The smell of napalm in the morning is beginning to get old.
Each day arrives with a new litany of traditions shattered, institutions weakened, and many ordinary lives upended in ways never dreamed of before. Even conservatives are beginning to recognize that “limited government” is a quaint notion that no longer applies to the reality of what they thought was the successful election of a party that shared their conservative ideals.
This morning the napalm was the front-page story that a judge had prevented our government from deporting hundreds of Guatemalan children who had arrived in the US unaccompanied by a parent or other adult. Many of the children were literally in aircraft on the tarmac in Harlingen and El Paso when the judge’s order finally reached the organizers of the flights; many of the children had active cases before immigration courts but advocates had learned that their cases were being cancelled.
This is but one of many examples where the issues on which voters based their decisions have turned out very differently from what many had expected. The idea of taking a harder stance on immigration, including deporting violent criminals, was appealing to many who were frightened or angered by the idea of “open borders” that Biden was wrongly accused of allowing. No meaningful immigration reform legislation had been passed for decades, and the one promising bipartisan bill created by the Biden legislature had been killed at the request of candidate Trump, who needed the issue to juice his campaign. Immigration was a hot topic even far from the border.
But immigration reform is not what has happened after Trump was elected, and, more important, neither have the violent criminals been captured and removed for our safety. If you had known that hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding immigrants, who had lived here for many years and who were making efforts to pursue legal citizenship, would be grabbed off the street by masked, unidentified men and deprived of due process to be swiftly incarcerated, might you have said, “Hold on here, that’s not what I had in mind!”?
If you agreed that the Federal government had too many civil servants who couldn’t be fired and didn’t do much useful work, you might have voted for the idea of streamlining government agencies, removing dead wood and duplications, and eliminating lots of red tape that prevented businessmen from doing their business. You might have viewed Democrats as simply advocating for more taxes and more spending, while passing way too many laws and regulations.
But did you really mean for Elon Musk and his chainsaw crew to sweep through government agencies without knowledge of who was doing what jobs and whose departments were more crucial to government functioning and public safety? Did you intend for professionals with years of deep experience in their field to be fired and replaced by Trump donors and loyalists with little to no knowledge of the job they were taking on? Might you have said, “There’s got to be a better way to go about this”?
Then there’s the economy. Many believe that Trump’s promise to bring down prices and improve the status of the average American was the key to his election success (as modest as it was at only 1.47% advantage over Kamala Harris). Do you recall Trump’s press conferences where he displayed various groceries and lovingly promised how much cheaper they all would be once he was in office? Has anything you regularly buy at the grocery store gotten cheaper?
There is a way to approach managing the economy that has caused the US to be admired worldwide. Our Federal Reserve, run by a Board of Governors, has been strictly independent of political influence so that decisions can be made even though they are unpopular, like controlling inflation by raising interest rates, as happened during the Biden administration. Though many voters may not be aware of the Federal Reserve, it has never been a controversial issue in Presidential campaigns; you do not see either political party promising to do away with the Federal Reserve.
If you had known that Trump was so fanatic about people doing his bidding that he would threaten to fire the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, for not lowering interest rates on command, would you have whole-heartedly endorsed Trump the economist? Might you have worried that it would be hard to trust economic data and interventions that were coming directly from the President rather than from the experts who have been steering the ship so well until now?
I hope you get my point, though I could go on: you agreed with Trump’s rhetoric on taking a tougher stance on crime, but you wonder if he needs to deploy National Guard and Marine troops to fight crime in cities (only Democratically-run) that haven’t asked and don’t want them; you agree there is probably fraud, waste and abuse to be cut from the federal budget, but you wonder if it’s wise to throw millions of people, including many children, off their Medicaid coverage and end low income food assistance, while preserving large tax cuts for our privileged billionaire class. Or dismantling FEMA as more catastrophic events occur every day.
As I repeatedly say, the vast area between the extremes is where our answers lie. You may not want progressive Democrats running the show, but how about supporting Republican candidates who are less MAGA-cized and more willing to work with others to find solutions? That is, if any of them become brave enough to stand up, dodge the napalm raining from the sky, and say, “Hold on there, this is too much!” Susan Hull is a retired clinical psychologist, a horse trainer, and an Independent voter. She suggests, if you don’t get the napalm reference, that you watch the film Apocalypse Now for a glimpse of the tragedy, absurdity, and insanity of humans in their attempts to gain control over other humans.
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