Trump's Rap Sheet vs. the People
Donald Trump's conquering of the country is complete. The blows he's inflicted on American democracy will take a lifetime to heal.
The president fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief, a woman, for a poor jobs and growth report. That is a death knell -- or a deep chill -- for honest government officials.
He shut the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, headed by a woman.
He'll no longer enforce pollution laws, giving fossil fuels open season.
He fired the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a woman admiral.
He decimated the federal workforce.
He slashed climate and weather national services as the air gets hotter, floods rise faster, blazes burn longer, and hurricanes cause havoc. He's threatened to curb the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
His volatile tariffs are hurting consumer prices and jarring the world trade system, creating uncertainty. Yet aide Peter Navarro suggested Trump could win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
Trump compelled the Senate to confirm his criminal defense lawyer, Emil Bove, to the federal bench, 50-49.
He's taking away health care for at least 11 million people (after the 2026 midterms).
He fired the librarian of Congress, a Black woman, and the Kennedy Center president, a woman -- in overnight emails.
He dismantled our helping hand around the world, the U.S. Agency for International Development.
He's seizing federal funds from top universities.
The mainstream media bends over backward, mainly in legal payoffs, to pacify his rage.
He's abducting residents with no criminal record.
And in one fell blow, Trump murdered the Kennedy Rose Garden, paving over it. The unkindest cut of all, for the flowers never had a chance.
Oh, but there's more.
I see with my own eyes senators in search of their souls. Southern Republicans Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Bill Cassidy (La.) felt forced to support Pete Hegseth and Bobby Kennedy for defense secretary and health and human services secretary, respectively.
They knew better but cast deciding votes for those outlandish picks, now at war with their agencies.
You may think the outrages and coercions would cross a line of "Enough!" in congressional Republicans.
Just the opposite is true. The more Trump lashes out at institutions, even the hallowed Smithsonian, the more timid they are toward the man the House impeached twice.
Congress is much more wary of Trump in his second term, and he likes to keep it that way.
The first president to come to power peddling lies and insults on "social" media, Trump has a sordid past, with friends like Jeffrey Epstein, the press managed to ignore.
And he sure made mincemeat of the two women he ran against. He has no idea of acting like a sport or a gentleman.
Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, is Trump's doppelganger. He defeated a one-term president, John Quincy Adams, in a grudge match in 1828. Jackson's unruly mob sacked the White House mansion on inauguration day.
Trump and Jackson are strikingly similar in their ferocity. A pro-slavery Southerner, Jackson expelled five Indian tribes from rich ancestral lands so slavery could expand.
The Army force-marched thousands from the Southeast to dusty Oklahoma. We know it as the Trail of Tears. Trump would like to take over Canada and Greenland.
Like Trump, Jackson survived a bullet. It lodged in "Old Hickory's" chest. Unlike Trump, Jackson displayed military valor, whipping the British in the Battle of New Orleans even after the War of 1812 was over.
Jackson closed the Second Bank of the United States, setting off an economic disruption like Trump's. The Panic of 1837, a severe depression, happened soon after Jackson left office.
Jackson named Roger Taney chief justice at the urging of Francis Scott Key. (Yes, that one.) Author of the 1857 Dred Scott ruling, Taney went down in history as the worst racist in judicial history. Blacks could never have rights or become citizens, he decreed.
Trump's Supreme Court stripped a constitutional right -- reproductive rights -- away from citizens for the first time in history.
One Adams biographer, Fred Kaplan, noted a lack of expertise in Jackson's cabinet. Worse, he criticized Jackson's "executive authoritarianism," "harsh racism" and "anti-intellectual ignorance."
Ring a bell?
As Shakespeare's Mark Antony proclaimed, "the evil that men do lives after them."
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The author may be reached at JamieStiehm.com. To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit creators.com.
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