Marble Falls      For all the signs of increasing resistance and chronic failures of the new Trump administration, there’s a problem that is impossible to ignore:  Trump’s threats and bullying in many cases is actually working.  In one case after another, there are huge blinking stop signs on fundamental activities and organizations because of the chilling impact of his litany of assaults in various forms.  The news is full of evidence.

Big, corporate, prestigious, and political law firms are cowering in the shadows now and refusing to join cases for small outfits against some of the clearer and wildly questionable and likely illegal actions of the administration, because they are now afraid of being sanctioned by the government.  Trump’s punitive executive orders against the giant Covington & Burling white-shoe law firm has sent other big firms into hiding, when smaller operations have asked for customary pro bono assistance.  This is a problem.  The government has unlimited resources.  The other side, especially our side, has small pockets and can be easily overwhelmed in such faceoffs.  Sometimes recruiting help has been the only alternative.  Now, some big firms, including many that have been famous for helping on very difficult cases are shying away and ducking for cover, claiming they fear for their business and losing government contracts for offending Trump.  Much of this is simply the revenge tour against firms that participated in cases over recent years against Trump and his companies.  This is chilling.

Industries and communities are coming into the light and admitting how much they depend on foreign workers, including those on temporary protected status, which the administration is moving to terminate, and who are undocumented.  In some cases, like St. Louis, the city was counting on immigrants for revival.  In industries like residential construction and direct, personal health care like home care, huge percentages of the workforce are undocumented.  It’s not just pickers that are being hit in the agricultural sector.  We are not going to find terminated federal workers going into these jobs and picking up the slack.  Day laborers are not coming to the corners because of fear of deportation.  Bosses are whining for workers.

I mention this later on the list, because it comes closer to home, which means my own work, but the administration is moving relentlessly against any possible opposition from nonprofits based on spurious and unproven claims in order to pre-emptively block any dissent.  There is a plethora of examples.  One in the current news includes Trump’s order to exclude organizations from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program which include 2-million now, that he says support “illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property and disruption of the public order.”  As Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said “He wants to impose an ideological litmus test antithetical to American values.”  All protests disrupt “public order.”  That’s their point.  That’s how they become the squeaking wheel, the rock in the road, and the last stand for justice.

The administration’s attacks against media outlets and resistance to transparency or even offering proof or justification for its actions, other than saying it wants to claim the power to do what it wants, is yet another example.  Perhaps it’s not yet as chilling as some of these other unilateral actions, but it’s not for lack of trying.  In the case of the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many social media outfits, including Facebook, it has already worked pre-emptively.

Having seen the impact of this years ago in the scurrilous and unfounded attack on ACORN and many of its allies and friends, I’m neither Cassandra or Chicken Little.  We can’t back down, but that doesn’t mean we won’t pay the price.  ACORN did actions, even when we knew it might cost us millions of dollars in cancelled grants and contracts, because that’s what it means to be an independent, democratic, membership-based organization.  Despite the threats, the only way to stop them is to stand up, and if you don’t stand up, you don’t stand for anything at all.