Trump’s Destruction of America

Trump’s highly unpopular murder budget that he signed on July 4 is widely recognized as deeply damaging to America’s health and well-being. Most obviously, the cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act alone — the largest healthcare cuts in U.S. history — will deprive 17 million people of healthcare by 2034, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths per year. And it will hit Trump’s base in rural America especially hard.

“It’s the single worst piece of legislation I’ve seen in my lifetime, and it is a congressional Republican and presidential attack on rural America,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said on CNN. “In my state alone, 200,000 are gonna lose their coverage … 20,000 healthcare workers are gonna lose their jobs, and we’ve got up to 35 rural hospitals that are typically the second biggest employers in their communities that may close … This is going to hit rural America right in the face”

Beshear is a Democrat. But North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said much the same thing in explaining why he would not vote for the bill. In the end, he was willing to end his political career, rather than capitulate. He will not run for re-election, facing the certainty of a Trump-backed primary opponent. Both men were simply conveying the facts that experts all agree on.

The bill also has similar cuts (smaller in size, but larger in percentage) in a wide range of other areas — the National Parks, National Weather Services, and Veterans Administration, that similarly harm Trump’s base.

For example, the $900 million (30%) cut to the National Park Service would leave the system “completely decimated,” warned Theresa Pierno, the president of the National Parks Conservation Association. The group estimates it would require closing 350 of the 433 parks, monuments, historic sites and other locations overseen by the Park Service. They generate more than $25 billion in local businesses, primarily in rural communities that voted for Trump.

The bill balloons the federal debt with $4.5 billion in tax cuts, $1 billion of which will go to the top 1%. In partial payment, the bill cuts $1.1 trillion in healthcare spending, $230 billion in SNAP (food stamp) spending, and $499 billion in clean energy tax cuts — at the same time, it’s increasing support for oil, gas, and coal. There’s also a 56% cut to the current $9 billion National Science Foundation (NSF) budget, along with a 73% reduction in staff and fellowships — a catastrophic attack on America’s scientific future.

There’s also $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement, an explosive increase in spending that would make ICE nearly as large a detention operation as all 50 states’ prison systems combined. Meanwhile, every day here in LA, we see new evidence that ICE detainees will be hardworking community members, not hardened criminals. That makes it another massive blow to the economy.

Still, the damage in the murder budget IS only one aspect of how Trump’s policies will severely damage America in the years ahead, as he’s waging war against the major sources of America’s long-term wealth and prosperity, including science, education, tourism, trade, immigration and soft power. Dismantling USAID, for example, will result in 14 million preventable deaths in the developing world, according to a new study in The Lancet. But with the U.S. withdrawing health and food assistance, China will surely take up some of the slack, gaining more allies and influence in the process.

The impacts are so profound and unusual that they simply don’t fit into conventional economic measures, making most of them difficult to comprehend. But the drop in tourism is not. It’s immediately measurable with a precision that the other factors lack. Yet in the long run, it’s typical of them all.

On July 4, Forbes reported, “While tourism is booming across the rest of the world, the U.S. is a notable loser this year” with tens of millions of tourists going elsewhere, “economy up to $29 billion—and risking millions of jobs.” Tourism spending had been expected to grow 9% this year, but it’s now projected to shrink by 8.2%—a catastrophic 17.2% drop from what was projected.

The day before, the Guardian reported, “A generation of scientific talent is at the brink of being lost to overseas competitors by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the National Science Foundation (NSF), with unprecedented political interference at the agency jeopardizing the future of US industries and economic growth.”

Unlike tourism, “The true costs of what Trump is doing to American science and leadership is literally incalculable and can never be adequately measured in simple economic terms,” MacArthur Fellow Peter Gleick told Random Lengths. “Trying to describe his destruction of US science and leadership in dollars hides its true cost.”

Still, a rough indicator can be found by looking at what happened to German science after Hitler came to power, ending Germany’s reign as the center of the scientific world, and attracting talent from around the globe. At the time, Germany led the world with 28 Nobel prizes —almost one a year — compared to 15 for the U.S. in 4th place. But Germany’s record-setting pace immediately broke when Hitler came to power, long before he began WWII and the Holocaust. The U.S. caught up by 1948, and now leads Germany by 296 to 84, with Britain between them in second place.

Just as Hitler’s Germany quickly fell from world leadership in science and technology, the same fate now stares Trump’s America in the face. The only way to avoid that fate is not to let ourselves be Trump’s America.

Like Hitler before him, Trump believes that global elites and racially inferior hordes threaten the nation. He not just ignores, but denies the climate crisis, which the worldwide scientific community agrees is the most comprehensive threat facing humanity, and instead, he focuses on immigration, which, again, experts in the field recognize as a source of strength for America, not a threat.

Calculating the costs of Trump’s climate denialism, and translating them into conventional frameworks is similarly difficult — if not impossible, and beside the point.

“Existing economic models are inadequate to tell us the true costs of failing to take action on the ecological crisis,” said Nat Dyer, author of Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray,  which includes a critique of such models. “We only know those models have a long history of dramatically downplaying the costs of inaction. They only consider the value of wealth, whereas we need to engage a wider range of values to guide big decisions,” Dyer said.

With that warning in mind, Trump’s war against climate action still makes no sense.

Damages from Hurricane Helene alone ranged as high as $250 billion, close to 1% of annual U.S. GDP — far more than the government spent annually to fight climate change before the new budget bill slashed the figure to almost nothing.

An early February report from First Street projected $1.47 trillion in net property value losses by 2055, impacting “70,026 neighborhoods (84% of all census tracts).”

But things could get much worse, according to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. That same month, when asked about mortgage availability in disaster-prone states, Powell told the Senate Banking Committee:

Those banks and insurance companies are pulling out of areas, coastal areas and … areas where there are a lot of fires. … [I]f you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage. There won’t be ATMs, the banks won’t have branches and things like that.

The resulting economic devastation would be catastrophic. But the month before Powell spoke, Britain’s Institute and Faculty of Actuaries presented an even grimmer long-term picture: The global economy could face a 50% loss in GDP between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change.

Donald Trump didn’t invent climate denial or any of the other toxic policies and perspectives he’s advancing. But he has amped them up to levels not seen before, and in doing so he’s not only made them far more harmful, he’s dramatically increased how their harms interact.

The damage Trump’s doing is similar in scale to what Hitler did to Germany or Pol Pot did to Cambodia, as Irish policy advisor Ian Hughes warned in his 2018 book, Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities Are Destroying Democracy,  and in a subsequent Salon interview with this reporter. Simply put, Trump is out to destroy America because, as a malignant narcissist, he cannot possibly understand what it is, or see the value in it.

In his book, Hughes described three distinct types of personality disorders (two of which predominate in malignant narcissism) and showed how they had manifested in the historical examples of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. And he presented a historical argument showing how modern democracies had developed as a defense against the destructiveness of such leaders.

“Trump represents a clear threat not only to democracy in the U.S. but also to peace, stability, and progress in the world. The path he is leading us is, in so many ways, diametrically opposed to the direction in which we should be moving,” he said in the Salon interview. 

The full scope of Trump’s destructiveness is simply beyond the capacity of our existing models to comprehend. This is why it helps to pay attention to specific instances and examples that illuminate the larger landscape. One recent example involved immigration agents at the Dodger Stadium parking being refused entry, amid community protests.

The Saturday before the parking lot confrontation, on “No Kings!” day, singer Nezza sang the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish, and Puerto Rican-born fan favorite Kiki Hernandez posted about his outrage at ICE on Instagram. “This is my second home, and I cannot stand to see our community being violated, profiled, abused, and ripped apart,” he said. “ALL people deserve to be treated with respect, dignity, and human rights.” And he signed off with the hashtag #CityOfImmigrants.

While immigrants make up just under 14% of the population, they represent 19% of business owners with employees and 24% of those without employees. What’s more, 46% of all Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. And while we’re just 4% of the world’s population, we have dominated the Nobel Prizes, because the best minds in the world flock to our shores. In short, immigration is the lifeblood of American prosperity, invention and progress. But so too are science, education, tourism and trade. And Donald Trump is viciously attacking all of them, in part as a direct result of his anti-immigration delusion.

What makes America America is not one people versus another but all people together united by a shared promise — the promise of creating a better future together, not as Trump would have, the promise of returning to a more sharply divided and badly misremembered past.