Suicide By MAGA

Most of us have read about “suicide by cop”–a (hopefully rare) situation where someone desiring death purposely provokes a standoff with police. I don’t think MAGA cult members are that intentional, but I do think the result will be the same. The pandemic was a precursor: data shows that the MAGA science-deniers who refused to be vaccinated against COVID died in far greater numbers than more sane Americans.

Who coined that phrase “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”?

The Trump administration has already taken a meat-ax to medical research, derailing promising research into cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s and other deadly diseases. Those cuts will hurt all of us–Red and Blue alike. But as Paul Krugman recently pointed out, the administration’s radical changes in social spending, immigration policy and tariffs won’t simply hurt tens of millions of Americans — they will land disproportionately on Red, rural Americans.

The first thing you need to understand is that while rural Americans like to think of themselves as self-reliant, the fact is that poorer, more rural states are in effect heavily subsidized by richer states like Massachusetts and New Jersey.

This reality makes it inevitable that the standard conservative fiscal agenda — tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor and middle class — hurts the heartland more than it hurts major metropolitan areas. But MAGA’s Reverse Robin Hoodism goes far beyond the standard conservative agenda, in ways that will be especially devastating to rural areas and small towns.

I’ve previously posted about Trump’s horrendous “Big Beautiful Bill” that will rob the poor to further enrich the wealthy. The bill contains savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, programs that will hurt all poor folks; but will disproportionately devastate Trump-supporting rural areas.

Krugman notes that Medicaid is a far more important program than most Americans realize.

Almost 40 percent of children are covered by Medicaid, with some of the highest percentages in deep red states like Alabama and Mississippi. Medicaid pays for 42 percent of births in America. And more to my point, Medicaid covers a higher fraction of the population in rural than in urban counties. So deep cuts in the program will hit Trump-supporting regions especially hard.

Ditto the impact of the drastic cuts to food stamps.

Many people–even those who are opposed to the “Big Beautiful Bill”– fail to recognize its very foreseeable impact on rural hospitals.  Hospitals in areas with low population density and a high percentage of patients who cannot pay for care struggle to stay open even now. Without Medicaid reimbursements at current levels, most will close. 

Most of us also fail to understand the role that Medicaid and Medicare spending play in supporting what Krugman calls “rural and left-behind local economies.”

For example, the economy of West Virginia no longer rests on coal mining, which employs very few people these days. It would be more accurate to say that the foundation of West Virginia’s economy is federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid. That is, in deep red West Virginia, Medicare and Medicaid are directly and indirectly a major source of income.

We are already seeing the impact of Trump’s immigration vendetta on the nation’s farmers.  Our agriculture relies heavily on hired workers, and some two thirds of those workers are immigrants–most of whom are undocumented. Farmers are already seeing the results of the threat: even workers who are legal residents or native-born citizens feel unsafe from the ICE goons who very clearly think all Brown people are illegal immigrants–so we see growing reports of workers decamping out of fear of arrest and deportation.

And then there’s the trade war.

In case you haven’t noticed, Trump hasn’t yet delivered a single one of the 90 trade deals he promised to negotiate by July 8. China has already retaliated, and others will follow. And U.S. agriculture is highly dependent on exports…

While many are now realizing that Trump’s policies will produce social and economic disaster, relatively few understand that the disaster will fall disproportionately on rural Trump voters. But of course it will. For the purveyor of Trump bibles and Trump meme coins, screwing the little guy has always been his personal style of grift. It remains to be seen if rural Trump supporters will awaken from their naivete.

Krugman is kinder than I am. I have given up any illusion that Trump voters are merely naive or uninformed. I’m pretty sure that MAGA voters are so wedded to their racism and grievance that they will support their own suicide if that’s what it takes to “own the libs.” 

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The Declaration Of Independence Sounds Awfully Familiar

Given the undeniable fact that the Republicans in Congress continue to ignore their Constitutional duties, it’s probably unproductive to suggest that they take a close look at another of our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence. If they did, however, they might notice that the document describing the behaviors of George III that impelled them to withdraw from the British empire are eerily similar to the behaviors of their MAGA cult leader.

You might think of the Declaration as the original “No Kings” statement, laying out America’s grievances against the actions of  George III that triggered the Revolutionary War. The list of those grievances was extensive, but several seem especially pertinent to the growing resistance to today’s would-be King. 

Consider, for example:

“He has refused his Assent to laws; He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither; He has obstructed the Administration of Justice; He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices; He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people; He has affected to render the Military independent and superior to the Civil power;

“For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world; For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent; for depriving us in many cases of the benefit of Trial by Jury; For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”

The Declaration isn’t law. It isn’t even a legal framework, as the Constitution is. But it is a statement of governing philosophy–a stirring declaration of what legitimate governance is and isn’t. Most schoolchildren are familiar with one of the opening paragraphs, an eloquent, “self-evident” description of the basic purposes of government:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Governments, the Declaration tells us, derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Thanks to decades of voter suppression and gerrymandering, the operation of the Electoral College, misuse of the filibuster, and population shifts that have made the Senate a massively unrepresentative body,  it is impossible to argue with a straight face that today’s federal government reflects the consent of the governed. 

We are currently being ruled, not governed, by an illegitimate gang of plutocrats and theocrats who are pursuing goals diametrically opposed to those expressed by the nation’s founders. Re-read that last quoted paragraph. Nowhere does it say that “all White Christian men are created equal.” It says that all men- which we now understand to mean all human beings–have “unalienable” rights. Unalienable rights are incapable of being surrendered, transferred, or taken away. They are rights that are inherently and permanently possessed. The Declaration tells us that protecting–securing– those equal rights is the purpose of government, and that when a government “becomes destructive” of that purpose, when it ceases to perform that fundamental task, We the People have the right to alter or abolish it.

It’s past time to alter a government that has drifted far from its original purposes. Look at the list of actions by King George that prompted rebellion–and think about their striking similarity to the policies being pursued by the Trump administration. Refusal to assent to law. Obstruction of immigration. Denial of due process. Insistence on personal loyalty. Misuse of the military. Interference with trade. Imposition of taxes/tariffs. Transporting people “beyond the seas to be tried for pretended offenses”…

It is past time to return this nation to the philosophy of government expressed in the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We have a delusional ignoramus in the White House, a cabinet filled with unqualified clowns and cranks, a Congress filled with cowards, bigots and Christian Nationalists, and a Supreme Court dominated by theocrats.

We got rid of King George and the Hessians. It’s time to get rid of Trump and MAGA.

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Is It Time To Be Good Germans?

Wow…just wow.

A recent essay from the Bulwark really shook me. It reminded me of a long-ago discussion with my mother. We’d been watching a TV mini-series on the Holocaust, and my mother said something to the effect that she would never have been one of the compliant Germans who put their heads down and went along with the brutal Nazi assaults. As I told her then, I wish I could be certain that I would stand up under such circumstances–but it’s not easy to predict what you’d do if your livelihood or liberty or children were at risk.

How many of us really would chance public resistance in such a threatening environment?

The Bulwark essay raised that question, albeit somewhat obliquely. The author, Jonathan Last, began by sharing a message he’d received from a friend.

Are you absolutely sure that as Christians this isn’t the time to hide Anne Frank? Shouldn’t I be willing to help migrants avoid deportation/detention at whatever legal perils await me? If not now then when . . . when it gets twice as bad or three times as bad or ten times as bad?

Sorry if this sounds weird, but everyone likes to think that given the opportunity they would be Mississippi freedom riders or on the bridge at Selma. Well what if it’s that time for me?

Last writes that his first reaction was denial–that bad as things are, the U.S. is not near an “Anne Frank” moment. But then, he began to think about it–and while his certainty didn’t evaporate, it certainly moderated.

Let’s say you’re an immigrant with questionable legal status. You’re married and your spouse is the same. You have lived in America for many years, paying taxes and whatnot, and own a house. You have two kids and they are American citizens—for now.

You and your spouse show up for a routine court date and are snatched by a group of men in masks who claim (without showing identification) that they are agents of the state. You are put in jail. And let’s assume that you are deported. Perhaps to El Salvador.

What happens to your children in the hours after you are arrested? Who picks them up from school? Who feeds them? Where do they sleep?

What happens to your assets?

If you own a home, what happens to it? Is it sold? By whom? Through what process? Where do the proceeds of the sale go?

What about your bank accounts? Do you have access to your savings?

How about your property? Your car, the furniture in your house, your clothes, your computer. What happens to all of that?

Last says he would be surprised if theoretical legal procedures–assuming they exist– are being applied to property rights, since these immigrants aren’t even being given their more basic due process rights.

Worse, even if you are a MAGA bigot who considers everyone who came here illegally a hardened criminal by definition, Last reminds readers that this administration has actually created “illegal immigrants” by arbitrarily changing the status of people who previously had legal status. It has revoked student visas (without bothering to inform the visa holders), and terminated Temporary Protected Status for refugees from Venezuela and Afghanistan.

It was Trump who made their presence “illegal.”

So when we ask these questions about the people that masked ICE thugs are rounding up– taking them off the streets and out of scheduled immigration meetings– when we ask what happens to their property, money and other belongings, we don’t get satisfactory answers. We don’t get answers at all. As Last says, we’re may not be at Anne Frank territory, but “we’re awfully close to the period in which German Jews were having their businesses seized.”

We have masked, unidentified agents of the state snatching people off of the streets. We have the government attempting to skirt due process. We have people being deprived of their property. We have an attempt to revoke birthright citizenship.

Maybe we’re not in Anne Frank territory. But also: Maybe the hour is later than we think.

Maybe it’s time to decide not to be compliant Germans….

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The South Did Rise Again

Let’s “get real,” as the kids might say. MAGA is the embodiment and resurgence of the Confederacy–a less geographically-bound version of the South that is determined to rise again. And this time, the war isn’t limited to Black folks–it includes all “others”–gays, women, Muslims, Jews…

The evidence is overwhelming.

The New York Times noted that Trump had made no statement about Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, despite the fact that lesser occasions routinely garner official proclamations.

On the day the Supreme Court ruled against gender-affirming care for transgender youth, the Trump administration ended specialized support for LGBTQ callers to the national suicide prevention hotline.

The Atlantic recently opined that

Five years ago, as the streets ran hot and the body of George Floyd lay cold, optimistic commentators believed that America was on the verge of a breakthrough in its eternal deliberation over the humanity of Black people. For a brief moment, perhaps, it seemed as if the “whirlwinds of revolt,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once prophesied, had finally shaken the foundations of the nation. In 2021, in the midst of this “racial reckoning,” as it was often called, Congress passed legislation turning Juneteenth into “Juneteenth National Independence Day,” a federal holiday. Now we face the sober reality that our country might be further away from that promised land than it has been in decades.

The administration’s frantic effort to defeat “woke-ism” and DEI–which it characterizes as bias against White Christian men–gives the game away. They aren’t trying to level the playing field–they are trying to return White men to social dominance. Consider just some of what this administration has done.

Trump’s Executive Order 14151 (“Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs”) terminated DEI units, removed references to minority achievements, and purged employees involved in diversity efforts. Another Executive Order
Issued on the same day revoked LBJ’s historic affirmative action order, and stripped federal agencies of the authority to enforce non-discrimination in federal contracting.

Agencies like NASA, DOE, HHS, NIH, DOD, CIA, FBI, NSF, and DOE have all removed so-called “DEI content” from webpages and other materials. We’ve seen ships carrying the names of LGBTQ figures and women renamed. (That renaming is in line with Trump’s announced intention to restore the names of Confederate traitors to the army bases that shed them.)

The current EEOC Chair has followed Trump’s directives and “deprioritized” discrimination cases related to gender identity and pushed agencies to investigate and pressure law firms and corporations with DEI programs. The Department of Justice has been directed to probe corporate DEI policies criminally and has withdrawn previous civil rights settlements tied to equity.

The Pentagon has removed content honoring Blacks, Indigenous individuals, women, and LGBTQ+ service members. Examples include the Navajo Code Talkers, Jackie Robinson, and Harvey Milk. And it isn’t only Juneteenth; agencies have also canceled or muted celebrations of other identity-based holidays like Pride Month and Black History Month.

Trump canceled more than 2,100 NIH grants totaling an estimated ten billion dollars that the administration deemed tied to diversity and inclusion. (A judge has ruled those cuts illegal and discriminatory.) 

There’s more, but the pattern is unmistakable. Scholars attest that the removal of content celebrating minority achievements and history mimics the classic white supremacist tactic of erasing the narratives of marginalized groups. The historical parallels are striking: analysts and historians have drawn comparisons between Trump’s policies and Reconstruction-era actions by white supremacists, not to mention 1930s-era, fascist efforts to control historical narratives and redefine “meritocracy.” 

We are once again in a contest between tribalism and universalism, between racism and humanism. Tribalism, however, is the essence of anti-Americanism. Ours is not a “blood and soil” country, like Nazi Germany, with its ideal of a racially defined national body. 

MAGA, with its version of White Christian male supremacy, is today’s Confederacy. It wants to restrict who can be considered authentically American, and applauds Trump’s efforts to reclassify those despised “others” as–at best–guests of those entitled to the title. It is an effort that demeans what is truly “exceptional” about the United States–the philosophical base on which the country rests.

The nation established by the Founders–admittedly all White guys (albeit not all traditional Christians)–was something new to our quarrelsome globe: it was an IDEA. And over time, most of us who occupy this land have come to realize that the proper definition of an American is anyone–of any gender, color or belief– who accepts and endorses that Idea. 

The New Confederacy will go the way of the old one. We the People–all people– just need to step up the Resistance…

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Law Versus Power

There’s a tendency to confuse the rule of law with obedience to the rules of a regime.

Within that confusion lies one of the multiple, dangerous threats posed by our current administration–a threat that became manifestly clear when Trump pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists. Autocrats can devise rules; the rule of law, however, is defined as a durable system characterized by four universal principles: accountability, just law, open government, and accessible and impartial justice.

Those elements are entirely foreign to MAGA and Trump. (Let’s face it–Trump wouldn’t even be able to define those terms…)

The chaos of the Trump administration, and the breadth of its attacks on democratic governance, have operated to distract public attention from its ongoing assault on the rule of law, and its persistent substitution of rules benefitting plutocrats and autocrats for laws benefiting society.

A recent issue of the American Prospect addressed that under-appreciated assault.

A functioning economy depends on a basic principle: cheaters shouldn’t win. But Donald Trump has tossed aside that principle, and that has real consequences. When the rules disappear, the worst actors thrive and everyone else pays the price.

In our new print issue, we examine how the collapse of financial enforcement and consumer protection is opening the floodgates to a golden age of scams. Under Trump, the referees have left the field. Civil penalties go unenforced. White-collar fraudsters are rewarded with pardons. Entire arms of the government designed to prevent theft, abuse, and discrimination are being dismantled.

It’s an intentional choice to let exploitation run wild. If there’s a way to game the system, someone’s doing it—and now they’re doing it with the government’s blessing.

The issue documented a variety of scams that have gained new security against government enforcement. One article reported on the multiple ways in which the gutting of the CFPB–the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau–has facilitated a wide variety of rackets and frauds. Another article delved into the failures of the Department of Education under Trump to protect student loan recipients from predatory lenders.

An article titled “Three Coin Monte” described what the magazine calls “the greatest and most brazen tale of corruption in history”– Trump’s crypto project. That article outlined “how Trump is using his ‘shitcoin’ to monetize the presidency and create new avenues for influence peddling.”

There’s also an explanation of a scam involving merchant cash advances. These are transactions in which tycoons sell what are effectively payday loans to small businesses and ruin their livelihoods. (We are told that one of those “tycoons” was on Trump’s pardon list in 2020; he’s back in jail, for now.)

These investigative articles are just a few examples of what happens when government fails in what has always been considered a foundational task: to prevent some citizens from taking advantage of others, to prevent the strong (or unscrupulous) from harming the weak and/or naive.

Donald Trump’s government has corrupted the very concept of law. The evidence is overwhelming: the gutting of the Department of Justice, the indiscriminate labeling of immigrants as “criminals” as justification for masked ICE agents’ thuggish behaviors, the appalling arrests of elected lawmakers on transparently false premises, orders from the administration to the EPA directing the agency not to enforce environmental rules against fossil fuel companies, the Trump family’s failure to even try to mask its monetization of the Presidency…the list goes on.

When the rule of law is replaced with rules favoring the predatory, when people in positions of authority sneer at the very notion of ethics and ethical behavior, when elected members of Congress fail to exercise their constitutional oversight responsibilities, ordinary citizens lose respect for the very concept of law. Corrupt regimes encourage lawbreaking by people who wouldn’t otherwise be scofflaws. Cynicism explodes. The trust on which societies rely evaporates.

The central goal of Project 2025 was to replace the rule of law with rules allowing selected people to exercise unrestrained and arbitrary power–power to give their sycophants and fellow-travelers free reign to plunder, but–more fundamentally– to facilitate the remaking of America into the Lily-White “Christian” nation of Project 2025’s fantasies.

In Henry VI, Shakespeare wrote “First you kill all the lawyers.” The authors of Project 2025 understood why that’s wrong. First you kill the rule of law.

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