By Mel Gurtov
In just two weeks, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions have managed to alienate, disrupt, disparage, and defy Americans and foreign friends alike. They have openly mocked Congress, the Constitution, the rule of law, and the virtues of diplomacy, all for self-serving ends. Here are five cases that summarize what they have done so far, why they are so dangerous, and why resistance is necessary.
Lawlessness
Trump’s first administration ended in lawlessness. Now it begins that way. Though we were all alerted as to what Donald Trump would do in his first days in office, it’s still shocking when he does it. Here’s a partial list:
- He has issued a clearly illegal and (according to a federal judge) “blatantly unconstitutional” executive order that disregards the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and is racist to boot: eliminating citizenship by birth in the case of babies born to parents in the US illegally. (Another judge has issued a nationwide injunction to block the order, saying “no court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation.”)
• His transition team says the US will not grant asylum to people crossing the border illegally, in plain violation of international law that calls for granting asylum to people who have a reasonable fear of persecution.
• His declaration of a national emergency at the Mexico border is a political stunt; there is no emergency. Illegal border crossings are way down—“at levels below the final months of Trump’s first term,” the New York Times reports. Nevertheless, Trump’s tariff threats have forced Mexico to agree to deploy 10,000 troops to the border to keep migrants out of the US. The ACLU is suing Trump, arguing: “No president has the authority to override the [humanitarian] protections Congress has granted to people seeking safety at the border.”
• He said in his inaugural address that he wants to “expand our territory,” which translates to a new imperialism directed at Greenland and perhaps Panama. Never mind that the government and people there don’t want to be absorbed by the US. (I have more to say about Greenland below.) Most recently, Trump has talked about taking “ownership” of the Gaza Strip, converting waterfront areas into another Riviera—with Jared Kushner, mind you, in charge. - He has issued blanket pardons for more than 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists, including many who committed violence that day and some who are dedicated to violence, such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders. Overturning their convictions is meant to justify Trump’s incitement of them.
- Trump promised to fire any civil servant who fails to report on a colleague who is acting in furtherance of diversity-equity-inclusion. He is mimicking the communist system, under which party secretaries spy on workers in all government agencies.
• Trump fired 17 inspectors general in federal agencies. But his email termination notices may have violated federal law, the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which requires Congress to receive 30 days’ notice of any intent to fire a Senate-confirmed inspector general. Trump intends to replace these watchdog appointees with loyalists, essentially ending the independence that is at the heart of the inspector general position. His press secretary says: “He is the executive of the executive branch, and therefore he has the power to fire anyone within the executive branch that he wishes to.” - The Trump regime is carrying out a purge of anyone in government service who had anything to do with prosecution of Trump’s many crimes. A purge—something we used to associate only with authoritarian systems. The purge extends to the FBI, where an apparently unwilling temporary director issued notifications to career field office leaders that they had been terminated. These orders are patently illegal; the officers are protected by civil service laws, and by law can only be fired if they commit crimes or engage in unethical conduct. (Nine FBI agents have filed suit to prevent the Trump administration from collecting information on the agents in investigations of Trump.) The purge also includes the firing of over a dozen federal prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in Washington.
• A little known but highly important treasury department office that distributes all federal payments—that’s trillions of dollars—is now under the control of a handful of Musk’s charges. These are kids, barely out of their teenage years, without security clearances, and pumped up about their control of huge, confidential personal data bases with the consent of Trump’s newly appointed treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. It’s being called the biggest security breach in US history. Senator Elizabeth Warren told CNN:
“It’s alarming that Elon Musk is attempting to gain access to the Federal Government’s critical payment system, which is responsible for delivering Social Security checks, tax refunds, and Medicare benefits to Americans across the country. It is equally alarming that Musk and the Trump Administration drove out the most senior career official at Treasury as the agency is already taking extraordinary measures to avoid a US default.”
To which Timothy Snyder adds:
“In gaining the ability to stop payments by the Department of the Treasury, Musk would also make democracy meaningless. We vote for representatives in Congress, who pass laws that determine how our tax money is spent. If Musk has the power to halt this process at the level of payment, he can make laws meaningless. Which means, in turn, that Congress is meaningless, and our votes are meaningless, as is our citizenship.”
- Trump has issued an executive order to deny gender-affirming treatment for trans children, part of a war for “biological truth.” Sounds like neo-Nazism to me.
• Freedom of the press is being eroded daily. In the Pentagon, the main news outlets, such as the New York Times and NPR, have been removed from their usual office and replaced with Breitbart, One America News, and other right-wing supporters of Trump’s policies. His chair of the Federal Communications Commission has announced an investigation of financial sponsors of NPR and PBS, with the evident aim to remove government support. CBS and ABC have paid off Trump rather than contest his ridiculous charges of biased reporting. And now Lara Trump will have her own Fox News show, further ensuring Fox conformity with the party line. - Trump will create a working group in support of cryptocurrency (“digital assets”), in a blatant example of conflict of interest. Trump has a substantial personal investment in the crypto industry, having started a crypto company called World Liberty Financial last year that is already selling currency. Trump and Melania are shlocking their own coins along with the shoes, perfume, Bibles, and hundreds of other goods. The $Trump memecoin has shocked the crypto industry, one of whose members and Trump supporter said Trump’s marketing makes crypto currency “look corrupt and self-interested.” Oh, really?
• Trump has ordered the US Dept of Agriculture to remove references to the climate crisis from its website; ordered the US Forest Service website on resources and research of wildfires stopped; put the Environmental Protection Agency on the chopping block; and issued an executive order to abolish the Department of Education. (On the last item, which requires Congressional approval, the head of the National Education Association said: “If it became a reality, Trump’s power grab would steal resources for our most vulnerable students, explode class sizes, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, take away special education services for students with disabilities, and gut student civil rights protections,” she said. “Americans did not vote for, and do not support, ending the federal government’s commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunities for every child.”)
The Emerging Crypto Currency Scandal
Howard Lutnick, chairman and CEO of the Wall Street investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald and Donald Trump’s nominee to become the next secretary of commerce, has his hands deep into the cryptocurrency netherworld. Cantor Fitzgerald is a banker for the most widely used and traded stablecoin in the world: Tether. What most concerns some senators who will question him is the use of stablecoin in secondary markets to finance terrorism, facilitate cybercrime, money laundering and the sale of precursor chemicals for illicit drug manufacturing. As commerce sec, Lutnick would be responsible for regulating stablecoin business. Notably, Tether announced plans to move its headquarters to El Salvador on Monday. El Salvador under an authoritarian leader, Nayir Bukele, has embraced cryptocurrency as a competitive advantage, moving its own economy and currency into crypto. And Bukele was the second leader, after Saudi Arabia’s Mohamed bin Salman, to be called by Trump after Trump’s inauguration. Marco Rubio just visited Bukele, and they reached an agreement—get this!—whereby El Salvador would receive not only Salvadoran deportees, but any criminals in the US. Oh, there’s a fee, supposedly to be used to finance their stay in the country’s mega-prison. El Salvador has one of the world’s highest rates of incarceration.
Budget Cuts and Human Rights
In a move consistent with his early “shock and awe” strategy, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that virtually all foreign aid—the $60-billion budget for humanitarian, development, and military—would be suspended pending a review. Initially, the only exceptions to the suspension were military aid to Israel and Egypt, and emergency humanitarian assistance. Outrage followed, and now “life-saving assistance” is said to be allowed. No one is certain what that means. Will it, for example, end US aid to protect against AIDS, a program started under George W. Bush that is credited with saving more than 25 million lives worldwide? That program has been frozen. “Life-saving assistance” will most certainly not include money for abortions, family planning or gender diversity programs.
How US humanitarian assistance will be handled is no longer clear: the quasi-independent Agency for International Development will be “shut down,” according to Musk (citing Trump). Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he’s now acting administrator of the agency. Even if AID survives, budget cuts will affect US aid to national ministries of health under the World Health Organization now that Trump has ordered the US to end its membership. Vaccine programs abroad may also be affected, especially if RFK Jr. is confirmed as health secretary. Also affected will be US aid to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to find and clear unexploded ordnance (bombs, mines, ammunition) the US used during the Vietnam War—a program that has spent around $750 million so far. Responding to the budget cuts, two Democrats in Congress said: “As leaders of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations, we write with extreme alarm about the administration’s efforts to undermine Congress’s power of the purse, threaten our national security and deny resources for states, localities, American families and businesses.”
The Assault on the Professional Military
On the military front, Trump (in the words of the New York Times) fired the first woman to ever lead a military service branch [Admiral Linda Fagan], signed an order to send [1500] active-duty U.S. troops to the border [in what one officer called a photo op] and said he was reinstating, with back pay, former service members who had refused to take Covid vaccinations, a breach of military health rules. General Mark Milley, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman under both Trump and Biden, is now accused of disloyalty. Portraits of him at the Pentagon have been taken down, his security detail has been removed, and Pete Hegseth, the new Trump toady at the Department of Defense, promises to investigate Milley despite his having been pardoned by Biden. Milley, you’ll recall, refused to support Trump’s intention to use the military against Black protesters in 2020, and has explicitly called Trump a fascist and national security threat more than once.
Hegseth, who squeaked by in the confirmation vote, has added to the military’s unease with comments about its current leaders. He has called Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of Naval Operations and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs, “another inexperienced first.” Actually, she has an exceptional combat record, as does another of the JCS, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., whom Hegseth intends to fire for being too “woke.”
Trump and Hegseth are also going after an array of service personnel who are (according to Trump’s executive order) “afflicted with radical gender ideology to appease activists” and have “many mental and physical health conditions [that] are incompatible with active duty.” That means soldiers with diagnoses “that require substantial medication or medical treatment to bipolar and related disorders, eating disorders, suicidality, and prior psychiatric hospitalization.” But the harshest targeting is directed at transgender soldiers, who are said to be living in conflict “with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” For the moment, transgender soldiers are still on duty, but their dismissal from service seems certain.
Buying Greenland: Really?
Make no mistake, Donald Trump really means to pressure Denmark into selling Greenland to the US. The Financial Times reports that Trump held a “fiery call” with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in January. Citing senior European officials, the Financial Times says Trump was “aggressive and confrontational” in blustering about his plans to take control of the Danish territory. Trump has said publicly that he covets the mineral-rich territory for national security reasons. Frederiksen reiterated Denmark’s position that Greenland is not for sale. Meantime, Mute Egede, leader of Greenland, is intent on moving forward with independence: “It is now time to take the next step for our country,” Egede said in a New Year’s address. “Like other countries in the world, we must work to remove the obstacles to cooperation — which we can describe as the shackles of the colonial era — and move on.” He has said an independent Greenland would have close relations with the US as well as with Europe. That’s not enough for Trump. He wants to be the next McKinley, hailed in US history textbooks as the president who expanded America’s northern border to the Arctic Circle.
Tyranny
We are in a constitutional crisis. Donald Trump has apparently convinced himself and everyone around him that he has a popular mandate to do what other dictators do, namely, rule by executive decree and expect no dissent. As a New York Times editorial of February 1 says, “Many of Mr. Trump’s first assertions of executive power blatantly exceed what is legally granted.” The Washington Post points out that not a single one of Trump’s nominees has been willing to say that s/he would refuse an illegal order from the President. Indeed, Trump is acting as though Congress and the judicial system are of little significance—that he can override or bypass any rules or norms he finds inconvenient. Trump has indicated that he is prepared to override the most fundamental power given to Congress by the Constitution: the ability to appropriate tax money and determine how it is spent.
A torrent of legal challenges to Trump’s authoritarian rule is in process. The more irrational and broadly harmful his orders, the greater the resistance. Here at home, those who voted for him will begin to understand that they have been duped as it becomes clear that their most important concerns have been trampled upon—the police, the military, the crypto industry, the civil servants, the people on Medicaid, the teachers and school administrators, the middle class. Abroad, governments in the Americas, Europe, and Asia will seek new partners as they realize how untrustworthy and unpredictable this administration is. Trump will find that his reach exceeds his grasp.
But it will take resistance, not merely protest.
Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.