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There Is a Contest Trump Is Winning

The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp. It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to...

NYTIMES 입력 2026.04.21 18:04 0

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Guest Essay

There Is a Contest Trump Is Winning

April 21, 2026,

5:03 a.m. ET

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Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes weekly essays from Washington on politics and demographics.

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The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.

It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to core democratic customs and traditions, from the legal system to universities, from innocent targets of fraud to those duped into believing vaccines do more harm than good.

One way to bring home the depth of Trump’s callousness is to look at a specific case. In May 2025, Anjee Davis, the chief executive of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group,

told

CBS News:

We have a member who is being treated for Stage IV colorectal cancer. She had just qualified to enter a clinical trial that was going to be her last-chance effort to slow the spread of her cancer.

Her trial was about to start when N.I.H. funding was pulled overnight, and the trial was canceled.

Davis replied to my inquiry about the case by email. “This patient has since passed away without receiving the clinical trial she was counting on,” she wrote.

“What we will never know,” Davis added, “is whether that trial could have given her more time with her children.”

I have described in

earlier

columns

bits and pieces of Trump’s destructiveness, but the list grows daily.

Projections suggest there will be

millions

of dead men, women and children as a result of his budget cuts, which were made without direct Congressional approval. A study published in The Lancet, the London-based medical journal,

found that

Trump administration cuts in U.S.A.I.D. funding “would result in approximately 1,776,539 all-age deaths and 689,900 deaths in children younger than 5 years” in 2025 alone.

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