Interim assessment of destruction: With Donald Trump, America is very close to the abyss

Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Interim assessment of destruction: With Donald Trump, America is very close to the abyss Karl Doemens • 5 hours • 6 minutes read All traces have been removed. The impressive inscription stretched eleven meters across 16th Street opposite the White House: "Black Lives Matter." The giant yellow letters, painted in the summer of 2020 after the George Floyd protests, were a statement against racism. "An iconographic art installation," Muriel Bowser enthused at the time. Now the mayor of Washington has hastily had the slogan removed: the new owner of the neighboring presidential palace would otherwise have cut federal funding for the capital. Also gone is the metal nameplate "U.S. Agency for International Development" above the entrance of the Ronald Reagan Building six blocks away: The former American development agency has been dissolved. Trump has transformed the USA at breakneck speed In the suburb of Bethesda, visitors to the National Institute of Health, the nation's leading health science research institution, are now greeted by a bare concrete wall in the foyer: The collage featuring the image of long-time institute director Anthony Fauci had to be taken down. Anyone planning a visit to the sprawling Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac River can no longer find the graves of female or Black veterans online. The directory on the website has been deleted. It's not just the American capital that has undergone radical change in recent weeks. The new President Donald Trump has transformed the entire country at a breakneck pace, more dramatically than any of his predecessors. He has fired tens of thousands of civil servants, closed entire government departments, disempowered Congress, declared diversity rather than discrimination against minorities his main ideological enemy, renamed international waters, deported migrants without court orders, stopped promised payments, intimidated academics, and threatened judges. "Almost every major action by Trump is deliberately illegal" It seems as if neither laws nor courts can stop the autocratic head of state and his allies. "Almost every major action by Trump is deliberately illegal," judges moderate-conservative journalist David Frum: "Trump is betting that the democratic system is too broken to stop him. He's acting according to the motto: All we have to do is kick down the door and the whole building will collapse." So far, the strategy has been disturbingly successful: While the president attacks the existing order with ever-new decrees and threats, his ally Elon Musk, with ice-cold ruthlessness and the necessary technical know-how, is undermining the administrative state from within. "The oligarchs don't want to govern," warns renowned US historian Timothy Snyder: "They want to grab as much as possible and render the rest ineffective. Their goal is destruction." Trump tests his limits daily Unlike in his first term, Trump no longer has to forge majorities or consider the opposition. There are no "reasonable" advisors around him who could slow him down. The critical public seems overwhelmed, Congress is aligned, and business leaders have defected. Every day, Trump tests the limits of his power in his Oval Office appearances: He invents figures, distorts facts, shuts out independent reporters, assumes authority, and disregards laws. Dozens of lawsuits are currently pending in the courts. But the president enjoys personal immunity, and months or even years could pass before the Supreme Court rules on key issues. Even if the Supreme Court were to intervene: How many people have been harmed by then? How many files have been destroyed, how much data has been stolen? And how many liberal social norms have been irretrievably destroyed? Destruction directed at media deemed "fake news" "That's the big question that will preoccupy Americans in the next ten or twenty years," says David Dagan in an interview with the "Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland" (Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland). The political scientist works at the moderately conservative Niskanen Center think tank in Washington. He has no illusions about the dramatic nature of the situation: "We are dangerously approaching the point where we can no longer speak of a liberal democracy." And yet, public resistance has so far been weak. "Many Americans perceive the state as no longer functioning. They say: Yes, Trump is a bit crazy, but it's good if he burns down the overgrown forest," Dagan attempts to explain the social background of the destructive policy, hastening to add: "If a forester controls it, it might work. But the problem is: It's being organized by an arsonist." Trump has cleverly directed his destructive work at targets already suspect to his supporters: development aid for faraway countries. The media, which the "Make America Great Again" movement considers "fake news." And the state school inspectorate, which ultra-conservative parents have always viewed as patronizing. Without a congressional resolution and without consideration for the devastating consequences for hundreds of thousands of Africans dependent on food aid and medicine, Trump cut off funding to the aid agency USAID overnight. Then he turned off the funding to the foreign broadcasters Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. In his final act, he has now dismantled the Department of Education. Elon Musk's cost-cutting team, Doge, has already fired more than 30,000 civil servants on the president's orders, and another 70,000 have been forced to "voluntarily" resign. Trump opens the floodgates to self-service and bribery Even the brutal cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is responsible for regulating financial products, are of no interest to many right-wing Trump voters. Yet the supposed reduction in bureaucracy only serves to make business easier for corporations in general, and for multi-billionaire Musk in particular, through radical deregulation. At the same time, Trump is opening the floodgates to self-service and bribery: Surely it's no coincidence that he fired all internal fraud investigators in the ministries, bypassing Parliament, and for the first time in the century-old history of the "independent" consumer protection agency, the Federal Trade Commission, fired the Democratic representatives. "Trump has no interest in building new structures," Dagan believes: "He's concerned with repression and corruption." The president is linking the dismantling of critical government functions with a second, presumably even more dangerous goal: the politicization of the state's police instruments. "The two projects belong together. And if he can pull this off, liberal democracy will be finished," Dagan warns. Student debt should not be forgiven for "woke" people In fact, Trump is rigorously using his unprecedented power to intimidate and suppress dissidents. He has not only blackmailed Washington Mayor Bowser. He is demanding that New York Governor Kathy Hochul abolish the congestion charge in the metropolis. He is making the student debt forgiveness announced by his predecessor, Joe Biden, conditional on academics not participating in "woke" organizations. He will only disburse $400 million in grants to Columbia University if the school places its Middle East and Africa studies programs under external oversight. Trump's entire actions are dominated by his thirst for revenge. Right from the start, he instructed the Department of Justice to take action against "enemies within," by which he primarily means his critics. Prosecutors who had been involved in the investigation into the storming of the Capitol were fired. Trump summarily declared the pardons of witnesses from the parliamentary investigative committee "invalid." His manic drive for revenge extends to the personal level: Trump has withdrawn personal security from his former Chief of Staff Mark Milley, as well as from his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former coronavirus commissioner Anthony Fauci. Law firms representing Trump opponents are being denied access to government buildings. Critical media outlets are being inundated with lawsuits costing millions. "There is an atmosphere of revenge and violence in the air," says Dagan. Many politicians in Congress are now afraid of violent repression. Since Trump's term in office: Raids at borders have increased Trump has been particularly uninhibited in exercising his authoritarian impulses in immigration policy. During the election campaign, the president indiscriminately defamed migrants as "criminals" and "rapists" and announced mass deportations. Since then, raids and disturbing incidents at the border have increased, with foreigners recently being detained for immigration purposes without explanation upon entry despite having a visa or green card. After the spectacularly staged deportation of more than 200 allegedly criminal Venezuelans was reprimanded by a court, Trump called for the judge's impeachment. It is still unclear how the power struggle with the judiciary will end in this and other cases. If the president truly refuses to comply with court orders indefinitely, the current constitutional crisis would take on a whole new, dramatic dimension. "If the president can violate court rulings and nothing happens, then he can do anything. Then he can arrest anyone and deport them to El Salvador," Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the renowned Berkeley School of Law, painted a grim picture a few days ago: "Then we would be in a dictatorship." Dagan doesn't believe we've reached that point yet. But he warns: "We're in a zone where all the red lights are flashing." At the age of 18, the son of an Israeli father and a German mother immigrated from Germany to the United States. He never would have expected such a development in his adopted homeland. "Over the past 80 years, Americans have shown Europeans what democracy means," the Jewish scholar says seriously: "Now Europeans must model democracy for Americans."