OPINION: Flirting With Disasters

Painful as they are, crises can lead to policies that help a lot of people.

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under Barack Obama. “And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.“

Obama, who took office during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, used that opportunity to get sweeping Wall Street reforms and the Affordable Care Act through Congress.

Donald Trump and his Project 2025ers, however, are running the country differently. For whatever reason, they’re creating crises.

Since taking office, Trump has declared “emergency” after “emergency,” regardless of whether the problems he bemoans actually merit the extreme measures he and his compadres have taken. And those actions  have caused serious problems of their own.

For example, Trump campaigned on making America affordable again, but the trade wars he started with his haphazard tariffs are generally pushing prices higher here. And they’re reducing demand for some of our exports.  

Then there’s his immigration policy. According to his own Labor Department, the immigrant roundups, harsh detention centers and crackdowns on southern border crossings aren’t just hurting brown-skinned people who’ve come here to work and build a better life for themselves and their families.

The cruel and unusual response to this “emergency” is also causing “an acute labor shortage” for farmers and “threatening the stability of our food supply and prices for U.S. consumers,” the department said. It made that startling statement to speed up implementation of a rule that, as the Washington Post explained, “effectively lowers pay for seasonal migrants working in agriculture under the H-2A visa program.”

The American Prospect, which broke the story, said such notifications usually come when an emergency is imminent. “To Trump’s Department of Labor,” it observed, “that emergency is Trump’s immigration program.”

Meanwhile, hospitals and other facilities that rely on doctors from other countries are reeling from the $100,000 application fee Trump announced for skilled foreign workers’ H-1B visas. More than 50 medical societies are asking the Department of Homeland Security to waive the fee for physicians, noting that 23% of those in the U.S. last year were “foreign-trained.”

Even before this edict, our health care was under siege. Experts were warning that cuts from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill for billionaires would force a lot more Americans to forgo insurance and place further strain on hospitals. And putting public health under RFK Jr. would be the stuff of a sitcom if his crackpot theories didn’t carry such serious consequences.

Besides shrugging off climate change and the destruction it wreaks, the federal government is waging war on wind and solar energy when we need all the power we can get as Trump and other elected officials push for more data centers.

These structures consume vast amounts of water and electricity to produce artificial intelligence — which corporate America is eagerly awaiting because of its potential to eliminate untold numbers of jobs. Even so, Christian nationalists from the White House on down are trying to persuade women to have more children so our society can become patriarchal again.

There’s so much to digest that it’s hard to make sense of what Trump and his Project 2025ers are doing. What is clear is that they’re remaking our country into something that’s nothing like the paradise Trump promised and claims we’re in now.

So is the administration simply incompetent? Or do those in it see opportunities in the crises they are inflicting?

Who knows? But powers that be who can never get enough money and power could probably pursue both more easily when jobs and basic necessities are scarcer, air is dirtier, people are poorer and sicker, and nothing is certain except uncertainty.

After all, few who must live under such conditions have the time or energy to hold their oppressors accountable.

Trump may not be capable of such strategic thinking, but the 920-page “Mandate for Leadership” that his Project 2025ers published in 2023 shows that they are.

Together, this administration has declared that those who challenge its agenda are “the enemy within,” which is why we the people, the real patriots, must resist it while we still can. 

Lisa Von Ahn is an experienced columnist previously published in the Pottsville Republican Herald newspaper.

Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.

Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.

^{Photo: Dall-E}

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