President Donald continues to be maligned at every opportunity by those infected with “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a disease manifested in sufferers by an unthinking hate.

A New York Times story, with the headline “Trump orders to strip union rights from nearly half a million workers” caught my attention recently. This was the result of an August 2025 federal appeals court ruling that lifted a preliminary injunction, allowing President Trump’s executive order to eliminate collective bargaining rights for a significant number of federal workers to move forward. This decision reversed a prior court order that had blocked the executive order.

This executive order was issued because the affected workers had positions that touched on national security and because provisions in their contracts would interfere with administration policies being carried out.The agencies impacted include the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, FEMA, and Veterans Affairs.

The move brought protests from Democrats and labor leaders including one who said that “The loss of bargaining rights for federal employees inevitably hurts the members of the public it serves.” Joseph A McCartin, a professor of labor history, called it “… an action that’s almost incomparable in terms of what a president can do to undermine unions.”

It is interesting to note what Democratic presidents said about the collective bargaining rights of federal workers. While Franklin Roosevelt supported collective bargaining in the private sector he rejected it for federal workers stating that it “cannot be transplanted into the public service.” In 1937 he stated his opinion that collective bargaining for federal workers made them less accountable to taxpayers who had no voice in negotiations between agencies and unions. FDR wrote that a strike by public employees was “unthinkable and intolerable” because it is an act against the government itself.

FDR’s successor Harry Truman, while very sympathetic to labor unions, was opposed to collective bargaining for federal employees because he felt a strike would paralyze the nation. His attitude towards collective bargaining for federal employees was demonstrated during a 1946 railroad strike when he went before Congress to request authority to draft striking railroad workers into the armed forces, whereby law they could not strike. In eliminating collective bargaining rights federal employees Trump is solidly in step with Democratic icons.

A headline I saw in the Buffalo News read this way: “Trump’s plans for the Fed would fortify his grip on power.” The story reported that critics of the investigation of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for mortgage fraud had accused the Trump administration of weaponizing the Justice Department to remove a Fed official with whom he disagrees on economic policy.

In doing this he joined a large group of his predecessors in office by using old fashioned “Jaw boning” or attempting to persuadeChairman Jerome Powell to get the Independent Fed to lower interest rates to stimulate spending and ease burdensome interest rates on home mortgages and credit cards. Previous presidents who sought to influence monetary policy through appointment and public comments include FDR, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter.

What really disturbs me is that Democrats at all levels, county, state, federal, and their friends in the national press, describe Trump as a fascist, a dictator or most often another Hitler. Anyone with a basic knowledge of history would know these characterizations to be untrue.

He is the only president in our history who was the target of a treasonous coup instigated by members of the Obama administration following Trump’s defeat of Hilary Clinton. This was led by President Obama and his national security team consisting of James Clapper, John Brennana, and James Comey who ignored the Constitution in an effort to thwart the Trump administration with the eventual goal of removing him from office.

In the months leading up to the November 2016 election the Intelligence Community stated that Russia is “probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means.” Even on December 7 James Clapper stated, “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.”

Then On December 9, 2016, President Obama gathered top National Security Council members for a meeting that included Clapper, Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe and others, to discuss Russia. After the meeting, DNI Clapper’s Executive Assistant sent an email to intelligence leaders tasking them with creating a new assessment “per the President’s request” that details the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.” According to new evidence Obama administration officials also leaked false statements to media outlets.

On January 6, 2017, an intelligence assessment was released that contradicted assessments that were made throughout the previous six months. Today the facts reveal that this new assessment was based on spurious documents like the Steele Dossier. This was politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, that led to the year-long Mueller investigation, and two Congressional impeachments. In an attempt to distract the public from this new evidence Democrats, in recent weeks have concocted false stories of some sort of Trump and Jeffery Epstein friendship.

Out of office, Democrats continued to hound Trump fearful that he would run against a virtually comatose Joe Biden. He was subjected to a tactic employed by a cabal of Democratic politicians and prosecutors called lawfare, a term coined by Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., in 2001, to describe the partisan and political abuse of law to achieve a takeover of government or impede its functions by seeding the judiciary with loyalist judges and prosecutors who ignore precedent and invent new legal doctrines to justify rulings that effectively usurp democratic processes. That sounds like what Trump enemies have been doing for the last eight years. Some may take issue with what I write but it’s hard to deny the truth.

Thomas Kirkpatrick Sr. is a SIlver Creek resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com.