This Week in Trump Outrages: Habeus, Corruption and Dismantling the Research State

Donald Trump says he “does not know” whether persons facing deportation must get “due process of law.” However, the US Constitution and Supreme Court are quite clear: they must. But the Trump administration has expelled hundreds (or perhaps thousands) without giving them any opportunity to contact a lawyer, much less a judge.  

To top it off, Trump’s top domestic adviser, Stephen Miller, says the administration is considering canceling the constitutional right of habeas corpus, which guarantees detainees the ability to challenge their confinement. The Constitution says the provision can be suspended only in times of war or insurrection.

Though Trump said he’d concentrate on removing violent criminals, US citizens, legal residents, ailing children, and long-resident undocumented immigrants have been caught up in deportation raids. One US citizen family in Oklahoma was rousted from its home in the middle of the night by immigration agents, traumatized, forced outside in the rain and had its home torn apart, with their phones, laptops and life savings in cash seized—all in a case of mistaken identity.

Trump also has tried to end the Temporary Protective Status program and other humanitarian parole programs, putting 1.4 million refugees in danger of deportation to such violent or repressive countries as Afghanistan, Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela. Lower courts have blocked the administration, but it has appealed to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the administration has offered refugee status to white South Africans, especially Afrikaners. Sixty have been admitted, but 67,000 others have expressed interest in the program.

Trump’s increasingly harsh arrests and deportations are only one of many outrages perpetrated by him or his administration recently.

 Others include:

Corruption

• Rampant corruption, including Trump’s advocacy of—and personal benefit from—crypto currencies. He and his sons are principals in World Liberty Financial, which sells crypto to foreign millionaires, allowing them to enrich Trump secretly—a violation of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause (Art.1 Sec. 9 Clause 8) prohibiting US officials from receiving money from foreign governments and other laws requiring disclosure of financial interests including foreign involvements.
• Trump disabled the Securities and Exchange Commission from regulating crypto and disbanded the Justice Department’s crypto crime task force. (Crypto is attractive to criminals because of the lack of financial controls and its anonymity and has been a favorite means of facilitating drug and arms dealers’ secret transactions.)
• Trump is staging two expensive receptions and dinners in May for crypto currency holders—one (at $1.5-$2 million a plate) benefiting his political action committee and the other him personally. Trump is estimated to have netted $1-$1.5 billion (or $2.9 billion according to some sources) from his various crypto projects since becoming president, though he’s protected from full disclosure by secrecy. In any event, his profiting from the crypto industry—and canceling policing of it—constitute a corrupt conflict of interest.
• Trump fired nine federal department inspectors general whose job it was to police waste, fraud and abuse. He’s also advocated repeal of laws against American companies bribing foreign officials and has canceled Biden executive orders barring officials’ taking gifts from lobbyists, taking government jobs in agencies they previously lobbied, or becoming lobbyists after leaving government service. Ex-lobbyists now hold senior positions in several agencies including the Justice Department, EPA and Department of Labor.
• Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr, who now run the Trump Organization, are working on deals to build resorts in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates from which Trump will benefit financially.
• Trump also may be gifted a new Air Force One (value: $400 million) by the government of Qatar, clearly a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.

The watchdog group Accountable.US terms Trump’s crypto activity alone “the most nakedly corrupt scheme of self-enrichment in US presidential history.”

Research

According to billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates “millions” of people will die because of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, which formerly provided food, medicine and education to the world’s poorest people. USAID was the first target of Elon Musk’s chainsaw on the US budget, leading Gates to say that “the world’s richest man is killing the world’s poorest children.” Gates announced that over 20 years he will give $200 billion—99% of his fortune—to fight global poverty and disease. His $10 billion a year, though, amounts to just a fifth of USAID’s budget.

Untold numbers of other people will die because of the administration’s cuts to health research and delivery agencies—$18 billion or 40% for the National Institutes of Health, $4 billion or $44% at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, $33 billion or 26% from the Department of Health and Human Services and $270 million or 31 % percent at the Food and Drug Administration.

Those cuts and other reductions for federal research agencies and university research are throwing away America’s pre-eminence in science to China. Trump and Elon Musk have slashed federal scientific research funding by $8 billion or 12.3 percent. China is increasing its R&D spending by 8.4% per year.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in 2023 China was spending 96 percent of US outlays on research and development, up from 72 % a decade earlier.  By several measures, China already leads the US. According to the Nature Index, China publishes more scientific and engineering articles in scholarly journals than the US does. China has the largest high speed rail network in the world—25,000 miles. The US has none.

The US advantage in science has been its ability to attract talent from all over the world. In the last 20 years, China has won just one Nobel Prize (in medicine), while the US has won 50. Many of the US winners—as well as top software engineers and cancer specialists—have been immigrants.

But the Trump administration is throwing all that away. When it cuts federal funding for science and medicine (55% at the National Science Foundation, 26% at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, 31% at the Environmental Protection Agency, for example—and when the government cancels all or part of universities’ research grants (100% at Harvard, significant but non-total cuts at Columbia, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, John’s Hopkins) experiments get stopped, advances don’t happen and —most important—researchers (especially young researchers who constitute the future of science in America) think about quitting their fields or leaving the US. In fact, a poll published last month in Nature magazine showed that 75 percent of US researchers, including Ph.D candidate, are considering leaving this country.

Foreign students, too, may stop attending US universities because of visa problems and/or dismay at Trump’s governance. That will be a blow to university enrollment (and budgets).

Other countries—especially European nations—are taking advantage of the US brain drain. The European Union has mounted a $533 million program—Choose Europe for Science—to attract US scientists and individual European countries have separate programs. China is urging its students to return home.

Fareed Zakaria, in his not-to-be-missed Washington Post column (April 25) and CNN Sunday show (April 27), recalled that the US became the world’s foremost scientific power around 100 years ago, displacing Germany, but it’s in the process of handing away that status “in 100 days.”