by W. D. Ehrhart
I recently received an e-mail from a Japanese friend of mine who wrote, “I have no idea what Trump is trying to do. He is making the world to be his enemy.” An Indian friend opined that #45/47 equals Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi in bigotry, intolerance, and mean-spiritedness. When an English friend asked me what Trump is trying to do, I had no answer for him. And when a friend from France observed that the United States seems to have gone off the rails, I could only agree with him.
How can one even begin to catalogue the outrages this vile disgrace for a human being continues to spew forth at a rate one cannot even keep up with? From pardoning war criminals and violent insurrectionists to appointing incompetent sycophants to federal cabinet posts, from climbing into bed with Vladimir Putin to advocating the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. There simply isn’t enough time or paper or ink to detail it all, which is—I suppose—part of the strategy: keep the outrages coming so fast and furiously that there is simply no opportunity to process it all, let alone react in any effective way.
And the amazing and truly heartbreaking truth is that we have done this to ourselves. At least some of us have. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, and only the slavery-biased electoral college gave the MAGAMonster the election. Joe Biden won the popular vote in 2020, and managed to win the electoral college, too, in spite of its pro-slavery origins. But in 2024, the American electorate actually delivered victory in both the popular election and the electoral college to this narcissistic, lying, dishonest, greedy, unprincipled huckster.
And the slaughter is now well underway. At the hands of the chainsaw-wielding richest man in the world, the unemployment lines are about to go out the door and around the corner and far out of sight. The Federal Aviation Administration has so far sacked 400 employees. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has fired 800 more. The General Services Administration has put out to pasture over 100 people while the Office of Community Planning and Development has axed 786 so far. And the National Nuclear Security Administration has lost another 300.
But all of this is nothing compared to the 2,000 people fired or about to be fired from the various health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. How about the 5,400 Defense Department employees? Or the 3,400 former employees of the Forest Service? Or the 11,700 who used to work for the Environmental Protection Agency? Or the 5,600 people who used to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development, an agency that has fostered good will toward the U.S. all over the world, but has now all-but-ceased to exist?
But even all of this is nothing compared to the 2,400 employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs who are already newly unemployed and the proposed further sacking of 70,000 to 80,000 additional VA workers. So much for honoring and caring for our veterans. (But what would a draft-dodging coward like our president care about those suckers and losers?)
And here’s my favorite of all: 7,000 people have so far been let go by the Internal Revenue Service, with the chopping block scheduled to receive another 50,000 soon-to-be ex-employees. No need for all those Trumplican billionaires to worry about being audited ever again. There will henceforth be only enough auditors to check up on the small potatoes and the amateur tax cheats, not the ones who hide their billions in dummy corporations in the Cayman Islands.
The carnage is likely to be even worse by the time this is published, and my dearest hope is that a significant number of the newly unemployed are people who voted for the man who is responsible for their present situation.
Meanwhile, another target of the grotesquely misnamed Department of Government Efficiency is scientific research with Elon Musk Ox and his Orange Cheeto sidekick working hard to cancel funding for work on everything from Alzheimer’s, muscular dystrophy, and corneal disease to cardiac arrest and cancer. And there apparently will be no new flu vaccine this coming year, though flu kills a minimum of 6,000 Americans every year.
And that brings me back to the fact that a large portion of the American people have brought this disaster upon themselves. The rest of us don’t deserve what we’re getting, but the people who voted for this disgusting grifter certainly do. And I hope to live long enough to see everyone who voted for him—imagining him to be a man of the people instead of the servant of the super-rich, imagining that he would save them from murderous immigrants and transgender activists, or restore order to the universe by putting white men back in charge and women back in their place—die in airplane crashes or wildfires or because they can no longer get decent care at VA hospitals or because they contract flu or have a heart attack or a cancer that could have been prevented if research had been allowed to continue.
I deeply regret the suffering that so many of my fellow citizens are going to have to endure because of the loathsome people who are now in charge of the government of the United States. But I don’t and won’t feel sorry for the trials and tribulations that befall the cretins who put those people back in power. They richly deserve whatever misery befalls them, and I hope it befalls them hard and soon.
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.