Undoing the Harm the Trump Administration has Done

I want to begin a series on “How to Undo the Harm that the Trump Administration Has Done,” starting along the lines of:

“Of course some of the harm cannot be undone:

The extrajudicial killings of fishermen in the south Atlantic, murders carried out by the U.S. military at the express direction of Hegseth and Trump. These killings are also war crimes for which Trump should be in prison.

The people killed in the illegal Iran War, including 162 schoolchildren along with their teachers, not to mention the unprovoked assassination of a foreign leader.
The estimated two million deaths attributable to the abrupt termination of USAID, at the behest of the richest man on Earth acting on behalf of the President.
The collusion in the genocide in Gaza.

There are also the daily struggles of ordinary Americans who are having trouble paying the rent, affording gas and groceries, as well as clothes and school supplies for their children. These are, in principle, reversible, but they are not likely to be relieved under this Administration. Similarly, throwing tens of thousands of immigrants into concentration camps, mistreating them, and deporting many of them. As far as I know, there is no way that any of us can stop any of this

But we can seek justice. The Supreme Court exempted Trump from any criminality for official behavior while in office, and his hand-picked Attorney General Todd Blanche is also seeking to exonerate him from IRS audits in the future. This probably means that going after Trump personally for murder or war crimes will likely fail. But his out-and-out corruption cannot be considered part of his official activities.

I could easily get lost in the outrage, but the more important task is how to dig ourselves out of this without repeating the mistakes of the past. We need to enumerate the harms being done, e.g., the removal of 90% of Bears Ears from the National Park and other cuts to the Parks and the Forestry Service, the disposal of public land, etc. The continuing injustices to minorities and poor people. Feel free to ask me questions. It’s also important to maintain a strict separation between the political commentary and my work leading CRCS / Possible Planet as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, where my actions and writings need to be scrupulously nonpartisan while retaining a moral compass. I post my personal political opinions at www.deadriverjournal.org, and avoid doing so at other websites, including my personasl site at www.jonathancloud,.com. Nonetheless my opinions are of course colored ny my personal experiences, my work, and my colleagues and friends.

But facts are stubborn things, and there needs to be accountability after the Trump Administration is no longer in power. Prosecutors should look at Pete Hegseth for giving illegal orders, Steven Miller for causing the deaths of untold numbers of migrants and foreigners, Russ Vought for violating the willi of Congress, and ideally even Elon Musk for his blatantly illegal actions while co-leading DOGE. Please lay out what you think is a fair analysis, holding back no punches but also being clear-eyed about what the Democrats have gone along with or given in to.”

ChatGPT (5.6 Sol Extra High)

Your central premise is right: some injuries can be repaired, but deaths cannot be reversed. Justice therefore has to mean more than restoring earlier policies. It must include truth, accountability, restitution, institutional reconstruction, and safeguards against repetition.

But the series will be more powerful if it is exacting about evidence and causation. Its moral force should come from facts that survive hostile scrutiny.

Corrections I would make before publishing

Your formulation	More defensible formulation
Fishermen murdered in the South Atlantic	U.S. forces have killed more than 220 people in strikes on alleged drug-smuggling vessels, principally in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The administration has often not publicly identified the dead or disclosed evidence against them. Human-rights experts characterize the campaign as extrajudicial killing. A reported Hegseth order to kill everyone aboard the first vessel—including survivors—has been denied by the Pentagon and requires investigation. WOLA documentation, Reuters reporting
All the boat killings are war crimes	If no armed conflict legally existed, the strikes are more accurately analyzed as unlawful or extrajudicial killings—and potentially murder. If the administration’s assertion of an armed conflict were accepted, deliberately killing shipwrecked survivors could constitute a war crime. Either analysis is damning.
162 schoolchildren and teachers killed in Iran	Available counts differ, but more than 150 people—overwhelmingly children and teachers—were killed at the Minab school. An internal U.S. investigation reportedly found American responsibility likely, but the final report remains undisclosed. The responsible formulation is “the U.S. strike that evidence indicates destroyed the Minab school,” pending release of the investigation. Reuters
Two million deaths caused by ending USAID	This is presently too certain and apparently too high. A program-by-program model projected roughly 780,000 deaths during the first year; reporting in July cited about 700,000 estimated deaths. A peer-reviewed Lancet study projects as many as 14.1 million additional deaths by 2030 if the dismantling continues. These are modeled excess deaths, not individually verified death certificates—but they are still an appalling measure of foreseeable consequences. Impact Counter, Lancet study summary
Collusion in the genocide in Gaza	“Material and diplomatic support for Israel despite authoritative findings of genocide” is stronger and more precise. A UN commission has concluded that Israel committed genocide; Amnesty International reached the same conclusion. The ICJ case remains pending, so there is not yet a final international-court judgment on the merits. This complicity also began under Biden; Trump deepened it by removing arms-transfer safeguards and attacking the ICC. UN Commission, ICJ case status
Trump removed 90% of Bears Ears National Park	Bears Ears is a national monument, not a national park. In July 2026 Trump reduced it from approximately 1.36 million acres to 121,096 acres—about a 91% reduction—opening excluded lands to mining, leasing, sale, and other disposition. Your underlying point is correct. Presidential proclamation
Blanche is immunizing Trump from future IRS audits	The agreement protects Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization from scrutiny of previously filed returns and potentially more than $100 million in back taxes. Blanche now says it does not cover future filings. That correction does not make the arrangement defensible; it remains an extraordinary act of self-dealing whose legality is disputed. Associated Press

I would also use “mass immigration detention system” more often than “concentration camps.” The latter can be historically defended if carefully defined, but it will enable critics to debate terminology instead of confronting the deaths, medical neglect, indefinite confinement, and denial of due process. More than 50 detainees have reportedly died since Trump returned to office, while Reuters found that the detention death rate more than doubled. Reuters

The organizing principle

Each harm should be placed in one of four categories:

Irreparable harms: deaths, torture, family separations that cannot truly be repaired, destroyed ecosystems and cultural sites, and lost years of human development.
Directly reversible harms: executive orders, grant cancellations, dismissals, detention policies, withdrawn regulations, sanctions, tariffs, and land-management decisions.
Repairable but not fully reversible harms: hollowed-out agencies, lost scientific capacity, traumatized communities, abandoned international partnerships, corrupted data systems, and degraded public trust.
Underlying conditions Trump exploited or worsened but did not create: unaffordable housing, economic inequality, militarized foreign policy, racial injustice, congressional surrender of war powers, the imperial presidency, and the influence of money over both parties.

That fourth category is indispensable. Rent and grocery insecurity are real, but not every price increase began with Trump. Housing unaffordability, for example, reflects decades of underbuilding, financialization, local exclusionary zoning, stagnant wages, and policy failures under both parties. Trump should be held responsible for what his tariffs, tax policies, wars, deregulation, and spending choices demonstrably worsened—not turned into an all-purpose explanation for American failure.

Accountability without political vengeance

The Supreme Court did not give Trump blanket immunity. It gave him absolute immunity for exercises of core constitutional authority, presumptive immunity for other official acts, and none for unofficial conduct. Unfortunately, commanding the military lies close to the protected core, making a domestic prosecution of Trump for military orders exceptionally difficult. Private financial corruption, campaign activity, business conduct, bribery, and self-dealing do not automatically become official acts merely because the perpetrator is president. Supreme Court opinion

That immunity does not automatically extend to everyone around him:

Pete Hegseth: Investigators should obtain the targeting records, legal opinions, operational videos, rules of engagement, casualty assessments, and communications concerning survivors. If he ordered people killed knowing they were hors de combat or posed no imminent threat, prosecutors should determine whether homicide, conspiracy, obstruction, false-statements, or war-crimes statutes apply. “Trump told me to” would not excuse a manifestly unlawful order.
Stephen Miller: Moral responsibility is not by itself a prosecutable offense. A criminal case would require evidence that he knowingly ordered or conspired to commit identifiable crimes—such as defying court orders, unlawfully depriving people of liberty, falsifying records, obstructing proceedings, or deliberately returning people to likely death. His influence and cruelty justify investigation; they do not relieve prosecutors of proving intent, causation, and statutory elements.
Russell Vought: GAO has found numerous administration spending holds unlawful under the Impoundment Control Act. Investigators should distinguish unconstitutional impoundment from a prosecutable personal crime. Congressional contempt, false statements, obstruction, destruction of records, or deliberate defiance of final court orders may provide clearer routes than trying to criminalize a policy disagreement. GAO impoundment decisions
Elon Musk: A court found the DOGE-led closure of USAID likely unconstitutional, and another found that DOGE lacked authority to terminate humanities grants. But an Appointments Clause violation is not necessarily a crime. The appropriate investigation should examine unauthorized data access, privacy violations, conflicts of interest, procurement decisions, destruction of records, false representations, and whether public authority was used to advantage Musk’s businesses. USAID decision, humanities-grant ruling

The standard should be simple: investigate conduct, not enemies. Charge only where admissible evidence satisfies a law that would also be applied to a Democrat. Where criminal prosecution is unavailable, there remain congressional findings, civil judgments, restitution, professional sanctions, disqualification where constitutionally permissible, public disclosure, compensation of victims, and institutional reform.

Democrats should not escape the accounting

This cannot honestly be written as a story in which Republicans invented every dangerous power and Democrats always resisted it.

Democratic administrations and legislators helped build the machinery Trump has used:

Obama institutionalized targeted killing, expansive drone warfare, aggressive secrecy, and mass deportation.
Congresses controlled by both parties repeatedly surrendered war-making authority and renewed emergency, surveillance, and national-security powers.
Biden provided Israel with arms and diplomatic protection despite mounting evidence of mass civilian killing and deprivation in Gaza. Trump’s policy is worse, but it did not begin in January 2025.
Democratic administrations preserved much of the immigration-detention apparatus they later condemned in Trump’s hands.
Some Democrats supported restrictive immigration legislation and repeatedly voted for enormous military and homeland-security budgets.
A small number of congressional Democrats opposed attempts to restrain the Iran war, although the overwhelming majority of Democrats supported the War Powers resolutions. In July, the House passed a resolution demanding congressional authorization, while the Senate rejected its counterpart. Associated Press
Democratic leaders placed too much faith in norms, institutional self-restraint, and cautious prosecution, even as Trump demonstrated that those restraints were not reciprocal.

This is not an argument that the parties are equally responsible. They are not. It is an argument that restoration of the pre-Trump status quo would be inadequate. The old system contained the powers, inequities, and habits of impunity that made Trumpism possible.

A proposed series

I suggest calling it:

How to Undo the Harm the Trump Administration Has Done
Accountability, Repair, and Democratic Reconstruction

Each installment should answer the same questions: What happened? What is proven? Who authorized it? Who was harmed? What law or democratic norm was violated? What can be repaired? What compensation is owed? What structural change would prevent recurrence? What did Democrats or previous administrations do to enable it?

A coherent sequence would be:

What Cannot Be Undone—and What Justice Still Requires
Illegal War, Extrajudicial Killing, Gaza, and the Abandonment of Human Life
USAID and the Weaponization of Indifference
Mass Detention, Deportation, and the Destruction of Due Process
Corruption, Self-Enrichment, and Government as Personal Property
Public Lands, Climate, Environmental Protection, and Indigenous Sovereignty
The Destruction of Government Capacity, Science, and the Civil Service
Affordability, Inequality, Labor, Health Care, and the Social Contract
How Democrats and Earlier Presidents Prepared the Ground
A Reconstruction Program: The First Hundred Days and the Next Generation

A possible opening

Some of the harm done by the Trump administration cannot be undone. The dead cannot be restored by a future election, a court judgment, or an act of Congress.

More than 220 people have been killed in American military strikes on small vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The administration called them “narco-terrorists,” often without publicly identifying the dead or presenting evidence that they posed an imminent threat. Among the most serious allegations is that the Secretary of Defense ordered everyone aboard one vessel killed and that a second strike was launched against survivors clinging to its wreckage.

In Iran, thousands have died in a war the United States and Israel began without congressional authorization or United Nations approval. More than 150 children, teachers, parents, and others were killed when a missile destroyed a school in Minab. The Pentagon has withheld the final results of an investigation that reportedly found American responsibility likely.

The abrupt dismantling of USAID terminated food, medical, vaccination, maternal-health, and disease-prevention programs on which millions depended. We will never possess a complete list of the dead. Epidemiological models estimate that hundreds of thousands died during the first year and warn that continued dismantling could contribute to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030.

In Gaza, the Trump administration continued and intensified American material and diplomatic support for Israel despite findings by a United Nations commission and major human-rights organizations that Israel had committed genocide. Here the responsibility is not Trump’s alone. The Biden administration supplied arms and political protection while Gaza was being destroyed. Any honest accounting must include that history.

No later government can bring these people back. But irreversibility is not an argument for resignation. It is an argument for truth, justice, restitution, and prevention.

The purpose of this series is not to fantasize about revenge or to treat every political disagreement as a crime. It is to create a documented ledger of what was done; distinguish criminal conduct from destructive but lawful policy; identify what can still be repaired; compensate victims wherever possible; rebuild the institutions that were damaged; and change the laws and incentives that made these abuses possible.

Nor will returning to the pre-Trump status quo be enough. Democratic presidents expanded executive war-making, drone killing, surveillance, immigration detention, and secrecy. Democratic legislators repeatedly funded the machinery they denounced when Trump used it more brutally. Trump bears responsibility for his choices, but Trumpism grew in soil that both parties helped prepare.

The test of a democratic reconstruction is therefore not whether it punishes one man. It is whether a future president—Republican or Democrat—is prevented from doing these things again.

Protecting CRCS and Possible Planet

Your instinct to keep this at Dead River Journal is correct. Because CRCS is a private operating foundation, it is subject not only to the general 501(c)(3) prohibition on campaign intervention but also to private-foundation excise-tax rules governing lobbying expenditures. CRCS can undertake genuine nonpartisan analysis, including analysis that reaches firm conclusions, but it must provide a sufficiently full and fair exposition of relevant facts rather than partisan advocacy or inflammatory unsupported assertions. IRS private-foundation guidance, IRS nonpartisan-analysis standard

I recommend:

A standing disclaimer: “Jonathan Cloud writes here solely in his personal capacity. These views do not represent CRCS, Possible Planet, their boards, staff, projects, partners, or funders.”
Separate domains, mailing lists, social accounts, email addresses, branding, and expenses.
No CRCS staff time, donor lists, logos, or publication channels for this series.
Avoid promoting your CRCS title in article headings or social-media descriptions; if biographical identification requires it, add “organization listed for identification only.”
Let CRCS publish separately on underlying subjects—ecological restoration, democratic participation, climate, public lands, community resilience—through fully sourced, nonpartisan analysis.
Have a nonprofit attorney review the separation policy once, particularly because CRCS is a private operating foundation rather than an ordinary public charity.

The deepest theme of the series should be: accountability without vengeance, reconstruction without nostalgia, and moral clarity without factual carelessness. That will hit harder than outrage alone—and it will be much more difficult to dismiss.