Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is broadcast on a large screen as he speaks during an anti-vaccine rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, January 23, 2022.
Donald Trump’s victory, along with Republicans’ diminished hold on the House and their capturing of the Senate, may be characterized by some as a triumph of populism, but its aftermath already can fairly be characterized as Predators’ Ball, Part Deux. Trump’s under-50-percent popular vote and his historically narrow popular-vote margin over his opponent may be hailed as a mandate by his supporters, but already, the signs of unchecked overreach foretell a betrayal of the working-class Americans he claims to champion.
Consider the war on financial regulation that his coming presidency has already spawned. A chief target of banks, financial speculators, cryptocurrency investors, and numerous stray billionaires is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose rulings have prohibited banks from imposing excessive overdraft fees and late fees on credit card payments, as part of the Biden administration’s war on junk fees. Since Trump’s election, however, as The Wall Street Journal has documented, their wish list has expanded exponentially. Besides axing the CFPB, Wall Street bankers are now seeking to weaken the laws requiring them to hold a prudent amount of capital and restraining them from gobbling up smaller banks. Insufficient capital reserves, by the way, was one of the core drivers of the 2008 financial crisis.
And now, the Journal reports, the Trump transition team and the dynamic duo of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are gunning for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which is the nation’s primary bank regulator and which guarantees depositors that the government will insure their deposits should their banks go under. The FDIC was created during the first hundred days of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, at a time when bank failures, in the absence of any federal regulation, had wiped out the life savings of millions of Americans. According to the Journal, the banksters don’t want to eviscerate deposit insurance per se, but by loosening bank regulations and just maybe allowing banks to invest in unregulated cryptocurrencies, they seem so besotted by greed that they are actually moving to replay the financial collapses of 1929 and 2008 simultaneously.
When Santayana famously observed that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” he could have been talking specifically about our financial oligarchs. The problem is that their refusal to remember the past condemns countless millions of non-financiers to repeat it as well.
It’s not just refusal to remember the past that characterizes much of the Trump transition; it’s also the complete denial of it. Consider, for instance, the presence of attorney Aaron Siri at Robert Kennedy Jr.’s side, as the two of them interview applicants for key health and drug regulatory posts in the Trump administration. Siri has devoted the past several decades to lawsuits that would revoke the government’s approval of vaccines—not just some vaccines but nearly all of them, including those for tetanus, measles and, yes, polio, a disease that crippled and killed millions of children until Jonas Salk’s vaccine effectively extinguished it. None other than outgoing Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has a permanent disability stemming from a childhood bout of polio.
Siri has demanded the government take polio shots off the market until the vaccine meets tests for side effects that have never yet been observed in the 70 years since polio shots were introduced. Polio’s pre-Salk fatalities and complications, though, were observed everywhere, as the disease posed the most widespread threat to children’s lives.
Even as the greed-heads and nutcases who make up Trump’s inner circle have been running amok during the incoming president’s staffing-up process, what we haven’t seen are concrete proposals to lower the cost of living, particularly the costs of food and housing. On the contrary, these are actually likely to rise if Trump deports the millions of immigrants who work in those two sectors. To be sure, a federal judge just blocked the proposed merger of Albertsons and Kroger supermarket chains, a ruling that had been sought by the Federal Trade Commission—but the lawsuit had by brought by Biden’s FTC under the leadership of Lina Khan, whom Trump’s financial backers volubly hate with a passion; he had long promised to fire her. No such cost-saving proposals have been forthcoming from any corner of Trump’s incoming crew.
The rush into far-right cul-de-sacs we’ve seen at Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks has been matched by similar stampedes among state-level Republicans. Trifecta Republican states are becoming laboratories for the kinds of policies that H.L. Mencken ridiculed them for a full century ago. Idaho is moving to allow parents to actually sue schools for having books in their libraries that they don’t like, while Arkansas is turning “vaccine harm” into a felony.
But it’s not just in trifecta states that Republican ids are running wild. In North Carolina, where the Republican gubernatorial candidate was clobbered by voters in November, and where other statewide Republican candidates were similarly rejected, the gerrymandered Republican supermajorities in the legislature have responded to Democrat Josh Stein’s gubernatorial victory by effectively stripping the governor’s office of such long-standing powers as appointing judges and members of the state’s election board. In the latter case, they’ve relocated the appointing power to the post of state auditor, which happens to be the one elected statewide position currently held by a Republican. In the case of judges, the new governor will be required to appoint judges who belong to the same political party as the judge who is stepping down, or whose term is expiring, or has inconveniently died.
As if that weren’t enough, state Republicans have also challenged the narrow electoral victory of a Democrat to the state’s Supreme Court by demanding the disqualification of 60,000 voters they now claim, retroactively, should not have been allowed to vote in November’s election.
The narrowness of Trump’s and the Republicans’ November victories doesn’t argue for much of a Trumpian mandate, but even if it did, it probably wouldn’t include bringing back bank speculation and polio. Those are, to put it gently, more niche causes, even if those niches now may define the agendas of Trump’s second presidency.
