Tag Archives: Trump

What We Stand To Lose

A while back, the Indianapolis Capital Chronicle published an article reminding readers of the importance of the nation’s public schools. The article began with an acknowledgement of the war being waged on those public schools by the Trump Administration and the Christian Nationalists responsible for Project 2025, and it followed that acknowledgement by underscoring what the nation stands to lose if that war succeeds. The authors reminded readers that the nation’s public schools have been responsible for creating an educated workforce–and far more importantly, for inculcating generations of students with the United States’ fundamental values of liberty, equality, fairness and concern for the common good.

As the great political scientist Benjamin Barber wrote, the public schools have been constitutive of a public–they have forged a community of Americans from the diverse families who sent their children into those public school classrooms.

Education is a public good;  it doesn’t simply benefit individual students, it benefits the country. The authors quote Horace Mann–often dubbed the father of our public school system–for the assertion that universal, publicly funded, nonsectarian public schools would help sustain American political institutions, expand the economy and fend off social disorder. Mann’s words really resonate right now, as the years of persistent war on public schools and the diversion of tax dollars to primarily religious schools has contributed greatly to the current polarization and tribalization of the American public, and contributed to our growing social disorder.

The authors of the article noted that they’d written a book titled “How Government Built America,” and they shared two lessons they took from their research for that book.

One is that the U.S. investment in public education over the past 150 years has created a well-educated workforce that has fueled innovation and unparalleled prosperity.

As our book documents, for example, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the states expanded public education to include high school to meet the increasing demand for a more educated citizenry as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And the GI Bill made it possible for returning veterans to earn college degrees or train for vocations, support young families and buy homes, farms or businesses, and it encouraged them to become more engaged citizens, making “U.S. democracy more vibrant in the middle of the twentieth century.”

The other, equally significant lesson is that the democratic and republican principles that propelled Mann’s vision of the common school have colored many Americans’ assumptions about public schooling ever since. Mann’s goal was a “virtuous republican citizenry” – that is, a citizenry educated in “good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being.”

Mann believed there was nothing more important than “the proper training of the rising generation,” calling it the country’s “highest earthly duty.”

The people currently in positions of authority have made it abundantly clear that they have no interest whatsoever in that “rising generation,” neither its training nor its very survival. From the replacement of medical science with quackery likely to cost children’s lives to denial of the climate change that threatens the livability of the planet, the grifters and con men currently in power are interested only in what they can extract during their time in office. They are perfectly happy to advance Christian Nationalists goals, including the destruction of “government” schools and their replacement with “godly academies” that deepen America’s social divisions.

Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education has been accompanied by pious statements about returning control to the states, but in direct contradiction to that rhetoric, the administration has also been busy mandating what can and cannot be taught in public schools. It continues to threaten funding for school districts that fail to penalize transgender children or that teach about slavery and contemporary forms of discrimination. The White House is demanding a curriculum highlighting “patriotic” education–a curriculum that ignores the less admirable parts of our history and instead depicts the founding of the U.S. as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling.”

A shining City on a hill…

Trump and MAGA fear true education. Instead, they want to indoctrinate–and the material they want to impart is (to put in mildly) inconsistent with reality.

The weakening and eventual destruction of America’s public schools is an essential part of the Christian Nationalist/MAGA/Project 2025 plan to privilege (certain) White Christians and turn others into second-class citizens.

The assault on our universities has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, and the assaults on our public schools have nothing to do with the quality of education.

Comments

When You Elect Despots…

Stephen Colbert. Jimmy Kimmel. A close relative. Just three of the many victims of our Mad King’s effort to erase the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.

Most of you reading this are already aware that the Trump administration’s threats–to block mergers and pull broadcast licenses–led their cowardly networks to pull comedians off the air, despite huge audiences and excellent ratings. Many of you have also been reading about the ordinary citizens who have been fired or suspended for comments made on social media. In all these situations, the comments at issue were protected by the First Amendment–and most of them were anything but inflammatory. 

One of our Mad King’s favorite accusations is that he is the victim of a “witch hunt.” Like most of his pronouncements, it’s projection. What we are seeing now is a witch hunt, carried on by the administration and MAGA–and it threatens more than the First Amendment. 

As usual, Indiana’s MAGA Governor has hopped on the Trump/Rokita train, threatening the state’s teachers, and announcing that “The Secretary of Education has the authority to suspend or revoke a license for misconduct and the office will review reported statements of K-12 teachers and administrators who have made statements to celebrate or incite political violence.”  In a Sept. 12 X post, Rokita encouraged people to report teachers who “celebrate or rationalize” Kirk’s Sept. 10 killing so they can be included in his office’s government dashboard. That platform has been used to list and condemn instances of “objectionable” political ideology entering the classroom. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith has also asked for such reports.

Orwellian.

You might wonder how these purported opponents of “cancel culture” justify their 180-degree turn on that issue. You might suggest they take a remedial course on the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But far worse than this display of hypocrisy and constitutional ignorance is the real-world effect of igniting actual witch hunts.

Rokita’s “dashboard” and Braun’s statement are invitations for disturbed or angry people, or people with grudges, to slander the objects of their hostility. My relative was a recent object of such vilification. That relative teaches at a charter school; an individual that relative has neither met nor heard of — a person who had evidently disagreed with my relative’s political postings on Facebook for some time– decided to “send a report” to virtually every public official in Indiana, along with numerous parents and funders of the school. The “offensive” posts consisted of statements that Rightwingers have been responsible for more violence than people on the Left (a fact found by the FBI that the Trump administration has now scrubbed from the official website), and one comment to someone else’s post to the effect that calls for empathy were inconsistent with Charlie Kirk’s own statement that he did not believe in empathy.

Hardly hate speech. Certainly not a call for violence. But a clear warning about the actual effects of a “snitch” society.

If MAGA folks were able to learn from history, they might take a lesson from other times and places, where people seeking favor from autocratic governments, and people with personal grudges, were encouraged to “turn in” friends and neighbors considered insufficiently loyal to the regime. Those societies weren’t pretty.

Frederick Douglas, among others, was eloquent on the importance of free speech, saying: “No right was deemed by the fathers of the government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government.” Dougles also said that freedom of speech “of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”

There can no longer be any doubt that Trump–ignorant and incompetent and mentally-ill as he is–is a wanna-be tyrant. But he isn’t the real threat. The real threat comes from the powerful people who obey in advance, the businesses happy to discard integrity in exchange for official permissions, the GOP elected  officials who “suck up” to their cult leader rather than standing up for civil liberty or even for their own prerogatives. 

What’s worse is that those who are bending the knee would easily prevail in a court of law. 

We have a would-be King who is so thin skinned that he can’t even take a joke, and a political party that is a joke. But it’s not funny, and we need to reverse it. 

Comments

A Confederacy Of Dunces

As regular readers of this blog know, I rarely address foreign policy issues. Mostly, my reluctance to do comes from prudence; I’m painfully aware that my lack of familiarity with the vagaries of international relations makes it likely that any such observations will be flawed. (Most of my experience and virtually all of my scholarship has focused on domestic policy.)

That said, anyone who reads or listens to the news cannot avoid recognizing the immense damage our idiot President has done to America’s stature in the world. As Simon Rosenberg recently wrote, “Our adversaries have been emboldened by Trump’s idiocy, buffoonery, cowardice, greed and self-sabotage – as they should be. For America is already a shadow of what it was even a year ago, far weaker, isolated, despised, clearly led by a confederacy of dunces and now hurdling towards rapid decline as a global power. Fox News viewers may see a viral strongman when they look at the Trump but the rest of the world sees an imbecilic fool.”

There has long been speculation that Putin “has something” on Trump. Whether or not that’s the case, Trump has long been dependent upon Russian money. Well before our would-be King entered politics, Eric Trump was quoted as saying that the unwillingness of U.S. banks to continue lending to the Trump organization wasn’t a problem, because their funding came primarily from Russia. (Most American banks had been burned by Trump’s multiple financial failures by that time, and had declined further funding.) Trump’s embarrassing, slavish fawning over Putin and other autocrats might simply be another facet of his desperate desire to align himself with “strong” leaders, or it may reflect something more sinister, but the end result is the same–our precipitous decline as a world power.

Trump’s animosity toward Ukraine and his shabby treatment of Zelenskyy has been unforgivable. He has done significant damage to NATO, imperilling not just the United States, but the Western alliance. His “friendship” and support for Israel’s Netanyahu (aka Israel’s Trump, albeit with brains) has allowed that country to commit war crimes with impunity. Destroying USAID and withholding international relief funds has been both inhumane and wildly contrary to American interests. Failing to keep the nation’s promises to battle climate change has added to the conviction that America simply cannot be trusted. And Trump’s frequent praise of autocrats and dictators–coupled with his disparagements of leaders of our democratic allies– has badly damaged the country’s relationships with our traditional partners.

Withdrawing the U.S. from the UN Human Rights Council and from the Open Skies Treaty underlined both America’s diminished concern for human rights and our further lack of reliability.

And of course, firing hundreds of respected experts in foreign affairs and replacing them with clowns and dunces has undermined American effectiveness across the board. His misnamed “America First” policies and actions have actually damaged alliances, alienated partners, and disregarded human rights–consequences that have hardly advanced American interests.

It is unlikely that the MAGA base either knows or cares. Trump’s voters are fixated on culture war issues and the recovery of White male privilege. I doubt that many of them will “connect the dots” between Trump’s insane tariffs and the rising cost of groceries, or recognize the other domestic economic effects of America’s lost international stature.

What struck me about the quote I shared from Simon Rosenberg was his description of America’s current government as “a confederacy of dunces.” There’s a book with that title, but it was funny.

There’s nothing funny about the dunces who are tanking the economy, undermining civic equality, and making America internationally irrelevant.

Comments

An Insider Analysis

Some of the most distressed observers of our national plunge into the very unAmerican, neo-fascist nightmare we’re experiencing are the political strategists who spent years working to elect Republicans. A number of them are now “Never Trumpers” who are wrestling with hard questions: how much of GOP rhetoric was simply PR? What was it in the GOP incentive structure that took the party down this disastrous path? What were the danger signals they failed to see?

One of those Never Trumpers is Stuart Stevens, and a while back, he wrote an essay in the Bulwark in which he tried to trace how the “law and order party had become the party of Jeffrey Epstein.” As he began,

Let me begin with a question that a lot of us are asking ourselves. How did we get here? How is it that right now, as we speak, there are American citizens that haven’t been charged with a crime, much less convicted, sitting in a concentration camp in Florida while one of the most notorious, evil, child sex traffickers of our time has cut some sweetheart deal so that she has been transferred from a prison in Florida to a Club Fed in Texas?

Stevens noted that Maxwell’s transfer violated clear Prison Bureau guidelines, and questioned how America had gotten to so lawless a place. “How did it happen? Well, the easy answer is that we elected Donald Trump. But that’s really a cop-out because it’s not just Donald Trump.”

When Trump first started to dominate the Republican Party, many of my Bush-era Republican friends talked about how Donald Trump had hijacked our party. This never made sense to me. The hijacker on the plane is not popular with the passengers. No one is thanking the hijacker for the chance to go to Cuba instead of grandma’s house. But Donald Trump quickly became the most popular figure in the Republican Party by a wide margin.

That, of course, is the question all sane Americans are constantly asking ourselves–especially those (like yours truly) who spent years in the Republican Party, assuming that the party’s political rhetoric accurately reflected its political and philosophical beliefs. As Stevens glumly concludes, “Trump didn’t hijack the Party, he revealed it.”

It’s hard to disagree with that conclusion; as Stevens writes, “People don’t abandon deeply held beliefs in a matter of months… What the party called ‘bedrock principles’ turned out to be nothing more than marketing slogans.”

As Stevens probes the reason for the GOP’s enthusiastic embrace of Trump, he comes to the same conclusion I did. It all goes back to America’s original sin: racism.  He points to the telling homogeneity of today’s Republican Party.

Race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. This isn’t new to the Trump era. In 1956, Eisenhower got 39% of the Black vote. In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act and received 7% of the Black vote. In 2020, Trump got 12% of the Black vote, a number he improved to 13% in 2024. That’s a six-point increase in 60 years.

In the Bush 43 years, in what seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far away, the party admitted it had failed to attract Black voters and took responsibility for the failure. In 2005, the Chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Melman, gave a speech at the NAACP convention apologizing for the Southern Strategy, which leveraged white racist anger to maximize Republican votes. Does it mean anything that you apologized? I think it does. It’s an acknowledgement that what had happened is wrong and that the party had to endeavor to earn more Black support.

That all ended in 2016 with Donald Trump’s openly racist campaign.

Today’s parties have sorted themselves into White Nationalists versus everyone else.

As Stevens notes, the homogeneity of the Republican Party makes it much easier to message to core voters than it is to message to the far more diverse Democratic Party. And Stevens ties that observation to the fecklessness of Congressional Republicans, pointing out that a “party that spends 60 years relying on candidates who can win by maximizing white voters inevitably draws a different kind of candidate than a party that requires appealing to a more diverse electorate.” That observation goes a long way toward explaining the current Republican politicians who exhibit “a North Korean-style supplication to their leader.”

It’s hard to discount Stevens’ “insider analysis.”

His essay answers the persistent question–why on earth would anyone vote for a pathetic, delusional ignoramus in possession of not a single redeeming human quality? That answer is depressingly simple. For far too many voters, primal hatreds overcome humanity and rational self-interest.

But who knew there were so many of them?

Comments

The Scalpel Versus The Blunderbuss

Every day, we see another headline reporting another example of Trump’s continuing–and often random– assault on federal governance and scientific expertise. A recent example, and not even one of the most consequential, was a decision scrapping satellite observations of Earth. Administration officials decided that those satellites “go beyond the essential task of predicting the weather.” In Trumpworld, only weather forecasts warrant government investment — not instruments that monitor climate, and–horrors!– might confirm the reality of climate change.

As the Washington Post reported,

Language in a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration budget calls for preserving funding for the National Weather Service while slashing anything tied to climate change, limiting government investment to “research that is more directly related to the NOAA mission.” It echoed a call in the Republican policy playbook Project 2025 to dismantle climate research, which the report said drives “the climate change alarm industry,” while continuing to improve weather forecasting accuracy.

But scientists said there is no such division between weather and climate — and that losing climate data will actually hurt weather forecasting.

The article explains the fallacy at the root of this particular decision, but it is representative of the incompetence–and increasing insanity– of the entire administration.  It’s just one example of what happens when decisions about governance are dictated by ideology rather than science or evidence. (Then, of course, there are the decisions that simply reflect Trump’s pique and uninformed tantrums…)

I count myself among the many critics who can point to areas of American government clearly requiring reform and reconsideration. But as any rational adult understands–and as the damage inflicted by Elon Musk and his band of DOGE children amply demonstrated– effective reform is considerably different from uninformed destruction.

It’s the difference between the scalpel and the blunderbuss.

Thoughtful reform begins with basic questions: is this activity a proper function of government, or might it better be left to the private sector? If it is something that we should expect government to do, should it be done “in house,” by public servants, or is it something that should be contracted out while being monitored by government? if the latter, does government have the capacity and resources to do that monitoring?

Once we have answered those questions, and decided that–yes, this is an activity that is appropriately governmental–the exercise moves to the next step. What is this activity accomplishing? How well is it performing? If we discontinue or materially change it, what are the likely consequences? Are those consequences acceptable?

Answering such questions requires–at a minimum–an understanding of what the activity entails, the reasons it is being conducted, the reason government is doing it, the identity of businesses and citizens who rely upon it, and the consequences to them and the public of altering or discontinuing it. Once in possession of that information, a cost/benefit analysis can be conducted and a considered decision can be made.

Forgive me for belaboring the obvious, but this process bears absolutely no relationship to the wholesale blunderbuss being taken to our governing structures by the uninformed, incompetent buffoons and cranks who occupy positions of authority in the current administration. As the linked article concludes,

Satellite data might prove impossible to replace once cut off, scientists said.

More than ever, accurate weather prediction depends on climate science, said Riishojgaard, whose center works with government satellite agencies on data algorithms. Meteorology and climate science depend on the same data, and to a large extent, the same computer models, which are informed by a record of satellite data that now goes back nearly 50 years, he said.

“You now cannot do weather prediction without understanding the climate,” Riishojgaard said. “If you ignore the past, it’s like you’re looking out the window in the morning and saying, ‘What’s going to happen?’”

What, indeed?

Comments