Trump loves power, so he tells us that we have problems, and only he can save us from them, but that his opponents stop him from doing so.
It may seem counterintuitive that a strongman would admit any kind of inability in the face of opposition. If he is so strong then why can’t he do this or that important thing? The strongman is supposed to appear capable and unrestrained. Surely then a president professing inability is not a strongman… right? But in fact, such claims of inability are deliberate tactics, especially for strongmen still consolidating power, and they should frighten us. The claim of inability is followed by its chilling next step: “…so I need more power.”
The United States government is not perfect, but it is also not inherently broken. It has not been broken historically, though Trump is breaking it deliberately. Our government’s political flaws are real, and people have legitimate complaints about these flaws and their root causes, but prior to Trump the US government was globally seen as a stable democracy leading the world’s most powerful defensive alliance, the world’s most powerful military, the world’s largest economy, and much of the world’s leading scientific research, all with low government corruption and (when ranking is not limited to the G20) high scores in medical availability and educational achievement. Anyone hearing claims that our government was broken before Trump should ask themselves: “Then why were we doing so well?”
The answer is obvious. The claims are lies. Our government was not broken before Trump. It worked, and worked well. It was not perfect, but our nation lost sight of how good our government was because of how good it was. Consider the topics and scales of our common complaints about our government. We disagreed about foreign policies such as who we should give weapons to; we complained about slow and stumbling program rollouts, despite funding and political will (for two examples, take FEMA’s inefficient and slow trailer distribution following Katrina, which left Americans in substandard housing made with unsafe materials under Bush Jr., and the woeful early performance of healthcare.gov, which was initially an utter failure of a front-end website for Obama’s flagship Affordable Care Act) and we expressed concern about a Congress that seemed able only to ratchet up our deficit, never down (although we maintained honest disagreements about the solution). None of these things fail to matter. They are all very important! But the luxury of discussing these topics belies how many existential concerns other nations face that we simply didn’t need to worry about because we were doing so well. We focused on what to do with wealth, and how to most effectively improve ourselves, because we didn’t have to focus on just getting by, or whether or not our next election would be honored, or discovering that corrupt politicians had lied to us by publishing false deficit numbers for years, or whether or not our neighbor would invade us. We housed Americans after Katrina inefficiently, and with unsafe materials, and we should have done better, but we did not leave them unhoused. We rolled out healthcare.gov poorly, a single (albeit complex) online marketplace and portal funded with half a billion dollars that couldn’t do its job on day one, but we fixed it, and we lose sight of the fact that it was part of a program to make sure everyone could get consistent and affordable healthcare coverage. On a national scale, the failures were missteps in programs that most other nations would have considered impossible luxuries. We had so many successes that we took them for granted and complained about details. You only complain about a small hole in the drywall, or question what color to paint the walls, when your home already exists and is already satisfying its most important functions.
Trump would have us believe that the American government is broken, and that only he can fix it, but that he has been unable to do so due to the presence and actions of others, especially civil servants who allow themselves to be constrained by the Constitution and statute (who he characterizes as “the deep state”), political opponents who disagree with him, and any court that imposes checks on his unconstitutional actions. He tells us that he could solve all of our problems if we just allowed him to do the things that he wants, or that he must use declarations of emergency because normal powers available to the president are not enough, or that the lawful actions of his opponents are illegal, or that they ought to be. He has characterized the media and his political opponents as “enemies of the people” because they are opposing his policies, which he frames as necessary to save the nation. In order to support his narrative that only he can save the nation, he must first make us believe that the nation needs to be saved. He cannot claim that he is a solution without first asserting that there is a problem, and he knows that we the people will not accept the dissolution of rule of law and an abandonment of constitutional, democratic norms easily. To hear him speak, we are faced by myriad existential crises. Only by abandoning our commitment to democratic principles of opposition, constitutional constraint, and limited executive power can we be saved, and he would be our savior.
There is another word for that, of course. When we unconstrain the executive, when they are no longer beholden to the courts and they are able to act without Congress and to direct a civil service loyal only to them, and when they are unopposed by other political parties, we call that a dictator. Trump’s argument is authoritarian in nature, and its end is authoritarianism, not democracy. Reject it.
Trump is trying to break our democracy. He has neither succeeded nor failed. His is an ongoing effort, in progress, partially succeeded, yet rightly meeting opposition. Today, part of his focus is on a dishonest claim that the government cannot maintain critical social safety programs during the current government shutdown. Despite the fact that SNAP has a dedicated reserve fund and a separate multi-year fund which are each available to fund it now, Trump claims that “I do NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT. Therefore, I have instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible.” This appears to be Trump’s way of spinning his administration’s defeat – not victory – in court as they attempted to stop SNAP payments in order to manufacture a crisis. Under Trump, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has hidden its own contingency plan for a shutdown, which relied on using the reserve funds to maintain SNAP benefits. Trump’s USDA reversed its longstanding position that these funds can be used to provide benefits during a shutdown, despite having actually used its reserves to provide benefits during Trump’s first term. This false claim of inability is a choice, not an honest failure of our political system, and at time of writing on November 2 these claims have suffered preliminary defeats in court after Trump’s administration tried and failed to justify them. Our government, for all its faults, has recognized with bipartisan support the importance of making funding for SNAP available without interruption, and the court has correctly recognized that Congress, not the president, has the authority to decide that these funds must be spent. The next week will show us to what extent the administration complies.
Trump wants us to believe that he is saving us from a crisis even though that crisis was manufactured by his own administration through an attempt to unconstitutionally impound funds. He wants to be seen as the strongman who saved the day even though he is the criminal who threatened the day. The reality is that this administration uses pain as a tool, as evinced by Russ Vought’s infamous quote about putting civil servants in trauma, and now the entire American public is the target of this tool as Trump tries to win a political dispute, the government shutdown, rather than perform his duty to take care that the law be faithfully executed by effectively using reserve funds as appropriated. Trump does not want to help the American people, he wants to treat us as a herd and drive us like cattle. His tool of choice is the cattle prod. He, and the administration he has built, create pain, then offer to save us from it if only our society will obey without opposition.
We should not comply with such attempts to coerce and control us. We should demand that our government lead from the front and call us to follow, not prod from the back, directing us with pain. We should certainly not accept a narrative that we are beswarmed with crises (SNAP is only the latest example), often existential (consider the administration’s language around immigration, trade policy, and domestic political opponents), that can only be averted by aggregating power in one man, to the exclusion of political competition and legal checks and balances. We must adhere to our democratic principles, and when the very existence of opposition is demonized we must support the opposition, not agree with the would-be strongman. He is not trying to defeat his opponents, he is trying to defeat opposition itself. Do not let him.
As the government shutdown continues, SNAP is not the only program under threat. Several other important components of our social safety net face disruption ranging from delays to total cessation of benefit distribution. In most of these cases, the greatest threats are more honest than Trump’s attack on SNAP. These include:
Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), a program under the USDA just like SNAP, but with a much smaller reserve fund. Normal reserve funds are in danger of running out and it is currently being temporarily propped up with infusions of cash available to USDA for some purposes from Section 32 of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1935. This is not a permanent solution.
The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), administered by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) under Health and Human Services (HHS). As the months get colder and energy bills climb, families could be reduced to huddling in the dark for warmth. As a nation, we should care enough to make sure our neighbors can do better than our forebears in the nineteenth century.
Several Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs that collectively assure the availability of housing, or ability to pay for it. Without these programs, Americans in need may be on the streets while housing units sit empty. Nobody wins here.
Child nutrition carryover accounts. These are accounts that take unspent money from a previous government fiscal year and use them at the start of the next year, providing coverage until Congress appropriates new money. However, they will run out during a long shutdown. Affected programs could include The National School Lunch Program (NSLP), The School Breakfast Program (SBP), and The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP).
These programs lack appropriated funds, so they can’t disburse funds. The symptom is simple, but the cause needs to be understood in its full context. Two political parties are engaged in a vehement budget dispute, and the sticking point is that one party has decided to slash healthcare coverage benefits and assurances for millions of Americans while the other party has chosen to ardently defend healthcare coverage. These positions are not ethically, practically, or even politically equal. The healthcare benefits in question are enormously popular among a large bipartisan swath of the American population. Heedless of the pain they would cause (or noting the themes in this blog post, perhaps eager to instigate that pain), Republicans want to ignore the political popularity and ethical duty of providing healthcare coverage for Americans who need it. It should not be a surprise that the party demanding these cuts is the same party that argued in court against using SNAP reserve funds. The current Republican party is comfortable with American pain and suffering, whereas Democrats are demanding better.
So as you witness continuing program lapses and cuts amidst this shutdown and see the pain they cause, remember that one party is saying that they will end the current pain, the program cuts, only if they are allowed to institute a new pain, healthcare cuts. The other party is saying that we can do better, that they won’t be driven by one pain to agree to the other, that we can choose a better thing, funding (as we have for years) healthcare along with the rest of these programs. The pain the Republicans offer is a false choice: comply with the pain we offer you, or we will hurt you in other ways. The Democrats are trying to reject the false choice, demanding an end to the second pain, without agreement to the first.
The Democrats need your support during this shutdown, and the Republicans need your blame for the pain it causes. Call the offices of each. Write letters to them. Tell them who you blame for what you see, and why, and how it will affect your future spending and voting. Make your voice heard.
And as you do so, also come together in mutual aid, finding ways to help your communities and nation. Charitable organizations, local community groups, and even just neighbor-to-neighbor comfort and material support are critical as programs lapse. This will be a time when those with means must support those in need more than normal. Become a part of it.
Recognize what you are seeing. If this shutdown feels abnormal, that’s because it is. If it feels unusually painful, that’s because it is. The pain is by design, and it is part of a larger effort to rob you of your freedom. Do not bow to those who would use pain to control you. Defy them. Resist with political voice, and with mutual aid, and with hope, and with perseverance. With these things, we can save our nation from the actual existential threat it faces.
The president loves power, and he does not love you, and so his administration chooses your pain. Resist!
This is Part 3 in a series titled “Trump’s Lies”. Go to Part 1 and Part 2.
Trump’s Lies Part 3: Lies of Inability
Trump loves power, so he tells us that we have problems, and only he can save us from them, but that his opponents stop him from doing so.
It may seem counterintuitive that a strongman would admit any kind of inability in the face of opposition. If he is so strong then why can’t he do this or that important thing? The strongman is supposed to appear capable and unrestrained. Surely then a president professing inability is not a strongman… right? But in fact, such claims of inability are deliberate tactics, especially for strongmen still consolidating power, and they should frighten us. The claim of inability is followed by its chilling next step: “…so I need more power.”
The United States government is not perfect, but it is also not inherently broken. It has not been broken historically, though Trump is breaking it deliberately. Our government’s political flaws are real, and people have legitimate complaints about these flaws and their root causes, but prior to Trump the US government was globally seen as a stable democracy leading the world’s most powerful defensive alliance, the world’s most powerful military, the world’s largest economy, and much of the world’s leading scientific research, all with low government corruption and (when ranking is not limited to the G20) high scores in medical availability and educational achievement. Anyone hearing claims that our government was broken before Trump should ask themselves: “Then why were we doing so well?”
The answer is obvious. The claims are lies. Our government was not broken before Trump. It worked, and worked well. It was not perfect, but our nation lost sight of how good our government was because of how good it was. Consider the topics and scales of our common complaints about our government. We disagreed about foreign policies such as who we should give weapons to; we complained about slow and stumbling program rollouts, despite funding and political will (for two examples, take FEMA’s inefficient and slow trailer distribution following Katrina, which left Americans in substandard housing made with unsafe materials under Bush Jr., and the woeful early performance of healthcare.gov, which was initially an utter failure of a front-end website for Obama’s flagship Affordable Care Act) and we expressed concern about a Congress that seemed able only to ratchet up our deficit, never down (although we maintained honest disagreements about the solution). None of these things fail to matter. They are all very important! But the luxury of discussing these topics belies how many existential concerns other nations face that we simply didn’t need to worry about because we were doing so well. We focused on what to do with wealth, and how to most effectively improve ourselves, because we didn’t have to focus on just getting by, or whether or not our next election would be honored, or discovering that corrupt politicians had lied to us by publishing false deficit numbers for years, or whether or not our neighbor would invade us. We housed Americans after Katrina inefficiently, and with unsafe materials, and we should have done better, but we did not leave them unhoused. We rolled out healthcare.gov poorly, a single (albeit complex) online marketplace and portal funded with half a billion dollars that couldn’t do its job on day one, but we fixed it, and we lose sight of the fact that it was part of a program to make sure everyone could get consistent and affordable healthcare coverage. On a national scale, the failures were missteps in programs that most other nations would have considered impossible luxuries. We had so many successes that we took them for granted and complained about details. You only complain about a small hole in the drywall, or question what color to paint the walls, when your home already exists and is already satisfying its most important functions.
Trump would have us believe that the American government is broken, and that only he can fix it, but that he has been unable to do so due to the presence and actions of others, especially civil servants who allow themselves to be constrained by the Constitution and statute (who he characterizes as “the deep state”), political opponents who disagree with him, and any court that imposes checks on his unconstitutional actions. He tells us that he could solve all of our problems if we just allowed him to do the things that he wants, or that he must use declarations of emergency because normal powers available to the president are not enough, or that the lawful actions of his opponents are illegal, or that they ought to be. He has characterized the media and his political opponents as “enemies of the people” because they are opposing his policies, which he frames as necessary to save the nation. In order to support his narrative that only he can save the nation, he must first make us believe that the nation needs to be saved. He cannot claim that he is a solution without first asserting that there is a problem, and he knows that we the people will not accept the dissolution of rule of law and an abandonment of constitutional, democratic norms easily. To hear him speak, we are faced by myriad existential crises. Only by abandoning our commitment to democratic principles of opposition, constitutional constraint, and limited executive power can we be saved, and he would be our savior.
There is another word for that, of course. When we unconstrain the executive, when they are no longer beholden to the courts and they are able to act without Congress and to direct a civil service loyal only to them, and when they are unopposed by other political parties, we call that a dictator. Trump’s argument is authoritarian in nature, and its end is authoritarianism, not democracy. Reject it.
Trump is trying to break our democracy. He has neither succeeded nor failed. His is an ongoing effort, in progress, partially succeeded, yet rightly meeting opposition. Today, part of his focus is on a dishonest claim that the government cannot maintain critical social safety programs during the current government shutdown. Despite the fact that SNAP has a dedicated reserve fund and a separate multi-year fund which are each available to fund it now, Trump claims that “I do NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT. Therefore, I have instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible.” This appears to be Trump’s way of spinning his administration’s defeat – not victory – in court as they attempted to stop SNAP payments in order to manufacture a crisis. Under Trump, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has hidden its own contingency plan for a shutdown, which relied on using the reserve funds to maintain SNAP benefits. Trump’s USDA reversed its longstanding position that these funds can be used to provide benefits during a shutdown, despite having actually used its reserves to provide benefits during Trump’s first term. This false claim of inability is a choice, not an honest failure of our political system, and at time of writing on November 2 these claims have suffered preliminary defeats in court after Trump’s administration tried and failed to justify them. Our government, for all its faults, has recognized with bipartisan support the importance of making funding for SNAP available without interruption, and the court has correctly recognized that Congress, not the president, has the authority to decide that these funds must be spent. The next week will show us to what extent the administration complies.
Trump wants us to believe that he is saving us from a crisis even though that crisis was manufactured by his own administration through an attempt to unconstitutionally impound funds. He wants to be seen as the strongman who saved the day even though he is the criminal who threatened the day. The reality is that this administration uses pain as a tool, as evinced by Russ Vought’s infamous quote about putting civil servants in trauma, and now the entire American public is the target of this tool as Trump tries to win a political dispute, the government shutdown, rather than perform his duty to take care that the law be faithfully executed by effectively using reserve funds as appropriated. Trump does not want to help the American people, he wants to treat us as a herd and drive us like cattle. His tool of choice is the cattle prod. He, and the administration he has built, create pain, then offer to save us from it if only our society will obey without opposition.
We should not comply with such attempts to coerce and control us. We should demand that our government lead from the front and call us to follow, not prod from the back, directing us with pain. We should certainly not accept a narrative that we are beswarmed with crises (SNAP is only the latest example), often existential (consider the administration’s language around immigration, trade policy, and domestic political opponents), that can only be averted by aggregating power in one man, to the exclusion of political competition and legal checks and balances. We must adhere to our democratic principles, and when the very existence of opposition is demonized we must support the opposition, not agree with the would-be strongman. He is not trying to defeat his opponents, he is trying to defeat opposition itself. Do not let him.
As the government shutdown continues, SNAP is not the only program under threat. Several other important components of our social safety net face disruption ranging from delays to total cessation of benefit distribution. In most of these cases, the greatest threats are more honest than Trump’s attack on SNAP. These include:
These programs lack appropriated funds, so they can’t disburse funds. The symptom is simple, but the cause needs to be understood in its full context. Two political parties are engaged in a vehement budget dispute, and the sticking point is that one party has decided to slash healthcare coverage benefits and assurances for millions of Americans while the other party has chosen to ardently defend healthcare coverage. These positions are not ethically, practically, or even politically equal. The healthcare benefits in question are enormously popular among a large bipartisan swath of the American population. Heedless of the pain they would cause (or noting the themes in this blog post, perhaps eager to instigate that pain), Republicans want to ignore the political popularity and ethical duty of providing healthcare coverage for Americans who need it. It should not be a surprise that the party demanding these cuts is the same party that argued in court against using SNAP reserve funds. The current Republican party is comfortable with American pain and suffering, whereas Democrats are demanding better.
So as you witness continuing program lapses and cuts amidst this shutdown and see the pain they cause, remember that one party is saying that they will end the current pain, the program cuts, only if they are allowed to institute a new pain, healthcare cuts. The other party is saying that we can do better, that they won’t be driven by one pain to agree to the other, that we can choose a better thing, funding (as we have for years) healthcare along with the rest of these programs. The pain the Republicans offer is a false choice: comply with the pain we offer you, or we will hurt you in other ways. The Democrats are trying to reject the false choice, demanding an end to the second pain, without agreement to the first.
The Democrats need your support during this shutdown, and the Republicans need your blame for the pain it causes. Call the offices of each. Write letters to them. Tell them who you blame for what you see, and why, and how it will affect your future spending and voting. Make your voice heard.
And as you do so, also come together in mutual aid, finding ways to help your communities and nation. Charitable organizations, local community groups, and even just neighbor-to-neighbor comfort and material support are critical as programs lapse. This will be a time when those with means must support those in need more than normal. Become a part of it.
Recognize what you are seeing. If this shutdown feels abnormal, that’s because it is. If it feels unusually painful, that’s because it is. The pain is by design, and it is part of a larger effort to rob you of your freedom. Do not bow to those who would use pain to control you. Defy them. Resist with political voice, and with mutual aid, and with hope, and with perseverance. With these things, we can save our nation from the actual existential threat it faces.
The president loves power, and he does not love you, and so his administration chooses your pain. Resist!
This is Part 3 in a series titled “Trump’s Lies”. Go to Part 1 and Part 2.