Trump’s MAGA movement says it wants a revolution. It gets a history lesson instead
Valentine’s Day came early when Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha explained why he and 22 other attorneys general were suing the Trump administration to stop a federal funding freeze in language that evoked the Declaration of Independence.
It warmed my heart.
Neronha spoke during a Jan. 28 virtual announcement held less than 24 hours after the Trump administration signaled its intention to cut off trillions of federal dollars to states and nonprofits, not just in the future but immediately. This included existing funding in place, with the excuse that the government expected to evaluate whether the President wants the money to be spent the way Congress and federal agencies had already agreed to spend it. Meals on Wheels, housing assistance, Head Start, and even Medicaid payments were temporarily unavailable.
To some people, this seemed like a reasonable and necessary step. But it was blatantly unconstitutional, and therefore against the law. Yet some folks in the media struggled to explain the separation of powers that our Constitution requires. Knowing how impatient with complexity we have become, I worried these messages would fail to reach those who were being told, mostly through avoidance of the severity of the issue, that this was not a big deal.
Then I heard Neronha’s statement:
“We as American citizens, almost from the very beginning, have had a compact with our government. And that is, we pay taxes, and those taxes go to Washington. But we expect those monies to come back to us, as allocated by our Congress. That is the way we build our roads and bridges, that is the way we educate our children, that is the way we take care of our seniors. We support law enforcement. And that has been our tradition for nearly 300 years. Now thrown out by a President in a memo…”
In suggesting our taxes might no longer be used to benefit the public good, but rather to advance one man’s agenda, Neronha condensed a long and complicated history of taxation in this country, but his words harkened back to a basic truth. When we separated from England, one significant complaint was that taxes should not be imposed on a people without their consent. The implication is that those who pay taxes — now us — must agree to the use of those funds directly or through our representatives. These were inspiring remarks, using language that was echoed by other elected officials in Rhode Island.
Even before the freeze was to go into effect, on the morning of Jan. 28, Medicaid stopped dispensing funds to states, Head Start providers could not reach their funding to make payroll, and federal agencies began to indicate they might not be dispensing previously guaranteed funding to a number of social services and state-run programs. That the White House a day later rescinded a memo outlining the freeze but not the actual plans for the freeze did not change the basic nature of the threat. Donald Trump wants your tax funds to be filtered through his priorities, not yours.
The concern was more than ideological, now and then. Taxing a population and not using that money to support the public good is what a king does. The results are, historically and consistently, that people are impoverished.
That the White House rescinded the memo outlining the freeze but not the actual plans for the freeze did not change the basic nature of the threat. Donald Trump wants your tax funds to be filtered through his priorities, not yours.
It is pretty ironic, if irony has survived the last few weeks, that the MAGA movement claimed that Trump’s reelection was their 1776, their new revolution to take the country back from immigrants and elites. Their inspiration does not come from our founding moments, but rather from an ancient tradition of people putting their trust in a leader, often claimed to be divinely chosen, who will rule absolutely. This kind of government has a history of not serving the average person very well. The god-king pharaohs of ancient Egypt are not famous for their goodness to their people.
This holds true in recent history whether the autocratic leader comes to power on rhetoric from the right or the left. Populist socialist revolutions have generally failed to provide good lives for working people when they end with a concentration of power in one office, or one person. Cubans in poverty suffered, Stalin allowed Ukrainians to starve in the Holodomor, and North Koreans starve and suffer now.
The only form of government that has a consistent record of attempting to serve and provide for all people is a democratic one.
As imperfect as we are, our democracy is, at least, potentially perfectible. I personally am hoping that the chaos of the moment can clarify the need for us to remember Abraham Lincoln’s words, and his hope that this country “shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Rhode Island Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com.
