Chaos and turmoil are whipping through America

Only one month in and the winds of chaos, the fallout of careless destruction, whip across the country, lashing Ohio, spreading fear and anxiety among millions of Americans.

“Disruption” is the regime’s preferred euphemism.

What does it look like?

I talk to my friends in health care and everybody is wracked with worry, about funding cuts and freezes, about the drastic cuts to scientific and medical research, about the future of public health and what happens if a future pandemic strikes, about career experts being axed and cranks put in charge and the NIH attacked. America’s leadership at the global cutting edge of science and medicine now seems in full and rapid retreat.

I talk to my farmer friends, and they tell me farmers are apoplectic. In Ohio, they’re stressed about USAID contracts and USDA cost-sharing investments. They held up their end. The government made promises. Now their family farms and livelihoods are on the line. Billions of dollars are at stake. It’s all being held hostage by Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

I visit with my friends who work in Ohio higher education and they tell me their colleagues feel terrorized, staff fearful for their jobs, faculty in hopeless positions choosing between resistance and silence. As Ohio Republican lawmakers look to impose censorship and control over classrooms while banning faculty strikes — trying to give Ohio’s great universities both the muzzle over the mouth and the jackboot on the face — Ohio’s college administrators have been notable only for their unified public silence.

It’s the students and professors fighting back for the timeless human rights of freedom of thought and expression.

My K-12 Ohio teacher friends are also endlessly frustrated, after years of being the targets of a right-wing smear campaign portraying them in the nastiest ways imaginable. They love teaching. The vast, overwhelming majority of them are incredibly passionate about their jobs, but their morale is also incredibly low. Now they have no idea how many more millions of dollars in funding cuts they will face from Trump’s wrecking ball and Ohio Republican lawmakers.

Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said he would fully fund Ohio’s Fair School Funding Plan, but it turns out after analysis by the Legislative Service Commission that DeWine’s budget actually has a $103.4 million cut to public schools in Ohio in the next two-year budget. DeWine also has a $265.4 million bump for private school vouchers and charter schools in his budget. This comes after last year, Ohio Republican lawmakers funneled nearly $1 billion of taxpayer money toward private and religious schools.

On average, Ohio school districts receive 10% of their funding from the federal government. High-poverty districts get 20% to 25%. If Trump dismantles the U.S. Department of Education, Ohio’s most vulnerable children in Ohio’s most vulnerable school districts will be the ones who pay for it. Teacher layoffs, cuts, larger class sizes, less resources. Kids with disabilities and special needs will be left in the cold.

They aren’t the only ones. Adults with disabilities are also in deep peril. As are 771,000 Ohioans who have their access to health care through Medicaid on the chopping block.

As U.S. Congressional Republicans look to take the axe to Medicaid — while lavishing trillions of dollars in tax cuts on the filthy rich — DeWine is greasing the skids. He put a “trigger law” in the state budget to slash Medicaid if federal contributions are cut. Meanwhile, Ohio is also looking to impose costly, burdensome, unnecessary, and ineffective Medicaid work requirements.

Regarding access to health care, those on Medicaid aren’t the only ones fretting.

My veteran friends are enraged as Trump and Musk rock military families and cause “chaos” at the VA. They are also laying off hundreds of thousands from America’s civil service where veterans make up 30% of the federal workforce. The 950,000 civilian employees in the U.S. Department of Defense, including tens of thousands of veterans, are also under threat of mass layoffs amid coming budget cuts.

My European friends are disgusted with Vice President J.D. Vance for coming to Germany, visiting the Dachau concentration camp, and then delivering a series of condescending insults to the European people while boosting a German political party that many Germans consider the modern descendent of Nazism.

My Springfield friends are appalled that the Trump administration cut protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants Thursday after Trump and Vance spread false, racist rumors about Haitians in Springfield, leading to more than 30 bomb threats on elementary schools, hospitals, and public buildings, and threats of violence on local residents and officials. Springfield is now suing a Neo-Nazi group alleging a campaign of threats and intimidation.

My business friends worry about Trump’s tariffs and fear the return of a ’70s-style stagflation. Others worry about the downstream economic effects of mass government layoffs.

Under the current program of wild and mindless destruction, red states like Ohio look to suffer the most.

Is American great again yet? Is this greatness? Is this what they all wanted? Is this their idea of leadership?

Is this any way for a society to exist, in fear and anxiety, a constant foreboding about the future, a gnawing feeling that everything definitely will not be OK?

Nuclear safety specialists recklessly fired, laid off FAA employees “scared to death” now for the safety of Americans, members of Congress cowering in fear and casting votes under death threats, firings of career prosecutors, pardoning of violent seditionists, anti-Constitutional Napoleonic declarations, unhinged screeds peddling Russian propaganda, open corruption of the rule of law, installing a crank extremist conspiracy theorist as director of the FBI, installing a person facing grave national security questionsas director of national intelligence.

They’re laying dynamite all around the room and playing with matches.

They’re continually insulting and alienating our friends, provoking our closest defensive alliestoward excluding us, and destroying America’s soft power around the world to the benefit of China and Russia. All of which makes America more vulnerable now to any number of malicious actions by hostile groups and powers.

Who does all of this to their society? To their country? In one month.

What a perversion of public service. What a wretched and debased abdication of all public responsibility.

As though the shared destiny and fate of millions of real human beings and their families and lives aren’t in the balance.

Who does this to other people? To doctors, nurses, farmers, teachers, professors, scientists, veterans, working families, people with disabilities, children with special needs, poor people?

What twisted, unnatural men.

What degraded, anti-social impulses.

J.D. Vance once said, “Trump makes people I care about afraid.”

Now he’s gleefully participating in their torment.

Well-adjusted, compassionate, normal people do not do this.

Healthy-minded individuals do not spend their time lying, gaslighting, trolling, and targeting others to scapegoat, victimize, and throw their lives into chaos.

Sick, broken sociopaths do, worshiping the false gods of money, power and fame, striving forever in vain to fill a dark void at the core of their being with their pathetic, delusional self-aggrandizement.

They really will do everything but go to therapy.