Jonathan P. Baird

It is hard to get your head around the scope of the totalitarian project being engineered by the Trump regime. The dimensions of the project are expansive. Instead of a constitutional republic, they desire a monarch-president with greatly expanded powers. Instead of three co-equal branches of government, they favor an entirely submissive Congress (which they have) and a corrupt complicit Supreme Court whose majority acquiesces to the Executive.

They are a constellation of mediocre white yes-men (with a few white women thrown in) who will sell out the working class every time in favor of billionaires.

Back in the 1960’s, people on the left emphasized naming the system responsible for the Vietnam War. Now we need to name the revised system which Trump and his cronies have created. Capitalism is a tired old word that inadequately conveys what is coming. It is only part of the picture.

The Steve Bannon metaphor “flooding the zone’ comes closer to describing how the process is unfolding but the project is anything but populist. As noted, it is at the service of the billionaire class and their profit.

There is the war on colleges and universities. Then there is the war on science and scientific research. There is also a war to control federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. As with classical fascism, there is scapegoating and the need to blame an entity. These fascists have landed on immigrants to explain all that is wrong in America.

Although they have tried unsuccessfully to align immigration with criminality, much of the Trump regime’s anti-immigrant aggression has been directed at students. There is a thinly veiled anti-intellectualism underlying this offensive. They want to kick foreign students out of the country, especially students of color. The reasons given are invariably flimsy. It is usually an op-ed written to defend Palestinian rights or something the student posted on social media that contravenes Trumpian orthodoxy.

Most liberal or progressive commentators are seeing a piece of what is going on but not the big picture. The Trump regime is attempting to criminalize dissent. International students get arrested for the crime of expressing a minority view. Then they get shipped to distant jurisdictions and face deportation. The Trump regime wants to set the parameters for allowable thought.

What is going on is far worse than McCarthyism. In the past, even if politicians were upset with a professor or the goings-on at a particular university, they were not trying to control the intellectual life of whole universities. Now the Trump regime wants to control curriculum. They want to decide what is intellectually acceptable. This is an unprecedented threat to academic freedom.

To quote Vice-President Vance, “professors are the enemy”. The Trump regime wants control of all cultural and artistic institutions, particularly those that are left leaning or are more free-thinking. They hate that universities and cultural institutions like the Smithsonian have made a sincere effort to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Cancelling millions of dollars in grants to researchers, banning international students and attempting to eliminate tax exempt status as they are doing at Harvard are part of their power grab scheme.

Harvard has been forced to sue because the university recognized Trump’s agenda is an attack on the First Amendment. It is a stand-in for all colleges and universities who all face the same threat to academic freedom. The Trump regime is using antisemitism (which they could care less about) as an excuse to attack private institutions outside their control.

Surveillance capitalism is now employed to monitor the social media accounts of thousands of foreign students. ICE and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are using AI and data mining to find suspect students whose visa could get revoked. Tech companies are cooperating with this endeavor. The effort has a Big Brother quality.

A further follow-the-money aspect is the connection between Trump’s mass round-up of immigrants and the private prison companies that profit from that enterprise. Companies like GEO and CoreCivic are making a killing housing masses of arrested immigrants who have no criminal convictions. These companies run what are effectively concentration camps and they charge the government $120,000 per immigrant. The companies then donate a percentage of profit back to Trump.

Many of these arrested immigrants have American citizen children. The private prison industry has effectively turned these children into orphans.

Trump’s war on science deserves mention. His administration has arbitrarily fired thousands of workers who ran America’s scientific infrastructure. The effort is about destroying the U.S. as an international center of learning. It will absolutely lead to a brain drain. You might think no one would benefit from assaulting science but since the COVID-19 pandemic, MAGA conservatives have made anti-science a new normal. In the name of health freedom and fighting elitism, they dismiss mainstream science, including around vaccines.

The budget bill that passed the House cuts biomedical research on cancer, infectious disease and Alzheimer’s. These MAGA conservatives seem determined to lower life expectancy in the U.S. It is like they are at war with scientific expertise if they perceive it as in conflict with their hard right ideology.

This shows up most blatantly around climate change. The Trump regime has withdrawn support from any science research that even mentions the words “climate change”. They have purged government websites of climate data. They are escalating the production of greenhouses gases, like a death wish.

Looking broadly, what is going on is the equivalent of a national book burning. Anything that conflicts with the Trump game plan goes into the burn pile. It is the new Dark Ages. The masked, unidentified ICE agent who is armed to the teeth is their public image.

Nothing is automatic in this life though. MAGA’s jihad to undermine liberal democracy is not a done deal. While we still have some rights, it is incumbent on people of all political persuasions to push back hard. We can stop this.

One of the biggest stories of the second Trump presidency has to be its mushrooming corruption scandals. A major theme of this presidency is self-enrichment and the normalization of white collar crime.

Just when you thought it could not get worse, there are surprises. I had thought the profiting-off crypto was the worst. Since January, Trump has been adding a billion dollars a month to his family fortune. But then along came his palace-in-the-sky, the $400 million luxury jet gifted by the Qatari royal family.

Trump had complained that Arab leaders had bigger and more impressive airplanes than the current Air Force One. His preference is for Louis XIV-style opulence and gold ornamentation. He said it would be stupid to turn down “a free, very expensive airplane”. The plan is for the jet to be used first as Air Force One and then it is supposed to be given to Trump’s presidential library foundation.

Whether it would remain available for Trump’s personal use after he leaves office remains contested.

The ethical and legal questions jump out. The Framers of the Constitution sought to prevent corruption in drafting the Foreign Emoluments Clause. That clause prohibits the president from receiving any profit, gain or advantage from foreign governments without the consent of Congress.

The jet looks to be an unconstitutional payoff from a foreign government to the president. Congress hasn’t authorized the deal. No president has ever accepted a gift of this magnitude from a foreign government. The formerly royal jet raises the spectre that the Qatari government will receive favorable treatment because of the gift.

And this arrangement doesn’t begin to get to national security concerns. The Qatari jet would require a costly, time-consuming renovation to meet the intensive security, safety and technical standards of an Air Force One. The plane would have to be stripped down to ensure there are no listening devices or secret technology hidden away. That cost alone could be enormous and it is not clear the work could be finished before January 2029 when Trump is slated to leave office.

I think extravagant gift-giving like the Qatari luxury jet perfectly illustrates the core model of behavior we see in this presidency. Corrupt gifts are this Administration’s life blood. Donors line up to purchase desired results.

When I was in junior high school, I had a very witty math teacher named Mr. Harper. I remember Mr. Harper saying, “Every man has his price”. So it is with Donald Trump.

We see this most clearly in how he is authorizing and selling pardons. Presidents do have broad pardon authority but Trump has misused the power to pardon white collar criminals and his political allies who have earned their prison sentences. You might think pardons would be about correcting some blatant injustice. This is absolutely not the case with Trump. His mission is to pardon the worst cheats and crooks.

In the last week, there is the Paul Walczak story. Walczak was hired by his mother to run a Florida nursing home and to act as a CEO. Over the course of years, he stole $10 million out of the paychecks of his employees (doctors, nurses and health care workers) and he stopped paying taxes. He used the money he stole to finance a luxurious lifestyle, including private jets and purchase of a $2 million yacht.

Walczak pled guilty and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and he was ordered to pay $4.4 million in restitution. At sentencing, the judge said “there is no get out of jail free card”. However, Trump granted Walczak a full and unconditional pardon meaning he would do no jail time and he was off the hook for the $4.4 million restitution. As a result, all the health care workers he cheated get no compensation for being ripped off.

Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, has a history of raising millions for Trump campaigns. The Trump pardon came less than three weeks after she attended a $1 million per-person fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago that promised face-to-face access to Trump. Good deal: pay one million so you don’t have to pay four.

At almost the same time as the Walczak pardon came the pardon of reality-TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who had been convicted of evading taxes and defrauding banks of more than $30 million. They had submitted false financial documents to obtain loans they used to fund a lavish lifestyle. The Chrisleys’ daughter, Savannah, has been a big player in the MAGA universe. She spoke at the Republican National Convention. She also was interviewed on FOX by Lara Trump about her parents. This pardon was tossing red meat to the base.

There are many other stories like Walczak and the Chrisleys where Trump has granted pardons. There is a New York lawsuit going on now where Rudy Giuliani’s former assistant Noelle Dunphy is suing Giuliani and alleging in her lawsuit that Giuliani was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split.

Trump has been signaling to his billionaire friends and his political allies that there is no longer any enforcement of white collar crime law. Likewise, he is signaling to foreign donors: pony up and let’s make a deal. His purge of the Department of Justice lawyers ensures no consequences for criminality. There is nothing to get in the way of leader wealth maximization.

Never has corruption been so out front. This presidency has replaced any sense of national self-interest with the family interest of the would-be king. We are all being played for suckers.

As the outlines of President Trump’s budget bill emerged into clearer focus, one fact became apparent. The bill has a shocker price tag. According to the Congressional Budget Office, over ten years, as many as 13.7 million Medicaid recipients will lose their health insurance. It will be the biggest loss of health care coverage ever sustained in American history.

The blow to health care this represents is nothing short of devastating. For poor and working people, this bill strips away what system of health care coverage has existed and replaces it with a far inferior model replete with new impediments. The new impediments are significant. They create barriers to access so that many fewer will qualify for care.

Adding work requirements to Medicaid is a key vehicle for the cuts and projected cost savings. Burdensome and repeated verification requirements are a proven recipe for shrinking rolls. While it may sound good to the uninitiated, there is a body of negative experience with states using such requirements. They create red tape to facilitate churning claimants and recipients off Medicaid.

New Hampshire, along with Arkansas, implemented work requirements in 2019 during Trump 1.0 but suspended the program and the federal court then halted it. There was confusion leading very large numbers to being disenrolled. Yet, those behind the new budget bill entirely ignore the history of how work requirements led to mass disenrollment.

The idea to make employment a precondition to Medicaid is bad public policy. Work requirements actually block access to medically necessary services that might enable work capacity. Medicaid is not a cash assistance welfare program. The purpose of Medicaid has been to furnish medical assistance, rehabilitation and other services that will help individuals attain and retain independence and self-care.

The budget bill plays on the stereotype of able-bodied, lazy people who are choosing not to work to get benefits but the stereotype gets it wrong. Nearly two out of three adult Medicaid enrollees aged 19-64 already work and most of the rest would be exempted for reasons like having a disability, caring for a family member or attending school.

Older adults receiving Medicaid will be particularly hard hit by the cuts. Around 70% of low income adults aged 50-64 live with chronic conditions and experience poor health. Under the budget bill, workers in all states up to age 65 will be subject to the work requirements. Experience has shown that exemptions commonly fail to work and end up excluding many who should remain eligible. It is a safe bet that millions who should be eligible will be locked out of coverage for extended time periods because of red tape..

The harm of the upcoming Medicaid cuts, starting at the end of 2026, is not well-understood. Not having health insurance literally kills. To avoid incurring costs, many will not go to the doctor or they will delay going. If they are suffering from cardiovascular illness, diabetes or cancer, delay could be life-threatening. People will not obtain the medication or treatment they need in a timely fashion.

Putting off care when conditions can be best-treated will lead to worse outcomes and higher costs later as often happens when an uninsured person lands in an emergency room. A new study by investigators at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, Boston University and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, published in the Lancet, found that reduction in Medicaid coverage could lead to thousands of additional deaths among working-age Americans as well as a disastrous financial burden for hundreds of thousands.

The Lancet article found that Medicaid cuts have a ripple effect on patient’s children, their parents and seniors who depended on the patient for care. Families experienced increased stress when primary breadwinners were out of commission. Medical debt can pile up, especially on those who have complex health needs. Those in worse health or those contending with a disability often suffered income loss because of difficulty in maintaining continuous employment.

In the past, Medicaid has generally not required co-pays or any balance billing beyond the Medicaid payment rate. There was an understanding that low income people could not afford such costs. The budget bill would force some Medicaid recipients to pay more for coverage through premiums or other fees. Such payment is entirely ill-advised as people rely on Medicaid because they cannot afford more costs or any private insurance options. They lack the income. This will be creating another impediment to care.

I saw that some Republicans were citing former President Bill Clinton’s use of work requirements with welfare (TANF) to justify Medicaid work requirements. While they have been touted, Clinton’s work requirements ultimately failed and ruined the TANF program, dramatically reducing the number of enrollees. That program is now a shrunken shell of what it once was which is likely the same goal Republicans have for Medicaid. Reducing the size of the program using excessive paperwork and frequent verification requirements is their goal.

All this is done to line the pockets of the obscenely wealthy so they can receive their precious tax cut. It is about a gluttonous transfer of wealth upwards at the expense of the low income. What happened to the goal of universal health care and recognizing health as a human right? The budget bill moves the ball backwards down the field.

Last Tuesday I attended the Campaign for Legal Services Kickoff Breakfast held at the Grappone Center in Concord. It was a wonderful and well-attended event supporting an entirely worthy goal – legal assistance for poor, elderly and disabled people. Many prominent members of the New Hampshire Bar were present as well as Gov. Kelly Ayotte and our two Congresspeople, Chris Pappas and Maggie Goodlander.

One thing that bothered me about the event was what was not said. You would not have known that the rule of law in America is under serious attack. I heard a few vague references to the importance of due process and the difficulties of being a judge but mostly I heard platitudes about how great the justice system is. There was an unremitting effort to be bipartisan and to pretend normalcy.

Ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room doesn’t serve the rule of law. Times are anything but normal. An authoritarian regime is actively attempting to dismantle constitutional rule and it is not hidden. Neither on a state or national level has the Bar responded. This is too reminiscent of other historical circumstances where lawyers did not speak up and collaborated with fascism.

In the last week, President Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller explained that the Trump administration was considering suspending habeas corpus. He did not know or care that the authority to suspend habeas is vested in Congress, not the Executive branch. Miller, not a lawyer, said:

“That’s an option we’re actively looking at. A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”

The Latin translation for habeas corpus is “deliver the body”. It goes back to the Magna Carta and the idea that people may not be detained without being brought before a judge. It is hard to overstate the importance of habeas corpus. I think it is fair to say it is a bedrock principle in American jurisprudence. No one is above the law, at least theoretically. The principle is embedded in our Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments that hold that “no person should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law”. I am reminded of John Adams’ famous quote:

“We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever.”

The Trump administration is the opposite of John Adams. Their priority is to punish the innocent and to use the law to intimidate. The Kilmar Abrego Garcia case is a prototype for the lawlessness we are seeing. First removal without due process and then stonewalling in bad faith as the Administration ignores a Supreme Court order. No one talks about the over 200 Venezuelan men who were removed from the U.S. without due process. They are all rotting away in a foreign prison. 60 Minutes showed that 75% of these men had no criminal record yet they have been wrongly renditioned.

ICE has been playing the role of Trump’s gestapo. The stories of its outrageous misconduct have been multiplying. Masked and unidentified ICE agents have been disappearing people in the manner of 1970’s-1980’s Latin American fascists. On May 4, ICE agents took away a man filling up gas in his truck at a gas station in Oxnard, California. They disappeared him, drove away and left his children in the truck.

On April 24, ICE agents terrorized a family of U.S. citizens when they broke into a house in Oklahoma City in the middle of the night but the search warrant was meant for someone else. ICE ordered the family out into the rain in their underwear and confiscated the family’s phones, laptops and cash savings as “evidence”. In the last two months, there are cases of U.S. born children having been wrongfully deported without due process. Trump is now seeking a six-fold increase in ICE funding.

Some of the immigrants ICE has picked up have been taken into custody for the crime of writing an op-ed and advocating for Palestinian rights. Now you get arrested and deported for having an opinion. What happened to the First Amendment? Tyrants don’t tolerate dissent.

Then there are the attacks on judges. Trump has displayed a troubling pattern of badmouthing judges who issue rulings he disagrees with. He calls the judges “radical left lunatics” and wants them impeached. Next the MAGA mob descends threatening the judge and his or her family. The Administration orchestrated the arrest of Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan with the FBI Director Kash Patel posting a photo on X of the handcuffed judge doing a perp walk. This is all about intimidating and threatening the judiciary.

I also must mention the Administration’s perversion of pro bono work. Pro bono work was supposed to be about helping the needy but nine heavy hitter law firms have signed agreements to provide Trump a collective $940 million in free legal work. This is akin to a mob boss shaking down a business. What a terrible example these Big Law firms set!

While being critical of lawyers who bend the knee or stay silent, I also acknowledge and appreciate the heroic actions of many judges who are upholding the rule of law. These judges have shown courage and integrity. Their actions have been critical in holding back the authoritarian tide.

Any student of history knows things could get far worse in the U.S. but that does not negate the darkness and backwardness into which we have fallen as a nation. Trump is about hoarding power for himself. Lawyers and judges have a key role to play in preventing the onset of an American version of fascism.

In the many years I worked as a staff attorney at New Hampshire Legal Assistance, I learned the importance of public benefits for low-income people. Two of the most important benefits were Medicaid and SNAP (also known as Food Stamps). Part of the importance is just the number of people these programs reach. 72 million Americans depend on Medicaid. Over 42 million rely on Food Stamps. Both of these programs are essential whether it is for access to health care or addressing hunger.

So it is shocking to see these programs in the Trump Administration’s crosshairs so they can fund an enormous tax cut to benefit billionaires. The budget bill that President Trump calls “the big beautiful bill” should properly be called the “Marie Antoinette Let Them Eat Cake” bill. It is taking from the poorest and neediest and giving to the wealthiest. You don’t hear Trump talk about cutting the bloated trillion dollar Pentagon budget.

Trump loves naming things but as is all too often the case his naming is opposite the reality. He ran for president, in part, on the idea that he would help the little guy. His concern now is how he can disguise his Robin Hood-in-reverse actions. Many of the Republican right are squeamish about the budget bill because they know it will shaft their voters who need medical care or food assistance. They want to figure out how to impose the cuts so no one knows what actually happened.

To allow for the tax benefits to the billionaires, the anticipated cuts from Medicaid and Food Stamps must be mind-bogglingly large. The Trump administration wants to cut $880 billion from Medicaid over 10 years and $230 billion from Food Stamps.

There are many possible ways these cuts could be imposed and it remains unclear how the Republican architects will get to the cut numbers they seek. They are scrambling to finalize the cuts with two goals in mind. First, they must maintain their threadbare majority in the House while getting across the finish line. Second, they must maintain the illusion that they are not hurting millions which they absolutely are.

One possible avenue that could be used is to tinker with the share of money states must pay for their matching contribution in what are joint federal/state programs. In both Medicaid and Food Stamps, the federal government has paid the lion’s share of cost. If the federal contribution is slashed it will be on the states to pony up. The likelihood of that is not a great bet.

A second avenue is the imposition of stricter work requirements. This would be a design to kick millions off both these programs . Since the goal is steep cuts, reducing the number of beneficiaries works toward the goal. There are other ways to impose cuts but all methods are about shrinking the programs and the numbers getting benefits.

What is crazy is that this is being done at a time when the risk of recession is rising. Food Stamps has always been a counter-cyclical program. It was set up to kick in and help more when economic need becomes greater. Cutting safety net programs before a recession is asking for trouble. It will sabotage response when need increases in the low-income community.

The sheer sinister absurdity of cutting Medicaid and Food Stamps to pay for a billionaire tax cut needs to be pondered. Trump has appointed at least 14 billionaires to serve in his administration. We all saw the coterie of billionaires standing behind him at his inauguration. That’s his team and the billionaires, especially Musk, bought him.

The combined wealth of the super-rich oligarchs at the inauguration topped $1.2 trillion. Elon Musk alone has a net worth between $335 billion and $396 billion. In the past five years, the five richest men in the world including Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have increased their wealth by $464 billion or 114%. Meanwhile, over half of Americans say they lack the cash to cover a $1000 unexpected emergency expense.

Wanting ever more, these billionaires could care less about pummeling Medicaid and Food Stamp recipients. Their greed is bottomless. How to explain the level of selfishness their behavior reflects? When you have so much why do you care about a tax cut? Warren Buffett once told the New York Times:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

That quote is more true now than when he said it in 2006. For the last few months, the ransacking of federal agencies has been unprecedented. It is not surprising that Republicans have gone along with MAGA and the Trump cult. That Party leadership has become a sorry collection of bootlickers, opportunists, religious fanatics, racist xenophobes and bigoted conspiracy theorists.

What has been disappointing has been the Democratic response to the class war. With a few notable exceptions like Bernie, AOC, Jasmine Crockett and Chris Murphy, the Democrats seem incapable of throwing a punch. There is a reason the Democrats’ favorability rating is underwater. Their leadership is aged and moribund. They just got their asses kicked in an election but they seem determined to repeat the past.

The Bernie-AOC “Fight Oligarchy” message expresses the feelings of many among the frustrated Democratic rank-and-file voters. Democrats need to defend working people on all fronts. Democrats want to see passion and fight from our leaders, not pitiful silence. It is the 1% versus the 99% and the 99% need fighters who will challenge and oppose the billionaires at every turn. We have been taking a lot of punches. It is time to show we can throw and land some punches.

The budget is a moral document, expressing societal priorities. Funding a garrison state while depleting Medicaid and Food Stamps is an expression of nihilism. It means many more Americans will die unnecessarily or will become uninsured or hungry.

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