Article - Solidarity Against the New US Regime - Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” – Elon Musk

The billionaires and millionaires are bent on taking away our rights, and exploiting us as
the US Empire declines.

But brilliant, energetic, young personalities and activists are not only inspiring and encouraging
organized dissent; they are drafting progressive plans of action. One, Chiaro Scuro, a prolific TikTok
presenter and activist, is networking with thousands of participants for the creation of an entirely
people-owned social media platform, with no corporate input and no shareholders. On Presidents Day, Feb. 17, 2024, the grassroots opposition organized a Not My President’s Day rally in all 51 US capitals. Code Pink has organized large, loud, nonviolent rallies virtually daily since Jan. 20, 2025, and before.

Let’s enumerate a small number of the many executive actions, most of them unconstitutional and/or illegal under US and international law, that President Trump and the unelected head of DOGE (Department of Government Elimination), Elon Musk, have been barraging the American people with – to confuse and overwhelm us.

Trump lied (surprise!) and distanced himself from the notorious Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 when he perceived how unpopular it was, especially the sections specifying cutting essential social services, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which Musk derided as “entitlements,” trying to characterize programs necessary for poor people as elitist rip-offs. Trump’s estrangement from the 922-page Mandate for Leadership lasted only until January 20. Then he succeeded in appointing Russell Vought, one of the main authors of Project 2025, to the position of Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). And at least 140 members of Trump’s first administration helped create the plan.
In general, many of Trump’s executive orders (70 in the first.month) violate the 10th Amendment that outlines the separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches, and their permitted functions. Trump has mostly usurped powers that the Constitution delegates to Congress,
such as allocating, revoking, or redirecting funding that is the sole right of the two houses of Congress to vote on and approve, and eliminating or creating agencies mandated by Congress, such as the Department of Education, and DOGE.
In Trump’s first term, his Secretary of Education was billionaire Betsy DeVos (married to multi-billionaire Amway heir Dick DeVos), whose dream has been to privatize all schools in America. In a reprise of dumbing down the America that Trump claims to love, Linda McMahon is the new head of DOE, and Trump has instructed her to follow the DeVos blueprint, which is a document for the dismantling of that very cabinet department. As a first step, nearly half of the DOE employees were fired or left due to their departments being eliminated: a loss of 1950 workers – 77 percent unionized – out of a former force of 4133, or 47 percent. Trimming government inefficiency? Cuts is proportionately affect financial aid to poor students, protecting their civil rights, and education research.
As of Mar. 13, 2025, a coalition of 20 Democratic-led states plus the District of Columbia has filed a lawsuit to prevent the DOE worker layoffs. Courageous federal Judge William Alsup has ordered the re-hiring of laid off workers in the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy, and the Treasury. He called the massive firings a “scam,” and said that the new Office of Personnel Management’s characterizing excellent employees as being fired for poor performance “a lie.” Severe cuts to the IRS, which were announced as a goal early last year, is preventing the efficient collection of the huge amounts of taxes that the rich get away with not paying, by using loopholes, tax shelters, false valuations (Trump), and offshore accounts.

So some of the strongest actions supporting our side have been and will be by judges of conscience upholding multiple laws that Trump is breaking.
The most dire, detrimental slashing of funding and departments concerns the environment. To quote Professor Noam Chomsky, “Donald Trump is the most dangerous criminal in history... passionately dedicated to destroying the projects for organized human life in the near future.” He is referring to everything from Trump’s breaking of treaties such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear treaty, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Climate Agreement – the only nation out of 196 parties, including the
European Union with 28 nations, to withdraw. He must know that the latter had a goal of keeping planetary warming to no more than 1.5*C above pre-industrial times until the year 2100 – and that it
reached 1.6C in 2024.

And since Jan. 20, 2025, Trump has mandated executive orders that have severely cut funding and personnel at the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), repealed the Clean Water Act and frozen funds appropriated by Congress for clean energy projects – such as wind energy, the country’s biggest source of renewable power. This is keeping in line with his famous “Drill, baby, drill!”

He has also scrubbed references to climate change from federal websites. Trump has actually declared an energy emergency, giving him the power to fast-track oil and gas production, in spite of his last term “energy domination” policies making the US the largest energy producer in the world. He promised the oil and gas industries to weaken environmental regulations in order to increase their profits, in exchange for the $75 million they “donated” to his campaign.

There are many more insults to the fragile planetary environment that our new president has enacted, too numerous to enumerate here. Also, many flout the law, with agencies defying court orders, freezing funds in legally binding contracts, and reinterpreting regulations to suit their aims. Two federal judges have ordered billions of dollars in climate and energy grants from the Inflation Reduction Act to flow again, and some of the funding has been restored. Trump has also fired thousands of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Energy. The new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has actually recommended reversal of the 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare.

Sounds intimidating? Large numbers of judges, states and organizations are issuing injunctions and lawsuits on behalf of the rights of Americans. Many groups had already started organizing and networking last Nov. 5. Please check out any of the following: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Sierra Club, Black Lives Matter, Indivisible, The Lincoln Project, People for the American Way, Transgender Law Center, Planned Parenthood, the Southern Poverty Law Center, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Americans for Immigrant Justice, Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, PeoPublica, Amnesty International, and many others.

You can join these organizations whose websites are specifically stating that they are working to oppose the new administration’s damaging policies. You can donate. You can call your representatives and specify what you are outraged about, and indicate that they will be voted out of office if they are not voting for the people. You can form your own groups. You can forward relevant info, and connect and network with like-minded folks who want to combat these rapid-fire assaults on our health and freedoms. You can write, as I do, being past the age for public protest and arrest, as I did in progressive affinity groups for years. And keep positive.

To be continued, with many more subjects to cover about Trump’s, DOGE’s, and other departments’ egregious and mostly illegal middle fingers to the 90 percent of Americans.

SOURCES: KPFA News Jan.-Mar. 2025; MOATS/George Galloway broadcast 3/16/25; codepink.org/events; Federal Government Layoffs Tracker 2025; News Wrap: Judge orders Trump administration to rehire thousands of fired federal workers, PBS News 3/13/25; How Trump Has Undermined US Climate Policy, David Gelles, LIsa Friedman and Brad
Plumer, the New York Times 3/1/25; Latest DOGE Cuts So Far, Newsweek 3/14/25; Elon Musk becomes the world’s richest with a $500 net worth, Times of India 12/23/24.
Barry Barnett is a political and environmental author and activist writing from the left
coast of the US Empire.