Trump’s Trashing of Liberty and Human Worth

Last week in low-profile decreeDonald Trump declared the period from November 2 to 8 “anti-communism week.”

Given Trump's penchant for malicious and dangerous actions, I think MAGAman could do much worse than waste his political energy on the mindless gesture politics of the McCarthy era. But then again, given what the Trump administration was actually up to last week, the wording of the order is worth quoting to their faces: “We renew our national pledge to stand firmly against communism, to champion the cause of freedom and human dignity, and to reaffirm that no system of government can ever replace the will and conscience of a free people.”

Let's talk for a moment about this will and conscience of a free people: polling data shows that approximately four out of five Americans strongly support SNAP and believe the government should provide benefits to hungry Americans. Even 69 percent of Republican voters support the program. Fully 77 percent of those surveyed said they would be concerned about benefit cuts as a side effect of the government shutdown.

So what did Trump, the voice of “the will and conscience of a free people”, do? He ordered his Department of Agriculture to limit the distribution of SNAP benefits. His administration then appealed lower court rulings on the benefits. Trump then told states that decided to distribute benefits after an appeals court rejected the federal government's request to overturn the food aid order that they must repay the aid given to hungry residents. Finally, his lawyers persuaded the far-right majority of the U.S. Supreme Court to stay enforcement of lower court decisions and temporarily allow the withholding of SNAP benefits. As a result, millions of Americans are more food insecure today than they were a week ago.

And why was the government closed in the first place? Because Trump has once again opposed the health insurance subsidies paid to millions of families under provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and his representatives in Congress have made it clear that they will not include money for these subsidies in their government funding package.

I can't remember another time in U.S. history when a president has so deliberately tried to hurt so many Americans, while seeking to simultaneously make health care unaffordable and prevent families from being able to feed themselves. This is not just political malpractice; rather, it is a complete denial of the duty to behave decently towards other people.

While he spent political capital to deny food stamp benefits to tens of millions of Americans, the commander in chief held glitzy balls at Mar-a-Lago and continued to cajole billionaires into funding his ludicrous White House ballroom, a project that Americans opposed two to one margin.

It is now debatable whether much of the blame for temporarily ending food stamps for millions of families with no savings to fall back on lies with Trump and his malign advisers, or whether it lies with a lazy and heartless majority on the US Supreme Court. But wherever the blame lies, what is clear is that the country's elite institutions—the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court—are failing ordinary Americans.

You could go on and on about Trump's horrific actions over the past few days and come to the same conclusion: As flight delays and cancellations cascaded last week, a month after air traffic controllers stopped being paid, Trump's response was brutal to the point: “All air traffic controllers must get back to work, NOW!!! Anyone who doesn't will essentially be 'docked,'” Trump wrote on social media. “REPORT TO WORK IMMEDIATELY.”

This is not the language of a politician trying to solve a difficult economic and political problem, recognizing the injustice of a situation in which government employees are asked to make enormous economic sacrifices—rather, it is the language of a slave owner, a man who considers federal employees to be nothing more than his personal property, chattel to be forced into submission.

In contrast, travelers at airports where air traffic controllers have distributed leaflets calling on the government to reopen and pay its workers have shown great support and compassion for these important public sector workers. Likewise, ordinary Americans reacted with horror to the end of food benefits, donating huge sums to pantries and food banks; and many restaurants and grocery stores, in partnership with DoorDashbegan distributing food to hungry locals and unpaid federal workers.

On foreign policy, while the Trump-Hegseth relationship continues to undermine international law with a policy of mass murder of boat crews in the Pacific and Caribbean that they claim are carrying drugs, only small minorities Americans support the bombing and favor a broader military buildup against Venezuela. Perhaps that's because most Americans realize that killing people based on secret evidence that they may have committed drug-trafficking crimes—rather than intercepting their ships, arresting them, using confiscated drugs as evidence in trials, and then convicting them after a fair trial—is not even remotely compatible with the “cause of freedom and human dignity” that Trump emphasized in his executive order.

And it's not just the American public that opposes the policy of mass murder: the British government is so concerned that its military and intelligence officials may be complicit in war crimes the country is committing. limited intelligence sharing with the United States on ships suspected of transporting drugs. Canada does not havehas now stopped sharing intelligence with Trump, but has also publicly distanced itself from the assassination policy.

Trumpism, with all its pompous disregard for international norms, earns the scorn of governments abroad. And, as the November 4 election showed, Trump and Trumpism are now also rejected by a large majority of the American public.

Trump is right that “no system of government can ever replace the will and conscience of a free people.” He was most strongly reminded of this fact when he made the ill-fated decision to attend a Commanders football game in Washington, D.C., last week. For more than two minutes, tens of thousands of angry residents of the capital he has militarily occupied for the past few months booed Donald Trump.

It was a truly magnificent sound, following the national cheer in the Bronx that voters gave to the Trumpified Republican Party.