14 Ways The Trump Administration is Trying to Kill Us
Deadly policy shifts from Trump’s first year back in office
One year into the second Trump administration, and it’s apparent that the president and his regime have little care for your welfare or mine. In fact, it often seems as if Trump & Co. would prefer that many more Americans go ahead and die — of infectious disease; a lack of health care; heart attack and stroke; loose guns; rogue federal agents…the list goes on.
In the eyes of the extremists in charge, the social safety net has rescued too many undesirables, and America will be made “great again” by a survival of the “fittest.” Below, a look at 14 ways the administration’s policies are threatening American life. (In this, our 250th year, its threats to liberty and the pursuit of happiness are already well documented.)
Health Insurance: Denied
Trump’s signature “One Big Beautiful Bill” is knocking millions of people off health insurance — by slashing support for Affordable Care Act policies and by tightly restricting eligibility for Medicaid and CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. By 2034, a projected 15 million people will lose coverage — more than the entire population of Pennsylvania. The consequences are harrowing: Experts at Yale and Penn have calculated that insurance losses on that scale would lead to more than 50,000 preventable deaths annually.
Life Value: $0
In January, the Trump administration announced that it will no longer consider any monetary benefit to preserving human life and health when regulating toxic, fine-particulate pollution.
Traditionally, the agency has used the “Value of a Statistical Life” — set at roughly $10 million per life saved — to balance the cost of regulation to industry against the benefit to society of not sickening and killing people. But when it comes to ultrafine particle emissions that can lodge in human lungs and cause cancers and other diseases, only the cost to industry will now be considered. As far as the Trump administration is concerned, the value of your life — or that of your kids — will now be $0.
‘Endangerment Finding’: Clawed Back
The Trump administration has declared its intention to revoke the 2009 “endangerment finding” that has enabled the federal government to regulate global warming pollution under the Clean Air Act. This reflects the administration’s let-’er-rip approach to climate change which is killing more than half a million people globally every year, in addition driving trillions in economic losses. The administration is now finalizing its draft rule which would let the automakers and polluters from industry overheat the climate with impunity.
Mercury Poisoning: OK’d
Heavy metals in air pollution are neurotoxic. Because they impact brain development, these emissions are particularly dangerous to pregnant mothers and young children. (Much more-so than, ahem, Tylenol.) But the administration is letting some of the nation’s biggest polluters off the hook for curbing emissions of mercury and other poisonous metals. Nearly 70 of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plants have won exemptions from limits on the metals they spew into the air. (This rollback is part of the administration’s decision to champion dirty coal as part of its “Energy Dominance” agenda.)
Measles: Made Great Again
Measles was declared officially eliminated in the United States in 2000 — a triumph of modern science and widespread vaccination. But vaccine hesitance, flamed by antivax cranks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been building for years, and the wildly infectious disease is making a comeback.
Measles can lead to lifelong disability and even death. But with Kennedy now in charge of the nation’s health bureaucracy, he’s continued to stoke unfounded fears about the vaccine, while dangerous MAGA-allied idiots like the podcaster Joe Rogan pile on, minimizing the threat of the disease. Poorly contained outbreaks from Texas to South Carolina are already threatening to turn the virus into an “endemic” threat, and to see the U.S. lose its elimination status.
Vaccine Recs: Slashed
While the measles jab is still officially recommended, the administration slashed the number of routine vaccinations for children to just 11 — excluding shots for serious, preventable illnesses like hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, RSV, meningococcal disease, influenza, and Covid. There’s little question that this will cost lives. Just the hepatitis B shot has saved an estimated 90,000 lives since the mid-1990s, by the government’s own data. These formerly routine shots will now be reserved for only high-risk patients, in consultation with their doctors, assuming they have access to regular care at all.
Centers for Disease Control: Gutted
The administration has taken a hatchet to the bones of the Centers for Disease Control. Long a global exemplar of public health, the CDC’s reputation took a hit during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly among right-wingers, when it became synonymous with unpopular restrictions like masking and social distancing. On returning to office, Trump administration officials have governed like they’re out for revenge on the agency, ending billions in CDC grants while slashing its staff by nearly a third. A December article in The Lancet offers a severe damage assessment: “Abrupt lay-offs, drastic funding cuts, and a disregard for scientific processes have compromised the agency,” it reads. “The prognosis is dire: a debilitated CDC unable to protect the health of the American people.”
National Institutes of Health: Hobbled
The National Institutes of Health, another crown jewel of American medical research, is similarly under assault. According to a new accounting in Nature, the Trump administration sought to freeze or terminate nearly 6,000 research grants — including nearly 800 related to infectious diseases. (Courts have ordered some of this funding reinstated.) The NIH has lost more than 15 percent of its staff, so far, and Trump has proposed a 40 percent budget cut for 2026.
WHO: Withdrawn
One of the first acts of Trump’s second term was to withdraw from the World Health Organization, decimating the budget of the global health agency. Combined with the gutting of the CDC, this move leaves America and the world less prepared to track and respond to the next pandemic — not to mention leaving the world more vulnerable to the spread of diseases like HIV and tuberculosis.
Food Pyramid: Flipped
Early this year, the administration flipped the food pyramid to privilege red meat, beef tallow, and butter — despite a lack of evidence that these heart-hostile foods are now good for you. (It also placed whole grains at the bottom as though they were a hidden threat.) The president, hardly a portrait of great health, has gotten into the act making himself the poster boy for a campaign to drink whole milk. The recommendation to gorge on saturated fats is expected to lead to a rise in heart attacks and strokes — already America’s leading cause of death.
USAID: Sent to the “Woodchipper”
Elon Musk’s most catastrophic legacy as Trump’s early term co-president was abolishing USAID, the foreign aid agency. That decision has already been lethal. One academic model estimates that more than 760,000 people worldwide have already died due to cuts of medical and nutrition aid. Without a change in course, these deaths are expected to mount to 14 million by the end of the decade, including more than 4 million children under 5. Beyond the moral injury of this death toll, predominately in Africa, the aid cuts are also dangerous to America’s self interest, increasing instability and undermining early detection of outbreaks of diseases like ebola, which have pandemic potential.
ICE: Untamed
The administration secured $170 billion for its “deportation industrial complex” in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Aggressive enforcement is going hand-in-hand with violence and — sometimes — death. Renee Good’s homicide at the hands of an unaccountable ICE agent has captured national attention. (The FBI initially found grounds to investigate, but is now standing down.) This killing of a bystander adds to a mounting death count of those in federal detention. More than 30 died in ICE custody in 2025, and at least six have already perished in 2026, including an alleged homicide at an ICE camp in West Texas.
Gun Safety: Reversed
Upon taking office, the Trump administration immediately shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, a signature initiative of Vice President Kamala Harris to reduce the harms of guns on society. Last year, the administration also settled a lawsuit to allow gun owners to modify weapons to fire like machine guns, and the “One Big Beautiful Bill” included special favors for the gun industry, including making it easier for Americans to purchase silencers and deadly short-barelled shotguns.
VA: Drained and Constrained
Under Trump, the VA is in danger of buckling. The medical system for veterans has seen about 30,000 professionals leave the system, and the administration is now seeking to eliminate 35,000 unfilled jobs. This is happening at the same time the agency’s inspector general reported a 50 percent jump in “severe” staffing shortages.
Even as it is making care harder to access, the administration is imposing draconian restrictions on the healthcare the VA provides. Doctors are now being prohibited from providing abortion care, even in cases of rape, incest, and the health of the mother. Only when patients are in imminent danger of death are VA docs permitted to perform the procedure. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) has decried the move as an “outrageous assault on veterans health care and a profound betrayal of veterans who have put their lives on the line for our country.”
The Trump assault on science, health, and the most vulnerable is horrifying, but it can also galvanize a mood of solidarity. You can’t save the CDC on your own, of course, but there are ample opportunities to show up for your neighbors with mutual aid and compassion. Longterm, there is essential work to be done, through the democratic process, to sideline the me-first MAGA movement and restore political power to leaders who understand that our public health institutions are essential — and that none of us is expendable.
Tim Dickinson is the Senior political writer for The Contrarian
An accurate assessment. The only thing I would quibble with is the word “seem.” It doesn't seem as if he is trying to kill us; killing us is most definitely his goal. The regime is a death cult.
What’s chilling here isn’t one monstrous policy but the accumulation of tidy little decisions, each stamped administrative. Eligibility narrowed. Protections rolled back. Funding paused. Guidance revised. Research abandoned. No jackboots, just spreadsheets. Cruelty delivered by memo.
The common thread is a quiet recalculation of who counts. When pollution rules price human life at zero, when public health is treated like a political vendetta, when global aid disappears because the suffering happens far away, it’s not governance. It’s moral abdication dressed up as fiscal prudence.
This isn’t chaos. It’s method. A government can dismantle a society without shouting, just by removing the guardrails and calling it efficiency.
Which is why mutual aid matters now. Not because it solves the system, but because it refuses the lie at the center of all this: that some people are expendable.