Donald Trump is an inveterate hater. He hates everyone and everything unless they fit neatly into his version of reality. He is the most vindictive and vicious president in American history.
As the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, he has prosecuted his political enemies for crimes as dubious as taking a picture of seashells on the beach.
He rewards his political friends with pardons, abusing his power to exonerate January 6 criminals and other malefactors of great wealth.
He served subpoenas at the homes of New York Times journalists to determine the source of their information that he was recklessly retrofitting Air Force One, a $400 million gift from the Qatari government despite security concerns. Then, facing certain defeat in the courts, he withdrew the subpoenas. The Time’s lawyers termed the actions of the Justice Department “replete with bad faith.”
On the heels of paying a $5 million judgment for defamation to the columnist, E. Jean Carroll, the 47th president continues to defame anyone he considers political enemies, particularly members of the press who are simply doing their job.
At the rerun of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner last week, he mocked the girth of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, as well as that of New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, conjuring an image of the two wrestling over a piece of cheesecake. He ridiculed the appearance of his critics, including Bruce Springsteen, whom he said, “looks like hell” (pot, see kettle), and rubbished CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who had been honored earlier for her White House coverage, saying she does not smile enough. Trump said he “hated” U.S. Senator Adam Schiff, the California Democrat, one of his most outspoken congressional critics, jesting at the size of Schiff’s head and neck.
Childish mockery is not a crime, but the evidence that he has abused the powers of his office to favor supporters and punish opponents is clear beyond any doubt. And he has lied about his motives.
When his administration canceled over $7.5 billion in Joe Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.
These statements were false.
In court filings, the administration has begrudgingly admitted that the $7.5 billion in cuts from clean energy projects begun under the 46th president were “based solely” on whether states had voted for the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 presidential election, a flagrant example of executive excess.
In stark contrast, the administration funded similar grants for states that had backed Trump in 2024, even though the Energy Department had recommended they be canceled.
The Energy Department previously acknowledged in two other cases that politics had been a “primary reason” for the cancellations, The Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfeld and Hannah Natanson noted in December. In those cases, a judge eventually ruled that the department had improperly canceled more than a dozen grants.
The admissions totally undercut the congressional testimony of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who said last June that “no decisions were made on politics.”
Asked to explain the discrepancy, Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told The New York Times that the agency made its recommendations on grant cancellations without regard to political considerations. Dietderich said that Wright, in his testimony, had been making a distinction between that review process and the timing of when certain cancellations were announced: Timing, my foot.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, also one of the masterminds of Project 2025, originally announced the cuts by saying, “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled.” But a government lawyer told the court that none of the cancellations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”
The record reveals that Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid. This is executive power run amok, likely illegal and certainly unethical, and the Republican-controlled Congress appears to be letting him get away with it. Far from rooting out the bloated spending that Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to weaponize the budget to assist the MAGA states—or as a meat cleaver to butcher the president’s foes.
To make matters worse, new proposed regulations would give Trump even greater control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants. The new rules would make it easier for Trump to press the pause button on a broad spectrum of congressionally approved funding over political differences.
“The risk that the Trump administration is willing to go to extreme lengths to politicize grant-making is not a hypothetical,” Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told the Times’s Tony Romm and Brad Plumer in their piece “Trump Administration Admits Canceling Grants to States That Did Not Vote for Him.”
“If they are willing to be that blatant about it,” O’Connor, an alumnus of the Biden administration, said of the court filing, “then I think we should take seriously when they put forward a framework that would allow for the extreme politicization of grant-making across all of the federal government.”
The grant cancellations came amid a broader White House effort to pressure Democratic lawmakers in a fight over funding that had shut down the government. Trump had made a dead giveaway of his strategy: He threatened openly to slash what he described as “Democrat agencies,” while Vought announced a series of spending cuts targeting Democratic-led cities, congressional districts, and states.
Vought’s actions halted funding for hundreds of energy projects in blue states, including “upgrades to electrical grids in states like California and Oregon; efforts to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas operations in Colorado; and large hubs to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuels in California and the Pacific Northwest,” as the Times reported.
Some agencies, including the Department of Transportation and the Department of Health and Human Services, revealed new details about how they reviewed their grants—using specific Trump buzzwords tied to his political priorities and past directives—for possible cancellations, according to court documents filed this month.
The admissions caused an uproar on Capitol Hill. In a joint statement, Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, and Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, a Democrat on the House’s energy appropriations panel, called politically motivated grant cuts “outright un-American.”
“This administration has now admitted in court what has long been obvious: It terminated nearly 300 cost-cutting energy projects for no reason other than the fact that the states they were in did not vote for the president in the 2024 election,” Murray and Kaptur said. “This is an astounding admission that the president and his team corruptly abused their power to kill good jobs and punish hard-working families because of their political views.”
Now, the White House is looking to assert even greater control over federal grants. Proposed regulations expected to be completed by October would require Trump’s political appointees to review all federal grants, with the ability to block or revoke grants that do not conform to administration policy.
The White House has also sought to layer restrictions on grant recipients limiting their political activities, memberships, and even conference appearances, along with vague requirements that they cannot use the money for purposes deemed “anti-American.”
The administration has cast the new rules as part of its broader campaign to prevent “waste, fraud, and abuse”; at a congressional hearing this month, Vought testified that they would ensure “that we have democratic control of the spending that is going out.” It would have been more accurate to say MAGA control.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a possible 2028 presidential candidate, promptly pointed out that the canceled grants included $583 million intended for Illinois “that would have gone toward lowering energy costs, strengthening grid reliability, and creating energy jobs.” He demanded the funds be restored. “Despite what he might think, Donald Trump is not the president of MAGA,” Pritzker said in a statement, but “the president of all America. He must release remaining federal grants to Illinois immediately.”
Pritzker can add the energy grants to Trump’s tab. After the Supreme Court declared Trump’s April 2025 tariffs unconstitutional in February 2026, Pritzker wrote a public letter billing Trump for an $8.68 billion refund to the people of Illinois. “Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof,” he wrote. “On behalf of the people of Illinois, I demand a refund of $1,700 for every family in Illinois. There are 5,105,448 households in my state, bringing the total damages you owe to $8,679,261,600.”
It’s all a pretty sad situation.
