The Rude Pundit: America Is Living in the Trumpian Darkness Now
America Is Living in the Trumpian Darkness Now
In the next week or so, multiple food banks in New Jersey will be having a huge grocery distribution event for furloughed and unpaid federal workers in the parking lot at MetLife Stadium, the place where the Giants lose. That's everywhere in America now. The food banks are bracing for the massive surge in need when Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits run out at the end of the month because of the government shutdown. When SNAP is gone, millions of families will face what one NJ food bank official called "No Meal November." People will starve, including kids. That's America now. Add to that the cost of health insurance as much as doubling for those in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace due to the end of tax credits that reduced premiums, and we will have many more sick and starving families very, very soon. That's America now.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, untrained Immigration and Customs Enforcement goon squads are using tear gas to terrorize neighborhoods, including one that was about to have a children's Halloween parade this weekend. The goons are violently swarming homes and businesses and streets, all to arrest people for the misdemeanor of being in the United States without proper documentation. Chicagoans have organized so that they try to block ICE or blow whistles to warn others that they might be rounded up and torn from their families. Kids in schools are afraid their parents will be gone; parents are afraid their teenagers will be disappeared. That's America now, and it's happening everywhere, sometimes with the help of National Guard troops, and it was has the blessing and frothing encouragement of the president and the majority of Congress.
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Meanwhile, the Republican-run Congress has ceded all of its constitutional authority to Trump, allowing him to do whatever he wants with funding that Congress passed, depriving states of infrastructure spending, depriving schools and institutes of research funding, depriving so many others of money they were budgeted and expecting. Trump today called himself "the speaker and the president," meaning that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is, at best, a marginalized figure, and, at worst, Trump's enthusiastic semen depository. The shutdown is happening because Republicans refuse to restore funding for Medicaid and Medicare that was cut in their savage recent bill and refuse to continue those ACA tax credits, and Democrats in the Senate won't allow a vote on those principles. But it doesn't matter, really, what funding is passed because Trump can simply cancel or redistribute funding under the broad banner of "national security" and his enthusiastic semen depository won't even squeak about it. That's authoritarianism in its purest form, when all power rests in a single dictatorial figure, and that's America now.
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On and on this could go, with the attacks on medical science and food safety and education and so much else, the gutting of everything that made America America, the reduction of this country to a shadow of itself in less than a year, a diminution that will continue as we face, quite literally, starvation, war, and disease. We are in dark, dark times. That needs to be acknowledged. We are in a great deal of trouble, and waiting and hoping that somehow the 2026 midterms will bring us back to the light is putting a great deal of faith in a system that hasn't been able to prevent any of this from happening so far
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