Recent events have turned increasingly ominous in relation to the Trump administration’s powers.
Storms in Texas caused epic and catastrophic flooding, leaving at least 110 people dead and scores missing. The New York Times reported that Austin/San Antonio’s “long-serving meteorologist in charge of ‘warning coordination’ . . . had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was not replaced.” Questions persist as to the impact of the National Weather Service’s workforce reduction and the availability of FEMA agents to respond to natural disasters.
The scientific journal The Lancet published a comprehensive report concluding that the Trump administration’s withdrawal of funding due to closure of USAID “could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, averaging more than 2-4 million deaths per year. These deaths include 4-5 million among children younger than 5 years, or more than 700,000 deaths annually.” Such astounding consequences reflect Trump’s gross moral failure for having deliberately eliminated life-saving medical and food assistance supplies and programs already appropriated for delivery by the heretofore largest humanitarian and developmental aid agency in the world. Demonstrably widespread American-precipitated genocide will unfold as the mortality count swiftly mounts, despite the blinders that Trump and his fawning surrogates wear to hide from themselves their own wickedness.
When Trump visited “Alligator Alcatraz,” the federal detention center being constructed in Florida’s Everglades, he was asked whether the idea was to surround the facility with alligators to deter detainees’ escape. He responded, “I guess that’s the concept. This is not a nice business. I guess that is the concept.” A coalition of protestors lined the nearby highways, raising “human rights concerns over what they condemn as the inhumane housing of immigrants. Worries about environmental impacts have also been at the forefront, as groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity and the Friends of the Everglades filed a lawsuit Friday to halt the detention center plans.”
The Republican Party’s Big Beautiful Bill gave a 160-billion-dollar boost to ICE’s militarized immigration enforcement budget, which was already “higher than the military expenditure of all but 15 countries.” (See the chart.) On the eve of the Congressional vote, 20 Roman Catholic bishops joined numerous clergy from other faith traditions in signing a letter of opposition to ICE’s increased funding. “The authors of the letter also criticized proposed reforms to Medicaid and food assistance programs, saying they would harm ‘low-income citizens and legal residents, including asylum-seekers and refugees, driving them deeper into poverty.’”
On its shadow docket, the Supreme Court sanctioned the legitimacy of deportations to third-party countries, including dangerously war-torn ones, thus opening the flood gates to persecutory and potentially lethal afflictions imposed by the Trump administration without the due process required of it by the Constitution and the Court’s mandate.
As The Hill reported, “Trump’s draconian immigration crackdowns,” which are designed to show the heavy hand of his authoritarian prowess, included the recent raid on Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park. “The massive operation involved nine federal agencies, the National Guard, local police and more than a dozen armored military vehicles.”
The Intercept has documented and analyzed more than a dozen operations of “ICE Agents’ Brutal Use of Force in LA Immigration Raids,” with video footage of the brutality. In “a militarized rampage and terror campaign,” the federal government’s “roving patrols” of armed personnel randomly “abducted day laborers, street vendors, car wash workers, and others swept in the government’s dragnet.” Victims included bystanders filming incidents or rendering assistance to persons as they were being attacked. What becomes increasingly clear is that the Trump administration deliberately employs acts of provocation and tactical violence as its weapons of choice to frighten and intimidate entire communities. The ICE raids are reminiscent of the role Hitler’s Brownshirts played in his rise to power.
The Supreme Court granted Trump permission to fire as many federal agency employees as he wishes. The cascading effect of his wanton destruction, ostensibly in the name of increased government efficiency, serves primarily to solidify Trump’s determination to place personal loyalty and service to himself above all else throughout the federal bureaucracies, including and especially everyone donning uniforms and face masks. The FBI is now using polygraphs to test officials’ loyalty. A former justice department lawyer, fired by superiors for refusing to fulfill a directive, claims that the Trump administration has been “thumbing its nose at the courts” and that “former colleagues were being forced to choose between the president’s agenda and their ethical obligations as attorneys.”
These dark developments, among others, are undergirded by the Supreme Court’s July 1, 2024, decision conferring upon Trump “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for all “official acts” during his presidency, be they legal or illegal. Without a formal ceremony of coronation but for all practical purposes, the Court had placed the crown of monarchy upon the president’s head, which was symbolically ratified this past weekend when the Speaker of the House of Representatives (the “people’s house”) surrendered his gavel, along with the formerly independent powers of the first branch of government, to the president’s dictatorial caprice. Little did the gleeful onlookers surrounding Trump realize that they were cheering the radical subversion of their own democratic liberties.
Stay tuned for tomorrow morning’s post and its sobering warning.
