Trump and the members of his administration are a disaster, but they aren’t the only ones. We are now seeing what happens when we elect Senators and Representatives whose entire allegiance is to their tribe and its leadership rather than the people they are elected to serve.
True, the negative consequences of what I am calling “politicization” are intensified by the Trump’s insanity–which is becoming more obvious every day. (He recently responded to questions about the bond market by threatening military intervention. If that doesn’t convince you, listen to this…) When Joe Biden began displaying the ravages of age, both his essential mental soundness and the competent and well-meaning administration he’d assembled made that decline far less worrisome than the precipitous decline of a man-child whose ignorance, serious mental issues, and thirst for revenge on anyone and everyone who ever thwarted his greed or ridiculed his tacky grandiosity were longstanding.
As Trump loses what is left of his already-disordered mind, that thirst for revenge, that desire to lash out and punish anyone who opposes him has been (as we say in academic-speak) operationalized. Federal officials have admitted withholding grants from Blue states for no other reason than that they would be spent in states that had voted against Trump.
And now, in the wake of the fierce weather that has battered large parts of the country, the administration is placing political conditions on disaster aid. Salem, Oregon just won a lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and FEMA in which the city charged the Trump administration of “dangling disaster aid above local leaders’ heads in exchange for a rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.”
The Judge in that case found that “As wildfires, severe storms, and floods routinely ravage through the State of Oregon, disaster relief has become a tool to advance unrelated executive policy.… It is hard to imagine the connection between the use of preferred pronouns and the fires currently burning through central Oregon.”
It isn’t just Oregon. The New Republic previously reported
The White House has admitted in court that it deliberately canceled federal grants to states that didn’t vote for President Trump.
In court documents filed last week, and first reported on by The New York Times, Trump administration officials confirmed they terminated $7.5 billion in clean energy grants in October “based solely” on political criteria, focusing on states with Democratic leadership that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. The admission came in a lawsuit filed by California researchers challenging the cancellation of Biden-era funding in multiple federal agencies.
As multiple reports have noted, Trump has been withholding disaster relief funds from American citizens who happen to live in states that recognize that (gasp!) trans people exist or that teach about racism in their public schools. Last month, he denied FEMA disaster aid requests from four blue states after accepting the aid requests of six red states just two days before.
Here in Red Indiana, where our MAGA governor has asked for federal aid in the wake of devastating storms that have flooded much of the state, we will probably get the assistance that–by law–should be made available on the basis of need, not politics. (Even Hoosiers in Blue cities will benefit, which raises the question: don’t the morons in the Trump administration understand or care that there are lots of Red folks–Trump voters–in the Blue states they are declining to help?)
Pointing out that this behavior is illegal is beside the point. This is an administration that routinely ignores both the spirit and the letter of the law. More recently, it has been ignoring court rulings as well. As the Guardian has reported,
During Donald Trump’s second term, federal judges and legal analysts have accused the administration of an unprecedented pattern of noncompliance, finding that officials violated or sidestepped court orders in at least 31 major lawsuits and over 250 individual immigration cases covering deportations, spending cuts, and policy rollbacks….
The Republican administration’s power struggle with federal courts, which is testing basic tenets of US democracy, reflects an expansive view of executive authority that has also challenged the independence of federal agencies, a president’s ethical obligations and the US’s role in the international order.
The unanswered question is whether the millions of apathetic Americans who didn’t bother to vote in 2024, not to mention the millions who cast ballots for a profoundly unfit White man because they were unwilling to elect a Black woman, have learned anything from the disaster we now inhabit.
I guess the results in November will answer that question.
By Sheila Kennedy