I know we Americans are facing truly horrific challenges–the White House is occupied by a man whose malevolent insanity is impossible to ignore. His ICE agents are America’s version of a (masked) Gestapo. Our “guardrails” have failed us, with feckless Congressional Republicans refusing to honor their oaths of office and a corrupt Supreme Court enabling the madman in the Oval Office.
It’s an ugly picture, and I don’t want to minimize how dire things are. But what has really incensed me–probably out of proportion to the severity of all the other threats we face–is the unbelievable hypocrisy of both Trump and MAGA.
Let’s talk about guns. Trump wouldn’t have won in 2024 without the gun lobby–his victory was thin. He sold himself to the NRA and other Second Amendment “patriots” as a defender of their ahistorical application of that Amendment. Now, he defends the murder of a peaceful protester by his ICE thugs by declaring that the protester’s lawful possession of a gun–which that protester never held and certainly never “brandished”–justified killing him, saying “You can’t bring a gun. You just can’t.”
I’m waiting for those intrepid Second Amendment protectors in Congress to call for his impeachment…
Then there’s Trump’s even more egregious lie about why he sent ICE into Minneapolis–and his rhetoric about stamping out “fraud” that he attributed to all Somali residents (they’re Black, you know, so they must all be guilty). It was immaterial that those allegations, which involved a small number of Somalis, had already been investigated and addressed by state law enforcement. That excuse was really rich, coming from a President who continues to pardon people found guilty of multiple crimes–including fraud–by juries. Of course, those pardons only issue when the fraudster or a relative pays him off, or when–like the January 6th rioters–they engaged in criminal behaviors at his request.
And don’t get me started on Trump’s excuse for bombing fishing ships out of international waters and murdering an estimated 124 people on board without any due process or evidence. His excuse was that those boats were carrying drugs. Meanwhile, he granted a full and complete pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was given due process, and who had been convicted in a court of law for conspiring to import over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S..
Perhaps the most blatant hypocrisy is coming from Minnesota, where Trump’s MAGA supporters are having what one pundit called a “toddler tantrum” over the fact that hundreds of Minneapolis area businesses have put “NO ICE SERVED HERE” signs in their windows. The MAGA people fulminating over this “outrage” are the very people who have spent years protecting the “religious rights” of business owners. They are the same people who’ve gone to court to protect the “First Amendment rights” of bakers to refuse to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples, and to protect web architects from having to design websites for gay folks.
And they won. Our disgraceful Supreme Court went out of its way (okay, out of the Constitution’s way) to accommodate those very “sincere” religious folks, to allow them to refuse to serve people whose very existence offended their “sincerely held” beliefs. Our home-grown theocrats celebrated the “liberty” of business owners to discriminate on the basis of principle. Their current outrage is just evidence of what the rest of us have always known: they were hypocrites. They weren’t interested in defending just any “principles” or moral beliefs upon which a given business owner might sincerely be acting–they were only interested in sending a “religious” message to particular people of whom they disapproved.
Trump’s hypocrisy is nothing new.
Back in 2022, Austin Sarat wrote in The Hill that Trump’s hypocrisy undermines democracy by eroding trust and breeding cynicism. “What Trump practices and what he preaches have little in common. He feels no compunction about doing the very things that he denounces and uses to demonize his political opponents.”
But democratic politics cannot thrive, or perhaps even survive, when hypocrisy becomes the norm. Political scientist John Keane has rightly observed that “Hypocrisy … is the soil in which antipathy towards democracy always takes root.”
Keane argues that democratic politics rests on a foundation of trust among citizens and between citizens and their representatives. Hypocrisy erodes that trust. It leads people to discount what others say in the political arena and promotes a corrosive disgust with politics.
“Corrosive distrust.” Sounds like a pretty apt description of where we are….
I would say corrosive distrust is where we have been versus where we are. And distrust fuels conspiracy theories. Trump and his regime have only made that worse.
And as we also discuss on this blog, the same distrust and hypocrisy can be laid at the feet of our media or “free press.” There are no checks and balances in our government.
The regimes of Obama, Trump, and Biden have all been hypocritical and liars, and none of them had checks and balances from the Supreme Court, Congress, or the media. Especially when it came to initiating wars on other countries, we can go back even further and include Bush and Reagan, etc, etc.
Look at our national hypocrisy where we chastise all the criminals who appear in child molestation cases at the local level, but at the federal and international level, we bury our heads in the sand. Pam Bondi loves to give speeches where she gets all self-righteous about other crimes, but refuses to prosecute any donor or oligarch. In fact, she’s doing her best to cover up the entire Epstein case and spitting in the faces of all the victims.
I could go on and on, but you can see why the American public and now the international public are cynical about the U.S. government. Single-handedly, Trump is re-arranging the international order because nobody trusts the United States anymore to do anything that they promise.
Is there anything more hypocritical than Trump calling for federal oversight of elections?
The tag line to your parodied title today in the movie “Apocalypse Now” is “It smells like victory.” In this case, the word hypocrisy changes that tag line to “It smells like losing”.
Another line from another movie keeps popping into my tired old brain: “These guys aren’t very smart”. Sadly, though, slime like Russ Vought, Stephen Miller and a few others ARE smart, and therein lays the danger for our Republic. SCOTUS has proven that having a law degree and the right politics does not make the law person smart. The hypocrisy among them and the Congressional Republicans proves – on a daily basis – that they absolutely aren’t very smart. They make Lauren Boebert look and sound like a rocket scientist.
Maybe we were too harsh on Marjorie Greene. She got out before she had completely sold her little soul to the devil of corporate/banking America’s favorite party.
It’s all a deliberate strategy. Accuse everyone else of doing what you are doing or planning to do. It has been so obvious for so long and repeatedly pointed out by so many people that it is old news.The strategy disgusts me almost as much as the people who pretend to not see it. The people who are truly unaware of it are just dim witted and are to be pitied.
Paul Krugman’s blog post goes a long in explaining why Republican SCOTUS members are caving in to Trump. It also explains why congress and a lot of others have rolled over dead.
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But to suggest that Supreme Court justices are insulated from pressure merely because they have job security is to misunderstand how power and influence work, especially within the modern right-wing movement.
Prominent figures on the right — and the Republican Six on the Supreme Court surely qualify for that definition — aren’t just members of a movement. They’re also part of a social scene — a scene shaped by the wealth and power of billionaires. They share in the privilege and glitter of that scene even if they aren’t outright corrupt — even if they aren’t all like Clarence Thomas, who, as ProPublica revealed, has taken multiple lavish vacations paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow.
To vote against Donald Trump’s beloved tariffs, delivering him both a policy and a political blow, would be to risk being ostracized and exiled from that milieu. If you don’t think that would matter a lot, you don’t understand human nature.
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