327 - Beware the Golden Age: Deceit in a Time of Endangering Megalomania

A tired-looking, self-congratulating, orange-tinged, information dissembler and unintentional punster Monday declared that “The golden age of America begins right now.” Indeed, it does, but presumptively much more for those who already have abundant gelt, or money, those in the crypto currency business (such as Trump and his family) who will be able to sell their accumulated bitcoins into a U.S. stockpile, and those who will make their fortunes by pursuing and entrapping undocumented migrants or cutting deals with Arab sheikhs.

It was my original intention to write today about something more cheerful, more upbeat, more constructive. The seeming success of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohammed Yunus in steering desperately damaged Bangladesh and its nearly 200 million battered people from the depths of despotism under a harsh and corrupt dictator toward the redeeming shore of full political participation and incipient democracy seemed like an appealing subject about which to write, and applaud. Soon I will turn there.

But doing so will have to wait. Days 1 & 2 of the Trump second presidency were so harmful that they demand immediate comment. His proclamations and acts, even the illegal granting of a stay to TikTok's demise, remind us that no matter how exhausted so many of his opponents are, and so deflated by Kamala Harris' loss, we must all pull themselves off the yoga mats of despair, reach deep into cores of resiliency, and resume endless battles against Trump's mendacity and mediocrity. A desperate political darkness has descended; it will not lift for years -- certainly not without pressure from below.

Abandoning the Paris agreement, and cancelling America's adherence to global warming reduction goals, was expected, and no less dangerous to the planet's future for being well anticipated. Equally endangering is his doubling down on drilling for oil and gas. Ironically, his efforts in that direction might produce vast over-supplies at the gas pump and correspondingly lower prices for consumers. Moreover, his deal-making buddies in Saudi Arabia will hardly sit idly by while Trump's efforts reduce their incomes (because of oil oversupply).

By curtailing wind power tower building (imagine what Freud would conclude) and reducing domestic production of solar panels, the future of everything he wants to include within the golden age is less probable, even forfeited, for decades. He proposes to erase tax credits for electric cars and chargers and end subsidies to build battery factories. Musk, do these changes enhance your golden age?

"Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation," a new executive order declares, falsely — like so much else.

Just as his fossil fuel preferences are hardly good for our personal health, given the pollution and plastics that will result, so southern Californians and many others across the planet will hardly forgive Trump when more calamitous fires destroy their homes, floods wash away their crops, and deaths from heatstroke become ever more common. Already the annual rains that sustain staple crops in nearly all of Africa have disappeared; the monstrous monsoons of south Asia are weaker and less predictable. And please contemplate massive snowfalls this week in Mobile and Houston!

Like Canute, Trump thinks vainly that he can hold back the climatic consequences of elevated amounts of CO2 and methane. We will all pay, not least those who voted him into office. A"hoax" global warming is not, but trying to pretend that global warming does not exist will profit many of those around Trump. Hence the golden age -- for the insiders and the Mar-a-Lago hangers-on.

All of this nonsense is misguided and dumb. Tariffs on Canadian and Mexican autos, for example, would lead to higher prices, lower demand for cars, and worker job losses because of faltering sales. There is no gold age in prospect. Sticker prices directly reflect the costs of manufacturing. And even General Motors -- the quintessential American company -- produces 25 percent of its pickups in Mexico and 15 percent in Canada. Trump proposes a 25 percent tariff on those cars on Feb. 1. Purchase your new vehicles now!

Climate change contributes to the spread of disease and death among less fortunate peoples than Trump's ilk. That is why promising to end our membership in the World Health Organization is so destructive short-term and long-term. His reasons for leaving the WHO are vindictive (like so much else), largely a settling of scores with those who opposed his approach to the Covid-19 pandemic. By leaving the WHO, the U.S. ends its long benevolent role as a major contributor to the health and welfare of less fortunate peoples across the globe.

Under a succession of prior presidents our government and our funds have helped to cure disease and make impoverished people healthier. The Gates Foundation and the Carter Center have done much innovative heavy lifting, virtually curing such scourges as guinea worm disease and river blindness but also working with the WHO to reduce deaths from HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. We have also contributed to vaccinations against infantile poliomyelitis, pneumonia, and dysentery.

To double down on his proposed retreat from helping others across the globe -- the responsibility of the wealthiest nation and a winner of esteem across the developing world -- Trump also declared a ninety-day pause in foreign assistance activities. This action, announced by one of the twenty-six executive orders he signed Monday, presumably is meant to gut the US Agency for International Development, so ably led under President Biden by Samantha Power and originally established by President Kennedy to show what Americans could do for the world.

As the New York Times wrote about Trump's inaugural address "Not once...did he exhort America's citizens to sacrifice in the cause of freedom [like the valiant Ukrainians] or to fight to expand democracy...." Instead, Trump's vision is of more wealth (which we already have in abundance, compared to other nations) and prosperity -- of a fortress America that pursues a "manifest destiny" by shutting its borders, settling Mars!, and taking away a Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment that gives citizenship to anyone birthed on our soil. (If the Supreme Court approves such an outlandish rewriting of our constitutional framework, then we are really farther gone than even I think.)

To cap a lot of outlandish proclamations and actions, one of the little noticed executive orders, labelled "America First," says "From this day forward, the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first." Who knows what that is intended to change in terms of American foreign policy, but it does underscore Trump and Vance's isolationism. If we withdraw turtlelike into castled America, Putin and Xi Jinping will triumph and all of the struggling peoples of the world will suffer, but hardly equally.

Trump also coupled those executive instructions with another that, dangerously, could easily result in the loss to our nation of an entire phalanx of experienced diplomats and competent civil servants: some have already turned in their official passes. (The federal work force today is the same size that is was in the 1960s; Trump wants to cut it back.) In future, his government intends only to employ 'highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests." No employee, further, may be "woke," or espouse the agenda of "diversity, equity, and inclusion." That is banished because "The injection of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' (DEI) into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy." Such destabilizing nonsense!

Finally, someone who is anything but, intends to "to restore common sense to the Federal Government and unleash the potential of the American citizen." I trust that all of my readers will feel refreshed and revitalized by the proposed return of whatever commonsense implies for our daily lives! Perhaps the deportations of our garden and construction crews? The stockpiling of cryptocurrency in underground vaults? Or perhaps invading Greenland? The release of 1,600 criminals from prison, including a host of right wing thugs? Enjoy our out-of-control roller coaster. And be ready to rise up against despotism when the time is ripe.

I will be traveling out of the country without a computer next week, so this Substack Newsletter will resume early in February.