Tag Archives: MAGA

Good Stuff Is Happening Too

There’s a reason “doom scrolling” has entered our vocabularies. Every day, the news is filled with incomprehensibly stupid and damaging activities of Trump and his collection of clowns, creeps, weirdos and incompetents; it’s easy to become fixated on all the chaos and destruction.

But there are encouraging signs that We the People are rapidly awakening from our civic slumber. Some examples, in no particular order: 

A Grand Jury has refused to indict two Senators (including former astronaut Mark Kelly) and four Congresspersons who’d filmed a video in which they reminded members of the armed forces that they have a legal duty to refuse illegal orders. It’s an axiom in the legal community that prosecutors can get grand juries to indict a ham sandwich, but this recent–and entirely appropriate–result follows several others in which panels of ordinary American citizens have refused to go along with bogus charges lodged against people targeted by Trumpian pique.

Despite early incidents in which institutions of higher education have “bent the knee,” universities have begun pushing back. In Red Indiana, where the current President of Indiana University has cozied up to our MAGA governor and complied with the administration’s various assaults on academic freedom, the faculty has passed a resolution urging IU to remove the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, along with its Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies, from the university’s list of approved employers who are allowed to advertise jobs on the IU Events calendar.  

The House of Representatives defied Trump for once, voting 217-214 against a rule that would have blocked members from voting on the president’s tariffs. The defeat means that members will be able to force up or down votes on the President’s insane, damaging global trade agenda. (The Senate had already voted against Trump’s tariffs with GOP senators siding with Democrats last year.)

ICE is leaving Minneapolis. Trump is steadily losing support on his signature issue of immigration. An NBC/SurveyMonkey poll found 49% of American adults strongly disapprove of the Trump administration’s handling of border security and immigration, compared with 34% who strongly disapproved in a similar poll last April.

An essay titled “Auspicious Omens and Excellent Insubordination” contains a lengthy list of other evidence that the resistance is making progress, and that an administration described as “weak, chaotic, and wildly unpopular” is continuing to do everything it can to make itself more so. 

There are also the slow-moving but inexorable revelations from the Epstein files, which–in addition to a reported million mentions of Trump–have ensnared people like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and debunked Trump’s assertions that he hadn’t known about Epstein’s sexual crimes. As the essay suggests, the continuing dribble of releases, along with the obvious efforts to suppress information about “who is being protected (powerful men) and who is not (abused children)” keeps fanning the flames.

The unhinged and increasingly overt racism that led Trump to portray the Obamas as apes has generated a backlash even among Republicans. As the author notes, Trump fails to understand “that we live in a world where causes have effects.” In this case, one effect was that thousands of people praised the Obamas as gracious, dignified, and beautiful while accurately describing Trump as gross, demented and repulsive.

J.D. Vance continues to be booed–in Vermont, at the Olympics…Trump skipped the Super Bowl because his staff warned that he too would be booed. (And despite his dissing of Bad Bunny, the Super Bowl halftime show was the most widely watched in history.)

Republicans see a bloodbath coming in the midterms, which the Trumpists are already frantically trying delegitimize–a clear sign they don’t think they can win fairly. Democrats have overperformed in every special election held in 2025. Most recently, a Democrat who was outspent by twenty to one won a state senate election in Texas by 14 points–in a district Trump had won by 17 points–a 31-point shift. (A GOP operative was quoted saying, “We watered down red districts to steal blue ones, and now the electorate hates us and our turnout is collapsing.”)

High school students across the country are staging walkouts to protest ICE–and the audience at a wrestling match shouted “Fuck ICE” before the main event.

And authentic Christians have finally been showing up to oppose the psuedo-Christian nationalists. The Catholic church is speaking out for immigrants, and so are Episcopalians, Methodists, and the United Church of Christ– along with rabbis, imams, and Buddhist monks. Across the country, churches are becoming meeting places, training grounds, and organizing networks for immigrant solidarity work.

There’s much more. MAGA has lost more than Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s lost We the (Real American) People.

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The Contrarian Has A List…

Nice Americans–okay, real Americans–increasingly issue anguished commentaries insisting that Trump’s America “isn’t who we are.” Much as I would like to believe that, it is clearly untrue (or at least an exaggeration). “We” rather obviously come in wildly different varieties–the racist MAGA cult, and the rest of us. Survey research suggests that some 37% of us are either MAGA or MAGA-adjacent, a far larger cohort than I ever imagined.

So who are the MAGA cultists who want to jettison the limits of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and trash the aspirations of the Declaration?

As regular readers know, I attribute MAGA’s support for Trump and the fascism of his administration to racism–to the resentments of White folks (mostly but not exclusively men) triggered by changes in the social order. White “Christian” nationalists and the “intellectuals” at places like the Heritage Foundation are reacting to a perceived assault on their status by those they insist are “lower”–Black and Brown folks, women, non-Christians. (Their fulminations always remind me of that song from Cabaret, where the emerging Nazis sing “The future belongs to us.”)

It has become increasingly difficult to ignore the rancid bigotries that motivate MAGA and Trump. In the wake of Trump’s most recent exercise–portraying the Obamas as apes–even the pathetic Republicans in Congress (who have assiduously avoided reacting to his multiple prior offenses) have been trying to distance themselves.

Can we spell “too little, too late”?

A recent post by Jen Rubin in The Contrarian addressed the numerous racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic actions of an administration that is increasingly and obviously fascist. Rubin blamed the mainstream press for failing to point out Trump’s racism–ignoring the racism of his accusations about Obama’s birth certificate, and his ride down the golden escalator and launching his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants drug dealers, criminals, and rapists.

As Rubin points out, there had been ample evidence of Trump’s abject bigotry for decades, including his insistence that the (exonerated) Central Park 5 should get the death penalty, and his “nonstop racist commentary about immigrants.”

His attack on DEI is rooted in this same racism, although the legacy media and timid politicians dare not call it that for fear of being labeled “woke.” Blaming the 2025 D.C. plane crash on DEI; taking down a tribute to Jackie Robinson; replacing MLK, Jr.’s birthday as a federal holiday with his own at our National Parks; trying to write slavery out of the Smithsonian; and arresting Black journalists…are plainly efforts to demean and erase African Americans from our history.

Rubin quotes the ACLU’s description of the anti-DEI ideologues who have ferociously attacked inclusion efforts in and out of government. “These ideologues have weaponized the term ‘DEI’ to mean ideas and policies that address systemic racism and sexism.” These attacks are part of “a larger effort by right-wing foundations, think tanks, and political operatives to dismantle civil rights gains made in recent decades.”

Trump has turned the top ranks of civilian and military personnel into a virtually all-white boys club. He has restored the names of Southern slaveholders to military bases; while refusing to appoint a single Black woman to the federal bench in his second term. He has repeatedly hired neo-Nazis and elevated White Nationalist sympathizers. He selected primarily Black and Muslim countries to enforce restrictions and provoke adverse treatment on visas.

Furthermore, his constant insults directed at women — evidenced by the E.J. Carroll sexual assault verdict, or his ongoing mistreatment of female reporters — leave no doubt about his misogynistic venom. His compulsive dehumanization of immigrants and resorting to enabling White supremacists have been at the heart of his presidency. It is hard to conjure what more proof of deep-seated racism and misogyny would be sufficient to persuade those who feign inability to know Trump’s real motives.

Rubin is entirely correct when she says that the corporate/legacy media could–and should– examine the racist views of Trump’s voters and explain how his policies, however rationalized, are racist. They could point out that MAGA’s efforts to destroy the Voting Rights Act is intended to return America to Jim Crow politics, that his mass deportation crusade (and limits to immigration from “shithole” countries) is an effort to make America White again.  They could refuse to let feckless Republicans “scamper away” without addressing Trump’s most recent racist comment. And they could stop “pretending there are benign reasons for policies and personnel decisions that (wow!) just so happen to bolster white men at the expense of all those easily classified as others.”

MAGA and Trump are not who most Americans are–but most Germans weren’t initially Nazis, either. The resistance understands that we are currently choosing who we are–and how history will remember us.

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Yellow Lines And Dead Armadillos

Well-meaning people continue to urge folks on the political Left and Right to talk to each other, to listen to each other, and to come to the “middle.” This constant refrain drives me up the wall, because what I see are not “politics as usual” disputes, but a fundamental moral divide. The only “policy” being debated is the right of a lawless administration to send ICE goons (aka Trump’s Gestapo) into American cities to kidnap and brutalize citizens at will.

Even the terms “Left” and “Right” are inappropriate. The Republican Party once had a coherent, politically conservative agenda–free trade, limited government, respect for law and order, support for NATO… That party has vanished, substituting  virulent racism and devotion to Trump for anything resembling a conservative philosophy–or any philosophy, for that matter.

The morphing of the Republican Party into an alternate reality cult has also remade the Democratic Party (most of which was never as “Left” as Republicans used to charge). Actual conservatives and moderates have departed the GOP in droves. Many–probably most–now count themselves Independent, but a not-insignificant number now identify as Democrats, turning Democrats into a nearly ungovernable ideological mix.

The GOP has become a neo-fascist cult; Democratic voters are those who oppose that cult.

When I read pious exhortations about “coming together” and “listening to each other” I want to scream that I have been listening– I’ve heard MAGA loud and clear, and I know there is no “middle ground.”

A recent, welcome essay in Lincoln Square made that point forcefully. As Stuart Stevens began,

In this time of national trauma, we hear many calls for an end to the divisions that are shredding the national fabric. It all sounds lovely. Who could argue that Americans need to do more to understand each other and reach a consensus?

Well, I could.

I don’t want to understand the guy in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt during the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

I don’t want to understand the Death Squad ICE agents who murder innocent citizens.

I don’t want to understand the twisted hatred of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem.

I don’t want to understand the MAGA followers who say the 2020 election was stolen.

Stevens–one of the sane Americans who fled the GOP–draws a stark line between those who he says are “defending the legacy of the Greatest Generation and those who defile its sacrifice.” He points out that carrying the same country’s passport  is an accident of birth, while values are a choice.

Too many Democrats still believe Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election when she said, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” I don’t know how to break it to you guys, but that’s the sort of self-flagellating instinct that helped my Republican candidates win races they had no business winning.

The problem wasn’t that Hillary Clinton described MAGA as deplorable. The problem was that she stopped doing it. You win races by defining the other side in sweeping negative language. Races are about differences and choices. There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos.

Stevens underlines that observation with a very simple question: Is this who you are?” He invokes the image of a ranting Stephen Miller “looking like he’s auditioning for Joseph Goebbels role as Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” and suggests asking a normal American, a sane voter, “Is this who you want to be?”

We are taught that it is a positive character attribute to give another person the benefit of the doubt. That may work when debating converting the U.S. to the metric system, but it’s a Munich Accord-level of appeasement when dealing with the lunatics of MAGA. Those of us who view this moment as an existential threat to democracy should reject any assumption that the other side is acting in good faith. When a home invader has broken in your door, don’t act like he thinks he’s visiting a friend and has the wrong address. Do whatever it takes to get the bastard out of your house.

Legacy media “both-siding” to the contrary, Americans are not engaged in the sort of normal political debate that demands compromise and conciliation. MAGA folks understand that, while far too many of the rest of us don’t. We are facing a sustained, intentional assault on the very foundations of America’s identity.

That assault calls for resistance, not conciliation. There is no “middle ground” between liberal democracy and fascism.

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The Smell Of Hypocrisy In The Morning…

I know we Americans are facing truly horrific challenges–the White House is occupied by a man whose malevolent insanity is impossible to ignore. His ICE agents are America’s version of a (masked) Gestapo. Our “guardrails” have failed us, with feckless Congressional Republicans refusing to honor their oaths of office and a corrupt Supreme Court enabling the madman in the Oval Office.

It’s an ugly picture, and I don’t want to minimize how dire things are. But what has really incensed me–probably out of proportion to the severity of all the other threats we face–is the unbelievable hypocrisy of both Trump and MAGA.

Let’s talk about guns. Trump wouldn’t have won in 2024 without the gun lobby–his victory was thin. He sold himself to the NRA and other Second Amendment “patriots” as a defender of their ahistorical application of that Amendment. Now, he defends the murder of a peaceful protester by his ICE thugs by declaring that the protester’s lawful possession of a gun–which that protester never held and certainly never “brandished”–justified killing him, saying “You can’t bring a gun. You just can’t.”

I’m waiting for those intrepid Second Amendment protectors in Congress to call for his impeachment…

Then there’s Trump’s even more egregious lie about why he sent ICE into Minneapolis–and his rhetoric about stamping out “fraud” that he attributed to all Somali residents (they’re Black, you know, so they must all be guilty). It was immaterial that those allegations, which involved a small number of Somalis, had already been investigated and addressed by state law enforcement. That excuse was really rich, coming from a President who continues to pardon people found guilty of multiple crimes–including fraud–by juries. Of course, those pardons only issue when the fraudster or a relative pays him off, or when–like the January 6th rioters–they engaged in criminal behaviors at his request.

And don’t get me started on Trump’s excuse for bombing fishing ships out of international waters and murdering an estimated 124 people on board without any due process or evidence. His excuse was that those boats were carrying drugs. Meanwhile, he granted a full and complete pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was given due process, and who had been convicted in a court of law for conspiring to import over 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.. 

Perhaps the most blatant hypocrisy is coming from Minnesota, where Trump’s MAGA supporters are having what one pundit called a “toddler tantrum” over the fact that hundreds of Minneapolis area businesses have put “NO ICE SERVED HERE” signs in their windows. The MAGA people fulminating over this “outrage” are the very people who have spent years protecting the “religious rights” of business owners. They are the same people who’ve gone to court to protect the “First Amendment rights” of bakers to refuse to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples, and to protect web architects from having to design websites for gay folks.

And they won. Our disgraceful Supreme Court went out of its way (okay, out of the Constitution’s way) to accommodate those very “sincere” religious folks, to allow them to refuse to serve people whose very existence offended their “sincerely held” beliefs. Our home-grown theocrats celebrated the “liberty” of business owners to discriminate on the basis of principle. Their current outrage is just evidence of what the rest of us have always known: they were hypocrites. They weren’t interested in defending just any “principles” or moral beliefs upon which a given business owner might sincerely be acting–they were only interested in sending a “religious” message to particular people of whom they disapproved.

Trump’s hypocrisy is nothing new.

Back in 2022, Austin Sarat wrote in The Hill that Trump’s hypocrisy undermines democracy by eroding trust and breeding cynicism. “What Trump practices and what he preaches have little in common. He feels no compunction about doing the very things that he denounces and uses to demonize his political opponents.”

But democratic politics cannot thrive, or perhaps even survive, when hypocrisy becomes the norm. Political scientist John Keane has rightly observed that “Hypocrisy … is the soil in which antipathy towards democracy always takes root.”

Keane argues that democratic politics rests on a foundation of trust among citizens and between citizens and their representatives. Hypocrisy erodes that trust. It leads people to discount what others say in the political arena and promotes a corrosive disgust with politics.

“Corrosive distrust.” Sounds like a pretty apt description of where we are….

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Echoes Of Infamy

Trump’s promise to MAGA –as I’ve noted before, the only promise he has kept–was to Make America White Again, with all that promise entails. (It isn’t just skin color that marks some citizens as “Other”– just being female or practicing the “wrong” religion will remove you from MAGA’s “Real American” category…)

The administration’s hysterical war on DEI and “woke-ism” has been unrelenting, underscoring the belief of MAGA folks that efforts to reduce discrimination against women and/or minorities are really discrimination against White males–that “inclusion” of women and minorities is really just code for exclusion of White “Christian” men.

Historians tell us that the Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow, that they “borrowed” from the legal structures that disadvantaged Black folks in the American south to craft the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor– the Nuremberg Laws that laid the  groundwork for the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust and World War II.

Imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery, and the Trump administration is now returning the favor.

As many of us have recognized–and as the New York Times has recently documented–the administration’s social media posts have increasingly adopted the terminology of Nazi racist propaganda. Its posts increasingly echo neo-Nazi literature, use terminology approving of ethnic cleansing and even QAnon conspiracies, and have “promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys.”

Their authors are not on society’s fringe. They are in the offices of the White House and the departments of Homeland Security and Labor, using official government accounts.

To some people, the administration’s posts sound patriotic. Others might sense at most a faint dog whistle to extremists. Some posts may just look odd. But those well-versed in the abstruse codes of right-wing extremism hear klaxons.

Some of us noticed this in the advertisements recruiting for ICE.  Ads on Instagram, Facebook and X all used an overlay with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”

That’s also the name of a song, written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order,” that has been embraced by the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups. Hundreds of explicitly neo-Nazi and white-supremacist accounts have shared the song on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, since 2020. The white supremacist who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Fla., dollar store in 2023 included lyrics from the song in his writing.

Most Americans would miss the significance, but White Supremacists (and those who study them) understand the message.

I’ve posted previously about other ads and social-media posts that have included pictures and symbols associated with far-right extremist groups, and websites excluding previously pictured women and Blacks. The Labor Department has posted an image with the words “TRUST THE PLAN”– a central catchphrase of QAnon, and the White House’s X account has posted a photo of Trump and the word “remigration.” The Times article points out that “remigration” is a “decades-old European concept centered on the expulsion of nonwhite people and immigrants deemed unassimilated.”

Tens of thousands of Germans protested the concept two years ago after the country’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party secretly met with neo-Nazis to discuss plans to implement it. (More than a dozen AfD politicians have reposted Mr. Trump’s “remigration” photo on X.)

The Labor Department has also posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” a caption that clearly and ominously echoes a Nazis slogan from World War II, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” or “One People, One Realm, One Leader.”

Experts cited in the Times article appeared confident that the apparent allusions were not accidental. One sociologist pointed to the use of “secret codes and numerological clues” in the ICE recruitment ads, which he believes have been designed to appeal to “a very specific segment” of Americans. These are “young men who live online and are disaffected by what they see as unwanted changes in American life.” The thuggish behavior of that cohort in Minneapolis would seem to confirm his conclusion.

Let’s be honest: this country has always had a significant number of Nazi and “Nazi-adjacent” citizens. In the 1930s, the the German American Bund had tens of thousands of members and held rallies with Ku Klux Klan members. In 1959, George Lincoln Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party; it employed a “White Power!” slogan and insisted that Nazism was “American patriotism.” The National Alliance, founded by the author of The Turner Diaries, spewed  white supremacy and antisemitism.

We’ve had bigots in the White House before, but never one who was such an enthusiastic descendant of those organizations.

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