I think we can know the policies of the parties and if they are being executed against. What policies are you most concerned with?
Among my greatest concern about this new administration are:
(1) Ignoring the separation of powers and contravening what Congress has legislatedâand a president has signed into law. For example, if the President and his allies think that the Dept of Education should be abolished, they should work through Congress to undo what they did in the past.
(2) Ignoring the rule of lawâand going ballistic and demanding the impeachment (and even arrest) of judges who donât agree with them. That is a fundamental attack on our system of government. We have checks and balances for a reason. Which leads to #3:
(3) Trump, nor any president, is the kingâdespite what a White House official released image suggests. Few things are more fundamental to Americaâs foundingâand our first Presidentâ than not being ruled by a king. (There is so much talk of Trump serving a third term, including work-arounds of the two term limit based on word-games. However, I am also concerned of a return to declaring elections âstolenâ and having an outright military coup that keeps the president in power. I canât believe Iâm saying that. It seemed a ridiculous idea a few years ago. But the man who tried to stage a coup when he lost is now the President.)
(4) Abandonment of âinnocent until proven guiltyâ and the circumvention of due process. Do you find this frightening? (Or is that complex and nuanced and we donât know what is actually happening?)
(5) Illegal firing people without legal authority to do soâand claiming âfired for causeâ when many of these fired people just had performance reviews that gave them glowing evaluations. Those will probably be reversed in court after enormous suffering to the fired and great financiala cost to taxpayers who will be paying the lawyersâand paying any awarded damages for illegal firings.
Those are just a few.
If I wanted to destroy the American government and our economy, I would be hard pressed to devise a more damaging and fast-faced and reckless strategy than what we are watching unfold daily. And I feel totally ashamed that many evangelicals I know have helped make this travesty possible. (I am an ordained evangelical ministerâbut I stopped using the term âevangelicalâ several years ago when its meaning was co-opted for political purposes and redefined.)
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There are so many things that could easily be added to that list, too. He pardoned more than a thousand terrorists as practically his first act, including such people as those who shouted âfuck the copsâ while physically beating those cops and practically drowning them in bear spray; the guy who wandered the Capitol with zip-tie handcuffs as his compatriots tried to hunt down members of Congress they particularly disliked; and the guy wearing the âCamp Auschwitzâ T-shirt.
He called those people âhostages.â Criminals who tried to destroy our whole way of life and subvert our government. And he was the guy who had expressed frustration that he wasnât allowed to just tell the army to shoot peaceful protesters.
America has long been a place where people disagreed passionately with one another about policy questions of all sorts. And disagreement on policy doesnât mean the people who donât agree with you are evil. Everyone understands this. But having an anti-American like Trump being talked about as though his disagreements with the rule of law and with the constitution are just another iteration in that long policy debate is ludicrous. The Republic is in peril in a way it has not been since the civil war. The difference is that the guy at the head of the destruction of the Union is not the president of a breakaway confederacy in Richmond; heâs the president of the Union itself. This is not a policy debate. It is a fight over whether we will have a country worth fighting for, when this is over.
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Indeed. You could rightly say that I quit listing the atrocities out of emotional exhaustion, not an exhaustion of the possible list of examples.
I look forward to @colewdâs reaction to my list. Is it inaccurate in any way? Am I missing important ânuancesâ which entirely change the accuracy of my characterizations?
Meanwhile, I suppose I could summarize my list as âthe destructive acts of a fascist.â
POSTSCRIPT:
From the Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/21/trump-tesla-vehicles-elon-musk-bondi-vandalism/
President Donald Trump on Friday escalated his administrationâs threats against those who destroy Tesla vehicles, pondering on social media whether he should send the vandals to an El Salvador prison notorious for its rough conditions.
Trump also wrote that people who vandalize or destroy Tesla vehicles â made by the company owned by his ally Elon Musk â could get lengthy jail sentences.
âI look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,â the president wrote on social media. âPerhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!â
Trump later suggested that recent efforts to vandalize Teslas are acts of terrorism worse than what took place during the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
âWhen I looked at those showrooms burning and those cars â not one or two, like seven, eight, 10, burning, exploding all over the place. These are terrorists,â Trump said at the White House. âYou didnât have anything like that on January 6th.â
Yeah, instead of vandalizing Teslas on January 6, the mob vandalized the U.S. Capitol buildingâand beat on police officers, not Teslasâand sent members of Congress running in fear of their lives. So, yes, Trumpâs review of the facts sure got me on that one! We didnât see Teslas vandalized on January 6. So I withdraw my complaint. (It is a matter of nuance, after all. And who can know what REALLY happened?)
It is obvious that Presidents should have the authority to send car vandals to notoriously brutal Central American prisons. I mean, if that is not the American way of life and values, I donât know what is.
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While the framers could not have foreseen the existence of Tesla, or of automobiles for that matter, I am sure this is exactly what they would have put in the constitution if they HAD foreseen it.
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Sure, Iâll join the pile. Of everything the current administration has done two things strike me as the worst, of the greatest impact on the future, and the most difficult to recover from (with the possible exception of the destruction of democracy):
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Demolition of environmental policy, notably all attempts to deal with global warming.
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Destruction of our alliances, attacking our friends, and cozying up to dictators.
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Something that I have heard from several sources (but have not yet been able to verify) sounds plausible: A U.S. government funded database being assembled to help reunite with their parents the Ukrainian children who were kidnapped by Russians has been erased.
I hope this is a false rumor.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5333328/trump-admin-cuts-funding-for-program-that-tracked-ukrainian-children-abducted-by-russia
https://www.reuters.com/world/state-dept-denies-deleting-data-halted-program-tracking-abducted-ukrainian-2025-03-19/
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Hi Allen
I think your list of concerns are reasonable. For the last several years Presidents have been issuing executive orders and certainly Trump has issued more than the rest. Balance of power is critical to our country functioning properly.
The country, however, has some big issues to deal with.
- A national debt of 37 trillion dollars and growing
- Two wars that we are funding where death and destruction is continuing daily.
- A southern border that has not been managed at all
- A middle class that has seen little if any gain in prosperity over the last several decades
Whether the current administration and congress can make progress on these issues is in my opinion a wait and see situation.
How much of that was due to Trumpâs first term? How much will Trumpâs proposed tax-cuts, and his proposed sovereign wealth fund, balloon it further?
And notice that enormous disparity between how Trump is handling these two wars.
A citation for this histrionic claim, please.
⌠and is highly unlikely to see any prosperity in the hear future, when Trumpâs âTrade Wars with Everybodyâ policy puts the economy into recession.
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Speaking of the Ukraine war, Europe is bearing the greater burden of cost even though the US has up until recently contributed a lot too. But besides the funding issue, whether a war is justifiably fought or not is about more than deaths due to direct battlefield casualties and indirect civilian deaths. Itâs also about the kind of world it creates afterwards depending on who wins.
Is freedom and self-determination worth fighting for? Is it worth spending money on? Is it worth doing something because it is right, not because it is cheap or because it is safe? Did the people who died in the American revolutionary war/war of independence, die for something that was worth it? I would think being from the US, your national history and the entire basis for your countryâs existence is a resounding âYES!â
âPeople are dyingâ could have been used as an excuse to surrender to Nazi germany and the other the Axis powersduring WWII. That would presumably have ceased battlefield hostilities and combat casualties, and fewer than the ~70 million people that died during WWII would have been killed. But what kind of world would that have created? You can take this to a grotesque trolley-problem. The train is coming down the tracks, and itâs going to exterminate all the jews in Europe somewhere at the beginning of WWII (maybe on the order of 10 million people at the time, according to some googling), or itâs going to run over 70 million people on the other track where history proceeds as it did. Should we just let the train run over 10 million jews then? Turn a blind eye and say we prevented a world war?
These things are just not that simple.
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No. There is no âhoweverâ about this. The division of powers, the basic, foundational principles of democracy â let alone America â are not negotiable. No case can be made in defense of their erosion, no matter how dire anyone imagines the situation is.
On a personal note, I find it absolutely mind-boggling how a base that was so indignant about being told what to do to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their neighbors against an intellectually completely unreachable and politically agnostic threat such as viruses are, is nothing short of extatic to sacrifice every right and principle they were shouting about just a few years back, along with the future of their nation, their species, and their home planet, the moment the issues are about human money and human power over one another, all on the excuse that it subjectively feels like theyâre facing rougher days than some in recent memory.
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Thanks for the links, @misterme987 Yes, the stolen children database story apparently reached reuters and NPR about 48 hours after the early rumors were circulating. (Iâve been so depressed at the news that had not kept current to check out the stories.) I had first heard it from a friend at Washington University who says one of his former students had told him details even more sad than what came out in the news reports. Iâm trying to take all rumors with a grain of saltâbut in this fascist dystopian nightmare weâve entered, the shocking stories get verified again and again.
Meanwhile, the MAGA people I know have virtually NO awareness of any of these terrible developments that are horrifying us. IF they hear anything about them from their very insulated and isolated echo chambers, it is always from some spin that goes like this: âLiberals are in a tailspin over X as they throw tantrums about Y but the real truth is there is a new sheriff in town and heads are going to roll. And you canât make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.â And they assume the rest of us are misled by the âliberalâ news sources.
I keep thinking of the countless stories from people describing life in 1930âs Germany and how oneâs âfriendly neighbor who had always been so niceâ started transforming into a brown-shirted bundle of hate. Iâm personally witnessing that kind of phenomenon.
Indeed, this first struck me under the previous Trump administration family separation policy. Compassionate people I knew seemed to be emotionless about what was happening at the border: âThe illegals are criminals. They are just like anyone else that commits a serious crime: they lose their children because they are taken to prison. Thatâs just how it is.â
Likewise, many of these same friends seem oblivious to the suffering in Gaza. That attitude is, âThey put Hamas in power so this is the tuff reality of war for them. Donât assume they are innocent people being killed. It was a war they started.â
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Except that it is frequently Canadians with a green card, Germans with a tourist visa and the like getting imprisoned as well these days.
ICE officers have are apparently been given quotas for the number of arrests they need to make, and are fairly indiscriminate in how they make up their numbers.
Numerous countries are issuing Travel Advisories.
Of course the fact that SCOTUS has seen fit to give ICE more-or-less unlimited discretion, without any judicial oversight, makes this all the worse.
âThe banality of evilâ seems an appropriate label for these sorts of capricious, arbitrary petty cruelties.
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Yes, what is happening now under Trump 2.0 is much worse than what happened under Trump 1.0. I donât think the general public is grasping that fact.
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Hi Tim
Here is some data.
So your data shows that there IS INDEED management at the southern border. Thank you for refuting:
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Hi Allen
There appears to be now since the election but it is too soon to tell if it is sustainable.
A 3rd point Iâd add to that list is the undermining of public trust in news media and journalism. Which inadvertently leads to this depressing sentiment among many that we canât say whatâs really going on and we just have to âwait and seeâ. This works to Trumpâs advantage every time.
It has become particularly noteworthy to me how Trump responds to critical questions by reporters at his press conferences. Rather than answer the question posed to him he will frequently ask the journalist giving him pushback âwhat outlet they are fromâ and then start ranting about how poorly these outlets (like CNN) are doing in ratings.
The implication is clear of course: that the journalists should worry more about the ratings of the company they work for (by which he really means whether heâor his fansâlikes what they are saying) than about whether the things he says are true and if he can defend them.
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