The Good News

Donald Trump is going down.

Right now, he’s using the tactic of shock and awe to overwhelm us so thoroughly that we’ll give up and quit trying, thus allowing him to rule without opposition. He’s been so successful at it that he sometimes refers to himself as king.

But that’s changing. The truth is that the wheels on that Trump train are wobbling badly and are about to fall off.

As Timothy Snyder, a scholar of authoritarianism, wrote on Blue Sky recently, “Something is shifting. They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading. Nervous Musk, Trump and Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”

The signs are everywhere.

Begin with Trump’s plummeting popularity. The budget plan adopted by the House last week, adopted after Trump gave it his full-throated support, would give billionaire oligarchs and giant corporations $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, which would be offset by cutting Medicaid, food stamps and Social Security. That is literally stealing from the poor to give to the rich, and since 72 million Americans rely on Medicaid, half of them children, and 42 million Americans receive food stamps, and 66 million Americans receive Social Security benefits every month, every one of them is likely to go ballistic if that bill advances. I know I will.

Also unpopular are Trump’s cutting off of USAID funding that is threatening millions of people’s lives. And his stream of orders that are plainly illegal and/or unconstitutional. And allowing access to him only to those far-right news media outlets that support him. And his betrayal of our friends and allies around the world by groveling toRussian ruler Vladimer Putin. And his and Vice President Vance’s shameful, nauseating tag-team ambush on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on national television last Friday. And, and, and. We’re getting sick of him.

About that ambush: It was so vile that several Republican congresspersons registered their disgust. Remember: it will only take a handful of Republican representatives to turn against Trump to make a third impeachment a real possibility.

That possibility grew even stronger recently when the former head of Kazakhstan’s intelligence service, Alnur Mussayev, claimed in a Facebook post that the KGB recruited Trump when he first visited Moscow in 1987. Soon after Mussayev made his claim, another ex-KBG officer living in France, Sergei Zhyrnov, endorsed the allegations. Neither offered any evidence, but their claims support Craig Unger’s best-selling 2021 book, “American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery.”

So yes, again, Donald Trump is going down. A new Pew poll shows a record-high 72 percent of those polled now say a major problem in America is “the role of money in politics” caused by Trump’s surrounding himself with billionaires. Fifty-three percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, 53 percent disapprove of his general actions as president, and 57 percent believe that Trump “has exceeded his presidential authority.”

A Post-Ipsos poll revealed that 39 percent of Americans “strongly disapprove” of Trump while only 27 percent “strongly approve”.

In every major poll taken to date, more Americans say they disapprove of Trump than approve of him.

And his numbers continue to plummet.

Trump’s personal life is not helping him. HuffPost recently reported that he spent at least 12 nights at Mar-a-Lago in his first 29 days in office, that he played golf at one of his own properties on nine of his first 30 days in office, and that those golf outings have cost the American taxpayer $10.7 million. Struggling American taxpayers are not likely to appreciate such a kingly attitude.

Elon Musk’s contributions have made matters even worse for Trump. Musk’s claims that DOGE has saved the government billions of dollars have been proven so wrong they are beyond laughable. They are full of slapdash accounting errors, outdated data, incorrect assumptions, unverifiable numbers, obvious exaggerations and flat-out lies.

DOGE increasingly looks like a giant hoax. Last week, reporters found that nearly 40 percent of the contracts DOGE claims to have canceled aren’t expected to save the government a penny, forcing DOGE to delete all of the five biggest “savings” on its so-called “wall of receipts.”

Also, after DOGE abruptly fired hundreds of nuclear weapons workers, and hundreds more scientists at the Food and Drug Administration, Trump was forced to rehire them all.

Also, last Wednesday, Musk said that DOGE “accidentally canceled” efforts by USAID to prevent the spread of Ebola, but that the initiative was quickly restored. That was a bald-faced lie. It wasn’t, and people are dying because of it.

Matters got so bad at DOGE last week that 21 federal civil service tech workers resigned, saying in a group letter that they were quitting rather than help Musk “dismantle critical public services.”

Finally, Musk’s conflicts of interest are bursting into the open. The Trump-controlled FAA is close to canceling a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon to overhaul a communications system integral to its air traffic control system — and awarding the contract to Musk’s Starlink instead.

Outraged Americans are expressing their anger in many ways, including vandalizing Musk’s Tesla automobiles wherever they can find them, or publicly shaming their owners by putting anti-Musk bumper stickers on their cars. Last week thousands of people demonstrated outside of Tesla dealerships from Philadelphia to Seattle to register their outrage with Musk’s political power, and scores of more such demonstrations are scheduled. Tesla owners are beginning to express buyer’s remorse.

Veterans are piling on. Douglas A. Collis, Veterans Affairs secretary, claimed that cuts to 875 contracts would save nearly $2 billion. But when veterans learned those contracts covered medical services, recruited doctors, funded cancer programs and paid for veterans’ burial services, they complained so loudly that the VA rescinded every single one of them.

Even the Christian Nationalism, which is supposed to be taking over the government, is facing profound internal problems that are certain to disrupt things. Andra Watkins, an acclaimed speaker and best-selling New York Times author, studied Christian Nationalism and discovered it is a tenuous alliance among three very different sects: Dominionist Pentecostal/Charismatics, Opus Dei Catholics, and hardline Baptists with a smattering of other Protestants. The problem, she writes, is that each sect firmly teaches its members that they are the only “real” Christians, and so a holy war could erupt and cause havoc throughout the Trump administration.

Faith-based institutions not involved with Christian Nationalism also are getting involved. Churches, synagogues and ecumenical organizations are joining hands in an extraordinary effort to rein in Trump’s stampede. Twenty-seven Christian, Jewish and ecumenical groups, which among them have millions of members, has sued the Trump administration over Trump’s order to allow ICE and Department of Homeland Security agents to invade churches to arrest undocumented residents. The order reversed a 30-year-old DHS policy not to make arrests in places of worship, schools, hospitals and funerals because arrests in those places cause more personal and social problems than they solve.

A spokesman for Trump said ICE and DHS agents need to invade those sacred spaces “to catch criminal agents – including murderers and rapists – who have illegally come into our country.”

But a spokesman for the lawsuit’s sponsors said ICE and others have always been welcome to enter places of worship “if they had a judicial warrant and if there were exigent circumstances. So if someone dangerous was running and went into a place of worship, then, of course, law enforcement can follow in order to protect people.”

But invade churches to arrest undocumented residents, many of whom have created no crimes? No!

(Interjection: Even though 27 faith-based organizations were involved in filing the lawsuit, the suit is titled “Mennonite Church VS The Department of Homeland Security”, which seems rather odd since Mennonites practice nonresistance, which means they do not resist authority even when it is unjustly exercised. Their prominent spot in the lawsuit’s title caused a SLATE writer to quip, “You know that you have well and truly stepped in it when you have pissed off the Mennonites.”)

But so much more is happening. Americans all over the nation are recovering from the “shock and awe” blast and are digging in their heels, making their disgust with Trump known in ever-growing numbers and with ever-growing energy. We are pelting our Washington representatives with more than1,400 phone calls a minute, attending town hall meetings in record numbers and publicly blasting Maga representatives, confronting them with visits to their offices, joining or starting resistance organizations. The news media, which was largely absent during the presidential campaign and often acted cowardly after Trump was elected, is showing signs of growing a spine.

And don’t forget the elections scheduled for later this year. More than 100,000 seats in 45 states will be decided this year at the local, state and national levels. Governors, mayors, city councils, state representatives, judges, school boards — these positions are a vital line of defense against the Musk-Trump-Vance regime.

Bottom line: Americans are waking up and don’t like what they are seeing in Trump and Musk, and that awareness is rapidly growing. So we are not doomed. We’re down but certainly not out, and we’re gaining fast. If we keep the faith, if we refuse to quit, if we press forward every day – and if we will vote! — we will win.

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