Are those who are actively seeking to dismantle the government and turn the US into a selfish, xenophobic, insular, backward nation. Trump and his minions. And their fans.
- Trump thinks there’s a big water faucet in California that the military turned;
- Trump halts funding to government grants to clear them of ideological thinking;
- Trump, halting funding for anything to do with fighting climate change, will go down as one of the greatest villains of history;
- Robert Reich’s comments about Trump’s actions;
- Why Trump’s freeze on science funding will undermine American leadership in the world;
- How Trump’s actions this past week have unleashed more crime.
This is hilarious.
JMG, 28 Jan 2025: Felon Lies That “Military Turned On The Water” In CA
Trump apparently thinks there’s some big faucet somewhere that someone can turn — he thinks the military actually did that! — to direct water from the northern part of the state to the southern part. This is nonsense in so many ways. California responded, as shown in the photo above. Trump is such a moron. The frightening thing is that millions of his fans apparently believe everything he says.
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Trump, thinking he is a dictator, demands that funding to hundreds of federal grant programs be frozen until they can be examined to make sure there’s no ‘woke’ or ‘DEI’ infecting them.
NY Times, 28 Jan 2025: How the Trump Administration Is Scrutinizing Federal Spending, subtitled “A sweeping directive from the Office of Management and Budget requires federal agencies to subject hundreds of grant programs to ideological litmus tests.”
The Trump administration has ordered federal agencies to subject hundreds of grant programs that account for trillions of dollars in spending to several ideological litmus tests, including whether the programs provide funding or support for abortion, “illegal aliens” or diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Right thinking will be rewarded; bad thinking will be punished.
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The Atlantic, Russell Berman, 28 Jan 2025: ‘It’s an Illegal Executive Order. And It’s Stealing.’, subtitled “Trump wants to go around Congress and freeze enormous amounts of federal spending. Can he?”
Buried within one of the dozens of executive orders that President Donald Trump issued in his first days in office is a section titled “Terminating the Green New Deal.” As presidential directives go, this one initially seemed like a joke. The Green New Deal exists mostly in the dreams of climate activists; it has never been fully enacted into law.
The next line of Trump’s order, however, made clear he is quite serious: “All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” The president is apparently using “the Green New Deal” as a shorthand for any federal spending on climate change.
Trump, if only on this issue, will remembered as one of the great villains of history. Or, fancifully, an alien in disguise bent on destroying the Earth, and the human species.
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Robert Reich, 28 Jan 2025: Clearly illegal, subtitled “This isn’t about cutting the size of government. It’s about further concentrating power in Trump’s hands.”
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Vox, Celia Ford, 28 Jan 2025: Researchers are terrified of Trump’s freeze on science. The rest of us should be, too., subtitled “Government support is essential to science. The Trump administration kneecapped it.”
Less than two days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Evangeline Warren, a sociology PhD student at the Ohio State University, logged into a professional development workshop alongside a hundred other young researchers. Just about everyone online was either employed by, or receiving grants from, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest single funder of biomedical and behavioral research in the world.
Mid-presentation, a senior organizer interrupted, informing attendees that the NIH was no longer “allowed to do any external communication,” Warren said. Without further explanation, the video call ended.
Science is a collective event in this era, done by societies, not tribes. Do Trump and his fans not realize that if they hobble American science, other nations will step in and take America’s place as the world leader?
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There is no energy crisis, many have pointed out. It’s easier to wreck things, than to build them.
Vox, Dylan Matthews, 27 Jan 2025: Trump rescinded a half-century of environmental rules. Here’s what that could mean., subtitled “Trump wants to ‘unleash American energy.’ What does that mean?”
If you pick through Donald Trump’s parade of executive orders upon taking office on January 20, you’ll discover many that revoke orders made by Joe Biden. But in one, Trump dug even further back: He revoked an executive order issued by Jimmy Carter in 1977, nearly half a century ago.
Carter’s order gave the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), a branch of the White House, the authority to issue binding regulations governing how federal agencies must comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Trump, by revoking it, takes away that power from the CEQ.
This may seem rather technical, but Trump in effect set off a process that could lead to very meaningful changes in the way the federal government handles environmental reviews for everything from oil pipelines to solar farms to highways to light rail systems to national parks.
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Trump and crime.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 28 Jan 2025: What “law and order”? Trump’s first week will only unleash more crime, subtitled “Our felonious president can only benefit from a climate of fear and chaos — that’s why he’s eager for more”
Donald Trump’s endless first-term bleating about crime and how he was the only one who could bring an end to it was always a joke. It took on new levels of ridiculousness when he spent the next four years accumulating a dizzying number of felony indictments and, eventually, 34 convictions. (There would certainly have been more if he had actually faced trial for stealing classified documents and attempting to steal an election.)
Trump’s alleged crimes weren’t bloodless “white-collar” matters, either. Jan. 6, of course, was a violent assault on the Capitol. A civil jury also found Trump liable for sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll, which is anyone’s definition of a violent crime. But American political discourse left behind quaint concepts like “making sense” years ago. Trump forged ahead with claims that he would “dismantle the gangs, the street crews and the criminal networks that are ravaging our towns,” even though he and his Jan. 6 co-conspirators look an awful lot like one of those “criminal networks.”
Trump’s lies are exposed, first of all, by the fact that crime rates fell steeply under Joe Biden. And now, Trump just spent his first week back in the White House doing everything he possibly could to increase the levels of street crime ordinary Americans may face. His most overt pro-crime move, of course, was literally springing a bunch of violent criminals from federal prisons with the Jan. 6 pardons. One such person, Daniel Ball, was arrested again hours later on a federal gun charge. His crimes during the insurrection included assaulting police officers and throwing an explosive device inside the Capitol building. On Sunday, another pardoned rioter, Matthew Huttle, was killed by a police officer after “an altercation” during a traffic stop. He had previous convictions for beating a toddler, drunk driving and “disorderly conduct” stemming from battering his partner. Family members of other rioters have expressed fear that their pardoned relatives could come after them, since many of those convicted had prior histories of domestic violence.
Note: one of the Jan 6th rioters whom Trump let out of prison a week ago has assaulted police and been killed. It’s Trump unleashing crime on the nation, not immigrants.
