Donald Trump's Crusade to Destroy America, Part II

Some of the damage Donald Trump is doing to the US will take decades to fix, and some of it is irreparable. Listen To This Story In the first part of this series on the vast and lasting damage Donald Trump is inflicting on the United States, we focused on foreign affairs and the harm the president is doing to the nation's relationships with other countries. Today, we are looking at the domestic side of things. In some areas, the problems at home and abroad are intertwined. For example, Trump's trade war is not only hurting foreign relations and forcing (former) partners to look elsewhere to do business; it also harms American consumers. Or take the hostile environment the administration is creating for foreign students. It is already causing some of the world's best and brightest to study elsewhere, to the great detriment of the US economy and its global leadership position in science and technology. But this damage is not limited to universities; the Trump administration, often for ideological reasons, has proposed or put in place billions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research. Some of this is consistent with the GOP's long-running war on science. In some cases, however, the president's efforts to slash government grants were too extreme even for Republican lawmakers. But that hasn't stopped him from trying. For example, let's look at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Shortly after Trump was sworn in, his administration embarked on a crusade to gut the agency. That effort kicked into high gear with the confirmation of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought, to whom we will return in a moment. While most of the initial attacks on NIH's budget failed, they are still ongoing. Just this week, Democrats accused the Department of Defense of using a so-called interagency agreement to try to siphon billions of dollars from the research center. 'These funds were provided for lifesaving medical research, not as extra money for the Department of Defense,' stated Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the top Democratic appropriator in the House. 'It is no secret that the Department of Defense is facing enormous financial pressure because of President Trump's war of choice with Iran. But the Trump administration cannot make American patients, families, and scientists pay the price.' But they are paying the price, and not just when it comes to medical and other research. Perhaps the greatest long-term damage Trump is causing, both domestically and abroad, is the systematic destruction of the federal government. Now, we are not saying that the US government is perfect. It is enormous and bulky and inefficient — and there are plenty of ways in which it can be improved. We also believe that the GOP's purported goal of reducing waste, fraud, and abuse is laudable… if that were what Republicans actually wanted to do. But their efforts are always ideologically driven. Somehow, the blatant fraud Trump and his family are committing, the massive overpayments to military contractors, and corporate welfare to industries that support them are never part of the conversation. Their goal isn't to make the government better and more efficient, it's to dismantle it. At a time when the gap between the rich and the poor has grown into a chasm and artificial intelligence threatens an unprecedented upheaval in the economy, Trump and the people bankrolling him and the GOP want to create a world in which nobody tells them what to do, there is no accountability, and 'the market' reigns supreme. Sure, they want the government to still keep them and their fortunes safe and enforce the laws they are paying Congress to write, but that's about it. Environmental protection, food and drug security, a social safety net? Those are things the GOP believes the government should have a limited role in, because 'the market will take care of them.' Now, to be fair, not everybody in the administration wants this. There are also the ideologues whose goal is to create an autocracy based on the tenets of Christian nationalism. President Donald Trump listens to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, deliver remarks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, on October 9, 2019. Photo credit: Trump White House Archived / Flickr (PDM 1.0) Those are the folks who gave us Project 2025, the blueprint to transform the US government into just that, and OMB Director Vought is one of its main architects. They are the ones who want the government out of their own lives and heavily involved in those of anybody who doesn't believe what they do. One of the endless examples of this dynamic recently played out in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who supported and signed legislation requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom, requested a federal investigation and threatened to cancel state funding to airports that install foot-washing stations open to every traveler but primarily used by Muslims. While their specific objectives don't exactly align, this unholy trinity of Trump (and his fellow kleptocrats), the oligarchs who favor a laissez-faire economic system, and the theocrats who want to force their religious beliefs onto all Americans is working together right now to achieve a common goal: to hobble or dismantle institutions whose central purpose is to protect the people from them. While some of the damage they are doing to those institutions will be reversible, what happens in the meantime is not. This is especially true when it comes to areas such as environmental protection, public health, education, and civil rights. And that doesn't even factor in the immediate harm experienced by the millions of Americans who were kicked off their health insurance or lost their food assistance since Trump took office. Then there is the administration's energy policy. On the one hand, it is opening up vast swaths of public lands to drilling (as well as mining and logging). On the other hand, a president who was bankrolled by oil and gas companies is pursuing an antiquated strategy that relies on fossil fuels while not only neglecting renewable energy sources but actively sabotaging them. In the meantime, most of the US's peers are innovating technologies that will not only provide greater energy independence but also reduce harmful emissions. That, of course, is another realm in which the Trump administration is doing massive and lasting damage to the country and the world: By labeling climate change a 'hoax,' it is exacerbating a global crisis that will cost the US trillions of dollars in the future. While that is a staggering amount, some of the things the president is destroying are so precious that the harm he is doing cannot be quantified in monetary terms. Such as American democracy. In order to justify his 2020 election loss, he has taken a sledgehammer to the nation's founding principle, its bedrock — and it is frightening to see how easy this has been. We have covered this topic extensively and won't go into details here because it would take too long. But you can go here and here and here and here and here to read just a few examples of how Trump is trying to end US democracy as we know it and as the Founders envisioned it. What we will say, however, is that it will take many years to undo the indoctrination of his followers… and it may not be possible at all. When Nazi Germany fell (and we have written an entire series of columns on how that regime was and wasn't like MAGAmerica), it took many years and the concerted efforts of an occupying force to eradicate Adolf Hitler's hateful ideology. Obviously, that will not be an option in the US, which means that even if Trumpism is eventually vanquished at the ballot box (and the GOP returns to some semblance of sanity), it will continue to fester among a sizeable segment of the population — in large part because it is good business for the right-wing propaganda machine, from Fox News on down. While that prospect is disconcerting, the alternative, which is that Trump succeeds in his efforts to destroy the nation's founding values and turn it into an international pariah, is much worse. Perhaps naively, we believe that Americans will rid themselves of this menace and that they will begin to do so in two months with the midterm elections. But we would be lying if we said that this will be easy or that the damage Trump and the GOP have done can be reversed quickly. Instead, it will take a concerted effort akin to the post-World War II Marshall Plan, which was instrumental in turning Europe from a feuding and war-torn wasteland full of traditional enemies into a community of democracies that is leading the free world now that Trump has abdicated that role.