A year of distress under Trump
Let’s do a year in review, lest we forget President Donald Trump’s rampage over the rules — written and unwritten — of the presidential code.
On his first day, Trump pardoned 1,500 Capitol rioters. Some harmed police officers on Jan. 6, 2021. How sweet the smell of revenge, freeing the armed mob that tried to overturn the 2020 election.
That same day, Trump shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development to turn our open hand into a clenched fist toward the world.
That was the first page of a playbook prepared by one Russell Vought behind the curtain of the Heritage Foundation.
Next order of business, to eviscerate the federal government, especially the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services. Career government lawyers and medical researchers got tossed overboard, by the hundreds.
The Smithsonian Institution’s telling of our past — warts, slavery and all — is up next.
Antisemitism was just another word for suing and harassing elite universities. All part of Trump’s populist jazz and long list of grievances.
Trump got every Cabinet pick confirmed, even a hawk and a quack: Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, and Bobby Kennedy at HHS. He told Kennedy to “go wild” on his crusade against the medical establishment.
But the chilling crux is the violence Trump sets on civilians at home. Federal masked agents wrestling residents to the ground in neighborhoods, workplaces and child care centers recall how Nazi Germany began its social control and terror.
We the people must organize and peacefully resist these scenes in cities Trump hates, like Chicago. That does not mean being meek. Active nonviolence is the best way to bring social change.
Migrants, legal or not, disappear off the streets and are detained or deported in flagrant abuses of presidential power.
We can’t just watch anymore.
Likewise, the National Guard should not be on Washington’s streets and Metro stops. It’s a cardinal rule of the military that they are trained for foreign wars, not policing the population at home.
But remember the rules: There are no rules in Trump’s cunning and criminal mind. The country is his own real estate to do “whatever I want.”
The rogue Supreme Court and Republican Congress are accomplices in Trump’s rampage, while he strips powers the Constitution gives to Congress.
Trump fired two women cultural leaders overnight: Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Deborah Rutter, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Trump’s daily damage done to presidential utterances cannot be counted. Richard Nixon was mean, vulgar and offensive on private Watergate tapes.
But Trump’s “dis-coarse” is mean, vulgar and offensive at all times and places.
Jamie Stiehm is a journalist and history buff.
