(Dobbs) Just a Day in the Life of America Under Donald J. TrumpEven when he is gone, the damage will take time to be fixed.
And millions of Americans still think this guy is helping America? Look at the news yesterday. Just the news yesterday. Just a day in the life of America under Donald J. Trump. • SO MUCH FOR THE FIRST AMENDMENT…. The Pentagon, which doesn’t make a move without the president’s approval, fired the publisher and the editor and the Middle East correspondent for Stars and Stripes. The reason? The military newspaper, supported by the government but, by tradition and law, independent of the Pentagon, must “refocus its content away from woke distractions.” The woke distraction? Stories like this, “Military families face food insecurity.” Apparently in the Trump administration, reporting on hardships for military families is “woke.” Especially during Trump’s war with Iran, where the deployment of the U.S.S. Lincoln carrier strike group, coming up on nine months at sea was, in Trump’s own words, “not nearly long enough.” The editor in chief, Erik Slavin, was given notice with an amazing statement one would not expect in a business the First Amendment is supposed to protect: “According to the notice, I am being fired for stating in a CBS interview that censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line.” The only entity that crossed a red line is Trump’s Pentagon. But that’s not the only story from yesterday about his attacks on the First Amendment…. • “TRUTH IS NOT AND CANNOT BE DEFAMATION” After a left-wing think tank called the Center for American Progress reported last month that Trump’s stationing of national guard troops in Washington DC has not, as he has claimed, “rescued our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor,” he sued. Personally. For defamation. It is no such thing. Statistics on homicide, violent crime, and gun victimization show that in Washington and other cities where the Guard was deployed, crime already was down, before he ever sent in the troops. What Trump is doing is taking credit for something he didn’t cause. But consistent with his inability ever to cry uncle, he has sued the Center for American Progress for $5 billion. That’s what he does when political rivals berate him. He doesn’t always win, but what he does accomplish is a drain on their resources to fight his vituperative lawsuits. The Center’s lawyer hit it on the head when he said, “Truth is not and cannot be defamation.” • PAY TO PLAY One of the biggest private prison companies in the U.S., the GEO Group, won big profitable deals to house immigrants targeted for deportation, contracts worth $165 million. First came an $85 million contract to run an ICE detention center in Colorado, then a second contract for $80 million to run one in North Carolina. Handing these prisons to GEO is questionable on the face of it since both state and federal inspectors have charged the company with maintaining substandard conditions in their facilities, which it denies, but even smellier is what GEO did in return: three days after the Colorado contract was finalized, a million dollar donation to MAGA Inc, which supports Donald Trump, then only two days after announcing the contract for North Carolina, a second donation for more than $400,000. Naturally, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security rejects the insinuation that there’s even a sniff of “pay to play.” It insists, “The competitive selection of federal contractors is a heavily regulated process” and maintains that it “runs this process by the book.” Yeah. Donald Trump’s book. “YOU’RE AT WAR WHEN YOU’RE ATTACKED, AND WE GOT ATTACKED.” That’s not the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran speaking. It’s Mark Carney, the prime minister of America’s closest neighbor, Canada. To summarize Carney’s reason for withdrawing yesterday from long-running negotiations on trade, Canada was double-crossed. At the last minute, he asserts, the United States tried to add terms on steel, aluminum, cars, and lumber that were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” Referring to the U.S., Carney told his citizens in a nationwide television address yesterday morning, “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.” Of course the U.S. tells a different story, asserting that Canada insisted on concessions to which the United States could not agree. But with Donald Trump’s erratic and unreliable track record on tariffs and Iran and everything else, who are you going to believe? Which leaves the relationship between two long-term allies more fractured than ever. It will cost Canadians, but it will cost us too, because Carney told his people that the United States “asked too much and offered too little,” leaving Canada no choice but to retaliate “dollar for dollar.” “You’re at war when you’re attacked,” he said, “and we got attacked.” • THIS IS WHAT THEY CALL “AMERICA FIRST?” Coming out of nowhere, the president posted Friday that under the auspices of helping American beef producers, he was opening the door to reducing tariffs for overseas beef producers and importing foreign beef. More than 650 million pounds of it. Is there a disconnect here? He’s helping American producers by lowering barriers to importing foreign product? The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association sees the disconnect. Its chief executive said in a statement, “While America’s cattle producers share the goal of keeping groceries affordable for consumers, flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd.” But as with most other issues, rebuilding America isn’t necessarily Trump’s greatest concern. The cost of ground beef to Americans has shot up by almost 25% since he came back to the White House. By reducing prices even though it’s the antithesis of America First, holding onto political power is his greatest concern. • THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS STICKING ITS NOSE WHERE IT DOES NOT BELONG For three quarters of a century, the American Bar Association, which is a non-partisan professional organization, has been the official accrediting power for America’s law schools. It evaluates the quality of the education that almost 200 law schools provide, and its evaluations guide the federal government when considering aid to law schools not connected to a university. Its function is described as a quality check on legal education. Now Trump’s Department of Education wants to strip that duty from the ABA. Its charge? That the American Bar Association has a liberal bias and promotes DEI— Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion— which in Trump’s Washington are dirty words. Last year Trump promised to fire the “radical left” organizations that accredit American schools. This is another step. • CUTS HAVE “SHAKEN ANY SENSE OF STABILITY AS TO WHETHER THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS A RELIABLE FUNDER.” Harvard is still under attack. Accused of antisemitism and, yes again, DEI, Trump’s government has been cutting funding for Harvard, and that doesn’t mean for its students’ education. It means for research into medicine, science, economics. The National Institutes of Health for example, which oversees some of the most important research in the fields of health, has seen grants and other federal funding drop since Trump took over by 18 percent. After he froze more than $2 billion to Harvard last year, a federal judge said he couldn’t do that. But, in keeping with its policy of flouting federal orders it doesn’t like, Trump’s administration has continued some cuts anyway. That’s why professor of social epidemiology Nancy Krieger says it has “shaken any sense of stability as to whether the federal government is a reliable funder” and asks, “What is the knowledge lost? And what are the myriad ripple effects for the economies of the cities and towns that depend on universities as major employers?” • “GUARANTEEING THE MIDTERMS” That’s what Trump said would happen if his patriotically unethical, arguably illegal plans to manipulate the upcoming elections were to pass. Some of them didn’t, but Friday the Postal Service announced regulations that would advance that goal. Although Trump himself has voted by mail several times— including the Florida primaries this past week— he calls it “cheating.” What’s behind that is obvious: statistics show that more Democrats use mail-in ballots than Republicans. So the Postal Service that he controls says that in states that do not release voter data to the federal government— which is constitutionally illegal because the states and Congress have the authority to run elections and control election data, not the White House— it will not deliver mailed ballots to election officials. “The Constitution does not grant the president any specific powers over elections.” That was the conclusion of a federal judge in Massachusetts in a ruling on an election challenge there. Predictably, the Trump administration has ignored her. Share And that is a day in the life of America under Donald J. Trump. He’s not helping America. He’s hurting it. Even when he is gone, the damage will take time to be fixed.
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