2

TRUMP’S DISASTROUS ACTS AS PRESIDENT

Donald Trump, as we’ve seen, is an inexperienced, uninformed, indolent, and possibly clinically dangerous man who had no business getting anywhere near the White House. Unfortunately for us all, that’s where he currently resides. In this chapter, let’s look at the incredible damage he’s done to the country since he’s been there.

One of the most often-heard takes on Trump’s first two years in office is that he has been largely ineffective, all bark and no bite. After all, in his first year, despite bragging about accomplishing more than any president since FDR, he only succeeded in signing one major piece of legislation, his giant tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations—and that only in the last week of December 2017. By that point, despite his claims that he had “signed more bills—and I’m talking through the legislature—than any president ever,” Trump had signed fewer laws than any president in the last sixty years. Legislatively speaking, the first six months of 2018 were no better for him.1

Still, that take is dead wrong. It ignores all the destruction Trump has done from the White House alone by example, rhetoric, or executive order. Even if he has been a legislative do-nothing, he has already undone or rolled back decades of progress in civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, immigration reform, criminal justice reform, environmental protection, and many other areas. Let’s roll the tape.

16. HE IMPOSED A BAN ON MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS

Right out of the box, Trump proved to be just as callous, prejudiced, and ignorant as president as he had been as a candidate.

Why should we be surprised? This is the same man, we all remember, who launched his candidacy with racist slurs about Mexican immigrants.

Along the way, he also called for reinstating police spying on Muslim communities; announced he would “strongly consider” shutting down all mosques; falsely claimed he saw “thousands and thousands” of Muslims dancing in New Jersey streets as World Trade towers fell on September 11; suggested all “young, strong” Muslim men were ISIS-affiliated and part of an immigration “Trojan horse”; and attacked the Gold Star family of army captain Humayun Khan.2

Not only that, “Donald Trump,” the candidate proclaimed in December 2015, “is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” And that’s exactly what he did, or tried to do, with his first executive order on January 27, 2017, exactly one week after taking the oath of office.3

Executive Order 13769 slammed the door on all immigrants, and even travelers, from seven predominately Muslim countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—for ninety days, with further restrictions to follow—only because of their religion.4

On the face of it, the ban seemed discriminatory, racist, and unconstitutional—and the courts soon agreed. Just one week later, on February 3, a federal judge in Seattle blocked the ban. Six days later, his order was upheld by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.5

For a while, Trump’s ban had a rough going. In March 2017, he issued a second, revised ban—only six countries this time, dropping Iraq—which was also shot down by the lower courts, but revived in a limited fashion by the Supreme Court.6

Trump then followed in September with yet a third version of his ban, dropping Sudan this time, and adding a non-Muslim nation, North Korea, for cover (plus government officials from Venezuela). But third time was not the charm. The ban was yet again invalidated nationwide by federal courts in Hawaii and Maryland.7

This set up a final showdown in the Supreme Court, where Trump’s stolen pick, Neil Gorsuch, proved decisive. “We express no view on the soundness of the policy,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in a 5-4 opinion on June 26, 2018, but, nonetheless—thanks to Gorsuch—the ban was upheld. In her blistering dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that the rabid conservatives on the Court had reached this decision by “ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent, and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”8

Even though Trump got his way in the end, ironically, one of the biggest legal obstacles the ban faced was Trump himself, who, as always, was his own worst enemy.

For one, Trump kept repeating the word ban. White House lawyers bent over backward to assure the courts that this executive order does not constitute a “ban,” which is probably unconstitutional, but instead a necessary “adjustment to” or “change in” immigration rules for national security reasons. Problem is, nobody told Trump. He undercut his attorneys multiple times with tweets advocating his Muslim “ban.”9

For example, June 3, 2017: “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety.”10

Or, two days later, June 5, 2017: “That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!”11

Or again, in September 2017: “The travel ban into the United States should be far larger, tougher and more specific-but stupidly, that would not be politically correct!”12

Nor did Trump help his case by approvingly suggesting that WWI general John J. Pershing killed Muslim terrorists in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig’s blood (he didn’t). It didn’t help either when, in November 2017, Trump retweeted virulently anti-Muslim videos by the far right-wing outfit Britain First. (Neal Katyal, a lawyer for the other side, tweeted back at Trump: “Thanks! See you in court next week.”)13

The cries of “ban” and consistent racism of these tweets were not lost on presiding judges. “What do we do,” a Virginia judge asked, about “multiple instances” of anti-Muslim tweets, “before the election, during the election, and just a week or so ago? Do we just ignore reality?”

“The ‘initial’ announcement of the Muslim ban,” another Maryland judge wrote while striking it down, “offered repeatedly and explicitly through President Trump’s own statements, forcefully and persuasively expressed his purpose in unequivocal terms.”14

Trump also created another problem with the majority of Muslim countries included in his travel ban, and those not covered. Fifteen of the nineteen terrorists on September 11 were from Saudi Arabia. So why wasn’t Saudi Arabia on the list? Or why was Sudan, repeatedly named as one of the world’s worst human rights violators, dropped from the list on Trump’s third version of the ban?

Answer: Follow the money!

As first reported by Daily News, the Trump Organization doesn’t hold any business interests in any of the countries on the list but holds major stakes in several of those excluded from it.15

Take the first Muslim ban on Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Not a single American was killed on U.S. soil by citizens from any of those countries between 1975 and 2015, according to the Cato Institute. Yet nearly three thousand Americans were killed by citizens from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt in the same time period, and people from those three countries are still welcome to apply for U.S. visas.16

And wouldn’t you know? The Trump business empire holds multimillion-dollar licensing and development deals in all three countries—in addition to Turkey and Indonesia, also hotbeds for terrorist activity and also excluded from the list.17

As for the Sudan switcheroo, The Intercept’s Ryan Grim and Alex Emmons reported in September 2017 that Trump and company were the beneficiaries of a lobbying campaign organized by the United Arab Emirates, who, as with Saudi Arabia, have been relying on Sudan’s boots on the ground to wage war in Yemen. Since “Sudan is doing the UAE’s dirty work,” as one anonymous source put it in the story, UAE ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba lobbied the administration hard on behalf of Sudan. (“Otaiba,” the story notes, “is particularly close with White House advisor Jared Kushner,” who, as we will discuss later on, has overseen a number of seeming quid pro quo arrangements during his tenure.)18

Clearly, the driving force behind Trump’s Muslim ban is not our national security. It’s his bottom line.

17. HE CANCELED PROTECTED STATUS FOR DREAMERS

Years from now, presidential historians will have a field day debating which was the most egregious of Donald Trump’s lies. But all of them will agree that this was one of the worst. “I have a great heart for the folks we are talking about, a great love for them,” Donald Trump told reporters on September 5, 2017, just hours after he had summarily canceled the DREAMers program and challenged Congress to vote to extend it in six months or else.19

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, was established by President Obama by executive order in June 2012. As established, young people who had been brought to the United States illegally could apply for protected status, enabling them to stay in the country without fear of deportation, for two years.20

Rules were tough: No one with a criminal record was accepted. DREAMers had to renew their status, at their own expense, every two years. And they were never eligible for U.S. citizenship. By 2017, 800,000 young people had applied for protected DACA status, out of an estimated total 1.8 million who fit the DREAMers definition.21

Obama created the DREAMers program after Congress rejected several attempts to pass the DREAM Act. If Congress refused to protect the DREAMers, the least controversial players in the whole immigration debate, Obama decided, then he would do so by executive order.

We call them DREAMers because they occupy a special place among immigrants who came here in pursuit of the American dream. These are young people who were brought by their parents, through no choice of their own, before they were sixteen years old, and have lived here continuously since 2007. Most of them come from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but they have lived in no other country. They’re in school or have graduated, have jobs, pay taxes, and have families. Nine hundred of them have served in the military. They’re American citizens in every sense but one, lacking a certain piece of paper.22

And they have broad public support. According to ABC News, in September 2017, when Trump canceled the program, 86 percent of Americans believed they should be allowed to remain in the country. A separate CBS News poll in January 2018 found 87 percent of Americans still agreed.23

When Donald Trump took office, the DREAMers program was actually a dream itself. Everything was running smoothly. Eight hundred thousand young people had signed up. An estimated one million more were considered eligible, and more of them were signing up every year. Most importantly, the program gave DREAMers the opportunity to get an education, get a job, or start a family without facing the constant fear of deportation.

And where did Donald Trump stand on the DREAMers program? Was he for it? Against it? Or uncertain? Yes. All of the above.

Among other promises made on June 16, 2015, when he announced he was running for president, was a pledge to terminate the DREAMers program immediately—a pledge he repeated often during the campaign.24

Yet, shortly after his election, Trump told Time magazine he sympathized with the DREAMers. Indeed, nobody described their plight more accurately: “They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”25

At other times he acknowledged that DACA was “a very, very difficult subject” for him because “I love these kids” and he promised to work “with a big heart” to help craft a “bill of love.”26

But, in the end, for Donald Trump, there was one big problem with the DREAMers program: It had been started by Barack Obama. Therefore, it must be bad. Therefore, he had to end it. Which he proceeded to do.

In September 2017, Trump effectively killed DACA by shutting it down, and—under the pretext that Obama did not have the power as president to take any unilateral action on immigration, even though Trump was at the same time arguing that he had the power to order a unilateral Muslim ban—gave Congress six months, until March 5, 2018, to pass a law making the program permanent or it would cease to exist and DREAMers would be immediate targets for deportation.27

Then, in typical fashion, Congress did nothing—which Trump should have expected. Neither Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell nor House Speaker Paul Ryan made any effort to pass an immigration bill containing protection for DREAMers. In the one week slotted for debate on the issue, four different bills failed to pass the Senate.28

President Trump didn’t do anything, either. In fact, he made it impossible for both sides to come together by insisting that any bill extending the DREAMers program also include $30 billion for the wall he wants to build along our southern border with Mexico. You know, the same wall Mexico was supposed to pay for. No wall, no deal.29

All the while, Trump continued to lie shamelessly about what he and his party were up to. “The Republicans are with you; they want to get your situation taken care of,” he told DREAMers at the White House in March. “The Democrats fought us, they just fought every single inch of the way. They did not want DACA in this bill.”30

A month later, USA Today reported that twenty-three-year-old Juan Manuel Montes, who’d lived in the United States since he was nine, was asked for his papers while out getting dinner in Calexico, California. Three hours later, he was in Mexico, and the first DREAMer we know of deported by Trump.31

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress—and even many moderate Republicans—continued to work to save DACA, despite Trump’s constant, blatant lies to the contrary. In fact, when a discharge petition that would force a vote on DACA was circulated in the House by Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican in an immigrant-heavy district, in May 2018, Paul Ryan and the House GOP leadership worked frantically behind closed doors to block it.32

And so, as of this writing, the DREAMers still remain in limbo. Disgusted with the nonstop political games being played with DACA, several DREAMers remarked, “We feel like bargaining chips.” That’s because, to Donald Trump, that’s all they are.33

18. HE ENDED PROTECTED STATUS FOR MANY IMMIGRANTS

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.34

For much of our history, give or take a few periods of nativist reaction, those inspiring words of Emma Lazarus summed up the gist of America’s immigration policy. People from all over the world came here to pursue the American dream, and we welcomed them with open arms.

With open arms, yes, but not necessarily with open borders. We have crafted limits on how many total new residents we could accept and how many from each country. But in keeping with the circumstances of our founding, we have tried to make a special exception for people fleeing violence, danger, or oppression in their home country.

As such, the Temporary Protected Status program, or TPS, was begun in 1990 by President George H. W. Bush in order to grant emergency assistance to immigrants fleeing danger in their home countries caused by armed conflict, natural disasters, or other strife. It’s been invoked by every president since to welcome immigrants from dozens of countries. It’s the welcome mat we Americans rolled out when someone’s house was burning down.35

But no longer. Not under Donald Trump.

Trump has turned American immigration policy upside down, not only trying to limit both legal and illegal immigration, not only ending special recognition for 1.8 million DREAMers, but also ending TPS for immigrants from six countries and, in effect, shutting down the program. By executive order, with no input from Congress, he slammed the door on some 425,000 refugees from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras and subjected them to immediate expulsion.36

Refugees from Sudan were the first target. In September 2017, Trump announced that more than one thousand refugees who had been displaced by war, pestilence, and famine would be sent back. Cruel? Yes, and Trump was just getting warmed up.37

Then Nicaragua. In the wake of devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1999, President Bill Clinton allowed five thousand Nicaraguans to come to the United States under the emergency TPS program. They’ve lived here for nineteen years. They have jobs, homes, and families. They pay taxes. On November 6, 2017, the Trump administration summarily told all five thousand they’d been here long enough. They were given one year to pack all their belongings and return to Nicaragua. No exceptions.38

Next: Haiti. Already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti suffered even more devastation from Hurricane Matthew in October 2010 and a 7.0 earthquake that struck near Port-au-Prince in January 2011, killing over three hundred thousand people. Again, invoking TPS, President Obama, with broad bipartisan support, opened America’s doors to sixty thousand refugees from Haiti. But again, revoking TPS, President Trump rolled up the welcome mat in November 2017, giving Haitian immigrants eighteen months to get out of the country on their own or be expelled.39

Then the country with the biggest number of protected immigrants: El Salvador. It was not just devastation caused by two major earthquakes that drove Salvadorans to flee their native land but danger resulting from a long civil war in which the United States, by funding and arming El Salvador’s ruthless dictator, was a major player. Starting in 2001, under President George W. Bush, Salvadorans were welcomed under the auspices of TPS.40

By 2017, some 200,000 Salvadorans had taken advantage of the opportunity to live and work legally in the United States. According to the Center for Migration Studies of New York, 88 percent of them were part of the labor force, owned homes, and paid taxes. And almost 193,000 of them had American-born children who were, of course, American citizens.41

Too bad. Donald Trump didn’t care. On January 18, 2018, he took away protected status for immigrants from El Salvador and ordered them to make plans to return, after sixteen years or so in the United States, to what is known as one of the most dangerous countries in the Western Hemisphere.42

He wasn’t done. In late April 2018, Trump canceled TPS for nine thousand Nepalis who had been given refuge here after a catastrophic 2015 earthquake. Then eighty-six thousand Hondurans, many of whom had also been living here for two decades since Hurricane Mitch, were also given the boot by Trump.43

And in June 2018, looking for ever more ways to close the golden door to people in need, Jeff Sessions overturned an immigration court ruling granting asylum to an El Salvadoran woman battered by her husband, and declared he was ending the rule that had allowed thousands of victims of domestic violence to find refuge in the United States and escape their abusers.44

Was all this legal? Yes. Was it cruel and unnecessary? Also yes. Isn’t it telling that this is almost entirely happening to immigrants from non-white countries? Yes, again. And, as if adding insult to injury, Donald Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and certain African nations “shithole” countries. More on that fiasco later on.

19. HE HAS UNLEASHED ICE AS A BRUTAL POLICE FORCE

What do you think of when you hear the term fascism? A secret, unaccountable police force trampling on basic constitutional rights? People being asked for their papers and arrested without warrant or charges? Activists being jailed for their political views, and families forced to live every day in fear of being rounded up, broken up, and locked up or deported?

Welcome to Donald Trump’s America. For him, that secret, unaccountable police force is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

True, Barack Obama wasn’t exactly known for being soft on those in this country illegally. He oversaw the deportation of so many more people than George W. Bush that he became known as the Deporter in Chief. But, at the same time, he was pushing Congress to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. When Congress refused, Obama limited ICE enforcement actions to those people with serious criminal violations. Just being in the United States illegally did not count.45

All that’s changed under Trump. All restrictions are off. And, of course, the net effect of lowering the standards for roundup and arrest is that ICE cops go after the easiest targets. As one agent put it, the goal is no longer to catch the bad guys but simply to “fill the beds.” Perhaps unwittingly, ICE deputy director Thomas D. Homan confirmed their new priority: “ICE will enforce the law, and if you are found to be breaking the law, you will be held accountable.”46

And the obvious results soon followed. In Trump’s first year, arrests by ICE went up 40 percent, especially among those with no criminal record. In 2017 alone, ICE made 37,734 “noncriminal arrests,” more than twice the number in 2016.47

As Brian Tashman of the ACLU noted in February 2018, “In the past year, ICE has gone after parents dropping off their children at school; primary caregivers to family members with disabilities; domestic abuse survivors seeking legal protections; religious minorities who fear persecution; political activists; community leaders; and people who work everywhere from convenience stores to dairy farms.”48

The results are thousands of modern-day gestapo arrests that are unworthy of a free society and amount to nothing less than clear and dangerous suppression at the hands of the federal government. News accounts give countless examples. Among them are the following, as listed by immigration activist Tania Unzueta Carrasco in USA Today.

•    In February 2017, Daniela Vargas, a young immigrant in Jackson, Miss., was detained following a press conference where she spoke out about the recent raid in her home and her family’s detention.

•    In March, Enrique Balcazar and Zully Palacios, two members of Migrant Justice leading the organization’s campaign for fair wages in Vermont’s milk industry, were followed by Border Patrol agents as they left their local community meeting. Both now face deportation.

•    In May, a California student, Claudia Rueda, was detained by Border Patrol agents outside her home. She had been trying to win enough public support to get her mother out of immigration detention.

•    In December, Maru Mora-Villalpando, an activist defending the rights of those detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement was issued a deportation notice, without any prior contact with the police or ICE.

•    [In February 2018] Scott Warren of the humanitarian organization No More Deaths in Tucson, Ariz. was arrested for giving food, water, and a bed to two suspected undocumented immigrants who’d crossed the desert. He was charged with a felony and could get five years in prison.49

Yes, in the Gospel According to Donald Trump, giving water to a thirsty person is a felony.

And Carrasco is just revealing the tip of the iceberg. Whether it’s cruelly breaking up families or stalking family courts, every week seems to bring news of another egregious injustice committed by ICE under Trump’s authority.

In February 2017, ICE agents swooped down upon a Texas courthouse where a Mexican El Paso resident was filing a protective order against her abusive boyfriend. Very likely tipped off by this woman’s abuser, ICE placed the woman under arrest. “This is really unprecedented … It really was a stunning event,” said El Paso attorney Jo Anne Bernal. “It has an incredible chilling effect for all undocumented victims of any crime in our community.”50

In October 2017, ICE agents entered a Portland, Oregon, home—without a warrant—and arrested Carlos Bolanos. Thankfully for Bolanos, a friend caught the whole incident on tape. “You’ve got officers that are violating the most sacred laws of the country,” said one immigration attorney of the warrantless arrest. “There are only so many of these that are caught on tape.”51

In December 2017, ninety-two Somalis were shackled and abused by ICE for forty hours straight on a deportation flight. “As the plane sat on the runway,” read the legal complaint they later filed, “the ninety-two detainees remained bound, their handcuffs secured to their waists, and their feet shackled together … When the plane’s toilets overfilled with human waste, some of the detainees were left to urinate into bottles or onto themselves. ICE agents wrapped some who protested, or just stood up to ask a question, in full-body restraints.” All the while, ICE taunted their captives with racist jabs. “They called them ‘niggers,’” one of the Somalis’ lawyers revealed. “They called them ‘boy.’ They’ve said things like ‘We’re sending you boys back to the jungle.’”52

Then, in February 2018, reports surfaced that ICE detainee Laura Monterrosa was held in solitary confinement for sixty hours at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Texas (a private prison) and told she could not leave until she recanted allegations of sexual abuse there. How often this sort of thing happens at ICE facilities is an open question, especially since, in 2017, the agency requested license to more quickly destroy the internal documents related to deaths, sexual assaults, and solitary confinement.53

In addition to accelerated arrests for noncriminal causes, activists correctly cite two additional problems with ICE. First are the shocking conditions in ICE detention facilities, where advocacy groups have documented numerous cases of sexual assault, substandard medical care, poor food service, overuse of solitary confinement, and physical assault by custody staff. From 2016 to December 2017, twenty-three persons died in ICE detention facilities.54

The second problem is the pressure on sanctuary cities. In order for ICE to ramp up its number of arrests and deportations, Attorney General Jeff Sessions demands that cities and states allow ICE agents unlimited access to jails and delay releasing immigrants from custody until ICE agents can detain them. Which is something sanctuary cities rightfully refuse to do, leading Sessions to threaten to withhold funding from cities and states—a move that, so far, courts have found to be unconstitutional.55

Sessions has also been trying to bully mayors and city officials to let ICE act unrestrained in these cities. When Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf issued a public warning that ICE was operating in the area, Sessions fumed that “800 wanted criminals that ICE will now have to pursue by other means” had escaped thanks to her. That was the last straw for one whistleblower. In March 2018, ICE spokesman James Schwab resigned because of Sessions’s comments. “I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts,” Schwab said. “I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that … I didn’t feel like fabricating the truth to defend ourselves against [Mayor Schaaf’s] actions was the way to go about it.”56

President Trump, meanwhile, not only defended ICE. He accused any critics of ICE—including Senators Dick Durbin, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren—as being in favor of open borders, violent crime, and MS-13 gangs. “The Liberal Left, also known as the Democrats,” he tweeted on July 1, 2018, “want to get rid of ICE, who do a fantastic job.” Without ICE, Trump warned, playing the ultimate fear card, “you’re going to have a country that you’re going to be afraid to walk out of your house.”

And then there’s the frightening and disgusting matter of Trump and Sessions’s detention camps for migrant children.

“Between October 2017 and May 2018,” Vox reported in June 2018, “at least 2,700 children have been split from their parents. 1,995 of them were separated over the last six weeks of that window—April 18 to May 31—indicating that at present, an average of 45 children are being taken from their parents each day.” The devious tricks being used to separate families by ICE and CBP—for example, taking kids away just so they can “have a bath”—will chill anyone who’s ever read anything about Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Already, one Honduran father committed suicide in detention after having his three-year-old son ripped from him.57

“I hate the children being taken away,” Trump bemoaned on Twitter. And yet, he declared he must commit these “horrible” deeds because of the “Democrats’ law”—“that’s what the Democrats gave us.” As always, Trump is egregiously lying. Of course no such law exists. Separating kids from their parents began in April 2018 with the announcement of a new, “zero tolerance” policy by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In fact, when a shocked Congress put forward a bill explicitly preventing the separation of families at the border, Trump announced he would not sign it.58 Why? Because he was holding these migrant children “hostage” until Congress agreed to give him $25 million to build his stupid wall.

Democrats weren’t the only ones to raise hell about Trump’s detention camps for kids. In The Washington Post, former first lady Laura Bush called Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy “cruel” and “immoral.” Reacting to video of kids crowded into cages, she wrote: “These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.”59

So where did these children go? In June 2018, a few journalists were allowed to tour a former Walmart now serving as the abhorrently-named “Casa Padre” in Brownsville, Texas, where more than 1,400 boys separated from their parents were being held. In the jail-like environment, where the kids are only allowed outside for two hours a day, the reporters were initially greeted with a giant mural of Donald Trump, the White House, and the flag, with the inscription—from Trump’s Art of the Deal— “Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.” The following day, the administration borrowed a page from Sheriff Joe Arpaio and announced they were going to build a “tent city” in Tornillo, Texas, to house 450 more children, the first such federal “tent city” setup to hold immigrants.60

Outrage at these child internment camps eventually grew so strong that Trump was forced to backtrack and sign an executive order that pledged to stop separating kids from their parents. (Instead, families would be detained together … indefinitely.) But, in terms of indefensible and unconstitutional policies at the border, Trump was just getting warmed up. “We cannot allow these people to invade our Country,” he tweeted on June 24, 2018. “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came.” Here was the president of the United States declaring due process null and void. Just as alarming was his declaration a few days earlier that “illegal immigrants” wanted “to pour into and infest our Country”—the word “infest” eerily reminiscent of Nazi propaganda against Jews in the 1930s and ’40s.61

One sadly ironic historical footnote: ICE’s zeal to round up and deport as many immigrants as possible today stands in sharp contrast to our shameful immigration policy post–World War II, when thousands of Nazi collaborators and accomplices were allowed into the United States. From 1945 to 1979, what was then called the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service repeatedly failed to investigate and deport for prosecution Nazi war criminals, including Holocaust perpetrators.62

We treated Nazis better at that time than we treat a poor refugee from El Salvador today. That’s all because of ICE, which was only created as part of the Department of Homeland Security bill in 2003. We did fine without them before then; it’s time for this flagrantly unaccountable and un-American police force to go.

20. HE WANTS TO BUILD A STUPID WALL

We know three things about Donald Trump’s wall:

•    It’s never going to get built.

•    Mexico’s never going to pay for it.

•    But Donald Trump will never stop talking about it.

On January 18, 2018, Trump tweeted: “The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it.” That is not true. In fact, almost every time he talks about it, his description of the wall changes. At various times, about this same wall he has said all of the following:

•    It will be a concrete wall—or transparent

•    Or it will actually be a fence

•    Or it will be part wall and part fence

•    It will have solar panels on top of it, or not

•    It will have a “big, beautiful door right in the middle of the wall” to allow access for those who come in to pick grapes

•    It will have a few “openings” in the wall, through which people “will come in and they’re going to come in legally”

•    It’ll be 1,000 miles long, or 650 miles long

•    It will be 35 feet, or 40 feet, or 50 feet high

•    It will cost $6 billion, or $10 billion, or $12 billion, or $25 billion

•    Mexico will pay for it; if not, U.S. taxpayers will63

There are, of course, several practical problems with Trump’s proposal. Geography, for starters. The southern border is not a two thousand–mile stretch of solid land. For one thousand miles, the border is a mix of wetlands, rivers, and mountain ranges where no wall is possible.

Another problem: This is not government property. In fact, two-thirds of the land, especially in Texas, is privately or state-owned. So the government would either have to invoke eminent domain to seize the land—which would be tied up in courts for years—or purchase it outright, which would be hugely expensive. Trump’s estimated cost of $25 billion does not include the cost of land acquisition.64

And finally, the wall is a solution to a problem that no longer exists. At one time, immigrants were flooding across our southern border illegally, but that is no longer the case. According to the Pew Research Center, between 2009 and 2014, more Mexicans actually escaped south across the border than fled north. Since then, the overall flow of immigrants crossing the border illegally has remained historically low.65

Not only that, 40 percent of today’s undocumented immigrants originally came here legally, with a visa, by plane. They did not walk across the border illegally; they simply overstayed their visas. No wall will ever stop them.66

Nor is Trump’s wall, as he claims, a national security measure. Since September 11, 80 percent of individuals arrested for terrorist activities in this country were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. And of 154 foreign-born people who committed or plotted terrorist attacks on U.S. soil from 1975 through 2015, only 1 was Mexican.67

For many reasons, Trump’s stupid wall is nothing but a joke. If it didn’t cost $25 billion and wasn’t so obviously fueled by racism, it’d be funny.

21. HE’S PACKING COURTS WITH UNQUALIFIED JUDGES

Even though they normally fly under the radar, the most lasting legacy of any president is usually the judges he appoints to the federal bench. By that test, the negative impact of Donald Trump’s presidency will already be felt for decades. For, very quietly, he has managed to pack the courts with more judges, and more unqualified judges, than any modern president. And these are lifetime appointments.

The most prominent example, of course, is the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, although Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell deserves more credit for Gorsuch than Trump. For over a year, McConnell refused to schedule a hearing on Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. It was a ridiculously partisan gambit, but it worked, thereby leaving the seat open for Trump to fill.

And, of course, Trump and McConnell got a second bite at the Supreme Court apple when Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement at the end of June 2018, giving these two partisan hucksters the chance to reshape the highest court in the land for a generation.

But it’s at the appellate court level where Trump and Republicans have been really busy. In Trump’s first year in office, working in close cooperation with Senate judiciary chairman Charles Grassley, the Trump White House won confirmation of twelve appeals court judges, a modern record. In his first year, President Obama secured only four appellate judges.68

Though little known to the public, the influence of appeals court judges cannot be overstated. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 82 cases. In 2016, only 69. Compare that to 52,000 cases decided by U.S. courts of appeal in 2015, and 58,000 in 2016. Then add 353,000 cases decided at the district court level in 2015, and 355,000 in 2016. You can see how important are appointments to the lower courts. They decided 99.9 percent of all cases each year.69

Two things stand out about Trump’s judicial picks. They are overwhelmingly white men. And they are underwhelmingly qualified.

According to The Hill, and as noted earlier, 80 out of 87 were white. There was one African American, one Latino, and five Asian Americans, and 81 percent of his nominees are men. And among them all there is not one openly LGBT American.70

In only his first year, four of Donald Trump’s nominees received a “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association—which is in itself some kind of record. It took George W. Bush eight years to rack up eight “not qualified” nominees. In his eight years, Barack Obama had none—mainly because, like every other president except Bush 43 and Trump, he didn’t nominate anyone that couldn’t pass ABA’s muster.71

Perhaps the most well-known embarrassment of Trump’s wannabe judges was FEC commissioner Matthew S. Petersen. He was actually rated as qualified by the ABA but couldn’t even answer the most basic questions about legal procedure in his confirmation hearing. He also admitted he had never tried a case, argued a motion, or taken a deposition by himself. Both Republicans and Democrats pressured the White House to withdraw his name.72

Of Trump’s first four ABA-rated not-qualified judicial picks, one, Steven Grasz, was nevertheless confirmed by the Senate. Another, Brett Talley, withdrew his name after it was revealed he had written a blog post defending the KKK.73

The 2017 clock ran out for the two remaining unqualified nominees. But that didn’t stop Donald Trump. On January 8, 2018, he renominated both of them: Charles Goodwin, deemed unqualified to handle the job of a federal judge because of his “work habits, including his frequent absence from the courthouse until midafternoon”; and Holly Teeter, rejected by the ABA for her lack of trial judge experience.74

However, if some of Trump’s nominees don’t qualify for the federal bench, all of them qualify for the right-wing extremist Hall of Fame. One nominee, Mark Norris, suggested that being a Muslim is the same as being a terrorist. Jeff Mateer, nominated to the federal court in Texas, was forced to withdraw after declaring that transgender children were evidence of “Satan’s plan.” Another reject, Brett Talley, of KKK notoriety above, also blasted calls for gun safety legislation in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting as “the greatest attack on our constitutional freedoms in our lifetime.”75

Three more representative examples: Gordon Giampietro, nominated for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, has called marriage equality “an assault on nature,” considers calls for diversity “code for relaxed standards (moral and intellectual),” and claimed Justice Anthony Kennedy “went off the rails years ago” with his 2003 majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down Texas’s sodomy law. People should simply “ignore Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion,” he wrote, “because it’s not really legal reasoning.”76

And Thomas Farr, Trump’s pick for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, has a long history of promoting laws making it more difficult for African Americans to vote. He served as attorney for Jesse Helms’s 1990 reelection campaign, which sent over one hundred thousand postcards to black voters in North Carolina with misleading information about voter qualifications. A letter signed by the Congressional Black Caucus argued that Trump couldn’t have found an “attorney in North Carolina with a more hostile record on African American voting rights and workers’ rights” if he tried.77

Then there’s Michael Brennan, a white lawyer from Wisconsin who spent a large portion of his confirmation hearing avoiding answering the obvious question of whether racial bias exists in our justice system. Senator Cory Booker, among others, was livid. “To be nominating a federal judge who does not even acknowledge the persistent impact of race within our justice system,” he said, “and doesn’t even have a plan or thoughts on it, to me, is stunning and absolutely unacceptable, if not offensive.” Brennan also never received a “blue slip” from Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin, in keeping with the long tradition of senators having a say over judges from their home state.78

In their mad rush to appoint more of Trump’s unqualified nominees to lifetime seats on the judiciary, Senate Republicans simply threw that tradition out the window. Brennan was confirmed by the Senate in May 2018, and the others are on the way to becoming Trump judges, too. And there’s many more rabid conservative ideologues waiting in the wings, since Trump, lazy as ever, has effectively outsourced his judicial picks to right-wing organizations like the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. God save the courts!79

22. HE’S BLOATED THE NATIONAL DEBT

Hey, friends, we must be getting old. Because we all remember the days when Democrats were big spenders and Republicans were deficit hawks. Or to be more precise, we remember the days when Republicans bragged about being deficit hawks while Democrats were in power but threw all spending constraints out the window once they took over.

So it was with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and so it is with Donald Trump. There’s a method in the madness, of course. It’s a diabolical ploy unmasked by David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, as “starving the beast.” First, rack up the biggest budget deficits you can. Then, use those deficits you’ve created as an excuse to cut social programs. In other words, spend as much as you can, leaving the government with less cash, then use the specter of huge deficits as a rationale to take away the benefits millions of Americans depend on.80

And nobody’s been better at playing that game today than House Speaker Paul Ryan, who masquerades as a fiscal conservative. Shortly after he guided the GOP’s budget-busting tax cuts through the House at the end of 2017, he let the cat out of the bag. “We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform,” he said on talk radio, “which is how you tackle the debt and deficit.” He should have added, “Which we just created more of.”81

As it happened, they didn’t get to entitlement reform, or anything else, in the first half of 2018. And Paul Ryan, seeing a blue wave rising in November, decided to call it quits and not run again. But he’s still announced the basic GOP blueprint for his successor in the House.82

Under Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell, it’s so déjà vu, so all over again. But our kids and grandkids are the ones who will have to pay for it.

After building the wall, balancing the budget was something candidate Donald Trump—who bankrupted six companies and never balanced a budget in his life—promised in every speech and interview. “When you start cutting, you’re gonna balance the budget—believe me, you’re gonna balance the budget. So we have that,” he told a campaign rally on October 3, 2015.83

“It can be done … It will take place, and it will go relatively quickly … If you have the right people, like, in the agencies and the various people that do the balancing … you can cut the numbers by two pennies and three pennies and balance a budget quickly and have a stronger and better country,” he assured talk show host Sean Hannity on February 22, 2016.84

Trump actually promised not only to get rid of the deficit but to eliminate the country’s then $20 trillion national debt over a period of eight years. If not, he told radio conspiracy nut Alex Jones, “we’re not going to have a nation anymore.”85

Once in the White House, Trump led the Republican Party over the fiscal cliff. It started with the GOP tax cut bill, which Trump called “the biggest tax cut in the history of our country.” It wasn’t. And which the White House argued would not add to the deficit. “The president is not going to sign something that he believes is going to increase the deficit,” said Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin. Except he did. And it did.86

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the tax cut bill will add $1.4 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years, which the administration insists will be more than paid for by greater economic growth resulting from tax cuts. The same promise George W. Bush made for his tax cuts, with no results.87

That was step one. In February 2018, step two was the bipartisan agreement to keep the government running for the next two years—which added another $300 billion in both defense and nonmilitary spending to the deficit. Trump readily embraced the plan.88

Step three was Trump’s own 2019 budget, which adds a staggering $7.1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. In their feeble attempts to defend their out-of-control spending, White House aides insisted the budget would reduce the debt by $3 trillion—but that’s only if they are actually able to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and only if they’re able to achieve 3 percent annual economic growth. If not, the cost will be $10 trillion, not $7 trillion.89

On Wall Street, flamboyant real estate developer Donald Trump was so strung out on bank loans and IOUs he was known as the King of Debt. That title fits him in the White House, too. Burying American taxpayers in a mountain of debt, that’s what he’ll be remembered for.90

23. HE’S MADE INCOME INEQUALITY WORSE

President Obama called it “the defining challenge of our time.” Pope Francis called it “the root of social evil.” Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau calls it “the staggering gap between the rich and the poor.” Two-thirds of Americans believe it’s a serious problem that should be addressed immediately and is only getting worse.91

Donald Trump probably doesn’t even know what income inequality is, but he’s already made it worse.

And, yes, this is the same man who campaigned as a billionaire who would fight hard for working-class Americans and raise taxes on the rich. The truth is, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anyone except his fellow millionaires and billionaires. They’re the only people he knows, hangs out with, understands, and cares about.

It’s a given that top-earning Americans have always cornered the lion’s share of income, but in the last half century, their share has grown disproportionately. According to Vox, from 1979 to 2013, the share of after-tax income held by the top fifth of earners has grown by 6.5 percentage points, while the share held by the bottom fifth has dropped by 1.2 percentage points. Most of that growth, in fact, has been gobbled up by the top 1 percent.92

And that’s the small, inordinately wealthy slice of Americans who benefits most from Donald Trump’s tax cuts—which shrink taxes on corporations they own, cut taxes on “pass-through” businesses they control—Trump has a stake in over five hundred of them—and rolls back estate taxes lucky heirs and heiresses might have to pay on fortunes they did nothing to earn. Or, as they say, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.93

While it’s true that, under Trump’s plan, even middle-class Americans also get a (modest) tax cut, their break expires in 2025, while tax breaks for the wealthy continue. Economists predict that by 2027, a full 83 percent of tax cuts would go to the top 1 percent. Again, just further widening the already-wide income gap.94

Echoing arguments made since Ronald Reagan was president, Republicans claim that cutting taxes on corporations and the rich will boost everybody’s income, because the results will “trickle down.” But that has never happened with massive tax cuts before and won’t happen now.

Almost every leading economist disputes that lame theory. Take, for example, UC–Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who tracked growth and inequality over the last three decades. They conclude:

Since 1980, taxes paid by the wealthy have fallen dramatically and income at the top of the distribution has boomed, but gains for the rest of the population have been paltry. Average national income per adult has grown by only 1.4 percent per year—a poor performance by both historical and international standards.

As a result, the share of national income going to the top 1 percent has doubled from 10 percent to more than 20 percent, while income accrued by the bottom 50 percent has been almost halved, from 20 percent to 12.5 percent. There has been no growth at all in the average pretax income of the bottom half of the population over the past 40 years—during which trickle-down enthusiasts promised just the opposite.95

In other words, this is pure “voodoo economics,” as George Herbert Walker Bush correctly called it before joining the Reagan ticket in 1980. Yet now Republicans are doing it all over again. They never learn. And we don’t, either.

Ironically, the Trump tax cut bill passed within days of publication of the annual World Inequality Report, prepared by an international panel of economists, including Saez and Thomas Piketty, renowned author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Their report shows that “income inequality has increased in nearly all world regions in recent decades.”96

But what it finds about the United States is most striking: The United States is a good deal more unequal than Europe and China; less so, but still more unequal than sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, India, and Brazil; and about even with Russia. In other words, more than almost any other nation on the planet, the wealthiest country allows its wealthiest to hoard most of its wealth.97

The adverse impact on the American economy is clear. Even though, on a per capita basis, the U.S. economy is more than twice as large as it was in 1973, the average working person, who works full-time, year-round, earns less today than in 1973, after adjusting for inflation. As long as the 1 percent reap most of the benefits, without the 99 percent earning their fair share, the economy will never perform 100 percent.98

In the last century, conservatives used to accuse liberals, a.k.a. “socialists,” of wanting to “redistribute the wealth”—meaning to take money from the rich and give it to the poor.

Funny, they don’t talk about that anymore. Maybe because they realize that the share of income going to the most affluent of American households has skyrocketed from about 9 percent in the 1970s to more than 20 percent in recent years. That’s more than $1 trillion a year.99

We now have “redistribution of wealth,” all right—from the poor to the rich.

24. HE’S DESTROYING HEALTH CARE

As noted previously (#12), Donald Trump is obsessed with overturning everything accomplished by Barack Obama. And, from the beginning, his number one obsession has been killing the Affordable Care Act, which everybody calls Obamacare.

Channeling Herman Melville, Obamacare is Trump’s white whale. The irony is that, since he hasn’t yet been able to do so, Obamacare is also Trump’s bête noire.

Even as a candidate, Trump expressed a special disdain for Obamacare. True, he promised to build the wall and balance the budget. But Obamacare? He promised to end Obamacare—on day one! While he hasn’t succeeded so far, it’s not because he and congressional Republicans haven’t tried. And tried. And tried.100

For all their reputation as being masters of the legislative process, when it came down to repealing Obamacare, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell looked more like the Keystone Cops. Even President Trump publicly expressed his frustration at their incompetence in delivering what Republicans had been promising for seven years, if only they could retake the House and Senate. But their efforts to do so were a series of fumbles.101

First up was Ryan’s baby, a so-called repeal-and-replace bill in the House. But unable to round up enough votes for his own plan, the Speaker was forced to admit defeat and pull the bill on March 24, 2017.102

House Republicans went back to the drawing board, made major concessions to the Freedom Caucus, and narrowly approved a repeal-and-replace bill, 217–213, on May 4. But everybody predicted it would be DOA in the Senate, which turned out to be the case.103

After struggling unsuccessfully for nearly two months to line up enough votes for their own repeal-and-replace bill, Senate Republicans decided to go for “repeal only.” When that vote failed on July 26, McConnell scrambled to put together an emergency, “skinny repeal” bill—but that, too, went down in flames. Late on July 27, John McCain’s dramatic thumbs-down meant three Republican senators (along with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski) opposed the bill, giving Democrats enough votes to save Obamacare once again.104

In a concession speech on the Senate floor, McConnell said, “It is time to move on.” Yet some still weren’t willing to give up. Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy came up with yet a third repeal bill. When it became clear in September that it would also fail to get sixty votes, Senate Republicans threw in the towel. Congressional efforts to repeal Obamacare—again, which Republicans for seven long years had declared over and over again was their top priority—were dead. When some die-hard congressional Republicans contemplated reviving Obamacare repeal in the summer of 2018, a Trump senior official told The Daily Beast it was a “suicide mission.”105

But as the legislative circus dragged on, Trump was doing everything he could by executive action to undermine the Affordable Care Act and discourage people from enrolling. As Politico reported on “Trump’s War of Attrition on Obamacare” in July 2017, “the administration slashed the advertising budget for new sign-ups by 90 percent, halved the 2018 enrollment period, and churned out anti-Obamacare propaganda to share on social media.”106

At the same time, Trump also signed an executive order expanding so-called association health plans, short-term plans offered by, say, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or a consortium of small businesses that can avoid normal state regulations—and exempting them from Obamacare’s rules. And he ended billions of dollars in subsidy payments to insurance companies made available under the Affordable Care Act in order to lower deductibles and out-of-pocket costs for lower-income Americans. Without those subsidies, insurers will be forced to charge higher premiums.107

Trump still wasn’t finished. He insisted that the GOP tax cut bill include repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate, allowing him to crow at its signing, “In this bill, not only do we have massive tax cuts and tax reform, we have essentially repealed Obamacare, and we’ll come up with something that will be much better. Obamacare has been repealed in this bill.”108

Big surprise: Trump was lying yet again. It wasn’t repealed, but by canceling the individual mandate, Trump will have caused as many as thirteen million Americans to lose the health protection they had secured for their families, many for the first time, under Obamacare.109

The Republicans’ “death by a thousand cuts” strategy made another slash a few months later. As part of the bipartisan plan adopted in January 2018 to keep the government running, Congress further weakened Obamacare by suspending three taxes it depended on for funding: the so-called Cadillac tax on high-value health plans, a 2.3 percent levy on medical devices, and the health insurance tax—three cuts the Joint Committee on Taxation projected would add $31.3 billion to the federal deficit over the next several years.110

Then Trump tried another tack. In June 2018, Department of Justice lawyers argued before a federal court that, because the Republican tax cuts had repealed the individual mandate, now other critical elements of the Affordable Care Act were unconstitutional—including the provision protecting Americans with preexisting conditions. As of this writing, the case is not settled, but Trump and Sessions are still going out of their way to see reforms that benefit roughly half the country be destroyed.111

And yet, despite all that, Obamacare is not dead. Nor is it, as Trump so often claims, in a “death spiral.” Obamacare is drastically weakened but still very much alive. A surprisingly large number of people signed up for coverage for 2018. Enrollment was only about 5 percent below last year’s total; 8.8 million signed up in market exchanges, and an additional 7 million Americans are now covered by Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. There’s life in the old dog yet. And the funny thing is, as polls have shown, even Republicans like the provisions of Obamacare … when it’s called the Affordable Care Act (or, as in Kentucky before Republicans killed the state exchange, Kynect). This conservatives well know—which is why they’ve taken to constantly calling it Obamacare in the first place.112

Meanwhile, in their zeal to deny Americans health care, Donald Trump and congressional Republicans didn’t stop at Obamacare. They also played hostage games with the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP.

CHIP should be celebrated as the ideal government program. It’s bipartisan, created by Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch. It’s been around since 1997. And it’s successful. Working with states, it provides health insurance to nine million children, giving the United States health coverage for 95 percent of our kids.113

What’s not to like about it? You’d think it would get universal bipartisan support when its funding ran out in October 2017. But such was not the case. Instead, Republicans decided to play politics with it as part of the debate over Obamacare.

At first, they tied any extension of CHIP to massive cuts in Obamacare and Medicare. When that failed, they used CHIP as a bargaining chip in immigration reform. Democrats had to choose, they said, between CHIP or protection for the DREAMers (see #17). They couldn’t have both. Mitch McConnell even posted a ransom note on Twitter pitting the nine million kids receiving CHIP against the seven hundred thousand DREAMers. “Senate Democrats have a choice to make,” he sniveled like a Bond villain. “This should be a no brainer…”114

In the end, Congress opted for CHIP. While the DREAMers remain in limbo, Congress agreed to extend CHIP for six years. But there’s no doubt Donald Trump would have let it die if that was the price for killing Obamacare. After all, taking health care away from kids is old hat for Donald Trump. This is the same man who, to spite the family of his dead brother, once sued to cut off health care for his grandnephew with cerebral palsy.115

25. HE’S AFTER MEDICARE, MEDICAID, AND SOCIAL SECURITY

Building a wall … repealing Obamacare … balancing the budget … We’ve seen a string of broken campaign promises from Donald Trump so far.

To which, add another one from May 2015: “I was the first and only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid. Huckabee copied me.”116

Again, promise made, promise broken. The 2018 budget proposal Trump sent to Congress would cut all three programs, the backbone of our American social safety net, by billions of dollars.117

In a sense, this is the other shoe dropping. As we saw with #22, Trump’s first move was to rack up ever higher deficits by giving massive tax cuts to the rich. Now he cuts programs that benefit working- and middle-class families to pay for those tax cuts. Taken together, these cuts would only create more poverty and hardship and swell the ranks of the uninsured.

First, Medicare. As ThinkProgress explained in February 2018, the Trump budget proposes “reforming” Medicare by “changing the way patients are reimbursed for post-acute care, making it harder for physicians to refer patients to other providers, and limiting hospital payments associated with early discharge to hospices.” Bottom line: existing Medicare benefits cut $554 billion.118

Note: Trump would still not enable Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies for lower prescription drug prices, breaking still another oft-repeated campaign promise.

As for Medicaid: Again under guise of “reform,” Trump rewards states for pulling out of the Medicaid expansion encouraged under Obamacare, in part by imposing a Medicaid per capita cap and shifting to block grants to states. Bottom line: $1.1 trillion in cuts, fewer services, in ten years.119

And Social Security. The Trump budget would not only cut Social Security, it would cut programs for the most vulnerable of Social Security recipients—the disabled—to the tune of $72 billion in cuts over the next decade.120

And, by the way, to prove that he never gives up his number one obsession, the Trump budget also includes the full repeal of Obamacare.

In addition, the Republicans’ tax plan officially embraces the concept of “chained CPI,” a narrower way of calculating inflation that, if applied to Social Security in the future, could mean billions of dollars in cuts out of the pockets of America’s elderly. Policy writer David Dayen called chained CPI a “Trojan horse” that is “intentionally confusing and obscure” and “puts Social Security under threat.”

“If it goes through unchecked,” he warns, “the slippery slope to impoverishing seniors will get coated in grease.”121

Of course, while the tax plan is now law, the Trump budget as presented to Congress may not ever be approved. No president’s budget is. But there are other ways in which Trump is already gutting Medicaid by executive action.

First, contrary to the policies of previous Republican and Democratic presidents, the Trump administration is encouraging states to impose some kind of work requirement on Medicaid recipients. In other words, it’s not enough to be living in or near poverty, the current test. You must also have a job or prove you’ve been trying to get one.122

Which, health care experts point out, is both unnecessary and cruel. Unnecessary, because the vast majority of Medicaid recipients who can work already have jobs. Cruel, because those who don’t are either elderly, disabled, retired, sick, or caring for a loved one.

In its December 2017 study of Michigan’s Medicaid program, for example, The Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, found that nearly half of Medicaid enrollees were already working. One-quarter were unable to work or were retired, in school, or acting as homemaker. And many of the 27.6 percent who were “out of work” had obstacles to finding a job: a chronic physical illness, mental illness, or some serious mental or physical condition. They weren’t just “lazy bums who refuse to get a job,” as Republicans assert.123

Nevertheless, Medicaid work requirement plans submitted by Arkansas, Kentucky, and Indiana were quickly approved by the Trump HHS, and several others are pending.

Worse, wherever they can, statehouse Republicans have been trying out additional cruel and demented variations on this terrible idea. In their version, Michigan Republicans exempted people who live in counties with more than 8.5 percent unemployment from the onerous work requirements—which sounds great, until you realize that, in effect and by design, it protects rural white counties, where rates are higher, and punishes urban black ones.124

In several other states, meanwhile, Republicans tried to put a lifetime limit on Medicaid—which means millions of America’s poor will lose their health care protection. In the past, no state has ever put a limit on how long a person can receive Medicaid benefits. But Arizona and Utah want to adopt a lifetime limit of five years. Wisconsin, four years. Kansas, three years. Maine wants to limit its coverage to three months in any thirty-six-month period.125

Thankfully, this, for now, has been deemed a bridge too far; Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Seema Verma rejected the Kansas plan in May 2018. When you’re too cruel for Trumpworld, that’s saying something.126

Nonetheless, between budget cuts, chained CPI, and work requirements, Trump has already smashed yet another of his key campaign planks. “Save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cuts. Have to do it,” candidate Donald Trump said on June 16, 2015. Too bad President Trump doesn’t remember a word of what candidate Trump promised.127

26. HE’S SHREDDING THE SOCIAL SAFETY NET

To take another example, Donald Trump campaigned for president as a populist. But nothing unmasks him more as a fake populist than his attempts to destroy the social safety net, starting with the food stamp program.

Food stamps—now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP—is one of the government’s most successful, efficient, and cost-effective programs. It prevents about forty-six million low-income Americans, almost a sixth of the population, from falling into hunger. It’s not a steady drain on the federal budget; it expands or shrinks, depending on the demand. People sign up when they need it, drop it when they need it no longer. It’s available everywhere. It’s cheap: The average food stamp benefit works out to be about $1.40 per meal. And 93 percent of every dollar actually goes to providing food to beneficiaries, which makes it one of the least wasteful federal bureaucracies.128

In fact, as Sasha Abramsky put it in The New Yorker, “SNAP is the single biggest reason why malnutrition has largely vanished from the United States.”129

But Donald Trump looked at SNAP and said to himself, This program looks too good to be true. There must be something wrong with it. (In fact, his 2011 book made up a “food stamp crime wave” that had no basis in reality.) So, let’s get rid of it. Which he’s trying very hard to do, in two ways.130

First, in his 2019 budget, Trump proposed cutting the food stamp budget by $213 billion over ten years and imposing more stringent work requirements on recipients, even though most of them already have jobs.131

Then, in one of his craziest ideas yet, Trump decided he would make up for the cuts in food stamp money by giving everybody a monthly “America’s Harvest Box,” consisting of “100 percent U.S.-grown and produced food.” In other words, instead of giving people the equivalent of cash so they can buy what they need, the government will tell them what to eat: whatever’s in that week’s box—mainly processed food in cans, tins, and jars.132

There’s one other problem, of course. The whole box project rests on the unlikely premise that the federal government, which never managed to successfully deliver premade meals to Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria, will somehow deliver boxes of fresh foods to millions of American households each week. Who are they kidding?

Even though Trump’s absurd subscription box fig leaf for deep SNAP cuts received the most media attention, it was only one aspect of Donald Trump’s assault on the social safety net, which tens of millions of low-income Americans depend on for survival.

By way of the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities, other programs targeted by Trump for deep cuts or elimination include:

•    Section 8 Housing—successfully providing subsidies for affordable housing for low-income families since 1937. Trump raises rents on existing stock and cuts funding for repairs by 47 percent.

•    Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—provides short-term income assistance, work programs, and other support for poor families with children. Trump cuts it by $21 billion over the next decade.

•    Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)—provides employment and training services for dislocated adult and youth workers. Trump cuts the budget from $2.7 billion to $1.6 billion.

•    Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (SEOG)—supplements Pell Grants for some 1.5 million needy students. Trump eliminates the program. Who needs college anyway?

•    Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP)—helps over six million low-income households pay their home energy bill. Trump eliminates the program. In other words, the rich get tax breaks while the poor freeze in winter.

•    Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP)—gives low-income, unemployed people over age fifty-five work experience in community service activities. Trump eliminates the program (even though he wants everyone to work for their Medicaid coverage and Harvest Boxes).133

Collectively, cuts to these essential programs hurt those who need help the most. They are all targeted at the very people candidate Donald Trump said would be his priority: those left behind by today’s economy or living in distressed urban or rural communities. Of course, Trump forgot them once he arrived in the White House, because he never cared about them in the first place.

In the 2000 presidential primary, candidate George W. Bush, campaigning as a “compassionate conservative,” criticized his fellow Republicans for trying to “balance their budget on the backs of the poor.”134

That message was completely lost on Donald Trump.

27. HE’S UNDERMINED PROTECTIONS FOR LGBTQ AMERICANS

Along with pretending to care about the needs of the most vulnerable, there was another issue Donald Trump occasionally ran on as if he weren’t a textbook conservative: LGBTQ rights.

While he began his campaign declaring he was “very much a traditional man” on same-sex marriage—some journalists pointed out he must love traditional marriage, because he’s had three of them—he soon seemed to loosen up on the trail. After all, he came from New York City. He had many gay friends. He had even attended a “beautiful” same-sex wedding.135

When controversy broke about North Carolina’s so-called bathroom law, prohibiting transgender women from using the women’s bathroom, Trump tried to have it both ways. At first, he said the law was unnecessary but insisted North Carolina had the right to enact it—no profile in courage but still more tolerant than what we heard from Mike Pence.136

So, it was presumed Trump would offer a relatively gay-friendly administration, but once again, he fooled everybody. Having sworn his allegiance to evangelicals, and they to him, he proceeded to turn back the clock on gay rights.

Despite his remarks on the bathroom law as a candidate, he took essentially the same action at the federal level, rescinding protections put into place by President Obama that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity.137

In May 2017, Trump signed a “religious liberty” executive order that many read as allowing faith-based organizations to use their faith as an excuse to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans.138

Under Trump, Pride Month lost any official recognition. Under Obama, June was National Pride Month, and the White House, in a stirring civil rights moment, was lit up like a rainbow. In 2017 and 2018, it wasn’t. Trump refused to recognize it and never mentioned gay rights, or pride, the entire month and did not, unlike Obama, issue a Pride Month proclamation.

Then, in July—hard to believe in the twenty-first century until you remember Jefferson Beauregard Sessions—the Trump Justice Department ruled that today’s civil rights laws do not protect employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation, only on the color of their skin. In other words, according to Trump, you can now legally get fired from any job just because you’re gay or lesbian. A giant step backward.

All of which led up to Trump’s most anti-LGBTQ move: a tweet out of the blue on July 26, 2017—a tweet not even the secretary of defense knew was coming—announcing a ban on transgender people serving in the military. He ordered the Pentagon to stop accepting any new transgender recruits while figuring out what to do with the fifteen thousand transgender troops now serving in the military. (For their part, the Pentagon said they weren’t going to do anything based on a tweet and wanted to see an actual policy memo first.)139

Why would he do such a hateful thing, without even consulting the Pentagon? For one, and as we’ll discuss more later, Trump always likes to stir the culture wars pot when he’s worried about his poll numbers. For another, he’s Donald J. Trump. He has never missed a chance to be an asshole. As one White House official put it, summing up Trump’s opinion, “It’ll be fun to watch [Democrats] defend this.”140

But, in the end, it wasn’t just Democrats. After three different federal judges ruled Trump’s executive ban unconstitutional, the military continues to accept transgender recruits and transgender troops remain still on duty.

So Trump lost that round, but not for lack of trying. And just as with the Muslim ban, he decided to try again. Urged on by Vice President Mike Pence, who reportedly coopted Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s report on the subject calling for inclusiveness, and other “Christian” (read: homophobic) allies at the Heritage Foundation and Family Research Council, Trump announced a revised ban on transgender individuals in the military, with some minor qualifications this time, in March 2018.141

The courts were not fooled. The following month, a U.S. district judge upheld the earlier injunction against this revised ban, while another district judge denied the Trump administration’s attempt to block a legal challenge to it. As of this writing, round two continues.142

Meanwhile, true to form, on December 29, 2017, Trump ended his first year in office by first firing all members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA), created by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and continued by Presidents Bush and Obama—and then disbanding the entire council. Earlier, six members had resigned from the council because, as they told Newsweek, “Trump doesn’t care about HIV. We’re outta here.”143

By that time, the Log Cabin Republicans felt vindicated. Since its founding in California in the late 1970s, the Log Cabin group has been the leading gay rights advocacy organization in the Republican Party. They exist to endorse and elect gay-friendly Republicans at every level. But in 2016, even after Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, they refused to endorse him—the first time in twelve years they failed to endorse the GOP nominee.144

He made vague promises about protecting gay rights, they acknowledged, but in the end, following President Reagan’s favorite Russian maxim “trust, but verify,” they just didn’t trust Donald Trump to do the right thing. And they were right.145

28. HE HASN’T FILLED KEY JOB SLOTS

When somebody runs for president, you assume they want to do the job, if elected. Apparently not Donald Trump.

One of any president’s first jobs is to fill the thousands of key positions necessary to keep the government running smoothly. Not Donald Trump.

We will talk about the disaster he’s made of the State Department in particular later. But even aside from State, Trump has not only put some monumentally unqualified people in important posts, he has failed to nominate anyone for hundreds of positions—leaving many agencies woefully understaffed.

The numbers tell the story. There are some 1,100 top government jobs that require Senate confirmation. Yet, as tracked by The Washington Post, seven months into his administration, President Trump had only nominated 277 people to those posts, and only 124 had been confirmed by the Senate. That’s compared to 433 nominated and 310 confirmed for President Obama.146

NPR took another look at progress in late November 2017 and found there were still 256 key posts for which the president hadn’t nominated anyone.147

Indeed, the White House Transition Project found that Trump’s pace in staffing the government was the slowest in forty years.148

Again, it was the State Department that was hardest hit. As of October 2017, over half of State Department positions requiring Senate confirmation still didn’t have a nominee. There was no nominee for ambassador to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or Turkey. There was no assistant secretary for arms control or assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation. And, at a time when Trump himself was threatening war on the Korean Peninsula, we had no ambassador to South Korea and no assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs.149

The pace never picked up. At the five hundred–day mark of Trump’s administration in June 2018, the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service reported that 204 positions requiring Senate confirmation remained unfilled, the slowest pace in at least six administrations. Among the empty spots were thirteen inspectors general, who could theoretically oversee any malfeasance occurring in Trump’s federal departments.150

For Donald Trump, this is no problem. He insists he’s not filling these positions on purpose. It’s part of his goal of “draining the swamp.”

“I’m generally not going to make a lot of the appointments that would normally be—because you don’t need them,” he told Forbes magazine. “I mean, you look at some of these agencies, how massive they are, and it’s totally unnecessary. They have hundreds of thousands of people.”151

The issue is, absent presidential nominees, those positions are usually filled temporarily by long-term federal bureaucrats who are only interested in business as usual. If Trump really wanted to “drain the swamp,” you’d think he’d appoint his own people to shake things up.

There’s one other problem. By law, posts requiring Senate confirmation can only be held temporarily for three hundred days. That deadline has long passed. Which means that any decision made by Trump’s fill-in employees in any agency could be challenged as illegal.152

One thing for sure. In this case, Trump can’t blame the Senate for not acting. Republicans control the Senate. As evidenced by his shoddy choice of judges, they’re ready to rubber-stamp almost anybody Trump sends up. But they can’t confirm until he nominates.

What Trump doesn’t seem to understand is that sorely understaffed federal agencies not only hurt the American people who are not receiving service they need from the government; in the end, it hurts Trump most of all, because it makes it harder to get things done and accomplish his goals. But apparently, he just doesn’t care.

29. HE’S WAGING A WAR ON WEED

In January 2018, Vermont became the ninth state, plus the District of Columbia, to legalize the recreational use of marijuana and the first state to do so legislatively. After legalizing recreational use in 2014, Colorado had reaped more than $500 million in tax revenue from marijuana by mid-July 2017. By the end of 2017, six in ten Americans favored legalization. At this rate, it won’t be long before pot is legal nationwide. When that happens, according to one recent study, it could mean $132 billion in federal tax revenue and more than a million new American jobs by 2025.153

But not if Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions have anything to do with it. They’re determined to reverse the trend. So much for conservatives supporting “states’ rights.” They’ve declared war on weed.

It’s a classic case of federal versus state law. At the federal level, cannabis is still classified as a Schedule 1 drug, with criminal penalties, even though several states have legalized its use. So what’s the federal government’s response?154

Under President Obama, the Justice Department took a states’ rights position: As long as states followed some basic rules, like keeping pot out of the hands of teenagers and preventing export to other states, the feds would keep their distance.155

Jeff Sessions has reversed that policy, angering legislators from both parties. No matter what states decide, DOJ will continue to enforce federal laws against pot use in every state and expects states to cooperate. Which means federal agents could raid pot outlets in Colorado, Washington, California, Oregon, Vermont, and four other states and shut them down, even though the operation was perfectly legal under state law.156

Republican senator Cory Gardner of Colorado was so livid at Sessions’s move that he placed a hold on all Department of Justice nominations. At the very least, the new Sessions policy will cause confusion and uncertainty in the expanding marijuana industry. Is it safe to begin a pot business? Is it too risky an investment? Can you get a bank loan?157

This war on pot should not come as a surprise from Sessions, who has long opposed the use of marijuana even for medicinal purposes. But it will probably force Congress to act in one of two ways—either to make pot legal nationwide (which is unlikely), or to prevent federal agents from interfering in states that have approved the recreational use of pot, just as Congress has already restricted DOJ from interfering in states that have approved its medicinal use.158

If there’s any surprise, it’s that Donald Trump would let Jeff Sessions lead him down this no-win path. There is no turning back the clock on marijuana. In Gallup’s most recent poll, 64 percent of American adults, including a majority of Republicans, back legalization. And as the plaintiffs in a lawsuit to compel the government to legalize weed recently pointed out, they’re not the first enthusiasts. Many of our Founding Fathers, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, farmed hemp for various (nonsmoking) uses.159

But, at least for now, when it comes to pot, Donald Trump is on the wrong side of popular opinion and history.

30. HE’S BRANDED THE MEDIA AS THE ENEMY

Funny thing about Donald Trump: He is 100 percent a creation of the media. He could never have run for president were he not a TV B-list celebrity, hosting NBC’s The Apprentice for fourteen years. He would never have been elected if cable television hadn’t given him far more TV exposure and far more favorable treatment than any other Republican in the 2016 primary and Hillary Clinton in the general election.

No doubt, Donald Trump would not be where he is today without the media. And yet, both during his campaign and since he’s been in the White House, he’s done nothing but brutally attack them in ways that are unbecoming of America’s president and even dangerous.

Unfortunately, Trump is not just some loudmouth in a bar. He’s the president of the United States. His negative comments about the media have had serious consequences on press freedoms worldwide and been condemned by the Committee to Protect Journalists, one of the world’s most prestigious journalistic organizations.160

What a contrast. In his first year in office, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In his first year, Donald Trump was named “the world’s most oppressive leader toward press freedom” by the committee. Trump actually edged out Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin as “winner” of the organization’s top prize for “overall achievement in undermining global press freedom.”161

It’s one honor Donald Trump richly deserves.

Attacking the media, of course, was the hallmark of the Trump campaign for president and the highlight of every campaign rally. He not only banned certain reporters from covering events, he pointed out others he considered unfriendly by name. Journalists in attendance were confined to roped-in pens where Trump would point them out and urge the crowd to express their displeasure. Hostility grew to the point where many news organizations hired security to accompany their reporters to campaign rallies—a new first, and a new low, for American politics.162

Trump took his hatred of the media with him into the White House, undermining both the First Amendment and our nation’s highest office with his adoption of two favorite phrases, both with scary historical precedents.

It’s probably impossible to keep track of all of Trump’s crazy anti-media tweets, and there is no room to list them all here. But according to the Trump Twitter Archive (yes, someone’s actually archiving all his nonsense), by October 31, 2017, Trump had tweeted about the media being nothing but “fake news” 141 times. And he hasn’t stopped since.163

In his world, of course, “fake news” is not just “news” as reported that is simply not true. That rarely, rarely happens—and, when it does, it is immediately retracted and corrected by any reputable news organizations. No, to Donald Trump “fake news” is any news story that is in any way critical of his administration or does not portray him in glowing terms.

It’s his deliberate way of sowing distrust in the media writ large, which is the same tactic and similar language to that used by Hitler to undermine the media. Where Hitler said “Lügenpresse” (lying press), Trump says “fake news.”164

But it wasn’t long before Trump made it even uglier. On February 17, 2017, he tweeted: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people!”165

Whoa! Members of the Fourth Estate are committing treason? Those practicing a sacred right enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution were the “enemy of the American people”? That statement—from the president of the United States—sent chills through anybody who believed in a democratic society. And again, it carried ominous historical meaning. As Republican senator Jeff Flake of Arizona felt compelled to note on the Senate floor, “enemy of the people” is the same phrase used by Joseph Stalin against the media during his murderous purge of the Russian people.166

But, of course, Trump didn’t stop with his tweets and hate rallies. He repeatedly attacked journalists by name, calling, for example, Chuck Todd of Meet the Press a “sleeping son of a bitch” in March 2018.167

He demanded that certain reporters and anchors be fired, like Dave Weigel of The Washington Post, Andy Lack of NBC, and Jemele Hill of ESPN.168

He threatened to revoke the FCC licenses of news outlets whose reporting he didn’t like.169

He called for tougher libel laws to intimidate journalists.170

And in January 2018, he handed out his own “Fake News Awards,” which, no surprise, went to CNN, The New York Times, ABC, The Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek—who just happen to provide the most substantive coverage of the Trump administration.171

Trump, in fact, considers everything in the media “fake news” except for Fox & Friends, which he watches and tweets about religiously every morning. But not everybody at Fox is a fan of Trump’s war on the media. Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, said in a speech that “President Trump is engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on the free press in our history.”172

And there’s no doubt that Trump’s sustained assault on the media has had its impact. First, here in the United States, by eroding public confidence in the media. A fall 2017 Politico poll found that 46 percent of voters believe major news organizations simply make up stories about Donald Trump.173

But it’s also had serious consequences around the world. As Senator John McCain pointed out, several hard-line, dictatorial leaders “are already using his words as cover as they silence and shutter one of the key pillars of democracy.” After all, if Donald Trump can get away with dismissing any media criticism as “fake news,” so can they.174

Even after his own many battles with an unfavorable press, Thomas Jefferson famously affirmed, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”175

Too bad nobody told Donald Trump.

31. HE’S CREATED A STATE-RUN MEDIA

But here’s the ultimate irony about Donald Trump: The man who’s always complaining about television news can’t turn it off. While he said it was a “false story” in the “failing NY Times,” reports indicate he watches more television in one day than most people watch in a week.176

And there’s no secret what channel he’s watching. You don’t have to guess. He’ll proudly tell you. He tweets about it. His TV fix is a steady diet of Fox News. It’s his “Home on the Range”—where “seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”

Indeed, if you’re not watching Fox News yourself, as Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America pointed out in his six-month study of Trump’s Twitter habits, you have a hard time understanding Trump’s tweets. Which, again, he made no bones about.

We already discussed the momentary panic early one morning in December 2017 when Trump, based on something he saw on Fox & Friends, abruptly announced his opposition to legislation extending the timeline of the FISA court—a GOP-sponsored bill scheduled for a vote in Congress later that day and which the White House had told House Speaker Paul Ryan just the evening before that the president fully supported.177

Another bizarre firestorm erupted at 4:50 a.m. on Friday morning, March 2, when, apparently and completely out of the blue, POTUS tweeted out a blast at “Alex [sic]” Baldwin and his “dieing [sic]” career, snidely observing that if it was painful for Baldwin to play DJT on Saturday Night Live, it was even more painful to watch.178

Yes, Alec (!) Baldwin had, indeed, created a sensation with his SNL portrayal of Trump, but he’s been playing him since 2016. Where did that tweet come from?

Where else? Fox & Friends had just run a story about a recent comment of Baldwin’s about how tough it was to play Trump but how willing he was to continue as long as it got under Trump’s skin. And their “audience of one” couldn’t resist resurrecting the feud.179

It was about this time that Fox & Friends put out word that they were looking for a new producer. What an incredible opportunity. As several pointed out—given the show’s ability to set the daily agenda and priorities for the president of the United States—that was probably the most powerful position in the world! Not for nothing did Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu go on Fox & Friends in May 2018 to push an end to the Iran nuclear deal. He knew exactly who was always watching—the one man he wanted to reach.180

Trump’s echo chamber exists with other Fox shows, too—notably Sean Hannity. When Trump fired James Comey, for example, Hannity said the real story was that now the Justice Department was free to forget about Russia and reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and put her behind bars at last—the same argument Trump made over and over again on Twitter.181

No kidding. You sometimes wonder: Who’s really running the country? Donald Trump? The morning trio of Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Ainsley Earhardt? Or Sean Hannity? Usually when somebody says the TV is talking directly to them, you’d think they’re off their rocker. But Donald Trump kinda has a point.

Indeed, Fox News today is as close as we’ve ever come to something Donald Trump would like to see: total state-run media. Fox is nothing more than an extension of the Trump White House—which, in turn, is nothing more than the Washington headquarters of Fox. That’s why, even as he calls all the other networks “fake news,” Trump has praised Fox’s “amazing reporting” and called it “MUCH more important in the United States than CNN.”182

Whatever you think of Fox & Friends, in the end, it’s a lousy way to govern.

32. HE’S LIMITING ACCESS TO THE INTERNET

If there’s one idea that has almost universal, bipartisan support today, it’s net neutrality: the idea that everything on the internet should be equally accessible to all adults. A nonpartisan December 2017 poll found net neutrality was supported by 89 percent of Democrats, 86 percent of independents, and 75 percent of Republicans.183

It’s a concept as all-American as the highway. We decide where we want to go. We don’t want anybody else deciding that for us or telling us that some of us have to poke along in the slow lane while others breeze by us in the fast lane.

Keep your hands off our highways, and keep your hands off our internet. That’s what most Americans believe and want—universal access to all sites; no restrictions on what you could download or when; no speed limits on getting to certain sites and not others. And that’s what federal rules, adopted in 2015, required.

But, no matter how popular, there was only one problem with those net neutrality rules: They were adopted under President Barack Obama. Therefore, in Donald Trump’s rubric, they had to go.

On December 14, 2017, the newly constituted Trump FCC voted 3–2 to abandon net neutrality and transfer control of the internet from public users to the three big internet service providers, or ISPs: Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T. Trump himself had sealed the deal by naming as the new FCC chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon corporate lawyer and longtime opponent of net neutrality.184

Trump’s new rules are not only anticonsumer; they will inevitably saddle internet users with higher fees. As FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn lamented, “What saddens me is that the agency that is supposed to protect you is abandoning you.”185

More significantly, the Trump rules are also antidemocratic. In fact, John Nichols of The Nation denounced them as “the most brutal blow to Democracy yet.” Why? Because the internet today is the key to political activism and organizing—by people on all sides of every issue.186

Without the internet, there would have been no Occupy Wall Street movement, no Black Lives Matter, no #MeToo campaign, no March for Our Lives. The corporate ISPs could have shut them all down or certainly made them much more difficult or impossible to organize by throttling internet access. Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, warned that without a free and open internet, American innovation will suffer, too.187

Is that the end of it? Does abandonment of net neutrality by Trump’s FCC mean the end of the internet as we know it? Not yet. The new rules met immediate opposition on several fronts.

By January 16, 2018, twenty-one states and the District of Columbia had filed a lawsuit to block imposition of anti–net neutrality rules. They accused the FCC of ignoring 99 percent of public comments in opposition to their proposed reversal of net neutrality. And, without waiting for the courts, several states already took action on their own.188

The new FCC order bans states and cities from adopting rules on broadband providers that contradict its plan. Thankfully, that’s being ignored. In March 2018, Washington became the first state to pass its own net neutrality rules. Governors in several other states, including New York, Hawaii, New Jersey, Montana, and Vermont, signed executive orders upholding net neutrality as well. Other states are considering laws banning ISPs from applying new FCC rules in their jurisdiction or allowing only ISPs that still adhere to net neutrality to do business in their state.189

Meanwhile, Democratic members of Congress vowed to use the Congressional Review Act—the same law used by Republicans to scuttle dozens of Obama-approved regulations—to overturn the FCC’s initiative and return to net neutrality. With three Republican senators crossing over to join Democrats, the Senate voted 52–47 to override the FCC and restore net neutrality in May 2018—but, for now, that resolution is going nowhere in the Republican-controlled House.190

Nonetheless, the fight for a free internet is not over.

33. HE LEFT PUERTO RICO FOR DEAD

“This is an island surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water.”191

That was Donald Trump’s defense of his administration’s dismally inadequate response to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, a response that left thousands of Americans dead and the island in a permanent state of catastrophe. He seemed as surprised to discover that Puerto Rico was an island—and thus impossible to drive relief trucks to—as he was to discover that Puerto Ricans were also American citizens.

Whatever the reason, while FEMA did a relatively good job aiding residents of Texas and Gulf states after Hurricane Harvey and Florida after Hurricane Irma, it totally failed to anticipate or respond adequately to the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

Trump’s comments and behavior following Maria made things even worse. Before traveling there, he blamed the people of Puerto Rico for their own misfortune, tweeting that a “financial crisis looms largely of their own making,” as a result of which “all infrastructure was disaster before hurricanes.” He also warned residents of Puerto Rico not to expect too much assistance: “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders … in P.R. forever!”192

In another Twitter snit, Trump also suggested the real problem wasn’t the “big ocean water”—it was because he thought Puerto Ricans were lazy. “Such poor leadership by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help” he tweeted on September 30. “They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.”193

Then, once he arrived on the island, Trump proved equally insensitive by vastly underestimating the number of fatalities, compared to deaths from Hurricane Katrina. “Sixteen versus literally thousands of people,” he told the governor of Puerto Rico. “You can be very proud.” By his measure, what happened in Puerto Rico was not a “real catastrophe.” Actually, the death toll from Maria, while still disputed, is much, much higher, ranging from the government’s “official” count of 64 to CNN’s tally of 499 to a Penn State study total of 1,085 to a shocking estimate by Harvard School of Public Health researchers of more than 4,600, which would be more than seventy times Trump’s official number.194

Before leaving the island, and after hurling rolls of paper towels (“beautiful, soft towels, very good towels”) at hurricane survivors like it was a timeout at a basketball game, Trump awarded himself a score of 10 out of 10 for the federal government’s response. Which, of course, was news to most residents of the island, because they had no home, no food, no drinking water—and no power to watch the news. But some did have paper towels, I suppose.195

In several ways, what happened in Puerto Rico reflected problems with the Trump administration overall: no experience, no expertise, and no idea on how to govern, all tinged with racism. This was nowhere more evident than in contracts awarded by the government to help with Puerto Rico’s recovery.

To provide meals, the Trump administration awarded a $150 million contract to an Atlanta firm with no previous government experience to deliver thirty million meals. At a time when, according to their contract, eighteen and a half million meals should have been delivered, the company could account for only fifty thousand. At the same time, in one month, relying mainly on volunteers, chef José Andrés had fed two million people.196

To provide emergency supplies, the Trump administration paid Bronze Star, a brand-new Florida firm, $30 million to deliver much-needed tarps and plastic sheeting. This was also Bronze Star’s first government contract. Months later, when they’d failed to deliver any materials, the contract was terminated.197

And, in the contract that received the most negative publicity, to rebuild Puerto Rico’s destroyed electrical grid, FEMA awarded a $300 million no-bid contract to Whitefish Energy Holdings, a small firm from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s hometown of Whitefish, Montana—which, at the time, only had two full-time employees. Zinke’s son had previously worked for them for a summer.198

Whitefish’s contract was also canceled, but the results of getting off to such a disastrous start at recovery remain. Five months after Hurricane Maria, 25 percent of Puerto Rico homes were still without power—and Donald Trump had long ago forgotten about them.199

34. HE’S IGNORED THE OPIOID CRISIS

The United States is in the middle of a serious public health crisis: the opioid epidemic.

In 2016, more than 42,000 Americans died of a drug overdose involving illicit or prescription opioids. Through the first ten months of 2017, 46,000 had died the same way. At this rate, medical experts predict, in the next decade drug overdoses will take 650,000 lives—equivalent to the entire population of the city of Baltimore.200

In terms of public policy, this is a layup. It impacts all fifty states and every single congressional district. Any move to combat the opioid crisis would get overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress.

Yet what has President Trump done about it? For eighteen months, just about nothing. Yes, he made nice promises. He declared it a “public health emergency,” appointed a task force headed by “Miss Alternative Facts,” White House advisor Kellyanne Conway (who has zero public health credentials), and held a couple of White House meetings, after which he made even more nice promises.

But what did he actually do in his first year in office? Again, nothing. As Vox’s German Lopez summed it up in January 2018, “No new funding, nor a push for more funding, no big new strategy.” One expert described Trump’s approach as “A lot of talk, but little action.”

“He’s done nothing,” said another. “It’s remarkable how little we’ve seen,” said yet another.201

Instead, Trump has actually taken several steps that make it harder to deal with the opioid epidemic. As of this writing, he’s named no one to head either the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the two principal players in treating drug addiction. Both posts remain empty. His first budget proposed cutting funding for the ONDCP by 95 percent, cutting Medicare by $237 billion, and Medicaid by over $300 billion. And he tried to repeal Obamacare, which greatly expanded access to addiction treatment.202

Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, under Trump’s direction, has revived the tired, old War on Drugs by cracking down with maximum sentences on nonviolent drug offenses—shades of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No.” In its thirty-plus-year history, the War on Drugs has succeeded only in filling our prisons to the brim, robbing young people of their future, disproportionately locking up people of color, and earning the United States a reputation as the country with the highest incarceration rate on the planet. It has done nothing to stop drug misuse or block the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Yet it’s cost over a trillion dollars.203

Trump likes to berate his attorney general, but on this bad idea, he’s on the same page. When Trump finally announced a comprehensive opioid plan in March 2018, its big idea was the notion of a mandatory death penalty for drug dealers, an idea he admits to cribbing from China and Singapore. “The only way to solve the drug problem is through toughness,” he told a Pennsylvania rally. Otherwise, his plan included a crackdown on painkiller prescriptions and some vague, couldn’t-be-bothered language—with no serious funding details—about expanding treatment. Trump, in short, is mainly substituting one failed war on drugs with another one.204

But in Trump’s mind, this apparently did the trick almost immediately, because less than three months later, he declared victory in the war on opioids. “We got $6 billion for opioid and getting rid of that scourge that’s taking over our country,” he told a Nashville crowd in May 2018. “And the numbers are way down. We’re getting the word out—bad … It’s way down. We’re doing a good job with it.”205

Meanwhile, in the real world, numbers are not “way down”—opioid deaths are up. When Trump allies said he was in fact talking about opioid prescriptions, they pointed to numbers from 2016—before Trump took office—and 2017, before the new funding, which is for two years, kicked in.206

Leave it to Donald Trump. When it comes to dealing with the opioid epidemic, the only thing worse than inaction is action in the wrong direction. And that’s just what he’s doing.

35. HE’S RIGGING THE CENSUS

In politics, there’s nothing more boring than reapportionment. Yet in politics, there’s nothing more important than reapportionment. The district lines drawn through reapportionment represent the very foundation of our democracy. They determine whether it’s a level playing field or a tilted deck. And ever since 2010, it’s been a deck tilted far to the right.

That didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of a brilliant strategy developed in advance of the 2010 census by RNC chair Ed Gillespie and White House senior advisor Karl Rove. Under their plan, dubbed REDMAP (short for “Redistricting Majority Project”), Rove and Gillespie identified fifteen states where the legislature would be redrawing district lines (some states delegate the job to a panel of experts), which included several blue states with the potential of turning red. They raised $30 million to support candidates for state legislature in the target states—and succeeded in “flipping” ten out of fifteen states from blue to red.207

Why was that so important? Because those newly elected state representatives would have the power to draw new legislative and congressional district lines. Which they did, creating districts that do not reflect any geographic, economic, or social commonality but merely make it possible to elect more Republicans.

It’s called gerrymandering, and it dates back to 1812 and Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who created a state senate seat that looked on paper like a salamander. Some of today’s districts look even worse, have no contiguity at all, yet they serve their purpose of favoring one party over the other.

By creating districts where it’s almost impossible for Democrats to win, gerrymandering, or reapportionment, is directly responsible for Republican control of Congress and state congressional delegations that are way out of proportion to a state’s political makeup. In North Carolina, for example, a 50–50 state in voter registration, Republicans control ten out of thirteen seats in Congress. Overall, in the congressional elections of 2012, Democrats won 1.4 million more votes than Republicans, yet—because of the way new districts were drawn in their favor—Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives by a margin of 234–201.208

For Republican legislators, not all new lines proved permanent, however. Courts have since struck down district lines drawn in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, which judges called “among the largest racial gerrymanders ever encountered by a federal court.” While Wisconsin’s GOP-drawn lines were temporarily left in place by the U.S. Supreme Court, the court also referred a legal challenge to the Republican plan back to the trial court for possible retrial.209

Now, with the 2020 census looming, the Trump administration is trying to tilt the deck even further right by doing everything it can to prevent an honest count. Trump has still not yet appointed a director of the Census Bureau, even though, for a while, he named anti–voting rights advocate Thomas Brunell as deputy director. Brunell, who argued for more gerrymandering, not less, soon resigned. Trump has also cut the Census Bureau’s budget, forcing them to cancel several critical field tests.210

Most perniciously, the Trump administration announced in March 2018 that it would be adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which is intended to scare immigrants away and produce an inaccurate count, especially in border states. As a result, blue states would not only wind up cheated out of their fair share of congressional seats but also cheated out of billions of dollars in federal funds based on census data. Twelve states and the ACLU have filed suit to remove this noxious question.211

Already, evidence indicates that the Trump administration is trying to produce an inaccurate census precisely in order to increase Republican representation in Congress and decrease the number of Democrats. If they succeed, we will be stuck with Trumpism for another decade.

36. HE’S LEFT OUR INFRASTRUCTURE FOR DEAD

Candidate Donald Trump promised to “Make America Great Again.” How? Two big promises, repeated over and over again at every campaign rally: build a wall, and rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure. You remember: “a $1 trillion plan,” which Trump insisted would deliver “the best, fastest, and most reliable infrastructure in the world.”212

As someone who was ostensibly a builder for most of his career, you’d think Trump would at least be able to get this one right. But no. Forget the actual infrastructure—his bumbling administration can’t even hold an “Infrastructure Week.” This White House has tried to hold an Infrastructure Week no less than three times, and each time it ended up being pushed aside by the latest Trump crisis.213

So there our infrastructure sits and rots, in more need of rebuilding than ever before, in many cases a serious public hazard, with no plan to fix it.

Ironically, this was the one issue on which Donald Trump could have achieved immediate, bipartisan success. Had he started off in 2017 with infrastructure, he would have scored a big victory with overwhelming Republican and Democratic support—and proved he was the consummate deal-maker he’d bragged about being. Instead, he started out with the Muslim ban and repeal of Obamacare, accomplishing nothing and only further dividing Congress.

In February 2018, when Trump finally did get around to addressing infrastructure in his third Infrastructure Week—soon overshadowed by the Rob Porter domestic abuse scandal, the horrible school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the revelation that Trump had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels—his plan turned out to be a total bust. Instead of $1 trillion, Trump put up only $200 billion over ten years, and half of that is earmarked for block grants, not actual construction funding. But, he insisted, that $200 billion would somehow, magically, spark $1.5–$1.8 trillion in infrastructure spending.214

Of course, Trump never indicated where those supplemental trillions would come from. From the states? They don’t have the money. If they did, they wouldn’t need federal help in the first place. From private developers? They won’t make public needs a priority. They’ll only build what they want to build, where they want to build it, and where they can make the most money out of it. Like more toll roads, which are not necessarily the projects cities and states need. As HuffPost noted, “If you like paying tolls, you’re going to love Donald Trump’s infrastructure plan.”215

In other words, the whole scheme is a shell game. The Los Angeles Times derided Trump’s infrastructure proposal as “all gleam, no grit.” What’s most striking is what’s not included in Trump’s sketchy proposal of $200 billion: no meaningful investment in housing, transportation, clean water, or quality schools—which are the kind of infrastructure investments most badly needed and which would most help working families.216

Bottom line: As candidates, both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump promised a $1 trillion infrastructure program. Sanders would have delivered. Trump has not. Don the Builder can’t even get infrastructure right.