Opinion: The Coming Trumpocalypse and the Jones Library Expansion Project

There is widespread agreement that the world changed on Tuesday, November 5, 2024 and that the United States is now entering a period of extreme, anti-democratic reorganization. The blueprint for that reorganization, Project 2025, has distinctly fascist aspirations with profound economic consequences.

We don’t know what’s going to happen in the first year of the Trump administration but, given the proposals in Project 2025 (now publicly declared by Trump’s transition team as the blueprint for the new administration), and the pronouncements of Elon Musk, who will head the new Department of Government Efficiency (with a mandate to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget), things are sure to be economically precarious for all but the billionaires, and this is already producing a lot of uncertainty and angst. For example, it is widely agreed that Trump’s promised sweeping tariffs on foreign goods will trigger substantial price increases on consumer goods with far-reaching economic consequences. While the stock market is currently booming (62% of adult Americans own stock, but 93% of stocks are held by the wealthiest 10%), it is noteworthy that economists are wary of what is going to happen several months down the road when government reorganization is in full swing.

The possibilities for locally felt disaster are everywhere. One example: Trump has promised to shut down the Department of Education early in his term. Public schools rely on federal funds for a variety of important programs. Here in Amherst, we receive $250,000 annually just for Title I, which supports programs that help to bridge the educational achievement gap for low-income students. And that’s just one instance of what the feds help us to pay for. How will we continue to operate our schools if federal funding dries up when we are struggling to keep our schools functioning even with federal support? 

I had an interesting conversation with a couple of academic fundraisers last week and they are worried that the donor ecosystem may collapse in the coming year in response to worries about what the Trump chaos is going to do to the economy. Sure the stock market is booming right now, but big donors are likely to be wary and hence more conservative in what they do with their money in the coming year. And we should be too. In Amherst, it’s hard to imagine folks opening up their wallets for the Jones expansion before they see whether the Trump administration is going to follow through on Project 2025 and its long list of radical and fiscally impactful promises. There is certainly plenty of reassuring talk out there, e.g. that Trump won’t tank the economy because that will hurt his billionaire backers. But I would be wary of those arguing that he can’t do the things that he’s been promising to do or that we will be protected because he won’t hurt his billionaires. But can we be confident that safeguards for billionares will trickle down to the rest of us? And as for doing whatever he promises, he does have that trifecta of controlling all three branches of government and he is, according to the Supreme Court, immune from prosecution. So we must face the fact that he can pretty much do whatever he wants.

The Jones fundraising situation appears to be a mess, so much so that the ability of the trustees to raise what they have promised appears to be highly questionable even if we weren’t facing the chaos of an unfettered Trump presidency. The details are elsewhere (see e.g. here, here, here, and here). But know that the trustees are currently in arrears to the town for $900,000 with another $4 million payment to the town due in January, according to the cash flow analysis given to town councilors last year before they increased town borrowing for the project to $46 million. The fundraising efforts have been opaque, and the trustees have failed to disclose their required financial reports (funds raised and expenses) for the last two months. They apparently raised zero dollars in the months of August and September. And they have been less than forthright in reporting on the funds they claim to have “raised,” e.g. continuing to claim for several months that they expected to receive $2 million in historic tax credits, even after being informed that their application for those credits had been denied four times.

Now the town has jeopardized another $2.1 million in federal grants because of its failure to properly complete a mandaotry Section 106 historical review and environmental impact statement. And the town is ultimately on the hook for any funds that the trustees promised to raise but are unable to deliver. All of this is to say that the trustees’ capacity to raise funds for their share of this project was doubtful even before Trump’s ascendancy, and now we have even more reason to be worried and untrusting. It’s hard to imagine that there is going to be a dramatic turnaround in fundraising success in the face of last week’s events.

So undertaking this shaky and risky project when, to date, the particulars have been so uncertain and the management so sloppy, the trustees so opaque, and the sponsors so consistently unrealistic in their fiscal estimates — and when the risks have been compounded since Tuesday — seems totally irresponsible.

Whether the town and the trustees can even come close to pulling together the necessary funding in this unstable and uncertain environment is an open question that everyone ought to be asking. The full-speed-ahead attitude at this point strikes me as unconscionable. Now it ought to be a full stop, with the next step being an explicit, townwide discussion of what the Trump election means for the town and for the Jones Expansion Project. That needs to precede any further action. Perhaps this is not the time to be undertaking a very expensive project where the final costs are uncertain and the needed dollars are not in hand. 

At the last Finance Committee meeting, on November 15, there was no acknowledgement that an election had even happened that might have implications for our local budgets. At the one meeting last month where the library project’s financials were on the agenda, no one from the project attended, and no meaningful information was produced or discussed.  

I call on the Finance Committee, the Town Council, and all town residents to engage in a comprehensive discussion of what the coming chaos means for the financial security of this town. My own sense is that we must acknowledge that the world has changed and that the current situation demands that we embrace a conservative, defensive strategy. 

Given the combined uncertainties of the Jones funding with the coming chaos from the Trump administration, it makes sense to pivot to a less costly, more modest project — that is, a repair and a repurposing of space that can give us a functional and pleasant library without fiscally endangering Amherst residents for a generation. Certainly, the situation demands that we consider the risks ahead and the full range of available options. 

Art Keene is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UMass Amherst.  He was co-founder and co-director of two social justice-based civic leadership programs at UMass – The UMass Alliance For Community Transformation (UACT) and The Community Scholars Program. He coached Cross Country at Amherst Regional High School for 17 years. He is Managing Editor of the Amherst Indy.