(C) Ohio Capital Journal
This story was originally published by Ohio Capital Journal and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Mad Musk, Fury Road: Trump and the billionaire chainsawing government enrage Ohioans • Ohio Capital Journal [1]
['Marilou Johanek', 'Sidney Shapiro', 'Joseph P. Tomain', 'David Dewitt', 'More From Author', 'March', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline']
Date: 2025-03-11
The fury is building. From the bottom up. It is palpable. People who never joined any protest before are showing up angry. At the Ohio Statehouse. At townhalls. At lawmakers’ offices. Wherever J.D. Vance goes.
Somebody has to bring the heat. Demonstrators with handmade signs and simmering rage are standing up and speaking out. Everyday Americans fear their country is on the brink of no return — because it is.
At a small-town Ohio meeting recently, I listened as a roomful of anxious community members spoke with sobering urgency about how to meet this break-the-glass moment for a nation conceived in liberty and spiraling toward subjugation. It is happening fast while elected leaders sit on their hands and rationalize restraint. As the Trump-Musk (Musk-Trump?) administration unleashed an avalanche to bury the beating heart of a barely functioning democracy, Republicans obsessed over transgender athletes while Democrats donned pink and waved paddles.
This is what insanity looks like. U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Toledo, voted to censure a fellow Democrat for speaking truth to power because etiquette was breached. Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno declared that inflicting unnecessary hardships on working families was worth the “short-term” pain and then proposed a ban on flag-flying (or free speech) in the U.S. Capitol.
No wonder citizens are taking to the streets. Hardly anyone in Washington is amplifying the alarm coursing through mainstream America. U.S. House Republicans decided to stop holding in-person town halls to avoid the optics of outraged constituents while Democrats dither over decorum as Rome burns.
But the madness gripping leadership in Congress and the White House is mobilizing the silent majority to get loud. The hapless demolition of government institutions, that serve vital public interests from national security to food safety and environmental protections, has real-life ramifications.
Wholesale eliminations of federal agencies and employees undercuts stability and strength across society.
Ohio farmers, who strongly supported Trump, are seeing their livelihoods teeter with his slapdash actions on senseless tariffs, frozen agricultural subsidies, and billions in lost government revenue for tons of American-grown crops going nowhere with cancelled foreign food aid programs.
Ohio veterans are losing care because an unelected tech billionaire fired thousands of veterans and public servants working at the VA.
Job cuts scrapped services, appointments, and even gutted the suicide prevention hotline.
Ohio’s nearly 100,000 auto and related industry workers fret that Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs with America’s biggest, cross-border trading partners will hurt the competitiveness of American automakers, close plants, and cause the price of vehicles to skyrocket.
Hundreds of thousands of Ohio Medicaid recipients — especially in rural Republican districts like Jim Jordan’s 4th — face steep medical bills without health insurance after Jordan and his GOP colleagues in the House voted for the largest Medicaid cuts in U.S. history to hand the ultra-wealth another $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
More than 1 in 5 Ohioans who depend on Social Security to survive worry that an unchecked, unauthorized private citizen is accessing their personal data and attacking their social safety net as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” (he means cryptocurrency) as a predicate to arbitrarily slashing earned benefits and crippling the Social Security Administration (serving more than 70 million Americans) with across-the-board cuts.
Look, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024, but nobody bargained for nonstop chaos, incompetence, and international realignment with the bad guys. Nobody expected a hostile takeover of the government by an unaccountable, unauthorized Trump donor holding tens of billions in federal contracts!
Exactly what business does Elon Musk have pouring through classified databases, purging independent agencies, downloading private info on millions of Americans and ordering federal employees to do his bidding or else? The answer is none. Absolutely none.
But the oligarchic co-president nobody elected has commandeered our government and is running roughshod over the rule of law without pushback from the Republican-led Congress or clueless Democrats.
We the people cannot forsake what generations of Americans fought and died to preserve. In less than two months the convicted felon-in-chief has done irreparable harm to our nation.
He has managed to tank the stock market, threaten a recession — Trump wouldn’t rule it out as his chaotic trade tariffs provoke market turbulence and uncertainty — jack up prices for groceries, gasoline, cars, electricity and more with his insane yo-yo tariffs on our closest friends.
But worse, few could ever imagine that the leader of the free world would go to the dark side so quickly as a fanboy of a bloodthirsty dictator and ruthless adversary bent on obliterating Ukraine and western civilization. There are no words.
Trump gave Vladimir Putin a green light to bomb the hell out of a besieged U.S. ally fighting for its life. Putin’s puppet not only stopped all shipments of U.S. weapons to Ukraine but sadistically suspended all U.S. intelligence sharing with Kyiv “suffocating” Ukrainian hope of holding out against Russian aggression.
Now Trump wants to deport more than 240,000 Ukrainians who came to America to escape the Russian invasion of their country.
It is beyond enraging and profoundly un-American. But an important movement is building from the bottom up in the U.S. You can feel it. Furious citizens are channeling their fire into action. (Doomscrolling doesn’t count.)
Ohioans and Americans are showing up and getting loud.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/03/11/mad-musk-fury-road-trump-and-the-billionaire-chainsawing-government-enrage-ohioans/
Published and (C) by Ohio Capital Journal
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/ohiocapitaljournal/
