Believe Trump When He Tells You Who He Is

Respected media sources such as NBC and the right leaning Washington Post have recently reported disturbing plans that show Donald Trump and groups supporting him, especially the Heritage Foundation, marching further into right-wing authoritarianism. What’s more frightening is how positively Republican voters have reacted to his plans and pronouncements.

Trump hasn’t even been subtle about his desire to turn the Department of Justice into a retribution organization that he’d unleash on his “enemies” including his own former Attorney General William Barr, and Chief of Staff John Kelly. Trump is miffed by their harsh criticism of him since he left office in 2021. That’s in addition to Trump threatening to tap a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family.

The Heritage Foundation is working on a guide for use by the next Republican administration which they’ve named Project 2025. The guide envisions changing federal service rules that would allow Trump to cut tens of thousands of civil service workers and replace them with ones deemed loyal to Trump’s agenda. The guide also calls for invoking the 1871 Insurrection Act on the first day in office in order to use military forces against protestors.

CNN reports that according to a source familiar with it Trump’s anti-immigrant plan involves rounding up undocumented immigrants already in the US and placing them in detention camps to await deportation. This sort of thing has been done before and often ends up with U.S. citizens being deported because they have brown skin and no one believes them when they claim citizenship even when documentation is provided.

Trump has said he would require local law enforcement agencies to use the widely disparaged stop-and-frisk tactic in order to receive some Justice Department funding. He’s also suggested he would deploy the National Guard to cities dealing with high levels of crime.

In a policy aimed at combating homelessness Trump calls for the building “tent cities” on “inexpensive land” staffed by health care workers, then giving homeless people a choice between relocating to the tent city or facing jail time. That’s not a solution, that’s hiding the problem and past experience with other attempts to hide problems like orphanages and homes for pregnant girls shows the residents are often abused, sometimes fatally.

In his speech at a Veteran’s day rally Trump said that “we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” The “vermin” comment wasn’t an off the cuff remark, it was contained in the written remarks provided to the press. Trump is using the same kind of language as previous genocidal leaders. Nazis characterized Jews as “rats” infecting their pure Aryan society, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge described their enemies as “worms” and “leeches” and in Rwanda, Hutu leaders called Tutsi “cockroaches”.

The poem on the Statue of Liberty says; “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Apparently welcoming and openness is no longer appreciated by Trump and the vast majority of Republicans.

All this ugliness has been revealed by Trump and his team yet he is gaining support among Republican voters. Both Trump and his supporters are telling us who they really are, we should believe them and act accordingly.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - November 29, 2023

Not Conservative, Reactionary

The contortions that the conservative mind can go through to justify an action or choice is mind boggling. A case in point is the reaction to the claims that Hillary Clinton has classified information on her personal server and therefore risked national security. Only one actually was ever actually marked classified and it was inconsequential in content. Trump supporters chanted lock her up. Seven years later, it has become quite clear that Trump retained more than one hundred classified or higher level national security information after leaving office. Many of those documents were stored in boxes or scattered on desks at his Mar-a-Lago club behind doors with locks a ten year old could pick while foreign nationals wondered around un-escorted. I have yet to hear a single one of those chanting lock her up in 2016 say such a thing about Trump even though his behavior is far more egregious especially considering that we now know that he bragged to Australian business tycoon Anthony Pratt providing details on how stealthy our nuclear submarines are and how many nuclear missiles they carry.

Here in Texas the state legislature with the backing of Gov. Abbott passed a bill to provide incentives in the form of low interest loans to electricity generators that use fossil fuels, gas in particular. They did this claiming that it’s to brace up the electricity grid which is in danger of failing due to high energy demand. The reason we barely escaped the summer without blackouts is the record high temperatures experienced across much of the state. It is beyond doubt that climate change is causing the extreme weather and that human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and thus dumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, is causing it. We know all that and yet our governor and state legislature are all in on building more power plants that will dump more CO2 into the atmosphere exacerbating the problem rather than mitigating it. They’d rather give away taxpayer dollars to their fossil fuel friends than arrange to build out sufficient transmission lines to the west Texas wind mills and solar power facilities that investors are anxious to build but can’t get permits because there isn’t enough transmission capacity. Let’s not forget the big freeze in 2021 when most of the state was without power for 3 days was due to gas powered plants and pipelines not being sufficiently weatherized to deal with extreme low temperatures, and nothing has been done about that.

There many other examples of the hypocrisy and denial that Republican voters and their elected officials engage in but I’ll leave you with just one more. The pro-life crowd rants about the sanctity of life but does nothing to make that life better for either child or the mother. In reality they are simply pro-birth and are quite happy to leave children go hungry, lacking in health care, with inadequate education and worst of all no hope. They will lie about abortion risking the health of the woman when the fact is that carrying a child to term in Texas is much riskier especially if you are a poor black woman.

In summation Republicans can claim to be conservative but that’s a lie, they are reactionary and I’m sick of it.

Insurrectionist in Charge

Last week House Republicans finally managed to select a new Speaker of the House to replace Kevin McCarthy. It took three weeks and several false starts to accomplish. They finally settled on Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson, a man who’s most outstanding accomplishment is having provided the legalese of what is essentially the dog ate my homework quality excuse for voting to overturn the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump which was then used by two thirds of the Republicans in the House.

Not only is Johnson an insurrectionist, he has voted for a nationwide ban on abortion with no exceptions and against same sex marriage. Johnson is one of the extremists even if he isn’t as loud as the first speaker candidate Jim Jordan, or Matt Gaetz who threw Kevin McCarthy under the bus.

In an interview with journalist Irin Carmon in 2015 Johnson said “Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are. When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.” That’s a wild and evidence free connection between school shootings and abortion.

Johnson’s way out there conspiracy theory like ideas don’t stop there. He delivered a sermon at Christian Center of Shreveport in 2016 and claimed the United States was founded as a Christian nation but had gotten off track in recent years with the introduction of things like “no-fault divorce laws,” “legalized abortion,” and the teaching of evolution, per the MeidasTouch PAC.

Johnson then explained how in his addled mind this leads to mass shootings: “And people say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple generations now of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”

In addition to voting for a nationwide abortion ban Johnson has co-sponsored three anti-abortion bills all of which carry criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for physicians who perform abortions.

In a September 2022, Johnson spoke about is ahistorical view of the doctrine of separation of church and state saying, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around. If anybody tries to convince you that your biblical beliefs or your religious viewpoint needs to be separated from public affairs, you should politely remind them to review their history and you should not back down.” Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams all said differently.

When he was chair of the Republican Study Committee, which puts out budgets, last term Johnson proposed extreme cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

The fact that the entire Republican caucus voted for an insurrectionist is another example of what I wrote a few weeks ago, voting for Republicans is voting for an authoritarian takeover of the country.

In my view Johnson’s best attribute is he has zero experience raising big campaign donations for his party which is one of the primary functions of the Speaker after setting the House agenda. Between his extremist views and lack of fundraising prowess he should be helpful in enabling a Democratic takeover of the House in 2024.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - November 1, 2023