Nothing's what it seems with edicts descending from D.C.

Sometimes it seems as though we’ve tumbled down Alice’s Wonderland rabbit hole and joined her at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, where nothing is as it seems. At least it has in the eight months — has it really been just eight months? — since we ushered Donald J. Trump back into the White House.

To hear Mr. Trump tell it, America has become a cesspool of crime and corruption, decadence and decline, moral rot and physical decay. And only he can bring us back to the glorious yesteryear of unrestrained American exceptionalism.

He’s declared war on our own government, it’s capital city and virtually every other manifestation of our institutional heritage.

The roster of his targets include our leading cities, universities, cultural centers, court systems, law firms, voting systems and diplomatic alliances — even our national networks of healthcare and defense. To him, it would seem, they all seem to smack too much of potential engines of his demise.

What’s more, his approach has been chaotic, undisciplined and often contradictory. Because of a complicit Congress and Supreme Court, it has also been dictatorial. And it’s leaving trails of wreckage behind in all directions.

There are myriad examples, but let’s stick to just one here — a recent instance playing havoc locally with beloved helping agencies.

In its zeal to cleanse America of the poor huddled masses streaming in from abroad — here illegally, but willingly doing our dirty work for us all across the land — his administration recently made Victims on Crime Act funding contingent on the sharing of confidential personal information with agents of the federal Immigration and Customs Service.

Our Henderson House domestic violence shelter and Juliette’s House child sex abuse assessment center both depend on VOCA for around a quarter of their operating budgets.

But sharing such information would destroy any last vestiges of victim trust and security they might be able to muster with their clients. What’s more, it could leave child sex abuse victims facing further devastating trauma via deportation of relatives committed to their protection.

Russell Mark, executive director at Juliette’s House, put it this way in an interview with the News-Register:

“It’s inhumane. Giving access to our information would put children in a position to be traumatized again.

“We’re about helping children heal from abuse. We’ve spent 30 years building trust; this would totally destroy that.”

The agencies don’t feel they have any real choice. If the new stipulation doesn’t fall under legal challenge, they are facing forfeiture of funds vital to their missions.

Word of the agencies’ plight triggered a tremendous outpouring of stopgap aid from compassionate members of our community. As heartening as that was, however, it’s simply not possible for locals to replicate over the long term the level of aid effectively being cut off by federal authorities — authorities who seem utterly fixated on immigration, as if it were the only ill America faced in these tumultuous times.

It certainly didn’t help when the president, annoyed that persistent domestic violence arrests were marring the crime stats he was seeking via National Guard interdiction in Washington, D.C., expressed his irritation this way:

“Things that take place in the home, they call crime. You know, they’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see?’”

“A little fight with the wife” shouldn’t be considered criminal? That would take us back at least 30 years, if not 50.

Masked secret police are terrorizing workplaces in a reputed search for murderers, rapists, gangsters and drug peddlers, “the worst of the worst.” But they are coming up largely with hardworking and gainfully employed family people of deep roots and clean records.

Meanwhile, DOGE is devastating the federal workforce in reputed pursuit of fraud and waste, but finding little of either. In the process, it is eliminating most of the regulations and regulators put in place for that very purpose by previous administrations.

And tariffs — paid not by nations, but by private enterprises incorporating them into the pricing structure — are battering farmers, manufacturers, importers, exporters and consumers alike. The economy is already feeling the negative effects.

How is this making America great again?

It may all make sense in the fantasyland revealed to Alice when she followed the White Rabbit underground. But from here, it makes none at all.