A Refreshing Reality Check

In the wake of the 2024 election, there was no escaping negative punditry. “Expert” political analysts declared the effective end of Democratic election victories, dubbed Trump’s slight incursions into minority voting blocs a “re-alignment,” and issued scathing criticisms of the Democratic Party.

Most of this was click-bait hogwash, and a “Never Trump” Republican recently cited data demonstrating just how far afield these “analyses” were. In a recent essay, Stuart Stevens has done just that. (After quoting some of those pontificating headlines, Stevens snarkily writes “This is how societies end up worshipping volcanoes. There’s a drought, the volcano belches, and it rains. Next thing you know, you’re sacrificing virgins to honor the Volcano God.”)

Donald Trump won the 2024 election by one of the smallest margins in modern history– a cumulative 230,000 votes, or 0.15% of the total. Furthermore, in polling right before the election, when Americans were asked whether they thought America was heading in the right direction” only 27% said yes. Stevens notes that no incumbent party has won a presidential race when the number choosing “right track” was below 45%.

2024 was a great year for a challenger to run against an incumbent president. It is entirely delusional to interpret Trump’s narrow victory as an endorsement of Trumpism. Any credible challenger would have done considerably better than Trump. Polls showed that Nikki Haley overperformed Trump by five to seven points.

The less-reported results of recent elections confirm Stevens’ thesis. In addition to Democrats winning statewide offices in Georgia, Republicans in Mississippi losing their legislative super-majority, Moms for Liberty losing every single one of their 31 contests– Republican margins dropped by 50% in Florida’s Congressional races, and Wisconsin saw a 12-point shift toward Democrats.

And when it comes to policy?

Turns out, Americans actually like the constellation of basic social net programs that ketamine-fueled weirdo Elon Musk is trying to slash. Nearly four in five Americans (79%) oppose any reductions to Social Security benefits. For all the hate MAGA piles on the Americans who depend on SNAP, Medicaid, and housing assistance, 41% say that the government should do more to help those in need; 27% say the government does too much.

How about those tax cuts? Guess what? Cut taxes for billionaires sucks as a political rallying cry. This isn’t some Bernie Sanders niche “eat the rich” issue. In 2020, only a quarter of voters thought the Trump tax cuts were positive. A recent Navigator survey found that by a 10-point margin, Americans believe that Trump’s tax plan will “hurt people like me.”

Not only is the Trump administration on the wrong side of major policy positions, the utter ineptitude of the clowns in the administration is enraging Americans daily. As Stevens writes,

Does anybody other than the MAGA faithful believe that gutting the Centers for Disease Control make their lives better? Or that a former heroin addict nutcase should be in charge of America’s public health?

Stevens calls the 2024 election the “Pickett’s Charge of MAGA. They were given the keys to the kingdom, controlling three branches of government. They squandered the opportunity with a train wreck of nutty policies implemented by a Star Wars bar of unlikeable freaks.”

Trump’s “policy” announcements, like making Canada the 51st state, or invading Greenland, certainly didn’t help. Neither did his far more serious efforts to weaken the West in favor of Putin, like pulling the US out of NATO and betraying Ukraine. Granted, MAGA folks aren’t typically interested in policy unless those policies are intended to marginalize those they consider “Other,” but the rest of us know stupidity (and graft) when we see it. As Stevens writes, the numbers don’t lie.

In 2020, Trump’s coalition was 85% white. Sure, he did better with the non-white vote in 2024. This time, only 84% of his vote was white. In a country that is 59% white. Republicans are celebrating that only 86% of African Americans voted against them and that only 63% of Asians and 54% of Hispanics voted Democratic. The base of Trump’s support is still non-college-educated whites. In 2000, that was 60% of the electorate. Now it’s 38% and is America’s fastest declining large demographic.

None of this should make us complacent. Americans appalled by the chaos and destruction, the overt criminality, the effort to turn America into a semi-fascist autocracy still have a ton of work to do. If nothing else, we need to motivate a significant faction of those who stayed home in November of 2024 to do their civic duty by pointing out how their lives have been worsened by the gang of incompetent grifters who–by a very slim margin–gained control of our government.

But the data should definitely encourage us. Happy Thanksgiving!!

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We Ain’t Buying It

Boycotts can be hard to organize, especially in a digital age when consumers find shopping at large, national retailers so easy and convenient.

During the past several months, we’ve seen the power of grassroots resistance to Trump and MAGA (I’m sure Jimmy Kimmel would agree), but getting people to forego a streaming channel or participate in a No Kings rally is easier than asking them to disrupt their daily shopping routines for weeks or months.

We Ain’t Buying It may have hit on a middle ground–a limited-time boycott that will send a message without requiring participants to engage in long-term withdrawals. As the Contrarian recently explained, a group of resistance organizers are promoting a brief consumer boycott over the Thanksgiving holiday. The boycott is focused on three companies: Amazon, Home Depot, and Target. The intent is to send a pointed and unmistakable message to three companies that have been identified as Trump regime enablers.

We Ain’t Buying It proposes to mobilize the collective power of the grassroots this Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. As the alliance announced,

President Trump and his corporate allies continue to relentlessly attack our communities—from mass firings of federal workers to corporate pressure to dismantle DEI to ICE raids targeting our neighbors to a government shutdown that left 42 million people without needed food….

Together we will hold accountable corporations like Target, Home Depot, and Amazon, that continue to enable and profit from this administration’s relentless and cruel attacks on working people and our families.

As a co-founder of Black Voters Matter explained, “We’re watching corporations bend over backwards to appease an administration and gain tax breaks, even when it hurts their own customers.”  As she also pointed out, they’ve ignored a significant fact: “tax breaks don’t matter when sales collapse.”

Choosing Thanksgiving weekend through Cyber Monday will give ordinary people an opportunity to send a very pointed message–that they have the power to direct their patronage and dollars to companies that have demonstrated a commitment to the people who build their bottom lines. And brief boycotts can be very effective.

In the case of Disney/ABC, “Data from research firm Antenna found that during September, the number of U.S. consumers who canceled their Disney+ subscriptions averaged 8%, which is double the 4% estimate for the prior two months,” The Street reported. Also, Hulu’s average cancellation rate was “twice the 5% rate for the previous two months.” (Among all its streaming services, Disney reportedly lost 1.7 million subscribers.) In addition, Disney suffered a dip in market capitalization of $4.2 billion at one point.

The article describes how, through our history, various boycotts have changed corporate conduct and publicized citizens’  grievances. They’ve given ordinary people a sense of personal agency, at the same time “incentivizing” companies to think twice before enabling an autocratic regime.

Indivisible, which is one of the organizations sponsoring the boycott, has a website devoted to the effort. Their “ask” is simple: “Target, Home Depot, and Amazon must stop undermining our democracy by collaborating with, and enabling, the Trump administration. Reinstate their DEI policies, refuse to cooperate with ICE, and withhold funding to Trump’s authoritarian regime. ”

The collective action they endorse is equally simple:

Join us for a full Thanksgiving black out. From Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday (11/27 – 12/1), don’t buy anything from Target, Amazon, or Home Depot. Don’t give any money to the companies that are undermining our democracy.

Instead, support small, local businesses or mutual aid efforts in your community.

We Ain’t Buying It chose Thanksgiving weekend for an obvious reason; it’s a peak shopping time. As the site recounts, more than 196 million Americans shopped over last year’s holiday weekend, making it a perfect opportunity to send a message– to notify Target, Home Depot, and Amazon that collaborating with Trump imposes a cost. We won’t shop with you. If they don’t get the record numbers of shoppers they’re anticipating, they’ll notice!

I stopped shopping at Target when they gave in to Right-wing criticisms and limited their Gay Pride merchandise. I haven’t shopped at Home Depot since I learned their founder was a huge Trump donor. Admittedly, I’d find it very difficult to entirely stop shopping at Amazon, but I can certainly refrain from visiting that site for the few days of the boycott. And I can–and will– also refrain from buying my Christmas and Chanukah gifts there, something I’ve done for the past several years.

We can all shop local this holiday weekend, helping smaller, local retailers and sending a very important message!

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Observations Worth Quoting

I do a lot of “wordsmithing.” One of the consequences is that I appreciate –and am jealous of–examples of superior writing. I’ve referred before to Lincoln Square, and recently I’ve been absolutely gob-smacked by the excellence and clarity of that site’s prose.

I’m going to cede most of today’s blog to some of the most perceptive paragraphs–but I urge you to click through and read both essays in their entirety.

On November 20th, the essay was titled “The Party That Forgot How To Blink”

Trump didn’t bother courting the middle; he declared war on it. The man didn’t run a campaign — he ran a group-therapy session for people allergic to accountability. If you were broke, it wasn’t automation — it was immigrants “stealing jobs.” If you were single and couldn’t get laid, it wasn’t your personality — it was feminism. If you were uneducated, it wasn’t disinterest — it was “the elites.” If you didn’t get promoted, blame DEI. If you lost an argument online, blame CRT. His rallies were motivational seminars for men who think foreplay is a liberal conspiracy. Somewhere in that stew of insecurity, the manosphere — that digital wasteland of fragile masculinity and podcast mics — found its messiah.

On November 19th, from an essay titled “How the Monster Turned On Itself.”

The smiles are tighter. The knives are increasingly out, not for the hated “socialists” but for one another.

The people who once lived to “own the libs” spend more of each day subtweeting each other, accusing one another of being disloyal to MAGA, of being globalist plants, Soros puppets, or, worst of all in that ecosystem, insufficiently devoted to Dear Leader.

This is what happens when you build a movement on raw power and loyalty checks instead of principle, paranoia instead of policy, vibes instead of values.

Eventually, the purity tests get so extreme that no one can pass them. The circle keeps getting smaller until the last three guys in it are accusing each other of being communist Deep State sleeper agents.

As the essay then notes, MAGA has done incredible damage to America. It has also wrecked the GOP and hollowed out conservative institutions.

But once you train everyone to think in terms of enemies and traitors, of obedience and betrayal, they can’t stop when the Democrats are out of the room.

All the 2028 aspirants are shanking one another. The influencers are attacking the think tanks. The Groypers attacking the “respectable” right. The populists are attacking the donor class. The donor class is on an extractive sprint before Trump dies. The online true believers are attacking the politicians who actually need to win elections. It is a five-alarm, all-hands-on-deck circular firing squad.

It began in the Obama years.

They told themselves it was about deficits, the Constitution, and small government. It was not. It was about the pissy grievances of suburban and rural dudes with fake Oakleys and erectile dysfunction who are just positive their job was being taken by a Mexican, not a McKinsey consultant and a private equity firm.

It was about cultural panic. It was about race. It was about people who felt the country drifting away from them and wanted someone to promise they could roll history back to 1958 (or perhaps 1858) by yelling at immigrants on Fox.

Then Trump came down that escalator.

He distilled every bitter little resentment on the right into a single-malt of wretched hatred. Overnight, all the old constraints of Republican politics, the donor class, the gentry conservative think tanks, the “serious” media ecosystem, and the alleged principles of the religious wing went out the window.

The old Republican Party did not die on election night in 2016. It died in stages, slow, humiliating, and for some, lucrative. You’ve heard the tale by now: sure, everyone knew better, but they decided to play along.

There was no neutral ground. There was no “agree with him on policy, disagree on tone.” Remember those days? “I didn’t see the tweet” became “I read the tweet and had it tattooed on my back to show how much I love Donald Trump.”

You either wore the red hat or you were a traitor.

And here is the important thing: once you teach people that loyalty to a person is the highest good, they never stop hunting for disloyalty.

They started asking who is secretly a RINO. Who is secretly woke. Who is secretly “controlled opposition.” They started by looking sideways at one another and wondering who was going to be the next one thrown off the sled.

They trawled through millions of tweets, parsing every word, every connection, every bit of writing, peering with intent for any sign someone might not be true to the Dear Leader and the cause.

That is the DNA of the MAGA civil war. A movement built on loyalty, grievance, and paranoia eventually runs out of external enemies and starts eating its own.

I couldn’t have said these things half as well.

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From The Street To A Home

This blog typically addresses national issues. I’m not apologizing for that–the Trump administration poses an existential threat to the America most of us want to retain. Its numerous evils are–to use Joe Biden’s characterization–a “BFD.” But the fact that our national structures are under assault doesn’t mean that local issues have disappeared or become unimportant.

And the fact that the American Idea is under assault by a Christian nationalist movement doesn’t mean that we should overlook–or diminish the importance of– the good works of genuine Christians and other people of faith.

Which brings me to Indianapolis, and the laudable work being done by GIMA–the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance, and its “Streets to Homes” initiative, a multifaith call to end chronic homelessness in Indianapolis.

GIMA began as an interfaith effort to make Indianapolis a more collaborative and inclusive city, to make it a “more just and livable place.” In stark contrast to MAGA’s faux Christianity, the faith leaders who came together in GIMA represent the city’s diverse religious traditions, with the stated intent to form what the organization calls “a sacred friendship,” and to collaborate on civic projects that serve the common good of greater Indianapolis.

I first encountered GIMA when the organization was focused on Indianapolis’ eviction crisis, and was impressed both by its  judicious approach to that issue and the breadth of the organization’s religious membership. Representatives of central Indiana’s Black and White churches, synagogues and Mosques exhibited a fellowship and respect that have been glaringly missing from our national conversations– thanks primarily to MAGA’s determined Othering. They identified a civic problem and came together to address it.

The organization describes “Streets to Homes” as follows:

Following the successful community action led by the Black Church Coalition, Indy Action Coalition, and the Validus Movement, The Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance (GIMA) is inviting congregations across Central Indiana to join a multifaith effort to support the Streets to Home Indy Initiative – a community- driven campaign to provide permanent housing and supportive services for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. This initiative is part of a broader campaign to provide not just shelter, but lasting homes and supportive services for those most in need.

The goal of Streets to Homes is to house 350 currently unsheltered neighbors, and to do so by June of 2026 “through an evidence-based model that includes housing and supportive services.”

As the website explains,

Besides being the right thing to do? 20 years of data demonstrates that providing stability to these neighbors sets them on a path to upward mobility and independence, which ultimately strengthens our community, increases public safety, and reduces the economic impact of homelessness.

We can only do this through a community-wide commitment that includes the business community, philanthropic community, faith community, and civic support.

GIMA is asking faith community partners to contribute $270,000 as its part of the philanthropy community’s commitment of $2.7 million. That commitment “joins with equal pledges from the Housing to Recovery Fund and the city of Indianapolis” in what the organization calls “an unprecedented community-wide coalition.”

Rabbi Aaron Spiegel, the Executive Director of GIMA, tells me that area churches have responded with unprecedented generosity. (What he didn’t say–but I will–is that this diverse, interfaith effort has forced Indianapolis’ city government to become far more focused upon the effort to end homelessness than it had previously been.)

As regular readers of this blog know, I am very critical of the performative “Christians” who disdain both the adherents of other religions and “woke” efforts to ameliorate poverty and hopelessness. GIMA’s efforts are a reminder that there are millions of truly good people in every religious community who focus on the admonitions–common to all religions–to love one’s neighbors and to work for social justice. (MAGA to the contrary, it has been my observation that all genuine religiosity is “woke.”)

I would encourage readers who reside here in central Indiana to visit the linked GIMA and Streets to Homes websites. You need not be a believer, or a member of a congregation, to support this initiative, which is an excellent reminder to those of us who are not religious to avoid painting the folks who are with too broad a brush.

Thankfully, genuine Christians aren’t like Micah Beckwith, genuine Jews aren’t like Bibi Netanyahu, and genuine Muslims abhor jihadists. They’re all pretty “woke”– and the rest of us need to remember that.

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The Real World Consequences

A majority of Americans are aware of the damage being done by this disastrous administration to our governing institutions,  the rule of law, and the economy. I think far fewer are aware of the thousands of preventable deaths caused by Trump’s version of “policy.”

The most visible are those caused by the defunding of USAID. USAID funding helped save an estimated 91 million lives over the past 20 years. Now, a peer-reviewed study tells us that Trump’s defunding of the agency will lead to more than 14 million preventable deaths globally by 2030, a number that includes more than 4.5 million children under the age of five.

Far less visible–but equally horrific– are the likely consequences of Trump’s indiscriminate war on medical science, and his termination of grants supporting clinical trials. A recent article from the Washington Post explored those terminations. Citing research published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the article reported that funding for 383 clinical trials had been pulled, and that the funding disruptions affected more than 74,000 trial participants. The researchers found that the cuts disproportionately affected trials focused on infectious diseases (such as covid-19 and HIV); prevention; and behavioral interventions. More than 100 of the canceled grants supported cancer research.

Robert Hopkins, medical director for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, said the study showed that funding cuts disproportionately hit areas “that are critical to public health.”

“Clinical research is a long game,” he said. “Developing new vaccines, antivirals and treatments takes years, often decades. Cutting funding now risks slowing progress on interventions that could help save lives for years to come.”

Some of the clinical trials that lost their grants sued, and several got their funding back, but they experienced delays during the course of the trials that are likely to have significant negative impacts on the studies and on their participants. As one researcher explained, “If you pause an experiment, especially when it comes to experiments involving drugs and patients where you need a consistent dose over time and consistent measurements, it’s possible that you just screwed up the entire research.” Another noted that much of the clinical infrastructure was crippled or entirely destroyed during the grant terminations, making it very difficult to resume the research. 

And of course, when clinical trials are delayed or canceled, the patients who were enrolled often lose access to care.

The funding terminations weren’t limited to clinical trials; numerous other research studies also lost funding. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine in May found that between February and April, nearly 700 NIH grants had been terminated across 24 of the federal agency’s 26 institutes and centers. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that studies focused on minorities–especially those investigating health concerns of non-Whites and LGBTQ+ citizens–appear to have been disproportionately targeted.)

Partners in Health addressed the likely consequences–and the importance of clinical research to public health.

Some of the greatest advancements made through research include vaccines, insulin, anesthesia, and treatments for infectious diseases. From laboratory studies to clinical trials and epidemiological investigations, scientists around the world use different methods of research to advance disease treatment, enhance diagnostics, and improve our overall understanding of diseases.  

“Research is the key to advancing health on the individual, community, national, and global level,” said Cora Cunningham, PIH Engage member, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health student, and research assistant with the Lantagne Group at Tufts University. “Whether about drinking water quality, disease dynamics, health systems, or the patient experience, research in public and global health is what allows us to access, receive, or deliver quality and patient-centered health care.”

Without research, there would be no breakthroughs, no clinical advancements, and no new cures. Despite its importance to humankind, biomedical research—particularly research funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—has been targeted by the current U.S. administration.

The bottom line is that years of progress in public health have been disrupted. Thanks to a combination of frozen funding, the erection of new, onerous roadblocks to financing, and imposition of overly complicated new procedures, experts predict that the setbacks in research will cause generations of delays in breakthroughs and cures. As the linked article from Partners in Health warns, “patients who were part of clinical trials will face health risks due to the abrupt end to their treatment and support. Advancements made on cures and treatments for various diseases will be squandered. Jobs will be lost, and public health will suffer.”

The question is: why? This particular vendetta wasn’t a response to citizen demands. It isn’t even likely to line the pockets of the billionaires to whom this administration disproportionately caters. Like the destruction of USAID, it is simply gratuitously cruel.

Like Trump. 


 

 

 
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