By Tom Burke / Herald Columnist
A little peck here. A little peck there.
Some nibbles around the edges. Now that’s not too bad, is it?
What’s a few duck pecks here and there?
But, gentle reader, it isn’t a just a few munches from some wayward wigeons.
Because after the nibbles comes the big bites; I mean great white shark-sized chunks ripped from the body politic, followed by orca-sized mouthfuls of the living sinews that bind our country together.
Our 250 year-old society is being destroyed a morsel; then a mouthful; then a full gut at a time by Donald Trump, MAGA, the Republican party, and the implementers of Project 2025 through relentless attacks on our laws, traditions and norms.
Oftentimes we simply can’t keep up with the feeding frenzy.
And that’s precisely the way the Trump and company wants it.
They want an all-out, all-the-time assault on you; a veritable political blitzkrieg taken right from the playbook guiding wanna-be authoritarians.
It’s a calculated onslaught to remake the United States in the image of a felonious, narcissist who cheated and lied his way to the White House and now is cheating and lying his way through four years of his presidency.
Need proof?
Here’s an abbreviated list of the nibbles, chunks and T. rex mouthfuls of Trump policies and programs, often made on a whim; often in ignorance; always wrapped in a lie; communicated via social media; and calculated to further enrich the already rich and transfer ever more power to a wanna-be dictator.
First the nibbles:
Closing the air space over Venezuela via Truth Social where Trump posted “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY;” (He has no legal authority to do this.)
Building a ballroom bigger than the White House (with money grifted from seekers of Trump’s favor and in absence of proscribed procedure).
Abolishing the free Direct File program for tax returns. Cutting the Internal Revenue Service budget. Instituting a hiring freeze after firing IRS IT staff and auditors. Halting investigations of dubious tax shelters.
Charging foreign visitors an extra $100 to visit a national park.
An official White House “Hall of Shame” featuring reporters and news outlets Trump doesn’t like.
Deregulating food safety protections.
Trying to change Senate rules to make Trump appointments easier to confirm.
Cutting the number of Federal Aviation Administration employees and programs.
Accessing state’s driver’s license data on millions of U.S. residents to build dossiers on all of us.
Naming himself president of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Next the chunks:
Rollbacks of air and water quality standards, such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s delaying a requirement that Big Oil limit emissions of methane, a powerful planet-warming gas. Ordering expensive, polluting coal-burning power plants remain open. Erasing the government’s legal authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from car tailpipes and power plant smokestacks. Giving nearly $6 billion in tax breaks to the country’s biggest oil and gas companies,
Cutting medical research budgets and staff. Proposing new regulatory measures for vaccines without actual scientific review.
Closing anything and everything perceived by Trump as DEI.
Cutting AI-fueled cyber attack consumer protections with a one-third cut in staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Halting all asylum applications.
Appointing himself arbiter of media bias and labeling the free press “enemies of the people.”
Attacking the independence of colleges and universities.
Canceling everything President Biden signed with an auto-pen, which was perfectly legal and which Trump has no legal authority to cancel.
Issuing Pentagon press credentials only for news outlets who take a pledge not to report anything Secretary of War Pete Hegseth doesn’t like.
And finally the T. rex mouthfuls:
Tariffs (another name for Trump’s tax on American consumers not foreign countries).
DOGE, Elon Musk, and firing thousand of government workers.
Calls for death to six members of Congress who reinforced the military’s mandate to “refuse illegal orders.”
Granting pardons to 15,000 Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists and other felons such as Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, convicted by the Justice Department of drug trafficking, and crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao who facilitated funding terrorists and narco gangs (and helped push Trump’s crypto company from $127 million to $2.1 billion in market capitalization).
Demanding Republican redistricting in Texas and other states,
Prolonging the longest government shutdown ever.
Raising health insurance costs for millions.
Cutting more millions out of health insurance.
Dismantling the Department of Education.
Extra-legal killings of alleged drug dealers in the Caribbean.
ICE-inflicted terror;- assaulting, and arresting, “illegal” immigrants and U.S. citizens in Chicago, Los Angles and Charlotte, N.C.
Weaponization of the Department of Justice to pursue Trump’s enemies.
Opening millions of acres of ecologically sensitive land in Alaska to drilling and delivering millions of acres of offshore ocean waters for new drilling.
Wow!
But it isn’t just what he’s doing, it’s how he’s doing it.
New policies, new programs, government spending, and even war, are things a president is expected (and permitted) to deal with. But, up until Trump, they’ve been dealt with lawfully, as prescribed by the Constitution, in the public square, and with the participation of Congress.
Trump has thrown all that Constitution/Congress crap into a dumpster and just does things.
Like tearing down the East Wing of the White House; or firing government employees without due process; or killing people in the Caribbean.
Trump’s cratering approval numbers, even among Republicans, is stark proof of how much America disapproves of his “rule.”
And all I can say is, “Donald, DUCK!” Because we’re coming at you every day, in every democratic way we can.
Slava Ukraini.
Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.
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