Making A List

 

Presenting a surfeit of offenses, this column can be consumed cafeteria-style.

Unlike Trump upon the death of Robert Muller, I’ll not say I’m glad Lindsey Graham is dead. As to Mitch McConnell’s “proof of life,” I have questions.

Man-with-a-plan Trump proposed collecting tolls for passage through the Strait. One-eightied a day later.

Here’s an abbreviated, sorta-sanitized joke: A ship sank. Its captain and a married couple made it to an uninhabited island. The captain orders taking turns in a tree to watch for help, and goes first. Every few minutes he says, “All clear. And stop copulating down there.” The couple is puzzled, since they weren’t. It repeats till the end of his shift. Then the husband takes his. “All clear,” he says after several minutes. Then, “By golly, it DOES look like copulation down there.”

I think of it when Trump issues his daily lies about election fraud going on down there. And the fact that the only examples are when he and Republican lawmakers are down there doing it. To us. Like saying Georgia Senators Ossoff and Warnock are “illegitimate” because of nonexistent fraud. That’s 25th Amendment stuff.

With his approval sinking like that ship, Trump’s plan is clear: hammer it incessantly, so that if Ds win November, he’ll claim fraud, and MAGA will gobble it like Trump on a cheeseburger. Meanwhile, he’s fast-tracking his own election dupery by firing the Election Assistance Commissioners, whose job is helping states identify and eliminate fraud. Why? (We pause for the three seconds required to figure it out.)

The murder by ICE of an undocumented Texas man who’d been in the US for 35 years, law-abiding since arrival, started a construction company, put his kids through college, is stomach-turning. He was on his way to a job, three employees with him, each of whom had been in the US for over twenty years. All deny ICE’s claim that he’d tried to run over an officer. Trump is rushing to deport them, which requires another three seconds to comprehend.

After the execution of Renee Good, justified by a similar claim even after video revealed it was a lie, who believes any statement from ICE? Or from Trump’s administration, including him? MAGA. That’s who. Incredibly, ICE thought they were chasing someone else. And they just killed a documented immigrant in Maine in front of his three-year-old daughter. It’s the police state of Trump’s dreams. Even after belatedly pausing (then not pausing) vehicle stops, the deaths are on him. He ordered indiscriminate, massive deportations, with quotas.

It’s a looping online reel: Trump bombs Iran, says Iran wants talks, Iran denies; Trump announces a ceasefire, Iran says there isn’t one; Hormuz is open, Hormuz is closed; one side resumes bombing, then the other; Congress capitulates; Trump says Iran wants talks, Iran denies; Trump says he destroyed Iran’s offence, Iran attacks; Congress capitulates: it’s a war, it’s not a war. Here we go loop-de-loo. As the Queen of Soul asked, “Who’s zoomin’ who”? (I’d have said “whom.)

Yet again, Trump smeared the Smithsonian Institution for recording history truthfully. He aims to rewrite America’s story the way MAGA prefers. Happy slaves, no racism, no Trail of Tears. No liberals, probably. Trump has homed North Korea. History isn’t political. It’s history.

 

If lying about Democrats’ election fraud doesn’t fly, and if commie-calling fails to gain traction, there’s resurrected claims of welfare fraud, a trope sticky like flypaper since Saint Ronnie spoke of welfare queens. Saddled by Trump with another loser after the Iran Memo of Understanding, V.P. J.D. is charged with rooting out fraud (not Trump’s). He hyped a case which, he said, proves Democrats are pro-fraud. The perpetrator was a woman prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned under President Biden. Oops. In J.D.’s defense, in Era d’Trump the lyin’s share is committed by Republicans. He had few options.

Because there’s no bottom below which Trump won’t sink, he shared a photo of a kindergarten ceremony, shaming smiling little girls for wearing hijabs. Because there’s no bottom below which MAGAs won’t sink, there followed ugly comments on the school’s website, including membership-required death threats.

Trump rejected disaster relief for several blue states while granting it to red ones. It’s part of his efforts to manipulate voting, punishing states that neither kow nor tow. And he ordered the Postal Service not to deliver ballots in states that refuse his illegal demands. That’d be us. USPS says it will obey. Courts have a Constitutional duty. Will they?

Continuing its assault on the First Amendment, punishing journalists and others, Trump’s DOJ subpoenaed New York Times reporters for revealing safety problems with his “gifted” Qatari 747, already costing taxpayers $400 million in retrofitting.

Trump inflicted his name onto the airport nearest Married-a-Lardo. At least Ronald Reagan waited till he died. It’s more North-Korea-level cultism. Like the Trumphal Arch, just approved by his hand-picked something-or-other commission. And those fawning posters hanging like dingleberries on government buildings. And now, a one-dollar coin from the US Mint, with his face on it, right next to "In God We Trust." Un-fking-believable. Might 2029 see names removed and projects disassembled? We can hope. 

That’s only one week. Be sure your cafeteria has a sneeze guard.

Stating The State

                    another chatGPT creation

A minute in, when Trump flat-out lied about the economy he inherited and Republicans gave him a standing O, I turned off the SOTU. Everything to follow was predictable and sad. I returned to making a list of recent events. So many topics, too many to ignore or do justice. So here’s a compendium, in shorthand:

• As if we need more evidence of Trump’s unending desire for fawning adulation, or that, with Pam Bondi’s slavish obeisance, he’s turned the Department of inJustice into a vengeance vehicle, there’s that Soviet-style, North Korea-emulating visage hanging from DOJ headquarters. Pre-Trump, Americans found such submissive, cultish idolatry abhorrent.

• The Supreme Court’s rejection of most of Trump’s unconstitutional wielding of tariffs like a child wields a toy light-saber ought to have been 9-0. Three so-called originalists dissented, ignoring clear, parchmentalized language. Justice Kavanaugh, by acclamation the least intelligent of the nonet, based his dissent on adverse consequences of returning the ill-gotten money. Which is like arguing criminals shouldn’t be punished if it would make their families sad.

• Classic Trump: after the verdict, he’s relentlessly attacked “the f..king courts” (his words), calling the justices, including two of his appointees, traitors. What he should have said, is “the f..king Constitution.” Because that’s how he sees it.  

• Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Destruction (sorry: “Protection”) Agency, proudly announced, “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.” Unpacking the Trumped-up mendacity and dangerous stupidity would eat up the rest of this column. 

• As Trump hypes his Epstein-distracting warlette on Iran, recall his words after his prior dog-wagging mission: Iran’s nuclear capability had been “completely and totally obliterated,” debunked within days. The lie is reconfirmed by his current demand that they end their nuclear program.  

• Expecting airports to be named after him, Trump has applied for trademarks for gift-shop junk bearing his name, “including clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.” GOTUS. It’s pathological.  

• Ignoring the First Amendment, Pentagon Pete Hegseth holds prayer meetings there. His latest was led by a Christian nationalist who favors submissive, non-voting women and finds slavery not so bad. They’ll produce fine soldiers.  

• Sending an unrequested and unnecessary hospital ship to Greenland? The ridiculousness is self-evident. But he may have hallucinated it. The man is unwell. 

• Because they make voting more universally accessible, MAGA hates mail-in ballots, which we’ve had here, scandal-free, for years. Because it’s what he does, Trump lied again about them, including claiming the US is the only country that allows voting that way.  

• Like his tariff usurpation, Trump’s desire to nationalize elections is unconstitutional. Does SCOTUS have a two-fer in them? He lies daily about non-existent Democrats’ election rigging while planning to do just that, including sending ICE agents to polling places. Not to arrest people voting illegally, which doesn’t happen, but because many non-white, legal voters, fearing the harassment and detention for days and weeks we’ve seen, might stay away.  

• A former ICE instructor testified that ICE drastically cut required training and lied to Congress about it. Given the intentional brutality and lawlessness we see from them, it would be surprising if it were otherwise.  

• Kash Patel, the FBI’s most unqualified director ever, who loves using his position for personal pleasure, shared the US men’s hockey victory by guzzling beer with them on live TV, like a frat boy. J. Edgar Hoover, he’s not. A Hegseth/Bondi/Pirro-level embarrassment, he is, confirming, once more, that Trump chooses people for compliance, not competence. 

• If it turns out Trump’s personal law firm, dba Bondi’s DOJ, withheld parts of the Epstein files that explicitly accuse him of sexual abuse and rape, would it surprise you?  

• Decades ago, senators on both sides were honorable, intelligent, and committed to legislating for the common good. Though there’s plenty of competition, no one better represents the level of stupidity and uselessness to which the Republican Party’s choices have descended than Utah’s Mike Lee.  

• After a lifetime of scams, grifts, and ripoffs, Trump’s brazenly corrupt “Board of Peace” tops them all. In part consisting of dictators and murderers, each of whom reportedly contributed a billion dollars for a piece of the action, it’s announced-by-Jared mission is to turn Gaza into an investment opportunity for oligarchs, who’ll be protected by a huge military base. Trump will be the board’s president for life, in control of the money, including ten billion U.S. taxpayer dollars he’s committed, unilaterally, to it. For what purpose, other than enriching himself on other people’s dime? More tie clips? He gets away with such outrageous self-dealing by “virtue” of Republican silence and the manufactured devotion of gratefully suckered MAGAs. The importance of the November election he’s trying so hard to scuttle can’t be overstated. 

• End of partial list. Thank you for your attention to these matters.

Killer Cults

No matter in what way one believes humankind came into existence, its current state shows the process was anything but perfect. Unable to grasp the rarity, the obligations of being alive, if ever so briefly, a subset of humans is ruining it, through selfishness, rancor, and intentional ignorance. Enough of them, anyway, to outweigh those who’ve managed to rise above outdated, primitive, and destructive instincts. Even in the minority (we’d like to think), they’re capable of destroying what we’ve been given. And they’re trying.

Perhaps there’s a reason – evolutionary or creationist – that there lingers among so many the need to give cultish, unquestioning devotion to authoritarian figureheads like Trump. “Drink the Kool-Aid,” after all, came from people so willing to submit to Jim Jones that they self-extinguished when asked. Small, isolated cults have always been around, often ending in mass suicide. “Heaven’s Gate” was another.

As difficult as it is to explain such people, they’ve tended to leave the rest of us mystified but unaffected. The cult of Trump, on the other hand, threatens us all. And not just one at a time, like people who fly rainbow flags or wear unwhite skin, but as a country, and, ultimately, as they deny climate change, as a species.

Surrendering to primordial instinct, genuflecting to Trump, a mendacious, solipsistic, embittered man, they’ve closed their minds to what it portends. In our lopsided democracy, they have all the power they need.

What explains the persistence of this deferential defect? Unless one believes a creator made us in his image and, therefore, must be imperfect (because we are), it argues for evolution. No evolutionist suggests it has achieved perfection; once-beneficial, now-destructive behaviors remain, to our detriment. Who knows why?

But it’s a philosophical dead end. For whatever reason, millions of Americans, and more around the world, haven’t the ability, or desire, to rise above prehistoric, reflexive fear and distrust of otherness. Having persisted for eons, that primal instinct may never disappear. In a graduation speech, Illinois Governor Pritzker put it this way: “The best way to spot an idiot: look for the person who is cruel... We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren’t familiar with... In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct... Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being... The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.” (The ellipsis-free version is here.)

The governor has it right, though he might have chosen otherly than “idiot;” applied to themselves, Trumpists don’t like that word. But theirs is a caveman’s worldview: fearful, paranoid, brutish. So-called Christians, in their devotion to Trump they’ve chosen cruelty over compassion. They want to erase kindness and empathy altogether, dismissing them, sneering, as “woke,” attributes to abhor. Texas, Florida, Arkansas, and, increasingly, all red states, are legislating and touting governmental cruelty. If there are conservatives who are disturbed by the trend, they’re shut out and silent. If they could be a force for returning their party to positivity, they choose or dare not.

Why so pessimistic? According to a recent poll, seventy-one percent of Trump supporters trust him for the truth more than family, friends, conservative media figures, or religious leaders. Given his tens of thousands of documented lies (not counting his business scams and failures), it fits with their disregard for his indictments and with the definition of a cult: Gullibility. Unquestioning belief. Self-abnegating obedience. Rather than sequestering in the forests of Guyana, though, or a boarded-up house in San Diego, this cult is embedded in plain sight within the Republican Party, calling the shots, setting the agenda, picking the targets of their Stone-Age thinking.

Much has been written about differences in brain functions between self-described conservatives and liberals. Gut-reactors vs. evaluators, in shorthand. No doubt, the differences would be most dramatic if the comparison specified Trump’s cultists rather than generic conservatives. Although there are stories of people successfully rescued from cults, for most it seems that, once in, there’s no escaping. Cults attract people who need to retreat from reality, who’d rather be told what to believe than make the effort required to think for themselves.

Some polls suggest cracks in the heretofore impenetrable, Foxotrumpian information-repelling wall. Among all Americans, Trump’s approval is dropping; as opposed to rising among his acolytes. Republican plutocrats appear to be taking note. Assessing the near-impossibility of a majority vote for Trump in a head-to-head election – not even in the antiquated Electoral College – and finding no one else worth purchasing, they’re surreptitiously backing third-party candidates; in particular, “No Labels,” designed specifically to pull votes from President Biden, deja-vuing Trump in through the back door.

The only way to get Republicans to rejoin our democracy, though, is a thorough trouncing of Trump at the polls. Then, maybe, they’d also stop supporting idiots (sorry) like those comprising the Freedom Caucus. The cult can easily find a new prevaricator. George Santos, perhaps?