Redburn Reads (March 5, 2025)
Trump's revenge tour
Since the Declaration of Independence, generations of Americans, including those who fought the Civil War to preserve the Union, have been trying to build a better nation. Donald Trump seems determined to destroy it before we reach our 250th anniversary.
Why? I don’t think anyone really knows. I’m still partial to the idea that Trump is bound in some way to our Russian enemy. But Jamelle Bouie, the NYT opinion columnist, has another unified theory that also makes a lot of sense: it’s all about revenge for the wrongs the American people have done to him.
Credit: Lisa Redburn
I plan to return to this spot in Canyonlands later this month.
And because I’m about to leave our home in winter-bound Massachusetts for a month of adventures in a sunnier climate, mostly in New Mexico and Utah, I’m going to limit this dispatch to his piece and a couple of others worth your attention. But I’m afraid I’m only scratching the surface.
Donald Trump rambled, ranted and raved his way through the 2024 presidential campaign, but he was clear on one point. When he was elected, he would get revenge. . .
For once in his public career, Trump wasn’t lying. As president, he has made it a priority to go after his political enemies. . .
Altogether, Trump has done more to actualize his desire for retribution than he has to fulfill his campaign promise to lower the price of groceries or reduce the cost of housing. A telling sign, perhaps, of his real priorities in office.
This fact of Trump’s indifference to most Americans — if not his outright hostility toward them, considering his assault on virtually every government function that helps ordinary people — suggests another dimension to his revenge tour. It is almost as if he wants to inflict pain not just on a specific set of individuals but on the entire nation. . .
For example, Trump will always reject the results and present himself as a winner if he loses a contest. This was clear in 2016 — he even claimed that Clinton’s popular-vote victory was the result of fraud — and it came to fruition when he lost re-election in 2020, a psychic wound so grievous that the only way he could attend to it was to try to overturn the result.
Trump failed — and spent the next four years stewing over his defeat. He made “Stop the steal” his mantra and organized the entire Republican Party around the delusional claim that he was the legitimate victor in 2020. And while Trump went on to win the 2024 race, even capturing the national popular vote for the first time in his political career, it’s not at all clear that his rage and resentment have subsided. It would actually be shocking, given what we know about his behavior and personality, if he could regulate his emotions well enough to turn his anger into something more constructive.
If this is his psychological state, then it stands to reason that Trump would want revenge against the public that denied him a second term as much as he wants revenge against the officials who have tried to make him answer for his illegal actions. . .
Under the cover of an audit, he has empowered Elon Musk, his de facto co-president, to take an ax to any and every program that helps ordinary Americans. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has stripped funds or personnel or both from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Park Service, the National Weather Service, FEMA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration, among others. It has degraded the federal government’s ability to deliver critical services to tens of millions of Americans and is endangering direct payments to millions more. There is no apparent rhyme or reason to these cuts, only a nihilistic drive to cause as much damage and to make it as irreparable as possible.
And as a result, far too many Americans – and countless others around the world who trusted us to help them – will die prematurely. In one of her Letters from an American this week, the indefatigable Heather Cox Richardson, reminded us that one of Trump’s first actions on taking office – shutting down the US Agency for International Development, will lead to untold suffering.
On Sunday, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a series of memos he and other senior career officials had written, recording in detail how the cuts to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” at the agency will lead to “preventable death” and make the U.S. less safe. The cuts will “no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” one memo read.
Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States.
Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to create a system for waivers to protect that lifesaving aid, the cuts appear random and the system for reversing them remains unworkable. The programs remain shuttered. Enrich blamed "political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation."
On Sunday, Enrich sent another memo to staff, thanking them for their work and telling them he had been placed on “administrative leave, effective immediately.”
And listen to Jim Fallows, the journalist and small plane pilot who has made himself an expert on aviation safety.
Some of the assault on governing institutions comes from ignorance and zeal. Some is just corrupt. Together this will lead to deaths. Here's why. . .
This is one more post about degradation of the nation’s aviation-safety network through the past six weeks. I keep coming back to this topic because it’s a vivid illustration of broader damage across the ‘soft infrastructure’ of modern life. . .
For decades, the reigning outlook in the aviation world has been, “What’s our Plan C, in case Plans A and B go wrong? And what’s Plan D, after that?” This includes rigorous study of the accidents and close-calls that do occur, to reduce the chances of the same things going wrong. That, plus luck, is how you build up a near-perfect safety record.
Now the reigning Doge attitude has changed to, “I wonder what this wire does? Let’s snip it and find out.” Before the election, Russell Vought—leading force behind Project 2025 and now director of the Office of Management and Budget—said that he wanted federal employees to be “traumatically affected” by budget cuts and threats of layoff. Based on everything I hear, that part of the plan has already kicked in.
Why these new strains—on the overall system, and on the people who make it work? Some of the motivation is zealotry, like Vought’s. Some is cocksure ignorance. But a significant amount appears to be blatently corrupt.
1) Starlink for the FAA. Dangerous and corrupt.
Why this is dangerous: Because it is a rush to judgment, in a system that prizes cautious deliberation.
Nothing the FAA does well, is done in a hurry. That’s a limitation, in adding years of delay before innovative commercial technology is OK’d for airline use.1 But it’s also the basis of the FAA’s decades-long record of working with airlines, aircraft companies, pilots and flight crews, and others to make commercial flying so safe.
For instance, two years ago, after its typical testing and caution, the FAA announced that it had chosen Verizon for a major system upgrade. Completing the project would take several years, it would cost some $2.4 billion, and it would upgrade the FAA’s Enterprise Network Services—essentially, the operating system for air-traffic control.
The heart of this upgrade was shifting the FAA’s systems from an outdated copper-wire network to the kind of fiber-optic backbone well established in commercial and home uses around the world. This is also the kind of network Verizon has specialized in for 20 years.
But starting six weeks ago, when Doge came to town, the FAA has by many accounts been pressured to switch from this long-planned transition, and instead buy something else. This sudden new alternative would be the satellite-based network Starlink, which has become widely popular but has not been subject to similar FAA vetting. Reporting last week in the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone and elsewhere has detailed the way Doge acolytes have been pushing backstage for this change. Meanwhile, in public on Xitter, Elon Musk has been recklessly and falsely criticizing Verizon’s technology as unsafe.
Why this is corrupt: Because it is naked self-dealing, favoring a company controlled by Elon Musk.
Starlink is Musk’s own company. It is part of SpaceX, of which Musk is CEO and largest shareholder.
So the fact that Trump also seems determined to merely damage the economy with punitive tariffs, immigration raids on essential workers and wasteful tax cuts looks almost mild by comparison. But it’s consistent with everything else he is doing.
Donald Trump rambled, ranted and raved his way through the 2024 presidential campaign, but he was clear on one point. When he was elected, he would get revenge. . .
For once in his public career, Trump wasn’t lying. As president, he has made it a priority to go after his political enemies. . .
Altogether, Trump has done more to actualize his desire for retribution than he has to fulfill his campaign promise to lower the price of groceries or reduce the cost of housing. A telling sign, perhaps, of his real priorities in office.
This fact of Trump’s indifference to most Americans — if not his outright hostility toward them, considering his assault on virtually every government function that helps ordinary people — suggests another dimension to his revenge tour. It is almost as if he wants to inflict pain not just on a specific set of individuals but on the entire nation. . .
For example, Trump will always reject the results and present himself as a winner if he loses a contest. This was clear in 2016 — he even claimed that Clinton’s popular-vote victory was the result of fraud — and it came to fruition when he lost re-election in 2020, a psychic wound so grievous that the only way he could attend to it was to try to overturn the result.
Trump failed — and spent the next four years stewing over his defeat. He made “Stop the steal” his mantra and organized the entire Republican Party around the delusional claim that he was the legitimate victor in 2020. And while Trump went on to win the 2024 race, even capturing the national popular vote for the first time in his political career, it’s not at all clear that his rage and resentment have subsided. It would actually be shocking, given what we know about his behavior and personality, if he could regulate his emotions well enough to turn his anger into something more constructive.
If this is his psychological state, then it stands to reason that Trump would want revenge against the public that denied him a second term as much as he wants revenge against the officials who have tried to make him answer for his illegal actions. . .
Under the cover of an audit, he has empowered Elon Musk, his de facto co-president, to take an ax to any and every program that helps ordinary Americans. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has stripped funds or personnel or both from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Park Service, the National Weather Service, FEMA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration, among others. It has degraded the federal government’s ability to deliver critical services to tens of millions of Americans and is endangering direct payments to millions more. There is no apparent rhyme or reason to these cuts, only a nihilistic drive to cause as much damage and to make it as irreparable as possible.
And as a result, far too many Americans – and countless others around the world who trusted us to help them – will die prematurely. In one of her Letters from an American this week, the indefatigable Heather Cox Richardson, reminded us that one of Trump’s first actions on taking office – shutting down the US Agency for International Development, will lead to untold suffering.
On Sunday, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a series of memos he and other senior career officials had written, recording in detail how the cuts to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” at the agency will lead to “preventable death” and make the U.S. less safe. The cuts will “no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” one memo read.
Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States.
Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to create a system for waivers to protect that lifesaving aid, the cuts appear random and the system for reversing them remains unworkable. The programs remain shuttered. Enrich blamed "political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation."
On Sunday, Enrich sent another memo to staff, thanking them for their work and telling them he had been placed on “administrative leave, effective immediately.”
Meanwhile, pay attention to Jim Fallows, the journalist and small plane pilot who has made himself an expert on aviation safety.
Some of the assault on governing institutions comes from ignorance and zeal. Some is just corrupt. Together this will lead to deaths. Here's why. . .
This is one more post about degradation of the nation’s aviation-safety network through the past six weeks. I keep coming back to this topic because it’s a vivid illustration of broader damage across the ‘soft infrastructure’ of modern life. . .
For decades, the reigning outlook in the aviation world has been, “What’s our Plan C, in case Plans A and B go wrong? And what’s Plan D, after that?” This includes rigorous study of the accidents and close-calls that do occur, to reduce the chances of the same things going wrong. That, plus luck, is how you build up a near-perfect safety record.
Now the reigning Doge attitude has changed to, “I wonder what this wire does? Let’s snip it and find out.” Before the election, Russell Vought—leading force behind Project 2025 and now director of the Office of Management and Budget—said that he wanted federal employees to be “traumatically affected” by budget cuts and threats of layoff. Based on everything I hear, that part of the plan has already kicked in.
Why these new strains—on the overall system, and on the people who make it work? Some of the motivation is zealotry, like Vought’s. Some is cocksure ignorance. But a significant amount appears to be blatently corrupt.
1) Starlink for the FAA. Dangerous and corrupt.
Why this is dangerous: Because it is a rush to judgment, in a system that prizes cautious deliberation.
Nothing the FAA does well, is done in a hurry. That’s a limitation, in adding years of delay before innovative commercial technology is OK’d for airline use.1 But it’s also the basis of the FAA’s decades-long record of working with airlines, aircraft companies, pilots and flight crews, and others to make commercial flying so safe.
For instance, two years ago, after its typical testing and caution, the FAA announced that it had chosen Verizon for a major system upgrade. Completing the project would take several years, it would cost some $2.4 billion, and it would upgrade the FAA’s Enterprise Network Services—essentially, the operating system for air-traffic control.
The heart of this upgrade was shifting the FAA’s systems from an outdated copper-wire network to the kind of fiber-optic backbone well established in commercial and home uses around the world. This is also the kind of network Verizon has specialized in for 20 years.
But starting six weeks ago, when Doge came to town, the FAA has by many accounts been pressured to switch from this long-planned transition, and instead buy something else. This sudden new alternative would be the satellite-based network Starlink, which has become widely popular but has not been subject to similar FAA vetting. Reporting last week in the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone and elsewhere has detailed the way Doge acolytes have been pushing backstage for this change. Meanwhile, in public on Xitter, Elon Musk has been recklessly and falsely criticizing Verizon’s technology as unsafe.
Why this is corrupt: Because it is naked self-dealing, favoring a company controlled by Elon Musk.
Starlink is Musk’s own company. It is part of SpaceX, of which Musk is CEO and largest shareholder.
So the fact that Trump also seems determined to send us into a recession and merely damage the American economy with punitive tariffs, immigration raids on essential workers and wasteful tax cuts looks almost mild by comparison. But at least it’s consistent with everything else he is doing.
I’ll be back in April.