The Reality Free World of Trump's Base

A piece in New York Magazine looks at the Kool-Aid drinking supporters of Donald Trump who continue to argue that any news stories - or anything else that reflects poorly on their Dear Leader  - is "fake news."  It's understandable that many find it difficult to admit that their were played for fools or allowed their baser - and racist - instincts to lead them into voting for an unfit individual who increasingly appears to have colluded with an enemy foreign power.   The levels of denial are mind boggling. Indeed, driving back from a court appearance for a client yesterday, I caught a portion  of Michael Smerconish's radio show where he was taking calls from Trump supporters.  Let's just say the abuse showered by some of the callers was shocking.  One caller even welcomed collusion with Russia and said that Putin "was our friend" and that the Russians were "Christians."  Here are highlights from the New York Magazine piece:

With the New York Times breaking the story of a June 2016 meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort with a Russian lawyer (according to Trump Jr. himself) who claimed to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton, the excitement is again mounting among Trump critics that (as an ABC headline put it) “fire peers out from Trump-Russia smoke.” 

But, as the various stages of reporting on the meeting in June 2016 have played out, the reaction from Trumpland’s corner of the news media has not betrayed any fear that the president’s own family might have been caught colluding with an agent of a foreign power who sought to tamper with a U.S. national election. The New York Post’s Michael Walsh called the story a “big yawn” and an effort to revive a “resentful smear cooked up in the immediate aftermath of Clinton’s stunning defeat last fall.” . . . . Fox News is focused on undermining the idea that Veselnitskaya was a “Kremlin crony” at the time of the meeting. Kellyanne Conway answered a question from Chris Cuomo on CNN about the new revelations with the deeply entrenched Trump countercharge that his enemies have created the Russia story to distract attention from the administration’s brilliant successes. . . . What bothers me is, there does not seem to be any type of disclosure about Team Trump and Russia that shakes its aggressive self-confidence. And that may be because it had done such a good job of convincing its political base that all criticism is maliciously partisan. At Vox, Lindsay Maizland reports how deeply Trump’s “fake news” charge about the Russia investigation has been absorbed by his fans in precisely those heartland rural and small-town areas that did so much to lift him to the presidency: When I recently visited my hometown and one other small town in Michigan that went for Trump, I talked with residents about the investigation. Nearly every single person I spoke with said the same thing: The media just needs to leave Trump alone, and the Russia investigation is a distraction.

A message of total disdain for media reporting is certainly falling on receptive ears. As a survey from Pew Research records, among self-identified Republicans the approval/disapproval ratio for “national news media” is 10/85. . . . . This gives him, at least among “the base” and its own allied media outlets, an extra layer of heavy insulation against bad news. In Trumpland, to a considerable extent, bad news is by definition fake.

So how does one explain this embrace of ignorance and refusal to see objective reality?  In one of a series of special reports, The Economist looked at Trump supporters and found a sort of "group think" as part of the explanation  The piece is here. Another piece here found that racism had in fact player a role in the behavior of Trump supporters.  Here are highlights from the first piece:

“IT’S A WONDERFUL day under President Trump! Please leave a message,” chirps the answerphone at the Palm Beach Republican Club, which sits on a palm-tree-lined avenue with a crossroads at one end and the turquoise Atlantic at the other. If Mar-a-Lago is Versailles, then this is its local village, whose inhabitants get occasional glimpses of the royal carriages. 

Palm Beach is about as different from rural Kansas as it is possible to be, yet the way the president’s supporters talk about him in both places is much the same: he’s a businessman, he’s trying to do the right thing, Congress is getting in his way, the media are painting him as a bad man which he’s not, and anyway the country was a disaster under Obama. In the time your correspondent spent in West Virginia, Kansas, Georgia, Alabama and Florida talking to mayors of small towns, local Republican Party bosses and ordinary folk who voted for the president, nobody spontaneously raised the lingering scandal over Russian meddling in the presidential election, and hardly anybody showed buyer’s remorse.

Go back 50 years, and if you knew someone’s income, you could predict, with reasonable accuracy, how they would vote. That is no longer true (see chart). From Florida’s golf courses to rural Appalachia, from Midwestern blue-collar suburbs to California’s bougainvillea-lined driveways, where some of the most prominent pro-Trump intellectuals grew up, the tribes that make up the president’s support are bound together by something powerful that has little to do with their economic fortunes.

To be fair, not everybody in America thinks it’s a wonderful day under President Trump.  Plenty of people have . . . . concluded that this president is a threat to the republic.

This special report is not about them. Rather, it is about the roughly 40% or so of voters—some 50m Americans—who have lived through the same events and like what they see. . . . . If you understand how they think about politics and what can change their minds, you can sketch the boundaries of the president’s support or, as his detractors might put it, what he can get away with.

The first thing to note is that most voters pay little attention. Those who follow politics tend to assume that everyone else does, too, but they are mistaken. According to the American National Election Study (ANES), a large survey run by Stanford and the University of Michigan and published in March, 94% of Trump voters did not attend a single political rally, speech or meeting last year. 

So how do the vast majority of voters change their minds? Not by taking each issue, deciding what is important to them, determining which candidate is closer to their preferences and then voting accordingly. In “Democracy for Realists”, the most influential recent book on voting, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels show that the opposite often happens: people may well decide which candidate they like and then ascribe policies they approve of to him or her, often incorrectly. 

Most voters make political choices based largely on what people like them are doing, and rarely change their minds. For example, it is hard to think of two more different candidates, in temperament, style and policy, than Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, yet more than 90% of those who voted for Mr Romney in the presidential election in 2012 also voted for Mr Trump this time, according to the ANES. . . . Those who expect Republican voters to desert Mr Trump each time a scandal breaks should bear this in mind.

This kind of groupthink is so powerful that it shapes the way people see the world around them. Right after the election, and more than two months before Mr Trump took office, Republicans told pollsters that their personal finances were in much better shape than they had been the week before the ballot. Democrats said the opposite. The question had nothing to do with politics, and yet the answers given were somehow conditioned by the election. 

Joe Scarborough: I’m Leaving the Republican Party

Nearly two decades ago I formally resigned from the Republican Party when I saw the GOP being hijacked by Christofascists who rejected knowledge and reason and who wanted to undermine the U.S. Constitution and make their foul version of Christianity the de facto established religion in America.  Many Republicans, including former GOP Congressman and TV host Joe Scarborough - and a number of my immediate neighbors - chose to close their eyes and pretended that the Republican Party still remained the party of their youth and James F. Buckley, Jr.  Enter Donald Trump and incessant lies and the GOP's willingness to turn a blind eye at possible treason with Russia and a horrific reverse Robin Hood agenda and Scarborough has final reached the point I did: It is simply impossible  to remain a Republican if one is a moral and decent person and a true American patriot.  The Daily Beast has details on Scarborough's decision to leave the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

It’s been a little less than two weeks since President Donald Trump delivered his unhinged tweetstorm against “Psycho” Joe Scarborough and “low I.Q. Crazy” Mika Brzezinski, and unfortunately for the Morning Joe co-hosts, the news cycle has since moved on to more pressing matters concerning the president’s first-born son.

The betrothed colleagues postponed their Fourth of July vacation to fire back at Trump on-air, and shared some thoughts on the president’s bizarre obsession with female blood with The New York Times, but their sit-down with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night’s Late Show was their first televised interview since the debacle. And Scarborough came armed with big news.

In light of his recent disagreements with the president, along with the GOP members of Congress who continue to support him, Scarborough announced that he is leaving the Republican Party and becoming an Independent.

Asked by Colbert why other Republicans have not been as critical of Trump as he has, Scarborough said he thinks their tacit support of the president is “inexplicable.” He argued that the party has “betrayed its core values” since long before Trump took office, pointing to December 2015 when then-candidate Trump first called for a “total and complete” ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

“I said on the air, it’s very simple, it’s black and white,” Scarborough continued. “I said I can never vote for anybody in my party that said they were going to ban people for the god they worshipped.” He said he found Trump’s words and actions “disturbing” throughout the entire campaign, from the time he claimed to not know anything about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan to when he said a judge from Indiana couldn’t be fair to him because he was of Mexican heritage.

“You didn’t have Republicans coming out and saying, I can never support Donald Trump because he’s racist!” Scarborough said. “Time and time and time again, they turned the other way, and they’re doing the same thing now. It’s actually disgusting. And you have to ask yourself, what exactly is the Republican Party willing to do? How far are they willing to go? How much of this country and our values are they willing to sell out?”

Scarborough may well be outraged by Trump’s various “racist” statements and policies, but the one thing that seems to have finally ended their on-again, off-again relationship for good was the president’s personal attack on Brzezinski.

In another Washington Post op-ed published late last month, the pair wrote, “The Donald Trump we knew before the campaign was a flawed character but one who still seemed capable of keeping his worst instincts in check.” But while the tape of Trump boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy” was not released until a month before the election, he made those comments in 2005.

Did becoming president really change Donald Trump, or did it take President Donald Trump to make Joe Scarborough realize how craven the Republican Party has become?

Having been a GOP activist for years and a City Committee member for 8 years, I understand that it can be hard to leave what one is familiar with and what one has worked for.  That said, at some point objective facts, morality and decency make it impossible to remain in a political party that has become something hideous.

Trump, Jr. Hands Over the Trump-Russia Smoking Gun

As numerous legitimate news outlets, such as Politico, New York Magazine, New York Times, and the Washington Post and others, are reporting - which excludes Fox News, a/k/a Faux News - Donald Trump, Jr., an arrogant cretin it would seem, released copies of e-mails today that many see as providing special prosecutor Robert Mueller, the "smoking gun" proving collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. While Donny, Jr., claims he released the e-mails for the sake of "transparency,"the reality is that the New York Times was about to disclose the e-mails' contents.   To paraphrase the Times, the emails make it crystal clear that one of Donald Trump's former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton which "would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”  The email, also noted that “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”  Vanity Fair looks at what Trump, Jr. has handed to Robert Mueller.  Here are excerpts:

For more than a year, Donald Trump and his associates have pushed back against allegations that his campaign colluded with the Russian government, which the president has called a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” orchestrated by Clintonworld. But a series of e-mails exchanged between the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid journalist linked to the Trump family through the Miss Universe pageant, suggests that the eldest Trump son not only sought compromising information on Hillary Clinton from a Kremlin-backed lawyer but was aware since at least June 2016 that the Russian government was working to help elect his father.

Trump Jr. received an e-mail from Goldstone informing him that one of his family’s former Russian business partners had received “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” The e-mail chain, which began June 3, was also addressed to the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Trump Jr. responded, “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” In a series of follow-up e-mails, he agreed to meet with the “Russian government attorney”—presumably Natalia Veselnitskaya, who later met with Trump Jr., Kushner, and Manafort at Trump Tower on June 9.

The e-mails between Trump Jr. and Goldstone are the first concrete evidence that the Trump campaign was aware of Russian government effort to help elect Donald Trump—months before the Obama administration made the Russian campaign known, and long before Trump himself acknowledged Russian interference. “The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me,” Trump tweeted on July 25. The day before, Donald Trump Jr. had gone on CNN to decry the Clinton campaign’s claims that the Russians were helping Trump as “disgusting” and “phony.”

The president’s son released the e-mail exchange Tuesday after learning that The New York Times was about to publish a story containing parts of his conversation with Goldstone, which the paper published minutes later. The acknowledgement that he was aware of Kremlin efforts to help his father become president, and his eagerness to meet with a Russian intermediary to solicit the promised information, follows a series of incremental reports from the Times, to which Trump Jr. has responded with ever-shifting explanations [lies].

On Monday, Trump Jr. hired New York-based lawyer Alan Futerfas, who has defended members of several major mob families. Collusion between Russia and members of the Trump campaign is one of several allegations being investigated by the F.B.I., under special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as by parallel inquiries by the intelligence committees in the House and Senate. Trump Jr. has said he would be “happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” in reference to the Senate panel.

In light of all of Trump, Jr.'s series of lies, ,  Trump, Jr., and Der  Trumpenführer himself now want us to believe that Trump senior knew nothing of the meeting that took place in Trump Tower that just happened to include his oldest son and his son-in-law.  As in Watergate, the questions become: what did the president know and when did he know it.  I suspect that he knew about all of it.

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Senator Warner: "Clear Evidence" Trump Campaign Met Russians to Harm Clinton

In addition to the legal problems that he has ignited for himself - and Prince Jared - Donald Trump, Jr., has given investigators their first concrete example of Trump campaign efforts to collude with Russia.  It is something I have always suspected took place given Der Trumpenführer history of dealing with shady (that's being charitable) individuals and ignoring the law when it did not suit his purposes.  One of the most insane side effects of the disclosure is Trump, Sr.'s claim that he knew nothing about the meeting.  Consider this: it occurred in Trump Tower and involved his son and son-in-law.  Only in Trump world is such a far fetched claim believable to his Kool-Aid drinking supporters.  A piece in CNN - not the fake news channel Der Trumpenführer claims (that would be Fox News) - Senator Mark Warner shares his views on the unfolding Russiagate scandal which increasingly has the feeling of Watergate deja vue.  Here are article highlights:

The vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Monday that Donald Trump Jr.'s acknowledgment of a meeting with a Russian lawyer last June is the first clear public evidence that senior Trump campaign officials met with Russians to try to discredit Hillary Clinton.

"This is the first time that the public has seen clear evidence of senior level members of the Trump campaign meeting Russians to try to obtain information that might hurt the campaign of Hillary Clinton," Sen. Mark Warner told reporters.

Trump Jr. acknowledged Sunday that he met with a Russian lawyer who he had been told "might have information helpful to the campaign." . . . Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended the meeting with Veselnitskaya, according to Trump Jr., but he said he told them "nothing of the substance" prior to the meeting.

Warner said Monday that Trump Jr.'s acknowledgment of the meeting reveals a "continuing pattern" of Trump campaign and administration officials having "conveniently forgotten" meetings they had with Russians.
 "It's also a continuing pattern that we've seen since the election of Trump campaign and Trump administration officials who have conveniently forgotten meetings with Russians, only when they are then presented with evidence they have to recant and acknowledge those kind of meetings," the Virginia Democrat said.

"I'm not going to get into the witness list and the individuals that we have talked to or plan on talking to, but rest assured Donald Trump Jr. will be someone that we want to talk to," Warner said. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the same committee, echoed Warner on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" later Monday. . . . . Wyden said he viewed Trump Jr.'s statement on Sunday as an "admission" of attempting to collude with a Russian person to bolster the Trump campaign.

"We don't know what was said, but when I look at somebody's own words, that was an admission," Wyden said. "He was getting together with somebody who was going to give him information of value, a Russian giving him information of value that would help Donald Trump get elected."

As in Watergate, there were first the improper actions followed by constant lies and then presidential efforts to obstruct justice.  The parallel's are increasingly stark.

Trump Jr. Told in Email of Russian Effort to Aid Campaign

Donald Trump, Jr. - did Ivanka get all the brains?

While Der Trumpenführer continues to claim that all Russiagate stories are "fake news," it appears that another shoe may have dropped this evening with a follow up to the New York Times piece that exposed a meeting between Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort and a Russian attorney with ties to the Kremlin.  Amazingly, Trump, Jr., - who increasingly appears to me a moron - eve admitted that the carrot that attracted him to the meeting was the promise of damaging dirt on Hillary Clinton.  Now, tonight, the New York Times has revealed that Trump, Jr., had received an email confirming the promised information was derived from the Russian government.  It's as if Trump, Jr., is striving to singlehandedly document collusion between his father's campaign and the Kremlin.   The fact that Trump, Jr., has hired a criminal defense attorney suggest that the dullard son has realized that he is not above the law.  Here are highlights of the newest development:

Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.

Mr. Goldstone’s message, as described to The New York Times by the three people, indicates that the Russian government was the source of the potentially damaging information.

[T]he email is likely to be of keen interest to the Justice Department and congressional investigators, who are examining whether any of President Trump’s associates colluded with the Russian government to disrupt last year’s election. American intelligence agencies have determined that the Russian government tried to sway the election in favor of Mr. Trump.

The Times first reported on the existence of the meeting on Saturday, and a fuller picture has emerged in subsequent days.

It is unclear whether Mr. Goldstone had direct knowledge of the origin of the damaging material. One person who was briefed on the emails said it appeared that he was passing along information that had been passed through several others.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, the campaign chairman at the time, also attended the June 2016 meeting in New York. Representatives for Mr. Kushner referred requests for comments back to an earlier statement, which said he had voluntarily disclosed the meeting to the federal government.

On Monday, after news reports that he had hired a lawyer, he indicated in a tweet that he would be open to speaking to the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the congressional panels investigating Russian meddling in the election. “Happy to work with the committee to pass on what I know,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Goldstone represents the Russian pop star Emin Agalarov, whose father was President Trump’s business partner in bringing the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013. In an interview Monday, Mr. Goldstone said he was asked by Mr. Agalarov to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

“He said, ‘I’m told she has information about illegal campaign contributions to the D.N.C.,’” Mr. Goldstone recalled, referring to the Democratic National Committee. He said he then emailed Donald Trump Jr., outlining what the lawyer purported to have.

But Mr. Goldstone, who wrote the email over a year ago, denied any knowledge of involvement by the Russian government in the matter, saying that never dawned on him.
His [Trump, Jr.] decision to move ahead with such a meeting was unusual for a political campaign, but it was consistent with the haphazard approach the Trump operation, and the White House, have taken in vetting people they deal with ahead of time.

News of the meeting involving the younger Mr. Trump, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Manafort blunted whatever good feeling the president’s team had after his trip to Europe for the Group of 20 economic summit meeting.

The president learned from his aides about the 2016 meeting at the end of the trip, according to a White House official. But some people in the White House had known for several days that it had occurred, because Mr. Kushner had revised his foreign contact disclosure document to include it.

The president was frustrated by the news of the meeting, according to a person close to him — less over the fact that it had happened, and more because it was yet another story about Russia that had swamped the news cycle.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty - Pt 1

LGBTQ Rights Are In Danger Of Being Rolled Back

My relationships with a number of "friends" who voted for Donald Trump remained strained as some of my worse fears of a Trump/GOP victory continue to be realized.  Why?  The answer is simple: such people have set in motion what may prove to be extremely harmful to me personally and virtually every LGBT American.  Already, Trump and his regime have rolled back a number of LGBT non-discrimination protections.  Sadly, I suspect that the worst is still to come and I believe that many in the LGBT community and among our straight allies underestimate the harm that Der  Trumpenführer and his Christofascist and evangelical Christian seek to inflict.  It is worth remembering that while anti-Semiticism was common in pre-Nazi Germany, few Germans would have dreamed that Hitler and his regime would murder millions of Jews.  Then, like now, it was believed that public opinion would prevent such a wholesale murder of millions.  Justice Neil Gorsuch has shown himself to be an extreme enemy of LGBT equality.  Here in Virginia GOP attorney general candidate, John Adams, is equally hostile towards LGBT citizens. Can LGBT Americans safely rely on growing public acceptance to protect them?  A piece in HuffPost, which I sadly agree with, argues that we cannot.  Here are column highlights:

I’ve many times discussed “victory blindness,” brought on by the seduction of big wins for civil rights and which has had many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people believing they’ve “arrived” ― that LGBTQ rights are secured ― while not seeing the perils ahead.

From as far back as 2014, watching the way that anti-LGBTQ forces were organizing for the future, I was worried about how the LGBTQ community would get too caught up in the anticipated win at the Supreme Court on marriage equality that was coming down the pike in 2015.

The onset of the Trump administration has certainly been a clarion call to snap out of it. And so many queer people have seen the threat and joined the Resistance.

But some recent exchanges and interactions I’ve had lead me to believe that many people, queer and straight, still believe that LGBTQ rights are secure and advancing. They point to public opinion polls, to cultural changes and to progress even in the most conservative corners of the country.

One person, educated in the history of the LGBTQ movement, told me that he couldn’t believe that the Supreme Court would undo something that the majority of Americans now supported ― marriage equality ― and implied a lot of the sounding of the alarm was for the conspiracy-minded.

I find this thinking to be naive and enormously dangerous.

It often doesn’t matter what the majority of Americans believe ― over 90 percent support universal background checks on gun purchases, after all, but we can’t get the legislation passed. The Supreme Court has handed down ruling after ruling that reversed precedents and defied the majority of Americans’ beliefs on voting rights, corporate money in politics, immigration and so many other issues. What is happening in our country right now is clear: a powerful minority is in control and is trying to get the fix in so that it can rule from the minority for a long time to come. 

Let’s look at the facts:

Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch  wrote a dissenting opinion two weeks ago regarding Arkansas and birth certificates for children of same-sex couples, defining himself as the new hardline leader on the court for religious conservatives and inviting lower courts to view the Obergefell marriage equality decision not as settled law, but as open to interpretation, possibly allowing for religious or other exemptions for those opposed to marriage equality.

Days later the Texas Supreme Court refused to see Obergefell as settled, sending a case back to a trial court. Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern, in a piece headlined, “Marriage Equality Could be in Peril,” laid out the case last week for the how marriage equality, with Gorsuch in the lead and Justice Kennedy perhaps retiring at any time and replaced by another anti-LGBTQ conservative, could be overturned.

Mississippi last year passed the most far-reaching anti-LGBTQ law we have seen and just a few weeks ago a federal appeals court ruled that the law should be allowed to take effect. The law allows for businesses and government employees to decline service to LGBTQ people, and that includes bakers, florists, county clerks and and other government employees, based on religious beliefs. It allows for discrimination in housing and employment against same-sex couples or any individual within a same-sex couple.  . . . The law allows mental health professionals and doctors, nurses and clinics to turn away LGBTQ individuals. It also allows state-funded adoption agencies to turn away LGBTQ couples. With several of the Supreme Court’s conservatives seeming to welcome these exemptions, expect other states to move in the same direction and, again, with Gorsuch on the court and Kennedy perhaps retiring at any time soon, it’s frightening to think what the court might decide about such exemptions.

Texas joined Michigan, South Dakota and Mississippi in allowing bans on adoption to same-sex couples by state-funded adoption agencies. In the cases of both Texas and South Dakota, the laws were passed this year and seemed to fly under the radar of all the attention on Donald Trump. But they, too, get at that same issue of allowing exemptions to same sex-marriage, turning same-sex marriage into second-class marriage. Again, look for more states to follow this lead.
The Trump administration has thrown transgender students overboard, withdrawing guidelines on protecting trans students that were put in place by the Obama administration for schools nationwide. And the Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, sees no problem with giving federal dollars to schools that discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender students. 

Trump’s cabinet and undersecretaries include some of the most ardent foes of LGBT rights, from Housing Secretary Ben Carson and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Price and his director of the Office of Civil Rights at HHS, Roger Severino . . . .

Trump has essentially made LGBTQ people invisible. There was no presidential Pride proclamation in June, let alone a White House reception. Two surveys by HHS about older Americans and disabled people have removed questions about sexual orientation, refusing to collect vital data. And the Census Bureau dumped plans to finally include information about sexual orientation and gender identity in the 2020 census. 

This is a vigorous attempt at a full-scale rollback by religious conservatives who’ve been part of Trump’s and the GOP’s base, and it’s already had some success. There is no denying it. Many are woke to it. But I’m afraid far too many LGBTQ people are not, still wanting to revel in victories, pointing to polls and to progress globally.

The United States, however, is right now led by an authoritarian whose party ― always hostile to LGBTQ rights ― has so far given him free rein to engage in destructive behavior against anyone and everyone.

None of us can believe any of the rights we’ve fought for are safe. But more importantly, we need to wake up and see that they are already being stripped away right before our eyes.

When Trump won the 2016 presidential election as a result of the Electoral College's failure to do its duty as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, I noted that emigrating from America might be an option that the husband and I might end up pursuing.  We have taken no action on this as yet, although we are remodeling our master bathroom - doing much of the work ourselves - to make the house more salable if things should come to needing to move.  We have no intention of making the same mistakes made by 1930's German Jews who failed to flee Germany while they had the opportunity. We will watch and wait, but have no intention odf sticking our heads in the sand as to what is happening - right before our eyes. 

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