Is There Anything Trump Won’t Blame on DEI?

During his less than two weeks in office, the Felon is wreaking havoc on federal employees, has rescinded LBJ's executive orders from the 1960's banning discrimination, is firing career civil servants and FBI agents, about to implement tariffs that are predicted to increase consumer prices, threatening military action against Panama, and erasing all federal diversity programs and policies, including eliminating Department of Education protections for LGBT students.  On Facebook, one LGBT blogger friend aptly described the agenda turning Washington, DC, and America upside down and instilling fear: "To reclaim and reinstitute straight Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy as "the norm" and the starting point of "neutrality," Trump and Project 2025 are manipulating public opinion and blaming everything - including the recent DC plane crash - on DEI, the concept of "thinking bigger" than a workforce of only white straight Christian men." Indeed, the Felon would have Americans believe that all of the nation's problems stem from non-white migrants and immigrants and diversity, equity and inclusion policies in both government and the private sector. Frighteningly, many corporations out of fear of retaliation or latent bigotry are jumping on board the band wagon when it comes to eliminating DEI programs and policies. The Felon has a long history of racism that tracks back to the early 1970's locally when a housing discrimination lawsuit against Trump operations in Norfolk, Virginia, was settled. A piece The Atlantic looks at this sick blame game that shows no signs of letting up as well as the unqualified individuals the Felon has nominated to his cabinet. Here are excerpts:

Shortly after midnight, a few hours after the horrifying collision between an airplane and a helicopter at Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump felt the time was right for a shocked nation to hear his insights into the tragedy. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,” . . .

But, by midday today, without the benefit of any important conclusions about the cause of the crash, Trump adopted a different perspective. “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” he told reporters in a rambling press conference. His strong opinion was that the cause was a “diversity push” in the Federal Aviation Administration’s hiring process.

Lest that comment be dismissed as the half-formed musings of a president reacting in real time to a developing event, a few hours later Trump doubled down. In a live broadcast from the Oval Office, he signed an executive order that, in the words of an off-camera Vice President J. D. Vance, pinned responsibility for the crash on “the Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies.”

The purpose of Trump’s wild finger-pointing appears to be twofold: first, to avoid taking any blame for a disaster; and second, to exploit the tragedy while it is in the public’s mind, using it to advance the notion that his administration is replacing favoritism toward minorities with pure, race-blind merit. “As you said in your inaugural, it is color-blind and merit-based,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, joining Trump at the press conference.

This was rich coming from a man who might be the least qualified secretary of defense in American history—a Cabinet official whose professional qualifications include mismanaging two small lobbying organizations and whose alleged history of drinking and mistreatment of women led his former sister-in-law to urge the Senate to reject his nomination, as it very nearly did.

And Hegseth is hardly an outlier. Trump has already done more to abandon the ideal of meritocracy than perhaps any presidential administration since the Progressive Era. He is going to war against the civil-service system, which was established more than a century ago to ensure that federal jobs go to qualified civil servants, rather than as rewards for party hacks, as had been the case previously. Trump,. . . . . would rather lose their expertise than risk it being deployed in ways that thwart his personal ambitions.

He has gone even further in this direction in selecting his Cabinet. Every president tends to fill such roles with supporters, but Trump has elevated loyalty to an almost comical degree. Not only must Trump’s Cabinet officials have supported him in the election, but they must endorse, or at least refuse to contradict, his infamously false claim to have won the 2020 election. The driving logic behind many of his most high-profile Cabinet picks appears to be a desire to find individuals who will stand behind the president if and when he violates norms, laws, or basic decency.

That is how Hegseth, despite his miserable record of management experience, was elevated to run the Pentagon. It is how Kash Patel, the author of a ridiculous children’s book portraying himself as a wizard and Trump as a king, was nominated to run the FBI. And it is how Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has waged a pseudoscientific war against vaccines and appears to not know basic facts about Medicare and Medicaid, was tapped to run the federal department that oversees those programs.

One problem with discussing Trump’s opinions on fast-moving matters like the plane crash is that, in the absence of a completed investigation, it’s impossible to say for sure what did cause the disaster. Investigators haven’t even determined which errors were made, let alone why they occurred.

It’s true that the federal civil service has many problems, not least the extreme bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of both hiring qualified candidates and firing low-performing employees. It’s true, too, that the FAA has been sued over a clumsy program to boost minority representation. That effort arose out of an understandable desire to broaden the overwhelmingly white hiring pipeline for air-traffic controllers, but is alleged to have included perverse hiring criteria that unfairly filtered out qualified applicants.

There is no evidence yet that the FAA, let alone its hiring practices, had any responsibility for the crash. But to the extent that Trump thinks the underlying issue is an insufficient focus on merit, his moves to purge the government of non-Trumpist civil servants is all but guaranteed to make the problem worse. When you are not only selecting for loyalty, but defining that loyalty to mean “affirming morally odious values and factually absurd premises,” you are reducing your hiring pool to the shallowest part.

La Cosa Nostra does not recruit its members very widely, because, as with Trump, its fear of betrayal outweighs its interest in hiring and promoting the most skilled racketeers and leg-breakers. When you are trying to run a government along Mafia hiring and promotion principles, you are necessarily forfeiting expertise and intelligence.

If Trump has his way, over the next four years, the political composition of the people engaged in directing air traffic, testing food for safety, preventing terrorism, and other vital public functions will change dramatically [for the worse]. . . . . You can justify that process as the president’s prerogative to shape the executive branch. What you can’t call it is an elevation of merit.

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The Trump/GOP War On the Transgender Is Just the Beginning

Having followed the misnamed "Christian Right" and white Christian nationalists for decades, part of their long term agenda was to undo the civil rights of minority groups they dislike and/or who the view as not conforming to their 1950's world view that is undergirded a 12th century view of sex and sexuality.  They have also long bristled at civil rights for nonwhites whose advances are seen as a threat to white privilege, especially white heterosexual male privilege.   The Felon and many in the Republican Party are only too happy to pander to these elements in the MAGA base and in his first week in office, the Felon has declared war not only on transgender Americans but also programs and policies that foster diversity, equity and inclusion.  In MAGA world, any nonwhite who holds a position is deemed to have received special treatment to the detriment of whites, especially straight white males. As a piece at The Atlantic lays out, the assault on transgender citizens is merely the first stage in a larger agenda to take the nation backward in time. Gays, women and nonwhites are also are targeted for a roll back of rights and protections under Project 2025 which the Felon is implementing.  The transgender are merely the first group to be stigmatized in an effort to desensitize the larger public to the rolling back of civil rights and equal protection under the law.  Here are article excerpts:

The American populism of the late 19th century was a rebellion of working people against financial elites; the American populism of this century is one of financial elites feigning rebellion while crushing the vulnerable. This is why, just a few short days into his presidency, Donald Trump is already making good on his promise to persecute trans people zealously. On Monday, Trump issued an executive order purging trans service members from the military on the grounds that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” a statement belied by the thousands serving honorably until they were singled out for discrimination by their commander in chief. A day later, Trump issued a second executive order that could make gender-affirming care for young people unavailable in most of the country.

The damage wrought by legitimizing this form of discrimination will not be limited to the trans community. Laws and legal rulings that undermine trans rights may soon be used to restrict the rights of other, less marginal groups. Anyone naive enough to think that the government can deny fundamental rights to one group without putting another’s at risk is in for some nasty surprises. That much became clear during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in December over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

The Tennessee bill declares that “this state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex,” and therefore in preventing medical treatments that “encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex.” Implicit in this is the belief that if you don’t “appreciate your sex,” then the state should force you to. Beyond the legal jargon and pretext, the underlying conflict here is between conservatives [extremists] who have concluded that trans identity is a social contagion to be eradicated and that using state power for this cause is legitimate, and their opponents, who believe that trans people are entitled to equal protection under the law.

The law bans treatments that enable “a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex.” Because those same medications are available as long as they are not used for gender-affirming care, lawyers for the Biden administration argued that the ban constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex.

One might question why this case matters if you are not yourself trans or do not have a loved one who is. The number of trans people is objectively small—less than a fraction of 1 percent of the population. . . . . The outcome of this case has much broader implications than it might appear, because if a state can, as Prelogar put it, force people to “look and live like boys and girls,” subject to the government’s definition of what that means, then a lot more people might be affected.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out during oral argument, for many years, some states prevented women from becoming butchers or lawyers. Women could not have their own credit cards or bank accounts until the 1970s. If it’s not unconstitutional sex discrimination for the government to say that people cannot behave “inconsistent with their sex,” well now you’re really talking about a lot of people—a lot more people than the rather tiny population included in the category of “they/them” that the Trump campaign was hoping you feel disgust and contempt for.

The conservative movement’s mobilization against trans rights, however, is just one step in a wider rolling-back of other antidiscrimination protections. Conservatives have consciously targeted a diminutive, politically powerless segment of the population, trying to strip them of their constitutional rights, and then used those legal precedents to undermine laws that prevent discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. The trick was making Americans think that only the rights of trans people are on the chopping block, that “they/them” could be persecuted without consequences for “you.”  As Frederick Douglass once said, “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people, who persuade themselves that they are safe, though the rights of others may be struck down.”

The harm to antidiscrimination law more broadly could be immense. Many of the rationales offered by the conservative justices during oral argument echo the reasoning of those opposed to bans on racial discrimination. If they regain legitimacy, they could later be used to weaken other laws that protect Americans from bigotry.

For example, defenders of Tennessee’s ban have said that it does not discriminate based on sex, because it prohibits gender-affirming care to both boys and girls—a point Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett raised during oral argument. Similar assertions were made in defense of interracial-marriage bans, which prevented both Black and white people from marrying their chosen spouses. “If we’re reinstating the equal-application theory … that was a theory that was used historically to uphold and justify race-based distinctions,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “I don’t know how you can wall off sex discrimination from race discrimination if you’re reviving this equal-treatment claim.”

Kavanaugh suggested that because the case involved medical science, the Court should just leave it to the “democratic process,” an approach that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointedly observed would have prevented the Court from striking down bans on interracial marriage, because at the time, Virginia had argued that the “science” regarding interracial marriage “was substantially in doubt,” and therefore banning it should be up to the voters. The point of equal protection is to prevent fundamental rights from being subject to mere popularity contests . . . .

The Trump administration’s early actions make clear that exploiting voters’ fears about trans people was part of a larger plan to undermine antidiscrimination protections for many other people, even as they intend to make the lives of millions of others—including many of Trump’s own supporters—much worse. Among the first actions taken by the administration was the repeal of the Lyndon B. Johnson–era directive ordering federal contractors to avoid discriminating on the basis of race, as well as subsequent orders barring discrimination on the basis of gender. The administration has also frozen all new cases in the civil-rights division of the Justice Department. Trump has also ended all federal-government diversity efforts and intends to fire employees involved in them.

The administration’s executive order on DEI also threatens to sue companies for having diversity programs, a threat that will encourage companies to resegregate to avoid being accused of anti-white discrimination.

This agenda has, by the Republicans’ own account, been partly enabled by their success at demonizing transgender people in the November election. Trans people are a group few in number and marginalized enough that there is little political cost at the moment to persecuting them as Republicans have, or blaming them for their political misfortunes and abandoning them as Democrats have following their electoral loss.

Over the past century, many groups have successfully sought to have their rights recognized, winning, at least on paper, the same rights as white, Christian, heterosexual men. The right-wing project today, which Trumpist justices support, is to reestablish by state force the hierarchies of race, gender, and religion they deem moral and foundational. Whether that’s forcing LGBTQ people back into the closet, compelling women to remain in loveless marriages, or confining Black and Hispanic people to the drudgery of—as Trump once put it—“Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” in which they are meant to toil, the purpose of this ideological project is the same: to put the broader mass of people back in their “proper places.” To those who see the world this way, freedom means the freedom of the majority to oppress the minority. Attacking trans people first was simply their plan for getting the American people on board with taking many other freedoms away.

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MAGA World Is In For A Harsh Economic Lesson

One of the ironies is that MAGA world views Donald Trump, a/k/a the Felon, as some sort of savior who will bring down grocery prices and gas prices.  This belief is disconnected from economic reality and ignores the reality of capitalism, especially unrestrained capitalism favored by the Felon and his billionaire buddies.  Making matters even worse for much of the working class MAGA base is that the Felon's policies will increase prices while seeking to slash social safety net programs - all to fund large tax cuts for the very wealthy - upon which many of the MAGA base rely upon.  Contrary to what the Felon and MAGA Republicans would have their base believe, the largest number of recipients under Medicaid are whites in red states, not blacks and Hispanics.  Thus, Trump's attempt to freeze Medicaid payments (temporarily blocked by a federal judge) will harm his base more than anyone else.  Throw in the Felon's threatened tariffs - aimed at raising funds to off set large tax cuts for the wealthy - and their economic pain will only increase as consumer prices rise as a consequence.  Indeed, as a piece at Salon argues, the MAGA base is untethered from economic reality and is about to receive a very harsh lesson on capitalism and economics.  Here are column highlights:

America is a nation at war with its mythologies.

For all the electoral postmortems about the desire for economic change, what’s unsurprisingly absent is what seems, to me, an obvious omission: an all-enveloping misunderstanding of American capitalism. 

One delusional mythology about American capitalism that has been instilled in We the People is that we somehow have a guaranteed right to prosperity; this imaginary right has been deployed by politicians who are afraid of educating their constituents about how our model of commerce actually works. Our national press has largely been lazy on this score as well. 

With due respect to the many Americans who voted for Donald Trump, their overwhelming sense of entitlement dwarfs that of the hard-working immigrants who cut their grass, scrub pots and pans in the restaurants they frequent, and care for their kids and elderly loved ones. Too many Americans have come to believe they are owed financial comfort and material abundance, not to mention eggs and gasoline at predictable prices.

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Frankly, it’s an illogical question in a capitalist nation.

Some people are of course worse off, and I don’t mean to make light of that. But in fact, many millions are better off; Joe Biden’s administration oversaw the recovery of millions of jobs lost during the COVID pandemic and the creation of millions more. Some people out there will be worse off by the time they finish this article than when they commenced reading it. I’m not being flippant; that’s reality. 

Welcome to capitalism, a system whose proponents always cite unequal outcomes as a reason for extolling it.

Are gas prices high? Is insurance for health care, real estate and vehicles increasing? Are supply chain constraints harming your livelihood, or your quality of life? The person in the White House has very little to do with that. Let’s recall that gas prices steadily increased during George W. Bush’s second term. 

Gas was cheap in 2020 because — hello! — tens of millions of drivers weren’t driving.

Welcome to the “laws” of supply and demand, which all of us must navigate on a daily basis. If you don’t know or don’t remember these details, ask yourself why you don’t. If you’re a Trump voter, then ask yourself whether you might have voted differently in November had you been aware. 

In 2015 and 2016, even though I was doing better financially than at any time in my life, Donald Trump’s populist campaign resonated with me. I knew others who had lost their jobs and contracts to offshoring. Years before he ran for office, Trump talked about the dangers of competition with low-wage Asian nations, in particular; when I’d heard him speak, I nodded in concurrence. 

But here’s what I never thought about at the time: I and other angry Americans hadn’t grasped that offshoring to increase profits was a central feature of capitalism, as advocated by both parties — but in particular by the mythologizers of capitalism on the Republican side. 

So I’ll pose almost the same question nearly a decade later: What do Trump voters, and especially true believers in the MAGA community, of which I was once a full member, think capitalism is? . . . . Americans, collectively and historically, have a high tolerance for greed. 

There’s the mythology of capitalist meritocracy at work, which is still championed by many people who’ve been failed by both major political parties. Their concerns have been exploited and manipulated by Republicans who have traumatized them into believing that liberalism, rather than capitalism, is the source of their ills; that because of the evil policies of liberals, they keep working harder and harder but never seem to break even, much less get ahead. 

The rage I felt, even more acutely experienced today among the MAGA faithful, was perhaps warranted but rooted in ignorance. Trump was not wrong when he lamented the once-thriving communities ravaged and hollowed out by outsourcing. But his solution was no solution at all.

Now he has persuaded millions into believing that only he can successfully stymie the global and domestic capitalist forces that he did essentially nothing about during his first administration. 

Why didn’t he do anything? Because Trump understands, in his own pedestrian way, that capitalism operates less on merit the higher one moves up in the hierarchy. 

Broadly speaking, the two core ideological dogmas within MAGA are: 1) liberalism is almost solely culpable for our national ills (second come the RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only, although it’s not close); and 2) Trump is the greatest fixer God ever created. 

Most people who voted for Trump — especially the MAGA faithful — want and expect him, and by extension the federal government, to intervene in commerce. According to the classical definition, that would be socialism — or Marxism or communism, whichever epithet we are using today. The confusion is general, because it’s all mythological.

[T]he notion that a singular person can serve as an economic savior and, in messianic fashion, usher in utopia, is much closer to a socialist-communist notion than a capitalist one. That surely does not mean the government should play no role in our economy; as mentioned above, the Biden administration oversaw remarkable growth. Trump and the Republicans, however, didn't actually campaign on any policy ideas aimed to increase economic mobility and opportunity. They benefited instead from the profoundly human delusion known as nostalgia. 

People are looking for reasons why they seem to work more but keep falling behind. I sympathize; this resonates with me.  

The answer is in front of us, and it is called capitalism, or at least the romantic mythology of capitalism. Our species makes sense of the world, in large part, through the stories we tell, and no country in world history is more defined by myths than the United States of America. All kinds of emotions inform those myths. MAGA believers like to tell their foes, “F**k your feelings,” but as someone who spent seven years within the MAGA movement, I can attest it is almost entirely driven by feelings. There is no logic that determines the tides and currents within the MAGA community; it took me an entire year to come to that epiphany. 

Many on the political right choose to ignore that they already depend, or very soon will, on “socialist” safety-net programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Some part of the MAGA community is aware that the reforms brought by liberalism help to keep them alive. 

One of our biggest civic crises in America is that so many of our citizens lack basic comprehension of the governmental and economic model they live under, or, perhaps, they willfully deny it. This does not reflect a dearth of intelligence, and I would argue that it’s not even primarily a failure in education, although that’s part of it. More than anything, it reflects the fact that our actual elected representatives, at all levels, are petrified of their constituents and reluctant to have candid conversations about capitalism, for fear of losing their positions and being primaried out as communists, socialists, liberals and Marxists, or otherwise victimized by the toxic stew of GOP lies. 

As he did in 2017,  Trump has been bequeathed a relatively stable economy, for now. Once he begins to destabilize it, which will adversely affect the working class, the middle class and small business owners, the falsehoods will only ramp up: Somehow, it was all Joe Biden’s fault. We can only hope the Democrats are ready for the onslaught of shameless absurdities.

I certainly don’t think that government can solve every problem, nor should try to. Perversely enough, Trump voters want it to try, although most would deny that or are not cognizant of it. The question we can keep posing to Trump voters is this: How much time does he get to fix your economic problems, and when will you understand that he never will? Expect no good answers; there aren’t any.

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Political Gravity Will Catch Up With Trump

While the unfolding chaos and revenge agenda of Trump 2.0 (or Felon 2.0) is both depressing, frightening and generally unnerving, as a piece in The Atlantic lays out, at some point political gravity, if you will, is going to catch up with the Felon and those currently shamelessly prostituting themselves to him.  One reality, is that the Felon and Republicans have no mandate: Trump received less than a majority of votes cast and votes from only around 30% of all voters and Republicans only have narrow majorities in the House and Senate. As the Felon pushes his extreme agenda, at some point the majority of Americans will say "enough!" and congressional Republicans will begin jockeying to protect themselves rather than the Felon as the 2026 mid-term elections get nearer.  Cuts to the social safety net, higher prices due to tariffs and economic instability will take their toll on support for the MAGA agenda outside of the true Kool-Aid drinkers.  Add to all of this the Felon's age and declining mental abilities and with luck the national nightmare will end sooner than the cultists want to believe.  Here are article excerpts:

Sometimes politics resembles one of the weirder branches of modern physics or a fantasy version of biology. . . . That is how American politics feels at the moment. By and large, however, Newtonian physics and traditional biology still apply, and that is worth remembering as we watch the Trump administration’s circus of transgression, vindictiveness, and sometimes mere folly.

Like most administrations, including those of considerably more sedate chief executives, that of the 47th president has decided to way overinterpret its mandate. The brute facts remain: Donald Trump received a plurality of votes (albeit a decisive majority in the Electoral College); the Republican Party is holding on to the House of Representatives by a hair and has a slim majority in the Senate. The administration may hate civil servants and seek to undermine their job security, but it will discover that it needs them to keep airplanes flying safely, the financial system functioning, drugs safe for use, and food fit for consumption.

Gravity still works—if somewhat unreliably. Politicians who overinterpret narrow wins in a divided country get pulled back to Earth, usually by the midterms. But not just that—the federal system of government gives a lot of power to the states, and although Congress has become anemic and irresponsible, most state governments have not. And so the governor of Florida has declined to appoint the president’s daughter-in-law to a vacant Senate seat, and the governor of Ohio has passed on one of the president’s more socially awkward tech billionaires for another. These are small but interesting indications of gravity reasserting itself.

Even the appalling sweeping pardons of the January 6 rioters and insurrectionists have their limits. If any of those people attempt violence in Maryland or Virginia or anywhere else outside of D.C., they will discover that assault and other crimes there are tried in state, not federal, courts. And the presidential-pardon power does not reach state prisons, which means that some ghouls will go back to their cleft rocks if they go out looking for revenge.

Newtonian physics also has it that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Precisely so. Pardon every criminal who clubbed a police officer, and police unions will be unamused. Impose high tariffs, and working-class voters will encounter higher prices and possibly unemployment. Blow up the national debt to cut taxes, and sooner or later the markets will react. Give way to vaccine skepticism, and epidemics will break out. Turn the intelligence community and military upside down by purging women and other undesirables, and you will produce not only big, embarrassing, consequential failures but also pushback from those large populations, their families, and those politicians who still care about national defense.

The reckless, violence-feeding mass pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists were evidence of Trumpian lawlessness. The orders to end the security clearances of scores of former senior intelligence officials who criticized Trump, and the stunning decision to remove security protection from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Brian Hook—three former senior officials of the first Trump administration—were pure personal meanness.

But Trump’s appointees, who will carry out this and other acts of payback, should consider that before very long they, too, will be out of government. They, too, will want to keep their clearances. And they, too, may incur the wrath of state and non-state enemies who want to kill them. They will wish to consider just how exposed they will inevitably be, once their triumph, like all others, passes into memory. If decency and respect for norms do not motivate them in the right direction, fear may have to serve in place.

More to the point, certain biological realities, including age and its accompanying physical and mental decline, will operate during Trump’s 80s. The flunkies and toadies who surround the president will seek to deny this elemental reality—the Biden team was egregious in this regard—but sooner or later, it will take hold too.

Primatology, in this case, offers a useful guide. In most troops of baboons, an alpha male dominates all the others, who exhibit submissive behavior if they know what is good for them. The dominance may be so pronounced that all the alpha male has to do is bare his fangs and snarl to get the behavior he wants. But baboons age, and although he may not notice, the alpha male’s muscles will atrophy, his fangs will fall out. He may continue to snarl, but the younger male baboons will notice and begin to sense the possibility of a succession crisis. And then they pounce.

So, too, here. Donald Trump is already a lame duck. He is, by any measure, old, which is one of many reasons that comparisons with Hitler or younger contemporary European authoritarians such as Viktor Orbán are misplaced. He will be an even lamer duck in two years, at which point the troop of Republican politicians will begin to struggle for the succession. Former friends—Donald Trump Jr. and J. D. Vance, for example—may fall out, and the coalition of differing subclans may fight more openly. Republican unity in several years is highly unlikely.

It’s a bad time in American politics, to be sure. But we need to remember that natural laws still apply, and things could get better if even just one piece of fantasy biology were to hold true: a large class of political invertebrates were to grow spines.

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The Moral Bankruptcy of Evangelicals

Not even a full week into his second regime and Trump, a/k/a, the Felon (and his Republican/Fox News echo chamber), has been in disputes with and maligned the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.  Their offense?  Both have merely argued for compassion and humane treatment for the vulnerable and needy.  (Meanwhile, Pope Francis has condemned the Felon's proposed treatment of undocumented migrants, most of whom are brown skinned.)  Other Christian organizations have similarly condemned the Felon's proposed inhumane treatment of migrants.  All these critics are being true to Christ's social gospel message of sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry, and caring for the poor.   Sadly, the morally questionable Vice President JD Vance, an erstwhile Catholic himself, has allege the Catholic Church only cares about migrants because of the money they bring to the Church coffers. Throughout this controversy, one group of supposed Christians have either failed to condemn inhuman treatment and the terrorizing of vulnerable communities and individuals, the vast majority of evangelicals. While this betrayal of true Christian principles is not surprising given the willingness of evangelicals to close their eyes to the Felon's endless transgressions against Christian principles, it nonetheless underscores the moral bankruptcy of the 80% of evangelicals who have sold their souls to the Felon in exchange for promises of political power and a license to discriminate against others.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this moral bankruptcy:

In his inaugural address on Monday, Donald Trump declared himself God’s chosen instrument to rescue America. He recalled the assassination attempt he survived last year: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Just a few minutes earlier, a beaming Franklin Graham—minister, Trump acolyte, and sometime Vladimir Putin admirer—had driven home the same point during his prayer.

One of the first acts of God’s newly anointed president was to issue pardons or commute the sentences of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump issued pardons to most of the defendants and commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militias, most of whom had been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

More than 150 police officers were injured during the assault on the Capitol. They were hit with baseball bats, flagpoles, and pipes. Aquilino Gonell, a former Capitol Police sergeant who retired because of the injuries he suffered as a result of the assault, was infuriated by Trump’s pardons and commutations. “It’s a miscarriage of justice, a betrayal, a mockery, and a desecration of the men and women that risked their lives defending our democracy,” Gonell told The New York Times’s Luke Broadwater.

THE IRONY IS HARD TO MISS: The movement that for the past half century was loudest in warning about the dangers of cultural decadence is most responsible for electing a president who personifies cultural decadence. (Trump won more than 80 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2024.) Not a single area of Trump’s life is untouched by corruption.

Trump has a cultlike hold on great swaths of the evangelical movement. They will stick with him regardless of what he does. Initially, they reconciled themselves to what he said. Then to how he acted. And now they have made their peace with policies and appointments that would have once caused a revolt.

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY INTRIGUING is how bracing and electrifying a figure Trump is to many evangelicals. It is as if his disinhibitions have become theirs. Parents who disapproved of their children saying “damn” are now enthralled by a man who says “motherfucker.” Those who championed modesty and purity culture celebrate a thrice-married serial adulterer who made hush-money payments to a porn star. Churchgoers who can recite parts of the Sermon on the Mount are inspired by a man who, on the day he announced his candidacy for reelection, promised vengeance against his perceived enemies. Christians who for decades warned about moral relativism are now moral relativists; those who said a decent society has to stand for truth have embraced countless lies and conspiracy theories. People who rage at “woke cancel culture” delight in threats to shut down those with whom they disagree. Men and women who once stood for law and order have given their allegiance to a felon who issues pardons to rioters who have assaulted police officers.

A lot of evangelicals justify their embrace of Trump on biblical grounds. They insist that they are on God’s side, or perhaps that God is on their side. The more they are pulled into the MAGA movement, the more they tell themselves, and others, that they are being faithful disciples of Jesus, now more than ever, and the more furiously they attack those who don’t partake in the charade.

The cognitive dissonance caused by acting in ways that are fundamentally at odds with what they claimed to believe, and probably did believe, for most of their lives would simply be too painful to acknowledge. . . . . The story that many evangelicals today tell one another is that they are devoted followers of Christ, fighting satanic forces that are determined to destroy everything they know and love, and willing to stand in the breach for the man called by God to make America great again. It isn’t going to end well.

But something is amiss. Today the evangelical movement is an essential part of a much larger, and largely destructive, political and cultural movement. Evangelicalism has in many instances become more tribal, unforgiving, and cruel. The world is noticing.

“As a general rule,” the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor has said, “I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”

Hitching the evangelical wagon to Donald Trump has meant unhitching it from the life and teachings of Jesus. It’s a bad trade.

 Sadly, I do not see the evangelical embrace of the Felon lessening.  Meanwhile, the rest of American society - and the world - will come to realize that no one is less Christians than self-congratulatory evangelicals who have made a mockery of Christ's message.  One can only hope that a major backlash against them is coming, hopefully sooner rather than later.

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Republicans Are Seeking to End Same Sex Marriage

"Friends" who voted for the Felon and Republicans in general claimed that they only supported GOP tax and economic policy and assured the rest of us that Project 2025 was not real or told myself and others that we were "over reacting," have gone quiet for the most part as in a single week civil rights protections from the 1960's have been reversed, anyone who might be labeled a DRI hire - namely anyone who is not a white heterosexual male - is on notice they may be fired, war has been declared on transgender citizens, and the nation's foreign policy has been turned upside down.  Of course, the sign posts for what has happened - and will continue to happen - under Project 2025 were in plain view the entire time. Thus, the pretense that "we did not know" falls flat and confirms that this lack of supposed knowledge was based on a mindset of "if it doesn't impact me, then I don't care."  Now, as the New York Times is reporting, the Idaho legislature - controlled by Republicans, of course, is advancing a resolution that asks the U.S. Supreme court to reverse its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that made same sex marriage legal nationwide.  Given the Court's control by right wing extremists and that majority's contempt for past precedents if they conflict with the majority's 12th century view of sex and sexuality, there is no assurance that marriage rights would not be stripped away. Should this occur, many married same sex couples may find themselves faced with having to leave their home states for a blue state where their marriages will be recognized.  Here are highlights from the Times piece (it's telling that this is couched in terms of states' rights - which was used to enforce Jim Crow laws): 

Since 1793, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined a request by President George Washington to offer legal guidance on foreign relations, the court’s justices have steered away from weighing in outside the context of a formal lawsuit.

That has not deterred lawmakers in Idaho, however. This week, a State House committee overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on the Supreme Court to undo Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 decision that gave same-sex couples the right to marry, and to hand the power to regulate marriage back to the states.

The resolution would still need approval by the full House and the Idaho Senate before any request could be sent to the Supreme Court. Both chambers in Idaho are controlled by Republicans.

“Since court rulings are not laws and only legislatures elected by the people may pass laws, Obergefell is an illegitimate overreach,” the resolution reads. It continues: “The Idaho Legislature calls upon the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse Obergefell and restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.’’

An [extremist] organization based in Massachusetts called MassResistance has pressed for the resolution, The Idaho Statesman reported. The group describes itself as a “pro-family activist organization” and traces its roots to marriage equality battles in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage became legal as a result of a 2003 decision by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court.

At the hearing in Idaho, the sponsor of the measure, Representative Heather Scott, a Republican, said it was important to make a statement about states’ rights.

“What is the purpose of this exercise?” said Mistie DelliCarpini-Tolman, the Idaho director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, who lives with her wife not far from Boise. “It really feels like a value statement being sent to the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Idaho that they are not welcome.’’

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, legal scholars have said that the same-sex marriage ruling may also be vulnerable. Two of the court’s conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have suggested that it should be reconsidered.

Still, legal scholars said that Idaho’s approach — with a letter of request, instead of an active legal suit — seemed unlikely to carry weight.

“This is just theater,’’ said Tobias Wolff, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “I will leave it to others to judge what impact it might have as a political matter, but the Supreme Court will no more respond to a letter from the Idaho Legislature than they would a letter from me.’’

But advocates for the resolution said their efforts reflected the views of many residents of their state. In 2006, Idaho voters passed an amendment to the State Constitution limiting marriage to between men and women.

Be assured, the Republicans will manufacture a lawsuit challenging same sex marriage in order to get this issue before the Court if this resolution fails to engage the court.  It's only a matter of time as the push to implement Project 2025 continues.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty