And on being Frank
A friend named Frank back in high school and college days had a reputation for being really blunt.
“Tom, you look like hell today. No offense,” he might say, grinning. We called it being Frank with you.
This morning’s Frank is Paul. Krugman. Bigots are back, he says bluntly.
MAGA likes that Donald Trump is blunt. Belligerent and bigoted, too. Trump grew up knowing his family’s wealth meant he could get away with doing or saying virtually anything and incur no consequences. He could shoot someone “in the middle of Fifth Avenue” and get away with it, he said himself. For the MAGA world, that feels like a superpower akin to being able to fly or bend steel. It’s a power they feel vicariously by touching the hem of his garment. For people who never evolved beyond race hatreds passed down from their parents, Trump freed them to express their darkest impulses without social opprobrium, at least within their own social circles.
Krugman writes:
Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, declared that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.”
And Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama basically declared New York’s voters subhuman, saying:
These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.
These reactions are vile, and they’re also dishonest. Whatever these men may claim, it’s all about bigotry.
While Tuberville looks like “an ignorant fool” even within a caucus filled with them, “his willingness to use dehumanizing language about millions of people shows that raw racism is rapidly becoming mainstream in American politics.”
Krugman continues:
Remember, during the campaign both Trump and JD Vance amplified the slanders about Haitians eating pets.
And now that they’re in office, you can see the resurgence of raw racism all across Trump administration policies, large and small. You can see it, for example, in the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which are so tilted against racial minorities that a federal judge — one appointed by Ronald Reagan! — declared
I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.
You can see it in the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals — that is, traitors who fought for slavery.
You can even see it in a change in the military’s shaving policy that is clearly custom-designed to drive Black men — who account for around a quarter of the Army’s new recruits — out of the service.
So racism and bigotry are back, big time. Who’s safe? Nobody.
The U.S. Supreme Court just allowed Trump to violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship until everyone stripped of theirs (it will be selective, naturally) litigates their cases in court. Legal resident status is meaningless now. Citizenship is meaningless now. I am a U.S. citizen by birth until Trump decides I am not and makes me defend it in court.
Should Trump’s bigly bill pass into law, it will massively increase funding for ICE brute squads to harrass Americans at random. Just because their focus now is on nonwhites is no consolation.
Krugman reflects:
I personally don’t have any illusions of safety. Yes, I’m a native-born white citizen. But my wife and her family are Black, and some of my friends and relatives are foreign-born U.S. citizens.
Furthermore, I’m Jewish, and anyone who knows their history realizes that whenever right-wing bigotry is on the ascendant, we’re always next in line. Are there really people out there naïve enough to believe MAGA’s claims to be against antisemitism, who can’t see the transparent cynicism and dishonesty?
He concludes, “Everyone who cares about keeping America America needs to take a stand against the resurgence of bigotry. Because the truth is that we’re all rats now.”
Let’s be Frank. Trump and his MAGA movement feel empowered to act like exterminators. If not stopped it could be just a matter of time.
MAGA is Kryptonite to freedom. Yet, America has strong democratic traditions, a friend reminds me, and individualist ones. That’s our superpower. The crowds surrounding swarming ICE thugs who arrive to disappear neighbors aren’t just saying no, but hell no. Silence gives the bigots license. Don’t be silent. We should be Frank about who they are and what they’re doing to this country.
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