Dispatches

TRUMP OUTLINED HIS VISION IN HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS. TWO YEARS LATER, HOW’S IT GOING?

In January 2017, Donald Trump was inaugurated president on the steps of the US Capitol, and he spoke to thousands of his supporters in the form of his first inaugural address.

He talked about the problems he wanted to fix. He talked about his priorities. He most memorably talked about his “America First” perspective and lamented “American carnage,” which he said “stops right here and stops right now.”

ThinkProgress interviewed Trump supporters on Inauguration Day to find out what they hoped he would do.

Some said Trump was the last, best hope to change the country from broken politics, rising debt, and fears about immigration. Ronald Borta, of Warrenton, Va., said simply: “Anything has got to be better than this.” Dan Storch, from Saint Augustine, Fla., said he supported Trump “because he wants to start over, he wants to build a new America, a better America, a better political system.”

Others thought he needed to do what he could to bring people together. Alex Robinson, from Chicago, said, “I think the first thing he needs to focus on is unifying the country.”

Two years later, Ryan Koronowski of ThinkProgress (1/17) examined how has this vision fared.

• Trump’s most famous line, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” has not fared incredibly well. He spoke of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”

Has this “carnage” — urban poverty, a struggling education system, and criminal violence — been alleviated?

Since Trump became president, the poverty rate has virtually stagnated. There was no statistically significant drop in the nation’s official poverty rate from 2016 to 2017, according to US Census Bureau figures.

One particular brand of American carnage is gun violence, which recently hit historic highs. Centers for Disease Control data released last month and analyzed by the gun violence news site The Trace showed that there were nearly 40,000 gun deaths in 2017, the highest absolute number in at least 50 years. Much of the increase was caused by suicides, but there were also several tragic mass shootings in 2017 and 2018, including Parkland and also the Las Vegas shooting, which was the most deadly in history. Trump’s administration has been quiet about policy responses to gun violence.

• “We will bring new roads and high roads and bridges and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation,” Trump said.

The Trump administration failed to kick off so many alleged “infrastructure weeks” that it became a recurring joke to say that every week was infrastructure week. Finally, last February, the administration released a plan that would push 80% of the cost onto states and cities, which is much higher than in past years. The plan was dead on arrival in the GOP-controlled Congress.

• “We will bring back our jobs, we will bring back our borders, we will bring back our wealth, we will bring back our dreams,” Trump promised.

In the last two years, Trump has taken credit for the rising economy. In fact, manufacturing jobs in America have been rising since 2010 — a rate of increase that has remained consistent since Trump took office. The coal industry, however, which Trump pledged to revitalize, saw more mines close in his first two years than Obama’s entire first term. Farmers have also taken the brunt of Trump’s trade war with China — soybean exports dropped 98% in 2018.

• “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice,” Trump said.

The growth of far-right extremism has been increasing for years, even under President Barack Obama, but it grew exponentially after Trump became president. So has far-right violence. Trump’s family separation policy, Muslim ban, comments describing countries in Africa “s**thole countries,” and attempts to curtail voting rights are also examples of his administration making plenty of room for prejudice. The president has encouraged supporters to call themselves nationalists, even apart from the usual trade protectionist framing in which that term is used in normal speech. Trump’s “both sides” response to the 2017 violence in Charlottesville earned him praise from white supremacists.

• Trump lamented “an education system flushed with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.” Yet in each of Trump’s budget proposals since he was inaugurated, his administration has attempted to cut the Education Department’s funding. Congress refused to accept the cuts and instead increased funding each year to earn Democratic support.

In the first two years of the Trump administration, public education has been deprioritized in favor of for-profit schools. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, has made great strides in helping for-profit schools instead of the students they so often defraud. In September, a judge ruled that her attempt to delay a rule protecting defrauded students was “arbitrary and capricious.”

• Trump concluded his address with an assertion that “all Americans, in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, and from ocean to ocean” would “never be ignored again.” But after two years in which the president has focused exclusively on pleasing his most ardent supporters while castigating everyone else, this assertion is less an inclusive invitation to all Americans and more a nod to the “forgotten man” from his campaign speeches.

Borta, the Trump supporter from Virginia who ThinkProgress interviewed at the inauguration, said “most politicians come in with a huge number of promises and end up doing almost nothing, so if he does a tiny little bit on his first day, that’ll be a vast improvement.”

In fact, Trump broke 34 promises his first day in office, and 80 in his first 100 days. (See links.)

TWO YEARS INTO TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY, FAR-RIGHT EXTREMISM HAS SURGED. Two years ago, President Donald Trump stood before an inauguration crowd in Washington, D.C. and warned of “American carnage,” claiming he alone could stop it.

“Crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential,” he said. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now…. We will make America safe again.”

Now, midway through his presidency, it has become increasingly clear that the real danger is one Trump himself has both fomented and chosen to ignore: far-right extremism, Luke Barnes noted at ThinkProgress (1/20).

The president has repeatedly used his bleak, fear-mongering vision of the country to advocate for building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, suggesting US law enforcement was totally outgunned by drug smugglers and that the threat of a migrant caravan was enough of a threat to justify sending the US military to the border. He has suggested Black Lives Matter protesters, fighting police brutality, pose a violent threat to Americans, and blamed so-called “alt-left” activists for inciting violent clashes with right-wing and white supremacist protesters.

Meanwhile, both the president and the Republican Party have emboldened violent far-right extremists through their inaction; over the last two years, Trump has barely acknowledged the explosion of far-right activity, much less done anything to combat it.

2017 was marked by tragedy when, at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., on 8/17/17, far-right extremist James Alex Fields drove his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing one woman. Fields was found guilty of first-degree murder last December and sentenced to life in prison, and has separately been indicted on 30 federal hate crimes charges.

In the immediate aftermath of the Charlottesville attack however, Trump infamously said that there was violence “on many sides.”

“What about the ‘alt-left’ that came charging at, as you say, the ‘alt-right’? Do they have any semblance of guilt?” he said, speaking during a planned infrastructure announcement days after the attack. “… You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it.”

Trump also blamed activists for trying to remove a Confederate monument, which had supposedly been the impetus for the white nationalist rally. “George Washington [was] a slave owner. So will George Washington lose his status?” he said. “What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him? […] You’re changing history. You’re changing culture.”

Trump’s comments, celebrated in their immediate aftermath by white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, ushered in a new wave of far-right violence in 2018.

On 10/12/18, a group of “Proud Boys,” a far-right gang, left the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City following an event featuring their founder, Gavin McInnes, and began violently attacking people protesting the even in the street, in one instance yelling, “Do you feel brave now, faggot?” The NYPD eventually charged nine Proud Boys with assault.

Ten days later, on 10/22, pipe bombs were sent to the home of liberal philanthropist George Soros, a frequent Twitter target of Trump, as well as the offices of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and CNN. Authorities eventually arrested Cesar Sayoc for the attack, a registered Republican and Trump fan who had attended the president’s rallies and echoed much of his racist, incendiary rhetoric, including his anti-Semitic attacks on Soros.

The worst attack took place on 10/27, when anti-Semite gunman Robert Bowers entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and opened fire, killing 11 worshipers before being arrested by police. Bowers later told police bluntly, “All Jews must die.”

Just three days before the shooting, the FBI Agents Association had tweeted that it was “time to treat domestic terrorism as the national threat that it is, and track, analyze and punish political violence at a federal level.”

Despite this, following the attack, Trump’s response was to blame the media. “There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news,” he tweeted. “The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly.”

Since Trump’s inauguration, far-right groups have flourished, including Atomwaffen, an extremely violent neo-Nazi terror organization responsible for five murders in eight months through the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018. The group, whose name means “Atomic Weapons” in German, also reportedly planned to attack a nuclear power plant.

There have also been multiple lone-wolf attacks. The same day as the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, two black people were killed at a grocery store in Kentucky. The shooter, Gregory Bush, allegedly told a bystander that “whites don’t kill whites” and was indicted on hate crimes charges in November.

These incidents represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the shocking rise in far-right extremism over the last two years. According to a November 2018 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the mean number of far-right attacks jumped from 11 between 2012 and 2016 to 31 in 2017. A Washington Post analysis that same month found that right-wing extremism, already climbing under President Barack Obama, surged in 2017. Statistics from the FBI also show hate crimes have risen for three years consecutively.

Multiple far-right plots have also been disrupted and foiled by law enforcement since Trump’s inauguration. In January 2018, for instance, a member of the Nationalist Socialist Movement was charged with terrorism after boarding an Amtrak train in Nebraska with a weapon. In November 2018, three militia members in Kansas were convicted of trying to bomb a mosque and apartment complex popular with Somali immigrants.

FBI director Christopher Wray told the Senate Appropriations Committee in May 2018 that the bureau had approximately 1,000 active domestic terror investigations, a significant number of which were focused on far-right extremists and lone wolves. (See a longer linked version.)

SCIENTISTS SAY TRUMP’S FIRST 2 YEARS MAY BE FATAL FOR LIVABLE CLIMATE. Two years in, the presidency of Donald Trump has been a possibly fatal disaster for our livable climate, a number of climate and clean energy experts told Joe Romm at ThinkProgress (1/18).

During the 2016 presidential campaign, countless climate experts voiced their concern about Trump, who had infamously called climate change a “hoax” and said it was “created by and for the Chinese.” Trump promised to undo Obama-era environmental laws, bring back coal power, and withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in which the world’s nations unanimously agreed to start ratcheting down carbon pollution.

For all these reasons, climatologist Michael Mann wrote in October 2016 that Trump was “a threat to the planet.”

Two years after taking office, Trump has followed through on many of his promises to gut environmental regulations, promote the production of fossil fuels, kill US climate action, and start withdrawing from the Paris accord.

“Our worst fears have come true,” Mann told ThinkProgress. Other experts agreed.

“In explaining the demise of our planet, a coroner’s report might very well read ’cause of death: the Trump presidency,’” said CNN host Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs under President Barack Obama.

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, noted that by undoing Obama-era climate rules and rejecting the Paris agreement, Trump is delaying climate action, perhaps fatally.

“Trump got the Koch Bros what they wanted,” McKibben said, referring to petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch. Trump’s rollbacks gave them “another half-decade or so of their business model, even at the expense of breaking the planet.”

Others, such as former Vice President Al Gore, acknowledge that “President Trump is going all out to damage humanity’s efforts to solve the climate crisis,” but take comfort in the clean energy revolution — which continues despite Trump’s repeated efforts to cut funding for research, development, and deployment.

“The price of renewable energy continues to plummet,” Gore noted. “All around the world, cities, states, and businesses alike have said ‘We’re Still In’ and are pushing forward new and increasingly ambitious goals” to cut carbon pollution.

Some experts pointed to the very real public health disaster being created by Trump and his team as they undermine and roll back basic clean air and clean water protections that Americans have come to take for granted.

“The deep culture of corruption at all political levels of the Trump administration has reawakened fears about toxic pollution, water contamination, and even asbestos exposure in communities across the country,” said Christy Goldfuss, former managing director of Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality and currently senior vice president for energy and environment policy at the Center for American Progress.(ThinkProgress is an editorially independent project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.)

In its first two years, the Trump administration has worked overtime to increase the exposure of our children to substances that are uniquely dangerous to their developing minds and bodies — including mercury, arsenic, and air toxics, as well as polluted water and the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which has been linked directly to fetal brain damage.

Trump’s appointees have routinely done the bidding of the industries they are supposed to regulate; several of them came to government after careers as industry lobbyists. For instance, Acting Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler is a former top lobbyist for coal giant Murray Energy, whose CEO, Robert Murray, is a huge contributor to Trump. (See the online version for links.)

FOUR VOLUNTEERS CONVICTED FOR LEAVING LIFE-SAVING SUPPLIES FOR IMMIGRANTS IN DESERT. A federal judge in Arizona has found four women guilty of misdemeanor charges for leaving survival supplies in a vast desert refuge on the US border. The AP notes that the decision marks the first conviction against humanitarian aid volunteers in a decade, Zack Ford reported at ThinkProgress (1/20).

The four women, Natalie Hoffman, Oona Holcomb, Madeline Huse, and Zaachild Orozco-McCormick, worked with an organization called No More Deaths to leave water jugs and canned food inside the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Arizona.

According to the organization, some 155 bodies have been recovered from the desert since 2001, including 32 in 2017. No More Deaths seeks to reduce the number of deaths from immigrants crossing over in this area, but permits are required to enter the region.

The women face fines of $500 and up to six months in jail. Five more volunteers still face trials in the coming months on similar charges.

The group has documented that Border Patrol agents have destroyed the food and water supplies left in the desert for migrants, including 3,856 gallons of water over four year. Refuge officials have adopted a policy prohibiting the placement of food, water, blankets, medical aid, or other humanitarian aid.

No More Deaths volunteer Catherine Gaffney said in a statement, “This verdict challenges not only No More Deaths volunteers, but people of conscience throughout the country. If giving water to someone dying of thirst is illegal, what humanity is left in the law of this country?”

NANCY PELOSI’S POPULARITY SURGES. It wasn’t clear whether Nancy Pelosi would be speaker when Democrats won control of the House in last November’s elections.

Considered too much of a lightning rod for Republicans, a couple dozen of the chamber’s Democrats sought to force her to give up the spot at the top of their caucus. The Democratic Party, they argued, needed “change” ― younger, fresher faces in its leadership ranks.

But now, just a couple months later, Pelosi is riding relatively high, Amanda Terkel noted at HuffPost (1/17.

Pelosi has become the chief foil of President Trump in the government shutdown fight. Both Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) refuse to give Trump the $5.7 billion he wants to build a wall along the US southern border. But it’s Pelosi who has been the main antagonist.

Since the election, her favorability rating is up 8 percentage points overall, to 35%, according to Civiqs, a progressive polling firm. Breaking down the numbers, she surged 14 points among Democrats, 8 points among independents and even gone up 1 point with Republicans. The poll showed 52% unfavorable, down 5 points from election day.

Pelosi is more popular than she has been in a decade. Trump’s approval, meanwhile, is tanking, though at 43% in the Civiqs poll, it’s still above Pelosi’s. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sunk to a 19% favorable rating in a 1/10 Civiqs poll, down 5 points since election day, and 61% unfavorable.

Paul Ryan retired from the House with 12% favorable and 72% unfavorable. Even among Republicans, he had only 24% favorable. Pelosi had 73% approval among Democrats.

The Republican Party in a 1/17 Civiqs poll had 27% favorable and 59% unfavorable. The Democrats in the same poll had 40% favorable and 50% unfavorable.

HOUSE DEMS SNUB LABOR CHOICE FOR TRADE PANEL. House Democrats rejected a stalwart union ally’s bid to chair the House panel charged with overseeing international trade, in favor of a more business-friendly choice.

Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday elected Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) as chairman of the panel’s Subcommittee on Trade, defying organized labor and left-leaning trade critics who had pushed for Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) to get the top spot in conversations with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other top Democrats, Daniel Marans reported at HuffingtonPost.

In particular, Blumenauer drew ire among critics of corporate influence in trade agreements for his key role in enabling passage of trade promotion authority in 2015. Known as fast-track authority, it assures presidents an up-or-down vote in Congress on international trade deals, precluding a lengthy debate and amendment process. At the time, it was widely viewed as a prerequisite for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial 12-nation trade pact negotiated by then-President Barack Obama but opposed by a majority of House Democrats.

Referring to the subcommittee vote, a House Democratic aide said, “They threw labor under the bus and gave them the middle finger.”

Unions are taking a more pragmatic approach, shifting their focus to keeping pressure on Blumenauer, Marans noted

“This chairman, though he was not our preferred choice — you play the hand you get dealt, and that’s what we’re going to do,” said a union official involved in lobbying for Pascrell who requested anonymity to speak freely.

Unions and other left critics of past trade policy see Trump’s aggressive enforcement of trade rules in general and get-tough approach with China in particular as an improvement on the status quo.

“It’s the one area where Trump has kinda, sorta delivered,” said Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, which studies corporate consolidation and power.

The union official put it more bluntly: “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

Blumenauer has strongly disputed any notion that he was a down-the-line free trade proponent, noting his opposition to the Central American and Colombian trade agreements.

He also insisted that he has a long record of supporting tougher enforcement of trade rules, including but not limited to the issue of illegal logging ― a key concern in Oregon. (See the online story.)

POLLUTION AT TEXAS COAL PLANTS POSES MAJOR THREAT TO HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT. Virtually every coal power plant in Texas is leaking pollution into nearby groundwater, imperiling the environment and the health of neighboring communities, according to a new report by the non-profit, non-partisan Environmental Integrity Project (EIP).

The report found that toxic coal ash pollutants from coal-fired power plants in Texas are leaking into groundwater around the state. Arsenic, cobalt, lithium, and a range of other pollutants are seeping from 100% of Texas power plants coal ash sites for which reports are available, E.A. Crunden noted at ThinkProgress (1/17).

Texas receives 24% of its electricity from coal, with 16 coal plants out of at least 19 in the state currently reporting coal ash data. Texas is the leading US generator of both oil and wind power, and while it produces far less coal, the fuel — and its pollution — remains a lagging issue for residents.

Coal ash is the toxic waste left behind after fuel is burned and is composed of a range of deadly pollutants, including carcinogens and neurotoxins. When it comes into contact with groundwater, it becomes particularly dangerous for human health, leading to diseases like cancer, and for the environment, imperiling aquatic life along with drinking water.

“Since coal-fired power plants depend on a reliable water source for steam, these pits are often located near waterways,” the report explains. “This makes it more likely that hazardous elements in coal ash… will leach into groundwater, poisoning drinking water aquifers and harming aquatic life in nearby surface waters.”

With minimal exceptions, the EIP report also notes that no coal ash ponds meet Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) liner requirements, meaning they are unlined or virtually unlined. Effectively, there are no sufficient barriers in place between the coal ash and the ground to keep the toxins from leaking, posing a deadly problem in a state plagued by coal ash.

In 2018, the first federal regulation on the disposal of coal ash came into effect, mandating that companies make their groundwater pollution data publicly available. That regulation underpins the new report, which found that in Texas, 13 of 16 reporting coal plants have unsafe levels of arsenic in nearby groundwater, with levels at ten times the EPA Maximum Containment Level amount. Ten plants reported unsafe levels of boron — which is deadly to humans and aquatic life — while 14 reported unsafe levels of cobalt and 11 reported unsafe levels of lithium.

Last November, researchers at Rice University in Houston released a report that found a combination of wind and solar energy could work in sync with one another to power the state. While their findings don’t indicate that Texas could run entirely on renewables just yet, they do highlight the state’s unique position when it comes to more sustainable energy opportunities. (See the online version)

BUSINESSES HIT HARD BY TRUMP SHUTDOWN ARE SUDDENLY SILENT ABOUT GOP LAWMAKERS THEY BANKROLLED. American businesses are losing hundreds of millions of dollars every day President Trump’s partial government shutdown — now the longest on record — rages on. But few industry leaders say they are pressuring Republican members of Congress they bankrolled to end the shutdown — even though few have chosen to break ranks with the president to reopen the government with a veto-proof majority of votes.

Business organizations have vigorously objected to shutdowns before, particularly when they occurred under Democratic presidents. In 2013, when Barack Obama was president, the conservative National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) likened a government shutdown to kings sacrificing the wellbeing of the peasants. William C. Dunkelberg, chief economist of the NFIB (which calls itself “the voice of small business”), said then that “the president’s ego is at stake. He refuses to compromise or negotiate.” Dunkelberg said the resulting impasse would hurt “the little people,” such as small businesses with government contracts and workers living paycheck-to-paycheck. “We need to elect better,” he concluded.

The organization responded by spending against Democrats: NFIB’s political action committee distributed millions of dollars — almost exclusively to Republican House and Senate candidates — in the 2014, 2016, and 2018 elections. But did they “elect better”? Six years after Dunkelberg’s statement, a Republican president has shut down the government to try to force American taxpayers to bankroll a border wall he’d promised Mexico would fully fund. Most congressional Republicans are standing with him.

This time, the NFIB has been suspiciously quiet, and it did not respond to a ThinkProgress inquiry. NFIB is not alone among interest groups representing the business community.

The nation’s largest business group, the US Chamber of Commerce, spent millions of dollars in independent expenditures in 2018 in support of congressional Republicans, including recently appointed Arizona Sen. Martha McSally ($2 million), Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn ($1.5 million), Florida Sen. Rick Scott ($750,000), Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith ($675,000), Alabama Rep. Martha Roby ($342,902), Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez ($300,000), and Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon ($250,000).

These lawmakers are now standing with Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to perpetuate the shutdown. The chamber sent an open letter to Congress on 1/8 noting that the “shutdown is harming the American people, the business community, and the economy.” The letter urged a compromise “that combines increasing border security with protection and legal status for Dreamers and long-term beneficiaries of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program” — a compromise that would the government immediately.

But asked if the chamber or its members were concerned that the candidates they bankrolled are obstructing efforts to reopen the government, a spokesperson told ThinkProgress only that “the letter covers it all on the impact of the shutdown.” (See a longer version.)

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2019

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