If you ask Trump, his lackeys, or his supporters how things are going they are bound to tell you that things are looking up. I have more hope. Actually, Trump is running into problems left and right, with more storms brewing. If you step back and think about it, there’s a big list:
For all his talk of government efficiency, DOGE has been very inefficient in their record keeping. As reported by the New York Times, their website has been riddled with falsehoods, exaggerations and stupid mistakes. More than once they have had to take down receipts off their wall and massively revise downward what they have saved.
So far, Trump has done absolutely nothing to address the issue that got him elected: food inflation. While he has been distracted with culture war issues and berating war-time presidents, food prices are actually up slightly. This is mostly due to high egg prices, which is due to avian flu and price gouging. He now says he is going to do something about the problem, but, in reality, his unelected “special government employee” terminated people responsible for monitoring the problem and developing a vaccine; then scrambled to rehire them, slowing the response and worsening the crisis. Trump says that the USDA and the CDC will have all the resources they need, but Iowa Public Radio has reported staffing shortages at the USDA main office in Ames, Iowa. These are the people in the middle of developing a bird flu vaccine. The USDA and CDC are left trying to combat an epidemic while being gutted. It simply is not possible. Trump’s solution to the problem is more of the same. Which means more federal funding for more dead chickens and more boots on the ground at the UDSA. So much for the price of eggs. Not to mention the fact that this could become the next pandemic.
As for “drill, baby, drill” nobody is doing it, and probably no one is going to. Oil companies want tight supply and high demand. They’re making good profits. They are going to exercise “capital discipline”– meaning not investing in what will become excess capacity. They (unlike Trump) know that the future demand for oil is probably going to go down as the rest of the world tackles climate change.
Then there is the Ebola epidemic already occurring that DOGE “accidentally” cut finding to. What Musk doesn’t seem to understand is that if someone makes a “mistake” with a global health crisis, which Ebola could become, you risk hundreds of thousands if not millions of people dying. This is no time for “accidents.” It is time to give decent people who really know what they are doing the resources they need and let them do their jobs. These are people risking their lives trying to keep the next pandemic from hitting America. They needn’t take orders from a man whose greatest responsibility was an unmanned rocket.
Closer to home, at least one child is now dead due to the policies of one of Trump’s controversial cabinet picks. There is now a measles outbreak in Texas within a community with historically low vaccination rates. Kennedy is falsely asserting that such outbreaks occur every year. In reality, measles was nearly eradicated in the US by 2000. Only now, as conspiracy theories have led to lower vaccination rates, has it made a resurgence. Meanwhile, the CDC refuses to listen to the vaccine experts responsible for creating our yearly flu vaccine. Last year that vaccine saved 3,700 lives and prevented 6 million illnesses, according to the CDC.
And, the EPA has angered its own people by dropping a lawsuit against a chemical company poisoning the children of a majority Black community with a mutagenic carcinogen. Apparently ensuring these kids don’t die young from cancer is “wasteful” and too “woke.” They’re the victims of a purge of anything called “environmental justice.”
At the same moment, Trump’s lackeys in Congress wasted time putting forward a bill they knew Democrats would vote down which did, amongst other things, take power from the NCAA over policy decisions surrounding transgender athletes. Of the approximately 500,000 athletes in the NCAA less than ten identify as transgender.
All the while, on the world stage, Trump has now managed to start a trade war, with our closest ally, that inevitably will spur inflation and has rattled stock markets. Why? Trump seems to have forgotten that far more drugs flow from the US into Canada than the other way around.
His ideas for Gaza have created pushback not only because his proposals are in violation of international law, but as his own followers have pointed out, turning Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East” is inevitably going to require billions of investment in nation building and American boots on the ground.
Lastly, Trump’s strongman tactics toward Zelensky may seem like a power play from “The Art of the Deal.” But his geopolitical protection racket is quickly causing Trump to become a pariah on the international stage. Trump’s “America First” agenda may prove less popular when people see the cruelty with which he addressed Zelensky.
Trump is more vulnerable than he realizes. He can’t spin straw into gold. However intimidating his actions may seem now, he has already begun to falter. For all the power that Trump believes he wields through his flurry of executive orders, in reality he is being forced into court and losing right and left. Is it really “strength” to put oneself in the position of having to disobey a court order and create a constitutional crisis in order to advance one’s agenda?
For all his “flooding the zone” Trump’s first weeks in office have created the confusion and chaos that nearly got him removed from office the last time around. Trump says he came into office much more prepared this time. He did. But no amount of preparation can change the fact that Trump’s entire ethos is one of entropy.
Progressive Without Apology 