Page 553 - Demo

Post-Pandemic547reelected, we couldn%u2019t imagine how much damage he%u2019d be able to do to the country as a whole, and to the institution of government in particular. So, we were pleased when Biden dropped out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris led the Democratic Party ticket. In fact, Lynn made two donations to her campaign, $500 each time.Besides Trump, radical right-wing leaders were also doing well in many other countries. As a result, racist, bigoted, sexist, and antiimmigrant rhetoric was on the rise world-wide. We certainly understood that such attitudes had existed long before Donald Trump arrived on the scene, but he was instrumental in validating such negative thinking and behavior%u2014and in allowing it to become a mainstream political and social movement. The U.S. Supreme Court had recently overturned some regulations that were the basis for the modern administrative state, which would allow federal rules that had been in place for decades to be challenged, which would radically change how the federal bureaucracy functioned. The Court also ruled that presidents had a great deal of immunity from prosecution for various actions taken while in office, something most analysts condemned as being significantly beyond what was constitutional. Immediately after this ruling, the four court cases currently underway against Trump were thrown into turmoil, and it was now guaranteed that none would reach a conclusion prior to the election. Various right-wing think tanks were gleefully planning what could be accomplished during a future Trump presidency, and it was frightening. For example, the conservative Heritage Foundation released a blueprint, called Project 2025, that contained a wish list of more than 900 pages. It called for firing thousands of nonpolitical civil servants and replacing them with Republican loyalists who would do the President%u2019s bidding, greatly expanding the power of the president, dismantling various federal agencies such as the Department of Education, chipping away at church-state separation, radically changing the immigration system, and implementing sweeping tax cuts for the wealthy.Overseas, Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, was continuing to destroy its sovereign neighbor of Ukraine, despite world-