I never thought of my birthday as a particularly significant event. Plus it’s pure hearsay because I can’t remember being born at all. And it would be fine with me to keep my current age a couple of more years. But now WAMC has decided to start its Spring fund drive on my birthday. So I’ve decided to treat all contributions to the station as a birthday present and cheer for each one!
That said, I’m worried about our country’s future. Trump’s campaigned on “making America great again” but it’s not clear to me whether Mr. Trump, and some of the people in Congress who insist on supporting and enabling his most outrageous behavior, actually embrace that objective.
- He appoints people with zero credentials to top positions in the country, including a Secretary of Defense who has no experience administering any large enterprise or keeping us safe and out of war except to say no, we won’t fight.
- He is hollowing out the State Department whose job it has been to keep us safe.
- He and his family have been collecting enormous sums from deals around the globe that are openly designed to influence American policy. Mexican buyers, for example, justified “Buying [memecoins as] in essence, [a way of] giving money to the Trump family — [as] ‘an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.’” Provisions of the Constitution were designed to prevent a president gaining personal advantage by surrendering American interests.[i]
- He undermined alliances that have stood for many decades, ruins America’s reputation and bargaining position by making America an untrustworthy partner in the face of looming battles over the arctic.
And it’s not clear who he is working for at home. He told us he loved the uneducated and those who worked with their hands but
- Trump’s tariffs will increase what they pay at the market
- Trump’s budget would decrease the benefits they get from government, including protection of their health.
- He’s canceled the infrastructure programs and cut back our investment in science all of which provide jobs for those of us who work with our hands and our backs.
- He says he’s doing all that to balance the budget but all it would take to balance the budget would be to repeal the Bush and Trump tax bills.
I get that Biden and other Democrats didn’t stress deindustrialization enough but Biden’s policies and the legislation Democrats passed dealt with exactly that, like funds for construction of chip factories, for example, but of course Trump has been threatening to scrap the ‘horrible’ chip program.
I will refrain from speculating about why he does all he can to undermine his stated objectives and the welfare of the people he has convinced to support him, whether he respects them or simply treats them as willing to follow him regardless of the actual impact on them or our country. But we’ll all go under if he’s not stopped.
[1] U.S. Const., Art. I, sec. 9, par. 8 and Art. II, sec. 1, par. 7.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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