To the editor:
The hypocrisy and dishonesty of Trump and his Congress are now so great that it seems like every day is Opposite Day.
Whatever they say, believe the opposite. This is the loudly anti-crime party that just voted to remove the tax on gun silencers. The “Make America Healthy Again” crowd that drastically cut medical research grants. The people who spread bizarre misinformation about FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene under Biden but now plan to abolish the agency. This is the president who attacks universities on slender evidence of antisemitism, yet who claimed in a recent press conference that the Nazi regime treated Jewish prisoners with “love.” These are the “populists” whose “Big Beautiful Bill” proposes the largest upward redistribution of income in U.S. history.
Their duplicity reaches the greatest heights on their signature issues. They hate DEI because they think it promotes less-qualified people. So is Pam Bondi, slavishly loyal to Trump, the attorney general we would have in a meritocracy? Or as secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who doesn’t seem to understand secure communications? How about Kristi Noem at Homeland Security, accomplished at posing in front of Salvadoran prisoners but unable to say what habeas corpus means?
On immigration, we are told that the government is going after “the worst of the worst.” This supposedly justifies its agents’ body armor, helmets, military rifles, camo, masks, and lack of identification. So why did one of Trump’s first executive orders (“Protecting the American People against Invasion”) end the priority for deportation of people convicted of serious crimes? We are finding out: so ICE could round up more people more quickly on weak or nonexistent evidence. In communities across the U.S., the most obvious “invasion” is by a government that acts like an occupying army.
On tariffs, Trump dismisses their effect on prices as minimal. But raising prices is their whole point. A tariff helps industries compete by making cheap imports more expensive—to a level at which domestic firms can make a profit. Trump loves the period around 1900, when he thinks tariff-wielding America was truly great. Well, guess whom American factory bosses liked to hire back then? Hint: They acted like employers in Springfield, Ohio, whom we heard about last year, who brought in Haitians because they showed up reliably, worked hard, and could pass a drug test. That’s right: MAGA’s lost industrial paradise rested on immigrant labor.
Jim Mahon
Williamstown
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