A Dictator for a Day
Convicted felon Donald Trump once addressed concerns that he wanted to be a dictator by saying he would only be a dictator for the first day of his second term.
That day has arrived.
Yesterday saw a flurry of executive orders ranging from the absolutely stupid to egregious moral transgressions which openly violate the US Constitution and any given moral code. I won’t be as meticulous as normal about providing links today as all of the executive orders are published on the White House website.
Let’s start with something light - Trump has ordered US government agencies to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” This has been proposed several times in the past - as a joke. As insanely stupid as this is, it is not without consequence. Aside from the fact that the vast majority of the Gulf is an international body and we can only rename the parts within the United States, Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced a bill to provide funding to start changing the name on maps - all of them. There is a real actual cost here that is a great illustration about how Republican concerns about spending and limited government have ALWAYS been a lie.
Trump has banned new leases for wind energy nationwide. He has long decried wind energy saying it does not work (it does) and that it kills too many birds (1 million a year in the US vs 2.4 BILLION killed by house cats). The real reason Trump hates wind energy is because he thinks windmills are ugly and lost a lawsuit to have them removed off the coast of his golf course in Scotland. Like his last term, prepare for a large number of policies that don’t seem to make rational sense. There is usually a reason for his stance and it’s usually some sort of petty grievance like this.
Naturally being unable to tolerate anyone other than him receiving attention, Trump ordered the flags which were at half-staff to memorialize President Jimmy Carter raised for his inauguration. Multiple governors, including three Democrats, followed suit and did the same. After John McCain died, Trump was furious about the idea of lowering the flags to half-staff and only relented after General John Kelly told Trump “when you die, the public will come to your grave and piss on it” if he did not.
Trump has pardoned roughly 1,500 of the people convicted in the 1/6/21 US capitol attack. (The absolute worst offenders had their sentences commuted instead). This included multiple overt Nazis and those who were assaulting police. Aquilino Gonell was a Capitol Police officer that day. Trump’s supporters pulled Officer Gonell into the crowd and savagely attacked him, resulting in multiple surgeries. This morning, Gonell received at least nine calls from the Department of Justice. Each one was to inform him that someone he had testified against for assaulting him was being released from prison. Multiple people who were in prison until yesterday for the attack were turned in by family members. They are now released and the probability for retaliation is high. I will point out Ted Cruz called these men terrorists and multiple Republican leaders said Trump would not be releasing the most violent offenders, which he of course has.
Trump has rescinded every protection for gay and transgender Americans put into place by President Biden. Not stopping there, he issued an executive order that the entire US government must insist there are only two immutable biological genders which are determined AT CONCEPTION rather than birth. Humans consist of all of one cell at conception. The EO explicitly says male and female are to be defined at this point by “the sex that produces the large [or small] reproductive cell.” Someone flunked high school biology and never saw Jurassic Park. Mammalian embryos all develop identically, inherently female, until androgens alter that process in males. This is actually why gender is not a binary process as there are numerous ways that process can take place, not all of which result in what conservatives think of as “male” and “female.” As bigoted and terrifying as this action is, they once again have no idea what they’re talking about and have defined every human on the planet as a woman.
Yesterday we saw a flurry of anti-immigrant actions from Trump, as expected. A national emergency has been declared at the border with Trump calling it an “invasion.” This term is rather key here to another right wing goal - ending birthright citizenship. The 14th amendment explicitly grants citizenship to anyone born on US soil with two exceptions. Aside from the text, its authors directly wrote about what they meant and we have over a century of litigation supporting it. The far right has wanted to kill birthright citizenship for decades but encounters the tiny problem of it being directly controlled by the Constitution. Enter “invasion.” One of the two exceptions is for children of foreign diplomats. The other is for children of invading armies. The authors of the 14th did not wish to grant citizenship to the kids of an invading army. So Republicans have started to call immigrants an invading army so they can disqualify their children from being citizens.
At least three lawsuits have ALREADY been filed over this by the ACLU and around TWENTY of the states. As loathsome as this Supreme Court has been, these lawsuits are likely to succeed. Aside from the naturalization process for immigrants, and exceptions made for certain people born to American citizens abroad, every US citizen since the ratification of the 14th amendment gained their citizenship via being born in the US. All of us. Hospitals do not keep records of the citizenship status of the parents of kids born here and even if they wanted to, there is no mechanism for checking this. This policy is not just unconstitutional and morally repugnant, it is absolutely unenforceable. They will not be able to verify the citizenship status of every parent to every child born in the US anywhere at any time. What they will do however is try to use this to deny citizenship to babies who are the wrong race.
While this was the worst example, he took several other actions against immigrants. Mirroring the Muslim ban Trump instituted in his first week in office, he revoked flights for over 1600 Afghans who were not only cleared to live in the United States, but already had flights scheduled. These are refugees, Afghans who assisted the US military, and even spouses of US military members. They were given permission to live in the United States, scheduled flights here, and are now unable to enter the country because Donald Trump is a bigot and Republicans support that.
Biden responded to Trump’s family separation policy by implementing a task force to reunite children who were taken by their parents by the United States government. After four years, we have still not succeeded in returning every stolen child. Yesterday Trump disbanded the group working on this. It’s very likely most of the remaining children never see their parents again. This is a consequence of voting for Republicans. Those kids are the price of your tax cut.
ICE for years has been banned from enforcement activities at places like schools, churches, hospitals, and courthouses. That is no longer the case as Donald Trump gave the green light for ICE to arrest immigrants at all of these places.
In a shocking level of pettiness, the Spanish translations of every White House website have been removed. The 404 error page for other missing White House pages (which now include removed info on reproduction and the Constitution) all have a button marked “go to home page.” The 404 message on all of the removed Spanish sites however has a message to Spanish speakers from Donald Trump, “go home.”
Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde gave a sermon at a service Trump attended in which she implored Trump to show mercy to immigrants, gay people, and transgender people, pointing out this is what God would want. Trump naturally dismissed this, but Republican Congressman Mike Collins went a step further and said Budde should be deported for saying these groups should receive mercy. Budde was born in New Jersey so I’m not sure where Collins would like her deported to, but as usual the cruelty here is the point. Like so many other issues, for white evangelicals, bigotry Trumps what the Bible actually says. Trump himself once said Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley needed to go back to the countries they “came from” despite all of them being US citizens and three of them coming from the United States of America.
Shortly before taking office, Donald Trump THREATENED the prime minister of Denmark over their insistence that they are not selling Greeland to the United States. NATO is growing increasingly concerned that its most powerful member isn’t just an unreliable ally, but an actual military threat. As he is not capable of understanding anything at all which isn’t transactional, Trump cannot fathom that the United States is unable to buy Greenland for the simple reason that Greenland is not for sale.
In 2017, Trump lied about divesting from his business. He held a press event in the White House with a large number of folders containing thousands of pages detailing his divestiture. Those pages were blank. We saw the largest conflict of interest in US history which Republicans simply did not care about. Not only is Trump now the primary shareholder of a publicly traded billion dollar company, this weekend he launched not one, but TWO crypto coins which immediately made up a significant portion of his net worth. These coins are structured so that Trump controls the vast majority of the coins. Rather than having to go through the trouble of booking rooms at his properties, foreign governments may now directly pump money into Donald Trump and do so completely anonymously. We have never seen financial conflicts like this and it’s only been one day.
(CW: domestic abuse for this paragraph) Senators about to vote on Pete Hegseth’s nomination to run the US military have received information regarding his second wife. Hegesth was so abusive she often had to hide in a closet from him and had codewords set up with a family member in case she needed to be exfiltrated from his presence, which happened. His ex-wife denies this happened.
I have been trying to prepare people for a while that this second Trump term is going to be much worse than the first and judging by the first 24 hours we are perfectly on track for that. There is a prevalent attitude that there is no point in resisting him and that the courts will do nothing to stop him. While the state of our Supreme Court is abhorrent, there are going to be times they DO stop him. I have the privilege of belonging to very few groups Trump is going to attack, but I understand the emotional exhaustion and I understand why someone would feel like giving up.
Don’t. We are going to fight him. We will not always win, but we will still fight. Stay informed. Find communities that support you. One of the best things you can do is simply to keep on existing, keep on persevering. To quote Hugh the Borg, “Resistance is not futile.”
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