This is what tyranny looks like.
The first three days of the Trump administration have featured several moves on the part of the new President that show his dictatorial intentions.
First came a freeze on the hiring of any new government employees. In spite of the fact that the number of federal employees has been stable for nearly 15 years, President Trump will not hire any new workers.
Next came his attack on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). With one stroke of his pen, the new President has frozen all new grants to the EPA.
The agency in charge of maintaining the health of our air, water and land depends upon a multitude of grants to support research into a wide range of potential dangers. Those grants have just been stopped.
The EPA depends upon grant funding to monitor air and water quality. This is hardly the time to stop that monitoring.
Grants are also used to rebuild industrial sites that have been identified and cleaned up by the EPA. Again, it isn’t exactly smart to end the funding for that rebuilding process.
Nevertheless, without bothering to go through Congress for any of this, the man in the Oval Office has stopped all new grants and stopped the renewal of those grants already in place.
Although we don’t know if the freeze is temporary or permanent, in either case it sends a signal that protecting the environment that keeps us all alive is not a priority of the new administration.
Even more disturbing than any of this, though, is the President’s desire to exert control over what people say about his actions. Attempting to limit discussion, to control the message; these are the actions of a dictator.
President Trump, he of the 3 AM tweet, has ordered the employees of the EPA to cease and desist from using any form of social media to talk about their work. They are not allowed to talk to the press, to send out tweets, to update the Facebook page of the agency. There will be no new blog posts about agency activities.
They aren’t allowed to talk about the freeze on grants and new work orders.
The directive bans any new content on the Agency website and orders all media requests to be sent to the Office of Administration and Resources Management.
This is beyond chilling.
This is exactly the kind of behavior that the world has seen time and again from dictators. This site has been saying it for months, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that we were correct.
Donald Trump believes himself to be the king of all he surveys. He is a dangerous demagogue and is making no attempt to hide it.
(The information in this article was provided by an anonymous EPA employee who feared retribution for sharing it.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcPDkKqh8IM
Featured image via YouTube screengrab.
