Editorial: Stop the Orange Betrayer

 In his first six weeks back in power, Donald Trump betrayed democracy, the rule of law, neighboring trade partners as well as our allies overseas, his own supporters at home and the principles that have kept the United States a beacon of hope at home and abroad over the past century. 

It is time for defenders of democracy to challenge the Great Betrayer, as well as Republicans who enable his power grabs.

The challenge was brought March 4 with Trump’s speech before the joint session of Congress, where Republicans celebrated the return of their leader, who had spent the past four years fighting criminal charges for his attempt to rig the 2020 election — while baselessly claiming  Democrats had stolen the election from him — and his attempt to mount an insurrection with a violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election — an insurrection that cost the lives of five police officers and injured 174 more. Trump has pardoned the assailants.

Trump also was found liable in separate cases in New York courts for fraud and for sexual assault and later he was convicted on 34 felony counts involving his use of business funds and documents to cover up his adulterous affairs before the 2016 election. A partisan majority on the Supreme Court obstructed the work of a special prosecutor who had brought indictments in Florida and D.C. involving the alleged insurrection and Trump’s refusal to return classified documents he had taken from the White House.

After his inauguration, Trump proceeded with his plan to rule as a dictator, issuing executive orders setting aside acts of Congress, congressional appropriations and at least one article of the Constitution. He let centibillionaire Elon Musk set up an independent Department of Government Efficiency, operating under White House authority, as young computer hackers with sketchy backgrounds were sent into federal agencies to search computer files and, apparently arbitrarily, identified areas of potential “waste, fraud and abuse” that had escaped the attention of actual government auditors, such as inspectors general, whom Trump had summarily and illegally fired.

One of DOGE’s first moves was to shut down the US Agency for International Development, which was authorized by Congress in 1961 to unite several programs that provided humanitarian assistance for underdeveloped countries and counter the Soviet Union’s influence during the Cold War. It earned a good reputation for providing food and medical care to stop epidemics from spreading, as well as socioeconomic development. But USAID’s inspector general had initiated a probe of Musk’s Starlink satellite business. Musk said USAID was a “criminal organization” and that it was “beyond repair” and needed to be shut down. Trump ordered USAID merged into the State Department, despite warnings the move was illegal, and blocked payment of $2 billion to contractors for work that already been done.

The Supreme Court provided a glimmer of hope March 5 when it ruled 5-4 that US District Judge Amir H. Ali had the authority to order the administration to restart the payments. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberal justices in the ruling, which stirred hope the court won’t endorse Trump’s dictatorial powers, but it apparently shows four justices would give Trump whatever he wants. 

DOGE has continued to call for thousands of federal workers to be fired, with the main targets being those who have been working less than a year, since they generally have less civil service protection.

Former Social Security commissioner Martin O’Malley predicted  the slashing of 7,000 jobs in the agency would cause disruption within three months of payments to some of the 73 million Americans who rely upon Social Security benefits. He also told Rolling Stone the gutting of employees and offices will also prevent Americans from easily applying for benefits and delay processing of disability claims.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is planning to cut 80,000 jobs from the agency that provides health care and other services for millions of veterans, according to an internal memo obtained by the Associated Press. That would require terminating tens of thousands of employees hired in a VA expansion during the Biden administration, including those who care for veterans impacted by burn pits under the 2022 PACT Act.

In the week before his speech to Congress, Trump had brought Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the White House on Feb. 28. But instead of negotiating to continue supporting Ukraine’s three-year-long attempt to defeat Russia’s invading army, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance tried to browbeat Zelenskyy into capitulating, while news crews, including the Russian news service Tass, broadcast the debacle, as Vance lectured Zelenskyy on how he had not been properly thankful for everything the U.S. had done for Ukraine (while Trump was negotiating with Putin on the terms of “ungrateful” Ukraine’s surrender). Trump ended up stopping intelligence sharing with Ukraine and left other support to NATO allies in Europe.

Democrats faced a challenge in how to respond to Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress. Democratic congressional leaders favored maintaining decorum at Trump’s speech to Congress, though many carried paddle-sized placards with messages of opposition.

US Rep. Al Green of Houston played the role of Old Testament prophet, pointing his cane and calling out Trump’s lies and Republicans for moving to slash Medicaid, which provides health care for many of Green’s working-class constituents. When Green refused to sit down and shut up, House Speaker Mike Johnson ordered the sergeant at arms to remove Green and let Trump continue with his lies. 

Green went peacefully, and many Democrats applauded him for at least demonstrating resistance, but Republicans later moved to punish Green for his behavior. 

Green was brought up for censure by the House, despite a history of Republicans heckling Democratic presidents Obama and Biden without retribution. Biden actually turned the heckling to his advantage in 2024, when Rep. Margorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) yelled out “Liar!” after Biden chided Republicans for floating the possibility of cuts to Social Security and Medicare. When others echoed Greene’s objections, Biden responded, “We all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right? ... We’ve got unanimity.” But Trump is not sharp enough to engage in a conversation that extends beyond his limited vocabulary of insults, and he had no answers to Al Green’s accusations.

Ten Democrats joined Republicans in voting to censure Green, but dozens of fellow Democrats accompanied Green to the well of the House and sang “We Shall Overcome” in a show of solidarity, causing Speaker Johnson to declare a recess.

Democrats at home may grumble that their congressmembers are not aggressive enough in their resistance to Trump and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, but the best thing Democrats can do is remain unified, hoping for cracks in the Greedy Oligarch Party, and prevent bad things from getting passed, at least until next year, when Republicans can be called to account for enabling Trump and his oligarchs in their attempts to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs for working families. 

Until then, Democrats must hold the line in Congress and keep voters informed. In the meantime, don’t despair. Organize.     —JMC

From the April 1 issue of The Progressive Populist.

Editorial: The Lyin’ King Sets Rules

When he was campaigning last year for a return to the White House, Donald Trump said he would be a dictator on Day One, and after his inauguration he made a show of signing 28 executive orders that stretched his authority. But it took him a month before he actually declared himself a monarch. 

The first-day edicts included pardons for 1,500 people convicted of crimes, including violence that injured police officers, and commuting the sentences of 14 others involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump called the convicts “hostages.” Another executive order aimed to cut off birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, for children of undocumented aliens. Five federal lawsuits were filed the first week challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order.

But Trump really hit his stride on Jan. 24, when he fired 17 inspectors general, who are responsible for investigating waste, fraud and abuse, and instead put Elon Musk’s Department of Govern Efficiency in charge of those tasks. Eight of those inspectors general, with oversight of the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, State, Agriculture, Education, Labor and the Small Business Administration, filed suit Feb. 12, charging their terminations were unlawful and seeking reinstatement.

Then, on Feb. 19, Trump declared himself “king” as he announced his decision to rescind approval of New York’s “congestion pricing” — an auto toll instituted by the state in January to raise money for the region’s aging mass transit system and cut traffic in the city.

“CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” the Trump proclaimed on social media. 

Soon after, an official White House account not only echoed the president’s online statement, it also released a portrait showing a grinning Trump wearing a crown.

Two days later, at a National Governors Association session at the White House,Trump referenced his recent executive order forbidding transgender student-athletes and said he had learned that Maine intended to ignore his directive. He then asked if Maine’s governor was in the room.

When Maine Gov. Janet Mills spoke up, he asked her whether her state would comply with his demands. The two-term Democratic governor — who also had served as Maine’s attorney general for several years — told the president she would comply with state and federal laws.

Trump replied, “Well, we are the federal law.” He added, “You better do it, because you’re not going to get federal funding.”

“See you in court,” the governor replied.

Republican members of Congress have bent the knee to the mango majesty, and have threatened to impeach federal judges who dare to undermine Trump’s decrees. Elon Musk stated on his X site that it is “time to impeach judges who violate the law.”

Republicans have no chance of removing the judges from office. Even if they pass impeachment articles in the House, they are dead letters in the Senate, where 67 votes are needed to remove the judges.

The Trump regime represents the opportunity for the Heritage Foundation to achieve their goal of dismantling the vestiges of the New Deal. Heritage is a right-wing think tank that has led the oligarch movement in the U.S. since the 1970s, when it was founded during Richard Nixon’s administration by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and beer magnate Joseph Coors. Heritage grew from the new business activist movement inspired by the Powell Memorandum, written by Lewis Powell in 1971 when he was a consultant for the US Chamber of Commerce. 

Powell, who later was appointed to the Supreme Court by Nixon, offered a plan for conservative business interests to dismantle New Deal programs, such as Social Security, Medicare and government regulation of businesses, which Powell considered socialist. Heritage advocated for pro-business policies and anti-communism in its early years, but also advocated cultural issues that were important to Christian conservatives.

Heritage’s influence grew with the ascent of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the Heritage Foundation in January 1981 published “Mandate for Leadership,” a plan to reduce the size of the federal government that provided guidance to the incoming Reagan administration, with more than 2,000 policy recommendations on how the Reagan administration could use the federal government to advance conservative policies. Several of its authors went on to take positions in the Reagan administration and Reagan later called the Heritage Foundation a “vital force” during his presidency. The Heritage Foundation remained an influential voice during the administrations of presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

Heritage discounted the candidacy of Trump in 2015. “Donald Trump’s a clown,” said Michael Needham, leader of Heritage Action, which handled political activism. Needham argued that Trump was riding the same wave of establishment disaffection that was floating Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic nomination. “He [Trump] needs to be out of the race.”

But once Trump secured the Republican nomination, Heritage changed its tune and obtained influence in Trump’s presidential transition and administration. After the 2016 election, Trump’s team was unprepared to staff the new administration, but Heritage stepped up with its 3,000-name searchable database of trusted movement conservatives who were eager to serve in a post-Obama government. The New York Times in 2018 reported that several hundred people from Heritage ultimately received jobs in government agencies, including Betsy DeVos, Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Scott Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, and others who became members of Trump’s cabinet.

Now, in Trump’s reincarnation, Heritage produced Project 25 to give Trump a running start in recreating U.S. government as an oligarchy. The GOP is going ahead with a budget reconciliation power play that makes severe cuts in federal services to allow more tax cuts for billionaires. There is a relatively minor amount of “waste, fraud and abuse” in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid — mainly in the eye of the beholder — but greedy oligarchs demand a piece of the action. 

Medicaid and the related Children’s Health Insurance Program provide health care for more than 79 million Americans in low-income families, at a cost of $880 billion a year. If the poor don’t get health care through Medicaid, they are likely to end up relying on local charities to cover health care costs.

Trump said cuts to Medicare and Social Security are “off the table,” but so was Medicaid until Republicans lined up enough votes to put it back on the table. They have proposed increasing the age to qualify for Medicare, cuts in coverage and moving remaining Medicare recipients to privatized Medicare Advantage, where insurance companies increase profits by denying medical procedures.

Social Security would be fiscally solid for the foreseeable future if Congress would increase the cap on taxable income from the current limit of $176,000, after which the wealthy pay nothing. Democrats must stand firm against the Greedy Oligarchs Party. — JMC

From the March 15, 2025 issue of The Progressive Populist.

Editorial: Don't Get Distracted by Chaos

In his third week back in the White House, Donald Trump brought the United States’ biggest trading partners to the brink of a tariff war, shut down the US Agency for International Development on the suggestion of volunteer co-president Elon Musk, and announced his plan to bring peace to the Gaza Strip by clearing Palestinians from the territory so the bombed-out rubble can be redeveloped into a Mediterranean resort.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress began to devise a way to pay for renewal of tax cuts for billionaires under special rules that allow them to get the budget through the Senate with a simple majority. But the reconciled budget cannot increase the national debt. So they must cut trillions of dollars from federal spending. Likely targets for cuts include health care, welfare and attempts to mitigate climate change. And they won’t miss a chance to take a swipe at Social Security and Medicare.

Trump allowed Musk to become the freelance head of the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), operating under Trump’s authority to conduct inquisitions of federal agencies to slash federal spending and replace entrenched bureaucracy with Trump loyalists.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which is essentially the human resources agency for federal government, has been practically taken over by Musk lackeys who sent out a mass “deferred resignation” offer to federal employees in an attempt to get “deep state” bureaucrats to leave willingly, with the promise that they would get full pay and benefits through September. But union leaders said the offer was dodgy, would imperil pensions, and advised federal employees not to fall for it. A federal judge in Boston temporarily blocked the Trump administration from proceeding with the buyout while lawsuits proceed.

Musk got his minions access into the Treasury Department’s payment system that disburses trillions of dollars and contains sensitive personal data on all Americans. The next thing you know, Musk announced that USAID, the 64-year-old agency that provides humanitarian assistance — mainly food and medicine— to combat poverty and support global health in 100 countries, is “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” are “evil” and “a criminal organization … Time for it to die.” (USAID also happened to be investigating problems with Musk’s Starlink satellite system, one of his many conflicts of interest with his probe of federal government waste.) But even if Republicans finally decided it was worth the risk to ignore epidemics around the increasingly mobile world, USAID’s $40 billion in annual appropriations isn’t going make much of a dent in the $2.3 trillion Republicans need to grease the planned tax breaks for the ultrawealthy. And don’t expect that risking another pandemic at home will get working-class taxpayers much of a break.

In Trump’s first term, households with incomes in the top 1% received an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2017, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60%, according to the Tax Policy Center. Trump brought the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, and now he wants to bring it further down to 15%.

For the ultrawealthy, Republicans propose to eliminate the federal estate tax, which now charges a percentage of the value of a person’s fortune after they die, with a $14 million deduction. It would cost the government $370 billion in revenue over 10 years.

Republicans plan to eliminate income taxes on tips, at a cost of $106 billion over a decade, fulfilling a pledge Trump made to to service employees in Las Vegas during the campaign. But the Bait and Switch Party wants to broaden the exemption to include bonuses for executives.

One of the programs Republicans have targeted for major cuts is Medicaid, which provides health care for 72 million people with low incomes, as well as nursing home care for seniors, at a cost of nearly $900 billion. 

Republicans propose to “recapture” $46 billion in savings from Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year, and they would limit eligibility for plans, based on citizenship status.

Other proposals would eliminate tax breaks for families with children. Currently, parents can get a tax credit of up to $2,100 for child care expenses. The House Republican plan floats the elimination of that break. The cut is estimated to save $55 billion over a decade.

They’re also eyeing repeal of significant health care rules the Biden administration put in place, such as requiring minimum staffing levels at nursing homes. In addition to Medicaid and ACA cuts, Republicans hope to claw back bipartisan infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Act funding. 

Also on the chopping block are Joe Biden’s climate policies, which are estimated to cost as much as $468 billion. Trump’s promises to repeal Biden’s “EV mandate,” as well as discontinuing “Green New Deal” provisions from the bipartisan infrastructure law and green energy grants from the IRA.

When that doesn’t do the job, Republicans are preparing to make the case for cutting Social Security and Medicare — touching the third rail of politics, Emily Singer noted at DailyKos.com. Rep. Riley Moore, R-W. Va, told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo on Feb 10 that Republicans have been “discussing” cutting “mandatory spending” — that is, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans benefits — in order to pass Trump’s tax cut agenda. ”This is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Moore said.

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah went further in a post on X, saying, “Social Security [is] a ripoff for most Americans compared to essentially any legitimate retirement investment.”

Musk’s unqualified DOGE bros have already accessed the Treasury Department’s systems that make payments for Social Security, raising alarm bells from Democratic lawmakers.

“The federal government is not Twitter. It matters if Elon breaks things at the Social Security Administration. Musk has no clue what SSA employees do, nor does he care — it doesn’t matter to him if you miss a Social Security Check. He belongs NOWHERE NEAR your Social Security,” Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, posted on X.

Cutting Social Security benefits could cause a massive backlash from voters. But Republicans might fear the backlash from billionaires more, if the rich folks don’t get those tax cuts they’re expecting. Make them fear the wrath of voters more.

Republicans only hold a 218-215 majority in the House and 53-47 in the Senate. Call your senators and House member. If you can’t get through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121, call their local offices. Demand they protect Social Security and Medicare. And if they’re Republicans, hold them to account for Trump’s misuse of executive orders and defiance of courts. They supported a convicted felon for president. Now it’s time to rein him in.     — JMC

From the March 1, 2025 issue of The Progressive Populist. 

Will the Military Follow?

As Trump plans foreign adventures - a possible invasion of Greenland, The Panama Canal, etc. - one question is paramount. Will the military go along with him. They are sworn to uphold the Constitution. Trump plainly is not.

Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite

 

Trump's Bird Flu

 

As new strains of bird flu continue to mutate and spread, scientists race to find a vaccine.

Will Trump react more prudently this time around. Doesn't look like it.

Art by Kevin Kreneck. For more Graphics and Greeting Cards, go to https://kkreneck.wixsite.com/mysite