Trump's Year of Havoc, Greed, and Ego (Part 1 of 2)
A review of this year, and why next year will be better.
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First, some good news. With 2025 nearing its end, Donald Trump is clearly in decline, and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is fraying at the seams. Stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and podcaster Joe Rogan have become critics, and the Epstein files have stunned the loyalists. Trump’s poll numbers are in the basement, and the Democrats are poised to sweep the next election.
Unfortunately, the year has also seen record corruption and a reign of intimidation as the President imposed his will on everyone from scientists to big-name law firms to the media. But let’s begin with the law enforcement sweeps that targeted immigrants and gave us scenes right out of some dystopian novel. While it felt unstoppable at the beginning of the year, there is now a sense that maybe, just maybe, we have come through the low water mark.
In this series of two parts, I go through the totality of what happened, lest we be unable to see and remember the full picture.
REIGN OF TERROR
In community after community, black-clad officers of the immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency rounded up people suspected of being undocumented immigrants, plucking them off sidewalks, off of construction sites, and from farms. A large proportion of these agents appeared without name tags and with their faces obscured by gaiters and balaclavas.
In infamous cases, ICE agents have rolled up on individuals in force, with half a dozen or more armed officers jumping out of unmarked vehicles to make an arrest and then shoving their target into a waiting van or car. In well over 150 cases, U.S. citizens have been taken into custody. Of the 600,000 total immigrants detained, just five percent have been the type of violent criminals Trump promised to target. All the rest have been law-abiding people, guilty only of civil offenses related to their lack of documentation.
In many other cases, ICE has held people in deplorable, unsanitary conditions and then sent them, not to their home countries but to third countries, including Ghana, South Sudan, and Rwanda, which have agreed to hold those arrested for per-capita fees. At the worst of these places, a penitentiary in El Salvador, prisoners are routinely beaten, deprived of proper food and water, and crowded by the dozens into pens big enough for five or six. They are denied visits, exercise, and medical care.
The whole point of the ICE operation has been to terrify immigrants, which it has. But in the meantime, it has forced the rest of us to live in an America we don’t recognize. It is a place of unidentified men cruising the streets and entering businesses without warrants. Peaceful people who work in our communities are being spirited away, and families are being broken apart.
Add the deployment of troops in big cities, on the pretext of crushing crime, and you get the feeling that we’re living in a police state. The Supreme Court, in a rare act of courage, recently ruled that these deployments are unconstitutional. If Trump follows democratic norms (this is a big if), the deployments will be rolled back. But much damage has already been done. Video of masked arrests. Uniformed soldiers on the street. These images of a police state are not going to fade.
ATTACKS ON THE MEDIA
Even before his 2024 campaign victory, Trump went after ABC for its reporting on his loss in E. Jean Carroll’s civil claim that the president-to-be had sexually assaulted her. Though Carroll won, and the judge in the case termed the assault a “rape,” newscaster George Stephanopoulos’s use of the word provided Trump with the basis for a massive defamation claim.
Although Trump has little chance of prevailing, proceeding in the case would have dragged on for years, costing ABC millions in legal fees and distracting its news team from their work. ABC capitulated, agreeing to pay a donation of $15 million to a Trump presidential library fund and another $1 million to cover Trump’s legal costs. One result: publicity related to Carroll’s $83 million win was muted by Trump’s victory over the network. Meanwhile, a message was sent to the media at large: Back off!
Trump took a second whack at the press with a suit against CBS, alleging he suffered “mental anguish” over the program 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with his political rival Kamala Harris. The network was owned by Paramount, which was in negotiations to be purchased by a company called Skydance, which is owned by pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison. CBS capitulated, agreeing to a payout similar to ABC’s. After the purchase went through all of CBS News was placed under the supervision of conservative media figure Bari Weiss.
Most recently, Weiss blocked the airing of a 60 Minutes piece on conditions at the El Salvador hellhole called CECOT -- the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo -- where immigrants expelled from the U.S. are being held. In other words, Trump’s lawsuit succeeded. Ellison and his father now have their sights set on gaining control of another media giant -- Warner Bros. Discovery -- which would put the news network CNN, which often criticizes the administration, the control, under pro-Trump supervision.
Meanwhile, Trump regularly attacks the hosts of late-night television programs and demands that individual network anchors and reporters be censored or fired. CBS, in an apparent effort to curry Trump’s favor, is forcing The Late Show host Stephen Colbert to step down in May, proving that Trump’s influence extends to the realm of entertainment. This is how modern totalitarians gain control of the media. Lawsuits and takeovers have silenced critics in Hungary and Russia, to name two autocratic states where the media has been defanged.
ATTACKS ON UNIVERSITIES AND LAWYERS
Similar to his offensive against the media, Trump has gone after big law firms and major universities. Nine major law firms, which employed attorneys who opposed Trump in one matter or another, were stripped of access to federal facilities. Nine of them quickly capitulated, agreeing to donate a combined $940 million in pro-bono services to groups deemed supportive of the Trump agenda.
As Trump sought retribution against lawyers, he also attacked universities that he deemed to have failed to protect pro-Israel student protesters. He threatened the universities with the withdrawal of several billion dollars worth of federal aid, including research grants. Many of the schools have succumbed to the threats, paying enormous settlements.
Trump’s war on universities was a nod to members of his base who resent higher education institutions as bastions of liberalism. Trump revealed as much when he said, “The days of subsidizing communist indoctrination in our colleges will soon be over.”
THE BIG UGLY BILL
Touted by Trump as The Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s signature piece of legislation, approved by the GOP-controlled Congress, is wreaking havoc on the health care system. The end of health insurance subsidies for middle-class purchasers will raise premiums by thousands of dollars.
Other provisions in the bill will:
· Grant the super-rich enormous tax reductions, ballooning the federal deficit.
· Provide $100 billion in tax breaks for families that leave public schools for private education.
· Cut benefits for poor children who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
· Impose work requirements for poor people who receive Medicaid.
· Repeal incentives for clean energy projects like wind and solar.
· Increase ICE’s budget fourfold to more than $47 billion.
· Add $4.2 trillion to the federal deficit.
WAR ON SCIENCE
Trump and his henchmen (especially Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) have decimated federally backed science. Thousands have been fired from the Centers for Disease Control. Billions have been cut from the National Institutes of Health, which backs more than 300,000 researchers.
Other cuts, or planned reductions, include an end to research on weather and climate change by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Trump wants to close NOAA’s main weather research center in Colorado, which is a world-leading scientific institute that also supports predictions on conditions across the country to the benefit of everyone affected by storms, droughts, and other weather events. The reason for the cut? The lab has found evidence of climate change, and Trump is ideologically opposed to the idea that change is occurring.
Trump’s war on science is, like his attacks on education and lawyers, reflects the large culture war that pits his MAGA supporters against perceived elites. Ironically, the firings and the cuts corrode projects that make America a world leader in certain science-based industries, have contributed little to reducing overall spending. Indeed, a seemingly aggressive attack on the overall spending by the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wound up saving very little.
Run by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, DOGE has reported widely inflated claims that have had to be rolled back by the billions. Where DOGE actually made cuts, it wiped out the gains made by scientists in many research programs, destroying the value of previous federal investments. Many promising projects in health and pharmaceuticals were left suspended short of producing treatments and cures.
THE END OF FOREIGN AID
One of the few DOGE actions that did have an effect on the budgets, and a massive impact on the ground in was the closure of the U.S. AID, the Agency for International Development, which has been providing food and medicine in refugee camps since the 1960s.
Opposed by much of Congress and the global aid community, the shutdown began with a 90-day freeze on aid disbursements, which led to furloughs and firings. Next came an announcement that 83 percent of USAID contracts would be canceled and the remainder would be managed by the State Department. Many tons of food and medical supplies were destroyed, rather than distributed, and warehouses were locked.
With the closure of USAID, Trump pulled America back from its humanitarian role around the globe. More than 60 years’ worth of goodwill evaporated as thousands of deaths were caused by disease. Russia and China jumped to fill the gap, replacing America as the beacon of hope.
Check back tomorrow for part 2, including war and peace, ego displays, injustice, profiteering, and Epstein. With some reason for hope!
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