This Week’s Trump Outrages: Portraits in Cruelty

Donald Trump deserves every possible negative adjective applied to him: corrupt, dishonest, narcissistic, authoritarian, foul-mouthed, unfaithful, divisive, bigoted, criminal, vindictive, violent. I invite readers to add to the list. But after Trump shredded one popular social program after another, the word that’s in widest circulation right now is “cruel.”

Trump is willing to fund ICE and expand the Border Patrol (deemed more aggressive than ICE) to continue roughing up, rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants (and some US citizens). He’s also found money to assist the right-wing president of Argentina, Javier Milei. His One Big Beautiful Bill gave 60% of tax cut benefits to persons with more than $217,000 in yearly income, the top 20% of taxpayers.

But Trump is willing to see 42 million low-income Americans go hungry (that’s one out of every eight citizens, including 16 million children, a disgrace in the richest country in the world).  Two federal judges ordered the Department of Agriculture to release Supplemental Nutriton (SNAP) funding, but the department planned to release only 50% of the money to the states. 

The Chief Judge of the federal court of Rhode Island, John McConnell, ordered USDA to release 100% but his ruling was stayed by the US Supreme Court after Trump appealed. After the Court’s ruling, USDA ordered that any state delivering 100% of benefits had to “immediately undo” the action or face a cutoff of future benefits. Mercifully, legislation to get the government open again includes funding for SNAP—at what level is unclear. But Trump had absolutely nothing to do with saving the program.

The biggest issue for Democrats’ refusal to vote for re-opening the government was gigantic increases in the cost of health insurance under Obamacare—114% percent increase on average—if premium subsidies were not extended past their expiration at the end of this year. All but 2 million of ACA’s  24.5 million enrollees are covered by subsidies ranging from 100% for the poorest enrollees to 50% for those with middle incomes.

The Trump/Republican “Big Beautiful Bill called for $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid, eliminating insurance coverage for 10 million low-income enrollees, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Termination of $250 billion in subsidies to help middle income people afford Obamacare will result in 5.1 million losing coverage. The bill’s up-to-$500 billion in cuts to Medicare over 10 years will not directly eliminate coverage for seniors (except refugees and non-citizens), but will reduce reimbursements to providers, especially those providing home health, post-acute care and mental health and substance abuse services. The cuts are expected to cause rural hospitals and many clinics either to close or stop accepting Medicare patients. That affects every one of us, whether on Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance.

Senate Democrats offered to reopen the government if Trump agreed to a one-year extension of ACA subsidies. But Trump and Republicans rejected the offer. Trump ordered Senate Republicans to do away with the filibuster so they could reopen the government without having to rely on Democratic votes—and also pass voter ID laws, ACA subsidy rollbacks and changes to immigration laws. But Republican leaders refused, fearing it would benefit Democrats when they regain a Senate majority. It was a rare GOP refusal to obey Trump. After eight Democrats broke ranks and joined Republicans, the Senate passed a bill that would reopen the government without guarantees of supporting the ACA subsidies, which still must pass the House.

Angering many Democrats, what Democrats got was a promise that the issue would come up for a Senate vote in December. That could benefit Democrats politically even if it fails to pass and ACA enrollees suffer. The subsidies are popular and voting them down in either chamber will brand Republicans as cruel when ACA premiums spike and 3.5 to 5 million people lose their insurance.

In another display of cruelty, the Trump administration proposed an $18 billion cut for the National Institutes of Health, reducing the budget from $45.6 billion to $27.5 billion, a 40% cut, the largest for any agency. When other health agencies are counted, the proposed hit to medical research was between $22 billion and $25 billion. What do NIH labs do? Save lives, and Trump just made that more difficult.

The administration claimed that NIH had become “politicized…obsessed with DEI and COVID research.” The cuts produced chaos in medical research, one of the premier scientific organizations in the world. Thousands of researchers and staff were laid off, graduate programs cancelled admissions and 8,000 grants. Other countries, aware of the talent in US research programs, began offering lucrative packages to attract them.

 Hundreds have relocated, especially young researchers. The JAMA Health Forum estimated that the Trump cuts would result in 750,000 premature deaths and $318 billion in excess health care costs over 25 years, largely from reduced biomedical innovation and delayed disease treatment.

The brain drain eased somewhat when Congress, in its first rebuff of Trump, restored $48.7 billion to NIH for the current fiscal year, $400 million more than the previous year’s budget and $18 billion more than Trump proposed. Still, countries—the EU, France, Germany, Canada, Denmark and China–are offering million-dollar salaries, fully equipped labs and instant visa approval to attract US scientists. The offers come without the instability currently plaguing US labs.

One of Trump’s worst acts of cruelty was allowing Elon Musk, then director of the Department of Government Efficiency, to dismantle the US Agency for International Development. The action was projected in the British medical journal, Lancet, to cost 14 million lives, including those of 4.5 million children, over the next five years, largely from AIDS, malaria, halted maternal care and collapse of sanitation and nutritional care.  The journal’s editorial board said the decision caused “a crisis comparable to a global pandemic or a major armed conflict.” A new estimate claims 600,000 have died because of the cut so far.

Trump said that the agency was run by “radical lunatics” and Musk called it “a criminal organization.” Former President George W. Bush, originator of the anti-AIDS program in Africa, PEPFAR, said “Do I think it is in our national interest that 25 million people who might have died now live? I think it is.” Barrack Obama called it “a travesty and a tragedy.” Global philanthropist Bill Gates said “the picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”

The decision is still the subject of lawsuits, but they are moot because 190,000 workers have lost their jobs, millions of dollars’ worth of medicines and equipment were destroyed or abandoned and thousands of clinics across Africa, Asia and Latin America have closed. Eliminating an agency representing less than 1% of the federal budget has cost the US untold good will in the world, and China and other countries will try to step in. The decision was not only inhumane but a monumentally stupid act.

Close in terms of cruelty is the Trump decision to deprive more than 700,000 refugees from crisis-ridden countries of Temporary Protective Status, making them subject to deportation—often without hearings. Of the total, 610,000 Venezuelans have been deported and those in danger of removal are from such countries as South Sudan, Afghanistan, Haiti, Honduras and Cameroon.

Meantime, whereas the Biden administration had a ceiling on refugee admissions of 125,000 per year, Trump has cut it to 7,500 – all of which are projected to be granted this year to white South Africans allegedly subject to racial discrimination and land confiscation.

Trump’s repeated acts of cruelty, along with his corruption, dishonesty, grandiosity, vindictiveness, narcissism—and his failure to deliver on his campaign promise to lower prices—have resulted in plunging approval ratings (down to the mid-40s or even the mid-30s, depending on the poll). And that, in turn, resulted in an across-the-board Democratic sweep on November 8.

The mid-terms can’t come fast enough!