The Wrecking of Reckoning

January 26, 2025

“Eye of the heron” (1/25/25)

And so it begins….

If you haven’t met me, or would even like to, the parts of me that seem to work best go back and forth between reporting and activism. I have handsome journalism awards on my walls and window ledges, including a dangerously heavy crystal obelisk from the Washington State Bar Association (legal reporting). But independent journalism rarely pays well and, for years-long stretches, I’ve worked for non-profit public watchdog organizations who need writers and researchers.

During those periods I was often invited to give testimony and/or join committees created to reform or improve government performance on thorny topics that I’d investigated (i.e. water and air pollution, hazardous and radioactive waste handling, police accountability). I’ve testified before both houses of Congress, presented to entities like the Health Physics Society, the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine), and served on federal advisory committees to Health & Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. I’ve been fortunate to work with and learn from exceptional scientists and public servants. I’ve won and lost battles for reform and sometimes the losses (like this one ending an intensive effort to bring medical screening to people exposed to high levels of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests) are bitter.

Win or lose, at least the arguments could be waged within rational boundaries—the constraints of reason, anchored in evidence and weighted toward the public interest. It is by no means perfect. As long as there are public works there will always be a wedge of public corruption on the pie chart, but at least in my experience it’s been the exception, not the rule.

After writing his book The Fifth Risk (2018), about Donald Trump’s purposeful dismissal of governmental expertise, the acclaimed non-fiction author, Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Moneyball, Liar’s Poker, etc.) actually began campaigning with other prominent writers to share the stories of invaluable public servants. These are professionals whose collective expertise is the largely unseen brain trust for our highly complex and technology-dependent society. They are not elected. You will not see them on national television and may only hear about them, anonymously, during derisive right-wing broadcast rants against “the deep state,” if you’re into that sort of thing.

Beyond ‘owning the libs’ there is no unifying vision for the Trump movement. The problem he and his devoted followers face is not so much that millions of us don’t trust or believe him. It’s that, ultimately, nature doesn’t believe him. And he can’t force nature to believe him. Whether or not the arc of the human universe bends toward justice, nature ultimately delivers on what’s true.

Three questions

With the second coming of Trumpism, we are swiftly moving to a different place, where virtuous expertise is for chumps and actual public service is cause for suspicion. Through all the cynical, fabulist bullshit, the rage-tweeting, the seedy merch and crypto peddling, we are witnessing, almost hour-by-hour, the attempted knee-capping of civil society. The attack on science, expertise and reality itself is the worst poison of Trumpism because of the lasting damage it can do. Trump’s flippant dismissal of climate change science is tragic enough for the biosphere as a whole. But his mock-the-messengers approach to fending off the warnings of climate scientists and scientific organizations is being received as a threat to their livelihoods and, with it, their invaluable work.

A week of this has passed and I have questions for Trump voters, especially the ones flying the largest flags.

You want good people in government? Tell me how the recruiting for that is going to work when well-qualified candidates get the not-so-subtle message their findings and professional opinions will be suppressed if they don’t comport with what a president demands to hear.

You want the best and the brightest (perhaps your son or daughter) to do research on cancer or infectious diseases? You know, to save lives, perhaps even yours? Tell me how that’s going to work when their research funds risk being cut off if they advance new vaccines or try to assess variations in disease rates among disparate racial genomes.

Would that be too woke? Can’t happen?

Tell that to the scores of researchers at the National Institutes of Health (and universities that rely on government grants for health research) who last week got the jolt that the new administration has canceled health research meetings, ordered a “communications pause,” and a halt to journal submissions.

Just within the past 48 hours (late Friday night) Trump unlawfully fired 12 Inspectors Generals (IGs), the experts who independently audit federal operations to foster efficiency and prevent “fraud and abuse in the programs administered by each agency.” For example, as Washington’s largest recipient of federal funds (now close to $3 billion annually) the cleanup of wastes from past plutonium production at the Department of Energy’s Hanford site near the Tri-Cities has been subject to numerous IG audits. These include investigations aimed at protecting workforce whistleblowers who’ve come forward over the years with crucial concerns not only about cost but about workplace safety in one of the most hazardous work environments on the planet.

The obvious sensitivity about the IGs is they are accorded independence. Independence is an inherently threatening concept for team Trump because the truth and truth-tellers are so frequently in conflict with the cruel and absurd messaging (see Springfield, OH) Trump engages in to exercise his demons and fire up his base.

This is not carelessness. It’s a domineering stroke of audacity, to suppress and radically reconfigure reality to accommodate the dear leader. (It’s no wonder Trump throws shade at European democracies and, in his words “fell in love” with North Korea’s murderous dictator Kim Jong Un.)

California’s imaginary “spigot”

Before he flew to California on Friday, Trump was already using a smoldering tragedy to score political points against his perceived opposition. With the heavy (‘these people are morons’) tone that excites MAGA world, he was accusing California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrats in California government in general—of turning off a “spigot” of badly needed water from northern California that (he alleged) could have been used to quell the devastating, wind-whipped Los Angeles area fires. It was and is a totally bogus accustion. As the New York Times carefully laid out in an article the day before Trump’s trip, additional water from northern California would have made no difference in the battle against the LA fires. None.

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