VANDALS

By, Patti Vasquez

Good morning, folks.

This week Patti’s writing about what a budget says about who we’ve decided matters.

While the people in charge strip away healthcare, food assistance, the support services that keep families like hers and yours afloat, they can still find $14 million for a photo op pool and a felony grand jury over two square feet of caulk.

And while that’s happening, ICE keeps killing people who weren’t even who they were looking for. Nine people dead. Zero agents charged.

This is the piece where Patti puts it all in one place. What gets funded, what gets gutted, who gets protected, and who doesn’t.

A quick reminder that independent voices like Patti’s don’t run on hopes and good vibes. A portion of everything we sell today, including our WOKE Coffee. bags and WOKE Oat Milk Sweet Cream canned coffee, goes directly toward paying the writers who bring you pieces like this one. If you want stories the mainstream would rather soften or ignore, fuel up with something that actually pays for them. Shop the Minocqua Marketplace. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack.

Here’s Patti.

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VANDALS

This weekend I went through the motions.

Made the coffee. Did the errands. Half-watched something on TV so my brain would have somewhere to go besides the news. It wasn’t rest. It was more like trying to float while wearing ankle weights.

And somewhere in there I realized what was actually happening to me, the sheer surrealness of everything weighing on me. How many unbelievably horrible things are unfolding right now, at the same time, while the rest of us are just trying to get through a Saturday. Grocery list in one hand, phone in the other, doom scrolling between errands like that’s a normal way to live. Because it is now. That’s the part that gets me. It’s normal now.

They are robbing us in broad daylight. Not hiding it. Doing it right in front of us, then getting indignant when we notice.

Saturday afternoon, while I was somewhere between the pharmacy and the parking lot, the President of the United States sat down and typed the word VANDALISM. In capital letters. Twice. About a hole in the ground.

Let’s talk about vandals.

Friday, his own Justice Department told a federal court his $14 million pool renovation was hasty and botched. Their words.

Saturday, he got on Truth Social and lost it. Said he disagreed 100% with his own hand picked U.S. Attorney. Didn’t know what she was thinking. Called it a pure case of VANDALISM, and then, and I want you to really sit with this part, said the vandalism “included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it.”

There may have been some contractor difficulty, he allowed. But the major damage was caused by VANDALS!

Then he posted a four minute video of people standing near the water and told us to look for ourselves. Said you could see it getting cut with a box cutter, for all to see.

So let’s actually talk about vandals.

Fourteen point six million dollars. That’s what the government paid a contractor, no bid, to redo the Reflecting Pool in time for a July 4th photo op. No competition, just speed. It started peeling within days.

David Hearn, Olympic canoeist, not a criminal mastermind, was there in June, touched a loose piece of sealant. The National Guard detained him. Three weeks later a grand jury indicted him on a felony. Damage: two square feet. About a thousand bucks.

A felony. For a thousand dollars of caulk that was already failing before he ever got there.

Friday, they dropped it. Turns out the damage ran clear out to the middle of the pool, nowhere near where you’d stand to hand peel a liner without a park ranger yelling at you. And, DOJ admitted that if Interior had just handed over what it already had, they never would’ve indicted the guy in the first place.

They had the paperwork. Sat on it. Let a man get arrested to cover for their own bad contract.

And Trump’s response to his own agency, his own contractor, his own filing? Pouting about somebody writing 8647 in the grass. That’s the injury. Not the $14 million. The grass.

I could end the column right there and you’d have a perfectly good bit about a small man yelling at a puddle. But while he was doing that, real vandalism was happening. To you.

February 20th, the Supreme Court struck the tariffs down, 6 to 3. Not close. Because the President doesn’t get to invent taxes. That’s Congress’s job. Hopefully they’re still teaching that in school.

Those tariffs cost the average household about a thousand dollars last year. You paid it at the register. Tires, furniture, the dryer part you were hoping to nurse through one more winter.

Through the end of June, Customs paid back $71 billion of it. With interest. They’re paying interest.

Not to you, though. You don’t get a check. You weren’t the importer, you were just the person who bought the product. The money goes to the company. Goldman Sachs already told its clients not to expect prices to drop anywhere near as fast as they went up, because prices only go one direction and the wheel’s on their side.

Bessent went on TV and told America flat out, you’re not getting this back. Somebody pushed him on it and he called the question “bad framing.”

Bad framing. Not wrong. Not complicated. Bad framing, like we asked the wrong question instead of him giving the wrong answer.

Warren, Welch and Booker called it what it is. A giveaway to giant corporations, paid for by theft from the middle class. And DOJ is still fighting to shrink the refund pool down to the roughly 4,000 importers who lawyered up and filed. So even the money that is going back has a velvet rope on it.

Run the math with me. A thousand dollars of caulk got a man a felony and the National Guard. A thousand dollars out of your kitchen got you a lecture about framing.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. ICE killed him in Houston. Six days later, in Biddeford, Maine, they killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a twenty five year old delivery driver who had his papers and wasn’t even who they were looking for. His wife and his three year old daughter found him in the street. She was in her Bluey pajamas. Nine people killed total in this administration’s enforcement operations. Zero agents charged.

Notice what this same government says it cannot afford.

It cannot afford Medicaid the way it exists right now. The bill they passed cuts it by roughly a trillion dollars over ten years and is expected to push somewhere between 8 and 17 million people off their coverage entirely, once the ACA subsidies are counted in. New work reporting requirements land at the end of this year, and independent estimates say those alone knock millions off the rolls, not because they stopped qualifying, because they got lost in the paperwork.

It cannot afford SNAP the way it exists right now either. Same bill. Food assistance takes a cut that’s proportionally even steeper than Medicaid’s, over a third gone within less than a decade.

Somewhere in this country tonight there’s a parent doing exactly the math I do. Whether the appointment gets kept. Whether the prescription gets filled or the light bill gets paid. Whether the waiver program that’s supposed to help their kid survives the next redetermination, or gets buried under a new form nobody bothered explaining properly.

Somebody had a trillion dollars sitting right there and decided a Reflecting Pool and a tariff refund for Dyson were the better use of it. That’s the choice. On purpose.

A budget is a values statement. This one’s already been signed.

Thirty days to indict a man over caulk. Ten years to unwind a trillion dollars of healthcare for people who never had this much to spare in the first place.

Call it what it is. A filing system. Power gets protected and made whole, with interest. You get processed, or means tested, or quietly dropped from a list you didn’t know you were on. And if you die getting processed, somebody in a cabinet position goes on TV and tells the country you probably deserved it.

So fine. Let’s use his word.

Vandalism is a $14 million contract rushed and wrecked for a photo op, and a citizen indicted to cover it up.

Vandalism is a thousand dollars taken out of every house in this country and handed back, with interest, to everybody except the people it came from.

Vandalism is nine people shot and fifty two dead in custody and not one single charge.

Vandalism is a trillion dollars pulled out of Medicaid and SNAP so the math works out for somebody who never needed either one.

That’s the damage. Emblazoned in giant letters. For all to see.

Some of my fatigue isn’t even about the news cycle. It’s older than that. It’s the clock I carry around that has nothing to do with elections, the one that says I only have so much time to make sure Declan is safe, and cared for, and set up to be okay after I’m not here to do it myself.

That’s not a metaphor for me. That’s Tuesday.

And that’s exactly why this isn’t abstract. A budget is a values statement. What we fund is who we’ve decided matters. Right now our government is telling us, in numbers, that Declan matters less than a tax cut for someone who already has more money than he’ll spend in three lifetimes. They’re drenching themselves in wealth that came from our labor, our sweat, our taxes, while gutting the very programs that would let a kid like mine live a safe, full life after I’m gone.

And the people cheering loudest for the people doing this to them? Getting robbed at the same register, standing in the same pharmacy line, watching their own healthcare get gutted right alongside everyone else’s, and cheering anyway. I don’t fully understand it and I’m done pretending I do. I just know it’s not going to talk itself out of existence.

I don’t have a better system. I have showing up.

I’m going to Wisconsin. Indiana. Iowa. Wherever they need bodies more than they need my opinions.

I don’t have another choice, honestly. Not if I want Declan to have a country worth being safe in. So I’ll keep doing the unglamorous thing, knocking, talking, listening, showing people that connecting with each other is still the whole ballgame, before and after every election.

They wrecked it. All of it. Declan didn’t get a say in any of this. So I’m going to keep showing up for him, and for everyone else’s Declan too.

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Patti Vasquez hosts “Driving It Home with Patti Vasquez” weekdays 5-7 PM CST on WCPT 820 AM. She’s a mom, wife, daughter, caregiver, radio host, writer, comedian, and professional feeler of feelings.

Steve Hofstetter’s Milk Shake Alarm Clock

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Consider purchasing a bag of WOKE Coffee Beans, a 4 pack of WOKE Oat Milk Sweet Cream canned coffee, or sign up for a WOKE Coffee subscription so you never run out. And drink it all from one of the new WOKE mugs!

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