Two issues that many journalists and writers continue to walk around are of great concern to me:
1 The core belief of America's right wing, MAGA, and today's Republican party is White Wealthy Christian Male Supremacy. All other beliefs, agenda, policies, and actions are the products of this core belief in the supremacy of wealth, men, Christianity, and white identity.
2 D J Trump is not now nor was ever anything but a Useful Idiot. Putin and Russian intelligence used him. Republican party leaders used him. NBC used him for their hit show “The Apprentice”, and all other major news outlets used him for clickbait and prime time audience numbers. America’s right wing including Christian Nationalist influencers behind pulpits and in local politics used him. The billionaire class and multi-national corporations used him.
Trump is not an innocent misguided victim; he was never a national conservative party leader before 2016. But the popular NBC show had fed his ego and family members like his son-in-law Jared Kushner saw the monetary potential. The Republican party needed a personality who could rally its voter blocs. Like a state fair needs carnival barkers, Republican leaders who were experiencing the fading glory of Reagan’s GOP, rising anger toward Bush era wars, voters’ excitement for a Black family in the White House, and nearly twenty years of Gingrich-led culling of Eisenhower conservatives from the GOP needed someone who could rally the masses against Democratic policies and leaders. Power, ego, personal gain, enormous wealth – these were Trump’s motivating factors.
Why is #1 a big concern? Because the power bestowed on people who adhere themselves – however silently or blatantly they hold to it – to this belief results in great harm, especially to vulnerable populations like women, children, immigrants, low-income earners, and all those compromised in physical or mental health. From the power that parents, teachers, judges, bankers, police officers, etc. hold to those who wield power from government seats. On everyone and everything these Believers touch.
Because voters giving national power in 2016 and again in 2024 to the holders of this belief -- Republican party and MAGA -- shows how pervasive, persistent, and aggressive the belief is among Americans and its institutions, like a plague or a cancer. It will not die with Donald J Trump or MAGA’s fall or end with Democratic wins in the midterms. We’ve got a problem, America. Are you paying attention?
Because the belief in white Christian wealthy male supremacy was never generated in peaceful, benevolent, kind, empathetic, intelligent, knowledgeable, broadly beneficial sources; it cannot be used in peaceful, benevolent, kind, empathetic, intelligent, knowledgeable, broadly beneficial ways toward peaceful, benevolent, kind, empathetic, intelligent, knowledgeable, broadly beneficial ends.
Yes, we can build fires to cook our meals using buffalo dung. But that is an example of ‘how to use dung and diminish its presence near our dugout’ not of ‘dung has a few good qualities so let’s corral a buffalo herd near our dugout and hope we aren’t trampled’.
Try as we might to hide America’s racism, misogyny, LGBTQ hatreds, and institutionalized biases from ourselves -- by rewriting history, employing right wing propaganda on social media and in film, preaching multiple versions of it from church pulpits to confuse the Believers, fudging crime and healthcare statistics, creating irrational fear-mongering stories like ‘thousands of Nicaraguans approaching our border on foot’ and ‘transwomen will compete in and take over women’s sports’ – the world sees us for who we are now: A nation that was clearing paths and healing itself and learning and progressing until the Christian Nationalists and the oligarchs took control of the Republican party in the 1980s.
Why is #2 a big concern? Because setting the political target on one human being, Donald J Trump, is misguided, dishonest, and counterproductive. Every dictator, authoritarian, strongman, religious cult leader, or despot in human history was there because they had a close circle of talented, intelligent, wealthy, desperate, ego-driven, power-hungry people who held them and their ideas aloft.
Why make every story on your podcast or in your newspaper article about Donald J Trump when you know for certain that he was incapable of fulfilling Project 2025 goals without a small group of Republican leaders and their billionaire donors? He is unintelligent, wildly and irrationally imaginative, ego driven, self-indulgent, imbecilic, incompetent, impulsive, uneducated, experienced only in being handed what he wants just to shut him up…a man with a flawed adolescent boy’s brain. He was never capable of writing or enacting policy. He is functionally illiterate and does not have the capacity to comprehend history, intelligence reports, documents like the Constitution, or rational argumentation.
What we are experiencing across our nation was not conceived by this one man, nor has he fulfilled it. This regression, degeneration, retreat from the rule of law, cruelty on immigrants and LGBTQ people, administrative incompetency, corruption…it is all on the Republican party, its powerful leaders, its policy writers, its media owners, its religious devotees, its Christian Nationalists, and its wealthy donors.
The political target should be the Republican party and its billionaire enablers. The demented old rapist is not long for this world; but the GOP and the powerful oligarchs who back it are open for business when he is pushing up golf turf. We will never get a chance to hold him accountable in proportion to the harm and corruption his circle allowed him to fulfill. But neither should we let his circle of advisors and whisperers, handlers and enablers, propogandists, and right-wing strongmen off the hook. If we do not hold them accountable in courts of law and in elections, the nation will never again be a beacon and stronghold of democratic values, freedom, liberty, justice, and equality.