Trump Defunds the Police

 

By David K. Shipler 

            There are several ways to curb law enforcement. One is to cut off funding literally, as a minority of Black Lives Matter protesters urged. Another is to redirect some money from uniformed officers to social workers and mental health counselors, which is what many demonstrators meant by “defund the police.” Still another is to release convicted violent assailants of police officers. Or to ignore specific laws; declare no intention to enforce them; and to investigate, fire, and intimidate prosecutors and policing authorities who combat certain crimes.

            President Trump is doing all of those things except, of course, moving money to mental health services. He and his consigliere, Elon Musk, have frozen spending broadly enough to impede law enforcement. Trump has fired most of the inspectors-general who investigate waste, fraud, and abuse. He has frozen hiring at the IRS and discussed laying off 9,000 employees to undercut tax enforcement. He has pardoned men found guilty of violently attacking police officers on January 6. He has removed veteran specialists from counter-terrorism work in the Justice Department, robbing the country of expertise in a critical area of national security.

            He has announced that the law prohibiting Americans from bribing foreign officials to get contracts abroad will no longer be enforced. He has defied the congressional statute, unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court, that bans Chinese-owned TikTok and has promised no prosecutions of companies that continue to distribute the prohibited platform.

            He has stymied three agencies that enforce laws protecting workers and customers of banks and credit card companies by shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and illegally firing the Democratic-appointed chair of the National Labor Relations Board and two of three Democrats on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The Demolition Expert

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.