By Chris Powell
While Donald Trump is reckless, a bully, and sometimes worse, his return to the presidency was caused in part by the sort of hypocrisy shown by the thousands of people who last week protested him in Connecticut and across the country.
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First more than 20 leftist organizations in the state issued a statement denouncing the president and his administration for disregarding the rule of law — particularly for criticizing federal judges who have issued injunctions against administration policies, for dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, and for firing or laying off thousands of federal employees.
Of course none of those organizations could be found five years ago when Senate Democratic Majority Leader Charles Schumer, enraged by the Supreme Court’s prospective reversal of pro-abortion precedent, endangered the rule of law by threatening two of the justices by name. Schumer raged: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch — I want to tell you, Kavanaugh — you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
By contrast, Trump has suggested only that some judges who have ruled against him should be impeached, a fully constitutional procedure. Schumer seemed to threaten the judges physically, a criminal offense. But that was OK with most leftists in Connecticut and probably still is.
Then over last weekend more leftists gathered in Hartford, New Haven, and elsewhere at rallies aiming to “save democracy” from Trump. Some protesters were the same people who last year insisted that President Biden was sharp as a tack; that his son Hunter’s laptop computer, packed with proof of the Biden family’s influence peddling, was a Russian forgery; and that the 10 million or more illegal immigrants who entered the country during the Biden administration were nothing to worry about — that democracy was perfectly safe with Biden and his grifters in the White House and the country’s borders wide open.
If the leftists who protested last week see any threat to democracy in the political violence and oppression being perpetrated by their fellows — the people vandalizing Teslas, the colleges shutting down Republican or conservative events or failing to protect them from crazed professors and anarchists — they didn’t mention it. Mainly they seemed afraid of losing government jobs and subsidies.
Some of Trump’s budget recissions are indeed questionable, but they are being litigated, and many recissions can be justified. The Agency for International Development has been full of bloat and nonsense while providing camouflage for U.S. espionage, and the growth of the federal Education Department has correlated mainly with the collapse of public education. More spending isn’t more education; mainly it is more government employment.
But democracy remains in position to work these things out. Indeed, the political margins in Congress are so narrow that getting much done still may require courtesy and compromise.
In any case, the federal government is in debt by the almost incomprehensible amount of $36 trillion, which lately has required spending 13% of federal revenue on interest, more than is spent on the military and medical care for the poor. The debt has gotten so large that other countries already were reducing purchases of U.S. government bonds even before the turmoil caused by Trump’s gambit with tariffs.
It has been many years since the federal government felt obliged to finance itself with taxes rather than borrowing and inflation, so now most Americans have come to think that everything they get from government is and should be free — from subsidies to a mad proliferation of programs to stupid imperial wars. It’s not free; its costs are high interest payments and inflation, a tax that is heaviest on the poor.
The sooner the country starts auditing government’s effectiveness and substantially reducing spending, the better. Of course Trump’s choices are not always careful; they may be mainly malicious. But his adversaries, including last week’s protesters, are obliged to specify alternative ways to economize. They offer nothing. They just demand more.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 
“The sooner the country starts auditing government’s effectiveness and substantially reducing spending, the better. Of course Trump’s choices are not always careful; they may be mainly malicious. But his adversaries, including last week’s protesters, are obliged to specify alternative ways to economize. They offer nothing. They just demand more.”
Thank you. Plainly stated and so very true.
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