Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right out and said it. Trump sending troops into American cities has nothing whatsoever to do with crime or policing but, instead, is all about stealing the 2026 election:

“Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans,” Pritzker said bluntly. “None of those states is Illinois.”

In fact, the cities with the highest crime and homicide rates are Memphis, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri respectively, both in Red States.  Jackson, Mississippi, has a much higher murder rate than Washington, DC, yet, Mississippi National Guard troops have been ordered to DC.

So, if this isn’t about crime, why is Trump working so hard to get Americans used to heavily armed troops — who aren’t trained in policing but can be very effective at crowd control — in our Blue cities?

The simple answer is that he and his cronies are terrified of suffering Richard Nixon’s fate (40 of his senior officials were indicted; many went to prison including his Attorney General and White House Counsel). That’s why they’re planning to steal the 2026 and 2028 elections by any means necessary, and the troops are part of their plan.

Because they know that one of the most common causes of people pouring out into the streets — including in ways that brought down authoritarian governments — was the regime in power stealing an election.

Governor Pritzker said it clearly and emphatically:

“This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Let that roll around in your head: “Militarize our cities, and end elections.”

Pritzker is no wild-eyed leftie or crazed conspiracy theorist. He’s the billionaire heir to the Hyatt fortune so he knows the billionaire circles Trump travels in well. He’s the governor of America’s 6th largest state, with a population larger than 170 nations or 87% of all UN member states.

He’s an attorney who knows the law, and a successful businessman who’s founded multiple companies, including backstopping tech companies, starting a venture capital operation, and building a private equity firm from scratch. He was elected in 2022 with the highest vote share of any Democratic governor anywhere in the nation in over 60 years.

And he’s watching what Trump is doing, far better, apparently, than our national mainstream press. He’s tracking Trump’s executive order giving the president the power to direct the military to seize voting machines (and thus nullify their votes) in Blue cities that may swing states away from the GOP. And Trump’s Executive Order to end mail-in voting.

Trump’s statement this week that Americans “want a dictator,” was almost certainly cribbed from his mentor, Vladimir Putin. His new order for the National Guard to work with ICE (eventually, presumably, to work for ICE, Trump’s personal secret masked police force) to create a “Rapid Reaction Force” to deal with civil disturbances reveals his end game.

Its mandate is to assist “local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.”

It appears to be modeled almost exactly after the Rosgvardiya National Guard rapid reaction force Putin created in 2016 to put down anti-Putin and pro-Navalny protests; today the Rosgvardiya numbers over 600,000 men under arms. Putin probably told him about it in the car in Alaska, as this EO came right after that meeting.

Additionally, Trump‘s executive order essentially invites Proud Boys and other white supremacist militia into the tent to help with election intimidation efforts. It creates “an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” who National Guard leaders “shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce federal law.”

As Alec Karakatsanis of the Civil Rights Corps, wrote on X, this will “permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers.” It’s a 21st century echo of the GOP’s Operation Eagle Eye, which enlisted white men to threaten people of color at voting polls in the 1960s and 1970s, or Hitler’s SA, the Sturmabteilung.

So, what sort of civil disturbance is it that Trump’s anticipating putting down with his Rapid Reaction Force?

Here’s a partial list of countries where a recent stolen or apparently stolen election caused citizens to pour out into the streets to challenge the regime in power:

Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Panama, Philippines, Georgia, Mozambique, Serbia, Malawi, Hong Kong, Comoros, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mauritania, Tunisia, Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, and Peru.

Stolen elections and the protests they provoke are one of the most common features of countries that are in the process of sliding from democracy into authoritarian fascism and strongman rule.

And if you think Trump doesn’t believe people will turn out in the streets — sometimes violently — to demand the overturn of a stolen election, just remember January 6th. If you truly believed that an election had been stolen in broad daylight, might you have been among those protestors, too? Given that example, you can add the United States to the list above.

And Trump definitely doesn’t want Americans — particularly Democrats — out in the streets protesting a stolen election again (unless Republicans lose so decisively he can’t steal the election, in which case he’ll try to repeat January 6th).

Make no mistake: this is what Trump’s militarization of Blue cities is all about. If he can confiscate enough voting machines, refuse to count enough votes, intimidate enough voters, and disqualify enough mail-in ballots to invalidate Democratic majorities in a few dozen big cities, he can flip as many Blue states to Red as he wants. And keep the GOP in power forever.

And he has to; in his mind he has no choice.

After Merrick Garland finally got off his ass following two years of worried thumb-sucking, just the smallest and most tentative efforts to hold Trump to account for a tiny percentage of the many crimes he committed both in and after his first term would have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.

Trump knows this well. He was arrested and mug-shot photographed in Georgia, convicted of fraud and what a judge called “rape” in New York, and was looking at dozens of other lawsuits and potential criminal and civil charges that are all on suspension since his election as president last year.

He can’t go back. His life and his fortune literally depend on his holding power and never allowing Democrats to have subpoena ability in the House or Senate again, at least as long as he’s alive.

It might explain why he just appointed 2020 election denier/activist and Cleta Mitchell protégé Heather Honey to a senior position in the DHS where she’s charged with “overseeing” the 2026 and 2028 elections, particularly, as Miles Taylor points out, the overseas mail-in votes that tend to trend Democratic. As ProPublica noted:

“Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility requirements for people to be on voter rolls. Members of Honey’s Pennsylvania Fair Elections, a state chapter of Mitchell’s nationwide Election Integrity Network, have challenged the eligibility of thousands of residents to be on voter rolls.

“Honey has also been involved in numerous other efforts to transform elections around the country, including a successful push to get many states with Republican leadership to pull out of a bipartisan interstate partnership to share data to make voting more secure.”

He’s getting ready.

After all, Trump is the man who cheered as his followers killed three police officers and smeared feces on the walls of America’s Capitol while trying to overturn the 2020 election. He’s the guy who routinely lies to the American people while threatening and castigating reporters who dare call him out on it. He’s the one who openly admires Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, Kim, Xi, and pretty much every other tinpot and major dictator in the world.

And the people who work for him — looking at the fates of John Mitchell, John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy and others who were busted for following the illegal and unconstitutional orders of a corrupt president — are equally emphatic that they’re never going to spend a day in a federal prison, either.

So, get ready because Trump’s already well more than halfway down the road toward fascism and, in his mind, there’s no stopping until America’s democracy is buried under the old Rose Garden and our dissenters are as quiet and terrified as are those few still remaining in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey.

If Democratic governors and mayors are going to stop Trump from having his armed forces pre-positioned to help Republicans steal the 2026 elections, they need to get an infusion of Pritzker’s and Newsom’s courage and begin to seriously fight.

A coalition or interstate compact — formal or informal — will be absolutely necessary to resist Trump’s armed forces. Perhaps even a sort of soft succession, openly defying Trump’s illegal orders and threatened violence.

Governors are not without resources, as both Pritzker and Newsom have pointed out; they just need to use them. Let your state’s governor know!

Trump held a “cabinet meeting” today that went well over three hours in his garish Washington D.C. bordello, which consisted of escalating rituals of abject ass-kissing with the occasional conspiracy theory thrown in.

This was one of Trump’s usual cult-of-personality Cabinet meetings  Tuesday, most of which was spent, of course, with his minions licking his ass while spouting obsequious praise.

As the hours ticked by, Mr. Trump’s cabinet members highlighted the cost — in hours, in money, perhaps in karma — of keeping a seat at his table. And many did so while testing the apparently imaginary boundaries of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities on the job.

The updates ranged from enthusiastic — Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the labor secretary, implored the president to come to her agency to look at his own “big, beautiful” face on a banner — to servile, and they went on for hours.

Occasionally, policy peeked in, but only in a way that allowed Mr. Trump to tack on his own thoughts or to take a hard right turn. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the onetime presidential challenger and current health and human services secretary, issued an update about shrimp contaminated with radioactive material, accusing South Asian nations of “dumping shrimp” that was then packaged and sold at Walmart.

“You are going to save the whales,” Mr. Kennedy, who once sawed the head off a whale and drove it home, said while railing against the dangers of wind farms and wind energy, a long-held peeve of the president’s.

Mr. Kennedy then engaged Mr. Trump in a back and forth about rates of autism in young boys, allowing the president to wonder aloud if there was “something artificially causing this, meaning a drug or something,” repeating a widely debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and opening it up to an even vaguer interpretation.

In other moments, some of the truth behind all of that radical transparency revealed itself, like when Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that this year’s Labor Day held a special place in his heart.

“Personally, this is the most meaningful Labor Day of my life, as someone who has four jobs,” said Mr. Rubio, who in his spare time is Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“That’s true,” the president replied.

And then there was Steve Witkoff, a billionaire whose praise was so slavish that even the president seemed to pick up on the overkill. During his turn, Mr. Witkoff, the president’s peace envoy, complimented Mr. Trump’s leadership in the Israel-Gaza conflict, a war that continued this week with Israeli strikes killing 20, including journalists, at a Gazan hospital. He suggested again that Mr. Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize he has long coveted.

“There’s only one thing I wish for: that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace, this Nobel award was ever talked about,” Mr. Witkoff said.

When he was finished, the billionaire received a round of applause from his colleagues. During a later question-and-answer session with reporters and far-right news personalities, Mr. Trump circled back to his envoy and frequent golf buddy. Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Trump said, had reassured him that he was the only person who could solve the Russia-Ukraine war.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said, “you’ve told me that a few times.”

The old reality television pro then broke the fourth wall. “Unless he was saying it just to build up my ego. But it’s not really. I have no ego when it comes to this stuff,” Mr. Trump said.

He added: “It’s a massive tax cut for the middle class.”

Like much of what was said on Tuesday, this was transparent but not truthful: The legislation overwhelmingly benefits top earners, and has adverse effects for low-income households.

Attorney General Pam Bondi promised to crack down on drunk voters over the Labor Day holiday.  She clearly has never seen a Trump Boat Parade.

He has moved well beyond mere extreme narcissism now. Trump is rapidly moving toward a Louie XIV state of mind, where he starts to equate himself with “The State” and vice versa. He has gotten away with virtually everything for all of his life, and now that he has been reelected to the most powerful position in the world, he has started to believe that his will is unstoppable, that all will eventually bend to his dictates when he fully asserts himself. It has been his life experience. European leaders who once laughed behind his back are no longer laughing, as they struggle to find approaches that might shield them from the consequences of his capricious rages.

The legal system that once threatened to imprison Trump is now increasingly under his thumb. The Department of Justice that once prosecuted him has become his lapdog. The Intelligence services that once exposed his treachery are now all subservient to him. Small wonder that Trump believes that no one is capable of stopping him. Those inside the Federal Government, and those active in Republican politics, who played any role in opposing Trump have systematically been marginalized and are increasingly under direct attack.

As Trump moves to impose his will on widening circles of American society, he senses no force is capable of effectively opposing him, so he presses on with less and less lip service played to constitutional constraints or the norms that once defined our political system for well over a century.

Congress is mere window dressing on his rule as the Republican Party bends to service all of his mandates, with no regard given to whether they fly in the face of everything that political party professed to believe in less than ten years ago. The vestiges of time honored checks and balances are crumbling fast. Trump orders Republican Governors to convene special legislative sessions, and they do. He orders corporations to change their policies, and they do. He orders museums to alter history, and they do.

Nothing is too small to be of direct concern to him. He takes over the Kennedy Center, plasters the oval office with gold, paves over the rose garden, and plans major structural changes to the White House so that he can have a grand ballroom. He openly demands tributes from those who seek anything from our government, and punishes those who refuse to fall in line with his views. Disaster aid to citizens living in blue states is held hostage as leverage to force capitulation to his mandates.

It is the rate of the collapse of all political norms that is both so staggering and alarming. Individually, Trump’s actions raise grave concerns. Collectively they represent a menacing consolidation of power in his hands. Trump has already invaded two cities run by Democratic mayors with his federalized forces, with plans now to occupy more. He asserts non existent “emergencies” as a pretense for unconstitutional assertions of raw power, from imposing arbitrary tariffs on trading partners, to deporting residents legally here in America to nations where they have zero ties.

In Trump’s mind, Executive Orders are the equivalent of Royal Decrees, giving him the right and authority to change virtually everything about the way government functions. While the leaders of our military are continually being shuffled as Trump seeks those with unquestioned loyalty to him personally. Meanwhile Trump is amping up his assault on media outlets that anger him, most recently calling for ABC and NBC TV stations to lose their broadcasting licenses.

Trump literally believes that he alone knows what is best for America. That is delusional. Increasingly Trump seems to take seriously the Far Right fever dream that God blessed and elevated him to leadership as part of some greater purpose. Kim Jong Un, it seems, has a fellow traveler seeking worship from the masses.

We are only seven months into Trump’s four year presidential term. The mid term elections that Democrats pin so much hope on are still over fourteen months away, twice as long to endure as the siege our democracy has already been subjected to. Politics as usual will not save us this time. A true opposition party has to be at the forefront of the resistance. The time is rapidly approaching when elected Democratic leaders must take to the streets themselves at the front of massive marches opposing federal occupation of our cities, or forfeit their leadership in the fight to save America

“It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” President Donald Trump wrote yesterday afternoon on social media. He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7 for its chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump on August 11, the president says, he told Tan the U.S. “should be given 10% of Intel.” Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as “the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company.”

It is wild to see Republicans cheering on a president who publicly threatened a CEO and stated openly that he shook the man down for a major share in his company.

It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the government takeover of a private company.

The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.

It was not always this way.

After World War II, leaders of both major political parties agreed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, protect civil rights, and shore up a rules-based international order to try to prevent another world war. Republicans and Democrats contended, sometimes bitterly, over policies, but members of both parties recognized that they shared with the other a loyalty to the country and a general set of beliefs about what was best for it that encouraged them to seek common ground.

As recently as 1974, Republican senators went to the White House to tell a member of their own party that the House of Representatives would vote to impeach him for covering up a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party and that they would vote to convict him. After their visit, President Richard M. Nixon resigned.

But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.” Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.

Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.

Their goal was not to compromise with Democrats or Republicans who believed in an active government; their goal was to destroy that government. They insisted that government regulations and taxes were creeping socialism; they said that social welfare sapped American individualism; they said that civil rights laws destroyed democracy by overruling state voters. Most Americans wanted little to do with this faction until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected Black and Brown voting enabled the businessmen who hated regulation and taxes to mobilize racists.

Ronald Reagan tapped into the Movement Conservatives in 1964, when he backed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, his promises focused on economic freedom, but the racism and sexism in the radical faction was always present; he deliberately appealed to racists with a promise to defend states’ rights and to the sexists trying to combat the women’s liberation movement with an appeal to religious traditionalists. Reagan promised to put businessmen in the driver’s seat, but he depended on the votes of racists and sexists to win the White House.

Reagan’s tax cuts tripled the federal debt and left his successor, George H.W. Bush, facing a $171 billion deficit in 1990, along with the threat of automatic cuts of 40% across the board if the deficit wasn’t reduced. Bush reneged on his promise not to raise taxes. Movement Conservatives signed on in private, but in public they attacked the deal as a betrayal of Reaganism and common people. Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to purge the Republican Party of its traditional base: those who believed in an active government. He accused anyone who stood against him of being a “Republican In Name Only,” or “RINO.”

In 1994, Gingrich managed to flip the House of Representatives to the Republicans for the first time since 1954, and he set out to reshape the Republican Party into an instrument for destroying the modern government. That effort would require destroying the Democratic Party by referring to its members as “corrupt,” “intolerant,” “sick,” “traitors”; by launching investigations of what he insisted—without evidence—was “voter fraud,” and by investigating and then impeaching Democratic president Bill Clinton.

By the end of the 1990s, leading Republicans no longer saw party differences as differences of policy. Party trumped country because they believed they were in a fight for the soul of America, and they were on the side of the angels.

If keeping Democrats out of power meant it was necessary to skew the system, surely that was justified. Republicans began to talk of purifying the voter rolls in the 1990s, and in 1998 the Florida legislature passed a law that purged from the system as many as 100,000 Black voters presumed to be Democrats. This purge paid off in 2000, when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College. The contest came down to Florida, where a confusing ballot had siphoned about 10,000 votes intended for Gore off to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.

A hand recount had reduced Republican candidate George W. Bush’s lead from 1,784 to 537 when Republican operatives attacked the recount venue in Miami-Dade County to stop the recount, claiming there was “voter fraud.” The Supreme Court—led by five Republican-appointed justices—stepped in to give the victory to Bush.

When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans declared war. On the night of Obama’s inauguration, Republican senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republican leaders agreed over dinner to oppose anything that the new president proposed, regardless of whether they agreed with it. “For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,” Republican senators told incoming vice president Joe Biden.

They also worked to make it easier for Republicans to win. In 2010 the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance laws to permit unlimited corporate and other outside money to flow into elections.

At the same time, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project, to take over statehouses before the redistricting after the 2010 census. They won the statehouses of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Three years later, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act by ending the requirement that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting preclear changes to their voting rules with the Department of Justice. Republican-dominated state legislatures immediately began to restrict voting rights.

But the Republican economic program of slashing regulations and taxes was never popular, and the Republicans stayed in power by doubling down on the racism and sexism of their voting base. After 1987, talk radio fed the rhetoric that racial minorities and women were ushering socialism into the United States, and after 1994 the Fox News Channel amplified it.

In 2016, Donald Trump rode to the White House by playing directly to that racism and sexism and asserting that white men should dominate women and people of color. Establishment leaders backed him for the tax cuts he promised, but they no longer called the shots. The racist and sexist MAGA base did. Trump and his loyalists took the idea that they had a right to rule to its logical extreme. When voters elected Democrat Joe Biden to the presidency, they tried to overturn that election with violence.

Now, back in office, Trump is dismantling the government as Movement Conservatives have wanted for decades. But he has abandoned the small-government principles Movement Conservatives claimed to champion and is using state power to terrorize citizens. He has abandoned the due process of the law and states’ rights and is working to rig the system permanently in his favor. And now he has abandoned the free-market principles around which the Movement Conservatives organized in the first place.

From the beginning, “Movement Conservatism” was anything but conservative. Its supporters embraced the radical goal of dismantling a practical system that stabilized the country after the Great Depression and a devastating world war, a system that was based in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But now they are embracing something altogether different.

Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo explained yesterday on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.”

Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930s fascism.”

Ghislane Maxwell is a convicted pedophile, convicted by a jury of trafficking girls as young as 13 for sexual purposes and for assisting her boss Geoffrey Epstein in sexually abusing these girls.

She knows that Donald Trump participated in Epstein’s abuse of girls.

Now, Trump’s defense attorney — who is also the Deputy Attorney General of the United States has interviewed Maxwell and has released the transcript of the interview.

In that interview, the Deputy AG tossed some softball questions to Maxwell who replied:

• “Donald Trump? Never saw him around little girls.  Epstein barely knew him.”
• “Sexual abuse of girls?  Don’t know what you are talking about.”

And then, she was moved from a regular federal prison to a very minimum security federal prison.

Coincidence?  Bullshit.

Trump will pardon her during his last few days in office in exchange for her not saying a word about Trump’s abuse of young girls.

When I first saw this I suspected it was an AI fake, but of course not. The fun really starts 45 seconds in:

Trump looks about 90 years old and sounds worse. He appears to be deeply unwell, as if he’s shot up with steroids and who knows what else to keep him upright (barely).

Everything about this is just unhinged. The tacky decor, the stupid hat, the groveling courtiers and courtesans, but most of the humiliating spectacle for any non-delusional American of the sight of this pathetic shambles of a man being manipulated so easily by a Russian autocrat, who must be in disbelief that his interventions into the American electoral process have paid off so spectacularly.

 

This will be of interest mainly to Virginians.  In November Virginia votes for Gov, LtGov, Atty Gen, all 100 delegates in the General Assembly as well as local offices.

COMMENTS ON EVENTS AT LAST NIGHT’S ARLINGTON SCHOOL BOARD MEETING

See below for some reactions and thoughts from last night’s Arlington County School Board meeting, at which Winsome Earle-Sears (and many others) spoke, and the rally prior to the meeting, at which one activist held up an offensive, ill-conceived, racist (even if the person’s intent, as she said to Fox “News,” was “satire mean to provoke conversation about the absurdity of prejudice”). It’s obviously blown up into a huge, viral story in right-wing media and on Twitter, although we’ll see if really breaks out into the “mainstream media” or not, and whether it lasts more than a few days. With that, here are a few thoughts and reactions.

• Last night, Abigail Spanberger almost immediately said she “condemns this repulsive display” as “racist, abhorrent and unacceptable.” She followed up this morning with another statement, elaborating that “no matter the intended purpose or tone and no matter how much one might find someone else’s beliefs objectionable, to threaten a return of Jim Crow and segregation to a Black woman is unacceptable.”

 

• Arlington County Board member Maureen Coffey also responded almost immediately: “Arlington was the 1st school district in Virginia to desegregate in 1959 This is entirely unacceptable &flies in the face of the work we have done to be an inclusive & welcoming community for all. We do not fight for progress by putting others down, we fight for equality for ALL.”

 

• Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA08) commented this morning: “There is no place for racism in Arlington or anywhere else. This sign is wrong, does not represent the values of our community and I join those condemning it.”

 

• Equality Virginia issued a statement a bit earlier this afternoon: “Equality Virginia condemns the anti-Black sign displayed at a rally for trans youth ahead of the Arlington School Board meeting on Thursday, August 21st. The sign invoked segregation-era policy and tactics that are dehumanizing and deeply harmful. Anti-Blackness has no place in our movement, the for LGBTQ+ liberation is intertwined with the fight for Black liberation. We must condemn anti-Blackness in all its forms with the same dedication that we fight against transphobia.”

 

• Of course, all of this overshadowed the content of the Arlington School Board meeting, at which the vast majority of speakers expressed their support for transgender students and their opposition to the Trump administration’s threats to slash funding to Arlington public schools if they don’t change their transgender student policies. 

 

• For her part, Winsome Earle-Sears consciously chose to come to Arlington to speak out, because she feels like raising the “salience” of this issue – which bathrooms and locker rooms transgender students should be using – will help her politically. She also, presumably, believes strongly in what she’s saying, namely that  – in her view: “What is happening in our schools right now is just wrong. It’s dangerous. It’s insane. And it has to stop. There are two sexes, boys and girls. And for generations, we’ve understood this that they deserve their own sports teams, their own locker rooms, their own bathrooms. That’s not discrimination. It is common sense…When girls lose their privacy, when boys are punished for speaking plain truth, when parents are silenced for simply asking questions, that’s not education. That’s indoctrination.”

 

• With a couple exceptions, the other speakers at the School Board meeting all spoke out strongly in support of transgender students, argued that Arlington County schools are following the law, “reflect the core values that we hold as Arlingtonians – respect, inclusion, kindness,” etc. They also pushed back hard against the “political cudgel” being used by the Trump administration against Arlington County public schools. Check out the video, below.

 

• As for the politics of this, clearly Virginia Republicans are looking for an issue on which they can gain some traction, after a rough summer of disunity – and also getting outraised financially and trailing in the polls. So they look at 2021 – when Youngkin used “wedge issues” like “CRT,” transgender kids’ use of school bathrooms, etc. as part of his winning gubernatorial campaign – as a model for 2025. The big difference, of course, is that in 2021, a Democrat (Joe Biden) was in the White House, while this time around a Republican (Donald Trump) is president. And historically, Virginia almost always goes OPPOSITE for governor of whichever party is in the White House. So how much did all the so-called “culture war” stuff help Youngkin in 2021? Hard to say, but in the end, he only won by two points, even with an increasingly unpopular Biden in the White House, and even with almost no record, a huge amount of money, and a pathetically incompetent media – allowing Youngkin to be all things to all people. This time around, Earle-Sears doesn’t (at least not so far) have nearly the money that Youngkin had; plus she’s got much more of a political track record (as a right winger all the way) than Youngkin had; but yes, the media still sucks, as badly or even worse than in 2021, so far mostly normalizing and “sane washing” the far-right-Republican 2025 ticket.

 

• The Spanberger campaign, of course, would like to keep the focus of this election on the economy, inflation, jobs, healthcare, DOGE cuts, federal workers, tariffs, etc. – the things voters care about and which make a big difference to Virginia’s future. And at the moment, it looks like the Spanberger folks will have a LOT more resources to communicate with voters on those things in the fall than Earle-Sears will.

 

• But…and it’s a big BUT, Earle-Sears has the *enormous* advantage of Republicans having built, over the past few decades, a *massive* right-wing media/messaging machine, while Democrats almost completely dropped the ball on that front (despite being warned repeatedly not to do so). Which means, of course, that Republicans have the ability to turn just about ANYTHING into a huge “issue” – for instance, “CRT” in 2021, despite the fact that it wasn’t even taught in Virginia public K-12 schools, nor did the vast majority of voters even know about it – while Democrats have minimal capacity to do the same to Republicans. Or, in this case, Republicans/right wingers can take a sign by a random activist, not even sure who the person is (but there’s no indication she’s any sort of Democratic Party or Spanberger campaign official, politician, etc.) and turn it into the messaging, “SEE, THIS IS WHAT ALL DEMOCRATS THINK! THEY ARE ALL HORRIBLE!” And in this environment, no matter how many times or how strongly Democrats like Spanberger denounce the offensive sign or whatever, it kinda doesn’t matter, because the right-wing echo chamber will amplify it regardless, claim (dishonestly, but that doesn’t matter to them) that it represents Spanberger and Democrats in general, etc. Yes, that’s the absurd world we live in…and that Democrats SHOULD HAVE adapted to many years ago, but that most Democrats *still to this day* don’t understand.

 

• One more point along these same lines: yes, some random activist had an offensive sign, and Democrats have been condemning it – as they should. Meanwhile, though, Donald Trump – a virulent racist, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, etc., who has said a GAZILLION offensive, vicious, horrible things over the years – is president of the United States and leader of the Republican Party. And yet almost nothing seems to “stick” to him. As for the 2025 VA GOP ticket, they’re tied to Trump, plus if you look at their past rhetoric and actions, there are tons of outrageous, extreme, bigoted, etc. things…and yet does anybody care about any of that? Would any of that stuff, if tweeted, get even a small fraction of the “eyeballs”/”clicks” as this story of a random, unnamed activist holding up a moronic, offensive, etc. sign at a rally? Of course not. And that’s just a massive failure on the part of Democrats, plus the media of course, which SHOULD – but doesn’t – differentiate for its readers what’s from an official source, a candidate, etc, and what’s from somebody you never heard about.  

But Trump has no shame. That is his secret power. He is, literally, shameless. So he can parade his vivid inadequacies—his ignorance, his vanity, his physical grossness, his overall gaucheness—before the world, shielded by this power of shamelessness. But there are times he needs more, and so he protects himself from the mortal threat that someone might stand up to him and compel him to recognize his own absurdity with an armor of cruelty. He is cruel. He must be cruel, must lash out, must smash, must humiliate and dominate any person who dares to notice how ridiculous he is, how wrong, how unlawful, how ignorant. That has probably happened a lot in Donald Trump’s life, and it has made him a master of cruelty.

This sick, disturbed, evil personality has captivated tens of millions of Americans WHO ARE JUST LIKE TRUMP. They have raised him up higher than almost any other American in our history. Why? How? There are structural economic reasons, yes; America was ripe for a populist revolt, as the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders showed. But Sanders is an eminently decent man. He lacked the elixir of hatreds, the cup of cruelty that Trump offers to all who follow him.

This is the key to Trump’s EVIL:  He gives people permission to say and do out loud, in public, the things they used to do and say in secret.  Trump’s followers are as mean, nasty, evil, and twisted as he is.

The contagion of cruelty has now swept our land, and swept Trump back into power. The culture of cruelty is now the center of power in our country. The ideal of American solidarity, that way of life that recognizes we are all bound together in this nation, all brothers and sisters living in one shared national community, working out our differences under law through democratic debates—that’s a joke in Trump’s America. MAGA doesn’t even pay lip service to it.

Oh, they prattle on about America all the time, but they don’t mean what Lincoln meant. Or Reagan. They sing “God Bless America,” when they ought to fear the judgment of a just and loving God. The only community that truly matters is MAGA. MAGA is America and America is MAGA. You’re in or you’re out. And once you are in, you are complicit, because MAGA is built and bound together by the endorsement of, and the participation in, this culture of cruelty. There can be no dissent. Dissent of any kind is dangerous, because it exposes the truth: The truth that is being cruel is a sickness, not a triumph. Their grandchildren will be ashamed of them for this.