Making It White

 

In Trumpworld, the disconnect between rhetoric and reality, verbiage and common sense is so vast, the output so voluminous, that it risks becoming background noise; even in the face of the constant cozening, as Trump and his mouthies tell us, unflinching, that down is up, dark is light. “The greatest first hundred days of any presidency, ever,” Trump claimed, standing amidst the ashes of the economy, consumer confidence, gutted necessary government agencies, trust in America’s world leadership, but dripping with grifted coin by the truckload.

Under a blinding gaslight, fingers surely crossed behind his back, Treasury Secretary Bessent assures us that it’s “strategic uncertainty,” referring to the crashes and mini-recoveries and crashes again of markets, ignoring vacant ports and emptying shelves. Because there’s nothing business owners find more strategic than uncertainty. Consumers, too.

Even with the consistent inconsistency stumbling out of the Oval Office, this latest Trumpy thing called “pronatalism” is something special. Birth rates are dropping, is the worry. Unspoken but obvious, the concern is the end of America’s dominance by white people. Patriotic women, formerly and futurely doing business only as vessels of man’s seed, must submit to the duty knocking (up) at their door. The photo above, complete with Jesus and a bald eagle, is clarifying.

J.D. Vance is pushing it. So, too, is the right-wing media cartel. Elon Musk is making babies faster than he’s producing Swasticars. To them, it’s about incubating future voters. To capitalism, it’s about buyers. To Social Security, it’s payers-in. To Earth, though, it’s about continuing destruction of life-giving biomes, depletion of resources, and, eventually, making the planet uninhabitable for mammals like us. So, whereas there are non-political arguments on both sides of the population issue, from the political right it’s cynicism wrapped in racism tied with a red ribbon of hypocrisy.

The disconcerting disconnect is this: even as they push for more pregnancies, they’re legislating to make life miserable or even impossible for the newly born. Especially for economically disadvantaged ones, who, for the most part, won’t become their voters. But if those children do grow up healthy enough to vote, Republicans are making sure public education won’t prepare them to think critically, making it more likely they’ll vote their way.

Pronatalism is about inciting women to become pregnant, repeatedly. Especially, if they could make it so, white women. In the US, birthrates among whites are significantly lower than among Blacks and Hispanics. Thus the panic: “We’re losing to... them.” And, because MAGA is MAGA, pronatalism is also about shaming women who don’t buy in.

Making America great again includes returning to when making babies was womankind’s sole purpose. And, now, their duty. To Trump. Because, by his own words, he runs the world. 

Pronatalism shares space with the push for public funding of religious and home schooling: when the kids are ready, get them indoctrinated in far-right Christian nationalism and “conservative” values. Kill empathy in the crib. Produce children who’ve become unable to resist the idiocy, like this gob-smacker, for only one example.

To be pronatalist ought to mean being against the anti-life measures forced by today’s Republican Party. Instead, they’re all in. The list is long, broad, and far-reaching. For example, the DOJ has canceled grants for gun violence and addiction prevention, darkening the future for children of all colors and beliefs. Under Trump, because it’s what he does, HHS plans to end suicide hotlines for LGBTQ youth, which get over two thousand calls a day. That’s pro-death, not pro-life. And that’s far from all. A ProPublica report makes it clear:

“The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely. The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, child care, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.”

Pronatalism’s children will be increasingly unsafe: cuts to research on childhood cancer and other diseases. Closing of vaccination centers, ending protections for minorities, unhealthier schools. Worsening climate change, uninspected food. Don’t worry, though, says Trump’s MAGAfied party. If you’re rich enough to protect yourselves from the consequences of our anti-life policies, go forth and multiply. Create voters for us. If not, you’re on your own.

Thoughts and prayers and all that.

Clowns To The Right Of Me

 

In fairness, no one could have seen it coming. No reasons to predict that appointing, to oversee Earth’s most powerful military, an alcohol-abusing, inexperienced, unqualified, sexually profligate (allegedly), threateningly-tattooed, weekend talk-show host on a network known for its troubled relationship with truth would be problematic. After all, America put into even higher office a convicted felon, sexual predator, and bankrupted businessman who got there by lying, cheating, threatening, and/or suing everyone in his way. Who, as promised, ended the Ukraine war on day one and cured inflation. 

No clues. No warnings for fifty members of a party once self-reported as partial to law and order and meritocracy to have voted against confirmation in hopes of being presented with someone only half-terrible. Plus, there’s the matter of consistency: the same slack-back body approved someone to run America’s most powerful law-enforcement agency who’d shown fawning deference to that failed businessman by refusing to prosecute him for one of his many life-destroying scams. And accepted donations in return.

Nor did they have the self-respect to refuse to put in charge of America’s health a brain-bitten, conspiracy-believing, steroid-pumping man with no background in healthcare other than promoting vaccine choices that led to dozens of deaths in Samoa, who couldn’t differentiate a credible scientific study from the morning line on a horse race.

Same with a director of the FBI who conspiratorially disparaged the agency, believing fantasies, who spends more time away from the office than in it, posing for pictures. And yet another picture-poser, playing pistol-packin’ dress-up, in charge of Homeland Security, who had her purse containing $3,000, her passport, driver’s license, and DHS ID badge stolen from under her nose. Plus another TV star and pusher of quackery in charge of administering Medicare and Medicaid. All approved with obsequious rapidity by “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski, whose mother’s relationship to my surgical practice HIPAA prefers I don’t detail (nor shall I discuss my surgical relationship with former Senator Dianne Feinstein’s family), bravely – and why should it require bravery? – voted against some, but not all, of those incompetents. She has since stated the obvious: that colleagues in her party are afraid of Trump; too concerned about primaries and power, future and fortune, to consider their duty to country. Which is exactly how Trump wants them. Exactly how dictators bulldoze and bully bodies theoretically empowered to hold them in check.

But, hey: if good people are being fired from the Pentagon, at least military cadets will no longer be reading Maya Angelou in their libraries, or around 800 other books containing scary words and liberal ideas ripped straight from the Sermon on the Mount. It’s unclear if the words of General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded operations in Afghanistan under Trump, are available in military academies, but, speaking of congressional cowardice, they’re worth hearing:

"When our leaders abandon character ... it tells people that principles are optional, that decency is weakness, that rules are for fools. It fosters a culture of fear, where hesitation replaces confidence, cynicism replaces trust, and self-preservation replaces the courage to stand for what is right. When those at the top abandon the standards that hold society together, the rest of us, knowingly or not, follow suit. And when enough people do, the foundation doesn’t just erode. It crumbles. We cannot afford to let this stand."

The General’s words describe exactly where we are. They apply not only to Republicans in power but to every remaining supporter of Trump. The sort that considers Maryland Senator Chris van Hollen a traitor for calling attention to the dangers of abandoning the rule of law, even for criminals or alleged criminals. The sort who no longer have the ability to tell right from wrong, truth from fiction; who, by following suit, are actively hacking at the foundations of society. Knowingly or not.

Seeing SecDef’s disastrous mismanagement and its deleterious effects in the Pentagon, one might wonder if any of the senators who voted for him have come to regret it. The question answers itself: of course not. Had they the inborn ability and insight to rethink decisions, to hold themselves accountable for their mistakes, they’d not have voted for him in the first place. Every day, they reveal themselves to be the opposite.

So, as others have said, a clown was placed in office and the circus came to town. Talk show hosts talking trash. Lib-stickers in lipstick. An “economist” who quotes himself in made-up names. An Education Secretary into the A1 sauce. A “border czar” who brags about flouting the law. There’s no one to blame but everyone who put them there. 

Finally: Pope Francis was a good, kind man whose life, unlike that of the fake Christians surrounding the fakest of them all, fully embodied the teachings of Jesus. And, therefore, not a MAGA favorite.

He’ll live on in the acts of goodness he performed and in the hearts of those who cherish his memory.

Time To Take A Stand

 

As it is axiomatic that there can be no followers of Jesus’ teachings who support Trump, so it is that there are no conservatives. And whereas there are plenty of Trumpists claiming to be one or the other or both, it’s no more true than if they professed to live on Mars.

Americans of every background and belief – excepting those who have no beliefs other than self-pity and selfishness and the certainty that they’re safe forever from Trump’s tidal wave of tyranny – ought to be sickened by what we’re witnessing from him and his cadre of sycophantic, Constitution-ignoring oppressors. Not just sickened: Taking to the streets. Figuratively, if not literally. Writing a column into the wind, even.

What Christian who accepts what Jesus actually said can countenance the spectacle we just saw in the Oval Office, where two despots congratulated each other for their lawless cruelty? Laughed and joked over the fate of an illegally deported man, incarcerated in a Salvadorian torture chamber. Only an unreachable Foxophile would believe that, had Trump told Bekele to bring the man back, he wouldn’t.

What conservative can accept scooping up people by masked goons and, ignoring due process, the most foundational American law, sending them to a brutal, foreign prison, forever? Or enjoy seeing the gloating pictures of the cruelty the White House produces? 

What law-respecting American, anywhere, would not be outraged by Trump’s plans to send “homegrown” – i.e., American citizens -- to the gulag, without (or despite) adjudication? With only Trump’s or Bondi’s or Patel’s or Rubio’s attestation to their criminality, all of whom lie prolifically in the face of all evidence to the contrary. 

It’s deliberate state-sponsored terror, meant to frighten potential critics into silence. In the US. By the US. It should be unconscionable to every American. For unrepentant MAGAs, it’s an existential disconnect.

If Trump and his confederates can decide who’s a criminal and who isn’t, no American should feel safe. Not Chris Krebs, who, for the crime of telling the truth about a non-stolen election, is subjected to Trump’s weaponized order for a DOJ “investigation.” Under Trump, truth is treason. About another retributive target, he said exactly that. To literal deathly silence from the wrong right.

Remember when “weaponization” was House Republicans’ favorite word? Evidently, it no longer applies, even as Trump attacks Democrats in Congress who’ve stood for justice? Suddenly, as Trump peels away Constitutional protections from us all, House Republicans are three-monkeyed. 

Nor can we yet ignore Trump’s idiotic tariffs. The ones, you know, based on the brilliance of King Arthur of the Deal; permanent not permanent, economy-growing destroying, paused by a genius chess-master as planned all along because people got “yippy” which was planned all along.

Remember the old saw of someone peeing on your leg and claiming it’s raining? It’s what Trump and his excusers have been doing since day zero. Not just about the price of eggs or shower-flow. Or “beautiful, clean coal.” For anthropomoistened lower extremities, nothing beats Marco Rubio, once considered within a standard deviation of reasonable, who offloaded this: “The alliance between POTUS and President Bukele has become an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.” Then he stood and removed his knee pads.

Trump’s abrogation of the First Amendment, facing no resistance from Republican leaders and their enabling media, makes those tariffs seem almost trivial. They’re only about money and food and livelihoods and the ability to retire. Trump’s flouting of the Constitution threatens the persistence of America as the Land of the Free. It hasn’t been the Home of the Brave for a decade: Cowardice has become the unifying characteristic of Congressional Republicans. Among Trump’s voters, though, it’s less about cowardice than the inability to process information in a way that leads to wisdom. Which is the nicest way it can be put.

“Big Law continues to bend the knee to President Trump because they know they were wrong,” announced Trump’s pressbot Karoline Leavitt. About what? Providing constitutionally-protected counsel to people resisting a lawless government? What’s wrong is that, like several media organizations, those lawyers agreed to government bribery, which Pam Bondi will never prosecute.

Addressing Trump’s tariffs, but equally applicable to the mindset of relentless Trumpists, conservative writer David Brooks wrote, “... Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence...” 

Here, it doesn’t much matter how MAGAs vote. But they might have friends or relatives where it does. Or children or grandchildren who, as they seek to survive the wreckage of what once was, will wonder why their progenitors did nothing. They should internalize Sun Tzu’s warning, presaging Trump, "An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes." Then, recognizing their complicity in this evil and remembering what it means to be American, do something.

Not So Tariffic

 

For those paying attention, it’s old news: Trump’s devastating tariffs, like everything else he’s ever said or done, are based on lies. That they were allowed reflects the cowering fecklessness of Congressional Republicans, who, as in all things Trump, kneel before him (or is it behind?)

Our constitution gives tariffs to Congress, except, per a fairly recent law, in cases of national economic emergency. Which Trump declared. When the US was outpacing all other countries in a period of steady economic growth beginning when Joe Biden ran him out of office. The biggest lie, of course, is that tariffed countries pay.

His calculations for the amount of tariff applied have been greeted with laughter. Touting a formula leaving heads scratched and jaws dropped, later festooning it with symbols that changed nothing, he equated trade deficits to tariffs. But, whereas some countries have tariffs on American imports (Switzerland’s is about two percent, e.g.), that’s not the whole story.

Trade deficits exist because other countries make products Americans want at prices they like, while America makes fewer, reciprocally. Deficit is a misnomer. It’s commerce. Nor is it, as Trump says, a rip-off. They give us goods, we give them dollars. Should we not avail ourselves of better TVs?

Trump’s Commerce Secretary foresees tariffs allowing Americans to be the ones screwing tiny screws into iPhones. What other tiny delights await?  

There was no emergency. Trump has been fixated on deficits and tariffs since he was bankrupting casinos and scamming suckers. It’s his bumper-sticker understanding of economics and his desire to abuse power for its own sake. “Look what I did,” he must be saying, surveying the detritus of the world’s economies. “Trump. I did that!”

One thing he got right: White House toadies and Congressional weaklings immediately fell in line, even though most had previously decried tariffs, rightly, as dangerous and inflationary, causing expensive trade wars. Which, Trump hallucinated, are “easy to win.” Now, it’s “We need to suffer to make things right.” Well, not so much “we” as “you.” Millionaires and billionaires all, are they suffering? Perhaps we’ll learn, someday, how many sold their stocks before “Liberation Day.” 

Trump’s economic slaughter of the western world is exactly the quid to their quo that Russia expected from him, making well-spent their investments in his two elections. On Russian TV, they’re giddy. 

Back in the USSA, senseless, vindictive cutting continues. The National Weather Service will end its translations of weather warnings. Because who cares if “those” people are harmed? Not MAGAs. Trump (because, theoretically, Musk works for him, as opposed to reality) even fired the doctor at NIH who provided the unreleased Covid-19 treatment that saved his life when he was deathly ill. Gone, too, are cancer researchers, vaccine experts, and other medical leaders.

Trump’s impeachment backstop, J.D. Vance is lying Trumpically about their next target, Social Security. He's a liar among equals.

Announcing the end of American greatness, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last ended with this: “We have a deeply stupid government . . . But also, we have the government we deserve. The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.” 

Is he wrong? Maybe. Though far too few, half a million Americans gathered in cities across America to protest his trumpling of the Constitution, the cruelty, the flagitious destruction amok in Kingdom Trump. When big enough, protests still matter in what’s left of our democracy. After it was revealed that Trump’s vindictive, bicep-flexing DEI purge included removing Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad from the Parks Service website, the outrage led to reinstatement. But much of our important and teachable history remains gone. The not-white parts.

Outrage? How about the DOJ no longer investigating cryptocurrency fraud, now that Trump et ux have their own brand. Coincidence or contemptible corruption? Same with cuts to the IRS and the DOJ tax division. Live free and donate, prosperous tax-cheats.

Trump has expressed his shoot-‘em dislike of protestors, but, like all dictators, he loves military parades in his honor. Reportedly, he’s planning one for his birthday. A friend and I exchange topical limericks. Here’s mine on that subject:

 

“It’ll stretch out for over a mile, 

Some in bunches and some single file. 

The question they'll ask 

While marching on past 

Is “When’s the required Sieg Heil”?

First, The Lawyers

 

“The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s safe to assume Trump is as unfamiliar with Shakespeare as he is with the Bible, but he’s taken that proposition to heart. His Mafia-style extortion of protection money from some of America’s largest and, until a few days ago, most respected law firms has been of a single purpose: to rob people who oppose him of legal representation. It’s working.

And it’s part of a larger plan to block all avenues of escape from his authoritarian takeover of America. Nor is it just lawyers: It’s the entire justice system. Through Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, he already controls the DOJ. Panegyric Pam refuses to investigate the perpetrators of that security breach by Trump’s unqualified and incompetent clowns at the DOD. And she just ended an ongoing lawsuit filed under President Biden that sought to overturn a Georgia voting restriction deemed specifically targeting Black voters. She called the lawsuit, not the law, “an attempt to divide us.” And Trump just fired career prosecutors who’d been looking into his or his friends’ crimes.

It doesn’t stop there, of course. Trump wants to be rid of all judges who rule against him; true to form, Holy Mike Johnson, who loves everything about America except for everything about it, proposed getting rid of courts altogether – the ones who stand for the law. JD Vance and Elon Musk have been calling for judicial impeachments since before Vance embarrassed his way to Greenland and Tesla stock tanked.

As to that Hegseth-inspired security breach, well, according to Trump’s congressional henchfolk, it wasn’t a breach at all. Trump’s MAGA-speak communication director, Steven Cheung, combined spin, gaslighting, and outright lying in his defense of it.

We’re witnessing not just the word-for-word implementation of every regressive goal of Christian nationalists’ Project 2025 – that thing that Trump has never heard of, the goal of which is to blow up government and keep the leftovers for themselves – but total rejection of the rule of law, domestic and international. KKKristi Noem’s photo-op in front of Venezuelan alleged criminals violated standards dictated by the Geneva Conventions, to which the US is (so far) party: “Prisoners may not be publicly exploited for purposes of propaganda.” But seeing those people, most of whom were already imprisoned here, shackled and sent off to a horrifying El Salvadorean gulag is too much enjoyed by MAGAmericans to ignore. So the White House produces videos of it.

Describing the asymmetric advantage held by authoritarians, Bill Kristol, former Republican operative and Chief of Staff for Dan Quayle (I know; but still...) wrote: “The authoritarians break the rules, and the liberals restore the rules. The authoritarians cheat, and the liberals try to play fair. The authoritarians enjoy their ill-gotten gains, and the liberals try to restore a level playing field for all.” As should be obvious to anyone not Foxomagafied, that’s what’s happening. (Lest conservatives take offense, Kristol’s use of “liberals” refers to the “ism,” not the party. People who oppose authoritarianism. Americans of old, which used to include Republicans.)

Among my “conservative” friends who love what’s going on, one is a professor at a prominent East Coast university who feels his career has been held back because he’s a white male. He’s glad that people he considers unfairly privileged whiners get their due from Trump, especially trans people, for some reason. Another is a retired Marine with whom I get along well as long as we don’t discuss politics. He loves seeing stuck-to libs, and, like Trump, who “couldn’t care less,” he finds the economy-crushing effects of Trump’s tariffs and tax cuts a reasonable price to pay for the pleasure.

For phony Christians like Holy Mike, it’s about ideology and a hall pass to Heaven. For Trump, who has no values, it’s about power for its own sake. And revenge against critics. Because he neither understands nor cares about American history, forcing the Smithsonian to rid itself of “anti-American ideology” (i.e., our history) is the perfect example. (tinyurl.com/by2smith)

Same with threats to universities for what he claims are weak protections against antisemitism, about which he cares even less. It’s power over “elitists” who never accepted him. For the same reason, he allowed President Musk to fire the FDA’s top vaccine scientist and to make drastic cuts to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. To Trump, the hurt he causes is irrelevant. Only his narcissistic psychopathology is.

In Trump’s America, people whose only crimes are expressing opinions, or who are falsely accused, are abducted off streets by masked government men, jailed or disappeared, without the due process our laws require, against judicial orders, and lied about. A government that does that, without resistance, will feel free to do it to anyone it chooses. People unafraid to speak out are accused of defending terrorists. It’s North Korea. It’s Tiananmen Square. If any Republicans care, they’re keeping it to themselves.