Documenting the Damage

Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Part I: Democracy and Government

• Part II: Civil Rights and Liberties

• Part III: Economy and Public Services 

• Part IV: Environment and Energy

• Part V: Foreign Policy

• Conclusion

Introduction

The United States of America is a different nation than it was 100 days ago. The opening months of the second Trump administration shattered the post-World War II record for the most executive orders issued by a new President. Within the first two weeks of his second term, President Trump had already signed more executive orders than he had during the entire opening of his first term. The events of the last 100 days will affect the trajectory of American politics for at least the next 100 years.

The reforms of early 2025 constitute the most aggressive attempt at reshaping the United States government since the New Deal government of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. But whereas the New Deal was intended to rescue the US economy from the depths of the Great Depression, the Trump agenda has focused on paralyzing the government, facilitating large-scale corruption, assaulting personal liberties, dividing the American people, polluting our shared environment, provoking conflict around the world, and redistributing money and power from the working class towards corporations and billionaires (a record number of whom serve in the administration).

Some commentators have nicknamed the opening strategy of President Trump’s second term as “shock and awe,” a reference to the military strategy of the same name which aims to “seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels.” In this reading, the Trump administration’s adversary is the American people, who have been rendered helpless in keeping track of the “overload” of news stories about what all has changed.

This rapid-fire approach offers several advantages to the second Trump administration. By changing such a wide variety of policies simultaneously, critics of the President’s agenda are forced to divide their efforts in a way which makes a sustained and unified critique nearly impossible. In addition, while many of these attempted reforms will be reversed through one means or another, many others will be overlooked and allowed to survive into the long-term, gradually becoming apart of what is considered “traditional” US public policy.

This project is an attempt at highlighting many of the most important policy reforms and political changes made under Trump’s 2025 “shock and awe” period. Revealing the scope and scale of these changes is intended to gather these harmful policies in one place, enabling greater public debate about the severity of our present situation. In addition, highlighting the negative changes which have occurred will hopefully help to prevent them from becoming permanent, giving future policymakers a guide towards the reconstruction of a democratic government out of the ashes of whatever President Trump leaves behind.

To create this project, I spent the first quarter of 2025 keeping track of every major policy change and political development I could identify. The result of this effort was a spreadsheet featuring more than 900 policy developments, most of which were then categorized into the 100 policy topics summarized in this report. Over the next two weeks, I will be releasing my findings in five thematic parts: I) democracy and government, II) civil rights and liberties, III) economy and public services, IV) environment and energy, and V) foreign policy.

For the sake of brevity in this introduction, I will save much of my analysis for the conclusion. But before diving into part I, here are some quick notes:

• This project aims to provide a semi-comprehensive accounting of the changes which have occurred so far, but it is still an incomplete and non-exhaustive record.

• Though many of the policies explored in this project are currently being challenged in the courts, I do not spend much time focusing on these court cases. This is primarily because of the fast-changing nature of these ongoing cases, but also because the Trump administration’s willingness to defy certain court orders calls the power of judicial review into question.

• The focus of this project is on harmful changes. I would consider a small minority of the changes which I tracked to be positive changes, but they generally represent tiny wins in the face of extremely large losses. There are several individual policies in this report which will prove to be more significant than every positive change combined.

• There is significant overlap between some of these 100 categories, but with some notable exceptions I have tried to avoid including individual policy changes in multiple different sections.

• Some people may be tempted to find this report’s contents to be demotivating, or to respond by retreating into hopelessness. I would like to encourage the opposite response. The frustration and discontent which this project may inspire within you should drive you towards action. Only through popular resistance to this administration will a reversal of these damages be possible. It is not too late.

• If you find a factual error, a misstatement, or a significant oversight in this report, feel free to make a note of it in the Medium comment sections and I will do my best to address it.

Part I: Democracy and Government

Far more so than most presidencies, the second Trump administration has focused on the demolition and restructuring of the government’s internal functions. Having learned from the significant constraints which the United States Constitution and bureaucracy placed on his first administration, President Donald Trump has sought to reshape the entire structure of the federal government. He is not just trying to be a President; he is trying to change the role of the Presidency within the US system of government.

The most significant features of these government reforms include the destruction of government institutions and practices, the centralization of executive power into the hands of the President, the replacement of independent public servants with political loyalists and for-profit contractors, the removal of restrictions on corruption and grift, a strong cult of personality around the figure of Donald Trump, and a clientelist culture of state privileges for loyal supporters and state punishments for opponents and dissidents. The large scale of these changes will shape the conditions faced by all future American presidencies, lasting decades into the future.

1. Mass Firing Government Workers

One of the most significant changes made in the last 100 days has been the hollowing out of the federal government’s workforce. Though these cuts have already harmed the quality of our public services, the full effects of this policy will not be felt for quite some time. The damage caused by this “thrashing of the bureaucracy” will be revealed gradually over the coming years as it slowly becomes clear exactly how many of the government’s critical functions have been abandoned, with no one at the wheel.

On the first day of the second Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was created with a mandate to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Elon Musk, prominent Trump supporter and the world’s richest man, has been the de facto leader of this effort. Most of its energy has been dedicated towards firing as many government employees as possible in a senseless and arbitrary fashion, often focusing more on staffers’ personal political views than their performance as workers.

Rough estimates of the number of federal workers who have left government service range from 160,000 to 280,000, though these are likely conservative undercounts which will grow with time. Few agencies have been entirely unaffected, but some have been hit harder than others: more than half of all staffers at the Education Department have been fired, along with virtually every single employee of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

The Trump administration and DOGE employed a variety of methods for these mass firings: direct layoffs, “buyout” offers, harassment, and more. The blanket termination of all remote and hybrid work arrangements for federal employees was intended to disrupt workers’ lives and force them out of their current positions, as evidenced by the failure to make any preparations for the mass influx of in-person workers.

There have also been substantial efforts to prevent the government from recovering from these cuts. The White House ordered a freeze on hiring to fill any existing vacancies on Trump’s first day in office. Then, they required agencies to draft their own plans for “large-scale reductions in force.” That same order made it so that only one new employee could only be hired for each four employees who left, making downsizing an inevitability.

To further emphasize their hostility towards their own staff, the government eliminated the Presidential Management Fellows Program, which sought to recruit new talent into public sector positions. Taken together, these actions guarantee that the civil service will remain chronically understaffed for years to come, as few talented workers will want to take the risk of working in a position which can be arbitrarily eliminated at the whim of an unelected billionaire. Ironically, this is a perfect recipe to reduce the efficiency of the federal government.

Mass firings are an unusual focus for what is supposedly a cost-cutting initiative, as the pay for all government employees makes up less than 5% of the federal budget—roughly the average amongst developed nations. Notably, despite the scale of DOGE’s disruptions, there has yet to be any sign that government spending has actually declined. While it is still too early to observe the effects of most polices described in this report, the government has so far spent more money this year than it did by this time last year, even after adjusting for inflation.

Despite DOGE’s apparent belief that the federal workforce is oversized, most government agencies have long been understaffed. In fact, there were fewer total federal employees in 2015 than there were thirty years earlier. Hollowing out the federal workforce is not a method to cut waste, but rather an ideological project to weaken state capacity, destroy obstacles to autocratic rule, politicize the government bureaucracy, and create new opportunities for privatization via contracting. As stated by Russ Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the administration

…want[s] the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

DOGE has achieved an impressive level of infiltration into the machinery of the federal government. They have installed staffers in key positions which grant them control over the government’s finances, started work to build systems which can access sensitive data, and embedded their operatives within agencies so that Musk’s influence will persist even after he departs his current position. An active effort by future administrations will be necessary to reverse this damage.

2. Destroying the Independent Civil Service

Slashing the government’s state capacity through mass firings was only the beginning. The subsequent chaos and paralysis created opportunities for President Trump to politicize many parts of the government that once operated independently, replacing independent civil servants with loyalists who pledge their allegiance to the President rather than to the nation which he leads.

Deep staff cuts were accompanied by several other policies that ground much of the government to a halt. Travel restrictions and a freeze on government credit cards blocked executive agencies from being able to carry out basic government functions. DOGE’s plans to liquidate unused government real estate quickly expanded into a plan to sell off government facilities which are being used; combined with the administration’s return-to-work order, this would paradoxically require government employees to work in offices which no longer exist. The agency which exists to protect the rights of government workers is at risk of being paralyzed. Government employees also lost a major avenue for self-improvement when the administration dissolved the Federal Executive Institute, which provided leadership training for civil servants.

Perhaps the most important change was the day-one creation of a new category of federal worker: “Schedule Policy/Career,” otherwise known as “Schedule F.” Federal employees in Schedule F lack the job protections that come with traditional civil service jobs, giving the President greater control over individual employees and allowing him to fire those who he dislikes (including those who might disobey unlawful orders). At first, only about 2% of federal workers will be placed in this category, though it may expand over time. Combined with an expansion of federal workers’ probationary statuses, these changes will make it easier to arbitrarily fire good workers and will also create opportunities for corruption and abuse by radically expanding the ability of the President to influence many decisions intended to be made by an independent civil service. 

3. Purging Government Officials

The mass expulsion of government employees included a purge of many high-ranking officials, including many who are not supposed to be removable by the President. Noteworthy examples include: the firing of more than 50 US attorneys and deputies; the firing of 17 inspectors general who serve as independent watchdogs against fraud and abuse; an illegal attempt at firing a Federal Election Commission official responsible for monitoring criminal behavior by election campaigns; the firing of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials who monitor corporate abuses; the firing of two of the three board members of the National Credit Union Administration; and the firing of the apolitical Archivist of the United States, who maintains official government records.

The elimination of key government officials signals a desire to further consolidate power amongst the President’s loyalists. The political nature of this purge is made clear by DOGE’s efforts to spy on multiple different government agencies for any sign of internal political dissent.

Such a political drive for loyalty makes the purge of military officials particularly concerning. In a move without parallel in American history, President Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and five other senior Pentagon officials, along with the nation’s top cybersecurity official and the leadership of several service academies. Doing so opens significant space for the President to stack the military’s leadership with figures who are first and foremost loyal to him, not to the United States at large.

4. Centralizing Power

One of the most consistent themes defining this administration has been the centralization of all political power within the President’s office. These actions have their roots in a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory,” which has its own origins in the Reagan and W. Bush administrations. Unitary executive theory asserts that the President has complete and total control over every aspect of the executive branch, without any internal checks on his power. Trump loyalist Lew Olowski described the idea as such: President Trump is “the living avatar of the executive power of the United States… The executive power is vested in nobody else. There is no President but the President…”

The second Trump administration has expanded the power of the President to interpret the law, demanded complete loyalty to him from government lawyers and diplomats, illegally exempted themselves from “notice and comment” requirements, exempted their foreign policy decisions from traditional procedures, centralized authority at the Justice Department (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and prompted the Supreme Court to weaken the judiciary’s power to review presidential decisions. After mass firings left many civil service positions empty, the White House usurped the power to replace them, thus gaining the ability to install more loyalists in government. Numerous emergency powers meant specifically for wartime have been invoked, ranging from energy policy to immigration policy. Many governmental organizations have seen their existing leadership structures bulldozed in order to increase President Trump’s power, ranging from economic institutions like the nation’s housing finance agencies to cultural organizations like the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Particularly significant has been the President’s consolidation of power within the budgeting process, which aims to bring into practice the White House’s anti-constitutional view that it is not required to spend funds appropriated by congress. President Trump has increased his own authority within the budgeting process, and so far congress has helped him to do so. The budget bill passed by congress in March grants the administration additional power to decide how funds should be spent, sometimes even giving them the ability to repurpose funds for uses other than their intended use.

Undying loyalty to Donald Trump is the number one factor deciding who is given responsibility within the Trump administration. A loyalist who investigated Hunter Biden at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was briefly placed atop the IRS’ criminal division, granting the President a level of access to tax investigations which has not been seen since President Nixon. Meanwhile, a DOJ lawyer who attempted to fix a wrongful deportation was suspended for failing to “vigorously advocate on behalf of” President Trump’s agenda.

The administration’s domineering approach towards state governments sits in direct conflict with the Republican Party’s traditional support for “state’s rights.” In 2012, the Republican platform declared that “Our States are the laboratories of democracy from which the people propel our nation forward, solving local and State problems through local and State innovations.” President Trump has made a clean break with this idea, speaking in favor of issuing federal orders to state governments because “the states are just an agent of the federal government.”

The administration’s demands for loyalty have also infected the internal politics of his party. Vice President JD Vance was selected to serve as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, a highly unusual move which unifies party and government. According to Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the environment of fear and control coming from the White House has permeated much of the party: “you’ve got everybody just like, zip lip, not saying a word because they’re afraid they’re going to be taken down.”

The widespread distribution of power that defines American governance is rapidly narrowing. In its place is a more absolutist executive power, the very type of monarchial executive which our constitutional system was meant to keep at bay.

5. Taking Over Independent Agencies

“Independent agency” is a term used to describe the various government organizations which are purposefully kept outside of the regular chain of command in order to allow them to operate independently of the current President’s political aims. To further centralize their power, the second Trump administration has both established greater control over independent agencies and minimized their powers.

An executive order from February frames independent agencies’ “minimal Presidential supervision” as a problem in need of solving. Thus, the order states that they will now operate under “Presidential supervision,” implying greater control by the White House. This declaration conflicts with existing law, and its limits have not been tested. The President may even believe that he now has new powers over the highly independent Federal Reserve, saying that the Federal Reserve Chairman’s “termination cannot come fast enough!”

President Trump issued two executive orders seeking to either minimize or eliminate 11 organizations that operated independently of his direct authority. One such organization was the United States Institute for Peace (USIP), a think tank funded by congress and overseen by a bipartisan board of directors which nonetheless had significant autonomy in its operations. In an audacious power grab, DOGE officials forcibly broke in to the USIP offices in March, replaced the organization’s leadership, and orchestrated what USIP’s original leadership called a “takeover by force.” Later that month, the entire USIP staff was fired.

DOGE seems to be genuinely unaware of what the limits to their power are, as evidenced by their attempt at infiltrating an independent non-profit organization that formerly accepted federal grants. Because the White House lacks the legal authority to do practically any of this, they are seeking retroactive approval from the courts to validate their criminal behavior. The administration has even asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 1935 case which gave these agencies their functional independence in the first place.

6. Ignoring Court Orders

The second Trump administration’s refusal to comply with court orders is another signal of its dictatorial intentions, exhibiting new levels of defiance to constitutional checks and balances. The administration has refused to obey court orders on issues like the distribution of federal funds, journalists’ access the White House, the deportation of legal immigrants, and more. When the White House invoked the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate deportations, US District Judge James Boasberg ordered them to halt and told the DOJ: “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.” White House officials received this order, debated it, and then willfully choose to ignore it.

President Trump has called to impeach Judge Boasberg, along with other judges who have noted the illegality of his actions. Yet despite his own defiance of court orders, he is nearly alone within his administration in acknowledging the fact that the courts do have the authority to review his decisions. Most others around him have adopted a far more radical, anti-constitutional position.

Attorney General Pam Bondi stated that Judge Boasberg was “attempting to meddle in national security and foreign affairs, and he can’t do it.” Vice President JD Vance falsely claimed that “Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.” White House aide Stephen Miller similarly claimed that “…when the President is using his powers as commander-in-chief, those determinations are not subject to judicial review.” Border czar Tom Homan stated plainly: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.”

These claims are not just false; they constitute one of the most radical attempts at violating constitutional checks and balances in American history. These and other attacks on the judiciary were enough to prompt a rare rebuke from conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who issued a brief statement saying that Justice Boasberg was operating within his proper authority, and that “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” For two centuries, but no more. This is a constitutional crisis.

7. Legalizing Corruption

No matter what kind of corruption you might want to engage in, this is the government for you. For those looking to hide their money laundering, the Treasury Department suspended enforcement of the law banning anonymous shell companies and excluded all US companies from having to comply with it. For corrupt multinational corporations, the White House announced that it is “pausing” enforcement of the law which bans foreign bribery. For foreign oligarchs, the DOJ disbanded its anti-corruption kleptocracy task force.

If you’re a for-profit lobbyist working in the Trump administration, they will designate you as a “special government employee” and then look the other way while you serve in two conflicting roles at once. If you’re a lobbyist for a foreign government, the DOJ disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force and deprioritized enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, leading to a sharp decline in the amount of information available about the activities of foreign government lobbyists.

For the very few white collar criminals who have actually been convicted and punished for their crimes, President Trump handed out pardons left and right, especially for criminals who made large donations to his campaign.

Are you a billionaire looking to secure government policies that will make you even wealthier? Pay $1 million dollars to attend a dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, and he might just change his mind for you. If that’s a bit too pricy for you, why not buy some of the President’s cryptocurrency to gain access to him? Alternatively, you could also just pay $200,000 to join Facebook and the New York Stock Exchange as a corporate sponsor at the White House Easter Egg Roll.

8. Loosening Ethics Rules

One part of the government’s pro-corruption agenda has been loosening the rules that govern the behavior of government employees, enabling pay-for-play politics of the worst kind. Not only has the swamp not been drained, it’s now the swampiest that it has been in a very long time.

On day one, Trump removed the ethics standards set by the Biden administration and replaced them with nothing at all. To prevent other ethics rules from being enforced, Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics and slashed the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section. The President also ordered an end to the FBI’s tradition of running standard background checks on White House officials, instead shifting this responsibility to the Pentagon. Congress has gotten in on the action too, leaving the House Ethics Office without the board members it needs to monitor congressional corruption.

White House officials whose behavior is particularly indefensible (like venture capitalist and “special government employee” David Sacks, who is now making policy decisions about the same things that he’s invested in) have simply been given blanket ethics waivers to do whatever they want. The guardrails have come off, and there is now practically zero ethics enforcement of any kind against top government officials.

9. Reducing Transparency

The second Trump administration marketed itself as the “Most Transparent Administration in History,” a claim which quickly falls apart upon closer inspection. The White House stopped releasing visitor logs detailing who they are meeting with, removed more than 8,000 webpages filled with information about the government from the internet, invoked state secrets privilege to hide information from the courts, and ordered the destruction of government records. The extent of the damage to transparency practices varies from agency to agency; for example, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has eliminated a long-standing transparency policy and temporarily closed the offices that respond to citizen’s requests for information.

Some government databases are now missing data which was present at the beginning of this year. When large mistakes were pointed out in DOGE’s estimates of the waste they had claimed to cut, DOGE responded by simply reducing the amount of information available about their estimates. Other DOGE activities have further reduced transparency: cuts to statistical agencies across the entire government, cuts to long-term data storage, and other disruptions will shrink the amount of information available to the public about their government’s activities.

10. Rewarding the President’s Allies

The second Trump administration has strongly embraced clientelism—rewarding friends and punishing opponents—of a variety far more blatant and worrisome than most prior presidencies. While a later section will focus on the government’s targeting of its opponents, it is also worth examining the ways in which the government has been bent to provide favorable treatment to President Trump’s allies.

Sometimes these political rewards are geographically focused. Republican Rep. Tom Cole said that “After working closely with DOGE and the Administration,” he was able to prevent the closure of three government offices within his district. He is one of several congressional Republicans to find success with this strategy; Democrats have had no such luck.

At other times, the benefits are doled out to all Republican-leaning areas. The Energy Department is hoping to focus its cuts to hydrogen energy projects to exclusively affect Democratic states, sparing the projects in Republican states. A memo from the Transportation Department announced that they would prioritize funding to Republican-leaning states: those that collaborate with federal immigration agents, have no COVID-19 vaccine requirements, and utilize the “opportunity zones” created by Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

Some benefits given to the President’s loyalists are even less subtle. Trump’s personal lawyer landed a cushy government job. IRS agents who investigated the son of former President Biden were promoted to more powerful positions, and an employee of the Social Security Administration (SSA) who collaborated with DOGE was put in charge of the agency.

When deciding who to hire to produce a nationwide propaganda campaign against immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security bypassed the usual bidding process to hand the contract to two Republican advertising firms. Members of the military who were discharged for refusing the order to be vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic have been fully reinstated, along with back pay for the time during which they were inactive. And while all Presidents corruptly reward their donors with ambassador positions that they’re unqualified for, Trump has gone even further than usual.

11. Putting the President’s Friends Above the Law

President Trump’s use of state power to reward his allies also takes the form of get-out-of-jail free cards. Not only was a blanket pardon provided to all January 6th rioters, the administration is even considering reparations for them. Another blanket pardon freed anti-abortion activists who broke the law against blocking access to reproductive healthcare centers.

The President issued individual pardons for supporters such as Rod Blagojevich, the corrupt former Governor of Illinois; Brian Kelsey, a corrupt former state senator from Tennessee; Michele Fiore, a corrupt former Las Vegas city councilmember; Devon Archer, who testified against Hunter Biden; and more. If an ally has a legal case ongoing, President Trump will refuse to enforce the law against them: both New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Republican Rep. Cory Mills have escaped serious legal trouble thanks to the administration’s intervention. President Trump fired the law enforcement official who tried to apply the law against actor Mel Gibson, a Trump ally with a long criminal record. One Trump appointee requested that the IRS reconsider its audit of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who he described as a “high profile friend of the President.”

It is obvious that these get-out-of-jail free cards are not being given to those who most deserve them: one businessman who got a pardon through his connections to Trump’s son-in-law has already been rearrested for assaulting a three-year-old. The message is loud and clear: the law does not apply to the President and his friends in the same way that it applies to you and me.

12. Giving Elon Musk Special Privileges

Amongst all of Trump’s allies, no one has benefitted more from his position in the Trump administration than billionaire Elon Musk. Although the public backlash against Musk and his companies caused a record-setting decline in his personal wealth, the government is granting Musk extraordinary privileges which, over time, will more than compensate for his losses.

Many of the agencies first targeted by Musk’s DOGE were those which Musk himself has had recent conflicts with, including USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In addition, all of Musk’s most prominent companies have received preferential treatment from the second Trump administration.

As a government contractor, Musk’s SpaceX is in the perfect position to grow rich off taxpayer money. Favorable treatment from the government has helped the company to secure new government contracts and handouts from the Commerce Department, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Space Force, and White House. The FAA suddenly started producing major wins for SpaceX soon after it was invaded by DOGE staffers: closing an investigation into one of the company’s rocket crashes, moving a SpaceX construction proposal closer to authorization, and advocating for more radio spectrum that could benefit SpaceX’s subsidiary Starlink. At the Pentagon, the firing of an inspector general may have even disrupted a probe into SpaceX’s contracting practices.

SpaceX is currently seen as the favorite to win the contract for building President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense system, a bid launched in collaboration with military contractors Anduril and Palantir (the latter of which has also received special treatment from the Trump administration). According to one official, the contracting process for the Golden Dome project has been "a departure from the usual acquisition process. There's an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government."

SpaceX stands to gain even more if Trump’s nominee to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Jared Isaacman, is approved. Musk specifically requested that Isaacman, a close friend of his, be put in charge of the agency that SpaceX does more than half of its government contracting with. This obvious conflict of interest has sparked concerns in congress about the potential rigging of NASA’s contracting process in SpaceX’s favor.

Musk’s Tesla Motors has received free advertising and promotion from the US government in blatant violation of the law. Government contracts represent another potential boost for the company: just two weeks after DOGE invaded the State Department, it was revealed that the agency had plans to purchase $400 million worth of “armored Teslas”; the now-paused order was later backdated to hide how recently this decision was made.

Musk’s social media platform X (also known as Twitter) has similarly benefitted from special treatment under the Trump White House. In a bid to drive traffic to the website, the Trump administration makes prominent use of X for official announcements and even treated an X executive as a journalist at a White House press briefing, allowing him to ask the first question of the briefing.

Musk is also being protected by the government in ways which no regular person could ever dream of. In response to acts of vandalism against Tesla dealerships, the DOJ and FBI are now prioritizing the protection of the company over other public safety concerns, singling out vandalism of Musk’s business as a form of “domestic terrorism” worthy of 40 year sentences (the average state prison sentence for murder is 14 years). The US Marshals Service has also deputized Musk’s personal security team, allowing them to function as law enforcement.

Musk’s position is both an obvious source of corruption and a serious threat to democracy, as it allows for a single government contractor to “function as a para-state capable of influencing the orders that the government gives” him. Never before has someone with so much to gain from the government been given so much power over it.

13. Trying to Freeze the Government

One of the most absurd actions attempted by the second Trump administration is one that was reversed less than a day later: trying to freeze more than 2,600 government programs, all at once. One week into President Trump’s second term, his OMB issued memo M-25-13 ordering that all federal agencies “must temporarily pause all activities” which involve “Federal financial assistance,” with an exception granted to programs that provide benefits directly to citizens. Government employees were given only 24 hours to interpret and comply with this demand.

The order was accompanied by a spreadsheet of more than 2,600 government programs that would be paused, including food assistance, support for seniors, public health programs, student loans, public education funding, infrastructure projects, emergency response services, veterans’ assistance, farm programs, and much, much more. The next day, only hours before the freeze was set to take place, the OMB issued a short question-and-answer document which raised even more questions about the freeze, directly contradicting themselves regarding which programs would be affected.

As the deadline grew closer, programs began to shutter. State governments lost access to critical systems. Just minutes before the memo was set to take effect, a judge stepped in to pause the freeze, averting what would have been the largest collapse of US government programs in history. The next day, the OMB fully rescinded their original memo. It was soon after revealed that they never told the White House that they were issuing the memo in the first place, thus explaining why the government later contradicted itself. Due to a mixture of malice and incompetence, the Trump administration came within minutes of decimating the US government.

14. Making It Harder to Vote

President Trump, who lost the popular vote in two of his three elections, has sought to create new barriers to voting. Although clearly lacking the authority to do so, the White House issued an executive order which threatens to take federal funding away from states unless they adopt a variety of measures to obstruct citizens’ access to the voting booth.

The order first demands voters to provide “documentary proof of United States citizenship” before casting their ballot. This is a response to the myth that there are non-citizens voting in national elections, a lie which has never had any credible evidence. While the President’s order won’t solve this imaginary problem, it will create a very real one: many Americans lack the specific types of identification that the order requires. A slim majority of Americans have no passport, and nearly 21 million Americans have no active drivers’ license.

These restrictions on our constitutional rights would be made even worse if Congress passes the “SAVE Act,” which would mandate even stricter requirements that could disenfranchise tens of millions of voters, including as many as 69 million married women whose current last name is different from the last name on their birth certificates. All in service of fixing a problem which does not exist at any meaningful scale.

Voter registration restrictions are not the only policy within Trump’s executive order. The order would prohibit the counting of ballots which arrived late in the mail, a practice used by 17 states to ensure that everyone’s vote is counted. It could require states to count votes by hand unless they buy new voting machines that do not yet exist. The order also empowers DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to rifle through states’ voter registration lists to ensure their “consistency” with Trump’s demands. Although each of these reforms is small in their own right, they together constitute a serious effort to restrict the American people’s right to select their own leaders.

15. Weakening Election Security

Recent investments in the reliability of US elections have been yet another victim of the second Trump administration. The Republican budget bill passed in March included up to $40 million in cuts to election security grants. Earlier that same week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced its own round of cuts to programs monitoring the security of US election infrastructure, programs which for now have been frozen. More recently, the administration fired regional election security officials. In an era defined by low public trust in the government and increasingly complex cyberattacks, these short-sighted cuts will only make things worse.

16. Denying the 2020 Election Results

There has never been a single shred of legitimate evidence that the 2020 Presidential election was “rigged” against Trump, yet the President has sought to keep this myth alive with a large-scale campaign of lies. He has practically never admitted the fact that he lost, and on one of the rare occasions when he did, he later said that he was speaking “sarcastically.” Democracy only works when politicians admit that it is possible for them to lose; a refusal to admit a loss is a refusal of democracy.

President Trump now hopes to reinforce this lie with state power. One former government official who was targeted by the President’s revenge campaign was punished specifically because he “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.” The purpose of this punishment is to dissuade any other government officials from pointing out the obvious holes in Trump’s lies about future elections, clearing the way for new attempts at defying voters’ choices. Election deniers are living in an alternate universe of their own making, and those of us who live in reality can now be punished for it.

17. Planning Around the President’s Ego

Any review of this administration would be incomplete without noting the profound role which President Trump’s ego and the cult of personality surrounding him plays in policymaking.

President Trump has planned a military parade which could cost as much as $92 million to take place on June 14th—his own birthday. He named a fighter jet under development the “F-47” in honor of himself, the 47th US President. He intends to use the funds he cut from museums and monuments around the country to instead build a “Garden of Heroes” dedicated to a random assortment of figures that he will personally label “American heroes.” He shared a video online imagining a massive golden statue of himself in a US-occupied Gaza Strip. When he lowered water efficiency standards for showerheads, he suggested that the counterproductive change was needed “to take care of my beautiful hair.”

One quarter of American voters believe that Donald Trump was chosen by God to win the 2024 presidential election. Trump, who shared a video online claiming that “God gave us Trump,” seems to believe the same.

18. Targeting Democratic States

More so than any prior President, Donald Trump has retaliated against US states and territories which he views as insufficiently loyal. California, New York, and Washington, DC—three of the country’s largest concentrations of Democratic voters—have all experienced real harms as a result of this vindictive behavior, putting their 60 million residents at risk.

California voted against Donald Trump 38-59; in response, the Trump administration launched an investigation targeting their high-speed rail project, interfered in their distribution of water resources, and has planned to revoke the state’s waiver authority under the Clean Air Act. New York voted against Trump 43-56; in response, the Trump administration took $80 million in FEMA funding away from New York City, blocked the city from pursuing a traffic reduction plan, and then further threatened the city over said traffic plan.

Washington, DC voted against Trump 6-90; in response, the Trump administration set up a task force to further increase policing in the nation’s most overpoliced city, and has even considered a plan to take over the local government entirely. Meanwhile, the Republican budget bill passed in March forced $1.1 billion in spending cuts upon the city (cuts which even Trump has called for the reversal of, as they could interfere with his planned police expansion).

Because the Trump administration never had much chance of winning these areas, they have apparently decided to treat them with a unique level of disdain. This explanation is consistent with the President’s actions towards these states during his first administration, as well as public reports from within the White House.

Mark Harvey, a member of the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, recounts having to show Trump how many supporters he had in California in order to convince him to send wildfire aid: “We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you.” Yet when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requested disaster assistance after a hurricane in the Florida panhandle, DeSantis recalled him saying: “They love me in the Panhandle… I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” As of last year, President Trump has continued to suggest that he will not provide disaster aid to California.

19. Threatening Data Security

For whatever else DOGE represents, it also represents a clear threat to the security and privacy of sensitive government data. The group has sought out (and frequently acquired) access to large amounts of data from dozens of different government agencies. Providing this level of access to sensitive data to untrained DOGE employees was authorized by the White House without any concern for the federal laws protecting said data, such as the Privacy Act of 1974.

DOGE staffers who left the organization warned that it was “mishandling sensitive data, and breaking critical systems.” For a brief period of time, Marko Elez—a DOGE staffer notable for his racist social media posts—was accidentally given the ability to modify the system that tracks trillions of dollars of federal payments. Edward Coristine, another DOGE staffer with access to federal data, was previously associated with a cybercriminal ring that was in conflict with the FBI. When asked by the courts why they needed all of this government data in the first place, DOGE representatives were unable to provide “even a single reason.” 

Part II: Civil Rights and Liberties

The second Trump administration has rid itself of the ideas of “freedom” and “liberty” that have traditionally been valued so highly in American politics. In place of these ideas are authority, order, and nationalism—a rigid and hierarchical vision of the world in which a superior elite is destined to rule over the masses, while those who don’t fit in are punished relentlessly. Rather than taking a position on the proper balance of freedom and equality, Trumpism rejects both.

The second Trump administration is flatly hostile to civil rights and liberties. This approach is characterized by the targeted repression of speech and dissent, an expansion of police authority and mass surveillance, the aggressive pursuit of an ideological agenda through state coercion, a rejection of racial equality, a bottomless cruelty towards all immigrants, a reactionary view of women’s inferiority, baseless fearmongering about LGBTQ people, and cynical appeals to a deeply conservative understanding of Christianity’s role in secular politics.

20. Repressing Free Speech

The early actions of the second Trump administration have revealed their low tolerance for speech which is critical of the government.

One prominent source of free speech violations has been acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, who wrongly believes that his office’s mission is to serve as “President Trump’s lawyers.” Martin launched an initiative called “Operation Whirlwind”—a name once used for the Soviet invasion of Hungary—to pursue penalties against critics of the Trump administration. In March, he sent a letter sent to Georgetown University informing them that the US Attorney’s office would no longer hire any of their graduates unless they modified what they teach to comply with the government’s priorities. In April, he sent letters to three medical journals accusing them of being “partisans in various scientific debates” and suggesting that they adopt “new norms.” Soon after, he threatened the non-profit status of Wikipedia.

A White House memo from February called for a review of all federal funding to non-governmental organizations in order to deny funding specifically to those which “undermine the national interest.” No definition of “national interest” was provided, though President Trump’s memo makes it clear that it includes “the goals and priorities of my Administration.” For example, the White House has announced that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program will no longer apply to employees of organizations which have “a substantial illegal purpose.” The crimes in question appear to be disagreeing with the administration on certain political issues, such as immigrant rights, a ceasefire in Palestine, and transgender rights.

Many of the administration’s immigration policies serve as mechanisms for restricting civil liberties like free speech. The White House believes that it has the authority to deport immigrants for no reason other than their political beliefs. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hinted at the effects that this doctrine might have on free speech by posting (and then later deleting) an image stating that part of their mission is to prevent “Ideas” from “cross[ing] the U.S. border illegally.” A nation where the government is given control over the flow of ideas can be called many things, but “free” is not one of them.

21. Restricting the Freedom of the Press

New limitations on free speech have been particularly stringent against the press, who President Trump has long had an unfriendly relationship with. This approach was laid out plainly when Trump described the reporting of the nation’s three largest newspapers and five major news television stations as “totally illegal,” encouraging FBI agents to “watch for it…”

Trump suggested that one outlet which reported on him critically should “lose their license,” and called on the FCC chairman to “impose maximum fines and punishment.” The Chairman agrees, suggesting that news channels which fail to parrot narratives from White House press officials could be pursued on criminal grounds. He has recently been joined at the FCC by a far-right Trump loyalist who believes that the second Trump administration “will be a time for retribution.” FCC probes have been launched against AP, CBS, PBS, NBC, NPR, and a San Francisco news station which was coerced into removing its reporting on immigration raids from the internet.

The executive producer of CBS’ “60 Minutes” resigned in response to corporate pressure not to upset the Trump administration, citing his inability to “make independent decisions.” Threats of legal action against the President’s opponents have even forced college newspapers into removing their stories from the internet in order to avoid government retaliation. State pressure on journalists will only grow over time, especially after the elimination of a policy protecting reporters who cover government leaks.

The White House consolidated its power over the White House press corps, taking over the authority to assign journalists to press conferences and to decide where they sit. They restricted access for wire news services like Reuters and have even begun censoring certain news reports from the press pool’s mailing list. The most concerning effect of these changes is the White House’s newfound ability to choose who gets to report on them. In one notable incident, The Associated Press was barred from the Oval Office. In another, the White House removed the liberal HuffPost from the press pool’s rotation while granting additional access to conservative press outlets.

To underline their hostility, the Trump administration cancelled government subscriptions to news services which published unfavorable stories. They also launched an investigation aimed at independent public media outlets like NPR and PBS (which the President would “love to” defund) while congress holds hearings to berate these outlets for not focusing on the same stories prioritized by conservative media outlets. When the Warner Bros Discovery company reached out to the White House looking for ways to get on the President’s good side, the government reportedly suggested adding more pro-Trump figures to CNN’s news programs.

Budget cuts have gutted the US Agency for Global Media, home to a variety of state media outlets like Voice of America (VOA) which advocate for the US government’s position abroad. There are some early signs that this propaganda agency will now work on behalf of the President’s personal agenda. Trump’s first appointee to run the agency was conservative media critic L. Brent Bozell III, whose son was sentenced to prison for participating in the Capitol riots of January 6th, 2021; the nomination was later withdrawn to appoint Bozell to another position. Responsibility for the agency has now been given to Trump ally and 2020 election denier Kari Lake, who told a crowd of conservative activists that VOA could serve as a “weapon” in “an information war.”

22. Attacking Opponents

President Trump’s very first action of his second term was an executive order declaring that the Biden administration “engage[d] in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents.” This allegation was followed by the exact same type of “systematic campaign” which they decried. This campaign of revenge is the most extensive such campaign since at least the presidency of Richard Nixon. Indeed, the White House appears to have set up an internal team dedicated specifically to attacking the President’s enemies. Many of these targets were featured in an enemy list drafted in 2023 by now-FBI Director Kash Patel, though the administration’s attacks have gone far beyond this list.

The same day that he spoke out against “the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” President Trump signed an order stripping security clearances from 51 government officials who signed a letter criticizing the President (along with John Bolton, the first of several of Trump’s former-staffers-turned-foes to be targeted). Next came the news that security clearances were also being revoked for other former government officials, including all three of Trump’s electoral opponents: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.

The FBI froze the bank accounts of multiple environmental non-profits and launched criminal investigations into them for participating in a Biden-era government program; congressional Republicans have done the same. The President at one point considered removing the tax exempt status of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an anti-corruption watchdog group which has investigated cases of corruption in both Trump administrations. In April, an executive order announced an investigation into ActBlue, the primary platform used by the Democratic Party for fundraising.

A range of retaliatory actions were taken against several major law firms who worked on legal cases involving Trump (Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, Covington & Burling, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey), acts of revenge which drew a rare condemnation from the country’s top legal association. Paul Weiss and multiple other law firms were able to escape these punishments by gifting the White House roughly $1 billion in free legal services for the President to use for causes of his choice. This extortion racket seems to have been largely successful in chilling the willingness of other law firms to challenge illegal behavior by the Trump administration.

The legal campaign against the President’s perceived opponents affects both those inside and outside of the government. For those on the outside, the White House announced “sanctions against attorneys and law firms” which file certain lawsuits to challenge government policies. A judge in Milwaukee was arrested by the FBI for resisting misconduct by ICE. Within the government, Trump fired multiple DOJ lawyers who had previously investigated his crimes.

Local officials who don’t bend over backwards for the Trump administration are being put under investigation. The state of Maine is under threat of having their K-12 education funding cancelled in retaliation for a spat with the White House. An FBI analyst on Kash Patel’s enemy list was put on leave without explanation. Associates of former National Institutes of Health (NIH) official Anthony Fauci were fired. Multiple whistleblowers have faced government intimidation for their attempts at flagging potentially illegal behavior.

As previously mentioned, the White House believes that it has the authority to deport people specifically because of their political views. This means that being a critic of US government policy is now sufficient grounds for deportation. Immigration activist Jeanette Vizguerra was arrested outside of her job. When a Cornell student sued the Trump administration over the deportation of student activists, ICE went after him next. Meanwhile, the attacks directed at the free speech of Palestine supporters and foreign students are so extreme as to merit their own separate entries on this list.

23. Targeting Palestine Activists

The second Trump administration is engaged in a systematic assault on the freedoms of pro-Palestine activists. Some of these actions have been quite broad, such as the additional visa vetting requirements for everyone who has visited Palestine’s Gaza Strip since 2007. But most of the repression has been aimed specifically at student activists. The administration applied tremendous pressure on college administrators to crack down on so-called “illegal protests,” including letters sent to 60 colleges demanding that they restrict the free speech of their student bodies. The White House’s new “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” has dedicated zero effort towards actually combatting antisemitism, but has instead focused on limiting First Amendment rights on college campuses.

There have been widespread deportations of people here on student visas who spoke out against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. This began with the kidnapping of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in front of his pregnant wife, and act of retaliation for his non-violent activism. Khalil was present in the United States legally and has not been accused of violating any laws—instead, his life has been torn apart simply for expressing an opinion which the government dislikes. President Trump called Khalil’s kidnapping “the first arrest of many to come.” Many more foreign students have come under attack since then, as detailed in a later section of this report.

Columbia University has been a site of particularly intense repression, including searches of dorm buildings by federal agents who acquired warrants under false pretenses. The Trump administration also sent a letter to Columbia demanding a free speech crackdown on campus: expulsions and suspensions for protestors, limits on the “time, place, and manner” of protests, expanded student conduct guidelines which treat criticism of the Israeli government as discrimination, the “arrest or removal” of dissenters, and more. It is likely that many faculty at Columbia are currently under investigation, as is the case in the University of California school system.

According to Marianne Hirsch, a member of Columbia University’s Jewish Faculty Group, “it should be obvious to everyone that what is happening on this campus, or to this campus, is not about protecting Jews.” Given that one Trump official involved in the university crackdown has shared antisemitic social media content from a neo-Nazi account, Hirsch’s argument is hard to argue with. These blatant violations of our rights in service of protecting the reputation of a foreign power engaged in mass human rights violations is one of the most ominous signs of the US’ rapid descent into authoritarianism over the last 100 days.

24. Exploiting Anti-Terrorism Policies

While reducing their focus on genuinely violent domestic terrorism, the second Trump administration has expanded their operative definition of “terrorism” to help justify their campaign of repression against their opponents.

The White House Senior Director for Counterterrorism suggested that people criticizing the government’s immigration policies may be “aiding and abetting” terrorists by doing so, implying that such criticism would be a felony. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has referred to peaceful campus protests in support of Palestinian human rights as “support of terrorism,” and the Justice Department launched a joint task force to criminalize these activities. The President and the Attorney General have described acts of vandalism against Musk’s Tesla Motors company as domestic terrorism. A French scientist was denied entry into the US because of anti-Trump messages on his phone that US authorities believed “can be described as terrorism,” according to French diplomats.

These political abuses of the already-nebulous term “terrorism” enable the Trump administration to apply draconian security policies passed in the wake of the September 11th attacks to suppress acts of dissent which cause no physical harm to any human being, further importing the authoritarian practices which defined the Global War on Terror onto United States soil.

25. Expanding Government Surveillance

The Trump administration has taken several steps to expand the government’s ability to spy on the public. First, President Trump fired enough members of the bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to deprive it of a quorum, thereby paralyzing it in its role as a watchdog advocating for privacy rights. Similarly, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was also downsized within the DHS. With these watchdogs neutered, the surveillance state has been busy.

Some of the most authoritarian parts of the federal government are now pouncing on the chance to expand mass surveillance. ICE recently solicited bids from contractors for a system which would monitor critics of the agency, including their name and location, work and school affiliations, facial identification scans, and “any identified possible family members or associates.” ICE is also setting up a separate database gathering information about people with extraordinary levels of detail, including location data. Among the beneficiaries of these plans are the nation’s largest private prison company and a highly controversial military contractor, both of whom are making millions off of new mass surveillance systems.

Creating databases filled with detailed information that could be used to monitor people seems to be a major interest of the second Trump administration. They have been planning to centralize all of the government’s various datasets so that they will have hundreds of datapoints on every single person in the country, all stored in the same place. Vulnerable populations are particularly threatened by this government monitoring, as exemplified by the NIH’s (now abandoned) effort to create a “comprehensive” registry of people with autism using their private medical records.

The second Trump administration has been demanding the social media and phone data of immigrants and visa holders. The DHS now openly admits that it is monitoring immigrants’ social media presence for unapproved opinions. Like many other violations of freedom which affect immigrants first, these invasive digital searches have already begun to expand to citizens: a US lawyer representing protesters was recently detained at the Detroit airport, where federal agents demanded that he turn over his phone so that they could examine his contacts list.

It would be foolish to believe that the massive expansion in government surveillance unfolding at the US-Mexican border will only affect immigrants, or that the spying on students will only affect foreign students. The demand for mass surveillance reaches deep inside of our borders. Look no further than a recent effort by the FBI to monitor citizens’ criticism of big corporations as a form of “terrorism.” To Big Brother, quaint notions of “citizenship” are meaningless.

26. Waging War on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The second Trump administration has declared war on anything and everything having to do with “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), a term which generally refers to movements for racial justice, LGBTQ rights, women’s equality, and so on. Among the many civil servants who have been fired are thousands who have been let go simply because their job titles include DEI-related words. This is part of a broad, government-wide censorship effort: the administration is reviewing all government documents in order to purge those which use a list of nearly 200 words deemed “woke” by the Trump administration. These include the phrases “ethnicity,” “equality,” “female,” “gender,” “mental health,” “minority,” “Native American,” “pollution,” “victim,” and “women.”

In agencies like the Defense Department (DOD), this censorship campaign has meant the erasure of information on Black war heroes, the deletion of pages about Holocaust remembrance, purges of libraries at military academies, and the flagging of a photo for removal because it used the word “gay”— as in “Enola Gay,” the plane which dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. While some of these removals were reversed, many more records remain missing. At least one critic of these policies has been blocked from speaking at the US Naval Academy.

The White House is now closely policing the government’s use of language, including memos demanding the replacement of all uses of the neutral term “noncitizen” with the far-spookier “alien.” They even appear to have spent the time necessary to create a formal policy against responding to emails from any sender who lists pronouns in their email footer.

The White House’s opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion is being imposed upon the education system as well. One executive order threatened to cut off funding to public schools which teach students about the issues of race and gender, instead requiring them to promote “patriotic education.” The Education Department is enforcing this propagandistic order, launching an investigation into more than 50 universities for their attempts to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity on campuses. Even private sector organizations have been targeted by the government’s anti-DEI crusade, with the FCC investigating media companies for “promoting invidious forms of DEI…”

Another executive order makes it clear that this war on DEI is a thinly-veiled attempt at pushing a culturally conservative agenda on the American people. Attempts at highlighting the long history of injustice in the US are dismissed out of hand as a “revisionist movement” which seeks to “rewrite history”—quite a claim from an administration that is literally rewriting history. Thus, the Trump administration demands that the Smithsonian museum system censor itself and redirect its focus towards America’s “extraordinary heritage.” While claiming to fight the “ideological indoctrination” of their opponents, the Trump administration is now mandating ideological indoctrination.

27. Reversing Civil Rights

The second Trump administration has reversed several major civil rights policies, including some created during the original civil rights movement. An early executive order from the White House overturned EO 11246, which was implemented in 1965 to prevent racial discrimination in federal hiring. The Minority Business Development Agency, created by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1969 to promote economic opportunities for minority-owned businesses, was one of many agencies which Trump “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The US Commission on Civil Rights, created in 1957, is currently being hijacked by the Trump administration to push right-wing culture war grievances.

Under Trump, the federal government has effectively halted all enforcement of civil rights laws. Lawyers at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division were told to halt the filing of any new civil rights complaints, and some were moved out of the division entirely. The President fired two commissioners on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, further obstructing federal civil rights actions. Many civil rights offices within individual agencies are being closed. Public schools have been urged to reduce their own enforcement of civil rights policies, and the President has redirected the work of the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights towards the crackdown on college protests.

28. Launching Mass Deportations

An extremely aggressive mass deportation effort was one of the centerpieces of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. The President is making good on this promise with a target of one million deportations this year. As a result, communities are being torn apart, lives are being ruined, the economy is weakening, and fundamental rights are being violated.

The first month of the second Trump administration laid the groundwork for mass deportations. The administration expanded the use of “expedited removal” procedures to bypass immigrants’ due process rights, removed protections for “sensitive” zones so that authorities could raid schools and churches, redirected law enforcement efforts away from serious crimes to instead focus on deportations, pursued punitive action against cities which welcome immigrants, paid for anti-immigrant advertising, and briefly moved some migrants to the notorious US torture facility at Guantanamo Bay (including those with no criminal records). Plans have been made to charge some undocumented immigrants nearly $1,000 a day for their presence, and to block mixed-status families from public housing.

Congress gave the administration an early boost by passing the Laken Riley Act, a misguided law which mandates the detention of migrants who are accused of even minor crimes like shoplifting and greatly expands the ability of state governments to sue the federal government for immigration policies they dislike. Congress also gave the White House an additional $485 million in deportation funding, though this is far too small for what the administration has in mind: they are planning for a nationwide expansion of detention facilities that could cost more than $45 billion. In April, ICE announced its largest ever contract for detention camps. The largest beneficiaries of this funding are private prison companies, who are using ICE funding to expand and to reopen closed detention centers.

The vast majority of the victims of this mass deportation campaign are people who pose no threat to others whatsoever. Federal agents were sent to elementary schools to interrogate children. One immigrant was sent to Guantanamo Bay for riding his bike down the wrong side of the road. Several children with citizenship have been deported, including a four-year-old being treated for cancer. The government used a photo of a teenager holding a water gun as evidence that he is a gang member. The White House has argued that it has an “inherent” authority to deport anyone, regardless of legal justification.

So eager was the administration to deport that it even sent accidental deportation letters to US citizens (and Ukrainian refugees). Many accidental deportation orders appear to have gone to immigration lawyers, suggesting that immigration officials sent the orders out to everyone they had in their records, regardless of their circumstances. Government harassment of immigration lawyers is on the rise. So too is the number of US citizens being forcibly held in immigrant detention centers, a problem which affects Latino citizens in particular.

Several parts of the administration’s deportation strategy make implicit admissions of the enormous value that immigrants contribute to the US. Sharing immigrants’ IRS and Medicare data with ICE while deleting their Social Security records is an admission that undocumented immigrants pay nearly $98 billion in taxes each year, much of which goes to programs that they will never receive benefits from (including $26 billion in taxes to Social Security and $6 billion to Medicare). The President’s suggestion that farmers could request exemptions from deportation for their farmworkers is an admission that the US agricultural system would collapse without the labor of undocumented immigrants who subsidize our lifestyle.

Many of those kidnapped by ICE are not properly processed, effectively being “disappeared” without any way for their families and friends to know what happened to them. The widespread failure of ICE to respect constitutional due process protections has led to the deportations of multiple US citizens, including one man in Chicago who was kidnapped off the street, shoved in a van, and detained for 10 hours before anyone bothered checking to see that he was a citizen. Yet by far the most disturbing human rights violations of the mass deportation campaign are those caused by the Alien Enemies Act.

29. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act

On March 15th, the Trump administration invoked the authorities of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to accelerate their deportation campaign. The law, intended to be used only in wartime, was last activated during World War II to imprison more than 120,000 Japanese-American people in internment camps based purely on their ancestry. The current White House seems to aspire to human rights violations of comparable severity.

The government first used its new powers to deport more than 280 people who the government claimed were members of a Venezuelan gang, sending them to an infamous mega-prison (CECOT) run by the dictatorship of El Salvador. No prisoner has ever been released from CECOT, where torture is common and tens of thousands are used as slaves. These deportations were in direct violation of a court order which the White House chose to ignore.

Banishment to a foreign gulag would be morally disgusting even if it was used on gang members. But it was not. The government identified gang members using a checklist that encouraged authorities to round people up on extremely flimsy grounds. Specifically, according to one ICE agent, they were “finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”

Those deported to Salvadoran torture chambers included a soccer player with a tattoo of his favorite team; a teenager who got a rose tattoo because he “thought it looked cool;” and a man who got an autism awareness tattoo in celebration of his autistic brother. At least one deportation case cited the logo of the Chicago Bulls basketball team as a gang sign. In another instance, an ICE agent who mistakenly detained the wrong person was informed by a fellow agent: “No, he’s not the one.” A third ICE agent intervened: “Take him anyway.”

Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, a gay make-up artist who fled Venezuela, was detained by ICE for having tattoos which read “Mom” and “Dad.” He had no criminal record. Romero was deported to the Salvadoran mega-prison, where US journalists later observed him being beaten by guards while he prayed to God and cried out for his mother. The report accusing Romero of gang affiliations was signed by disgraced former police officer Charles Cross Jr., who had previously been flagged by prosecutors for his dishonesty and fired after drunkenly driving his car into a family’s home. Romero is still imprisoned in El Salvador.

At first, the Trump administration insisted that it had “carefully vetted each individual alien to ensure they were in fact members” of a gang. They acknowledged that they often found no evidence of gang affiliations, but argued that the lack of proof was proof: “…the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.” Less than two weeks later, the government finally admitted that some of the deportees were not gang members, but were instead “involved in activities that were not productive to the United States.”

The entirety of the government’s false narrative soon fell apart. Between 75% and 90% of the deportees currently sitting in the Salvadoran torture prison have no known criminal records. The deportation operation was so rushed and unorganized that it accidentally included eight women who had to be flown back to the US. Yet the White House has continually refused to comply with a court order to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia—an immigrant included in the deportations by “administrative error.” When asked by a US Senator why they were continuing to detain Garcia, the Salvadoran Vice President said that the Trump administration was paying them to do so. Garcia’s wife was forced into hiding after the DHS posted her address online.

The nightmarish ordeal suffered by those falsely accused and shipped off to be beaten for the remainder of their lives is itself sufficient grounds for a complete impeachment and removal of President Trump, as well as a trial for crimes against humanity. Yet this state violence is not limited to immigrants; the government wants to make it clear that it can do this to citizens too.

The dictator of El Salvador offered to open his mega-prison to detain not only immigrants, but also “U.S. citizens or legal residents,” according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Asked about the idea of sending imprisoned US citizens to the gulag, President Trump replied “Well, I love that… I have suggested that, you know, why should it stop just at people who cross the border illegally?” Asked again whether he was considering subjecting citizens to this barbaric treatment, Trump replied: “…yes, that includes them. What, do you think there’s a special category of person?”

One plan under consideration in the White House would allow for US citizens to be stripped of their citizenship and deported to the gulag. Behind these same closed doors, the administration also concluded that the Alien Enemies Act allows them to break into peoples’ homes and arrest them without a warrant, regardless of the Fourth Amendment.

In a unanimous Supreme Court decision demanding that the administration return the wrongfully-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the White House’s position “implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” The White House, which is still trying to organize more deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, has so far defied this court order and insisted that the innocent people sent to El Salvador “should stay there for the rest of their lives.”

30. Militarizing the Border

Another component of President Trump’s war on immigrants is the extreme militarization of the US-Mexico border. Borders have always been zones of authoritarianism where normal laws don’t apply: for example, US Border Patrol agents have long been able to violate the rights of anyone within 100 miles of a border—an area covering two-thirds of the US population. By deploying the military to the border, President Trump is going even further, turning the southernmost area of the US into a military occupation zone.

After declaring a national emergency to expand his powers, President Trump sent thousands of troops to the US-Mexican border alongside AI surveillance systems, radar equipment, surveillance drones, armored vehicles, helicopters, and a Navy destroyer. During the first month and a half, this operation cost about $6.4 million a day, for a total of $328 million. Such an occupation will likely last for “years, not months,” according to US Northern Command.

The President has given the military authority to occupy federal lands and create “National Defense Areas” on the US side of the border, a zone in which soldiers are authorized to detain and arrest people on civilian territory (and if this deployment is anything like the one in Trump’s first term, soldiers will likely also have the ability to use lethal force). This move was carefully crafted to avoid the requirements of the Posse Comitatus Act, which has kept military and civilian law enforcement separated since 1878. The barriers between soldier and cop were designed to prevent a military dictatorship, but have long been under assault by American politicians. Now, ICE and the military are cooperating more than ever before, with the military even being used to evade court orders.

The expansion of military authority into non-military matters is a hallmark of authoritarianism, one which the Trump administration has happily adopted. The brief detention of immigrants at the illegal and notoriously brutal Guantanamo Bay detention center made little sense as a practical matter, but the logistics were not the point: the point was to declare that the military now has free reign to brutalize immigrants, and perhaps even free reign to brutalize any citizens who stand in their way. One idea under consideration by the Trump administration is invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would give the President newfound powers to use the military to repress protests led by the American people.

31. Targeting Child Migrants

The sadistic treatment of minors which characterized the first Trump administration has come back in full force. The second Trump administration has relaunched its earlier family detention practices, reopened private detention centers for children, and eliminated the executive order which created a task force to reunite the families separated during Trump’s first term. Any semblance of concern for these young lives has gone out the window: the government has eliminated funding for both care services and legal aid for migrant children.

As many as 1,360 children were never reunited with their parents after being separated from them by the first Trump administration, leaving them orphaned by the US government. This number will only grow in the coming years.

32. Terrorizing Legal Immigrants

The modern Republican party has long sought to convince the public that they only have a problem with “illegal” immigrants, and that they have no issue with foreigners who come to the United States through legal processes. The second Trump administration has permanently shattered this myth with an unprecedented assault on non-citizens who are in the country legally.

First, the pathway to legal immigration has narrowed. In his first week, President Trump shut down an app which simplified the process of applying for asylum. The Citizenship and Integration Grant Program, which provided legal immigrants with civic education about the US, has been eliminated. All South Sudanese immigrants have had their visas cancelled, not because of anything they’ve done, but as an act of retaliation against the war-torn government of South Sudan for not sufficiently facilitating US deportation flights. And though it was predictably blocked by the courts, the Trump administration also sought to eliminate a basic constitutional principle in its attempt to end birthright citizenship.

New restrictions have been placed on the freedom of movement for all foreigners in the US, regardless of legal status. The government is demanding that all immigrants register themselves with the Department of Homeland Security. To stay in compliance with this totalitarian order, all adult noncitizens will be required to carry proof of their registration with them “at all times.”

The government has targeted many “green card” holders, pausing many green card applications and aggressively harassing those who already have them. An elderly Filipina woman who has been living in the US with a green card for fifty years was captured by ICE and detained in a private prison. A German man with a green card was “violently interrogated” at a US airport, deprived of sleep and access to his medications, and given so little water and food that he had to be admitted to a hospital.

Refugees who came here legally have been punished for doing so: the government is specifically targeting people who registered for the US’ humanitarian parole program for deportation. One such target was Maksym Chernyak, a Ukrainian refugee with no serious medical history who died of “bleeding from the brain” after being detained in an ICE detention center where at least two others have died.

Even tourists have been caught up in the terror. Law enforcement has been using increasingly “extreme” tactics against visitors to the US, prompting travel warnings from the governments of Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Two teenage backpackers were detained and deported for not making hotel reservations before their arrival in Hawaii. Multiple tourists have been detained in severe conditions, including a Canadian woman who was forced to sleep on the cement floor of a detention cell for two weeks despite having legal authorization to enter the US. Canadian visitors are now required to register with the US government when staying for longer than 30 days, a new restriction on visitors from the former US ally. Across the Atlantic, European tourism to the US is currently in freefall.

There is only one type of foreigner which the Trump administration is willing to tolerate: the rich. Plans are currently underway to replace the EB-5 visa with a “gold card” program offering a path to citizenship for the price of $5 million. “Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card,” said President Trump. The only immigrants who are safe in the United States right now are millionaires.

33. Attacking Foreign Students

The campaign of repression against immigrants who are legally present in the US has been particularly noticeable on college campuses, where the Trump administration has launched a comprehensive assault on free speech activities. The government has bragged that at least 1,800 students here on student visas have fallen victim to its “Catch and Revoke” program, many but not all of whom participated in pro-Palestine protests. US officials have been desperate to justify this blatant violation of free speech, accusing those who participated in peaceful rallies of engaging “in acts of rebellion and riots on campus.”

Those affected include:

• Mahmoud Khalil, kidnapped by immigration agents in front of his pregnant wife for engaging in non-violent pro-Palestine activism. The government lacked a warrant to arrest him and have consistently failed to produce any evidence of his wrongdoing; the case against him is based on tabloid reporting and obvious falsehoods. Still, the government is arguing that a McCarthyist law from 1952 gives them the power to jail and deport him for his political views. Khalil was denied a temporary release to be present for the birth of his first child.

• Rumeysa Ozturk, kidnapped off of the street by masked federal agents for an op-ed she wrote for her student newspaper defending “the equal dignity and humanity of all people.” Prior to her capture, the State Department had already concluded that there was no evidence of her espousing antisemitic or pro-terrorism views; her only offense was “engag[ing] in anti-Israel activism.”

• Yunseo Chung, a green card holder who has lived in the US since the age of 7. Chung maintained a 3.99 GPA at Columbia University, where she engaged in peaceful pro-Palestine activism.

• Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder and student activist who was legally complying with the process for becoming a US citizen until he was captured by ICE at an official interview for citizenship.

• Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard medical researcher who fled from Russia to avoid persecution after protesting against the invasion of Ukraine. There is no record of her participating in any activism in the US; instead, she has been detained by ICE for a failure to properly declare a scientific sample at airport customs, an offense usually punishable by fine.

• Alireza Doroudi, a Ph.D. student who has been accused of posing “significant national security concerns” despite never once participating in any campus protest.

While the government has already begun to walk back many of these arrests due to their flagrant illegality, they have still done significant damage to thousands of innocent people and chilled free speech on campuses around the country.

34. Turning Our Backs on Refugees

The notion that the United States should serve as a beacon of hope for those fleeing violence and oppression around the world is one which President Trump categorically rejects. Accordingly, the White House has been dismantling policies which once provided safety to those who fled from persecution at home.

Under President Trump, the US has closed the Refugee Admissions Program and removed various protections for refugees from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ukraine, and Venezuela, leaving hundreds of thousands of people vulnerable to deportation back to situations where their lives will be in danger. Another 900,000 people who legally applied for parole are now being asked to “self-deport.” Even Afghans who allied themselves with the US during the invasion of Afghanistan are being abandoned. Support for the refugees who are allowed to remain has been severely reduced.

For those at the US-Mexico border waiting to apply for asylum status, the Trump administration has encouraged judges to reject them without hearings. They have also reinstated the “Remain in Mexico” policy of Trump’s first term, trapping asylum seekers in dangerous refugee camps without access to basic services. If this decision goes anything like how it did last time, thousands of people will be exposed to entirely avoidable harm.

35. Encouraging Police Violence

Despite the scale of the Black Lives Matter protests which drew attention to the United States’ epidemic of violence and abuse by law enforcement, fairly little has changed in American policing in recent years. Still, the second Trump administration is attempting to undo the incremental reforms which did occur, giving police officers and federal law enforcement additional power to violate our rights with impunity.

The White House first revoked a 2022 executive order which made some progress towards addressing the violent behavior of federal law enforcement, with several different effects. First, federal law enforcement is now free of several restraints meant to protect human life, including a ban on lethal chokeholds, the requirement that force should only be used as a last resort, and restrictions on the use of controversial “no-knock raids” (which have even drawn criticism from conservative organizations). It also had the effect of shutting down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which collected information about police misconduct to make it harder for rouge police officers to find new law enforcement jobs after being fired elsewhere for severe misconduct.

In late April, President Trump issued yet another executive order “unleashing” law enforcement to “aggressively police communities…” The order promises even more protections to shield abusive police officers from accountability and encourages the continued transfer of military equipment to local police departments, further contributing to the out-of-control militarization of civilian law enforcement.

These changes are likely to worsen the culture of violence within US law enforcement. The potential for increased state violence is particularly high in Washington, DC, where the acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia issued a letter further loosening of police accountability measures. These actions include the weakening of the “Lewis List” which monitors police misconduct, as well as a promise to “stand up” to public defenders and judges who try to hold police officers accountable. The fact that these actions have been taken specifically within the nation’s capital city suggest that the move will allow for an intensified repression of political protesters.

36. Expanding the Death Penalty

An executive order issued on the first day of Trump’s second term resumes death penalty executions and calls for an expansion of the death penalty within the federal justice system, telling the Attorney General to “pursue the death penalty for all crimes of a severity demanding its use.” In addition, the White House has demanded that those on death row be treated in cruel and unusual ways prior to their execution, “to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.” One potential victim of this killing spree could be alleged CEO killer Luigi Mangione, who the DOJ is already describing as a guilty party despite his ongoing trial.

Before this escalation, the United States was already one of the world’s leading executioners of its own people. The death penalty is both unethical and ineffective at stopping crime, but the Trump administration’s embrace of the practice highlights an equally significant case for its abolition: the tremendous potential for abuse associated with giving an authoritarian leader the power to choose which of his citizens to kill.

37. Worsening Mass Incarceration

The second Trump administration hopes to expand mass incarceration in the United States, which is already among the top five nations in the world for jailing its own people. One DOJ memo calls on prosecutors to pursue the most aggressive charges possible, including “those punishable by death, or those with the most significant mandatory minimum… and the most substantial recommendation under the Sentencing Guidelines.” This will worsen the prevalence of excessive sentencing within the United States, leading to greater prison overpopulation at the expense of an effective justice system.

By rescinding the ban on private prisons, Trump has once again opened the door for the use of facilities which are inhumane, wasteful, and corrupt. By dropping a legal case against a private prison company which retaliated against its inmates, the President is also signaling that prisoners can be abused without consequence. Because private prisons have a profit incentive to maximize the number of people incarcerated, they frequently lobby for excessively harsh criminal justice policies, further worsening mass incarceration. Their return to the federal justice system will also have the effect of rewarding the private prison industry for the more than $1 million they contributed to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

38. Restricting Abortion

Following the reversal of the historic Roe v. Wade case by the US Supreme Court (including all three justices appointed during President Trump’s first term), the White House sought to further reduce abortion access. Protections put into place by the previous administration were eliminated, funding for Planned Parenthood and other reproductive healthcare centers was frozen, the informational resource reproductiverights.gov was deleted, abortion coverage in military healthcare plans was reduced, and a federal lawsuit requiring government-funded hospitals to provide abortions during medical emergencies was dropped.

President Trump also made it easier for extremists to harass reproductive healthcare providers and block patients from accessing them, a trend with a long and deadly history. The White House has said that it will now only enforce the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in “extraordinary circumstances,” and 23 anti-abortion activists who broke the law have been pardoned.

The administration’s opposition to abortion has affected US foreign policy as well. The US rejoined the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an anti-abortion statement supported almost exclusively by dictatorships and nations with a poor record on women’s rights. Even more concerningly, the White House reimplemented the global gag rule (also known as the “Mexico City Policy”), which denies foreign aid to all organizations providing abortion counseling, advocating for legal abortion, or offering abortion services (although a separate policy has always blocked US aid funds from paying for abortions directly). Researchers have repeatedly found that this policy disrupts women’s healthcare around the world, resulting in thousands of preventable deaths and disease infections each year while also failing to reduce abortion rates.

39. Weakening Sexual Assault Protections

Under the second Trump administration, the Education Department has weakened its enforcement of Title IX protections against sexual harassment on school and university campuses. By reverting back to earlier regulations, the change makes it harder to report and address cases of sexual assault and harassment in schools, forces victims to face cross-examination by their assaulters, and eliminates protections for trans students.

Schools aren’t the only place where policies to address sexual assault are being reversed. The administration also closed the National Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center. Next up could be the US military, where officials are considering the removal of sexual assault protections for soldiers as part of the administration’s deregulatory campaign.

This policy is particularly atrocious when viewed next to the White House’s embrace of multiple alleged and confirmed sex offenders, including rapist Conor McGregor, alleged statutory rapist Matt Gaetz, accused sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate, alleged molester Steven Munoz (who repeatedly ran afoul of Title IX protections), and even the President himself.

40. Undermining LGBTQ Rights

On his second day in office, President Trump eliminated anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ federal contractors, along with anti-discrimination protections for transgender contractors and employees. Homophobic and transphobic discrimination in the workplace is now effectively legal against approximately 100,000 LGBTQ contractors and 14,000 transgender civil servants. Meanwhile, the White House’s forthcoming budget proposal would eliminate the suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth, a service helps more 2,100 young people in crisis every day.

The anti-LGBTQ agenda of the second Trump administration applies overseas as well. The White House revoked an existing memo which declared that the US shall “pursue an end to violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics.” US embassies have also been banned from flying the LGBTQ flag. Through these actions, the administration has made it clear that the United States government does not believe in LGBTQ rights at home or abroad.

41. Attacking Trans People

Transgender people have faced an extremely disproportionate amount of cruelty under the second Trump administration. The trans community makes up 0.6% of the nation, yet by my count at least 2.7% of the administration’s policies so far has something to do with them. In other words, the proportion of Trump’s policies focused on trans people is more than four times larger than the proportion of Americans who are trans.

The White House has sought to end the enforcement of anti-discrimination protections for trans people, ban them from military service, bar them from receiving accurate passports, and to endanger trans women by transferring them to men’s prisons. After defunding research on trans healthcare, the government is now commissioning propaganda about trans people’s “regret” after medically transitioning (the actual rate of regret is below 1%). Worst of all, the government has effectively denied the very existence of transgender people through a scientifically illiterate executive order declaring that human sex is binary and “not changeable.”

Trans youth, who already face widespread discrimination and bullying, must now contend with a new onslaught from their own government. President Trump’s actions have eliminated protections and resources for trans students at schools, blocked them from receiving age-appropriate medical care, and restricted their participation in school sports. This transphobic extremism has gone so far as to deny $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania for having one single trans athlete, four years ago. The intended purpose of these actions is to turn trans people into second-class citizens and erase them from public life entirely, crushing personal freedom and destroying thousands of lives.

42. Weakening Separation of Church and State

In February, the White House announced the creation of the White House Faith Office (WHFO) as an office which works alongside “faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship.” The White House already had an office which served that purpose: the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which Trump had dissolved several weeks earlier.

This shake-up was only the first sign that the new WHFO would be a different beast entirely. Trump’s appointee to lead the Office is Paula White, the leader of a Christian ministry which she named after herself.

Speaking on the television show of notorious scam artist Jim Bakker in 2019, White said that Christians who do not support Trump will “have to stand accountable before God one day.” She is associated with a far-right Christian movement which believes that the church must take direct control of the US government. When early results from the 2020 election revealed that President Trump was likely to lose his reelection campaign, White stated that it was the result of “demonic confederacies… attempting to steal the election from Trump” and called upon an “angelic reinforcement” to intervene. While an appointee to her new White House position, she has offered “supernatural blessings” to anyone who donates more than $1,000 to her ministry.

It is interesting to note what exactly the Trump administration considers a risk to religious liberty. An executive order on the matter mentioned “anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and additional forms of anti-religious bias,” a statement conspicuously absent of any mention of Islamophobia. Of course, even the mention of antisemitism is insincere; the only religion considered worthy of protection by this government is Christianity. The DOJ created a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” to combat the imaginary anti-Christian discrimination within the US government (Christians are already overrepresented in high-ranking government positions like congress). This has created a bizarre environment for the remaining employees of Departments like State and Veterans Affairs, who are now being encouraged to tattle on one another for any activity which might resemble “anti-Christian bias.”

Part III: Economy and Public Services

Having made much of his money by scamming everyone he could, President Trump wants to reshape the American economy in his own image. But he’s not alone: he’s surrounded by other billionaire elites, with five of the world’s 20 richest men flanking him at his luxurious inauguration. President Trump’s economic agenda will be great for these oligarchs, but disastrous for the average worker.

Key objectives of the second Trump administration’s approach to the domestic economy include the removal of protections for workers and consumers, the dismantling of public education and healthcare, slashed supports for people in need, a short-sighted opposition to long-term public investments, the funneling of taxpayer funds into the pockets of the industries that funded Trump’s campaign, and extreme cuts to public services in order to help pay for tax giveaways to the rich. The result will be a poorer, more unequal, and less productive nation.

43. Eliminating Consumer Protections

One of DOGE’s earliest targets was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has served as a vigilant watchdog protecting people from scams, fraud, exploitation, and unethical business practices. Over its brief history, the Bureau estimates that it saved American consumers nearly $20 billion dollars. Precisely because of its success in protecting us from corporate wrongdoing, wealthy businessmen like Elon Musk have long sought to destroy the bureau.

In February, the government closed the CFPB’s headquarters and ordered the Bureau to halt all of its work on behalf of consumers. The agency’s social media was deleted, and Trump officials rushed to fire workers before the courts could order a pause. The administration attempted another round of mass firings in mid-April.

A brief look at the CFPB actions which were halted or reversed by the second Trump administration gives a good idea of what has been lost. Trump officials dropped at least six of the Bureau’s enforcement actions, including a case against Capitol One for cheating its customers out of $2 billion. The Bureau has said that it will “deprioritize” cases involving student loans, digital payment apps, and medical debt. Several recent rules are in jeopardy, including a ban on the inclusion of medical debt in credit reports and a rule that stopped banks from blocking their customers from switching over to competing banks. The CFPB even worked alongside the big business lobby to kill a rule capping late fees on credit cards.

Don’t expect other government agencies to step in for the CFPB, either: the Trump administration closed other consumer protection offices as well. The days of the US government protecting the financial security of its citizens are now at an end, foreshadowing what will likely be a tidal wave of scams and fraudulent behavior.

44. Cutting Education Funding

President Trump has implemented some of the most severe cuts to public education in modern American history. The administration began by firing nearly half of the Education Department’s workforce, followed by an executive order aiming to eventually closing it entirely. Education Department programs provide about 14% of the funding that public schools operate on, funding which is now left in limbo as already-underfunded schools across the nation wonder how they will keep their lights on.

Specific cuts which will harm our education system include the elimination of over $600 million in teacher training grants, $350 million for Regional Education Laboratories, and $226 million for education centers. The Education Department is also cutting off schools’ access to $2.5 billion in leftover funding from the COVID-19 pandemic. The state of Maine is at risk of having all of its federal K-12 education funding eliminated in retaliation for defying the administration’s anti-trans agenda.

It's not just the public K-12 school system at risk, either. The early childhood education program Head Start has already been disrupted by the White House’s budget and staffing chaos, and the program would be eliminated entirely under Trump’s forthcoming budget proposal. One executive order practically eliminated the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, which provides millions in grant funding to libraries and museums each year. Spending cuts at the National Endowment for Humanities will similarly remove a significant source of funding for museums, universities, and historical landmarks.

12 million former college students no longer have access to income-based repayment plans for their student debt, and other student debt plans are set for their own shakeup soon. Five million former students with defaulted loans are set to lose the leniency they received during the COVID-19 pandemic, and staff cuts have disrupted the student loan payment process for millions more. Fulbright scholars sent to study abroad were left stranded overseas by funding disruptions at the State Department. Applications for the next cohort of Fulbright scholarships are being ideologically vetted by Darren Beattie, a far-right State Department official who was fired from the first Trump administration for attending a white supremacist conference.

45. Attacking Colleges

Beyond the punitive actions against student protestors and the cuts to public research funding, universities are also under threat of having their funding cut off unless they comply with political demands from the White House. The effect of this widely-condemned assault on higher education will be to damage our world-class colleges and to repress students’ freedom of speech.

In its first 100 days, the second Trump administration froze certain funding streams for Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, UPenn, and Princeton. These cuts were intended to punish universities for policies that President Trump dislikes, including climate research, free speech for students, “DEI,” and the participation of trans people on sports teams. Meanwhile, Trump’s new approach to historically black colleges hopes to increase “the private-sector role” in “working to advance my Administration’s key priorities…”

Free speech rights will be the largest victim of this war on colleges. Columbia ultimately caved to the administration’s demands for restrictions on student protests, and their compliance was rewarded only with even more extreme demands for federal oversight. Similar demands were rejected by Harvard, leading to unprecedented threats to revoke the college’s tax exempt status. These attacks have already led to an environment of censorship on college campuses, with some student newspapers taking down their articles in compliance with requests from school administrators who are nervous of attracting the Trump administration’s attention.

46. Blocking Infrastructure & Climate Funds

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) provided large sums of money for infrastructure, clean energy, transportation, sustainable agriculture, and more. Yet on the first day of the second Trump administration, the White House paused all of this spending, freezing billions of dollars in funding which the government had already approved.

When the courts ruled that the White House lacked the authority to pause these funds, the Trump administration initially resisted their demands to release the funding. They eventually relented, ostensibly unfreezing the funding (while also rewriting the language in future grants so that they will be easier to cancel). Still, the funds remain inaccessible for many, and multiple judges are still pressing the government for their full release. In late February, the head of an environmental organization noted that “Many of these grants have been frozen and unfrozen and frozen again multiple times in just the last few weeks.”

The Trump administration’s obstruction has already harmed the US economy and raised Americans’ electric bills. The value of IRA and IIJA funding was recognized by none other than Trump’s own Commerce Secretary, who admitted that any economic downturn during Trump’s second term could come as a result of blocking these programs: “These policies produce revenues. They produce growth. They produce factories being built here.”

47. Undermining Infrastructure

Other recent policies will have a similarly harmful impact on efforts to improve the US’ outdated and underfunded infrastructure. The March budget bill cut $1.4 billion in funding for infrastructure projects that would have better prepared the US for natural disasters, along with additional cuts to rural broadband services, the construction of new Veterans Affairs facilities, and more. The Energy Department offices which help administer infrastructure funds are slated for mass firings. The board of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a public authority which provides electricity to nine million Americans, was paralyzed. AmeriCorps, a program which employs young people for community service projects, is having 41% of its budget cut by DOGE. Thankfully, the administration failed in its attempt to minimize the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, an organization with wide bipartisan backing that provides community development funds to local non-profits.

48. Cutting Public Research

Government investments in research and development (R&D) are the backbone of the entire US economy. Every dollar invested in public R&D produces several dollars of benefits, and nearly a third of all patents filed rely on public research. The iPhone, for example, was built by combining 12 different technologies that were funded by public R&D. The value of this research makes the second Trump administration’s assault on public R&D highly concerning.

A substantial amount of damage has already been done to our national research and development capacity. Scientists are being fired from agencies like NASA, the EPA, and the National Science Foundation. The March budget bill cut $280 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and political conditions are now being attached to their grants. Meanwhile, reduced coverage of “indirect costs” will harm thousands of research operations. A measurement lab which has been in continuous operation for more than 120 years is set to close, and a seed library founded in 1898 has come under fire. Suggestions for even bigger cuts may be coming soon in the White House’s forthcoming budget proposal.

Medical research has been hit particularly hard by recent reforms, including temporary pauses on grant reviews, unpredictable interruptions, government censorship, and reduced resources for research into diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, HIV, and STIs. On top of all of this, DOGE is “controlling information, causing chaos, disrupting everyone, [and] keeping us off-balance” according to one NIH scientist. These attacks on public R&D and medical research are incalculably foolish. The economy will be damaged, and lives will be lost. 

49. Cutting Social Security

Social Security is one of the government’s most popular programs, providing support to over 73 million seniors, disabled people, widows, and more. Yet this cornerstone of the country’s welfare state is now being eroded by the second Trump administration.

Cuts to the Social Security Administration (SSA) have made it harder for recipients to get in touch with caseworkers, and have even eliminated recipients’ ability to do paperwork online or over the phone. The requirement that recipients must now visit SSA offices in person is made worse by the fact that 45 of them are set to close, leaving fewer offices to visit. Despite reducing the amount of paperwork that can be done over the phone, the agency’s phone service has only gotten worse: since January, the rate at which Social Security recipients fail to contact an SSA employee by phone spiked from 3% to 28%.

Elon Musk and President Trump have repeatedly made false statements about Social Security fraud in order to justify taking benefits away from real people. In reality, fraudulent payments represent just 0.006% of total Social Security spending. Cuts to “fraud” and “waste” are really just cuts to the program’s basic functions.

In private, the Trump administration has acknowledged how damaging their plans would be for Social Security recipients. According to their own projections, their desired changes would produce “longer wait times and processing time,” “service disruption,” “operational strain,” and “Increased challenges for vulnerable populations.” Indeed, the requirement to travel to a SSA office in person will be especially burdensome for the millions of disabled people who rely on Social Security to make ends meet.

There have been signs that the administration is now reversing their original plans to disrupt the SSA, though their meddling will likely persist in other forms. The purpose of these changes is not to reduce fraud, but to cut away at one of the country’s most important and beloved social welfare programs.

50. Cutting Support for the Disabled

The second Trump administration has criticized not only “DEI,” but also “DEIA,” a variation of the term which includes “Accessibility” supports for the disabled. DOGE has begun to set its sights on the US Access Board that sets accessibility standards. Supports for the disabled have come under attack, including the reversal of an executive order emphasizing the need for accessible government buildings, cuts to education programs which help disabled students, cuts to disability healthcare programs, and cuts to the Social Security Administration that manages disability benefits. More damage could be coming soon: the President’s forthcoming budget proposal is expected to suggest major cuts to disability programs, and congress’ recent proposals for Medicaid cuts and inefficient “work requirements” would inevitably cut benefits for the disabled.

51. Increasing Poverty

Reduced funding for public education, Social Security, and food aid will raise the already-unacceptable levels of poverty afflicting the United States, an absurdity given our status as one of the world’s wealthiest nations. Yet these are not the only changes which will harm the poor.

Housing aid is one of the biggest victims of President Trump’s pro-poverty agenda. The March budget bill failed to sufficiently increase the Tenant-Based Rental Assistance program, and House Democrats estimate that this shortfall could deprive 32,000 people of vouchers that would help them meet their housing costs. The law also increased the shortfall in funding for homeless assistance programs, damage which will be amplified by the President effectively eliminating the US Interagency Council on Homelessness. Under Trump’s forthcoming budget proposal, far larger cuts to housing aid could occur.

In addition to these cruel housing policies, the government also fired the entire staff of a program which helps six million low-income households pay their heating bills during freezing winters. Child welfare programs are being slashed, and the government cancelled a pilot program allowing five states to experiment with improvements to the crucial-yet-underfunded Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits. Even the team that calculates the federal poverty level to determine who is poor has been eliminated. Each of these decisions is a step in the wrong direction. Rather than abandoning those in need, we should be expanding our efforts to end poverty within our lifetimes.

52. Increasing Hunger

A shocking 13.5% of US households have trouble affording enough food, including millions of children. Under the Trump administration, this problem will only grow worse. While the March budget law was a mixed bag for the funding of nutrition programs, the reconciliation bill currently under construction by congressional Republicans is set to propose massive cuts to programs which feed the poor. The Trump administration has already gotten a head start on cutting anti-hunger initiatives by reducing support for food banks, cancelling farm-to-school programs, and encouraging states to experiment with new limits on food stamps.

53. Weakening Workers’ Rights

President Trump’s disregard for workers’ rights was made clear in his first 100 days, starting with the public sector workers who he has the most control over. One executive order lowered the minimum wage for federal contractors and overturned a Biden-era order improving workers’ rights on government projects. The body responsible for monitoring the rights of federal contractors has been slashed. Public sector workers have had their union agreements cancelled and ignored, their union activities monitored by their bosses, and some have even had their union rights removed entirely.

The largest blow of all came with the decision to revoke federal workers’ collective bargaining rights by classifying virtually every government agency as a “national security” agency, exploiting a loophole in federal labor law. This decision eliminated a basic labor right for 700,000 workers, subjecting them to worse conditions, worse pay, and a major blow to the strength of organized labor—the only force that seriously stands up for workers in this country.

The American Federation of Government Employees argued that these attacks on public sector unions are “merely a pretext for attacking the rights of regular working Americans across the country because they happen to belong to a union.” The administration’s other labor reforms prove that this is true, and that their anti-worker agenda is coming for all workers. This agenda even extends into foreign policy: the administration revoked a memo expressing a commitment to workers’ rights globally and cancelled grants to promote workers’ rights abroad. 

The second Trump administration illegally fired two members of the nation’s workers’ rights body, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Doing so left the NLRB without enough members to achieve a quorum, thereby preventing the agency from functioning at all. This coup was accompanied by a slate of changes which weakened the rights of all working people, including rules against non-compete agreements, remedies for unfair labor practices, and a ban on captive audience anti-union meetings. Once the NLRB was paralyzed, the administration next ordered the elimination of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, another body meant to help resolve labor disputes.

The second Trump administration has also been a disaster for workplace safety, closing offices of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and firing almost everyone working at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. From coal mines to meatpacking plants, the government is working to make unsafe jobs even more dangerous.

Finally, the government’s mass deportation campaign serves as another cover for suppressing workers’ rights. Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino is a labor activist who arrived in the US at the age of 13 and has since dedicated his life to organizing exploited farmworkers for better pay and working conditions. In March, Zeferino was captured by ICE and is now set to be deported. These and other attacks make it clear that President Trump is not just an enemy of federal workers, but an enemy of all workers, in every industry, everywhere.

54. Privatizing Public Services

Government contractors like Elon Musk have grown rich through the privatization of public services that would be better handled by the government, and the second Trump administration seems eager to create more opportunities for billionaires like Musk to step in and fill the gaps where democratic institutions once stood.

The White House eliminated the General Services Administration’s 18F unit, which saved the government money by meeting its technology needs without having to rely on expensive private contractors. The White House is requesting cuts to public media outlets and may be working towards the reprivatization of housing finance agencies. They also encouraged states to funnel public school funding towards private and charter schools.

Military contractors are poised to benefit massively from increased military spending. For prisons and detention centers, the government has embraced corrupt private prison companies. For deportations, they have held talks with the infamous Blackwater mercenary group to discuss the creation of a for-profit deportation machine. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has said that he wants to treat deportations “like a business… like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

In March, DOGE infiltrated the US Postal Service (USPS). Despite their insistence that this move was not a step towards privatization, the USPS was identified by Musk as an institution to privatize (along with the nation’s passenger rail service, Amtrak). Musk has stated that “we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized,” a move which would greatly benefit government contractors like himself.

Other targets for privatization include government-owned real estate, public lands, foreign aid, and even weather forecasting. The influential Project 2025 manifesto argued for the dismantling and privatization of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency in charge of the National Weather Service that has produced virtually all of the nation’s weather data for over 150 years. NOAA is now at immediate risk of being dismantled.

Hundreds of the NOAA workers producing weather data were fired, and cuts to weather balloon launches have already begun reducing the accuracy and availability of weather forecasting in the US. Right on cue, private companies began stepping into the vacuum in hopes of privatizing this basic government function, which would allow them to start charging money for a service which has long been available to everyone for free.

55. Helping Corporate Monopolies

Concern about the power of corporate monopolies has become slightly more bipartisan in recent years, leaving many to wonder whether the second Trump administration will continue the superb work done on anti-trust issues by former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairwoman Lina Khan.

In fairness, there have been some reasons for hope: the Trump administration kept Khan’s tough guidelines on corporate mergers, continued the existing cases against Google and Meta (despite pressure to drop them), and even filed a new lawsuit against Uber. An executive order targeting “anti-competitive” regulations could prove to be fruitful, though it could also be a cover for further mass deregulation. Still, other developments have cast serious doubt on the Trump administration’s willingness to make a serious break with its corporate backers.

The firing of both of the FTC’s Democratic commissioners dealt a serious blow to the bipartisan agency’s ability to police corporate monopolies. The damage was further compounded by the deletion of over 300 statements and blog posts from the FTC’s website, including many which provided guidance to companies on how to comply with the law. The FTC effectively ended an inquiry into “surveillance pricing,” and other agencies have made it easier for big banks to merge with one another.

While it is possible that the Trump administration will pursue a few select anti-trust cases, the government’s general approach seems to be reverting to one which puts corporate monopolies ahead of the public good. The FCC seems willing to approve mergers for major media companies so long as they abandon DEI, and multiple agencies have cleared the way for the merger of two of the nation’s largest credit card companies. More of these capitulations to corporate power are likely in the near future.

56. Deregulating Everything

Regulation is one of the basic tools which all governments use to accomplish public goals. Driven by an ideological opposition to using public power for public welfare, the second Trump administration is now attempting to destroy the government’s ability to regulate anything, a destructive campaign which endangers our health, our safety, our environment, our wages, and our communities.

It is difficult to overstate the extremism of the deregulatory campaign which is currently underway at more than 400 government agencies. The second Trump administration froze all regulatory rulemaking and now seeks to review all existing rules with an eye towards eliminating those that the President dislikes, while also placing expiration dates on whatever remains. An arbitrary cap was placed on all future rulemaking during this administration, requiring the elimination of ten existing rules for each new one issued (regardless of whether or not there are ten relevant rules worthy of eliminating).

Existing rules have been neutered by a stark drop in the enforcement of everything from worker protections to pollution limits: over 100 different law enforcement actions against corporations were dropped in the administration’s first two months alone.

The creation of a “United States Investment Accelerator” has given special deregulatory privileges to large corporations, offering exclusive help to “reduce regulatory burdens” for billion-dollar investment projects. No comparable institution has been created for small businesses working on smaller projects, save for a suggestion box website that allows people to submit “deregulatory recommendations.”

Environmental protections are particularly endangered by this deregulatory mania. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the “Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History,” an effort which will allow for more pollution in our air and water, dirtier power plants, and the abandonment of communities struggling from industrial pollution.

While there are certainly some regulations which do more harm than good, we should remember the worker’s adage that regulations are “written in blood.” Most regulations are the direct result of an attempt at ending practices which once threatened peoples’ lives and livelihoods. Large-scale deregulation might make our bosses richer, but it will come at our expense.

57. Deregulating Big Banks

Wall Street has even more to gain from this government than other industries. The Trump administration’s plan to centralize financial regulation is expected to loosen restrictions on the behavior of large, risky financial institutions. While the full details of the plan are not yet public, much can be learned about it from the fact that it has been opposed by small banks but welcomed by the CEOs of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.

In case there was any doubt about President Trump’s bias in favor of Wall Street, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that the administration will be reviewing “all bank regulation” to decide which safeguards to dismantle. In a speech to the bankers’ lobby, Bessent rejected international efforts to strengthen capital requirements for banks and discussed his plans for a variety of deregulatory reforms. Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman is also a well-known advocate of financial deregulation.

Over 1,200 staffers are being fired from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and congress is planning on cuts to other financial oversight agencies later this year. The government has already delayed new reporting requirements for mutual funds, ended “reputational risk” rules at multiple regulatory agencies, and merged two offices in a way which is likely to benefit big banks. It’s still early, but the second Trump administration has already proven itself willing to destabilize the economy in order to boost the profits of Wall Street bankers.

58. Disrupting Public Health

As the US gradually recovers from the worst pandemic in a century, the White House is actively undermining efforts to improve our public health system.

A gag order preventing health agencies from communicating with the public deprives us of valuable medical information, as does the turn against a data-driven approach to COVID-19. In fact, many of the federal government’s online resources for COVID-19 have been replaced with a page explaining the President’s preferred theory for the disease’s origins. Life-saving medical research has been damaged by a combination of frozen funding and widespread censorship which will slow the rate at which we will discover new breakthrough treatments. The withdrawal from the World Health Organization leaves us as one of the only nations on earth who will not fully benefit from the organization’s tremendous efforts. Minority health offices, tribal health offices, and other programs which aim to reduce healthcare inequalities are also under attack.

The administration fired the top officials responsible for managing the bird flu, along with eight board members of the National Cancer Institute. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s database on drug safety has largely been abandoned. In one especially revealing example of how illogical the mass firings have been, the FDA thoughtlessly fired the workers responsible for preventing the sale of tobacco to minors and is now desperately trying to rehire them.

In April, the administration announced a major restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which will include the firing of 10,000 employees. The White House’s forthcoming budget proposal for this year contains even more cuts. Combined with the elimination of environmental health offices, reduced support for programs addressing opioid addiction and gun violence, and billions in cuts to state health agencies, our entire national infrastructure for responding to major health crises now faces a crisis of its own.

Don’t worry though, insurance companies will make more than ever! The administration proposed a $25 billion increase in Medicare Advantage funding as a form of corporate welfare for the insurers who benefit from the privatized program. While the rest of us get sick, corporate executives will continue to see healthy profits.

59. Raising Drug Prices

Former President Biden was the first ever President to move towards negotiating Medicare drug prices downward, a policy used by most of the world’s developed nations to reduce the amount of money wasted on the absurd prices set by pharmaceutical monopolies. The authority to negotiate will kick in by 2026, after which the government is expected to reduce its spending on ten major drugs by an estimated $1.8 billion a year. These initial negotiations would be only the first step in a process that could ultimately save over $10 billion a year.

The future of this promising new policy is now at risk. President Trump overturned the executive order which implemented the negotiation policy, although the law authorizing negotiations still remains in place. He then issued his own executive order “improving” the negotiation plans. The contents of this order suggest that the administration will carry out negotiations in some form, but could water down the policy for certain categories of drugs. Any attempt at weakening these negotiations will represent a massive giveaway to big pharma at the expense of US taxpayers.

Other recent policy choices risk raising drug prices even higher. The mass firing of government workers has halted an effort to hold pharmacy benefit managers accountable for 1,200% increases in insulin prices. And the President’s plans for “major” tariffs on pharmaceutical imports will function as a “major” tax on millions of Americans’ medications.

60. Embracing Anti-Vax Conspiracies

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative combines legitimate concerns about chemical pollution and food safety with long-debunked conspiracy theories. Kennedy’s false claims about the safety and efficacy of vaccines—one of the most important life-saving developments in medical history—have now begun to distort government policy.

The top vaccine official at the FDA was forced out of his position, meetings of the advisory committee on vaccines were cancelled, and the application to approve a new COVID-19 vaccine was allowed to expire. The administration withheld funds from schools with COVID-19 vaccination requirements, and they are now considering removing the recommendation that children be vaccinated for COVID-19. Medical research into why people like Kennedy are hesitant to take vaccines was cancelled. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine hysteria even led the government to cancel a campaign of public service advertisements encouraging people to get their annual flu shot.

Elsewhere within HHS, a known anti-vaccine quack has been commissioned to conduct a study exploring the long-debunked myth of a connection between vaccines and autism. Kennedy confidently claims that he will find the cause of autism “by September.”

Secretary Kennedy has been talking out both sides of his mouth in response to a growing measles outbreak in Texas, offering a soft endorsement of vaccination to the public while privately lying to the family of children killed by the disease that “You don’t know what’s in the vaccine anymore.” As RFK Jr.’s own past record has shown, these lies about vaccines can be extremely deadly. If the government continues to abandon their commitment to the scientific method in favor of crackpot conspiracies, “Make America Healthy Again” will make America far, far sicker.

61. Embracing AIDS Denial Conspiracies

Anti-vax conspiracies are not the only absurd ideas embraced by HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He has also been influenced by AIDS denialists who believe the medical consensus about the condition to be false, and that AIDS is actually caused by alkyl nitrite party drugs (commonly known as “poppers”). Kennedy once falsely claimed that 100% of early AIDS deaths “were people who were addicted to poppers… people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.”

This dangerous delusion is being translated into policy. In recent months, the HHS has begun to conduct systematic raids of poppers manufacturers while simultaneously cutting millions of dollars in HIV research. And at USAID, the world’s most successful anti-AIDS program has seen its funding slashed.

There has been enormous progress on HIV/AIDS in the US in recent years, lowering both its infection rate and its lethality. Secretary Kennedy’s anti-scientific conspiracism threatens to reverse this progress.

62. Helping Tax Dodgers

The Trump administration’s policies will hit working people hard, but they’re great news for wealthy tax cheats. Between staff firings and congressional cuts to the IRS’ enforcement budget, it is getting much easier for the rich to avoid paying their fair share. Audits are already on the decline, but it could get far worse; if the additional cuts suggested by the White House’s budget are passed through congress, they could reduce the IRS’ staff down to its lowest level in modern history. Because each dollar spent on tax enforcement raises more than one dollar in revenue, these cuts will actually cost the government a massive amount of money, effectively providing a tax cut to the most dishonest members of our wealthy upper class.

The assault on the IRS is complimented by other policy changes which make tax evasion even easier. The DOJ’s Tax Division, which pursues criminal tax evasion, is under threat of closure. Meanwhile, congress passed a law which made it easier to dodge taxes through cryptocurrency.  

President Trump’s policy of supporting tax cheats has even affected global efforts to crackdown on tax evasion. On day one, the administration withdrew from the international deal to address tax havens with a minimum corporate tax rate. In order to maximize their disruption to the world’s efforts on this issue, US diplomats stormed out of a United Nations meeting discussing an international tax framework and encouraged others to join them (none did). Ironically, because the US has been something of a nuisance in these negotiations, some advocates believe that a US withdrawal could ultimately produce a stronger global agreement on tax justice. Hopefully the rest of the world can continue to act responsibly while we make fools of ourselves.

63. Making It Harder to File Your Taxes

Every year, Americans waste billions of dollars paying two massive companies—TurboTax and H&R Block—to help them with their taxes. The tax filing duopoly lobbies to keep it that way in hopes of preventing the government from setting up a free alternative. Unfortunately for them, the government recently created IRS Free File, giving many Americans a simple way to file their taxes without having to pay anything at all. The program was expected to save the average user $160 in fees and hours of their time each year.

But the $1 million which TurboTax gave to President Trump seems to be paying off, as the White House is reportedly planning to kill IRS Free File and has already halted work on it for next year’s tax season. Killing this program in its infancy reduces government efficiency, makes it harder for people to file their taxes, and allows a parasitic corporate duopoly to continue squeezing money out of our pockets every year.

64. Hurting Farmers

President Trump’s promise to “PROTECT OUR FARMERS” has not translated into action. Trump admitted that his tariffs put farmers “on the Front Line” of the trade war, endangering the more than 20% of farm income which comes from exports. He has few solutions for this problem beyond another potential round of bailouts taken from a fund which is currently running low.

Farmers are also being hit hard by the government’s spending cuts. The administration cut support for Farm Service Agency offices, farm-to-school food programs, sustainable crops, agricultural research, conservation programs, and more. Cuts to the Farm Service Agency will be especially harmful, one North Carolina farmer explained, because “that’s the avenue for farmers to communicate with the federal government for reporting problems. That’s supposed to be our lifeline to get some kind of help at a time like this.”

Though small and medium-sized farms are at the greatest risk, most support so far has gone to big agricultural corporations. The most significant relief for farmers from the Trump administration so far is a $10 billion payout through the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program, which provides most of its support to a handful of commodities that are dominated by large industrial agro-corporations (corn and soybeans alone are projected to take up 65% of the bailout payments). At best, a few corn farmers will break even from all of this. But for most family farmers, the second Trump administration is likely to be an era of severe pain.

65. Cutting Veterans Services

Despite his administration’s promises, President Trump’s agenda has included cuts to the public services that veterans of the US military rely upon. First and foremost, the large-scale cuts to the government’s workforce disproportionately harm veterans, as they make up nearly one in four federal employees thanks to veteran hiring preferences. But even veterans who don’t work for the government will be affected by cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which has seen almost 15% of its staff fired. Even the remaining staffers are having their time wasted by frivolous demands from the White House, like identifying all documents “that reference the word ‘gender.’”

The March budget bill was ultimately a mixed bag for veterans, funding their healthcare and raising wages for active duty soldiers while also cutting $800 million in funding for the construction of new VA facilities. Most other recent changes have been unequivocally negative, such as the cuts to research funding that affected hundreds of healthcare research projects at the VA, as well as the $2 billion cut in VA contracts, some of which dealt directly with providing care for veterans.

66. Resegregating Housing

One of many victims of the President’s war on “DEI” is fair housing policies. The Department of Housing and Urban Development rescinded a rule requiring states to verify that they are working to eliminate housing discrimination. There will also be a major decline in the enforcement of fair housing rules due to the defunding of organizations that help enforce the Fair Housing Act. In one particularly shocking case, the government is now seeking to return a fine paid by a discriminatory housing lender as a penalty for their criminal discrimination. Residential segregation remains a serious problem across most of the United States, and it is a problem which the Trump administration hopes to make worse.

67. Boosting the Crypto Industry

The cryptocurrency industry was the number one spender on elections last year, to a shockingly large degree: 44% of all corporate money spent on the 2024 elections came from the crypto lobby. This year, the lobby’s reward is a bipartisan obsession with serving their needs. Nowhere is this subservience to the crypto industry more apparent than the White House.

President Trump set up a working group filled with crypto industry advocates to work on pro-crypto policy, and also appointed a key financial regulator who considers the creation of a crypto-friendly regulatory framework a “top priority.” A recent regulation keeping traditional banking separate from the highly-volatile cryptocurrency market has been eliminated, and regulators have decided that certain cryptocurrencies are outside of their jurisdiction entirely. The crypto craze has even infected foreign aid, with White House plans to reorganize USAID proposing that it “Leverage blockchain technology.”

Law enforcement efforts against cryptocurrency-related crime are now largely nonexistent (with only a few exceptions). The SEC has reduced its enforcement efforts against crypto crime, and  the Justice Department disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. The government dropped lawsuits against multiple crypto companies and removed sanctions on a crypto firm which helped launder funds stolen by North Korean hackers. In an apparent first, President Trump even pardoned a corporation: a crypto exchange which violated anti-money laundering laws.

Trump himself has sought to profit from the scam-ridden industry. The President launched his own $TRUMP coin and has used the presidency to pump up its value, even offering White House access to those who buy the most of it. Binance, a major crypto exchange which pled guilty to money laundering charges in 2023, is currently engaged in talks to make a deal with Trump’s crypto business; at the same time, they are also in talks with Trump’s Treasury Department to further loosen regulations.

The most blatant government subsidy to the crypto industry came in the form of the “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” filled with billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin that was seized by the government in various criminal cases. Instead of selling off these crypto assets to raise revenues or reduce the debt, the government will instead sit on them to keep Bitcoin’s value artificially high; in fact, the Reserve may even seek to purchase more! This effectively uses the government’s power to subsidize Bitcoin owners, driving up the asset’s value by taking a significant amount of supply off the market.

We are rapidly approaching the peak of crypto hysteria. Even though cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are completely speculative, unstable, intrinsically worthless, and a waste of physical resources, President Trump’s crypto adviser considers them to be “digital gold” which “should be treated as such.” Yet despite their complete victory, the crypto lobby that bought last year’s elections are still unsatisfied. They want revenge too, looking for ways to punish anyone who may have once stood in their way. It’s the scammers’ economy now; you’re just living in it.

Part IV: Environment and Energy

The second Trump administration may be the most radically anti-environmental presidency in American history. While every Republican administration since Reagan has adopted anti-environmental policies, the second Trump administration has gone further in pledging to shove a “dagger through the heart” of environmental policies, sacrificing the long-term health of the planet so that a few corporations can make short-term profits.

Noteworthy features of the second Trump administration’s environmental agenda include a dishonest rejection of the realities of climate change, attempts to censor the mere mention of climate change, the removal of basic rules against air and water pollution, the dismantling of food safety and disaster preparation policies, corporate subsidies to dirty industries, and an opposition to any form of transportation besides unsafe and inefficient cars.

68. Accelerating Climate Change

As temperatures rise, natural disasters grow more severe, and billions around the world face new challenges caused by climate change, the fossil fuel executives leading Trump’s environmental policy take the position that “There is no climate crisis.” Now that the oil and gas elite are in power, they are doing everything they can to reverse the progress which has been made towards addressing this existential threat.

The government repealed a tax placed on methane emissions, a highly dangerous form of pollution which companies have long been able to pump into the atmosphere at no cost. Indeed, the government seems to deny that pollution carries any cost at all. The “social cost of carbon” is a figure that the government uses to estimate how much damage is caused by each unit of carbon emissions. The estimate used by the Biden administration was already far too low, but now the second Trump administration is working to reduce it further, perhaps even bringing it down to zero.

The White House moved repeatedly to weaken efficiency standards that reduce the amount of energy and water used by household appliances, decisions which both increase pollution and raise people’s utility bills. And even though the Trump administration claims to want to increase energy production across the board, it has actually reduced the government’s ability to produce green technology through the Defense Production Act.

It is not enough that the federal government abandon its climate responsibilities—President Trump also wants to force states and cities to do the same. In an unprecedented power grab, Trump ordered his Attorney General to identify practically all state and local climate policies and bring many of them to an end by taking “all appropriate action to stop the[ir] enforcement…”

Yet the real holy grail for anti-climate corporate executives is a policy which is still in the works. If the Trump administration succeeds in its plans to undermine or eliminate the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” it will allow the government to completely deny the scientific reality of climate change and eliminate countless more environmental protections, unleashing a massive wave of pollution large enough to threaten the very survival of humanity.

69. Rejecting Cooperation on Climate Change

Dealing with the threat posed by climate change is the greatest long-term challenge that our world faces today. Yet the second Trump administration has fully surrendered on this challenge, rejecting international cooperation towards common solutions for a common problem.

President Trump’s second term began with a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, leaving the US as one of the only nations on earth that won’t cooperate with the global effort to tackle the climate crisis. The implications of this move alone could be tremendous, risking a significant reversal of the progress that has been made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The US is even refusing to simply monitor the issue, banning government scientists from contributing to the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s premier effort to keep track of the climate crisis.

Beyond the rejection of existing agreements, the Trump administration is also trying to scuttle talks for future agreements. The State Department office dedicated to climate negotiations is being eliminated in its entirety. The US is actively working to disrupt international negotiations to address maritime shipping pollution, telling other governments that America will completely reject their agreement and may even punish those who participate. Meanwhile, the administration has also been pressuring the International Energy Agency to bias its approach in favor of fossil fuels.

One final component of the administration’s surrender to global climate change is the cancellation of the US International Climate Finance Plan and $1.2 billion in climate aid, reneging on our promises to help developing nations reduce their pollution and prepare for the future. This irresponsibility is on full display in the government’s refusal to address past damages caused by our status as the world’s largest historical polluter. By withdrawing from the board of the newly-created Loss and Damage Fund, the US has abandoned its (already tiny) pledge to help the developing world recover from the harm caused by our pollution. Even the small amount of climate aid currently available through the IMF and World Bank is too much for the US Treasury Secretary, who accused these institutions of “mission creep” for caring about climate change at all.

This is a disastrous approach. Climate change does not stop at our national borders, and neither should our efforts to fix it.

70. Censoring Discussion of Climate Change

Denying the reality of climate change is central to the second Trump administration’s project. Because they cannot credibly challenge the scientific consensus on the matter, they have instead opted to censor any discussion of it at all, forcing the entire government to stick its head into the sand and ignore basic facts.

Mentions of “climate change” have been systematically removed from government documents, with senior officials demanding that their employees “eliminate… the use of climate change terminology…” Scientists have been blocked from holding long-running calls with the media about climate science. Many polluters may not even have to report their greenhouse gas emissions for much longer.

Future research into both the scope of climate change and its health effects has been halted. Research on how climate change affects the weather is also on the chopping block. All of the scientists who compile the National Climate Assessment have been fired. Despite its status as one of the greatest threats to global security, the military is now censoring documents and cancelling initiatives which mention climate change, all the while removing discussion of the threat that it poses from their analyses. And despite the threat that climate change poses to our food system, employees at the Agricultural Research Service have been banned from using terms like “climate change,” “clean energy,” and even “safe drinking water.”

Recent data shows that climate change accelerated at a record pace in 2024. You may not have heard about it, because the government agency that published the data suppressed its announcement. Although this mandatory ignorance being imposed on the public may serve the Trump administration’s immediate political goals, it will only allow the problems facing us to grow larger while we waste critical opportunities to address them head-on.

71. Damaging the Environment

Apathy towards climate change is sadly common, but the White House’s approach goes even further: total apathy towards any form of environmental action at all. Regional offices across the country which host scientists, conservation workers, and resources for local communities are set to close. Scientific experts are being replaced by political hacks, including oil company employees, authors of the Project 2025 manifesto, and all types of crackpots. The American Climate Corps—a recently-created program giving young people job opportunities in cleaning up the environment, improving public lands, and preparing for natural disasters—has been shuttered. It doesn’t matter how reasonable a proposal is; if it uses the word “climate” or “environment,” it is now under threat.

72. Increasing Air Pollution

Air pollution is the world’s second largest risk factor for death, killing roughly 8 million people every year. While the US has made great progress on reducing air pollution in recent decades, that progress is now threatened by reforms from the second Trump administration which will make it easier to pump our air full of dangerous toxins and pollutants.

As part of the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history,” the EPA is considering plans to weaken four of the nation’s most important air pollution protections: the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, the Particulate Matter National Ambient Air Quality Standards, the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants, and the Regional Haze Program.

To make it even easier for polluters to dodge Clean Air Act regulations, the agency set up an email inbox exclusively for companies to request an exemption to the rules blocking them from flooding our air with cancerous chemicals. The dirtiest power plant in the country was one of the first to contact the email address, asking to be exempted from air pollution rules for two years. Exemptions have been granted to at least 47 companies so far.

The second Trump administration is also planning to weaken vehicle emission standards, which would increase the pollution emitted from exhaust pipes (and raise drivers’ gas bills). This will be particularly harmful when combined with the government’s various plans to undermine the waiver that allows California to set air pollution standards which are stronger than the national standards. This would not only worsen air pollution in California, but also in the 17 other states who have opted to use their improved standards. All together, the second Trump administration’s plans are a recipe for dirtier air, threatening the health of everyone in the United States.

73. Increasing Water Pollution

It’s not just clean air under threat: clean water is too. The EPA is considering plans to make it easier for oil and gas companies to dump their waste into the water system and to protect pesticide companies from lawsuits. A major rule protecting wetland ecosystems from pollution is on the chopping block. An executive order focused on promoting the government’s use of plastic straws (yes, really) will increase the proliferation of microplastics, which are now widespread within our drinking water and our bodies. The administration also abandoned an effort to keep sewage out of the drinking water of a majority-black county in Alabama, while two of Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees supported the recent decision to dump more raw sewage in US waterways. Between chemical waste, pesticides, microplastics, and raw sewage, these changes will make America sicker and place our marine ecosystems in grave danger.

74. Ending Food Safety Inspections

Food safety inspections are a critical part of our food system, helping to reduce the millions of illnesses and thousands of deaths caused by foodborne illness each year. Yet the number of annual food inspections declined from a peak of 20,000 in 2011 to less than 8,000 in 2020, and they have still yet to recover to pre-COVID levels. The Trump administration plans to bring these food safety inspections down to as low of a level as possible.

Mass firings at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) led the agency to suspend an important food safety inspection program for much of this year, and they are even making plans to permanently reduce their involvement in routine food safety inspections. A rule preventing the spread of salmonella in poultry sales was cancelled, and the administration is considering weakening the Seafood Import Monitoring Program. FDA officials responsible for announcing food recalls have been fired, as have the researchers working on the safety of baby formula. Some of these FDA workers may be replaced by contractors, privatizing a basic government function and leaving the health and safety of the American people in the hands of unaccountable for-profit companies.

75. Undoing Disaster Preparations

While the frequency and scale of natural disasters in the US grows, the second Trump administration has undermined efforts to prepare. One executive order calling for the creation of a “National Resilience Strategy” seems quite reasonable until one sees it through the lens of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s desire to completely “eliminate” our disaster recovery organization, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Suddenly, the subtext of the executive order becomes clear: the White House might just be laying the groundwork to downsize the national government’s role in disaster management and preparation.

While President Trump’s resistance to providing disaster aid to Democratic-leaning areas is well-documented, even conservative and politically competitive areas are now being denied help. In the areas of western North Carolina which are still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Helene, the second Trump administration denied an extension of disaster aid, cut off health aid, and pulled volunteer teams out of the area. The White House even denied aid to Arkansas to help with tornado recovery.

The White House ended FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant (a program launched by Trump himself during his first term) and cut EPA disaster recovery grants. They also removed a requirement for cities to plan ahead for the effects of climate change, reducing preparedness for future disasters.

The March budget bill cut $1.4 billion in funding that would have gone towards hurricane and flood mitigation. Another $10 billion in disaster aid was cancelled for fear that some of the relief might go towards non-citizens affected by disasters. Even worse, the government is currently planning on staff cuts at FEMA. Natural disasters are becoming a larger problem, not a smaller one. Unless the government acts accordingly, lives will be lost.

76. Degrading National Parks and Forests

Our National Parks and Forests are the crown jewel of the United States, beautiful landscapes which are visited by hundreds of millions of people from around the world each year. This could soon change under the second Trump administration, which views public lands as a “balance sheet” of “assets” to be exploited by corporations, not something worthy of conservation.

At least 1,000 National Park Service workers and 3,400 US Forest Service employees have been fired from their jobs, placing serious strain on two vital agencies which were already understaffed. The declines in service and maintenance quickly became apparent to some National Park visitors, although Park employees have been barred from providing honest answers for why when asked by curious tourists. These cuts might also have a disastrous effect on wildfire management: at least 700 of those fired from the Forest Service were trained to assist firefighters in slowing the spread of deadly wildfires.

77. Giving Natural Resources Away to Corporations

Corporate executives are being given a blank check to loot our country. When companies harvest natural resources from public lands, they pay the government rates which are far below market value, effectively giving them government subsidies to damage the environment. Most federal land is already open to these types of activities, but the second Trump administration hopes to expand their availability even further.

Actions taken in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term have opened up more public land to abuse by the fossil fuel industry, watered down environmental reviews for new fossil fuel projects, and even threatened national monuments. This campaign has been particularly aggressive in Alaska, where the government has been pushing hard for fossil fuel operations in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—our “last great wilderness”—even though the industry itself does not seem very interested.

The fossil fuel industry isn’t the only one being given a green light to spoil the commons. The push to cut down more trees in our national forests threatens to destroy beautiful natural ecosystems in order to harvest their “assets,” trading fresh air and healthy wildlife for more “timber outputs.” More than half of all US Forest Service land is now open to deforestation.

Rules preventing overfishing and protecting marine ecosystems were loosened, and a protected marine area in the Pacific was opened to commercial fishing. The White House is also encouraging the controversial practice of deep sea mining in international waters (the US is one of the few countries which has not signed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty meant to regulate such practices).

Finally, the White House is pushing for increased mining on public lands, flooding pristine environments with hazardous waste without any serious compensation for the damage. One major victim of this policy will be Native tribes. In Arizona, for example, the Trump administration is moving to transfer sacred Apache lands over to a mining company. Mindlessly tearing up the earth we stand upon in this fashion will not produce prosperity for anyone except a wealthy few, placing a heavy burden upon the shoulders of all future generations.

78. Boosting the Fossil Fuel Industry

The fossil fuel lobby spent $96 million last year to help re-elect Donald Trump. To return the favor, the second Trump administration has rolled out the red carpet for the CEOs of oil, gas, and coal companies, handing major benefits out to a dangerous industry which is already heavily subsidized.

The declaration of a “national energy emergency” was the first favor to the fossil fuel industry, as the emergency grants President Trump new authorities to bypass environmental laws in service of expanding dirty energy production. The government also established a “National Energy Dominance Council” to focus attention on the President’s preferred energy sources. Despite declaring that the council is committed to expanding “all forms of reliable and affordable energy,” the announcement of the group’s creation mentions natural gas four times without mentioning either solar or wind once.

More concretely, the second Trump administration expanded the export of liquefied natural gas, withdrew plans to improve gas pipeline safety, loosened restrictions on offshore drilling, gave oil and gas companies special exemptions from Trump’s tariffs, and abandoned a rule which would have required corporations to disclose their emissions. At times it seems as though the entire government has been turned into a vehicle for promoting fossil fuels, with even the Army Corps of Engineers dedicating their efforts to promoting these inefficient energy sources.

Coal, the dirtiest source of energy available, has received the most special treatment. The government promoted the creation of new coal plants, designated coal a “critical mineral,” reestablished a “National Coal Council,” boosted financing and research support for coal companies, and made a variety of other concessions to the dying industry. Despite being more expensive than its cleaner alternatives, the administration is also pushing coal on developing nations in Africa, encouraging the continent to lock itself into an extremely inefficient form of energy generation which already kills countless Africans each year.

Lest anyone mistakenly assume that these moves are to the benefit of coal workers, the Trump administration has dispelled that notion. While heaping benefits upon coal executives, they cut a healthcare program and job security protections for miners. The administration also paused the enforcement of a new safety rule which protects mineworkers from deadly levels of silica dust exposure, prompting a legal battle with the United Mine Workers of America. We don’t need to give fossil fuel companies more preferential treatment; we need a just transition away from fossil fuels which ensures that all workers have their needs met.

79. Halting Clean Energy Progress

The White House’s commitment to increasing US energy production apparently applies to every form of energy except for clean energy. The second Trump administration paused all leasing for “renewable energy” projects on public lands for 60 days, even as they accelerated the process for fossil fuel projects. Even worse is an indefinite ban on all offshore wind energy projects which will remain in effect until the President decides otherwise. President Trump has had a strong hatred of offshore wind energy ever since losing a battle to block wind turbines from being built off the coast of his Scottish golf course. So intense is his hatred that he even blocked two offshore wind projects in the US which were already in the planning and construction stages.

Wind and solar energy are two of the safest and cleanest energy sources available, and our supplies of wind and sunshine will never run out. Purposefully obstructing the development of the energy projects that will define our future is clear evidence that President Trump’s plans are not to maximize energy production, but to defend the interests of the fossil fuel CEOs who helped fund his presidential campaign.

80. Dismantling Environmental Justice Programs

The impacts of environmental destruction are not evenly distributed: poor communities suffer more than wealthy ones, and communities of color suffer more than white communities. Only recently has the government made any efforts to address these long-standing inequalities, and now these early responses are being destroyed. Environmental justice programs seeking to address pollution in poor and minority neighborhoods are being dismantled across the government, including the Justice40 initiative to ensure that communities in need get their fair share of federal investments. Meanwhile, staff cuts at the EPA have focused on reducing the capacity of environmental justice offices. These reforms ensure that the damage done by President Trump’s anti-environmental agenda will hit vulnerable people the hardest.

81. Weakening the Endangered Species Act

The Endangered Species Act, which is credited with saving nearly 300 species from extinction since its passage, was weakened by the second Trump administration. The government’s “national energy emergency” declaration includes a section urging government regulators to prioritize fossil fuel projects over the protection of endangered wildlife, including the creation of an “extinction committee” with the authority to decide which species will be allowed to live and which will be left to perish. The White House plans to further weaken the law by narrowing the definition of what it means to “harm” an endangered animal. All of these senseless decisions will worsen the severe extinction crisis which the world is now facing, damaging the intricate biodiversity that keeps our planet healthy.

82. Gutting NEPA Protections

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is one of the US’ foundational environmental laws, establishing a framework through which the government must consider the impacts of activities that disturb the environment. Debate has raged in recent years about potential reforms to the law, raising questions about how to properly balance the goals of sustainability and efficiency.

President Trump has waded into the NEPA debate by adopting the most extreme position possible, basically nullifying the entire law by removing all of the regulations used to implement it and setting impossibly short deadlines for environmental reviews. The White House wants to completely neutralize NEPA as an environmental protection tool, as demonstrated by their exemption of more than 3,000 oil leases in the western US from environmental review. Yet gutting NEPA may not even succeed in reducing red tape: private developers now may have to comply with the complex labyrinth of overlapping rules that NEPA was originally meant to consolidate. In the debate between sustainability and efficiency, we are now set to get neither.

83. Limiting Transportation Options

The White House has limited Americans’ choices for travel, placing impediments in front of several different alternatives to gas-powered cars. The most obvious example has been the administration’s hatred of electric vehicles (EVs), as seen in their plans to end pro-EV policies and their decision to spend extra money to shut down brand new EV charging stations.

Other transportation options are in danger as well. The Department of Transportation (DOT) froze spending on bike infrastructure, limiting support for a clean and healthy form of transportation used by more than 100 million Americans. At the same time, tariffs on China now threaten to crush the bicycle industry. Rail travel is also under attack: the DOT eliminated funding for a high-speed rail project in Texas, and the removal of Amtrak’s CEO could make it easier for President Trump to finally impose the cuts to passenger rail service which he sought during his first term.

84. Making Travel Less Safe

Not only have Americans’ options for travel been limited, they have become more dangerous too. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has suffered through staffing cuts and infiltration by Elon Musk’s SpaceX (makers of spaceships which constantly explode), creating heightened anxiety around a recent spate of aviation accidents. The FAA’s acting administrator anticipates that the reduction in aviation staffers will continue for some time to come: “We will be leaner in a year, two years. It’s the fact.”

Musk is also the mastermind behind Tesla Motors, whose cars have the industry’s highest accident rate, so much so that they are currently being recalled en masse. Naturally, Musk’s response was to fire workers at the auto safety agency which is currently recalling his vehicles. President Trump’s team has also considered eliminating a rule opposed by Tesla that would create reporting requirements for crashes by “self-driving” cars. When it comes to transportation safety, the fox is guarding the hen house.

Part V: Foreign Policy

Fans and critics alike have labelled President Trump an “isolationist,” someone who desires an end to US involvement in the world. This is entirely inaccurate. While it is true that Donald Trump rejects peaceful engagement with others—diplomacy, trade, and immigration—he is still an advocate of unilateral interventions in the affairs of other nations. He is not opposed to getting the US tangled up in foreign affairs, he is opposed to working alongside other nations as equal partners. The President does not want the US to dominate the world in collaboration with a network of allies and multilateral institutions—he wants the US to dominate the world alone.

The foreign policy of the second Trump administration is defined by a principled hostility towards peaceful diplomacy, an unprovoked trade war against the entire planet, imperialist claims to the resources and territories of other nations, further growth of US military spending, a complete disregard for basic human rights, and an aggressive approach towards others which risks sparking new armed conflicts around the world.

85. Abandoning Global Diplomacy

The second Trump administration is categorically opposed to multilateral diplomacy and global cooperation, instead preferring the use of unilateral violence and coercion. America First means America alone.

The US government has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, the Paris Agreement on climate change, the global minimum corporate tax agreement, and several other instruments for peaceful cooperation on major global challenges. The White House is currently reviewing US participation in all international organizations and treaties to determine which are “contrary to the interests of the United States…”

The State Department is planning a massive reorganization which will shed 15% of its staff and directly undermine its ability to engage in diplomacy on a host of important issues. Offices slated for closure include those dedicated to women’s rights, human trafficking, climate change, and more. The State Department also intends to limit the scope of its annual reports on international human rights, removing references to due process, the right to protest, corruption, freedom of movement, prison conditions, and “free and fair elections.” The President’s forthcoming budget proposal is expected to go even further, cutting the State Department’s budget in half and closing at least 27 diplomatic outposts overseas.

Many of the administration’s anti-diplomatic decisions were motivated by President Trump’s general foreign policy agenda, such as the freeze on funding to the World Trade Organization. But many others were motivated by a desire to punish institutions which have disagreed with the Israeli government, including the creation of sanctions on the International Criminal Court, the blockage of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, and the “review” of US membership in the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

More generally, the second Trump administration is signaling a principled opposition to the use of multilateral diplomacy at all, even for matters of global consensus. In March, US diplomats announced their total opposition to the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of basic priorities which the international community has organized around since 2015. This list of goals which the US government now “rejects and denounces” includes “quality education,” “zero hunger,” “gender equality,” and “clean water and sanitation.”

86. Destroying Foreign Aid

The first government agency selected for destruction by DOGE was the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the world’s largest source of humanitarian aid. The plot to destroy foreign aid began with a “90-day pause” on foreign aid to all recipients (except for Egypt and Israel). Next came plans to eliminate up to 90% of all foreign aid, which eventually materialized in the form of an 83% cut. Several other foreign aid agencies are also being targeted. Border Patrol’s move into USAID’s old office perfectly symbolizes the government’s shifting priorities: rather than helping people in need, we are simply trying to keep them away from us.

It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of life that will be lost as a result of this decision. Ending support for child vaccination in poor countries, cancelling support for famine aid, demolishing the world’s most successful anti-HIV/AIDS program—altogether, one estimate suggests that these and other cuts could kill somewhere between 2-5 million people per year. Another analysis suggests that the cuts to health programs alone could kill 25 million over the next 15 years. Already, we have already begun to hear the stories of some of those who were killed by the destruction of USAID.

Although USAID has been decimated in its original form, leaks from the White House suggest that it will survive in a worse form than before. Rather than being an independent agency, the reorganized “US Agency for International Humanitarian Assistance” would be located within the State Department, allowing for even more political interference in its humanitarian decisions than before. The agency will “not be philanthropic in nature,” but will instead focus explicitly on “advanc[ing] our direct national security, strategic, and commercial interests.” It will also direct its energies towards “supporting American companies to trade and invest in high-growth markets,” subjugating human lives to the profits of US corporations. In other words, many of the worst features of the old USAID will be amplified and intensified, leaving millions to perish. 

87. Starting a Trade War

Trade is the one area in which Trump’s foreign policy breaks mostly sharply from the consensus of Washington DC. Rather than pushing for corporate-friendly “free trade” agreements, President Trump is instead dedicated to starting a mercantilist trade war against the entire world, dealing severe damage to the world economy and ensuring that the cost of living crisis will only intensify.

The second Trump administration began by placing blanket import tariffs on all three of the US’ largest trade partners—Mexico, Canada, and China—prompting retaliatory tariffs from each. These have been accompanied by tariffs on steel and aluminum; cars and automobile parts; and countries importing Venezuelan oil. Investigations into the need for future tariffs have been launched on wood, copper, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors. To solidify the nation’s new direction on trade, the March budget bill included a provision that will make some of these tariffs harder to remove.

Several other policies directed at China could further disrupt the US economy. The elimination of “de minimis” exceptions for low-value imports will subject a wide array of once-exempt consumer goods to the new tariffs. The administration had also planned to raise port fees for Chinese ships in a way that would raise the cost of maritime shipping, although this plan is now being reconsidered.

All of these changes to trade policy were only a small preview of what was to come. On April 2nd, the Trump administration announced massive “reciprocal” tariffs covering practically the entire world. This tariff plan was widely criticized for its poor reasoning, basic errors, bad targeting, and for not even being reciprocal, amongst many other complaints. Within 24 hours, this backlash led Trump to pause the tariff plan for 90 days, instead placing a flat 10% tariff on the entire world and a stunning 145% tariff on China for daring to retaliate (for some products, tariffs on China could reach as high as 245%). These massive trade restrictions on China resulted in the backup plan raising tariffs even higher than Trump’s original plan would have.

The rollout of these tariffs was marked by extreme inconsistency. On Friday, April 11th, the White House issued a “Clarification of Exceptions” to the tariffs; two days later, the President claimed that “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday.” Indeed, there were some moments when the White House itself was unsure what tariff rates they had just set. These large, chaotic shifts in US tariff policy within such a short time frame created deep confusion amongst foreign diplomats and raised economic policy uncertainty to its highest ever level in the 21st century so far, bringing much of the nation’s economic investment to a halt. Some even suspect that the odd timing around these back-and-forth moves may have been an opportunity for insider trading, as billionaires had their “best-ever day” on the stock market after the first reversal was announced. For now, there’s no way to know whether tariffs will rise or fall in the near future.

Unless the negotiations to deescalate the trade war show some major results, the United States will have an effective tariff rate of about 27%. This is the highest tariff rate of any country in the world today, as well as the highest tariff rate that the US has seen in nearly 100 years. Economists from across the political spectrum believe that the tariffs will be economically destructive and highly regressive (hitting the poorest more than three times as hard as the richest). Others note that the President’s authority to grant exemptions to the tariffs creates enormous opportunities for corruption—Trump himself said that the decision of who to give exemptions to will be made “instinctively, more than anything.”

88. Advocating Expansionism

President Trump has repeatedly praised former US President William McKinley, noting that his presidency featured an “expansion of territorial gains for the Nation.” This is true: President McKinley oversaw an aggressive campaign of imperial expansionism, dominating foreign territories from the Philippines to Puerto Rico. The naked expansionism of the McKinley era has returned to American politics today through President Trump’s disturbing fascination with stealing others’ lands.

The US-Canadian border—the longest land border on the planet—has been directly challenged by the White House, while the President continues to refer to the US’ northern neighbor as the nation’s “51st state.” Trump has repeatedly reaffirmed this position: “When I say they should be a state, I mean that. I really mean that.” The combination of a trade war and expansionist threats has forced Canada to seriously reconsider its long-standing alliance with the US. According to the Canadian Prime Minister, “The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over… It’s clear the US is no longer a reliable partner.” Almost half of all Canadians now see the US as a hostile nation.

President Trump has also made clear his desire to annex the Danish territory of Greenland, saying in his first congressional address of the term that “One way or the other, we're going to get it.” He has discussed these colonialist ambitions in multiple meetings with Danish and NATO officials, statements which were condemned by all five of Greenland’s elected political parties. Even though only 6% of Greenlanders wish to become a part of the US, the second Trump administration has continued to study a potential takeover and place pressure on the island territory, even threatening invasion: according to President Trump, he “never take[s] military force off the table.”

Next, President Trump repeatedly called for US “ownership” of the Palestinian Gaza Strip. The President referred to the territory as “an incredible piece of important real estate” and shared an AI video (made with the intention of parodying of him) featuring a Gaza Strip adorned with massive golden statues of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, a proposal under discussion at the White House would treat El Salvador’s mega-prison as a US territory, allowing for people to be disappeared into the mega-prison without it even counting as a deportation.

The case of Panama proves that these expansionist broadsides are not mere bluster—they’re extortion. Trump’s repeated threats and military coercion aimed at the Panama Canal Zone were enough to force the nation into modifying its foreign policy with China, for no compelling reason other than that the US President demanded it. This type of naked imperialism backed by threats of offensive war is exploitative, immoral, illegal, and genuinely dangerous. We can only hope that the world will find a way to collaborate towards containing the American rogue state.

89. Waging Imperialist Pressure Campaigns

Territorial expansion is not the only way in which the second Trump administration is pressuring others to bend to its will—they’re using traditional imperialist coercion too. The White House reportedly leaned heavily on Iraq’s fragile government to force them into increasing their oil exports. In Argentina, the US tried to hold the nation’s access to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) hostage until it dropped a currency swap deal with China. What other nations want for themselves is irrelevant—all that matters is what President Trump wants.

The IMF and the World Bank are two important institutions through which the US dominates the rest of the world: the US has de facto veto power over major IMF decisions and is given the exclusive privilege of selecting the World Bank’s President. If Trump were actually an isolationist, he would want to withdraw from both; yet these are two of the only international institutions which he plans to seriously engage with. The US Treasury Secretary stated his intention to use these institutions to push President Trump’s agenda on the rest of the world, calling for reforms that would “expand U.S. leadership,” pressure China into modifying its economic policies, and abandon projects addressing climate change and gender inequality.

The Trump administration’s disregard for the sovereignty of other nations is especially clear in its feud with the democratic government of South Africa. The nation’s post-apartheid efforts at reducing racial inequality have drawn the ire of major Trump supporters like Elon Musk, whose wealth is rooted in his father’s career in the apartheid-era mining industry. Musk’s ridiculous claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa triggered a complete meltdown in US-South African relations, including the expulsion of their ambassador, a cutoff of official support, and the absurd offer of refugee status to white South Africans (even as refugee admissions have been shuttered for those in actual need). Plain racism is one of the major causes of this conflict, but so to is personal gain: the Trump administration’s actions can be read as an attempt at coercing South Africa into repealing its recent land reform efforts, along with other laws which Musk sees as obstacles to his business ambitions.

90. Spending More on War

In public, the second Trump administration has flip-flopped on its public position towards military spending, an indecisiveness representative of the clear foreign policy divides that exist within the Trumpist coalition. But behind all of the bluster about efficiency, there is no doubt that the second Trump administration will continue to shovel more money into the single largest source of government waste: the Department of Defense (DOD).

The Pentagon announced in March that it was cutting $580 million in “wasteful spending,” along with another $5.1 billion in April. These modest cuts are a step in the right direction, but have already been completely overtaken by other changes in the opposite direction. Congress approved a $6 billion dollar increase in national security spending in their March budget bill, which may ultimately balloon into a $15 billion increase by the time that they are done with it. The budget bill also provided the White House with additional flexibility in how they spend these funds. Congress hopes to inject up to $150 billion more into the Pentagon later this year, and the President has committed himself to wasting a record-breaking $1 trillion on the military.

While closing the office responsible for crafting much of the US’s military strategy (a form of political payback), the administration also endorsed the creation of several expensive new toys that will pad the pockets of corrupt weapons companies. The proposal for a new fighter jet named after Trump is practically guaranteed to turn into a wasteful failure: the “F-47” is already expected to cost more than $300 million each, several times more than the disastrous F-35 jet which has become the most expensive weapon system in history. Trump also promoted the creation of an expensive “Golden Dome” missile defense system, a long-time dream of certain militarists despite the fact that such systems are unneeded and have never worked. War profiteers like Lockheed Martin are salivating at the opportunity, though the company most favored for the contract appears to be Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The White House’s promise of defense acquisition reform could prove to be productive, but the sections dedicated to cutting programs that exceed their cost estimates lack teeth. Other parts of the memo are committed to the deregulation of military contractors, which will just shuffle money around the military-industrial complex without lowering costs or cutting waste. While all of the parts of the government that help people are being torn apart, the war machine just keeps growing larger.

The White House is reportedly considering a reduction in the number of US troops stationed in Europe, which is a good idea in its own right. But even if they do follow through on these plans, their final goal is only to shift the costs of militarism, not to reduce it. The White House has repeatedly pressed the European powers of NATO to spend 5% of their GDP on their militaries. The demand is laughable—very few peacetime nations spend that much on their militaries, and even the US spends only 3.5%— but the pressure might still be enough to shift Europe’s resources away from human needs and towards the “organized murder” of war.

91. Killing More Civilians

One often-forgotten aspect of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign was his explicit endorsement of war crimes, advocating for the murder of entire families. This disdain for innocent life continues into the present administration, as evidenced by the second Trump administration’s disturbing obsession with the US military’s “lethality.” In order to increase this “lethality,” President Trump is willfully increasing the number of civilian deaths caused by US military operations.

The White House has loosened the DOD’s civilian protection standards for airstrikes and special operations raids, making it easier for the US military to act without any concern for the innocents it kills. Officials working on civilian protection programs within the Pentagon report that their programs are being downsized. Training courses on the “Law of War” will soon become optional for US soldiers. Meanwhile, plans to reform the US military’s justice system would deemphasize the need to hold soldiers accountable for war crimes.

A similar philosophy has informed the government’s approach towards weapons exports: arms transfer rules intended to prevent US weapons from being used to kill civilians have been removed without explanation, making it even easier for the US to arm mass murderers around the world. One executive order indicates that the administration plans to further loosen arms export rules in the future, and insiders suggest that a massive arms sale to the Saudi monarchy is currently in the works.

The “Signalgate” scandal revealed leaked chat logs showing top US officials gleefully celebrating the destruction of an entire apartment building in order to kill one target. Not long after, the President shared a video on social media of a US airstrike which killed dozens of Yemenis; the Houthi rebels targeted by the strike claimed that the victims “had no connection” to them. This barbarism will destroy countless innocent lives and make the world a far more dangerous place.

92. Bombing the Broader Middle East

Following an airstrike in early March, Donald Trump became both the fifth and the seventh consecutive US President to bomb Iraq. Despite four decades of failure, no one in US foreign policymaking circles seems to have realized that this approach may not be the solution to armed conflict in the Middle East.

Far more than Iraq, the second Trump administration has so far focused its violence towards Somalia and Yemen. Trump tripled the level of US airstrikes on Somalia during his first term, accomplishing nothing but thousands of deaths. This year, he has returned to a policy of intensive airstrikes against one of the world’s poorest countries. In his first three months, President Trump launched more airstrikes on Somalia than President Biden did throughout the entirety of 2024.

So too has the White House been escalating its warfare in Yemen. After re-designating the Houthi movement as a terrorist organization, the Trump administration dramatically increased its bombardment of the nation and sent aircraft carriers to the region as an intimidation tactic. The US military claims to have launched more than 800 airstrikes between March 15th and April 27th, averaging more than 18 a day. This billion-dollar bombing campaign has mostly hit non-military targets, killing hundreds and destroying a cancer hospital. US “double tap” strikes that kill emergency medical personnel constitute obvious war crimes. Yet the administration is considering going further still, potentially even funding a new offensive ground operation which would further destabilize the region.

When the Trump administration’s war plans leaked in the “Signalgate” scandal, the American press focused almost exclusively on the government’s lack of information security, never seriously interrogating the fact that they contained gleeful celebrations of a war crime. The numbness with which violence against Middle Easterners is received in the US has been a major contributor to the emergence of Donald Trump as a political figure: without the authoritarianism, xenophobia, and callous disregard for humanity unleashed by the Global War on Terror, it is difficult to imagine Trump ever making it this far.

93. Doubling Down on Violence Against Palestine

Blind support for the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine is a bipartisan tradition, but Trump is always willing to take things to another level. After more than a year of intense violence, the second Trump administration squandered a brief ceasefire to continue providing support to the relentless Israeli assault on Palestine.

Upon taking office, President Trump removed sanctions on extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank, blocked funding to the UN agency providing aid to Palestinian civilians, and explicitly called for an ethnic cleansing that would allow the US to “take over” the Gaza Strip. The White House has enabled and encouraged the far-right Israeli government in its most sadistic impulses, including intentional ceasefire violations and the blockage of life-saving aid. Despite arrest warrants for Israeli leaders issued by the International Criminal Court, the US government welcomed the Israeli Prime Minister and sanctioned the Court.

The second Trump administration also circumvented Congress to approve a $7.4 billion arms sale in support of Israel’s campaign of destruction in Gaza, which human rights groups have increasingly come to recognize as a genocide. The March budget bill promised even more support for the Israeli government.

The White House has been unwilling to even rhetorically condemn Israeli war crimes. Trump’s ambassador to Israel has denied the very existence of Palestinians as human beings, declaring that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian.” While the US government has always supported Israeli violence against Palestine, the second Trump administration has found a way to take this inhumanity to new depths.

94. Risking War in Iran

Both the first and second Trump administrations have been concerningly open to the possibility of a war with Iran. This time around, they have returned to a “maximum pressure” sanction regime intended to obliterate the Iranian economy, threatened to bomb Iran, drafted extensive plans for a US-Iranian war, and built up our military presence in the Indian Ocean to prepare for a potential conflict. In late February, the US Air Force conducted simulated bombing runs in the neighboring country of Iraq while also running a joint exercise with the Israeli military to prepare for an Iranian bombing run. While a war with Iran is far from certain, it is still far too close for comfort.

The administration’s offer for US-Iranian diplomacy was at first thoroughly rejected by the Iranian government, which has no reason to trust President Trump. Trump chose to violate the successful Iran nuclear deal in 2018 (despite Iran’s compliance with the agreement) and assassinated a top Iranian military official, destroying the US government’s credibility. In addition, the “diplomatic” letter which Trump sent to Iran contained obvious threats; according to Trump himself, his message was: “I hope you're going to negotiate. Because if we have to go in militarily, it's going to be a terrible thing — for them.”

Fortunately, the Iranian government eventually agreed to negotiations, and President Trump has so far resisted the pressure to immediately attack them. Such negotiations offer incredible opportunities for peace in the Middle East if successful, but the chances of success have been weakened by continued US aggression. Even as the diplomatic process was unfolding, the White House continued to launch new sanctions and threaten military action. While emphasizing that war with Iran is not his preferred option, Trump added “…I may go in [to Iran] very willingly if we can't get a deal. If we don't make a deal, I'll be leading the pack.”

The conflicting messages offered by US officials, swinging wildly back and forth between peace and war, have already undermined the nascent diplomatic process. If a deal is made, it will be a sign of extraordinary restraint by the Iranian government in the face of endless US provocations.

95. Risking War in Mexico

Traditional US “adversaries” like Iran are not the only nations at risk of an offensive US assault. The second Trump administration has also laid the early groundwork for a new war to be fought within the territory of our southern neighbor, Mexico.

The second Trump administration’s designation of Mexican and Central American drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations did little to expand the government’s ability to address the cartels, but it did make it easier to engage in secretive “counterterrorism” operations against them. As Trump told Congress, “The cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels, which we are doing.” At least one member of Congress was excited enough by the prospect to introduce a formal authorization of military force against drug cartels, with phrasing that would allow the President to wage war in virtually every country in the western hemisphere. While the odds of passage through Congress are slim, the White House would be willing to wage a war regardless of whether they had congressional permission.

Further evidence that the Trump administration is considering a war in Mexico can be found in both what they say and what they do. This year’s “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community” focuses much of its attention on the threat posed by cartels, at one point grouping them together with ISIS and al Qaeda. More concretely, the Central Intelligence Agency has escalated its surveillance drone flights over Mexican territory.

Asked if he would rule out an unauthorized military airstrike on Mexican soil, President Trump’s nominee for the US ambassador to Mexico refused to say that he would. Trump himself said that he would “absolutely” consider such an attack. The White House has already been considering these types of drone strikes despite the disapproval of Mexico’s President. Combined with the military build-up on the US’ southern border, it is not difficult to see where these developments could lead. Considering the abject failure of the militarized “War on Drugs” over the last fifty years, we can only hope that this war doesn’t become far more literal.

96. Meddling in Latin America

The selection of neoconservative hawk Marco Rubio as Trump’s Secretary of State was an early indication that the new administration would take an aggressive stance against Latin America, meddling in the affairs of nations which refuse to be subservient to US demands. It did not take long for this assumption to be proven correct.

The second Trump administration reversed the Biden administration’s small steps towards normalizing relations with the Cuban government, adding the nation back onto the State Sponsors of Terrorism list despite a complete lack of evidence for this charge. It also reinstated the “Cuba Restricted List” to limit business transactions between the two neighboring countries and placed restrictions upon Cuba’s medical diplomacy program, drawing sharp condemnation from the Caribbean nations which benefit from it. In case there was any doubt about Secretary Rubio’s feelings, he celebrated the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs operation, the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba which Rubio described as a “heroic mission.”

Actions taken against the Venezuelan government have been equally punitive, tightening sanctions on the nation’s oil industry, cancelling authorizations for foreign businesses dealing with the industry, and even implementing unprecedented secondary sanctions on countries which purchase Venezuelan oil, all of which will worsen the nation’s humanitarian crisis.

In March, the Ecuadorian government led by conservative President Daniel Noboa announced the creation of a new naval facility that they hope to see “eventually occupied by US troops,” encouraging the US to take on a greater role in Ecuador’s efforts against drug cartels. Soon after, just two days before the country’s elections, news emerged that US intelligence agencies preferred Noboa over his opponent. Noboa won another term in an election marked by some questionable circumstances, and the State Department announced that it “look[s] forward to continuing our work with President Noboa’s administration” on problems like “drug trafficking organizations.”

The US government’s aggressive posture has even sparked conflicts with traditional friends of the US like Colombia, briefly picking a fight with a nation that is officially designated as an ally. This meddling in Latin America’s affairs will raise tensions across the region, endangering peace and development throughout the western hemisphere.

97. Supporting the Salvadoran Dictatorship

There is one government in Latin America which the second Trump administration has made friends with: the government of El Salvador, a dictatorship led by the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele. Despite the extreme authoritarianism of the Salvadoran regime, the Trump administration has repeatedly praised their behavior, complimented Bukele for launching a “renaissance of capitalism,” and referred to a US “alliance” with the tyrant. The State Department even made the political decision to lower its travel advisory for the nation.

El Salvador has become the world’s worst prison state under Bukele, incarcerating nearly 1.7% of its total population. This has not phased President Trump, who a secret deal with Bukele to provide his dictatorship with millions of dollars in order to detain US immigrants in a mega-prison which no prisoner has ever been released from. Along with the direct payments, prisoner transfers offer several other benefits to the Salvadoran regime: deportees can be used as slaves in the country’s “Zero Idleness” labor program, and the few actual gang leaders with knowledge of Bukele’s secret deals with gangs can be disappeared before they ever have a chance to testify.

This US-Salvadoran cooperation has also provided one of the Western hemisphere’s worst dictatorships with propaganda materials, especially after the US Homeland Security Secretary visited Bukele’s mega-prison and called it “one of the tools in our toolkit,” thereby endorsing the use of torture on people who were jailed without trial or due process. Salvadoran activists protested this visit, decrying the Trump administration’s “use of our land as an imperial prison and the attempt to turn our territory into free zones for neofascist experimentation.”

98. Exploiting Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine left the nation’s fate at the mercy of the US and other western nations backing its war effort. Now, President Trump plans to exploit this situation to bleed Ukraine dry. Trump is not the first President to exploit Ukraine’s vulnerabilities as a money-making opportunity—the US government has been pushing the nation to privatize its state assets for decades—but his plan is by far the most offensive.

While the US government provided massive levels of military assistance to Ukraine under the Biden administration, it failed to make sufficient efforts towards a diplomatic solution which would end the violence and respect Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. The plans of the second Trump administration are a sharp reversal in the opposite direction, slashing support while pushing Ukraine to accept practically any deal that Russia offers. In exchange for such a deal, Trump is demanding US control over Ukraine’s natural resources and infrastructure.

The second Trump administration opened with a variety of policies that, when viewed together as group, can fairly be described as “pro-Russian.” Not only did they briefly pause military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, as well as offensive cyber operations against Russia; they also voted against Ukraine at the United Nations, withdrew from a European-led organization investigating the Russian invasion, shut down a project tracking kidnapped Ukrainian children, and started a public argument with the Ukrainian President.

At the same time, the White House announced negotiations with Russia. Diplomatic negotiations are the right path forward for ending the Russ0-Ukrainian War, and they have already achieved some small, temporary successes. But the approach of the Trump administration has sparked concerns that the US-Russia talks are not truly aimed at a just peace. First, these talks did not include Ukraine, leaving room for US officials to discuss “dividing up certain assets” in Ukraine between the US and Russia. Worse yet, Trump’s “final offer” proposal would require Ukraine to effectively abandon the vast majority of territories that Russia is currently occupying,

Amidst these negotiations, President Trump has insisted that Ukraine owes the US for its previous support. The US government is pushing the Ukrainian government to accept an exploitative mineral rights deal which would allow America to extract at least $100 billion of natural resources from Ukrainian territory, perhaps even giving the US ownership over Ukrainian energy and transport infrastructure. Ukraine has already agreed to an outline of a deal, though some Ukrainian officials warn that America’s proposed plans are a form of “robbery.”

Already, the idea that the US will take whatever action is necessary to dominate foreign mineral reserves is affecting US relations with other parts of the world. In response to a minerals-for-military aid offer by the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the US government sent an envoy to discuss the possibility of such a deal. From Ukraine to the Congo, notions of peace, justice, and national sovereignty all fall to the wayside when confronted with the Trump administration’s hunger for other nations’ wealth.

99. Risking War in China

Though bipartisan hostility towards China is on the rise in the US, a US-China war represents a worst-case scenario for the 21st century: an entirely avoidable disaster with the potential to kill millions. Yet according to some in the second Trump administration, this war has already started. President Trump’s nominee for the US ambassador to China claims that “This is a new kind of war. It’s not a Cold War, it’s not a kinetic war, it’s a different war.”

So far this anti-China sentiment has taken largely predictable forms, like the tightening of US export restrictions on China and other measures to disentangle our economies. Other early signals are more disturbing. The US military announced that it will increase its presence in both the Philippines and Japan, reorganizing the US Forces Japan command into what they call a “‘warfighting’ headquarters.” The Chinese government has accused the US government of engaging in cyberattacks against the Asian Winter Games, which may represent another escalation in the growing cyberwar between the two great powers. And at the UN, US representatives stated that they were suspicious of the phrase “peaceful coexistence” purely because it had been used by the Chinese government.

Particularly concerning is a recently-leaked DOD memo which elaborated on the White House’s intentions to prepare for a full-scale war with China. The memo contained significant content taken directly from a report published by the Heritage Foundation, which is a major advocate of the idea that we are already in a “New Cold War” and should arm ourselves accordingly. While the possibility of a direct US-China war is thankfully still remote, it is far from clear that the White House can be trusted to keep it that way.

100. Decreasing Nuclear Security

Hanlon’s razor states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” This strikes me as an appropriate lens through which to view recent changes to nuclear security policy. Cutting funding for nuclear nonproliferation programs? That can be attributed to either the malice of militarists or the stupidity of short-term thinkers in Congress. But thoughtlessly firing the workers responsible for maintaining the security of our nuclear weapons, realizing what you’ve just done, and then immediately scrambling to rehire them? That’s pure stupidity.

Conclusion

There is a dance between change and continuity which is key to understanding the dangers of Donald Trump. While many of his critics draw attention to the ways in which he is unique, it is sometimes quite remarkable how little there is separating him from the status quo of US politics. Presidential power has been growing since Nixon, tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the rest has been the name of the game since Reagan, the US-Mexican border has been increasingly militarized since Clinton, the use of terrorism as an excuse for authoritarianism has been standard practice since W. Bush, and the use of drone warfare and “surgical” airstrikes to enable widespread interventionism was perfected by Obama. In these and many other areas of policy, Trump simply took things that were already broken and made them worse than ever before.

In particular, there would be no Trump presidency without the ground that had been set by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. For proof of this, one needs to look no further than the Heritage Foundation, the influential right-wing think tank which played an integral role in setting the conservative agenda under both Reagan and Bush. The organization has grown increasingly far-right alongside the rest of the conservative movement in recent decades, as evidenced by their “Project 2025” manifesto advocating for a comprehensive restructuring of the US government to weaken democracy and ensure a permanent shift to the political right.

While President Trump distanced himself from Project 2025, it has clearly informed his policy agenda in much the same way that the Heritage Foundation informed the agendas of Reagan and Bush. A review by TIME Magazine found that two-thirds of the executive actions implemented in the first four days of the second Trump administration bear a close resemblance to proposals in Project 2025, and independent projects have documented even more connections. The Heritage Foundation did not suddenly become extremist overnight. They, like President Trump, faithfully followed the principles of Reagan and Bush’s conservatism to one of its logical conclusions: far-right authoritarianism.

But despite this continuity, there is no denying that the second Trump administration also represents a radical change. The breakneck speed at which the administrative state is being dismantled creates unprecedented opportunities for the reactionary project of Trumpism to solidify its power and reshape American politics in favor of the wealthy and the powerful. The absolute rejection of all forms of internationalism and globalization represents an unsettling rejection of humanity’s common interests. And the complete disregard for basic democratic practices foreshadows a serious threat to the notion of popular self-governance, as limited as it may already be in the United States.

It is different this time. Trump was effectively granted legal immunity by the Supreme Court, his allies learned important lessons from the failures of his first term, his opposition is scattered and unfocused, public trust is at extreme lows, billionaire control over media and communication networks is stronger than ever, and a radicalized conservative movement has proven that it is very well-organized. President Trump claims that his “second term is just more powerful… When I say ‘do it,’ they do it.” This is a power that they are eager to use. In the words of presidential advisor Elon Musk, “This is a revolution.”

Still, it is the choices of yesterday which have set the stages for these new developments. There is widespread agreement that the current American political system is paralyzed and unresponsive, incapable of seriously addressing the challenges facing it. It is the plain truth that most of the power in our society is held by a self-interested and unaccountable elite which is largely apathetic to the public’s demands. And while the fortunes of those at the top continue to grow, far too many people are experiencing stagnation and decline.

Lacking a powerful organized labor movement or a unified progressive political force to connect these generalized complaints with their true culprits—neoliberalism and a lack of democracy in both our politics and our economy—this popular frustration has been captured by right-wing populists who instead offer a “producerist” explanation: an evil sect of liberal elites is conspiring with underserving minorities and anti-American leftists to steal your hard-earned money and destroy your beloved culture.

This type of right-wing populist scapegoating has always been a feature of American politics, arguably finding its first national success through President Andrew Jackson (one of Trump’s favorite Presidents). It was refined into a form considered acceptable to mainstream political audiences by Republican political operatives during Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and the Reagan Revolution. But the more radical strain of this thought now embraced by the Trump coalition has always been right beneath the surface, steadily growing in power. For every Donald Trump, there have been dozens of Pat Buchanans, George Wallaces, and Strom Thurmonds waiting to strike.

The current Democratic Party has shown itself to be entirely unprepared for this moment. Under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, the party lurched significantly to the right in hopes of reshaping its coalition to include well-educated professionals, business executives with large checkbooks, and moderate Republicans. They understood that doing so might lose them support among their traditional support base, but they considered this to be a winning trade.

In 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer argued that “For every blue collar Democrat we will lose in western [Pennsylvania], we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio, and Illinois, and Wisconsin.” That same year, the Democratic presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton promoted the candidacy of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries under the belief that he was so extreme that he could be easily defeated. She ultimately lost in three of the four states that Schumer predicted she would win.

Even in the face of an unprecedented shift towards anti-democratic authoritarianism, the Democratic Party has still failed to establish itself as a serious opposition party. This report makes 13 references to a budget bill passed in March which contained a variety of harmful policies. This bill was only able to pass because of the support of ten Senators in the Democratic caucus, including Minority Leader Schumer. The Democratic Party’s ceaseless capitulation to the demands of its opponents, abandonment of economic populism, and excessive focus on donors and moderate Republicans at the expense of its own voting base are all contributing factors to the rise of President Trump.

We should not assume that the second Trump administration will be willing to relinquish its power voluntarily. Their defeat will be the result of widespread popular discontent and resistance, energy which must be directed towards a credible alternative that meets the urgency of the moment and the hopes of the voting public. Business as usual will not do. A countermovement is required, once which is present both on the streets and at the ballot box.

Theoretically, the newly expanded powers of the presidency could be wielded by any future government, including a progressive one. Trump’s solution to this problem is to move quickly in cementing his vision within the permanent architecture of government. Whether or not he is joking when he discusses his thoughts of running for an unconstitutional third term, Trump does intend for the Trumpist project to outlive his second term and continue into the next Presidency, regardless of how the American people will feel about it when they realize what has happened. Given the Biden administration’s willingness to embrace many of the first Trump administration’s policies on trade, immigration, and US-China relations, this is not a far-fetched assumption.

So long as the next Democratic presidency prioritizes a “return to normalcy,” Trump will be successful in permanently reshaping US politics in his image. This is not a wound which will heal on its own, but a wound which will become infected without proper treatment. The first 100 days of the next administration must be committed to a campaign of Detrumpification which is at least as ambitious as Trump’s first 100 days, pursing a positive vision for the future rather than promising a return to the status quo which produced Trump in the first place.

While crafting a full Detrumpification agenda is beyond the scope of this report, I might suggest the inclusion of the following: firing every single political appointee and DOGE operative of the second Trump administration; replacing empty government positions and revitalizing the civil service; investigating the corruption of the Trump administration, including criminal prosecutions when appropriate; abolishing ICE and dismantling the DHS; strengthening anti-corruption institutions and ethics standards for executive officials; repealing the Alien Enemies Act and reforming the President’s emergency and wartime authorities; strengthening data privacy laws; comprehensive campaign finance reform to limit the undemocratic power of the wealthy; electoral reform to allow for multi-party democracy; replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote; democratic and majoritarian reforms to Congress; fixed terms for Supreme Court Justices; and a steadfast commitment to the creation of a multi-racial working class political coalition capable of resisting the siren song of reactionary nationalism.