Only one month in, the winds of chaos, the aftermath of careless destruction, have swept across the country, lashing Ohio and instilling fear and anxiety in millions of Americans.
The regime’s preferred euphemism is “disruption”.
How does it look like?
I speak with friends in health care, and everyone is concerned about funding cuts and freezes, drastic cuts to scientific and medical research, the future of public health and what happens if a pandemic strikes, career experts being fired and cranks put in charge, and the NIH being attacked. America’s global leadership in science and medicine appears to be in full and rapid retreat.
I speak with my farmer friends, and they tell me that farmers are outraged. In Ohio, people are concerned about USAID contracts and USDA cost-sharing investments. They held up their end.
The government made promises. Now their family farms and livelihoods are at stake. There are billions of dollars at stake. Elon Musk and Donald Trump are holding it all hostage.
I visit with friends who work in Ohio higher education, and they tell me that their colleagues are terrified, staff are afraid for their jobs, and faculty are forced to choose between resistance and silence.
As Ohio Republican lawmakers seek to impose censorship and control over classrooms while prohibiting faculty strikes, attempting to give Ohio’s great universities both the muzzle over the mouth and the jackboot on the face, Ohio’s college administrators have been notable only for their unwavering public silence.
Students and professors are fighting for the timeless human right to free thought and expression.
My K-12 Ohio teacher friends are also incredibly frustrated after years of being the targets of a right-wing smear campaign that portrays them in the most vile ways possible. They enjoy teaching.
The vast majority of them are incredibly passionate about their jobs, but their morale is extremely low. They now have no idea how many millions of dollars in additional funding cuts they will face from Trump’s wrecking ball and Ohio Republican lawmakers.
Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine promised to fully fund Ohio’s Fair School Funding Plan, but an analysis by the Legislative Service Commission revealed that DeWine’s budget includes a $103.4 million cut to public schools in Ohio over the next two years.
In addition, DeWine’s budget increases private school vouchers and charter schools by $265.4 million. Last year, Ohio Republican lawmakers directed nearly $1 billion in taxpayer funds to private and religious schools.
Ohio school districts receive an average of 10% of their funding from the federal government. High-poverty districts receive 20% to 25%. If Trump dismantles the United States Department of Education, Ohio’s most vulnerable students and school districts will bear the brunt of the cost.
Teacher layoffs, cuts, larger class sizes, and fewer resources. Children with disabilities and special needs will be neglected.
They’re not the only ones. Adults with disabilities face serious risks as well. As are the 771,000 Ohioans whose Medicaid coverage is under threat.
As U.S. Congressional Republicans prepare to cut Medicaid while lavishing trillions of dollars in tax cuts on the filthy rich, DeWine is easing the way. He included a “trigger law” in the state budget that would reduce Medicaid if federal contributions were cut.
Meanwhile, Ohio plans to impose costly, burdensome, unnecessary, and ineffective Medicaid work requirements.
Medicaid recipients are not the only ones who are concerned about their access to health care.
My veteran friends are outraged as Trump and Musk disrupt military families and create “chaos” at the VA. They are also laying off hundreds of thousands of people in America’s civil service, where veterans account for 30% of the federal workforce.
The 950,000 civilian employees of the United States Department of Defense, including tens of thousands of veterans, are also facing mass layoffs due to impending budget cuts.
My European friends are disgusted with Vice President J.D. Vance for traveling to Germany, visiting the Dachau concentration camp, and then delivering a series of condescending insults to Europeans while promoting a German political party that many Germans regard as the modern descendent of Nazism.
My Springfield friends are outraged that the Trump administration removed protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants on Thursday, after Trump and Vance spread false, racist rumors about Haitians in Springfield.
Resulting in over 30 bomb threats on elementary schools, hospitals, and public buildings, as well as threats of violence against local residents and officials. Springfield is currently suing a Neo-Nazi group, alleging a campaign of threats and intimidation.
My business friends are concerned about Trump’s tariffs and the possibility of a return to 1970s-style stagflation. Others are concerned about the economic consequences of massive government layoffs.
Under the current program of wild and mindless destruction, red states like Ohio appear to suffer the most.
Is America great again? Is this greatness? Is this what everyone wanted? Is this their view of leadership?
Is this any way for a society to exist, in fear and anxiety, with a constant foreboding about the future, a gnawing suspicion that everything will not be fine?
Nuclear safety specialists. recklessly fired, laid off FAA employees “scared to death” now for the safety of Americans, members of Congress cowering in fear and casting votes under death threats, firings of career prosecutors, pardoning of violent seditionists, anti-Constitutional Napoleonic declarations, unhinged screeds peddling Russian propaganda, open corruption of the rule of law, installing a crank extremist conspiracy theorist as director of the FBI, installing a person facing grave
They’re laying dynamite throughout the room and playing with matches.
They are constantly insulting and alienating our friends, provoking our closest defensive allies to exclude us, and undermining America’s soft power around the world in favor of China and Russia.
All of this increases America’s vulnerability to a variety of malicious actions by hostile groups and powers.
Who is doing all of this to their society? To their country? In just one month.
What an abuse of public service. What a wretched and demeaning abdication of all public responsibility.
As if the shared destiny and fate of millions of real people, their families, and lives aren’t on the line.
Who does this to others? What about doctors, nurses, farmers, teachers, professors, scientists, veterans, working families, people with disabilities, special needs children, and the poor?
Such twisted, unnatural men.
What degraded antisocial impulses.
J.D. Vance once stated, “Trump makes people I care about afraid.”
He is now gleefully participating in their torment.
This is not something that well-adjusted, compassionate, or normal people do.
Individuals with a healthy mindset do not waste time lying, gaslighting, trolling, and targeting others in order to scapegoat, victimize, and disrupt their lives.
Sick, broken sociopaths worship the false gods of money, power, and fame, striving endlessly in vain to fill a dark void at the core of their being with pathetic, delusional self-aggrandizement.
They are truly unwilling to attend therapy.
