Can this country escape from Trump 2.0?

 As we sit on the cusp of something our nation has never seen — the inauguration of a convicted felon as president — a dear friend called my attention to the following final paragraph of an article in the Economist entitled“The Trump Doctrine” in the  January 18-24, 2025 issue:

“When the use of power is untethered by values, the result can be chaos on a global scale. If ultra-loyal, out-of-their-depth would-be disrupters like Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard are confirmed to head the Pentagon and intelligence, the chaos will spread on the inside, too. Mr. Trump is ill-suited to separate his own interests from his country’s, especially if his and his associates’ money is at stake, particularly as Elon Musk’s will be in China. By turning away from the values that made postwar America, Mr. Trump will be surrendering the single greatest strength that his despotic opponents do not possess.”

Every time I see something like this in the media I despair. These kinds of statements focusing on Donald Trump are either purposely distracting from what’s really going on or the major media are blissfully unaware of the nature of this time in our nation. Has no one read “Democracy in Chains?”

Or read a list of books that together and in sequence document how this right-wing stealth coup came to be and has taken over our country. I suspect many in my orbit are tired of me discussing these books and how the media really just doesn’t know WTF these books expose. Shall I go on?

Here we are now, with Trump the face of and puppet for the billionaire oligarchy. The founders of this conspiracy are James McGill Buchanan as the intellectual base and the Koch brothers implementing Buchanan’s vision. And if you understand the oligarchs’ strategy, including successfully co-opting the evangelicals to impose a Christian-nationalist theocracy on us, you’ll see that Texas and Florida have been the test beds for their plan, now known as Project 2025. With the triple win of the oligarch-captured Republican Party, Project 2025 will be implemented, but it’s only part of the endgame. The full fruit of our failure to stop this decades ago will be an Article V Constitutional Convention to massively roll back our our legal framework to the 1850s. This plan has flown under the radar for decades but is now in the open. This movement has its own website.

I am at a loss to see a peaceful way out of this — nor do I see how any violence can prevail when the right-wing reduces government to militarized law enforcement and “national defense.” Don’t look for anyone honoring Posse Comitatus. Don’t be surprised to see any protest shut down by force. Can you imagine A-10 Warthogs swooping down on our own people? Or tanks rolling through our cities spewing .50 caliber shots at protesters?

Oh, yes. We’ll have some waging a guerrilla war, picking off oligarchs and their proxies around the edges. Think about how much schadenfreude and folk heroism Luigi Mangione’s killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO exposed. You can be assured that sphincters were tightening and security procedures reviewed in corporate America but you can also be assured this won’t the only such act.

Yes, it’s a pessimistic and dystopian view. If you can see another scenario, I’d love to hear it.

Meanwhile, to refresh your memories, here is the list of books:

“Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America,” by award winning Duke University historian Nancy MacLean;
“Dark Money” by Jane Mayer;
“Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right” by Anne Nelson;
“The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism” by Katherine Stewart;
“Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez; and,
“Hiding in Plain Sight” and “They Knew” by Sarah Kendzior.

Making enemies where there are none

Once again, Faith Family Church’s Jim Graff trots out a right-wing trope in the Dec. 1, 2024 Victoria Advocate. His message is that those who are vocal and open about being a Christian are victims of persecution. But,
in keeping the faith throughout the persecution will result in a reward in Heaven. Even the title, or headline, for this piece is divisive: “How to win the war for those we love.”

This is the Christian nationalism that “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism” by Katherine Stewart exposes and warns us about. And its emphasis on Christians being persecuted is part of the echo chamber and serves the purpose of riling up the troops to oppose both the more liberal versions of Christianity and those of a more secular bent. In setting up his pep talk for his version of Christianity, Graff uses John Bunyan’s imprisonment is an example of someone enduring persecution for his faith. We can give Graff a pass when he calls John Bunyan, the author of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” Paul Bunyan in the second paragraph.

As he has done before, Graff uses misdirection an disinformation by clearly implying that the 250 million copies of Bunyan’s work helped the imprisoned preacher support his family. While the multi-million copies sold is accurate from the time it was first published on February 18, 1678 until now, it’s playing fast and loose with the facts that is so troubling. Whether in hard news or opinion articles, this kind of writing damages credibility. Why Graff chose Bunyan’s story as an example of religious persecution isn’t clear, but there are several stories in whatever version of the Bible Graff likes to make the same point. The apostle Paul comes to mind.

The real damage, however, is pivoting to cherry-pick verses to make his case that Jesus assured those persecuted that they’d go to Heaven. Even worse, he quotes Jesus from Matthew 10:34-35, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law… .”

There is some delicious irony when Graff states, “He did not cause division because He wanted to, but because division was the natural response of a culture set on duplicity.”

What is the irony? It’s that he brings this up when many of us see this time of the year as one of peace and goodwill to all. Further, it would be helpful if Graff told us what this duplicity is in our culture. Is it that other religions or faiths are deceiving their followers? And, if so, about what? Why does Graff disrespect the possibility of one faith promising 72 virgins? Or a good follower of another version of Christianity would get their own celestial planet? Or is it our society that is deceptive? If so, how?

Graff then quotes the late Dr. Warren Wiersbe to assert that — and I have to quote to make my point — “Jesus is the Prince of Peace and the gospel is the message of peace. But when people confess Christ, they usually make enemies.”

I don’t see it. I’ve never had anyone display enmity toward me for being a liberal Episcopalian or before as a parishioner at a United Church of Christ. Nor have any of my friends in various other mainstream Christian denominations complain to me that they were treated as enemies. If you’d like examples of people persecuted either in this country or around the world, consider Muslims, Jews and America’s own Native Americans.

What Graff is doing in this piece is telling his flock that they must love God more than their own families to reach his version of Nirvana and the path for that is to withstand persecution. But what he is really doing is isolating his flock, imbuing his followers with religious hubris and making others enemies where there are none. One wonders how Faith Family Church’s worldview would fit in with any kind of ecumenical work in Victoria. If we want to celebrate this season, we can do so this year with our Jewish friends whose holiday this year shares the season. Hanukkah runs from the evening of Dec. 25, 2024 to Jan. 2, 2025. And while this year our Muslim friends’ holy days don’t overlap Christmas and Hanukkah, there’s always Festivus.

However, looking at this column in a broader and more well-read context, the message is sinister. By isolating and framing disagreement of beliefs as war, Graff subtly telegraphs the agenda of Christian Nationalism and dominionism that underlies the White conservative evangelical movement. Perhaps there is more duplicity here than meets the eye.

Sowing Chaos is the plan

On most days, I scan the news landscape by opening two dozen sites, including The Associated Press, The Washington Post, New York Times, Houston Public Media and Google News.

Today I noticed a pattern of content having to do with Trump’s cabinet and other leadership roles in his upcoming administration. Most of the pundits focused on how poor these choices are. Some are in over their heads, others know nothing about that which they will supervise and so on. What these choices have in common, these BigMedia talking heads assert, is their loyalty to Trump. Therefore, they will sow chaos, as will Trump, across the entire federal government.

While all all of these lamentations are partly true, they miss the bigger picture. These proposed appointees aren’t really Trump’s picks. He doesn’t know enough about the government to make those picks. They are are chosen by the operatives of the billionaire plutocrats and oligarchs behind the the dismantling of our democracy. And, yes, they will cause chaos, but that’s only a tactic. The real strategy is to destroy government. As Dr. Nancy MacLean points out in “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America,” Charles Koch and his allies — a cast of thousands — want to tear government out at its roots.

Remember, this is a long-term game. At its heart, this is the epitome of white privilege and racism that caused a civil war in the Nineteenth Century. Those feelings didn’t go away. They just flew below the radar. But they were energized by Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that separate education wasn’t equal. This is at the core of the right-wing radical movement. Immediately after the ruling, the so-called segregation academies popped up as private schools for whites only. ProPublica’s series (https://www.propublica.org/series/segregation-academies) traces this movement. But that was just the start. Voucher plans to destroy public education are operationally no different now from the ones 70 years ago.

And topics that raise ire and are “hot button” reactions like abortion, contraception, union busting, crime, immigration, LBGTQ rights fossil fuels and climate change are the wedge issues designed to divide people and sow chaos. That’s why we’ve been subjected to them. Even worse, they’ve been normalized as the right-wing American Enterprise Institute’s Jonah Goldberg points out, “But now it seems the odor has dissipated, at least among political scientists and operatives. Sure, there are still some ugly wedges, but wedge issues as a generic category or tool are now recognized for what they always were: normal politics.”

The truth is that most of the right-wing, at least the secular part, really doesn’t care about the cultural issues like abortion and gay rights. But they rile up the crowds, don’t they?

So, the chaos, you see, has been a tactic all along; and, so has disinformation, which has been turning definitions on their head. Tyler Cowen, the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, Koch-funded intellectual mothership of the radical-right movement, wrote, “the freest countries [defining freedom as economic liberty] have not generally been democratic.” MacLean quotes Cowen in “How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation,” Chapter 5 in “The Disinformation Age: Politics, Technology, and Disruptive Communication in the United States.”

MacLean continues by writing that her research “adds to our understanding is its exposure of the core ideas guiding these efforts and how those ideas, in turn, explain the reliance on radical rules change (including change to the Constitution) being secured without alerting the public to the real endgame.”

Read that again. It’s began long ago with stacking the judiciary with Federalist Society judges, overturning Roe v Wade, gerrymandering, voter suppression and eliminating voting sites. But these were for two reasons: to undermine the voice of the people and to distract from the long view. This stealth project wants to change the Constitution to lock down the unfettered economic power of the ruling class. The next step is a Convention of the States, under Article V of the current U.S. Constitution. I am not going to dwell on this, but I urge you to look at: https://conventionofstates.com/

It really doesn’t matter whether the Trump appointee is incompetent. The pandemonium is the plan and the rhetoric will ramp up calling for the dismantling of whatever the government activity is. That will open the door for shutting it down. Then think about what’s left when the government has only two functions: law enforcement and national defense. Posse Comitatus be damned.