A new message from your friends at People For the American Way.
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Friend,

Welcome to our weekly “Trumptastrophe” email series that serves to remind
us of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we encountered
during the Trump presidency and the threats that he and others in the MAGA
movement still pose – and to keep those moments clear in our memory as we
fight to defeat Republican extremists during the upcoming elections.

This week’s Trumptastrophe brings into focus the disastrous ways MAGA
Republicans plan to end investment in important federal programs (like
public health, education, and the environment) while padding the bottom
line of corporations and the wealthy by providing deep and drastic tax
cuts:

In mid-March 2017, Trump submitted his first budget to Congress, building
on an outline released a month earlier. The 2018 budget proposal called
for massive cuts to social safety net programs, including food stamps,
disability benefits, and [ [link removed] ]student loans. Nobel prize-winning economic
Joseph Stiglitz [ [link removed] ]summarized the budget this way: “Trump’s budget takes a
sledgehammer to what remains of the American Dream.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders criticized the budget’s call to repeal the Affordable
Care Act, saying “this is a budget that provides massive tax breaks for
billionaires and corporate CEOs, and massive cuts to programs that tens of
millions of struggling Americans depend upon.” But it was not only
progressive Democrats who were appalled by Trump’s budget proposal.
Reuters [ [link removed] ]reported it was even “too savage” for some congressional
Republicans.

Foreshadowing the Trump administration’s lack of preparedness to deal with
the COVID pandemic three years later, Trump’s budget called for about a 20
percent cut to the National Institutes of Health and cutting the number of
officers in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by [ [link removed] ]nearly 40
percent. The budget “has roiled the medical and science community with a
call for massive cuts in spending on scientific research, medical
research, disease prevention programs and health insurance for children of
the working poor,” the Washington Post [ [link removed] ]reported.

The proposed budget also took a [ [link removed] ]sledgehammer to the Environmental
Protection Agency, eliminating more than 50 EPA programs, including
cleanup of the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay. Experts said it would bring
the EPA’s pollution enforcement to a halt. The budget called for about a
one-third cut in the State Department’s budget, defunding United Nations
programs and eliminating the USAID Global Climate Change Initiative.

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s anti-public-education Secretary of Education,
absurdly described the 13 percent cut to her agency’s budget, and plans to
divert more funding to private and religious schools, as a “historic
investment in America’s students.”

Trump’s budget signaled what was important to his administration—and who
was not. Things did not get better later in the year when a more detailed
budget was provided. Experts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
concluded, “The details now reflected in the budget would effectively
shift an extraordinary amount of income from struggling families to the
highest-income families — from the poor to the rich — amounting to
‘reverse Robin Hood’ policies of a magnitude that no modern President’s
budget has ever proposed.”

That first budget is more evidence that Trump and those around him share
the brutal vision contained in [ [link removed] ]Project 2025, the right-wing movement’s
plan to “take the reins of government.” In the words of the Heritage
Foundation’s Paul Dans, who is leading Project 2025, they are
“systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army:
aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do
battle against the deep state.”

* Project 2025 calls for shutting down the Department of Education,
eliminating Head Start and phasing out Title I funding for schools in
low-income communities. At the 2024 Conservative Political Action
Conference, Trump advisor Stephen Miller called for conservatives to
use government power more aggressively against opponents, railing
against district attorneys for not [ [link removed] ]arresting teachers who violate
new state laws restricting teaching about race, gender, and sexuality.
* Trump’s 2018 budget was a move to begin dismantling the Environmental
Protection Agency. Project 2025 calls for a radical reversal of U.S.
policy designed to limit the harmful impacts of climate change,
including gutting the EPA and dismantling the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. Project 2025 declares that “the Biden
Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government
unwinding,” dismissing climate policy as part of “the woke agenda.”
* Trump’s 2018 budget called for massive cuts to cultural agencies as
the first step to shutting down the National Endowment for the Arts,
the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Museum
and Library Services, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Project 2025’s plans for a new administration call for abolishing the
CPB and ending “tyrannical” funding of public radio and television.
* Trump’s current team is even more aggressive than his first term in
attacking the United Nations and international agencies like the World
Health Organization. At the recent Conservative Political Action
Conference, speakers [ [link removed] ]called for the U.S. to defund the U.N. and
WHO.

Sen. Sanders pointed out the glaring difference between Trump’s campaign
posturing and the policies he proposed in his first budget:

"When Donald Trump campaigned for president, he told the American people
that he would be a different type of Republican, that he would take on
the political and economic establishment, that he would stand up for
working people, that he understood the pain that families all across
this country were experiencing. Well, sadly, this budget exposes all of
that verbiage for what it really was: just cheap and dishonest campaign
rhetoric that was meant to get votes, nothing more than that."

This year, voters have the clarity provided by Trump’s actions as
president and by the draconian plans being put forward by his campaign and
his allies. He has told us what he wants to do to this country. Between
now and November we must convince Americans not to give him the chance.

These are just some of the reasons we need YOU in this
fight. So, find your
favorite way to unwind after reading through this week’s recap, and then
make a plan for how you will fight back this week, this month, this
election cycle.

For members who are interested in sharing the weekly Trumptastrophe
series, [ [link removed] ]you can find all previous editions on our website! This post
will be published by Thursday so you can share with your friends and
family and remind them of the importance of ensuring that Trump is
defeated again this November.

[ [link removed] ]If you’d like to opt-out of this series but still continue receiving
our other email content, you can do so here >>

Thanks for all that you do to defeat Republican extremism.

– People For the American Way

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