Tag Archives: Trump

Feeling No Shame

I keep thinking about the question that led to the downfall of McCarthy and McCarthyism–at long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?

I doubt that Donald Trump could spell decency, much less define it, but I think there’s another, related question we might pose–although we know the answer: at long last, sir, have you no sense of shame?

I recently looked into the concept of shame and its social utility. It turns out that the ability to feel shame is an essential element of what psychologists and psychiatrists call “pro-social behavior.” It prevents people from damaging their social relationships and reputations, and it warns one of social ostracism or disapproval. Feelings of shame motivate individuals to conform to group norms and expectations, and that helps members of a society function cooperatively.

Although shame can also be toxic, in its healthy form it serves as a natural mechanism for self-control and social regulation, and promotes a shared sense of values and expectations for behavior.  

As we learn daily, Donald Trump and his cast of incompetent clowns and sycophants are incapable of feeling shame or even of experiencing its dimmer cousin, embarrassment. In the wake of one of the most recent exhibitions of Trump’s detachment from reality, Lincoln Square ran an article bemoaning the fact that Trump isn’t simply embarrassing himself, he’s embarrassing America.

The author of that article, Kristoffer Ealy, wrote,

Every time I see a headline or a YouTube video that says, “Trump embarrasses himself by…” it irks me a little. Not because Trump doesn’t make a fool of himself — he always does — but because is it even possible for him to get embarrassed? Embarrassment requires self-awareness. It requires an understanding of social standards, the recognition that you’ve fallen short of them, and the capacity to cringe at yourself.

Trump doesn’t express any of these traits. He barrels through life like a man who believes the world is his open mic, and the crowd is obligated to applaud no matter how stale the jokes are. Embarrassment implies an internal governor that makes you stop and think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.” Trump is missing that chip. He is an indictment on the United States of America, and not just as a president but as a mirror of the worst parts of us — anti-intellectualism, cruelty as entertainment, and the delusion that bluster equals brilliance.

Ealy wasn’t even writing about the latest embarrassment–Trump’s rambling and incredibly inappropriate speech to an assembly of American military leaders. He was reacting to the equally senile and unselfaware word-salad delivered to representatives at the United Nations, which he characterized as “bad improv with nuclear weapons.”

The first gem was his declaration that other nations are going to hell. That’s not analysis; that’s Shao Kahn from Mortal Kombat mixed with Jimmy Swaggart. If the goal was to sound like a dictator moonlighting as a televangelist, mission accomplished. He said it with the same flourish that Swaggart used to beg for donations, except instead of promising salvation he was predicting damnation. Imagine sitting in that room as a world leader and hearing the U.S. president channel both an arcade boss fight and a disgraced preacher. That’s not foreign policy—it’s fan fiction written by a crank.

Then came his insistence that climate change is a hoax. This is where roasting almost feels too easy, because it’s not just dumb — it’s dangerous. Trump is proof of how far the Republican Party has fallen. I would never call George W. Bush a champion for climate action, but even Bush had the baseline sense to acknowledge that climate change exists. 

That embarrassing performance has been eclipsed by the more recent–and more shameful–display to America’s military leadership. (The overall reaction to both Trump and Hegseth was summed up in an Atlantic headline: “Hundreds of Generals Try to Keep a Straight Face.”)

Trump’s obvious inability to understand when he is making a fool of himself, his utter imperviousness to feelings of shame or embarrassment, are indicators–according to the psychiatric literature–of psychological conditions like narcissism and psychopathy. An inability to feel shame also accompanies a lack of empathy and a lack of self-awareness.

That lack of self-awareness must also be a characteristic of Trump voters, who evidently view his ongoing clown show and decline with equanimity, and seem perfectly okay with his demonstrable inability to govern, not to mention his destruction of America’s global status…

They’re shameful.

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Data? What Data?

It’s bad enough that a substantial percentage of our fellow Americans reject probative evidence that is inconsistent with their preferred realities. What is arguably worse is the administration’s effort to erase such evidence–its conduct of a war on data that might undercut Trump’s fantasy realities.

The New Republic recently focused on that war.

Trump has always made things up. Remember that he entered politics promoting the hoax that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But what’s new about Trump’s second presidency is that not only have his lies escalated in dimension and scope, becoming increasingly brazen and weird—London is under sharia law!—but he’s also waging a concerted all-out war on facts that contradict his narrative, which is to say, all reliable sources of data.

As the article notes–and as most academics know–for many years, the government has been one of the best sources of data available; not only has it been an important source of probative, vetted information, it has made that information easily accessible to journalists and citizenry alike.  That informational history is under attack by Trump, who–as the article notes– doesn’t want any facts to get in the way of his made-up stories.

To declare that Trump has been right and the scientists have been wrong about climate change is so counterfactual that it requires a massive suppression of available data. Good thing Trump has thought of that. Through a combination of layoffs and weird directives, his administration has dramatically reduced its ability to collect data on industrial pollution that causes climate change, extreme weather caused by climate change, greenhouse gases contributing to climate change—really any facts related to the climate crisis. To take just one example, an effort launched by the Biden administration to collect emissions data was canceled by Trump on his first day in office. The same could be said about his Tylenol claims; lucky for him he has made significant cuts to autism research.

What about the autism claims unsupported by any credible medical research? Or the wild and dangerous claims from Trump and RFK Jr. about vaccines? As the article points out, those vaccine claims will be insufficiently challenged since he has cut vaccine research by more than half a billion dollars.

It goes on. And on.

Trump’s commitment to falsehood—and to eradicating facts at their roots—is not limited to science and public health. This summer he claimed that his policies were leading America into “another golden age” and that economic growth under his presidency “shatters expectations.” The data said otherwise: Whether you’re talking about job growth, inflation, or just about any other measure, the numbers did not chart in a direction favorable to the president. Here again, Trump is not willing to tolerate the facts: When the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month reported numbers that contradicted his sunny narrative, he fired the head of the agency.

Trump constantly says bizarre and unsupportedd things about crime–at least, in cities run by Democrats. He claims violence is surging although it’s  decreasing, actually, in some places, at historic rates,  He constantly blames immigrants, although relatively little crime is committed by immigrants, and he and MAGA are now trying to blame mass murders on transgender Americans, despite the fact that only 0.1 percent of mass shootings are committed by transgender people—and very few murders of any kind.

Are these and multiple other assertions inconsistent with the data? Well, there’s an easy “fix” to that–stop gathering and reporting the data.

Trump’s Agriculture Department cut its annual food insecurity survey, so Americans won’t know how many people are going hungry as a result of Trump’s cuts to food stamps and his inflationary tariffs.

We also won’t know how children are doing in school after his massive cuts to K-12 education, since the administration gutted the Department of Education’s research offices and the National Center for Education Statistics.

States, universities, and other nonprofits are trying to make up for the loss of the data, but in many cases the information provided by the federal government was irreplaceable.

When every day brings a new assault on our constitution and the rule of law, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that data, research, and facts are dangers to authoritarian regimes. Trump doesn’t know much, but he does understand that “data provides the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts.”

If and when we rid ourselves of Trump and the MAGA plague, rebuilding and restoration will take many years…..

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An Interview Worth Your Time

Mark Elias of the Democracy Docket recently interviewed Rick Wilson, the Never Trumper who established the Lincoln Project. The transcript of that interview (linked) is lengthy, but it really is worth your time to read in its entirety. If you haven’t that time, or the inclination, I’ll focus on some highlights.

Wilson defected from the GOP when he realized the party had gaslighted him.

All of us jaded, cynical consultants were actually the guys who really believed everything we said, like the Constitution, the rule of law, personal responsibility, and integrity. The rest of the party was like, whatever comes next that gets us to the next job, we’re going to be with it. And then Trump was that. I just decided I wasn’t going to be a part of it.

He also understands something that far too many progressives do not–that you can’t have a policy debate with a man who is totally uninterested in issues–and you can’t argue policy in a GOP that lives in its own preferred ‘reality.”

I think two things happened to the Republican Party. The first was the emergence of a separate populist conservative subculture. It came out of talk radio, and it came out of right-wing media on Fox and elsewhere. It came out of the rise of social media where people were suddenly able to pick and choose the news they got, pick and choose the world they wanted to have represented to them. Politicians suddenly realized in the Republican party that the incentive structure was to go further out, to be crazier. To raise money, you needed to be the guy who was on Fox. To be on Fox, you had to be the guy who was the crazy guy. And they’re on a hamster wheel of that. So the perverse incentive structure inside the party was the opening act of it.

Wilson notes that most Democrats don’t understand how to debate someone who is not motivated by ideas or policy preferences, and he criticises  Democrats who tend to enter the political debate by saying something like  “Check out page 74 of my climate change plan, and then you’ll be convinced.”

In what may be his most significant observation, Wilson attributes the solidity of the Republican base to the fact that “it’s not a political party anymore. It’s a cultural movement, and it wraps up nationalism, populism, fascist adjacency, white nationalism. It’s a culture, and it’s hard to convince somebody in a culture to change that culture over a policy.

Even though the things that the Republican party has done to working-class voters in the last 12 years has been horrific, and as an ex-Republican, I can tell you that it’s horrific, they still believe that the cultural thing — and that’s God, that’s guns, that’s gay rights stuff — that an awful lot of this country that are not in coastal cities, that are not college graduates, that are not folks who are politically tuned into MSNBC or CNN or Fox every day, they feel like the culture around them is changing in a way they don’t like.

Trump offered them an easy solution: “I’ll be the enemy of your enemy. I’ll hurt the people you want to hurt. I’ll hurt the people you think are hurting you.” And that offer, that deal that he made, was a culture deal. You’re seeing them play it out right now with the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing. You’re seeing them play it out in the censorship regime they’re trying to impose because a lot of the things in that culture, they are connected only to the branding of America, not to the reality. They don’t believe in a pluralistic republic based on democratic principles. They believe in a Christian nation. They believe in a nation where authority figures like Trump have power because that will make it easier to hurt the people they don’t like.

The interview also contained some hopeful observations.

Donald Trump is so much weaker than you think. He is right now 26 points underwater on inflation and prices….  right now, the economy is unspinnably bad for a lot of his voters. When you go into the grocery store or Target or Walmart or the gas station, prices are not down, and you can’t spin that away….

His polling numbers right now are so far below where they were in the first term, and they’re so far below where Biden’s numbers were at this time in the beginning of his term, where we had roaring inflation. We’re going to go into 2026, unless there’s some unforeseen economic miracle, with an economy that’s dragging on Donald Trump pretty badly. An economy that is saying, “Okay, we tried your tariff game, it didn’t work.” And all these Republicans who backed Trump on this do not have the immunity that Trump has from reality with his voters…

The laws of political gravity still apply down the ballot. So we’re going to go in with an environment where a change election is in the wind. And a change election means that it’s not going to be, as the DCCC thinks, we’re going to fight it out over six or seven seats… We’re going to fight it out over 25 or 30 seats if Trump’s numbers continue to remain so low… He is an unpopular president, and the Republicans have defined themselves by only one thing: being Trump’s guys. They don’t represent people in a district anymore. They’re just Donald Trump’s representative from the fourth congressional district of Missouri or whatever…

He’s a boat anchor right now in terms of ratings and politics. The big bad bill is having very nasty impacts out there on rural hospitals. People are getting how bad it is. We’re in the middle of a real estate collapse in about seven or eight Sunbelt states right now, which we’re pretending it’s not happening … across the deep south in the Sunbelt, we’re about to have a real estate collapse. That is a very bad political outcome for Trump. A lot of these Republicans are also still trying to sell immigration as a net win, but it’s also destroying our agriculture system around the country and raising food prices. There are all the components here for a Democratic sweep of the House.

You really need to read the whole thing, or you can watch the full interview here.

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It’s All Out In The Open Now

We’ve come a long way, baby, from the days when our American bigots used to chafe at the “political correctness” that kept them from openly expressing their disdain for those despised “others.” As I have previously pointed out, the most consistent “through line” of America’s current, terrible administration has been its open assault on the civility that once kept people from broadcasting their hatreds; it has consistently conveyed its permission–indeed, encouragement–to voice them.

The Trump administration and Red state MAGA culture warriors enthusiastically attack anything that smacks of efforts to level the civic playing field–going after any program that hints of acceptance of diversity. At the federal level, Trump has fired talented and competent people of color and replaced them with wildly incompetent clowns whose most obvious (and often only) qualification for the job is White skin. Closer to home, our embarrassing and unethical Attorney General is harassing teachers and nonprofit organizations that display any concern for fair play or inclusion (one of the unfortunate teachers who made it onto Rokita’s threatening list of teachers he deems too liberal to be in a classroom is deemed guilty of being “unAmerican” because she included a rainbow flag in her room…).

Recently, media reports that the Trump administration has fired FBI agents who had the temerity to kneel in support of racial justice protests

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI has fired agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, three people familiar with the matter said Friday.

The bureau last spring had reassigned the agents but has since fired them, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel matters with The Associated Press.

The number of FBI employees terminated was not immediately clear, but two people said it was roughly 20…

The FBI Agents Association confirmed in a statement late Friday that more than a dozen agents had been fired, including military veterans with additional statutory protections, and condemned the move as unlawful. It called on Congress to investigate and said the firings were another indication of FBI Director Kash Patel’s disregard for the legal rights of bureau employees.

These firings follow others that targeted agents who investigated the January 6th insurrection, or who looked into Trump’s illegal retention of classified documents. Lawsuits stemming from those actions, which were patently illegal, allege that those dismissals are part of an ongoing effort to remove any FBI officers who investigated Trump or his cronies.

There is, rather clearly, also an effort to rid the FBI of officers who display support for racial justice.

In the short time Trump has been in office, he has gutted the Justice Department and turned the DOJ and FBI into compliant tools of his corrupt and lawless administration. Lawmakers and government lawyers have turned a blind eye to Trump’s multiple grifts, allowing him to run the administration like a Mafia boss, and rake in billions of dollars in what are outright bribes. Investigations of Trump allies have been dismissed, while efforts to take vengeance against those who have incurred Trump’s anger have ramped up, leading to meritless indictments (Comey) and invasive and publicized searches (Bolton).

Needless to say, these are the tactics of fascists and autocrats, not the proper activities of an American administration.

And that brings me back to what constitutes the underlying strength of this horrifying, unAmerican cabal: racism (with a side of misogyny). I cannot account for the corruption of the six “Conservative” justices on the Supreme Court, but it has become quite obvious that the Republicans in Congress are completely in thrall to the GOP’s MAGA base–the White supremacists who continue to support Trump because he’s making bigotry acceptable again.

Are groceries more expensive? Is health insurance becoming unaffordable again? Has America’s position and power in the world declined precipitously? Are masked thugs snatching people off the streets? Is public health declining? Is your city struggling due to the federal cutoff of previously authorized funds? Are free speech and the rule of law under attack? Has persistent incompetence and dysfunction caused a government shutdown?

None of that matters to MAGA folks so long as Trump gives them permission to express contempt for those detested “others.”

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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.

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