I’ve been struggling to imagine Elon Musk might do if he gets his trillion-dollar payday. He could spend a million dollars a day for 3,000 years. Or, more realistically, $100 million a day for 30 years. He could spend the $290 million he invested in Trump’s election and do it 3,400 times, wherever and whenever he pleases. Or buy more media properties, spending up to twenty times the $44 billion it took for him to buy Twitter and make it into a misinformation swamp key to Trump’s reelection.

Although President Donald Trump has claimed that “every policy” of his administration was “designed to lift up the American worker,” he has acted consistently, since returning to office in January 2025, to undermine workers’ chosen representatives, America’s labor unions.

The most flagrant Trump action along these lines occurred in March 2025, when he issued an executive order that terminated collective bargaining rights for more than 1 million federal government employees. This measure, the largest single union-busting action in American history, ended union representation and protections for 1 out of 14 unionized workers in the United States.

To the Editor:

As a resident of German Village and Chair of the German Village Society’s Historic Preservation Committee, I am writing out of deep concern for the ongoing and unnecessary destruction of historic sandstone curbs in our neighborhood. These curbs, hand-cut in the 19th century by immigrant stonemasons, are not just stones. They are part of the original streetscape that gives German Village its nationally recognized character.

In recent months, contractors working on behalf of the City of Columbus have demolished these curbs during ADA ramp installations — without public notice and without obtaining a Certificate of Appropriateness (COA). Every homeowner in German Village is required to secure a COA for any sidewalk, curb, or exterior work affecting historic materials. Yet the City has proceeded as though it is exempt from the very rules that residents must follow.

The result is permanent loss. Once these sandstone curbs are removed and replaced with modern concrete, they cannot be recreated. Their historic craftsmanship and material integrity are gone forever.