The President Will Destroy You Now
The targets of Trump's assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America's foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.
J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there has never before
Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.
Let's look at just one target of the administration's vendetta, medical research. Trump's attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals; and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.
'This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,' Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science Magazine. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will 'totally destroy the nation's public health infrastructure.'
I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump's wreckage. 'The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,' Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, 'is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.'
I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique with respect to his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied:
Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump's election the opportunity to pursue their goals?
Wilentz's reply:
I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. 'Not to be flip,' Rudalevige replied by email, 'but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts the answer is already distressingly permanent.'
From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote:
I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige's:
Another question: How much is Trump's second term agenda the invention of conservative elites and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump's MAGA supporters?
'Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,' Rudalevige wrote, 'but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.'
In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025
In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued,
One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged American's relations with traditional allies everywhere.
Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, wrote in an email:
Trump is not unique in his destructiveness, in Rudman's view,
Trump's second term agenda, Rudman argued, is elite-driven:
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, shares the belief that Trump has taken a wrecking ball to foreign relations. Cain emailed me his assessment:
Similarly, Cain continued,
Cain argued that in both economics and politics, destruction can have beneficial results, but not in the case of Donald Trump.
Musk and Trump, in Cain's view, 'are driven more by instinct than knowledge, vindictiveness than good intentions and impatience than carefully designed plans.' They
In ranking the most destructive presidents, the scholars I contacted mentioned both Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president for political studies at the Niskanen Center, a center-left libertarian think tank, wrote by email:
Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and a lecturer in law at George Washington University, was even more pessimistic, writing in an email that he fears that
Rosenzweig believes that
I asked the experts I contacted whether Trump was laying the groundwork for a more autocratic form of government in the United States.
Robert Strong, a professor of political economy at Washington and Lee, replied by email:
From a different vantage point, Ellen Fitzgerald, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, questioned the value of trying to determine 'whether Trump is the most corrupt and/or most destructive president in U.S. history.'
Such evaluations
Despite those cautions, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that 'it's fair to say that if we look at the arc of American history from Reconstruction to the current day, there's no question that Trump is busily destroying much of what several generations of Americans worked very, very hard to achieve.'
'The anti-immigrant sentiment of the late 19th and early twentieth century,' Fitzpatrick wrote, and 'the rhetoric abroad in the land today':
Some of those I questioned argued that Trump's assault on American institutions and values is not supported by most of his voters.
Russell Riley, professor of ethics and co-chairman of the Miller Center's Presidential Oral History Program, took this view a step farther, noting that Trump explicitly dissociated himself from Project 2025 during the campaign and then, once in office, adopted much of the Project 2025 agenda:
Trump, in contrast, 'barely won the popular vote, with just under 50 percent — hardly an electoral mandate, even for an incremental program. Indeed as a candidate Mr. Trump openly distanced himself from Project 2025.'
Lacking both a clear mandate and an electorate explicitly supportive of Project 2025, Riley argued, means
The reality, however, is that the abdication of power by Republicans in Congress has allowed Trump to create a mandate out of whole cloth.
Where will this frightening development take us?
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