To the Editor:
Trump has essentially declared war on America in many areas and levels. First on lower-income people, and he has done it with the complicity of Republican politicians. As a mostly overlooked example of how, the recent budget passed by Republicans has essentially raised the threshold of seniors’ taxable SS income by $4,000, which doesn’t do the average seniors any good because they didn’t pay any taxes on SS income anyway. It’s just a giveaway to wealthier seniors who don’t need the extra tax savings, meanwhile pushing the deficit up.
In more recognized ways he has hurt the lower classes by cutting eligibility for Medicaid and cutting SNAP benefits and a host of others. Of course, Trump has put a tariff on all goods coming from China, which mainly affects the lower 50% of families. As Gary Cohn, ex-Trump economic adviser, said, “The thing we need to understand about tariffs is that poorer people end up paying a disproportionate percentage of the tariffs.”
He has declared war on our environment on a number of levels, not the least of which is his tariffs on China, which produces 75% of the world’s quality solar panels, thus electricity is more expensive for Americans. His Sec of Interior Doug Burgum threatened to sue Minnesota in 2003 for converting to renewable climate-friendly solar electricity sources, which also happen to be the cheapest levelized source.
We can see this absurdity in our own backyard with Republicans’ conflicting claim that we need more sources of electricity, yet fighting offshore wind, while at the same time protesting price increases from conventional sources. Of course, Trump has always been notoriously anti-renewables.
Because the main beneficiaries of DEI have been women and minorities, Trump has essentially declared war on both. Since most higher-level jobs across the board are held by white men, any cutting of DEI in either formal programs or implicit practices by businesses reverses any progress made by women and minorities.
Trump and his Republican allies (aka puppets) have declared war on science. Not only has he threatened to withhold funding from our most prestigious Ivy League universities (like withholding funding from Harvard’s critical biological warfare research for the Pentagon) but his appointed DOGE team has fired or tried to fire around 10%-20% of the entire NWS, NIH and CDC work force. They were almost all hired back, but not because of any efforts by Trump or his minions.
Which of course, leads to yet another war – the war on education and especially higher education. His Dept of Ed, led by Linda McMahan, whose main credential for the job is that she was the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, is now investigating over 60 major universities under the pretext of “antisemitism,” including Rutgers, Temple, Lehigh, Princeton, Drexel and even tiny Muhlenberg, that hot bed of animus toward Jews, in Allentown.
His views about higher ed are pretty apparent, given that almost 60% of college grads vote Democrat, but the damage he is doing is across the board in one of the areas for which the U.S. is held in universal admiration and esteem, it is truly worrisome. Even more so is the deafening silence of Republican politicians, like Van Drew, on all of the above.
Bruce Allen, Del Haven