From nuclear security to education, the Trump administration’s cuts are dangerous | Opinion

Late last week, the Trump administration showed itself to be stupidly dangerous with nuclear weapons and then tried to make the country even dumber by using a Supreme Court ruling against the nation’s public schools and universities, distorting the work of Martin Luther King Jr. during Black History Month to do so.

The administration recently fired hundreds of employees responsible for the upkeep of our nuclear weapons. Yes. The man voters put in charge of the most powerful nation on Earth got rid of people charged with ensuring nothing goes wrong with the most powerful weapons on Earth.

Then the administration had trouble finding those workers to un-fire them because it lacked their personal contact information. National Nuclear Security Administration officials terminated a number of employees last week then sent workers an email the next day that read, “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”

The United States of America has thousands of nuclear weapons, more than any other country but Russia. Even when we’ve had enough people working on our nuclear systems, we’ve had close calls that could have caused widespread death and destruction.

Led by Elon Musk, an un-elected, unvetted uber-billionaire, the Trump administration potentially created another close call because it doesn’t understand what the heck it is doing.

This isn’t a time to mince words. What Trump, Musk and others did was stupid. Dangerous.

While the administration scrambled to put our nuclear deterrent back together again last Friday, it also decided to issue a bombshell of a letter. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has decided that all race-based and “race-conscious” policies are now illegal, including race-neutral ones that might be interpreted as race-conscious. Every college and university must get rid of those policies or lose federal funding. The directive also applies to K-12 schools.

This could affect scholarships designated to increase the number of poor Black students in college and help for poor white kids who need school lunch or Pell grants. The Trump administration wants to stop students from voluntarily having their own “graduation” in addition to the one the school hosts for everyone. Professors and teachers would have to rethink how honest we want to be about this country’s ugly racial history or inadvertently say something that might run afoul of Trump’s edict. It feels like an attempt to implement a “Lost Cause” propaganda movement in 21st century America.

What’s particularly egregious is the administration’s use of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as justification. This administration has distorted that iconic anti-discrimination law to root in bigotry, as well as a 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard University and Chapel Hill that removed race from admissions processes. The Trump administration has decided that court ruling applies to everything. That’s despite even the plaintiffs in that case saying the ruling applies only to admissions.

Trump, Musk and company have decided they know best, that there’s no need for debate in a supposed democracy of more than 330 million people. Checks and balances be damned.

We are becoming the plutocracy we’ve counseled other nations to not allow themselves to become.

Presidents Day protests in many U.S. cities showed that more of us are awakening to this perilous reality as a broad array of policies are in jeopardy from farm subsidies to cancer research. But the attack on education is particularly disturbing.

It’s an attempt to effectively make Trump king-like, if not king: He decides what we get to think or study. We must fall in line or be punished.

This is a hair-on-fire moment, but most Americans are responding as though they are at the salon getting a monthly trim. That’s despite the U.S. morphing into the rich man Jesus warned us about.

This isn’t how a healthy democracy operates. Countries that operate this way aren’t democracies at all.

If this were happening elsewhere, it would be easy to see. But too many of us are blinded by political infighting and the myth that the United States is destined to always get better, stronger.

Our history has taught us the folly of that thinking. Maybe that’s why the Trump administration is attacking education. It doesn’t want us to think, only comply.

More of us better wake up — and soon — before we lose everything we swear we hold dear.