Wake-up Call by Geoff Carter « The Pen in Hand Blog

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

The second Trump presidency has been an unnatural disaster—as damaging as a Category 5 hurricane. And like a hurricane, this administration has wrought extensive and irreparable damage, damage to our government, our people, and our country—and to the people of the world who have depended on American aid. And because of the shock and awe tactics of his blitzkrieg on our democracy, the degree and extent of the damage has been hard to keep track of.

If (like President George W. Bush surveying damage caused by Hurricane Katrina from Air Force One), we attempt to get a bird’s eye view of this disaster, the totality of the abuses of power we’ve experienced over the past six months (yes, it’s only been six months) is almost overwhelming.

Here’s a recap. On day one of his second presidency, Trump issued over one hundred executive orders, including:

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
Eliminating all DEI programs in federal government
Opening up federal lands for development
Withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization
Establishing DOGE
Attempting to invalidate American Citizenship
Restoring the Death Penalty
Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting American Territories
Realigning U.S. Foreign Aid (Bye, NATO)
Reforming Federal Hiring Practices
Revocation of Previous Executive Orders
Measures Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling
Enabling greater deregulation

And regrettably, there’s more (for those of you with the stomach for it)…

According to the Federal Register, this is the complete list of this administration’s EO’s from Inauguration Day to the present.

The deeper implications of these measures resulted in the termination of USAID dollars to dozens of needy countries, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. According to The Michigan Journal of Economics, this cessation of aid in Africa will result in ten million more AIDS cases and more than three million HIV-related deaths. Over thirteen million souls gone—and for what?

Then we have DOGE, Trump’s pet renegade organization that invaded government offices, stole millions of files of sensitive information, and threatens to hamstring the Social Security Administration. They’ve fired hundreds of thousands of federal employees, often rehiring them the next day after discovering their work was indispensable.

FEMA, which dispatches federal aid in cases of natural disaster, has been dismantled, and NOOA, which helps predict dangerous weather situations, has been stripped down to almost nothing. Ask the people of Texas, particularly the families of dozens of young girls caught in a flash flood on the Guadalupe River, whether this matters or not.

And finally, in this all-too-short outline of his criminal negligence toward the American people, is the passage of his “Big, Beautiful Bill” which will terminate Medicaid coverage for millions of Americans.

But the most terrible, possible permanent damage Trump and his minions—he couldn’t have done this himself—have wrought is disassembling our Constitution.

They have thrown a series of monkey wrenches into our system of checks and balances. The Supreme Court has become nothing more than a rubber stamp endorsing Trump’s power grabs. The Republican majority in Congress couldn’t muster up enough of a spine among them to block Trump’s heinous bill, even though it will harm vast numbers of their constituents, especially the disabled and elderly, and more than likely jeopardize their political careers.

If we contrast our mindsets, our sensibilities, and our anxiety levels from six months ago until now, I think we would have a hard time recognizing ourselves. In July of 2024,

We were not worried about losing our health insurance or Medicaid.

We weren’t worried about Social Security being ravaged by agents of DOGE.

We weren’t worried about being arrested by ICE agents—or whoever these masked thugs are.

We weren’t worried about the National Institute of Health and CDC being stripped down to almost nothing.

We weren’t worried about punitive tariffs ruining our economy.

We weren’t worried about the president commandeering state national guards and deploying military units on American soil.

We weren’t worried about our national parks and federal lands being clear-cut and strip mined.

We weren’t (as) worried about climate change.

We weren’t worried about our universities and colleges being attacked.

We weren’t worried about the Department of Education being shuttered.

We weren’t worried about being abandoned by our federal government in the aftermath of natural disasters.

We weren’t worried about idiots like RFK, Jr., Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and the other inhabitants of the clown car serving as Cabinet members.

We weren’t worried that federal funding has tripled the budget of ICE to over three billion dollars, exceeding the size of the FBI, the ATF, U.S. Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.

We weren’t worried about our elections being shanghaied and co-opted.

Could we have imagined all this a year ago? Even six months ago? Most of us wouldn’t have believed this sort of blatant sort of power grab would have been possible. Not here in America. Would we have believed a felon and the man who engineered the January 6^th Capitol riots could be re-elected? Of course not, but a majority of Americans—voting Americans—believed his lies. He lied about the 2020 election, he lied about not touching Social Security and Medicare, he lied about not involving us in international conflicts, and he lied about stopping inflation and lowering prices. He lied about everything. And he’s still lying.

Let’s take a step back. We have to try to keep remembering who we were a year ago. This non-stop onslaught on our rights, these cruel and sometimes insipid Executive Orders have at first shocked us, then overwhelmed us, and finally exhausted us. The sheer volume of inequities, injustices, and lawlessness emanating from this administration has been nothing short of mind-numbing. So we tend to lose track of just how much evil he has wrought. This essay, in fact, barely touches the surface of everything he’s done.

And on top of all this is the question of Donald J. Trump’s state of health—particularly his mental health.

He wants to annex Greenland, make Canada our fifty-first state, take back the Panama Canal, and rename the Gulf of Mexico. These certainly sound like the guy in the Napolean uniform wandering around the mental ward calling himself the king of the world.

The president has gone off on into numerous nonsensical ramblings. When asked how long detainees could be imprisoned in the new “Alligator Alcatraz” prison in Florida, he spent a good two minutes talking about how much he liked Florida and how long he might stay there himself—not in Alligator Alcatraz, we presume.

During a speech on June 27th, touting his proposed bill, Trump very quickly went off-track, attacking Chuck Schumer:

“It’s crazy and it’s so demeaning, and they don’t wanna change, I seen it the other day. Guys like Schumer, our great Palestinian senator, this guy,” he said of Schumer, who is Jewish. “He’s changed. He used to like Jewish people. Now he’s totally against Jewish people. It’s the most incredible transformation I think I’ve ever seen.” (Yahoo News)

First of all, to imply Senator Schumer is no longer Jewish is not only demeaning, but idiotic. Or insane. Then, just trying to follow this twisting downward spiral of stream-of-consciousness is akin to listening to the drunken ramblings of the guy sitting on the curb and drinking from a brown paper bag.

Could we imagine Obama or W. or Reagan going off like this? It’s beyond non-presidential. It’s immature. It’s crazy. It’s sick. Yet, here we are. We’ve watched as Trump and the Republican Party have peeled the orange and revealed the rot beneath. And because we’ve known the rot was there, we are not shocked. And because we are not shocked, we have become numbed. We’ve learned to accept it.

Shame on us. It’s time to wake up and get our heads out of the sand.