Arthur E. Sowers is a resident of Harbeson.
When asking the internet to “share how many say they agree that President (Donald) Trump is a ‘dangerous dictator’ whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,” the answer is 52% of 5,025 U.S. adults. Here we are, 100 days into Trump 2.0, and we have a trainwreck instead of a “golden age.” It is not my opinion. It is in the many polls that just came out.
Trump was going to “fix everything.” Our “stable genius” promised a “golden age.” Against the advice of a majority of economists, corporate CEOs and centuries of economic history, he wildly increased tariffs on every other country. This ended up making them all mad at him and at the USA. Canadians are really mad at Trump. Wall Street lost trillions of dollars in wealth in less than a week. Many experts are predicting a recession later this year. Some business experts are saying there will soon be empty shelves in stores. I have seen three articles that say even Trump’s deportation numbers are inflated.
Our revolutionary and rich electric car genius Elon Musk promised Trump that he could easily find $2 trillion worth of government waste to eliminate. The BBC website has an article, posted Saturday, titled “How much has Elon Musk’s (Department of Government Efficiency) cut from US government spending?” The BBC has “BBC Verify,” sort of like a fact-checker, which analyzed what it could find on the DOGE project. Well, the long article said — as of its date — all it really found was $0.03 trillion (3%) to cut and that there were accounting errors on the DOGE data. An article on another study estimated 7.5%. Other articles, however, report wider and deeper budget cuts on important functions and many tens of thousands of fired employees. Some agencies had to rehire those fired employees. Negative polls and decreases in Tesla car sales indicate that Musk flopped, too. But this situation is still developing.
The legal picture of Trump 2.0 is even worse. Trump blasted out a truckload of executive orders, executive memos and other executive actions. And all that was met with a truckload of lawsuits, judge’s court orders and overall chaos, all the way up to the Supreme Court. All the dust will not settle for years, and some of the dust may never settle. Some of Trump’s buddies want him to just ignore all the courts and judges and maybe Congress, too. Polls say that even a majority of Trumpers want judicial review. Other experts say we are already in a constitutional crisis. Two judges have already been arrested for “obstructing” Trump. On Monday, this article came out online: “Karoline Leavitt Boasts Trump Wouldn’t Hesitate to Arrest SCOTUS Justices.”
Related to the legal situation, the long article, “Connecting the Dots: Trump’s Tightening Grip on Press Freedom,” reminds us of Trump’s long list of pressure tactics and lawsuits against press, news channels and our freedom of speech, which he keeps saying are “the enemy of the people.”
Did I leave out something else that is important? Out of many highly important issues, high on my list is that Trump and “Make America Great Again” believers both think that climate change is a hoax. The data says the recent years are the hottest on record and getting hotter. The science is proven. Abnormally high storm damage from extreme weather, including wildfires, in the last five years is averaging 100% higher than storm damage the five years before that. And, 10 years ago, storm damage was much less. Articles I read about other countries report that large majorities there understand the problem. Only among the radicalized far right in the USA do we have people, including Trump, who can’t see the elephant in the room.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
