Not every American is going to understand the damage done by Donald Trumpâs tariff policy, or care about Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine. But there is one issue that should get through to everyone:
Donald Trump is stealing from you.
He's stealing from you. He's stealing from your family. He's stealing from your friends. He's stealing from your children. He is stealing your property, your services, and your savings. And he is doing it in almost every way imaginableâincluding some that should be impossible in any functional government.
He is lining his pockets with your money, and if he isn't stopped soon, his actions will drive the economy into ruin unlike anything we've seen in a century and leave America deep in a pit no future administration can fill.
He's stealing your public land and giving away real estate, timber, oil, gas, copper, lithium, coalâand beautyâthat belongs to you
The millions of acres under the control of the federal government are one of the greatest resources that Americans hold. It's a shared resource, one that belongs equally to all of us, and one that provides benefits from the serenely beautiful to the vitally practical. Trump, who has never taken a hike, rafted down a river, or simply strolled through the woods in his entire gold-plated life, intends to steal these lands from you and from all the generations of Americans who might have enjoyed them in the future.
Trump has ordered 280 million acres of trees on public lands to be cut down and demanded that agencies ignore environmental laws in making this timber available. Trump insists this action is necessary to keep lumber prices low in the face of growing tariffs on Canadian timber, but this is an artificial issue created entirely by Trump.
The result of this will be devastating to national forests, the wildlife they support, and the millions of Americans who visit these forests each year for recreation and relief. By ignoring environmental laws, Trump is also ensuring that this clear-cutting extravaganza will leave scars on the land that may never be repaired and that gigatons of soil and debris are washed into the nation's rivers and streams from hillsides left barren of growth.
Trump is taking what should be a sustainable, renewable resource and simply destroying it. And heâs setting in motion an environmental disaster that will take centuries to heal.
To make this possible, Trump is invoking a rarely-used committee nicknamed "the God Squad" to bypass the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Trump needs five votes out of the seven members on the committee to trample these laws. But since the seven members are the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture, the heads of the EPA and NOAA, and the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers â all of them appointed by Trump â it seems unlikely that he'll be sweating the outcome.
Trump is also opening millions of acres of the most beautiful lands in the nation to mining and drilling. Once again, Trump has knocked down both environmental and economic safeguards that are supposed to protect these fragile areas. Trump is literally allowing industry lobbyists to rewrite the rules on how your public lands can be destroyed.
That includes national monuments like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante that Trump already chopped down from their original size during his first time in the White House. The two monuments are set to be reduced again in a giveaway for energyâeven though there is no demand for the coal reserves that are being used to justify the move.
The number of coal mines continues to decline as gas, wind, and solar are now all much cheaper. Even large existing mines in Wyomingâs Powder River Basin, the lowest cost mining area by far, are being idled as demand wanes.Despite Trumpâs claims that he was going to âmake coal great againâ and campaign stops where he was backed by miners (or people pretending to be miners), the number of both mines and mining jobs declined steeply during his first term.
Coal is just a cover story for a land grab. Trump may be able to rig the stock market, but he canât talk power companies into wasting billions on Americâs dirtiest fuel.
That wonât stop Trump from using coal that will never be mined, are oil that will never be produce, as an excuse for his big plan for federal lands: Sell them. Sell them cheap. Sell them into a market where the DOJ and Treasury Department have deliberately stopped looking at the real ownership of shell corporations or trying to unravel the tangled control of LLCs. Trumpâs efforts to steal Greenland and Gaza may make the news, but his biggest, most valuable real estate theft is right here in the United States.
And Trump doesnât have to end up with all the property to score all the profit. Trump plans to dispose of millions of acres of public land could end with pouring the profits into his "sovereign wealth fund." Which is whatever Trump says, for whatever he wants, benefitting whoever he sees fit.
There's no doubt that someone will make enormous profits from this new federal land rush and from all the timber, copper, coal, oil, and other resources ripped out of the ground you own. But it won't be you.
This land, and everything it holds, is being stolen from you.
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