America is being dismantled

Moving back to the United States after an absence of decades, I never dreamt that we as a nation would be where we are today.

We are being ruled by a narcissistic egomaniac, who has all of his cabinet members falling over each other to see who can push their tongue further up Donald Trump’s behind, in a rush to please their “dear leader”.

It is crystal clear now that the Trump administration came into power in January with a full agenda of dismantling immigration and welfare policies and to punish pro-Palestinian voices. And they moved with super speed, using rarely used presidential acts to circumvent Congress completely in implementing their anti-immigrant agenda.

A coterie of extreme rightwing advisors put together these policies, such as dismantling the United States Agency for International Development, which was created in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, and funded by Congress. With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, we heard hardly a peep when this happened.

Trump appointed billionaire Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk, to lead his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), in slashing allegedly wasteful spending and firing inefficient federal government workers. Musk and his nerdy minions swooped into Washington and took over the computer systems of whole departments, in what amounted to a coup. A coup because all the departments that they slashed and burned, while also firing thousands of workers, are all funded by Congress. Of course, Trump being the king of conflicts of interest, did not blink knowing that Musk has billion-dollar contracts with the US government through his SpaceX rocket launches.

Stephen Miller is Trump’s principal advisor, a holdover from the first Trump administration, but now with much more power. He is the principal architect of the Trump clampdown on illegal immigrants, pushing an especially cruel policy of not only arresting and deporting criminal immigrants, but also law-abiding ones working hard and supporting their families. This has led to scenes of masked government agents arresting immigrants when they show up to their court dates. This policy also had Homeland Security agents ridiculously running after agricultural workers in a strawberry field in California. What a joke.

Trump eventually realized that the US economy would grind to a halt if all illegal immigrants were swiftly deported, causing him to direct federal agents to stop arresting immigrants working in the agricultural, restaurant and construction businesses. Unfortunately, he has swung back and forth on this issue, leaving the public, and especially business owners, baffled as to if these workers were going to be arrested or not.

And uncertainty is the worst enemy of business owners, who don’t know how to plan their future spending and investments. The stock market also hates uncertainty, and this has been reflected in the volatility of the market this year.

Trump’s shock announcement that he would be sharply increasing import tariffs on Chinese goods, left US companies and retailers reeling from this blow. The president is obsessed with forcing other nations into “deals” that are supposed to favor the US. But Trump’s constant tweeting his demands, and making bombastic pronouncements on television, left the world disoriented and not able to count on the US being a stable and reliable business partner.

The president eventually lowered tariffs on Chinese goods, but not before putting everyone on a rollercoaster of shock and fright for weeks on end. Trump thought it was funny, and a mark of how savvy he is as a negotiator. Sadly, the public knows that he has never been a very successful businessman with his own companies.

The victory of socialist Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani in the primary for mayor of New York City, sent a bolt of hope and happiness into all people who want a better world. His platform of creating affordable housing in New York and establishing free supermarkets and buses for the underprivileged, sent waves of fear through most Republicans who continue to push policies that give the rich more tax breaks and increase taxes on the poor and middle class.

With the demise of US AID and of the Voice of America, which has also been hacked to pieces by Doge, the United States is losing two pieces of soft power that it had around the world. For decades, audiences in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America woke up each morning and got their news updates from listening to VoA broadcasts in English and in various other languages. Radical Republicans claimed VoA did not present a “good” picture of the US and have used this to justify their decimation of a well-loved public service. The British have BBC radio and we had VoA.

China has been for years chipping away at American power in Africa, by building bridges, Congress buildings and railroads for various African governments. Naturally, they follow the American model, by giving the biggest share of the construction contracts to Chinese companies, which recycle their overseas spending back into the Chinese economy. Trump believes that such foreign spending is a waste of tax-payer money, which is a shame really.

Finally, we have the horrible push by the Trump administration to go after foreign students in the US who have protested the genocide in Gaza on college campuses from Columbia University to Harvard.

In scenes reminiscent of communist dictatorships, masked plainclothes police have been arresting these foreign students off the streets, pushing them into unmarked vehicles, without telling them where they are being taken, or giving them a chance to call their spouses or families to tell them what is happening.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University, became the face of Trump’s anti-Palestinian crackdown. He was arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, with his pregnant wife, a US citizen, filming the whole scene and desperately asking the masked agents why they were arresting her husband and where they were taking him. It was a scene worthy of Nazi Germany in its cruelty and brutality.

Khalil was whisked off to a privately-run immigration detention center in Louisiana, where he stayed locked up for 140 days. He had to listen to the birth of his son through a telephone call. A federal judge finally ordered his release, saying he could not be detained for his opinions. The Trump administration has announced they are going to pursue other legal cases against Khalil, in a mad, Stephen Miller ordered, campaign against him.

We, liberal and progressive-minded Americans, cannot despair despite the direness of the current situation. Mamdani has showed us that there is a thirst for compassionate politicians that really want to help the people. Hopefully next year the Democrats will be able to wrest control of all or part of Congress back from these regressive and whacko Republicans.

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