MAGA’s Defender Of Christianity

Trump’s base is disproportionately composed of Christian nationalists–people who tell you they support him because he is a defender of (their version of) the Christian faith. The notion that Trump has ever encountered Christianity–or any faith tradition–is ludicrous, but then, so is the pretense that Christian nationalists represent any variety of authentic Christianity.

The other day, I was reading Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letter, and after reading the following passages, I wanted to find a self-identified Christian nationalist (Micah Beckwith? Jim Banks?) and ask “Do you really think this is what Jesus would do?”

Here’s what Richardson wrote:

Yesterday the Trump administration said it would not use any of the approximately $6 billion the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) holds in reserve to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The government shutdown means that states have run out of funds to distribute to the more than 42 million Americans who rely on SNAP to put food on the table.

Roll Call’s Olivia M. Bridges notes that this position contradicts the shutdown plan the USDA released in late September. Then, it said: “Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.”

Yesterday’s USDA memo also says that any states that tap their own resources to provide food benefits will not be reimbursed.

That last paragraph especially infuriated me, because it makes the fact that the cruelty is intentional too obvious to miss.

The Trump administration is not only withholding food from families and children. It clearly recognizes that–as food banks have been warning–nonprofit agencies will be unable to make up the deficit. This “let them eat cake” administration is well aware that a stoppage of SNAP means that millions of Americans (disproportionately children and the elderly) will not have enough to eat. And just in case some potentially “woke” Blue state government might be tempted to step in to ameliorate the situation, the administration is sneering that they’d better not expect reimbursements.

I guess those states will join the other “suckers and losers” who put themselves at risk to help their fellow Americans…

I’m not a Christian, but I cannot imagine this cruelty being consistent with the genuine teachings of Jesus. For that matter, I cannot conceive of any religion or religious tradition that teaches adherents that it’s fine to deny basic sustenance to millions of people in order to score political points. Or, for that matter, deny disaster relief to people who have the misfortune to live in Blue states, as the administration is also doing.

These and multiple other travesties are consistent with Trump’s war on “woke-ism”–and with MAGA’s belief that kindness, civility and concern for our fellow-Americans is evidence of a wimpy, “librul” unAmericanism.

At the No Kings rally I attended, a number of signs went beyond anger aimed at Trump and the incompetent clowns in his cabinet. Those signs were rebuttals to the utter inhumanity of this administration–the masked ICE goons, the effort to portray all immigrants as criminals, the constant, vicious assaults on concepts like equity and fair play.

When I was young, I could not have conceived of a President willing to portray himself as a King showering the citizens of his country with excrement–with shit. I could not have imagined a senile occupant of the Oval Office posting incoherent, misspelled diatribes on social media, or a President turning the Justice Department into a weapon of personal, petty vengeance. I absolutely would not have believed that a President of these United States would be willing to deny food to children in order to satisfy a political pique.

But this is where we are. Trump is the Jim Jones of a MAGA cult that is willing to shut the government down rather than restore the subsidies that make health insurance affordable to millions of Americans.

If these are the behaviors of a defender of Christianity, I’ll eat my hat.

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Political Attention Deficit Disorder

The problem isn’t the message. It’s getting people to hear the message.

While pundits and strategists wring their hands and insist that the Democrats have “a messaging problem,” that diagnosis misstates the real problem. Chris Hayes recently–and accurately–wrote an essay for the New York Times (which, to ironically emphasize his point, MAGA folks are highly unlikely to read), in which he quite accurately described our information environment, where the problem isn’t the message, it’s getting people to hear the message.

Take the national election in 2024. Hayes (again, in my view, quite accurately) asserts that the Harris-Walz campaign’s message was fine. The campaign not only spent ample money on advertising, it concentrated that effort in the swing states–and as a result, swing state voters were less likely to defect to Trump than in non-swing states. “And the message of those ads was in line with a lot of what many critics have suggested — focused on core economic issues and framed in populist terms, with Kamala Harris portrayed as an ally of the working class.”

In other words, even though she lost, her core problem was not her message, however imperfect it might have been. It was an inability to get enough people to hear it, in spite of record-breaking advertising spending. If Mr. Trump had not run a single paid advertisement in the race, he almost surely would have dominated the single most important resource of our age: attention. Democrats need to win the attention contest in 2026 and beyond if they want to win back the country.

And winning attention is a lot harder than it used to be.

For one thing, as Hayes notes, ever since Teddy Roosevelt coined the term “bully pulpit,” the political party that doesn’t control the White House has struggled to match the agenda-setting power of the presidency. And as he also points out, today’s asymmetry is more daunting and profound than ever, because Trump has a “feral, almost pathological genius for getting people to talk about him, and to a degree that his supporters find thrilling and his opponents find suffocating, he dominates the nation’s and the world’s attention.”

As I have often argued on this blog and elsewhere, the fragmentation of our information environment frustrates efforts to communicate with a broad and diverse public. Not only have we lost the community newspapers that were widely trusted, and that accurately if scantily reported national news along with the results of the last City Council vote, not only do we have national mass media news that is little more than propaganda (think Fox and Sinclair); people use the Internet to confirm their biases rather than to access sources of vetted journalism.

Add to that–as one of the commenters to this blog regularly reminds us– the national penchant for entertainment. Given a choice between a football game and a news program–or a choice between a concert and a lecture–millions of Americans will happily choose the game or the concert. Hayes’ advice to Democrats is to “go everywhere”–to appear in forums that are untraditional. Podcasts, television shows, places where candidates talk “off-script” and  with “lots of different kinds of interlocutors.”

And in our social media age, he emphasizes the need to post. Constantly.

It’s not just how you campaign and which outlets you talk to, though. Successful campaigns must prioritize producing content. One thing successful content creators will tell you about excelling in the world of digital attention is that there’s no penalty for quantity. No one checks your percentages — only your total numbers. You need to always be posting if you want a better chance of things going viral or at least ending up in the algorithmic slipstream that shoots it out to millions of eyeballs. So Democratic campaigns and candidates should be thinking about how their campaigns are going to produce a lot of attention-grabbing short-form videos to meet the most disengaged and youngest voters where they are.

He points to candidates who have effectively used social media–Mamdani in New York, AOC, a North Carolina candidate. Hayes also counsels candidates not to be risk-averse, not to worry about negative attention. (The proof of that recommendation has to be Donald Trump, who–despite his demonstrable lack of mental acuity–was evidently born knowing that any and all publicity is good publicity.)

As Hayes argues, the public has become distracted and distractible, and gaffes, controversial and even offensive statements  no longer matter the way they did. When people are distracted, they rarely recall anything but the name.

And we’re all distracted all the time now.

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Our Diverse History

There’s a reason the Trump administration and its White Christian nationalist base are so intent upon replacing education–especially classes in history–with a wildly inaccurate, “White-washed” version. The substitution of their fanciful and phony nostalgia for the inconvenient facts of America’s history supports their fond belief that only White Christians are real Americans.

Today’s historical revisionists like to insist that those who can trace their ancestry to the people they want to believe settled the country and/or who fought in the Revolutionary War are the “real” Americans. Since the country’s actual history is rather different from that version, they are working to subvert accurate historical instruction.

A recent guest essay in the New York Times focused on the history of this country’s diversity–a diversity that has existed from the nation’s beginnings. Titled “The Right Wing Myth of American Heritage,” the essay began by recounting a fight–in 1764 Pennsylvania–between Irish settlers and English Quakers. When Benjamin Franklin’s diplomacy averted an all-out conflict, the battle devolved to a “war” of pamphlets giving voice to what the author called “the toxic stew of grievances held by the wide mix of ethnic and religious groups in the middle colonies.”

There were pamphlets that accused the Quakers of taking secret satisfaction in the slaughter of Irish and German settler families at the hands of the Indians, and that called for Quakerism to be “extirpated from the face of the whole earth.” In the reverse direction, Irish Ulster Presbyterians were described as “Ulceration” “Piss-brute-tarians.” Franklin himself referred to the Irish settlers as “Christian white savages” and Germans as “Palatine boors” who refused to assimilate or learn English.

This was the state of relations among European settlers on the brink of the American Revolution. It’s a history that is inconvenient to the latest ideological project of the nativist right.

Those nativists insist that to be a “true American,” one must be descended from a group of founders who–they imagine– were united by a shared system of values and folkways, founders who (in their fevered imaginations) were all English-speaking Protestants from Northwest Europe. Those with bloodlines going back to those settlers–considered by nativists to be America’s “founding ethnicity”– are more American than those who lack such bloodlines, and they argue that immigration has “diluted” that “pure” American stock.

The MAGA bigots who embrace this ahistorical story are thrilled by Trump’s efforts to favor White asylum seekers over non-white ones, and his proposal to counteract growing diversity in America, which the Trump administration regards as a destabilizing cultural force. “The documents submitted in connection with the proposals assert that increasing diversity, “has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity.”

The Times essay quoted Vice-President J.D. Vance’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in which Vance disavowed the belief that the United States is a country built on a creed, and insisted that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history.” As the author notes, that mythology is historically delusional.

Americans have never been “a group of people with a shared history.” The founders were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely — because they didn’t have any other choice but to do so. This was true even within the British majority; Puritans and Quakers alike were banished from Anglican Virginia, Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts, and English colonists in New England and the Tidewater region sided with and in some cases fought for opposing sides of the English Civil War. America was a nation that emerged in spite of itself…

Mr. Vance, like other nativists, refuses to acknowledge that cultural diversity, with all of its prejudices and conflicts, is in fact the through line of American history. The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common cultural heritage; we’re exceptional because we’ve been able to cohere despite faiths, traditions and languages that set us apart, and sometimes against one another. The drafters of the Constitution tried to create that cohesion by building a government that could transcend our divisions.

As the essayist concludes, the achievement of the founders would have been far less remarkable had the colonists been a monoculture. It is the very rejection of the pretense that any one group deserves some kind of privileged status that has made us  American.

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A Visual Representation

A recent newsletter focusing on a conversation between Charlie Sykes and Adam Kinzinger opened with a list of Trump’s  offenses against the rule of law (and arguably, sanity…) during just one week.

Posted a video of “King Trump” dumping feces on fellow Americans.
Announced that he is completely demolishing the East Wing of the White House to make room for his sh*tty ballroom.
Demanded that the DOJ cough up $230 million in taxpayer dollars to salve his wounded ego.
Murdered two more people on the high seas, without providing either due process or actually any evidence at all.
Presided over the explosion of the national debt to $38 trillion.
Screwed over America’s farmers as he bailed out his buddies in Argentina.
Commuted the sentence of chronic fraudster, fabulist, and MAGA lickspittle George Santos; even as we learn that one of the J6 rioters pardoned by Trump was arrested for plotting the murder of a top congressional Democrat.
Failed to end the killing in Gaza or the war in Ukraine. Failed to reopen his own government.
Declared that he — Donald J. Trump — is greater than either George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

And that was just one week! 

Each of these offenses warrants an in-depth discussion. Some of them are additional evidence–as if additional evidence were needed–of his accelerating mental decline; others demonstrate his utter lack of qualifications for any public office, let alone the highest office in the land. But I want to focus in on what might seem like the least consequential of these assaults on decency and respect for the rule of law–the demolition of the East Wing of the People’s house.

That demolition is a metaphor for the entire Trump Presidency–not only because it is vivid, but because it demonstrates Trump’s inability to understand the office he holds.

In a very real sense, Presidents are tenants–entitled to reside in the White House during their terms of office. We the People are the landlords. Our tenants can make alterations if they are properly approved by the agencies entrusted with those decisions–a process that Trump has contemptuously ignored. 

Not only has Trump destroyed part of a historic structure that is not his, he is proposing to construct a gaudy and inappropriate “ballroom” that will extend over the site and dwarf the rest of the White House. And as Paul Krugman has explained, the fact that the proposed addition is gaudy and tasteless reinforces our understanding of Trump’s mentality.

Why, you might ask, at a moment of national crisis am I writing about Trump’s bad taste?

Masked government agents are snatching people off the street. The National Guard has been sent into major cities on the obviously false pretext that these cities are in chaos. The U.S. military is essentially murdering people on the high seas. Huge tariffs are, in addition to their economic costs, undermining a system of alliances former presidents spent generations building. Green energy is being eviscerated, vindictive prosecutions are the norm, and many millions are on course to lose their health insurance. So why do I want to talk about Trump’s appalling design sense?

But these aren’t separate issues, because tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.

Trump’s tastelessness has long been the subject of derision. (The interior of his New York apartment–with its gold toilet, overscaled rooms, and inaccurate historical detailing has been widely mocked.) But as Krugman notes, the ballroom isn’t simply one more sign of Trump’s personal vulgarity. “Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can.” 

There’s an old adage to the effect that a picture is worth a thousand words. The photos of the East Wing’s destruction will test  the accuracy of that adage.

Citizens who are unaware of the administration’s assaults on democratic processes and the rule of law–people whose “information bubbles” don’t include the appalling behaviors of the incompetent clowns Trump has installed, or the video of Trump dumping shit on the American public– may nevertheless react to the visual evidence that this man is both mentally ill and exceptionally dangerous.

Not to mention vulgar and trashy.

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There’s A Lesson Here

A recent Vox article focused on a question–perhaps the question–that consumes most sentient Americans these days, especially the seven million of us who turned out for the No Kings protest: can America recover, or have we lost representative government forever?

As the article began,

The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.

Can any democracy come back from this?

There is relevant research on that question, and the article cited two papers published earlier this year that seemingly came to opposite conclusions. In both, researchers examined what are called “democratic U-turns.” Those are situations in which  a country that begins as a democracy subsequently moves toward authoritarianism, but recovers in relatively short order. The first research team’s conclusions were optimistic. “They identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.”

The second team, however, focused on 21 of the most recent cases and concluded that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were “short-lived mirages.”

After contacting both teams of researchers, the author concluded that the seemingly opposed findings weren’t actually inconsistent —and that the implications for the United States are both hopeful and disturbing.

Both research teams used a “democracy score” that takes into account how free the press is, whether elections are free and fair, and other accepted markers of democratic societies. A U-turn is defined as the country’s democracy score rebounding after a recent decline — and the data suggests that such U-turns are very common, that over half of all countries that have experienced a slide toward autocracy have also experienced a U-turn. And the research found that those U-turns have typically been very successful.

Good news, right? But as we know from differences in poll results, results will vary depending upon who you ask and how you frame the question.

The second group of researchers focused their analysis on twenty-one cases of democratic U-turns that occurred post-1994.  The authors then looked to see how many of those countries maintained their higher, post U-turn democracy scores. Their analysis extended to the years following those that the first team analyzed–looking to see whether the gains of a country’s U-turn were sustained. The findings on that score give us little cause for optimism; “out of the 21 cases, 19 countries experienced another decline in their democracy score within five years of the seemingly successful U-turn.”

Both teams of researchers emphasized that their findings were not in tension. For one thing, modern autocratization differs from the historical pattern. “Before the 1990s, democracies tended to be toppled by coups or revolutions — unmistakable uses of force that ended the current regime and replaced it with naked authoritarian rule.”

Nowadays, thanks in large part to democracy’s increasingly dominant ideological position around the world, the threat tends to come in a more subtle and hidden form — what scholars call “democratic backsliding.” In these cases, a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections. The ultimate aim is often to create a “competitive authoritarian” regime, where elections are not formally rigged but take place under such unfair conditions that they can’t truly be considered democratic. That’s what Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party did in Hungary, and what PiS tried to do in Poland.

And–rather obviously–what Trump is trying to do in the U.S.

As the article notes, because elected authoritarians were elected, they often represent a real constituency–one that is often large enough to make it impossible for their opponents to defeat them permanently and democratically illegitimate for those opponents to outlaw them entirely. Just because you have a democracy doesn’t mean you have a stable democracy. As the article concludes:

Even if America experiences a U-turn upon Trump’s departure, the country may not be out of the woods. The forces that made Trump possible in the first place will still remain, open to exploitation by any political leader with the requisite savvy and shamelessness.

“There is a reason why Trump came to power, and there is a reason why he won those elections… If you don’t solve the underlying reasons, then of course democracy will still be at risk.”

I am increasingly convinced that the U.S. will oust Trump and his band of wildly incompetent White Christian Nationalists–that we will experience a U-turn. I am far less sanguine about our ability to address those “underlying reasons.”

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