Two madmen are on a rampage to dismantle the United States government, its agencies, and fire thousands of employees so they’re the only ones left to make decisions and dictate policy, all while Democrats fiddle as Rome burns and Republicans enable the madmen’s pernicious actions.
Madman #1 is Donald Trump. He checks all the boxes that mental health professionals’ use to diagnose a sociopath. The term refers to people who:
- seem charming to fulfill their self-interests,
- are incapable of experiencing guilt, shame, remorse, or empathy,
- exhibit aggressive behavior,
- verbally attack and insult their critics,
- don’t admit mistakes
- intimidate and threaten to maintain control
- disregard social norms, rules, protocols and laws,
- have difficulty controlling impulses ,
- act without considering the consequences and
- Their dreams are realities for them and frequently nightmares for the rest of us.
Sociopathy leaves one unencumbered by the feelings of others and free to act without a spec of guilt, shame, regret or remorse. And the absence of conscience provides license to define and believe one’s own realities, declare victory in any competition they lose, and claim superior expertise on subjects about which they know almost nothing.
Read on and see if it fits .
Ignoring its legality and without considering its consequences,
Trump ordered a freeze on payments by all federal agencies’ financial assistance programs without specifying which of the thousands of programs would be effected. Federal aid reaches every corner of Americans’ lives. It funds education, health care, anti-poverty programs, housing assistance, disaster relief, infrastructure and more. Not surprisingly, a federal judge quickly blocked Trump’s order, citing the devastation that would ensue and its well-established illegality.
The Constitution, federal law and court decisions make it clear that the freeze was illegal. The payments of aid were authorized by Congress and Article I Section 8 of the Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the president has no power to overrule Congress by impounding funds Congress has authorized. Trump then rescinded the order.
Ignoring the law again, President Trump issued an illegal executive order denying citizenship to children born in the United States who don’t have a parent who is a permanent resident or U.S. citizen. The order blatantly violated the 14th Amendment which automatically gives citizenship to “all persons born … in the United States,” and was quickly blocked by several judges.
Although ludicrous, Trump suggested that: the U.S. take over Gaza and maintain a “long-term ownership position” there; move its residents to a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” in another country; that we buy Greenland and annex Canada, all impossibilities, but realities him.
In defiance of long-time CIA security rules and practices, Trump required the CIA to email his administration an unclassified list of every person it had hired over the past two years. The email exposed and endangered many of our operatives who monitor adversaries like Russia and China. A former CIA official described the email as a “counterintelligence disaster.”
Lacking empathy for the needy around the globe and unburdened by guilt, shame or remorse, Trump suspended nearly all U.S. foreign aid programs, including for health, education, food, and all other humanitarian areas, and wiped out its many benefits to the U.S.. Of course, his Secretary of State, in reaction to a shocked nation, had to walk back his suspension, claiming it didn’t apply to “lifesaving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence.”
Trump didn’t consider the positive consequences that would be sacrificed by his suspension. Foreign aid builds America’s influence and its military might around the world. For more than fifty years, foreign aid has been a core tool of US engagement, which provides military bases and critical allies throughout the globe. Freezing these initiatives would put the U. S military strategies at risk and enable China’s and Russia’s advancements.
It also bolsters economic and political stability in developing countries and reduces the risk of coup’s by hostile and corrupt leaders. Foreign aid also strengthens the U.S. economy and benefits its workers by growing foreign industries that buy U.S goods. Over the past 10 years, nearly two-thirds of the growth in U.S. exports was given to major recipients of U.S. aid and was critical to pulling the U.S. out of the most recent recession.
But Trump doubled down anyway, and placed employees of USAID – the agency that administers foreign aid — on mandatory administrative leave, ordering them to return to the U. S. from their worldwide assignments. Trump’s shrinking the agency from 13,600 personnel to 294.
Trump touts foreign aid as a money-saving move, but it’s less than 1% of the US budget and, at .02% of gross national income, it’s near the lowest percent of any country and well-worth its benefits.
In an effort to dominate what children know and how they think, Trump’s intent on eliminating the Department of Education so he can control what children are taught. Under the grossly misleading title “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” Trump issued an executive order defining what parts of American history can and cannot be taught. In a display of callousness, he would shut down the Title I program, which is meant to help educate children from low-income families, and the IDEA program, which provides funding to help meet the needs of children with disabilities.
Trump also disabled the National Labor Relations Board, which has been enforcing workers’ rights since 1935, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces law against workplace discrimination. He cleverly did it by firing enough board members so they couldn’t operate. Both actions were illegal. The Supreme Court has ruled that a president cannot dismiss at will commissioners or members of any independent agency created by Congress to performed quasi-legislative and judicial functions.
The FBI has arrested millions of criminals and stopped millions of crimes, including murder, drug trafficking, child sex trafficking, cyber-attacks, kidnaping, burglary and more. But Trump’s choice of Kash Patel to head the FBI will end all that. He’ll use his agents to implement Trump’s agenda of retribution, hunt down and deport a million immigrants and purge the FBI of any employee who refuses to cooperate. The consequences, which Trump hasn’t seemed to have considered, will be that crime will run amok and his deportation of immigrants will create a labor shortage, stoke wage inflation and overall national inflation by as much as 9%.
Trump’s early moves of firing thousands of federal workers and
issuing reams of executive orders in his frenzied early days in office, aimed at ensuring that no dollars go toward diversity, equity and inclusion programs and others programs inconsistent with with his agenda.
Trump pardoned and freed hundreds of Capitol rioters whom he unbelievably called patriots. They included dozens of prisoners with prior convictions or pending charges for crimes including rape, sexual abuse of a minor, domestic violence, manslaughter, production of child pornography and drug trafficking.
Ed Martin, Trump’s interim head of the federal prosecutor’s office astonishingly called for cash reparations to be paid to the January 6 defendants and demanded jail time for those responsible for bringing the charges in the first place and tweeted “We have to find & throw in jail the person in Biden’s Administration who ordered the prosecutions of peaceful Jan 6 defendants.”
Then there’s the unsettling enigma of Elon Musk whom Trump deputized to carry out his wreckage. Musk is proud to be on the autistic spectrum and claims that his Asperger’s Syndrome gives him insights that are unavailable to those who follow the herd. Really, should a person so afflicted be let loose to butcher America’s government?
Musk rapidly took over two U.S. government agencies which enabled him to exert control over America’s 2.2-million-employee federal workforce.
Trump granted Musk access to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid systems and technology. Medicare serves 140M older and disabled Americans and lower-income enrollees. Without providing any evidence, Musk claimed “this is where the big money fraud is happening.”
It took a federal judge, citing a risk of “irreparable harm,” to halt Musk’s access to the Treasury’s payment system that holds confidential information on taxpayers, employees and companies. The order also halted the destruction of any downloaded information by anyone given access since Trump’s inauguration, citing “the risk of the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the risk of the system being more vulnerable to hacking.”
In the 1950s, the United States kneecapped itself by removing thousands of federal employees who were suspected communist spies. The clues used to identify them were homosexuality, being related to a suspected relative and flimsy rumors of suspicious political beliefs. Not a single spy was discovered. There are striking similarities with Trump’s shutting down agencies and purging federal employees, except that his justifications are to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and fictious corruption. It comes down to this: the mutilation of Americans’ government, destruction of their civil and Constitutional rights, the maintenance of their healthcare, financial and anti-poverty benefits, the regulation of corporate excesses and their protection against crime will be diminished by a sociopath and an on-the-spectrum Aspergers sufferer, and may altogether cease to exist along with the consciences and courage of their enabling Republicans’
