Trump’s Inhumanity to Children
While Trump personally cares about children, the people that he let draft his budget (Mick Mulvaney, head of OMB), or copied from the Koch and Mercer funded American Heritage Foundation, had no respect for children at all. Trump and his backers seem to be totally deaf to the effect that their administration will have on children. We will list the areas in which this shows up in his administration.
We had already covered three articles back about our concern for possible changes in coverage for children in the Paul Ryan and possible Freedom Caucus plans eliminating coverage for 24 million people. This and the CHIP plan for children of citizens or legal residents could be at stake.
We can now add that there is no coverage for children of the 11.5 million illegal immigrants, except for emergency services, which might expose their parents illegal status.
We also discussed the breakups of illegal immigrant families, leaving citizen children here without one or both parents, or deportation of children brought to the US when very young, the Dreamers.
Under the severe 18% NIH budget cuts, the small Fogarty Institute funding for research abroad would be eliminated, covering plagues such as Ebola, and Zika, which attacks children.
Trump’s categorical “America First” cuts to foreign aid will cut clean water and sewage projects for the billion of people, including children, who lack them.
Trump’s ban on admitting refugees from Syria, which has had 11 million displaced persons and a half million deaths, with uncounted injured, including children, is in contrast to European countries which have admitted millions of refugees. While nobody knows how to defeat Bashar al Assad, especially now with Putin’s backing, the saving of refugees more than nullifies his power and cruelty. Trump’s campaign denunciations of Clinton for backing tens of thousands of refugees, and hyper inflating it to 600,000, probably helped him win, after scaring Americans about their supposed terrorist threat. Now, Trump’s immigration ban or delay, and “extreme vetting” policy, as well as requirement that they must have our vague “values”, insults the motives of all immigrants present, or previous to the United States.
Trump’s possible federal defunding of Planned Parenthood may deny the child’s parents of having the child at the time best suited for them, and when their parents are secure enough financially to give him or her the best childhood and schools. It may also guarantee that the child not be born illegitimately. The child may be born handicapped because their mother did not receive convenient and affordable pregnancy care. No child should have to be born as an unwanted pregnancy.
Republicans plan to cut the School Lunch programs and School Breakfast programs for poor students. These cover 12 million children. Califonia and other states are cutting any requirements on such students, such as cleaning up the cafeteria, that set them apart and embarrass them. Actually, they are all below the age for working, and this would amount to violating child labor laws.
Trump’s Poisoner and Administrator of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has overridden the scientific findings that a pesticide used in the fields is a poison and is especially harmful to children.
Trump’s EPA is destroying clean air regulations, thus giving more children asthma and increasing their suffering, causing more smog and volatile organic compounds, restoring mercury pollution and acid rain from coal plants, and allowing coal ash and mining residue in the same areas that Trump has won by promising to restore harmful coal mining jobs. In cutting clean water regulations, he is encouraging more Flint Michigan disasters, with lead poisoning for children as an example. Nobody knows if he will fully fund all cleanup sites.
Trump’s oil-oligarch-dominated denial of climate change and desecration of climate science and scientists, will have its effects on all of our children and grandchildren, especially those vulnerable to flooding around the world. Also at stake, the inheritances of those rare children who’s father owns many ocean front golf courses, or Towers whose basement flood protection will have to be raised with sea and storm level rises. Plus the rich donors to such a Presidential candidate who have seafront property.
