It's Almost Here

 

Example number infinity that FOTUS can do or say whatever he wants and he’ll get no resistance from the MAGAfied, much less Congressional Republicans: Speaking of Rosie O’Donnell, Trump said, on unTruth Sociopath, “I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship. She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!” You’d be excused if you thought that can’t possibly be true, even considering the sort of bizarrity he bleats hourly. 

As dismissive of the Constitution as he is, Trump might believe he has that right. We know he wouldn’t be informed otherwise by A.G. Pam Bondi, whose only legal concern is doing whatever Trump demands, unlawfulness notwithstanding and immaterial. Nor would his base stop to think about the implications, if a Democratic president were to assert that power. They hate everything Ms. O’Donnell is as much as Trump does. It’s a major motivator for their votes.

Thinking of thinking, think how much better off America would be if Trump hadn’t hired, and Congressional Rs hadn’t bent over to them, nothing but arrogant incompetents. According to him, it’s “evil” to ask questions about Kristy Noem’s requirement to get her permission for FEMA expenditures over $100 thousand and how it delayed critical responses to the devastating Texas flood. That’s but one of many accouterments of dictatorship we’re seeing: suppressing probing questions, demonizing dissent. Inklings of a nascent police state have become inkblots, but MAGAs see only butterflies. 

Under Trump’s Bogus Belligerent Budget Bill, ICE will soon have more funding than the FBI, making it America’s largest and most well-financed “law enforcement” agency. Unlike the FBI, which requires college degrees and puts agents through months of training, including teaching what the law does and doesn’t allow, ICE, by rapidly increasing its numbers, will require practically nothing; not even a high school degree. With those enthusiastically brutal arrests by masked, anonymous ICE agents so widely publicized, people who apply must picture themselves doing it, and want in.

In addition to personnel, ICE’s budget includes billions for building new “detention” camps, modeling MAGA’s new objet d'amour, “Alligator Alcatraz.” And what of the hoped-for millions of undocumented residents to be incarcerated, who, according to law, are entitled to bond hearings for release until adjudication? Not under Trump. Millions, his acting ICE director says, must now remain incarcerated until trial, which means months or years. To that end, he just fired seventeen immigration judges. 

Other than arriving illegally, fleeing mortal danger, many are law-abiding, productive contributors to society. Until Trump’s supremely obedient courts allow him to disappear the Fourteenth Amendment, they’ll have children who are American citizens. But maybe they’ll be allowed out during daytime to join Medicaid recipients working as slave laborers on farms. 

The reason Trump, his henchfolk, and MAGAfied Americans countenance these outrages is simple. They see non-white migrants as less than human. They’re “the other,” and othering is a time-proven method dictators use to sneak their way to unchecked power. If “sneak” is the right word. Trump and MAGA’s lack of empathy, their penchant for undisguised cruelty, couldn’t be more obvious.

What people with any claim to righteousness would stand by as the Trump administration orders the incineration of 550 tons of food intended for children starving in war or disaster zones, as part of their heartless ending of USAID? They couldn’t let another organization distribute it? How confident is Trump that his base of believers will never push back? The White House, no joke, recently published this. Why is House Speaker Holy Mike Johnson, who waves his so-called Christianity like panties at a rock concert, silent on any of this?

Since it’s an increasingly hot topic, let’s not ignore those Epstein files which disappeared from Pam Bondi’s desk so thoroughly that they never existed. It’s not speculation to say Trump was in them. For years, by both of their accounts, they were bromantically involved. Because I’m not into conspiracies, I’m just asking. Which is more likely: Epstein hung himself to avoid trial and just happened to do it when cameras weren’t working, or that word got out that he was ready to tip over the bean jar to get a light sentence? Kowtowing to Trump instead of doing what’s right, per usual, House Republicans just voted down a Democratic effort to require release of the files. Might they know there’s there there?

Which makes the MAGA revolt over Ms. Bondi’s claim of nothing there puzzling. One assumes they expected dirt on the Clintons, the Bidens, and more. Because all lefties are pedos. MAGAs must assume Trump is featured, too, but, like everything else Trump, they’d manage to excuse it. He’s playing 4-D checkers. But he sure wants it to go away.

But wait!! Evidently, the files DO exist. Trump, fonda Bondi, is now saying she should release "whatever she thinks is credible." Because that’s how transparency works: his yes-lady will tell us what to believe, and Drump the rest. Pure as the melting glaciers.

America, We Hardly Knew Ye

Fantasy: If every voter knew and understood everything that was in Trump’s Big Bad Bogus Belligerent Belied Bereft Baleful Budget Bill, seventy percent of them would vote out of office every Republican who voted for it. It’s safe to assume, though, that those who get their “news” from the White House official media outlets, Fox, Newsmax, OAN, or their talk radio equivalents will never know. Add together Democrats’ signature inability to produce a coherent and clear message and Republicans’ Machiavellian methods of vote suppression, it’s a bad bet.

What did it take for the performatively recalcitrant but predictably foldable “holdout” Republican Congresspeople to fall in line? A trip to the Oval Office featuring Trump-signed tchotchkes and presidential puffery. To paraphrase the old saw, they know what they are; they were just arguing about the price. 

Those legislators are so sure their constituents care more about punishing immigrants than they do about their own healthcare or food security that they’ll overlook what’s being done to them. If not to them, to millions of others about whom they don’t care. They’ll have been convinced that the billions dedicated to DHS for incarceration and deportation are worth it, even though, of the people now being rounded up, fewer than ten percent have committed violent crimes. 

Now, most of the incarcerated are people who’ve obeyed the law since they arrived illegally, who’ve been here for years, contributing to society and our economy. People whose absence will put businesses out of business. But to MAGAs, it seems, the more immigrants are rounded up, the worse the conditions in which they’re imprisoned, the more gratified they feel.

In addition to the disinformation from rightwing media, Trump’s voters will have seen video of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the El Salvador mimicking concentration camp in Florida’s Everglades swamp. Cages, admired by jocular, visiting Trump. They’ll have seen the tasteless, unbecoming gloat from Kristy Noem’s Department of Homeland Security. They’ll have loved it, taking selfies by the tasteless, unbecoming signs outside the gulag. They’ll buy RNC-approved merch, while chuckling over Trump’s favorite adviser Laura Loomer’s sadistic commentary. Approval of the inexcusable: Team Trump counts on it.

As one who once considered this country fundamentally good, this is stomach-turning. Few, if any, disapprove of deporting murderers and rapists, the committers of violent crimes that constituted Trump’s least inconsistent campaign promise. But what’s happening now is cruelty for its own sake, spearheaded by Stephen Miller and his racist desire for an all-white America. In the future, will we be remembered not for building great things, but for stalags and gulags?

The BBBBBBBBB contains more intentional cruelty. There are, no doubt, people receiving healthcare and food benefits who take advantage of the system, but they are relatively few. Most people on Medicaid are working or can’t. Now, they’ll all have to fill out paperwork at least twice a year; some as much as monthly. Why? Because today’s Republican Party has long since internalized Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” vision of people in need.

According to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “There are no change (sic) in benefits. There’s a change in requirements to get the benefits.” Translation: “It’s there. We’ve just made it hard to get, which we hope you don’t.” The same applies to food stamps, the cost of which is less than that now allotted to incarcerating or deporting migrants, and of which more white people partake than black or brown. Because of the same upside-down, Robbing-Hoodwink priorities, funds for school lunch programs will be eliminated. Climate change is a hoax, as we know, so tax credits for alternative energy will phase out. Because oil. Adapt or die.

Tariffs? Who knows? Trump has flipped, flopped, and flipped again. The bizarre letters he wrote to leaders of Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, and Tunisia thud somewhere between Mafia threat and freshman writing assignment. 

Between now and the election of 2026, it’ll be a battle of words. Truth vs. lies. Straight talk vs. deflection. What characterization applies to which side will be retinized by the beholder. As usual, burdened with a predilection for factuality, Democrats will fight with their hands behind their backs, against a virtual state media conglomerate within which lies and deflection are what bring and keep their viewers and listeners.

We can’t depart before changing the subject to the – what to call it? – strangeness of the DOJ, whose words are its Bondis, announcing there’s no Epstein client list after all, having previously said it was on General Pam’s desk being reviewed. And that Epstein definitely, absolutely, no question killed himself. Nope, not at all suspicious. The DOJ is independent and liars don’t lie.

Another: Now that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is back in US custody, why haven’t we seen pictures of the MS13 knuckle tattoos that Trump assured us were absolutely, definitely, pinky-swear not fake? 

Independence?

 

Independence Day. May it trigger a desire for freedom from the cult of MAGA for enough people to restore America’s greatness. May those waving Old Glory do so while shedding the chains of Trumpism, weighing them down, unrecognized. May they join in furthering the day when America regains its defining goodness.

Pride, according to Christian teaching, is a deadly sin. I’ve never been proud of things over which I’ve had no control. I’m tall. It has given me undeserved advantages, for which I'm not proud. I learned to be a surgeon; I think I did a good job of it. Should I be proud of not being bad? I’m not. No more than having never robbed a bank.

I’m glad I was born in the USA, but, having had no part in it, it’s not a source of pride. Nevertheless, for all its faults, I admire how, as it evolved, America hasn’t denied them, but has worked, if imperfectly, to correct them. Until about ten years ago, I believed our democratic republic was the most moral, ethical, generous, and productive form of government there’s ever been. I’d bet our founders had pride in their product. Then again, most of them were Deists, not Christians.

Because it all happened without me, I’ve never felt proud to be American. If I ever had, though, I couldn’t now. For the same reasoning as pridefulness, I shouldn’t feel shame on this day of celebration, either. I didn’t create nor would I ever join MAGA. So, not ashamed. Deeply disappointed. Sad. Embarrassed. And very, very worried.

It’s not just the unkindness into which America has descended, as if on a down escalator, at the hands of Trump and his punitory cabineteers. It’s that so many Americans – a people I’ve always considered generous, welcoming, and mostly moral – are not only fine with what we’ve become: they’re proud of it.

At every Trump rally, “Proud To Be An American” is played while the congregants sing along. Their pride must be real, but for what? Clearly not for America’s eventual commitment to civil rights for all: they’re glad to see it disappear at the hands of ideologically blinded Justices. That, except for Native Americans, we’re a nation of immigrants is obviously not a source of pride.

Nor, incredibly, are our world-leading institutions of higher education, or the advances in science, technology, and medicine for which their American creators, until Trumpism, were admired gratefully, worldwide. MAGA loves his attacks on them and his attempts to dictate what’s taught.

Are they proud to see immigrants, following the rules, outside courtrooms awaiting hearings for citizenship, snatched by masked, unidentifiable men, sent to prisons abroad? Does it shake their belief that immigrants are “moochers” when it’s workplaces being raided? Does pride burst forth, knowing children are starving and, according to a study in The Lancet, millions of people will die as a result of ending USAID, America’s world-leading beneficence? Not in me. Did our nation’s lifesaving generosity mortify them?

What fireworks are best to celebrate Trump’s undisguised corruption? Are they singing their pride for handing world leadership in research and development to China? Or for America’s role in the resurrection of measles? Do they agree with JD Vance that millions of Americans losing health insurance under Trump’s just-passed Big Bogus Bill is “immaterial”? 

Maybe not. Endungeoned within news sources that ignore those horrors, they probably haven’t heard of them. So they require no proof the election was stolen, that Democrats want to change their children’s gender, that they plan to replace Caucasians with illegal, brown voters. They accept that migrants who fled danger to come here decades ago and have made a better life for their families deserve unadjudicated deportation.

Perhaps not all set out to believe Trumpism’s falsehoods, but they chose news sources that provide nothing else. Telling them diversity in a population destroys it, equity of opportunity diminishes theirs, inclusion of people not like them means exclusion of them. So they find nothing ominous in Trump’s banning of words and books that refer, even obliquely, to those values.

MAGA pride must include seeing reporters who told the truth about Trump’s paltry bombing of Iraq accused by Trump and his belly-baring Cabinet of “demoralizing” the troops who carried out the raid. Like all Trumpish phantasms, they believe it.

On Independence Day, they'll profess pride in America, founded on free speech and the right of assembly, happy that, under Trump, those rights no longer apply to liberals; glad that institutions designed to rebuff authoritarianism are caving to his autocratic threats. Who can be surprised, though? Their movement was founded on Kenyan birth and “Lock her up.”

Surely, many under the spell of MAGA retain reachable decency. What will it take to bring them back? They could start by watching this. And, to understand the appeal, hear this. 

On July Fourth, I’d be proud of those who break free.