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| Trump's Executive Effects
| Trump’s Executive Effects
| Trump's personal and political trail has unfortunately been repetitive in a very negative tone. He is a self-centered egotist who is sexist and racist, supports authoritarians, and has repeatedly made campaign promises that were lies that he has not delivered. As Jimmy Kimmel said on 10 June 2025, "Trump lies about everything." In Catalyst (Spring 2025), Eric Schulz stated that "There's no doubt where the new presidential loyalties lie. As a candidate, Donal Trump vowed to 'stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists.' In the same breath, he also pledged to build 'hundreds of brand-new beautiful [fossil fuel] power plants.'" Brian Dixon noted in the June 2025 issue of Population Connection that "On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump and Elon Musk issued an executive action freezing all new foreign assistance grants for 90 days, while the administration assessed whether funded projects aligned with the administration's values." A critical point is that the values were not directed at the needs of the country, its people and its future.
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| With legislative support, he is pushing the "big beautiful bill" which is a budget that moves funding and support from the lowest through the middle classes of our economy to help himself and the wealthiest part of our population. It is the opposite of Robin Hood's supposed role, as it will take from the poor and give to the rich. This conflicts with his stated goal of DOGE, and Elon Musk wound up turning against Trump. Musk alleged Trump's resistance to releasing the Epstein files is due to Trump's ties with Epstein. To redirect popular concern, Trump sent unsolicited national forces to California regarding immigrant protests, which flared up in Fox media. The last case of similar unsolicited national intervention was when LBJ sent the National Guard to protect civil rights protestors in Alabama in 1965.
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| In Air-Borne, Carl Zimmer referred to Trump's short-coming regarding COVID-19 in his first term. On 19 January 2020, Trump stated "We have it totally under control. . . .It's going to be just fine." Zimmer noted that Trump's administration did not follow the advice of Rick Bright, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and did not increase the production of protective masks. When the pandemic had started to harm the nation, "Trump made matters worse by revealing his contempt for masks." In the 2016 election, referring to the government as corrupt, Trump had claimed that he "alone can fix it," but four years later, during the pandemic, he was distancing himself from government policies.
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| According to a release by ProPublica on 10 February 2025, the federal deficit increased by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump's first term. As a side effect of COVID-19, inflation became the greatest concern of US surveys. It became a focus of Trump's promises, gaining support that got him reelected, but his actions have not followed suit. The price of eggs did not decrease. The price of other public expenses have increased. German Lopez noted in The Morning (of The New York Times) on 30 June 2025 that Trump's bill "would add more than $3 trillion to the national debt."
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| In the context of Trump's current term, Lopez pointed out in The Morning (of The New York Times) on 9 June 2025 that "President Trump returned to the White House with big promises on foreign policy. He would get a peace deal in Ukraine within 24 hours. An agreement between Israel and Hamas would follow. China would stop taking advantage of the United States on trade. For that matter, Europe, Japan and the rest of the world would stop, too.
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| "Things have not worked out as promised. Trump has not ended any wars. His only trade deal to this point is a limited, and temporary, one with Britain. His administration has claimed progress in nuclear talks with Iran, but so far they have produced no agreement. It's still early in his term, but he has failed to meet the extremely high expectations he set for himself. Why? The United States may not have as much leverage as Trump believed." Three days after that article, Israel initiated bombing of Iran. Trump has now initiated an aggressive attack on Iran without any input from Congress.
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| In the Spring 2025 issue of Solutions, Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp stated that "The new administration has worked to dismantle the vital protections of the Clean Air Act, by asserting, contrary to prior Environmental Protection Agency guidance and U.S. Supreme Court rulings, that the government lacks the power to curb climate pollution. EPA programs protecting the most vulnerable were among the first targeted. This administration has also set us back in the global clean energy race by withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement and halting federal investments in clean energy."
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| As noted on 12 May 2025 in Science, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "will no longer update its influential database on billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the United States." Elsewhere in the same issue, Jeffrey Mervis noted that the National Science Foundation's "process of choosing what to fund would no longer rely heavily on scientists on leave from their universities, bringing with them fresh ideas on how to invest in cutting-edge science." In the 22 May 2025 issue of Science, Mervis noted that the termination of half of NSF's grants had an imbalanced effect on "women, racial and ethnic minorities, veterans, and low-income and rural students."
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| Budget impacts were explained further in the 5 June 2025 issue of Science. "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . . . would see a 52% cut . . . and its staff would be reduced by 43% . . . as most functions related to noninfectious diseases are abolished or rehoused in a new Administration for a Healthy America." In addition, "Department of State funding for global health programs would drop by 62%" and the "National Institute of Health's budget would fall 40% . . . and its 27 institutes and centers would be consolidated into just eight or eliminated altogether." Finally, "Funding for the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science . . . essentially eliminates climate research as part of a plan to cut DOE's biological and environmental research programs." In the June 2025 issue of Population Connection, John Seagar pointed out that "The cruel, calculated cancellation by Trump/Musk of all US investments in family planning and their deliberate decimation of climate programs mean that we are betting our future on hallucinations."
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| In "Fool's Gold", an editorial by David Michaels and Wendy Wagner in the 19 June 2025 issue of Science made it clear that Trump had rescinded a Biden-era policy in an executive order on 23 May 2025. Political appointees now are in charge of "Restoring Gold Standard Science." That is, "It officially empowers political appointees to override conclusions and interpretations of government scientists, threaten their professional autonomy, and undermine the scientific capacity of research and regulatory agencies."
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| On 22 May 2025, Science noted that "Trump's administration ramped up its attack on Harvard University last week, cutting $450 million in federal funding on 13 May and an additional $60 million on 19 May, on top of the $2.2 billion the government terminated last month." Similar action has been directed at other top-level educational centers (including MIT) that do not match his perspective. In an editorial in Science on 12 June 2025, Marc B. Parlange stated "Ivy League universities have dominated recent news headlines, having become popular targets for critics of higher education. But the threats they face -- cuts to federal research funding, assaults on academic freedom, and bans on admitting international students -- extend far beyond their campuses. Research universities across the country -- large and small, public and private -- are grappling with these same pressures. . . . Public research institutions are as vital to the national research enterprise as their billion-dollar-endowed private counterparts."
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| In The Morning (of The New York Times) on 23 June 2025 it was noted that "Trump's cuts to research at Harvard threaten work on cancer, mental health and drug abuse." Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Ethan Singer were more specific in an article in The New York Times on 22 June 2025. They pointed out "The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university's mission. It's a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States." They also stated that this "administration has canceled research grants at other universities, too, ending studies related to racial diversity and equity, scaling back the reach of federal science agencies, and sometimes attacking universities it views as ideological foes."
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| President Frankiln D. Roosevelt said that "The test of our program is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." As noted on 26 February 2025 in The Baltimore Sun, "The ongoing effort to shut down the United States Agency for International Development by Elon Musk and President Donald Trump -- bolstered this week by widespread layoffs with thousands more placed on administrative leave -- runs counter to this value." On 26 March 2025, it was noted in The Washington Post that "Plenty of good arguments can be made in favor of reforming federal assistance -- to make it more effective and efficient. But neither the president nor cost-cutter Elon Musk has articulated them. Their ridicule of specific aid programs only muddles the important debate over how to ensure that foreign aid serves its core mission: to improve the lives of billions living in the world's most impoverished nations."
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| Standing up to Trump is critical! In Catalyst (Spring 2025), Gretchen Goldman stated "Under an administration that lies, cheats, and breaks laws while it destroys critical government functions and research that save lives and drive US innovation, we must be honest and courageous." In an editorial on 8 May 2025 in Science, H. Holden Thorp declared "The endless churn of damaging actions from the Trump administration toward science . . . has wreaked havoc in American universities and reverberated around the world. . . .At a time when forces are trying to distract and disrupt the scientific enterprise, doing the important work of finding and sharing the truth is now a great act of resistance."
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| In another editorial on 5 June 2025 in Science, Thorp pointed out "As the Trump administration continues to drastically defund and dismantle basic science in America, the United States is presenting other countries with opportunities to take the lead in seeing farther ahead, anticipate where scientific and technological prowess is going, and create the future, while the United States stands on the sidelines. . . .Moreover, applying these technologies in medicine and elsewhere will rely on still more basic research-research now threatened by sweeping cutbacks inflicted by the Trump administration. . . .the steep loss to the country itself is unambiguous." Or, as Michael S. Harris said in a Science editorial on 12 June 2025, "With the greatest threat to American science . . . sitting in state legislative chambers and the White House, will the United States have the courage to respond as strongly as before? The world will not wait while American researchers are defunded and muzzled."
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| Daniel Patrick Moynihan had stated "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts." This is especially true of the current president. In the May 2025 issue of Scientific American, Robert Jay Lifton made this point very clear in "When a Nation Embraces a False Reality." "To cope with the catastrophe of a second Trump administration and to counter the serial lying, we need to use every imaginable means of truth-telling. And the truth-telling itself becomes an expression of activist resistance." Referring to Nazi leaders and doctors, Lifton stated "There are parallels to this cultlike aspect in Trump's claim to omniscience, believed by his hardcore followers, and his continuous claims on the ownership of reality." He closes with the note that "there is no absolute moment of realized factual truth. Rather we are engaged in an ongoing struggle, as individuals and as a country, on behalf of the decency, necessity and satisfaction of truth-telling."
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| In the March 2025 issue of Population Connection, John Seager ended his "President's Note" with the following point: "Trump shrewdly presents himself as an irresistible force. We must be immovable objects. We must show the world he is nothing more than a failed businessman who couldn't even make money running a casino and who is now recklessly gambling with the future of our nation and the planet."
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