My first question is: Does anyone believe that the President Donald Trump’s actions towards institutions and individuals that disagree with his policies are driven by anything but retribution for their anti-Trump opinions and actions? The next question is: Why does the president take these actions when they are clearly illegal, many also unconstitutional? (I assume that we all understand that Mr. Trump is not a lawyer, has a limited knowledge of history and economics, and does not read or absorb any information other than in short bits from his favorite right-wing colleagues and like-minded media sources.)
The obvious answer is that Mr. Trump believes he has unfettered power to do what he wants since he is the president of the United States and knows that he doesn’t have to personally pay for the lawyers defending or implementing his policies and vendettas since he can direct the Department of Justice to perform those functions. I am not going to bore you by discussing the unitary theory of executive power which has been somewhat tacitly approved by the Supreme Court when it broadly defined the immunity of a sitting president, but the result has been to encourage the administration to do what it wants, since there is no consequence to the president if he breaks the law.
The Supreme Court has been delaying decisions concerning Trump’s illegal use of certain statutes and violations of constitutional provisions so that time passes and the government’s improper actions have often been allowed to continue while the cases slowly wend their way back to the Court for a decision on the merits. Americans have no patience for the glacial process of litigation, and many have despaired over the lack of results from the hundreds of cases brought against the administration.
Once you accept the above conclusions, you realize why Rosie O’Donnell is being threatened with loss of her citizenship (in contravention to the Constitution) and thousands of government and ex-government employees are being investigated for who knows what. Since attempting to destroy his perceived enemies (anyone who disagrees with him) has nothing to do with governance and particularly nothing to do with advancing the nation’s economy or foreign or domestic ideals, you wonder why so many people still support him.
There is no doubt that Trump regularly plays the race card in his immigration policies and panders to the hard-right wing of the country and those who are terrified of a loss of a white majority. This constituency includes a (hopefully small) band of Nazi admirers and anti-democratic, pro-autocratic believers. Since we are all immigrants, except the Indigenous communities whose land we stole, why is there this blindness on the part of the rest of us to his actions which will make the country economically and politically worse, whether through tariffs or through actions in contravention to the ideals enshrined in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.
When Trump signs executive orders limiting or totally excluding immigration from certain nations, it is not a coincidence that those countries all happen to be primarily composed of Black and/or Muslim citizens. As I noted in a recent column, the only basis written in his recent executive orders stopping immigration from these countries is national security, representing that these nations are regularly sending terrorists. This claim is laughable considering that the Cato Institute reviewed all terrorist prosecutions in the U.S. of these nations’ citizens and found only one such prosecution in the quarter century since September 11, 2001, concluding that the annual odds of a U.S. citizen being killed by any foreign terrorist was one in 4.5 million and the odds of a U.S. homicide committed by any refugee was 1 in 3.6 million. The murder rate in the U.S. in 2023 was 6.8 deaths per 100,000 people (perhaps we should deport all our residents and be more welcoming of refugees and other immigrants).
Our nation may be waking up. Immigration and the fear of the other was the Trump linchpin for his electoral success, and the polls now show a turning away from his brutal enforcement and his deportation policies. When the inflation and disruption from his tariffs hit and rural hospitals and school lunch programs are forced to shut down (15 percent of state school budgets are funded by federal funds), we may see an even larger desertion from a presidency founded on corruption, retribution, and for the financial benefit of the Trump family. (Trump bitcoins anyone?)
“On the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or bad thing for the country today?” This is a question annually asked by Gallup in its national immigration survey. In the most recent poll, 79 percent of the respondents agreed that immigration was a good thing; only 17 percent said it was bad for the country. This result stunned the polling community, especially the difference of 62 percent, which was 20 points higher than one year ago.
Nate Silver, in his July 14 column in The New York Times, found particular relevance to this gap and opined that it should be a particular warning to Steve Miller and Trump about the popularity of their brutal immigration policies, reflecting a growing disgust with how the government is enacting them and the realization of many independents that the knee-jerk hatred of immigrants promulgated and nurtured by Trump is wrong, un-American, and harmful to the country.
Silver, citing the Gallup pole wrote:
In Gallup’s annual immigration pole, 35% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the issue (immigration) and 62% disapproved. That’s his worst second-term immigration approval poll in our database, and it’s not particularly close.
According to Gallup, the difference between approval and disapproval of the administration’s handling of immigration is minus 27 points, 11 points less than his prior worst rating in June in a Guinnipiac poll (minus 16).
This remarkable disapproval of Trump’s handling of the issue he ran on gives me hope that President Truman’s comments about the public’s initial approval of General MacArthur and their subsequent change of mind is still correct. As Truman said, “American’s know a phony when they see one.”
I am waiting to see the reaction when the results of Trump’s policies increase inflation, reduce economic activity and government services, and continue to create chaos in the world’s financial and political systems. These effects are just starting to appear and will only get worse in the next months. We can sue and oppose through litigation the worst of his policies, but when American’s see how they directly affect their pocket books and ideals, perhaps they will understand the mistake we made in electing him. Hope springs eternal. Don’t give up on the decency and intelligence embedded in our national character.
