As we mark President Trump’s first 100 days in office, it’s hard to decide where to begin to assess the damage he has done to the nation.
With a flurry of executive orders on his very first day in office, Trump took aim at immigrants, based on myths about some eating pets and most threatening public safety, launching raids across the country, scuttling due process and rounding up mostly Latino and Black immigrants. Some innocents have been swept up in this indiscriminate dragnet. A Republican-controlled, do-nothing Congress has sat idle and silent while the intimidating party-mate tramples on the U.S. Constitution and violates his oath of office.
The mass deportations that have followed were designed to instill fear in those immigrant communities and, unfortunately but understandably, have done just that. Many residents who lack U.S. citizenship, even those with lawful status to live in the country, have stopped going to church and sending their children to school, fearful immigration officers will pop up in their place of worship or their kid’s classroom. The reverberations are felt in Boston’s Dominican community and its Haitian community — the third largest in the country.
Trump’s global decision to institute tariffs, which are taxes imposed on goods imported into a country, has sent stock markets on Wall Street on a roller coaster ride and dampened the confidence of investors, who are uncertain about the future of trade, and consumers, who worry about prices rising. Negotiating trade deals with dozens of countries will take a lot longer than the seemingly thoughtless moment it took Trump to impose higher tariffs.
Meanwhile, Caribbean countries, which have had a special trade relationship with the United States since the administration of Ronald Reagan, are trying to sort through how the new tariffs fit with that longstanding deal and are fretting about the impact on their fragile economies.
Trump’s moves to carry out his campaign promise to remove DEI efforts from every part of American society, falsely claiming their illegality, has led to regressive measures in the military, federal civil service, higher education and big business.
The Black chairman of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Brown, was fired and replaced with white Lt. Gen. Dan Caine. Brown is a four-star general, while Caine is a two-star general. And Trump has the nerve to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion undermining “merit.”
Trump’s unqualified white defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has embarked on an internal campaign to remove or demote Black and brown officers who are not down with his racist agenda.
The military’s ranks were integrated in 1948 by an executive order from President Harry Truman, six years before the Supreme Court ordered the nation’s classrooms to integrate. Since then, with the switch to recruiting volunteers, the armed services have become one of the more diverse and fair workforces in the country, though that’s not to say they have a perfect record.
Trump’s unleashing of Elon Musk to hack away at the federal government has led to the layoff or dismissal of tens of thousands of civil servants, honorable men and women who keep the country working no matter who occupies the office. It won’t be long before social media and, hopefully, the email boxes of members of Congress are flooded with complaints about the slow delivery or outright failure to deliver government services.
Musk’s purge has been so quick and willy-nilly, comprehensive data have yet to be compiled on the demographics of the civil servants lost to the country. It is known that the federal civil service, like the military, has been more diverse than most workforces because of less discrimination in hiring. Civil servants have long formed the foundation of the Black middle class in Washington, D.C., and majority-Black Prince George’s County, Maryland, bordering the nation’s capital. The purge is a threat to the social and economic stability of those communities.
The Trump administration has withheld federal grants from Harvard and other elite universities in an unvarnished attempt to coerce them to eliminate their well-meaning attempts to make their campuses more welcoming to students of color and others from marginalized groups. The president’s upside-down thinking casts such DEI efforts as “discrimination.” Those selective schools educate an outsize percentage of the country’s leaders, including Republican officials. The attempt to eliminate DEI in the elite schools is a move away from a more diverse leadership class and a step back toward white rule.
The withholding of grant funding for biomedical research at universities threatens to have a greater impact on Black Americans who bear a heavier burden of disease, as shown in the widely documented health disparities in the prevalence and seriousness of illnesses.
Trump has also aimed his blustering about DEI at major corporations. Some have moonwalked on their diversity commitments or scrapped them altogether. Educated consumers have become aware of which retail chains have backslid and are withholding their dollars, while shopping more at other outlets that have stayed true to the value of diversity.
The Trump attack has also taken on a cultural dimension by trying to erase Black history that makes him and his political allies uncomfortable. The president has in his crosshairs the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Kevin Young, the museum’s second director, a Harvard graduate with family ties in Boston, resigned before Trump issued an executive order questioning the American history that the museum conveys in its popular exhibits. Here’s hoping Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s founding director who currently oversees all the Smithsonian’s institutions, holds the line against Trump’s move to whitewash the Black exhibits.
Almost nine years after its opening on the National Mall in Washington, the museum has drawn so many visitors you still need a timed ticket to enter. That level of demand for admission ought to mean something to a president fixated on TV ratings. Bluster all you want, Mr. President, but keep your hands off the “Blacksonian.”
It’s clear the first hundred days of Trump II have been tremendously damaging. In response, many Americans of goodwill have taken on the administration in court. Because judges weigh evidence and deliberate, unlike Trump and Musk, federal courts are moving at a slower pace to repair the damage. The Supreme Court is edging into legal action.
It remains to be seen if the judicial system is strong enough and inclined to hold back Trump’s assault on the Constitution and rule of law, at least until the midterm elections next year, when voters have a chance to put Democrats in charge of at least one chamber of Congress and check an out-of-control administration.
In the meantime, thank God for the lawyers and civil rights advocates who continue to fight relentlessly in court against Trump’s unprecedented attack on the American way of life.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
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