In a private email to friends, a psychologist in Waco marveled at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s stunning 2024 election victory after a term that included, just for starters, bungling a deadly pandemic crisis that arguably cost hundreds of thousands of U.S. lives needlessly and conspiring to overthrow an election he clearly lost:
My mind has been moving through epic failures of judgment
in history, often based on hubris and the enthusiastic embrace of flawed ideas.
Business, politics, medicine and everything else. Titanic. The Maginot Line.
Ford Pinto and Edsel. Trojan War. The Crusades. Fascism in Europe. Thalidomide.
So many more. And now this.
Democracy functioned, more or less, as designed on Nov. 5. Some
76 million voters did not, at least in terms of citizen responsibility,
vigilance and discernment. An acquaintance of mine, a politically savvy mother
of two, posted her grief on Facebook the day after the election: “The number of
times I have said ‘I’m sorry’ to my children this morning is actually chilling.”
A retired physician friend who block-walked for Kamala
Harris and days later remained outraged at the election outcome now delights in the likelihood many ordinary, unthinking Trump supporters will feel the pain
of Trump's cruel and blundering policies to come before my friend suffers from them. He even spoke of parallels with the French Revolution when figures such as
Hébert, Danton and Robespierre exhausted their supply of enemies and so
began chopping one another’s heads off.
Another gifted friend – Mike Raymond, a former marketing director for Coors Brewing, vice president of marketing for Domino’s Pizza, senior vice president of marketing and president of Curves International and adjunct professor of marketing at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University – wrote in the local newspaper:
I’m not reluctant to admit that I’m a Never Trumper. I don’t respect the man or his values.
Since the election, I’ve had to ask myself how I was going to survive the next four years with constant coverage of his lies, boasts and insults. My first thought was to relocate to Portugal. Since this would require the dissolution of my marriage, it is off the table.
My current thinking is to act like he doesn’t exist. I no longer watch TV news coverage, which is a significant life change for me. I limit my online news consumption and never, never enter the world of social media. I don’t know if it will work, but it is the only survival mechanism I can come up with right now.
It’s possibly instructive to consider how our allies abroad view all this. After Scottish First Minister John Swinney formally congratulated Trump on his election victory in a brief note, Scottish Greens co-leader Patrick Harvie unloaded on Swinney, even though Swinney’s gesture appeared strictly perfunctory.
“Writing officially on behalf of the Scottish government,”
Harvie fumed of Swinney, “he wrote that he is ‘sure’ Scotland's cultural and
social ties with the U.S. ‘will flourish’ during the presidency of a
misogynist, a climate denier, a fraudster, a conspiracy monger, a racist, a far-right
politician who tried to overturn an election result both by covert threats and
by inciting violence. Words fail me. What social and cultural ties does the first
minister really think will benefit from a relationship with such a man?”
Me? As a somewhat retired, 70-year-old newspaperman living in the Central Texas city where Trump launched his 2024 reelection campaign and a county where 65 percent of my neighbors on Nov. 5 pulled the switch for Trump, I still have trouble looking certain citizens in the eye. I cannot imagine all of us celebrating, in a year and a half, our nation’s founding on its 250th anniversary with Trump gloating and hogging the spotlight from Declaration of Independence visionaries Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. In returning Trump and his Make America Great Again circus of delusion, deceit and depravity to political and even spiritual power, we prove to the world we are, in fact, no longer great, certainly not worthy of the founders' high hopes.
The irony is that, by the time we break out the flags and firecrackers to mark the semiquincentennial of America's throwing off the shackles of a remote, oppressive monarchy and the founders' subsequent engineering of a constitution with checks to foil any homegrown king, we may well have witnessed what at least some of the founders considered unimaginable – the Republican-run Senate surrendering its constitutionally derived advise-and-consent power over pivotal executive appointments and the Republican-run House giving up its constitutionally derived power of the purse through a Project 2025 "impoundment" scheme dedicated to an imperial presidency under Trump.
Nonsense? Think again. When only a week after the election President-elect Trump demanded that Republican senators bow to his use of recess appointments to bypass embarrassing Senate confirmation hearings gauging and grilling his absurdly dangerous picks for powerful government positions, the three Republican senators vying for the top Senate leadership post – including Texas' John Cornyn – revealed not only little regard for this assault on the U.S. Constitution but themselves as mere Trump stooges, disgracefully amenable to his demands and dictates.
Granted, other presidents have employed recess appointments, though when the nation's first black president did so, the Supreme Court set extralegal conditions on the practice. While Justice Antonin Scalia agreed broadly, he faulted the court majority for not acting more decisively in discouraging the practice. "The real tragedy of today’s decision is not simply the abolition of the Constitution’s limits on the recess-appointment power and the substitution of a novel framework invented by this court," he argued. "It is the damage done to our separation-of-powers jurisprudence more generally."
Of course, late Justice Scalia – once admired as the lion of constitutional originalism in conservative circles – has been quietly shunted aside by Trump followers who claim to be conservative and are anything but.
Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives too many Republicans bow to Trump's kingly ambitions to strip them of their constitutional power to specify federal funding, including cigar-chomping, chicken-hearted "tough guy" Troy Nehls of Fort Bend County, Texas. "There's no question he's the leader of our party, so now he's got a mission statement, his mission, his goals and objectives," Nehls said of Trump days after Trump's reelection. "Whatever that is, we need to embrace it, all of it, every single word... If Donald Trump says 'Jump three feet high and scratch your head,' we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That's it."
Nor can one count on the Supreme Court of the United States, so long as Trump even permits it to have say over his reign. In a July 1 ruling that shocked seasoned observers and will forever define the legacy of the Roberts court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a long, tortuous opinion in Trump v. United States that violates the fundamental, all-American principle that presidents be as accountable under the law as the rest of us. It instead allows immunity loopholes for all sorts of corruption and criminality by a president if he or she can pass off such malfeasance as "official acts."
In doing so, Roberts and his right-wing compadres showed increasing disregard for originalism or legal precedent. They galloped right past Federalist No. 69 by Alexander Hamilton, who in 1788 sought to outline for Americans the benefits of a president over a king in the proposed constitution: "The president of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried and, upon conviction of treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable: There is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution."
New York Times columnist and American observer David Brooks, who visited Waco-based Bayor University less than a month before Election Day, expanded upon his themes of a "social and emotional crisis" in a post-election analysis, insisting voter outrage over inflation – illustrated in the formerly high prices of eggs and gasoline – was, in fact, "superficial" as a contributing cause of the election outcome. The political resurrection of Trump reflected a societal rift over class and education in America. This rift revealed, he said, "sadness and meanness" including anxiety, alienation, loneliness and distrust sufficient to constitute a nationwide "spiritual and emotional crisis."
Left unsaid in Brooks' intellectual speculation is the fact that many American voters ultimately chose to vent their resentments by adopting, just as in 2016, a "burn-it-all-down" approach to American institutions and norms, a "fuck-your-feelings" response to fellow citizens urging caution and prudence, thus returning to power a man only too happy to oblige a broad "class" of people proud of the derisive term applied to them by Hillary Clinton in an unguarded moment in 2016: "deplorables."
XX
It’s possibly relevant that when Trump began his 2024 reelection campaign in Waco on March 25, 2023, city officials – mindful of Trump’s regularly stiffing the venues he played – made him pay $60,714 in advance before his campaign could set up at the airport. That should have communicated something to area voters but probably didn't if they knew about this at all. Faced with the showman’s challenge of topping himself to enthrall followers accustomed to more and more outrageous behavior, Trump in Waco tested his followers’ understanding of citizenship and allegiance to country by inviting all to stand with hand over heart for a pre-recorded rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by January 6 inmates in sync with an audio track of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance amid drone-like background music as images of the Trump executive pomp and Capitol violence replayed on a huge screen. That too should have communicated something to discerning voters.
During nine long hours of interviewing Make America Great
Again disciples that day, I marveled as people bubbling over in giddiness
began arguing with each other over dueling conspiracy theories or erupted in
rants over everything from sovereign-citizen rights to the coming resurrection
of JFK Jr. An Air Force veteran and January 6 rioter from my hometown of
Abilene arrived dressed as Captain America – her schtick these days – and posed
for photos with fellow MAGA merrymakers. Another reveler came adorned as “King
Trump,” complete with crown.
Much of this rambunctious, joyous Trump mania blossomed into
the willful ignorance and denialism I encountered in conversations with
neighbors and interviews with fellow citizens in the months leading up to Election
Day 2024. To quote a pleasant, unhurried 59-year-old man smoking a cigarette
and leaning against a John Deere tractor at the recent Heart O’ Texas Fair
& Rodeo about where he got his news: “It’s Facebook or it happens in front
of me. The world’s not going to stop and I’m not going to die because I didn’t
know what went on in Iran.”
Tellingly, he offered to furnish an opinion if I would
explain what I had been questioning fairgoers about – in this case, Trump’s
Sept. 23 vow to impose a 200 percent tariff on John Deere machinery made in
part in Mexico.
This lackadaisical citizen is one side of the coin. The
other was a block-walker for a candidate aligned with Trump. During an exchange
at my front door, I explained that I couldn’t get past the January 6 skullduggery
and violence to invalidate 2020 election returns. As a professional journalist, I had
witnessed the fate of a local married father of four children duped by Trump
into participating in the riot at the Capitol and now serving nearly seven
years in prison.
Winemaker, former teacher and Air Force veteran Christopher
Grider, I explained, garnered a far more severe sentence than deserved because
he unwittingly contributed to the shooting death of fellow January 6 protester
Ashli Babbitt. The block-walker insisted that Babbitt, also an Air Force
veteran, was merely protesting when shot; I countered, explaining that as a
journalist I had closely reviewed all video footage – and that Babbitt was in
the physical act of catapulting herself through a smashed-out window frame
leading to the House floor when shot.
We ended the exchange on sufficiently friendly terms as she left to knock on other doors, but she made clear I was all wrong. I’ve wondered since: Did she actually see the video footage shot at the Speaker’s Lobby doorway on the Sixth of January? Or did she just mindlessly echo some incendiary account spouted on a right-wing radio talk show bolstering the politically useful martyrdom of Saint Ashli? Not helping matters: Trump's regularly holding Babbitt up before delusional followers as a "patriot" and branding the police officer who shot her a "thug."
Easily disprovable falsehoods certainly dominated the 2024 campaign, mostly spread by Trump and his proxies and digested without question or reservation by cult-like followers: lies about legal Haitian-born immigrants eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats in Ohio, lies about the Federal Emergency Management Agency diverting disaster relief funds from devastated hurricane victims to immigrants, lies about schools secretly overseeing gender-change operations on children, lies (courtesy of billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk) about Democrats “importing voters” from the ranks of non-citizens and illegal immigrants to forge a “one-party state,” and old, recycled lies about the supposed stealing of the 2020 presidential election from Trump.
Compounding this problem: intellectually lazy citizens
getting “news” from conspiracy-infested sources such as Facebook and “X” or
primetime opinion shows leaning into rumormongering and exaggeration. When I asked a 77-year-old
neighbor who claimed Kamala Harris was a Marxist how she could trust anything
on Fox News – her chief news source – after it paid $787 million in a lawsuit
settlement for knowingly and willingly and repeatedly lying to its viewers
about supposedly crooked Dominion voting machines, she timidly suggested that “maybe they learned
their lesson.”
Not likely. An October Ipsos survey of 938 U.S. adults indicates those supporting Trump and immersed in Fox News and other right-wing media far more often flubbed simple questions on inflation, border crossings and crime – key motivating issues – than Harris supporters who answered the very same questions. The difference was the latter relied primarily on national newspapers and mainstream cable news for their information.
What’s more, many of us have partisan prejudices so
baked in that little is likely to move us beyond our usual knee-jerk voting patterns, even when warning signs appear.
Example: a diehard Republican neighbor, a retired lawyer, who over the
past few years on our morning walks has voiced significant outrage over only two matters – participation of transgenders in women’s sports and anything that might
upset his retirement investments, a concern raised when congressional Republicans earlier talked of provoking a government shutdown. How will inflation and the stock
market fare in a global war of tariffs and counter-tariffs and retaliatory tariffs? How will inflation and the stock market fare when the estimated
10 percent of the U.S. workforce consisting of unauthorized immigrants laboring
in housing and highway construction, roofing and slaughterhouses and agriculture is mass-deported at enormous cost from the United States?
* * *
If there's anything that should shock one's sensibilities, it's that the growing, almost casual disregard for constitutional tenets comes from many of the same Republicans who so often during my career showed up at the Waco Tribune-Herald newsroom during election season and waved pocket copies of the U.S. Constitution in my face during editorial board interviews. They did so to demonstrate not only gravity in the serious business of governance but their vow to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
Which explains one of my own deep regrets. As part of a lineage of Republicans extending all the way back to the Civil War, I assured anxious and crestfallen friends and associates upon Trump's stunning election to the presidency in 2016 not to fear, that Republican lawmakers such as John Cornyn and Ted Cruz – Texas' two senators – and our own congressman Bill Flores would surely show sufficient backbone and keep the brash, deceitful, constitutionally contemptuous reality-TV star, wrestling promoter and business tycoon on a short leash and place him in service of the U.S. Constitution and the people.
How colossally wrong I was.
Examples of the astounding transformation of once-responsible, constitutionally respectful Republicans into unprincipled accessories and enablers to constitutional malfeasance and outright corruption are too numerous to bear repeating here, so allow me to cite a less familiar case: Elected as our congressman in Central Texas in 2010 through the defeat of longtime Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards, retired oil & gas executive Bill Flores struck me as a more thoughtful, grounded example of the sort of slash-and-burn lawmaker lifted into power through tea-party sentiments of fiscal responsibility and limited government. While I didn't vote for Flores and even wrote a column urging continued support of Edwards in the election, I nonetheless found him a responsible, intellectually curious sort whose ability to grasp exceedingly complicated issues such as health care belied beliefs by some that he was simply an elected advocate for the oil and gas industry. I even liked the guy.
For me, one of Flores' finest moments came during a 2013 town-hall meeting in Waco in which the congressman calmly dismissed some of the wild claims of area folks who believed President Obama meant to overthrow the United States of America. This included suspicions about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s procurement of 1.6 billion bullets that year. Flores, whose opposition to the Obama administration was undisputed, nonetheless put these conspiratorial theories to rest after someone asked if Homeland Security “is buying millions of rounds of ammunition, plus armored personnel carriers.”
Flores explained that the Department of Homeland Security included some 72,000 uniformed personnel and that the bullets were purchased primarily for legitimate weapons training: “The Department of Homeland Security uses about 120 million bullets a year and they were buying them in a helter-skelter fashion, so Congress encouraged them to buy them on a five-year plan,” he explained. “So they put out a recent bid to buy like a billion bullets of various calibers.” While my numbers varied with Flores’, the congressman's message was clear: To save taxpayer expense, federal authorites dutifully bought in bulk. Hint of problems to come: A segment of voters sought to turn this dash of fiscal conservatism into a crazy conspiracy about the Obama White House seeking to mount a coup.
The congressman then scotched other claims, including one that Homeland Security purchased 2,700 armored carriers (sorry, that was the Department of Defense, though Homeland Security does have a handful) and that railway cars with shackles were purchased – part of a conspiracy theory about government-run concentration camps. “That’s not true,” said Flores, who cheerfully suggested folks not believe everything they read on the Internet.
On the eve of the first Trump presidency, Flores, upon concluding a two-year tenure as chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee – a testament of the high regard in which most conservative Republicans held Flores – quite correctly signaled at an American Enterprise Institute forum before a largely conservative audience that, with the change of administrations, he certainly hadn't changed his belief that Congress’ constitutional authority in crafting laws surmounted any president's executive orders:
I think we’d all agree that some of President Trump’s proposed policies are not going to line up very well with our conservative policies [in Congress]. With respect to that, what I’d like to do is, if I had absolute control over the agenda in the House, and I don’t, I would say: What are those areas where we have good alignment with where President Trump wants to go and where we want to go, and we just tell him, ‘Hey, we’ll take the lead on this and we will give you the legislative and constitutional support to go forward.’ That way he’s not inclined to try to use a pen to follow the Obama model [of overreach through executive orders]. Early on, during the election process, [Trump] said, ‘I will do executive orders to do this, this and this,’ and I think you saw over time where he began to ameliorate those views and soften them because I think his advisers said, ‘Hey, you got to pay attention to what Article I [of the Constitution] says [regarding congressional law-making authority] versus what Article II says [regarding executive-branch authority].’ So I think to reinforce that and make him feel comfortable with that, let’s do tax reform, let’s repeal Obamacare, let’s replace Obamacare, let’s start dealing with border security, let’s rebuild national security.
But while Congressman Flores hadn't changed his belief in the Constitution's Article I powers, some Americans who had strenuously objected to Obama's reliance on executive orders as unconstitutional suddenly went silent at the prospect of Trump doing the same in defiance of Congress, even when the Senate and House would be under Republican control at the start of Trump's term. What's more, any effort to defy Trump, even by Republicans on sure constitutional grounds, would bring condemnation and scorn. During the 2016 holiday period, Flores found himself pilloried by Trump's unsparing media warriors as seeking to confound the president-elect's immigration plans – and all because he had sought to assert Congress' constitutional rights.
By the time Flores opted to retire from Congress at the end of his fifth term in 2020, the transformation from principled public servant to servile Trump lackey seemed nearly complete. He had succumbed not only to Trump's threats but the president's worst instincts, reposting on social media questionable and even outrageous claims such as those peppering the Gateway Pundit website, famous for trafficking in falsehoods, hoaxes and conspiracy theories. I was regularly contacted about Flores' postings of such by, of all people, a prominent Waco Republican who in times past (that is, during the Obama presidency) had occasionally contacted me to politely but firmly serve notice when the Waco Tribune-Herald had, in his view, strayed left of traditional center-right moorings. I suppose I took his calls more seriously than some because, while we might disagree on individual issues, I recognized that his arguments, always civilly and maturely put, were rooted in his deep faith in America and its institutions. He regarded President Trump with horror but was even more dismayed at Flores' seeming conversion.
For instance, he complained that on Jan. 22, 2018, Congressman Flores retweeted a story from Gateway Pundit involving the possibility of a "secret society" embedded in the FBI dedicated to undermining President Trump. This "secret society" reference – quite possibly made in jest – originally surfaced in an exchange of private, post-election text messages between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI agent Peter Strzok, then engaged in a romance. Both made clear their doubts about a Trump presidency. The story seemed to complement Fox TV hosts and right-wing talk radio hawkers who had gone into overdrive encouraging the idea that the FBI was biased in its attitude toward President Trump. If true, the claim might taint Special Counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation into whether the president's inner circle conspired with Russians to manipulate U.S. voters in the 2016 presidential election and whether President Trump sought to derail a lawful federal investigation in 2017 – in short, obstruct U.S. justice.
When called on such posts, Flores laughed it off, attributed it to his own ignorance or misunderstanding and vowed to remove it. But another questionable post would soon appear.
One of Flores' last acts before leaving Congress ranked as especially disgraceful. Along with 125 other Republican lawmakers, he signed an amicus brief in support of the preposterous Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that, on Trump's behalf, sought to invalidate the votes of millions of citizens in four key battleground states. Alleging "unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election" that "cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections," the lawsuit ignored the fact that courts and officials in numerous states – including Texas, by the way – made arguably innocuous tweaks to state election laws to mitigate the impact of a deadly viral pandemic on election workers and voters. Steven Vladeck, celebrated professor of law at the University of Texas, smartly labeled the suit "insane" and "mostly a stunt – a dangerous, offensive and wasteful one, but a stunt nonetheless."
Interestingly, the brief was circulated to lawmakers by Republican Congressman Mike Johnson as a sort of Trump loyalty test, even as Trump meanwhile schemed to remain in power in defiance of a decisive election victory by his Democratic proponent, Joe Biden. “President Trump called me this morning to express his great appreciation for our effort to file an amicus brief in the Texas case on behalf of concerned members of Congress,” Johnson wrote fellow Republicans in the December 2020 email, subsequently obtained by NBC News. “He specifically asked me to contact all Republican members of the House and Senate today and request that all join on to our brief. He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”
Yet the Supreme Court of the United States grasped the audacity and perils of even considering such a lawsuit and on Dec. 11, mere days after its filing, rejected it: "The State of Texas’ motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections." Put another way: How would you Texans respond if the state of Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Georgia or Michigan objected to how you conducted your elections?
Incidentally, Vladeck noted the absence of state solicitor general Kyle Hawkins' name in the Paxton filing. "Good for him for refusing to associate himself with this utter and indefensible nonsense," Vladeck opined.
Flores, however, chose to end his congressional career in association with this "indefensible nonsense."
Because my strategically delayed retirement commenced days after the 2020 general election, I never had an opportunity to conduct an exit interview with Flores to explore what struck me as his shift in approach to governance in the Age of Trump. And, indeed, Trump's words and deeds in protesting the election outcome quickly dominated all else in the news, prompting even my partial return to the field of journalism. I can only assume the congressman in recent years had struggled and squirmed under extraordinary top-down and bottom-up pressures involving a president prone to temper tantrums who was quick to malign and condemn and crucify anyone who crossed him, or who he imagined had crossed him, and dutiful hangers-on and supporters who, hanging on Trump's every tweet to them and regarding them as inviolate, could be counted on to add to the torment.
If it's any consolation, Flores' transformation wasn't as jarring or as disgraceful as that of some fellow lawmakers, but such transformations were clearly obvious to some Americans who expected better, particularly those who expected far better of them. I am reminded of a letter that a friend of mine, Mark Long, a Baylor University history professor, a former military intellience officer and a self-described "conservative with progressive values," dispatched to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn during the latter's 2020 reelection campaign, a letter that I with his permission published in the Tribune-Herald on Sept. 12, 2020. After stating his own conservative credentials, Long continued:
But my ties to the party of conservatism, though not to the political ideology itself, began to change in 2002. A group of intelligence analysts contacted me about a potential conflict in Iraq. I could see only catastrophe ahead, and I opposed our going to war. I didn't offer opposition because I had grown soft on crime but because I was certain no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq. And I was more certain that Iraq would become a largely failed state, offering a venue where al-Qaida could metastasize. More troubling, I saw my party abandoning norms-based internationalism, one that treasured multilateral alliances. A few years later I watched with increasing concern the rise of the Tea Party with the growing politics of vitriol and non-compromise. Worse, in my view, would ensue. And to truncate what further history I might give, I will simply observe that we now have an administration that has so distorted the traditional Republican values of conservatism that I find the party almost unrecognizable. The rise of QAnon candidates for national office within the Republican fold is but the latest sign of that diminution of traditional values, and of clear-headed, fact-based analysis.
Here's what I witness now: an accretion of power in the executive that the Constitution was explicitly designed to prevent, with Article I powers increasingly eviscerated or, sadly, abandoned. I have seen the Trump administration traduce senior intelligence officers I have known - men of extraordinary integrity and ability - simply because they have done their duty and upheld their oaths of office. That, not incidentally, is a traducement unfortunately extended to the intelligence community more broadly. I have watched with dismay as the administration has sacked inspectors general, thus to insulate itself from a rigorous and honest accountability. I have been disconcerted to see the Mueller Report mischaracterized, even as congressional subpoenas have been summarily dismissed. I have seen vacancies languish in essential departments (where only "acting" appointments have been made since April 2019) and critical reports (say, of the EPA) bowdlerized or shunted aside because the truths they tell are inconvenient, or worse. I have seen the Justice Department essentially subverted to become, in effect, the administration's personal counsel. The handling of the pandemic should leave anyone paying attention appalled and gasping (literally) because the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, overseen by the administration's hand-picked director of national intelligence, explicitly warned of it. Moreover, Republicans once believed in science; conservatives still do, and they explicitly reject quackery as a viable disease treatment. And the transparent efforts to hamstring the USPS, thereby endangering our sacred national election, is simply a horror.
All while, our worst enemies mock us, something I see regularly as I engage, as a Middle East specialist, with jihadist messaging. To mention only one of many examples, both al-Qaida and ISIS used the occasion of President Trump's Bible walk to St. John's as a moment for special ridicule . . . and to conflate al-injeel (the Christian Gospel) with the use of tear gas and flash-bang grenades to clear peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights. And as they mock, allies who stood shoulder to shoulder with us against the Soviet threat during the Cold War wonder what in the hell is wrong with us.
* * *
Amid all the nonsense peddled by a right-wing media conglomerate on behalf of Trump among the
ignorant and the indoctrinated, the American electorate proved ripe for moralizing
by Christians championing a profane, lying, vindictive man as their heaven-sent
warrior. Complicit: a multitude of pastors, prophets and self-styled apostles
including Waco’s own Christ the King Baptist Church pastor Ramiro Peña, a
former member of the Baylor University Board of Regents.
On Oct. 22, Peña joined other pastors and apostles in Florida
in laying hands on Trump and praying to God to, in Peña’s words, “lift up the
man that we believe you’ve put your hand upon to help restore America and bring
America back to the place that honors you, to a place where we will not be
kicked out for saying ‘Christ the King’ or ‘Jesus is Lord.’”
Eclipsing Peña moments later was Honduran televangelist
Guillermo Maldonado, founder of the Miami-based King Jesus International
Ministry, who declared just before praying over Trump that “this is not a war
between the left and the right, this is a war between good and evil.” The
audience, assembled in a Trump golf club, not a church, erupted in righteous applause.
When, amidst children dressed as monsters and dinosaurs, I cornered an unusually low-key, seemingly troubled Rev. Peña at his church's Halloween celebration and politely requested a post-election interview, regardless of who won, to discuss the ongoing transformation of Christianity in America and its collective faith in Trump and his own role in it, he quietly and obligingly set a time and date – and then days later directed an assistant to cancel it because of two weeks of activities and obligations that had somehow slipped his mind. Given our mutual respect in the past, I was surprised but not shocked.
Am I now fair in sensing an inclination by a man of God to dodge the whole, increasingly complicated topic, including what some of us regard as the repeated prostitution of Jesus' teachings for evil, self-serving political ends? When Peña and I discussed his support for Trump back in September 2016, he confidently quoted biblical sources. “I have been highly criticized by people I love and are close to me for agreeing to be an adviser to Donald Trump,” Peña told me. “I have taken a lot of criticism for that. But my response is to point to the multiple examples in the Bible where God’s person is an adviser to someone who is not God’s person. All you have to do is read the short book of Daniel. Daniel served, advised and counseled multiple pagan kings. I’m not calling Donald Trump a pagan king. But God uses Daniel to be an adviser to multiple people who are not walking with God — and, again, I’m not saying Trump is not walking with God."
All this stretching and straining to draw biblical parallels justifying the religious anointing of Trump since 2016 has become unbelievably convoluted, including arguments by Christian nationalist and Peña associate Lance Wallnau delinating between Cyrus the Great, to whom Wallnau and others compared Trump during his first presidency, and Darius the Mede, to whom they now seem inclined to compare Trump, complete with (to quote Wallnau in an abolutely mind-bending, Bible-contorting election night broadcast hosted by "prophet" Amanda Grace of Ark of Grace Ministries) "supernatural and angelic reinforcement" as Trump's second divinely ordained presidency begins. For God-fearing followers ignorant of economic dynamics explaining the price of eggs, all this prophesizing and interpretation and proclamation is overwhelming; much better to simply brand Trump's opponents as "babykillers" and move on.
During a dog-walking encounter on the evening of Oct. 18, a neighbor asked if I had attended the Ted Cruz campaign rally in Waco that day. Opting to avoid saying anything inflammatory about someone I blamed for scheming to invalidate the votes of millions of Americans after the 2020 election, I said I saw no need to attend such rallies, that I knew everything I needed to know about Republican U.S. Sen. Cruz as well as his opponent, former Baylor football linebacker and Dallas-based Democratic Congressman Colin Allred. My neighbor agreed, saying she had not gone to the Cruz rally either.
She then observed that though Allred talked of being from
Baylor – a resolutely Christian
university that has lately gone to impressive lengths to atone for its racist
heritage – any Christian must be against "baby-killing." Thus, she
said, “if you’re a Christian, you must vote red." I forced a
chuckle, said I had a different view of Christianity and quipped that she must
have been consulting her "$60 Trump Bible, published in Red China."
My response was feeble but sufficient to end our discussion on a neighborly note.
Granted, I thought of invoking, then and there, all the Baylor-associated Christian scholars I knew – respected and gifted thinkers such as Robert Baird and Blake Burleson and A. Christian van Gorder – and my absolute faith from their remarks to me and their guest columns in the local newspaper that they and many other Baylor scholars were voting for Harris and Allred out of deep concern for women's rights, democracy and the rule of law, and that this surely didn't make them any less “Christian” than her or her friends.
Burleson – a popular and respected presence at Baylor who in his long career has served as a teacher, pastor, administrator, missionary, deacon, adviser and chaplain – even wrote a newspaper column this year offering biblical justification for pro-choice perspectives. He targeted in particular the state of Texas' draconian abortion ban because it "does not trust women to make moral decisions about giving birth. The fact is that many pregnant Texas women – without government coercion – would have chosen during the two years since the overturning of Roe and since the passing of the Texas abortion ban to give birth even if the conception had been unplanned or unwanted. Texas robbed them of their responsibility as co-creators to make that decision before God, reducing their status to that of mere children."
I was there on January 6 and I experienced the violence first-hand, and the fact so many Americans are willing to support a presidential candidate who would inspire that kind of violence, and not just that day – I mean, the former president continues to use the same rhetoric and espouse the same lies. I hate the term "double-down," but he has allied himself with those who stormed the Capitol and attacked police officers on January 6. I mean, in so many words, at a recent event, he said "we" referring to those individuals who attacked the Capitol – "we didn’t have guns, the other side had guns," meaning law enforcement. How as an American do you support a person who clearly supports violent assaults not just on law enforcement but on fellow Americans? If you just take policy out of the equation, this guy is evil. Everything he stands for is anti-American – I mean, [just consider the idea of] using the military against American citizens [which Trump repeatedly espoused in the 2024 campaign].
As an American and someone who dedicated 20 years of my life to law enforcement, I think we’ve failed. Whatever the outcome of the upcoming election, I think we’ve lost. I think we’ve lost something that my generation will never get back. I hope my children can make America great again because it ain’t. Our institutions have failed us. The fact that Donald Trump is a candidate is a failure of our democracy, the fact we can’t seem to hold him accountable for his criminal acts is a failure of our democracy. Because of the Supreme Court, regardless of whoever becomes the next president of the United States, that president will enjoy levels of immunity that I believe – again as a career law enforcement officer – were never intended for any American citizen, president or not. And so it’s terrifying that we should have to concern ourselves with, you know, if this person holds office, they will have the ability to summon SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, to use one example.
Fanone's profound words about Trump, the rule of law, our generation and an electorate that has lost its virtue while claiming to be godly will forever stay with me, especially after the 2024 election outcome. Yet during my dog-walking encounter the evening after Sen. Cruz's campaign rally in town, I decided against deploying such counterpoint against my neighbor and her argument on what real Christians must do. Why upset her rotten-apple cart? A widow with an estranged son, she charitably delivered home-cooked meals to ailing, shut-in neighbors. At dusk weeks earlier when we encountered each other while walking our dogs, she even offered her flashlight because my dog and I had farther to go in the growing darkness. She is truly moved by, if not common sense, then at least some measure of Christian goodness.
And, after all, few differences in political and religious ideology
and idolatry are settled in the streets of Suburbia, U.S.A.
Even so, one expects better of white suburban residents who statistics
suggest are far better-educated than other segments of society. In the weeks leading
up to the election, the widow of a missionary informed me, and with a certain glee,
that the out-of-work son who lived with her had preached to her that women
should not be president. Women were set upon Earth, she said, to be
"nurturers." As she said this, she gestured broadly to illustrate the
point, repeatedly stretching out her arms from her breasts.
Amid such Americans, Kamala Harris never stood a chance. Neither did America.
* * *
Another discouraging realization dawns: No cavalry is riding to the rescue as the Age of Trump ramps up and remakes America – not this time, at least no time soon. As Michael Schaffer reported in his insightful Nov. 15, 2024, “Capital City column” in Politico, anti-Trump forces are responding to Trump’s return to power "with more of a whimper that a shout. Liberals are fleeing Elon Musk’s X; post-election viewership at CNN and MSNBC has fallen off a cliff; big-name publishing houses – which churned out stacks of Trump books during his first term – are 'exhausted' rather than enthused." As Schaffer stresses: “For a country wondering whether the return of Trump will drive an immediate return of the public fury and journalistic energy triggered by his first win, it makes for an early hint that the answer will be: Nope."
The reason for all this may well boil down to my physician friend's prescription for sitting back and watching all the carnage to unfold: The electorate has spoken. Now it can stew in its own collective juices as the pot begins to bubble. Days after the election, we saw Trump nominate a “Fox & Friends” weekend co-host to oversee the Pentagon and the U.S. military; notorious anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary; and bomb-throwing Florida congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general amid a congressional investigation of allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use leveled against him.
One possible reaction: Most of my Trump-supporting neighbors finally took down their Trump banners and signs after these whacky nominations surfaced in the media.
As my physician friend, now into his 70s, stressed in a terse, straightforward Nov. 13 follow-up email to me after a post-election evening spent warmly debating a "failure of messaging" by Democrats in deterring the American electorate's rallying again behind Trump:
Now that you have seen the proposed leadership within major departments and cabinet posts, you must surely begin to see the horrifying magnitude of detrimental change and previously unheard-of incompetence in federal government. This nightmare-become-reality was not unforeseen but clearly and passionately stated, accurately, in warnings before the election by so many through multiple journalistic outlets (broadcast/streamed/printed) and social media. It was declared personally across the nation by the opposition candidates and further supported by legendary stars of stage, screen and athletic stature.
Such dire warnings were not unheeded due to “failure of messaging.” These warnings went unheeded by a selfish simplistic electorate who chose the pretty lies, the titillating fear-speech and the opportunity to vent suppressed misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and racism now presented by Trumpers as patriotism and Christian nationalism.
You heard my stated opinion that for this electorate to really know the truth (and wisdom) of the warnings which they CHOSE to disregard, they must truly FEEL the painful consequences of their choice. I now wholeheartedly believe that they shall. They will painfully FEEL it, and unfortunately so will many of the minority and marginalized U.S. communities, asylum-seekers, U.S, laborers, middle-class consumers, rural America, freedom fighters in Ukraine, those suffering from relentless killing in Gaza and the democratic allies of the U.S. all over the world.
Those who rightly foresaw this horror prior to its imminent reality now after an election that added a Republican U.S. Senate, increased the Republican majority in Congress and restored a MAGA tyrant to the presidency are powerless and blameless as the disaster unfolds. There is not even a storm shelter of protection in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Given this magnitude and rapidity of draconian rush to disaster by Trump, my hope is that the pain of such to be felt by the electorate will lead to contrite repentance at the midterms and sanity in governance will be restored to the Senate and House after the longest two years of chaos has passed. The presidency must wait longer. The U.S. Supreme Court will not be untainted in what remains of my lifetime.
I told you so.
Fair enough. That said, I and others still question if Democrats, in the face of all of the above, fumbled in strategy and messaging. In view of what is likely to unfold, historians will long debate everything from a doddering president's failure to recognize his limitations by bowing out soon enough for a full-fledged Democratic primary process to ensue, to Vice President Harris' continual failure to effectively articulate how her presidency would differ from President Biden's or even smartly answer questions for which she should have been rigorously prepared by her staff.
But my friend's point about all the many warning signs of a constitutionally contemptuous demagogue, warning signs ricocheting madly around a somnambulistic, delusional electorate that instead claimed and arguably feigned outrage over the price of eggs and gasoline (prices which had declined sharply in 2024), is in the final analysis legitimate. Possibly, democracy in America proved too abstract an idea for a crowd that, ironically, also understood very little about fundamental economics, including the likely result of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and a trade policy of tariffs on imports and more tax cuts for the richest Americans.
I'm constantly reminded of political boss James Getty's retort to heady, overconfident and hopelessly naive newspaper titan-turned-gubernatorial candidate Charles Foster Kane in the classic 1941 film "Citizen Kane," which focuses on narcissism, corruption and supreme lapses of judgment in the rough-and-tumble American political arena: "You're going to need more than one lesson. And you're going to get more than one lesson." So far as the American electorate goes, on this point my physician friend and I agree: If the death and chaos of everyday Americans because of the Trump administration's reckless oversight of a catastrophic pandemic; if the Trump-directed taxpayer bailout of farmers because of a Trump-directed tariff war; if the attempted overthrow of a national election through covert scheming and outright violence – if all these and more during the first Trump term weren't lesson enough, then we're in need of more than one lesson. And we're going to get more than one lesson.
That said, expect more MAGA denials or ho-hum acceptance as the constitutional transgressions and human rights violations mount. Much of the electorate has devolved into a bread-and-circus mindset, the sort that distracted the masses during the decline of the Roman Empire. Tom Nichols, retired professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a shrewd political observer, argues many Americans have over time become like Trump, which conjures up late Waco Tribune-Herald publisher Jim Wilson's belief that Trump opened the Pandora's Box within each of us. If racism and hatred lay within, buried beneath layers of civility and political correctness, then they were then unleashed upon society and democracy.
One reason so many of us reeling from Trump's political resurrection have retreated to almost cloistered existences since Election Day – temporarily avoiding both news of his great triumph and friends with whom we bitterly disagree – is the in-your-face, I'm-a-patriot-you're-not exuberance of so many MAGA followers, even in victory. While a graying couple from Abilene and I met at a local restaurant this past summer and discussed their efforts to purchase a retirement home in the nearby McLennan County town of McGregor, we struck up a conversation with a beaming, graying and quite possibly inebriated restaurant patron passing by. (Journalists do this sort of thing.) I asked if the occasional roar of rockets at SpaceX visionary and Trump cheerleader Elon Musk's nearby rocket-testing facility might, in his opinion, prove too loud and annoying for my friends. Some residents have complained of cracked foundations and shattered windows.
"Maybe, but it's not as loud as the screeching of Nancy Pelosi!' the patron exclaimed.
I laughed at this audacious, remarkably uninvited burst of political enthusiasm, then asked, for the serious benefit of my lifelong friends, what he considered the best thing about living in the Waco area.
"Lotsa Republicans!" he exlaimed.
And the worst thing?
"Too many Democrats!"
Not quite what my amiable, low-key, somewhat conservative friends from West Texas wanted to hear. A Baylor graduate, Larry had watched from retirement as the widely circulated, three-editions-a-day newspaper to which he had devoted his entire career dwindled to one reporter and one photographer amidst Trump's heckling cries of "enemies of the people" and "fake news." Nancy had spent her entire career in nursing, which meant she had choice opinions about Trump's handling of the deadly pandemic that erupted on his watch.
In the end, my friends moved to Waco but scotched any notion of settling near Elon Musk's thundering SpaceX rocket-testing facility in McGregor. Given Musk's repeated contention, between spirited support for Trump well into the fall, that "citizen journalists" on his "X" social-media platform eclipsed on-the-ground professional journalists gathering hard facts and asking tough questions in the mainstream news media, I can't say the decision surprised me.
Yet no matter where they live in the county, they will hear and feel Musk's mighty roar.
* * *
Of all my pre-election encounters, the one sure to endure
longest in memory unfolded in a Cotton Patch Café parking lot a few weeks
before the election and highlights the conspiracy theories and groundless
assumptions so many in the MAGA camp embrace. It counters, once and for all, that
old refrain under which many newspaper editorialists of my graying generation once
upon a time labored: Never cast doubt on the intelligence and wisdom of the
American voter.
I think we can scratch that one. This adage may have had
currency back when people actually read newspapers. And even then, no less than
American newspaperman and seasoned political observer H.L. Mencken famously
wrote in 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents,
more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious
day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and
the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
Shortly before Election Day, I witnessed former Central Texas
Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards – close friend of late civil rights leader
John Lewis and a short-list prospect as Barack Obama’s running mate – explain,
graciously and patiently, Democratic health-care and economic initiatives to
two white women, a mother and her very pregnant daughter. The pair appeared to have
stepped right out of JD Vance's “Hillbilly Elegy.”
A jolly sort tragically bereft of most of her front teeth,
the matriarch recognized Edwards in the parking lot and warmly engaged him as
if she personally knew him. During this most civil exchange, she claimed the
2020 election had been stolen from Trump, offering up a couple of roundly
debunked claims (which she acted out). She hailed recently disbarred Trump
attorney Rudy Giuliani for suing two Black Georgia election workers – an
account she had backwards. When asked what she liked about Trump’s first term,
she cited tax cuts; when asked what she disliked about Biden, she cited
inflation. When asked what she hoped for in another Trump presidency, she mentioned
stick-it-to-’em tariffs on imports. Which, of course, by their very nature are
inflationary.
The old woman possibly betrayed her real motive for backing
Trump moments into the encounter when, cupping one side of her mouth as if
whispering, she smiled and explained she was “afraid of the Blacks.”
Her daughter acknowledged knowing little of politics. She
talked about maternity leave from her job at a nearby manufacturing plant – a
place where she presumably works alongside some people of color with varied
backgrounds. She offered that her fondness for Trump came from his speeches
which, she said, recalled “the speeches of JFK” – a head-spinning observation. But
her unwillingness to jump to conclusions suggested she was at least open to
Edwards’ entreaties; her mother, by contrast, appeared well beyond hope and
reason.
To his credit, Edwards – defeated in the tea-party tidal
wave of 2010 that in so many contrarian ways presaged the Age of Trump – never
flagged in his earnest quest to somehow reach the women, even after I silently deemed
it a lost cause and itched to move on. Later, when I praised his patience and
optimism, Edwards remarked that if John Lewis didn’t lose faith in America
after being severely beaten during the 1965 march for voting rights on Edmund
Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, neither should he in encounters with
delusional fellow Americans in Waco, Texas. Fair enough.
Even so, the following day, when we ran into each other at
another event, Edwards asked me, only half-jokingly: “Just when were the Dark
Ages – and how did we ever get out of them?”
