*Behold below the following abbreviated online appendix to my book Hollow Resistance: Trump, Obama, and the Politics of Appeasement (CounterPunch Books, October 2020). It is a compilation of Trump’s worst offenses while serving as president. The list is particularly non-comprehensive for the period after July of 2020 for a simple and depressing reason: I could no longer keep up with the pace and extent of Trump’s evil, lies, and crimes. I had to step back from recording and listing these transgressions in order protect my mental and physical health.
Week One: Getting to Know President Trump
- Celebrating his first day in office by giving an Inaugural Address written by the national and global neofascist-white-nationalist leader Steve Bannon and essentially accusing Obama and the Democrats of having plunged the United States into “carnage,” misery, and despair – and by:
- Issuing his first executive order, which established interim procedures for the repeal of Obama’s signature domestic legislation, the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, which, for all its many corporatist flaws, added 20 million people to the nation’s health insurance rolls.
- Marking his second day in office by going to the CIA’s headquarters to give a mind-bogglingly moronic, delusional, and disjointed “speech” that bemoaned how the U.S. hadn’t won any wars in many years. Trump blustered that “we should have kept [Iraq’s] oil” and that “maybe you’ll have another chance” (to get “the oil”).
- Marking his initial days in office by absurdly claiming with no evidence that 3 to 5 million illegal immigrant votes had cast him a popular vote victory in the 2016 presidential election and by ridiculously insisting that the “fake news” media was suppressing that supposed fact that he had garnered a larger Inauguration crowd than Obama did in 2009. Four days into his presidency, Trump dealt a rapid and sharp blow to Obama’s environmental legacy by signing executive orders advancing the completion of the controversial and environmentally disastrous Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. Obama, who had halted the Keystone XL project and helped protesters delay the Dakota Access one, said nothing in public.
- Marking his fifth day in office by outrageously removing all references to climate change, arguably the greatest existential crisis facing humanity, from the White House Website and by issuing Executive Order 13767, criminally directing the Department of Homeland Security to begin construction of a wall on the Mexico–United States border – an action opposed by most Americans.
- Marking his seventh day in office and sparked anti-racist protests across the nation by suspending the Refugee Admissions Program and denying U.S. entry to citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
A Continuing Relentless, Exhausting, Depressing, and Mind-Boggling Assault on Human and Civil Rights, Basic Decency, Civilized Norms, Social Justice, Constitutional Checks and Balances, Electoral Democracy, and the Rule of Law
That was just Trump’s first week. The next three-plus years have been almost beyond belief. This is all happened here, in the United States:
- The Trump administration’s vicious immigrant family separation policy, sold to the public as a “zero tolerance” approach to deter illegal immigration. From the spring of 2017 through the fall of 2019, Trump’s immigration officers separated children from parents or guardians with whom they had entered the US at the U.S.-Mexico border. The adults were incarcerated in federal jails and the children the children placed under the supervision of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The policy included no measure to reunite the families.
- Repeated vicious military-style Immigration and Customs Enforcement Raids to round up and deport “illegal” immigrant workers across the country.
- The enactment of Homeland Security Secretary rules aimed at ending the decades-old Flores settlement agreement. “Without the protections of Flores,” the LCHR notes, “the government can hold immigrant children indefinitely, and in prison-like conditions, with no hope for a timely release and no mandate for appropriate care of traumatized children.”
- The egregious abrogation of internationally recognized asylum rights: a Justice Department ruling that fears of domestic or gang violence are not grounds for asylum in the United States; a Homeland Security ruling that blocked people from claiming asylum if they enter the United States outside legal ports of entry; an administration moved to “end asylum protections for most Central American migrants [by] deeming anyone who passes through another country ineligible for asylum at the U.S. southern border;” the appointment of Board of Immigration Appeals judges with high rates of denying asylum claims; suspension of the longstanding right of migrant families seeking asylum to remain in this country while their asylum applications are pending.
- The cruel denial of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for different non-white groups (Haitians, Salvadorans, Hondurans. Nicaraguans, Nepalese, Bahamians residing in the U.S.
- The almost unfathomably malicious sending out of U .S. Citizenship and Immigration Services letters “stating that the agency will no longer consider most deferrals of deportation for people with a serious medical condition” and “asking people in extreme medical need to leave the country within 33 days.”
- The Department of Homeland Security’s vicious nativist and classist “public charge” rule, under which “immigrants who apply for a green card or visa could be deemed a ‘public charge’ and turned away if they earn below 250 percent of the federal poverty line and use any of a wide range of public programs.” (LCHR).
- Trump’s insane nativist claim that he would end “birthright citizenship” – the Constitutionally protected granting of U.S. citizenship to people born in the U.S. – by executive order.
- A Department of State regulation meant to denying poor pregnant women of color visas to the U.S.
- Attempt to include citizenship questions in the 2020 U.S. census, guaranteed to lead to an under-reporting of the nation’s poor and nonwhite population.
- Trump’s insane false and nativist claim that caravans of Central American and Mexican immigrants seeking asylum and respite from violence, poverty, and terrorism in their home countries constituted an attempted hostile military invasion of the U.S.
- Trump’s insane 35-day shutdown of the federal government over Congress’s refusal to fund his highly unpopular US-Mexico border wall in the winter of 2018-19.
- Trump’s insane and arch-authoritarian, unconstitutional February 15, 2019 declaration of a “National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States,” ordering the diversion of billions of dollars of funds that had been appropriated to the U.S. Department of Defense for military construction to the building of his cherished nativist Wall.
- “As part of its campaignof intimidation against state and local governments that choose not to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” the American Civil Liberties Union reported in early March of 2020, “Trump administration officials have confirmed plans for two new tactics in their anti-immigrant agenda. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will deploy Border Patrol’s special forces-style unit, known as BORTAC, and other Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents — dressed in plainclothes — into Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit, and Newark. And it is reportedly launching Operation Palladium, enlisting 500 special agents for an ‘enhanced arrest campaign’ designed to ‘flood the streets’ of these same cities.”
- Trump’s temporary suspension of all immigration to the U.S. in a “Proclamation Suspending Entry of Immigrants Who Present Risk to the U.S. Labor Market During the Economic Recovery Following the COVID-19 Outbreak” in April 2020.
- Repeated Trump calls for Congress to end Obama’s signature legislation the Affordable Care Act and to thereby thrown tens of millions of disproportionately poor and nonwhite Americans out of health insurance coverage.
- A Department of Justice filing (on June 8, 2018) before the U.S. Court of Appeals arguing that the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional – this even as Trump and his fellow Republicans claimed to be dedicated to preserving “Obamacare’s” guarantee of health insurance rights for such people.
- A March 2019 filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals calling for the invalidation of entire Affordable Care Act.
- Approval of sadistic work requirements for Medicaid and Food Stamp recipients in numerous states run by right wing Republicans.
- A White House challenge (currently before the U.S. Supreme Court) of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s rule on forced arbitration. “Overturning the rule,” the LCHR rinds. “will enable big banks, payday lenders, and other financial companies to force victims of fraud, discrimination, or other unlawful conduct into a ‘kangaroo court’ process where their claims are decided by hired arbitration firms rather than by judges and juries – harming consumers and undermining civil rights and consumer protection laws.”
- Trump’s 2018 dismantlement of an Obama-era White House National Security Council directorate whose mission was to prepare for when, not if, a major pandemic hit the United States.
- Trump’s refusal to release personal tax records to Congress and courts on the grounds of absolute presidential immunity from prosecution – a claim to be fully and explicitly above the rule of law.
- Trump’s provocative and authoritarian reference to an esteemed federal jurist who ruled against his racist Muslim travel ban as a “so-called judge.”
- Trump’s insane failure to appoint a Science Adviser for more than a year and a half.
- Trump’s repeated insane claims to know more about critical policy issue than leading subject area experts and to trust his own “gut” over that of professionals.
- Trump’s insane eco-cidal June 2017 announcement that the U.S. would leave the Climate Accord, combined with the Orwellian statement that “we’re gonna have the cleanest air.”
- Trump’s reversal of the Obama administration’s policy of letting transgendered individuals be openly employed by the U.S. military.
- A Department of Health and Human Services rule permitting health workers to cite religious or moral objections to deny care to patients, a serious threat to women and transgender patients.
- Trump’s wild August 2017 threat to hit North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if did not suspend its nuclear weapons program.
- A demented Trump Tweet boasting about the size of his “nuclear button” in January of 2018: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
- The horrible events in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017, when Trump suggested moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and other white supremacist marchers on one hand and liberal and progressive civil rights and social justice marchers on the other hand. Trump faced heavy backlash from both political parties over his remarks blaming “both sides” for the deadly violence that occurred at the gathering – and for claiming that were some “good people” among the white nationalists who marched under the openly fascistic slogans “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”
- Trump’s disturbing August 2017 pardon of the fascist Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, convicted for defying a federal judge’s order to stop racial profiling in the arrest and incarceration detaining “individuals suspected of being in the U.S. illegally”.
- Trump’s false claim that his family separation policy was begun by Obama.
- Trump’s disturbing racist declarations war on Black athletes like Colin Kaepernik for daring to protest racist policy brutality against Black Americans. Trump even referred to these athletes as “son[s] of bitches” before white racist fans at one of his September 2017 hate rallies.
- Trump’s holding of a top-secret security meeting over dinner in the dining room of his Mar a Lago resort in the winter of 2017.
- The reversal of an Obama executive order (issued after the original Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2014) suspending the shipment of surplus military equipment from the U.S. military to local U.S. police departments
- Trump’s giant tax cut for the wealthy few and their corporations in December of 2017.
- Trump’s racist January 2018 reference to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”
- The president’s repeated insane, arch-authoritarian praise of dictators and tyrants, including “communist” rulers Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, the absolutist rulers of Saudi Arabia, and “elected” neo-fascist reactionary “populist” ethno-nationalists Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, and Narenda Modi.
- Trump’s bizarre silence when Turkish security forces violently assaulted human rights and democracy protesters outside the Turkish embassy in Washington D.C. shortly after Erdogan’s first official visit with Trump in May 2017.
- Trump’s bizarre and creepy performance at a July 2018 summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump behaved like Putin’s sheepish puppet, denying the findings of his own intelligence agencies while telling reporters and the world that he could see no reason why Russia might have interfered on his behalf in the 2016 presidential election.
- Trump’s repeated (and thankfully failed) efforts to foment and sponsor a right wing racist and business class coup against the democratically elected socialist government of Venezuela.
- Trump’s reversal of Obama’s overdue moves to partially open up of U.S.-Cuban relations.*
- Trump’s insanely false and narcissistic statement to the United Nations General Assembly in September of 2018: “in less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” The delegates in the room exploded in laughter.
- Trump’s bizarre and chilling refusal to acknowledge that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin-Salman ordered the brutal vivisection and murder of the Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Kashoggi in the fall of 2018. Trump justified his creepy defense of the Saudi regime by pointing out it was leading purchaser of U.S. military equipment in the world.
- The vicious reinstatement of the federal death penalty.
- Trump’s bizarre stripping of national security clearances from former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former National-Security Adviser Susan Rice, and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
- Trump’s insane firing of his Secretary of State by Tweet in March of 2018.
- Trump’s constant and repeated shaming and firing of federal officials who do not do his bidding, who question his policies and wisdom, and who in some cases blow the whistle on his outrageous conduct.
- Trump’s insane arch-authoritarian June 2018 claim that “I have the absolute right to pardon myself.”
- Trump’s Orwellian claim to have been exonerated by the Mueller Report on his compromised relationship with Russia.
- Trump’s repeated references to legal and congressional investigations into his corrupt foreign dealings and connections, his financial past, his illegal payoffs, and his ongoing violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause as “a witch hunt” based on a “hoax.”
- Trump’s making of false statements, often including outright lies, at a pace of 15 per day (18,000 false or misleading claims across his first three years by the rigorous count of the Washington Post).
- Trump’s recurrent sexist outrages, including making fun of an accomplished woman who accused his right-wing Supreme Court appointee Brett Kavanaugh of rape and ripping European female heads of state (British Prime Minister Teresa May and German president Angela Merkel).
- Trump’s bizarre, creepy, un-American and authoritarian call for a military parade in Washington D.C.
- Trump’s false arch-authoritarian claim that the Second Article of the U.S. Constitution “let’s me do whatever I want.”
- Trump’s Ukraine Gate (arms for political dirt on Joe Biden) scandal, for which he was impeached in December of 2019.
- Trump’s arch-authoritarian legal claim (the Dershowitz argument) that he did not reserve removal for his Ukraine shenanigans because presidents can do whatever they want to get re-elected.
- Trump’s incendiary and racist June 2019 statement that four progressive Congresswomen of color – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib – should “go back to the crime-infested countries they came from.”
- Trump’s horrific response to Hurricane Maria in August and September of 2018, which decimated Puerto Rico. After terrible delays in coordinated federal emergency response, Trump falsely claimed to have ordered a quick and effective emergency response, official lying about the number of dead, a running feud with San Juan’s mayor, and an insulting photo-op that involved him throwing paper towels at storm victims.
- Trump’s clueless response to the deadliest gun massacre in American history, when a hotel tower shooter killed 59 people in Las Vegas .“Look, we have a tragedy,” Trump said, but “what happened is, in many ways, a miracle. The police department, they’ve done such an incredible job.”
- Trump’s vicious and insane response to epic and lethal California wildfires in the fall of 2019: threatening to withhold federal aid from the state, claiming that Governor Gavin Newsom “has done a terrible job of forest management” because hie did not listen to Trump’s insane call for him to “clean” forest “floors”, a bizarre charge he first made in 2018 (claiming that Finland prevents forest fires by “sweeping” forest “floors”).
- Trump’s hyper-politicization of the federal judiciary including the appointment of far-right justices and the reference to judges constitutionally appointed by his predecessor and approved by Congress as “Obama judges.” (We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Chief Justice John Roberts felt compelled to correct Trump: “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”)
- Trump’s call for the nation’s police to “take the gloves off” (code for crack down violently) on urban “criminals” (mainly Black and Latino) and his related claim that Chicago’s police could end gang violence “in one day” (a not-sop veiled call for racist police-state executions in the street).
- Trump’s miserable National Rifle Association-captive failure to advance common sense humanistic gun reforms after repeated horrific gun massacres in Las Vegas, Parkland, Florida, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Two of the massacres (Pittsburgh and El Paso) were committed by right-wing white nationalists likely encouraged by Trump’s hateful rhetoric.
- Trump’s repeated encouragement of political violence against protestors and critics.
- Trump’s repeated false claims of voter fraud on the part of Democrats, minorities, and immigrants, clearly meant to (among other things) seed the narrative that he can’t be fairly un-elected in November 2020.
- Trump’s repeated reference to the media as “the enemy of the people,” combined on at least one occasion with the advice that Americans take their facts from him and “don’t believe what you see and hear” from other sources.
- Trump’s insane dictatorial revocation of press credentials to reporters who asked questions he didn’t like, such as this one: “Do you think that you demonized immigrants [Trump did] in this [the 2018 mid-term] election?”
- Trump’s insane January 2019 hate rally praise for a right-wing Congressman who body slammed a liberal reporter who pressed him on his health care policies in 2017.
- Trump’s insane February 2019 claim that Obama had as president been on the brink of war with North Korea.
- Trump’s insane insistence in September 2019 that Hurricane Dorian would “hit Alabama very hard” despite the fact that the federal government’s National Weather Service said no such thing.
- Trump’s insane presentation to the media of a weather map with Sharpie marks purporting to demonstrate thar the Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama.
- Trump’s bizarre ordering of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association to contradict the National Weather Service by claiming that Dorian could hit Alabama.
- Trump’s vicious attempt to slash food stamp assistance for nearly three quarters of a million impoverished Americans in December of 2019.
- Trump’s insane Strangelovian threat to bring about “the official end of Iran” in May of 2019.
- Trump’s arch-criminal January 2020 assassination of the commanding general of a sovereign government – Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassim Soliemani – on the sovereign territory of Iraq without the permission of Iraq’s government.
- Trump’s absurd charge that Democrats took “talking points from Iran” for questioning the reasons given for the reckless Soleimani assassination.
- Trump’s insane January 2020 re-tweeting of a right-wing lunatic’s tweet depicting Democratic Congressional leaders Charles Schumer (Senate Minority Leader) and Nancy Pelosi (House Speaker) in Muslim garb (a turban for Schumer and a hajib for Pelosi) in front of an Iranian flag.
- Trump’s recurrent blanket defiance of Congressional subpoenas
- Trump’s recurrent denunciation of elementary efforts to exercise Congressional oversight and constitutional checks and balances as “treason” and attempted “coup.”
- Trump’s championing and pardoning of sociopathic war criminals who murdered civilians with sadistic impunity in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Trump’s insane called for Border Patrol agents to shoot asylum-seekers and to otherwise break the law.
- Trumps recurrent threatening of political and media opponents and critics with violence and jail.
- Trump’s not-so veiled threats not to honor an election count that doesn’t go his way this fall, consistent with his “jokes” about wanting to be “president for life.”
- Trump’s transformation of the U.S. Attorney General’s office into his own personal and political legal service.
- Trump’s constant fascist-style conflation of corporate and moderate Democrats with the “radical” and “socialist Left.”
- The Trump administration’s construction of the giant federal COVID-19 bailout program as a giant slush fund with which Trump can reward his friends and punish his enemies in the business world.
- Led a public campaign against mail-in voting and attempts to expand it in the context of the coronavirus pandemic as part of his ongoing fictional narrative of Democratic voter fraud.
- Trump’s insane, lethal, racist, nativist, and fascist responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including: calling it a “hoax” and “the Chinese virus:” claiming that it would disappear soon and with the arrival of warm weather; refusing in early March to let the cruise ship Grand Princess’s infected passengers come ashore because “I like the numbers [of Americans with the virus] where they are…I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship…”; failing to order a proper testing regime; failing to order the proper production and distribution of personal protective and medical equipment; cheering on armed and other right-wing groups who occupied state capitals and otherwise protested to demand the premature “liberation” of the nation from necessary public health restrictions and rules; ordering the lethal and premature re-opening of meatpacking plants, thereby sickening and murdering thousands of disproportionately Latinx workers; holding a mass indoor white-nationalist hate rally (originally scheduled for June 19th, a day honoring Black emancipation from slavery) in Tulsa, Oklahoma (home to a racist pogrom that killed hundreds of Black Americans in 1922), without proper safety procedures in place.
- Trump’s insane two-hour June 20th speech in Tulsa. Oklahoma: he called the coronavirus “the Kung Flu” and went full-bore with wild QAnon conspiracy theories claiming among other false and bizarre things that Joe Biden was under the control of unnamed radical powers and that Biden and the Democrats favored “after-birth execution” of babies. Trump threatened and promoted violence against liberals and the left and raised the timeworn specter of nonwhite “hombres” raping unprotected white women.
- Trump’s repeated calls for the nation to slow testing for COVID-19 since tests only create more cases.
- Trump’s repeated attempts in the spring and summer of 2020 to create a false scandal he called “ObamaGate” (based on the notion that Obama in 2016 hatched an evil conspiracy to cripple Trump with the charge of collusion with Russia).
- Trump’s insane racist and fascist response to the George Floyd rebellion detailed in the first chapter of this book, including threats to deploy U.S. military and combat units to suppress civil rights protests, telling governors to respond to the unrest with “total domination,” the shaming of governors for not using enough armed repression, the military police clearance of LaFayette Square to enable a Christian-fascist photo-op with the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in tow.
- Trump’s rolling out of a severely limited “police reform” agenda, including a “choke-hold ban” that preserved cops’ right to use choke-holds after George Floyd rebellion and the murder of the young Black man Rayshard Brooks by a white police officer in Atlanta.
- Trump and numerous Trump administration officials’ denial that systemic racism is a problem in the systemically racist United States, including its deeply racist criminal justice system, in the wake of 2020 Black Lives Matter rebellion.
- Trump’s repeated defense of public monuments honoring the racist and secessionist slaveowners’ Confederacy as valuable parts of America’s shared historical legacy.
- Trump voted the 2020 Pentagon funding bill because it included name changes for military bases previously named after Confederate War heroes.
- Trump and top Trump spokespersons’ repeated bald denials of the existence of systemic racism in the United States in the wake of the George Floyd rebellion.
- Trump’s reference to the painted slogan Black Lives Matter on Fifth Avenue in New York City as “a symbol of hate.”
- On June 28, 2020 Trump put up a Tweet approving a video of a Florida senior yelling “White Power.” The video was taken at The Villages, a Florida retirement community, and showed dueling demonstrations between Trump supporters and opponents. “Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” Trump wrote, Moments into the video clip he shared, a man driving a golf cart displaying pro-Trump signs and flags shouts ‘white power.” The video also shows anti-Trump protesters shouting “Nazi,” “racist,” and profanities at the Trump backers.
- Trump put up an approving Tweet showing video of a wealthy white St. Louis couple defending their mansion with an assault weapon and a pistol.
- Trump defended a teen fascist who murdered two civil rights protesters (in Kenosha, Wisconsin) with an illegally owed assault weapon in August of 2020.
- Trump invaded Portland, Oregon and other cities and towns with violent federal border paramilitaries loyal to Trump.
- Trump nominated a Christian fascist cultist to the Supreme Court and jamming her through the U.S. Senate as soon as possible to help him steal the 2020 election.
- Trump openly undermined the nation’s electoral process while refusing to commit to leaving office if he lost the 2020 election.
- Trump repeated his chillingly authoritarian and sexist “Lock Her Up” chant at his fascist-style 2020 hate rallies — this time targeting not Hillary Clinton but rather the Michigan governor who some of his crazed backers were planning to kidnap and execute.
- Trump fired numerous departmental inspectors general for investigating matters that could have caused Trump embarrassment.
- Trump fired Geoffry Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York as punishment for pursuing cases that caused Trump embarrassment: prosecuting and convicting Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen; investigating the dealings of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; looking into whether a bank with ties to Turkey’s leader had violated Iran sanctions.
- Trump’s heled a reckless and fascistic July 4th celebration event at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. There were no masks or social distancing required at Trump’s speech, in which he “claimed that a left-wing fascist mob was trying to ‘end America’ by erasing the nation’s history and indoctrinating its children” (CNN).
- Trump’s July 4th speech in Washington, where he said “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing.” The event highlighted the pageantry and power of the US military while snubbing public health anti-covid recommendations Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. was leading the world in responding effectively to the coronavirus – a complete Orwellian inversional of reality – and repeated his absurd claim that the rising number of cases of COVID-19 was due simply to increased testing.
- Trump ridiculed NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag and called on its only Black driver to “apologize” for reporting a racist hate crime.
- Trump insanely and falsely said that COVID-19 was “harmless” in “99 percent of the cases” on July 5th
- Trump made shout-/Tweet-outs during the 2020 campaign to the neofascist Proud Boys, other demented white supremacists, fascist QAnon, and right-wing terrorists who plotted the murder of a state governor and occupy state capitals to protest public pandemic protections.
- Trump insanely and repeatedly criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases(NIAID) and a leading member of the Trump Administration’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, for telling basic scientific truths about COVID-19 expansion and the causes of that expansion in early July of 2020.
- Trump threatened in early July to withhold federal funds from school districts that failed to open with full time in-person teaching in the fall of 2020.
- Trump held repeated reckless COVID-19 super-spreader campaign events that killed hundreds of his supporters and infected many of his own staff members and Secret Service personnel.
- Trump used his own COVID-19 infection by the Trump Virus to downplay the lethality of the disease and to claim his own genetic superiority.
- Trump refused to concede defeat in the 2020 election despite his overwhelming loss in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. On the morning of November 16th, thirteen days after the election, Trump actually sent out this Tweet: “I won the election!”
- Trump sabotaged a sane and orderly transition to the Biden presidency.
- Making numerous moves that appeared to beckon an attempted coup to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Ecocide and Nuclear Arms Regression
- Pulling out of the (admittedly tepid) Paris Climate Agreement, signaling complete U.S. abandonment of any commitment to positive and coordinated international action to reduce carbon emissions.
- Scrapping Obama’s (admittedly inadequate) “Clean Power Plan,” which would have required the energy sector to cut carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030.
- Loosening EPA regulations on air pollution.
- Scrapping EPA rules around methane flaring and leaks.
- Revoking an executive order that required federally funded construction projects to factor rising sea levels into their building standards.
- Weakening fuel economy standards for auto manufacturers.
- Rolling back federal protection of rivers and wetlands.
- Approving the climate-cooking and water-endangering Dakota Access and Keystone-XL oil pipelines.
- Issuing executive orders that streamline approval for corporations to build oil and gas pipelines while limiting the capacity of state governments to block those pipelines.
- Rolling back safety regulations in offshore oil drilling.
- Issuing an executive order (in the absurd name of “wildfire prevention”) to increase the logging of forests on federal public lands.
- Rolling back Department of Interior restrictions on mining and drilling meant to protect the endangered Sage Grouse.
- Approving the use of seismic air gun blasts to search out underwater oil and gas deposits.
- Dramatically downsizing two great national Obama-designated conservation and public lands monuments – Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah – in order to open up more federal territory for corporate mining and drilling.
- Shrinking the size and influence of Environmental Protection Agency while drastically reducing its criminal prosecutions.
- Lifting restrictions on carbon emissions from coal plants.
- Approving the first oil and gas production wells in the federally managed waters of the Arctic Ocean.
- Disbanding the EPA’s former scientific air pollution review panel.
- Ending NASA’s state-of-the-art Carbon Monitoring System.
- Cutting “climate change” out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Strategic Plan.
- Deleting references to “climate change” from federal government websites.
- Suspending federal scientific study of health risks for people who live near mountaintop removal sites.
- Disbanding a federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment.
- Revoking federal flood-risk standards that used climate scientists’ sea-level predictions.
- Removing rules that protected whales and sea turtles from being entangled in fishing nets.
- Dismissing the EPA’s 18-member scientific advisory board and replacing its members with industry representatives.
- Ordering the expansion of offshore drilling.
- Removing the word “science” from the mission statement of the EPA’s Office of Science and Technology.
- Stripped gray wolves of Endangered Species Act protection across the lower 48 states, permitting trophy hunting and trapping of wolves in the Great Lakes states and halting the environmentally desirable recovery of wolf populations in their former range.
- Overturned an Obama-era National Park Service rule that banned hunters in Alaska national preserves from baiting bear traps, killing denned bear cubs and wolf pups and other from other practices condemned by environmental and wildlife protection groups, including the hunting of denning black bears with artificial light, killing of denning wolves and coyotes, the hunting of swimming caribou and hunting of caribou from motorboats. The Obama administration had barred those practices in National Parks.
- Withdrawing from three nuclear arms control agreements while requesting, producing, and deploying a new “low-yield tactical nuclear warhead” (the W76-2) aboard a US nuclear submarine.