A majority of Americans are aware of the damage being done by this disastrous administration to our governing institutions, the rule of law, and the economy. I think far fewer are aware of the thousands of preventable deaths caused by Trump’s version of “policy.”
The most visible are those caused by the defunding of USAID. USAID funding helped save an estimated 91 million lives over the past 20 years. Now, a peer-reviewed study tells us that Trump’s defunding of the agency will lead to more than 14 million preventable deaths globally by 2030, a number that includes more than 4.5 million children under the age of five.
Far less visible–but equally horrific– are the likely consequences of Trump’s indiscriminate war on medical science, and his termination of grants supporting clinical trials. A recent article from theWashington Post explored those terminations. Citing research published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the article reported that funding for 383 clinical trials had been pulled, and that the funding disruptions affected more than 74,000 trial participants. The researchers found that the cuts disproportionately affected trials focused on infectious diseases (such as covid-19 and HIV); prevention; and behavioral interventions. More than 100 of the canceled grants supported cancer research.
Robert Hopkins, medical director for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, said the study showed that funding cuts disproportionately hit areas “that are critical to public health.”
“Clinical research is a long game,” he said. “Developing new vaccines, antivirals and treatments takes years, often decades. Cutting funding now risks slowing progress on interventions that could help save lives for years to come.”
Some of the clinical trials that lost their grants sued, and several got their funding back, but they experienced delays during the course of the trials that are likely to have significant negative impacts on the studies and on their participants. As one researcher explained, “If you pause an experiment, especially when it comes to experiments involving drugs and patients where you need a consistent dose over time and consistent measurements, it’s possible that you just screwed up the entire research.” Another noted that much of the clinical infrastructure was crippled or entirely destroyed during the grant terminations, making it very difficult to resume the research.
And of course, when clinical trials are delayed or canceled, the patients who were enrolled often lose access to care.
The funding terminations weren’t limited to clinical trials; numerous other research studies also lost funding. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine in May found that between February and April, nearly 700 NIH grants had been terminated across 24 of the federal agency’s 26 institutes and centers. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that studies focused on minorities–especially those investigating health concerns of non-Whites and LGBTQ+ citizens–appear to have been disproportionately targeted.)
Some of the greatest advancements made through research include vaccines, insulin, anesthesia, and treatments for infectious diseases. From laboratory studies to clinical trials and epidemiological investigations, scientists around the world use different methods of research to advance disease treatment, enhance diagnostics, and improve our overall understanding of diseases.
“Research is the key to advancing health on the individual, community, national, and global level,” said Cora Cunningham, PIH Engage member, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health student, and research assistant with the Lantagne Group at Tufts University. “Whether about drinking water quality, disease dynamics, health systems, or the patient experience, research in public and global health is what allows us to access, receive, or deliver quality and patient-centered health care.”
Without research, there would be no breakthroughs, no clinical advancements, and no new cures. Despite its importance to humankind, biomedical research—particularly research funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—has been targeted by the current U.S. administration.
The bottom line is that years of progress in public health have been disrupted. Thanks to a combination of frozen funding, the erection of new, onerous roadblocks to financing, and imposition of overly complicated new procedures, experts predict that the setbacks in research will cause generations of delays in breakthroughs and cures. As the linked article from Partners in Health warns, “patients who were part of clinical trials will face health risks due to the abrupt end to their treatment and support. Advancements made on cures and treatments for various diseases will be squandered. Jobs will be lost, and public health will suffer.”
The question is: why? This particular vendetta wasn’t a response to citizen demands. It isn’t even likely to line the pockets of the billionaires to whom this administration disproportionately caters. Like the destruction of USAID, it is simply gratuitously cruel.
On Wednesday, I spoke to the Shepherds Center at North United Methodist Church. They had asked for a discussion of birthright citizenship, a status which is currently under attack by Trump (along with the rest of the Constitution). Here’s what I said. (A bit longer than usual–sorry.)
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I’ve been asked to speak about birthright citizenship, and Donald Trump’s effort to eliminate it. Let me just begin with a bit of history, and then consider what would happen if our mad and racist would-be King were to be successful.
As many of you know, in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in the infamous case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. The court ruled that Scott, an escaped slave who was suing for his freedom, was not a citizen because he was of African descent. According to the decision written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, no person of African descent could be a citizen, even if they had been born in the United States.
It took a civil war to change that conclusion, but in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, defining citizenship as applying to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
The clear language of the Amendment should have foreclosed debate, but it 1898, the 14th Amendment’s definition of citizenship was challenged in a case involving a man named Wong Kim Ark.
Wong had been born on American soil in 1873; he was the son of Chinese immigrants. That was well before the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited most Chinese immigration and, by extension, the naturalization of Chinese citizens–an Act that was one of several historical eruptions of anti-immigration hostility. Since Wong’s parents weren’t citizens, his status was considered unclear, and as a result, he was denied reentry into the U.S. after visiting China.
Wong waited on a ship in San Francisco harbor for months as his attorney pursued his case. The Department of Justice opposed him, taking the position that people of Chinese descent weren’t citizens, but when the case reached the Supreme Court, Wong won.
Justice Horace Gray wrote the majority opinion, and it’s worth quoting part of it. Gray wrote “The Fourteenth Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States. To hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
That case became binding precedent and has operated to defend the birthright citizenship rights of other Americans—even including Japanese Americans during WWII—despite the shameful treatment of those citizens.
Bottom line: birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the plain language of the 14th Amendment and subsequent case law, and I doubt that even our deeply corrupt Supreme Court majority will find a way around the clarity of that language and those precedents.
But what would happen if they did—if somehow, the Court found a way to evade the plain language of both the Amendment and the Court’s own, unambiguous precedents? That question was recently examined by the Niskanen Center. The Center describes its mission as the promotion of policies that advance prosperity, opportunity, and human flourishing, guided by the belief that a free market and an effective government are mutually dependent.
I have found the research published by the Center to be both intellectually honest and uncommonly insightful—Niskanen advocates for an adequate social safety net and for the provision of essential public goods, while also supporting laws that foster market competition in areas where markets are appropriate. The Center is firmly committed to liberal democracy and an open society.
The Center’s researchers looked at the probable results of overturning birthright citizenship, and they identified three major ones: ending birthright citizenship would erode America’s current demographic advantage over rival powers; it would endanger the advantage we have enjoyed in internal assimilation and stability; and it would introduce an unnecessary and protracted distraction from building an immigration system that could guarantee continued American prosperity.
Let’s look at each of these predictions.
We know that the world population is aging: According to U.N., the majority of the world’s population now lives in countries in which the fertility rate is below replacement level. By 2050, deaths will exceed births in more than 130 countries.
Thanks to immigration, the United States is an outlier to that demographic fact. In addition to having higher fertility rates than nearly all other developed countries, America’s “demographic exceptionalism” is tied to what has been our robust immigration. As a result, the U.S. is the only major power currently projected to maintain both population and labor force growth through the mid-century. Meanwhile, both China and Russia are experiencing population decline and are rapidly aging societies.
Ending birthright citizenship would also directly hurt American competitiveness. As Niskanen researchers point out, throwing a quarter of a million children into a position of legal uncertainty each year—which is what reversing birthright citizenship would do– would have a hugely negative effect on America’s strength and prosperity. If the children leave with their parents, which is what the architects of this inhumane policy intend, we’ll struggle to fill jobs—especially those requiring manual labor– and we’ll also struggle to fund Social Security with fewer workers.
If, instead, these children stay in the United States, they’d be treated by the legal system and by large swaths of society as foreigners in the only country they’d ever known, a situation that would challenge the domestic stability that has resulted from our history of comparatively smooth cultural assimilation. That ability to assimilate large numbers of newcomers and their descendants, to turn them into proud Americans, has been a considerable source of America’s strength and stability.
Despite the current hostility of the Trump administration and the MAGA White Supremacists who want to expel Black and Brown folks and limit immigration to White South Africans, America has had a far better history with immigrants than countries like China and Russia. America actually has had a very good track record of assimilating a wide variety of minorities, and that success has been due in large part to the ideals of American citizenship—ideals that include policies like birthright citizenship. And we need to remember that, for children of immigrant parents, birthright citizenship not only validates their American identity, but also imposes patriotic responsibilities on them. Those children haven’t just voted and served on juries—they’ve fought and died in America’s wars.
Let me just quote two of the concluding paragraphs of the Niskanen paper, describing the likely consequences of abandoning birthright citizenship.
“Many of the children born to illegal immigrants may also be temporarily rendered stateless. Some countries such as India do not automatically grant citizenship to the children of citizens born abroad. Given how politically polarizing other policies involving immigrant children, such as family separation and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), have been, artificially creating a population of potentially hundreds of thousands of stateless children living within the U.S. would become a poison pill in American politics….
The net effect of repealing birthright citizenship would be a prolonged state of chaos in our domestic politics and our immigration system. Doing so would squander key advantages we have over rivals who are gaining ground on the world stage and distract us from being able to build an immigration system that prioritizes the talent we need to remain competitive by miring us in decades of legal challenges, ambiguity, and disunity. As is often the case, those who are currently seeking to suddenly impose mass changes to the social fabric will find that the status quo has functioned well for a reason.”
A few years ago, I looked into the issue of immigration—both legal and not– for a speech to the Lafayette ACLU, and was struck with the sheer extent to which the U.S. has benefitted from it, especially when we look at innovation and economic growth.
The Partnership for a New American Economy issued a research report back in 2010 and found that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies had been founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.
The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.
On economic grounds alone, then, we should welcome immigrants. But not only do we threaten undocumented persons, we make it incredibly difficult to come here legally. If there is one fact that everyone admits, it is the need to reform a totally dysfunctional and inhumane system. Based upon logic and the national interest, it’s hard to understand why Congress has been unwilling or unable to craft reasonable legislation. Of course, logic and the national interest have been missing from Washington for some time.
The bottom line: repealing birthright citizenship would be stupid—it would be a self-inflicted wound, making America less competitive, less stable and less prosperous. But there is also a moral imperative at stake here.
Those of you who attend these Shepherd Center events recognize what the MAGA bigots clearly do not– the moral and ethical dimensions of this effort to define anyone who isn’t a White Christian as “Other.” The basis of the MAGA movement and its support for the Trump administration is racism, misogyny and White Christian nationalism—with a hefty side helping of anti-Semitism. The effort to overturn birthright citizenship is part and parcel of that larger effort to remake America into a “blood and soil” country—a version of the Third Reich. We cannot let that happen.
Interestingly named Whitestown is one of several bedroom communities around Indianapolis, in central Indiana. It is 93% White. It is also the site of a recent murder–and I use that term intentionally.
The facts–at least, the readily ascertainable ones– have been widely reported. Members of a cleaning crew went to the wrong house in what has been described as a “cookie cutter” neighborhood. Two of them–a Hispanic couple–knocked on the door of that incorrect address, and in response, someone shot the woman through the door, killing her.
The owners of the Whitestown home where a 32-year-old woman was shot and killed have hired one of Indiana’s most prominent constitutional lawyers.
Guy Relford, also known for his weekly “Gun Guy” show on WIBC, has practiced law for more than four decades. He specializes in the Second Amendment.
As the Star also reported,
The shooter — who has not been identified by law enforcement — could face criminal charges in connection with Maria Florinda Ríos Pérez’s death, pending the outcome of an ongoing review by the Boone County Prosecutor’s Office. Authorities have not confirmed whether the homeowner was the shooter.
Other than identifying the person who actually fired that gun, I cannot imagine what an “ongoing review” could uncover–and I certainly can’t imagine what defense “gun guy” will be able to offer. (Perhaps the shooter’s mental illness??)
I write these blog posts a few days ahead, so perhaps we’ll know more by the time this is published, but as I write this, it seems pretty clear that what we’ve seen in Whitestown is the merging of America’s racism and gun culture. The person inside that home saw two Hispanic people, and evidently equated “Hispanic” with “home invasion,” although I rather doubt that many home invaders knock on a home’s front door.
As the Star reported, Indiana has a Castle Doctrine law–one of those “stand your ground” statutes that give people the right to use deadly force to prevent unlawful entry into their homes. But even under those laws, the shooter’s belief of imminent danger must be “reasonable.” I find it extremely difficult to label shooting a woman knocking on one’s front door as “reasonable”–even if that woman’s skin color means she doesn’t look like a resident of Whitestown.
Of course, if far too many Americans weren’t in possession of firearms, incidents like this would be less likely. Having a gun in the house rather obviously increases the likelihood that that gun will be used–and in many cases, used inappropriately. Studies have found that 58% of gun deaths are the result of suicide, and the CDC has reported that nearly two out of every 10 non-lethal firearm injuries are unintentional–the result of accidents. (The CDC also reports that people who survive a firearm-related injury typically experience long-term problems with memory, thinking and PTSD, even if they don’t have permanent physical disabilities or paralysis.)
Maria Perez was a 32-year-old house cleaner, and the mother of four. An immigrant from Guatemala, she died in the arms of her husband when they arrived at what was definitely the wrong house–a house occupied by someone who was armed and evidently terrified of or hostile to people who looked “different.”
So here we are.
Four children no longer have a mother. A husband is left with memories of holding his dying wife in his arms. I’m sorry, but no “Castle Doctrine” can justify this; no “gun guy” can find a defense even in a Second Amendment that has been reinterpreted from its initial meaning in order to protect the gun industry and America’s gun fetishists.
Before I retired, I spent 21 years teaching Law and Public Policy to students who wanted to know about those topics, and I can confirm that even individuals with an interest in government often had a hard time following the intricacies of the policy process. When we come to the population at large–people who (as Jon Stewart once memorably explained) “have shit to do”–it isn’t surprising that much of what this blog addresses might just as well be written in ancient Aramaic. Policy nerds like yours truly talk about Trump violating the Emoluments Clause, and the average American wonders what that is.
Widespread ignorance of the laws–of America’s so-called “guardrails”–has allowed Trump to violate all manner of constitutional and statutory rules without generating an appropriate amount of concern. But sometimes, visual evidence of the arrogance and self-dealing breaks through. That’s what we are seeing with the destruction of the East Wing of the People’s house and its planned replacement with a gaudy and inappropriate ballroom, funded by people who have business with the government, and whose “contributions” are rather clearly bribes.
If you were watching any of the voter-on-the-street interviews Tuesday, you might have been surprised to hear how many Americans are deeply disturbed, furious even, about Donald Trump’s bulldozing of the White House to make way for a garish $330M donor-paid ballroom. It may not be the most egregious offense of the Trump regime (which has kidnapped people off the streets, sent them to foreign hell holes, and cut off SNAP benefits, among other outrages). It is not even the worst case of corruption, given the estimated $5B or so in wealth Trump and his family have hauled in from (among other sources) foreign buyers of crypto. But the ballroom is the most visible, easily explained, and visually disgusting evidence of Trump’s destruction of our democracy and the public’s ownership of our institutions.
Rubin cited a report from Public Citizen that–as she wrote–“captures the stomach-turning effort to transform the White House into a monument to private greed and public corruption.” Among other things, the report found that 16 out of 24 donors hold government contracts. Overall, those corporate donors benefited from nearly $43 billion in contracts just last year and $279 billion over the past five years.
More significantly, most of those donors—14 out of 24—are either currently facing federal enforcement actions “and/or have had federal enforcement actions suspended by the Trump administration,” including major antitrust actions, labor rights cases and SEC matters. The report also noted that these companies and wealthy individual donors have invested “gargantuan sums in combined lobbying and political contributions, totaling more than $960 million during the last election cycle and $1.6 billion over the last five years.”
In other words, those generous donations to Trump’s bad taste are rather obviously bribes.
You can almost hear the mob boss crooning into the ears of the supplicants: “you want this little enforcement problem to go away? Want another cushy contract? Just pony up for my ballroom and government will look out for you.” Trump is frequently described as “transactional,” a nice word for a mob boss approach that begins with “what’s in it for me?”
Citizens may not have noticed other corruption. Take the Trump family’s crypto scams, for example. Through their World Liberty Financial, they launched Trump-branded “tokens”–coins with no intrinsic value, purchases of which are efforts to gain or retain the good graces of our would-be King (aka bribes). Unlike those and similar transactions, the visual–and visceral–impact of East Wing destruction is hard to ignore. It’s an entirely appropriate metaphor for Trump’s mob boss regime.
As Rubin argues:
Certainly, any 2028 Democratic candidate worth his or her salt would need to advance a mammoth anti-corruption plan to tackle not only this outrage (“Tear it down, rebuild democracy!” would make a lively campaign chant) but to severely regulate crypto, recover unconstitutionally acquired foreign emoluments, restore prosecution of foreign bribery statutes and other white collar crimes, and undergo an exhaustive investigation and prosecution of any bribery that took place in the Trump regime.
As with other autocratic atrocities, the corruption issue is too important to leave solely to the politicians. Shareholders of these companies could demand a full accounting and pursue shareholder suits if appropriate. Consumers can organize public campaigns to expose and embarrass these companies or conduct targeted boycotts (e.g., cancel Amazon Prime, do not patronize Hard Rock Casinos and restaurants). And further No Kings events should keep corruption front and center.
Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.
Sometimes I read an essay or an op-ed that hits me–a sentence or paragraph or analysis that seems so on-target that I feel impelled to share it. That was my reaction to a recent op-ed by Fareed Zakaria (always one of my favorites) in the Washington Post.
Zakaria began by noting that partisanship has become the lens through which Americans interpret reality. Although a majority of voters still say the economy is their top concern, for example, they interpret the state of the economy through that partisan lens. “When their party is in power, they think the economy is strong; when the other side takes over, that same economy suddenly looks dire. In effect, politics now shapes people’s sense of economic reality, not the other way around.”
And as Zakaria notes, people have chosen their political tribe guided by “two markers the left has long struggled to navigate: culture and class.”
Those two markers aren’t unique to the U.S.–they are global. Social changes wrought by globalization, the increasingly digital nature of our environment, immigration, and the emergence of new gender and identity norms have engendered a cultural backlash.
Over the past 40 years, billions entered the world market, millions crossed borders, the internet collapsed distance and hierarchy, and women and minorities claimed long-denied rights. Scholars celebrate this as progress, integration, emancipation. Yet to many, it feels like dislocation — a dissolving of familiar identities and moral coordinates. A 2023 Ipsos Global Trends survey showed that in many advanced democracies, large majorities think the world is changing too fast, including 75 percent in Germany and nearly 90 percent in South Korea. In the United States, a 2023 Gallup poll showed that more than 80 percent of Americans believe the nation’s moral values are getting worse. These numbers cut across income and region; they reflect not poverty but that much of America feels culturally adrift.
Hence the paradox: Populism thrives in countries that are, by virtually every measure, richer, safer and freer than at any point in history. Its fuel is not deprivation but disorientation. The right has learned to weaponize that unease, offering a story that is emotionally coherent even when factually thin. It promises a return to the world many people remember — a society of stable hierarchies, recognizable roles and shared norms — if only the global elites are cast down. It is, in essence, the politics of nostalgia.
Zakaria points out that this isn’t new. A similar “cultural nostalgia” erupted in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, when figures like Benjamin Disraeli and Otto von Bismarck appealed to the working class through “nationalism, religion and pride, pairing social reform with cultural conservatism.” Our contemporary populists are following the same formula.
There is, Zakaria tells us, one difference: what constitutes class in today’s societies. Today’s divide is no longer between capitalists and workers; it’s between people who flourish in a credential-driven economy and those who don’t.
The commanding heights of business, media and government have converged into a single, credentialed class. In principle, it is open to all; in practice, it has become self-replicating…. And the party that once spoke for the working class is now seen — fairly or not — as the party of the professional elite: urban, secular and fluent in the idioms of globalization.
The reactionary Right has exploited that cultural resentment. Trump’s cabinets– packed with billionaires– have been “ferociously anti-elitist.”
His enemy is not the hedge-funder but the Harvard professor, not the CEO but the columnist. “The professors are the enemy,” Richard M. Nixon once quipped, and JD Vance has repeated the line. Trump turned it into strategy, waging war on America’s cultural institutions — universities, the press, the federal bureaucracy — and convincing millions that the real ruling class was not the wealthy but the educated…
That divide isn’t imaginary.
Among White voters without a college degree, Republicans now win by more than 25 points. Democrats typically win nationally by around 16 points among college graduates. The urban-rural divide is at heart a class divide that has become a political one as well.
There are ways, Zakaria insists, to bridge these gaps. We can build a more democratic meritocracy, one more open and welcoming. And Democrats can “embrace the party’s best instincts — compassion, inclusion, reform — with a tone of respect for those uneasy about rapid change.” Progressives can show their patriotism. Liberals can speak the “language of tradition.”
Right-wing populism is not destiny; it is nostalgia. Liberalism has been counted out many times before, only to prove itself remarkably resilient — because, in the end, it addresses the most powerful yearning of human beings: for betterment, progress and freedom.
Nostalgia, after all, isn’t progress. It’s a dead end.
