On Monday, June 23, at least a thousand New Mexicans gathered outside the Western Governor’s Conference to protest public land policies championed by Trump cabinet secretaries inside the Eldorado Hotel in Santa Fe. A great mass of people holding clever signs flowed out of a nearby park and into the streets. Once in front of the hotel, we stopped and started to yell slogans at the front doors of the hotel where a line of state police guarded the doors. For two hours the chanting and cheering continued. “Not for sale” we shouted in unison, repeatedly. We were referring to republican schemes to sell federal land in the West.
According to those inside the hotel meeting rooms, our voices were loud enough to disrupt the meeting. People are angry that the Trump people want to sell national forest and BLM land and gradually close the national park system. This anger is rising nationally.
The Western Governors Association hosted Interior Secretary Doug Burgum who has proposed giving most of the national park system to the states and selling BLM lands. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was there to announce the end of the Roadless Rule that has protected millions of acres of wild country from industrialization.
Meanwhile Utah US Senator Mike Lee was in Washington promoting his idea to sell 250 million acres of Forest Service and BLM lands. This proposal and the obvious welcoming complicity of the Trump crowd to this unprecedented proposal was what drew the big angry crowd in Santa Fe. Ultimately, Mike Lee backed off and they took the land sell off out of the Trump bill, but only when powerful republicans said they would vote against the entire Trump agenda if they kept the land sales in the bill. Republicans ignore democrats and their concerns.
In any given moment it is easy to lose sight of the history being made around you. What seems somewhat normal today may be looked back upon as a pivotal moment in history. The big protest in Santa Fe, though little noticed by the national media, is part of a major shift in American behavior that has the right in America quietly concerned. People are speaking out. They are not obeying.
Americans at the public lands rally in Santa Fe and at the No Kings (5 million people) and other huge national rallies are reacting to Trump’s overreach and misread of his mandate from the 2024 election. Trump decided his narrow victory was a mandate to tear the federal government down, even as he offered no replacement for the thousands of programs, he and Elon Musk and Russ Voight attacked. From shutting down international disease control and anti-poverty programs that will result in the imminent deaths of millions of people, to shutting down federal support for food banks in the US and ending federal support for virtually all scientific research programs in the US including those researching the very health problems afflicting Donald Trump, the Trump attack on the government and science has angered Americans across the political spectrum. The administration’s detachment from the concern of voters has those voters alarmed.
Trump is a radical. He operates outside the rules and always has. As a real estate developer, he had a reputation for not paying contractors who worked on his properties and then inviting them to sue him with his teams of lawyers. He cheats on his taxes as revealed by his 35 felony convictions in New York State. Now he seems to select which court orders he wants to follow and which he wants to evade with fancy word games.
On the larger level, he and his team think their ideas about government are too important to be constrained by laws and the courts. They have special ideas that need to be implemented regardless of opposition, court actions, or his plunging poll numbers. He surrounds himself with like-minded people and dismisses those who disagree, often with condescension and condemnation. Trump thinks he can bully people and get his way. It probably usually works and has since he was a little boy. And in his trip through the China shop on the back of a big ugly bull, nothing is sacred. Trump builds nothing, he only tears down. He delights in firing people and ruining careers and institutions. He knows best and people who work for the government in whatever capacity are losers in his mind and easily dismissed.
Trump Attack on Science
There is a cultural divide between scientists, program managers, park rangers, public health experts, education specialists and the ultra-capitalist businesspeople who focus on their own wealth and the culture of wealth. Trump now has his chance to really hurt those government types now and he won’t waste the opportunity. We could conclude this is a culture war with Donald and the far right in Washington. He keeps referring to the “green new scam” which encompasses anything having to do with environmental science or environmental management, regardless of its scientific merits. Thus, the dismantling of NOAA, with serious consequences for the public (see current floods in Texas).
His leadership causes his cabinet secretaries to fall in line and help destroy agencies that they barely understand. Cuts to science programs will have serious long-term costs for Americans and for people who depend on our scientific leadership worldwide. But for Trump had Russ Voight, money spend on cancer research or national park management is money wasted because neither man understands what science is or what it does.
Now Trump is calling for zero funding for any research related to climate change. Period. This will shut down hundreds of studies being done by university and government scientists. Trump has attacked the National Science Foundation that provides millions in funding for a wide range of research. Voight and others have said the foundation is fraudulent and wasteful. Rebuilding those programs in the future will be difficult and the continuity of research will be a serious loss to society, all because of Trump’s ignorance about climate and his dislike of scientists.
When will this catastrophe we call Trump II end? Will it really run for three and a half more years? With daily disastrous decisions from Voight and Trump, we can only fear for our future and fear for children worldwide. Something must give.
