Edwin Eisendrath is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Alderman who hosts It’s The Democracy Stupid on Lincoln Square and a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. Subscribe to his Substack.
Governing matters. As we close this election cycle, let’s take a minute to step back from our barking politics and look instead at the governing outcomes Donald Trump and his Republican Congress have delivered for us over the past two years.
Pardons, Tariffs, and DOGE
On day one, Donald Trump pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists and began an unprecedented assault on the rule of law that continues to this day. He quickly imposed tariffs that cost Americans billions and sent inflation, which had been coming down, back up. When the Supreme Court declared those tariffs illegal, Trump began issuing refunds to corporations, effectively completing a huge transfer of money from Americans’ pockets to corporate bottom lines.
Instead of learning from this disaster, Trump imposed new tariffs, including punishing measures that hurt Americans and placed tremendous burdens on our friends in Canada. Throughout, companies that successfully curried Trump’s favor might receive exemptions. So began the corruption of our government for his personal gain—another practice that continues to this day.
Early on, he also invited Elon Musk to create DOGE and weaken our government in ways no foreign adversary could hope to accomplish. We now know that DOGE did not save taxpayers any money. But it did dismantle parts of the government that provided internal checks on waste, fraud, and abuse. Inspectors general, auditors, and talented career public servants were fired. So were employees responsible for ensuring that Musk’s companies delivered what they had promised under federal contracts.
To distract us from those self-serving cuts, DOGE also dismantled USAID. They knew we would focus on that because of the carnage we knew would result. More than 700,000 deaths are already attributable to those cuts. To this day, Trump continues to weaponize our empathy to hide his greed.
The DOGE Disaster Memory Hole
Don Moynihan is the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy Subscribe to his Can We Still Govern? Substack.
What was unclear at the time was that more than half of the employees DOGE fired were Black, per The Washington Post. That is hardly surprising. Early in his administration, Trump ended America’s multigenerational commitment to civil rights. Instead of protecting the civil rights of all Americans, he directed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to focus almost exclusively on alleged violations of the rights of white men.
ICE Terrorizes America
In Trump’s first year, with help from the Republican Congress, he built ICE into the largest domestic police force in America. He lowered hiring standards, rushed recruitment, and failed to provide adequate training. Then he sent these forces into our cities to terrorize entire communities. In Chicago, they used a Black Hawk helicopter in a raid on an apartment building. When Americans pushed back peacefully but resolutely, his forces threw tear gas canisters onto neighborhood streets and shot Americans. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered in Minneapolis. Their killers have not been brought to justice.
Almost immediately after taking office, Trump began rounding up immigrants. He was not hunting for violent criminals to make us safer. He was chasing numbers so he could claim the largest deportation campaign in history. Defying a federal judge’s orders, he flew his captives to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. So proud was his administration of this cruelty that he sent his then-Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, to the prison for a photo shoot.
A Death in Chicago and Why ICE Needs Civilian Oversight
This week, just after dropping his kids off at school, Silverio Villegas-González was killed by ICE officers in suburban Chicago. According to the Chicago Sun Times, ICE agents said they stopped the car as part of ‘targeted law enforcement activity.” The incident is described this way:
Military Purges, Venezuela Oil Grab, and Murders at Sea
Trump quickly purged the military’s senior leadership, demand loyalty oaths not to the nation, but to himself. And he installed Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, who would help make Trump’s children and Elon Musk major military contractors. Trump then used our armed forces to kill fishermen in the Caribbean and the Pacific and to take over the government of Venezuela.
With his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, now overseeing Venezuela, the country’s oil is being sold on the market, and the proceeds are flowing into a secret bank account originally established in Qatar. The transactions are secret. Even Congress does not know where the money is going. What we do know is that Venezuela’s elected leader continues to fight for democracy, while Trump keeps a puppet government in power that allows him to make secret use of the country’s oil wealth.
A Costly War with Iran
Then Trump launched a war in Iran. Unbelievably, he claims he did not anticipate that Iran would fight back. Our Arab allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—have all been attacked. Allies around the world, from France to Japan, were not consulted and have been left to absorb enormous energy costs. Iran’s terrible regime now has a new lease on life and a new weapon: control of the most strategic waterway on the planet, the Strait of Hormuz.
Once again, Americans are paying the price. Gasoline, oil, and diesel costs have skyrocketed, along with the price of everything transported by truck. Meanwhile, oil companies have posted record-breaking profits because of the war.
Russia, Russia, Russia
One more thing — even though even this leaves the list of his governing failures far short of comprehensive: Trump has allied himself with Russia in a war in which America supports the other side.
Congress, representing the American people, imposed sanctions on Russia and authorized arms sales and support for Ukraine. Trump has slow-walked those arms deliveries and waived sanctions on Russia. In return, Putin is waging a propaganda campaign to subvert our elections, using methods far more sophisticated than those he used to help Trump in 2016.
In just two years, Trump’s failure to govern well has torn America apart, made us poorer, and left us without allies in the world.
He could have done none of this without the full and vocal support of the Republican Congress. Together, they have perpetrated the most corrupt abuse of power America has ever seen. They have undermined the independence of many large corporations, brought major law firms to heel, and dictated admissions policies and even curricular choices at universities.
Trump has pushed American democracy to the wall.
The Hypocrisy Is the Point
When Britney Spears’ younger sister, Jamie Lynn, got pregnant at 16, Bill O’Reilly routinely assailed her parents on Fox News and slammed her as a “pinhead.” It was evidence of Hollywood’s moral rot, the godless left, the collapse of American values. There was a particular relish to it — the kind of gleeful condemnation that suggests Bill O. had been waiting years for some ingenue to make exactly this mistake.
But when our backs are to the wall, Americans are awesome.
Tuesday is democracy’s D-Day. It is the day we put Trump and his corrupt, greedy, hate-filled regime on the defensive.
Years ago, Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo gave us this famous line: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
This week, we are going to show ourselves and the world that we have met our liberators — and they are our neighbors, our fellow citizens, the extraordinary ordinary Americans.
Thank you, Mr. Eisendrath. Trump did not make any sense while speaking at the reflection pool. Yes he has failed in a big way. It’s my belief that the election today will probably prove that out. I go vote today. Straight democrats even on the down ballot.
Democrats must challenge improbable Republican wins by demanding hand recounts. Election Truth Alliance has built a toolkit for candidates to use to challenge questionable election results. I urge everyone to forward the link to their Democratic candidate in any competitive state or district. Here's the link;
https://electiontruthalliance.org/toolkit/