Complicit in the cruelty
Well into his second term, President Donald J. Trump is thinking a lot these days about his legacy. Most likely he will be remembered first and foremost for his cruelty.
His destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will directly cause the preventable deaths of millions of impoverished people from starvation and disease, all to save $9 billion in taxes for the richest Americans.
Trump has excluded or deported hundreds of thousands of refugees seeking asylum from political and religious persecution, domestic violence, and sexual exploitation — without any process whatever. And he continues to separate children of undocumented immigrants, many of them U.S. citizens, from their parents.
He has consistently taken Vladimir Putin’s side in Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine, most recently with his one-sided “peace plan.” Some 50,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed so far, and millions more have been displaced from their homes.
Similarly, Trump has supported Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu in the killing of at least 70,000 Palestinians and the reduction of most of Gaza to rubble.
Trump’s firing of 300,000 career federal employees with no notice and without cause, has created immense hardship for these public servants.
This will be the legacy of the leader of the nation once known as the strongest, richest, and most generous on Earth. Will we, the American people, also be remembered as complicit in Trump’s cruelty?