Like River City’s Harold Hill, some politicians whip up a frenzy of discontent. A historical example is Senator Joseph McCarthy. He wasn’t fretting out supposed waste and fraud in government bureaucracy. He was looking for commies in government and the entertainment industry. His lead prosecutor was Roy Cohn, who later became a legal advisor for Donald Trump. They were merciless, destroying careers based on hearsay and other flimsy forms of evidence. There are such predators today using the same time-worn methodology.
With guilt predetermined, they begin their hunt. Bugles blare innuendos and lies, and their dogs follow the resulting scents. They scour the terrain for groups possessing “unfair” advantages, such as magic, money, owning the land the victims want, receiving government subsidies and scholarships to college, speaking a different language, or worshiping a different almighty. Incensed by provocateurs, the victims proclaim, “It’s not fair. If these individuals are entitled to help, we must be entitled. Besides, they don’t look like Americans.”
The frustration and fear, fueled by misinformation, eliminates the possibility that others may be smarter, more ambitious, more perceptive, or luckier. That’s unrealistic because the scapegoat doesn’t look like Americans. Therefore, America’s victims, primarily European American males, are deserving. They supposedly have more ambition, intelligence, and luck than most. It leaves one conclusion: Because scapegoats have robbed opportunity, America is in decline.
The New Right caters to these fantasies. It imputes the Black Lives Movement, wokism, illegal immigrants, or DEI programs. Each shares one common denominator: They relate to minorities. The Right frames these programs as promoting the rights of minorities over those of the “majority,” European Americans (Whites). They never phrase it so clearly. They argue that U.S. laws already guarantee the rights of individuals. Still, the nation’s current laws haven’t erased the consequences of a time when those rights were not guaranteed and how generations later find themselves digging themselves out of a rut, they didn’t dig. It’s summed up in the command: Make America Great Again.
The phrase confuses me. It implies America no longer is great and, by extension, it’s declining. Is it declining because African Americans don’t want to be killed needlessly by police officers? Is it declining because there are individuals who want America to recognize its complicity in the horrors inflicted on African Americans, indigenous Americans, immigrants, and women? Is it declining because individuals want the nation’s institutions, universities, companies, and government workers to reflect the composition of the nation’s populous? Or is it declining because there are individuals, as there always have been, who were assigned the incorrect gender at birth?
The music men of American politics deflect these points, claiming they want to restore the American meritocracy. Like the merit of getting into an Ivory League college with the aid of one’s family? Like the merit of keeping a casino afloat with illegal losses on the casino floor to infuse money into its dried-up coffers? Like the merit of building a company based on the multimillion-dollar company one’s father built? Is there merit to issuing a crypto meme token days before being inaugurated? Is there merit in saving an app once you discover yourself going viral? Or is there only a concept of meritocracy?
Meritocracy does not explain why the major positions in Trump’s company are filled by family members or how an 18-year-old is selected for the “DeFi Visionary” position of a new cryptocurrency company in which his father has a significant stake. Merit doesn’t explain why a CEO receives a salary valued at $56 billion. Merit doesn’t explain why scores of FBI agents were terminated. Merit doesn’t explain why hundreds of individuals were fired because they executed DEI programs as their managers instructed. Merit does explain why inexperienced individuals received Presidential cabinet positions.
The United States isn’t declining. It has been built and rebuilt through the merits of thousands of individuals.[1] The skilled efforts of individuals in the financial markets and the Treasury Department rescued the nation from the disastrous financial crisis of 2008-2009 that wiped out the fortunes of millions of Americans, especially those in the middle and lower classes. They helped Americans rebuild the nation’s wealth faster than any other nation. The rescue couldn’t prevent the consequence of such an economic disaster. What took years to create would take years to remedy.
In his first presidential run, Trump told Americans that the country was declining and that decline was responsible for their economic woes, not the banks and financial institutions that used unstable investments to earn billions annually for 10 years. Wall Street is a distant concept for most people. It was too intangible. The average American doesn’t know investors on the magnitude of those who precipitated the 2008 investment debacle. Recovery was taking place as he entered office.[2] Besides, the most effective solution would be cutting taxes on the middle class and increasing taxes on the top 10 percent, especially the top 1 percent. Yet, Republicans have never favored such a move, and it would increase Trump’s taxes. So, he promised the fantasy the middle class dreamed of: To make America great again—with no explanation as to how. The phrase is almost a decade old, and its master has yet to explain how and to do just that. He has continued to blabber about the nation’s decline.
He attributed America’s decline to tangible events disconnected from the lives of average Americans. He claimed illegal immigrants had tainted American blood (whatever that means), wokeness (another fuzzy term) made European Americans feel bad about themselves, that the uncertainty among the U.S., Russia, and China could be easily solved, and he could pull America militarily out of foreign interventions. He claimed bureaucrats (or deep state as he preferred) threatened the revival of American greatness.[3] To which end, he never explained. In the many trials against him, he portrayed prosecutors and judges as incompetent or “not very smart,” a phrase he repeatedly uses to describe people who disagree with his actions or rhetoric. The insidiousness of the deep state and the radicalism of liberals, whom he also called fascists, were infringing on the integrity of a man trying to help the average American.[4] During his second administration, he said the Department of Justice would go after those who challenged him, creating a political and criminal atmosphere of the false dilemma: “If you’re not on my side, you’re the enemy,” to paraphrase Luke’s gospel.
His truth mainlines Silly Putty, enabling him to stretch fiction into fact. He twists and stretches phrases, sifting meanings this way and that, giving birth to what one Trump media consultant called alternative truths, a variation of his truthful hyperboles. He didn’t redefine the problem or the nature of being American. He has ended disagreement and discussion. Opinion is truth, especially if it’s his. So, one day, TikTok was a threat to America, and a few years later, his dancing image went viral, and TikTok became a good idea. One day, crypto was a scam. He launched his crypto business. Now, crypto is such a grand idea that he recruited crypto fans into government positions. One day, a Democratic-led Congressional investigation into the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capital was stupid. A few years later, the Republican investigation was okay.
Wherein lies truth? In the mind of one man? Depending on his mood, the individual’s political or judicial positions, or the size of his bank accounts?
Trump truth is mercurial. It wavers to fill in the gaps in his truthful hyperbole, and yet, the American Constitution says, “in order to form a more perfect union.” Perfection is an unattainable eternal pursuit, requiring truth, the mortar of democracy’s foundation. The mercurial weakens the bonds of that foundation.
There was a time long before you were born when Republicans and Democrats, in their imperfect ways, struggled to stay on quest. The distinct principles of each party fostered tension, but that struggle helped leaders navigate the changing currents as seen by Americans. Each party offered competent individuals to take the helm. Today, too many individuals treat the piloting of the nation like playing with a rubber ducky in a bathtub, and when the ducky doesn’t sink, they proclaim themselves brilliant. Fewer decisions are tethered to common sense, leaving the national ship in the hands of sycophants who cheer the disingenuous and ensure it generates wealth for the uber-rich.
In a nation where truth wobbles, it’s easy for a man who cannot identify his favorite New or Old Testament verse to proclaim his divine anointment. It’s easy for an administration to give access to confidential information to youngsters without viable clearance. It’s easy for an administration to fire people in agencies that were investigating the people doing the firing. It’s easy for an administration to advocate violation of the international law against ethnic cleansing. It’s easy for an administration to lecture others for not permitting hate speech. And it’s easy for leaders and the populous to find scapegoats for their frustrations, fears, and economic insecurities. Each step is easy, but with each step, Americans accept or endorse distortions of logic. With each step, it will not be long before the country dices up the rights of Americans who don’t think or look like the individuals propagating antidemocratic and anti-American notions of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s happening as I write.
The political, social, and even religious environment has shifted from the tempered notion of understanding and thrives on casting blame on others and bending facts to justify conclusions. The hints of this closure on liberty (freedom) and the pursuit of happiness are emerging. The Gulf of Mexico was xenophobically renamed the Gulf of America. Annexation gestures ignore the liberties of those living in Greenland, Canada, and Gaza. The administration is ending efforts for diversity and equity in federal programs, falsely claiming they are inhibiting a merit system. The president, who continues to call illegal immigrants murderers and rapists, takes offense when a bishop dares to ask him to be merciful. And a president claims God saved him from death to restore American greatness, a statement I consider blasphemous.[5] It implies God has anointed him, elevating him to the level of prophet or, worse, Messiah.
The nation’s atmosphere is filled with so many untruths. It has depleted the oxygen of truth, making it an environment conducive to the belittling of others, as minds are poisoned with the carbon dioxide of truthful hyperboles. It creates a familiar atmosphere from a forgotten or ignored American era.
In 1828, Thomas D. Rice performed a song-and-dance caricature of African Americans in blackface. It was called “Jump Jim Crow.” It was so popular that Jim Crow became a pejorative for African Americans, a phrase accepted by white Americans long after the Civil War. President Andrew Johnson, a Southerner and Abraham Lincoln’s successor, eliminated Reconstruction soon after Lincoln’s assassination.[6]
A thunderous and fatal storm blotted out the brightness of liberation as one former slave state after another instituted what they called Jim Crow laws. Within weeks of enactment, African Americans lost their right to vote, to assemble, to drink water from the same fountains as whites, to attend schools with whites, and to flirt with a European American woman. The punishment for the last was death, usually a lynching. (Thousands of African Americans were slaughtered during this period, according to several historical analyses. Mass lynchings were not uncommon.)
The codification of an apartheid system three decades before South Africa stripped the formerly enslaved of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The rest of America, including my great-grandfather, the son of an Irish immigrant, were unaware of the problem or ignored the carnage. In 1896, the Supreme Court decided segregation was acceptable so long as it was separate but equal, a doctrine rarely honored. African Americans bore this yoke for more than 80 years, and the weavers of myth and fact tucked it into the entirety of the American fabric. The buried enabled European Americans to ignore the vile and inhumane while enjoying the fairytale of Gone with the Wind. The myth of American justice remains strong today.[7]
I cannot help but wonder what weavers are tucking into today’s American fabric? How is their weave affected by the machinations of a solipsistic putz? Let’s start with the basics, the foundation upon which all movements are built. Metal rods, called rebar, are woven into the concrete of foundations. It enhances strength and provides flexibility to an otherwise rigid structure. The rebar of most movements comes from its leaders. The MAGA movement emerged from the imagination of a man who boasts brilliance. It’s a claim that calls to mind a variation of a line from Hamlet, The gentleman “doth protest too much, methinks.”
I’ve known people whose IQs put them at the genius level, and never have I heard them say or hint that they are smart. There’s no need. They know they’re smart. The people around them recognize their intelligence. The opposite is true of the intellectually insecure. They brag about their mental competence to camouflage vulnerabilities. So what can be said for a man who brags? Is he more intelligent than his generals and NIH scientists? What can be said about a man who claims he can solve an international crisis in a day? What can be said about an individual who periodically claims he knows a lot of stuff to use his phraseology? What can be said about a man who resorts to middle-school name-calling? What can be said about a man who lies about the size of his fat ass?
When bluster and truthful hyperbole replace fact and truth, lies are all that remain. The environment heralded by this type of individual lacks a structure in serious rhetoric and logic, and from this murk arises monsters such as racism. For instance, Trump suggested that he or the U.S. run Gaza as the Riveria of the Middle East. It was so kind of him to repave a strip of land that had been the home of 2 million people and create a resort where they could no longer live. What to do with the Palestinians? Export them to Arab nations. It reads like a terrible script for an action-adventure movie that would never be financed. Why? It sounds like unbelievable rubbish. You get to throw out rubbish, but this man is serving up ethnic cleansing as a main dish. Though hundreds of American rabbis have opposed his proposed cruelty, it doesn’t trouble him. His disgusting banquet pleases him. He believes it will safeguard Israel and make land developers, such as himself, wealthier. All that needs to be done is move 2 million dark-skinned individuals to countries with more dark-skinned individuals. Not only is it criminal, it’s racist.
His proposal surprised me. It shouldn’t have. He has long believed in the “racehorse theory” of genetics. Most simply, good breeding produces good people, a long disregarded and disproved notion born of eugenics, the fallacious scientific theory regarding the superiority of certain genes, especially the genes that determine skin color. Yet he has belittled illegal immigrants for having “bad” genes and claimed that Minnesota rally attendees (all light-haired and white) had good genes. (He paused, expecting a cheer, but the audience was silent.)
John O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, wrote that Trump frequently denigrated African Americans. He remembers Trump saying: “I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Four simple sentences reveal racist and antisemitic proclivities. There’s a twist. His daughter converted to Judaism and is raising her children according to Jewish traditions. He must have been thrilled.
[1] I deliberately exclude the efforts and sacrifice of the thousands of men and women in the U.S. armed forces. Their merit keeps the country safe, enabling average citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
[2] In the last quarter of 2024, the last year of the Biden Administration, the nation’s GDP roses 2.3 percent, higher than financial analysts were predicting. That’s not a nation in decline. The question unasked: Where’s this new wealth going?
[3] Over the years, I have interviewed and worked with several Americans who worked in various government agencies. They were all hard working, competent if not brilliant men and women who cared about their missions within their departments and helping Americans. Not a one ever mentioned referred to interfering with the political process. One may not have liked their positions or decisions, but all were based on the rubrics of the department and their individual tasks.
The label paints them as evil individuals. What have they done wrong? They have refused to follow orders from President Trump. It wasn’t because they were liberals or Democrats. It was because they violated federal law or regulations, obstacles the president thought irrelevant. As he once boasted: “I could shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and I wouldn’t be arrested.” It’s a quotation that exposes his disregard for the life of an individual and the rule of law.
[4] Fascism is born from right-wing ultra-nationalism, such as the Nazi Party of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Radial left-wing liberalism is an extreme form of socialism, as seen in the creation of the Soviet Union during the 1920s.
[5] Since the assassination attempt, I have wondered if Donald Trump believes he was saved by God, whom he does not pay respect to on the Sabbath. If he does, does he expect God to give him a front row seat in Heaven.
[6] Reconstruction was an attempt to guarantee loyalty to the United States, eliminate the enslavement of Africans and African Americans, and grant them rights to full citizenship. It was poorly executed, leaving to be exploited. Rather than fix to intent of the program, Johnson killed it.
[7] There’s an irony in the debate about segregation. In reaction to this mistreatment, Booker T. Washington advocated for a separatist policy. For example, Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey suggested that Africa Americans return to Africa via Liberia. (It declared its independence in 1847, making it first and oldest nation on the continent.) Ironically, there was always tension between the Americo-Liberians and the indigenous African tribes.
For a Dignity Deserved 