In Trump Campaign For Power, Truth Is Quickly Eliminated And Many Will Pay
We are lambs being led to a slaughter that will come either through a final, irreversible climate catastrophe, another deadly pandemic, economic Armageddon or many of us will just be swallowed up in an even more profoundly wicked deportation gambit.
It also is quite possible that future elections will be either cancelled or so rigged that only the incumbent authoritarian or his chosen successor will lead.
The coming cataclysm is like an unstoppable avalanche and there are many reasons why the degradation happened so quickly and in such plain sight. Generations of solid scientific studies and facts that are as clear as day have been tossed aside in the blink of an eye by a public eager to have someone rationalize their conspiratorial fears about the government. The leader refuses time-tested facts and calls them hoaxes.
There are reasons why so many Americans have been more than willing but hungry for a fascist to provide quick, easy, false answers that more than satiate the anger and suspicion that so many people have against the government and science.
Authoritarian governments must dispose of facts that do not meet their authoritarian needs. Fascism attacks critical thinking and dissent, historical facts are distorted and public perception is manipulated to create a false narrative that empowers the fascist leader and destroys the opposition. The fascist leader would have people believe that nothing is true unless the leader says it is so; that there is no fixed truth but that the people with the most power will define it for us.
There are, however, indisputable truths that are independent of anything that any authoritarian may say. There is an objective reality. The sun rises and sets and no amount of authoritarian denial will change the fact. The danger is not that the people will believe the lies but that they will no longer even care about truth. Truth matters because without it, there is no democracy.
Propaganda and disinformation or what is euphemistically referred to by authoritarians as “fake news” is nothing new, although trump has taken it to a whole new and frightening level.
In 1835, a New York newspaper published articles claiming scientists found life on the Moon. The reports described strange animals and plants.
In 1917, two girls in Cottingley, England took photographs that appeared to show fairies. The pictures gained wide attention and fooled many people, including some experts.
Disinformation was rampant during World War I when governments spread false stories about victories, enemy actions and political intentions. The lies were part of propaganda campaigns run by intelligence agencies or political powers in order to shape public attitudes.
Disinformation about disease and health have been common throughout the 20th century and continuing with the lies about the harsh effects of vaccines.
Climate Change
The gravest threats to world health include the attacks on climate change and vaccines. Trump has slashed environmental funding, made wholesale cuts in staffing of environmental offices and ordered environmental laws repealed but his most corrupt actions are aimed at convincing Americans that global change is not a problem.
At current pollution levels, the planet has six years before the industrial-era rise in global temperatures eclipses the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and 27 years before it breaches the even more serious benchmark of 2 degrees, according to the Global Carbon Project, an international team composed of climate researchers.
The American Lung Association found that 46 percent of Americans or around 156.1 million people are living in places with unhealthy levels of air pollution, worsened by extreme heat and wildfires. An analysis by the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former EPA employees, found that air pollution would increase as a result of trump’s deregulation, leading to nearly 200,000 premature deaths and cause more than 10,000 asthma attacks every day in America.
As far back as Nov. 6, 2012, trump tweeted that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
Trump hasn’t changed his tune and has sold many Americans a bill of goods about the climate change “hoax” because he received hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the petrochemical industry and others who would suffer from tough climate laws.
The most urgent attempts at disinformation can not change the facts that have been determined by experts around the world that increased carbon dioxide emissions are the primary cause. The burning of fossil fuels has raised global temperatures and aggravated heat waves, fires and floods in the United States and Europe. Those are irrefutable facts but not to the climate deniers.
The so-called climate hoax started gaining momentum in the 1990s after the U.S. and other nations signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the first major worldwide effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Opponents of the findings about the dangers from carbon dioxide emissions quickly mobilized. That April, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote an influential opinion piece that climate change was an “imaginary enemy” and temperatures would be “about the same” in a century.
The New York Times reported that in response to the Kyoto Protocol, the oil industry planed a multi-million dollar campaign to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media, and other key audiences.” InsideClimate News also found that Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, but the company knew it would lose money and public support if the world understood the dangers of climate change.
In April 2016, the United States signed the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, and President Barack Obama committed the United States to contributing $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund. On June 1, 2017, trump ended the U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement claiming it would “undermine” the U.S. economy, and put the U.S. “at a permanent disadvantage.”
In another ruthless disregard for facts, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently proposed to repeal its landmark 2009 finding that greenhouse gases pose a threat to the public. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said that repealing an Obama regulation that deemed greenhouse gases as a threat to the world, “will be the largest deregulatory action in the history of America.”
The EPA finding will be used to justify canceling climate regulations, especially rules governing the auto industry that have significant environmental and economic ramifications.
The Energy Department, and its handpicked, pro-fossil fuel “experts,” have claimed that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet. The lies are all part of a concerted and coordinated effort to roll back climate regulations that have been called for by the petrochemical industry.
In turning facts upside down, the Energy Department report determined that sea level rise is not accelerating; that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be good for plant growth; and that computer models used to predict global warming tend to exaggerate future temperature increases.
The trump administration has steamrolled ahead on an insidious plan to “drill, baby, drill” and to increase oil and gas production, regardless of the tremendous effects it will have on climate.
Most recently, the trump administration announced new tariffs as part of a trade deal with the European Union. Lost in the backslapping and buried in the agreement was a provision that could more than triple the amount of oil and gas America sells to the European Union and further harm efforts to stop climate change.
Under the trade deal, the 27-country bloc will buy $250 billion in energy resources from the United States every year through the end of trump’s term. The EU currently buys $70 billion in energy, mainly in the form of crude oil and liquefied natural gas.
The deal will have a large impact on European efforts to counter climate change and reduce emissions. The European Union is the leading importer of Chinese-made solar panels, is rapidly increasing renewable energy sources and has adopted a law to have renewable energy sources make up at least 42.5 percent of its energy consumption by 2030, up from a quarter currently.
Those goals would very likely fall apart under the trump deal.
Likewise, Japan and South Korea have pledged to make their economies carbon-neutral by 2050. But the recent trade deal with the U.S. also includes a major expansion of U.S. energy imports.
Vaccine Attacks
Trump’s lies about the impact of climate change mirror his 2016, 2020 and 2024 campaigns that capitalized on his supporters’ opposition and skepticism about vaccines. His base has been especially critical of any vaccine mandates such as the rules imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic even though COVID-19 vaccines have been given to more than 270 million Americans and are estimated to have saved millions of lives.
Trump has never been a big fan of vaccines, In 2007 he repeated the totally debunked theory of a link between autism and childhood vaccines. In 2015, trump said that he had never had a flu shot.
“I don’t like the idea of injecting bad stuff into your body, which is basically what they do,” trump said.
In the 2024 campaign, trump aimed at undermining the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump claimed that Kennedy was not being truthful about his position on vaccines. Kennedy quit the presidential race and trump subsequently named him as secretary of health of human services. Kennedy remains a strong vaccine skeptic and trump has kept in step.
“I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate,” trump said in a 2024 campaign stop in Waukesha, Wis.
Vaccine denial flies in the face of the fact that tens of millions of lives have been saved and the medical and scientific evidence is overwhelming that the benefits of vaccines far outweigh the risks.
The decline of public trust in vaccination didn’t start with Kennedy or trump and goes back many years, based on a series of issues involving health and vaccines.
Especially influential was a delayed vaccine schedule proposed by California pediatrician Robert Sears in his 2007 book, “The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision For Your Child.” The mainstream medical community has largely rejected delayed vaccinations but many parents have chosen not to have their children vaccinated. Large studies have shown that the majority of children in the United States are not currently vaccinated on schedule and that parents who delay or refuse vaccine doses are more likely to have vaccine safety concerns.
The roots of the anti-vaccine conspiracy can be traced back as far as 1955 with the so-called “Cutter Incident.” Experiences involving vaccines have led to greater federal monitoring but also have generated conspiracy theories.
At the time, some batches of polio vaccine that were given to the public contained live polio virus, even though they had passed required safety testing. More than 250 cases of polio were attributed to vaccines produced by Cutter Laboratories. The vaccine was recalled as soon as cases of polio were detected. The Bayer pharmaceutical company bought Cutter Laboratories in 1974.
The Cutter Incident led to the creation of a better system of government oversight and regulating vaccines. After the government improved the process, polio vaccinations resumed in the fall of 1955.
In the 1980s, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was created, after lawsuits against vaccine companies and health care providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce U.S. vaccination rates. The program uses scientific evidence to determine whether a vaccine might be the cause of an illness or injury, and provides compensation to individuals found to have been harmed by a vaccine.
Concerns over the safety of vaccines again was fueled by the discovery that from 1955 to 1963, an estimated 10 percent to 30 percent of polio vaccines administered in the U.S. were contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40). The virus came from monkey kidney cell cultures used to make polio vaccines at that time. After the contamination was discovered, the U.S. government established testing requirements to verify that all new lots of polio vaccines were free of SV40. No vaccines used today contain SV40 virus.
In 1976, vaccinations used to fight swine flu were found to have a small risk of a serious neurological disorder called Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). The increased risk was approximately 1 additional case of GBS for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vaccine. Federal health officials stopped using the vaccine after more than 40 million people were vaccinated against swine flu. Officials decided that the small chances of an association of GBS with the vaccine, required stopping immunization until the issue could be explored.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) conducted a thorough scientific review of this issue in 2003 and concluded that people who received the 1976 swine influenza vaccine had an increased risk for developing GBS. Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continually monitors the safety of seasonal and pandemic flu vaccines. Possible safety problems are discussed by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
In 1998, concern was raised after some research showed that hepatitis B vaccinations might be linked with multiple sclerosis (MS). The link has not been found in the large body of research that has been done since that time. In 2002, the Institute of Medicine thoroughly reviewed all available evidence and concluded that there is no link between hepatitis B vaccination and MS.
In 1998, the FDA approved RotaShield vaccine, the first vaccine to prevent rotavirus gastroenteritis. Shortly after the vaccine was licensed, some infants who were vaccinated developed intussusception, a rare type of bowel obstruction that occurs when the bowel folds in on itself. CDC quickly recommended that use of the vaccine be suspended and immediately started two emergency investigations to find out if receiving RotaShield vaccine was causing some of the cases of intussusception.
The investigations showed that RotaShield vaccine caused intussusception in some healthy infants younger than 12 months of age who normally would be at low risk for this condition. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices withdrew its recommendation to vaccinate infants with RotaShield® vaccine, and the manufacturer voluntarily withdrew RotaShield from the market in October 1999.
An increased risk of narcolepsy (a chronic sleep disorder) was found after vaccination with Pandemrix, a monovalent 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccine that was used in several European countries during the H1N1 influenza pandemic. The risk was initially found in Finland, and then some other European countries also detected an association.
Pandemrix is manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline in Europe but was never licensed for use in the United States. In 2014, the CDC found that the vaccination was not associated with an increased risk for narcolepsy.
Dire Effects
A June 14 report by the Lancet had dire predictions of the impacts of trump’s health policies on the nation. It said the trump administration has targeted the American scientific enterprise, “an engine of research and innovation that has thrummed for decades.” It has slashed or frozen budgets at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA and thousands of researchers have been fired or defunded.
The report noted that the government has become a world leader in science and cutting-edge advances in health that have reduced deaths from chronic diseases, cut motor vehicle fatalities and eradicated once-fatal diseases like polio.
“However, despite this remarkable success, President Donald Trump and his administration are dismantling the country’s health research infrastructure,” the Lancet reported.
The administration is also targeting universities, where most of the nation’s health-related research occurs
“A climate of fear has descended on academia, with many engaging in anticipatory obedience — taking pre-emptive steps not yet required by law to placate the administration and keep federal dollars flowing,” the report found.
The Lancet reported on six major impacts of trump polices on health research including:
Access has been reduced to data, making it difficult for investigators, health professionals and public health department to design and conduct important studies.
Second, disruptions in health research will inevitably delay scientific progress and slow the production of new evidence for practitioners, policy makers, and patients.
“The gravest setbacks will occur to research topics vilified by the administration, such as racial-ethnic health disparities, LGBTQ+ health, reproductive health, vaccines, and climate science. It will take years, if ever, to restart stalled projects,” the Lancet reported.
Third, ideologically-driven censorship of federal data and research findings could weaken public confidence in the objectivity and independence of health research.
Fourth, the trump administration is thinning the US workforce for health research.
“The prospect of a career in health research is becoming less appealing in the USA. The so-called brain drain has begun; US scientists and prospective students are already moving overseas to pursue their careers in freedom,” the report noted.
Fifth, the government’s “America First” approach and withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) will impede collaboration between US health researchers and international colleagues, limit the exchange of scientists, and narrow the network of collaborators available to US researchers.
Sixth, the assault on science will erode public confidence in health research.
“Many Americans — and powerful leaders in the new administration — have embraced conspiracy theories, weakened confidence in scientists and public health research, and castigated universities as elitist, disconnected institutions,” the Lancet found. “While the Trump administration has committed to “making America healthier,” its actions to destabilize the research enterprise could stall, if not reverse, efforts to improve population health.”