POST 1145

It’s no surprise that Trump is making moves to erase the entire Biden presidency. It’s not just Biden’s legacy he’s after. He’s trying to erase Biden from future history books. The reason his infantile tantrum is no surprise is because that’s what he attempted to do to the Obama presidency during the first time Trump attempted führer-ship. How insecure does one have to be to need to erase everyone else?

But there’s more to it.

Take a look at the Trump lineup of demolition as described by Heather Cox Richardson on January 24. It is his standard everything, everywhere all at once sowing of chaos and suffering.

The Guardian reported today that incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered a halt to almost all foreign aid, with the exception of military assistance to Israel and Egypt. The Guardian notes that this order is likely unlawful, since Congress sets the budget and in 1974 declared it illegal for the president to impound funds. Still, a source foresaw the end of the global influence the U.S. has had since World War II, telling The Guardian: “Freezing these international investments will lead our international partners to seek other funding partners—likely US competitors and adversaries—to fill this hole and displace the United States’ influence the longer this unlawful impoundment continues.”

As Peter Baker of the New York Times notes, new president Donald Trump is trying to break NATO by demanding that members increase military spending to 5% of their nations’ economies, although the U.S. currently spends about 3% of its GDP on defense. If we were to meet that requirement, Baker points out, the U.S. would have to increase its defense budget by $567 billion a year. Isabel van Brugen of Newsweek reports that an Italian news agency says that Trump intends to pull about 20,000 U.S. troops from Europe and wants Europe to pay to maintain the rest.

Trump has undertaken to dismantle the postwar democratic government at home, too. He has stopped the funding for repairing roads, bridges, airports, and ports that passed Congress in a bipartisan vote in 2022, as well as taken away funding for new solar manufacturing plants and other new systems to address climate change.

He has frozen all travel and communications at the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” one researcher told Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Mark Johnson of the Washington Post. “This is like a meteor just crashed into all of our cancer centers and research areas.”

And, of course, Trump has declared a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In his revoking of LBJ’s Executive Order 11246, itself based on FDR’s Executive Order 8802, he explicitly rejected the principles for which the Americans fought in World War II.

Mara Gay was on Nicolle Wallace’s program Deadline: White House in the afternoon following Trump’s inaugural address. Her comments were so striking that I transcribed them and offer them to you in this PDF – because our current reality is so very not normal. We’ve had extremists and hate mongers and un-American traitors before, but as for all things Trump, now there is no bottom.

There is far more like that to report, but for now, a useful question is, “How are Trump voters going to feel when the consequences of all these things hit them, like”

When workers fail to show up to build that new I-75 bridge over the Ohio River because Trump cut the project and eliminated their jobs, or when the roads and bridges in your town crumble and nobody shows up to fix them;

When investment in those chips plants dries up, manufacturing jobs stop coming home and we are at the mercy of the Chinese who have no mercy for us;

When FEMA funds aren’t available for victims of catastrophes that happen;

When nobody prepares for the next pandemic and it wipes out our grannies and our little kids;

When funds for research for Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease, obesity and Alzheimers have been cut off (they already have been) and you and your loved one are left hopeless;

When NATO has been made a eunuch and Putin overruns Ukraine and then sends troops into Poland and the Baltic States;

When Xi invades and swallows Taiwan;

When your daughter doesn’t get treatment for her rare disease;

When global warming increases unchecked because we defunded renewable energy projects and encouraged “drill, baby, drill” and now the super hurricane is on the way with no presidential Sharpie to redirect it;

When Proud Boys, 3 Percenters, Oath Keepers and other hoodlum vigilantes are attacking state capitols, our election volunteers, our cops and even you because you asked a tough question at a town hall and nobody is coming to help because our law enforcement agencies have been gutted.

When Trump’s economically counterproductive tariffs and his stupid head abandonment of the fight against public health threats like bird flu are fully developed, I’m pretty sure that the price of eggs will be the least of your worries.

There are already signs of major disapproval of Trump for what he’s doing, including his sycophant, dishonest reprehensible, loyal-only-to-Trump (and who cares about the law?) cabinet picks. A key Trump horrible last week was his politicized idiocy of falsely assigning blame for the midair tragedy to DEI and making attacks on imaginary Democratic policies. His evidence for his claims is “common sense,” but of course there is nothing common or sensical to Trump’s statements. Let’s hope he continues to be this offensive to everyone and he loses yet more public approval.

Most of our last 100 years have been a bulwark of democracy against fascism. We fought wars and sacrificed our young to stop that cruelty, but oligarchs and fascist believers starting with Reagan have been chipping away at our democracy for decades. Now Trump is demolishing it in giant explosions, aided and abetted by cowardly, hypocritical Republicans in Congress.

Here’s the high, hard one:

You did this, Trump voter. You and the 6 million who voted for Biden but stayed home on election day 2024. I’m hoping that there is still time for you to wake up, to join the rest of us and

• REBEL!

Breaking News!

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• Last week Jim Acosta left CNN. It was a shameful moment when the network pushed him out but it was another statement of courage and integrity for Acosta. Recall that he is the White House correspondent who withstood Trump’s false, demeaning and cowardly attacks for four years and did it with dignity and decency. Kudos to Jim Acosta.
• Watch his announcement on Substack here.
• His final message to us for now is a descriptor of how he works and is a timely and powerful mantra for all of us right now:

Don’t give in to the lies.

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Don’t give in to fear.

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Hold on to the truth

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Hold on to hope.

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JA

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