— by Rivera Sun —
It takes time. That’s what people keep saying in response to concerns about the Trump Administration. It’ll take time before he can get the good stuff done. They say the promised benefits to this chaos are coming soon.
Don’t hold your breath. The egg prices are still sky-high. How much time will it take for those to come down?
Trump passed 200 executive orders in his first day in office. Not one of them taxed the rich. Not one of them lowered your taxes. Not one of them stopped price-gouging by giant corporations. Not one of them fixed the price of eggs. And yes, Trump could have used his executive orders to do all of those things on day one. He didn’t.
While claiming that the benefits to you will take some time, President Trump hasn’t wasted any time in causing widespread alarm, confusion, and upheaval.
It didn’t take him any time at all to:
- Put thousands of hardworking Americans out of work, including 1000 people at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, 4,400 public lands workers, forest service workers, firefighters, and park rangers; 388 EPA workers with 1,100 more receiving termination warnings; 1,300 Center For Disease Control workers; 1,500 National Institutes of Health workers; and half the NNSA workers who do safety work on nuclear radioactive waste.
- Destroy a centuries-long friendship between the United States and Canada, and antagonize Mexico, Panama, Denmark, and Greenland.
- Threaten the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and to takeover Gaza.
- Collapse a key market for Kansas grain farmers.
- Plunge the federal government into a deceptive and misleading censorship of facts, data, and science.
- Try to dismantle the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that prevents corporations and rich people from fleecing people like us, possibly for the benefit of Elon Musk’s plans for a payment system on X.
- Order NASA to remove anything about women leadership, including female astronauts.
Look, you’ve got to admit they’re doing something wrong when they piss off the veterans, park rangers, Kansas farmers, and even the Canadians.
You know what else didn’t take any time at all?
- Lining their pockets, especially Elon Musk’s pockets, who planned a $400 million armored car contract and $38 million in Space X deals.
- Breaking the law. There are now 68 lawsuits against the Trump Administration over civil rights violations, disclosing the identities of FBI agents, First Amendment violations, labor law, discrimination, unfair firing, and more.
- Wasting tax dollars on Trump’s $3.4 million trip to the Super Bowl, which he didn’t even stay at until the halftime show.
- Ignoring the Constitution. From the funding freeze to birthright citizenship to disregarding administrative practices to firing congress-appointed federal agency members to getting rid of inspectors general, constitutional scholars are alarmed at the rate at which Trump is crossing lines.
This administration hasn’t found time to lower the price of eggs or make it life more affordable for the average American.
But they have made time to insult Canada, demean half our country, plan human rights violations for migrants, violate the Constitution, give handouts to Elon Musk, and fire people who actually serve the public by researching cancer, keeping our national parks vacations fun, fighting fires, and taking care of veterans.
Are we great yet?
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Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News, Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence, and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.
