As Donald Trump nears completing six months in office, he’s followed through on multiple promises made during the 2024 campaign. Trump’s launched militaristic nationwide mass deportations, where masked ICE agents are abducting non-citizens, primarily people of color off the street, where even U.S. citizen children battling cancer and other diseases have been deported — clearly betraying his pledge to target dangerous criminals and “the worst of the worst.” Over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Trump deployed the U.S. military to Los Angeles to suppress angry protests that erupted against ICE agent’s brutal treatment of migrant workers.
The regime is also engaged in eliminating entire federal agencies, as it attacks Trump’s perceived enemies including media companies, law firms, universities and judges who ruled against the president’s executive orders. The DOJ has been directed to open vengeance-driven criminal investigations against former staff members, as Democratic mayors, U.S. House representatives and U.S. senators are arrested or physically assaulted.
Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Congress is on track to pass Trump’s federal budget bill that will be the largest transfer of wealth from working-class families to the ultra-wealthy, cutting $1 trillion in Medicaid and Medicare funds, while giving the wealthiest Americans record tax breaks. When enacted, some 17 million Americans will lose healthcare coverage and millions of poor families and children will lose access to SNAP program nutritional benefits. The pace of Trump regime assaults on the foundations of democracy are continuous and overwhelming, where polls now find Trump to be the most unpopular president in 70 years. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with best-selling author Sarah Kendzior, who examines how Trump’s erratic and cruel conduct is fraying American’s nerves, as she takes hope in Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary.
SARAH KENDZIOR: A lot of the things he’s done is just to create an environment of threat in which you’re never really sure whether these policies are going to be enacted or retracted. So you’re constantly on edge like, “Are we going to war with Iran? Are we not going to war with Iran? Are there going to be tariffs? Are there not going to be tariffs?” And so what that does is it kind of negates the American capacity to envision the future and to make plans in order to push back against all of these horrible policies.
The thing that frustrates me is that a lot of these policies were the same ones he ran on in 2016. They’re ones that his backers have supported for 40, 50 years. Through Project 2025 and other documents, this was all laid out. And so while the manner in which he behaves is very erratic, the general direction of all of this was completely predictable. It was always a crisis and it was not treated as one. And it’s just very frustrating to see that lost time and the poor people, innocent people, who are suffering because of it.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said. Thank you, Sarah. Most public opinion polls find that there’s little faith in the Democratic party leadership’s ability to effectively confront and challenge the Trump regime’s criminal behavior, as I and many see it. Where do you find hope in electoral politics today? Certainly Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic primary victory in New York City last week is a signal that many people in New York anyway are ready for a dramatic break with the past. Do you think we can extend that hope elsewhere around the country?
It’s all just one big gross group, often very nepotistically-tied that’s been in New York for a long time. So it’s very refreshing to see somebody like Mamdani win, spending a tiny fraction of the money coming in with policies that are going to benefit the public good. And of course, you see him viciously attacked, not just by Republicans, but by Democrats, by Democratic officials and on baseless grounds — inventing things that he said, trying to take the worst faith interpretation of everything that he does.
Being blatantly Islamophobic in a way that I really haven’t seen at this level since Obama ran for office back in 2008. And of course, just the general tenor of the War on Terror-era during Bush. It reminds me a lot of that. And so I’m worried for him because I think that unlike with Trump, I think his support base is organic. I think it’s real. I think it surprised people and they’re trying to figure out what to do about him because I don’t think they have any intention of allowing him to become the mayor and maybe they’ll just manage to temper it down somehow or maybe he’ll pull a (John) Federman and turn out to just be horrible in every way, so they’ll still win. But I think it does give people a sense of hope because it gives people a sense of possibility and of surprise.
It shows that not everything is set in stone, that some things can turn around. And I do think there’s tremendous frustration throughout this whole country. And a lot of times I think it’s like the branding of the Democratic party because people hate the leadership so much. They’re so fed up with Pelosi and Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and the rest. And I see a lot of candidates, for example, in Missouri that I think if they ran on the exact same policy platform, but just without Democrat next to their name with just independent or something else, I think they would win because the Republicans are also widely loathed.
People don’t love the Republicans, people aren’t fans of the Republicans. It’s mostly that they just sometimes hate the Democrats more. And so when you’re in that kind of situation, having a new face, a new kind of person come out, that can be inspiring. So yeah, I hope it leads to more. But I also look at what happened to “the Squad” and others who came after my own representative, Cori Bush, where basically the right-wing and AIPAC paid for a candidate to replace her in the most expensive race in my district’s history. And that was a real awful thing to see. It felt very much like we were being disenfranchised as voters. So they’ll try. I guess we’ll see what happens.
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