April 4, 2025
Dear Interested Readers,
Liberation Day?
I did not have the stomach to watch President Trump’s pronouncement of his tariff determinations during a gathering of his sycophants in a Rose Garden ceremony late Wednesday afternoon. My guess is that all of the applause I saw and heard when I saw brief clips on the evening news gave him a pleasurable dopamine hit, but a growing number of us were left groaning and shaking our heads over our anticipation of the pain and suffering that we know is coming. Trump called it Liberation Day, but it felt more like Doomsday to me.
I was not alone in my sorrow as I contemplated how far we have fallen because of the misguided nature of our president’s policies. David Brooks described our situation in a thoughtful and chilling opinion piece entitled “How To Destroy What Makes America Great.”
Brooks’s New York Times colleague Tom Friedman gave us some glimpse of the disbelief with which our friends and enemies view Trump’s reckless and ill-conceived tariff strategy in his opinion piece published in the wake of Liberation Day that was entitled “Trump Just Bet the Farm.” Friedman began his piece by referencing Trump’s egotistical belief in his intuition and “gut” over carefully considered policy and an understanding of how the enormous wealth and influence of our country has been built over the last eighty years with what I would call Non-Zero thinking. The success of our economy has more often been advanced by win-win than I-win-you-lose transactional approaches and the use of intimidation that seem to be Trump’s only operational concepts in a complex world that he manifestly does not understand.
The Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman gave an analysis on his Substack site just minutes after Trump’s speech was over. According to Krugman, the speech was economic nonsense, a display of ignorance/incompetence, or just a collection of lies. Trump’s ideas are a ratatouille of nonsense containing all those elements of ignorance, false facts, and ego that Krugman identified, plus a full measure of his personality disorder. Krugman began:
Just a quick update after Trump’s Rose Garden speech.
I guess it’s just possible that when we get details about the Trump tariffs they will be lower than what he just announced, but based on what he said, he’s gone full-on crazy. It’s not just that he appears to be imposing much higher tariffs than almost anyone expected. He’s also making false claims about our trading partners — not sure in this case whether they’re lies, because he may be truly ignorant — that will both enrage them and make it very hard to back down.
Yesterday morning, Krugman had even more to say as the markets were falling. I don’t know about your experience, but our retirement accounts so far have lost six digits of value as Trump plays Russian roulette with our economy. Krugman’s article yesterday (April 3rd) was entitled “Will Malignant Stupidity Kill the World Economy?” Krugman gives us some history that Trump did not know or ignored:
America created the modern world trading system. The rules governing tariffs and the negotiating process that brought those tariffs down over time grew out of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, devised by FDR in 1934. The growth in international trade under that system had some negative aspects but was on balance very good for America and the world. It was, in fact, one of our greatest policy achievements.
Yesterday Donald Trump burned it all down.
As he continues, Krugman shows us charts that reveal Trump’s misrepresentations and points out that he completely ignored the services that we sell to other countries. If services are included in the analysis of our business with Europe we go from a deficit to a positive balance of trade. Say goodbye to that. Krugman gets a little ironic as he wonders whether or not the presentation was an example of an AI analysis gone wrong or the work of a DOGE hit squad. He writes:
The size of the tariffs, however, wasn’t the only shocking thing about the Rose Garden announcement. Arguably what we learned about how the Trump team arrived at those tariff rates — the sheer malignant stupidity of the whole thing — was even worse.
You might be tempted to dismiss complaints about the policy process as elitist snobbery. But credibility is a crucial part of policymaking. Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally.
So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess…
I suggest that you read the full article if you you are interested in “the formula” or other Krugman speculations on the future impact of Trump’s “Liberation Day” that will be noted in doctoral theses over the coming years as a generation of economists analyze how a narcissistic dunce wrecked the world’s strongest economy. Krugman maintains his gallows humor as he ends the piece [the bolding is my contribution]:
Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?
Next thing you’ll be telling me that Trump’s people are planning military actions over insecure channels and accidentally sharing those plans with journalists. Oh, wait.
I’d like to imagine that Trump will admit that he messed up, cancel the whole thing, and start over. But he won’t, because that would spoil the dominance display. Ignorant irresponsibility is part of the message.
I am exhausted. It seems that every day since “from Day One” of the president’s second term we open the newspaper, look at a notice on our smart phone, or get a wake up jolt when we turn on the radio and hear the news of some new outrageous event initiated by the president or the clowns with which he has filled his cabinet. The cover of this week’s New Yorker is a cartoon parody of the famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s classic movie, “Dr. Strangelove.” On the cover, the entire collection of clowns from the “Houthi PC small group” that broadcasted imminent attack plans over Signal are seen like Major Kong gleefully riding the atomic bomb. (Click on the link to see the Major ride the bomb.)
Inside the New Yorker, the editor, David Remnick, writes the lead article in the “Talk of the Town.” The article contains an amazing sentence that I must share with you. The first sentence of Remnick’s second paragraph sums up much of my feelings of the last two months. He writes:
In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second administration, the quality of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals.
Please note that Remnick said “principals,” not “principles,” but in truth, the sentence would work with either. Further along, Remnick reminds us that Trump was a star pupil of the “satanic” [My characterization, not Remnick’s] and ultimately disbarred famous lawyer of Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, who taught Trump the strategy or “principle” of “never apologize” and “slander the messenger.” In the case of the Signal fiasco, the messenger was the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who, through someone’s ineptitude, had been added to the chat heard round the world. Further into the article, Remnick gave me another dopamine hit when he wrote:
This is an administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful inadequacies.
I encourage you to read or hear Remnick’s piece. You don’t need a New Yorker subscription; just click here. In case you can’t or don’t, here is the last paragraph:
The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight. Some will choose to deny it, to domesticate it, to treat the abnormal as mere politics, to wish it all away in the spirit of “this too shall pass.” But the threat is real and for all to see. No encryption can conceal it.
What has flummoxed me has been the rapidity and multiplicity of Trump’s executive orders and his flagrant violations of the rule of law. There have been so many crazy and disturbing announcements and events in this “blitzkrieg strategy” that it seems almost impossible to respond effectively to any. Court orders are ignored, and the damage mounts as if we have seen a man sent to an awful prison by “error” for which there appears to be no repair. Who is next? Now, I have another reason to advise you not to get a tattoo.
I have written before about the whack-a-mole feel to our attempts to mount resistance to the distruction of our federal beaurocracy by executive order and the indiscriminate processes of Elon Musk under the banner of DOGE, but I have not done as good a job as Carlos Lozada did this week in a long and eloquent piece on April Fool’s Day entitled “Trump Just Reached a Historic Milestone.” The article is about Trump’s record-setting use of executive orders.
After a reference to FDR’s first 100 days in office, Lozada writes:
Last week, with more than a month to go before he will reach 100 days in office, Trump surpassed 100 executive orders. Reading through them all lays bare the assumptions, obsessions and contradictions of the man signing them.
The executive order is Trump’s preferred governing tool. Even with Republican congressional majorities, he favors the flourish of the order over the hassle of lawmaking. Why bother assembling legislative coalitions when you can just write, “By the authority vested in me as president by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered” and then tack on whatever you like?
A little further along Lozada begins to build his case:
Yet despite the muddle — or perhaps because of it — the new administration’s orders fulfill one essential service: They affirm and expand Trump’s vision of the presidency, of politics, of our Nation. (Yes, “nation” is invariably capitalized.) The orders capture the world as Trump sees it and wishes it to be, and they show how the borders between high principle and low politics, between words and reality, are porous.
America was great until Biden ruined it. The economy is shackled by misguided regulations and must be set free. Trump’s opponents are ideological, while he relies on common sense. American values are always in danger and must be shielded from enemies, often enemies from within. The president is not just the head of the executive branch but also the sole interpreter of law and the lone representative of the people.
Lozada skillfully and with appropriate sarcasm dissects and reveals the philosophical inconsistencies and contradictions that are present in many of Trump’s executive orders. Lozada shows them to be biopsies or extremely explicit pronouncements of the president’s opinions, need for revenge, and intellectual inconsistencies that are at variance with the intent and spirit of the Constitution, which he claims gives him authority that it doesn’t. Like Remnick, Lozada ends his piece with a chilly and sarcastic acceptance of the gravity of this moment of extreme challenge in our history.
Consider the logic: Because the Constitution empowers the president and the president faithfully executes the law, the president’s actions as chief executive are necessarily lawful, and his interpretations of the law — say, when he talks about running for a third term or when he attempts to unmake the 14th Amendment — are necessarily correct. And so a document that is held up as the greatest force for good the world has ever known is deployed to justify the personal preferences of one man.
And that’s an order.
I have not forgotten that this letter is about healthcare. Healthcare, like a legal immigrant from El Salvador, can be injured or wronged in unreparable ways by the malicious nature of this president. Perhaps the biggest threat of many threats that his presidency brings to healthcare is the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to the role of Secretary of Health and Human Services, a position that he is manifestly unqualified to occupy.
Healthcare access and finance may be eventually given a shocking blow by legislation passed by Congress to undermine the ACA or drastically cripple Medicaid, but I fear that damage will come a long time after care delivery, medical research, efforts to improve the social determinants of health, efforts to guide pulic health, and our participation in world wide health efforts have been critically damaged by executive orders and the conspiracy biases of Robert Kennedy.
The attacks on healthcare, public health, and medical research in our universities that have occurred are much more damaging than any reading of Project 2025 would have allowed us to imagine. Much of the damage won’t be reversed for decades, if ever, because the talent and the infrastructure of public health and medical research have been severely damaged by Mr. Kennedy’s decrees and performance. These destructive administrative actions are expressions of his staggering biases and ignorance that will continue as long as he is protected by the president who is empowered by a Republican controlled Congress that has shown little desire to perform its Constitutional responsibility.
I was shocked to hear and then confirm in articles from local and national news networks that we can expect big deficiencies in the federal heating assistance programs, food bank supports, and SNAP (food stamps) that so many of my neighbors depend upon. The extent of damage done to these programs through decisions coming from HHS and its agencies, which are under Kennedy’s jurisdiction, turns out to be staggering.
As you may see from the answer I got from my request for clarification of these actions from ChatGPT, it will not be just my neighbors in this “purple state” that will suffer, but like the impact of tariffs, the damage may be even greater in “red states” where the state governments won’t fill the hole left by departing federal dollars and there are so many “Trump voters” who were conned by the MAGA lies.
I asked ChatGPT, “ Please discuss the budget cuts and changes at Health and Human Services (HHS) that seem likely for SNAP, federal fuel assistance programs (LIHEAP), and support to food banks across the country. How will these policy changes impact the budgets of states?
The answer was frightening. At the end of the answer, the bot offered some of its references.
ChatGPT said:
Recent federal budget proposals and administrative actions have introduced significant changes to programs managed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), notably the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), and support for food banks. These developments are poised to have profound implications for state budgets and the well-being of vulnerable populations.
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP):
- Proposed Budget Reductions: The U.S. House of Representatives has advanced a budget resolution aiming for over $1 trillion in federal spending cuts, with significant reductions targeting SNAP. These cuts could lead to decreased benefits and stricter eligibility criteria, potentially increasing food insecurity among low-income households.
- Economic and Employment Impacts: Analyses indicate that such cuts could result in the loss of approximately 1 million jobs nationwide and a $113 billion reduction in state GDPs by 2026. For instance, Arkansas could face around 10,900 job losses, while Ohio might see a decrease of 43,000 jobs and a $4.4 billion drop in economic output. Axios+2Commonwealth Fund+2GWU Public Health+2Axios
Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP):
- Administrative Staff Terminations: A significant reorganization within HHS has led to the termination of the entire administrative staff responsible for LIHEAP. This action jeopardizes the program’s functionality, potentially hindering the distribution of remaining funds designated for assisting low-income households with energy costs.
- State-Level Concerns: In Connecticut, officials express deep concern over the program’s future, warning that vulnerable residents could face life-threatening conditions without heating assistance. The state is considering interventions, including potentially using its rainy day fund, but acknowledges that it cannot fully compensate for continuous federal rollbacks.
Support for Food Banks:
- Funding Cancellations: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has canceled the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided food banks and other feeding organizations with funds to buy food from local suppliers. This decision affects approximately $420 million in planned support, potentially reducing the capacity of food banks to assist those in need. Wikipedia
Impact on State Budgets:
The proposed federal cuts to SNAP and LIHEAP, along with reduced support for food banks, are expected to place additional financial burdens on state governments. States may need to allocate more resources to fill the gaps left by federal reductions, potentially leading to budgetary constraints in other areas. Moreover, the anticipated economic downturn resulting from job losses and decreased economic activity could further strain state revenues.
Conclusion:
The proposed budget cuts and administrative changes to SNAP, LIHEAP, and food bank support are likely to have far-reaching effects on vulnerable populations and state economies. Reductions in these programs may increase food and energy insecurity, lead to significant job losses, and impose additional financial pressures on state budgets. Policymakers and stakeholders must carefully consider these implications to mitigate adverse outcomes for affected communities.
The bot offers some references to support its analysis:
Cuts to food stamps and Medicaid could imperil this California Republican
Low-Income Heating Program Loses Its Staff in HHS Cutbacks
How federal cuts to Medicaid and SNAP could affect Ohio
As you may remember, I am very active as a board member and participant in two local charities that seek to help our neighbors who have financial needs. In their current configuration, the minimal economic needs of many of our neighbors are not met by the combination of SNAP, the fuel assistance programs, and our wonderful area food banks. Each year, we see and provide resources for dozens of families that need extra help. We help them sign up for these programs that are going away or will be severely cut, and when those resources are inadequate, we cobble together money for food and fuel to supplement the inadequacies of the current programs. For some of those who need a car to get to work, we find a way to provide a reliable used car that has been repaired.
Each year, one of the hurdles our clients must clear is getting the processing done for fuel assistance. The problem has been a lack of staff to do the work. Robert Kennedy just fired every one of the people who make the fuel allotment decisions in New Hampshire and across the country. This year, with the program in place, the two organizations that I work with have spent over $20,000 supplementing the current program, which was inadequately staffed and funded. My wife manages the program that provides firewood (the local price is more than $350/per cord). Many of our clients use wood stoves to live within the allotment they get for propane or fuel oil. Through one of the charities, I manage a budget of $15,000 for emergency purchases of oil and propane. We help people with their SNAP applications and deliver food from our food bank to a few people who don’t have a way to get to the food bank when it is open. I fear what we can do through our charities will be woefully inadequate to fill the void created by the cuts coming from Trump, Kennedy, and Musk. For many of our disadvantaged neighbors, “Liberation Day” and “Make America Great Again” are cruel jokes.
I have no idea how these disadvantaged neighbors will get by when the impact of Kennedy’s changes roll through our state and local economy. Many are elderly and living on inadequate monthly Social Security. Some are physically disabled. Some are single parents trying to combine low-wage work with parental responsibilities. These people, the state budget, and our local economy will be hit hard by the president’s policies and tariffs. Yesterday, the stock market had its worst day in over five years. The losses continued as the market opened today. I guess that is what is meant by “short-term pain.” If those losses were limited to our retirement accounts, maybe it would be short-term. I fear that many of our citizens don’t have stock, but their incomes come from the businesses that are losing value and are confused about the way forward toward profitability under higher supply costs and lower profits created by the tariffs. Many employers may not survive these “short-term” losses and the policy changes that undermine business as well as the survival and care of our disadvantaged and vulnerable neighbors.
In this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, we learn that even before Trump and his collection of clowns initiated their destructive misconceptions, the richest people in America did about as well as the poorest people in Western and Central Europe in terms of mortality. The article is entitled “Association between Wealth and Mortality in the United States and Europe.”
I urge you to at least read the abstract and conclusion. Before Kennedy and Trump took an axe to the social determinants of health, things were bad. I can only expect that just as Trump confused our response to COVID-19, he will continue to violate the principle of primum non nocere, which, as you know, means “Above all, if you can’t make it better, don’t make it worse.”
So far, Trump and Kennedy show no inclination or ideas that would lead us to think that they might “make it better.” It appears we are full steam ahead to worse.
Birches Bending in an Ice Show
Snow storms can be problematic, but I will take 20 inches of snow over any ice storm. Our last big-time ice storm was in December of 2008. We had no generator at that time and were using our current home only on occasional weekends and vacations as work allowed. The storm left hundreds of thousands of people in New Hampshire without electricity for about a week. We had to hire a man to come to our house with a gas generator for several hours each day for a week to run the heating system and keep the interior temperature above freezing to protect the plumbing. Frozen pipes are an expensive mess and usually quite a bummer. We made sure to get a generator before the next winter.
The ice storm we had this week was the first such big ice event in seventeen years. Coming as it did in the early spring rather than in the depth of winter as it did in 2008, the ice was gone quickly. In 2008, I noticed how many of our local birch trees bent to the ground but did not break as did other less bendable trees like the oaks and maples that lost many limbs. Unfortunately, many of those birches that bent in 2008 stayed bent when the ice was gone.
Several years ago, we wanted to cut down a blue spruce (not native) to provide a better view of our lake from our deck. We have strict local regulations about preservation of our shore line and the environmental officer whom we affectionately referred to as the “Lake Nazi” would have fined us $5,000 for cutting down the tree unless we planted a native species as a replacement within the same general area. As a resolution of the problem, we planted several birch trees at the corner of the deck that added up to the required replacement as judged by their collective trunk diameters.
Birches grow very fast. I think that they are some combination of weed and tree. They are beautiful, and as they have grown, I have come to love them and the shade they provide. I was startled when I awoke last Sunday morning to see all of the ice in the trees and the birches bent down to kiss our deck. You can see a bit of that in the header for this letter.
I was quite worried that when the Ice melted, we would discover that the birches were permanently bowed onto our deck. My fears persisted until the ice melted a few days later, and these birches sprang back to their usual height. I guess that I am not as literate as I often try to appear. Until I began to search the internet to find out why birches bend but do not break, I had forgotten Robert Frost’s poem about bending birches. My excuse is that I probably last read it in a literature class in the early sixties. In case you have also forgotten it, here are the first few verses. It is a long but beautiful poem that depends on the images and mystery of bending birches.
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
That is exactly what happened to my birches.
Click here if you want to read the rest of this long poem. I recommend it.
If you are interested in the bending property of birches and the fact that their bent fate depends on both internal and external factors, plus how long they are bent, click here. The reference is a lovely essay with a touch of science that also reflects on Frost’s poem.
I hope that my birch trees are a metaphor for what we are going through with Trump now. Perhaps if he wrecks the economy quickly the sycophants in the Republican party who say, “How high?” when he commands them to jump will discover that they don’t need to bend to his command and will snap back up to their full height and provide what only they can provide which is protection of all those things in our country that aren’t like birches and will surely break.
Be well,
Gene
