I don’t know if you’ve been following this…
…but the last couple of weeks, the Trump regime has kept busy, busy, busy:
- Closing 47 Social Security offices (while newly requiring many seniors to appear in person for routine changes)
- Proposing to cut the CDC and NIH staff by a further 10,000 employees, for a total loss of of about a quarter of the HHS personnel
- Announcing that a notorious medical fraudster and vaccine denier will head an official government vaccine-autism study
- Doing Deportations – using masked thugs.
- Extreme renditions to foreign prisons without evidence or charges.
- Reveling in Revocations – or removal – of every level of residency status ( native-born coming soon!) for social media posts, or presence at a protest. Fulbright scholars and top post-docs serving as high-profile examples of the kind of educated undesirable “we don’t want here”
- firing almost all the employees of Homeland Security’s civil rights office
- Outlawing demonstrations, empowering campus police to make arrests
- Straight up blackmailing universities and major law firms
Germany, 1934, anyone? We must cling to the knowledge that Trump did NOT win almost 90 percent of the vote, and that while this macabre circus races on, the administration’s clowns just announced (classified not classified) bombing plans in a group chat which accidentally included a journalist. But I’m not sure their massive incompetence will save us – and it may well kill us. After only two months – yes, it does seem like years – of an escalating tsunami of idiocy and pointless cruelty, it should be clear to anyone with open eyes that we can’t wait for midterms. Regardless of the outcome – regardless of whether midterms will even be held – we will not have anything like a democracy after 2 years of this. We don’t have one now. The underpinnings have been ripped out and we’re in free fall. With each judicial ruling, the constitutional crises pile up, one atop the next like leaky old air mattresses. The judges are blowing as fast as they can, but the tired vinyl isn’t going to cushion our descent.
This may be my last letter, it’s getting too depressing to revisit this relentless decimation of democracy week after week, as Bebe obliterates Gaza and AIDS surges back into the vacuum left by USAID. We are still protesting in New City at the courthouse, Tuesday at noon, though I won’t be there this week. I would love to say I’ll be [at what I hope is a massive showing] in the Capital next Saturday, but instead I’ll just be coming back from visiting family. I hope some of you will go – I’ve already donated towards your bus fare…