2 weeks Ago By Rene Ciria Cruz
window.rapplerAds.displayAd( "middle-1" );window.
rapplerAds.displayAd( "mobile-middle-1" );What’s it like to live in the United States right now? How about waking up every day to despotic actions and orders spewed by the White House. “What??!!,” is one’s reflexive gasp.
Every morning. Frustrated, helpless, is how one feels as the U.S.
of A. sprints headlong to authoritarianism. Like when you see footage of body-armored ICE agents sledgehammering the car window of a legally protected Guatemalan asylum-seeker to illegally seize him.
Or news of immigration enforcers trying to raid schoolhouses, or abducting foreign students and sending them to far-flung prisons simply because of their political views, or arbitrarily refusing entry or detaining foreign visitors with valid visas at airports just because they can.How about learning that the US Naval Academy library, by order of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, purged 400 books on civil rights, the Holocaust, Black military heroes, and works by authors like Maya Angelou, but kept Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the shelf? Wouldn’t you feel the chill too? What’s next? Homeland Security agents in black trench coats slowly removing their gloves and mumbling, “We have ways of making you talk.”?Squeezing law firmsNeed a lawyer to defend your civil liberties? Trump’s answer to that is to financially squeeze big law firms that do pro bono work for victims of injustice.
He’s also doing it to universities like Harvard and Columbia because of their liberal curriculums and “woke” policies–red meat for his conspiracy theorizing, science-shunning, minority-hating, under-educated MAGA base.Only Trump diehards aren’t worried that the Department of Education has given states and K-12 schools 10 days to sign and return certification that they have axed DEI initiatives or risk federal defunding. Just like the ‘50s McCarthy witch-hunts demanding “loyalty oaths” from a wide range of people if they wanted to keep their jobs.
Must Read US Supreme Court temporarily halts deportations of Venezuelan migrants under wartime law Trump is also disobeying federal court orders to unfreeze billions of dollars for climate initiatives, infrastructure projects, education, and public health programs that he halted through overreaching executive actions. Likewise, he has ignored court orders to stop the exclusion of the Associated Press from the White House press pool and instructions to return planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants bound for El Salvador’s notorious prisons. Worse, Trump officials are openly floating the idea of “deporting homegrown” criminals,” aka US citizens, to the same gulags.
He’s already staring down probable criminal contempt charges for this. High noon with Supreme CourtMost alarmingly, the White House is defying the US Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling to bring back legal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly seized and sent to a Salvadoran prison due to what enforcers admitted was an “administrative error.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that no one is safe if the government “could deport and incarcerate any person, including US citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.
” What happens if Trump triggers a constitutional crisis by continuing to ignore the Supreme Court ruling? No one is certain. Even the country’s top legal scholars like Erwin Chemerinsky and Lawrence Tribe are baffled because such a crisis in the system of checks and balances has never happened before, unless you count the US Civil War.window.
rapplerAds.displayAd( "middle-2" );window.rapplerAds.
displayAd( "mobile-middle-2" );The good news is, one is actually not alone waking up to overwhelming dread. At least neighbors, friends, celebrities, usually cool-headed intellectuals, dispassionate analysts, and trade unionists are resisting and sounding the alarm that the specter of authoritarianism is starting to rule over the “Land of the Free.” Nothing to lose but chainsThe emergency has come to the point that traditionally conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has called for a coordinated national “civic uprising” against Trump’s “multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men [such that] any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed.
” His rallying cry: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”Several universities and law firms are banding together to face down the White House. Students and faculty are rallying in defense of ICE’s abductees, and foreign students have sued the State Department for unreasonably revoking their visas.
Nearly weekly demonstrations are taking place all over the country denouncing Trump and Musk. Tens of thousands are flocking to Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and Sen.
Bernie Sanders’ traveling protest rallies, including in traditionally conservative cities, signaling an energized Democratic base, putting to shame elected Democrats who are conciliating with MAGA or playing dead. Even in red states Republican town halls are disrupted by angry voters, forcing the GOP to tell its legislators to stop holding them. However, even if polls show that 51% of registered voters disapprove of Trump’s performance, his hardcore MAGA followers seem to not mind suffering from his chaotic presidency because, as some commentators observed, the people they hate are suffering more.
It’s the economyBut it’s looming economic disaster that may give Trump supporters pause, and the movement against him more urgency. He promised low prices, slower inflation–economic prosperity — from Day One of his term, but prices remain high, the inflation rate is 2.8%, up from 2.
3% t at the end of Biden’s term.Must Read China says it is ‘tearing down walls’ to expand trade alliances amid US standoff Tourism, which brings billions of dollars and 18 million jobs to the economy, is down 10 to 12 percent as likely tourists from Europe, Canada, China and Latin America are repulsed by the White House’s animosity toward allies and immigration enforcers rash treatment of arriving foreign visitors. As a result of Trump’s chaotic presidency, experts are forecasting a 47-percent likelihood of recession due to his whimsical trade tariffs on more than 50 countries, mostly U.
S. allies. Moreover, drastic, arbitrary cuts to federal spending will severely hurt seven of the 10 Republican-voting states most reliant on federal funding.
In the 1930s, at a time of severe economic depression, Hitler had to launch a range of economic and social programs, such as massive public works and a war-rearmament economy, to keep the support of millions of already Nazi-swayed Germans. Trump has no credible plan that could shield his true believers and newly-earned voters from the looming economic crisis of his own making.window.
rapplerAds.displayAd( "middle-3" );window.rapplerAds.
displayAd( "mobile-middle-3" );Meanwhile, we continue to wake up to the incredibly absurd.The White House is now floating the idea of denying emergency disaster funds to Democratic-led states after rejecting the state of Washington’s and North Carolina’s respective appeals for aid due to recent devastating weather-relate disasters.At least two US-born lawyers in Massachusetts have received notices from the Department of Homeland Security to self-deport.
One of them, Boston immigration attorney Nicole Micheroni, who was born in Newton, grew up in Sharon, and was educated at Wellesley College, said she received an email from the department ordering her to leave the US within seven days. “Do not attempt to remain in the United States. The federal government will find you,” the letter read.
“Please depart the United States immediately.”“There are a lot of people within their rights to stay here that are being told to leave, and a lot of people don’t know the difference,” Micheroni told the news media.Good morning, America, how are you? – Rappler.
comRene Ciria Cruz is an editor at PositivelyFilipino.com. He edited the book A Time to Rise: Collective Memoirs of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), (UP Press), and was Inquirer.
net’s US Bureau Chief 2013-2023. He has written for the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacific News Service, and California Lawyer Magazine..
