The kids are not all right

How anyone with children or grandchildren can support Trump is impossible to fathom.

The children are the worst of it, girls from a Christian summer camp swept to their deaths in a flood. That’s the worst of it — the loss of young lives, a nightmare for parents and grandparents.

So far, based on reports from Central Texas, children make up about one third of the victims. At this writing, more are still missing.

When it comes to preventable deaths, those of children are the worst — from failure to warn of a dangerous storm, from failure to stop a mass shooting, from failure to inoculate against a disease.

Adults are supposed to take care of kids; it’s our first duty to protect them for as long as possible, until they can find their own way in life. And we are supposed to always be building toward a better world so that our kids might enjoy a better life than we do now.

But most Americans have a dim view of that.

Two years ago, a Wall Street Journal/University of Chicago poll found that nearly 80% of adults did not believe their children’s lives will be better than theirs.

Climate change is one of the main reasons. It should have been clear to everyone, a decade or more ago, that the planet was headed for big trouble if we did not get off fossil fuels relatively quickly and develop renewable energy. But Republicans denied and dithered, and when Trump came along, he took the country out of the climate challenge. He doubled-down on that after his second inauguration this year.

The 27-year-old White House press secretary, the Trump true-believer with the motor mouth, says it’s a “depraved lie” to blame her boss for the flood.

No one is blaming him for the flood, but at a time of extreme weather due to climate change, Trump has inexplicably and inexcusably cut the staffs of the federal agencies that forecast weather and warn us about storms. At the same time, Republicans in Congress have crafted legislation that amounts to a full-scale attack on the Biden-era efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

There is a long list of damning things you can say about Trump, but the fact that he offers nothing for America’s children — for America’s future — might be the worst.

Nothing.

In all his zig-zaggy speeches, all his social media hits, you hardly ever hear him say or write the word, “children,” much less profess to care about them.

The clock ticks on climate change and Trump goes golfing.

The death rate among children from guns has increased by 106 percent since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. Since 2020, guns have been the leading cause of death among children from 1 to 17 years.

“The United States has by far the highest rate of child and teen firearm mortality among peer nations,” reports the Kaiser Family Foundation. “In no other similarly large, wealthy country are firearms in the top four causes of death for children and teens, let alone the number one cause.”

What does Trump do about this? Nothing. In fact, he signs an executive order rolling back gun control measures. And the useless Republican-led Congress, offering nothing but “thoughts and prayers” after numerous school shootings, votes to eliminate the $200 tax stamp for gun silencers and short-barrel rifles.

That same Congress voted to cut Medicaid funding in the decade ahead, an act that will likely deprive at least 11 million low-income adults and children of health insurance.

Trump nominated an anti-vaccine crackpot to be the nation’s secretary of health. The doubts about vaccination raised by the irrational Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others have created danger for children. Two unvaccinated children in Texas died of measles. Nationally, measles cases are now the highest they’ve been since the country eliminated the disease in 2000.

The Trump regime has separated immigrant children from their parents — in border detention during Trump’s first term and now during cruel ICE roundups.

Trump, who once said he “loved the poorly educated,” has attacked education at all levels and his administration has withheld billions of dollars in federal grants for public schools. One of Trump’s executive orders called for dismantling the Department of Education.

And, of course, when Trump/Musk/DOGE destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development in January, it meant death for starving children in foreign lands. A Boston University researcher believes that millions could die from starvation or disease because of the USAID cutoff.

Lastly, Trump is a horrible example for young people.

Once upon a time, at least in the ideal, the country had standards; our parents and grandparents wanted presidents they and we could admire and respect. It did not always work out — few presidents got out of Washington without scars or scandal of some kind — but it never started out that way; we never knowingly elected a vulgar man, a felon and aspiring autocrat. And now Americans have done it twice.

I expressed this point many times as a columnist for The Baltimore Sun: How anyone with children or grandchildren can support Trump is impossible for me to fathom. His brainless position on climate change alone should have disqualified him among parents and grandparents. Continued support for Trump at this point betrays a tragic and immoral disregard for generations to come.