What Will He Do?

What will he do? That's the question that has been consuming everyone who pays attention to politics. While we should always consider with a skeptical eye any campaign promises a candidate makes, the second Trump administration leaves us with more questions than usual.

Even with a "normal" president, campaign promises are often more aspirational than concrete. Congress may not support the campaign promises. Global events may completely derail presidential plans. Bursting housing bubbles and pandemics change everything. 

With Trump it's a whole 'nother game.

Attempting to figure out what Trump will do in his second term is not as simple as listening to what he says. One reason for that is that he's a shameless, unrepentant, liar. Not just the typical politician's lies to make themselves look better, but lies about everything. Who else would spend valuable time during a debate arguing about crowd size? Or continuing to bring up a "Michigan Man of the Year" award that never happened? A corollary effect of his lying is that he will say whatever it takes to get people to applaud during his rallies. In Nevada, where the hospitality industry provides the lion's share of employment, he promises to eliminate income taxes on tips; in industrial areas, it's taxes on overtime. To his typical anti-immigrant audience he emphasizes deporting millions. His stance on abortion changes depending on who he's talking to.  

Another aspect of Trump's personality which effects the actions that he takes is that he is a narcissist. He has be to be the main character of every story, the guy in the spotlight. If any of his cabinet members, advisors, or supporters looks like they're getting credit for a program, even if it conforms to a known Trump priority, Trump's ego will prevail over getting his agenda implemented. Trump may say things that make his supporters think that he has their best interests at heart, that he loves our country and is doing things that they believe are best for the nation, but Trump is only in it for the boost to his own ego. He only ran for the second term because he couldn't stand the humiliation of losing in 2020 to the man he derided as "Sleepy Joe". 

Let's not forget, despite having been the president from 2017-2020, he is still profoundly ignorant about how things work. The most obvious example is his repeated misrepresentation of how tariffs work. He has no desire to learn how to connect the dots regarding any of his ideas or their ramifications. An observation that I saw the other day was a speculation about what minor concessions would Trump accept from Mexico, Canada (Canada!) and China in order to claim that his threat of tariffs "worked". He has already lied about the President of Mexico's response, claiming that she agreed to "close the border" - she responded that she would never do that. 

The previous examples focus on how things he said he would do might not get done. But there are a number of his pronouncements that are illegal, or unlikely to garner Congressional support, that a reasonable person might conclude can't get done. But this is an area where his ego and ignorance could very well combine into an arrogant attempt to circumvent the Constitution. His success at evading any meaningful accountability for his actions, combined with the Supreme Court ruling giving him virtually unlimited immunity from prosecution, will surely embolden him to ignore Congress and the courts. Of all his cabinet picks, the selection of Pam Bondi, who unlike Jeff Sessions, fully supports prosecuting Trump opponents for whatever imaginary crimes she can dream up, is the most disturbing. It remains to be seen whether the Senate will comply with Trump's "suggestion" that adjourn so that he can make recess appointments and avoid Senate confirmation hearings, but it's an authoritarian "suggestion" nonetheless. 

I'm under no illusions about this administration. But I just don't know how bad things will be. 

The Trumpist Cult of Ignorance

Trumpism is a cult. Many who voted for or otherwise support Trump are offended by this characterization, mainly because they don't know what a cult really is, or understand how a cult leader gets and keeps followers. 

I was in a cult for many years, been out for over twenty and have had the opportunity to reflect on my involvement and how the cult experience is applicable to today's politics. My series So, You Want To Join a Cult delves into the subject at some length. 

Trumpists get offended because they think a cult has to be people drinking the literal Kool-Aid, or are brainwashed, and have no free will. Cults are much more banal than all of that. One of the reasons people are taken in by cult leaders is ignorance. 

When I was involved in a religious cult, most people who joined had only a superficial understanding of the Bible, so the confident pronouncements of the cult leader sounded like they must be right. Of course there was little bit of truth - which was the bait. In my own specific cult, the leader, in his foundational instructional class spent a lot of time pointing out how what most Christians believed was not supported by the Bible itself. This wasn't to undermine faith in the Bible (he had spent hours hammering home the idea that the Bible was inerrant) but to undermine confidence in what he called "denominational Christianity". He then substituted a faith in his own teachings, which, if we had followed his own advice to "read what was written" and various other methods for vetting what we were taught, we would have realized were at least as unreliable as what the churches were selling. 

The cult leader started out by showing us how his doctrine lined up with the Bible, but quickly veered off into "trust me, I know what I'm talking about" territory. We were even encouraged to "hold in abeyance" any doubts or questioning, convinced that the problem was our own limited understanding rather than the doctrine itself. The ignorance that we brought into the cult was reinforced into a belief that we could never be as smart of educated in Biblical studies as our leader. 

The cult of Trump is similar. 

Although there was an emotional attraction, in particular the fear that many White people had about immigrants and the vast amorphous "others", there were a number of people who thought that Trump actually had solutions to their perceived problems. As with religious cult involvement, the pathway to thinking that Trump had the answers was ignorance. 

One of the most common rationales that I heard from people who supported Trump, apart from the rabid anti-immigration or anti-"woke" arguments, was that he was better for the economy. This, of course, is an argument based on a profound ignorance of how the economy works. While there are actions that president can take which will affect the economy, in general, it is something that government has little control over. The factors that led to global inflation 2021-2023 and enduring high prices can be traced, among other things, to increased demand following depressed purchasing during the pandemic, supply chains not ready to restart, increased wages, and corporate price gouging. Interestingly, gas prices shot up 2021-2023, but have since settled own to right around where they were pre-pandemic. 

Trumpists not only convinced themselves that the economy was robust because of Trump and that inflation was caused by Biden, but somehow Trump would wave his magic wand and bring prices back down to pre-Biden levels. Social media is full of Trumpers celebrating the soon to be lower prices after Trump is sworn in on January 20, 2025. These beliefs are based on ignorance of economics. Related to this is Trump's ignorance of how tariffs work. He has insisted that tariffs are paid by foreign suppliers, or even foreign governments, when in reality they are paid by the importer, who passes those costs on to the consumer. 

Trumpist ignorance is not limited to economics, but can be applied to any subject. This can be traced back to Trump's own ignorance, with his followers declining to fact check him. They simply take what he says at face value. Their "research" is more often than not other Trump cultists conforming their "facts" and conclusions to what Trump has already told them to believe. 

Naturally there are other aspects to Trumpism and the Cult of Trump, but it all starts with ignorance and snowballs from there.

The Ultimate "Get Out of Jail Free" Card

Donald Trump has spent his whole life evading accountability for his actions. Most rich people do. Fight rich people in court and they can delay and delay, racking up the legal fees until you're exhausted and broke. Rich and powerful people flout the law with impunity, knowing that while they aren't necessarily untouchable, it takes a lot more effort and resources to hold them accountable.   

Until recently, Trump's legal problems were civil suits, not criminal charges. In the aftermath of his electoral defeat in 2020 he faced criminal charges for the first time. Several indictments were related to his attempts to overturn the results of the election, including inciting the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He was also indicted for retaining government records and refusing to return them when requested to do so. He was adjudicated a rapist (technically sexual abuse, a distinction without a difference) and lost a defamation suit by the woman he raped. He was convicted of falsifying business records in a scheme to hide payoffs to a woman he had an extramarital affair with. (He was convicted on 34 counts, which were basically the result of there being 11 checks written, 12 ledger entries and 11 invoices for legal services, all for the same underlying crime). But all of that is going to go away. The federal charges will be withdrawn when the new attorney general is appointed in January, or Special Counsel Smith may withdraw the charges in anticipation. The Justice Department has no jurisdiction over any state charges, but even if convicted, any sentence will be effectively moot - are we going to jail the serving president of the United States? Even before his re-election myriad legal maneuvers delayed accountability. The Supreme Court that he in large part appointed ruled that he had immunity for a large swath of actions taken while in office. A friendly judge dismissed charges, not on the merits, but because she thought the office of Special Counsel was unconstitutional. 

Trump and his supporters have accused the Biden administration and the mostly Democratic prosecutors of "lawfare" unfairly and illegally targeting him. Other than the so-called hush money case in New York we'll never know whether Trump would have been guilty as charged in any of the other cases. To anyone not blinded by worship of Trump, his actions clearly warranted some kind of legal action. He was indicted in all of these cases. Indictments are handed down, not by the prosecutor, but by a jury of 16, who in each case concluded that there was reasonable cause to hold a trial. The fact that someone aspires to political office shouldn't be sufficient to ignore potentially criminal actions. A majority of Americans apparently believe that it is. Many are even claiming that he's not really a convicted felon for reasons that don't make sense. And now, in typical Trumpublican doublespeak, they're cheering for using the Justice Department to go after Trump's 'enemies", not for any legally supportable reasons, but to enact retribution. There's talk of investigating Special Counsel Jack Smith apparently for doing his job. 

A majority of voters decided that the rule of law doesn't apply to Donald Trump. 

Why?

Why did Harris lose? Why did Trump win? Everybody has an opinion about what Harris did wrong. The truth is that nothing Harris did was going to make a difference. Nothing that any Democrat did was going to change the result. Why?

• People believe that the president is responsible for the economy and most people believed that the state of the economy was bad. 
• A president's policies affect illegal immigration and illegal border crossings were up significantly
• Many people who would have voted Democratic, or at least anti-Trump, stayed home because they believed that we were enabling a genocidal war in Gaza. 

Of course there were other reasons: misogyny and bigotry cannot be discounted. There are without a doubt demographics that usually vote for Democrats but harbored prejudice against women as leaders. 

The economy was the most common reason that I heard among voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 and didn't fit the stereotype of a Trump voter. Despite most metrics indicating that the economy was healthy, including the inflation rate being back to normal (around 2% annually), the results of several years of high inflation had not gone away. Prices are still high and aren't going back down. Many people remembered that there was low inflation during Trump's time in office and contrasted it with Biden's term and came to the conclusion that Trump was better suited to preside over the American economy than Biden or Harris. This belief required one to have no understanding of economics. The high inflation rate was a global phenomenon, not just in the U.S. and was the inevitable result of several interlocking factors. Supply chain issues, ballooning demand in the wake of Covid shutdowns, increased wages and even companies artificially raising prices to take advantage of the situation all contributed. Property taxes for home owners and rents for non-owners were big budget busters - the result of skyrocketing home valuations - a local, not a national issue. Gas prices were much higher during the first few Biden years compared to the last Trump year. Gas prices were low in 2020 mainly because few people were traveling and shot up in 2021 for the same reasons everything else went up - gas prices at least have settled back down to pre-2020 levels. Voters weren't wrong to be frustrated by the lingering effects of several years of high inflation, but ignorantly blamed Democrats for their predicament. 

While much of the criticism of immigration policy and border security falls into the tinfoil hat category, there's no question that Biden's approach to securing the border were inadequate. Was it all his fault? It was not, attempts to address the problem through legislation were sabotaged by Trump, who wanted there to be a border problem that he could run against. All many voters saw was a huge increase in illegal border crossings, ignoring the lack of Congressional cooperation. Also ignored was that although illegal crossings were lower under Trump, he was constantly crying wolf about "caravans" and even declared a national emergency at the border so he could divert funds to build his "big, beautiful Wall". Voters were apparently incapable of  seeing the nuances of the situation. 

Single-issue voters, or just people who thought that the Democrats were no different than the Republicans totaled around 1.6% of total votes nationally (0.5% to Jill Stein). Trump has 50.4% and Harris 48%. I haven't seen the state-by-sate breakdown to determine whether "3rd Party" votes would have made a difference if they had gone to Harris, but it's undeniable that a lot of 2020 Biden voters stayed home. Trump received almost exactly the same number of votes that he won in 2020 - 74 million. Harris however received 10 million fewer votes than Biden did. The most vocal of the anti-Harris, or sit-it-out electorate, were those who were opposed to our support of Israel in their war in Gaza. I'm not going to use this post to talk about what the U.S. should be doing (anyone who thinks they know what the "right" answer is over there doesn't know what they're talking about) but it's clear that no matter what position the United States takes a lot of people will be angry. One thing that is indisputable, our support of Israel's action in Gaza will continue, or even escalate, in Trump's administration. 

No matter what the reasoning for voting for Trump, or enabling his election by inaction, no matter how logical it may sound, how perceived self-interest had to prevail, a Trump voter had to be okay with the division, the hatred, the bigotry and the lies. A Trump voter, no matter how "normal" they may seem, had to be okay with his attempts to subvert an election, to rule autocratically, to jail his opponents. A Trump voter has to be okay with his ignorance of how things work, his cozying up to dictators while screwing our allies. A Trump voter has to be okay with the utter contempt with which he holds most Americans, including his own supporters. A Trump voter has to be okay with how he changes what he promises to do based on what gets the loudest applause, or who gives him the most money. A Trump voter has to be okay with his obvious mental decline. A Trump voter has to be okay with the economy being disrupted by increased tariffs and mass deportations. A Trump voter has to refuse to think. 

A Trump voter is complicit. 

Brainwashing and the Trump Cult

I've written a lot about the cultic aspects of Trumpism - how Trump fits the definition of a cult leader, how his core followers are no different than any religious or doomsday cult. What I haven't done is pin the label of "brainwashed" on them. 

What spurred me to write about brainwashing was a recent conversation with a friend whose mother accused him of being brainwashed. She brought up "coming to get him" and having him deprogrammed. This friend was not a Trumper, his mother is, and was offended at the "hate" (i.e. no holds barred opinions about Trump and his supporters) that he posted on social media. 

Trump and his supporters continually employ projection, accusing their opponents of the things that they are doing. Their own cultishness is projected onto Democrats, who are in turn painted as brainwashed cultists.

"Brainwashing" gets brought up a lot when it comes to cults. Although there is room for disagreement about whether those in religious cults are brainwashed or not, let me define the term as I understand it. Brainwashing is not a scientific term, and actually has no widely accepted meaning. But the way I understand it, it would involve the forcible conversion of an individual from one set of beliefs to another set that they would not have changed to without physical, chemical or mental coercion. Brainwashing could involve torture, it could involve sensory or sleep deprivation, it could involve threats to family members. Some kind of forcible change from one set of beliefs to another. 

I do not believe Trump supporters, even the most ardent, the most committed, have been brainwashed. Accepting the idea that they have been brainwashed would necessarily absolve them of any responsibility for their actions, most notably the Trumpists who participated in the January 6th Insurrection. No one tortured them into buying that giant Trump flag. No one drugged them in order to get them to attend one of his rallies. No one was locked in a sensory deprivation tank to force them to vote for him. Rather than Trumpers having their minds forcibly remolded in Trump's hate-filled image, Trump molded his image to conform to the hate that was already present. 

This isn't to suggest that Trump isn't a hate-filled misogynistic, ignorant, bigot - he is that. But that there was already a mass of grievance fueled resentment animating the electorate and Trump was giving voice to it all. It's as if there was this amorphous proto-cult just waiting for its cult leader to give it form, and Trump came down that golden escalator and it all coalesced.   

Assuming that Trumpists are brainwashed into their support assumes that they have no access to sources of information. Members of some religious cults were sequestered away from society - the cliche of the "cult compound" comes to mind. If a cult leader can control what information his followers have access to, he can mold how his followers think. It has been argued that this is exactly what Trump has done with his characterization of any news organization that didn't kiss his ring as fake news. Trumpists have eschewed professional news sources in favor of bloggers and podcasters who echoed Trump's nonsense. Much has been made of the social media echo chamber, where we are fed content mirroring what we already believe. But no one is forcing anyone to remain in their bubble. The sources of information are virtually unlimited and differing points of view are easy to find. Facts are easy to find. Trumpists who remain in a feedback loop of Trump fantasies are there because they choose to be there. 

Trumpists are not fooled, they're not tricked, Don't absolve them of their complicity.

Vote FOR 439 and AGAINST 434

The amount of disinformation, the amount of lying, surrounding the competing abortion referenda on tomorrow's ballot is just pissing me off. 

The anti-439 claims that if 439 passes that men will be able to force women to get abortions or that 439 will guarantee government intrusion into women's health decisions, or that somehow forcing children to transition is involved, is ridiculous, and hopefully no one who was planning on voting for 439 will be swayed to change their mind. 

Initiative 439 guarantees a right to an abortion up to fetal viability, usually around 22-24 weeks, with certain exceptions past that time (there are also similar exceptions in the current law and in Initiative 434). Most importantly, this right would become part of the Nebraska Constitution, preventing the legislature from any further restrictions. If you believe that the current 12 week cutoff if "just right", be aware that we were quite close to a 6 week ban this year - one vote away from it becoming law. The anti-abortion crowd is only interested in compromising insofar as it is a step toward a complete ban. People who believe that abortion is murder will not stop at 12 weeks, or 6 weeks. They will keep pushing until the job is done. 

I've always avoided debates or arguments with anti-abortion people - it's generally not something that's open to discussion. I'm not going to change their opinion. Yes, it's an opinion. There's no science that can unambiguously determine whether the embryo or fetus is a human being, a potential human being, simply part of the woman's body, or when the transition takes place. What you think is no more than your opinion, and it's usually an opinion informed largely by your religious beliefs. And even when that's the case, evidence from the holy book of one's choice cannot be produced - in fact scriptural evidence that a fetus is not yet a person, or at least inferior to a person can be pointed to. 

No one's opinion, no one's religious beliefs, should become the standard for anyone else. 

Vote FOR 439 and AGAINST 434

Voter I.D.

It's now a requirement in Nebraska that you present identification when you vote. It was the subject of a referendum that passed with a majority of votes cast. Nebraskans were swept up in the Republican-led faux-concern about election integrity spurred by the lies told by former president Trump. Proponents claimed that it helped ensure secure elections. But what problem did it actually solve?

Even though we occasionally hear about someone voting twice, or groups turning in fraudulent ballots, and despite the hysterical claims of election interference or the 2020 election being stolen or rigged, there isn't any evidence that our elections are anything but incredibly secure. What isn't secure in many cases is the ability for many people to exercise their right to vote. In early 2021 Democrats in Congress attempted to pass a bill that would have, among other things, made it easier to register to vote. The bill included workarounds for people who did not have a government-issued I.D. and standardized the types of documents that would be acceptable. It passed in the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate. At the time Nebraska Congressional Republicans justified their votes against the bill by claiming that our voting infrastructure in Nebraska was just fine thank you, and didn't require any adjustments. But when the question of voter I.D. was up for a vote by petition initiative, these same Republicans insisted that our elections weren't secure and we needed additional hurdles for voters to leap over. For anyone who lives in a city where there's a handy DMV, who owns a car or is close to reliable public transportation and can afford the fee required to get a license, an I.D. requirement doesn't seem onerous. But in many areas it's not so clear cut. In Nebraska, many DMV offices had to close because they could not staff them. In many states the voter I.D. requirements "coincidently" are most burdensome in areas that tend to vote Democratic. 

What problem is being solved by instituting voter I.D.? Why, it's the problem of too many people voting for Democrats!

In a democratic republic, one might be forgiven for assuming that the goal would be to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to vote. And some jurisdictions do try to make it easy. Many states loosened restrictions during the Covid pandemic and there are states where voting is completely done by mail (Nebraska's rural counties have gone to all-mail voting). But for many people voting isn't easy. Election Day is on a day when most people work. Many states and cities limit the number of drop boxes. Even mail-in voting can be a Byzantine process of signing, initialing and dating multiple papers and envelopes. Republican groups routinely go to court to get ballots invalidated for failing to cross their "t"s and dot their "i"s. Not because they care about election integrity, but because it's becoming increasingly harder for them to win over a majority of voters.

Until the 2016 presidential election there was no widespread perception that there was any problem with our elections. Trump, with no basis for saying so, started publicly questioning whether it would be a fair election. He won, which one would think would undercut his argument, but he then started claiming that even though Clinton had received more votes than he did, millions of non-citizens had voted, "explaining" her "winning" the popular vote. He created an election integrity commission, which despite being staffed with his sycophants, found no election irregularities and was disbanded after a few months. And we all know what happened after the 2020 election that he lost. In the wake of the failed  attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Republicans throughout the country put into place many new laws that ostensibly increased election security, but in reality made it harder to vote: shortening early voting windows, restricting mail-in voting, eliminating drop boxes, restricting absentee voting, disallowing some types of I.D.'s, or purging voter rolls with short notice. 

In Florida a referendum restoring voting rights to convicted felons who had completed their sentences was neutered by the legislature by throwing up roadblocks that were virtually impossible to clear. In Nebraska the Secretary of State unilaterally decided that a law restoring voting rights to former incarcerated individuals was unconstitutional and refused to accept registrations until the State Supreme Court ruled that he lacked the authority. In Nebraska there have been multiple challenges to referendums: An end run around a successful  petition drive to repeal a bill giving public money to private schools involved the Republican-majority legislature repealing the original bill and substituting a similar one (a second petition received enough signatures to get on the ballot tomorrow); two medical marijuana petitions are being challenged in court because a notary failed to follow procedure involving a small percentage of signatures; what could have been a simple yes/no vote on abortion rights has been confused as a second referendum claiming to protect women and children is also on the ballot. In Ohio, the legislature attempted to increase the threshold for passing a  constitutional amendment for 50%+ to 60% (they failed). 

Given enough time I could point to numerous other examples. 

In a nation where there is no credible evidence of "cheating" or "rigging", where the elections are free, fair and secure, what is the purpose of making it more difficult to vote? 

I think I'll be voting for the party that wants me to vote.