Tag Archives: Trump

Cutting Through The C**p

If I see another “study” attempting to describe the different motives of those who support Donald Trump, I will once again engage my (not-so-inner) potty-mouth.

The most recent example I’ve come across was a description of a study purporting to describe four different varieties of Trump voter. Here’s the crux of the study’s “scholarly” conclusion:

About 29 percent of 2024 Trump voters are what we call the “MAGA Hardliners.” These are the fiery core of Trump’s base, mostly composed of white Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, who are animated by the belief that God is on their side in America’s existential struggle between good and evil. Then there are the “Anti-Woke Conservatives” (21 percent): a more secular and affluent group of voters deeply frustrated by what they perceive as the takeover of schools, culture, and institutions by the progressive left. Another 30 percent are the “Mainline Republicans”: a more racially diverse group of middle-of-the-road conservatives who prioritize border security, a strong economy, and cultural stability. Finally, we have the “Reluctant Right” (20 percent). Members of this group, unlike the other three, are not necessarily part of Trump’s base; they voted for him, but have ambivalent feelings toward him. Only half identify as Republicans, and many picked Trump because he seemed “less bad” than the alternative.

Any reasonable look at those “differences” will note the common thread that unites them, the overwhelming grievance that allows them to ignore–or even cheer–Trump’s ignorance and venality, his increasing dementia, and his destruction of America’s constitution at home and influence abroad. 

That common thread is a deep-seated racism. 

Let’s look at all four of those categories. The first, the MAGA Hardliners, are described politely; they are rather clearly White “Christian” nationalists. Project 2025 mapped out their preferred society–a society where God has installed  White males in positions of authority, where women are returned to the kitchen and bedroom, and people of color who are allowed to remain in the country are properly subservient.

“Anti-woke conservatives” are assigned to a second, presumably separate category. Everything we need to know about them is in the “anti-woke” descriptor. They are only different from the White “Christian” nationalists because they don’t attribute their racism to a god. They may be more educated and more secular, they may even be more circuitous when expressing their hatreds, but they are every bit as racist as the MAGA Hardliners.

Calling the third group “Mainline Republicans” is a slur on those who could formerly have been described that way– genuinely traditional “mainline” Republicans have mostly departed from today’s GOP, leaving the “mainline” moniker to those who were formerly on the fringe. They are, according to the description, concerned with “border security, a strong economy, and cultural stability.” Border security and “cultural stability” are the give-aways here: securing the border means “keep Black and Brown folks out of the U.S.” “Cultural stability” is code for keeping White Christian male status dominant.

And that fourth group–the voters who chose to give the nation’s nuclear codes to a clearly unfit buffoon who had been found guilty of multiple felonies and rape because he was the “lesser of two bad choices?” Come on! Kamala Harris was only a lesser choice to people who could not bring themselves to vote for a Black woman (a Black woman married to a Jew, no less!)

These aren’t different constituencies. At most, they’re different varieties of racists.

And credit where credit is due: the one promise Trump has kept is his promise to emulate the Nazis. He hasn’t brought down the price of eggs or other groceries, hasn’t kept America out of foreign military engagements, and certainly hasn’t made America great. He and Stephen Miller and the assortment of clowns, misfits and outright psychopaths he has assembled have pursued an unrelenting attack on DEI, on “wokeness,” on accurate history, and on anyone perceived as an enemy of the would-be King of (some) White folks.

Now, Trump’s administration has unleashed its very own Gestapo–directed at cities in Blue states that failed to vote for him. Actually, Trump has gone one better than Hitler– Gestapo thugs didn’t wear masks.

Sane-washing takes lots of forms. For far too long, the media has tried to portray insanity and corruption as just one set of political positions, while academics have attempted to “slice and dice” MAGA supporters into more and less reprehensible categories. Those efforts are another kind of mask–one that keeps us from seeing the extent of the fascism we face.

Purveyors of “making nice” need to cut the crap and face up to the very ugly evidence of where we are right now.

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I Told You So…

I’ve fallen into a repetitive pattern; when friends or family members express horror at some new evidence of Trump’s ignorance, vanity or lunacy, I typically note that “he’s insane.” Rinse and repeat. On this platform, I have frequently offered the same opinion: in addition to stupidity and ignorance (not the same thing), Trump is clearly and increasingly mentally ill.

There is copious evidence of both his longstanding intellectual defects and his growing lunacy. The most recent–which actually managed to be startling–was the letter he wrote to the President of Norway, expanding on his fixation with Greenland.

That letter read in its entirely:

Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.

I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

Where to begin? Perhaps by pointing out that Greenland is part of Denmark, not Norway? That the Nobel Committee is a private entity, not part of Norway’s government? That there are plenty of “written documents” memorializing both Denmark’s ownership and the U.S. recognition of that ownership?  That his obsession with the prize is flat-out nuts, and his assertions of having stopped eight wars is –to be polite, let’s just say–fanciful?

Historian Anne Applebaum’s response (among many) is on point; this pathetic missive proves beyond a doubt that “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize.” As blunt and undeniably correct as her assessment is, there’s little hope that the Republicans in Congress will respond to her plea to stop Trump from “doing permanent damage to American interests.”

Applebaum says that those Republican Congressmen “owe it to the American people, and to the world.” True. Unfortunately, however, most of them have already demonstrated their spineless subservience to a MAGA cult that is equally divorced from reality.

Paul Krugman has offered what may be the most accurate description of where we are with this madman at the helm of the ship of state. He compares Trump’s late-night social media posts and letters to his father’s “sundowning.” Sundowning is a particular type of mental illness that manifests at night–after the sun goes down. (On the other hand, as Krugman concedes, “This might not exactly be sundowning, since it’s not clear that Trump is lucid and rational at any time of the day. What is incontrovertible is that he’s deeply unwell and rapidly getting sicker.”)

Krugman points out that it is unfair to blame a mentally-ill person for his illness–that it is the people around him and the cowards in Congress who are genuinely responsible for enabling behavior that may well bring on the destruction of the world order. He concludes by asking the question so many of us have asked:

How did a great, sophisticated nation, one of the world’s longest-standing republics, end up so fragile that it can be undone by one man’s dementia? That’s an important question, the answer to which I believe lies in the straight line from Bush vs Gore and the Roberts Supreme Court, to January 6th, to the execution of Renee Good. However, what’s more important is that we realize where we are right now, that we don’t try to sugarcoat and sanewash what’s happening: A petulant, violent and deranged individual is running America.

We all know it. The clowns and sycophants in his cabinet and our spineless Senators and Representatives know it. As Krugman accurately notes, It would take only eight people — four Republican senators and four Republican representatives — to “switch sides and caucus with the Democrats” to end this nightmare.

But those people would need to be actual patriots–not self-protective cowards averting their eyes from Trump’s all-too-obvious lunacy and the existential global danger he poses.

And from where I sit, today’s GOP doesn’t have any patriots.

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MAGA’s War On Education

Yesterday, I posted about the threat to higher education spearheaded by a Florida organization that proposes to redefine education as job training and to defund college courses that don’t promise graduates good salaries. 

The fact that the sponsoring organization is located in Florida shouldn’t surprise us: under DeSantis, that state is leading the way when it comes to MAGA’s war on education. He has already destroyed New College, which offended him by being “woke.”

As one observer recently wrote, DeSantis’ goal was to convert a liberal institution into a conservative one by using government money and purges. But by 2023, one third of its faculty had departed for jobs elsewhere, students were unable to find classes, and those with housing contracts were living in an airport hotel.

Today, New College spends more per student than any other institution of higher education in Florida–but the “return on investment” that so fascinates the Right has failed to materialize. The school has dropped 60 spots in the US News & World Report rankings, and its administration is currently trying to turn things around by–wait for it–recruiting student athletes and eliminating all-gender bathrooms. (In all fairness, maybe it will work. Indiana University’s winning football team has succeeding in diverting attention from the widely-criticised performance of IU’s president.)

Efforts to replace education with indoctrination aren’t limited to Florida. An article in Talking Points Memo notes that, when it comes to waging war on education, Trump appears to have taken yet another a page from the Confederacy.

In the early twentieth century, devotees of the ahistoric Lost Cause (it was all about state’s rights, not slavery) like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) used their considerable political influence to revise history curricula. As the article reports, “For the next several decades, nearly 70 million Southern students were taught that the enslaved were actually servants and that the Confederates fought merely to preserve a Southern way of life.” The article traced the numerous efforts that commandeered state-level commissions and controlled the “history” taught to generations of students, particularly–but not exclusively– in the South.

Under President Donald Trump, this blueprint is being adapted and disseminated directly from the White House. The president in September announced the Department of Education’s partnership with dozens of conservative and far-right organizations including Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, and PragerU. The group will lead the Trump administration’s 250th anniversary civic education efforts “in schools across the nation.” Among the administration’s priorities? “Renewing patriotism,” and “advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.”…

Trump II is leaning heavily on the “again” part of his MAGA slogan by pushing policy that propels the nation backward. Experts told TPM that by partnering with right-wing groups, Trump and his allies are exercising control over the retelling of history in hopes of shaping the political opinions of the youngest Americans. With groups like TPUSA and the Heritage Foundation at the helm, the Trump administration threatens to propagandize public education for generations to come, and to revive the highly politicized, and ahistorical, curriculum campaigns of the early- and mid-20th centuries.

The linked article goes through the history of these (undeniably successful) efforts to distort history, and is very much worth reading in its entirety. It also highlights Trump’s partnership with PragerU, a conservative, anti-DEI media nonprofit, to produce “educational materials” about the Revolutionary War. 

PragerU has published materials with false claims about slavery and racism, echoing the ethos of the UDC, in the name of “American values.” Like the UDC and other 20th century education activists, the group has been lobbying to get its materials in schools for years. Under Trump, the architects of the next decades of public (and charter and private) schooling appear to be right-wing groups like the PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point.

If that isn’t chilling enough, a glance through the administration’s wider efforts to control what Americans learn is instructive. 

The administration’s numerous threats to museums and libraries are part of that war. At the end of December, The New York Times reported the destruction of NASA’s largest research library, described as “a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else.” According to a NASA spokesman, while some materials would be stored in a government warehouse, the rest would simply be tossed away. That library’s closure followed the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, including three this year. 

I think it was Santayana who warned that those who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it…

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Fascism Versus Market Capitalism

Thomas Edsall’s columns in the New York Times share a consistent pattern: Edsall poses a question or initiates an inquiry, then contacts several experts, posing the relevant questions, and sharing their responses. Most recently, he explored the mechanisms that have characterized the Trumpian replacement of market capitalism with a “bend the knee in order to earn government’s blessing” approach that–like so much of Trump’s administration–is reminiscent of bygone fascist regimes.

It has become common to label Trump’s administration fascist, but usually that accusation arises in the context of ICE thuggery, the attacks on minorities and the evisceration of constitutional rights–actions echoing the Fascist regimes that focused on whitewashed pasts, and claimed traditional class structures and gender roles were essential to the “social order.”

These comparisons are accurate but incomplete; fascism also–and importantly–engaged in a thoroughgoing and intentional subversion of market economics.

Fascism is sometimes called “national Socialism,” but its approach to the economy differs significantly from socialism. The most striking aspect of fascist systems, of course, is the elevation of the nation—a fervent nationalism is central to fascist philosophy. That nationalism accompanies a union between business and the state; although there is nominally private property, fascist governments control business decisions.

In one of his recent columns, Edsall explored the current echoes of that approach, and how dramatically it differs from former Republican agendas and beliefs. As he notes, Trump and his administration regularly apply a “financial and regulatory chokehold” on businesses, corporations and nonprofits that he believes are antagonistic to him, from electric cars and wind energy projects to service-providing nonprofits and television networks.

“The administration has terminated, to use one of Trump’s favorite words, wind energy projects and ended tax and other incentives for electric-powered vehicles, two industries he believes are the creation of Democratic policies.”

As Edsall notes, the Trump administration’s extensive intrusions into the private sector are in direct conflict with traditional Republican and conservative beliefs, which held that government interference with the free market should be limited. Trump, of course, is  neither conservative nor Republican–for that matter, he appears incapable of developing anything remotely like a coherent agenda, economic or otherwise. For him, government regulation is not ideologically an anathema; it is a tool to exercise power and control in his constant pursuit of self-aggrandizement.

Trump is often referred to as “transactional,” but a more accurate description of his corrupt dealings would be “quid pro quo.” Private sector businesses needing government approvals (or needing government authorities to ignore improper activities)  “bend the knee” in exchange for those desired outcomes. In effect, they have acquiesced to the government’s control of business decisions–the sort of control that characterized fascist regimes.

The administration’s growing chokehold on the private sector are also tools allowing Trump and MAGA to pursue their culture-war aspirations. According to an email to Edsall from a political historian at George Washington University,

The president’s use of the government’s power to approve corporate mergers, the fear — and the actuality — of lost research funding and government contracts have enabled Trump to shift the culture in his ideological direction. Social media companies have lifted bans on far-right hatemongers and made X and Facebook more hospitable to pro-MAGA content. Universities such as Columbia; law firms like Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom; and media institutions like ABC News have reached settlements with the Trump administration to stave off existential threats, including canceled licenses, loss of research funding and revoked security clearances.

CBS, once a key source of critical reporting on the Trump administration, has, for example, been taken over by Larry and David Ellison, Trump allies, who put Bari Weiss, the anti-woke publisher of The Free Press (and a former writer and editor for Times Opinion), in charge of the news division.

The takeover of information sources may be Trump’s most politically consequential victory. As Edsall reports, “key platforms and hubs in the social media complex — TikTok, Meta, X — have been taken over by Trump allies or have shifted right to accommodate Trump,” shielding low-information voters from vital information, and spreading bigotry and propaganda.

These incursions haven’t been limited to the private sector; as noted sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele wrote:

The entire nongovernment community (or — as we might say in tax parlance — the 501(c)(3) sector) has been threatened with a combination of loss of tax exemptions, cuts to federal funding and potential investigations.

Some statistics indicate that fully one-third of NGOS incorporated in the U.S. lost funding in the first half of 2025.

As a professor of public policy noted in his email, every part of Trump’s government is intent upon bringing private institutions to heel.

The old GOP is long gone.

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Harnessing Hate Only Goes So Far

When the Electoral College installed Trump in the Oval Office in 2016–allowing Red states to overrule his loss by some three million votes cast largely by voters in Blue ones–it seemed clear to me that his appeal rested largely on his willingness to abandon “dog whistles” for out-and-proud bigotry. The people who had been appalled by the presence of a Black man in the White House applauded Trump for “telling it like it is”–and took his “candor” for permission to express sentiments that “political correctness” had  suppressed.

Those of us who immediately made that connection ran up against the protests of (far nicer) folks who wanted to attribute Trump’s electoral success to economic distress, or other, more typical political reasons, but by the end of his first term, political science research had largely confirmed that “racial resentment” motivated most votes for Donald Trump.

 By the conclusion of 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term–there was no longer room for doubt.

As an article in Lincoln Square recently put it, overt racism and antisemitism are the defining features of what is now Trump’s  GOP.  That article listed several examples, but the one that managed to astonish me was language included in the administration’s recently published National Security Strategy.

That document said, among other things, that the NATO treaty was signed with Europe when Europe was overwhelmingly white, and that since immigration has changed the continent, the NATO treaty might no longer be valid. The strategy joined naked racism to a pro-Putin approach to Europe and appalled the entire foreign policy establishment. The publication of the strategy shined a bright new light on the ugly bigotry that had been in plain sight all along. A few weeks later, at a meeting of Turning Point USA, J.D. Vance gave a speech where he invited Nazis, Groypers, and other hate-groups into the administration’s political coalition.

I’ve previously reported on the administration’s numerous domestic efforts to turn back the clock to a time when racism and misogyny were considered “normal” and “Christian,” and I won’t repeat that litany here. Suffice it to say that most sane Americans (a somewhat smaller percentage than I’d previously. hoped, but still a majority) are now fully aware that continued support for MAGA and Trump is grounded in hate of the “Other.” 

As that awareness has grown, comparisons with Nazi Germany have also proliferated–but increasingly, with an interesting twist. Historians and pundits who previously highlighted the measures that allowed Hitler to come to power have begun focusing on the decisions that ultimately defeated him. 

I no longer recall where I read this, but one historian has pointed to a fatal error in judgment: as the tide on the battlefields was turning against Germany, the Nazis increasingly deployed their scarce strategic resources toward the destruction of the Jews. Trains that could have moved troops, for example, were used instead to deliver human beings to death camps.

The parallel is instructive.

To the best of our knowledge, Trump, Miller, et al aren’t yet establishing death camps, but they are creating horrific “holding areas” like Alligator Alcatraz, throwing humans in foreign dungeons in places like El Salvador, and spending enormous amounts unleashing ICE thugs on Americans who don’t present as lily-white.  The administration is redoubling efforts to re-legalize discrimination against women and minorities, and increasingly engaging in language demeaning those who aren’t White Christian males. Their hatreds consume them.

As the linked article noted, the administration is ramping up its cruelest race-based policies at the very moment when the forces of resistance are turning the tide.

At a time when majorities of Americans are deeply opposed to all of this–a time when polling and survey research confirm that Trump and MAGA are deeply unpopular, a time when millions of citizens keep taking to the streets in protest and Republicans have been losing election after election–the Trump administration is doubling down on the bigotry, cruelty and stupidity that have powered the resistance and been responsible for their plunging approval ratings.

I am increasingly convinced that we are at an important turning point–that 2025 was the low, and that 2026 will see the growth of a resistance that not only takes advantage of the daily missteps of a monumentally inept administration, but that –especially–rebels massively against the bigotries that fuel Trump and MAGA.

A number of pundits scorn those of us who insist that “America is better than this.” But we are better than this–and I am increasingly convinced that this is the year we will prove it.

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