interview that the global climate process is less credible if the ‘superpower is not at the table for discussing an existential threat.’

“Poorer countries are…depending on the United States to help finance plans that are essential to the world’s climate goals.

“‘No mitigation efforts can work without America at the table,’ Nzovu said.”

Experts discuss the problem

Jenni Doering, Steve Curwood, and their colleagues at Inside Climate News also consider what climate and environmental policies will look like in Trump’s second administration (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09112024/climate-and-environmental-policies-during-second-Trump-administration). Here are excerpts from the article, which features a discussion among well-informed analysts.

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering and Steve Curwood with Inside Climate News’s Washington bureau chief Marianne Lavelle and executive editor Vernon Loeb, about what the election of Donald Trump may mean for the environment.

STEVE CURWOOD: What’s your view of how the world is going to look at us now that we have chosen a leader who denies climate change when we’ve been seeing temperatures going up and storms and such are getting worse and worse?

VERNON LOEB: Well, I think the world has seen this before. When Trump was in office the first time, one of the first things he did was take the country out of the Paris Agreement. Clearly, the world is expecting he’ll do that again.

Climate action didn’t stop when he did that the first time. It won’t stop this time. But I think clearly, world leaders feel like progress on climate is going to be a lot harder to achieve with Trump in office and with the U.S. out of the official agreement. It’s not a good moment for the climate. I don’t think progress is going to grind to a halt, but it’s not a good moment.

LAVELLE: President-elect Trump has made clear that he is going to roll back the regulations that are meant to nudge the auto industry toward electric vehicles over the next decade. He says he is going to repeal that on day one, and that is going to make a big difference.

My colleague Dan Gearino and I have been working all year on writing about the politics of electric vehicles, and one of the analysts we’ve talked to says that there is going to be 40 percent less demand for EV batteries and EV technology under a Trump administration than there would have been under a Harris administration. Those kinds of changes in policy are bound to make a huge difference in how quickly we make the transition—that’s already going on all over the world—to electric vehicles.

LOEB: There’s a long description in Project 2025 about how the EPA’s enforcement capability should be pulled way back. And instead, the agency should move to something called “compliance assistance,” which is working more closely with corporations.

Project 2025 also talks about dismantling NOAA, which is the National Weather Service—the agency that tracks hurricanes—and the National Hurricane Center. Project 2025 even calls for the repeal of the EPA efficiency ratings for appliances, the Energy Star efficiency ratings. So Project 2025 could be a real disaster for environmental protection, if it is indeed the Trump blueprint.

LAVELLE: One of the things Project 2025 says to do is to eliminate EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice. It definitely is in the sights of the team around Trump to really redirect this initiative to address environmental justice.

One thing I noticed is that House Republicans this week put out a report on environmental justice grants by the Biden administration, and they’re very critical of those grants because they’re going to groups that, for example, oppose the natural gas export terminals on the Gulf Coast. What this report does is kind of gives a blueprint for the incoming Trump administration on what grants to withdraw, and also kind of a basis for withdrawing the program altogether. That report came out very much with an awareness that Trump is coming into the White House with an eye to cutting back the support for these communities that are overburdened with pollution, and have been for a long time.

DOERING: What do you think is going to happen now that the Trump administration is coming back in and has 20-something natural gas projects which it can potentially give the green light to?

LOEB: The Biden administration put a hold on those projects as it considered the climate implications. My hunch is that that will be one of the first things Trump does away with and basically gives those plants the green light as part of his energy dominance, “drill, baby, drill” approach. Of all the industries, none has fared better under Trump than the fossil fuel industry. I would expect a real explosion of LNG exports over the next four years under Trump, too.

DOERING: Remind us why are climate activists so concerned about those terminals?

LOEB: The terminals just lead to more fracking. We’re already the leading oil and gas nation in the world, and if we can continue to frack and start exporting our natural gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe, which is still somewhat smarting from the loss of Russian natural gas, it just means more fracking. And when you’ve got more fracking, you’ve got more air pollution, more greenhouse gas emissions, more produced water piling up with no place to dispose of it. LNG exports means more fracking across the nation.

CURWOOD: I’ve seen some research that says that the actual carbon footprint of exported natural gas can even exceed that of burning coal.

LAVELLE: As somebody who’s been writing about this for a long time, I usually focus on the stories I’m telling and what I’m working on, not looking out at the big picture that much. This forces you to look at the big picture. And anyone who has young people in their lives, you think, what kind of world are we leaving for them? The way I deal with it is just focus on the importance of the work we’re doing, trying to explain the science and tell people really that there are things that can be done to address climate change, and we know what they are, and it’s going to take all of us to do something about it.

CURWOOD: Talk to me about what some people call the glimmer of hope: the states and localities.

LOEB: Voters in Washington firmly rejected a measure on the ballot that would have overturned the state’s signature climate law. In California, the voters approved a $10 billion bond fund for projects that focus on resiliency and coastal adaptation and response to floods and wildfires. And similarly, in Honolulu, voters also approved a climate resiliency fund there. So kind of a mixed result, right?

While the national vote was going for Trump, who’s someone who’s sort of avowedly almost a climate denier, you’ve got majorities in these states clearly voting for climate change measures to fund things like adaptation and resiliency.

Concluding thoughts

The Trump/Republicans win in a blow-out “red” wave defeat of Democrats in the recent elections. At the same time, some Americans will continue their struggles to combat the sources of the problem, namely, fossil fuel companies and their economic and political allies, including Trump and the Republican Party.

Members of the World Resources Institute contend that “all hope is not lost” (https://wri.org/insights/trump-climate-action-setbacks-opportunities-us). The authors, Cristina DeConcina, Jennifer Rennicki, and Gabby Hyman, identify “several pathways remain to keep momentum for climate action alive.”

“For one, there are bipartisan climate-friendly opportunities to seize, such as continued clean energy development, which has already delivered tremendous economic benefits in both red and blue states. There is also support from both sides of the aisle for next-generation geothermal energy and from the business community for decarbonizing heavy industries and strengthening international supply chains to ensure U.S. competitiveness and security. These initiatives would bolster U.S. manufacturing and national security, while also benefitting the climate.

DeConcina and her colleagues continue.

“In addition, subnational actors like states, cities, businesses and tribal nations boldly stepped up during Trump’s first term in office. They can — and early signs show they will — take up the mantle of leadership again in the climate fight.
Some of the major opportunities include:

“When President Trump announced in 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, American communities, states, tribal nations and business leaders quickly coalesced to form America Is All In. More than 4,000 mayors, governors, university presidents and business leaders signed the We Are Still In declaration, committing to meet the emissions-reduction targets set in the Paris Agreement and continue engaging with the international community. The 2019 Accelerating America’s Pledge report found that bottom-up leadership from states, cities, businesses and other subnational actors would reduce U.S. emissions by up to 37% by 2030, even without federal intervention.

“And since the first Trump administration, subnational climate action initiatives have only grown in strength and commitment. Managing Co-Chair of America Is All In and former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy said recently, ‘No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable, and our country is not turning back.’”

“Many states have enacted ambitious climate policies. For example, the 24 states and territories that comprise the bipartisan U.S. Climate Alliance, representing 54% of the U.S. population and 57% of the U.S. economy, have committed to achieving net-zero emissions no later than 2050.

“Some states are poised for even greater action before Trump takes office. In California, voters overwhelming approved Proposition 4, a $10 billion bond measure that will help the state prepare for the impacts of climate change. Just after the election, California’s Governor Newsom announced a special session of the state legislature to take steps “to safeguard California values”— including the fight against climate change — ahead Trump’s second term. A day later, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) approved updates to the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), designed to accelerate the development of cleaner fuels and zero-emission infrastructure to help the state meet legislatively mandated air quality and climate targets.

“At the same time, voters in Washington state upheld a new law that forces companies to cut carbon emissions while raising billions to support programs such as habitat restoration and climate preparation. Maryland’s Governor Moore issued a wide-ranging executive order earlier this year directing state agencies to develop climate implementation plans to ensure the state could continue working towards its ambitious climate change targets, which aim for net-zero carbon by 2045.

“In parallel, cities have long played a crucial role in advancing climate policies and will continue to do so. Climate Mayors, which started as a network of 30 mayors in 2017, is now a bipartisan network of nearly 350 U.S. mayors driving climate action in their communities. These cities continue investing in public transportation, green infrastructure and local emissions-reduction initiatives — all of which will continue to mitigate the impacts of climate change and build more sustainable urban environments with or without federal action on climate.”