The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Paul Potvin is a retired emergency medicine and hospitalist doctor and a member of the Maine Medical Association Public Health Committee.
I grew up feeling that my country was benevolent, a force for good, using our might with compassion to bring stability and peace to the world. How did we all of sudden become a bullying, fear mongering, selfish, vengeful aggressor, and a threat and menace to not just other countries but to our own citizens? At the same time we are aligning with the worst of the bad guy nations as we morph into one of them. This is not what America is all about.
Under this administration, the United States is becoming a nation not to be trusted. We are abandoning our commitments to allies, trading partners, NATO, the World Health Organization (WHO), Paris Climate Accord, and the United Nations.
On the home front the Trump/Musk team is haphazardly and carelessly firing tens of thousands of federal workers without cause and without regard to the damage inflicted on the security and stability of our country or the harm to federal workers and their families. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are illegally gutting programs and departments created and appropriated by Congress — ones that feed starving babies, provide early warnings of tornadoes and hurricanes, find cures for cancer, protect us from pandemics, give us clean air and water, guard our nuclear stockpile, and ensure safe airline travel, to name a few.
Trump and Musk claim they are eliminating fraud and abuse, but most of their claims have been shown to be either outright false, gross misrepresentation, or malicious ridicule, including claims regarding Medicare, U.S. aid to foreign countries, and medical research.
For example, in his recent speech to Congress, Trump claimed that the DOGE team had found “$8 million for making mice transgender,” and added: “This is real.” Actually the mice were not “transgender”; they were “transgenic,” which means they are genetically altered to learn more about human health, including Alzheimer’s disease. He either doesn’t understand the difference, was totally careless in his information gathering, or intentionally tried to deceive the American people (none of these options are befitting a president of our USA).
In his first month in office, Trump spent about $10.7 million in taxpayer money playing golf. Furthermore, the weekend before his inauguration he launched his new version of bitcoin and made himself and others close to him millions of dollars in a matter of days. In so doing he exploited the office of president for personal gain, and created a platform that could be used to accept hidden bribes. Now after his family members have launched their own cryptocurrencies, he is brazenly proposing to spend taxpayer dollars to create a bitcoin reserve and eliminate capital gain tax and regulation of cryptocurrency transactions, labelling them as a corrupt attack.
When Trump or Musk accuse others of corruption, fraud and abuse, weaponizing the federal government, ruining the economy, limiting free speech or of being a dictator, they are actually engaging in a form of propaganda used by authoritarian dictators, called “accusation in the mirror”— that is to accuse targeted opponents of doing exactly what it is they themselves are doing or intend to do and thereby create confusion and divert voters’ attention away from their own guilt. It can prompt Trump’s followers to feel they need to support the annihilation of federal programs, agencies, and regulations and defend themselves against the targeted adversaries.
The technique has been utilized around the world to incite violence against innocent citizens, even to the point of genocide, such as in Nazi Germany and Rwanda. Trump employed this tactic when he falsely accused his opponents of fraud in the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol. He was doing the same in 2024. Then he won, and insinuated that Musk rigged the ballot computers in Pennsylvania. In fact, there is some evidence suggesting 2024 ballot machines were tampered with in his favor.
Add to that Trump and Musk’s use of intimidation, fear, and ridicule, and demonization of immigrants, transgender people and anyone who dares disagree. One has to ask: Whose country is this?
