How the Constant Noise Distracts From the True Peril of Trump’s Misrule

On his first day in office, he declared a national energy emergency to open the way to more production of coal and oil, even as the US is producing more oil than any nation in history. His EPA is now moving to repeal the 2009 finding that climate change poses a danger to the public which would revoke the grounds for addressing it. The administration will no longer track the major sources of greenhouse gases. “We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox Business in May.

His administration has launched an all-out government effort to weaken or eliminate the programs that address it. He took the US out of the Paris Climate Accord and moved to defund the Biden initiatives on alternative energy. As the US and the world suffer the hottest years on record, Trump is dismantling the capacity needed to track the growing threat, gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate agency responsible for weather forecasting, slashing capacity at the National Weather Service. The White House moved to dismantle FEMA—the Federal Emergency Management Agency—that deals with weather catastrophes and defunded its program to pay for infrastructure that would help limit disaster damage. Even after backing away from that, FEMA’s dysfunction puts more and more Americans facing catastrophe at risk. And, of course, Trump is assiduously pursuing the oil industries wish list, as he promised when he dunned oil executives for a billion in campaign contributions.

While he is putting lives and property at greater risk, Trump is ceding to China the industries of the future—from solar to wind to electric vehicles to batteries and storage. China will dominate the coming industrial revolution. Trump’s climate denial is an astonishing dereliction of the president’s primary duty to protect and defend the country and its citizens.

Global Pandemics

Covid-19, the deadliest disaster in US history, took the lives of over 1 million Americans, the most of any country in the world and left millions more impaired from long Covid. An estimated 40 percent of those deaths might have been averted if the US response had corresponded to that of other high-income countries.

Americans died in greater numbers in part because of our degraded public health system, exacerbated by the number of people without health insurance. Contradictory public policy—masks, no masks; overselling vaccines—sapped public confidence. Trump’s risible public interjections—predicting the disease would magically disappear, recommending injection of a household disinfectant, pushing responsibility to the states, touting and then souring on vaccines and more—surely contributed.

Pandemics have never been part of the National Threat Assessment, but it is hard to find a greater and more direct ongoing threat to Americans. The potential spread of deadly pandemics is an inevitable product of the modern world—with more international travel, greater urbanization, greater human encroachment on nature. Last year, H5NI bird flu ravaged US chicken farms, and threatened to infect humans. This year witnessed this country’s worst spread of measles this century.

The threat surely demands a strengthening of our public health system, a guarantee of health insurance to all, and a stronger commitment to strengthening global public health programs and alarm systems. International cooperation, greater research early warning capacity and education are vital. Surely a basic first step would be a nonpartisan evaluation of our response to the Covid pandemic, probing the mistakes that were made, the lessons that could be learned, the reforms needed to prepare better for the next challenge.

Perversely, Trump has chosen not to strengthen the institutions tasked with addressing the threat but to lay waste to them. No doubt resentful that his mishandling of Covid contributed to his defeat in 2020, he appears to be retaliating against our public health institutions.

On taking office, he announced that the US would leave the World Health Organization and withdrawing funding for the organization. He eliminated the Directorate of Global Health Security that coordinates government efforts from the National Security Council. The closing of USAID resulted in deep cuts in global health programs, reductions built into his 2026 budget request. His spending legislation will strip an estimated 17 million Americans of health insurance coverage. His HHS Secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr., fired thousands of HHS employees, decimated the FDA, and dismissed the experts on the CDC’s federal vaccination committee, while elevating charlatans and crackpots. NIH and America’s health research programs have also been slashed. The content of the threat assessment was largely ignored. Now the supposed head of the White House Office of Pandemic Prevention and Response Policy has resigned after six months—and it turns out he was never appointed in the first place. The office is leaderless.

This isn’t a sideshow; it is not cutting waste and fraud. It is putting the lives of Americans at risk in the face of real and present dangers. If Trump does pull the US out of WHO, for example, as Gordon Brown notes, US officials—including those stationed abroad—will lose access to its global networks that collect information about infectious threats and respond to outbreaks. Already, with the H5NI bird flu the absence of adequate testing and reporting makes it impossible to know the extent of the threat.

“We have not even remotely maintained the level of pandemic preparedness—which needed a lot of work, as we saw from the Covid pandemic,” reports Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. “But now, we essentially have no pandemic preparedness.”

Trump’s ruinous policies extend to other elements of the polycrisis. His tax policies and wanton corruptions only exacerbate the obscene inequality that is corrupting our democracy. The preposterous “golden dome”—his recycled version of Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy—and his relish for a “mad man” theory of the presidency only add to the precariousness of a tripolar nuclear arms race that now includes China, a new generation of nuclear weapons, a collapse of virtually all arms control arrangements. This list can go on.

While cursing his supporters for fixating on the Epstein flip-flop, Trump claimed that “we are about to achieve more in six months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years.” And no question, in unleashing masked ICE thugs in warrantless raids on American streets, terrorizing government employees, larding tax cuts on the rich while taking food from children, fostering a new era of Gilded Age corruption, Trump has been an “impactful” president. What’s also clear after six months is that his policies are making Americans more vulnerable to real and present threats to our security, making people, as Rasmussen summarized, less safe, less healthy, and more dead.