Trump's 500 Days: America Didn't Vote For This
The desecration of the White House is not just another Trump travesty. It's a symbol of his destruction of America's power and principles. A new book details the damage done.
“Don’t it only seem to go, you don’t what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone,” Joni Mitchell sang nearly six decades ago in her hit Big Yellow Taxi. After 500 days of Donald Trump’s second presidential term and with America’s 250th birthday a month away, the refrain from her 1970 classic could just as well be the nation’s anniversary theme.
A new book that catalogues how the Trump regime has damaged the country, undermined its democracy and values, and weakened its world role shows why. Betrayed: America Didn’t Vote For This isn’t a polemic. It’s a powerful recitation of facts that portray a presidency of unparalleled destructiveness.
Edited by Ira Shapiro and Anne Kim, Betrayed integrates the analysis of four dozen former government officials, military officers, academics and scholars of all political stripes. The contributors include experts as well as policymakers who have served in, as well as analyzed the actions of Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
As editors, Shapiro and Kim know the issues and their politics well. Shapiro is a former senior trade official, congressional staffer, lawyer, and author of several books including a Pulitzer Prize-nominated study of the Senate. Kim, a journalist and lawyer, is a former Hill staffer, think tank analyst, and widely published author.
Concise, well-written and documented, Betrayed is not only a tale of Trump’s failures but also their consequences. It ranges across the international, economic, political, constitutional, legal, environmental and societal landscape, describing the debris from the wrecking ball battering the foundations of America’s security and historic success.
Betrayed’s dozen chapter titles could be the subheads of a prosecutor’s indictment. One day, some may well be. From assaulting alliances and gutting the US role in the world to tariff-driven economic turmoil at home, the facts that establish Trump’s failures continue to accumulate. That said, the book’s compilation is no less appalling.
To the authors’ credit, Betrayed goes beyond a policy wonk’s recitation of his regime’s mindlessly self-inflicted macro political and economic mess. Citing multiple studies, official statistics, and industry data, Shapiro and Kim portray the price being paid by Americans as well as the future toll facing them as US competitiveness erodes.
A sampler makes the case: a New York Fed analysis that American consumers and companies have paid 90 percent of Trump’s tariffs; in farm country a 46 percent spike in bankruptcies as costs climb; declining manufacturing jobs from coast-to-coast; and, driven by Trump’s budget, a $3.4 trillion boost in the deficit in the decade ahead.
The costs for Americans are by no means only economic. From the “sicker, unhealthier” country emerging as a result of the regime’s faux science to the rollback of environmental regulations, Trump’s attacks on health care, insurance, universities, research, and government’s basic functions literally threaten the nation’s welfare.
Actions are one thing, ambitions another, and Betrayed offers evidence on the latter warranting Americans’ alarm. Immigration sweeps that pervert the law and due process; unrelenting assault on the press, persecutions disguised as investigations: the book’s facts evoke an authoritarian playbook that to date only lacks show trials.
Betrayed unambiguously describes the emerging threat to the democracy. Trump’s actions that substantiate its accompanying warning speak for themselves—orders to his party minions to push gerrymandering; attempts to seize control of elections from the states; efforts to disenfranchise millions; and false claims of fraud nonstop.
“Trump has worked relentlessly to undermine public confidence in our elections,” Shapiro and Kim assert, and they acknowledge, with troubling corrosive effect.
He is waging “a frontal attack on the foundation of American democracy: the right to vote. His success would mark the collapse of the first line of defense in a march toward authoritarianism.”
Facts are stubborn things, John Adams famously wrote. So is the calendar.
Betrayed is well-timed reading for Americans who will vote in November. It is also a resource— a trove of facts that are detailed, documented, and dissected—for candidates, wherever their constituencies, whose campaigns must confront the Trump regime head-on.
That task in crucial. Shapiro and Kim address it well.
“We have great confidence in the talents, energies, and potential of the American people. But the rebuilding of the United States can occur only after recognizing the full scope of the damage that is being done and taking the necessary actions to stop it in its tracks.”