Opinion | Trump Is Already Making America Weaker and More Vulnerable
President Trump said in his Inaugural Address that he had “no higher responsibility than to defend our country.”So what did Trump do on his first day in office? He made America weaker and more vulnerable.Trump’s move to breathe new life into TikTok in the United States is the best example, and I’ll come back to that in a moment.But it wasn’t the only such move.One of the threats looming over all of us is a viral disease that begins in a distant corner of the globe, as we saw in the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak and in the coronavirus pandemic.
A guardrail protecting us from pandemics is the World Health Organization, which works to stop viruses early in foreign countries, before they spread.Yet Trump announced on his first day that the United States will withdraw from the organization, elevating the risk that the next virus goes global and kills large numbers of Americans.Trump is not entirely wrong when he accuses Democrats of sometimes having been too lax about law and order.
Yet on assuming the presidency, he sided with domestic terrorists over law enforcement when he moved to free every person incarcerated for attacking the Capitol on Jan.6, 2021.“I got a pardon baby,” posted Jacob Chansley, known as the QAnon Shaman.
“Now I am gonna buy some guns,” he wrote, using an expletive.One Proud Boy told Reuters the pardons would help with recruitment and that members would feel “bulletproof.” On a pro-Trump website, Reuters counted more than two dozen people calling for the execution of judges, police officers or Democratic officials, saying that some of these people should be hanged, beaten to death or fed into wood chippers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscr...