Those who voted for Donald Trump for President because they believed he wanted to make their lives better in some way— lower the cost of food or whatever— are beginning to realize that they were sold a pack of lies.
Soon after he won the election, someone asked when he’d be bringing down food costs as he had promised during the campaign. Trump’s reply: “You know, it’s hard to bring something down once it has gone up.”
In other words, he’s telling those who voted for him because of that vow to lower grocery prices, “Too bad, sucker—you should’ve known better than to believe anything I say, especially if it has to do with helping someone other than myself.”
Probably the first sign to Trump’s followers that he cared nothing about them was that he moved the inauguration inside, so that those who had thought they had “tickets” to viewing spots for an outside inauguration, got stiffed. Then they saw that the people who actually occupied places of honor just behind Trump on the dais at the inauguration were wealthy tech bros; Jeff Bezos (Amazon owner), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook and Instagram owner), and Elon Musk, world’s richest man and owner of X [formerly Twitter] and SpaceX.
Could there be a clearer sign of who Trump REALLY cares about? It isn’t the poor or middleclass people who are his die-hard fans.
Now we see Trump moving quickly to dismantle parts of the government he doesn’t like, which also happen to be the governmental agencies and functions that help regular people, including—surprise!—Trump’s non-rich supporters.
One action he tried to take, freezing federal aid funding (which includes money for popular programs such as Meals on Wheels), has temporarily been blocked by orders from two federal judges. One of them (U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell of Rhode Island) stated in his opinion that “the Executive’s action unilaterally suspends the payment of federal funds to the States and others simply by choosing to do so; indeed, no federal law the Executive cites as legal authority allows it to do so” (Daniel Barnes and Dareh Gregorian, “Second judge blocks Trump’s federal aid funding freeze,” NBC News, January 31, 2025.
Since he took office on January 20 of this year, Trump has fired numerous federal employees without legitimate reason or legal right to do so. For example, he fired via email some 18 inspectors general in a late-night action. Inspectors general are the watchdogs within government who insure that the departments follow rules.
An Inspector General (IG) conducts independent audits and investigations to prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse. Inspector generals can be fired, but only for “cause” and with 30 days’ notice (“Removal of Inspectors General, Rules, Practices and Considerations for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, updated January 27, 2025).
You get rid of the watchdogs if you don’t care about whether things are done properly or, worse, if you intend not to follow the rules. It’s not hard to guess which is true of Trump. He has shown us many times that he doesn’t care about laws, rules, or norms. He cares only about what he wants to do. Period.
He also tried to get rid of birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. No executive order can overrule a part of the Constitution, but Trump either didn’t know that or, more likely, didn’t care. Fortunately, judges have shut down his attempt to overrule that part of our founding document. For now.
Particularly frightening is Trump’s giving his rich buddy, Elon Musk, access to the federal payment system within the Treasury Dept., the part that issues Social Security, Medicare, and other such checks Only a few people within Treasury are allowed access to those records, because they contain very sensitive information about taxpayers and their financial histories. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, on Trump’s orders, granted Musk’s representatives access after another top Treasury official, David Lebryk, had refused that permission. Unfortunately, Lebryk was “put on leave and then suddenly retired.”
For any unaware of Musk’s position within our government, that’s an easy one to answer: he doesn’t have one. He’s not a part of the federal government in any way. Trump calls him the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, but there is no such department. Departments of the government must be created by Congress, and that hasn’t happened for “Government Efficiency.”
Many more examples could be listed of Trump’s illegal actions as he attempts to change this democracy to a dictatorship with himself at the head, but space here doesn’t permit.
The truth is that Trump has never spent one moment thinking about how he could help someone else. Everything is about him, and nothing about his present position makes the slightest bit of difference in the way he thinks.
The specific term for his way of thinking—one that is unnatural, since most people have the ability to care about other people, at least to some degree—is narcissism.
Psychiatrists consider a complete narcissist, which Donald Trump is, to have a form of mental illness.
Since Trump announced for President in 2015, various groups of mental health professionals have diagnosed him as being mentally ill. See, for example, the bestselling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. The book was originally published in 2017, but a later edition, issued in 2019, included new essays that updated the psychiatrists’ observations about Trump, based on his behavior in his first term as President.
As the psychiatrists pointed out, Trump has grown more erratic, chaotic, and destructive as pressures on him have mounted. And both being U.S. President and running for President are high-pressure situations.
Numerous people both within and without government are pushing back against Trump’s efforts to dismantle government as we know it. A coalition of 22 states filed suit to stop the freeze on federal funding, and they were successful, at least for now. The ACLU and other groups are filing suit on behalf of individuals unfairly fired or otherwise mistreated.
And individuals are taking action. For example, the Indivisible groups that formed in many locales around the country during Trump’s first term and which are reinvigorated now, are encouraging their members to contact representatives and senators to protest Trump’s actions, and high call volumes at Congressional offices indicate voters are doing so.
It appears that democracy is in a real fight now. It’s “all hands on deck” to save it. Any who are former Trump fans, whose eyes have now been opened by watching him demonstrate how little he actually cares for the non-rich people who support him, are welcome to join the fight.