In a private email to friends, a psychologist in Waco marveled at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s stunning 2024 election victory after an earlier term that included, for starters, triggering a global tariff war that resulted in a federal bailout of American farmers; 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 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and days later remained outraged at the election outcome consoled himself with the knowledge that many ordinary, unthinking Trump supporters would feel the pain of Trump's cruel and blundering policies before my friend experienced it. He angrily spoke of modern-day 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, former 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 a letter to 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 allies abroad viewed 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 mostly 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 fellow citizens in the eye. The majority decision strikes me as so colossally, so obviously and so perilously wrongheaded that I've lost all faith in the American electorate, which I suppose means I've lost faith in America. I must struggle emotionally and intellectually to regain it if possible, presuming I bother.
Till then, my remaining labors in the journalism profession will be dedicated to documenting for future generations the needless melodrama about to unfold, even as I will be quick to honestly acknowledge if I am wrong about all this and Trump puts aside his habitual grifting and deceit and effectively checks his narcissism and instead sets on a course of healing our nation and addressing the immense and complicated challenges ahead, including manmade climate change and clear dangers to world peace such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Then, and only then, Trump might become the great man so many of my neighbors insist that he is. But he will always, always cast a shadow on the democracy imagined by earlier generations of Americans for self-servedly smashing the institutional foundations put in place to ensure it.
Meanwhile, when my comfortable, mostly white suburban neighborhood regularly shakes amidst the roar of almighty rocket engines from American oligarch Elon Musk’s rocket-testing plant 10 miles west of my home, I will no longer contemplate his once-inspiring vision of transporting civilization to Mars and beyond for its very survival. Rather, I will consider all the falsehoods and exaggerations and slurs that Musk helped spread, indoctrinating many of my neighbors and others beyond via his gigantic social-media platform. Particularly odious: his charge that Democrats conspired to overwhelm polling places with illegal immigrants and snuff out the simple wishes of everyday citizens – an audacious claim from an African-born opportunist who early on sought to make his own fortune in America without benefit of citizenship, without formal permission to work in the United States. From what I can tell, most of the illegal immigrants I have encountered – at least, those who tended to my neighbors’ well-manicured lawns and conducted other menial duties for slave-labor wages, including reroofing homes in the torrid summer sun – kept their heads down and their voices lowered; they sought to attract as little attention as possible. Yet in the 2024 election, legitimate problems — border security and immigration law — had been sensationalized by those seeking to unleash the xenophobia and hatred long hidden in so many of us. And so I am left to wonder what malignancy Musk intends to send to the heavens. Is it the same strain he has spread across America?
Of great Trumpian expectations, I remain cynical. For me, returning Donald Trump to power signals not so much another turning point in our tumultuous history but a steep, unprecedented descent into an abyss of ignorance, grievance and delusion, all confirming the views of political visionaries and philosophers from distant times who recognized that, but for the wisdom and foresight of the voter, democracies sooner or later must extinguish themselves. "Remember democracy never lasts long," attorney, revolutionary patriot, diplomat and former President John Adams, then 79, wrote in a bristling Dec. 17, 1814, letter from Quincy, Massachusetts, to Virginian John Taylor, a political theorist who that year had written a critique of Adams' views on principles of government. "It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." Adams noted darkly in his letter that democracy "has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy."
I think often on Alexis de Tocqueville's famous observation in "Democracy in America" about voters in the Age of Jackson, some six decades after the nation's founding. "On my arrival in the United States, I was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the citizens and so little among the heads of the government," he wrote of gauging latter-day elected officials versus the enlightened generation who founded the republic in 1776 and fortified it as a constitutional republic in 1787. "It is a constant fact that at the present day the ablest men in the United States are rarely placed at the head of affairs; and it must be acknowledged that such has been the result in proportion as democracy has exceeded all its former limits. The race of American statesmen has evidently dwindled most remarkably in the course of the last 50 years." And what would the discriminating Frenchman make of the American electorate in 2024?
For my part, I cannot imagine all of us celebrating, in just a year and a half, our nation’s founding on its 250th anniversary with Trump gloating and pontificating and hogging the spotlight from Declaration of Independence crafters Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. In returning Trump and his Make America Great Again rag-tag circus to the governing spotlight, we prove to all the world we are, in fact, no longer great – certainly not worthy of the founders' cautious 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 of Representatives giving up its constitutionally derived power of the purse through a Project 2025 "impoundment" scheme dedicated to an imperial presidency under Trump.
Nonsense? Let's hope. When only a week after the election Trump demanded 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 then vying for the top Senate leadership post – including Texas' John Cornyn – displayed little appropriate indignity about this assault on the Constitution and their own chamber. They revealed 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 Antonin Scalia agreed broadly with his fellow justices, he faulted the unanimous court 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 in fact anything but. Scalia, particularly irked by the replacement of constitutional text "with a new set of judge-made rules to govern recess appointments," delivered his strongly worded opinion just 10 short years ago in National Labor Relations Board v. Canning. Look it up.
The audacity of so many Trump administrative picks this time around – oddballs, misfits and stooges who never would have passed muster with Trump on his long-running reality-TV show “The Apprentice” 20 years ago – seem sure to compel at least the semblance of Senate confirmation hearings, sufficient enough to satisfy any constitutional obligations. While approval of most nominees is a given with such a Trump-compliant chamber as the one assembling in January, the process will nonetheless offer evidence of just how irresponsible these nominations actually are. Further, the president-elect’s original demand that his appointments bypass legislative scrutiny and the seeming acquiescence of at least some senators bodes poorly for the legislative branch’s supposed independence and vigilance in the months and years ahead. I mean, really – a hard-drinking, womanizing Fox & Friends weekend co-host to head our nation’s massive Department of Defense in an increasingly dangerous world peppered with tyrants who see Trump as their stooge? Are those veterans who supported Trump for reelection really simpatico with all this? And what does this say of their own judgment versus that of distinguished former generals who better understood their sacred oaths to country and Constitution?
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 expenses, 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 the 2024 election. "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."
All this fully demonstrates what has become of Congress, a lament stressed by longtime Washington Post columnist George Will, heir of intellectual and constitutional conservatism in journalistic circles with the death of William F. Buckley in 2008. "What Madison said was that the branches [of government] should be 'rivalous,'" Will, 83, said in a spirited Nov. 27 post-election interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller. "He didn't anticipate the coming of the party system and the coming of presidential-centric politics under which the president's party in Congress is considered mere appendages, to salute sharply and tug their forelocks and implement his agenda. My 19th-century whiggish belief builds upon Madison's belief in the primacy of the legislature. The Congress is the first branch of government. It's Article I for a reason in the Constitution. The president's powers are basically – at least in domestic affairs – to 'take care that the laws' are 'faithfully executed.' The makes him secondary and responsive to the first branch of government, the Congress."
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 court observers and will forever stain 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."
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it seems many Americans have wearied of the responsibilities, frustrations and trials inherent in a democratic republic, which only moves forward in great fits and painful starts amidst dizzying exhilaration and deep regrets and lingering resentments. Although their revolutionary DNA would never allow them to describe it as such, they in effect welcome what in essence is an Old World monarchy, at least as idealistically viewed by 18th-century philosophers and political theorists. Great thinkers of those enlightened times recognized the vulnerabilities of democracy – particularly its ripeness for easy manipulation and tyranny by would-be despots – and instead encouraged enlightened monarchs who, under the best conditions, might be expected to look out for the people against abuses by society's nobles and threats by foreign powers. As fashioned in the Old World, such a king must be of divine spark to justify and maintain elevation over his subjects, even as this king's moral and ethical indiscretions, let alone constitutional transgressions, are overlooked in favor of the magnanimity shown his grateful, even fawning subjects. He maintains regal order and viability through his appointments of family members and nobles who might otherwise amount to troublesome or scheming rivals. Arguably, he is not only above the law that ordinary men must heed, he in effect is the law.
Evidence of such societal preferences are everywhere, sufficient even to scuttle the ordinary ways of American justice, once the hallmark of the civilized world, now increasingly viewed by many as fully complicit in the country's decline through such myopic Supreme Court rulings as Bush v. Gore (2000), Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and Shelby County v. Holder (2013). "As a result of the election held on Nov. 5, 2024, the defendant, Donald J. Trump, will be inaugurated as president on Jan. 20, 2025," Special Counsel Jack Smith stated in a filing in District Judge Tanya Chutkan's court seeking withdrawal of federal charges of election subversion against Trump. "It has long been the position of the Department of Justice that the United States Constitution forbids the federal indictment and subsequent criminal prosecution of a sitting president. But the department and the country have never faced the circumstance here where a federal indictment against a private citizen has been returned by a grand jury and a criminal prosecution is already underway when the defendant is elected president."
Smith similarly withdrew charges against Trump for the latter's irresponsible and indulgent mishandling of classified documents that belonged to the federal government, not ex-presidents. Smith's request was filed with (and granted by) the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit where this Smith case was lodged after a Trump-appointed district judge in Florida ruled – without any valid grounding beyond a solitary, legally irrelevant opinion by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – that the special counsel's appointment wasn't even lawful. As gruff attorney and perennial Trump critic Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, noted in the wake of all this (and has stated more than once, including in a lengthy, in-depth February 2022 essay published by the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law), there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says a sitting president cannot be indicted or brought to trial: "The Department of Justice made that up in 1973."
To quote journalist McKay Coppins: "A lesson from the past eight years: For all Trump's defiance of norms, laws and common decency, his opponents have placed way too much faith in special counsels, prosecutors and federal investigators to hold him accountable. Electoral politics is the only proven way to beat him."
And as the violent January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol proved, even that's iffy.
* * *
Our nation's intelligentsia have offered conflicting insights into the Election Day motivations of voters. Globetrotting New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, during a Nov. 19 Intelligence Squared forum in London, predictably blamed inflation, though he acknowledged another problem for Democrats: "The backlash against the 'woke agenda' was definitely a factor. It played out in different states and different localities, but I think it was very, very important. Democrats had adopted certain positions that were really far away from the median American voter. I think the three dumbest words in the English language were 'Defund the police.' That was not something minority Americans or white Americans wanted to do in their communities. I think that was a huge mistake. There were a lot of those sort of cultural markers. I think a lot of people were just fed up with feeling that there were certain things you couldn't say and would be canceled for."
Yet most mainstream Democrats never encouraged the absurd idea of, say, defunding the police in the chaotic wake of African-American (and former Texan) George Floyd's strangulation by Minneapolis police in May 2020 – only a tiny extremist faction of the party. Yet the belief that Democrats are obsessed with arguably marginal issues such as transgender rights has convinced many voters that they're simply not up to more pressing challenges such as immigration and the economy; Harris, for instance, never escaped her 2019 campaign position of supporting gender-affirming care for federal prisoners and immigrant detainees. Meanwhile, mainstream Republicans have defended or refused to challenge virulent extremism consuming their party. In an age colored by senseless shooting sprees, steadfast Republican opposition to simple "red-flag" laws to remove guns (at least temporarily) from citizens credibly accused of threats or violence pending court review is but one significant example. Quick and easy access to firearms by the most irresponsible members of society is a more important principle in the Republican Party than preventing further loss of innocent life.
New York Times columnist and longtime American observer David Brooks, who visited Waco-based Baylor University on Sept. 10, expanded further on themes of a "social and emotional crisis" in America in a subsequent post-election analysis. He insisted voter outrage over inflation – illustrated in the high prices of eggs and gasoline – was, in fact, "superficial" as a contributing factor in the election outcome, particularly given that prices had dropped significantly well before it. Rather, the political resurrection of Donald Trump reflected a societal rift over class and education – specifically, between the educated, sometimes mislabeled "elites," and the uneducated, who sometimes view themselves alone as "we the people" and believe the educated meritocracy has made a mess of life and politics in America. This rift revealed, Brooks argued, "sadness and meanness" in our culture reflecting anxiety, alienation, loneliness and distrust sufficient to constitute a nationwide "spiritual and emotional crisis."
What's especially tragic in all this is the fact many voters chose to vent their resentments by adopting, just as in 2016, a "burn-it-all-down" approach to American institutions and traditions, a "fuck-your-feelings" response to fellow, possibly better-educated citizenry urging caution and prudence and, finally, bull-headed denialism incorporating Trump presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway’s handy "alternative facts," 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: "deplorables." While Clinton's elitist-seeming, even haughty air didn't make her presidential bid any easier in 2016, it's relevant to note that she divided Trump supporters into two categories: those desperate for change amid bleak feelings of abandonment by government and the economy and those she placed in a "basket of deplorables" and, simply, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” Such critical nuances were lost as trumpeted high and low by Trump's media champions.
For the record, Baylor's goal in inviting Brooks to speak in 2024 was to encourage more thought and patience in what passed for public discourse: "As we navigate another highly contentious election season, we are reminded that whether in politics, the church, on campus or within our families, there is a need for civil discourse. While we may not always agree, civil discourse requires mutual respect and objectivity without hostility – demonstrating an appreciation for the experiences of others. As a Christian university, Baylor seeks to both model civil discourse and train students to do the same." During its year-long focus on civil discourse, Baylor also featured author and journalist Tim Alberta speaking on the societal and political crisis arguably warping American Christianity.
For all his soft-spoken civility and intelligence, Brooks perhaps has reason to know about venting and rage without sufficient good reason or factual grounding. A year before speaking at Baylor, he took a beating after he posted on social media (on Sept. 20, 2023) a photo of a half-eaten hamburger and fries, laid out on an unfurled paper wrapper along with ketchup packets and a drink notably served in a glass, not a paper cup: "This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible." The restaurant returned fire, noting on social media that Brooks' bar tab was "almost 80 percent and he's complaining about the cost of his meal. Keep drinking, buddy." The burger and fries cost about $17 – possibly higher than what one might find elsewhere in Newark, but then this was after all purchased at an airport restaurant where prices ordinarily skew higher. The 1911 Smoke House Barbecue subsequently offered a "D BROOKS SPECIAL" that included a "super delicious" burger, fries and double shot of whiskey for $17.78. Readers voiced outrage over Brooks' deception, including one who posted to his social-media page: "David you lied about the cost of this meal. You also lie about inflation. But then you're a journalist for the New York Times so of course you lie."
While eminent conservative scribe George Will of the Washington Post suggested the tidal wave of state and federal indictments against Trump for an astonishing range of serious allegations may have prompted many Republicans to rally to his side in the general election (during which Trump proclaimed himself a victim of political persecution, building on the successful MAGA catalyst of grievance and resentment), the erudite 83-year-old columnist argued in a Nov. 6 column that Harris, rather than inflation or class warfare or even Trump’s web of legal problems, was ultimately to blame: "Enough has been said about the Republican Party’s eight years of self-degradation. More needs to be said about the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president. And then, via Democratic Party high-handedness, foisted her on the nation as the party’s nominee. She did not pass through the toughening furnace of competition [that is, through a succession of primary elections] that reveals mettle, or its absence. Her campaign, although short, was too long for her talents. They do not include the skill of making her synthetic centrism – her repudiation of her entire public profile prior to July – seem authentic.”
The controversial Wall Street Journal opinion page is very often enlivened by opinionated ideologues and oligarchs mixing dizzying statistics and buttoned-down propaganda to justify their outsized influence on the political sphere, supposedly for the betterment of all mankind but ever betraying the benefits to a class of entitled, know-it-all captains of industry such as Elon Musk, the 53-year-old entrepreneurial showboat who used his stunning success overseeing the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla to catapult himself into what some contend is a worrisome “co-presidency” alongside Trump. The most approachable of Journal columnists is former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, a gracious individual who nevertheless sometimes comes across as a prim, fussy, long-suffering yet indulgent aunt. She is quick to express disdain for Trump's unruliness as she dutifully struggles to outfit him in red, white and blue colors to make him more presentable to the rest of us. "As for the Republicans, we always feel now we’re picking a government to manage our decline," she wrote in her Nov. 7 column on the election outcome. "But when Mr. Trump met with the Journal’s editors last month, he spoke for a moment with excitement about how America 'can be so rich and so successful.' He described watching the arms [that is, the giant robotic pincers on Musk’s Boca Chica launch pad in southern Texas] come out and catch the [descending] SpaceX rocket. 'It was good old Elon. It was him, he’s amazing.' That chord he was trying to hit – and tried to hit in late rallies – is one America yearns to hear. They want the old sense that their kids are being launched into a society and culture that’s healthy and vital. Exuberance, expansion, Musk to Mars, drill, baby, drill – we’re going to be exciting again! Then Mr. Trump would revert to American carnage. But in a funny way, almost in spite of himself, I think he communicated what he meant, I think he got the Dream Big vote and he should continue it as a centerpiece."
Which demonstrates just how little Noonan internalized in her ivory-tower perspective after Trump's first presidential term of carnage, brimming with decisions that inflicted unnecessary cruelty on desperate immigrant families, drained the federal treasury, enriched the wealthy, contemplated shooting protesters whose causes conflicted with his own, spurned global allies, cost thousands of American lives in a viral crisis, comforted ruthless tyrants and, finally, undermined the U.S. Constitution and democracy to such a degree that some of us will forever envision Trump at mere mention of the word "treason,” along with Jane Fonda and Benedict Arnold. In some ways, Noonan – whose inspiring speeches for Reagan, a former Hollywood actor, glowed with all-American optimism and reason – symbolizes the ideological knots into which aging "Reagan Republicans" tie themselves in trying to rationalize and excuse and embrace Trump, a showman whose demagoguery, ignorance and foulness defy all that President Reagan conveyed to the nation in his heyday.
Ditto Bush Republicans such as Karl Rove, the analytical “brain” of President George W. Bush and now also writing a column for the Journal. "When his reelection journey began in 2022, it seemed impossible to all but him, his family and true believers that he would win," Kove observed in a Nov. 7 WSJ column reflecting on Trump's victory. "The lawsuits, indictments and later the conviction [in May 2024 for 34 counts of falsification of business records to hide from voters in the 2016 election Trump's adulterous tryst with pornographic film star Stormy Daniels] would have doomed any other candidacy. But he persevered and his supporters grew in numbers. He knew what appealed to people in a way others – including me – didn’t see. A friend explained it to me on Monday as we walked a New York street. Pointing to nearby construction workers, he said the former president cares about people like them and they feel that. Millions of Americans who don’t believe politicians care about them, their challenges and their aspirations see Mr. Trump as their champion."
One of the most insightful political consultants of our times, Rove didn't dwell on it in noting his friend's working-man logic, but the incongruity of a narcissist who inherited his foundational wealth, who famously cheated contractors and workers (possibly impacting construction workers just like those cited by Rove's friend) throughout his career as a real-estate developer, who raided his own charity foundation – the utter incongruity of this limelight-seeking egotist and braggart then venturing out and successfully forging strong, meaningful political ties with all-too-gullible working stiffs proves in a most perverse way the observation of muckraking journalist-turned-political activist Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." And thus Donald Trump employed lies, patriotism and demagoguery to provoke outrage among simpleminded voters who little understood such complicated problems as inflation, who little appreciated the absurdity of Trump's vows to immediately “slash” grocery prices upon election – vows Trump himself acknowledged as absurd only after his 2024 win. In the final analysis, this was not their only failure of comprehension.
Rove correctly nailed another serious problem, noting that Trump benefited from the mental and physical incapacity of the sitting president imprudently seeking a second term. White House staffers denied up and down President Biden’s feebleness till it became obvious during his dismal performance in a June debate with Trump. "It’s a scandal that Joe Biden and his inner circle thought it was in the country’s best interest that he run when he had declined so precipitously," Rove argued. "They hid the fact that age had robbed Mr. Biden of what America needed in the Oval Office." Indeed, in the weeks after the election, campaign strategists, political scientists and journalists debated whether Biden's statement in the 2020 campaign that he sought to be a “bridge” to future Democratic leaders actually signaled an intention, at least at the outset of his presidency, to limit himself to a single term because of advanced age. In any case, he unwittingly paved the way for only his vice president – and then with insufficient time for her to conduct a concerted and coherent presidential campaign. If there's one takeaway in this, it's that politics requires substantial ego and confidence on the part of a successful candidate – and that such qualities linger long after other mental faculties have slipped away. Incredibly, growing evidence of Trump’s own cognitive decline – including wildly disjointed, at times utterly incomprehensible rambling and rants veering into madness – failed to discourage voters from rallying to him. The transfixed faces of idolizing fans directly behind him at campaign rallies showed not an iota of concern.
Other factors weaving their way in and out of post-election political analyses: Resentment by younger voters amid nationwide campus demonstrations protesting Israel's ongoing war with belligerent, bloodthirsty Palestinian leadership and the failure of the Biden administration to compel Israeli leadership to halt what amounted to near-extermination of innocent Palestinians caught in the crossfire – as if a Trump administration would really show more compassion than, say, a President Harris, who at least voiced support for an inclusive two-state solution. In a Dec. 4 post-election observation during the New York Times DealBook Summit, former President Bill Clinton marveled at the astonishing ignorance of "the young people" regarding Mideast strife going back to the Six-Day War of 1967 and the deal he helped negotiate between Israel and the Palestinians during his presidency – a deal that soon unraveled. "And I go through all the stuff that was in the deal and they, like, it's not on their radar screen. They can't even imagine that happened." Clinton noted the impossibility of returning to such deals in present global times: "You walk away from a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and you can't complain 25 years later when the doors aren't still open and all the possibilities aren't still there."
Arguably second only to inflation was anger over border security, which the Biden administration failed to tackle decisively at the outset of its four-year term – when Democrats controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Biden only sought to address the crisis comprehensively during the last year of his term when his legislative advantage had evaporated. Yet those so angry about an overrun U.S.-Mexico border never displayed appropriate anger toward Trump, who used his considerable sway to kill a strong Republican-authored border bill so that he could use the crisis as a provocative issue on which to campaign. This meant the border chaos continued another full year. To me, it seemed as if Biden had run up the white flag by January 2024 and Senate Republicans quite correctly set tough conditions in their border bill. But in then bowing to Trump and allowing the bill to die, they exposed Trump and others as charlatans, frauds and con men in no way interested in calming tensions in America and staunching the "invasion" at our southern border. Maverick Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas correctly suggested that Republican lawmakers who worked against the bill on behalf of Trump stood guilty of dereliction of duty: "I'm extremely disappointed in the very strange maneuvering by many on the right to torpedo a potential border reform bill ... if we have a bill that, on net, significantly decreases illegal immigration, and we sabotage that, then that is inconsistent with what we told our voters we would do."
Perhaps meaningful answers to the 2024 election lie with more provincial insights and impressions. A few weeks before Election Day 2024, during a luncheon gathering of the Waco Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors hosted by Trib Editor Steve Boggs and Church Under the Bridge missionary and pastor Jimmy Dorrell at the World Cup Café, we went around the table of community columnists at one point, each contributing an observation about the upheaval we had witnessed in an election season long unparalleled in lying, corruption and hostility. Dorrell lamented that dialogue is increasingly impossible because so few earnestly listen to one another; Baylor University emeritus philosophy professor Bob Baird argued post-modernism has evolved to the point that reality differs for each of us and truth is often cast aside for more preferrable narratives; civic leader Ashley Bean Thornton suggested marketing obsessions have led to oversimplification of matters that are simply beyond simplification – a grave peril for a society facing sprawling, complicated challenges.
Commercial real estate agent Randy Reid offered insights about conservatives who fear earthshaking challenges to long-entrenched views of the world around them – even scientifically applied statistics about the actual age of the earth – while progressives’ zeal sometimes goes to dubious lengths in trying to ensure equity for all people in all things, an impossibility in a vigorous capitalist system in which one's ambitions, risk-taking, discipline, ego and smarts often determine winners and losers. Civic leader, accountant and retired foundation director Harry Harelik, who often writes in the Waco Tribune-Herald of his Jewish immigrant ancestry in Texas and their patriotic embrace of American ways, feared much of the division and self-deceit we witness reflects anxiety over fast-shifting demographics and a feared loss of supremacy by white Americans who have long enjoyed both privileges as well as rights, justified in their minds because of the strides of frontier ancestry. Former military intelligence officer and history professor Mark Long stressed delineation between the 1776 Declaration of Independence, a founding document focused on liberty, and the 1787 Constitution, which demonstrates the founders' fears of unbridled political power, shrewdly checked by the separation of powers between the three branches of government – an intricate setup now under attack by "patriots," their minds and allegiances fogged by subversive Russian propaganda and Trumpian contempt for institutions, norms and traditions.
And after the election? A thoughtful, benign retired physician of immense wisdom, whose professional career elevated him to leadership of the American Academy of Family Physicians which in turn saw him mix with learned men nationwide, acknowledged privately to a circle of friends disturbing symptoms for the nation’s health in the 2024 election: the failure of women nationwide to rally sufficiently against Trump at the polls, a shortfall that promised further marginalization if not subjugation and worried my friend’s own daughters; the continued decline of an unprincipled judiciary whose opinions rested less and less on law, precedent and history and more and more on political contrivance, subservience and real dread of confrontation with Trump; and, finally, the astounding success of one American, a historical and constitutional ignoramus, a profane narcissist, an unrivaled liar but a hardheaded genius in manipulation and marketing, in so completely destroying so much of what wonderfully defined America, from its intellectual conservatism to its simple day-to-day compassion and decency – and doing so while waving the U.S. flag and welcoming adoration by Christian pastors and preachers. My friend, in his 70s, boosted spirits by invoking an observation British wartime leader Winston Churchill never said but might have, especially from 1939 through 1941 when Great Britain contended with militant fascism marching across Europe while America slumbered amidst the grip of another delusional America First movement: “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” My friend also recollected awful times in America's past, including the Civil War and Jim Crow racism that saw horrific lynchings in our very own town a century ago. Yes, America would somehow again triumph over MAGA hatred, ignorance and illiberality, even if this might come well after our own descent into dust.
While reporters, editors and op-ed writers at papers big, small and between seek to interpret the 2024 vote, I've reflected deeply on shortcomings of the mainstream news media. One question debated in the legitimate press since Trump's resurrection is whether a professional journalist is ethically obligated to be "fair" and to rigorously practice "bothsidism" when a candidate or a political party regularly misleads voters and encourages citizen outrage through lies, half-truths and exaggerations. Many in my profession increasingly believe such candidates or parties forsake any right to fairness from the work-a-day press when those candidates or parties repeatedly dupe voters, especially when the legitimate press itself is struggling to maintain its age-old business model of marketing facts and reality as bobble-headed citizens flock to questionable, often biased, "free" media such as TikTok, Fox News or Joe Rogan podcasts. As historian and author Yuval Noah Harari noted in his 2018 book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century," you get what you pay for when it comes to relevant and reliable information regarding current events. I recall with discomfort a young dental hygeniest working on my teeth during the 2020 pandemic while mindlessly regurgitating all sorts of crazy views on viral contagions and quack medical treatments she'd absorbed from physicians of dubious repute, indulged on air by Rogan, a former comedian and actor.
Clearly, the press is guilty of some serious shortcomings. An editor at one of Texas' largest metropolitan dailies acknowledged to me that its opinion staff avoided publishing op-ed pieces on Trump, something I had noticed as Trump rebuilt his political machine after electoral defeat and humiliation: "Our opinion policy has been to largely ignore Trumpland so as not to give it oxygen." Granted, this exchange occurred in July 2023 when many couldn't imagine the electorate ever again elevating Trump to power. Yet at his reelection launch just down the interstate highway from this big-city newsroom three months earlier, Trump not only vowed "retribution" for supporters who had been "wronged and betrayed" but rationalized away the violent January 6 insurrection, touting the insurrectionists as patriots. Popular right-wing media apologists joined right in. Dedicated to resurrecting Trump, they busied themselves in normalizing much about him that should never have been deemed normal in a civilized, democratic, law-abiding, god-fearing society. They did their job well, even as they denigrated the legitimate news media as "fake news."
Meanwhile, mainstream news entities practiced something called "sanewashing," downplaying Trump's incoherent ramblings about, say, becoming a dictator on Day One or spouting conspiracy theories about, say, undocumented immigrants eating neighbors' dogs and cats, allowing news entities to maintain the appearance of even-handedness by treating Trump like any other presidential candidate when basic news stories written by journalists with honesty and authority, news stories grounded in historical context and constitutional law and societal norms, would have made abundantly clear Trump was not like any other presidential candidate. But the mainstream press can bear only so much blame. It's unlikely any halfway cognizant voter, whatever his or her preference, considered Trump like any other presidential candidate.
Yet appearances do matter, especially involving large newspapers after which mid-sized newspapers (such as the Waco Tribune-Herald) and smaller papers understandably model themselves. Certainly not helping credibility of the mainstream press in 2024 and beyond was the decision by Washington Post leadership, and at the 11th hour of the general election, to kill its opinion-page endorsement of Kamala Harris, a decision that thousands of outraged subscribers saw as safeguarding from political retribution Post owner Jeff Bezos' others business interests including Amazon, an amazingly successful (and controversial) multinational technology company and online retailer, and Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company rivaling that owned by Trump's confidant and crony, the ever redoubtable Elon Musk. "What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias, a perception of non-independence," Bezos wrote in defending the sudden decision to refrain from a Post endorsement. "Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one." There's truth in what Bezos says; the Waco Tribune-Herald ended its policy of candidate endorsements years earlier. But such decisions should be made at the outset of the election season; abruptly ending the practice mere days before Election Day understandably invites allegations of cowardice and complicity. Nor did Bezos help matters further in subsequently donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and currying favor by courting Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
I'm old enough to remember when newspaper readers regularly phoned the newsroom to question when the paper would issue its candidate endorsements in upcoming elections. This pivoted on the belief that, aside from flat-earthers and moon-landing deniers, facts were indisputable things. Interpretations of facts might differ, and did differ, but those interpretations at least hinged on society's general agreement that facts are facts and that arguments for or against must rely on facts. In endorsing or critizing a policy or a candidate, a newspaper's opinion-page staff used the same facts its competitors on television network news and weekly news magazines employed. If a reader differed with newspaper editorials, he or she had to base that disagreement on agreed-upon facts as assembled by newspapers of record. Yet I also recognized the readers who informed me that they intended to clip endorsements from the paper and take these with them into the polling place to guide them were almost always older than me. And by the time my career began to draw to a close, political dynamics had changed with everyone from right-wing broadcaster Rush Limbaugh to Fox News propagandists exaggerating or outright fabricating facts upon which so many earnestly relied in forging opinions. Their success was in crafting narratives of outrage that justified baked-in political and societal sentiments from their listeners and viewers not always justified by actual facts. While newspaper columnists with mug shots and reputations carved out over time, column after painstakingly researched column, endured to a significant degree, newspaper endorsements from a faceless editorial board have lost ground in terms of credibility.
I've long believed newspapers serve voters better by conducting vigorous, lengthy, sit-down Q&As with willing candidates, whether they're running for school board or the presidency of the United States. I'm talking about Q&As involving informed questioners not afraid of asking pointed (but polite) followup questions and challenging candidates with evidence that tests knowledge and scrutinizes their campaign claims. Yes, such interviews can draw charges of bias, but they also provide far more useful portraits of the candidates, especially when their very personality comes across through their particular rhetoric and wording on the printed (or online) page. And whenever some reader has accused the Waco Tribune-Herald editorial board of not being fair in its aggressive questioning, I remind that critic that if the politician can't withstand questions from an obscure journalist at some mid-sized daily newspaper, he or she certainly has no business addressing a multitude of complicated public responsibilities. Yet, while the public generally applauds the idea of candidate Q&As, I can't see, after many years of conducting them, that they've played any significant role in electing obviously superior candidates. In the end, voters still act based on partisan or societal identities rather than qualification or policy stances of the candidates themselves. Many voters are clearly creatures of party, not country.
Meanwhile, far-right media, unapologetic and unrepentant about their biases and marketing of lies and half-truths to a segment of the population addicted to disinformation and drivel, continue to question and malign journalists who practice their professions with objectivity, integrity and honor. "Do you still watch cable news or read major newspapers like the NY Times or USA Today?" Wes Weaver of the aggressively right-wing, agenda-driven Texas Public Policy Foundation wrote in a Nov. 20 missive touting the foundation's Associated News Service, which it described as an Associated Press without the wokeness – a political hindrance I’ve found many on the right can’t define for me. "What we know as 'mainstream media' is now being called 'legacy media' because it’s lost so many viewers. In fact, many pundits say the outcome of the 2024 election is evidence that the political tactics of the legacy media are dead. We’ve seen the blatant leftist bias on full display for years now. By destroying the trust of the public through pure deception, the formerly popular news outlets can no longer be trusted to offer honest and factual accounts of the latest happenings."
This comes from a foundation that, whatever else, has steadfastly supported Republican politicians who lie or mislead or leave out crucial and relevant information in what they convey to others. Citizens with an objective worldview as well as legitimate news media veterans who regularly and honestly conduct "postmortems" on the coverage they assemble and market know better than to tolerate fabrication or exaggeration. In an Oct. 16 "Amanpour & Co." interview regarding his book, "Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Liars, Why Republicans Do It More and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy," Bill Adair, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and founder of PolitiFact, suggested the greatest challenge facing America today is a party and its dutiful media surrogates who, in the marketing and trafficking of falsehoods and exaggerations, "just do it without any care at all about being called out on lies, and I think that's what we need to care about as we go forward: How do we change this system to get people to care about lying and to get politicians to care about lying?"
Particularly insightful under Michel Martin's questioning are Adair's findings on why Republicans and conservatives lie far more often than Democrats do:
I asked that question to many former Republicans, some current Republicans, political operatives, elected officials, and I got some common answers. First, one was historic. A lot of them put the turning point in the early 1990s when Newt Gingrich took over the House Republicans. That changed the culture of the Republican Party, they say, because it established a culture that says, "Anything goes. If you want to win, you can, you know, throw some elbows, you can lie, what matters is winning." Along those lines, Denver Riggleman, a Republican congressman of Virginia who served one term, put it to me this way. He said that many Republicans see their work as part of this epic battle and, in that, it is such an important cause to them that they really believe lying is justified in that epic battle.
And then the other thing you need to add into it is a media ecosystem on the right – Fox News, talk radio – that not only doesn't question the lies from Republicans but echoes them and even profits from them. So put all those things together and it really has been established that the Republican Party just accepts lying as part of its culture.
Adair went on to suggest Democrats "are stopped from lying by two things. One, I don't think they believe it's as effective as the Republicans do. They also don't have the media ecosystem that would egg them on the way that the conservative media ecosystem does."
Which may well change after the election of 2024. In recognizing the successful strategy and tactics of the Republican Party, some Democrats now contemplate their own media ecosystem. Question: Will it too market lies, given that much of the public clearly revels in lies? Could the intellectually lazy citizen really blame them if a Democratic media ecosystem aped its Republican counterpart?
Broader question: Are our anything-goes social-media platforms and freewheeling podcasts and a right-wing media ecosystem sufficient replacements for mainstream media, including newspapers and certain networks with their scrutinizing editors and vigilant fact-checkers? Or are the former just cheap and far more entertaining in their inflammatory hair-on-fire hysterics? So far as newspapers go, many cynics accuse work-a-day journalists of bias even for such accounts as, say, a bare-bones report about state lawmakers charging Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton with corruption or a straightforward, no-frills story on testimony before a U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. When I've challenged such critics to explain precisely how our just-the-facts-ma'am stories are "biased," most have hedged and hawed, then acknowledged that, well, no such bias exists in the actual writing and reporting but that editors blew such stories out of proportion by placing them on Page One.
As a newspaperman who served three tours of duty as a city editor, cultivating, pitching and defending stories produced by competent, robustly manned newsrooms, I assure anyone of the vigorous, heartfelt and sometimes deflating debate between fellow editors meeting over what was fit for Page One and what was best published inside if at all, debate that focused on not only a story's relevance to readers but its potential interest. As any outsider invited to sit in on such lively meetings might well testify, little pretense or elitism was at play; various editors meeting around a long table in the afternoon debating news, sports, feature and wire stories, arguing over a story's placement and even its editing and headlines, might assume at various moments the competing, consuming spirits of Thomas Jefferson, Ben Bradlee, H.L. Mencken, Benjamin Franklin, Edward R. Murrow, Mark Twain, James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, Henry Villard, William Shirer, Frank Buck, Lincoln Steffens, Walt Whitman, and, yes, even P.T. Barnum. Each guiding spirit from the past might possess one editor, then drift around the table and possess yet another, as flesh-and-blood editors remained seated and fought over the next story's placement and treatment.
As one who still writes opinion pieces and conducts interviews for the local newspaper – its newsroom no longer robustly staffed, its chief editor consigned to overseeing both Waco and College Station newsrooms, 90 miles apart on State Highway 6 – I find it hard in 2024 to dismiss the shared conclusion that some stellars in my profession held Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris to a far higher standard than they did her rambling, fiercely evasive Republican opponent. I took great offense at an unnecessarily argumentative interview conducted by CBS News veteran Bill Whitaker (yeah, same name), obsessed with Harris' past policy stances versus current policy prescriptions such as expanding the child tax credit and government assistance for first-time homebuyers. It's as if he and other media stars assumed everyone knew almost everything out of Trump's mouth was a lie and so instead focused attention on Harris, who had only become a presidential candidate weeks earlier after President Biden reluctantly quit his reelection bid.
Then again, maybe Whitaker's frustratingly combative interview made no real difference. Post-election analyses suggest many of the people Harris' policies sought to benefit – the poor and the lower middle class – instead got swept up in all the scene-stealing star power of Trump's MAGA rallies, ranging from wrestler Hulk Hogan's Oct. 28 touting of Trump for president and vulgar trashing of Harris (including simulating spitting upon her) at Madison Square Garden, to Trump's Nov. 1 simulating oral sex on a microphone during a Milwalkee campaign rally. In failing to repeatedly sound warning bells about a candidate who vowed retribution on his enemies, who spoke of terminating the U.S. Constitution, who self-amusedly vowed to be a dictator at the very outset of his second presidency, some news entites indeed pursued "bothsidism" in mercilessly picking apart Harris who, whatever else, at least vowed to defend democracy and respect constitutional norms. Retired Chicago Tribune metro editor Mark Jacob's Oct. 6 admonishment of the legitimate news media for failing to sufficiently warn of looming catastrophe facing America should have resonated far more: "The story of your lifetime is in front of you: the Republican assault on democracy. Focus. Right now, it seems like you're failing to see the Hindenburg aflame in the sky because you're too busy interviewing the ground crew about its plans to land the airship."
At the same time, I seriously doubt the self-flagellation so often practiced by conscientious members of the legitimate press is completely deserved, given an electorate that has come to expect politicians to entertain and amuse them rather than encourage them in good citizenship, rather than educate them as to constructive policy solutions. If citizens cared, the increasing fissures in American institutions were everywhere. It’s possibly relevant, for instance, 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 up front before his campaign could set up at the city airport. That should have communicated something to area voters but probably didn't if they knew about it 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 Trump in executive pomp and Capitol violence replayed on a huge screen. That too should have communicated something to discerning voters but probably didn't. In immediately rising and placing hand over heart, they participated in a display of idolatry and sedition, not allegiance to country and constitution.
During nine long hours of interviewing Make America Great Again disciples that day, I marveled as people bubbling over in giddiness occasionally began arguing with each other over dueling conspiracy theories and erupted in rants over everything from sovereign-citizen rights to the coming resurrection of JFK Jr. – the latter a conspiracy theory that gained credence in November 2021 when scores of QAnon believers, many from beyond Texas, gathered at Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas to await fulfillment of the prophecy of QAnon renegade Michael Brian Protzman, alias Negative48. The prediction: John F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. would materialize in a divine scheme to restore Trump to power. During the 2023 Trump rally in Waco, an Air Force veteran and January 6 rioter from my hometown of Abilene, Texas, arrived dressed as Captain America – her roadbound retirement routine these days – and posed for photos with fellow MAGA merrymakers. Another reveler, this one from Houston, came adorned as “King Trump,” complete with crown. In remarks to this gathering of an estimated several thousand citizens (far short of the 10,000 Trump forces claimed), Trump recalled how he pressed his Texas campaign chairman, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, to mount the rally at hand somewhere of unstinting, overwhelming support – not “one of those 50-50 areas” – and that, in settling on Waco as that place, they opted to "go right into the heart of it.” That is, right into the heart of Trump country.
Much of the rambunctious, joyous Trump mania of that 2023 rally blossomed into the willful ignorance and stubborn 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 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 simply 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 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 this 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 by a right-wing talk-radio host 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 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, of course, old, recycled lies about the stealing of the 2020 presidential election from Trump.
Yet, tragically, compounding this societal and political problem were intellectually lazy citizens
getting most of their “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 Harris was a Marxist how she could trust anything
on Fox News – her chief news source – after it paid a whopping $787 million in a lawsuit
settlement for knowingly and willingly and repeatedly lying to its viewers
about supposedly rigged 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 same questions. The difference was the latter relied primarily on national newspapers and mainstream cable news for their information.
Some of the most disturbing insights into the American mindset come from political strategist Sarah Longwell’s remarkable focus-group discussions with voters ordinarily disposed to vote Democratic. Some acknowledged up front that Trump was a hateful and divisive force in American life but threw in with him anyway. One even called him "a piece of shit, I think he's crazy, I think he lies, I think he's just a horrible human being," but voted for him nonetheless because her paycheck counted for more during his first term than it did under Biden, left to wrestle with devastating economic fallout from a pandemic Trump mismanaged. "Hate was up, of course, hate was up," she acknowledged of Trump’s first tenure, "but I could afford to live at that point and these past four years dramatically made things so much tougher."
Others expressed similar disdain for Trump but voted for him because of the paradigm-busting supporting cast he assembled for what could be called his second season in American primetime. These players included individuals such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the notorious anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist disowned by the rest of the Kennedy clan, and, of course, Elon Musk, the eccentric, cryptic, Mars-or-bust billionaire who invited Americans using his popular social-media platform to consider themselves "citizen journalists" in flooding the platform with conspiracy theories, falsehoods and misinformation while he did the same. "I did not vote for Trump," one voter ordinarily inclined toward Democrats told Longwell. "I voted for Elon Musk, I voted for RFK, which I really love him in his position. I voted for [former Democratic presidential candidate, congresswoman and alleged Russian sympathizer] Tulsi Gabbard. You know, I voted for Elon Musk, you know, [rumormongering right-wing commentator] Tucker Carlson, and then I voted for Trump. So it's a team and I love the fact that they represent, you know, running the country as a business."
Longwell’s fascinating focus-group interviews suggest that the warping of the American mind in the Age of Trump impacts not only go-along, get-along Republicans responding to an arguably racist, fascist takeover of their entire political party but others once disinclined to succumb to such recklessness but now susceptible in a dizzying world where, to quote the chief defender of Trump throughout his embattled first term, “Truth isn’t truth.” These interviews suggest that, for many of us, truth is no longer sought out in traditional news media but, rather, online where anything goes and truth is a quick road-rage casualty of “citizen journalists” trafficking in hokum and hatred, a combination always toxic to a democratic republic so dependent on public virtue. In this increasingly disorienting fog, many have become impatient with the methodical, deliberate, even tedious processes the founders installed in the Constitution for significant change, processes that require shared facts, constructive debate and reasonable consensus between enlightened gentlemen. Many today are weary of such conditions and, in desperation, are prepared to trust witch doctors, spiritualists, prophets, quacks, carnival barkers and soothsayers in positions of immense power.
"The big, overarching theme is that this is an unserious country filled with unserious people," Jonathan V. Last, conservative editor of The Bulwark, concluded amidst a post-election session spent discussing focus-group insights with Longwell. These included a voter who dismissively declared, without equivocation, that Vice President Harris had nothing at all on her daily calendar (demonstrating, apparently, indolence) and that Trump had transformed himself over the election season from the "most outlandish, over-the-top, almost comical character" to an individual of great presidential bearing. Last’s understandable conclusion: “The extent to which these people are utterly unserious about government, America, themselves, their lives was shocking to me, and I don't easily shock on this stuff." In regard to the voter cited, he expressed confidence she had never laid eyes on the vice president's scheduling calendar. Regarding Trump, Last added: "I'm sorry, but the last two weeks of the election, Trump was talking about [late golf icon] Arnold Palmer's dick [at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania] and then fellating a microphone [at a Milwaukee rally]. This idea that he was – and then this woman 'T' is Puerto Rican, she is in favor of abortion rights and she says she has a trans daughter – she has absolutely no concern about her trans daughter in Trump's America – but she was super-happy to vote for Trump. I don't even know what to say. It's just, like, unserious." The reference to the voter's being Puerto Rican conjures up the fact Trump, as president, withheld billions of dollars in federal aid that Congress allocated after Hurricane Maria devastated the U.S. territory in 2017, knocking out power to large swaths of the island for nearly a year and killing nearly 3,000 people – relief funding that didn't begin fully flowing till the ascension of President Biden. What's more, during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, warmup comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as “literally a floating island of garbage.”
Meanwhile, many others have partisan prejudices so baked in that little is likely to move them beyond their usual knee-jerk voting patterns, even when grim warning signs appear signaling trouble for our own existences, forget about everyone else. Example: a diehard Republican neighbor, a retired lawyer, who on morning walks the past few years voiced real outrage over only two matters – participation of transgenders in women’s sports and anything that might upset his retirement investments, a concern sparked when congressional Republicans talked about provoking a government shutdown on Biden's watch months ahead of the election. My friend grumbled at the prospect of taking a hit in the stock markets and vowed to confront Republican Congressman Pete Sessions, who supported a shutdown, at the church where they worshiped. Somehow this confrontation never came to pass, as if doing so might violate certain rules of etiquette. In any case, the shutdown was avoided. And how, I wondered about my friend just ahead of the 2024 election, would inflation and his investments fare in a global war of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs, a scenario which Trump seemed determined in setting into motion? How would inflation and my friend's investments fare when the estimated 10 percent of the U.S. workforce consisting of unauthorized immigrants laboring in housing and highway construction, roofing and agriculture is mass-deported at enormous cost by the United States, as Trump also seemed set upon?
We didn't have to wait for Trump to formally come to power in January. Just a week before Christmas, when my friend’s thoughts had turned to prospects of a national championship for the beloved football team of his alma mater (the University of Texas) and Christmas holidays with cherished children and grandchildren, Trump shook his retirement world to the core when – egged on and arguably even manipulated by “first buddy” Elon Musk, richest man in the world – the president-elect demanded a government shutdown, insisting that a continuing budget resolution negotiated in good faith with the Democrats was unacceptable. This prompted fearful Republican lawmakers to abruptly abandon a budget deal many had worked on for months to keep the U.S. government operating till March 2025.
Musk helped foment this confrontation through posted lies or careless flubs such as the incendiary claim that lawmakers sought a 40 percent increase in their pay in the continuing resolution or that it funded the construction of bioweapons labs — proof of Musk’s disregard for facts amidst his constant belittling of “legacy” news media, which in the final analysis showed more attention for facts than Musk and his “citizen journalist.” Musk ultimately proved, too, that he could emulate Trump not just in creating and spreading falsehoods but in making threats via social media over those he presumed to lord over. At one point, Musk simply declared on "X" on Dec. 18: "No bills should be passed [by] Congress until Jan 20, when @realDonaldTrump takes office. None. Zero." This proved that Musk had no real understanding of how legislating and continuing resolutions work, given that a CR was necessary to avoid a shutdown and the furloughing of federal employees during the holidays, a calamity that in the past had cost the government billions of dollars more in catchup. “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years,” the American oligarch without rival declared in yet another post.
All of which suggested that my friend's angrily confronting Congressman Sessions at church, citizen to citizen, about any shutdown probably wasn't going to count for much alongside the almighty utterances and threats of Musk, first citizen among citizens. Catastrophe was averted, but only barely.
* * *
If there's anything that shocks citizens cognizant of our nation's uniqueness in a dysfunctional and hostile world, it's the casual disregard for our constitutional tenets. It's displayed by 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 their gravity in the 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 deepest regrets. Descending from 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 show sufficient backbone and keep the brash, constitutionally contemptuous reality-TV star, wrestling promoter and business tycoon on a short leash. They would place him in service of the Constitution and "we 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 list 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 in the beginning struck me as a more thoughtful, grounded example of the sort of slash-and-burn lawmaker lifted to 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 Flores an agreeable, 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 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 unquestioned, 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 to constituents. “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 enough: 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, a falsehood that led to the embarrassment of Jade Helm 15 involving innocent military training exercises in 2015.
During the town-hall meeting, the congressman scotched other claims, including one that Homeland Security purchased 2,700 armored carriers (sorry, that was the Department of Defense, though Homeland Security did 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 jittery eve of the first Trump presidency, Flores, upon concluding a two-year tenure as chairman of the Republican Study Committee – a testament of the high regard in which conservative Republicans held Flores – quite correctly signaled during 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 strenuously objected to Obama's reliance on executive orders as unconstitutional suddenly went mum 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 ground, promised condemnation and scorn. During the 2016 holiday period, Flores found himself mercilessly pilloried by Trump's unsparing media warriors. Flores was wrongly portrayed as seeking to confound the president-elect's immigration plans – and all because he sought to assert Congress' constitutional rights on Day One.
By the time Flores opted to retire from Congress at the end of his fifth term in 2020, the transformation from principled conservative and responsible public servant to servile Trump lackey seemed complete. He had succumbed to not only 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 drek 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 proved even more dismayed at Flores' seeming conversion.
For instance, my acquaintance 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 News 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 his repostings of such nonsense, Flores laughed it off, attributed it to his own ignorance or misunderstanding and vowed to remove it. But then another questionable post would soon appear and my outraged informer would again phone me.
One of Flores' last official 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 Paxton's home state of 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, then 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 Republican 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 opponent, 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 in a December 2020 email, quickly 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.” In other words, President Trump would be checking to see who was naughty or nice in the Republican membership.
Yet even the Supreme Court of the United States grasped the audacity and perils of 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 – the four states targeted in the lawsuit – objected to how you conducted your elections?"
Incidentally, Vladeck noted the absence of state solicitor general Kyle Hawkins' name in the Paxton lawsuit, a strong indication of how foolhardy a proposition all this was. "Good for him for refusing to associate himself with this utter and indefensible nonsense," Vladeck opined.
Flores, however, chose to conclude his congressional career with this "indefensible nonsense." Tom Goldstein so fretted over the failure of so many to realize the colossal error of the Paxton lawsuit that, in an editorial published by the famously reliable SCOTUSblog, he pressed the high court to explain in some detail why it rejected the suit. "The justices’ decision whether to do that needs to account for this extraordinary, dangerous moment for our democracy," he wrote on Dec. 11, less than a month before the storming of the Capitol on January 6. "President Donald Trump, other supportive Republicans and aligned commentators have firmly convinced many tens of millions of people that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. If that view continues to take hold, it threatens not only our national politics for the next four years but the public’s basic faith in elections of all types that are the foundations of our society."
Meanwhile, Gateway Pundit quietly settled a defamation lawsuit filed by two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shae Moss, both falsely accused of rigging the 2020 results in Georgia. This came less than a year after the election workers prevailed in another defamation lawsuit against ex-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani with the former New York City mayor being ordered to pay them $148 million.
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 his final years in office 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 anyone who crossed him, or who he imagined had crossed him, and his dutiful disciples in the American constituency who, hanging on Trump's every tweet to 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. Sen. Ted Cruz, who for years smugly paraded around portraying himself as some sort of constitutional know-it-all, easily comes to mind. In the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in which he proved more than a supporting player, Cruz wound up the target of a May 18, 2022, complaint to the State Bar of Texas for his "assisting with criminal conduct and defending and amplifying 'claims not backed by law' and 'claims not backed by evidence but instead speculation, conjecture and unwarranted suspicion.'" Among transgressions, the complaint noted that Cruz, on January 6, "objected to counting Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes and did so even after he and his colleagues had to flee the Senate chamber because of the insurrectionists."
A month after the insurrection, Cruz was exposed fleeing Texas to Cancun, Mexico, while his own constituents suffered horribly amidst a statewide power outage during a winter storm that claimed hundreds of lives across the state. Yet despite all this, Texans easily voted to reelect him over Colin Allred in a 2024 campaign in which Cruz linked the former NFL linebacker and civil rights lawyer to transgender politics in such advertisements as one showing a male football player wearing an Allred jersey tackling a young girl, which Cruz highlighted as his favorite. The fact any self-respecting Texan would reelect a supposed leader who ran out on his people in the midst of a deadly natural disaster and power failure arguably redefines the very moral center of Texans who consider themselves tough and courageous, more likely to remain at the Alamo than flee to safety.
I'm reminded, too, of a letter that my friend Mark Long – Baylor University history professor, former military intellience officer and self-described "conservative with progressive values" – dispatched to Sen. John Cornyn, a former judge and state attorney general, during the latter's 2020 reelection campaign, a letter that, with Mark's permission, I published in the Waco 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 secular fiction and falsehoods 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 the presidential election, 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 pulled out his cellphone and set a time and date – and then a few days later directed an assistant to cancel the interview because of two weeks of activities and obligations that had somehow slipped his mind and apparently didn't show up on his cellphone appointment calendar. Given our mutual respect in the past and the growing indefensible nature of the man with whom he had allied himself, 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.
Yet rationalizing Trump as a divinely ordained force to stock the highest court in the land with jurists obligated to dismiss the notion of women's reproductive rights invites the troubling question of how much in terms of Christian virtue are such Christians willing to surrender to ending "baby-killing" in America. A few weeks after Rev. Peña dodged our interview about the God's lifting Trump up to restore America, Trump's announced Cabinet-level appointments included a 42-year-old Florida congressman nominated to serve as attorney general who allegedly paid women for sex during drug-infused parties between 2017 and 2020, including possibly an underage girl, and was under a congressional ethics investigation overseen by fellow House Republicans; a 44-year-old Fox & Friends weekend cohost nominated as secretary of defense who admittedly paid off a woman to extinguish her allegations of rape against him to protect his hosting job with Fox News and whose own mother in 2018 labeled him an “abuser of women” in an email; a 76-year-old World Wrestling Entertainment founder nominated by Trump as secretary of education targeted by an October lawsuit filed by five men who alleged she ignored a male WWE employee's sexually preying on them teenagers during the 1980s and 1990s. All these appointments come from a man who had cheated on each of his three wives and was convicted in 2024 of falsifying business records to hide from voters his payments to a porn star with whom he had conducted a sexual tryst. Even my most Trumpy of Trump-supporting neighbors finally took down their Trump banners and signs after these whacky administration nominations surfaced in the news media.
I think often on my neighbor's pronouncing that Kamala Harris was a Marxist, apparently because Harris' father taught the subject at Stanford University. Because my neighbor's reading consisted primarily of innocuous mystery novels and the Bible, perhaps she drew upon Exodus 20:5: “You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.” Yet the Bible also offers Deuteronomy 24:16: “Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.” Or Ezekiel 18:20: “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” Which shows why the Bible is ripe for cherry-picking amoong would-be prophets and charlatans whose holy elevation is built on condemnation and debasement of others.
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 campaign 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 hadn't 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."
And in a blazing Nov. 8 article published in a right-wing religious site, John Zmirak, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration" and "No Second Amendment, No First," and senior contributor and filmmaker Jason Jones called for almighty retribution in the names of not only wrongly imprisoned January 6 protesters but MAGA heroes such as Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani, the attorneys behind election-fraud lawsuits on behalf of Trump, and once-respected conservative law professor John Eastman, who sought to set aside the votes of millons of Americans in battleground states. In this, the authors demonstrate impatience with the ways of the Lord and dismiss Romans 12:9: "Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." Perhaps, because Trump has been anointed as a force of God, he will substitute nicely:
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 “Fox & Friends” weekend co-host Pete Hegseth 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.
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.
Driving the rural back roads of Central and West Texas during the Thanksgiving holiday period, I saw many "TRUMP 2024: TAKE AMERICA BACK" still flapping in the autumnal breeze as well as its variations, including the defiant I'M VOTING FOR THE CONVICTED FELON TRUMP" and the utterly sophomoric "LET'S GO BRANDON" that functioned as code for an obscene expression directed at President Biden – all this during a period when farming groups in Texas and beyond, despite supporting his campaign, now pressed him to exclude from his vow of mass deportation of illegal immigrants thoses working on their field of agricultural produce. In short, many in our rural stretches were begging the incoming government to pick and choose who would benefit and who would suffer under policies that president had trumpeted on the campaign trail – the very thing so many on the far right supposedly resent. Federal statistics indicate nearly half of the workforce laboring on American farms lack legal status. Similar anxiety was in the elections' aftermath coming from Texas' business sector, including the construction business which also relies heavily on immigrant labor.
Data-crunching journalist G. Elliott Morris, author of "Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them," has pointedly condemned "a lot of snarky elitism" by the more educated among us in warmly welcoming a "reap-what-you-sow" calamity upon more defiantly ignorant voters, most of whom he acknowledged "do not watch/read news or know about policy promises of candidates, let alone know the real-world outcomes of various [government] outputs. From various survey work in the 90s we know only half of people can name the vice president, for example. That should give us a lot of doubts about the ability of voters to rationalize about info and policy output." Yet in lamenting such responses as my physician friend as "just mean-spirited" in a Nov. 26 social-media post, he provoked understandable outrage from those Americans who argued that, whatever the reality of the situation, a democracy survives only so long as those casting votes double-down in their efforts to seek truth, not comfort and convenience.
"What you’re saying is that most people are ignorant and vote out of habit, emotion or social influence," one fired back at Morris. "Is that something that should just be accepted in a democracy or should there be pushback? And why is it 'mean-spirited' to hope that people suffer the consequences of their actions, however ignorant?" Another: "It’s elitism to know what you are voting for and to know their most popular platforms? Come on, man. Google is literally free." Yet another: "The implications of this framing lead to a nonsensical version of democracy where voters are not actually responsible for anything and cannot be held to account for their choices. We ask children to be more introspective about the consequences of their actions. In a previous age political discourse was moderated and led by a small cadre of technocrats [that is, those among us with area of expertise] and media elites, but that isn't true any more. We cannot get into a time machine and make it a previous decade. Maybe voters have to grow up and do the reading now. Technocracy is dead."
And finally this from one sick and tired of smug, even joyous right-wing satisfaction in "owning the libs" by outraging moderates and progressives among us: "Why are we supposed to withhold our emotions for people experiencing the promised results of their vote when those people's animating political principle for 10 years has been to make us upset? Why are libs the only ones ever with agency?"
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 disagree – is the in-your-face, I'm-a-patriot-you're-not exuberance of so many MAGA followers, not only in victory but in their pre-election confidence and showy pride. 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, quite possibly inebriated restaurant patron. (Journalists do this sort of thing.) I asked if the occasional roar of rockets at the nearby rocket-testing facility – owned by SpaceX visionary, "X" social-media opinionator and zealous Trump cheerleader Elon Musk – might, in this restaurant patron's opinion, prove too loud and too annoying for my friends. Some residents have indeed complained of cracked foundations and shattered windows (though these seemed to decline after Musk displayed his political colors).
"Maybe, but it's not as loud as the screeching of Nancy Pelosi!' the patron exclaimed.
I laughed at this audacious, uninvited burst of political enthusiasm, then asked, for the 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.
My friends subsequently moved to Waco but scotched any notion of settling too close to Elon Musk's thundering SpaceX rocket-testing facility in McGregor. Given Musk's repeated contention, between spirited support for Trump, that "citizen journalists" on his social-media platform eclipsed the on-the-ground professional journalists gathering hard facts and asking tough questions, I can't say their decision to keep their distance surprised me.
Yet no matter where they live in the county, my friends will hear and feel Musk's mighty roar.
* * *
What most disappoints me is not just the failure of the press, the politicians or the preaching folks but, more than any of these, an American electorate who not only ignored basic constitutional tenets laid down by the founding generation (including, yes, everyday citizens, not just "elites" of the period) but demonstrated that far fewer of us qualified as virtuous, vigilant citizens. Well before the election, I continually marveled: What kind of people not only elect but reelect Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, a rabid conspiracy theorist who peddled absolute claptrap about Jewish space lasers igniting California wildfires and at one point claimed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an "inside job" and who incredibly was cheered upon her arrival at the launching of Trump's relection bid in Waco. What kind of people not only elect but reelect Matt Gaetz, a bombthrowing braggadocio from the beginning whose participation in drug-fueled sex parties in which he reportedly paid women for sex was not only the subject of a 2021 Department of Justice investigation but a Republican-run House ethics committee inquiry, whose own question to me upon arriving at Trump's Waco rally dealt with crowd size?
As a middle-class citizen with an above-average (but not particularly expansive or insightful) grasp of history and civics who grew up in a home with three sets of encyclopedias (one from my grandmother in which World War II was still being fought) and plenty of books and news periodicals (Time, Newsweek, U.S. World & News Report, Business Week, two local newspapers plus the Sunday New York Times), who pushed a two-wheeler in a warehouse in high school and college and later took a job waiting on tables; and still later as a newspaperman with a sharper understanding of the qualifications and relevance of individual candidates pursuing public office, whether I personally covered them or not, I have already accepted the loss of candidates I supported in print as an professional editorialist or merely in the polling place. That's just part of a democracy. As a citizen and as a journalist, one just hopes the election winner will weigh at least some of the fears and anxieties of supporters of the loser in governing, given that candidate may seek their votes next time.
Yet the 2024 election struck me as different, so different that I assumed most of the American electorate recognized what I did. The fact it did not is not so much an indictment of my conclusions about what was at stake in America but my failure to realize how rapidly fellow citizens had surrendered to mind-bending social media and primetime propaganda. In the process, a long line of outrages such as the reckless management of a deadly pandemic; spreading lies about a stolen election; and unleashing on the Capitol a violent mob to derail certification of the election was over time rationalized away in significance versus inflation and the cost of eggs. The sheer craziness of Trump's desperate campaign rallies and what was falsely claimed and the slurs cast about by the candidate and his supporting cast arguably drowned out the relative normality and relative truthfulness of the Harris-Walz ticket, even when former President Obama, Bruce Springsteen and other entertainers encouraged voters to support the latter campaign in the name of democracy. Consider this advertisement, released in the final days of the 2024 campaign, featuring the actor best known for his colorful role as globetrotting archeologist Indiana Jones seeking centuries-old relics while battling off Nazis – except in this ad he appeared haggard, solemn, confessional, photographed in serious black and white:
Look, I've been voting for 64 years, never really wanted to talk about it very much. But when dozens of former members of the Trump administration are sounding alarms, saying, "For God's sake, don't do this again," you have to pay attention. They're telling us something important. These are "soft" people. They're governors, generals, standing up against the leader of the party they spent their lives advocating for. For many of them, this will be the first time they've ever voted for someone who doesn't have an "R" next to their name, because they know it really matters. The truth is this: Kamala Harris will respect your right to disagree with her about policies or ideas. And then, as we have done for centuries, we'll debate them, we'll work on them together and we'll move forward. The other guy? He demands unquestioning loyalty, says he wants revenge. I'm Harrison Ford. I've got one vote, same as anyone else, and I'm going to use it to move forward.
For the price of eggs (a dozen of which could well before the election be purchased for a couple of bucks), the electorate will allow to go not only unpunished but triumphant a man whose narcissism, scheming and rhetoric brought death and destruction to the U.S. Capitol and sent lawmakers scrambling from their sworn constitutional duties to hide from the mob taht some of these same lawmakers helped encourage hours or days earlier. The 76 million Americans who reelected a man who recognizes no limits to his power or authority will collectively and figuratively wrap themselves in the flag upon which this idol of theirs has defecated. We will be left to marvel at a working class that imagines it really wants to assume all those jobs in slaughterhouses and feed lots and farm fields and restaurant kitchens and hotel rooms that so many undocumented immigrants have filled – the immigrants we're bent on deporting in huge numbers to satisfy our racism and anger about everything from a nation of fast-shifting racial demographics, to the artificial intelligence that now hungers for our better jobs, to our mounting indifference to and contempt for one another based as much on our consumption of propaganda as our neighbor's realization that we're lost causes. As we allow Trump to put our anger into action with a policy of tariffs (assuming the incoming president lives up to his pledge), the more discriminating among us may fondly remember current times when temporarily high inflation rates caused by a pandemic that halted everything from production assembly lines to shipping had finally settled to respectable levels, unemployment was at a 60-year low and the stock market demonstrated record highs in an economy Trump and his media propagandists claimed was so awful.
In the end, Fox News, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Hulk Hogan, Lance Wallnau and Marjorie Taylor Greene were also victors of 2024, an electoral tribute to the propaganda, nihilism and ignorance permeating a nation created not by God but through the endeavors of a remarkable generation influenced by the 18th century Enlightenment, a period as much about humanity, civility, equality and the rule of law as it was about science, technology, media and kitchen-table politics. While Trump is imagining himself as the fifth president honored at Mount Rushmore – assuming he doesn't obliterate Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt to accommodate his gargantuan ego – some of us will dutifully stand by for further indoctrination involving whatever fantasies right-wing media machine produces at the behest of MAGA priorities. Given its work in making so many Americans believe that crime was high, that we were in a calamitous recession and that children were undergoing gender-change procedures at school, these propagandists surely rate a rest. Alas, Trump's Cabinet picks have pressed them further. Consider Elon Musk's dutiful quest on his "X" social-media platform, now primarily dominated by fellow conspiracy theorists, to forcefully save Trump's absurd nominee for U.S. attorney general by actually advocating for an alleged statutory rapist:
Matt Gaetz has 3 critical assets that are needed for the AG role: a big brain, a spine of steel and an axe to grind. He is the Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system and put powerful bad actors in prison. Gaetz will be our Hammer of Justice. As for these accusations against him, I consider them worth less than nothing. Under our laws, a man is considered innocent until proven guilty. If AG Garland (an unprincipled douchebag) could have secured a conviction against Gaetz, he would have, but he knew he could not.
Among those "X" users applauding this endorsement from on high was one who posted: "Those that oppose this appointment have something to hide and should be investigated too." Another targeted a California congressman who led investigation of Trump during his first term: "I wonder what crime a real DOJ will find in Adam Schiff??" Such logic from individuals high and low confirms the relevance of a chalkboard supposedly spotted outside an Irish pub, presumably during or after the 2024 election: "All Americans must be accompanied by an adult."
Perhaps the worst of all in all this is the informed citizen who, amidst all this, claimed the presidential election 2024 was an impossible decision, justification to simply withdraw from any decision – as if voting for somewhat doddery Joe Biden or California liberal Kamala Harris to save the democracy from Donald Trump's vows of autocracy and retribution was simply a bridge too far. Perhaps the worst citizen of all is the one who claimed the Biden-Harris administration had not acted sufficiently to stop the genocide visited upon innocent Gazans by Israeli forces aftere the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas slaughter of some 1,200 men, women and children. Incredibly, defense of Gazans was held out as justification by some Americans for voting for a third-party candidate who could never win and thus clearing the way for an administration that, unlike Biden's, had precious little concern for Gazans. Such rationalizations, based on admittedly principled stands, simply don't pass simple tests of deduction and common sense. Meanwhile, other injustices will unfold.
"In just under two months, President Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States – capping off the greatest political comeback in modern American history," a Nov. 22 Trump-Vance transition press release informed me. "In the 1992 election, Bill Clinton carried just 43 percent of the popular vote – and his victory was hailed as a "mandate for change." President Trump was re-elected with 50 percent of the popular vote, a decisive Electoral College victory and massive swings in his favor across virtually every demographic, cementing a Republican governing trifecta in Washington. In short, President Trump will take office with an historic mandate for his agenda, despite the unprecedented obstacles he faced every step of the way." These obstacles included the fact Trump was "indicted four times in six months, had his home raided by federal agents, was subjected to civil litigation, was convicted on 34 felony counts and faced attempts to disqualify him from the ballot – all requiring a financial and time commitment unlike any previous candidate."
Put another way, the electorate functioned as a mob, employing democracy to break their entertaining idol out of jail and cheating justice of the opportunity to weigh evidence for and against him in a court of law. In a filing weeks before the election, special counsel Jack Smith made a bid to sort where Trump might have immunity for "presidential acts" (as established through a reinvention of the Supreme Court of the United States) and where he clearly did not:
When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’ certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and, when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification. The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud. They used these lies in furtherance of three conspiracies: 1) a conspiracy to interfere with the federal government function by which the nation collects and counts election results, which is set forth in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act; 2) a conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding in which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential election; and 3) a conspiracy against the rights of millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted.
Trump will never be held to account on these grave charges. In reelecting him, the American electorate has permitted him to soon use executive action to quash the criminal indictments against him alleging election interference and hauling off high-security documents – allegations arising from unusually well-documented evidence already in the public record. The American electorate will also allow him to free and pardon supporters involved in the violence of January 6. And it will allow a colossal misjudgment by everyday citizens to blemish, possibly for all time, the history and reputation of our nation. Its only redeeming value is as an example to the rest of the world that once-great nations inenvitably experience decay and decline.
The events of recent years – maybe longer – are certainly in line with 18th-century British historian and politician Edward Gibbon's observations in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," the first volume of which was published in 1776. "The empire of Rome appeared eternal," he wrote, "but was founded on the fragile and transient foundation of public opinion, a sentiment that can be quickly altered by the caprice of a single ruling individual or a fickle populace." He also observed: "History is a record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind, and it is not without a bitter irony that the height of human achievement often lays the groundwork for its eventual decline."
While many know the old saying about history repeating itself – or at least closely rhyming with itself through world history – too many of us refuse to acknowledge our own susceptibility to such realities. We deceive ourselves under the heading of American Exceptionalism, believing our ways preclude the fates of other nations. Encyclopedia Britannica defines American Exceptionalism as the “idea that the United States of America is a unique and even morally superior country for historical, ideological or religious reasons” – justification for the America First mindset Trump deployed to presidential power. Yet one is also reminded that other generations of Americans, even those who endured challenging times, see corruption, deceit and demagoguery far differently and to their credit. Consider the May 24, 1994, letter by American legal scholar and former Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox to some high school students more than two decades after his investigation of President Nixon's efforts to ensure continued power through corruption ended with his controversial firing, which accelerated Nixon's own downfall. By then emeritus professor of law at Harvard University, Cox said "thoughtful Americans" should learn two things from the Watergate experience:
First, we should be reminded of the corrupt influence of great power, especially when the power is in the hands of someone who is willing to resort to any tactics, however wrong, to retain and increase his power. Perhaps it is inescapable that modern government vests extraordinary power in the president and puts around him a large circle of men and women whose personal status and satisfaction depends entirely on pleasing that one man.
Second, thoughtful Americans should be reminded of the essential but fragile character of our traditional constitutionalism – of the rule of law inherited from England, which holds that even the very highest officials are bound by law. Former President Nixon sought to challenge that rule and was overwhelmed by an aroused public opinion. We should remember that the rule depends on constant vigilance.
I'm reminded, too, of charismatic Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke, the kinetic, limber West Texan whose boyish, bookish intellect was balanced by earnest, easygoing efforts to reach out to voters often ignored by traditional Democrats. He did so by traveling to each of the state's 254 counties in his bid to defeat Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. He was particularly proud of his fundraising, something he stressed during an interview with the Waco Tribune-Herald in the final weeks of the fall 2018 campaign: "I really hope it's the new litmus test, that people can say, 'Hey, O'Rourke in Texas just in one quarter raised $38 million without a dime from PACs, most of it from Texas, and so you should be able to do it, too.' People should be able to say, 'I don't ever want to wonder whether you voted for the pharmaceutical corporation, for some special-interest group, for this PAC, or for us. It should always be us.'"
At one point, while noting that he carried a book with him, I expressed concern that the Republican-run Congress during Trump's first two years had clearly looked the other way regarding White House ethics and corruption. I asked what was now to keep the next Democratic president from doing such things as ignoring the Constitution's Emoluments Clause. O'Rourke didn't try to defend any future Democrat, only acknowledged that Trump's disregard for ethics might contribute to more harm down the road:
I just finished this biography of Julius Caesar, which is really a story of the late Roman republic. It showed its transition from a republican form of government to an imperial, essentially a dictatorship, under Augustus. And it wasn't him just crossing the Rubicon. It was the chipping away at norms and institutions over 100 years preceding Julius Caesar. And at some point it just gave altogether. So, yeah, when we're no longer a nation of laws, when we instead become a nation of men – and when some people, some men, are above the law because of the position of power they hold – we're going to lose this.
In a fascinating if gloomy Nov. 21 interview with Tim Miller of The Bulwark, American philosopher, neuroscientist and author Sam Harris correctly highlighted the Democratic Party's too often dancing to extreme elements on its left flank and Kamala Harris' damning failure in the campaign to forcefully explain her shift from past stances such as supporting gender-affirming surgery to prison inmates. In this shortcoming, she failed stake out a firm position more in line with that of most Americans, allowing Trump Republicans to readily paint her as an unrepentant leftist. But Sam Harris also signaled a larger political blunder by the electorate in returning to power someone who was a clear threat to the republic. And all this involved what had already happened, not what might happen in another Trump presidency:
Our democracy has already been damaged, so I'm wasting no time worrying that he might not leave in 2028. I'm just worried about what has already happened that half our society doesn't care about. We have already reelected a man to the presidency who last time around wouldn't admit he'd lost an election and in fact lied continuously about having won it, knowing those lies were a continuous provocation to violence in our society. And he clearly tried to steal the 2020 election, all while telling us that it was stolen from him.
We've allowed this kind of misbehavior and we haven't penalized it and now we've rewarded it with a second presidential term. And just look at what it's done to our politics. We know that there were Republican congressmen and women who would've voted to convict him [in the 2020 impeachment trial on the grave charge of "incitment of insurrection"] but for the fact they were worried that the MAGA cult would come for them and their families. And we know this from Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. This is the kind of thing Republicans will divulge behind closed doors. They're afraid of their own base. That's already horrifying, that's already something that is unraveling our democracy. The Republican Party is a personality cult right now, it's not a normal political party, and I think that's a moral injury to our society that we should be upset about.
Sam Harris suggested that trying to apply traditional analysis inquiries of what happened on Nov. 5, 2024, may well fall short in explaining an electorate's decision to return Trump to the White House:
These are people for whom Alex Jones is still in good standing, and Trump is effectively an Alex Jones-level liar. He's a pure fabulist about everything high and low, when it matters, when it doesn't matter, when it serves his purpose, when it doesn't. He's a neurological case study with respect to this one variable of truth-telling or bullshit or lying by turns. And nobody cares. But they do care if someone left of center lies, gets caught in a lie, that's every bit as embarrassing as it ever was because they're being held to a very different standard.
This aysymetry is something that I don't know how you interact with with it successfully, politically. One thing so frustrating in dealing with Trump supporters -- happily, unselfconsciously, they elected a man to the presidency again who they knew would not have accepted the results of the election had he lost. They fully expected Harris to concede within 24 hours. They would have been totally outrage if she hadn't done that, but they knew that Trump was not going to concede. They knew it.
All this explains my disappointment in attorney and lobbyist David Sibley, a former, much-respected Republican state senator, former Waco mayor and old-styled "Bush" Republican, expressing frustration at the presidential choices given the electorate during an April 4 student-organized political forum in spring 2024 when President Biden appeared certain to remain the Democratic nominee for reelection and Trump had vanquished all of his Republican rivals, including Florida Gov. Rick DeSantis. A close ally of Democratic Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and Republican Gov. George W. Bush, Sibley during his 11-year Statehouse tenure (ending with his resignation in 2002) had pressed some of the most important legislation of the period, including lawsuit reform, patients' rights and utility deregulation. Yet, by spring 2024, by now in his mid-70s, he spoke as many graying Republicans did in the Age of Trump. In doing so, he sent a horrific message to young Americans such as those students listening to him at Baylor University:
Well, we have 335 million people in the United States and I can’t imagine two sorrier candidates to run for the office of the president of the United States, so I think the dread is: Who wants either one of them? I mean, I’m dreading this election. I voted for the first time in 1972 – you had to be 21 at the time – and they sensibly lowered the voting age to 18 – but I have always voted for the Republican candidate, always see something positive. I don’t recall ever hating the other candidate, I just said, "This is my preference for various reasons." I don’t think I’m voting for a president in this upcoming election and so I dread this election, if you will. If I’m some portion of the United States voter, I guess that might be the reason. The way to fix it is to get two new folks. It’s like, let’s do it over again and see if we can’t find two people that would be worthy of the vote.
Such a comment immediately prompts any skeptical citizen who cherishes democracy to wonder if Sibley said this to protect ties to more Trump-compliant friends and associates by publicly condemning Trump and Biden alike as unacceptable. I witnessed Republican Congressman Bill Flores smile and quip, even at Republican luncheons, how he would have supported any number of other Republican candidates before rallying to Trump – a remark that demonstrated sufficient loyalty to the party without embracing Trump's character, rhetoric and famously poor judgment. Yet one marvels when such a statement is offered to budding political scientists listening. God knows how they interpreted it.
On the stage with Sibley during the forum was former Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards, who had served eight years in the Texas Senate (before Sibley) and 20 years in the U.S. House of Representatives before his career imploded in the titanic tea-party tidal wave of 2010 – the same contrarian forces that quickly consumed the Republican Party and dashed Sibley's own efforts to return to the Texas Senate that same year. (Former Republican Congressman Van Taylor, 52, an Iraqi war veteran whose promising career on Capitol Hill was upset by an affair with the widow of an American who gained notoriety for joining the Islamic State terrorist sect, completed the forum trio that day.) Edwards, 72, respectfully suggested refusing to vote for either Trump or Biden was a false choice given Trump's actions in the wake of the 2020 election, including his insistence that the U.S. Constitution should have been terminated on his behalf amid his claims of election fraud. Edwards' enusing exchange with Sibley – both victims of political extremism – is worth repeating at some length:
EDWARDS: Well, I’m saying it’s OK to dread the 2024 election. I dread
it in many ways. I wish Joe Biden were younger. I imagine Joe Biden wishes he
were younger. I am deeply disappointed and concerned about the fact that the
Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has called the American citizens who invaded
our Capitol violently and tried to overturn a lawful election, a
constitutionally mandated counting of votes to elect Joe Biden as president,
that he would call them “hostages” and “patriots” rather than the criminals
that they’ve been convicted of being in our judicial system. I would say the
three of us – and it is a privilege to be with David, who was one of our most
respected senators, beloved by the Democratic lieutenant governor, because he
was a Republican senator, and Van, who I deeply respect by the way. When our
election was over in 2006, I happened to win, but he ran a great campaign. And
when it was over, I didn’t hate Van, I respected him. He was a Marine who
served our country in Iraq and put his life on the line and then wanted to come
back home and took off his uniform and wanted to serve our democracy. I think
one way we could make our election less dreadful is referencing what David said
– remind people that we shouldn’t hate someone for disagreeing with us or
voting for another person. We ought to celebrate that. It’s called freedom. And
in our country you can say what David Sibley just said about the president of the
United States and walk out of here comfortably and go back and be in his home.
If you said the same thing about Vladimir Putin in Russia, you’d end up in
prison like Mr. Navalny did and possibly be poisoned and killed. We ought to
celebrate that we have elections where people can vote for different candidates
and express our views.
And, David, I don’t know what the chances are of changing the candidates, but I think if I looked beyond the 2024 election, I’d say one thing you and I can do is vote. I think part of the problem with America today is if you only have 20 percent of Republicans voting in the Republican primary, you’re going to have the far right and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes nominated. If you only have 20 percent of the Democrats voting in the Democratic primary, you get the far left and the loudest of the Democratic Party elected. If we had 80 percent turnout in the Republican and Democratic primaries, I think Americans – being not given to extremes on the right and left and wanting people to solve their everyday, real-life problems like education and health care and finding a decent job and living in safe neighborhood – I think you’d have more reasonable people nominated that the American people could get behind when the election is done.
SIBLEY: If I could, I voted in the primary and I sent money to a candidate in the primary – not Trump. I supported other candidates in other states and so I believe in voting, but I don’t feel I have a choice. … I saw today that No Labels [a nonpartisan organization that had discussed forwarding a third option for president] is pulling out, they’re not going to put anyone forward, so I did vote in the primary, I always do, I usually go by the polling place just to make sure it wasn’t an election I didn’t hear about. But at this time, and I know when the election’s coming, I don’t feel there’s a viable choice at this point to clarify.
EDWARDS: I respect that, but this would be the one area of disagreement. I think ultimately in the presidential election you have a binary choice. It could be an ugly choice based on whatever our views are on the candidates, but ultimately some third-party candidate, if American history prevails, will not be the next president. So I think we have to decide. Now, as a Republican and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, that is making a difference. You’ve made a choice and there’s normally a Republican candidate you can depend on. But let me put this in historical perspective: This was in the presidential campaign of 1800 in a major newspaper on the east coast: “This is what would happen to America if Thomas Jefferson beat John Adams in an election. With Jefferson as president, murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced. The air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, the nation black with crimes.”
SIBLEY: And here we are.
EDWARDS: Yeah, here we are, 200 years later. I lost an election once by 185 votes and, after a recount was done, it was done and I respected that. But in Joe Biden, you know, I wish he were a lot younger, but I personally don’t think he puts our democracy at risk. Our economy is doing pretty well, we’ve restored some faith in our allies abroad in Europe and strengthened NATO, which is important in standing up to Russia. I wish he had an understandable border policy and I think he’s not been successful there. And I think both parties have failed on the issue of the national debt. To Baylor students today, I think you need to challenge both parties on what are you going to do about global warming, what are you going to do about the national debt, two issues that will have an impact on your quality of life.
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 physically acted out for our benefit. 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, even though it had peaked almost two and a half years earlier before falling rapidly to acceptable levels. When asked what she hoped for in another Trump presidency, she mentioned
stick-it-to-’em tariffs on imported goods. Which 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.”
But what most astonished Edwards was the old woman's insistence that the Democrats were puppets of "the corporate elites" – an astounding observation at which I laughed loudly, as if the Democrats had a monopoly on wealthy benefactors. This observation would become more astounding after the election when Trump tapped for key administrative posts a long list of multi-millionaires and billionaires, ranging from Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick, with a net worth of more than a billion dollars, to Elon Musk, whose net worth is estimated at $323 billion, paid no income tax in 2018 and is tapped work with billionaire and flat-taxer Vivek Ramaswamy to cut government regulations and federal personnel regarded a wasteful. Triggered by Musk's recklessly and shamefully accusing former National Security Council director and Army lieutenant colonel Andrew Vindman, on Nov. 27, of being "on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs" and committing "treason against the United States," no less than former Russian chessmaster Garry Kasparov that same day warned Americans to consider the period in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was a period when corruption eclipsed capitalism in overwhelming Russia's hopes as a properous, full-fledged democracy: "America, this is your next four years, or longer. Oligarchs protected by Trump accusing former public officials of the gravest crimes without evidence or even pretense to provide any. Trial by social media, which of course is owned by said oligarch. Russia in the Wild West 90s."
The daughter of the woman engaging Edwards in the parking lot acknowledged knowing precious 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. And, whatever else, I did notice, shortly before the election, that a single, almost overlooked "Harris/Walz: We Are Not Going Back!" campaign sign had been erected outside David Sibley's hilltop mansion in Woodway.
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?”
