Donald Trump Has Been a Mirror, Held Up to Us Americans

Several friends posted about an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer  by a former career member of the U.S. military who comes from a military family.  At first glance given its headline the piece is upsetting since it appears to be a thank you to Donald Trump.  However, reading the column,  the piece is in reality a condemnation of Trump and those who created the pathway for his election.  Put simply, Trump embodies what is wrong with America and has made the nation's shortcomings painfully obvious to anyone not living under a rock or who is not a white supremacist and/or evangelical extremist.  Thus, the piece thanks Trump for making it clear what needs to be done to undo the stain he and principally the Republican Party have done to harm so many Americans and to usher in a national decline.  Between the GOP efforts to bring about a new Gilded Age and and its and Trump's attacks on science and objective facts, America faces not only racial strife but also a class struggle against the greed driven very wealthy.  Here are column highlights:

Of my 57 years drawing breath, I’ve spent 51 of them directly or indirectly serving this once great nation. So, as you might imagine, I found myself on Nov. 8, 2016, more than a little dismayed at the news we had elevated Donald J. Trump to the nation’s highest office — a man so clearly unfit to lead America.

But over time I’ve come to appreciate Trump in ways I did not expect. Now, I am thankful that we elected Trump. Because Donald Trump is exactly what America needed. Trump is a mirror, a warning, and ultimately a catalyst for change. Reflected in Trump is all that is wrong with the United States: the injustice of our broken social contract, the crassness of our politics, and the cruelty of our economy. Trump is also the shock that a mature democracy needs for action. To use a timely metaphor, Trump and his supporters are a virus, and they have activated our democratic antibodies. What we are seeing in the streets is the body fighting the infection.

What we are seeing in our current moment is not only a race war but a class war. America must confront systemic racism to move forward, but it also must acknowledge that we have created a permanent underclass of all colors (though mostly Black and brown). We are a society where your melanin content and your zip code determine your future.

Beginning with Newt Gingrich in 1994, Republicans stopped trying to govern and instead began accumulating power. McKay Coppins writes in his profile of Gingrich in the Atlantic, “… few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise.” Effective governance requires compromise, trust, and mutual respect. Gingrich’s new version of Republican had no interest in that. He destroyed the bipartisan structures for governing and even resorted to name-calling and conspiracy theories — over the line at the time, but in hindsight presaging Trumpism.

A straight line can be drawn from Gingrich’s “Contract with America” to the tea party in 2009. Another outsider movement characterized by distrust of government, expertise, and experience, the tea party helped elect a rogues’ gallery of loathsome lawmakers — I’m looking at you, Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Texas). Trump’s dystopian vision of America is the ultimate flowering of the outsider, populist, anti-government thinking that has metastasized in the Republican Party over the past decades.

Under both political parties, America has rolled back regulatory guardrails and created a volatile economy that values the wrong things. . . . Over the same period, we dismantled the meager social safety net we had. We have reduced access to food aid, job training, and unemployment insurance. Meanwhile, the cost of health care and higher education has skyrocketed, placing both out of reach for many Americans.

Now for the good news.

Everything wrong with America is manifested in Trump. The hunger for power, the vile derision of people who don’t look like you, the cruelty, the privilege, the gleeful ignorance, and mendacious narcissism. Our revulsion at Trump is causing Americans to ask: How did we get to this place? And how do we get out? That will take time and hard work by well-intentioned people from every corner of American society.

What is happening in our streets is how open, progressive societies improve — fitfully, imperfectly, frustratingly, sometimes tragically. But we do improve. So, thank you, President Trump. Thank you for showing us what we were becoming and helping us find the courage to confront it. We are going to be OK.

Col. Curtis Milam served 26 years on active duty and has over 4,000 flight hours in the C-130. He has served tours at the Pentagon, NATO HQ, and the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, Hungary.

The Trump virus must be exterminated and his supporters must be marginalized to the point where they can do no more damage..

The Pandemic Has Shown That America is a Very Broken State

If nothing else, the Covid-19 pandemic is revealing that years of Republican policies - both under George W. Bush, while the GOP held the U.S. Senate and obstructed the Obama administration efforts, and now under the corrupt and incompetent regime of Der Trumpenführer - have left America a broken state.  Some might even argue a failed state.  Clearly, America is not the nation that won WWII and was the unrivaled leader of the world in the post-WWII era, leading in technology, manufacturing, science and a government infrastructure and economy that worked for a majority of Americans.  The GOP has long sought to bring back the Gilded Age of the late 1800's and pre-WWI era when the robber barons and incredible rich payed little in taxes while the rest of the citizenry struggled to get bay.  Under the Trump/Pence regime, much of this GOP agenda has been realized with huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the rolling back of health and safety regulations, and an economic system designed to benefit the wealthy first and foremost.  Now, the pandemic gripping the nation has pulled back the curtain and revealed the consequences of GOP policies.  A very long piece in The Atlantic looks at where America finds itself and the decision that must be made as to where the nation goes from here.  The following are article highlights: 

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. 

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From [Trump] the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message. Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader.

[I]t should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. . . . . . All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s. Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen. Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying. Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future. If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.
 The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. . . . . . ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face. [T]he rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals. We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. [W]hen his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death. To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat. The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention . . . We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

The Trump Economy Has Been Terrible for the Non-Rich

As noted in a previous blog, I did not watch the State of the Union since Trump's voice is nauseating and I knew his "speech" would be packed with lies.  On the latter front, Trump lived up to expectations and lied through his teeth, especially about the economy.  One has to wonder when his racist/Christofascist base will belatedly realize that his regime is killing them financially even as the super rich gobble up more of the nation's wealth.  Two pieces look at Trump's glaring untruths.  The First is in New York Magazine and looks at Trump's false claims of a blue collar boom.  Here are excerpts:

Americans are flourishing, Donald Trump insisted during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address. Unemployment is down; so is poverty. Everyone is delighted and having a very good time. “Under the last administration, more than 10 million people were added to the food-stamp rolls,” he added. “Under my administration, 7 million Americans have come off of food stamps, and 10 million people have been lifted off of welfare.” Congressional Republicans leapt to their feet and roared approval.

I note, because this is a Trump speech, and certain traditions must be observed: [Trump] The president is not telling the full truth. The number of Americans on food stamps did increase during the Obama administration. But the increase was linked to the recession, which Obama did not cause. . . . . If Trump’s criticism is that the wastrel Democratic president threw gobs of money away on lazy poor people, it doesn’t quite hold.

Trump’s braggadocio about his own record is similarly undermined by reality. [Trump] The president spoke tonight of a “blue-collar boom,” an economic golden age instigated by his administration’s deregulatory policies. This is false — unemployment is down, but wages are largely stagnant, and income inequality reached historic heights last year. People didn’t stop using food stamps because their economic circumstances had drastically improved. The percentage of Americans on food stamps shrank because the Trump administration changed eligibility standards. The president took help away from people who needed it. That’s not proof of a blue-collar boom. In fact, the administration has demonstrated no real interest in creating a blue-collar boom at all.

Trump’s economic priorities consist of slashing welfare, deregulating industry, and passing tax cuts that mostly enrich the wealthiest people in America. No standing ovation can obscure the basic fact that the Trump presidency has been disastrous for the poor. 

As for how those other than the poor have fared, a piece in Yahoo Finance looks at some of Trump's biggest lies.  Here are some highlights:

Trump seems unable to resist lies and exaggerations. When he gave a speech on the economy in November, Yahoo Finance tallied 22 glaring lies on trade, jobs, interest rates, wages and Trump’s record compared with President Obama’s. His main thrust seemed to be taking credit for economic developments that were likely to happen anyway.

“We have added nearly $10 trillion of value to our economy.” GDP was $19.2 trillion when Trump took office, and it’s $21.7 trillion now. That’s a gain of $2.5 trillion, not $10 trillion.

“Under my administration, [median income] rose $5,000.” Census data shows median household incomes have risen from $62,626 to $63,179 since Trump has been in office. That’s just $553. The data ends in 2018, but another 11 months won’t account for that extra $4,447 Trump tossed in.

The average household is $10,000 richer under Trump. He gets this figure by starting with the $5,000 in income gains he’s inflated by a factor of 10, then making similarly gassy claims about savings from tax cuts, deregulation and “energy cuts,” whatever that means. Nobody can come close to substantiating this figure, and ordinary people can fact-check that by looking around for their own magical $10,000 windfall.

“We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars in tariffs that China is paying for.” American importers and businesses are paying the tariffs, not China. The tally so far is about $75 billion in new taxes on businesses on an annualized basis, according to the American Action Forum. This may be Trump’s most prolific economic lie—he’s told it at least 100 times, according to a Yahoo Finance tally.

Trump v. Jesus: Christians Can’t Follow Both

As regular readers know, I have a problem with many Christians.  First there are the toxic white evangelicals who have embraced Donald Trump and his racist, divisive policies, including policies that harm the poor, the sick, the elderly and advance religious based bigotry.  Then there are the "good Christians" who try to follow the New Testament teachings of Christ - as opposed to the Old Testament so loved by white evangelicals who cherry pick brief passages as a means to condemn others - and do not seek to harm others.  My complaint with these Christians?  Their silence and failure to loudly and openly condemn (i) Trump and the GOP policies that are the antithesis to the Gospel message, and (ii) the white evangelicals who are killing the Christian brand and fueling the flight of the younger generations from religion entirely.  One exception to this damning silence Rev. Jim Wallis and 90 other religious leaders who have joined in a statement in support of the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry.   The point these religious leaders make is simple: support of Trump and following the Gospel message are mutually exclusive.  Read the statement here. Here are highlights from a piece that looks at this position. 

Many Christians pluck a line from the Bible and pretend it is the entirety of Scripture, using the command as a club against anyone who makes them uncomfortable. Their religion is a green light from God Almighty to harass gays, plague women, and of course support Donald Trump, the living embodiment of their faith.

“I love him so much I can hardly explain it,” said right-wing pastor and Trump adviser James Robison.   Many echo Robison; 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump.

But there are also Christians like Rev. Jim Wallis.  “There is a conflict between the politics of Jesus and the politics of Trump,” said Wallis. “Racial bigotry is a deal breaker for the Gospel. White nationalism, which Donald Trump embraces and champions, isn’t just racist — it’s anti-Christ. Dehumanizing immigrants isn’t just racist — it’s anti-Christ. Demeaning women isn’t just sexist — it’s anti-Christ. At some point, Christians have to ask themselves: Are the teachings of Christ going to be followed or not?”

Nor is Wallis alone: 90 Christian leaders joined him signing a call for this Sunday, Oct. 13, to be a National Day of Prayer “for the truth to be revealed through the impeachment inquiry.”

“For the sake of our nation’s integrity and the most vulnerable in our society, we call on fellow Christians to support the current impeachment inquiry,” read the statement. “Now is the time to shine the light of truth.”

“Trump appeals to our worst demons,” he said. “There really is a worst of America, and he is a marketer for it. He’s deliberately dividing our country.”

Wallis believes much of the powerful evangelical movement isn’t based on religion, but on politics. “In 1980 there was a political effort by Republican operatives, who approached Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and said, ‘Give us a list of your followers and we’ll create a new right wing movement and make you household names.’ It’s a political mobilization. Not theological. Not religious.”

But the faith that can be corrupted to serve Trump can also, Wallis believes, light the path away from him.

“There’s is a religious right that wraps political ideology around faith to polarize the country and, I think, silence and sabotage Jesus,” said Wallis. “He’s been hijacked. I want to try to reclaim Jesus and what He said. Those who turn to the politics of Jesus will defect from the politics of Trump,”

Any indication that those who have sold their souls to Trump are now willing to renege on the deal?

“A lot of white evangelicals are breaking from their parents over climate change, over LGBTQ issues,” Wallis said. “There are a growing number of white evangelical suburban Republican women who are shifting, [saying] ‘We care about life in the womb, but we also care about life on the southern border, about kids being ripped away from their parents.’”

“Jesus says, ‘I was a stranger. How you treat the stranger is how you treat me. How you treat the sick is how you treat me. How you treat the poor is how you treat me,’” Wallis said. “These are the most important people to Jesus and the least important to this administration.

“If you are followers of Jesus, you can’t ignore what Jesus said,” said Wallis. “So much of what Donald Trump says and does and makes policy is literally antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. No one can deny that. So how can you support him when he is contrary to everything Jesus said and did?”

Mayor Pete Called Out the Hypocrisy of Trump-Supporting Evangelicals

Trump with evangelical hate group leaders.

Christians for a long time.  Indeed, there are few groups that lie more frequently, hate so many others so maliciously, and parade around in displays of utterly false piety. If there is any positive aspect of the Trump presidency, it is that the loyalty of evangelicals to the toxic demagogue has displayed their hypocrisy and hate writ large for the world to see.  They are morally bankrupt and have no more moral authority that the Catholic prelates who aided and abetted child rape for decades if not centuries. To call them modern day Pharisees, insults the Pharisees of the New Testament. The candidacy of Pete Buttigieg may do even more to expose they foulness of these people, especially since Buttigieg seemingly has no intention on being reticent about calling them out.  A piece in Esquire looks at Buttigieg's willingness to confront Christofascists and also looks at just how ladened with hypocrisy evangelicals are in fact.  Here are article highlights:

Amid all the chaos and cruelty, perhaps the one enduring benefit of Donald Trump's presidency will be The Great Unvarnishing. The acidity of Trump's public persona—his blatant narcissism and vindictiveness and lack of ethics and selfishness and greed—has worn on the top coat of paint many people have applied to themselves, gradually exposing what lies beneath. It isn't often pretty. All the pretense has gone straight out the window as [Trump] the president has seized control of one of our two major political parties while saying the quiet parts out loud.

No one pretends Donald Trump is an ethical person. He and his allies scarcely even pretend he is a president for all Americans. Everyone knows for whom he is the president: The Base, and especially the core Republican constituency of White Evangelical Christians. This is all the more revelatory because no one pretends Donald Trump is a man of God, really. His pantomimes of Devout Religiosity during the campaign were so half-assed that few adult humans could realistically believe he's a believer. The guy who bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy" and OK'd calling his own daughter a "piece of ass" was suddenly pretending to have accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

It was all there: the obvious unfamiliarity with the material, and the open disdain for anyone who actually was familiar. Trump, the ultimate snake-oil salesman, couldn't resist calling out his newest and easiest marks for what they were while he made the sale. Except, again, it's doubtful many Evangelicals who pulled the lever for Trump really believed he's a God-fearing man. . . . They knew what they were getting.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a rising star in the 2020 Democratic field, said as much recently when he declared of [Trump] the president, "It's hard to look at his actions and believe they are the actions of somebody who believes in God." Chuck Todd of Meet the Press asked him to square that with Trump's Evangelical support on Sunday.

It's only "hypocrisy" if you believe the most important word in the phrase White Evangelical Christian is "Christian"—as in, you prioritize, above all else, the teachings of Jesus Christ. Of course it isn't. It has always been "White." The current all-encompassing figurehead of the Republican Party has merely laid this bare, because the question, What principles of Jesus Christ does Donald Trump embody? can only be met with derisive laughter. The better question might be which of the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth—does he [Trump] not embody.

No, the important part of White Evangelical Christian is White. These folks had called themselves Values Voters, which mainstream politicos would accept without much examination even though the most important values seemed to be abstinence-only sex ed and opposition to marriage equality and abortion. Jesus never devoted much time to any of these topics, and all his talk about giving aid to the poor and the sick never got much play in Republican politics.

They believe the United States was at its best in the postwar boom of the 1950s and '60s, but not necessarily because programs like the G.I. Bill—a dreaded Big Government initiative—enhanced social mobility and gave young (white) men the chance to establish middle-class families. They're more interested in who made the rules back then: white, Christian men, who accepted input from other white, Christian men. This is politics, and politics is about power.

Trump has merely exposed this longstanding force in conservative politics for what it is, even if he pays lip service to the concerns of people in the industrial midwest who've been left behind by globalization. His basic appeal is as a bulwark for White America against a changing world, where The Others—chiefly, Hispanic immigrants and worshippers of Islam—are the villains in American life. That is the potent symbolism of The Wall, which Evangelicals support more than any other group. This is also the psychological thicket of power and identity where America's gun culture resides.

Trump's brash disregard for consequences—a symptom of the collapse of shame as a social force—has also spilled over onto some of the Thought Leaders on the Christian Right. . . . One thing that never seems to come up is, say, this:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

"Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Trump enjoyed the support of 71 percent of Evangelicals shortly after his administration embarked on its "zero-tolerance policy," the inevitable consequence of which was to separate children from their parents at the southern border. He continued to enjoy their support after the Mobile Locker Room tape, and after it emerged he'd paid $130,000 to silence a porn star about the affair she alleges they had shortly after the birth of his youngest child. He enjoyed their support after his administration teargassed migrants—The Stranger whom Jesus implores us to Invite In—which apparently was a rare moment of Trumpian praise for Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security Secretary who also oversaw the family separations but now has been forced out because she's insufficiently extreme.

He will continue to enjoy their support because he is a potent vector of weaponized nostalgia, and he has made it a priority to install Conservative Judges—not to be confused with Great Legal Minds Who Happen to Be Conservative—to enshrine in the judiciary these politics of backlash against the changing world.

Yes, Donald Trump has given us one gift: The Great Unvarnishing. Racism cannot be dismissed as some vestigial legacy of America's past mistakes—it is one of the core animating forces in our society, a vehicle for power that still runs smooth as ever. Everything is malleable in the face of power and riches. People who oppose crony capitalism in theory support it in practice—as long as they're the cronies. And self-proclaimed Men of God will support Donald Trump, American president. It's almost like everyone has personal standards of ethics, and what religion you practice doesn't necessarily have anything to do with your morality.

On the bright side, you never have to listen to Political Christians again if you don't want to. Again: what principles of Jesus Christ does Donald Trump embody? Would you even let the guy babysit your kids? 

With luck, the exodus of the younger generations from religion will accelerate thanks to the glaring hypocrisy of the evangelicals.  If we are even luckier, evangelical Christianity itself will die in time.  In view, that cannot happen soon enough. 

Trump Hands Democrats a Gift with Effort to Kill Obamacare

I often make the statement that Trump and the Republican Party want to create a new Gilded Age where the wealth of the richest Americans soared to obscene levels - thinks of the Rockefellers, Goulds, Vanderbilts, etc. - while the majority of Americans struggled to survive.  One study found as follows as to what happened to life expectancy during the rise of the Gilded Age:

"an average white ten-year-old American boy in 1880, born at the beginning of the Gilded Age and living through it, could expect to die at age forty-eight. His height would be 5 feet, 5 inches. He would be shorter and have a briefer life than his Revolutionary forebears.” “Infant mortality worsened in many cities after 1880.”

Part of the problem of the Gilded Age was a lack of safety and environmental regulations - things that were eventually remedied.  Yet now, Trump and the GOP are steadily rolling back such regulations so that big business can reap larger profits. Now, Trump has declared war on the Affordable Health Care Act and seeks to deprive millions of access to healthcare.  Even before this latest action, as a Washington Post story reported, the USA was going backwards in terms of diminished life expectancy and infant mortality.  Here are excerpts:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, reported in November [2018] that life expectancy for the average American ticked downward for the third year in a row. The news attracted a storm of attention . . . . Other trends, however, passed by more quietly. In health care, for example, maternal deaths inched up slightly this year to 20.7 per 100,000 live births, according to data from the United Health Foundation. In fact, giving birth in the United States has become increasingly deadly over the past few decades, placing our country in the same category as developing nations such as Afghanistan and Swaziland. And the rates are even worse for mothers of color.

The latest CDC data released this year shows that U.S. infant mortality rates, after steadily falling over the past few decades, haven’t decreased significantly for five years. Today it stands at 5.9 deaths per 1,000 births, far higher than the average rate of 3.9 deaths for developed countries. Again, it’s even worse for infants of color.

Given these statistics, increasing access to health care would be the moral thing to do.  Sadly, to Trump and Republicans (and evangelical Christians), most of us simply do not matter.  Indeed, it appears that they'd prefer that Americans - especially minorities and the poor - simply die while the rich rake in an ever larger share of the nation's wealth. How else to explain the Trump administration's latest effort to destroy health care access for millions.  A piece in Politico looks at this disgusting development and the Democrat response to such immorality.  Here are highlights:

House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday seized on the Justice Department’s endorsement of a federal court ruling to eliminate Obamacare in its entirety, immediately renewing attacks on the GOP for trying to gut the law’s popular protections and rip health coverage from more than 20 million Americans.

The administration’s surprise decision — a shift from its prior stance that only parts of the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out — offered a unifying moment for Democrats still grappling with the news that Mueller would not charge President Donald Trump with any crimes and comes as the party readies a fresh legislative offensive on health care.

“It’s disgusting. It’s horrible,” said Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the No. 4 House Democrat. “It’s what they were trying to do during the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, it’s what Republicans were doing when they filed the lawsuit. The president’s been clear about his position the whole time.”

And even as Democrats decried the move, they also saw it as a political gold mine.

[L]awmakers were privately ecstatic about the Trump administration’s decision to essentially to trample all over its own good news cycle and turn the attention back to an issue that Democrats used to win back the House.

“It’s really outrageous. I don’t understand if Republicans weren’t present for the last election, but if there was an issue that was deeply critical, it was health care,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said after the meeting. . . . It’s “not only immoral, it’s a really bad political decision for them,” she added.

“We’re going to introduce a bill to protect and strengthen the ACA. That’s the responsible thing to do,” said Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.). “They’re being irresponsible, and they’re putting 20 million people in this country at risk.”

Indeed, House Democrats had planned a pivot to health care even before the Trump administration late Monday announced its support for a federal judge’s December ruling that the entire ACA should be invalidated because Congress eliminated its individual mandate penalty in the GOP tax law.

Democrats are rolling out a wide-ranging Obamacare package aimed at shoring up the law’s benefits while reversing several of the Trump administration main health priorities — a bid to follow through on the campaign-trail vows that helped propel them into the House majority.

The package is largely a rehash of policies that Democrats pitched last year, like expanding the Obamacare subsidies meant to help Americans afford health coverage and restoring outreach funding that Trump slashed over the past two years. It would also rescind regulations expanding cheaper, skimpier health plans that the administration has touted for providing greater choice, but Democrats have derided as “junk” insurance.

Their plan gained new significance in the wake of the Trump administration’s legal action, providing vulnerable Democrats with concrete legislation to hype for their swing-district voters and a powerful tool to use against Republicans who refuse to endorse any Obamacare-related measures even as they insist they want to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.

For Republicans, meanwhile, the Justice Department’s move threatens to put them back on the defensive just days after what was arguably their biggest victory of the Trump era.

[M]ost Republicans have so far remained fairly quiet in the aftermath of the DOJ filing in a case that few view as politically advantageous — even as Trump appeared to celebrate the decision. . . . GOP lawmakers who did have an initial reaction expressed exasperation at the disconnect between the Trump administration and the Hill on health care.

[T]he issue is a new headache given the new Senate map: Democrats have gone from defending 10 states that Trump won in 2018 to launching campaigns against incumbents in places like Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina and Maine. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has been particularly outspoken in opposition to the administration’s support of the lawsuit.

[N]either the Trump administration nor Republicans in Congress have any ready replacement for Obamacare if it is ultimately wiped out. . . . with a serious battle for Senate control developing in purple and blue states, Democrats say they have the political upper hand on an issue their House counterparts used to devastating effect in 2018.

This move by the Trump administration to take away health care will prove far more detrimental to the administration and the Republican Party than any gains they might have made by the [findings] of Mr. Barr’s letter,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Even Doug Jones of Alabama, by far the most endangered Senate Democrat next year, was singing the same tune as party leaders. “I’m outraged. It’s going to hurt my state really bad if that were to go forward,” Jones said in an interview. “They couldn’t do in this chamber what they wanted to do, which is completely dismantle and disintegrate it. So they’re trying to blow it up in any way possible.”

Being a Republican and being a decent and moral person are becoming increasingly mutually exclusive.

Trump May Try to Kill Medicaid by Executive Fiat

To me one of the prime signals that the Republican Party is the antithesis of so-called Christian values that per the gospels include caring for the poor, the sick, the hungry and the homeless is the party's incessant obsession with killing Medicaid and other government programs that assist these desperate populations.  The GOP's basic message if you are a member of any of these categories is basically, "do us a favor and just die."  What's disturbing is that evangelical Christians - today's Pharisees motivated by hate rather than Christ's message - fully support the GOP agenda, or at least until grandma needs to go into a nursing home or they lose their job and their health insurance.  Besides being un-Christian, this mindset is stupid and these greed driven cretins fail to grasp that America's healthcare costs are sky high because we do not cover preventive care and force many to rely on non-profit hospital emergency room care - the least cost effective means there is.  Add to this the failure to catch illnesses when they have an inexpensive fix and it's a recipe for fiscal disaster.  The result is that ALL OF us end up paying ridiculously high hospital costs as hospitals seek to recover lost revenue. Medicaid is one mechanism that addresses this ass backwards approach of America's broken healthcare system and recognizes the lives of the less fortunate.  So what does Der Trumpenführer want to do?  Basically kill Medicaid as we know it, in part to pay for his tax cuts to the obscenely wealthy and, in my view, in part because he sees the poor as little more than vermin.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this dangerous Trump/GOP agenda.  Here are highlights: 

One of the most ancient Republican policy hobbyhorses has been eliminating Medicaid’s status as a federal-state entitlement program guaranteeing health-care services for low-income Americans and certain other categories of needy people. You think killing Obamacare is an obsessive Great White Whale for conservatives? Attacks on Medicaid’s basic structure date back at least to the beginning of the Reagan presidency (fittingly, since the Gipper was one of the most visible opponents of the original Medicare and Medicaid proposals back in the early 1960s). In fact, an effort to arbitrarily “cap” federal Medicaid payments was one of the few early legislative setbacks for his administration.

GOP efforts to turn Medicaid into a “block grant” (i.e., a proposal in which the federal government would appropriate a fixed sum of money that states could use to deal with the Medicaid population, with the federal contribution expected to wither away over time), terminating any individual entitlement to benefits, have come back over and over again like a recurring nightmare. There was a Medicaid block grant in the 1995–96 Gingrich budgets that Bill Clinton repeatedly vetoed. George W. Bush proposed the same thing in 2003. It was a regular feature of all those “Ryan Budgets” during the Obama administration. And most recently, Republicans tried to smuggle it into law as part of their unsuccessful bills to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, under the guise of rolling back Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

Even as such frontal assaults on Medicaid continued, the Trump administration, under Medicare and Medicaid director Seema Verma, has been working hard at using “waiver” powers originally designed to help states cover more people under Medicaid to let them move in the opposite direction via work requirements and other provisions aimed at discouraging eligibility. Last year there was even talk of letting conservative states impose an arbitrary lifetime limit on how long childless adults could receive Medicaid benefits, which would have been a pretty clear abrogation of congressional authority . . . .

Now, with the 2018 midterm elections ending any fantasies of Republican-style “health-care reform” legislation making any progress before 2021 at the earliest, Verma is reportedly contemplating a giant and audacious leap into the past: turning Medicaid into block grants via state waivers, or to put it another way, abolishing Medicaid as we have known it by executive fiat. Politico first reported the scheme:

The Trump administration is quietly devising a plan bypassing Congress to give block grants to states for Medicaid, achieving a longstanding conservative dream of reining in spending on the health care safety net for the poor. … new limits could apply to all Medicaid populations — including nursing home patients — or just a smaller subset like working-age adults.

Any way you slice it, though, any block-grant-by-waiver initiative would change Medicaid’s basic structure and purpose, with the clear intention of abrogating congressional powers. The reaction from Democratic Members of Congress has been predictable:

“Hell no,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) wrote on Twitter on Friday evening, vowing to oppose the administration’s block grant plan “through legislation, in the courts, holding up Administration nominees, literally every means that a U.S. Senator has.” 

If Verma goes ahead with this scheme, a legal challenge will most definitely arise. But it’s an indication of how determined conservatives are not just to fight the long-term trend of making Medicaid a de facto universal health coverage program for the poor, but of rolling it back as far as possible.

But make no mistake: most ideologically-prone Republicans hate Medicaid with the heat of a thousand suns, and they won’t give up trying to hamstring it, restrict it, cut it, or kill it so long as a devious way to go about it has yet to be deployed.

I truly do not see how a decent, moral person can be a Republican any longer.

How the Selfish Use Christianity as Their Cover Story

Paul Ryan at hate group FRC's "Values Voter Summit"

I write often about religion for a number of reasons, including but not limited to (i) it is the driving force that has made life hell for LGBT individuals for centuries, and (ii) it provides cover for some of the most hate filled and selfish individuals - and has done so for centuries.  In today's America, the most hypocritical are evangelical Christians  81% of whom voted for and continue to support, a thrice divorced, self-admitted serial sexual molester even as they throw a conniption fit over the broadcasting of a same sex kiss during the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. They share their hypocrisy with other regular churchgoers who feign piety while in the pews yet support Republican policies that seek to shred the social safety net and cut funding for children, the poor, the homeless and the hungry while they themselves clamor for additional tax breaks. And then, of course, there is the Catholic Church hierarchy that lives like princes even as they aided and abetted sexual predators so that their cushy positions would not be threatened by scandal.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at this reality:  Here are highlights: 

Anyone who has worked in the restaurant business will be happy to tell you that waiters always fight each other to avoid working Sunday lunch shift. Not because they want to sleep in, but because it’s a widespread belief that the post-church crowd is loud, demanding and unwilling to tip appropriately. In the food service industry, “Christian” is synonymous with “selfish.”

[W]aiters probably remember the bad Christian tippers more because the hypocrisy is so stunning. The image of a man piously preening about what a good Christian he is in church only to turn around and refuse the basic act of decency that is paying someone what you owe them perfectly symbolizes a lurking suspicion in American culture that the harder someone thumps the Bible, the more selfish and downright sadistic a person he is. And that perception—that showy piety generally goes hand in hand with very un-Christ-like behavior—is not an urban myth at all. On the contrary, it’s the daily reality of American culture and politics.

It’s absolutely disgusting how the politicians who make the biggest show of how much they love Jesus would be the first in line to bash him if he returned with a message of clothing the naked and feeding the poor. The Jesus of the Bible multiplied the loaves and fishes. His loudest followers these day gripe about feeding people, claiming it creates a “culture of dependency.” They may even comb through the Bible to take quotes out of context to justify their selfishness toward the poor, as Rep. Steven Fincher did when he claimed the Bible says, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” The fact that those jobs are unavailable didn’t give him a moment’s pause when suggesting this very un-Christ-like plan to his fellow Americans.

There are plenty of progressive Christians who genuinely try to live out Jesus’ command to love your neighbor as yourself . . . . That said, statistics bear out the sense that people who are more invested in being perceived as pious also embrace the most selfish policies. Self-identified conservatives and Republicans claim go to church regularly at twice the rate of self-identified liberals. People who go to church more than once a week are far more conservative than the rest of the population.

The attempts to reconcile the correlation between displays of piety and support for selfish policies get complex on the right, with conservatives often arguing that hating your neighbor at the voting booth doesn’t count because church charities supposedly make up for it. (They don’t.) In reality, the relationship between Christian piety and support for selfish policies is fairly straightforward. It’s not that being Christian makes you conservative. It’s that being conservative makes being a loud and pious Christian extremely attractive.

Without Christianity, the underlying mean-spiritedness of conservative policies is simply easier to spot. . . . . Since Christians are “supposed” to be good people, people who really aren’t good are lining up to borrow that reputation to advance their agenda.

The fact that conservatism causes obnoxious Christian piety in American culture is most obvious when looking at some of the theological developments that have accrued since the philosophers of selfishness decided to use Christianity as their cover story. The “prosperity gospel” that has developed in recent years is a classic example.

The fact of the matter is that the purposes religion serves in America are shrinking in number. Our cultural identity is increasingly shaped by pop culture, not faith or ethnic identity. Our holidays are more about shopping and having a chance to catch up with far-flung family these days, not showing devotion to a deity. Spiritual needs are often addressed through modern means like psychotherapy and self-help. People build communities through hobbies and interests more than through faith communities bound by geography, ethnicity and family.

Increasingly, the only thing religion has left to justify itself is that it provides cover for people who want to have bigoted, selfish beliefs but want to believe they are good people anyway. As these social trends continue, we can expect the alignment between public piety and grotesquely selfish political beliefs to get worse, not better.

Meanwhile, the truly "good Christians" remain quiet and yield the field to the falsely pious and selfish.  It's little wonder that a growing number of the younger generations have walked away from religion entirely.

McConnell Blames "Entitlements", Not Massive Trump/GOP Tax Cuts for Rising Deficits

One need not be a math whiz to do the math involved in comparing the amount of the massive Trump/GOP tax cuts to the very wealthy and huge corporations with the amount by which the federal deficit is soaring.  Yet, Mitch McConnell is ignoring this simple arithmetic exercise and is blaming the federal deficit on "entitlements" such as Social Security and Medicare into which American taxpayers have been paying funds their entire working lives.  In my own case, over the years, I have paid a very large sum into Social Security and Medicare, yet McConnell is depicting me and millions like me as greedy, irresponsible freeloaders looking for a free give away.  Meanwhile, McConnell and his wife have parlayed their political positions to become very wealthy and, in McConnell's case, he enjoys a platinum retirement package that relieves him of the financial concerns the rest of us have to deal with.  The man is despicable.  Give massive tax cuts to the obscenely wealthy and then demand cuts to programs for the poor, the middle class, and the elderly.  This from a man and political party that pretends to honor "Christian values."  A piece in Bloomberg looks at this foul batshitery.  Here are highlights:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed rising federal deficits and debt on a bipartisan unwillingness to contain spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and said he sees little chance of a major deficit reduction deal while Republicans control Congress and the White House.

“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News when asked about the rising deficits and debt. “It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”

McConnell’s remarks came a day after the Treasury Department said the U.S. budget deficit grew to $779 billion in Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year as president, the result of the GOP’s tax cuts, bipartisan spending increases and rising interest payments on the national debt. That’s a 77 percent increase from the $439 billion deficit in fiscal 2015, when McConnell became majority leader.

Shrinking those popular programs -- either by reducing benefits or raising the retirement age -- without a bipartisan deal would risk a political backlash in the next election. Trump promised during his campaign that he wouldn’t cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, even though his budget proposals have included trims to all three programs.

The Office of Management and Budget has projected a deficit in the coming year of $1.085 trillion despite a healthy economy. And the Congressional Budget Office has forecast a return to trillion-dollar deficits by fiscal 2020.

Republicans in December 2017 also passed a tax cut projected to add more than $1 trillion to the debt over a decade after leaders gave up on creating a plan that wouldn’t increase the debt under the Senate’s scoring rules.

At the time, McConnell told reporters, “I not only don’t think it will increase the deficit, I think it will be beyond revenue-neutral.” He added, “In other words, I think it will produce more than enough to fill that gap.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York responded Tuesday by saying McConnell and other Republicans “blew a $2 trillion hole in the federal deficit to fund a tax cut for the rich. To now suggest cutting earned middle-class programs like Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid as the only fiscally responsible solution to solve the debt problem is nothing short of gaslighting."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California said in a statement, “Under the GOP’s twisted agenda, we can afford tax cuts for billionaires, but not the benefits our seniors have earned.”