President Donald Trump is sinking America
What keeps President Trump's diehard supporters on board? He has been found guilty of criminal behavior and inept policies.
Let’s start with criminality. Trump is the only U.S. president ever convicted of a felony. Well, to be precise, Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts involving an illegal scheme to boost his 2016 presidential campaign by paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from going public with the details of their affair. That affair took place in 2006, while Donald was married to Melania, who was busy taking care of their 4-month-old son Barron at the time. What a guy.
Doubling down on his criminal — indeed treasonous — behavior, when Trump lost his reelection bid to Joe Biden in 2020, he incited a violent mob of insurrectionists to descend upon the nation’s capital, assault police officers, illegally occupy the Senate, and threaten Vice President Mike Pence’s life in an effort to stop Congress from performing its constitutional duty of certifying Biden’s victory. Trump was so enamored with the violent, criminal, traitorous actions of these insurrectionists that on the very first day of his second term in office, he granted clemency to all of them, even those who assaulted police officers.
Worse, Trump is now yielding to his criminal proclivities when acting as commander in chief. According to Marc Weller, director of the international law program at Chatham House, a highly respected source for independent analysis of international affairs, “It is difficult to conceive of possible legal justifications” for America’s military invasion of Venezuela, or the capture of Venezuelan President Maduro.
Most of the world agrees with Weller. At an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, several Council members denounced the invasion as a violation of the U.N. Charter and international law, including all 125 countries comprising the Non-Aligned Movement.
Of course, Trump was emboldened to ignore international law and invade Venezuela, because a Republican-controlled Congress sat idly by and allowed his administration to literally get away with murder by conducting military strikes against civilians suspected of smuggling drugs into America. Through December, those strikes killed 115 people.
Killing civilians
There’s no gray area here. Using the military to summarily kill civilians who might be committing a crime, without arresting them and giving them a fair trial, is a fundamental violation of both international law generally and U.S. law specifically. Killing civilians is especially egregious in this instance because even if these purported drug dealers were arrested, hauled into a U.S. courtroom, tried and convicted, they wouldn’t face the death penalty. Depending on various factors like the drugs involved and the number of prior offenses, the ultimate sentence would include a fine and incarceration that could vary from less than a year in prison to life.
No wonder the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights organizations filed a lawsuit seeking the immediate release of all documents Trump relied on to authorize these illegal, lethal strikes.
“The public deserves to know how our government is justifying cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful,” said Jeffrey Stein, an ACLU attorney.
If criminality and government-sanctioned killing of civilians without a trial isn’t your cup of tea, maybe you like Trump’s inept policies. Here, there are so many options to choose from, it’d be hard to cover them in an 80,000-page tome, much less an 800-word column. So let’s focus on one of Trump’s favorites: tariffs. When he announced his “beautiful tariffs” in April, Trump promised they’d bring in “trillions of dollars, lead to lower prices and have jobs and factories come "roaring back" into our country. Boy, that rhetoric hasn’t aged well.
Start with the “trillions of dollars” claim. To date, tariffs have netted about $250 billion, nowhere close to Trump’s hyperbole — nor anywhere near enough to make a dent in the $3.4 trillion his tax cuts for rich folks and corporations add to the deficit over the next decade. Meanwhile, economists agree that, far from bringing prices down, Trump’s tariffs have led to greater inflation in the cost of most consumer goods, even those produced domestically, because many American businesses incorporate imported merchandise in their products.
How about his boast about jobs and factories roaring back? Well, not so much. Since Trump first imposed tariffs, there’s been no factory boom. To the contrary, America has lost about 50,000 manufacturing jobs, and domestic manufacturing activity slumped to a 14-month low in December.
Worse, overall job growth is well below initial projections, and the U.S. economy is tanking. According to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank's Survey of Professional Forecasters, real GDP growth will be just 1.9% in 2025, and 1.8% in 2026, down from 2.5% in 2024.
Bottom line: Trump’s criminal actions and ill-informed tariffs are ruining the nation’s economy and reputation. So how can anyone justify supporting him?
Ralph Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a nonpartisan fiscal policy think tank, and the Arthur Rubloff Professor of Public Policy at Roosevelt University.