Trump’s Trashing of Liberty and Human Worth

Last week, in a little-noticed executive order, Donald Trump declared November 2 to 8 to be “anti-communism week.”

Given Trump’s propensity for malicious, dangerous actions, there are, I guess, many worse things MAGAman could be doing than wasting his political energies on meaningless McCarthy-era gesture politics. But then again, given what the Trump administration was actually up to last week, the language of the order is worth quoting back in their face: “We renew our national promise to stand firm against communism, to uphold the cause of liberty and human worth, and to affirm once more that no system of government can ever replace the will and conscience of a free people.”

Let’s talk about that will and conscience of a free people for a moment: Polling data shows that roughly four in five Americans are strongly supportive of SNAP and believe that the government should provide benefits to hungry Americans. Even 69 percent of Republican voters support the program. Fully 77 percent of those polled said they would be concerned by a cutoff in benefits as a side-effect of the government shutdown.

So what did Trump, the voice of the “will and conscience of a free people,” do? He ordered his Department of Agriculture to curtail the distribution of SNAP benefits. Then his administration appealed lower-court rulings ordering the benefits be paid. Then Trump told the states that chose to distribute benefits during the period after an appeals court denied the federal government’s request to overturn a ruling ordering that food assistance be paid that they had to recoup the aid given out to hungry residents. And finally, his lawyers convinced the hard-right majority on the US Supreme Court to put on hold the lower-court rulings and temporarily allow the SNAP benefits to be withheld. As a result, millions of Americans today are more food insecure than they were a week ago.

And why was the government shut down in the first place? Because Trump had thrown his copious weight, yet again, against the health insurance subsidies paid to millions of families under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and his congressional enforcers had made clear they would not include money for these subsidies in their government funding package.

I can’t think of another moment in US history where a president has so deliberately attempted to harm so many Americans, seeking both to render healthcare unaffordable and deprive families of the ability to put food on the table. That’s not simply political malpractice; rather, it’s a complete abnegation of the duty to behave decently to fellow human beings.

At the same time as he was expending political capital to cut off food stamp benefits to tens of millions of Americans, the commander in chief was holding garish balls at Mar-a-Lago and continuing to court billionaires to fund his ludicrous White House ballroom—a project opposed by Americans by a two-to-one margin.

Now, one can argue whether the primary fault in temporarily cutting off food stamps to millions of families who have no savings to fall back lies with Trump and his maleficent advisers or whether it lies with the supine and callous majority on the US Supreme Court. But wherever the ultimate blame lies, what’s clear here is that the country’s elite institutions—the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court—are failing ordinary Americans.

One can go down the list of appalling Trumpian actions from the past few days and reach the same conclusion: When air travel delays and cancellations cascaded last week, a month after air traffic controllers stopped being paid, Trump’s response was brutally to the point: “All Air Traffic Controllers must get back to work, NOW!!! Anyone who doesn’t will be substantially ‘docked,’” Trump wrote on social media. “REPORT TO WORK IMMEDIATELY.”

That isn’t the language of a politician trying to navigate a thorny economic and political problem, recognizing the inequity of a situation in which public servants are being asked to make huge economic sacrifices—rather, it’s the language of the slave master, a man who views federal employees as little more than his personal property, chattel to be whipped into subservience.

By contrast, travelers at airports where air traffic controllers have handed out leaflets urging the government to reopen and to pay its workers, have shown tremendous support and empathy for these essential public-sector employees. Similarly, ordinary Americans have reacted in horror to the cutoff in food benefits, donating huge amounts to pantries and food banks; and many restaurants and grocery stores, in cooperation with DoorDash, have begun giving away food to hungry locals and to unpaid federal workers.

On foreign policy, while the Trump-Hegseth nexus continues to shred international law by embracing a policy of mass assassination of boat crews in the Pacific and Caribbean whom it claims are running drugs, only small minorities of Americans support the bombing and approve of the broader military buildup against Venezuela. Maybe that’s because most Americans realize that killing people on the basis of secret evidence that they may have committed drug-running crimes—rather than interdicting their ships, arresting them, using the confiscated drugs as evidence in court trials, and then sentencing them after a fair trial—is not even remotely compatible with the “cause of liberty and human worth” that Trump highlighted in his executive order.

And it isn’t just the American public who is opposed to the mass murder policy: The UK government is so worried that its military and intelligence officials could be implicated in war crimes that the country has curtailed intelligence-sharing with the United States on suspected drug-running ships. Canada has not, to date, stopped sharing intelligence with Trump, but it has also publicly distanced itself from the assassination policy.

Trumpism, with all its puffed-up scorn for international norms, is being scorned by governments overseas. And, as the November 4 elections showed, Trump and Trumpism are also now being rejected by solid majorities of the American public.

Trump is right that “no system of government can ever replace the will and conscience of a free people.” He was, most powerfully, reminded of this fact when he made the ill-starred decision to attend a Commanders football game in Washington, DC, last week. For more than two minutes, tens of thousands of angry residents of the capital city that he has militarily occupied for the past several months booed Donald Trump.

Coming on the heels of the nationwide Bronx cheer that voters gave to the Trumpified GOP, it was a truly glorious sound.