Rally-hopping journalist Carl Hoffman: MAGA grievance, delusion confound solutions in 21st century global economy

Author Carl Hoffman: "He's powerful. The first time I saw him, I thought, 'Wow, this guy is powerful, he just conveys a power.'"

Two years after Donald Trump kicked off his 2024 reelection bid with a March 25, 2023, rally at Waco Regional Airport, a constitutionally contemptuous Trump presidency is gutting everything from the Internal Revenue Service to the Department of Veterans Affairs; siding with Russian attackers over Ukrainian defenders; weaponizing the Department of Justice to pursue Trump’s political enemies; and testing the tolerance of global markets and the federal judiciary. Anyone trying to understand the mindset of Americans supportive of all this should consult globetrotting American journalist Carl Hoffman’s 2020 book “Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey into the Upside-Down World of Trump’s MAGA Rallies.” It chronicles the former National Geographic contributing editor’s rollicking months attending Make America Great Again rallies nationwide, including an Oct. 17, 2019, rally at the American Airlines Center in Dallas that drew 20,000 Trump fans. The book’s final chapter bristles with arguably the most profound, insightful summation of the MAGA mindset under Trump’s influence. A brief excerpt:

"He acknowledged them. Acknowledged their pain, their confusion, their vertigo. He gave voice to them. They played the victims, and it was easy to have no sympathy for them because they had little sympathy for anyone else. When I listened to Trump fans talk about 'them' and 'they' – how 'they' wanted something for nothing nowadays – the subtext, the code, was lazy people of color and immigrants who wanted everything for free. Yet we were supposed to have sympathy for white men who weren't changing with the times. They wanted to work, didn’t want handouts, were hungry for the meritocracy, in their parlance. But that was bullshit. They were nostalgic for privilege, the days when an uneducated white man got a job over a better-educated black man; they wanted to be let go by police for traffic violations in a world when black men were too often gunned down for the same; they longed for a world in which a thousand small barriers existed that boosted them and blocked everyone else. They wanted massive farming subsidies and all kinds of handouts and preferential treatment. They pined for a time when billions of Indians and Chinese, Brazilians and Indonesians – the whole rest of the world – were living in abject poverty with scant education and Americans and Europeans were the only people who designed things and built them. But the world wasn’t like that anymore."

On occasion of the Waco rally's two-year anniversary, the Waco Tribune-Herald spoke with Hoffman – best-known for his extensive forays and research into tribal cultures of New Guinea and Borneo – about Trump’s steadfast supporters a day after Trump "paused" military aid to besieged Ukraine in its war with Russia (with the Kremlin praising the United States for forsaking its ally in exchange for a policy that "largely aligns with our vision"); sparked trade tensions by threatening 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, causing all of the gains seen in the S&P 500 since Trump’s Nov. 5 election to vanish; vowed gutting federal funding for colleges and universities that allow "illegal protests," whatever those are; and oversaw continued cutting of tens of thousands of federal employees, threatening to paralyze constituent services such as Social Security. Below is a greatly expanded edition of exchanges conducted March 4 and March 19 and published March 22, 2025, in the Tribune-Herald.

Q   Of the avalanche of books about the political and cultural phenomenon of Donald Trump, “Liar’s Circus” has long struck me as the most engaging if most disturbing. It conjures musty motel rooms, long lines of Trump fans camped out to get into coliseums and ingratiating conversations with Trumpers that seem rational one moment, utterly insane the next. It's extraordinarily personal, given the intimacy you gained with those who regularly frequented Trump's far-flung rallies during his first presidency. The book was published Labor Day weekend 2020, two months before the general election. Have any further conclusions about Trump followers crystalized?

Carl Hoffman   Thank you for saying that. I’ll be honest with you: That’s my fifth book and the worst-selling one of all. It was a total flop. It got no attention and almost no one reviewed it and I sold like 6,000 copies. I appreciate your words more than you know.

Q   It’s extremely readable. You allow conversations with very interesting folks to unfold, each offering varying motives for his or her Trump obsession. It’s entertaining. I mean, there’s a gal from my hometown of Abilene – maybe you’ve seen her – who gets dressed up as Captain America in this skin-tight, red, white and blue outfit and drives in her sports car from Trump rally to Trump rally across America. She’s a Dyess Air Force veteran, an Iraq War veteran, a J6er, a lot of fun. She also believes former Vice President Pence should be executed for treason. It took several cops to drag her off inauguration scaffolding during the January 6 violence.

Hoffman   I worried that people meeting the characters in my book – Rick Frazier, Rick Snowden and Gale Roberts, for instance – would think I picked the most egregious, craziest nutcases rather than the norm. I don’t think that’s so. They were colorful in the way some people are, but their opinions and views, their conspiratorial views, their nonsensical views, their way of seeing the world as upside-down – at least I see as upside-down – were more prevalent than I thought. When I started this project, I thought I would have long, interesting political conversations with these people. A big Trump rally was 22,000 people, a small one is 10,000, and I thought the kooks would be a small percentage. In reality, out of 22,000 people, I think 21,900 believe most of the conspiracy theories one way or another. Characters such as Gale and Rick and Rick were actually pretty mainstream in their Trumpian thinking.

Q   Your book came out two months before the 2020 election.

Hoffman   That was one of the problems, the book coming out in the middle of the pandemic before a vaccine was available. No bookstores were open, I couldn’t do events, nobody was really flying at airports.

Q   With the passage of time, have any further conclusions about the psychological profile of Trump followers struck you?

Hoffman   No, everything those guys said, everything everyone said to me during my reporting, was right on then [in terms of MAGA thinking]. It’s as relevant today. It was true in 2019 and early 2020 when I met them and wrote down their words and it’s true now. I mean, there’s so many things to talk about, but what Trump has done is not because of Trump alone but because of the changing media landscape, which is really a changing technological landscape. The reality is 75 million people did not vote for Trump but 77 million people in 2024 did. There are two kinds of people [in the Trump camp]. There are smart, affluent people who know better but just are greedy and want lower taxes. But tens of millions of other people really do live in a world which is an upside-down world. I can’t emphasize this enough. Seventy million people don’t read a newspaper, probably don’t watch a network news show – I mean, NBC, ABC, CBS, something you think of as more or less neutral or factual. For many people it’s either Fox News or they get all of their news, all of their information, from social media. They literally don’t believe Trump did anything wrong, they literally don’t know the details of, say, the indictment behind his keeping [classified] documents – and the crazy thing is that’s an open-and-shut case. They don’t understand these things. They just think it was a witch hunt to go after him.

Trump in Dallas, 2019: "At stake in this fight is the survival of American democracy itself." 

Q   Yes, campaign officials handed out signs reading “Witch Hunt” for Trump supporters to wave at all the cameras during the 2023 Trump rally in Waco. You stress 77 million people voted Trump back into power. Surely not all of them are rich people who just don’t want to pay their taxes or people who live in this “upside-down world” such as Rick and Rick and Gale. What explains Trump’s appeal beyond these two groups?

Hoffman   It’s important to understand, again, that Rick and Rick and Gale, the characters populating “Liar’s Circus,” were not aberrations. I mean, they might be aberrations in the sense they were going to one Trump rally after another over months and were sort of groupies, but their opinions about Trump and the state of the world and their belief in this upside-down world is totally common. That’s one thing about media and the bubble in which people now live. These people genuinely believe that the [2020] election was rigged, that the charges filed against Trump were politically motivated, that the impeachments lacked merit and were based on Trump Derangement Syndrome. My book is four years old, almost five, but there’s a lot in it about changes in the world that upset people and left them feeling this sense of vertigo and disempowerment. Years later it’s clear these feelings still exist and it’s perhaps even deeper. We keep hearing people say how the economy was bad and people were overwhelmed by the price of eggs and inflation. Yet statistics showed that unemployment was crazy low under Biden, that the stock market was high, that there was this incredible stream of job creation – and that inflation was a direct result in part of the pandemic and worldwide and present in economies run by liberals as well as conservatives. These things clearly had an impact on these people. I can’t put my finger on it. I can’t really explain this narrative spun by Trumpians about the economy. In certain areas of the country – the Midwest, the Rust Belt – there are places that feel very depressed. I mean, they’re not like bustling, teeming Los Angeles or New York City or D.C. But the larger point is there’s a lot of people who support not just Trump in the first place but continue to support what Musk is doing in this complete gutting of the federal government and this antipathy toward democracy. And I don’t know what the reason for that is. I just don’t know.

Q   They really seem to want to “burn it all down.”

Hoffman   Yeah, and I don’t know where that comes from really. At the end of the day, will Trumpian tariffs reconstitute the kind of manufacturing this country used to have in the United States or is that never going to happen because times have changed, the economy has changed and we have all these other countries with educated workforces who are capable of designing and building anything while wages are still lower there. Why would someone build something in the United States when it takes millions of dollars and years to build factories? Will these things come back? I don’t think, no matter how big a tariff you put on [imported goods], we’re going to return to a place where America’s economy is built on old-time manufacturing. Even if it does, with the rise of AI and robotics, the number of people who are unskilled without college educations necessary to make all this happen will never exist. I just don’t believe it’s going to happen. I’m getting off track here, but if I had to put it simply, it seems there are great changes taking place economically and culturally and socially across the world that no person or policy is responsible for and that people are feeling those. The Trumpians have been able to exploit this.

Q   Bringing old-time manufacturing back to the United States strikes me as trying to put the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. Does anyone really think they can pay Americans working in manufacturing plants what they pay them in, say, China?

Hoffman   You’re not going to be able to pay them that little. And you’re not going to be able to make it and sell it (competitively) if you have to pay them $30 an hour.

Q   I don’t imagine even Trumpers will stand for returning to manufacturing jobs with their wages cut just so they can bring manufacturing back to the United States. I mean, this is a case where a lot of people just aren’t thinking. There are things that could help this economy but we’re just not interested in those. We want to go back to the 1950s or apparently now the Gilded Age that Trump talks so glowingly about, but we’re taking bits and pieces out of our history and ignoring the broader context of those very different times.

Hoffman   Getting rid of environmental protections in favor of the internal combustion engine – that’s trying to rewrite history. At the end of the day, electrical cars are going to triumph because they’re better.

Q   Yet the other day President Trump talked about bringing back coal, a reversal of what even conservatives talked of a few years ago in encouraging more nuclear power. [In a March 17 social-media post, Trump wrote: "After years of being held captive by Environmental Extremists, Lunatics, Radicals and Thugs, allowing other Countries, in particular China, to gain tremendous Economic advantage over us by opening up hundreds of all Coal Fire Power Plants, I am authorizing my Administration to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL."] We here in Central Texas already went through all that. When a proposal arose among state officials more than two decades ago to ring our area with coal-fired power plants, a lot of rural folks who would’ve lived next door to these plants raised the roof and managed to derail these plans. I remember one longtime rancher, Robert Cervenka, saying he didn’t want a coal-fired power plant with all sorts of chemical-ridden exhaust ash falling into his stock tank!

Hoffman   You have a world in which the second largest economy in the world, maybe the largest at certain times – I’m talking about China – is making tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail. It’s not just about having the trains but the technology to build those things and that network and to be able to export that technology and those trains. The same with solar panels and electric cars. There has been a slew of stories recently about how incredible Chinese electric cars are and they’re cheaper and better than the American cars. Trump can wish all he wants to dig more coal and return to the internal combustion automobile on the Great American Highway, but that’s from the 1980s and the world meanwhile is changing. And we’re going to lose out. The point is the U.S. is falling behind and will be behind the rest of the world and we’ll lose out on markets. This [Trump-led] abandonment of NATO, this abandonment of Europe, this so-called “America First” – all of those things are abandoning American hegemony in the economy and security and moral force. All of this is a complete retrenchment and it’s not happening in a vacuum. That’s the thing people don’t understand. You won’t make electric cars? Well, the Chinese will and they’ll sell them all over the world. There are millions of other people who are going to step into this [American] vacuum to lead in all of these things and it’s going to put America behind. It’s destroying this country.

Q   A few people in our area were involved in the January 6 violence at the U.S. Capitol. I’ve been through their court filings, prosecution and defense, plus those of many, many others. It’s clear the FBI wasn’t out there instigating violence. Nor were antifa activists. Most J6 defendants in sentencing memorandums acknowledge their presence in the attack, either explaining themselves as unwittingly caught up in all the excitement or excusing the crimes for which they were convicted by pleading some societal grievance such as PTSD or pandemic isolation or business failure. One from our area sentenced to several years in prison explained that he thought it was OK to enter the Capitol because of Trump's encouragement in his incendiary speech earlier in the day at the Ellipse. Yet political operatives at my front door trying to get me to vote Republican in 2024 insist J6 was an “inside job.”

Hoffman   It's cliché to say so, but it’s true: All the things Trumpers say of others are projections of themselves. Everything they accuse the left of doing are things the right is actually doing. January 6 is a good example. I have friends on Facebook, a large number of people who are not my political brethren. I don’t silence or block them because I’m interested in what they have to say. I practiced karate for almost 30 years and my teacher is like a father figure to me. He’s also the most right-wing, obnoxious, racist Trumpian. I never knew this about him until Trump came along, so I’m loathe to silence him. But here’s a guy who believes in Blue Lives Matter and sees BLM [Black Lives Matter] as rioters who should be thrown into prison and the key tossed away. Yet he posts every day about the “patriots” who went into the Capitol and how the [police officer] who is black, not white, killed Ashli Babbitt. I mean, here was a group of violent rioters who broke into U.S. property and assaulted the police. And the person who was shot by police because she was physically breaking through the last barrier between the rioters and the vice president of the United States – I mean, he’s got it all upside-down!

Q   The casual Trump voter I get. Some of my neighbors, for instance, don't particularly care for Trump, acknowledge they would have preferred someone less volatile as the Republican nominee. But they're also easily overwhelmed by the tedious complexities of such issues as tariffs and immigration and taxation, not to mention the flood of executive orders and social-media posts coming daily from the Trump White House and Trump co-president and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk and Trump himself. So they retreat into this non-thinking, knee-jerk default position of identity politics. They simply vote Republican and trust in Trump to bow to at least some Republican priorities, including not interfering with their 401(k) investments in the markets and not letting transgender people compete in sports.

Hoffman   I think you’re right. It’s also because the media system has changed. I’m 64, almost 65, and when I was growing up, people tuned to “Huntley & Brinkley” [which aired from 1956 to 1970 on NBC] or whatever each night. Every American watched the same newscast for a half-hour.

Q   We all had the same news. We discussed and debated the same facts.

Hoffman   Now these people, even the casual Trump voters, the people you’re talking about, don’t read the newspaper. I mean, maybe they read a local newspaper – I don’t know how much local newspapers say – but they don’t read, say, the Washington Post or the New York Times, they probably don’t even read the Wall Street Journal. They’re not engaging on an intellectual level with any of this. They’re removed from history. We’re getting further and further away from World War II and from fascism [which the United States belatedly fought]. What happened in World War II was a signature event of our lives. I was born after World War II, but it was still about Nazis and Mussolini. Twenty million Russians died and untold millions of other people. It was a generation about Anne Frank and the degradation of Nazism and racism and a world war in which Rosie the Riveter and the Greatest Generation represented the values that the whole Western world coalesced around. People today have forgotten those things. Casual Trump voters don’t seem to be aware of the connections between democracy and liberalism [as in “classical liberalism”: individual rights, civil liberties, democracy and free enterprise]. They’re being swept away by nonsense and all the political bullshit thrown at them. There’s no other way around it. And at some point we have to assign responsibility. In “Liar’s Circus,” I was really empathetic to all these people [traveling to Trump rallies] – genuinely so – men who had lost power through everything from losses of manufacturing to changes in gender roles. I’m very sympathetic to these people. But at the end of the day, it’s like, at a certain point, all of these people who are living in places subject to economic decline, for instance, and who are penalized for their lack of education – at some point, those people just have to get up off their asses and move to New York City or LA or a factory town in the South or wherever the jobs are and go to work. And, yeah, college is expensive, but there are community colleges.

Q   You’re talking about victimhood, a theme that runs strong through your book and the MAGA movement. The White House sent me a list of its guests for Trump’s State of the Union address. Most are in some way victims. You’ll look in vain for people who, say, run a soup kitchen for the poor. Guests included a 15-year-old Texas girl who was the victim of computer-generated deepfakes created by a bully at her school and the wife and daughters of Corey Comperatore, the former firefighter and MAGA disciple killed by the gunman who also shot at Trump during that campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July 2024. One Trump honoree is 13-year-old Devarjaye “DJ” Daniel, a Houston youth suffering brain cancer, notwithstanding the fact that the Trump administration eliminated child cancer research funding – what one observer described as “a perfect encapsulation of MAGA morality.”

Hoffman   This explains the role of immigrants and trans people in the movement. There needs to be a target, an “other,” and that’s what those people are for this administration. Look, at the end of the day, for the Trump administration, it’s purely about power. It’s not really about making government more efficient, it’s not about reducing the deficit, it’s all about power and they’re building that power on victimhood, if you’ve been a “victim,” and exploiting that victimhood. One of the political talking points for the GOP for the last 20 or 30 years – really since Reagan – was about resentment over your money going to help inner-city black people, even though that was not always true – more poor whites were on public assistance than urban blacks. [Figures in 2024 indicate this remains true.] Nonetheless the pitch was your money was going to help these people and this country isn’t built on help [public assistance], it’s built on Horatio Alger themes [stories of poor boys triumphing over impoverished backgrounds through hard work and gaining middle-class security and respectability].

Trump speaks of political enemies and persecution during his March 25, 2023 rally in Waco

Q   Your book reminds me of the Waco rally of March 2023 that I attended. It was one for the history books. It was the first Trump rally where, upon his arrival from the sky, rallygoers were invited to stand and pledge allegiance as a video played on huge screens showing pitiful January 6 inmates languishing behind bars and Trump filmed in scenes of presidential pomp and patriotism with backdrops such as Mount Rushmore and massive coliseum crowds. The video soundtrack, which played as the Waco crowd recited the pledge, involved a recording of Trump reading the Pledge of Allegiance while a jailhouse choir of J6ers sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." Did anything happen in all the rallies you attended that compares?

Hoffman   No. And, of course, January 6 hadn’t happened yet. But the scene you describe – there’s no other way to say it – is a perversion of everything that America stands for and all of its values. It’s a complete flipping of them. But every Trump rally was like that to some degree. That’s why the book was called “Liar’s Circus.” I don’t like the idea of living in a bubble in which there is no truth, in which truth is inverted. And it’s a masterstroke for Trump that he was able to do that, to flip things and make hot cold and dark light. I mean, to say [Ukrainian President] Zelensky is a dictator and is responsible for the invasion of his own country – that’s not a nuanced thing, it’s not something that scholars can agree to disagree on. It’s an actual inversion of the truth.

Q   It's pretty astounding – Kremlin talking points are echoed by Trump and in a day or so your neighbors down the street are saying it too!

Hoffman   It’s beyond me. I mean, you can say these people don’t know their history, but why do you and I think differently? How is it that Liz Cheney, with whom I don’t agree on anything politically or policy-wise but who I admire because she stands for the truth – how did it get to be that she emerges as a truthteller? The question growing up for me was always: How could Hitler have taken power? How could this have happened? How could people have gone along with the Holocaust, the murder of six million people, the premeditated, meticulously synchronized murder of six million people? And it’s not just Germany but Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain. Look at the military junta in Argentina and Brazil and Pinochet in Chile. How could people go along with that?

Q   We’re seeing more evidence of this in the United States.

Hoffman   It’s a revelation. I didn’t realize people were so easily manipulated, but they are. In my book, my editor suggested [in 2020] that I take out these references to Hitler, that it’s not really that bad. And I said no, I think there really is a comparison. I feel that way even more now. I mean, 2025 is not 1933 and Trump is not Hitler. People are confused and misled by trying to be too literal. They’re different people. The thing about Trump is he has no real ideology. He’s just a sociopathic narcissist. I don’t say that in a flippant way. I think honestly, deep down, that’s the thing driving him – sheer, unadulterated power. I think that’s what the tariffs are about. He’s brought America to its knees; now he needs to do it to the whole world. That’s what Panama and Greenland and Ukraine are about. And I think people don’t grasp that enough. Musk may have an agenda. His agenda may be tech getting rid of regulations that impinge on the growth of his companies and his crazy techno dreams. That’s the case of the tech bros. But Trump just wants power. That’s all he wants, all he cares about. And that is different from Hitler to a certain extent. But the gutting of institutions and the rule of law – things are happening very quickly with Trump while larger things will take more time – but I believe that, unchecked, and I mean unchecked by the Supreme Court which may or may not happen, we don’t know, Trump will come after the media, he will try to suppress the mainstream media. I mean, already the Washington Post is self-censoring. He’s going to go after television news, I think there’s going to be a case somewhere down the line in which he tries to sue or the Justice Department goes after a reporter, a specific reporter like at the New York Times, and I think it’s going to go all the way. I don’t think there’s any stopping Trump. I guess it’s up to the Supreme Court or the people in some way, but I believe Trump is so insane that he has to dominate everyone and everything and that no one can be undominated by Donald Trump.

Q   I’m afraid the Supreme Court of the United States has in many ways led us to this point, whether in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission or Trump v. United States.

Hoffman   And I’m not confident they’re going to be the bulwark we need them to be. I mean, these people – [Justices Samuel] Alito and Clarence Thomas – are really something. Can you imagine being a Supreme Court justice and taking a $250,000 RV and food and housing and all these things [from wealthy, influential patrons] and never thinking these are things you need to report and actually saying it’s not corruption when it’s the very definition of corruption?

Q   Did past experiences immersing yourself in the cultures of Borneo and New Guinea tribes [resulting in the Hoffman books “The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure” and “Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art”] help you understand what political scientists describe as tribalism or the MAGA psyche? Two key features of tribalism figure around hierarchy and obedience.

Hoffman   You say hierarchy and obedience, but it’s more complex. There’s ritual, a lot of ritual – and Trump is all about the ritual. The rallies are rituals, the wearing of colors, the regalia, the flags mounted on pickup trucks with slogans like “Don’t Tread on Me.” All of these are rituals about identity. Tribalism by definition has an “in” group and an “out” group. You know, like the Asmat, the people who killed Michael Rockefeller in 1961, people with whom I spent a lot of time – and they’re not doing that [cannibalism] today – but at the time of Rockefeller’s death, villages were in constant warfare with each other. If you were members of one village, you were enemies of another village. Nazism was built on portraying as “others” the Jews, Eastern Europeans, the Poles – and Trumpism is about making “others” of immigrants and trans people. The role of immigrants in this country – I don’t think Trumpism is going to change that in any particular way. He’s not going to expel all those people. All of this is performative. If you do the math, you can see it’s never going to happen. But “Liar’s Circus” was built on spending a lot of time with these people [Trumpers], spending a lot of empathetic time with them. I mean, I enjoyed my time with them for the most part. The friendships I made were genuine in the sense that it’s not like I liked everyone but, well, [Trump rallygoer] Rick Frazier’s been to my house since the book came out. These were friendships.

Q   Even though they know you’re on the other side of all this?

Hoffman   Oh, yeah. I couldn’t have done what I did if I’d just gone in there and said to these people, “You’re a fucking racist!”

Q   Well, it’s obvious in the book you enjoyed these people. I enjoyed those I met at the Waco Trump rally, though over eight hours of interviews they were exhausting in their giddiness and obsessiveness and detachment from reality. There’s something charming if naïve about them.

Hoffman   They’re funny as hell. They have a zest for life and a joyfulness. It was all kind of a big party. That’s really what it was. The point is with these tribes in Borneo and New Guinea, you can’t just parachute in there as a journalist and demonstrate attitudes about them. You have to be open and listening and be willing to give of yourself. And so the process is the same [in gaining insights from Trump fans].

Q   One individual from our area who participated in the January 6 insurrection is something of a keyboard warrior. He didn’t fight any cops – he let all the other guys fight the cops – and then he strolled into the U.S. Capitol. He got several months in prison. I spent a summer just following his social-media group, patterned after the anti-tax Whiskey Rebellion of the early 1790s. They continually posted memes that seemed to yearn for a world somewhere between two Mel Gibson flicks – "The Patriot" and "Braveheart." Some of those individuals peppering your book would seem to qualify but I may be wrong.

Hoffman   No, I think you’re right actually. They long for an easier, more black-and-white time. A lot of them seem to yearn for a world of the 1950s. But we’re not in that world today and I don’t think we can go back. And look at all Trump is doing. Is the government really going to be more efficient? That is, are you going to get more [government] efficiency with less [personnel staffed to do jobs of public service]? All the people who voted for Trump – are their lives going to be better? Is inflation going to go down? Is the price of gas going to go down? Is the air going to be cleaner? Are they going to get their masculinity back? Are they going to get back to the days of men going to work in a mine or a factory where they’re making good money and they’re supporting their families and they feel good about themselves and their wives look at them and bat their eyelashes when they get home and they can afford one or two cars on their salaries? I could be completely wrong, but I think by the end of Trumpism, when it comes, the world is going to be more brutal, more violent with fewer government services and the deficit isn’t going to be any lower and things are going to be more expensive and there’s going to be less humanity because AI is all about getting rid of people. And the less we go shopping, the less we go to work, the less whole we are and the more separate we are from each other and the things that matter and give us meaning. Trumpism isn’t going to give any of the things that the people who voted for it imagine.

Q   It’s odd. When I tell people I spent eight solid hours interviewing folks in the MAGA crowd at the 2023 Trump rally in Waco – this was before Trump actually arrived – some of my friends say, “Oh, my God, how awful!” But the Trump folks could not have been more accommodating. One thing my friends don’t understand is that Trump loves press. Nothing means more to him than the chance of making headlines and getting attention, even if a lot of it is just to stir people up in ways that often backfire. The press coordinators of the rally, who determined ahead of time whether or not I got press credentials, and how I was treated at the actual rally – they could not have been more accommodating, even though Trump went through his usual showmanship bit during the rally, pointing at reporters and photographers in the risers and vilifying them to the crowd’s amusement. Ironically, some of the press in the risers with me were from “news organizations” that are little more than propagandist agencies for him. I watched one of these “reporters” go to the barricades that cordoned off press from the MAGA crowd awaiting Trump. That’s where this one “reporter” fired wildly provocative questions at the crowd, just to get them baited and stirred up for Trump.

Hoffman   You know, as a reporter, people often ask – and I’m sure they ask you this – “Were people willing to talk?” People love to talk about themselves. I like to talk about myself. And people [at these rallies] were almost unfailingly nice.

Q   The rallies are a big party. If you approach individual Trumpers on, say, a street corner, they might feel threatened, they might clam up. But at the Trump rally they’re among their own and they’re having a good time, flying massive flags on pickup trucks and buying Trump souvenirs and listening to music by people like Ted Nugent. So they’re tickled to talk with you.

Hoffman   Yeah, and I’m a middle-aged straight white guy so they don’t see a perceived threat from me, you know. I haven’t called them a racist or anything. I didn’t berate them or call them out in my first conversations with them. And I was a genuinely curious person.

Trump supporters overwhelm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to halt certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Q   Did the January 6 insurrection or riot or protest or however you want to label it surprise you, given all the time you spent at Trump rallies in 2019 and 2020 and the friendships you cultivated with individual people attending these rallies?

Hoffman   It did not surprise me at all. I mean, you’re always slightly surprised at any event. You know, when, say, the Russians actually attack Ukraine, and you’re asked, “Well, were you really surprised Russia attacked?” The answer is no, but the moment of anything can still be a little surprising. But so much of the book, the subtext, of “Liar’s Circus,” of the feeling that I had through the experience of listening to Trump and watching him work the crowd and the down-ballot people – governors, senators and representatives in attendance of whatever state he was speaking in who usually gathered there in mass – it was the gathering together of a crowd and the power. As Elias Canetti put it in his book “Crowds and Power” (1960), that’s the point of the rallies – to, on one hand, create this kind of cult following – but the larger point should never be lost and that’s power. The power of the mob, the power of the crowd, was always on display.  It’s the roar of the crowd when Trump stood up on stage and mocked Marco Rubio and belittled him. That was the power of the crowd over Rubio to toe the line, the power of the crowd to go primary someone and vote them out of power. Trump’s power – originally as a populist – involved this power of the crowd. So what happened on January 6 [after President Trump’s fiery speech about a stolen election earlier in the day and his exhortation “to fight like hell”] didn’t surprise me at all. I mean, that was the plan.

Q   What stunned me is that many of these people for so long talked about the Constitution and respect for the police and the rule of the law – and then one day you turn on the TV and they’re overrunning the U.S. Capitol and pummeling cops with clubs and flag poles. It struck me as such a broad statement of hypocrisy.

Hoffman   It is. I mean, what’s happening right now with [the Department of Governmental Efficiency under Musk’s controversial direction] and deportations and the courts – they’re obviously contemptuous of the rule of law. The rule of law for Donald Trump is the rule of Donald Trump. The state becomes Donald Trump. Those are the elements of anti-democratic populism, still within [the framework] of a democracy as in the first Trump term and the evolving nature of the second term which is moving from populism into something more nefarious and more dangerous. I think sometimes we talk about Nazism and fascism and people get hung up on those ideas of the 1930s. But these terms on their own are describing a kind of authoritarian dictatorship in broader terms in which will triumphs over reason, in which action is everything, in which efficiency and the trains running on time are the ideas used to – well, it’s not really about making the trains run on time, it’s not really about making government efficient, it’s about power. And part of fascism is the equation of state with the man. The man becomes the state and that’s what Trump is doing. He is the Constitution, he is the law and if [as a judge] you rule against him in a court, then you’re a “lunatic judge.”

Q   A friend who spent his career in upper management of two or three major corporations but still believes in such things as democracy and the rule of law told me the other day that, since the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump, he has undergone therapy because he simply cannot imagine or accept an American electorate of 77 million people putting this guy back in power. Given your understanding of what happened in Germany in the 1930s and what some would say is happening today, most recently with this constitutional crisis involving the federal judiciary and a Trump Department of Justice that clearly does not respect the federal judiciary, how do you find it possible to continue to be friends with people such as Rick and Rick and Gale? How do you emotionally and rationally put aside what they’re clearly contributing to and still be friends?

Hoffman   Well, I can’t really. I haven’t spoken to them this year at all. In the runup to the book and after its publication, I talked with Rick Frazier and Gale. But I haven’t talked with them in a long time. January 6 was kind of a watershed moment for me. I found it hard to listen to Rick, who I appreciate as a good man. But I found it difficult to listen to his support of something that was so obviously egregious. We had reached the point where there was no sugarcoating it anymore. So I really haven’t talked to them. I mean, if Rick called, I would be kind to him and I wouldn’t rule out, you know, having a beer with him or something. But it would be hard to. And this goes back to your question about the people [in MAGA] who aren’t rich and aren’t just voting out of greed and why they support Trump. Well, they support him for all the reasons in the book but, on another level, I can’t say why people support Trump. Again, one of the great mysteries to me growing up in the time I did was always how people could rationalize the KKK or how people could have supported Hitler. These seem such aberrations to me. It was once so obvious that everyone in America – even with racism in the South – in World War II and afterward with all the talk of the Greatest Generation – that someone raising their arm in a fascist salute a la Hitler or Mussolini, even as a joke, back in the 1960s, Seventies and Eighties, would have been seen as abhorrent. We’ve always had whackos that never go away, but these were minorities. If anyone had done that [in past decades], they would have been castigated by the left and the right, by Republicans and Democrats.

Q   We as a people seem to have lost that post-World War II virtue.

Hoffman   The Trumpers will always say, when someone like Elon Musk raises his arm like that, it’s just a joke, they’re just trolling liberals, they’re “just trying to get a rise out of you.” That’s like a man saying abusive things to a woman and when the woman gets upset, the man says, “Oh, I’m just joking.” Well, it’s not a joke. This isn’t something to joke about. But another thing that we don’t always fully understand – especially liberal Democrats, and this is something I’m grappling with even now – is the extent to which the media and the pillars of what we think of as the truth [are being abandoned]. I mean, my go-to source, if I had to name one, is the New York Times. I believe in it. I don’t think it’s a religious belief, but I think the reporting of the New York Times is largely accurate. It’s probably the best source of accurate information about America and the world and things in general. But I’ve found that people just don’t read the newspaper anymore. And it’s not just the right – many liberals don’t read newspapers either. It’s all social media, it’s all “influencers.” I know a couple, I met them at a bar near my house because they’re neighbors, it turns out. This has nothing to do with journalism or anything – these are very lefty YouTubers and they have in the neighborhood of a million followers and their fulltime job is kind of being left-wing pundits by YouTube. And I’d never heard of them before. Yet a million people follow them and prefer that to the New York Times. And in that world are some 70 million or 80 million people locked in that right-wing information bubble and they don’t see anything else.        

This interview was conducted, condensed and edited for clarity and brevity by retired Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor Bill Whitaker.

Churchill would condemn Trump's cowardice, capitulation

 

Lost in all the pomp and thunder of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration was word that he returned to the Oval Office from another White House location a prized Jacob Epstein bust of Winston Churchill, a showy testament to Trump’s identification with the forceful, courageous wartime British prime minister who steadied his nation in fending off devastating daily attacks by Nazi Germany after Adolf Hitler had subdued the rest of Europe.

But in abandoning besieged Ukraine in time of war, Trump proves that he has far more in common with Neville Chamberlain than Winston Churchill. Certainly, he lacks the wisdom, virtue and guts of the great Anglo-American statesman and soldier he so admires.

To the disdain of Churchill, British Prime Minister Chamberlain infamously demonstrated the pitfalls of appeasement to tyrants, much as Trump proposes in bowing to Russian President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, notwithstanding a multitude of horrific war crimes committed under Putin’s banner. In signing the Munich Agreement with Chancellor Hitler in September 1938, Chamberlain ceded the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in a myopic bid to prevent world war.

By accommodating Hitler’s lust to expand his domain, Chamberlain unwittingly invited the fascist to commit more transgressions against not only sovereign nations but also humanity. Given the context of the war to come, one can only marvel at Chamberlain’s arrogance, crystalized in his cavalier dismissal of concerns by fellow citizens about Hitler’s determination to take a piece of Czechoslovakia. “A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” Chamberlain sniffed.

In a famous Oct. 5, 1938, House of Commons speech, Churchill lambasted the agreement as "a total and unmitigated defeat." Indeed. A year later, World War II began with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. By May 1940 Churchill was leading Great Britain in the way Trump so admires – talking tough, strolling about his bombed-out city and countryside while encouraging resistance by everyday people, raising spirits, invoking patriotism and coordinating plans to militarily confound Nazi Germany.

Less remembered: Churchill spent much time trying to rouse from slumber the United States of America to the dangers looming over it. Alas, America and many of its lawmakers were then under the spell of “America First,” an antisemitic movement that under the leadership of such traitorous individuals as American aviator and Hitler admirer Charles Lindbergh fought President Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease plan to send U.S. arms and war materials to help the British people resist Nazi domination.

Less remembered: Churchill’s seething low regard for his predecessor. At one point he privately labeled Chamberlain “the narrowest, the most ignorant, most ungenerous of men” – a description that neatly fits Trump. When Churchill nonetheless gave a respectful eulogy over Chamberlain in 1940 and his wife Clementine complimented her husband on his restraint and decorum, Churchill grumbled: “Well, of course, I could have done it the other way round.”

Whenever as a young journalist years ago I attended reunions of World War II veterans, one of them would inevitably get full of himself and boast how the United States had saved “Europe’s ass” without acknowledging that the war wound up harder for Americans to fight and win precisely because America sat on its “ass” under the America First Committee’s fiercely isolationist, dictator-coddling, know-nothing policy, deluding itself as Hitler expanded his territorial gains and strengthened his fortifications.

Truth? America rose up in defense of Europe and the rest of the world only after it got its own “ass” handed to it through the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 – an attack by the Japanese that killed more than 2,400 people and hobbled our naval defenses. As a staunch ally of the Japanese, Hitler declared war on the United States days later. Till then, too many Americans naively believed the massive oceans west and east of our continent would safeguard us from attack and war.

Oops.

During my early years in journalism, I came to marvel at the Greatest Generation. I worked alongside a veteran newspaperman who, like thousands of Americans before Pearl Harbor, demonstrated zero tolerance with Lindbergh’s “America First” lot, crossed the U.S.-Canada border and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force to fight Nazis in Europe – a stark difference from the cowardly, constitutionally contemptuous rabble now occupying the White House.

Trump’s most candid “America First” thoughts on Ukraine come through a preferred form of delivery – social media. In an astonishingly uncivil Feb. 19 post, he clearly backtracks on his vow to bring peace between Russia and Ukraine, instead drawing up de facto terms of surrender for the nation that had been invaded while drawing no meaningful concessions from Putin, whose covert support for Trump in presidential elections is by now a rock-solid matter of record, notwithstanding supporters’ denials.

Never casting a shadow of blame on Putin, Trump instead maligns Ukrainian President Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian” and “dictator” because the latter has held no wartime elections, notwithstanding the fact many Ukrainian voters are under siege or domination by Russian forces. It’s a galling and hypocritical comment from one who on Dec. 3, 2022, actually called for termination of the U.S. Constitution to overturn the 2020 election and reinstate himself to power over America.

For the record, the British held no elections during World War II.

Trump insists the war is “far more important to Europe than it is to us – We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation” – which proves Trump learned nothing from the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York City that killed 2,753 people, including 343 firefighters. And it’s impossible to ignore his warning that Zelenskyy “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left” – words almost identical to those Trump used in inciting a mob of Make America Great Again zealots to violently storm the U.S. Capitol.

What’s more, Trump proves again that everything is about him. In a post rife with lies that his sheeplike supporters embrace without question, he dismisses Zelenskyy’s protests of negotiations conducted without him. “In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only TRUMP and the Trump administration can do,” Trump boasts. “Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring peace and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the ‘gravy train’ going.”

In spoken comments, Trump disgracefully not only sides with the invader over the invaded but also returns to his tiresome refrain of a so-called “stolen” 2020 election: “I could’ve made a deal for Ukraine that would’ve given them almost all of the land, everything … and no people would’ve been killed, and no city would’ve been demolished, and not one dome would’ve been knocked down, but they chose to do it that way and President Biden, in all fairness, he doesn’t have a clue.”

All this demonstrates the ugly transformation of the Republican Party from that of Reagan and Bush 41, who, through different paths in World War II, grasped as Churchill did the importance of a free and secure Europe to American freedom, economic prosperity and peace. They understood the danger of appeasement to tyrants. They understood the lessons of modern history, something that Trump and his followers don’t know or don’t care about to the peril of our children and grandchildren.

“At last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, where America’s public tone towards its European allies shifted towards outright hostility, I felt as if I had a front-row seat as history was being made,” British journalist Zanny Minton Beddoes, The Economist editor-in-chief, wrote on Feb. 20. “Events since then have moved quickly on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, there has been panic as the continent’s leaders contemplate that the country which created the NATO alliance now seems prepared to smash it.”

This shocking realization was further confirmed Monday with the United States’ voting with authoritarian states Russia, Belarus and North Korea against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Is Zelenskyy a Churchill, as some champions in Europe and the United States claim? I don’t know about such comparisons but I do know about bullies and blowhards and braggarts. I do know what Trump and his circle of conspirators are doing will long blot out the greatness that the Greatest Generation showed through the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War. And on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we will show how far as a people we have fallen morally.

Churchill supposedly said (though scholars doubt), “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they've tried everything else.” Perhaps. But the rampant disinformation of our times allows many Americans who see themselves as political inheritors of Reagan, Thatcher and Churchill to ignore abundant evidence that none of those figures out of honor and principle would have stooped so low as to abandon an ally on the battlefield the way Trump now proposes.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.

ICE, Border Patrol actions leave folks angry, fearful and, most of all, confused

The Feb. 5 letter to parents from Alice Independent School District Superintendent Anysia Trevino about school trips for extracurricular activities such as sports and band will surely rank as one of the defining documents of the Age of Trump.

Acknowledging the possibility of U.S. Border Patrol agents stopping school buses at checkpoints through the Rio Grande Valley to inquire of students’ citizenship status, the superintendent of a school district where 92 percent of the 4,500 or so students are Hispanic warned parents to be wary of “the potential implications of these encounters.”

“If a student is found to be without proper documentation, they may be removed from the bus, detained and possibly deported under current immigration policies,” said Trevino, who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley. “Additionally, if a student provides false information regarding their citizenship and it is later discovered, this could result in a permanent bar to future U.S. citizenship.”

The letter went on to reassure parents in the South Texas school district that a chaperone would follow the bus on trips and stay with any student detained “while the rest of the group continues their journey.”

True, U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks – the state of Texas’ former border czar – the next day on “Fox & Friends” described the idea that Border Patrol agents would “target school buses and children” as “absurd," prompting Alice ISD to walk back its letter. Yet a follow-up Border Patrol memo acknowledges that while school buses are not “targeted,” they might be boarded at checkpoints “to confirm the legal rights of all passengers to include adult chaperones and students to be in or remain in the United States with proper documentation and to verify the purpose and destination of their travel.”

Clear as mud?

Consider, too, beleaguered Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith, who ran afoul of Make America Great Again sensibilities in using a Feb. 6 community forum in Tyler to attempt to calm and reassure his constituents, including angry, fearful immigrants who cited U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids as reason to (quoting the sheriff) “stop sending their children to school, going to church, going to work and most importantly preventing those individuals from reporting major crimes to law enforcement.” The sheriff in a Feb. 12 letter acknowledged only confusing matters more and apologized to “citizens of Smith County, Gov. Abbott and his office, [U.S.] Border Czar Tom Homan and President Trump.”

Not exactly explained in his letter: What red line did he cross? The fact he shared the stage with several other sheriffs from conservative East Texas, including Franklin County Sheriff Ricky Jones, president of the Association of Texas Sheriffs, and the association’s executive director, former Nacogdoches County Sheriff Thomas Kerss – and that none disagreed with Smith – suggests Sheriff Smith understands he has been caught in the dizzying cultural and political turmoil dividing America that goes beyond conflicting views on the Constitution, immigration law and Christian decency. Indeed, several Make America Great Again-inclined citizens subsequently took legal steps to remove the sheriff from office for “gross ignorance of official duties.”

Presumably, this political sacrilege includes Smith’s reassuring constituents – immigrants among them – that neither he nor his deputies in the everyday business of traffic stops and such plan to routinely check on immigration status.

This is where we are in Trump’s America: Half the nation begrudgingly accepts the by-a-whisker public mandate of fellow citizens returning Donald Trump to power, yet hopes to prevent the societal and economic ruin that could result from the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants promised during Trump’s rancorous 2024 campaign. Greatest fear: U.S. citizens of color and immigrants here on visas becoming swept up in scenes conjuring images of daily life in Nazi Germany.

Looming over all, especially in Texas: Confusion by everyone from school officials to church leaders to county sheriffs to immigrants legal and otherwise over just what ICE and Border Patrol officials are prioritizing and planning.

During a Feb. 8 Saturday morning gathering organized by Baylor University world religions scholar and Baptist minister Blake Burleson and organic chemist and researcher Mark Brickhouse at Seventh & James Baptist Church, just off the Baylor campus in Waco – more than 400 miles from the anxious heart of the Rio Grande Valley – some 80 mostly white residents raised concerns about possible ICE raids of homes, schools, churches and businesses to corral undocumented immigrants. Anger edged out fear in the room, though confusion prevailed over all. Yet from all this the Heart of Texas Coalition for Immigrant and Migrant Rights was formed. It now has more than 100 volunteers and counting.

After an hour or so of expressions of concern by friends and neighbors amid suggestions of organizing to support local immigration advocacy groups, lobby politicians and ferry immigrants to doctors, schools and attorneys, longtime local attorney Kent McKeever, whose practice includes immigration as an area of expertise, stressed the extreme fluidity of the moment.

“This could change tomorrow, OK?” he said. “Literally. But right now the local ICE office is telling us that they do not have the capacity to conduct raids in our community, so that’s good, right? But that could change. They are prioritizing individual enforcement against undocumented people who have criminal records, more recent [immigrants] within the last two years of illegal entrance, and then people with prior deportations and other immigration violations.”

With Trump’s issuance of pronouncements, declarations and executive orders, some in conflict with others, authorities in Waco seem intent on reassuring the public about continuance of daily life. They discourage visions of federal agents storming school classrooms, playgrounds and extracurricular events to scrutinize and possibly detain brown-skinned individuals. Amid anxiety in Waco Independent School District where 60 percent of its 14,000 students are Hispanic, McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara – strapping inspiration for Taylor Sheridan’s Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton in the 2016 film “Hell or High Water” – assures trusting Central Texas constituents that ICE is only targeting individuals who have committed crimes and known gang members. The ICE raid of Feb. 24 in the Houston coastal area that resulted in 118 arrests would seem to confirm this; arrests reportedly involved individuals accused of criminal sexual conduct, homicide, theft, child sexual abuse, weapons offenses and drug charges. The raid presumably included at least some of those who chose to associate with such individuals.

For the moment, these are distinctions with a difference, so far as law enforcement is concerned. Rusk County Sheriff Johnwayne Valdez, in trying to bolster’s Sheriff Smith’s reassurances during the latter’s off-the-rails Feb. 6 immigration forum in Tyler, stressed that if immigrant constituents, documented or not, hesitate out of fear to contact the sheriff when serious problems arise, it defeats the first obligation of a sheriff and his deputies to deter serious criminal activity and protect the entire county population.  

“I’ve been doing this for 40 years,” said Valdez, whose background includes service on the Deep East Texas Narcotics Task Force. “I don’t answer a call for service and ask everybody there what their immigration status is. I ask how I can help them because they called us for a reason. They called 9-1-1 for a reason. They called for an ambulance for a reason and we’re the first ones to respond. What I don’t want for the citizens of Rusk County is for them not to call us when they need help, because I could give a rip what their immigration status is at that moment.”

To which Hopkins County Sheriff Lewis Tatum, based in Sulphur Springs, added to Hispanics in the Tyler audience: “You need to go to school, go to work, go to church, conduct your lives like you have been, just like the sheriff is saying here. Don’t break the law and you don’t have nothing to worry about. Just continue on with your lives.”

Franklin County Sheriff Jones, who heard Trump border czar Homan speak during the February National Sheriffs Association Winter Conference, said concerns similar to those voiced in Tyler are being aired in other counties. “My understanding after we came back from Washington, D.C.,” he said, “we’re looking for the rapists, we’re looking for the murderers.” He added: “I don’t think I’ve ever asked anybody since I been sheriff since 2013 if they had papers and I’m not going to start today and neither are my officers.”

Notwithstanding such reassurances (and by unquestionably conservative sheriffs), confusion among Texans has only accelerated. In 2017, former Waco Tribune-Herald assistant opinion editor Sandra Sanchez wrote of state legislation requiring local governmental entities and law enforcement officials to comply with federal immigration laws and detainer requests, inviting the prospect of racial profiling on city streets, including the targeting of her then-teenage daughter.

“Clearly, they were targeting immigrants, but there will be others affected who now live in a state where at any time they might feel forced to prove their birthplace,” Sanchez wrote in a compelling McAllen Monitor column. “Does this mean she'll need to carry her passport to school? And if she ever is approached, will it change how she views law enforcement? We have, after all, long taught her to respect and trust them. As her 16th birthday approaches, all along I thought the most I had to fret about was whether she'd remember to put both hands on the wheel, keep the music low, don't follow too closely and pay attention to other motorists. But now we both have so much more to fear.”

And that was only a few months into Trump’s first presidency.

To confound matters, it’s evident each of us walking around in America has a different idea of what our country should be doing on immigration, even among those who support deportation in one form or another. A poll by The New York Times and Ipsos of 2,128 U.S. adults conducted in early January found 87 percent surveyed supported deporting undocumented immigrants in the United States who have criminal records; 63 percent favored deportation of those who arrived in America over the last four years. However, 62 percent oppose ending protection from deportation for immigrants who were children when they illegally entered the United States, while 55 percent oppose ending birthright citizenship for children born to immigrants here illegally. Incidentally, birthright protection is part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which Trump apparently thought he could invalidate by executive order.

To confound matters further, Trump "co-president" and MAGA-come-lately tech billionaire Elon Musk has fiercely championed immigration exemptions allowing better-educated immigrants to assume or retain reasonably well-paid high-tech jobs in America through H-1B visas, drawing equally fierce condemnation from MAGA firebrands such as Steve Bannon – the latter arguably the heart and soul of the MAGA movement – as effectively cheating well-educated, native-born Americans of good-paying, high-tech jobs. Musk drew a line in the sand on the matter. “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” the 53-year-old South African-born founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla Motors replied to a critic on “X,” the sprawling social-media platform Musk controls. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Bannon meanwhile has responded by reminding MAGA diehards that Musk and fellow Trump-supporting billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy's pronounced support for H-1B visas justify MAGA doubts, given the fact that, notwithstanding the $290 million Musk invested in Trump's 2024 reelection and Musk's work in "deconstruction of the administrative state," Musk remains, first and foremost, "an oligarch" pressing certain priorities way out of step with "America First" principles. Bannon in February has only doubled down on such rhetoric, blasting Musk and other tech CEOs as "techno-feudalists" and Musk in specific as a "parasitic illegal immigrant."

To confound matters even further, on Feb. 26 Trump presumably raised at least some "America First" eyebrows by announcing a "gold card" for wealthy immigrants. "We're gonna put a price on that card of about $5 million and that's going to give you green card privileges, plus," Trump declared. "It's gonna be a route to citizenship and wealthy people will be coming into our country." When asked by a reporter whether a Russian oligarch would be eligible for such a card, Trump replied: "Yeah, possibly. Hey, I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people."

For those who angrily branded President Obama a tyrant for using executive action in 2012 to provide a measure of legal protection for young immigrants brought illegally into the United States as children, Trump's gold card scheme raises obvious questions about philosophical coherence, assuming consistency in MAGA principles exists. It also raises questions about a two-tiered approach to legal status in America, one for elite, wealthy immigrants, another for those of more desperate circumstances. The Trump initiative appears to be a significant revision of the EB-5 program, established by Congress in 1990 as a way to draw foreign investment through granting legal status to individuals who invest approximately $1 million in a business that creates at least 10 jobs. 

If Trump 2.0 can be believed (and that’s asking a lot given its trafficking in falsehoods, conspiracy theories and half-baked policy proposals), the so-called "invasion" at the southern border has largely ended, whether because of seasonal cold, Trump's ascension or both. The administration in a Feb. 21 statement cites legitimate news media reporting that, among other things, Catholic Charities is seeing only “zero to three families” at its famous McAllen migrant shelter (courtesy of reporting by Sandra Sanchez, now of Border Report). It cites a report (again by Sanchez) that a Brownsville shelter shut its doors due to a “sudden decrease in asylum seekers” over the past month. And a migrant shelter network in El Paso says only one or two of its 20 shelters will remain open.

"Two years ago, U.S. Border Patrol agents encountered 1,500 illegal immigrants every day in the El Paso sector alone – now, they’re seeing roughly 80 per day amid President Donald J. Trump’s unprecedented effort to secure the homeland," the White House Office of Communications stated. "Now, organizations that once facilitated the invasion of illegal immigrants are finding out that sheltering them is no longer necessary."

Another statement on Feb. 26 suggested ICE raids were indeed targeting dangerous immigrants. Examples cited included a Haitian national charged with three murders and apprehended in North Carolina; a Salvadoran national and MS-13 gang member convicted of aggravated assault with bodily injury and DWI, apprehended in Houston; a Guatemalan national charged with multiple counts of child rape, apprehended in Massachusetts; a Brazilian national and confirmed gang member convicted of assault and battery, apprehended in Boston; and a Honduran national convicted of sexual conduct with a minor, apprehended in Minnesota. The statement added: "The Trump administration will remain focused on putting our own citizens first by mass-deporting illegal migrant rapists, murders [sic] and other criminals out of American communities.”

Yet anxiety continues. Waco attorney Susan Nelson told veteran Waco Tribune-Herald reporter Carl Hoover that many of her clients applying for a green card or addressing other immigration issues are worried, particularly families where some members are citizens and others are undocumented. While she believed it unlikely that ICE would enter schools to make arrests, experience suggested they might arrest undocumented parents as they arrived at a school to pick up their children. And Waco ISD Trustee Jose Vidaña told Hoover that he senses a general concern among students and parents about the prospect of immigration arrests and possible deportation. "Even people who have been here legally fear being picked up," Vidaña said. "I want to assure them that we're here to support them."

During the Seventh & James Baptist Church gathering, realization quickly set in that most participants were in the dark about all this – not just about how the Trump deportation dragnet is unfolding but what immigration laws and protocols actually are. A German-born woman with whom I spoke stressed that Americans who talk of undocumented immigrants simply “getting in line” for legal status – as if renewing a driver’s license – display ignorance about how difficult it can be to get citizenship: She has five degrees – a testament to her intelligence, discipline and doggedness – yet, she said, it took her 23 years to become a U.S. citizen.

Meanwhile, others in the Seventh & James group seek to battle racist stereotypes.

"I know from personal experience not all of our illegal immigrants are bad hombres,” said Guatemala-born immigration and personal injury attorney Luis Vasquez, who years ago overstayed his visa while growing up in Waco. “Yet that's the message we hear and it seems the news, the media, they want to focus on, you know, the bad apples, and there are. I think there was an interview asking, 'How do you feel about immigrants coming in?' And, sure, for security reasons, there has to be some balance. We can't have open borders. But there's also a lot of good people here.”

Vasquez's comments conjure Burleson's thought-stirring 2017 column for the Waco Tribune-Herald in which he marveled at a neighborhood spectacle just after Trump's 2016 victory, partially sealed through Trump’s characterization of immigrants as murderers, rapists and drug dealers. On his way to work, Burleson waved at José, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, carefully raking leaves in the front yard of neighbors around two imposing "Make America Great Again" signs near a flagpole flying Old Glory. Burleson pondered the fate of an individual who seemed "one of William and Cindy's family members since he takes faithful care of the beautiful gardens and lawns of the elderly couple nearly every day of the year – fall, winter, spring and summer. I couldn't help noticing the incongruity of this scene."

An Old Testament verse sprang to Burleson’s mind – Amos 5:12, which condemned the prevalence of injustice in 8th-century Israel and the failure to uphold the law: "There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts."

Thus the spectacle of Trump’s America churns on, whether in Alice or Waco or Tyler or Washington, D.C., whether in the rugged Texas borderland or the history-lined corridors of the U.S. Capitol. A few days after freeing and/or absolving some 1,500 supporters who four years earlier violently stormed the Capitol, brutalized police officers and threatened the lives of lawmakers, Trump was in Las Vegas, reveling in his return to power and justifying his immigrant deportation scheme by repeating groundless claims about foreign leaders opening up faraway prisons and mental institutions and liberating murderers and rapists to flow into America. The J6 liberator then asked unquestioning rallygoers: “Can you imagine somebody doing that to our country?”

Described by one of his editors as “an equal-opportunity skeptic” and one of his readers as a "modern-day Don Quixote" (for better or worse), Bill Whitaker in November 2020 retired from Texas journalism after a career of nearly 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist. He served as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor during his final dozen years in the profession.

Of space, honeybees and dragshows

For Central Texans who for more than a decade now have blamed SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk's thundering rocket-testing facility just west of Waco for cracking the foundations of their homes and rattling their walls and shaking loose framed pictures of Aunt Bee, brace yourself.

Pegged by some as President Trump’s “co-president,” Musk is now taking a crack at some of America’s most entrenched institutions as part of the Make America Great Again mission to remake the United States and its system of governance. But is this truly about streamlining a bloated and arguably wasteful government or part of the political retribution that seems to driving much of the Trump administration? 

We all may pay a hefty price in learning the truth.

After trafficking in falsehoods about illegal immigrants on his social-media platform in support of Donald Trump's reelection, the eccentric, limelight-craving South African-born tech billionaire was enlisted to, in Trump’s words, "pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies – essential to the ‘Save America’ movement.”

All of which might seem a good thing unless you suddenly discover you or someone close to you is in the path of the Trump-Musk Department of Government Efficiency bulldozers.

"It will become, potentially, 'The Manhattan Project' of our time," Trump stated on Nov. 12. "Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of 'DOGE' for a very long time. To drive this kind of drastic change, the Department of Government Efficiency will provide advice and guidance from outside of government and will partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large-scale structural reform and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.”

Consider this a layup to Musk’s goal of not only one day colonizing Mars but also being among the first to walk on the Red Planet. The 53-year-old tech billionaire would seem to have credentials for tackling the federal deficit if you believe government should be run like a business – and it shouldn’t because it isn’t a business. After acquiring the social-media platform “X,” formerly Twitter, in 2022, Musk famously cut the workforce from some 8,000 employees to about 1,500 by spring 2023.

Therein lies the problem: Massive staffing cuts can either improve workplace efficiency or overwhelm remaining staff to the point that efficiency, production and workplace quality suffer dramatically.

A few days before the 2024 election, I lost all access to my “X” account. I patiently and methodically followed all required “X” protocols to reestablish contact, only for the clunky “X” program to implode each time I passed its test to prove that, no, I wasn’t a robot. Clearly the problem was a gummed-up computer program – a familiar “X” problem, I’ve since learned. If any tech staff remained on duty, they ignored my online entreaties. The only company phone number yielded no callback.

Thanks, Elon.

Now imagine being 140 million miles from Earth and running into an onboard glitch in a SpaceX vessel orbiting Mars and being unable to reach Mission Control back on Earth because they’d all been fired as redundant by Musk and the robotics left in place didn’t function. This scenario conjures up an epic film released before Musk was born in which the malfunctioning “Hal 5000” computer signs off by telling a desperately imperiled astronaut: “Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”

Musk foolishly boasted during an Oct. 27 Trump campaign rally that “at least $2 trillion” can be cut from the $6.75 trillion federal budget, prompting wild cheers and applause. And at a Nov. 14 America First Policy Institute at Mar-a-Lago he echoed cries of January 6 insurrectionists storming the U.S. Capitol in suggesting that massive cuts in federal spending figured in the Election Day 2024 mandate: “It’s not going to be business as usual. We’re going to shake things up. It’s going to be a revolution!”

Yet Musk now needs to prove he’s not as crazy as the rest of the Trump circus. During the America First fête at Mar-a-Lago, brimming in self-congratulatory rhetoric, Musk vowed to pursue Trump’s “restoration of common sense” during a week that saw Trump nominate a “Fox & Friends” weekend co-host to run the Pentagon, notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary and Florida congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general amid a congressional investigation for sexual misconduct and drug abuse.

Musk prides himself on his fancy figuring. Well, figure this: Not quite half of the budget funds Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, the latter two exceedingly popular among Trump supporters (and everyone else). Trump, for what it’s worth, vows not to cut these. Another 15 percent or so goes to defense, which Trump has talked of expanding. Another 12 or 13 percent goes to funding interest on the federal debt. That leaves veterans’ benefits, farm subsidies, transportation infrastructure and other agency missions. 

One way to gauge whether the coming federal slaughter is legitimate, above-board and equitable or just another Trump boondoggle – such as the 2017 Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity that found zero evidence of all the illegal voting Trump claimed after the 2016 election – is to gauge whether any of Musk's federal contracts fall prey to all this joyous “dismantling,” including his SpaceX business. The latter has reportedly benefited from $19.8 billion in federal contracts since 2008.

If Musk isn’t sharing in the pain he acknowledges could be coming to others, this effort could prove to be just another instance of oligarchs playing monopoly with American lives.

To his credit, Musk voiced legitimate concerns about federal spending well before deciding to become Trump’s moneybags cheerleader of disinformation on “X.” During a 2021 Wall Street Journal interview, Musk – celebrated manufacturer of electric vehicles – said he thought $7,500 EV tax credits and subsidies for recharging stations should be deleted from legislation given that federal spending wildly outstripped revenue. “I’m literally saying get rid of all subsidies,” he declared. “Also for oil and gas.”

Oops. A lot of Texas conservatives don’t want to hear that – which gets us to the real problem. Many of us are all too happy to question the other guy’s federally funded subsidy and tax credits and loopholes but express great indignity upon our own being questioned. For genuine conservatives, the problem is not so much subsidies and tax credits but the fact politicians, right and left, regularly play favorites in picking who gets what. Musk’s success will pivot on how equitable and fair he is in proposing what’s cut.

This much is sure: Musk starts out from behind. He knows more about Mars than federal expenditures. When Maya MacGuineas, longtime president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and a respected expert in budget, tax and economic policy, learned that Musk had boasted of cutting $2 trillion, “it was kind of a signal that he wasn’t quite familiar with the federal budget at the time. It was the biggest overpromise.”

Musk appears to have realized his error. During a Jan. 8 podcast Q&A with political strategist Mark Penn, Musk chuckled uncomfortably when asked about his vow to cut $2 trillion, suggesting that if his team aspired for $2 trillion, “we’ve got a good shot at getting $1 trillion.” MacGuineas’ informed opinion: Even modest reforms will require a mix of budget cuts and tax hikes. Excluding Social Security, Medicare, defense and veterans’ benefits reportedly would require 85 percent in cuts to everything else.

In his own pursuits, Musk has every selfish reason to be contemptuous of government regulations and priorities of other citizens. Despite overwhelming opposition, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission last March ignored Texans, sided with Musk and approved a swap of 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park with SpaceX for 477 acres of private land near Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. Many Texans also voice concern over Musk’s Boca Chica launch site’s impact on birds and wildlife at the refuge.

That’s the thing about regulations. They never seem relevant till your neighbor pollutes a creek that flows into your stock tank. Here in McLennan County, folks have been sniping at one another on a neighborhood app over the earthshaking tests at Musk’s SpaceX rocket-testing facility. This has assumed political overtones. Some want compensation for what they contend is structural damage done to their homes. Others side with Musk over their own neighbors, partially because Musk is on Team Trump.

One woman complained of area homes “being damaged by the testing of mega rockets.” A neighbor advised stoicism, noting: “I mean...we sort of voted for this in November. Good luck.” Another defended Musk in a run-on sentence: “Nobody can go after SpaceX give me a break like Elon said if you don’t like it move.” Another left undisguised her loyalties to Trump over neighbors: “Hurry up 1/20. We gonna run out of money to send to Ukraine and celebrate sin and pay lawyers to release guilty people.”

Even before Musk’s formal appointment to “DOGE,” the world’s richest man warned MAGA followers of “temporary hardship” in connection with overhauling wasteful programs and frivolous spending. The problem is that in a movement deeply grounded in grievance – some real, some imagined, some brought on by MAGA individuals themselves, some by factors beyond their control – MAGA disciples will sacrifice only so much before bailing – and, with them, some of Trump’s Republican backing in Congress.

Also unlikely to help matters: Musk’s propensity to pop off and say stupid things such as suggesting (via his social-media platform) that the Internal Revenue Service be “deleted,” which of course would throw into uncertainty everything from federal crop insurance programs to defense spending. This prompted someone on Musk’s own social-media platform to retort: “Musk should try this out on his companies first by eliminating their Accounts Receivables departments. See how that works out for him.”

Nor does Musk bolster confidence when he claims (and then convinces President Trump to repeat) that $50 million was allocated to Gaza by the previous administration to buy condoms for Hamas – an easily disproved falsehood that casts further doubt on not only DOGE but the entire Trump administration. Either someone can’t read spreadsheets or all the president's men and women are riding the same crest of lies they did during the campaign. Meanwhile, another conspiracy theory is dutifully digested by MAGA's millions.

Nor can any citizen who values his or her Social Security check or Medicare payments be reassured by the oligarch's chosen designates, none reportedly older than age 24, gaining access to the U.S. Department of Treasury's sprawling and intricate payment system responsible for not only dispensing trillions of dollars in government expenditures but protecting sensitive information about hundreds of millions of Americans, including their Social Security numbers and medical histories. Which raises a broader question given the enormous potential for corruption and incompetence only now arising in the minds of inquiring citizens: Did Trump voters really mean to vote for a shadow government and a cabinet full of billionaires? Are they willing to bet their retirement and health benefits on such convictions?

In any case, Republican lawmakers, terrified of a disapproving tweet by Trump or Musk, dare say little on behalf of jittery constituents. Example: As the blood pressure of some Texans spiked as more and more learned of potential disaster with Musk and his unvetted designates meddling with sensitive information, Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a former state supreme court judge, attorney general and self-described conservative, clearly sought to change the subject with a Feb. 2 "X" post about Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow in central Pennsylvania: "That means we could see six more weeks of winter, at least according to Groundhog Day lore." Thanks, Big John!

During an Inauguration Day rally, Musk thrilled a wildly cheering MAGA crowd with wildly incongruous promises of “safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending, basic stuff – and we’re going to take DOGE to Mars!” Yet in discerning minds this raises questions about dramatically cutting federal spending in such programs as Social Security and Medicare to fund trillions in tax cuts for the rich, send the military to the border, buy Greenland, take over and develop the Gaza Strip  and send a costly manned expedition to Mars.

In a November interview, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explained the pure folly of a Mars mission amidst MAGA’s run-government-like-a-business mantra – and how private enterprise might greet the idea: “What does that venture capitalist meeting look like? ‘So, Elon, what do you want to do?’ ‘I want to go to Mars.’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘It’ll cost a trillion dollars.’ ‘Is it safe?’ ‘No, people will probably die.’ ‘What’s the return on investment?’ ‘Nothing.’ That’s a five-minute meeting and it doesn’t happen.”

Unless, of course, Trump and Musk can fire up MAGA to agree that traveling to Mars is more important than, say, the skyrocketing egg prices so many complained about during the presidential campaign or the cost of prescription drugs that Trump just threatened. And given the hostility of Mars’ environment, is it not smarter to ensure Earth is not only more habitable for our children and grandchildren but that we’re creating a systemic defense against the asteroids that keep skirting our planet?

There’s absolutely no doubt the federal government funds dubious if not stupid endeavors. As U.S. Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma recently noted, the U.S. State Department allocated $20,600 to a culture center in Ecuador to host, of all things, a dozen drag shows. And the National Science Foundation spent $660,000 to study COVID-19’s impact on Russian women. An earmark of $750,000 funded the New York Metropolitan Opera’s overhaul of its fire alarm system.

“Now, I may have different opinions in this room on drag shows,” Lankford, a religiously grounded conservative, conceded of funding drag shows abroad, a program that aimed to advance the values of diversity and inclusion of LGBTQ communities in daily life. “I’m just asking the simple question: Is the best use of American tax dollars to actually fund drag shows in Ecuador with U.S. tax dollars? I don’t believe that it is.”

Of course, such funding figuratively amounts to nickels and dimes when you’re looking for $2 trillion (or even a trillion). It’s also critical to note that not all expenses are as stupid as they might at first seem. I recall an oft-played sound bite by Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona in 2009 attacking, among other “pet projects” inserted by lawmakers into spending bills, an earmark by Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards of Waco. It allotted $1.7 million for what McCain called a "honeybee factory."

Look closer (as I did) and you'll discover the "honeybee factory" wasn't a factory at all but a research center in South Texas charged with studying the sharp decline in bee populations worldwide, including here in Central Texas. That might not seem important till you note that, in a world without bees, you're also likely to be without those crops that bees pollinate. We're talking about apples, avocados, cashews, watermelons, macadamia nuts, cantaloupes, almonds, pumpkins, peaches, apricots, cherries, raspberries, plums and pears, to name a few.

All this cutting could boil down to what’s foolhardy in federal spending and what’s not – and choosing between, say, research to determine the quantity and quality of water on Mars – that planet upon which Musk hopes to one day walk – or the mounting challenges of producing food in America, something Texas farmers and ranchers stressed in their pleas for a wider range of government-run crop insurance coverage during a U.S. House Agriculture Committee listening session in Waco in March 2023.

If Musk ultimately bungles his search for $2 trillion of cuts in the federal budget and unwittingly helps President Trump turn America into a devastated, delusional, more dysfunctional third-world nation brimming with reckless oligarchs richer than they are now and a working class grappling with more than egg, gasoline and prescription drug prices, one objective may well present itself to a future president of the United States: Giving Musk his wish and sending him to Mars. Along with Trump.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.