Barbara Mezeske: The use of power
Trump is playing to a different audience: the ill-informed MAGA crowd that believes every lie he and his people tell, and the elites whose money insulates them from the cost of groceries or the fear of unjust arrest.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.
On Tuesday, Aug. 26, Donald Trump declared, I have “the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”
That is not true. The U.S. Constitution, written by immigrant statesmen, explicitly guarded against the kind of rule many had fled in Europe: kingship. Those men created a nation in which power was divided between the executive; the Legislature, which broadly represented the citizens, and the judges, who administered law.
But take a look around you. We have a supine legislature rubber-stamping the Trump agenda in order to stay in his favor. We have a judicial system whose top court is hand-picked to rule against voter rights, civil rights, climate concerns, and limitations on executive power.
And the consequences are that Trump is reaching wide and deep into American life and culture — doing what he wants, with little regard for anything except his own ego, tastes, and power. How is he wielding his power?
Trump has named himself head of a key cultural institution, fired its board and packed its performances with celebrities who reflect his worldview.
He has issued executive orders that revoked leases on coastal wind power sites, froze federal hiring, created DOGE, withdrew us from the World Health Organization, made English the official national language, and many more. He has remade the White House Rose Garden and plans to replace the East Wing with a $200 million ballroom.
He has allowed his Health and Human Service Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to pack that agency with anti-vaccine hires, to cancel already-awarded research grants, to change recommendations for childhood and adult vaccines, and to disallow any grant proposal that uses language from a “banned” list of words, including "accessible," "asexual," "barrier," "anti-racism," "bisexual," "clean energy," "climate change," "elderly," "ethnicity," "hate speech," "marginalized" and "underserved."
What are the effects of these actions? First, it appears that routine COVID and flu vaccines may cost more and be difficult to get if you aren’t over 65. If vaccination rates tumble, especially amongst young children, herd immunity against a host of childhood illnesses including measles, whooping cough, and polio, may be lost. Public assurance that government policies followed good science has given way to confusion. Research has been hamstrung by Trump’s opposition to what he calls “woke” ideology.
What exactly does it mean to be “woke?” It means that you value diversity, equity and inclusion — that DEI bogeyman that the MAGA crowd rails against. But, if you oppose DEI, then what do you want? Plainly, you want homogeneity, inequality, and exclusion (which are, coincidentally, the qualities of any old white-boy fraternity in the 1950s).
Under the anti-DEI banner, Trump has withheld funding from schools, including our premier colleges and universities and our military academies. He has demanded the removal from school and public libraries of any books dealing with race, gender difference, slavery, Black and brown people, like the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo code-talkers, and females in the military. At West Point, this has led to the removal of books by Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, the abolishment of Black History Month, and the ending of the sociology major. He has demanded the firing of women and people of color from federal posts,, especially in the military.
The effect of trying to scrub diversity from a nation of immigrants, to reverse gains made by women in the economy and at work, and to no longer make a place for those whose bodies, minds, or culture differ from the average white, heterosexual English-speaking man, is an attempt to erase most of the history of the 20th century. To be anti-DEI is to be pro white supremacy.
In the spirit of anti-wokeness, Trump has set a goal of deporting some 10 million people who are in the country illegally. We have seen the outcome of the newly aggressive ICE. Masked and armed ICE agents ambush people at work, in church and even in the courts where they have come to make required immigration check-ins.
The methods are brutal, as we have seen in many videos. Detention centers like Alligator Alcatraz are notorious for their abysmal conditions. Deportations to places like El Salvador, Uganda and South Sudan take place without due process. People are disappeared into places where families and lawyers can’t track them.
Immigrants and their families live in fear. Errors occur when citizens or legal aliens are swept up. To the world, America looks more and more like a police state. The effects on our labor markets, especially our agriculture, hospitality and construction industries, are devastating. Crops are plowed under. Produce is more expensive.
Trump is beholden to the fossil fuel companies, and so he is defunding and ending various climate initiatives. Here in Ottawa County, that is keeping the Campbell coal plant open beyond its planned closing, at the cost of $29 million just through the end of June. He finds wind power and wind mills distasteful, and at the end of August, cancelled $679 million already-awarded funding for offshore wind projects. (Note: Pay attention to Texas, a deeply red state with a notoriously shaky power grid. In 2023, more than one-quarter of the state’s power was generated by wind.)
This retreat from alternative sources of energy will cost consumers, imperil our health and contribute to pollution.
Finally, consider Trump’s use of the military in our streets. First Los Angeles, then the District of Columbia, followed by threats to Chicago and Baltimore. The military is not trained to police civilians, chase down leads or interview suspects. It is a blunt tool that serves mostly to quell demonstrations and make public spaces seem dangerous. The effects of Trump’s takeover of the Washington, D.C., police and the calling up of the National Guard have been chilling to tourism and trade, and are a terribly poor reflection on our nation.
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All these power flexes have costs for our national reputation, our hopes to remain in the forefront of science and our historical cultural values. As to fiscal costs? No one has that number, though it is clearly billions of dollars. As taxpayers, are these the ways we expect our money to be used?
What would happen if this money were invested in our citizenry? In the education of our children, from cradle to university? In our health systems, our energy grid, our roads? What about the social safety net: Are we OK with it being shredded to pay for additional funds for ICE, or for a grand, Mar-a-Lago-style gilded ballroom?
The average citizen does NOT benefit from Trump’s exercise of power. Trump is playing to a different audience: the ill-informed MAGA crowd that believes every lie he and his people tell, and the elites whose money insulates them from the cost of groceries or the fear of unjust arrest.
Trump claims he has “the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”
No president of the U.S. has ever made that claim, or ever believed that to be true. We should not believe it either.
— Community Columnist Barbara Mezeske is a retired teacher and resident of Holland. She can be reached at bamezeske@gmail.com.
