A Hundred Days of Hell #334
By Hank Silverberg
I am starting my blog this week between two games of a double header between my beloved Red Sox and the Cleveland Guardians. I point that out only because it is baseball that has kept me calm for the last few weeks while Donald J. Trump has put me, the entire country, and a big part of the world into hell.
America is not perfect. We have had a few problems to deal with that were not of Trump's making. The war between Ukraine and Russia, the carnage in the Middle East that started with the mass murder of Israelis in October of 2023, and the continuing inability to deal with an illegal immigration that was slowed only by the pandemic.
But before Trump took office on January 20th, our economy was in pretty good shape, having come out of the economic disaster of the the pandemic better than much of the world.
Unemployment was hovering between three and four percent, and the stock market was doing well. The supply chain had been restored and people were buying things again. But Trump managed to convince a substantial portion of the public that all was not well, and he blamed it all on illegal immigrants, fraud and waste in our government, the high price of eggs (actually spiked by the Avian flu), and alleged unfair trade with allies and foes alike.
Our government, though not perfect, had been functioning just fine. I must agree there were places that needed to be fixed.
Here's where the trouble started: Trump hired Elon Musk to fix it. Musk, who knew nothing about how government works, and still doesn't 100 days later, had only one solution--throw the baby out with the bath water. He decided to fix things that weren't broken, just like he did with Twitter, with disastrous results.
Instead of taking a meticulous look at each department, finding trouble spots and correcting them, Musk's solution was to simply blame all our troubles on people who had spent careers making things happen, and get rid of as many government employees as he could.
Now 100 days in, that tactic has started to reach deep into state and local governments, and dozens of successful programs that relied on federal dollars to work.
Jobs were eliminated, good projects have been slashed, but more horrifically, people have been snatched off the street and rushed off to incarcerations without so much as a simple court hearing. We are not just talking about one poor man from Maryland who has a questionable past who was definitely denied his day in court.
How bad is the overall Trump destruction plan going to get? Here are just two examples:
A woman from Guatemala and her two U.S. born children (making them American citizens) have been held in jail for a week after she used a phone app in Detroit to find the local Costco and accidently crossed the Ambassador Bridge that leads into Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She was then picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol.
 |
| (Ambassadorbridge.com) |
Not convinced enough that the current deportation program has messed things up and that Trump's "fix" to the government is a disaster?
Let's go to Arkansas, a red state which gave Trump a 30% margin of victory last November. Last month, 14 tornados hit Arkansas killing three people and damaging hundreds of homes, cars and businesses. The loss was about $8.8 million in damage.
The state's Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, immediately followed customary procedures and asked for federal aid from FEMA.
You may remember Huckabee Sanders. She was Donald Trump's press secretary during his first term. Well, the Trump administration DENIED her request and an appeal from the state's majority Republican congressional delegation.
The denial said this: The Federal Government has "determined that the damage from this event was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies.”
Arkansas' hell will be repeated elsewhere.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/arkansas-tornados-trump-fema-help_n_680bd3c2e4b0f42cc7ebde87
News You May Have Missed
Buyer's Remorse?
Young men, those between 18 and 44, helped elect
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A second poll done by the Associated Press shows 4 in 10 voters think Trump has been a "terrible" president, and 1 in 10 say he has been "poor".
In contrast, 3 in 10 say he has been "great" or "good," and 2 in 10 say he has been "average".
And finally, the AP poll indicates that 7 out of 10 people questioned say his first 100 days have been mostly what they expected.
Trump now has the lowest overall approval rating at 100 days-- 41%, than any president in the past seven decades, including his own first term.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls-men-2064127
Climate Change Damage!
Twenty-eight trillion dollars! That's how much damage has been caused to our climate by the world's biggest corporations. A study done by a Dartmouth College research team came up with that number as part of an effort for both people and governments to hold corporate giants accountable for climate change.
The estimate looks at pollution caused by 111 companies, with more than half the figure coming from fossil fuel providers Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, National Iranian Oil Co., Pemex, Coal India and the British Coal Corporation. 
(standford.edu)
To put that in perspective, $28 trillion is a bit less than the value of all goods and services produced in the United States. The researchers estimated that every 1% of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere since 1990 has caused $502 billion in damage from heat alone. That does not include damage from other extreme weather conditions like hurricanes, droughts and floods, also tied to climate change. How was this calculated? There's a complex formula. Here's a link to the study if you want to look at the math. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08751-3
Despite what you may have heard from the current administration in Washington, man-made climate change is real and we are all paying the price.
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-world-biggest-companies-trillion-climate.html
Dumbest Quote of The Week!
This week's dumb quote is a short one. It comes from Secretary of State Marco Rubio who is probably the only member of Trump's cabinet who has any idea what his job is. Leaving a meeting in Paris this past week, Rubio was asked about the alleged peace talks underway on the Ukraine/Russia War. Those are the talks that involve Russia and the United States, but not Ukraine. It comes after Trump got a little testy on social media and criticized his buddy Vlad Putin, over the latest missile strikes on civilians in Ukraine. Trump wanted Putin to "stop it" as if that will have any impact. Russia's latest peace plan involves them keeping Crimea and all other land they have taken during the war, a non-starter for Ukraine.
Rubio told reporters asking about Trump's latest rant, said the administration would decide in a "matter of days" whether its's possible to end the war in Ukraine. If it turns out it is not to be, he said
"We need to move on."
Really? That of course, means nothing. Especially when keeping Ukraine free and independent is extremely important to our own national security as well as Europe's. What does "move on" mean?
I don't think Rubio nor Trump have any clue.
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