Trump: Promises Made, Promises Broken

 

By David K. Shipler 

                One of President Trump’s campaign slogans most popular with his supporters was the mantra, “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” But the most important promises that presidents are obligated to keep are those made by their country. And in merely three weeks, Trump has broken multiple solemn promises made by the United States, many longstanding and life-saving.

                His message is clear: Don’t trust America.

If you work for our soldiers in war and are promised safe passage to the US, don’t believe it. If you’re promised continuing treatment with HIV medication, don’t believe it. If the world’s leading democracy promises to keep supporting your pro-democracy efforts in your not-so-democratic country, don’t believe it. If you’ve obtained a hard-won promise to fund effective work combating sex-trafficking, civil conflict, ethnic strife, or radicalization that leads to terrorism, don’t believe it. If you have a subcontract or a lease or an employment commitment from a non-profit organization funded by the US, don’t trust it. Don’t think that promised funds for hospitals, ports, roads, or other development projects already underway will actually be paid—unless the money is coming from China.   

                Don’t trust any international agreement with the United States, not on nuclear weapons, climate change, or trade. Don’t believe in any alliance with Washington. Don’t think that common security interests or economic interdependency protects you from a blizzard of broken promises.

If you’re in the US, don’t believe the promise of a written contract based on federal funding; it can be scuttled at midnight. If you’re a federal employee, don’t believe in the promises of the law, civil service protection, due process, or even plain ethics; you can be kicked out of your office in an instant. Don’t believe that your long expertise will protect you; in fact, it is likely to hurt you, since the Trump movement resents, vilifies, and distrusts “experts.”

Do not, under any circumstances, text or email anything sensitive, particularly with such terms as “gender” or “diversity.” Use the phone if you have to communicate. Don’t trust your coworker, who might be an informant.

The opposite side of this coin is a panoply of new assumptions. If you’re an American taxpayer, you can assume that much of your money will be siphoned off into the pockets of corrupt Trump acolytes. Assume that no watchdogs will catch the graft, since Trump fired some 17 agencies’ neutral inspectors-general—the investigators who combat waste, fraud, and abuse. You can assume that Trump-favored businesses will get waivers to avoid tariffs in exchange for money or loyalty to the Dear Leader. You can assume that your Social Security numbers and private bank account numbers will no longer be safeguarded, now that they’ve been accessed by Elon Musk’s gang. They could even be sold for profit.

If you use a credit card or have a bank account or mortgage, assume more risk as Trump assaults the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  Assume that you will face more discrimination in the workplace if you are Black, Latino, female, or gay as Trump emasculates the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and empowers Musk, who displayed mastery of the Nazi-style salute.

 If you’re in a university, your promised funding for health research has already been suspended, halting projects in midstream, and you should assume that future research will be very scarce. A theme of the Trumpist movement’s hatred of the accomplished “elite” is its campaign against institutions that train and house them. America’s longstanding promise of advanced research, which has garnered more Nobel Prizes than any other country’s, is coming to an end. Top scientists should look for greener pastures elsewhere.

                This new American landscape, littered with broken promises, is likely to have consequences. When Trump suddenly halted flights to the US for Afghans who had risked everything to help Americans during the war—people now cleared for refugee status after years in hiding from the Taliban—his colossal betrayal was denounced by US troops who’d fought there and more quietly in the expatriate community of Afghans already in the US. In the next conflict, wherever it occurs, how foolish would you have to be to sign up with an unreliable partner?

                The same can be said of foreign leaders. As a rule, they’re keen on their own survival, and when they see Trump hating America’s friends—Canada, Mexico, Panama, the Europeans—their calculations are sure to change. How reckless would they have to be to place all their chips on American loyalty instead of hedging their bets? China and Russia are bound to benefit.

                A brain drain from government also seems probable. Many skilled federal employees can earn more money in the private sector, and it’s hard to imagine good people with options choosing to serve their country when their country doesn’t serve them, denying them basic honor and dignity.

                 The result might be just what Trumpists want. Their movement rode to power on the wave of the public’s disrespect for government, and making government worse feeds those popular passions of resentment. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: denounce the evils of government, excise them with a butcher’s cleaver, and leave a maimed remnant of greater dysfunction to prove your case.

Then, populate the power centers with agents of zealotry to wield nefarious means aimed not at making considered reforms but rather at spreading ideological conformity and political loyalty in government and far beyond, into civil society. It is a totalist mindset.

Can it be stopped? Trump is trampling the centerpiece of the constitutional system—the separation of powers among the three branches of government—and has moved so fast that the checks and balances cannot keep up. Nearly all his broken promises also break the law, but the law has never been a restraint on him, not as a businessman and not as president.

Indeed, he and Musk are treating the federal government as if it were their own private company. Musk’s email urging federal employees to resign with pay until September was reminiscent of his housecleaning email to his employees at Twitter, now X, after he bought the platform. It carried the same subject line: “A fork in the road.” It should have read, “A knife in the back.”

The question is whether the two other branches of government, conceived by the Framers to prevent dictatorship, will act decisively and be obeyed. The legislative branch has punted. Dominated by Republicans who either fear or admire Trump, neither house of Congress has fulfilled its constitutional role, not even to the point of blocking his wacky cabinet nominees to date.

If Congress acted, would Trump defer? He’s been ignoring its legal budget and procedural mandates, with hardly a peep of protest from his Republicans.

Would he defer to the courts? Federal district court judges have been imposing temporary injunctions on some of his expansive power grabs (but not all) pending full hearings and rulings. Yet it’s not clear that those orders have been followed.

The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, remains essentially closed, with almost all workers on administrative leave or ordered to return home from overseas, despite a judge’s temporary injunction, which applied only to the employees. The judge did not unfreeze the freeze on foreign aid.

Nor is it known how to enforce another judge’s order to block the Musk team’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems, and to destroy any downloaded material. Courts in such matters rely on deference by the law-abiding, with contempt citations as punishment. There is no such deference in the Trump takeover. Federal marshals enforce court orders, but could they realistically be sent to keep prohibited people out of the Treasury Department’s secure computers?

A judge also ordered a pause in the Musk “fork-in-the-road” program offering pay through September to employees who resigned by Feb. 6. But it’s not clear what will happen to those who want to rescind their resignations if the courts find the program illegal. Nor is there any congressional authorization to pay them for not working: in other words, a scam.

These and other cases of expanding executive power are likely to end up in the Supreme Court, where a rightwing 6-3 majority prevails. It’s widely assumed that it will grant Trump a win in at least one area—the president’s power to fire commissioners of agencies Congress has made semi-independent. Trump has just done that, too, in violation of existing laws deemed likely to be swept away by the extremist high court.

A final question is whether this descent into unconstitutional lawlessness can be reversed, or whether it will reach a point of no return. The semi-autocracy that Trump and millions of his voters seem to desire will surely be pursued. We have seen only the beginning. Will Americans eventually rise up? Or will the public be governed by complacency, acquiescence, and fear? Better hedge your bets.