Tag Archives: Trump

President Vance?

Those of us who have been obsessively following the political campaigns have been struck by Trump’s increasingly precipitous mental decline.  In just the past week, he has turned in truly bizarre performances. At a rally, he stopped taking questions and stood for 39 minutes silently “dancing” to music from what was evidently a playlist; in interviews, he refused to answer questions, instead going wildly off-subject, lobbing insults and demeaning journalists at the Wall Street Journal.

With less than three weeks left until November 5th, we seem to be in a race to see whether Trump’s meltdown will be too complete–and too impossible for even MAGA to ignore– before the election, or whether America will risk the unthinkable by electing him and then waking up to the reality that we’ve really elected JD Vance.

Heather Cox Richardson has focused upon that prospect, noting that–even if Trump wasn’t so obviously losing it–he’s 78 years old. The likelihood of a senile 78-year-old serving a full term is, to be charitable, low.

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Richardson described several other “tech bros” who subscribe to that world-view and support both Trump and Project 2025, which–to use academic language–“operationalizes” it. It is a worldview and a plan that JD Vance wholeheartedly endorses.

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.

Vance would continue the Right’s war on education; Richardson notes that Vance has called American universities “the enemy.” But there’s much more.

Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages.

The available evidence suggests that MAGA folks are far less supportive of Vance than they are of Trump, despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that Vance is a far more articulate communicator of their Project 2025 worldview. I wonder how many of them will knowingly vote for a Vance presidency– assuming they are capable of recognizing that probability.

I also wonder how MAGA voters are processing Trump’s increasingly public deterioration. How are they explaining away the bizarre comments about sharks and the “great” Hannibal Lecter, and Trump’s own “beautiful body?” Do they worry about the fact that every economist–liberal or conservative–says Trump’s love-affair with tariffs would tank the economy, increase inflation and impose a huge tax on American families?

Or does their loyalty to Faux News and its clones protect them from even hearing about these things?

And most obsessively of all, I wonder how many of these fearful, angry, and irrational people are there–and how many will vote?

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Biden Administration Bragging Rights

A few days ago, I wrestled with the question that I still believe is THE question–how can anyone look at Donald J. Trump and see a person qualified to be President (or, frankly, dog-catcher)? Today, I want to focus on a different question: why has there been so little public appreciation of the incredible performance of a transformative and incredibly successful Biden Administration?

The most recent jobs report (a report Simon Rosenberg characterized as “Smoking Hot”) showed the addition of 254,000 jobs in September–far in excess of expectations. Not only that, but routine revisions from the previous two months added another 72,000 jobs. Both liberal and conservative economists agree that the American economy is currently the strongest advanced economy in the world.

That strong economic performance has allowed the administration to accomplish other important tasks.

Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris we’ve had the longest period of low unemployment in a peacetime American economy since WWII and the best job market since the 1960s. The stock market is breaking records. GDP growth has been 3% over 3 years. We have the lowest uninsured rate in American history. The rate of formation of new businesses is at an all time high. Wage growth has been running ahead of inflation for some time now. The battle against inflation has been won. The deficit is lower. Crime is down. Drug overdoses are down. Obesity is down. The flows to the border today are lower than at the end of Trump’s Presidency. We passed the first bi-partisan gun safety bill in 30 years. Domestic oil, gas, renewable production are higher than they’ve ever been and we are more energy independent today than we’ve been in decades. The three big Biden-Harris investment bills will be creating jobs and opportunities for American workers for decades to come, while accelerating the energy transition needed to keep the planet from warming.

Read that paragraph again, and unless you have been lobotomized by Faux News and its clones, you can’t help but be impressed. Despite the constant, bizarre and increasingly frantic lies of Trump and his MAGA minions, crime is down. Inflation is way down. The deficit is lower. We are finally combatting climate change. And much more.

Unlike Trump, who is a publicity hound entirely focused on occupying center stage, and entirely uninterested in governing–or honest work of any kind– Biden approached the Presidency as a job. He was so focused on performance rather than publicity that in the third year of the administration, Politico ran an article titled “30 Things Joe Biden Did That You Might Have Missed.” Among them: expanded overtime pay guarantees; first over-the-counter birth control pills; making renewable power the nation’s #2 source of electricity; rules preventing discriminatory mortgage lending; crackdowns on junk fees and overdraft charges; and a wide variety of measures aimed at ensuring a level playing field for American business vis a vis China.

And that was before the administration engineered lower prices for several lifesaving medications–including insulin, which is capped at $35 for Medicare recipients.

American society is certainly not perfect, but these facts are so positive–especially given the chaos inherited from Trump and the pandemic–that Republicans have resorted to simply lying about them. Marco Rubio responded to the most recent jobs report by insisting that it must be “fake.” Trump and his allies lied about FEMA’s response to hurricane Helene, calling it inadequate, despite the fact it was characterized by Republican governors as excellent. And Trump has continued lying about endorsements.

Here’s the thing: As we enter the last few frenzied weeks of the Presidential campaign, it is easy to get caught up in the lies and the constant name-calling–to attend more to the horse-race and less to the candidates’ demonstrable policy and performance differences.

Most of the people who will go to the polls this year lived through a Trump administration characterized by constant turmoil and turnover, not to mention the sight of a U.S. President openly consorting with autocrats while demeaning and undermining America’s allies. For the past four years, those voters have thrived under the Biden-Harris administration.  Citizens who care about policy, who base their votes on verifiable facts and experience and who care about the common good, will vote for Kamala Harris. Those who are motivated by bigotry and resentment–voters who reject reality and whose sole interest is culture war and animus–will vote for Trump and the profoundly regressive MAGA movement promised by Project 2025.

Harris is running on the premise that Americans won’t vote to go back. I hope she’s right.

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Do Republicans Hate Cities, Or Just Those Who Inhabit Them?

My husband and I live in the downtown core of Indianapolis, having downsized from a previous home in a nearby historic district. We are urban folks who love being able to walk to the grocery, the dentist, the bank and multiple restaurants and bars.

A recent report from Indianapolis Downtown suggests we’re not alone–our downtown’s residential population has grown nearly 50% since 2010, to almost 30,000, more than 50 new businesses have opened since last year, and $9.5 billion in development is in the works. Despite the fears and misconceptions of suburban and rural folks, crime downtown decreased 34% in the past year, and downtown is the safest district in Marion County. We were only 5% of all crime in the county.

Obviously, not everyone shares our love for urban living, and that’s fine–to each his own. What isn’t fine is the current Republican war on cities and those of us who choose to live in them.

Donald Trump portrays city neighborhoods as feral places, deranged by Democrats. “The crime is so out of control in our country,” Trump charged at a Michigan campaign stop during the recent Democratic National Convention. “The top 25 [cities] almost all are run by Democrats and they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped. … We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in America.”

This is, of course, a ludicrous caricature, as numerous bread-fetching city dwellers could attest. Yet to understand the significance of this seething anti-cities rhetoric — both its political potency and the unique opportunity it presents for Democrats — requires a brief look at a deep-seated tension in how conservatives have talked about urban areas across recent decades.

The article noted that the GOP conservative wing has run against cities for years, with an animus rooted in nativism and religion. Initially, they appealed to Protestant voters by attacking heavily Catholic cities as sites of “popery, demon rum, and corrupt Irish politicians.” Later, Nixon appealed to white voters by focusing on urban crime and civil uprisings.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leading conservative politicians and intellectuals modified Nixon’s rhetoric, adding elements aimed at corralling new urban and urban-adjacent Republican voters. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan explicitly placed the social functions played by local neighborhoods at the heart of his urban commentary. Tender odes to the beauties of the human-scale city neighborhood — paired with condemnation of government programs for undermining community self-help capacities — infused national GOP communications output. Crucially, this often lent the party’s outreach efforts a pro-urban veneer. Propelled partly by this neighborhoods appeal, Reagan attracted key support from traditionally Democratic “white-ethnic” inhabitants of older city and suburban areas.

Donald Trump and MAGA have returned to the earlier portrayal of urban areas as dangerous hellholes that endanger an  “American Dream” anchored in (White) suburban and rural America.

The central metaphor Trump uses when talking about cities is “war.” Normally, war occurs between sovereign nations. For Trump, however, the war is within our nation. War requires two sides that are clearly differentiated and physically distinct. For Trump, the two sides are cities and suburbs. In the cities, as Trump tells it, you will find one of America’s enemies: foreigners who presumably look different from native-born Americans. They have infiltrated urban neighborhoods, in his telling, fueling a conflict between alien cities and native suburbs.

This rhetoric depends on racism and xenophobia for its effectiveness. For that matter, Trump’s entire appeal–and MAGA’s philosophy (if one can call fear and hatred a philosophy)– is firmly rooted in racism.

Trump uses terms such as “living hell,” “total decay,” “violent mayhem,” and “a disaster” to describe cities. Cities are foreign outposts within American society. In this view, the hordes of “illegal aliens” invading the southern border have taken over city neighborhoods.

These attacks aren’t simply wildly inaccurate and hateful, they are evidence of MAGA’s pathological racism.

A few days ago, I suggested that Americans are engaged in a “cold” Civil War, and that it is being fought over essentially the same issue as the last one–whether people who aren’t White Christian males are entitled to be seen as human beings who deserve equal civic status with the White guys. The rhetoric employed by Trump–and increasingly by other Republicans–underscores that observation. 

A vote for Trump and those who support him is a vote to return to the Confederacy. I hope Harris is right when she says “we’re not going back”

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Question And Answer

In a recent column for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson asks THE question: how on earth is this election close?

The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.

Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.

This is the conundrum that drives most rational people crazy. Even without January 6th, 32 felonies, multiple sexual assaults and the horrified testimonies of people who worked in Trump’s administration, who listens to the childish rants of a mentally-disturbed man with a third-grade vocabulary and thinks, “Yep, that’s the guy who should have charge of the nuclear codes.”? Who wants this ignorant name-calling bully to be a role model for America’s children?

How can this election possibly be close?

Robinson suggests some possibilities. First, Kamala Harris is a woman, and many Americans harbor a deep-seated misogyny. He notes that Trump desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race–and that Trump and Vance  “are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.”

Another reason might be that the 71 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 are loathe to admit that they backed a loser, let alone an embarrassing buffoon utterly unfit for office. (Large numbers of these voters, after all, still believe the “Big Lie.”)

And Robinson notes that Trump does best among uneducated Whites–the demographic most responsive to his vicious demagoguery on immigration — “the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example.” He constantly tells working-class Whites that immigration is a threat to their jobs and communities. As Robinson says, those tribal appeals aren’t likely to win over many new voters, but will likely motivate turnout of his base.

Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.

I have wrestled with the question Robinson poses, and I consistently return to one answer: the “through” line in Robinson’s analysis is bigotry. Racism. A yearning for patriarchy. A simmering hatred of the Other.

Robinson identifies anti-woman, anti-immigrant strands of what we have come to identify as White Supremacy or White Christian Nationalism, but–at least in this essay– he fails to connect the dots, fails to call out the intense White grievance that lies at the heart of the MAGA movement.

When Trump won (barely–and only in the antiquated Electoral College), a number of pundits attributed economic motives to his voters. Research has soundly debunked that assumption; numerous studies confirm the association of “racial resentment” with support for Trump and MAGA. I have previously quoted my youngest son’s observation that there are two kinds of people who vote for Trump–and only two kinds–those who share his racism, and those for whom his racism isn’t disqualifying.

Beginning with that first campaign, Trump jettisoned “dog whistles” in favor of explicitly hateful, racist rhetoric. He asserted that there are “very fine people” who chant “Jews shall not replace us.” He tried to keep Muslims from coming into the country. He said Black immigrants came from “shithole” countries (unlike those nice White folks from Norway…) His supporters want to roll back gay rights, and they persistently wage war on trans children.

This election isn’t about the economy, or national security, or other policies. It’s about culture war.

His MAGA supporters agree with the only clear message Trump has delivered: making America great again requires taking America back to a time when White Christian heterosexual males were in charge, and the rest of us were second class citizens.

This election is close because too many voters share that worldview. The rest of us had better turn out.

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The Theocracy At The Center of Project 2025

A writer for The Guardian recently read the entire 900+/- pages of Project 2025, rather than relying on what she called “snippets.” What she found was even more appalling than the various excerpts most of us have seen.

Basically, the Project lays out a road to theocracy.

The document repeatedly characterizes America as a country poisoned by “wokeness.” And it proposes, as an antidote to “wokeness,” remaking the government in accord with a fundamentalist version of Christianity.

Across multiple agencies, it would make access to abortion infinitely more difficult. It would change the name of the federal health and human services department to the “Department of Life”. It would criminalize pornography. There would be mass deportations and curtailments of legal immigration programs, including Daca. It would dismantle the Department of Education.

Throughout the manifesto, authors also recommend ways to increase funding for religious organizations by giving them more access to government programs – largely through increased use of school vouchers that could go to religious schools or by modifying programs like Small Business Administration loans to make religious groups eligible for funding.

In some parts, the project takes a more explicit Christian worldview. In the chapter about the Department of Labor, the manifesto suggests a communal day of rest for society because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest”. One way to enforce this idea would be for Congress to require paid time-and-a-half for anyone who works on Sundays, which the project calls the default day of Sabbath “except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time”.

In nearly all chapters, there is a mention of driving out any forces that seek to increase diversity in the federal government. And whenever LGBTQ+ rights are mentioned, it is to say there should be fewer of them.

Heritage might just as well have named Project 2025 “Project Christian Nationalism.” The document doesn’t stop with the enumeration of goals, either–it outlines the practical steps that would enable a Trump Administration to reach those goals.

Achieving the goal of “Christianizing” America would be the task of loyalists who would replace civil servants–as has been reported, Project 2025 advocates reclassifying thousands of federal jobs as “political” rather than non-partisan, in order to replace the civil servants who are currently doing those jobs with Trump loyalists.

The effort would also require taking control of the census.

The census helps decide how federal resources should be allocated to communities, but, for our purposes here, it’s most relevant that census data is used to decide how to divvy up seats in the US House and make electoral maps during decennial redistricting done by states. The census can alter the balance of power in statehouses and in Congress.

Given its influence, the project suggests an incoming conservative president needs to install more political appointees to the census bureau and ensure ideologically aligned career employees are “immediately put in place to execute a conservative agenda”. The next census isn’t until 2030, but plans for it are already under way.

That conservative agenda includes adding a citizenship question, something Trump tried to do for the 2020 census but was blocked by the US supreme court. The project says “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census.”

The project also suggests reviewing and possibly curtailing plans to broaden the race and ethnicity categories because “there are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas.”

There is much more, of course, but the quoted material is enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck, and probably the necks of most rational Americans.

Those of us tempted to dismiss Project 2025 as a theocratic fever dream unlikely to be realized even in a Trump administration need to understand that the people committed to imposing their beliefs on the rest of us are nothing if not patient. They worked for fifty years to overturn Roe v. Wade. If Trump wins, their wait will be shorter–as the article notes, to the (very limited) extent that Trump has enumerated any policies (or would recognize one if he encountered it), they’ve aligned with those in Project 2025. Even if he loses narrowly, they will be encouraged to dig in.

Even a massive loss–a Blue Wave–will only slow them down. They will bide their time and continue trying to “return” the country to a place that existed only in their twisted imaginations. Americans who want to protect our constitutional system will need to stay perpetually alert.

As the saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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