Trump had no voter mandate to launch a wrecking ball into America

President Donald Trump has accomplished a lot in only a dozen weeks – upsetting the U.S. economy, wrecking America’s leadership role in the postwar western alliance, destabilizing the lives of elderly veterans, retirees, and countless civil servants who keep us safer.

The wrecking-ball of this new White House administration has been swinging wide and far – all of it condoned by a cowardly Congress that fears most of all what this man might do to them at next election.

We are now in April and there is much trouble. So deep and punishing has all this been, in fact, that Trump and the Republican geniuses around him could be sowing the seeds of their own ouster, as U.S. citizens are beginning to see the damage of this un-American mischief.

And the ousters won’t be limited to Washington. Even current state-level leaders who in their extremism have remained shamefully silent as Trump’s rampage are risking their jobs.

Americans did not vote to dismantle public services

The blizzard of Trump’s executive orders – which he signs for the news cameras with a self-regarding flourish at his desk – have already caused much damage. Yet he is unfazed by any criticism and seems to listen only to the most extremist advocates of “Project 2025” and apparently trusts none of his most senior advisers.

Trump’s personal devotion to international tariffs can be fathomed by no one but himself now. And he has reversed his own course on a dime, heedless of how he makes the U.S. look to Wall Street or the world.

His wrecking-ball has also been turned on America’s most important institutions, from U.S. research universities to Radio Free Europe. He insists that Ukraine started that awful war – somehow invading itself – and with not so much as a scowl toward his pal in the Kremlin, the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

All this should have a cost, and it shouldn’t be limited strictly to those Washington pols. Trump has presented a big dose of unearned political opportunity to his own domestic opposition. But will Democrats know what to do with it?

For now, we should all keep in mind there was no broad voter mandate from the November election for any of these grievous events:

● Sabotaging Social Security by fouling up its communication systems for citizens who depend upon it

● Eroding of the confidence of veterans in the VA.

● Obliterating the U.S. Agency for International Development, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

● Dismembering the post-W W II alliance that isolated Stalinist Russia, which has kept free nations free, and the larger world from blowing apart.

Tennessee leaders back Trump’s tariffs while Americans are hurting

The geniuses in today’s White House also had no plan or strategy for working the country out of the mess they’re making. The whole enterprise is based on letting a vengeful, wrathful old man take the lead - and giving him no benefit of pushback or stern counsel.

There are many examples now. On April 15, The New York Times reported there was apparently no smart plan for moving past this train-wreck: “Across the more than 400 federal agencies that regulate almost every aspect of American life, from flying in airplanes to processing poultry, Mr. Trump’s appointees are working with the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative headed by Elon Musk and also called DOGE, to launch a sweeping new phase in their quest to dismantle much of the federal government: deregulation on a mass scale.”

And let’s zero in on the internationally connected auto industry. Until the early 1980s, it didn’t matter much to most Tennesseans what Washington might do to the U.S. auto industry. But that all changed in 1983, when first Nissan and then General Motors and later Volkswagen came here and put Tennessee on a new map of the automotive industry and where cars and trucks are made across the world. Today, 140,000-plus Tennesseans are employed on these vehicle assembly lines and in the connected supply and support operations.

But no one in government is speaking up for these U.S. citizens affected by Trump’s knee-jerk tariff regime – neither of our U.S. senators nor our Gov. Bill Lee, who said he supports Trump’s tariffs policy (dreaming that automakers might someday build more production in Tennessee).

There will be a way to tell this searing story when it will count at election time. In Tennessee we will select a new governor, legislature and members of Congress next year. But will Democrats finally organize to tell it so it registers as a voting issue?

Possibly. Or not. Keel Hunt, a columnist for the USA Today Network in Tennessee, is the author of four books about Tennessee politics and working on a fifth on the long friendship between Senator Howard Baker and Tennessean publisher John Seigenthaler. Read more at Keel-Hunt.com .