Everything is worse

Let's be honest: Everything is worse now.

On January 20, 2025, the newly sworn in President of the United States began issuing executive orders that would undo decades of progress for the health, safety, economic opportunity, security, and wellbeing of the American people, and for the defense of their fundamental rights. Among those actions:

The U.S. would be withdrawn from global negotiations about how to best achieve climate-resilient development—meaning the U.S. will lose favor in all such discussions and most Americans will be left out of that unprecedented opportunity.
The President went further, however, freezing or dismantling scientific agencies and initiatives aimed at understanding our planet's climate and weather systems, providing precise forecasts and early warnings, and helping communities to adapt and build resilience.
2025 is the costliest year in recorded history for disasters made worse by human caused climate change. Nearly 20% of all major disaster costs since 1980 have come in the last 12 months.
He "withdrew" the U.S. from the World Health Organization—reducing the benefits of science to Americans and of American science to the world. This will make the whole world, including Americans, sicker, though companies that profit from sickness response might increase their profits.
He "froze" foreign aid (which no law permits), then set about dismantling USAID, the most important U.S. controlled humanitarian and development assistance agency, projected to have saved 92 million lives over just the last 20 years.
It is estimated that more than 690,000 lives have been lost as a direct result of these sudden cuts to humanitarian and development assistance. Among those are 469,000 children.
This was predicted; it was known by Trump, his budget office director (Vought), his most intrusive campaign donor (Musk), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and yet they went ahead and caused that horrific wave of mass death to play out.

Paramilitary gangs are now roving American communities, under color of law enforcement.

Masked agents not dressed in uniform and who present no badge or identifying badge number, are abducting people from sidewalks, parking lots, places of business, and cars—sometimes with children in the line of fire of chemical agents, or sitting in the car watching their parents be assaulted and disappeared.
None of that is lawful, given the clear language of the Bill of Rights, but it is happening anyway, and scholars in authoritarianism warn such flagrant violations are performative tests—intended to see how far the law will bend while also aiming to alter the nature of the law in practice.
The head of Border Patrol says in a menacing propaganda video, depicting an unlawful paramilitary assault on the home of a man whose car was smashed during a raid, that "regardless of immigration status" this is the treatment people can expect if they oppose such raids. (The family whose house was raided, none of whom had committed any crimes, were U.S. citizens.)

The lives of ordinary Americans have been degraded in many important ways, beyond these horrors.

Almost from the beginning of the new administration, the nation's air traffic system began to fail. Multiple deadly crashes happened in just a few days. Air traffic controllers were subjected to menacing emails and threats of forced retirement. Regulations requiring airlines to treat staff and passengers fairly were undermined.
Chaos has continued throughout the year, as cancellations and delays have become commonplace, and the ready supply of trained, experienced pilots and air traffic controllers is dwindling, due to abusive corporate practices and irresponsible federal funding and staffing decisions.
Climate disruption is also playing a role. Because the Trump administration refuses to acknowledge not only the human cause but the actual ongoing planetary change, programs that would upgrade and reinforce systems to deal with weather are being cut back, infrastructure is not being maintained, and the management of weather-related delays and disruptions is becoming more and more chaotic.
The administration decided to "help" by removing the requirement that airlines compensate passengers for major delays caused by the airlines themselves. Naturally, this is an invitation to further mismanagement and abuse.

Then, there is the question of whether it is even affordable to make the journey through your everyday life. Trump promised he would "end inflation on Day 1", which was always impossible, but his actions went far beyond failing. Instead, he imposed unprecedented blanket tariffs, some intended to increase the price of goods by 100% or more. The purpose of tariffs is to increase prices. Tariffs are not used to decrease prices; there is no way for that to happen.

Climate change is making everything more expensive, and pollution is still not being priced, so we all pay what the polluters don't have to.
Trump and his allies in Congress have conspired to remove constraints on abusive practices by health insurers, so, it is rapidly getting more and more expensive to access even basic healthcare, and insurance premiums are now set to skyrocket in the new year. Everyone will be paying more to get less in return.
A new wave of tax cuts eliminated funding for nearly everything that is non-Defense discretionary spending, which means most of the government's responsibilities can only be properly funded by new borrowing, so the debt is rising fast.
These price-raising policies are why a new poll finds “70 percent of people say that their area where they live is not affordable”, which is “up from 45 percent just this summer”.
Meanwhile, it is now estimated Trump has accepted at least $1.8 billion in payments and personal gifts, while his net worth has increased by $7.5 billion in ways connected to his decisions as President.
And, he is aggressively trying to defund, dismantle, and erase some of the nation’s most consequential scientific research institutions, like the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the elimination of which will cause widespread harm and degrade the U.S. materially and strategically for generations.

Several times a month, I hear someone ask: Why does he work so hard to make everything worse? It is as if Trump has misunderstood the utilitarian principle (do the most good for the most people) and thinks he can only be a success if he creates the most unfairness and senseless harm for the most people. And he is doing this as President, where his job requires him, by law, to be everyone's servant and protector.

The why behind this obsessive pattern is a great mystery, which may never be solved. What we can say, with clarity, is: Everything is worse now, and we all know why.

We can thank the team at Vanity Fair that provided a genuinely historic report on life inside the administration. If nothing else, the photos of key officials that enable this mess reveal an unacknowledged awareness that things are not OK. Everything would be better if only there were a President and Cabinet willing to honor the oath in word and spirit, in genuine service of all people's transcendent rights and shared humanity.