Trump’s Domestic Policy Is Domestic Abuse

It’s Wednesday. Here’s a liberal look at the news. 

Trump has hurt Americans, specifically

Thinking of the untold millions killed by the ending of USAID, or of the poor countries lacking large oil reserves who are facing far more severe consequences for the Iran war than the U.S. is, I could not truly say that Donald Trump’s domestic policy is one of hurting America first. But he has certainly hurt Americans a great deal.

It does not much matter whether you are in a state that votes for Democrats or one that votes for Republicans, though he’ll go out of his way to harm the former. Still, there is no more loyal friend to Trump than the rural voter, and both the tariffs and the mass deportation regime have hit them hard. As Morgan Chilson puts it in the Kansas Reflector, “Kansas agriculture and rural communities need immigrants, but system has failed them.” Chilson’s coverage extends beyond agriculture:

“U.S. Immigration and Enforcement Agents performed immigrant detention operations in southwest Kansas the week of Sept. 22, detaining about 110 people. Their presence in Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal caused beef processing plants to shorten or cancel shifts when employees didn’t show up for work. 

“Restaurants closed, and hotel managers said they couldn’t rent rooms because employees didn’t show up to work.”

Coverage like this emphasizes the harm to American industry and companies rather than the harm to the immigrants themselves, who are either kidnapped in broad daylight and then forced to endure the horrific conditions of an overcrowded detention center, or live in hiding out of fear of that outcome. But the point is that it is harming American industry and companies, beyond the atrocity itself.

And of course, from the beginning, citizens have been directly swept up in the deportation campaigns of the two Trump terms. ProPublica released a report on 506 documented cases of citizens who have been detained in the machinery of mass deportation, including “At least 70 American children and teens.” Here are a few examples of how Trump’s masked agents treat American citizens:

“In May, a New York teen was thrown to the ground, bloodied and then dumped in an unfamiliar neighborhood. “He just grabbed me and threw me on the floor,” the teen recalled.”

“Willy Wender Aceituno was stopped twice by federal agents who broke his window, pulled him from the car and detained him, even as he and bystanders protested that he had already proved he was a citizen to other agents.”

“Darren Eichler was working at a Christian cemetery in a Chicago suburb last October when he and his coworkers moved to help a man who was wading in the nearby river. They soon realized—too late—that the man was running from immigration agents, who emerged from the brush near the river and demanded access to a gated area of the cemetery. When the men refused and started filming, agents used bolt cutters to cut open the gate, then fired pepper balls and tackled the men.”

These aren’t even the worst stories, all of which occur in the detention centers or in transit to wherever the victims are being deported to.

Then there are the less violent, more prosaic ways in which Trump is hurting the country. The usurpation of the power of the purse continues unabated; a recent example involves a plan to tie money appropriated for transit funding to how high a locality’s birth rate is. Yes, you read that correctly: the average fertility rate of a particular geography will determine how much transit funding it gets from the federal government, according to the latest scheme concocted by MAGA’s coterie of former Fox hosts and ideological clowns.

Aside from defunding states directly, the effects of Trump’s wars and tariffs have led to several states suspending their gas taxes, which will reduce the budgets of those state governments yet further.

Building a censorship regime

A certain kind of person who has not touched grass in perhaps a decade was convinced that the Biden administration was party to unprecedented censorship. Before the second Trump term even began, it became clear what actual censorship would look like.

We’ve seen it again and again, in numerous forms, from frivolous lawsuits filed by the occupant of the Oval Office, to masked federal agents showing up at the homes of journalists in the middle of the night, to threats by FCC Chair Brendan Carr.

On that last one, here is the latest from an ABC lawsuit against the FCC:

“ABC is accusing FCC Chair Brendan Carr of threatening to impose a corporate death penalty on its eight stations in the nation’s largest TV markets by hauling in its licenses for a review years ahead of schedule. That’s forcing the Disney-owned network to second-guess how it covers the midterm elections for fear of angering the administration, ABC’s lawyer told a federal judge in Washington Tuesday, a consideration seeping into decision-making around whether to air presidential speeches and what the political line-ups should look like on daytime shows like ‘The View.’”

A related issue is the long-term trend towards media consolidation, a process that has become overtly aligned with the administration in Trump’s second term. The bleak news on this front is that Paramount-Skydance’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery has cleared its final hurdles. One company, run by overt allies of the president, now owns both CBS and CNN, among many other holdings. We can only hope that Warner Bros. sends Paramount belly-up the way it has done for every previous owner. There’s already reason to hope that will happen. 

America doesn’t have a monopoly on voter suppression

The latest in Trump administration election shenanigans is refusal to allow in international observers. This puts the U.S. in a select group of nations that includes Russia and Belarus. Don’t worry, the Justice Department will send its own poll monitors. I know I am comforted that Todd Blanche’s DOJ will be on top of it.  

Lest Americans think themselves special when it comes to election interference or voter suppression, we ought to look abroad for examples of just how bad it can get. In India, voter suppression tactics very much in line with what the Trump administration’s SAVE Act would have required have led to 130 million names being expunged from voter rolls.

Libs’ strongest soldier

Dragged across the timeline

• Unprecedented Student Protests Are Rocking France. Here’s Why They’re Angry, by Melissa Bell at CNN
• Nearly 12,000 School Book Bans Nationwide in 2025–2026—Biggest Number in a Single Year, a report by PEN America
• Trump Accounts’ Extraordinary Expansion Puts Individual Stocks Into Kids’ Holdings, by Richard Rubin and Ashlea Ebeling in the Wall Street Journal
• US, Israeli and European Far-Right Figures to Gather for Conference in Israel, by James Wilson at the Guardian
• Alabama Makes State Workers Say ‘Gulf of America.’ Colleges Aren’t Spared., by Ryan Quinn at Inside Higher Ed