“If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention,” writes Charles Blow, reacting to the Alabama Supreme Court’s Tuesday ruling that frozen embryos are children. Destruction of those embryos, even by accident, the court ruled, falls under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
From the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe to plans by Trump-aligned think tanks to restructure the United States to suit Christian nationalists to Alabama’s Tuesday ruling, Tali-bans will pop up all over in a second Trump term. A national abortion ban is clearly on the agenda.
“Control of women’s bodies is the endgame,” Blow continues.
But is it? Reducing women to birthing vessels and daycare attendants is only one part of the plan. Theists who have long argued that the founders intended to create a Christian nation publish textbooks, build theme parks, ban books, and rail against public education on that basis in a bid to force the rest of us to live according to their worldview. And not just women. Women in their minds are simply easier targets.
Will Bunch this week posted a Heritage Foundation clip from last year advocating the elimination of birth control. Bunch comments, “If Democrats can’t defeat a party that wants to end recreational sex then I give up.” Women are not their only targets, boys. They’ll be coming for IUDs and condoms in short order. The most radical among them believe even barrier methods are murder.
If Democrats can't defeat a party that wants to end recreational sex then I give up https://t.co/X8xfuDzbje
Their Mandate for Leadership (over 900 pages) and its supporting organizations toss around the word freedom liberally, but neither liberality nor freedom is their goal. Not, at least, as the majority of Americans living outside their looking-glass world would recognize it.
Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi reminds people that the IVF ban impacts men as well as women, mothers and fathers, families, couples, everyone. The Christian nationalist vision is fueled not simply by isolationism and xenophobia. Their vision is totalizing, and they’ve written it down.
Families are suffering from MAGA Republican attacks on our freedom and health care after Trump’s extreme Supreme Court Justices ended #RoeVWade.
Alabama is the latest attack on mothers and fathers who rely on In Vitro Fertilization to become parents.
It is ironic how, especially post-September 11, whenever a Muslim ran for office, the right screamed that she/he meant to introduce Sharia law to the United States. Some other faith’s religious law: bad. Christian theist’s law: good.
The extremist right threatens civil war whenever it does not get its way in a democratic process it has already abandoned. And they have not gone to guns yet. But already in the post-Roe era we are devolving into free states and slave states where it is not only women’s rights to control their bodies being restricted, but the rights of anyone who wants to become a parent and start a family. Our most intimate decisions are at stake. Christian nationalists’ targets are all of us.
Update: Too good not to add.
Wait, can folks who don’t plan to have children, freeze embryos, and then claim them as dependents for life?
At last night’s S. Carolina town hall, Trump was asked what the actual plan was for the rounding up of immigrants:
Trump: “I came up with a new word myself… [proceeds to put two existing words together in a meaningless way] “… it’s called migrant-crime. And it’s going to be worse than any other type of crime.” [crowd applauds] https://t.co/Uwc6QHd3WK
GOP Rep. Mike Waltz on Trump's mass deportations: "That's the population of Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont that would have to be completely cleaned out, rounded up, and deported." (To be clear Waltz supports this.) pic.twitter.com/fgGDKlmDwj
Faced with a surge of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 and 2019, Donald Trump’s White House discussed ways to more aggressively deploy the resources and the might of the U.S. military.
Aides and officials spoke privately about detaining migrants on military bases and flying them out of the country on military planes — ideas that the Pentagon headed off. Throughout his presidency, Trump himself would frequently demand to send troops to the border and catch people crossing.
“He was obsessed with having the military involved,” said a former senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
That approach and unfinished business have taken on renewed significance and urgency as the country confronts another migrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, and as Trump closes in on the Republican presidential nomination. The former president is making immigration a core campaign theme, promoting a proposal for an unprecedented deportation effort if he is returned to power.
Trump pledges that as president he would immediately launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As a model, he points to an Eisenhower-era program known as “Operation Wetback,” using a derogatory slur for Mexican migrants. The operation used military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers, sometimes transporting them in dangerous conditions that led to some deaths. Former administration officials and policy experts said staging an even larger operation today would face a bottleneck in detention space — a problem that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed addressing by building mass deportation camps.
“Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement. She added that undocumented immigrants “should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home.”
Trump has made similar promises and hasused inflammatory smears since his 2016 campaign. But he, his aides and allies say a second turn in office would be more effective in operating the levers of the federal bureaucracy and less vulnerable to internal resistance. During his term, former officials said, Trump learned to install more officials at the Department of Homeland Security who would carry out his orders instead of trying to curb his impulses.
Anyone who believes that letting these psychos win will teach Joe Biden and the Democrats the lesson that they’d better accept their policies regarding climate/Palestine/immigrants/whatever need to have their heads examined. And yes, I am reading and hearing this on social media.
What it means to be an American has always had many definitions and not all of them good. But selling out to an autocratic foreign power in order to keep power at home is a new one. We haven’t actually done that one before. But it’s the natural consequence of the radicalization of the GOP over many years which has culminated in the elevation of a psychopathic conman to lead the party. And here we are.
It’s right in front of them and they don’t want to acknowledge it
Last night it was reported that the House GOP’s confidential informant, who has been charged with lying to the FBI about Hunter Biden and Burisma (I wrote about that here), was actually working as a Russian agent. It should be the final nail in the Biden impeachment coffin but they seem determined to keep humiliating themselves with this thing (anything for their Dear Leader) so it doesn’t appear they’re ready to roll it up.
This piece by Josh Marshall says it all. (It’s from his newsletter which you should subscribe to, it’s really great.)
A Bigger Story Than You Can Possibly Imagine
I know that’s a big headline that promises a lot. But I think it’s true. David has a good rundown of the events in the Morning Memo. But I want to do my best to set them out on a larger canvas that goes back to the “Hunter Biden laptop” and really all the way back to 2015, a continuing Russian information operation that has been ongoing for almost a decade.
Let’s review recent events. First came the news that prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss’s office had decided that the confidential FBI informant who had been one of Biden’s top accusers had been lying and that they were charging him for lying to the FBI. That next step is critical. Informants lie to prosecutors all the time. They seldom get charged. It’s one standard to decide your informant isn’t telling the truth and/or won’t hold up at trial. It’s an entirely different one to think that you can prove they knowingly lied beyond a reasonable doubt. Clearly investigators felt they had caught Alexander Smirnov dead to rights. Yesterday came news that Smirnov has admitted that he got his false stories from Russian intelligence officers. Smirnov isn’t just at the center of the DOJ investigation, he’s at the center of what we have to generously call James Comer’s House inquiry, the premise for Joe Biden’s increasingly wobbly impeachment.
And on top of that, Hunter Biden’s lawyers are now claiming, as part of their effort to force new disclosures by Weiss’s office, that it was new or newly specific accusations from Smirnov which scuttled the plea deal which blew up as it was being agreed to in a federal court room. That point about the plea deal remains an accusation and obviously an interested one from Biden’s attorneys. But given what we’ve learned over the last week from the prosecution side — the folks who were repeatedly duped and took actions on the basis of disinformation directly from Russian intelligence — it seems to me highly likely that it’s true.
[…]
We were told that Russia’s effort to meddle in the 2016 election was obviously bad. And Rudy Giuliani’s dumpster diving in Ukraine and other parts of the former USSR in 2018 and 2019, which led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment, was probably hoovering up Russian disinformation too. But that was then. Now we’re on to Hunter Biden, obviously the troubled son of a powerful politician whose life skidded into a longterm fugue of drugs and alcohol. That wasn’t real. This is. That was then. This is now. Stop bringing up Russia every time you don’t like a story! This Hunter Biden story is real. But really what we see now, which many of us long suspected, is that this is one ongoing influence operation now going back almost a decade.
For years I’ve continued saying, against what seems like the unified thinking of every reporter, editorialist and credentialed smart person, that the fabled “Hunter Biden Laptop” was obviously the product of a Russian influence operation. The story was absurd on its face. Somehow Hunter Biden decided in a drugged-up fugue that he needed to take his laptop to a computer repair shop. He then forgot about it. The legally blind owner of the repair shop decided to crack it open and look at the files (as one does, of course) and then somehow managed to get the contents to Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.
Sounds totally legit, as they say!
The standard response has always been: but the emails are real! Hunter’s attorneys don’t deny it. But this is silly. The DNC emails were real too. That’s always how these things work. I don’t know whether some bogus documents were added into the trove that eventually made it to news organizations and the FBI. But very clearly some party either hacked into Biden’s computers or physically stole the laptop and then devised this cover story to launder it into the public realm.
And yet basically everybody and I mean everybody ended up falling for this. Indeed, the very brief efforts to remain wary of the laptop story in the final days of the 2020 election have evolved into an object case of the dangers of censorship and even liberal media election meddling. It’s a decision — albeit one lasting only a few days — that everyone now agrees “we got wrong.” It was the centerpiece of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” nonsense. But Elon Musk going in for it isn’t the point. He’s a clown. All the serious people ended up doing exactly the same. This has always been bullshit. Media organizations at first wouldn’t touch the story because they’d spent the previous four years kicking themselves for allowing themselves to become the promoters of a Russian election interference and disinformation campaign with the purloined DNC emails back in 2016. Since the Hunter Biden laptop stories had all the hallmarks of exactly the same thing somehow happening to pop up in the final days of the 2020, of course they were suspicious.
At worst, that initial resistance was very reasonable, given the record for 2016, even if it had been the case that the story was entirely legitimate. But it wasn’t. Even though the Smirnov revelations themselves don’t speak directly to the laptop story, they tell us very clearly that Russian intelligence operations have continued to drive stories at the center of the American political debate right up until today. Their work likely engineered the collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal which was one of the biggest bad news stories for the President last year.
Are we really supposed to believe that these Russian operations, which kicked off in 2015 and continued into 2017, were going full force through 2018 and 2019 with Rudy Giuliani and continue right up until today somehow played no role in the unbelievable story of Hunter Biden’s laptop? Of course they did.
This entire thing has been based on Russian plants and intelligence operations from the start. Every bit of it. It’s been obvious. And yet, well … they’re all dupes. Somehow almost a decade after this whole thing started we’re shocked to see, wow, Weiss’s office was being led around by another cat’s paw of the Russian intelligence services. We’re shocked. But why are we shocked? Every last person among the serious people of the nation’s capital and the sprawling thing called elite received opinion has egg on their face. And it’s not even clear they fully realize it yet.
The point is that Republicans may or may not have been willing dupes. At this stage it’s really hard to extend them the benefit of the doubt. This has been going on for years and years now and it’s become one of those “first as tragedy finally as farce” things. But an even greater problem for us in this moment is, as Josh says, the “reporters, editorialists and commentators, who vouched for and credited this whole edifice of lies and bullshit.” They knew it was bullshit. All you have to do is listen to these clowns for five minutes to know exactly what they were doing. But they wanted the sweet, sweet thrill of taking down Biden. That dynamic has been going on for decades and it’s at the heart of what’s gone wrong in this country.
JV Last at the Bulwark takes a look today at the way the Republicans now see institutions since they realized that they have lost the educated, financially successful American cohorts. Their first order of business was to create alternative institutions which they’ve done successfully with the media which has made it very easy to control politicians by propagandizing their constituents. A case in point:
As a result of losing the popular culture, they now believe that they can only control it by using the power of the state, thus authoritarianism.
-Republicans can no longer create popular majorities, but they can take control of the apparatus of government.
-The institutions of civil society have historically been a mediating layer between citizens and government. But Republicans have also lost the argument with educated and financially successful voters, leading to their loss of support within many American institutions.
-In response, Republicans have decided that the existing institutions of civil society are illegitimate and that all power should be centrally located with the state.
-But if Republicans are also a persistent minority who can only take control of the state intermittently, then they must seek electoral advantage wherever they can: Voting laws to shape the electorate. Post-election lawsuits to change outcomes. Insurrections. Coups.
-Because their only hope of holding off both the popular majorities they see as evil and the institutions they see as illegitimate is to win some final victory in which state power is concentrated within the party and then used to overcome the party’s small-d democratic weakness.
-This is either authoritarianism or, if you prefer, illiberal democracy.
As he says, if you think this is an exaggeration, think again:
He writes that we are in the process of finding out if they will prevail:
The party’s current weaknesses in popularity and institutional footholds mean that it will shift away from the traditional field of political conflicts—elections and institution-building—toward asymmetric conflicts where it has advantages.
Instead of trying to regain a place in mainstream media, it has propaganda outlets. Instead of civil society institutions, it has the Proud Boys. Instead of lobbying efforts, it has direct action. Instead of electoral victories, it has post-election maneuvering. Instead of constitutional governing, it has a . . . more expansive view of executive power.
Meanwhile, there are the “Christians.” I’m sure you’ve been reading about the GOP’s Christian nationalist agenda the last couple of days. It’s been all over the internet although we’ve been talking about it here for quite some time. Alabama this week pretty much voided the ability of people to obtain fertility treatments and IVF because their high court declared that frozen embryos have full human rights. (Pregnant women do not, however.) So, it’s happening.
Here’s just a taste of what the cultists backing their twice divorced, porn star bedding, adjudicated rapist Dear Leader have in mind:
If Democrats can't defeat a party that wants to end recreational sex then I give up https://t.co/X8xfuDzbje
The vast majority of Americans are not on board with any of that. But by the time they figure out that Donald Trump is a liar and a tool (or that yes you should vote for the lesser of two evils) it may be too late.
News came last week of the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny last week. He had survived an attempted assassination by poison in 2020 but eventually returned to Russia, where he was immediately detained and sentenced first to two and a half years, then nine years and ultimately 19 years in prison on charges of “extremism.” In December he was sent to a distant prison in the Russian Arctic. And now he is gone.
Navalny was the most famous political dissident in the world, probably since Nelson Mandela. Those who care about such things held out hope that he would survive incarceration, as Mandela did, and prevail one day in a new Russia. In this era of rising authoritarianism, the death of this man — and his bravery in embodying a dream of freedom and liberty, now for the moment crushed — adds more fuel to fears of the creeping fascism now gaining traction around the world.
For those of us in the U.S., this is particularly distressing because the timing of Navalny’s death feels as though it may be directly connected to the unhinged rhetoric of Donald Trump, the putative presidential nominee of the Republican Party. It’s true that an “election” is scheduled soon in Russia in which it is certain that President Vladimir Putin will be triumphant. There has been some speculation that Navalny’s death was related to that, although it’s hard to understand how that would help Putin domestically. More likely the killing of Navalny is a show of strength following the comments Trump has been making on the campaign trail that if he becomes president again he will give the green light to Russia to invade any NATO country he deems not to have “paid its bills.” (This is based upon his unshakably ignorant insistence that NATO is like one of his golf clubs that require members to pay dues — to him — and there’s no disabusing him of it.) His exact words were, “I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want,” which were heard all over the world as a sign that America was on the verge of abandoning Europe on a fatuous pretext in favor of Russia.
This fear is not unreasonable, considering that the Republicans in Congress have successfully blocked funding for aid to Ukraine on the explicit orders of Donald Trump. That impasse came after Republicans demanded that Democrats and the White House agree to a draconian immigration bill in exchange. They eventually did, but in the end the GOP refused to back the bill anyway because Trump apparently believes it would help Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
You have to wonder whether that’s the real reason he nixed the deal. After all, Biden signing that immigration bill would have further inflamed the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is already upset about the president’s policy on Israel. It’s a perfect wedge issue. Instead, the Democrats are now able to say they tried, and get to blame the Republicans for refusing to take yes for an answer.
And consider this: a Gallup poll from last year shows that siding with Russia remains extremely unpopular among Americans at large, despite Tucker Carlson’s paeans to Moscow’s subways and grocery stores and Trump’s admiration for Putin.
A Pew survey released just last week shows that 74% of Americans view the war in Ukraine as “important to U.S. interests,” and that includes 69% of Republicans. The pro-Putin faction in the GOP is not as big as liberal political observers often believe it is, and it certainly isn’t big enough to explain the way Congress is handling the issue in an election year — beyond, that is, their need to show fealty to Trump.
Trump is once again favoring Putin’s goals, even at the apparent expense of his own. He’s been doing that ever since he came on the political scene, for reasons no one can quite explain.
It’s certainly possible that Trump’s political judgment is not all it’s cracked up to be. He lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes, after all, no matter how loudly he denies it. So it’s curious that Trump is once again favoring Putin’s goals, even at the apparent expense of his own. He’s been doing that ever since he came on the political scene, for reasons no one has ever been able to adequately explain.
When the news broke about Navalny’s death, everyone waited with bated breath to see what Trump would say about it. Would he, for the first time, condemn Vladimir Putin? Would he side with America’s allies? And what would the Republican Party do?
It wasn’t long before we got our answers and they were predictably grotesque:
I think Gingrich was one of the first to compare Trump to Navalny but he wasn’t the last. It took Trump himself three days before he could bring himself to say anything. When he did, it was to echo what Gingrich said:
Trump has embraced this ludicrous idea that he’s the American Navalny, being persecuted by the tyrant Joe Biden. But by doing that he’s implicitly admitting that Putin is a tyrant too, which is unusual. If you wanted to give him credit for being clever, you might think Trump was trying to appease the vast number of Republicans who don’t admire Putin as much as he does while maintaining his martyr status among his cultish flock. But in reality it was just another excuse for him to whine about how badly he is being persecuted, which is his one and only 2024 campaign message.
On Tuesday night, Trump appeared on Fox News. When asked about Navalny’s death, he said it was “sad” but implied that Navalny should have known better than to come back to Russia because he knew what was likely to happen. He never said a word about his pal Putin, perhaps hoping the world wouldn’t notice that he was suggesting Putin was as bad as the monstrous Joe Biden.
When asked about the fines he’s been ordered to pay in his New York fraud case he replied:
That’s gibberish but the point was clear enough. Ordering him to pay up is somehow or other equivalent to being killed in an arctic gulag. In fact, he’d gone further than that in a rally earlier in the day:
Trump: "They say the president that was treated the worst was Abraham Lincoln…Lincoln And Jackson was treated badly,…And I haven't seen the new list (of presidents treated badly), but if I'm not number one, over Lincoln, I will be very disappointed."pic.twitter.com/GVraG8l2oi
Trump insists that he is being treated worse than Navalny — and worse than Abraham Lincoln — because he is a spoiled rich boy who has never been held to account for anything he’s done in his life. On some level, I imagine he believes it. But those two men were murdered. He is being held to account through judicial due process, even as he’s running for president, flying around the country in his private jet, hawking gold sneakers and being feted nightly at his gaudy mansion in Palm Beach by his wealthy paying customers.
No one has ever pitied himself more than Donald J. Trump — certainly not Lincoln or Navalny, who were brave leaders trying to change the world for future generations, not whiners who believed everything in the world revolved around them. As former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer observed, Trump is no “strongman.” He is a very weak man, desperately trying to outrun accountability for a lifetime of failure. The reason he cozies up to the likes of Vladimir Putin is because he’s a coward who would rather “preemptively surrender to protect himself than fight to protect others.”
He’s exactly the opposite of someone like Alexei Navalny. So, by the way, are the pathetic Republicans politicians who follow Trump like a horde of lemmings as he tries to lead the nation and the world over the cliff.
I have always assumed Trump would have more than enough money to finance his campaign. There’s a lot of cash floating around and the MAGA cult loves to give him money. Still, this doesn’t seem like good news:
As Donald Trump’s legal troubles consume more and more of his time, they’re also consuming more of his donors’ money—and there’s a huge hole in the bucket.
On Tuesday, Trump’s “Save America” leadership political action committee reported raising just $8,508 from donors in the entire month of January, while spending about $3.9 million, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission.
Nearly $3 million of that overall spending total was used for one purpose: to pay lawyers.
At the same time, the Trump campaign itself reported a net loss of more than $2.6 million for the month of January. It raised about $8.8 million while spending around $11.5 million, according to a separate filing made public on Tuesday.
The filings reveal that Trump is continuing to burn through his donors’ funds as he struggles to feed two massive cash drains—astronomical legal bills stemming from numerous civil cases and four criminal indictments, plus the costs of a national presidential campaign.
After the Trump filings were released on Tuesday evening, his sole primary challenger, Nikki Haley, flashed a sign of strength, with her campaign reporting $11.5 million in receipts last month. It is the first-ever fundraising period where Haley’s campaign outraised Trump.
Despite reporting almost no donations in January, the Save America PAC—a group Trump launched days after the 2020 election, ostensibly to fund legal challenges—actually increased its bottom line by more than $1 million, ending the month with nearly $6.3 million on hand.
However, that increase can’t be chalked up to new donations. It’s entirely due to a $5 million transfer from a different pro-Trump super PAC, which is still in the process of refunding $60 million that the former president demanded back last year, as his legal bills threatened to put Save America, his legal slush fund, into bankruptcy.
The super PAC has been kicking that refund back in $5 million installments beginning late last spring, but that emergency bailout won’t last, either—the full refund is set to be completed by June.
There’s another metric for the depth of Trump’s financial strain: Save America itself had to bail out yet another one of Trump’s PACs, transferring $500,000 to his old campaign committee in the middle of January. That group, called “Make America Great Again PAC,” started the year with only about $570,000 in the bank, so the mid-month injection from the sputtering Save America suggests that MAGA PAC might very well be in danger of bottoming out too.
A Trump spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a comment request.
As he heads into his third consecutive presidential campaign, it’s safe to say Trump’s cash apparatus is complicated.
I know we’re supposed to believe that he’s a juggernaut and we should all be petrified of him. But he lost the last presidential election and he was an incumbent in the middle of a once in century crisis. That isn’t supposed to happen. Historically, the country rallies around the president at times like that. But he lost.
Sure he could cheat again or incite another insurrection. But there are a lot of facts out there that indicate that he’s not the force that everyone seems to think he is. This money madness is yet another sign of it. Where are all the big donors? Where is the cult?
If you missed Tuesday’s reporting by Politico’s Alexander Ward and Heidi Przybla on plans to enact a Christian nationalist agenda in a second Trump term, do have a look. Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, now “president of The Center for Renewing America think tank, a leading group in a conservative consortium preparing for a second Trump term.” If you thought overturning Roe would turn the U.S. into the Republic of Gilead, that assessment was perhaps not alarming enough:
CRA’s work fits into a broader effort by conservative, MAGA-leaning organizations to influence a future Trump White House. Two people familiar with the plans, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, said that Vought hopes his proximity and regular contact with the former president — he and Trump speak at least once a month, according to one of the people — will elevate Christian nationalism as a focal point in a second Trump term.
The documents obtained by POLITICO do not outline specific Christian nationalist policies. But Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda, saying a person’s background doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, citing Biblical teachings, whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.”
Vought has a close affiliation with Christian nationalist William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives.
Vought, who declined to comment, is advising Project 2025, a governing agenda that would usher in one of the most conservative executive branches in modern American history. The effort is made up of a constellation of conservative groups run by Trump allies who’ve constructed a detailed plan to dismantle or overhaul key agencies in a second term. Among other principles, the project’s “Mandate for Leadership” states that “freedom is defined by God, not man.”
Dan Pfeiffer warns that based on statements from Trump advisers, such an agenda might include:
A national abortion ban;
Using FDA authority to ban or greatly restrict access to abortion medication (a defacto abortion ban);
Undermining marriage equality;
Attacking the rights and freedoms of trans people;
This is not theoretical. All across the country, Republican extremists are implementing policies to further involve the government in people’s private decisions. Republicans want to regulate what you read, who you marry, how you procreate, and your medical decisions. In Alabama, the State Supreme Court just ruled that frozen embryos are people which could end access to in vitro fertilization (IVF). There is no doubt that a Trump Administration would argue against IVF in this case.
There are two things we know about Trump. One, he is not a details guy. He pays little attention to what his government does. The Christian Nationalist hacks that he places in these government jobs will have the freedom to run amok. Two, given a choice between appealing to his MAGA base or the broader electorate, Trump will choose the base every day and twice on Sunday.
We’ve warned here for years about the New Apostolic Reformation and Seven Mountains Domionionism that are apparently too in the weeds for Politico to mention. These tales of Christian nationalism are scary and meant to be. They are written to alert non-believers, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and non-conforming others that Christian nationalists mean to render them more marginalized than they are now. In Jesus’ name, of course.
What Pfeiffer and others miss is that Christians are no more a monolithic block than any other subset on the American demographic landscape. Christianity may represent the predominant faith in the U.S., but the whacked-out brand Christian nationalists advocate, noisy as it is, hardly represents the Christian mainstream. So it’s not just non-Christians who need worry that Christian nationalists might gain control of the levers of power. Christian non-nationalists should worry.
MAGA Republicans may be tribal, but the American Taliban is even less willing to tolerate deviations from the decidedly un-Jesusy views that the god whispering inside their heads finds acceptable. God help you, ordinary Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, etc. You are not exempt. Your freedom of religion is not guaranteed.
Puritans executed other Christians in colonial Salem. Christian nationalists in a second Trump term may say, Hold my beer.
“Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.” It’s something I’ve repeated since taking the Hullabaloo morning shift ten years ago. “Working people know in their guts they work for the economy, not the other way around.”
Joe Biden gets it. In July 2021, he spoke of ensuring “that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.” Unfair competition and monopolies the Roosevelts once worked to rein in have landed us in a second Gilded Age.
“Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path, in my view,” Biden said, “following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition.”
People still know in their guts they are getting screwed, write Katherine J. Cramer and Jonathan D. Cohen in a New York Times guest opinion:
When asked what drives the economy, many Americans have a simple, single answer that comes to mind immediately: “greed.” They believe the rich and powerful have designed the economy to benefit themselves and have left others with too little or with nothing at all.
We know Americans feel this way because we asked them. Over the past two years, as part of a project with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, we and a team of people conducted over 30 small-group conversations with Americans from almost every corner of the country. While national indicators may suggest that the economy is strong, the Americans we listened to are mostly not thriving. They do not see the economy as nourishing or supporting them. Instead, they tend to see it as an obstacle, a set of external forces out of their control that nonetheless seems to hold sway over their lives.
“Greed” is an oversimplification, like reducing the MAGA cult to racism. But it’s handy shorthand for people feeling “the economy is rigged against them.” While income inequality has shrunk somewhat over the last few years, people surveyed still feel their lives are as shaky as a fiddler on the roof, to borrow a famous phrase.
An absence of economic resilience prevents people from spending time with family, from getting involved in their community and from finding ways to build a safety net. “The way the economy is going right now, you don’t know where it’s going to be tomorrow, next week,” a human resources employee in Indiana said. Well-being “is about being financially stable. It’s not about being rich, but it’s about being able to take care of your everyday needs without stressing.”
Stress is a rampant part of American life, much of it caused by financial insecurity. Some people aspire for the mansion on the hill. Many others are looking just to get their feet on solid ground.
Auto loan and credit card deliquencies are up, along with child poverty after the pandemic child tax credit expired. The fiddlers still feel shaky. And our political system is not addressing that sense by meeting their needs:
“In my democracy, I’d like to see us get rid of Republicans, Democrats,” one Kentucky participant told us. “Just stand up there, tell me what you can do. If you can do it, I don’t have to care what you are.” Many Americans seem to see Washington as awash in partisan squabbles over things that have little effect on their lives. Many believe that politicians are looking out for their political party, not the American people.
It should not be surprising, then, that so many are so pessimistic about a seemingly strong economy. A rising gross domestic product lifts lots of boats, but many Americans feel as if they are drowning.
What would make the people we talked to less stressed? The ability to accumulate savings. Low-wage workers have seen their incomes rise only for many of these gains to be wiped out by inflation. And the costs of housing, health care and child care can quickly absorb even a very robust rainy-day fund. Without a safety net that can propel people into security, the threat of these costs will continue to make many Americans feel unstable, uncertain and decidedly unhappy about the economy.
Cramer and Cohen recommend eliminating the benefit cliffs that knock people out of eligibility for financial supports. That would include safety net programs Republicans seem determined to shred for all Americans, their voters included.
Fundamentally, however, what people feel is disempowered, not so much by others’ greed as corrupt elites’ need to stand above and dominate their peers. Accumulated wealth is a means, not the end.
Whatever promises America makes it fails to fully deliver. Over a half century ago, Martin Luther King spoke of broken promises made to its citizens of color. Those remain unfulfilled, but today citizens of color have company. The American economy has defaulted on its promise that anyone who worked hard and played by the rules could get ahead, live a good life, and leave a legacy to their children. Is it any wonder people feel the political system has failed them, not just the economy? Is it as broken as it seems. Biden, ever the optimist. thinks not.
But look at the desperate measures made today, financed by the wealthiest among us, to disenfranchise and marginalize anyone who might ask for a fair share of the tattered American Dream in exchange for their labors. That working people feel their lives as shaky as a fiddler on the roof is no accident. It is intentional.
