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Trump and His Feral Crew of Wreckers Want to Kill America’s Future
The House budget is the Make America Immobile Act. Trump is doing his best to freeze things in place: on behalf of oil companies that want to keep pumping oil, on behalf of automakers that want to keep churning out SUVs.
May 23, 2025
Credit where due: I am ever impressed by the feral energy of U.S. President Donald Trump and his crew, who are able to do an extraordinary amount of damage every single damned day. And somehow their energetic cruelty seems to drain my own reserves: I want to stay in bed. But we fight as best we can, and so here’s my assessment of one dire day, and more importantly what we still might be able to do about it.
It began, early Thursday morning, with House passage of the budget bill, which somehow managed to get even worse in the wee hours. Among other things, a single sentence was amended in such a way as to potentially kill off most of the rooftop solar industry in the U.S. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin explains:
While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”
That arcane piece of language was enough to knock 37% off the share price of SunRun today, the biggest rooftop installer in the country. And it was only a cherry on the top of this toxic sundae, which would essentially repeal all of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Nuclear power gets a little bit of a reprieve, and of course ethanol (Earth’s dumbest energy source) does great. But it’s a wipeout far greater than anyone expected even a few weeks ago. Here’s how Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins and his team at REPEAT (Rapid Energy Policy Evaluation and Toolkit) sum it up:
- Increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 0.5 billion metric tons per year in 2030 and more than 1 billion metric tons per year in 2035.
- Raise U.S. household and business energy expenditures by $25 billion annually in 2030 and over $50 billion in 2035.
- Increase average U.S. household energy costs by roughly $100-160 per household per year in 2030 and roughly $270-415 per household per year in 2035.
- Reduces cumulative capital investment in U.S. electricity and clean fuels production by $1 trillion from 2025-2035.
- Imperil a total of $522 billion in announced but pending investments in U.S. clean energy supply and manufacturing.
- Reduce annual sales of electric vehicles by roughly 40% in 2030 and end America’s battery manufacturing boom.
- Substantially slow electricity capacity additions, raising national average retail electricity rates and monthly household electricity bills by about 9% in 2030—and as much as 17% in some states (including Texas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania).
In the midst of all this, the Senate—ignoring its parliamentarian—bowed to the wishes of the auto industry and told California (and the 11 states that had followed it) that it couldn’t demand the phaseout of internal combustion vehicles by the middle of the next decade. (This is among other things federalism in reverse).
“Attacking these waivers will devastate our ability to advance the use of electric vehicles in the state,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press conference after the vote, flanked by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials. “We won’t let it happen, not when we’re facing an air pollution and climate crisis that’s getting worse by the day.”
The 1970 Clean Air Act permits California to receive waivers from the Environmental Protection Agency that enable the state to enact clean air regulations that go further than federal limits.
Oh, and then at day’s end the Department of Homeland Security told Harvard that 27% of its student body couldn’t study there beginning in the fall because they came from foreign countries.
If you add it up, this is all an effort to keep America precisely where it is now. It’s the Make America Immobile Act. Trump is doing his best to freeze things in place: on behalf of oil companies that want to keep pumping oil, on behalf of automakers that want to keep churning out SUVs. That depends, among other things, on shutting down research at universities, because they keep coming up with things that point us in a different direction, be it temperature readings demonstrating climate change or new batteries that enable entirely different technologies. If America lived alone on this planet that would be truly terrible; luckily for everyone else, there are other places (China, and the E.U.) that are not making the same set of stupid decisions. But if this stands it will kill the future for America.
It will also, of course, kill the present. I’m not bothering to talk about the deep cruelty of the Medicaid cuts (and the fact that they will destroy America’s rural hospital system). There’s also the not-small matter of the intense attacks on transgender people the bill contains. And I won’t bother gassing on about the utter grossness of handing over yet more money to the richest among us. (The top 0.1% of earners gain $390,000 a year on average, while Americans making less than $17,000 lose on average about $1,000. This is, among other things, Christianity in reverse).
So, our job is to do what we can to make it… less worse. The U.S. Senate still has to pass its own version of the bill. Given the GOP majority, they’ll pass something very bad. Perhaps, at Trump’s urging, they’ll rush it through in the next 24 hours; more likely it will take a little longer. We need to put as much pressure as we can on that process, in order to take out the most egregious parts of the bill. Here’s what Third Act sent out on Thursday, and here’s the link we want you to use to register your opposition with Senators. It comes from our very able partners at Solar United Neighbors, who have done as much as anyone in America to help people build clean energy. Fill it out so you can get a call script and the numbers to use. Again, here’s the link. If you want a little inspiration, check out Will Wiseman’s video of rural Americans talking about one particular part of the IRA that’s helping change their lives.
I’m not going to bother pretending that this is guaranteed to work. The bad guys here are riding hard and fast, and they’re trying to shock and cow us into submission. But—don’t go easy. If they can summon the feral energy to wreck the country, we can summon the humane energy to try and save it.
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'No Legal Basis,' Says Harvard After Trump Declares Tax-Exempt Status Will Be Taken Away
"Such an unprecedented action would endanger our ability to carry out our educational mission," said a spokesperson for the Ivy League school.
May 02, 2025
Harvard University pushed back forcefully Friday after President Donald Trump declared in a social media post that "we are going to be taking away Harvard Tax Exempt Status," adding that is "what they deserve."
Trump's comment came just hours after Democratic senators sent a letter demanding a probe into whether the administration is acting illegally by trying to compel the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to yank the university's tax exemption.
Trump's post did not specify whether the IRS, the entity that has the power to remove an organization's tax-exempt status, is opting to remove Harvard's designation. Multiple outlets noted they got no immediate response from the IRS when they asked the agency for comment.
"There is no legal basis to rescind Harvard's tax-exempt status," a university spokesperson said in a statement, according toPolitico. "Such an unprecedented action would endanger our ability to carry out our educational mission."
It is illegal for the president, vice president, or other top officials to request, indirectly or directly, that the IRS audit a particular taxpayer.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and multiple other Democratic senators on Friday asked the Acting Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) to probe whether the IRS has received illegal pressure from the administration when it comes to Harvard, and to provide information about whether the agency is looking into other entities at the direction of the president or other top officials.
"It is both illegal and unconstitutional for the IRS to take direction from the president to target schools, hospitals, churches, or any other tax-exempt entities as retribution for using their free speech rights," the senators wrote in a letter dated Friday to the Acting TIGTA Heather Hill.
"It is further unconscionable that the IRS would become a weapon of the Trump administration to extort its perceived enemies, but the actions of the president and his operatives have now made this fear a reality. We request that you review whether the president or his allies have taken any step to direct or pressure the IRS to take politically-motivated actions regarding the tax-exempt status of the president's political targets," they continued.
Loss of tax-exempt status, something that would only typically occur after an audit process that allows the university opportunity to defend itself and appeal, would be extremely significant for the university. Tax-exempt status means the school does not pay federal income tax on charitable contributions to the school and other income. It also means that donations to the school are tax-exempt for those who make them.
Trump mused publicly on April 16 that Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status, after the university's president said the institution would not comply with a list of policy demands from the president, that included, according to the Harvard Crimson, derecognizing pro-Palestine student groups and auditing academic programs for viewpoint diversity. The pushback from Harvard prompted the administration to freeze over $2 billion in federal funding for the school.
That same week, it was reported that the IRS was making plans to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status.
In response to Trump's bullying tactics, Harvard sued the administration, calling the freeze on funding unlawful and asking the court to restore it.
The tangling between Harvard and the Trump administration is part of a broader wave of scrutiny by the White House on higher education.
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Pro-Semitism as an Antidote to Bigotry and Bombing
Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot and Israelis were being eradicated and driven towards expulsion.
Apr 27, 2025
From a recent peaceful student rally at Columbia University came a chant that summed up their protest: "FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND DEAD AND YOU’RE ARRESTING US INSTEAD."
This is the bloody omnipresence that the co-belligerent Trumpsters and their fearful university leaders, whom Trump has targeted for submission, are relegating to the shadows of the dying Hell in Netanyahu’s genocidal mass murder of Gaza’s Palestinian families.
A survey, reported in Harper’s Index (March 2025), reported that 49% of the children in Gaza “wanted to die,” while 96% of them “believed they would soon die.”
Instead of that annihilation’s intensification, with U.S. weaponry and unconditional U.S. government backing under both parties in Washington, D.C. being the subject of action, both Trump and the president of Harvard agreed that the big concern is “anti-semitism” against Jews at Harvard and other universities. Both men kept referring to such “anti-semitism” against Jews with no evidence, no examples, and no other substantiation.
Today’s operating “anti-semitism” is “ The Other Anti-Semitism,” to use the title of a lecture in Israel years ago by Jim Zogby. The “Other Anti-Semitism” is expressed lethally and daily by F-16s, Helicopter Gunships, and Tank Artillery from Israel’s regime against defenseless Palestinian Semites. Netanyahu’s genocidal policy, since the mysteriously collapsed Israeli border security apparatus on October 7 enabling the Hamas attack, is driven by the “no food, no water, no medicine, no electricity, no fuel,” for Gaza policy. After his truce-breaking in early March, blocking trucks carrying humanitarian aid, he is pushing more Palestinians into starvation.
Domestically, it is more than grotesque to describe Harvard University President Alan Garber parroting Trump’s accusations of anti-semitism against Jews on campus without mentioning that the students, including Jewish students, were protesting there and on other campuses and pressing for an end to the mass slaughter, a ceasefire, emergency humanitarian aid and a peaceful resolution of the conflict. In short, PRO-SEMITISM.
Instead of receiving praise, these protesters – Palestinian Americans and Jewish Americans in the lead, with many others – are beset upon by police, arrested, harassed, banished from their campuses, beat up (at UCLA), expelled, their events canceled, and, to rub salt into the wounds, labeled as “anti-semites.”
Leading Jewish commentators have reviled Trump – the hypocrite – for brandishing an unfounded anti-semitism smear as the laser beam for his illegal demands and freezing federal grants to these universities. They see his exploiting ploy as being cynically driven to silence or divide his opponents.
Nonetheless, until Trump demanded turning Harvard into his fiefdom, provoking Harvard to finally sue the federal government, Garber’s public communications were groveling to Trump. Especially those adopting Trump’s wild claims of anti-semitism thus further enabling Trump’s dictates.
Here is Garber on March 31, 2025 – “We fully embrace the important goal of combating anti-semitism…I have experienced anti-semitism directly even while serving as president.” Why no substantiation? Because he and others like former president Lawrence Summers, have accepted a definition of anti-semitism that mostly equates criticism of Israeli government policies (e.g., Netanyahu) with anti-semitism.
Mr. Garber has not spoken out against the Gaza genocide, or the U.S. backing it while violating six federal laws (Garber is a lawyer). His public statements reveal his own thinly veiled anti-semitism against Palestinian Arab Semites.
Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot and Israelis were being eradicated and driven towards expulsion, would Mr. Garber have remained silent? Would he have labeled pro-Israeli rights advocates on campus as “anti-semites”? He needs to be educated by Jewish Voice for Peace, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and Rabbis for Human Rights.
He also needs to confront his fears and demonstrate moral courage against large complaining corporate donors, with many camouflaged axes to grind, including their ludicrous belief that Harvard has long been a hotbed of radical Marxism against capitalism.
He needs to reverse actions against faculty studying the Middle East or collaborating on public health issues with a Palestinian university. He should find ways to exit his costly hiring of a lobbying firm and lawyers close to Trump in an attempt to appease Trump. Doesn’t he know that Trump is further goaded on seeing such weakness?
He could start his self-rehabilitation consonant with his powerful position in the world of academia by having coffee with a similarly fearful Dean Goldberg of the Harvard Law School. (See, my April 4, 2025 column,
When the Dean of Harvard Law School Went Dark). They can start their reflections by absorbing Aristotle’s enduring insight, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others,” and apply it to their present predicaments imposed by a fascist dictatorship moving into a police state shredding all our basic civil liberties and civil rights.
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