Back at the beginning of this year, when Donald Trump was spouting his “51st State” nonsense and threatening a tariff war with Canada, there were concerns about the effect on Vermont’s tourism economy. Well, we’re almost a year into the second reign of King Manbaby, and the numbers show that Vermont has, in fact, suffered greatly from Trump’s cold war with our neighbors.
Canadian tourism is down. Way down.
Canadian credit card spending in Vermont is down even more.
This is only one of the many negative effects of Trump on Vermont. Tariffs have bedeviled many Vermont industries and businesses, and have hit housing construction especially There are real and potential losses in federal funding, including the rampant politicization of disaster recovery aid. There’s the chilling effect on migrant workers, which is putting a real hurt on our construction and agricultural sectors.
I can’t quantify those effects. But I’ve got a bunch of numbers regarding Canadian tourism. And man, do they ever make for some grim reading.
The calculus may have changed given the Democratic sweep of Tuesday’s elections, but according to a story published Monday by The Hill, a group of “at least eight moderate Senate Democrats” has been meeting to discuss surrendering to Trump, oops, sorry, my mistake, “finding a deal to end the monthlong government shutdown.”
And one of the eight is our very own Sen. Peter Welch.
Feeling proud? I know you are. I can hardly wait for the Vermont Democratic Party convention on November 15, where I’m sure Welch will deliver a stem-winder of a speech about resisting Trump’s authoritarianism. He’s good at those.
Who knows, if enough Vermont Democrats learn of his complicity in this surrender attempt, maybe some will greet Welch with boos instead of cheers. A man can dream.
Recently I had the opportunity to sit in on an update and short-term forecast of the economy and the markets. It was an exercise in what they call “wealth management” — stewardship on behalf of the well-to-do. I did so as an investor with retirement funds in the markets, who’s been feeling a fair bit queasy about the chances that Donald Trump’s doggedly anarchic policies might cause everything financial to drop straight into the toilet.
Well, I have some very good news wrapped in a bad-news burrito.
The good news, from this analyst’s perch: The economy is doing pretty well, actually. It has weathered Trump’s reign of error because of some very strong fundamentals. Also because deregulation and tax cuts are business-friendly. By every measure, the outlook is positive.
In the aggregate, that is.
But within the aggregate, there are distinct winners and losers. I bet you can guess who falls into which category.
Earlier this week, for the first time in Donald Trump’s second term in office, a sitting Democratic U.S. Senator voted for one of Trump’s nominees for the judiciary.
And in case the headline and image didn’t give away the surprise, yes, it was our very own Sen. Peter Welch, who voted in favor of Kyle Dudek for a seat on the U.S. District Court in Florida.
Democrats have occasionally supported the odd Trump nominee, but never have any of ’em broken ranks on a judicial appointment. There’s a reason for that; Trump’s executive branch officials will be turfed out as soon as their boss leaves office, while federal judges are appointed for life. Dudek was born in 1985, which means he’s likely to serve for at least three decades.
The good senator’s explanation? “[Dudek] is the needle in the haystack—a competent nominee by the Trump administration,’ Welch told Bloomberg Law. When asked what led him to that conclusion, Welch told Bloomberg that “there was nothing specific about Dudek’s record” that led to his “Yes” vote.
When state Sen. Russ Ingalls, a conservative Republican, bought a bunch of Northeast Kingdom radio stations earlier this year, he indulged in some high-toned blather about emphasizing local information and keeping politics out of the product.
Well, now we know how thatturned out.
As VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson reports, Ingalls has raised some ire among liberal listeners by getting rid of newscasts from major network broadcasters and the Associated Press and replacing them with, you guessed it, Fox News.
And that’s the way our capitalist media system works, isn’t it? He who pays the piper calls the tune. Ingalls is well within his rights to air whatever kind of newscasts he wants. (Thanks, it must be said, to Ronald Reagan’s deep-sixing of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to fairly represent all points of view from the birth of electronic media until its repeal in 1987.)
Actually, when I first scanned the headline, I thought he’d replaced the stations’ entire programming with far-right conservative talk. He hasn’t. He’s decided to air Fox News in the brief window devoted to news at the top of each hour. Which usually amounts to no more than a couple minutes of news along with plenty of advertisements.
Point being, if you depend on commercial radio newscasts to keep you informed, it’s kind of like making Lunchables the foundation of your diet.
So I don’t have much of a beef with Ingalls’ decision. I do have trouble, and plenty of it, with his comments about the situation. Which reveal him to be a tunnel-visioned ideologue with no patience for criticism of himself, the country, or its current (you should pardon the expression) leadership. Not to mention his open contempt for constituents who disagree with him.
It was a little more than a week ago that Gov. Phil Scott held an unpublicized-until-after-the-fact meeting with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. The only notice anyone received of the event was a post on the governor’s Facebook page, which included a bunch of photos and a brief caption. Which is all we know about the meeting, since the press apparently got no advance notice.
But yeah, you might hope that Scott’s dignity would have at least bought him a little breathing room from the Trump administration’s savage and unconstitutional cuts in federal spending, especially where Zeldin himself is concerned.
I regret to inform you that any such hopes were completely unfounded.
The Scott-Zeldin confab was on Sunday, August 3. Well, four days later, on August 7, Zeldin delivered a swift kick in the nuts to our groveling governor: The Trump administration announced a clawback of $62.5 million in already-appropriated federal funds meant for Vermont’s Solar for All program, designed to help lower-income people access the benefits of solar power. (The cut was first reported by VTDigger, um, today.) It was part of a larger, nationwide cut in the program, but that’s one hell of a lot of money we’re not going to get, that won’t help a lot of lower-income people take advantage of the Green Revolution or build out our renewable infrastructure or reduce our dependence on out-of-state fossil fuel.
Accompanying the announcement was a cheery little video message from Zeldin himself, labeling Solar for All, a brainchlld of Vermont’s own Sen. Bernie Sanders, ” as a “grift” and a “boondoggle.”
Gov. Phil Scott continues to urge Vermonters to take a chill pill and ignore the bull rampaging through the china shop. He tells us to stop focusing on “the rhetoric in D.C.” — without identifying the source of the rhetoric. He did so once again last week in an interview with Vermont Public’s Michaela Lefrak which was faithfully, painfully, completely transcribed on VP’s website. Feast your eyes on this cornucopia of good talkin’.
Well, what— again, we have to wait for whatever the action is he takes against us here in the state, and react to that. And I, I think we have been doing that, but, but for all of us to fall into that trap, I think, is, would be unfortunate and it takes away from all the problems that exist here in Vermont today, that we’re not doing because we’re focusing on the rhetoric that he, he wants to stir up, and I don’t believe we can live in chaos for the next three and a half years. They just have too much to do, too much to accomplish right here in Vermont.
Winston Churchill would be proud.
Anyway, the governor couldn’t be wronger about this. First of all, we’re going to be living “in chaos for the next three and a half years” no matter what. Donald Trump is going to keep waving all the red flags and eroding our democracy and our federal government even if we take Scott’s advice and whistle resolutely past the graveyard.
Trump is a bully. He backtracks when confronted, and then seeks the soft spots in our defenses. It’s exhausting and yes, it takes a lot of time, but we don’t have the luxury of sitting back and waiting for rhetoric to turn into reality. Just ask immigrants, refugees, and transgender folk if they’re feeling secure these days.
Even when it’s nothing more than “rhetoric,” it creates tremendous uncertainty across the board. As Public Service Commissioner Kerrick Johnson told a legislative committee in February, “It changes daily in terms of the program. It changes daily in terms of the program and the people we’re required to work with. It changes daily in terms of the interpretation of the language and what’s being sent.” How the hell can the state do its job in that environment?
But c’mon, it’s gone far beyond mere rhetoric in more ways than I can count. Still, I’ll give it a try. What follows is a list of specific actions taken by the Trump administration that have already had a measurable impact on Vermont and Vermonters. I dare the governor look over this list and gabble placidly about “rhetoric.”
Yeah, I think Thursday’s May Day rally on the Statehouse lawn went a little better than Wednesday’s pro-Trump “honk and wave” in Barre. I’d say the attendance was about a hundred times better, anyway. My guesstimate is that the crowd hit four figures with some room to spare. (It was impossible to capture the entire crowd in a single photo because they were so spread out.) Pretty good for a weekday afternoon.
The rally wasn’t specifically targeted at the authoritarian Trump regime as has been the case for other recent protests. Since it was May Day, the focus was on organized labor. At first I was a bit disappointed, but as the event went on, it was kind of nice not to hear the same familiar litany of terrible things our government is doing under the orange usurper.
Also, the labor movement is accustomed to fighting through setbacks and playing the long game. I mean, one speaker brought up the Haymarket affair, which occurred 139 years ago. In the context of labor’s long struggle, a few years under Trump takes on a fresh bit of perspective.
There was also a piece of well-timed good news on offer.
The Democratic Legislature is looking at ways to limit, or end, an agreement allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (and other federal agencies) to house detainees at Vermont prisons. There’s a real itch for action because, well, Donald Trump’s enforcement regime is so thoroughly toxic, from the masks and the unmarked cars to the rank unconstitutionality of it all.
No argument there. But if you object to our complicity in Trump’s crackdown, what about our ongoing relationship with CoreCivic, the for-profit prison operator that’s making a fortune off Trump’s regime*? If we don’t want to be part of an arbitrary and punitive immigration enforcement system, well, isn’t CoreCivic an enthusiastic participant? Haven’t the company’s fortunes shot through the roof because of Trump?
*CoreCivic’s stock price basically doubled right after Trump’s election and has held its value since then. In spite of the Trump-triggered stock market swoon.
For those just tuning in, Vermont contracts with CoreCivic to house some of our inmates in a private prison in Mississippi. We’ve been doing this for years, with one for-profit operator or another. We’ve been told that we just don’t have enough space in our own prisons.
That may have been true in the past, but now? The numbers simply don’t add up.
So let’s end the contract, stop sending our inmates 1,400 miles from everything and everyone they know, and stop enriching an evil corporation.
Well, I thought I had a nice varied collection of stories for this week’s Vermont media roundup. But heck, five of the eight nominees have something to do with how the excesses of Donald Trump are reverberating here in our B.L.S.
Apologies, but that’s the world we’re living in and my starship is on the fritz.
A stark warning about Trump from someone who’s been right more than most. Journalist David Goodman hosts “Vermont Conversation,” a blandly-named weekly show on Radio Vermont/WDEV available afterward as a podcast under the auspices of VTDigger. This week’s guest was author and Dartmouth prof Jeff Sharlet, who has spent years chronicling the dark corners of the far right. He has foreseen the persistence of the Trump phenomenon, its return to power, and its authoritarian intent. He told Goodman that he and his colleagues have “all been surprised by the speed with which it’s happening,” and said that the opposition has a lot of work to do.
Sharlet said he’s seen “a lot more people tuning out than in the first Trump administration. And I want to say to people, you don’t have that privilege.”
Echoes of fascism in a small rural library. In the latest installment of her podcast “Rumble Strip,” Erica Heilman takes us to the Haskell Free Library in Derby Line, VT and Stanstead, QC for an audio accounting of authoritarianism’s jackbooted footprint. The feds’ crackdown on the security-imperiling cross-border traffic at the library, announced after a deliberately provocative visit from dog-killer and Trump functionary Kristi Noem has left both communities shaken. For no reason whatsoever except that our federal government feels compelled to act like a bully.
The Vermont Political Observer. 