Even before the latest oval office resident came on the scene, many in his party had campaigned, and won, not by promising to do better at governing, or by providing more services and protections to a majority of the people, but on a platform based almost entirely on deep cuts to government funding and personnel. For decades, they rammed their anti-government points home, but had little or intermittent success, using their short-lived terms in office to give tax breaks to the wealthy and pay for them by cutting critical programs. There was damage, all right, but never enough for them to be held accountable. Former President Reagan brought the mantra more broadly into the mainstream, openly branding government the enemy and determinedly convincing people they would be better off without it.
Once I was in government, I realized that, for those developing this rhetoric, “government” referred to the critical programs and responsible protections we were providing for the vast majority of Americans, all of which were extremely inconvenient to corporations who desperately needed to remain unregulated in order to swell their bottom lines, never mind the health and economic risks to everyone else.
The anti-government drumbeat finally built to a crashing drum solo. By the time the current administration came into office, these efforts had successfully built a deep distrust of, and disdain for, government. They had also created a “populist”, individualistic campaign agenda, based solely on a message that we would be better off with less government “interference”. This worked fine for the party, so long as they never had the power to actually carry it out.
Of course, you know I love metaphors, and the morality tale of the dog who caught the car is an old one, though, currently, perfectly apropos. It has served, for decades, to characterize someone who has a goal, idiotic or not, barks loudly about the goal, frantically and loudly chases that goal, and, finally, having caught it, has no idea of what to do with a mouthful of moving car.
It’s the perfect tale to exemplify the disasters of Trump’s first hundred days. After making grandiose and inflated promises to cut unidentified government “waste, fraud and abuse”, deport millions of unidentified immigrant “criminals”, and make us all rich again by imposing tariffs, the administration now has the whole car stuck in its craw with no idea of what government really does, and no plan to actually govern.
Predictably, the only plan, carefully laid out in the right-wing tome called Project 2025, was to take a chain saw to all federal budgets, departments, personnel rosters, and real estate, and frenetically cut blindly through it all. The Doge caught the car and has chewed through the tires, the motor, and the seats. Thousands of critical employees have been fired, maybe reinstated, lost, and mistreated. Millions now are forced to live without life-saving health services or food. Thousands of workers, a vast number of them, veterans, have been removed from their homes and work. Hundreds of men are locked away in El Salvador, and more in black box jails in the United States. Children are ripped from their families. Nuclear waste goes unprotected. Weather can no longer be predicted. Allies are being spurned and insulted. Financial markets are thrown into turmoil simply because our executive branch hasn’t any more idea of how world finance and our own markets work than the mindless dog in the tale.
Suddenly, Americans are waking up to what is being lost in their individual lives. Suddenly, they realized they are losing their own medical help, housing, educational support, Meals on Wheels. They learn that academic research on the very cancer from which they suffer has been terminated. “Wait wait,” they cry, “I didn’t know the waste, fraud, and abuse you promised to end was saving my life.”
In other words, they didn’t know you were chasing their car. “I needed that car,” they say. “I loved that old car.” Cut Social Security staff? IRS staff? Environmental protection staff? Every section of the Department of Health and Human Services? Oversight and protection from financial fraud? “How do I survive without that car? I thought you were going to drive it, not scrap it.”
After suffering through hundreds of inane Executive Orders and the worst appointments ever made to a sitting Cabinet, many are finally realizing that government needs vision, empathy, talent, fairness, and dogged determination in order to craft laws that protect and direct and fund the basic elements needed by constituents to survive and thrive. It’s not for amateurs. It takes a guard dog, not a junkyard dog.
Well, at least America is coming to appreciate the genius of the Founding Fathers in giving us the protection of the courts against the dismantling of democracy. Hopefully, more and more are learning the meaning and importance of the words Constitution and Due Process. Unfortunately, it’s a lesson in American Government being delivered, not through Tough Love, but through Cruel Indifference. Many are learning that what they thought, in the abstract, had to do with “rights” they didn’t fully understand, actually had real world consequences. The dog caught the car and is wrecking it, with everyone still trapped inside.
Reckless Endangerment Most Foul
A few weeks ago, I wrote in this space about the crime of homicide through reckless endangerment. This is a statutory concept in our criminal law used to hold a person accountable for unintentionally causing another’s death when any reasonable person would have seen that the actions they took would result in that death.
It is time to apply this charge to the current president, his demonic billionaire sidekick, his scary, clown-filled Cabinet and all the appointments who are carrying out his agenda, an agenda that has, already, caused thousands of deaths. Take just one example—mindlessly cutting US AID funds, supplies and personnel—and you can begin to see the results of this administration’s acts of reckless endangerment all around the world. As I reported a few weeks ago, Professor Brooke Nichols and her colleagues at the Boston University School of Public Health, have developed an impact counter to continuously tally up the deaths caused by these callous, knee-jerk cuts.
This week, the endlessly growing chart tallies over 40,000 adult deaths and over 4,000 juvenile deaths from the withdrawal of PEPLAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) funding alone, as well as an additional 18,000 deaths this year and 22,000 additional infections from the loss of TB funding. Add to this the likely results of slashing Medicaid funds at home, and the numbers jump exponentially This is tantamount to murder by reckless endangerment. And that’s just the beginning.
The Department of Health and Human Services (now reduced to such a misnomer, it could have been used as a Newspeak word in Aldous Huxley’s 1984, and so could the “Department of Government Efficiency”), now being destroyed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will be directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who perish from lack of services and research for brain injury programs, removal of food safety programs, loss of pandemic responses, lead poison monitoring, oral health treatment, heart disease, diabetes, smoking related cancers, closing of rural hospitals, deferred training of doctors, the termination of medical research on everything, delay of new treatments, the spread of measles, elimination of patient safety protocols, ending the development of new therapies, dropping Alzheimer treatments, infectious disease prevention, pediatric care, and so much more. Each of these deaths will be due to Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and all their sycophants and should, properly, be identified as murder by reckless endangerment.
In Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father sets the plot in motion by decrying his own murder at the hands of his brother, Claudius. He acknowledges that, while all murders are foul, some are much worse, saying:
“Murder most foul, as in the best it is /
But this most foul, strange and unnatural”.
To die from the willful neglect of your own leaders, from banishment to a deadly prison or a hostile land from which you’ve escaped, or from the intentional removal of life-saving measures by allies and public servants upon whom you’ve relied…that, indeed, is murder most foul.
