I do a lot of “wordsmithing.” One of the consequences is that I appreciate –and am jealous of–examples of superior writing. I’ve referred before to Lincoln Square, and recently I’ve been absolutely gob-smacked by the excellence and clarity of that site’s prose.
I’m going to cede most of today’s blog to some of the most perceptive paragraphs–but I urge you to click through and read both essays in their entirety.
Trump didn’t bother courting the middle; he declared war on it. The man didn’t run a campaign — he ran a group-therapy session for people allergic to accountability. If you were broke, it wasn’t automation — it was immigrants “stealing jobs.” If you were single and couldn’t get laid, it wasn’t your personality — it was feminism. If you were uneducated, it wasn’t disinterest — it was “the elites.” If you didn’t get promoted, blame DEI. If you lost an argument online, blame CRT. His rallies were motivational seminars for men who think foreplay is a liberal conspiracy. Somewhere in that stew of insecurity, the manosphere — that digital wasteland of fragile masculinity and podcast mics — found its messiah.
The smiles are tighter. The knives are increasingly out, not for the hated “socialists” but for one another.
The people who once lived to “own the libs” spend more of each day subtweeting each other, accusing one another of being disloyal to MAGA, of being globalist plants, Soros puppets, or, worst of all in that ecosystem, insufficiently devoted to Dear Leader.
This is what happens when you build a movement on raw power and loyalty checks instead of principle, paranoia instead of policy, vibes instead of values.
Eventually, the purity tests get so extreme that no one can pass them. The circle keeps getting smaller until the last three guys in it are accusing each other of being communist Deep State sleeper agents.
As the essay then notes, MAGA has done incredible damage to America. It has also wrecked the GOP and hollowed out conservative institutions.
But once you train everyone to think in terms of enemies and traitors, of obedience and betrayal, they can’t stop when the Democrats are out of the room.
All the 2028 aspirants are shanking one another. The influencers are attacking the think tanks. The Groypers attacking the “respectable” right. The populists are attacking the donor class. The donor class is on an extractive sprint before Trump dies. The online true believers are attacking the politicians who actually need to win elections. It is a five-alarm, all-hands-on-deck circular firing squad.
It began in the Obama years.
They told themselves it was about deficits, the Constitution, and small government. It was not. It was about the pissy grievances of suburban and rural dudes with fake Oakleys and erectile dysfunction who are just positive their job was being taken by a Mexican, not a McKinsey consultant and a private equity firm.
It was about cultural panic. It was about race. It was about people who felt the country drifting away from them and wanted someone to promise they could roll history back to 1958 (or perhaps 1858) by yelling at immigrants on Fox.
Then Trump came down that escalator.
He distilled every bitter little resentment on the right into a single-malt of wretched hatred. Overnight, all the old constraints of Republican politics, the donor class, the gentry conservative think tanks, the “serious” media ecosystem, and the alleged principles of the religious wing went out the window.
The old Republican Party did not die on election night in 2016. It died in stages, slow, humiliating, and for some, lucrative. You’ve heard the tale by now: sure, everyone knew better, but they decided to play along.
There was no neutral ground. There was no “agree with him on policy, disagree on tone.” Remember those days? “I didn’t see the tweet” became “I read the tweet and had it tattooed on my back to show how much I love Donald Trump.”
You either wore the red hat or you were a traitor.
And here is the important thing: once you teach people that loyalty to a person is the highest good, they never stop hunting for disloyalty.
They started asking who is secretly a RINO. Who is secretly woke. Who is secretly “controlled opposition.” They started by looking sideways at one another and wondering who was going to be the next one thrown off the sled.
They trawled through millions of tweets, parsing every word, every connection, every bit of writing, peering with intent for any sign someone might not be true to the Dear Leader and the cause.
That is the DNA of the MAGA civil war. A movement built on loyalty, grievance, and paranoia eventually runs out of external enemies and starts eating its own.
This blog typically addresses national issues. I’m not apologizing for that–the Trump administration poses an existential threat to the America most of us want to retain. Its numerous evils are–to use Joe Biden’s characterization–a “BFD.” But the fact that our national structures are under assault doesn’t mean that local issues have disappeared or become unimportant.
And the fact that the American Idea is under assault by a Christian nationalist movement doesn’t mean that we should overlook–or diminish the importance of– the good works of genuine Christians and other people of faith.
GIMA began as an interfaith effort to make Indianapolis a more collaborative and inclusive city, to make it a “more just and livable place.” In stark contrast to MAGA’s faux Christianity, the faith leaders who came together in GIMA represent the city’s diverse religious traditions, with the stated intent to form what the organization calls “a sacred friendship,” and to collaborate on civic projects that serve the common good of greater Indianapolis.
I first encountered GIMA when the organization was focused on Indianapolis’ eviction crisis, and was impressed both by its judicious approach to that issue and the breadth of the organization’s religious membership. Representatives of central Indiana’s Black and White churches, synagogues and Mosques exhibited a fellowship and respect that have been glaringly missing from our national conversations– thanks primarily to MAGA’s determined Othering. They identified a civic problem and came together to address it.
The organization describes “Streets to Homes” as follows:
Following the successful community action led by the Black Church Coalition, Indy Action Coalition, and the Validus Movement, The Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance (GIMA) is inviting congregations across Central Indiana to join a multifaith effort to support the Streets to Home Indy Initiative – a community- driven campaign to provide permanent housing and supportive services for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. This initiative is part of a broader campaign to provide not just shelter, but lasting homes and supportive services for those most in need.
The goal of Streets to Homes is to house 350 currently unsheltered neighbors, and to do so by June of 2026 “through an evidence-based model that includes housing and supportive services.”
As the website explains,
Besides being the right thing to do? 20 years of data demonstrates that providing stability to these neighbors sets them on a path to upward mobility and independence, which ultimately strengthens our community, increases public safety, and reduces the economic impact of homelessness.
We can only do this through a community-wide commitment that includes the business community, philanthropic community, faith community, and civic support.
GIMA is asking faith community partners to contribute $270,000 as its part of the philanthropy community’s commitment of $2.7 million. That commitment “joins with equal pledges from the Housing to Recovery Fund and the city of Indianapolis” in what the organization calls “an unprecedented community-wide coalition.”
Rabbi Aaron Spiegel, the Executive Director of GIMA, tells me that area churches have responded with unprecedented generosity. (What he didn’t say–but I will–is that this diverse, interfaith effort has forced Indianapolis’ city government to become far more focused upon the effort to end homelessness than it had previously been.)
As regular readers of this blog know, I am very critical of the performative “Christians” who disdain both the adherents of other religions and “woke” efforts to ameliorate poverty and hopelessness. GIMA’s efforts are a reminder that there are millions of truly good people in every religious community who focus on the admonitions–common to all religions–to love one’s neighbors and to work for social justice. (MAGA to the contrary, it has been my observation that all genuine religiosity is “woke.”)
I would encourage readers who reside here in central Indiana to visit the linked GIMA and Streets to Homes websites. You need not be a believer, or a member of a congregation, to support this initiative, which is an excellent reminder to those of us who are not religious to avoid painting the folks who are with too broad a brush.
Thankfully, genuine Christians aren’t like Micah Beckwith, genuine Jews aren’t like Bibi Netanyahu, and genuine Muslims abhor jihadists. They’re all pretty “woke”– and the rest of us need to remember that.
A majority of Americans are aware of the damage being done by this disastrous administration to our governing institutions, the rule of law, and the economy. I think far fewer are aware of the thousands of preventable deaths caused by Trump’s version of “policy.”
The most visible are those caused by the defunding of USAID. USAID funding helped save an estimated 91 million lives over the past 20 years. Now, a peer-reviewed study tells us that Trump’s defunding of the agency will lead to more than 14 million preventable deaths globally by 2030, a number that includes more than 4.5 million children under the age of five.
Far less visible–but equally horrific– are the likely consequences of Trump’s indiscriminate war on medical science, and his termination of grants supporting clinical trials. A recent article from theWashington Post explored those terminations. Citing research published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the article reported that funding for 383 clinical trials had been pulled, and that the funding disruptions affected more than 74,000 trial participants. The researchers found that the cuts disproportionately affected trials focused on infectious diseases (such as covid-19 and HIV); prevention; and behavioral interventions. More than 100 of the canceled grants supported cancer research.
Robert Hopkins, medical director for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, said the study showed that funding cuts disproportionately hit areas “that are critical to public health.”
“Clinical research is a long game,” he said. “Developing new vaccines, antivirals and treatments takes years, often decades. Cutting funding now risks slowing progress on interventions that could help save lives for years to come.”
Some of the clinical trials that lost their grants sued, and several got their funding back, but they experienced delays during the course of the trials that are likely to have significant negative impacts on the studies and on their participants. As one researcher explained, “If you pause an experiment, especially when it comes to experiments involving drugs and patients where you need a consistent dose over time and consistent measurements, it’s possible that you just screwed up the entire research.” Another noted that much of the clinical infrastructure was crippled or entirely destroyed during the grant terminations, making it very difficult to resume the research.
And of course, when clinical trials are delayed or canceled, the patients who were enrolled often lose access to care.
The funding terminations weren’t limited to clinical trials; numerous other research studies also lost funding. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine in May found that between February and April, nearly 700 NIH grants had been terminated across 24 of the federal agency’s 26 institutes and centers. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that studies focused on minorities–especially those investigating health concerns of non-Whites and LGBTQ+ citizens–appear to have been disproportionately targeted.)
Some of the greatest advancements made through research include vaccines, insulin, anesthesia, and treatments for infectious diseases. From laboratory studies to clinical trials and epidemiological investigations, scientists around the world use different methods of research to advance disease treatment, enhance diagnostics, and improve our overall understanding of diseases.
“Research is the key to advancing health on the individual, community, national, and global level,” said Cora Cunningham, PIH Engage member, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health student, and research assistant with the Lantagne Group at Tufts University. “Whether about drinking water quality, disease dynamics, health systems, or the patient experience, research in public and global health is what allows us to access, receive, or deliver quality and patient-centered health care.”
Without research, there would be no breakthroughs, no clinical advancements, and no new cures. Despite its importance to humankind, biomedical research—particularly research funded through the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—has been targeted by the current U.S. administration.
The bottom line is that years of progress in public health have been disrupted. Thanks to a combination of frozen funding, the erection of new, onerous roadblocks to financing, and imposition of overly complicated new procedures, experts predict that the setbacks in research will cause generations of delays in breakthroughs and cures. As the linked article from Partners in Health warns, “patients who were part of clinical trials will face health risks due to the abrupt end to their treatment and support. Advancements made on cures and treatments for various diseases will be squandered. Jobs will be lost, and public health will suffer.”
The question is: why? This particular vendetta wasn’t a response to citizen demands. It isn’t even likely to line the pockets of the billionaires to whom this administration disproportionately caters. Like the destruction of USAID, it is simply gratuitously cruel.
Talking Points Memo just celebrated 25 years of online political reporting. It’s a “go-to” source for many, if not most, political observers. Heather Cox Richardson, among others, frequently cites publisher Josh Marshall, and TPM is one of my trusted sources for insightful political analysis.
In a recent column, Marshall proposed a basis for evaluating Senators, and I strongly agreed with his criteria for “purging” those who don’t pass his tests. He identifies a series of issues that he says can give voters “a clear indication of whether they are serious about confronting the challenge of the moment or battling back from Trumpism.” He analogizes the process to a status interview you might hold if you were a new manager hired to turn around a failing company–a “sit down” with every employee to determine whether they’re part of the solution or part of the problem.
Marshall identifies five issues. The first is the filibuster. He writes that lawmakers who support keeping the filibuster “are not serious about moving the country forward in any positive direction.” Support for the filibuster means that Senator should be primaried and removed from office, because absolutely none of the legislation that is required to repair America’s government can happen with the filibuster in place. As he writes, “If you support the filibuster that means that your response to Trumpite autocracy is to do nothing and hope for the best. That’s unacceptable and you need to go.”
The second identified issue is Supreme Court reform. Marshall notes that it is only within the past two or three years that he has reluctantly come to that conclusion, which has been forced by the corruption of the Court majority.
They have cut free not only from precedent but from any consistent or coherent theory of the Constitution, no matter how wrongheaded. The purpose of the high court is not to run the country. It is to render decisions on points of constitutional and legal ambiguity in a good faith and broadly consistent manner. It is now engaged in purely outcome-driven reasoning, mixing and matching doctrines and modes of jurisprudence depending on the desired ends, with the aim of furthering autocratic and Republican rule. That is the heart of the corruption. Passing laws doesn’t matter if they can and will be discarded simply because six lifetime appointees don’t like them. That’s a perversion of the constitutional order. I know this one is hard to swallow for many people. It doesn’t come easily to me either. But the facts of the situation and fidelity to the Constitution require it.
Like Marshall, this conclusion was difficult for me, but the sheer intellectual dishonesty of the majority has convinced me that we will not return to the rule of law without substantial Court reform.
Those first two criterions are Marshall’s “most important,” because without them, the next three won’t happen.
Number three is (finally!) making DC and Puerto Rico into states. He acknowledges that this isn’t as essential as the first two, but it’s very important, and it’s the right thing to do. DC and Puerto Rico should in fact be states. It really is bizarre–and unfair–that citizens living in two U.S. jurisdictions simply don’t have the political rights that every other American enjoys.
We now know that Marshall’s number four is especially important. He calls it “clearing the law books.”
As we’ve seen over the last year, the U.S. federal code is full of laws which assume the sitting president broadly supports the federal Constitution, civic democracy and the best interests of all American citizens. We know now that that is a dangerous assumption. There are lots of laws which grant the president vast powers if things get super weird. And the president is in charge of deciding whether they’re weird. A lot of this is the dirty work of the corrupt Republican majority on the Supreme Court. But a lot of the laws are genuinely far too ambiguous. We need to change all of those laws. That involves potentially creating different harms by weakening the presidency. There are cases when you want a president to be able to move expeditiously and effectively in emergencies. Laws will have to be revised with that contrary danger in mind. But right now the balance is far too much in the direction of presidential power.
And number five? Here, Marshall proposes something near and dear to my heart: outlawing gerrymandering with a federal legal framework governing how maps can be legitimately drawn.
As Marshall acknowledges, it’s not an exhaustive list. But it would be a strong beginning.
On Wednesday, I spoke to the Shepherds Center at North United Methodist Church. They had asked for a discussion of birthright citizenship, a status which is currently under attack by Trump (along with the rest of the Constitution). Here’s what I said. (A bit longer than usual–sorry.)
____________________
I’ve been asked to speak about birthright citizenship, and Donald Trump’s effort to eliminate it. Let me just begin with a bit of history, and then consider what would happen if our mad and racist would-be King were to be successful.
As many of you know, in 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in the infamous case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. The court ruled that Scott, an escaped slave who was suing for his freedom, was not a citizen because he was of African descent. According to the decision written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, no person of African descent could be a citizen, even if they had been born in the United States.
It took a civil war to change that conclusion, but in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, defining citizenship as applying to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
The clear language of the Amendment should have foreclosed debate, but it 1898, the 14th Amendment’s definition of citizenship was challenged in a case involving a man named Wong Kim Ark.
Wong had been born on American soil in 1873; he was the son of Chinese immigrants. That was well before the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited most Chinese immigration and, by extension, the naturalization of Chinese citizens–an Act that was one of several historical eruptions of anti-immigration hostility. Since Wong’s parents weren’t citizens, his status was considered unclear, and as a result, he was denied reentry into the U.S. after visiting China.
Wong waited on a ship in San Francisco harbor for months as his attorney pursued his case. The Department of Justice opposed him, taking the position that people of Chinese descent weren’t citizens, but when the case reached the Supreme Court, Wong won.
Justice Horace Gray wrote the majority opinion, and it’s worth quoting part of it. Gray wrote “The Fourteenth Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States. To hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
That case became binding precedent and has operated to defend the birthright citizenship rights of other Americans—even including Japanese Americans during WWII—despite the shameful treatment of those citizens.
Bottom line: birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the plain language of the 14th Amendment and subsequent case law, and I doubt that even our deeply corrupt Supreme Court majority will find a way around the clarity of that language and those precedents.
But what would happen if they did—if somehow, the Court found a way to evade the plain language of both the Amendment and the Court’s own, unambiguous precedents? That question was recently examined by the Niskanen Center. The Center describes its mission as the promotion of policies that advance prosperity, opportunity, and human flourishing, guided by the belief that a free market and an effective government are mutually dependent.
I have found the research published by the Center to be both intellectually honest and uncommonly insightful—Niskanen advocates for an adequate social safety net and for the provision of essential public goods, while also supporting laws that foster market competition in areas where markets are appropriate. The Center is firmly committed to liberal democracy and an open society.
The Center’s researchers looked at the probable results of overturning birthright citizenship, and they identified three major ones: ending birthright citizenship would erode America’s current demographic advantage over rival powers; it would endanger the advantage we have enjoyed in internal assimilation and stability; and it would introduce an unnecessary and protracted distraction from building an immigration system that could guarantee continued American prosperity.
Let’s look at each of these predictions.
We know that the world population is aging: According to U.N., the majority of the world’s population now lives in countries in which the fertility rate is below replacement level. By 2050, deaths will exceed births in more than 130 countries.
Thanks to immigration, the United States is an outlier to that demographic fact. In addition to having higher fertility rates than nearly all other developed countries, America’s “demographic exceptionalism” is tied to what has been our robust immigration. As a result, the U.S. is the only major power currently projected to maintain both population and labor force growth through the mid-century. Meanwhile, both China and Russia are experiencing population decline and are rapidly aging societies.
Ending birthright citizenship would also directly hurt American competitiveness. As Niskanen researchers point out, throwing a quarter of a million children into a position of legal uncertainty each year—which is what reversing birthright citizenship would do– would have a hugely negative effect on America’s strength and prosperity. If the children leave with their parents, which is what the architects of this inhumane policy intend, we’ll struggle to fill jobs—especially those requiring manual labor– and we’ll also struggle to fund Social Security with fewer workers.
If, instead, these children stay in the United States, they’d be treated by the legal system and by large swaths of society as foreigners in the only country they’d ever known, a situation that would challenge the domestic stability that has resulted from our history of comparatively smooth cultural assimilation. That ability to assimilate large numbers of newcomers and their descendants, to turn them into proud Americans, has been a considerable source of America’s strength and stability.
Despite the current hostility of the Trump administration and the MAGA White Supremacists who want to expel Black and Brown folks and limit immigration to White South Africans, America has had a far better history with immigrants than countries like China and Russia. America actually has had a very good track record of assimilating a wide variety of minorities, and that success has been due in large part to the ideals of American citizenship—ideals that include policies like birthright citizenship. And we need to remember that, for children of immigrant parents, birthright citizenship not only validates their American identity, but also imposes patriotic responsibilities on them. Those children haven’t just voted and served on juries—they’ve fought and died in America’s wars.
Let me just quote two of the concluding paragraphs of the Niskanen paper, describing the likely consequences of abandoning birthright citizenship.
“Many of the children born to illegal immigrants may also be temporarily rendered stateless. Some countries such as India do not automatically grant citizenship to the children of citizens born abroad. Given how politically polarizing other policies involving immigrant children, such as family separation and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), have been, artificially creating a population of potentially hundreds of thousands of stateless children living within the U.S. would become a poison pill in American politics….
The net effect of repealing birthright citizenship would be a prolonged state of chaos in our domestic politics and our immigration system. Doing so would squander key advantages we have over rivals who are gaining ground on the world stage and distract us from being able to build an immigration system that prioritizes the talent we need to remain competitive by miring us in decades of legal challenges, ambiguity, and disunity. As is often the case, those who are currently seeking to suddenly impose mass changes to the social fabric will find that the status quo has functioned well for a reason.”
A few years ago, I looked into the issue of immigration—both legal and not– for a speech to the Lafayette ACLU, and was struck with the sheer extent to which the U.S. has benefitted from it, especially when we look at innovation and economic growth.
The Partnership for a New American Economy issued a research report back in 2010 and found that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies had been founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.
The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.
On economic grounds alone, then, we should welcome immigrants. But not only do we threaten undocumented persons, we make it incredibly difficult to come here legally. If there is one fact that everyone admits, it is the need to reform a totally dysfunctional and inhumane system. Based upon logic and the national interest, it’s hard to understand why Congress has been unwilling or unable to craft reasonable legislation. Of course, logic and the national interest have been missing from Washington for some time.
The bottom line: repealing birthright citizenship would be stupid—it would be a self-inflicted wound, making America less competitive, less stable and less prosperous. But there is also a moral imperative at stake here.
Those of you who attend these Shepherd Center events recognize what the MAGA bigots clearly do not– the moral and ethical dimensions of this effort to define anyone who isn’t a White Christian as “Other.” The basis of the MAGA movement and its support for the Trump administration is racism, misogyny and White Christian nationalism—with a hefty side helping of anti-Semitism. The effort to overturn birthright citizenship is part and parcel of that larger effort to remake America into a “blood and soil” country—a version of the Third Reich. We cannot let that happen.
