No guardrails

Ever since Donald Trump came on the political scene, bragging that he could shoot someone in full view on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter, I and a lot of people on the leftish-side of things have wondered what it would take to get his followers to admit they'd been scammed by a career con-man who has zero moral code.

I think it was about a third of the way into the first Trump presidency that I realized he'd been, for once, telling the unvarnished truth.  I hear now and then of some Trump voter who publicly states that they've woken up and will never support him again, but I think they're very much the exception.  And I've long blamed it largely on the media; a study shortly after the election found that one of the strongest correlations to voting for Trump was lack of access to fact-based information.

So for a while, it was comforting to think that if only these people did have accurate information, they'd come to their senses.  But recently I've begun to think the situation is worse than that.

They know -- but they don't care.  There is no red line, no boundary he could cross that would make people say, "Okay, that's enough."

Since his re-election, Trump's behavior has become more and more unhinged, and instead of provoking a sense of "good lord, what have we done?", the reaction has been more, "Wheeeeee!"  In the last two weeks, the same man who said one of his top priorities was to get us out of military conflicts overseas has stated his intent to annex Greenland and Canada, invade Mexico, and retake the Panama Canal.  (And speaking of media complicity, CNN framed this story as "if he's serious, it'd be the biggest U.S. expansion since the Louisiana Purchase" rather than what any legitimate news source would say, which is, "fucking demented lunatic threatens our allies and risks international conflict with his unprovoked deranged saber-rattling.")

And the fact remains that he's still catastrophically ignorant.  He tweeted this image, apparently without having any idea that the Matterhorn isn't in Canada.

His supporters haven't batted an eyelash.  MAGA Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn said she was all in on taking back the Panama Canal, that "this is what Americans want to see."  Mini-Me, a.k.a. Eric Trump, thought it'd be a good idea to throw fuel on the fire, and posted this:

Next stop, the Sudetenland.

His supporters think Trump has some sophisticated plan here, but he's not playing three-dimensional chess.  He doesn't have the intelligence for tic-tac-toe, much less anything harder.  The Panama thing is most likely retribution, because businesses owned by Trump were recently shut down in the country after accusations of tax evasion and that they were being used as fronts for laundering drug money.  Strategy-wise, he's never progressed any further than "Thag hit me with rock, me hit Thag with rock."

It's why he's threatening to jail Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, and Alexander Vindman.  They committed the cardinal sin of standing up to him, of calling him out on his lies, of demanding that he be held to the same standards of justice as anyone else in the country.  Anyone who dares to point out the Emperor Has No Clothes needs to be silenced by whatever means necessary.

But despite all this, his followers are still cheering -- and lambasting anyone who dares to contradict Dear Leader.

It's gotten so bad that even when one of Trump's favorites -- former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, once nominee for Attorney General -- was credibly shown to have paid for sex, committed statutory rape, and gone on drug-fueled binges, the response by his supposed family-values followers was not to say, "this guy should be locked up," but to circle the wagons and claim Gaetz had been framed.

Lie after lie, grift after grift.  And yet -- somehow -- it's worked, and is still working.  He scams people in broad daylight, and his followers eagerly line up to be taken advantage of.  The evangelical Christians, who are somehow still behind him one hundred percent despite the fact that he embodies all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual, are just thrilled to pieces by the fact that he's hosting a pre-inauguration prayer service and allowing supporters to attend -- for $100,000 each.

"Pay-to-pray," it's being called.  

I may be off-base, here, being an atheist and all, but isn't this the sort of thing that caused Jesus himself to get violent?  Something about using a whip on money-lenders in the Temple, if I remember correctly.

I think the bottom line is that we on the other side of things have made the mistake of thinking this behavior is rational.  That somehow, if we argue, if we just present more information, use logic and facts, people will be convinced.  The truth is, what's happening here is fundamentally irrational; it's precisely the same appeal to emotion, anger, and nationalism that happened in Germany in the 1930s.  Just like Hitler did, Trump is taking the legitimate concerns of struggling citizens -- anger and anxiety over high cost of living, poor access and high cost of health care, lack of decent-paying jobs with benefits, concerns about crime rate -- and twisting the aim to focus on the wrong causes.  Trump's biggest allies are the super-wealthy corporate leaders, so at all costs we can't have them become the targets.  Instead, get the blame pinned on minorities, immigrants, liberal Democrats, non-Christians, LGBTQ+ people.  

It's why alleged CEO-killer Luigi Mangione has them so freaked out.  For a moment, it forced the attention back on corporate billionaires as a fundamental piece of what's wrong in the United States.

But don't expect the focus to stay there.  It's back to distract, distract, distract.  I don't think we're actually going to invade Greenland, Canada, Mexico, or Panama; Trump has the attention span of a toddler who just had eight Milky Way bars for lunch.  And in any case, actually accomplishing any of that was never the goal.  The real goal is to get Americans to stop thinking, and back to treating everything Trump says as the de facto gospel truth.

He knows that if in two years he hasn't followed through on a single one of his campaign promises, much less any of his idle threats, none of his followers will care -- or even remember.

There is no red line, no guardrails, no brakes, no point where the people who back him will say "enough."  Waiting for it to happen is a fool's errand.  We have to resist, we have to continue to fight, but the war won't be won through logical argument.

It's probably crossed your mind to wonder why, if I think the Trump voters are that unreachable through reasoning, I'm bothering to write this.  It's a valid question.  Besides just processing my own anger, for me it's also a way to connect with like-minded folks, to reassure them that there still are sane people in the world.  To quote British philosopher Edmund Burke, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Or as Benjamin Franklin put it, more succinctly and more pointedly: "We must all hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."

****************************************

The cabinet of Doctor MAGAligari

So Dictator-for-Life-elect Donald Trump has started to select his appointees for cabinet and other major government positions, and his choices are as appalling as they are unsurprising.  Apparently the only qualification for being selected is how fervently a prospective candidate has kissed Trump's ass.  Many of these are so awful they'd be funny if the consequences weren't so dire; the worst make replacing a distinguished jurist like Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the vapid Amy Coney Barrett seem like, "Eh, okay, that's not so bad."

Let's start with one that's so weird that when I first saw it posted, I thought it was a parody.  Alas, it isn't.  Trump has proposed a new department of the federal government, to be run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, called "The Department of Governmental Efficiency."  Or... DOGE.

I swear, sometimes the jokes write themselves.

It's unlikely that Trump can just declare the creation of a new department without Congress's approval, so it might be that this will be some sort of advisory board -- or considering the current Congress, maybe they'll just rubber-stamp it.  Whatever form it takes, Musk has already promised to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget, which is going to be tricky because the discretionary budget is only around 1.7 trillion dollars.

But Musk's grasp on reality is such that he considers the loss of three-quarters of the users of Twitter since he took over a sign of his excellent business acumen, so why not?

What's most amusing about this one is that apparently Musk is already rubbing Trump the wrong way, and there are signs that his stay in the administration might be under half a Scaramucci long.  It's unsurprising when you think about it; there's no way in hell Musk and Trump could share the limelight.  There can only be one egotistical, sociopathic man-baby getting the praise, or else sparks start to fly.  What I wonder is what will happen when they have a serious falling out; Musk's way smarter than Trump (not that this is a high bar), and if he starts using his obscene amounts of wealth to sabotage Trump's agenda, things could get ugly fast.

Then there's the nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.  At first, tapping Hegseth struck many people as a puzzling WTF moment; his sole qualification seemed to be that he'd been a host on Fox & Friends.  But further inquiry into Hegseth's background found that there's something darker behind this choice.  Hegseth has frightening ties to the Christofascist movement, especially the "Reformed Reconstructionists" (nicknamed the "TheoBros"), who advocate laws based on Christian supremacy, male dominance, and "building the Kingdom of God on Earth."  A sign of his beliefs is his tattoo someone found an image of:

"Deus Vult" ("God Wills It") was the rallying cry of the Crusaders, and has been taken over by the Christian Dominionists -- who want laws passed requiring Christianity as a prerequisite for holding elected office.

The Environmental Protection Agency is going to be run by New York State congressman Lee Zeldin, whose definition of "protection" is "deregulate the absolute fuck out of everything."  Zeldin has strong ties to the fossil fuel and auto industries, and basically wants to repeal any legislation holding back oil and natural gas drilling.  "While protecting access to clean air and water," Zeldin said, almost as an afterthought, although how he plans on doing both simultaneously is a mystery to everyone, probably including himself.

Then there's Mike Huckabee -- who stated "there's no such thing as a Palestinian" -- as ambassador to Israel.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been nominated for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services; in a speech Trump said he was going to let RFK "go wild on health care."  The man is an antivaxxer, a conspiracy theorist who said that COVID-19 was genetically engineered to spare Jews and Chinese people, and promotes a whole shelf full of fringe-y "alt-med therapies."  He, in fact, seems simply to be an all-around general-purpose wacko, whose extreme anti-science views and determination to spread them was directly responsible for a measles epidemic in Samoa that killed dozens of children.  

And how about Tulsi Gabbard, who called media coverage of the January 6 coup attempt "sensationalized," and labeled Trump's 34 felony convictions as "persecution," who has been nominated for Director of National Intelligence despite having zero experience in intelligence (in both senses of the word).  Representative Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer, said about Gabbard, "Not only is she ill-prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar-al Assad and Vladimir Putin.  As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am deeply concerned about what this nomination portends for our national security.  My Republican colleagues with a backbone should speak out."

But of course they won't, because no one questions Dear Leader.

Perhaps worst of all (at least so far -- heaven only knows what other hideous revelations await in this warped and surreal horror movie), there's the nomination of Florida Representative Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, which may have moved Trump onto shaky ground even with some of his supporters.  Gaetz has been the subject of investigation for having sex with a minor and for child sex trafficking, so putting him in the position of Attorney General -- the top legal advisor to the president, who oversees all issues of law enforcement nationally -- is a horrifying choice.  (I heard an interview with one Republican on the radio this morning who was one hundred percent supportive of Gaetz, and who said that one positive result of the nomination would be shutting down the investigation into Gaetz's actions -- further evidence that the majority of the GOP have more of a problem with a child being queer than they do with a child being raped.)  At least there were two Republicans, who (for obvious reasons) declined to be named, who said they were "stunned and disgusted" by the pick, and that "we wanted him out of the House, but this isn't what we had in mind."

Oh, and Republican Senator Susan Collins went so far as to say she was "shocked" by Gaetz's nomination, thus exceeding her previous most-overwrought emotional state, which was "concerned."  I'm sure she'll even make a frowny-face as she votes "yes" on confirming him.

What's coming?  I'd have said his next likely move was to put Marjorie Taylor Greene in charge of the Department of Education, but he's planning on closing that.  So MTG will have to cool her heels in the House of Representatives for a while longer.  Maybe the My Pillow guy can become the head of the Department of Homeland Security or Surgeon General or something.  I dunno.

The only glimmer of hope I can find in all this -- and it's a slim one -- is that his choices for cabinet members are, one and all, so dramatically unqualified that they're likely to resemble the Keystone Kops more than they do the Wehrmacht.  The problem is, as the entire mess implodes, it can do a lot of damage, depriving American citizens of services they depend on, and in the case of Kennedy and HHS, actually killing people.  As usual, the GOP is the Party of Small Government Until They Want Large Government.  Cutting services to ordinary Americans, defunding public education, destroying health services and medical care, deregulating industry, and killing environmental standards, that's all fine and dandy; but let's get the government into libraries, schools, and people's bedrooms, and along the way get the church into everything.

So those of you who voted for Trump -- I hope you're happy with the chaos that's about to descend.  It's grimly satisfying to know that with Republican control of the Executive Branch, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and (likely) the House of Representatives, you people at least won't have the option of blaming the Democrats when things go to hell.

****************************************

Risk versus chaos

I got up this morning and with some reluctance looked at the news, and I was immediately reminded of something a former student of mine said years ago.

The subject was environmental degradation and climate change, and the question I asked the class was when Americans would be motivated in sufficient numbers to initiate a real change in our environmental policy.  What she said, near as I can recall, was this.

"It won't happen until things have gotten a great deal worse.  Nothing will change until ordinary middle-class people with houses and cars and bank accounts turn on the taps in their kitchen and no water comes out.  Until their kids can't walk to school without wearing gas masks because of the air pollution.  When they go to the grocery store and find the shelves empty.  We're all too comfortable, and when we're comfortable, it's too easy to disappear into that comfort and assume it could never be any other way."

I think we might have crossed that line, not with respect to the environment, but in the governance of the United States as a whole.

In a few short weeks we've been catapulted into chaos.  The powder keg was already there, fashioned over long careful years of preparation by the constant fear-talk of people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.  That message of the Big Bad Other is, honestly, what propelled Donald Trump into the presidency, with his constant harping on illegal aliens destroying America.  Your way of life is in significant peril, they said -- all the while creating exactly the conditions that would imperil our way of life once the match was lit.

What exactly set the powder keg off was almost irrelevant; it could have been anything.  In this case, it was twofold; the lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the murder of a black civilian by a white policeman who had already been investigated multiple times for using excessive force.  It's like the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Serbian extremist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in 1914.  That one act was the first card falling, but the entire house of cards was already there -- and in five years, twenty million people were dead and whole countries devastated beyond recognition.

And like in World War I, the people who could step in and prevent the catastrophe instead are inflaming matters and making it far, far worse.  Donald Trump, who will do anything to protect his bloated ego, was so pissed off by being mocked as "BunkerBoy" on Twitter for his escape into a protected bunker and refusal to appear publicly that he decided to stage a photo-op to prove what a tough, macho strongman he is.  He had the police attack peaceful demonstrators in front of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington D. C. with tear gas and rubber bullets, then marched out in front of it holding a Bible (upside down) and threatened to unleash the military on civilians exercising their right of assembly.

"If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence," he said, "then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore, Donald Trump (29496131773), CC BY-SA 2.0]

His loyal ass-kissers were effusive in their praise.  "No one else would have had the guts to do this," crowed former governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker.  Florida Representative Matt Gaetz said this was the start of the military hunting down "members of Antifa... like we do those in the Middle East."  Not to be outdone, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had this to say:

Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.  If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.  We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.  And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order.  No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.

And you know what "no quarter" means.

Shoot to kill.

We're on a precipice right now, and the people who could rein in this lurching, out-of-control president -- the men and women of his own party -- are refusing to do anything but throw gasoline on the fire.  The only possible solution, the only thing that might keep us from descending into chaos, is if the ordinary middle-class people like the ones my student spoke of will stand up and say "Enough."  We've got to be willing to give up our comfortable, privileged safety and risk being seen and heard by a government that at the moment is doing everything in its power to stop citizens from speaking up and acting in the cause of justice.

I'll end with a quote from Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, which was written in 1935 but is frighteningly prescient:

The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work.  It's the fault of Doremus Jessup!  Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest. 

A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were evil.  But possibly they had to be violent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn't be stirred up otherwise.  If our grandfathers had had the alertness and courage to see the evils of slavery and of a government conducted by gentlemen for gentlemen only, there wouldn't have been any need of agitators and war and blood. 

It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was 'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship.  It's I who murdered Rabbi de Verez.  It's I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes.  I can blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only my own timid soul and drowsy mind.  Forgive, O Lord! 

Is it too late?

************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]