Under Donald Trump, the federal government is not going to be doing a lot of things it used to do, and the question is going to be: Will American realize just how much they have been taking for granted?

I’m not sure, but if there is a bright side, it might be that more Americans take an interest in what they used to have, in the beforetimes, and with that knowledge, work to bring it back. The safety net is about more than Social Security and Medicare. It’s an expression of our values, especially how we treat these least among us.

Whatever happens, it will boil down to education, according to Lindsay Beyerstein, journalist and frequent contributor to the Editorial Board. “The critical thing is to keep educating people about everything we’re losing. If they don’t understand now, they won’t spontaneously figure it out when life gets shorter and more painful in a million ways.”

Lindsay is working on a new book. It’s called Against the Light: The Deep State from the Illuminati to QAnon. She says “it tells the story of how conspiracy theories came to dominate conservative politics.”

JS: Measles. For the first time in my life, I’m thinking about the disease. Is this what happens when political insanity rises to the top?

LB: This is what happens when you appoint frothing conspiracy theorists to positions of great power. According to a new study, measles could become endemic in the US if current vaccination trends continue, after being declared eradicated from our country in 2000. 

This is the legacy of years of antivax activism at all levels of government driving down vaccination rates to critically low levels. 

However, Robert F Kennedy Jr is making the situation much worse by refusing to unequivocally recommend the measles vaccine.

Under Kennedy, the US Department of Health and Human Services slashed $11 billion for state and local government health programs, a good chunk of which goes to community vaccination infrastructure. Fifty measles vaccination clinics in Texas alone were closed because of these cuts, during the worst measles outbreak in decades. 

On top of that, Kennedy is signaling that he wants to eliminate the covid vaccine from the childhood schedule, which is outrageous and not based on credible science. HHS is also holding up the Novavax covid vaccine on the false pretext that it’s new and needs more testing. 

Kennedy tipped the popular vote to Trump and he’s being rewarded with sweeping influence across the government. Trump’s letting him shape policy at the Department of Agriculture and the EPA on top of his HHS portfolio. No HHS secretary has ever had a portfolio like that. 

It’s dire.

JS: Part of me thinks what we’re seeing is the consequence of Americans taking things for granted. No one is used to thinking about food safety in the middle of dinner at Olive Garden, but that may change if enough people get salmonella poisoning or even die from it.

LB: Never underestimate the value of living in a functional society. We take it for granted that our milk isn’t full of chalk or lead or fecal coliform bacteria, like it was all the time before the Progressive Era. 

We take it for granted that someone’s inspecting the drug and supplement factories where so much of our national supply comes from, but thanks to DOGE, the FDA’s overseas teams are falling apart. 

We assume that sunscreen has the SPF it says on the label, so we don’t get roasted when we go outside. Most people don’t even know what the government is doing to monitor bird flu in the nation’s dairy cows. 

The critical thing is to keep educating people about everything we’re losing. If they don’t understand now, they won’t spontaneously figure it out when life gets shorter and more painful in a million ways. 

Education is everything.

JS: Educating the public is made more difficult by two things, I think. One is that the Democrats do not have their own media infrastructure. The other is that massive disinformation is coming from the top of the government. Kennedy is going to fudge government data to make sure his conspiracy theories look true. Where do you begin tackling this?

LB: Trump is trying to crush as many independent sources of information as he can, from research universities, to major medical journals, to the American Bar Association. DOGE went through and killed almost all programs with “data” or “statistics” in the name. 

I would like to see progressives investing in more parallel media infrastructure the way the right does. The right didn’t like how the algorithms were treating their content on social media, so they made their own platforms. Maybe the left needs to do the same thing. 

I also think we need to look beyond our borders and forge alliances with progressives in other countries. We’ve been too insular for too long, and democracy-loving people of all countries need to come together to fight this threat. We need to start building bases of power outside of Trump’s reach and beyond the reach of hostile algorithms.

JS: A pivot: Why does Trump keep talking about Canada?

LB: I think he wants to reshape the world map as his legacy. He’s an old man and stealing Canada and Greenland is as close as he’ll ever get to acknowledging his own mortality. That’s partly plain old expansionist fascism. Trump alluded to Manifest Destiny in his inaugural address. He wants more rare earth minerals and arctic navigation routes. 

It also relates to Trump’s warped moralistic view of trade. He is obsessed with the false idea that the US subsidizes Canada because of the balance of trade. In his mind, it means the US is being humiliated by buying more from Canada than Canada buys from us. In reality, it just means that countless buyers and sellers are coming to agreements that both sides consider to be fair. It doesn’t mean Canada’s cheating. 

But Trump can only see interactions as zero-sum games with winners and losers, dominants and submissives. There’s no room in his worldview for mutually beneficial cooperation or even a rules-based framework where a weaker party has recourse against the stronger one. He believes that might makes right. Maga rejects the whole idea of universal ethical principles. Trump has no problem saying that the US border is sacrosanct and nobody else’s border means anything.

JS: His polling. What do you make of it? Normal presidents would be sensitive to falling approval. Trump, however, is not normal. It may make no difference. He may continue with his wrecking ball.

LB: I don’t expect the polling to constrain Trump much on its own. He’s not running up for reelection. He’s so self-centered that he doesn’t care about the reelection prospects of the Republican Party.

He’s convinced of his own genius and desperate to be vindicated by history. So he’s going to push on in the face of mere unpopularity. 

What is going to constrain him is if he gets so unpopular Republicans in Congress start to take their oversight responsibilities seriously. If Trump were polling at 25 percent for months, they might start to realize there are scarier prospects than a maga primary challenger.

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