By David K. Shipler
You’ve got
to hand it to Donald Trump. He’s gone from construction to destruction while
scarcely missing a beat. After a real estate career doing deals to build hotels
and resorts, he has not constructed a thing to advance the country since
becoming president—not a coherent policy, not a beneficial program, not an
international agreement, not even the ill-conceived wall that he promised
falsely would be paid for by Mexico.
Instead, he relishes firing people
and publicly undermines those who still work for him. He bulldozes the
structures of government that protect Americans from dirty air, poisonous
water, unsafe workplaces, corporate exploitation, inferior health coverage, and
racial discrimination. He halts reform efforts in the criminal justice system.
He introduces new toxicity into the country’s divides along political, ethnic,
class, and racial lines. Years of progress are being rapidly reversed.
He has driven wedges into our international
alliances, made adversaries of friends, and set out to tear apart painstakingly
negotiated agreements that promote trade and curb disastrous global warming. He
has threatened to obliterate North Korea over its nuclear weapons, yet he
simultaneously strives to torpedo the agreement that has suspended Iran’s rush
toward such weapons. In the unlikely event that North Korea ever considers a
deal with the US relinquishing its nuclear programs, it would have to doubt
America’s trustworthiness, as Pyongyang’s Foreign Ministry has said.
For Trump has shown the United
States government to be unreliable in its promises abroad and to its own
people. It has been erratic and unpredictable in a manner that erodes the rule
of law, which requires legal stability and consistency.
Trump’s wrecking ball, which he
wields with a self-satisfied smirk whenever he signs an executive order, makes
it impossible for health insurers, patients, doctors, and hospitals to navigate
with assurance through the complex finances of medical care. Business ventures
that trade internationally, American farmers who export to Canada and Mexico, health
services that treat women overseas, immigrants who seek an American life,
foreign leaders who have depended on the American umbrella of protection and
leadership, and myriad others can no longer count on the United States government.
This is deeply unsettling. The
disruption reaches far beyond Trump’s intemperate tweets, his vulgar personal
clashes, and his incessant lies. Mostly in the name of undoing everything with
former President Barack Obama’s name attached, Trump seems indifferent to the
harm caused to vulnerable people, from women in Madagascar who can no longer
get contraceptives through a non-governmental organization dependent on US
funds, to American voters of his who will now find their health premiums
skyrocketing because he is merrily cutting off government subsidies. They will
surely distrust government even more than they did before, when their
alienation led to Trump’s victory.
Fortunately, he does not head a
dictatorship, for he would be a cruel and vindictive autocrat if he had his
way. He would not only urge that NBC stations’ broadcast licenses be revoked
for news stories he dislikes; he would revoke them. He would not only call for an
end to tax breaks for the NFL in retaliation for players’ kneeling during the
national anthem; he would end them. He would not only denounce the critical media
for “fake news” when it told unwelcome truths; he would close them down.
