Dispatches

TRUMP NOMINATION OF PROJECT 2025 ARCHITECT MEANS SOCIAL SECURITY, MEDICARE ‘ARE AT RISK.’ President-elect Trump’s choice of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 architect, to lead the White House budget office was seen as further evidence of the threat the incoming administration poses to Social Security, Medicare, and other critical government programs, Jake Johnson noted at Common Dreams (11/25).

Vought, who currently heads the far-right think tank Center for Renewing America think tank, served as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump’s first term, and he’s set to return to the post after playing a central role in crafting the Project 2025 agenda that the Republican president-elect attempted to disavow on the campaign trail.

In remarks to an undercover journalist earlier this year, Vought dismissed the notion that Trump opposed the aims of Project 2025, saying the Republican leader was “very supportive of what we do.”

Vought is expected to aggressively pursue federal spending cuts in concert with other actors within and around the incoming Trump administration, including the “government efficiency” commission led by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

During his tenure at OMB and as an outside adviser to Republican lawmakers, Vought advocated massive cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, programs that the GOP is targeting as it looks to offset the costs of its proposed tax cuts.

Vought also spearheaded budget proposals from the Trump White House that recommended cuts to Social Security and Medicare, both of which the president-elect vowed to protect during his 2024 campaign.

“Vought oversaw every budget in the first Trump administration that cut Social Security and Medicare,” said Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US. “This much is clear: Social Security and Medicare are at risk in the second Trump presidency.”

According to Accountable, Vought is one of at least six individuals associated with Project 2025 whom Trump has picked for a spot in the incoming administration.

“With the architect of Project 2025 nominated to lead Trump’s Office of Management and Budget,” said Carrk, “there can be no distinction between the two.”

While Project 2025’s sweeping policy document includes little discussion of Social Security, the far-right program’s authors have endorsed changes such as raising the retirement age—which would result in across-the-board benefit cuts.

As for Medicare, Project 2025 proposes making privatized Medicare Advantage plans the default enrollment option for U.S. seniors, a change that would be massively profitable for insurance giants and potentially disastrous for patients.

UNIONS NOTE LABOR PICK’S ‘PRO-UNION’ RECORD, ‘BUT DONALD TRUMP IS THE PRESIDENT-ELECT.’ Amid a flurry of Friday night announcements about key roles in the next Trump administration, one stood out to union leaders and other advocates for working people: Re. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican, for labor secretary, Jessica Corbett noted at Common Dreams (11/23).

Chavez-DeRemer, who lost her reelection bid to Democrat Janelle Bynum Nov. 5, “has built a pro-labor record in Congress, including as one of only three Republicans to co-sponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and one of eight Republicans to co-sponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act,” said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler.

“But Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States—not Rep. Chavez-DeRemer—and it remains to be seen what she will be permitted to do as secretary of labor in an administration with a dramatically anti-worker agenda,” she stressed. “Despite having distanced himself from Project 2025 during his campaign, President-elect Trump has put forward several Cabinet nominees with strong ties to Project 2025. That 900-page document has proposals that would strip overtime pay, eliminate the right to organize, and weaken health and safety standards.”

“The AFL-CIO will work with anyone who wants to do right by workers, but we will reject and defeat any attempt to roll back the rights and protections that working people have won with decades of blood, sweat, and tears,” added Schuler, whose group endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and developed a guide detailing how the right-wing initiative would be catastrophic for working people. “You can stand with working people, or you can stand with Project 2025, but you can’t stand with both.”

Seth Harris, a Northeastern University professor who served as acting secretary of labor under former President Barack Obama, told Bloomberg that “the president-elect has nominated a unicorn: a genuine pro-labor Republican.”

“This is about the best nomination for the Labor Department that Democrats could have hoped for,” he said, but “we don’t know if she’s going to be given the freedom to carry out the agenda that she supported in Congress.”

Some skeptics and critics highlighted that Chavez-DeRemer—who only entered the U.S. House of Representatives last year—has just a 10% lifetime score from the AFL-CIO. Among them was longtime labor reporter Mike Elk, who warned, “This is divide and conquer politics at its worst as Trump prepares for an attack on federal workers unions!”

Others, such as Progressive Mass policy director Jonathan Cohn and University of California, Los Angeles historian Trevor Griffey, have suggested that Trump’s U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) nominee supporting the PRO Act was simply her “posturing in a swing district.”

Like the AFL-CIO, the nation’s two largest teachers unions shared nuanced reactions to Trump choosing Chavez-DeRemer. Alongside many other labor groups, both backed Harris after President Joe Biden left the race—though Trump’s victory has ignited heated debates over the Democratic Party’s failure to win over working-class voters in a cycle that featured Trump cosplaying in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s and a garbage truck while cozying up to the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and praising him for firing striking workers.

National Education Association president Becky Pringle noted Chavez-DeRemer’s co-sponsorship of “pro-student, pro-public school, pro-worker legislation” and votes “against gutting the Department of Education, against school vouchers, and against cuts to education funding.” Pringle asserted, “this record stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s anti-worker, anti-union record, and his extreme Project 2025 agenda that would gut workplace protections, make it harder for workers to unionize, and diminish the voice of working people.”

“During his first term, Trump appointed anti-worker, anti-union National Labor Relations Board members,” she continued. “Now he is threatening to take the unprecedented action of removing current pro-worker NLRB members in the middle of their term, replacing them with his corporate friends. And he is promising to appoint judges and justices who are hostile to workers and unions.”

Trump’s track record also includes nominating agency leaders and U.S. Supreme Court justices with histories of siding with companies over employees, gutting DOL regulations intended to protect workers’ wages and benefits, and giving major tax cuts to wealthy individuals and corporations—policies he plans to extend with the help of an incoming GOP Congress.

WHAT WILL TRUMP AND GOP CONGRESS DO TO CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BUREAU? Just hours after President-elect Trump named a labor secretary nominee seen by some union leaders and advocates as genuinely pro-worker, the Washington Post on Nov. 23 detailed what the incoming administration and Republican Congress have planned for a federal agency designed to protect everyday Americans from corporate abuse, Jessica Corbett noted at Common Dreams (11/25).

Initially proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) while she was still a Harvard Law School professor, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Congress passed in response to the 2007-08 financial crisis.

The first Trump administration was accused of “gutting the CFPB and corrupting its mission.” However, the Post noted, “[the bureau’s] current Democratic leader, Rohit Chopra, has been aggressive” in his fights for consumers, working to get medical debt off credit reports and crack down on “junk fees” for everything from bank account overdrafts and credit cards to paycheck advance products—efforts that drew fierce challenges from the financial industry.

Chopra, an appointee of outgoing President Joe Biden, isn’t expected to stay at the CFPB, but Trump’s recent win hasn’t yet halted bold action at the agency. On Nov. 21, it announced plans “to supervise the largest nonbank companies offering digital funds transfer and payment wallet apps,” which is set to impact Amazon, Apple, Block, Google, PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle, unless the Trump administration shifts course.

The Post reported that Republican leaders “intend to use control of the House, Senate, and White House next year to impose new restrictions on the agency, in some cases permanently,” and “early discussions align the GOP with banks, credit card companies, mortgage lenders, and other large financial institutions.”

Warren, who won a third term in the Senate earlier this month, is optimistic about the agency’s survival. “The CFPB is here to stay,” she told the Post. “So I get there’s big talk, but the laws supporting the CFPB are strong, and support across this nation from Democrats, Republicans, and people who don’t pay any attention at all to politics, is also strong.”

WALL STREET CHEERS TRUMP’S TREASURY PICK, CORPORATE TAX CUT PROPONENT SCOTT BESSENT. With the stock market surging Nov. 25 after President-elect Trump’s nomination of hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to be treasury secretary, some Wall Street executives said they were celebrating a “reasonable” pick who would moderate some of Trump’s most extreme proposals, Julia Conley noted at Common Dreams (11/25)

But economic justice advocates and experts said the jubilation was likely over expectations that Bessent will deliver “trillions in tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy.”

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, founder and president of the Yale Chief Executive Institute, told CNN that the billionaire Key Square Group executive is a “pragmatic” choice who supports only “selective tariffs” and could dial back Trump’s plan to introduce across-the-board tariffs of up to 20% on imported goods—a plan that economists say would raise prices for U.S. households.

But Bessent himself told radio host Larry Kudlow that tariffs “can’t be inflationary.”

David Kass, executive director of the economic justice group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), said that during Bessent’s confirmation process, the organization will work to ensure lawmakers get answers to questions about whether the Wall Street billionaire plans to use tariffs to fund another Trump plan Bessent has endorsed: the renewal of the 2017 tax cuts.

“As income inequality is soaring and Americans are being crushed by the rising costs of living, we have to ask why billionaire Scott Bessent supports renewing the Trump tax bill, which gives trillions in tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and mega-corporations,” Kass said. “Moreover, we also need to know how Mr. Bessent would fund this massive tax giveaway. Will he make working and middle-class Americans foot the bill by enacting wide-ranging cuts to vital government programs like Social Security and Medicare? Will he squeeze Main Street by raising prices on essential goods through tariffs?”

The government watchdog Accountable.US noted that Bessent has defended Trump’s tariff plan, which analysts found would raise annual household costs by an average of $3,900, while backing the extension of Trump’s tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and corporations.

“For all his talk of looking out for working-class Americans, President-elect Trump’s choice of a billionaire hedge fund manager to lead the Treasury Department shows he just wants to keep a rigged system that only works for big corporations and the very wealthy,” said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk. “If confirmed, Scott Bessent’s first order of business will be to push trillions of dollars in more tax giveaways to the very well-off and at the same time essentially enact a $3,900 tax increase for the typical American family.”

GOP SENATORS SHRUG OFF RAPE ALLEGATION AGAINST TRUMP DEFENSE SECRETARY PICK. Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin said on Nov. 24 he doesn’t believe the woman who accused Trump’s secretary of defense nominee of sexual assault, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (11/25).

Fox News host Pete Hegseth, whom Trump tapped to head the DOD, was accused of rape in 2017 by a woman who attended a Republican women event in California. Her accusations are detailed in a 22-page police report, which Trump’s team allegedly did not know about before Trump tapped Hegseth.

“He wasn’t charged. He wasn’t even kind of charged in this. There was no crime committed. The police dropped everything there,” Mullin told CNN’s Dana Bash of the rape allegation against Pete Hegseth.

While it’s true Hegseth wasn’t charged after the police report was filed, that doesn’t necessarily clear him of wrongdoing.

Prosecutors may not have believed there was enough evidence to prove the allegation beyond a reasonable doubt—something that happens often in rape cases as they are often based on competing accounts from the accuser and the accused.

“Out of every 1,000 instances of rape, only 13 cases get referred to a prosecutor, and only 7 cases will lead to a felony conviction,” the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network stated.

What’s more, Hegseth paid the accuser off to keep quiet about her allegations, which Hegseth reportedly feared could have cost him his Fox News gig.

Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee said he won’t let the rape allegation “distract” him and plans to vote for Hegseth without any more vetting necessary.

“Don’t let these allegations distract us,” Hagerty said of Hegseth. “What we need is real significant change. The Pentagon has been more focused on pronouns than they have lethality the past four years. We need to get back to business, and I think Pete is just the person to do it.”

Ultimately, not one Republican senator has come out publicly against Hegseth.

That includes Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, a veteran who is a victim of sexual assault and has been vocal about the need for the military to address its problems of sexual violence.

In 2019, Ernst was the only Republican to vote against Trump’s pick for vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been accused of sexual assault by a fellow member of the military.

However, Ernst has raised concerns about the Hegseth allegations as well as his belief that women shouldn’t serve in combat.

“Any time there are allegations, you want to make sure they are properly vetted, so we’ll have that discussion,” Ernst told Politico.

Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota has also raised concerns about Hegseth but hasn’t said he will vote against him.

“It’s a pretty big problem, given that we have, you know, we have a sexual assault problem in our military,” Cramer said of the rape allegation against Hegseth.

In addition to the rape allegation against Hegseth, Democratic senators are pushing back on Hegseth because he is not qualified to run one of the largest segments of the federal government.

“Pete Hegseth never commanded a unit or a company—let alone battalions, brigades or whole armies. He does not have the experience to run a Department that includes 3 million servicemembers and civilians along with a budget of over $900 billion,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a veteran who lost both of her legs during a tour in Iraq, wrote on X Sunday. “He is unqualified and dangerous.”

THOUGHT GAETZ WAS BAD ATTORNEY GENERAL PICK? GET A LOAD OF PAM BONDI. After his first choice, sex trafficking investigation subject Matt Gaetz, decided to drop out, Donald Trump chose former Florida Attorney General and Fox News guest host Pam Bondi to serve as his attorney general, Oliver Willis noted at Daily Kos (11/22).

Bondi fits right in with Trump ideologically. During her time serving in Florida, Bondi focused on attacking the Affordable Care Act, which Trump has long pushed to repeal.

In 2012, she worked with other Republican attorneys general on a lawsuit meant to undo the law, which has extended health care coverage to millions of Americans. Bondi clearly relished her role as the public face of the suit and a 2012 Tampa Bay Times story quoted Bondi asking her team to take photos of her in front of the Supreme Court following a news conference there.

The case failed and the law has remained in place—with coverage expanded by the Biden/Harris administration.

Bondi was also part of a 2018 lawsuit that sought to strike down provisions in the law that require insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions. That effort also ultimately failed.

Like so many others in the Trump orbit, Bondi is a frequent part of the rotation of guests and guest hosts on Fox News.

In her appearances on the network the lawyer distinguished herself by referring to Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse as merely a “little boy out there trying to protect his community,” and by calling for schools to follow the post-9/11 airport security model in response to school shootings, as opposed to gun regulation.

Trump enlisted Bondi to argue his case on the Senate floor when he was impeached for using the presidency to solicit political favors from Ukraine, and she was one of the public faces of Trump’s efforts to promote election lies following his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

“We’ve won Pennsylvania,” Bondi claimed at the time—and in a Fox News appearance came up with a story about “fake ballots” purportedly being counted in the state. Trump lost Pennsylvania to Biden by over 80,000 votes.

Trump has frequently said that loyalty is extremely important to him, and Bondi has been an advocate for him for years.

Those ties have also led to the appearance of corruption. In 2016, Trump was forced to pay a penalty to the IRS after it was determined that he had broken tax laws by giving a political contribution to a Bondi-connected nonprofit.

Following that 2013 donation of $25,000 from Trump, Bondi decided not to investigate fraud claims against Trump University in her role as Florida attorney general. Years later, Trump paid out $25 million in settlements to students who said the organization had duped them with promises to impart the “secrets of success” in real estate.

Unlike Gaetz, Bondi may not have any ongoing sex trafficking investigations (that are publicly known at least) but she has proven herself a Trump diehard, which is his top qualification for the most important positions.

CRITICS SAY ‘HISTORY OF ENABLING SEXUAL ABUSE’ MAKES MCMAHON UNFIT FOR TOP EDUCATION POST. A group that combats sexual violence on campuses was among those speaking out Nov. 22 against President-elect Trump’s nomination of former wrestling entertainment executive Linda McMahon for education secretary, warning that her own sexual abuse scandal makes her an “appalling” choice to lead the department tasked with protecting students from discrimination and violence, Julia Conley noted at Common Dreams (11/22).

Kenyora Parham, CEO of End Rape on Campus, said McMahon’s “documented history of enabling sexual abuse of children and sweeping sexual violence under the rug” is “disqualifying” for a nominee to lead the Department of Education.

Parham was referring to a lawsuit that was filed in October by five anonymous plaintiffs in Maryland, which alleges that while McMahon was the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) in the 1980s, she and other executives enabled “open and rampant” grooming and sexual abuse of the company’s teenaged “ring boys” by announcer Mel Phillips and others.

The lawsuit alleges that McMahon and her now-estranged husband, WWE co-founder Vince McMahon, knew that Phillips was recruiting boys as young as 12 to work as stagehands and then sexually exploiting them, sometimes in front of wrestlers and executives in the locker area. WWE wrestlers Pat Patterson and Terry Garvin are also named as abusers.

The plaintiffs said they were between the ages of 13-15 when they were abused, and that the McMahons were aware of the sexual exploitation. According to the lawsuit, Vince McMahon admitted the couple was aware of Phillips’ “peculiar and unnatural interest” in young boys, and the McMahons fired him briefly in 1988 over allegations of sexual abuse.

They “rehired him six weeks later on the condition that he ‘steer clear from kids,’” according to the lawsuit, but the exploitation continued.

Parham spoke out a day after she and other rights advocates celebrated the news that former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who Trump had nominated to be attorney general, was withdrawing from consideration amid allegations that he paid to have sex with a 17-year-old, which were the subject of an investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

“Now can we get Linda McMahon to withdraw her appointment as secretary of education, too?” said Parham Nov. 21.

Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host who Trump has nominated to be defense secretary, has also been accused of sexual assault, the details of which were revealed in a police report that was made public after his nomination was announced. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump nominated to lead the Health and Human Services Department, has been accused by his children’s former babysitter of sexual abuse.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who Trump has named to run his Department of Government Efficiency, has been named in a lawsuit filed by former SpaceX employees who alleged sexual harassment at work. Trump himself was found liable in 2023 for sexual abuse in a case filed by writer E. Jean Carroll.

Putting McMahon in charge of overseeing Title IX protections, which prohibits sex discrimination and sexual harassment and assault at schools that receive federal funding, “is like handing keys to an arsonist to run the fire department,” said Caroline Ciccone, president of government watchdog Accountable.US.

“Donald Trump’s nomination of Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education is indefensible,” said Ciccone. “This is someone accused of ignoring rampant sexual abuse under her watch... It’s an insult to survivors and a blatant attack on the safety of students nationwide.”

Trump chose McMahon to lead the Education Department after President Joe Biden expanded Title IX protections to cover discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. Trump has pledged to roll back the expanded policy, and has called for the entire department to be dismantled.

RFK JR. THOUGHT TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE ‘BELLIGERENT IDIOTS.” In 2016, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. crapped all over Donald Trump and his supporters, agreeing that they were racist idiots too stupid to succeed, according to a trove of radio clips unearthed by CNN.

CNN reported that Kennedy—Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services—made the comments on his radio show “Ring of Fire,” where he regularly criticized Trump and those who backed him, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (11/22).

For example, in an episode that aired in March 2016, Kennedy praised journalist Matt Taibbi’s criticism of Trump and his base.

“One of the things that you write so beautifully, and your stuff is so fun to read, but you write about Trump, quote, ‘The way that you build a truly vicious nationalist movement is to wed a relatively small core of belligerent idiots to a much larger group of opportunists and spineless fellow travelers whose primary function is to turn a blind eye to things,’” Kennedy said, quoting Taibbi’s writing. “‘We may not have that many outright Nazis in America, but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers, and once those fleshy dominoes start tumbling into the Trump camp, the game is up.’”

Kennedy went on to say that Trump is a racist demagogue but isn’t smart enough to be effective like Adolf Hitler because Hitler had a “plan” and “was interested in policy,” while Trump is “non compos mentis”—Latin for “of unsound mind.”

CNN reported that Kennedy also compared Trump to other past autocrats, like Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco.

“And you can see that every statement that Donald Trump makes is fear-based,” Kennedy said in an episode that aired in December 2016, according to CNN. “Every statement he makes. You know, we have to be fear of the Muslims. We have to be fear of the black people, and particularly the big Black guy Obama, who’s destroying this country, who’s making everybody miserable.”

Kennedy went on: “And only one person has the genius and the capacity to solve these things. And I’m not gonna tell you how I’m gonna do it. Just trust in me, vote for me and everything will be great again. And of course, that whole thing is like a carnival barker.”

He also called Trump racist and compared him with former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, an infamous segregationist.

“Wallace’s appeal … was to White middle-class men who had experienced the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as a social demotion, and who found their lives in turmoil,” Kennedy said, according to CNN. “And that kind of insecurity, I think, is the target of the summons that Donald Trump has sent out to the American public.”

Of course, Kennedy has now changed his tune, blaming his past comments on—you guessed it—the “mainstream media.”

“Like many Americans, I allowed myself to believe the mainstream media’s distorted, dystopian portrait of President Trump. I no longer hold this belief and now regret having made those statements,” he told CNN.

“There’s apparently nothing that can’t be blamed on the mainstream media, even one’s own very public criticisms,” CNN reporter Jim Sciutto wrote in a post on X.

Ultimately, Kennedy is one of a number of people now in Trump’s orbit who slammed the president-elect in the past but have since retracted their statements in an effort to amass power.

Vice President-elect JD Vance infamously called Trump “America’s Hitler.”

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote to an associate in 2016.

Vance also was appalled by the “Access Hollywood” tape that surfaced in October 2016, in which Trump was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent.

“Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man,” Vance tweeted at the time. “Lord help us.”

And he even called Trump “reprehensible, writing in an October 2016 tweet: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”

Right-wing billionaire Elon Musk—Trump’s shadow president who seems to quickly be wearing out his welcome in Trump’s inner circle—once said Trump shouldn’t run for president again.

“I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset,” Musk wrote on Twitter (now X) in 2022. “Dems should also call off the attack—don’t make it so that Trump’s only way to survive is to regain the Presidency.”

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, once called Trump a “con artist”

“He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy—his entire career,” Rubio said in 2016, when he was running against Trump for the GOP presidential nomination.

“He’s going to Americans that are struggling, that are hurting, and he’s implying, ‘I’m fighting for you because I’m a tough guy,’ A tough guy?” Rubio added. “This guy inherited $200 million. He’s never faced any struggle.”

And former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii—the Vladimir Putin apologist whom Trump picked to lead the United States’ intelligence—once said Trump was “unfit to be commander in chief.”

‘“He’s essentially pimping out our men and women in uniform to a foreign power who’s the highest bidder,” Gabbard said when she was running for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2024

Populist.com