Tag: trump

Child separation during Trump’s two administrations

Bob Sheak

Arlene Sheak edits

Nov 24, 2025

Introduction

This post offers a position against Trump and his administration policies during his first and second presidential terms of authorizing the separation of children from their families and treating them in abhorrent ways. It’s part of their efforts to deport immigrants and the promises they made to their base to do so. Such policies deserve our criticism and scorn. There is also something new currently, that is, to push for the end of birthright citizenship.

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Looking Back to Trump’s first presidential term

 Caitlin Dickerson looks Back at the Family Separation Policy of Trump’s first term, writing for the American Immigration Council, Oct 30, 2025

(https://americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/family-separation-policy). Here are comments and excerpts.

Family separation during the first Trump administration

“In the spring and summer of 2018, the first Trump administration sought to deter migrants from coming to the United States through the cruel practice of separating children from their parents. To do this, they implemented the zero-tolerance policy, which aimed to prosecute all adults who crossed the southern border without inspection. If a family was apprehended, the parents were taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security, while their children were taken into custody by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.”  

Dickerson continues.

The children were often sent to shelters thousands of miles away from their parents, without a way for the children and parents to contact each other.

“In many cases, these kids were sent to shelters thousands of miles away from their parents, without a way to contact them.”

Then government had difficulty in reuniting them and thousands of the children remained without their parents

“Later, the government struggled to reunite families, in part because there was no centralized database of where the children had been sent or who their parents were. Years later, some of the nearly 3,000 children taken by the government during the zero-tolerance period had still not been reunited with their parents.   

The harms to the children

The American Immigration Council and partners filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records to better understand how the government was doing. “In 2020, the Council published a tranche of documents highlighting the harms and trauma to children caused by the separations. After years of continuing litigation, the Council received tens of thousands of additional pages from government documents about this policy.” 

There is new evidence, Dickerson points out.

“This site showcases a new subset of the records obtained.” It reveals how journalists, attorneys and members of Congress fought to expose this horrific policy and hold the government accountable for the pain and havoc it created.

Further evidence from the report on the past

“In trying to deter migrants from coming to the United States, the first Trump administration implemented one of the cruelest tactics of its tenure.” The government implemented a “zero-tolerance policy,” resulting “in thousands of children being torn away from their relatives. To this day, many still have yet to be reunited with their families.” 

A New Analysis of the effects of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy

Dickerson continues. “The Trump administration ended the zero-tolerance policy after just six and a half weeks, thanks in part to the actions of journalists, legal advocates, and representatives from other branches of government. The purpose of this new analysis—produced after years of litigating public records requests—is to look at the interventions that contributed to the end, at least officially, of this shameful policy. The documents featured here serve as a stark reminder of the government’s actions during the time, and in the aftermath, of family separation. They also show how entities opposed one of the most egregious anti-migration policies of the first Trump administration.” 

Government Records Show that Journalists, Advocates, and other Government Representatives Sought Transparency and Accountability

“This chronicle is based on government documents and correspondence provided in response to the Council and our partners’ Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As such, the records contain limited information about the personal experiences of those who were affected, such as separated children and parents; attorneys and social workers; journalist witnesses; and impacted communities.

“These key stakeholders—immigration and children’s advocacy organizations and others— sought transparency and accountability. Journalists published photos and stories on the plight of separated families. A wave of public outcry forced Congressional leaders to demand answers from government agencies. On June 20, 2018, President Trump signed an executive order mandating the end to categorical family separation, a little over six weeks after it had begun.”

The “Legal” Framework for Family Separation

“In the early days of the first Trump administration…key officials were fixated on deterring families from crossing the southern border. To carry out this plan, they announced their intent to prosecute everyone who crossed the border without permission…. Family separation was the intended consequence of this so-called zero-tolerance policy.”

“The Trump Administration criminally charged thousands of parents with misdemeanors for entering the United States without proper authorization, requiring prosecution of parents and directly causing family separation by treating parents and their children as unrelated. The goal was to achieve deterrence through en masse family separation.

Dickerson writes: “By designating all adults, including those traveling with minor children, as subject to prosecution, the administration triggered a process by which children were immediately sent to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a subagency of HHS. The government took the position that because parents apprehended by Border Patrol were likely to go into criminal custody (even for a short period of time), they would become unavailable to care for the children. The children were then classified as unaccompanied… and sent to ORR custody, often thousands of miles away from where their parents were detained. The children were relocated even if their parents had spent only a few hours in criminal custody or were never actually prosecuted.

Reunification made difficult

“Parents had to follow cumbersome processes to reunify with their children. Under the Trump administration, agencies were adamant that parents who had already been removed from the United States could not re-enter the country to reunite with their children (though a limited number of parents were eventually paroled into the United States for this purpose). Furthermore, U.S. agencies had to coordinate with embassies and consulates in the families’ home countries to secure travel documents and arrange for parents to reunite with their children at an

Efforts of the ACLU

“The Ms. L case, filed in 2018 by the ACLU on behalf of a separated mother, helped establish significant measures to ensure family reunification, including following a 2023 settlement agreement.

“In 2020, two years after the official end of the family separation policy, hundreds of the 4,368 children the U.S. government identified as taken from their parents remained separated.”

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A valuable source

Jacob Soboroff wrote a book titled Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (publ 2020) about these years. It covers the time from March 2017 through October 2019, years of the first Trump administration. Here are two examples from the book.

“The Trump administration’s deliberate and systematic separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents was, according to humanitarian groups and child welfare an unparalleled abuse of the human rights of children. The American Academy of Pediatrics says the practice will leave thousands of kids traumatized for life” (xiii)

Soboroff quotes Dr. Colleen Kraft, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Studies overwhelmingly demonstrate the irreparable harm caused by breaking up families. Prolonged exposure to highly stressful situations – known as toxic stress – can disrupt a child’s brain architecture and affect his or her short- and long-term health” (p. 245)

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How the system works presently

Hamed Aleaziz, a reporter for The New York Times delves the issue in the first months of Trump’s second presidential term  (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/politics/trump-administration-family-separation.html).

He opens his article with an example of a family caught up in the US immigration system and illustrates how the options they have are all bad.

Evgeny and Evgeniia, who fled their native Russia to seek political asylum, have been separated from their 8-year-old son, Maksim, since May. It is now August. They face “an excruciating choice.”

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers told the couple they could leave the United States with their child and return to their native Russia, which they had fled seeking political asylum. Or they could remain in immigration detention in the United States — but their 8-year-old son, Maksim, would be taken away and sent to a shelter for unaccompanied children.” They chose to stay in the U.S. in a condition of what ICE officials call “interior separation.”

“Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, insisted [falsely] that ‘ICE does not separate families and placed the onus on the families themselves, saying that the parents have the option of staying with their children by leaving the country together.”

“Previous administrations separated undocumented families for reasons including national security concerns, public safety and child endangerment. But Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, said that previous administrations, to her knowledge, did not use the threat of family separation as leverage to get people to leave the country.”

Encouraging deportation

Now, with illegal crossings notably low, the Trump administration is focusing on immigrants who are in the United States and have been ordered to leave.

The American Civil Liberties Union is investigating the legality of the separations, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the group.

“That the Trump administration has found a new form of family separation is hardly surprising given they have yet to acknowledge the horrific harm caused by the original policy and are now blatantly breaching provisions of the settlement designed to provide relief to those abused families, many of whom to this day still remain separated,” he said.

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Trump’s administration wants to eliminate Birthright Citizenship Under the U.S. Constitution

The Trump administration wants to do away with the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, that is, the doctrine that says if you are born in the U.S., then you are automatically deemed a citizen. The Supreme Court is presently considering the issue and may well side with Trump.

The right is specified in Section 1 of the 14th amendment of the Constitution and has long been understood to grant American citizenship to anyone born on US soil. Here is how the Constitution states it.

“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. No state shall make or enforce any law which will abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Samuel Breidbart and Maryjane Johnson offer a review of the concept and point out that there is considerable opposition to what the administration wants (https://www.brennancenter.org/research-reports/birthright-citizenship-under-us-constitution). Their analysis was published on July 29, 2025. Here are excerpts.

The original intent

“When Congress debated the language of the Citizenship Clause in 1866, Sen. Jacob Howard explained that the clause was ‘simply declaratory of . . . the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States.’ Several lawmakers expressed concerns that such a broad guarantee would extend citizenship to the children of immigrants. Sen. John Conness affirmed that the proposed language ‘declare[s] that the children of all parentage . . . should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.’

In line with Howard and Conness’s understandings, the final text of the Citizenship Clause featured no language barring the children of immigrants from citizenship. The Supreme Court affirmed this understanding in Wong Kim Ark, where it rejected claims that children born in the United States to noncitizen parents were not themselves citizens.”

Breidbart and Johnson continue.

What Trump wants

“On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order attempting to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.

The president’s “Executive Order 14160 purports to deny citizenship to any baby born in the United States to a mother who is present ‘unlawfully’ or ‘lawful[ly] but temporar[ily]’ and a father who is ‘not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident.’ In other words, under this order, the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and the children of parents residing in the country under temporary legal authorization, such as student visas and work visas, would not be considered U.S. citizens.”

Breidbart and Johnson add: “The order directs federal departments and agencies to deny ‘documents recognizing United States citizenship’ to these children. While the order doesn’t specify what this means, its express mention of the secretary of state and the commissioner of social security suggests that it would bar affected children from receiving passports and social security numbers, among other documents. The children would still presumably get birth certificates, which are issued by local governments, but these would no longer necessarily be considered proof of U.S. citizenship.”

Opposition to Trumps Executive Order

“State attorneys general, civil rights organizations, and immigrant rights groups soon filed lawsuits challenging the order in federal courts around the country.” But the administration remains undeterred.

Breidbart and Johnson also consider the problematic consequences of ending birthright citizenship

They write: “Trump’s executive order would cause major problems across the country if it were allowed to go into effect. Lawyers challenging the order believe that hundreds of thousands of children in the United States would be denied citizenship, thereby creating a new subclass of people lacking the full rights and protections long enjoyed by citizens.

“Additionally, without U.S. citizenship, some of these children could be rendered stateless, meaning they would not be recognized as citizens of any country. As the United Nations Refugee Agency has noted, people who are stateless often lack access to basic rights and services, such as health care, education, and the ability to travel freely. Without U.S. citizenship, these children could also end up deported to foreign countries where they have never lived and where their welfare would be endangered.”

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Concluding thoughts

Child separation is one disturbing aspect of Trump’s immigration policy, as indicated by the information examined in this post. It is harmful to the thousands of children and families affected by the policy. It is – or has been – unconstitutional. And it overlooks the evidence on how productive immigrants are and how important they are to the American economy, especially as the American population ages.

Trump disregarded the children during the shutdown, but not his self-glorifying projects….

Trump disregarded the children during the shutdown, but not his self-glorifying projects. And then the Epstein saga reemerged.

Bob Sheak, Nov 14, 2025

The Shutdown and the effects on children

The shutdown lasted 43 days, the longest federal shutdown in American history. From October 1 to November 12, 2025, government operations were partially frozen, millions of workers were affected, and the economy faced mounting pressure. Among the victims were children. Trump exacerbated a problem affecting children that already existed. Michele Kayal puts it in context (https://firstfocus.org/news/what-trump-2-0-means-for-americas-children)

“U.S. investment in the nation’s children has fallen for the third year in a row, according to First Focus on Children’s recently released Children’s Budget 2024, and actions planned by the incoming Trump Administration threaten to accelerate that trend. The report finds that the U.S. allocates less than 9% of the federal budget to children — who make up roughly one-quarter of the population. Overall, U.S. investment in children has declined nearly 6% from Fiscal Year 2023, according to the report, largely driven by deep cuts to food assistance and other life-sustaining programs. 

But it’s been worse: namely, during the first Trump Administration. In 2019, under President Trump, the United States spentmore servicing the national debt than it did on the nation’s children for the first time in history. By FY 2021, President Trump proposed eliminating 59 children’s programs, slashing $21 billion from their services, and reducing federal investment in children to just 7.32% of the budget, the lowest level since First Focus on Children began tracking in 2006.

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More on the cruelty to children

Brad Reed, a writer for Common Dreams, also reports on the cruel effects on children during the shutdown, Nov 4, 2025 (https://www.commondreams.org/snap-beneficiaries-government-shutdown).

“Beneficiaries of federal food aid are expressing anger and bewilderment at the Trump administration’s efforts to use the program as a hostage to end the current shutdown of the federal government.”

“Roughly 42 million people living in the US currently receive SNAP benefits, and The Washington Post estimates that SNAP payments account for 9% of all grocery sales in the US.”

‘On Monday [Nov 3], the Trump administration said that it would partially restart funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the wake of two district court rulings mandating that the administration use emergency funds set up by Congress to continue the program,’ but “that it would only fund around 50% of the $8 billion in total monthly benefits, while also warning that there could be delays before SNAP beneficiaries are able to access the funds.”

The administration has options. “Before the administration allowed more than 40 million people—nearly 40% of whom are children—to go without food assistance on November 1 and refused to use a contingency fund to keep SNAP running, the Republican Party passed roughly $186 billion in cuts to the program in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer.

“The bill expanded work requirements, shifted some of the cost of SNAP to the states, and restricted benefit increases, leaving millions of people vulnerable to losing their benefits.”

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Shutdown Impact on Head Start Programs

First Five Years Fund reports on this issue on Nov. 13 (https://www.ffyf.org/resources/2025/11/shutdown-2025-impact-on-head-start-programs).

“After 43 days, the federal shutdown has officially ended. In the days ahead, we urge Congress to act quickly to provide increased stability for families by passing a spending bill that funds childcare and early learning programs through Fiscal Year 2026. Passing the remaining Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill and prioritizing federal investment in early childhood care and education are vital steps for supporting young children and families.”

But, as of 11/12/25, the last day of the shutdown, “Head Start programs in 40+ states did not receive their scheduled funding on November 1st. This put many in immediate jeopardy of closing their doors.

“On November 1st, Head Start programs located in 40+ states and Puerto Rico did not receive their operational funding. These programs serve nearly 60,000 children.” This jeopardizes “access to the care, early learning, nutrition, and the stability Head Start provides. The writers add,

“In addition to those which have closed, many Head Start programs are only able to remain open by making serious concessions. Some have been forced to eliminate transportation and services, while others have had to cut back on staff or shorten operating hours. Still others have had to take out loans or open private lines of credit, raising concerns about paying interest rates and taking on associated risks if their full funding is not issued quickly once the government reopens.” 

There has been some progress. “As of Wednesday, 11/12/25, Head Start sites in 17 states and Puerto Rico had not opened.”

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Cuts to programs for the poor and “a Gleaming new bathroom in the White House.”

Jess Bidgood reports on “Lines at the Food Pantry, Billionaires at the White House” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/shutdown-trump-rich-poor.html). Here’s some of what she writes on contrasting images.

The longest government shutdown in American history is over, but Bidgood writes, “‘there are two sets of images from these last few weeks that could endure well beyond it.

“The first shows the lines snaking out of food pantries after the Trump administration chose not to use available funds to keep full food stamp benefits flowing to millions of poor Americans this month, and fought the federal rulings requiring it to make full benefits available.” This has been discussed above.

“The second, released on social media by President Trump himself, shows his gleaming new bathroom in the Lincoln Bedroom, renovated in gold fixtures and marble.”

These two images highlight “the striking difference in the president’s treatment of the rich and the poor.”

Bidgood reports on some of the effects of the cuts in programs of social aid to the poor, including cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, programs that Trump vowed to get rid of, which the president refers to as “Democratic things.” There were “sharp cuts to Medicaid by scaling back the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of coverage for the working poor.”

Party time for rich donors and friends

Bidgood continues. “Trump, whose administration is stocked with billionaires, has shown few reservations about cozying up to the wealthy during the government shutdown — nor about the optics of turning the White House into an opulent playground while it was going on.

‘Tonight, for example, he is slated to host a private White House dinner with Wall Street executives like Jamie Dimon. He held a dinner for donors to his White House ballroom project about two weeks into the government shutdown. And then, of course, he attended a glitzy Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, where guests dressed as flappers and the theme was ‘A little party never killed nobody’ — a line from a song in the film version of ‘The Great Gatsby.’”

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Epstein and Trump: More evidence on Trump and girls

The Epstein scandal is relevant in any discussion of the president’s views and contacts with children, in this case with young girls. Indeed, he has a history of denigrating women. Now, the The New York Times reports on the most recent revelations (https://www.nytime.com/live/2025/11/12/us/epstein-files-trump). The article written by Glenn Thrush, Annie Karni and Devlin Barrett was updated on the 13th. Here’s some of what they report.

“Messages in which Jeffrey Epstein discussed President Trump were among 20,000 documents posted online. President Trump called the release a distraction engineered by Democrats.”

“The mocking and accusatory voice of Jeffrey Epstein emerged from a trove of more than 20,000 emails made public by lawmakers on Wednesday [Nov 12], including his claim that President Trump once ‘spent hours at my house’ with a young woman who later accused Mr. Epstein of sexually abusing and trafficking her when she was a teenager.

“In a series of emails with friends and associates — surfacing first in a few messages selected by House Democrats and then in full by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee — Mr. Epstein described Mr. Trump as a ‘dirty’ businessman who was ‘borderline insane,’ untrustworthy and worse in ‘real life and upclose’ than the image he sought to portray to the public.

“Mr. Trump, White House officials and administration allies dismissed the disclosures as the utterances of a discredited sexual predator who had fallen out with Mr. Trump long before his crimes became publicly known. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called the emails a ‘clear distraction.’ The president labeled them a ‘hoax.’”

The reporters continue.

“Wednesday’s document dump was the latest act in the rapidly unfolding political drama engulfing Speaker Mike Johnson and his Republican majority. They shuttered the House for the past two months, in part, to forestall a bipartisan effort to force a floor vote on a bill to force the Justice Department and F.B.I. to release a separate set of documents, this one involving their investigation into Mr. Epstein and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

“That bid gathered enough supporters to force a vote within weeks, and Mr. Johnson, who has opposed considering the measure, said he would relent and bring it to a vote next week. Congress’s newest member, Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat of Arizona who was sworn in on Wednesday, provided the final signature necessary on the resolution.”

Trump’s response

“Mr. Trump urged Republicans to reject any effort to revive a discussion of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, blaming Democrats for the release of the documents in a post on social media and writing that they were ‘trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown.’”

What else to know:

  • Trump connections: The thousands of documents include numerous references to Mr. Trump, including some in which Mr. Epstein discusses their relationship. Others are innocuous. In one exchange, Mr. Epstein is apparently pitched on a transaction related to his Boeing 727 by someone who says they previously worked for Mr. Trump.
  • Pressure campaign ramps up: Top administration officials summoned Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado for a meeting in the White House Situation Room, escalating their pressure campaign against Republican lawmakers who have demanded a full release of files related to Mr. Epstein. Mr. Trump also reached out to Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of three Republican women in the House who signed a petition that calls for a vote demanding that the Justice Department within 30 days release all of its investigative files on Mr. Epstein, but she refused his pleas on the petition.
  • A de facto adviser: A recurring presence in the messages is the author Michael Wolff, who acted as an adviser to Mr. Epstein. “I believe Trump offers an ideal opportunity,” Mr. Wolff wrote to Mr. Epstein in March 2016, according to the emails, suggesting that “becoming an anti-Trump voice gives you a certain political cover which you decidedly don’t have now.”

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Concluding thoughts

Trump’s priorities favoring the rich, the big corporations, and Republicans is, by now, an old story. Overall, recent polls indicate that the president has low poll ratings for his economic policies, even among about one-third of Republicans. Meanwhile, he and his administration will do their best in trying to fool the public by distracting them from the poor economy and the flood of Epstein revelations. So, far they are failing in these efforts. Despite that, the rich and powerful continue to make record profits, Trump and his family enrich themselves, while tens of millions of Americans struggle to pay the bills.

Trump wants more nuclear weapons and protection against them

Bob Sheak, Nov. 4, 2025

Testing nuclear weapons is a bad idea

Chris Walker reports on “Trump’s Push to Resume Nuclear Weapons Testing Rests on Falsehoods,” November 3, 2025 (https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-push-to-resume-nuclear-weapons-testing-rests-on-falsehoods). Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Here’s some of what he writes.

“This past week, President Donald Trump called on the Department of Defense (DOD) to restart nuclear weapons testing ‘immediately, citing false claims about other countries’ nuclear arsenals and testing.”

“Despite Trump’s suggestion that other countries are testing nuclear weapons, only one country, North Korea, has even tested such weapons in the 21st century. Indeed, most countries ended their nuclear weapons testing in the 1990s. (The U.S. suspended tests in 1992.)”

Walker writes, “Notably, Project 2025 (the policy blueprint for the Trump administration developed by the Heritage Foundation during last year’s presidential election) includes sections that discuss nuclear testing. For example, the document calls on Trump to reject the international Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It also encourages the Trump White House to ‘move to immediate test readiness’ when it comes to the country’s nuclear arsenal.”

Opposition

Walker cites The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

If the U.S. re-starts testing its nuclear weapons, this will accelerate a new nuclear arms race, as other nuclear weapons states do the same.”

“CND calls for more global pressure to create diplomatic space for new treaties to be established, to push for nuclear weapons states to abide by nuclear disarmament obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and for the ratification of the CTBT by all the nuclear weapons states,” the organization continued.

Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people. He can be found on most social media platforms under the handle @thatchriswalker.

Share

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Tom Engelhardt offers criticism of Trump’s decision

(https://counterpunch.org/2025/09/08/a-potentially-world-ending-president). Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear and other books. Here’s some of what he writes

Nuclear war would end the world as we know it

He points out that the world now has “an estimated…an estimated 12,000 or so nuclear weapons of various kinds on this planet — enough, that is, to do in an almost unimaginable number of planets. Worse yet, two of the countries that possess them, India and Pakistan, only recently came close to launching a full-scale war with each other, even exchanging rounds of conventionally armed missiles, before agreeing to a ceasefire.  And keep in mind that, if those countries were to use nuclear weaponry against each other in what would still pass for a ‘limited’ nuclear war, it would most likely result not just in almost unimaginable local destruction but planetary devastation. Massive clouds of dust from those nuclear explosions could potentially block the sun, leaving us in what has come to be known as nuclear winter in which more than two billion people on this planet might indeed die.”

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Dan Drolletee Jr, the executive head of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists considers Trump’s proposal to start testing nuclear weapons (https://thebulletin.org/2025/10/the-experts-respond-to-trumps-proposal-to-start-testing-our-nuclear-weapons-on-an-equal-basis/#report-heading).

He points out that “Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media site, that he had instructed the Department of War (formerly the Defense Department) to return to ‘nuclear testing’ — although it’s unclear whether he was referring to testing a nuclear delivery system (such as  a rocket) or testing a nuclear explosive device (the actual bomb itself). Those are two very different things that Trump seems to be confused about.”

“In the words of prominent nuclear weapons expert Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists (who is one of the lead authors of the “Nuclear Notebook” column, published regularly in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists):

‘It’s hard to know what he means. As usual, he’s unclear, all over the map, and wrong.’ Kristensen then goes into detail, debunking a series of Trump’s assertions in his social media post.” “For example, even if China was to up the number of its warheads dramatically, that would still amount to less than a third of what the United States and Russia each already have.”

Kristensen also notes, the US already tests its missiles (without nuclear payloads) to ensure that they can launch safely and correctly: “If by testing he [Trump] means nuclear explosive testing, that would be reckless, probably not possible for 18 months, would cost money that Congress would have to approve, and it would certainly trigger Russian and Chinese and likely also India/Pakistan nuclear tests. Unlike the US, all these countries would have much to gain by restarting test testing.”

Drollete cites veteran national security reporter Walter Pincus,

“People today seem to have forgotten—if they ever knew—what a single nuclear weapon can do. The inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, whose home was turned into a nuclear proving ground, have certainly never forgotten.”

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Norman Solomon, the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, the author of War Made Invisible:  How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, and a cofounder of RootsAction.org, writes here on how

“the Dangers of Nuclear War Have Never Been Higher” (https://thenation.com/article/world/nuclear-war-military-spending-doomsday).

He is particularly concerned about Trump’s decision to resume nuclear weapons’ testing. Here’s some of what he writes.

“The dangers of nuclear war have never been higher, but political pressure to prevent it is at low ebb. Eighty years after the atomic age began with the Trinity bomb test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, words can’t possibly be adequate to describe the extent of global horrors that today’s nuclear arsenals are capable of inflicting. But mainstream US media outlets and partisan politics are routinely oblivious to the threat of oblivion.

“Despite the efforts of individuals and groups striving for arms control, the national discourse ignores the likely results of nuclear buildups—which continue to boost the actual risks of annihilation. Pronouncements from the nuclear establishment about a need to ‘maintain deterrence’ and ‘modernize’ usually go unquestioned as to the underlying assumptions. Senators and representatives praise nuclear systems with components produced in their state or district.”

“More than 700 scientists signed a letter last summer,” Solomon writes, “going beyond the focus on cost to urge the complete elimination of America’s ICBMs. The letter, organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained that ‘the US could eliminate the land-based leg of the triad tomorrow and the US public would only be safer for it.’”

“The history of the last eight decades [since the US dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan]tells us that Americans will go along with astronomical spending for nuclear weaponry if they believe it makes them safer.

“Unless we effectively make the case that the opposite is true, the nuclear arms race will continue to play out in media and politics as a pricey necessity.

In recent years, numerous activists and groups have given priority to calling for abolition of nuclear weapons. It’s a position that occupies the highest moral ground, famously seized by the Nobel laureate scientist George Wald in a widely reprinted 1969 anti-war speech at MIT. ‘Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror,’ he said. ‘We have to get rid of those atomic weapons, here and everywhere. We cannot live with them.’”

There are profits

Solomon writes, “Meanwhile, for the corporate beneficiaries of a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget and an out-of-control nuclear weapons program, the more hostility toward Russia and China the better. And the country that first brought atomic weapons into the world is continuing to lead the way toward thermonuclear destruction.’

Nuclear weapons await launch by accident, if not intention

“For those of us who have lived in the era of nuclear bombs for many decades, still being alive can seem close to miraculous. Luck and collective efforts for sanity must have been factors. Now, the generations with most of their lives potentially ahead are in a world that could instantly make that impossible. The heightened militarism of American politics is threatening to seal their fate.”

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Trump dreamily thinks of protection against foreign enemies. Calls for U.S. Iron Dome are “a Fantasy”

Dr. Laura Grego, takes this position, Common Dreams, Jan 29, 2025

(https://commondreams.org/newswire/calls-for-u-s-iron-dome-a-fantasy). She is a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Shortly after being elected president, “Trump issued an executive order mandating development of a hugely expensive, unrealistic and counterproductive homeland missile defense system. Comparisons to Israel’s Iron Dome are inaccurate and such a system has a low likelihood of success, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).”

Grego continues.

“President Trump’s vision of an Iron Dome over America is a fantasy. The apparent successes of Israel’s Iron Dome system are not relevant to US homeland defense. Iron Dome defends small areas from short-range nonnuclear missiles. It’s a vastly easier task than defending the whole country against missiles that travel 100 times further and seven times faster than those Iron Dome is built for.

“Homeland missile defense requires an entirely different kind of defense, and because ICBMs carry nuclear-armed missiles, it needs to be very reliable and effective. Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked.

“Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs. This effort has been ineffective against a real-world threat. A UCS-MIT technical analysis found that even a less-developed country such as North Korea could use long-understood countermeasures to fool midcourse defenses like the current homeland defense system, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. Proposals to get around those weaknesses by building space-based missile defenses have repeatedly been abandoned because they are expensive, very technically challenging, and readily defeated. Trump’s idea of a space-based missile defense is a bad investment.”

———-

Concluding Thoughts

Trump is again – and again – advocating policies that, if advanced, would be ineffective and harmful to the country. When it comes to nuclear weapons’ policies, the wrong decisions could destroy not only the US but all nations. And given his power, he could well launch these weapons with little or no restraint against any supposed enemy (e.g. China). He has said he is against war, but his rhetoric and decisions contradict that position.

There is opposition to such policies, but it appears too weak to sway the president. He will do what he wants to do, perhaps in a moment of anger, distraction, or mental breakdown.

The president abuses power

Bob Sheak, Oct 28, 2025

On Oct. 18, an unprecedented 7 million or more Americans joined in a reported
2,600 rallies across the country to express opposition to Trump’s self-serving
ambitions and abuse of power. The millions who rallied said loud and clearly that
they don’t want a King as president. Over his second presidency, Trump has often
acted something like a king, or as a president who is above the law. Worrisome, he
dominates the Republican Party, has support from 30% of so of the population in
MAGA, has numerous allies among the rich and powerful corporations, and can
often count on the Supreme Court.
In this post, I identify some of the evidence that supports Trump’s anti-democratic

thirst for power.

Behaves like a “king”
Chris Walker offers some evidence (https://truthout.org/articles/trump-says-hes-
not-a-king-a-majority-of-americans-believe-he-wants-to-be). He is a news writer
at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin.
In his article, Walker cites statements by Taegan Goddard, who manages the
site Political Wire. Goddard says it only took a minute to come up with examples
of how Trump has acted like a king. Goddard wrote:
“He’s raised taxes without approval from Congress; He’s canceled programs that
were duly enacted into law; He’s directed prosecutors to charge his political
opponents despite little or no evidence; He’s deployed National Guard troops over
the objections of state governors.
“Each of these actions reflects the kind of unchecked, unilateral power that
America’s founders rebelled against,” Goddard opined. “In fact, the list reads like
an updated version of the Declaration of Independence’s grievances against King
Walker also points to new polling that shows that most Americans are worried
about the functioning of U.S. democratic norms, and that they do not want Trump
to act as a king. He cites a poll, “52 percent of Americans believe Trump wants to

be a king, with only 36 percent saying they don’t believe he wants to be a king. In
a separate question, 85 percent of respondents said they don’t think Trump should

be a king, either.”

Deployment of troops just to “Democratic” cities
He has found various dubious justifications for deploying National Guard troops in
only Democratic cities and threatening the constitutional rights of Americans.
George Cassidy Payne writes on how the White House is waging war at home
((https://commondreams.org/opinion/trump-wages-war-on-us). The article was
published on Sept. 26, 2025. Here’s some of what he writes.
“President Donald Trump has treated the US military less as an instrument of
national defense than as a personal tool for enforcing political will. National Guard
units have been deployed to Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and other cities under
circumstances that critics argue constitute intimidation rather than legitimate
security operations. Citizens and green card holders have reportedly been detained
without clear legal authority, raising urgent questions about the erosion of civil
liberties. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has been rhetorically rebranded
as the Department of War, signaling a broader offensive posture not just abroad,
but potentially at home.”
Payne notes that the deployment of National Guard forces to US cities reflects
“the militarization of domestic governance.” Trump has framed these deployments
as necessary for “security,” yet the timing, targets, and accompanying
rhetoric—such as memes depicting him as a cavalry commander in Apocalypse
Now—signal political theater intended to intimidate and assert personal authority
over the citizenry.”
He is exercising anti-democratic orders and advancing “executive orders,
emergency declarations, or selective enforcement” and enabling the National
Guard and other government agents to engage in “illegal detention of residents,
militarized policing in domestic spaces, emergency declarations used to bypass
Congress, all examples of authoritarian rule.
“The consequences for democracy are tangible, Payne writes. “Norms are eroded
incrementally: The legitimacy of elections is challenged, opposition figures are
threatened, and civil liberties are subordinated to political calculation. Militarized

Democracy does not collapse in a single moment; it atrophies when citizens fail to
defend institutions designed to protect them.”
The central question for Payne is this: “Will Americans exercise the tools the
Constitution provides to resist authoritarian drift? The blueprint exists, but it
requires active defense. Democratic institutions are not self-sustaining; they
depend on the vigilance, courage, and collective action of citizens. Failure to act
risks normalizing domestic militarization and the gradual erosion of civil liberties.
In this sense, Trump’s presidency is both a warning and a test. It challenges us to
confront the vulnerabilities of our political system, to insist upon accountability,
and to recognize that democracy is not merely procedural, it is relational,
contingent on a society willing to defend it against those who would wield power

as an instrument of personal dominion.

Talks about a third term
Trump continues to toy with the unconstitutional idea of being a third-term
president, which would mean ignoring the 22nd Amendment. Kristen Welker and
Megan Lebowitz are among those reporting on this story
(https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-third-term-white-house-
methods-rcna198752). Their story was published in March 30, 2025. Here’s some
of what they write.
“President Donald Trump did not rule out the possibility of seeking a third term in
the White House, which is prohibited by the Constitution under the 22nd
Amendment, saying in an exclusive interview with NBC News that there were
methods for doing so and clarifying that he was ‘not joking.’”
“‘A lot of people want me to do it,’ Trump said in a Sunday-morning phone call
with NBC News, referring to his allies.”
“When asked whether he has been presented with plans to allow him to seek a third
term, Trump said, ‘There are methods which you could do it.’”
Welker and Megan continue.

“The White House has amplified Trump’s comments likening himself to royalty,
posting a picture of a fake magazine cover depicting the president with a crown
after the administration shot down congestion pricing in New York City.
“The White House’s post to X quoted Trump’s previous comments on Truth Social:

‘LONG LIVE THE KING!’”

Says the greatest threat is “the enemy within”
Trump has said that that the greatest threat to the United States is the “enemy
within,” by which he seems to refer to Democrats and anyone else who opposes
him or doesn’t like him.
He says he “hates” Democrats and would, at least, like to marginalize them
politically. He has a list of those he wants to punish by having his Justice
Department manipulate and distort the law. They are, in his words, “the enemy
within,” Michael Klare considers this anti-democraticTrump plan
(https://thenation.com/article/politics/trump-hegseth-military-war-diversity).
Klare is the Nation’s defense correspondent, is professor emeritus of peace and
world-security studies at Hampshire College and senior visiting fellow at the Arms
Control Association in Washington, DC. Most recently, he is the author of All Hell
Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change.
“The generals and admirals who traveled from their posts around the world to
Quantico, Virginia, last month to hear from President Trump and Secretary of War
(as he now fashions himself) Pete Hegseth have been training for over a dozen
years to fight and overcome China and or Russia in an all-out, high-end conflict.
“… they were told to put all that aside, and to dismantle the diversity measures
they had long embraced, while also mobilizing for the ‘war within.’
“Without actually coming out and saying it, Trump indicated that the primary focus
of US strategy would now shift from a focus on war with other great powers to
combatting narco-cartels in Latin America and leftist ‘insurrectionists’ in US
cities.” And without evidence, he got specific.
“Many US cities are safe, he claimed, ‘but it seems that the ones that are run by the
radical-left Democrats—[look] what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New

York, Los Angeles—they’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them
out one by one.” Then, facing the assembled officers, he added, “This is going to
be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war
from within.”
“Trump then went on to describe major Democratic-governed US cities like those

four and Portland, Oregon, as ‘war zones,’ requiring military intervention.

Arbitrarily orders the demolition of the East Wing
He has arbitrarily ordered that the East Wing of the White House be demolished.
David E. Sanger has reported at length about this. Sanger covers the Trump
administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times
journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy
and national security challenges.
In this article, Sanger emphasizes two “lessons” that capture what Trump has done.
“First is the permanence of the act — once torn down, it is hard to imagine that the
East Wing will ever be re-created. For President Trump, of course, that was the
point. He learned that lesson in his New York real estate days, when he was known
to bring out the wrecking balls to turn a vision into a fait accompli. Once his $300
million ballroom rises in its place, he may be betting that how it got there will be
all but forgotten.
“But perhaps more important, and more telling, is how Mr. Trump went about it:
the initial claim that his new ballroom would not be ‘touching’ the White House,
and the absence of notice when that changed. Then, the elaborate descriptions by
White House officials of the legal loopholes that made it perfectly fine to destroy a
wing of the people’s house without consultation about whether Mr. Trump’s

90,000-square-foot ballroom was worth the historical or architectural trade-offs.”

Concluding thoughts
There are plenty of reasons to support the millions of Americans who rallied
against Trump on “No King” day. In this post, I have considered just a few of the

prominent reasons. It is not hopeless. Recent polls indicate that a majority of
Americans are critical of Trump and what he is doing as president. And millions of
Americans are suffering financially, in part because of the effects of the president’s
tariffs and the Republican Party’s efforts to cut government programs, with the
firing of tens of thousands of federal workers. Writing in The Atlantic Magazine,
David A. Graham offers some hope
(https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/12/2026-midterms-trump-
threat.684615).
“The most important defense against losing our democracy is the same thing that
makes it a democracy in the first place: the people. An engaged electorate,
demanding clean elections and turning out in force, has been the strongest and
most consistent bulwark against Trump. “It is going to require that every single
American do everything in their power to ensure that elections happen, to ensure
that they are free and fair, and to push back on this extremism,” Skye Perryman,
the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, told me.”

Trump’s dubious claim for compensation

Bob Sheak, Oct 23, 2025

The Washington Post quoted Trump on Tuesday, Oct. 21, that “the federal government owes him ‘a lot of money’ for prior Justice Department investigations into his actions and insisted he would have the ultimate say on any payout because any decision will ‘have to go across my desk’” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/21025/10/21/trump-fbi-justice-department-47b2c9ac-aed0-11f0-ab72-a5fffa9bf3eb_story.html).  The implication is that Trump thinks he can use the power of his office and his control over the Justice Department to ensure that he will be given this money. And it is a substantial amount of money.

The Post story further explains the issue in question.

“Trump’s comments to reporters at the White House came in response to questions about a New York Times story that said he had filed administrative claims before being reelected seeking roughly $230 million in damages related to the FBI’s 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago property for classified documents….”

The flaw in Trump’s views of the case is that he did break federal law when, after the end of his first presidency, he took boxes of public documents to his Florida private estate. At the time, there were news stories about the case. One of the news reports was written by CNN journalists Kaitlan Collins, Kevin Liptak, Katelyn Polantz, Sara Murray, Evan Perez, Gabby Orr and Dan Berman, CNN, Aug 9, 2022 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/21/trumlp-fbi-justice-department/4 7b2c9ac-aed0-11f0-ab72-a5fffa9bf3eb_story.html).  Here are excerpts.

“The FBI executed a search warrant Monday at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought there, three people familiar with the situation told CNN.”

”The search began early Monday morning and law enforcement personnel appeared to be focused on the area of the club where Trump’s offices and personal quarters are, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“The FBI’s search included examining where documents were kept, according to another person familiar with the investigation, and boxes of items were taken. Following the National Archives’ recovering of White House records from Mar-a-Lap..”

It’s worth noting, as Collins and her colleagues point out,

“Christina Bobb, Trump’s attorney, said the FBI seized documents. ‘President Trump and his legal team have been cooperative with FBI and DOJ officials every step of the way. The FBI did conduct an unannounced raid and seized paper,’ Bobb said.”

“The National Archives, charged with collecting and sorting presidential material, has previously said at least 15 boxes of White House records were recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort – including some that were classified.”

The journalists also note, “It is a federal crime to remove classified documents wrongly.”

———-

Ali Velshi’s book, The Trump Indictments: The 91 Criminal Counts Against the Former President of the United States (publ. 2023), includes one having to do with the documents (pp. 54-57). Here is some of what Velshi reports.

“1. Defendant Donald J. Trump was the forty-fifth President of the United States of America. He held office from January 20, 2017, until January 20, 2021. As President, Trump had lawful access to the most sensitive classified documents and national defense information gathered and owned by the United States government, including information from the agencies that comprise the United States Intelligence Community and the United States Department of Defense.

“2. Over the course of his presidency, Trump gathered newspapers, press clippings, letters, notes, cards, photographs, official documents, and other materials in cardboard boxes that he keeps in the White House. Among the materials Trump stored in his boxes were hundreds of classified documents.

“3. The classified documents Trump stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United Cto a foreign attack. The authorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the Untied States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”

Velshi makes other points, including this one: “On August 8, pursuant to a court-authorized search warrant, the FBI recovered from Trump office and storage rooms at the Mar-a-Lago Club 102 more documents with classification markings.”

———-

Concluding thoughts

Given the official record of Trump’s handling of classified documents, it appears that his demands for $230 million in compensation border on the absurd. However, the question remains whether in the present context, in which he and his party have something like total control over the federal government, he may get away with it.

Republicans put the interests of the rich over the majority. They disregard the healthcare system in crsis

Bob Sheak

Reasons for and effects of the government shutdown

The country is in shutdown because the Democratic Party wants to ensure that the Affordable Care tax credits are extended, while Trump and the Republicans refuse to discuss the issue until the government is opened. However, whenever it comes to a vote, the Republicans are expected to reject the Democratic proposal.  

Selena Simmons-Duffin writes for NPR that the tax credits make “ACA [Affordable Care Act] health care premiums affordable for many Americans” (https://npr.org/1025/10/12/nx-s1-5570849/shutdown-aca-health-care-tax-credits}.

She explains. “The tax credits that make ACA health care premiums affordable for many Americans don’t expire until December, as Republican lawmakers note. But Democratic lawmakers want to see them extended before enrollment begins Nov. 1, and they have made that a condition of voting to reopen the government.” The Democrats fear that Trump and the Republicans will not extend the tax credits, which otherwise continue into 2026.  

“It’s not just a battle over political messaging,” Simmons-Duffin writes. “These are real health insurance marketplaces where real people — 24 million of them — buy coverage. The amount the federal government picks up for their monthly premiums makes a big difference.” She identifies “5 things to know about the healthcare fight behind the shutdown.” (1) She refers to polls indicating that a majority of respondents favor extending the tax credits. (2) The issue is urgent since open enrollment starts Nov. 1. (3) Premiums are set to shoot up next year.

(4) “When researchers at KFF analyzed 2026 insurance filings, they found that premiums will double for many consumers next year. ‘On average, we’re expecting premium payments by enrollees to increase by 114% if these enhanced tax credits expire,’ says Cynthia Cox, director of the Program on the ACA at KFF.

Sky-high premiums might drive people to risk it and go uninsured, she says. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 4 million people will become uninsured in the next few years if the enhanced tax credits expire.”

(5) “The subsidies are expensive for the government. The subsidies that kept costs down for consumers cost the federal government a lot of money. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it would cost the government $350 billion over the next decade if the enhanced subsidies were extended permanently.”

Simmons-Duffin adds: “Conservative groups that have always opposed the Affordable Care Act are against the enhanced subsidies. A coalition of groups recently argued in a letter to the president that the enhanced tax credits were meant to be temporary during the COVID-19 pandemic and that extending them will exacerbate rising health care costs.” They dismiss the harm that will cause so many people to be priced out of the healthcare market.

One of the principal arguments invoked by the Republicans is that the national debt of some 37 trillion dollars makes it irrational to add more to that debt. The truth is that Republican President and Congress are principal actors in raising this debt. Their tax cuts for the rich are so much greater than the tax-credit issue now at stake makes their argument ridiculous. Consider the following evidence reported on April 10, 2025 (https://budget.senate.gov/ranking-members-newsroom/press/news-cbo-analysis-shows-republican-tax-giveaways-add-52-trillion-to-national-debt-over-30-years).

“At the request of U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, the independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a new projection showing that the tax giveaways in the Senate Republicans’ budget proposal will add $52 trillion to the national debt over the next 30 years. The previous projection for the cost of extending the Trump tax law and the Republican leadership’s attempt to use a budget gimmick, known as “current policy baseline,” was $37 trillion over the 2024-2054 period.

This new projection follows recently released data from the Joint Committee on Taxation showing a new estimate that the Republican plan to extend the 2017 Trump tax law will cost $5.5 trillion including interest over the next decade. The budget resolution Senate Republicans passed last week allocates an additional $1.5 trillion for tax giveaways. This brings the total potential 10-year cost of the Republican tax plan, which will overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy and corporations, to more than $7 trillion. 

“It has taken over 249 years, since the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, for the U.S. to accumulate nearly $37 trillion in debt – and today the Republicans want to use a budget gimmick to add an astronomical $52 trillion to our debt with one bill with one intention: to fund massive tax giveaways for billionaires,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee. “For 30 years, Republicans have been changing the rules to give tax cuts to the wealthy – and families have been stuck paying the bill. Republicans who claim to care about fiscal responsibility should be outraged and doing everything they can to stop it. This is the Great Betrayal of working families across the country.”

———-

The current Republican agenda is far-reaching

The current political fight reflects a broader goal of the Trump administration, namely, to diminish the size and power of the federal government generally and to create a presidency with extraordinary power, that of a “king.” Coral Davenport and her colleagues provide a detailed and insightful analysis of this anti-democratic vision (https://nytimes.com/2025/09/29/us/politics/russel-vought-trump-budget.html). She highlights the role of Russel Vought, the White House budget director, in this project. Vought is a central figure in Trump’s administration when it comes to budget issues. Here is just a little of what Davenport writes.

“Now Mr. Vought, 49, is leveraging the shutdown of the federal government to further advance his goals of slashing agencies and purging employees. In a series of social media posts on Thursday, Mr. Vought said the administration had delayed or halted about $8 billion in what he called “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” a move that affects projects in 16 states, most of which are led by Democrats. He also paused about $18 billion in approved infrastructure funding for two major transportation projects primarily in New York City, whose state delegation includes Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader.

Just before the shutdown, Mr. Vought’s office had told agencies to prepare for mass firings unless Congress could strike a deal to keep the government open.”

———-

 US Healthcare System Is in Crisis

James K. Elsey, MD, FACS analyzes how the US health care system as a whole is in crisis (https://facs.org-articles/bulletin/2025/february-2025-volume-110-issue-2/us-healthcare-system-is-in-crisis). The article was published on Feb. 5 of this year. Dr. James Elsey is a professor of surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and Past Vice-Chair of the ACS [Affordable Care Act] Board of Regents.

Bear in mind, Trump, Vought, and the Republicans want to cut overall government healthcare spending, along with other government programs they don’t like.  

Here is some of what Elsey writes.

“During my 44 years of active surgical practice, I have witnessed numerous, significant, and onerous progressive changes that threaten the quality, safety, accessibility, and affordability of medical care in this country. Sadly, it has evolved into a highly corporatized system controlled by a decreasing number of increasingly powerful conglomerates where profit is often the main metric of performance and success. The stark realities of this dark devolution create daily difficulties for patients trapped in this harsh and inequitable system.”

His patients are commonly more concerned about the costs of a procedure. They ask: “How can I pay for this? Will I lose my house or my job? How fast can I get back to work?,” followed, all too frequently, by comments like: “There is no way I can afford this. I don’t have access to that level of deductible. This will bankrupt me.” And, periodically, they would come to this decision: “I just can’t proceed, doctor. This will put my family in the street. I’ll just tough it out and take my chances.”

Elsey continues. “There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with this increasingly common situation where the accessibility of healthcare, which I believe should be a basic human right, is determined by one’s financial station in life. For this to be occurring in the most affluent country in the world is not just wrong, but in my opinion, abjectly amoral.”

“This system leaves too many people out resulting in 26 million uninsured and 43 million underinsured.3 In fact, recent World Health Organization metrics suggest that the US does an incredibly poor job with healthcare delivery, with the US ranked 37th overall to comparable Western country metrics and last among the 11 highest-income countries.4 These rankings are not surprising when you consider the fact that the US healthcare delivery system consumes 17% of our current gross domestic product and is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy accounting for 66.5% of total US individual monetary defaults.5,6

Placing Profits over Patient Care

“The US healthcare system handicaps business competitiveness with a crippling 160% increase in employer healthcare costs in the last 20 years, which averages about $14,000 per employee.” Elsey writes.7 “This system also causes downward pressure on employee wages resulting in a 8.9% inflation adjusted decrease in employee household income.8 In addition, it requires many Americans and their families to line up in fields for humanitarian healthcare events mirroring the activities of many third-world countries as well as requiring increasing numbers of citizens to use the ER as their default medical care.

“This default is fragmented, costly, inefficient, and a generally poor method of providing care with a total lack of continuity. This healthcare model also drives significant racial disparities in the availability and quality of care, and in the outcomes for these patient populations.

“Currently the US, compared to similar Western countries [all of which have some form of universal healthcare] has the lowest life expectancy at birth, highest reported maternal and infant mortality, highest hospitalization rate from preventable causes, highest death rate for avoidable and treatable conditions, highest suicide rate, and highest chronic disease burden rate in the world.9

“Our system lacks an emphasis on primary and preventive care. We strain under a dysfunctional payment system. It is plagued by a costly and onerous liability industry, and it has fallen prey to the detrimental policies of the medical industrial complex and corporatized care.”

———-

Concluding Thoughts

The Trump-Republican justification for not negotiating on an end to the shutdown reflects a dubious view of the causes. Rather than suggesting that their phony concern with the nation’s fiscal issues is what drives them, the evidence indicates they want what right-wing politicians have always wanted, less government spending on healthcare and other programs for Americans, expansive deregulation, and any other policy to improve profits for big corporations and the rich.  

A hateful president

Bob Sheak, Oct. 3, 2025

This article provides five examples that illustrate this hatefulness.

#1 – The Central Park Five

Here are extracts from Wikipedia’s account (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case)/

The Central Park jogger case (sometimes termed the Central Park Five case) was a criminal case concerning the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a woman who was running in Central Park in Manhattan, New York, on April 19, 1989.[1][2] Crime in New York City was peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the crack epidemic surged.[3][4] On the night Meili was attacked, dozens of teenagers had entered the park, and there were reports of muggings and physical assaults.[2]

Six teenagers were indicted in relation to the Meili assault. Charges against one, Steven Lopez, were dropped after Lopez pleaded guilty to a different assault. The remaining five—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise (known as the Central Park Five, later the Exonerated Five)—were convicted of the charged offenses and served sentences ranging from seven to thirteen years.[5]

More than a decade after the attack, while incarcerated for attacking five other women in 1989, serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to the Meili assault and said he was the only actor; DNA evidence confirmed his involvement.[6] The convictions against McCray, Richardson, Salaam, Santana, and Wise were vacated in 2002; Lopez’s convictions were vacated in July 2022.”

Donald Trump took out ads in major newspapers for $85,000, urging that the boys suffer the death penalty. Even after they were exonerated, Trump did not publicly admit his mistake.

Tyler Page reports on the case (http://nytimes.com/2025/09/22/us/politics/trump-kirk-memorial-hate.html).

“After five teenagers were accused of assaulting and raping a young female jogger in New York City in 1989, Mr. Trump called for New York State to bring back the death penalty and told reporters, ‘I want society to hate them,’ according to a book on the president by Maggie Haberman, a New York Times reporter. (The men were later exonerated.)”

#2 – Trump vows retribution against his opponents (e.g. Democrats and critics).

During the campaign for a second presidential term, Trump told his supporters that HE is their retribution, as reported on July 25, 2025, by Jacob Knutson (https://democracydocket.com/analysis/trump-administration-weaponization-government-targeting-political-opponents).

“At a political conference in Maryland two years ago, Trump told hundreds of his supporters that he would be a tool of vengeance should they return him to the White House.

“‘I am your retribution,’ Trump said before repeating it again for emphasis.

Trump’s now returned to the White House, and he is fulfilling his promise. 

From the Department of Justices to the most peripheral federal agencies, Trump and his political appointees are weaponizing the bureaucracy to go after hundreds of the president’s political opponents and public officials who attempt to hold him accountable.

“To carry out this effort, Trump has obliterated the longstanding firewall protecting the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other agencies from being used for political ends.

“The use by Trump of the massive resources of federal law enforcement against his political opponents threatens fair elections and aims to intimidate public officials out of using their positions to hold Trump accountable. As such, it represents perhaps his most chilling move yet to undermine democracy.”

#3 – Trump’s remarks at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service

Tyler Pager reports on some of what Trump said at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service  (http://nytimes.com/2025/09/22/us/politics/trump-kirk-memorial-hate.html. Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

“As tens of thousands of people mourned the conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sunday, President Trump made a seemingly unscripted remark that summed up the retribution campaign that has come to define his second term.”

“‘I hate my opponent,’ Mr. Trump told the crowd at the memorial in Arizona, ‘and I don’t want the best for them.’”

“He spoke just minutes after Mr. Kirk’s widow, Erika, said she forgave her husband’s killer. Here is what she said.

“I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do,” she said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love.”

Pager continues. “‘At a time where the nation desperately needs to be bringing down the temperature, you’re saying he authentically doesn’t want to bring it down, or you’re saying that he authentically hates half of America,’ said Sarah Matthews, who was Mr. Trump’s deputy press secretary in the first term until breaking with him over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. ‘It just goes to show that’s what his mantra has always been. It’s just all about division and feeling like a victim and wanting to hate his opponents and get retribution.’”

#4 – Trump posts tawdry videos of Democratic Leaders Schumer and Jeffries after he met with them and ahead of the government shutdown

Kit Maher reports on this for CNN (https://cnn.com/2025/09/29/politics/trump-ai-generated-video-schumer-jeffries-shutdown). Here is some of what Maher writes.

“As the US government barrels toward a shutdown, President Donald Trump shared a racist video on social media, which appears to be AI-generated, depicting House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wearing a sombrero and a mustache and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaking in a fake voice.

“Jeffries and Schumer met with Trump just hours before at the White House to discuss the looming shutdown.

“In the video, Schumer is depicted as arguing for undocumented immigrants to get ‘free healthcare’ because minority voters hate Democrats and they could use the votes in the next election.

“As mariachi music plays in the background of the video, the fake Schumer voice says, ‘There’s no way to sugar coat it: Nobody likes Democrats anymore.’

“The fake voice goes on to echo false GOP claims about Democratic policies and slam liberal leaders as ‘woke.’”

“The video was posted on Trump’s X account as well his official Truth Social account.”

Responses

“Shortly after Trump posted the video, Jeffries wrote on X, ‘Bigotry will get you nowhere. Cancel the Cuts. Lower the Cost. Save Healthcare. We are NOT backing down.’”

“Schumer followed moments later, commenting on X, ‘If you think your shutdown is a joke, it just proves what we all know: You can’t negotiate. You can only throw tantrums.’”

“‘More than 20 million Americans are on the brink of experiencing dramatically increased premiums, co-pays and deductibles because of the Republican refusal to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits which benefit working class Americans,’ Jeffries said. ‘Working-class Americans, their health care, that’s what we’re fighting to preserve, to defend and to strengthen.’”

#5 – Trump is particularly focused on punishing Democratic cities and states  

White House Uses Shutdown to Maximize Pain and Punish Political Foes

By Tony Romm, New York Times, Oct 1, 2025

(https://nytimes.com/2025/10/01/us/politics/white-house-shutdown-punishment.html). Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.

Here are excerpts from the article.

“The Trump administration took steps on Wednesday to maximize the pain of the government shutdown, halting billions of dollars in funds for Democratic-led states while readying a plan to lay off potentially droves of civil servants imminently.

“The moves by the White House appeared both unprecedented and punitive, underscoring the risks of a fiscal stalemate that had no end in sight. It also evinced how President Trump might try to leverage the government-wide closure to achieve his agenda, slash the budget and exact revenge on his political enemies.

“In a series of social media posts, Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, said the administration had paused or moved to cancel the delivery of about $26 billion in previously approved funds across a range of programs, describing the money as wasteful or in need of further review.

Here’s one of Romm’s examples. “The timing seemed to be no mere coincidence, nor were Mr. Vought’s choices of location. He said the administration was terminating one tranche of funds, totaling about $8 billion, because it was ‘Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,’ a move that affected projects in 16 states, most of which are led by Democrats.”

Romm continues. “In a second instance, the Trump administration paused about $18 billion in approved infrastructure funding for two major transportation projects primarily in New York City, whose state delegation includes Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader. The two men have been frequent targets of Mr. Trump’s personal attacks, and the Transportation Department said the money would be held pending further review.

“Mr. Vought’s budget maneuvers marked an attempt to formalize Mr. Trump’s threat from a day earlier, when he described a shutdown as a ‘good’ opportunity to cut federal agencies, programs and benefits he disfavors in ways that would harm Democrats. He said at the time that it could include another round of mass layoffs targeting ‘a lot’ of government workers.”

Thus, “many federal employees are now furloughed, while others, including military service members and airport baggage screeners, are forced to report for work without pay. While those employees will eventually get back pay, there is no clear indication of when that might happen. Scores of critical government services are also halted or reduced significantly.”

Hours after Mr. Vought pledged to revoke some climate-related funding, the Energy Department offered scant details about its cuts. The agency said it had terminated 321 awards for more than 223 projects, claiming the investments did not ‘advance the nation’s energy needs’ and were not economically viable.’”

“Overall, the government is already expected to employ 300,000 fewer workers by December than it did in January. The substantial decline reflects a series of firings, layoffs and induced resignations that date back to the start of the president’s term, and the work of the cost-cutting campaign orchestrated by the Department of Government Efficiency.”

Concluding thoughts

In a March article for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner writes that “Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable” and he is doing what he can to satisfy this morally twisted urge (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/us/politics/white-house-shutdown-punishment.html). Wehner reminds us that “No one can say they didn’t know.” Indeed, “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.”

Wehner notes, “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.’”

“The threat this poses to American democracy is obvious,” Wehner writes. He continues. “A president and an administration with a Mafia mentality can create a Mafia state. 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.”

An alternative

Later in the article, Wehner refers to a book by Václav Havel, “written as president of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic,—a playwright, human-rights activist, and dissident whose words shook the foundations of the Soviet empire—meditated on politics, morality, and civility. He emphasized, again and again, ‘the moral origins of all genuine politics.’

“Some people considered him naive, a hopeless idealist, but he pushed back. ‘Evil will remain with us,’ Havel wrote, ‘no one will ever eliminate human suffering, the political arena will always attract irresponsible and ambitious adventurers and charlatans. And man will not stop destroying the world. In this regard, I have no illusions.”

“Havel went on: “Neither I nor anyone else will ever win this war once and for all. At the very most, we can win a battle or two—and not even that is certain. Yet I still think it makes sense to wage this war persistently. It has been waged for centuries, and it will continue to be waged—we hope—for centuries to come. This must be done on principle, because it is the right thing to do.”

Havel later wrote:

“So anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible….

Our republic and its ideals are supremely good causes. We should strive to protect them, which begins by speaking out for them, and by trying to do, in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, what Havel did during his ennobling and consequential life: to once again give depth and dimension to notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, and forgiveness. To refuse to live within the lie. And to awaken the goodwill that is slumbering within our society.”

An anti-worker administration

Bob Sheak Sept 12, 2025

The economy is not doing well for the majority

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

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

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

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

———-

Stagflation concerns rise with rising inflation and jobless claims

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

Inflation

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

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

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

Unemployment

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

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

———-

Anti-Union

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

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

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

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

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

Reed continues.

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

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

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

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

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

———-

The most anti-union president ever

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

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

Here are excerpts.

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

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

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

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

———-

Concluding thoughts

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

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

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

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

Bob Sheak, August 22, 2025

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

2020 Election

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

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

2024 Election

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

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

Trump ascendant

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

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

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

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

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

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

The memo includes the following.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

————-

Deployment of Troops into Washington D.C.

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

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

Trump’s made-up justification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What will the courts decide?

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

For now, it’s government policy

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

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

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

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

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

————-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

————

Concluding thoughts

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

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

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

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

Economic problems multiply under Trump

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump’s Tariff Debacle

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

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

China.

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

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

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

The European Union

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

Canada and Mexico

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

Hope that Trump will retract the tariffs

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

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

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

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Mass Firing of federal workers

Lauren Kaori Gurley writes on the high unemployment in July

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

is the labor reporter for The Washington Post.

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

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

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

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

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The Bleak Future of Trumponomics

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

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

The global importance of the dollar is now threatened

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

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

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

The dollar’s role as global reserve currency

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

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

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

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

International faith in the dollar has been jolted

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

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

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

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Trump’s Unforgivable Sin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prices up, employment down

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

Cut backs in the Social Safety Net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding thoughts

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

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