Addressing Trump Trauma in Rhode Island

Photo illustration by Emily Rietzel. Imagery: IStock/Getty Images Plus and Edesia.

In 2009, the United States agency for International Development struck a deal with Navyn Salem. She had founded Edesia Nutrition to produce and distribute Plumpy’Nut, a highly nutritious peanut-based paste widely used to treat acutely malnourished children in developing countries. In 2008, she built her first factory in Tanzania, where her father was born — a mission part humanitarian aid and part economic development. USAID persuaded her to open a second factory here and use raw materials produced in America. In exchange, USAID would buy her Plumpy’Nut and deliver it worldwide under its logo.

For fifteen years, North Kingstown-based Edesia and USAID have been partners; last year, USAID funds supported 85 percent of the 800 metric tons of therapeutic nutrition Edesia produces weekly. In January, the newly minted Trump administration issued a foreign aid freeze and a stop-work order and abruptly canceled the organization’s contracts. Salem had to lay off ten percent of her staff, rescind orders from suppliers, and stop a global supply, manufacturing and distribution operation in its tracks. 

“You’ve got raw materials in your warehouse and en route to Edesia via trucks from fifteen different states. You have product on the production lines, on ships, at U.S. ports, being distributed across Africa and the Middle East,” Salem says. “Clinics have shut down in many places. The situation was already urgent. Dying children can’t wait for political decisions, and hungry people lead to political instability and mass migration. The ripple effect is enormous.

“My stress level is very, very high. I don’t sleep anymore.” 

The return of President Donald J. Trump to the White House has introduced a level of trauma unseen in modern times among a wide swath of constituencies. The affected groups are experiencing job losses, diminished incomes, uncertain futures and threats to due process and civil rights. 

In April and May, United States Senator Jack Reed’s office saw a four-fold spike in constituent contacts over the same period last year, the vast majority expressing anti-Trump “fear, anxiety and anger.”

“People are shaking their heads, saying, what is going on down there? Because every day, almost every minute, it’s a different story, and many of them are so outrageous, so confusion is one of the issues,” Reed says. “Second is the perception that the president is ignoring his responsibility to the Constitution, the laws in the United States. No president in my memory has used the White House as an extension of his private office and engaged in direct transactions that benefit him.” 

Bellowing about corruption and waste, the president, who was found guilty of thirty-four counts of falsifying business records in New York state (as of July, he is still appealing the verdict) and threw himself an estimated $45 million birthday military parade in June, took a chain saw to the federal workforce, which as of September 2024 directly employed 2.4 million people, excluding the active-duty military and postal service. (In Rhode Island, the Department of Veterans Affairs and Naval Undersea Warfare Center are the biggest federal employers.) In the first round, 130,000 employees took a buyout, retired or were fired. Another 150,000 are expected to lose their jobs in future reductions in force.  

The effort has sparked comparisons to 1993, when President Bill Clinton launched a program to streamline the federal government. By the time he left office, this initiative had thinned the federal ranks to fewer than 1.9 million, according to Drew DeSilver of the Pew Research Center. 

“But they did nips and tucks. The idea was to do it in such a way that it wouldn’t impact service delivery so most people wouldn’t notice,” DeSilver says. “The fact that you have to remind people that it happened tells you how successful they were. But they were doing over six or seven years what [former head of the Department of Government Efficiency] Elon Musk tried to do in six or seven days.”

The average person has the vague notion that the government comes on April 15 to take their money and give it to poor people, old people and the military. But the federal government is woven into everyday life in myriad ways that are unrecognized, and our tax dollars are invested in thousands of projects and programs that improve the quality of life here and abroad and support the economy.  

“What happens in Washington, D.C., has a direct impact on what happens in Rhode Island — direct,” says Rhode Island House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi. He ticks off a list of federally supported jobs and projects: a third of the positions at the state Department of Health and the Coastal Resources Management Council, bridge and school construction, as well as nursing home, physician and hospital payments. 

“We are now being told that they are not going to release our bridge money unless we sign something that [says] Rhode Island’s not a sanctuary state, and we are not going to institute any Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” he says. “Some of our programs for Medicaid pay 90 percent; we pay 10. If they were to cut that to 50-50, that is hundreds of millions of dollars that we will not be able to make up — and it threatens the whole health care system.”

Karen Dockery worries that her sixteen-year-old daughter, Shannon, severely autistic with a host of medical issues, will be one of the casualties. Medicaid pays for much of Shannon’s care and education at Pathways Strategic Teaching Center in Warwick. School officials have so far assured Dockery that they will not cut back on her services, “which is great. But how much can they stick to that?” she asks. “What’s actually going to happen is another story. If they have to cut back on staff, not only do I worry about compromising her learning, but even more so — her safety.” 

The University of Rhode Island, with $146 million in awards in fiscal year 2024 — more than 80 percent from federal sources — lost $48.1 million in a matter of weeks. These investigations fulfilled specific research requests from the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Defense and Homeland Security, the National Science Foundation and USAID. Awarded via a national competition, these grants explored plant and animal health, port security, hurricane readiness, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, and workforce training in partnership with General Dynamics Electric Boat to build the next generation of submarines. 

“These things are really important to our society, that the public cares about,” says Bethany Jenkins, URI vice president for research and economic development. “In some cases, people have lost their livelihoods; in others, people are taking salary reductions. The university is scrambling to keep students funded on other sources so they can finish their degrees. And we have had to be the people notifying our colleagues that their work was getting cut. That is a really hard thing to do and it takes its toll on a community.”

In early spring, Pamela Davis, owner of Eclectic Energy, a Wakefield gift shop, was a queasy rider on the rollercoaster of Trump’s tariff threats. Most of her Halloween and Christmas stock is produced abroad, and even her small product designers rely on raw materials produced overseas. In March, the wholesale vendors were pushing her to beat potential tariffs by ordering her stocking stuffers early.

“That’s very difficult when you have to put all your money out for the summer season in a seasonal town. I’m in a flux,” she says. “I don’t know which way to go. Should I bring all the product in, rack up my credit cards and pay crazy interest now until January 1 and hope that was the right thing to do?” she asks. “Right now, the decisions are very stressful.”

Rhode Island PBS, which recently merged with The Public’s Radio, was facing a potential $1 million loss and running multiple disaster scenarios in late spring. 

“That’s a big blow. Nearly 70 percent of our budget is people. We’re trying to figure out how to preserve the core and continue our mission while rethinking what we do and how we do it,” says Rhode Island PBS CEO Pam Johnston. “It makes me sad and scared. There’s a lot at stake — this national system is the last locally owned and operated media outlet in many parts of our country. And it is still free educational, arts and culture content that connects all of America.”

Farm Fresh Rhode Island lost $2.8 million in funding from the USDA Local Food Purchase Agreement and the Local Food for Schools program, says Executive Director Jesse Rye. These initiatives to strengthen the local food system, address food insecurity and create markets for farmers served tens of thousands of Rhode Islanders and supported nearly ninety small businesses supplying community food programs and school districts. The organization lost eight members of its staff, and all of its AmeriCorps volunteers, with the termination of that national service program. 

“There are moments where there’s something from the day that I can’t let go of — talking to people about the uncertainty of their careers,” Rye says. “But the thing that keeps me up at night the most is knowing that almost 40 percent of Rhode Islanders are food insecure and that we’re cutting these things senselessly. That makes me very worried.”

Andraly Horn and Sienna Viette, who produce food at their Open fArms Retreat in Cumberland, were in the midst of planting for distribution to a federally funded Woonsocket food program that had been reauthorized for the next three years when their funding was cut.

“That funding is no longer there, which means our program can no longer continue and we don’t have an outlet for selling our food, so we are switching to selling wholesale and hoping it will go through soon,” says Viette. 

The immigrant community in Rhode Island, which makes up 14.6 percent of the state’s population and 16.7 percent of the labor force, has been paralyzed by the current wave of high-profile United
States Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that have indiscriminately swept up U.S. citizens and legal residents along with those lacking permanent legal status. 

Milagro Sique, chief operating officer of Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island, which assists about 6,000 clients per year with immigration and refugee-related services, has been fielding questions from community members: “Should I apply for citizenship? For this benefit? Is this going to impact me in the future?” she says. “It’s true fear about how to meet their basic needs, how to live in this world. People are shutting in and staying home — they’re not going to restaurants, to work, or sending their children to school. It’s really impacting their day to day.”

“The level of fear and trauma among the families that we serve is unrecognizable to me from any prior experience, and I’ve worked with immigrants in different capacities for over forty years,” says Jennifer Wood, an attorney and executive director of the Rhode Island Center for Justice.

The ripple effects of Trump’s war on diversity and bodily autonomy washed up recently at Chariho High School, where Chris Kona’s child, a nonbinary ninth grader, had emerged from their shell and for the first time was enjoying school activities in a supportive environment. In the wake of an executive order rolling back Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, some members of the Chariho School Committee wanted to review the district’s policies. An outpouring of community support discouraged them from proceeding.

“Executive orders have no effect on state law,” Kona says. “But we were afraid of the impact they might have on school policy — and we’re not the only ones. There are pressures from the federal government and local extremist groups that advocate for discrimination against LGBTQ+ students. So, we continue to be worried because we’re one school district, but there’s a lot of others in Rhode Island that have had a myriad of different responses.”

Then there are those who thought the ripples wouldn’t reach them. A few months ago, Shekarchi was getting a haircut when his barber, an ardent Trump supporter, began badmouthing the president. It turned out that his wife had just been fired from her job at the IRS after twelve years. 

“I asked why. He says, ‘There was no reason why. He just could, so he did, I’m sorry I voted for him,’” recalls Shekarchi. “I think there are a lot more people like that out there that we don’t know about and a lot more to come.”