The Aftermath

Those of us outside the MAGA cult see Trump’s steady deterioration. Granted, he’s always been mentally ill, intellectually deficient,  massively ignorant, and a purveyor of ugly rhetoric, but his daily descent–both mental and physical– from even that very low bar is impossible to miss.

So what happens when he’s gone? What happens when the cult loses its Jim Jones?

In an essay in Lincoln Square, Rick Wilson revisits the aftermaths of other strongman regimes, and makes several predictions. (My favorite: an aside suggesting the inevitability of his grave becoming “the largest public all-gender restroom in history.”) Snark aside, Wilson notes that the public discussion has yet to address the chaos and bloodshed that so frequently comes after the collapse of systems built around a single man. As he warns, that’s when a supposedly unified movement turns into a feeding frenzy among the sycophants who have been rewarded not for competence but for “fealty, loyalty, public and private obeisance.”

Autocrats are very good at seizing power and holding it. They are very bad at leaving it behind without blowing something up on the way out. Political scientists have long argued that personality cult regimes are especially fragile at succession because the leader spends his life eliminating rivals rather than training successors.

Wilson points to a long succession of cult figures, beginning with Nero and extending through Mussolini, Stalin and Mao. The more a system is in thrall to one man,” the less prepared it is for the day that man disappears. “The court that spent years flattering him is suddenly full of men who see an empty chair they crave beyond words and reason.”

Franco’s Spain. Romania’s Ceausescus. Libya’s Ghaddafi. Dozens of cases exist in the modern era, including, of course, the Austrian Guy. Some age out. Some lose wars.

In each case, the same thing happened. The autocrat spent his life telling the country that he alone embodied the nation. He hollowed out institutions, punished independent power centers, and promoted flatterers over equals. When he left the stage, he did not leave behind a constitutional order; he left behind a mob of ambitious men in the same room.

If you zoom out, scholarship on personality cults and personalist regimes boils it down to a few core truths, and in the age where Trump is dying before our eyes, we’d better get ready to watch them play out…and exploit the chaos to slap autocracy back into its hole.

Wilson tells us that the more central the person has become, the more dangerous the aftermath. He describes three possibilities: the movement may fracture into rival factions (in which case, he predicts a Vance/Cruz/Rubio/DeSantis knife fight); the cult converts into a dynasty (Donald Jr. is already ramping up–as Wilson says, “you don’t think the Trumps are giving up all this money, do you?”); or the movement is forced into a larger “transition” because it’s too weak to carry on without its human idol.

Donald Trump has spent almost a decade turning the Republican Party from a political party into a cult. The party platform literally dissolved into “whatever Trump says.” Candidates run on loyalty to him more than any coherent ideology. The conservative media ecosystem revolves around his moods, his grudges, and his need for constant adoration. If that is not a proto-cult, it is a full-dress rehearsal.

Wilson says the sycophants who aspire to follow Trump come in three factions: the zealots who picture Trump as some kind of quasi-religious figure, and who won’t move past him will be the core of Don Jr’s 2028 campaign. Then there are the courtiers– the family, money men, and figures like JD Vance who’ve been cultivating their ties to billionaires and Silicon Valley reactionaries, who claim to be the only people who can keep the base and the money together. Finally, there are post-Trump aspirants like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz.

Wilson’s conclusion? “When Trump finally fails to answer the bell, either politically or biologically, do not expect a solemn passing of the torch. Expect the Roman script with better lighting and worse hair.” There will be competing Right wing factions fighting for the same base, scapegoating and accusing each other of treachery (a la Mao’s “Gang of Four”). And he predicts “historical rewrites that would make a Soviet propagandist blush.”

Bottom line: MAGA won’t disappear when Trump does.

The energy that once ran vertically, from base to Leader, will start to run horizontally, between camps and claimants. That is where movements get creative, and reckless, and violent.

You really need to click through and read the whole essay.

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An Immoral Slum Of An Administration

I’ve posted several times about the misuse of political labels and the unfortunate effects of that language misuse. It is especially misleading to call MAGA and Trump “conservative.” They are the antithesis of genuine conservatism, and the ranks of the Never Trumpers are filled with pundits and political figures who are conservative, just not neo-Nazis.

If you need any confirmation of that assertion, read this recent column by George Will.

I almost never find myself in agreement with Will. I not only disagree with a majority of his policy prescriptions, I’m put off by the arrogance and pomposity of much of his writing. That said, when a Republican administration has lost George Will, they’ve lost any connection to intellectually respectable conservatism.

Will doesn’t pull any punches. His first sentence is: ” Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” And he proceeds from there. After repeating the facts that have emerged, he writes that “the killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.”

Will then turns to the “peace” proposal that Trump demanded Ukraine accept, noting Rubio’s initial confession that the proposal had been delivered to an American official by Russia–and that he told members of the Senate that the proposal didn’t represent America’s peace plan. Mere hours later, he reversed himself, taking to social media to assert that the United States had “authored” the plan.

Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are indeed at risk.”

Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight. This probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!” Americans are the deceived.

If there was any doubt of the accuracy of Will’s analysis, publication of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) should confirm it. As Heather Cox Richardson has written, it represents a dramatic retreat from the foreign policy goals the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

After a brief introduction touting what it claims are the administration’s great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II Allies put in place after that war to prevent another world war. The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined “the character of our nation.”

And the document makes it very clear what this administration believes is the true “character of our nation.”

Their vision of “our country’s inherent greatness and decency,” requires “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” “an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age,” and “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”

Observers referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and “fourteen words” to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan…

The document is a White supremacist manifesto. It rejects immigration, denounces “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies” that it claims have harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and operated to subsidize our adversaries. It further distances the U.S. from NATO.

The upshot is that the document “reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia.” It characterizes Europe’s current course as one leading to “civilizational erasure” and calls for reassertion of “Western identity,” (by which it clearly means White.)

It may be the most shameful document produced by this “Immoral slum” of an administration.

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Bring Me A Pitchfork

A recent, lengthy screed from Lincoln Square argued that voters in 2024 had “signed up for the myth of the businessman president,” an assertion with which I take issue. I do, however, agree with the ensuing observation that what those voters got was the guy who “bankrupted casinos and decided the solution for a hurting country was to blow up the economy for a jacked-up economic theory from the 17th century, build a ballroom, and hide the books.”

I also agree that Trump’s economic incompetence is enraging voters, and that “None of the culture war crap, the performative yelping about the Deep State, the liberal media, or whatever else tickles MAGA Twitter’s happy place” will save Republicans in 2026, when they will encounter “the oldest rule in politics and business: eventually, the mark realizes he has been conned.”

And when that happens, it is not just the con man who pays the price. It is everyone foolish enough to stand next to him when the lights come up, and the check arrives.

Trump is too old to pay that bill…and doesn’t pay his bills in any case.

But the MAGA GOP sure as hell will. That sound they hear in the distance is a mob, hungry and furious, approaching their palace.

With pitchforks…

I am increasingly convinced that the author is correct about voters’ current fury, but I am equally confident that Trump’s narrow victory in 2024 was not founded on his economic promises. Political science research overwhelmingly points to a different–and very depressing–reason people voted for Trump: racism.

Adam Serwer addressed that racism in the Atlantic, in an article titled “Why Doesn’t Trump Pay a Political Price for His Racism?” The article was triggered by Trump’s publicized rant, during a Cabinet meeting, calling Somali immigrants “garbage” that we don’t want in our country. Serwer noted that no one in the Cabinet reacted negatively to this latest expression of gutter racism, and worse, that “Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table.”

This expression of animus toward all Somali immigrants came in response to the shooting of two National Guard officers by a Somali, and a fraudulent episode involving some Somalis living in Minneapolis. Rather than decrying the criminal actions of those individuals, Trump reacted with his usual racist stereotyping.

Serwer points to the obvious: we don’t hold White Americans as a whole responsible for Trump’s dismantling of the federal  capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, for his “doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering.” Most Americans don’t look at Donald Trump or the collection of clowns and grifters with whom he’s surrounded himself and conclude that their behaviors are due to something inherent in White culture. We simply–accurately–see them as reprehensible individuals.

Watching Trump’s repeated attacks on Somalians—the latest group of Black immigrants to be targeted by the president—I can’t avoid the conclusion that the government of the United States of America is in the hands of people who believe that they can apply a genetic hierarchy to humanity, and that American laws and customs should recognize and serve that hierarchy…

The logic of this racism is relatively simple—the individual bears the guilt of the whole, and the whole bears the imprint of some alleged crime that deserves collective punishment. Blaming the egregious behavior of men such as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on their German or Norwegian backgrounds would sound comical to the same people who treat the president vomiting out similar generalizations about Somalis as sound observation.

This reaction is consistent with Trump’s constant Hitler-like accusation that immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. As Serwer concludes, the fact that he’s paid virtually no electoral price for his very overt racism says something shameful about today’s America.

The U.S. abolished immigration restrictions based on nationality in 1965, recognizing that such restrictions were inconsistent with who we purport to be as a country. Until that change, promising scientists from Asia would be rejected in favor of illiterate farmers from Germany, because immigration laws considered race, national origin and culture to be immutable traits inherent in the populations of entire countries. Accordingly, entire (usually non-White) nationalities were deemed unfit for American citizenship.

Trump wants these racist (and ridiculous) assumptions to once again govern U.S. immigration policy, and his MAGA voters enthusiastically agree.

I’m ready to buy my pitchfork and march on the castle. Metaphorically speaking, of course…

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Heritage, Again

As Trump continues to disintegrate before our eyes, and special elections confirm what the polls have been telling us, I think Americans can begin to breathe again. Granted, this evil and incompetent administration will continue to wreak havoc for three more years, but there’s reason to believe that the midterms will put a halt to much of the destruction, and that the political pendulum will swing back from Trump’s gulag to support of something more closely resembling the America we thought we inhabited.

What happens then, however, will depend upon what we’ve learned from this horrifying episode. What rot within the body politic allowed the ascent of people so morally and intellectually unfit for public office? I think there are three interrelated answers to that question. An unfair, “gilded age” economy and a fragmented, politicised media landscape have combined to facilitate the re-emergence of bigotries that had been suppressed but obviously not eliminated.

Research has confirmed that the single most potent predictor of support for MAGA and Trump is racial resentment. But racism is almost always accompanied by other hatreds: of women, of Jews, of Muslims, of immigrants (at least those with Black or Brown skin). Those attitudes haven’t just been fostered and encouraged by “Christian” nationalist churches, publications and social media posts, but also by (mis-named) think tanks. The election of America’s first Black President lit the flame of the rancid ideology they had carefully nurtured during more civil times.

And that brings me to the Heritage Foundation.

With the publication of Project 2025, Heritage shed its disguise as a research institution, and identified itself as a purely ideological enterprise, intent upon remaking American society into one dominated by White Christian males. Minorities aren’t the only elements of the population who would lose status should its fever dream be realized–women would be returned to subservient status too.

The Atlantic has recently documented Heritage’s misogyny. As the article noted, Heritage’s current unmasking may have begun with Kevin Roberts’ defense of anti-Semitism, but disclosure of the nature of the “Heritage” it is trying to protect includes the recent decision to hire Scott Yenor to lead its Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. The author says the choice “poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.”

In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Yenor labeled professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He frequently uses the term AWFLs (short for “affluent white female liberals”). He was ejected from a position as chair of the University of West Florida’s board of trustees when even Florida’s MAGA Republican-controlled state Senate wouldn’t confirm him.

Yenor believes that employers should be legally permitted to discriminate against women in the workplace, and has advocated for legal changes that would allow businesses “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”—that is, denying women jobs solely on the basis of their sex or paying men more for performing the same job as women. He also believes that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”

Yenor’s ideas are rather obviously outside both the American and conservative mainstreams–and not just his opinions on employment discrimination. He has also dismissed women’s suffrage as “a feat of social engineering.” Feminism, he has asserted, weakens the all-important institution of marriage–a situation that calls out for policy change.

So Heritage now faces an uncomfortable question: Does it agree with its new director of American studies?

What makes the question particularly pressing is Heritage’s “one voice” policy. “While other organizations may have experts advocating contradictory points of view,” the institution explains, “Heritage employees are always rowing in the same direction.” If this is Yenor’s view, and he’s now a Heritage director, does that make it Heritage’s official view?

Heritage was founded in 1973 by Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Joseph Coors, and Paul Weyrich. Despite the obvious political ambitions of those founders, until very recently the media has portrayed it as a legitimate, albeit Right-wing, think tank. And that brings me to the role played by the media in MAGA’s capture of our government.

One of the thorniest problems we will face as we try to repair the systemic flaws that allowed bigotry and misogyny to drive  political behavior will be what to do about a media landscape that abets false equivalences–a landscape that allows Americans to avoid “inconvenient” realities and  choose “news” that confirms their biases.

I have no idea what we do about that.

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Onward “Christian” Soldiers

It has become increasingly obvious that there are two kinds of Christian–the ones who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, and the ones who use the label in their quest for political hegemony. I identify the latter group by placing quotation marks around the word Christian.

And that latter group is on the march, both locally and nationally.

In Indiana, where we have long had a legislature dismissive of the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State, we currently have a Lieutenant Governor who is an out and proud “Christian” nationalist. And in Zionsville, a bedroom community north of Indianapolis, a newly formed organization called “Zionsville Men of Truth” wants the local library to stop endorsing “LGBTQ+ ideology,” by removing books and limiting accessibility to “GLBT inclusive” events like Pride.

According to the Indianapolis Star, the group wants to protect children and teens from “content that blurs moral boundaries or exposes children to adult themes.” And of course, they’ll decide where those “moral boundaries” lie.

As the article notes, a number of Republican-led states have experienced book banning and other restrictions of access, thanks to lawmakers’ passage of legislation making it easier to do so. “Men of Truth” is described as a group of local religious men who “want to see that truth be proclaimed in our communities and to restore those biblical values that our nation was founded upon.”

It’s their “truth” that must be proclaimed of course. And permit me to observe that Madison and Jefferson, among others, would be surprised to find that they’d crafted the Constitution using “biblical values”…

It isn’t just Indiana. Other Red states are experiencing equally “Christian” episodes.

There’s Oklahoma, for example, a state that ranks 50th out of 51 in education. A recent report from the New York Times set this former academic’s hair on fire.

At the University of Oklahoma, a student claimed to be the victim of religious discrimination because her psychology instructor gave her a zero on an essay in which she cited the Bible and called “the lie that there are multiple genders”  “demonic.” The instructor explained that she had deducted points because the essay “does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.”

Those certainly sound to me like permissible reasons to deduct points, but–hey! Onward “Christian” warriors–the University has suspended the instructor. Not only that, they’ve assured the student that her poor mark on the essay won’t affect her grade. She is identified as a psychology major and pre-med student who intends to go to medical school. (The prospect of a doctor who elevates “biblical truth” over science is rather chilling…)

The student’s cause was taken up by Turning Point USA, which has posted about it on X (of course!) and drawn 40 million views and thousands of online comments. (Granted, many of those views were probably bots, but still…) Oklahoma’s “Christian” governor weighed in, mischaracterizing the university’s reaction as protection of the First Amendment’s Free Speech provisions, calling the situation at the university “deeply concerning,” and demanding a review by the university’s regents to “ensure other students aren’t unfairly penalized for their beliefs,”

This ridiculous framing of the issue evidently forbids instructors from penalizing answers that are non-responsive to the questions, at least if the student invokes “Christianity.” As even a conservative political scientist observed, evidently “You have to pass students who only cite religious faith for their opinions now or they’re victims of discrimination.”

In this case, the class had been assigned a scholarly article on “gender typicality, peer relations, and mental health,” and told to write a “thoughtful discussion” of some aspect of it. The student wrote that “The article discussed peers using teasing as a way to enforce gender norms. I do not necessarily see this as a problem. God made male and female and made us differently from each other on purpose and for a purpose.”

When her instructor failed to accept a response that relied on “biblical truth” rather than psychological research, the student contacted Ryan Walters, currently the chief executive of something called “the Teacher Freedom Alliance.” Walters called the student “an American hero,” and said that any university employees who were involved in giving her a bad grade should be fired.

It may explain Oklahoma’s education ranking to note that Walters recently stepped down as the Oklahoma state superintendent of schools.

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