Donald Trump sets policies based on idiotic ideas. It’s not a cherry-picked statement. Many individuals who previously held high-level positions in his previous administration think him a moron. It sounds funny, but this attribute makes him dangerous. The threat: Reason, logic, and facts rarely alter a moron’s point of view. To quote Forrest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does.” So, let’s drink some chlorine and cure COVID.
Put all these thoughts in a stew, and you will understand why I’m concerned about you two.
His victory in November 2024 unsettled many attentive African Americans. “Many said his rhetoric, including racist and sexist language, proved he does not have the best interests of Black Americans at heart. Mary Spenser, 72, a retired nurse and educator in Oak Creed, in the swing state Wisconsin, was dismayed, [saying] ‘Trump’s opinion of black people was condescending,’ implying that blacks strive for jobs that drew illegal immigrants, ‘which he identifies as housekeeping or working on landscaping projects,’” reported the independent news service Reuters.
African Americans have persevered resiliently even though Trump is not America’s first racist or racist President.[1] Prevailing over the whims of the foolish wastes energy that African Americans could have used to make the most of their rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Think about the implications. Will you or should you be satisfied with merely enduring the denial of your individual rights, of your life, liberty, and your pursuit of happiness for you and your families? Fuck, no. You want to excel. You want your spouses and children to excel to the fullness of their abilities as promised to you and them at the moment of your birth in the United States. By law—constitutional and local—these rights are guaranteed to all, but wrapped within the warp and weft of the American fabric are strong threads restricting these rights. If you have questions, ask George Floyd’s family members.[2] Or listen to the dog whistles from then-President Trump, as noted by Politico:
“Left-wing mobs have torn down statues of our founders [referring to statues of and carried out a campaign of violence and anarchy,” Trump said. “Whether it is the mob on the street, or the cancel culture in the boardroom, the goal is the same: to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully Americans into abandoning their values.”
Doubt not the subtle threads of racism he’s weaving into the American flag. He never explains what dissent is being silenced, what truth goes unheard, and how people are bullied. I was never silenced, I never heard a truth go unspoken, and I never saw anyone bullied. Did he mean that someone is ignored when they use the N-word or denigrate an individual’s sexuality? Was he referring to individuals with racist notions who felt that there was no one willing to listen to their bullshit? Was he thinking of George Floyd, who was silenced for maybe using a counterfeit bill? I think not. Or maybe he was referring to the Central Park Five convicted of a heinous crime? He campaigned for their incarceration. I think he imagined five African Americans savagely attacking a European American woman. There’s a hint of the racist trope of African American men not being able to control themselves around European American women. Ten years later, those men, all convicted, were released. Their verdicts were overturned. A serial rapist confessed to the crime, and his confession was collaborated with DNA evidence.[3] Did Trump apologize? Of course not. He thought their release was outrageous. Maybe, more importantly, he couldn’t admit he was wrong. This balderdash comes from a man who abused a woman in a department store dressing room, whose ex-wife accused him of rape, and who appointed individuals with similar sexually abusive histories to high positions in government.
To make matters worse, he would have to admit he was wrong about five innocent African Americans. If he was Joe Average citizen, it would matter little. No one would have noticed. Trump was a celebrity, and his manner set an example to thousands of Americans. His manner is normalized. The taint of its sinfulness is artificially absolved. He has made racism that much more acceptable, even though it violates American law and its long-delayed promise of dignity for all.
The threads are woven into the American fabric. They are not lost with time’s passage. They are ignored.
The Exploitation of Middle America
I believe MAGA was born from a distrust of government. It did not arrive because of DEI, woke, abortion, or transgender. Most Americans go about their daily lives without considering any of these points. They have lost their America and are grasping for what they missed, which is their financial security. They are transferring that anger at anything that they disagree with.
There are voices behind the MAGA movement, and those voices are intolerant of equity, believing that this nation was built purely and sacredly on merit. With that erroneous presumption, they are demanding an overhaul. Shortly before the 2024 election, Harper Collins released Dawn’s Early Light.[4] Its introduction was written by Vice President J.D. Vance, who once compared Trump to Hitler. The author Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, advocated “burning institutions such as the FBI and Department of Education as part of a campaign against ‘those who seek to abolish the existing order in the name of emancipation, freedom, and progress,’” reported The Guardian.
The sentiment is incongruous with its verbiage of violence and its opposition to freedom. What American would oppose emancipation, freedom, and progress? Are these qualities not included in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, especially if the existing order squashes any of these goals for all Americans? And why the slash and burn? Cannot there be some redemption to the projects and ideas run by people dedicated to serving the American people and not to a political-economic agenda based on fear of anyone who’s not white, Christian (whatever the ill-defined term implies), and conservative? There are many fine white, conservative Christians. They care about their fellow human beings, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or gender.[5]
That’s not enough. Heritage’s firebug believes the nation must incinerate the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, BlackRock, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy. (Will the EPA be around to issue air quality alerts after all these fires?) There also are hints that he wants to Christianize decadent America.[6]
Roberts fears change in the “established” order. He never establishes the “established” order. He can’t because the established order has shifted since its founding. When the Constitution was ratified, there were no political parties. The nation didn’t reach beyond the Allegheny Mountains to the west and further south than the borders of Georgia. It took only two elections to change that.
Meanwhile, Southern states counted each enslaved individual as 60 percent of its population, enabling those states that denied the enslaved to be human larger delegations in the House of Representatives. Was his order found in the America of 1787, 1832, 1861, 1865, 1896, 1929, 1941, 1964, or 2008? It’s a short list. Americans have dramatically altered the nation’s fabric more often than my short list indicates. In actuality, his argument calls for destroying the established order, at least the one established by Congress.
Robert’s bluster and bravado hide a fear. I believe so. He and his ilk fear losing power and wealth to those who aren’t white, conservative, and Christian. Oh, mercy me! The sky’s falling.
Roberts claims the notion of America is carved in polished granite. He’s half right. The American face is carved in the principles of the Constitution, and freedom and emancipation are found in the Bill of Rights and the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments. His book sounds like a primer from Nurse Ratched of One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest fame. Don’t play by her rules, whims, and control, and it’s time for electroshock treatment. If that doesn’t work, then there’s a lobotomy. Roberts appears to lobotomize those whom he perceives as “radical” and keep the nation trapped in a mental hospital of his defining.
I might be too bold and crass, missing his truly paternalistic nature. He may have watched too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best. I still have a problem. I had a father, a good one. I don’t want or need another. The latter Roberts, unfortunately, appeals to the hearts of people who like sappy sitcoms and who believed their father when he said as he slid off his belt, “This is going to hurt me more than you.” If that was the case, then why didn’t he switch roles. I repeat the same to Roberts.
Brutal paternalism somehow has charmed more or less half of the American voters three times. In 2016, he lost the popular vote by a couple of million, but he won the Electoral College. Four years later, he lost the popular vote and the Electoral College. Finally, in 2024, he barely won the popular vote but slammed a fantastic victory in the Electoral College. His MAGA supporters managed to navigate his truthful hyperboles, lies, non-sequiturs, backtracking, and adolescent vernacular, qualities generally not associated with leadership. For example, he said he never read Project 2025. I believed him. The book was more than 400 pages. I don’t think he has read a book in the past several decades, and I’m being optimistic. So, he didn’t lie, but he knew of the project as much as can be described in a 15-minute, bullet-pointed presentation.
I cannot believe that Republican congressional representatives and senators missed these points. They, for the most part, are intelligent. Their reactions to Trump’s pudgy rhetoric, his pronounced coronation, and the igneous violence of Roberts’s positions staggered me in their blatant anti-democratic tones. I have forgotten that quests for power and wealth taint the best of hearts, and we’re not dealing with the best of hearts from my seat on the sidelines. It vitiates vision. For example, Republicans touted the 1.5 percentage margin of victory in the 2024 election as a landslide, an American mandate. How could these suck-ups find an authoritative command in a 50-50 popular vote? These politicians, though, have studied Trumpian rhetoric and mastered the power of truthful hyperbole.[7] They greeted his scorched-earth policy at the beginning of his term with applause or a shrug. They refused to see or admit that he was denying the right of Congress to create the laws. They accepted his claim about fraud and waste without proof. They surrendered the power of Congress, even as federal judges issued stays. They didn’t flinch when Trump implied he might impeach them, even though only Congress can do that. And we, the citizens, watched. Some applauded, some, like me, sputtered, and most never noticed because they were busy with their Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram feeds.
A battle brews. Not of weapons but of ideas. It’s a fight for the definition of what it means to be a constitutional republic. It has nothing to do with life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. It’s cloaked in those terms. It’s a screen. It’s money. Money.
Wealthier Americans, as a rule, believe the richer they become, the richer the average American will become. It has many labels, but “trickle-down economics” has stuck. It started under the Reagan administration. Tax laws sullied with this unfounded theory were passed. Subsequent tax “cuts” followed a similar pattern. The results have been consistent. It hasn’t worked in more than four decades. The nation’s debt has increased even though the Gross National Product (GNP) expanded. The wealth of families in the top 10 percent has consistently climbed, while income for the lower 50 percent has remained flat or declined. The top 10 percent is overwhelmingly European American. The lower 50 percent is a mix of single-parent households (primarily women), African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and indigenous Americans.
It sure looks like a form of bias against non-European Americans, particularly males. It is, but is it the result of outright prejudice or presumptions based on ignorance? I have known many European Americans, and I have discovered one consistency. Too many don’t know minorities. Rich white people hang around rich white people. It’s apparent at resorts and country clubs like Mar-a-Lago.
You probably don’t remember, but Nana and I lived in a small house in a neighborhood more urban than suburban. You don’t know that people in my town were afraid to visit the neighborhood. Our neighbors were Hispanic, African American, and Asian American. There were many multi-family buildings on the street. They considered us poor. They, therefore, imagined our neighborhood as dangerous, even though it had one of the lowest crime rates in the town. They didn’t know us, nor did they want to, for their minds were made up. We were to be avoided. In fact, they never went to the supermarket near our home. Their fear or ignorance fed their fear and ignorance.
Either way, the economic policies of Democrats and Republicans are screwing minorities, primarily people of color. Let me explain. For more than four decades, the more conservative elements of the American political system have created an economy that values wealth over labor. It has eroded the wealth or the ability to accumulate wealth for those in the middle and lower classes. During that time, the value of labor declined, and wealth grew. In other words, the more you own, the more you’re worth it. The less you own, over time, the poorer you are in the future.
Economist Thomas Piketty shocked the world about a decade ago with his book Capital in the 21st Century. There, he mapped out how capital has flowed away from the lower and middle classes of the U.S. to the top 10 percent and, more provocatively, to the top 1 percent. The main reason: The federal income tax has become less progressive in the past 40 years. In his new book, Equity: What It Is and What It Means, co-authored with Philosopher Michael Sandel, he advocates a return to the levels of taxation on corporate and individual wealth common after World War II. “We’ve given up on some ambitious continuation of the egalitarian agenda of making the most powerful economic actors accountable to democratic control, making them contribute to the public goods we need to fund,” Piketty writes. This has become the case, as Sandel points out, because the more liberal elements of politics have failed to hold those responsible for mobile capital accountable for their societal obligations. Here are some of the latest statistics. The top 10% of households in the United States possess more than 66 percent of the nation’s wealth, having increased more than 56 percent between 1989 and 2022.
At the beginning of 2025, the House Republicans prepared for tax cuts, further eroding societal obligations of America’s wealthiest. Its tax legislation comes as the quasi-Department of Government Efficiency supposedly cuts government waste, which appears more like individuals cutting programs they don’t like, not because of waste.
Essentially, these policies reflect selfishness and greed and an absolute failure to recognize the societal benefits of a more humane government.
As capital (wealth) flowed from the working class to the upper class, average workers, resentful and angry, looked to the right with its promises of restoring their lost dignity and economic well-being.
Conservatives presume people will invest wealth generated by tax cuts, making the economy more efficient and competitive. The GNP will climb, and the benefits will trickle down to the middle and lower classes. The trickle is more of a drip.
Investments didn’t match expectations. There comes a point where any individual doesn’t need more wealth, which usually sits in stocks, bonds, futures, and crypto. After a while, watching accounts grow becomes boring. The wealthy never shared their good fortune with the middle class and poor, upon whose backs their wealth was built. The compensation gap between the average salary of their workers progressed at a much slower pace than did compensation for the leaders of the nation’s top corporations.
With the extras, the wealthy needed satiation. They purchased mega-homes, mega-yachts, mega-cars, and joined mega country clubs. They purchased art not because they liked art but because it gave them prestige. They flew in rockets. Why? Because they could, and few people could brag about such a moment.
“Looking at the cumulative growth of wealth disaggregated by group, we see that the bottom 50 percent of wealth owners experienced no net wealth growth since 1989,” according to a 2019 report from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “At the other end of the spectrum, the top 1 percent have seen their wealth grow by almost 300 percent since 1989. ” In other words, if you relied on work to build capital, you were likely to lose money, whereas if you relied on capital to gain more, you became wealthier. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. To top that off, the 400 wealthiest American families pay a lower income tax rate than the poorest 50 percent of the country. That’s inequity. That’s at the heart of the middle and lower-class frustration, and it’s precisely frustration that leads to attacks on the bureaucrats who run programs that protect Americans and approaches such as DEI. All of which is only a few steps away from racism.
The middle and lower classes are economically suffering. Conservatives and even moderates have diverted the anger of the middle class from the wealthy, who have enriched themselves on the misery of others, toward items such as Medicaid, SNAP (food programs for children), and DEI. With truthful hyperbole, these programs have become scapegoats, and since these programs serve America’s poorest, they transform into scapegoats, not citizens or fellow Americans. Let’s start with entitlements. More than one-third of Americans receive entitlements, which include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Most retirees say they are getting back what they put into Social Security and Medicare. Nope. These are not pension plans. They are insurance plans. The money you contribute to these programs goes to the people who retired while you were working. Let’s take the second misconception about government assistance. Americans have a prejudice regarding government assistance. They presume African Americans receive the most.
[1] “A supervisor ‘told me that if a black person came to 2650 Ocean Parkway and inquired about an apartment for rent, and he, that is [redacted] was not there at the time, that I should tell him that the rent was twice as much as it really was, so that he could not afford the apartment,’ the ex-doorman said,” quoted Politico from an FBI investigation into allegations against Donald and Fred Trump and their real estate firm. They settled.
Woodrow Wilson was a noted racist. He resegregated the Federal government, backed the “great Klu Klux Klan,” and killed a Japanese proposal for racial equity during the Versailles Convention, where the victors drafted the peace agreement for World War I. Other racist Presidents include James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, and Calvin Coolidge, to name but a few.
[2] On May 25, 2020, police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck and back for more than nine minutes, asphyxiating him. His dying words: “I can’t breathe.” Chauvin was convicted. Floyd’s death led to the coalescence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which too many European Americans considered unAmerican and threatening.
[3] At that time, Donald Trump referred to “roving” bands of individuals threatening New Yorkers. In the year he was running for office the first time, two years after the city settled a lawsuit from the five for wrongful prosecution, he said “They admitted they were guilty…The fact that that case was settled…is outrageous.” What he forgot to mention was that the confessions were coerced from the individuals, as revealed in the financial settlement they received from the city.
[4] By the way, the title borrows from the Star Spangled Banner, written by an enslaver whose platoon was destroyed by a British platoon of free African slaves during the War of 1812. His bitter taste for the experience by individuals whom he did not consider individuals is evident in the third stanza of that anthem we mumble before baseball and football games.
[5] I prefer the term gender. It’s more accurate. The first definition of sex is: Sexual activity, especially sexual intercourse: hasn’t had sex in months. b.The sexual urge or instinct as it manifests itself in behavior: motivated by sex. The binary distinction of human beings is the secondary meaning. Gender, by definition, captures the intended use of the word: a.A grammatical category, often designated as male, female, or neuter, used in the classification of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and, in some languages, verbs that may be arbitrary or based on characteristics such as sex or animacy and that determines agreement with or selection of modifiers, referents, or grammatical forms. b.The fact of being classified as belonging to such a category: The Trump Administration’s mandate about human gender confuses me. I had one thought. Sex tingles the President’s little parts.
[6] Ironically, fewer than 30 percent of Christians attend weekly service. What was that third commandment on Moses’ tablets, I ask as a recovering Roman Catholic. Oh yeah! Remember keep holy the sabbath day. So, I can still go to that football game.
[7] In all fairness, exaggeration is nothing new to American politics. Supporters of John Adams and those of Thomas Jefferson made radical claims about each candidate, again using hyperbole.
For a Dignity Deserved 