Views from Crestmont Drive

• Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the past few days and puts events into context;
• (With asides about having read Fail-Safe and watched the movie, this past week; and a Facebook meme about Emperor Hirohito bombing Pearl Harbor and then expecting peace);
• Trump’s God-talk;
• And Kyle Mantyla at Right Wing Watch spelling out why MAGA hopes the Israel/Iran conflict will bring about the End Times.

First of all, Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the past few days, and puts things in context that at a glance might not have anything to do with one another. But many people have noticed this pattern over the years: Trump diverts attention from a relative failure to something new and outrageous.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: June 22, 2025

Last night, exactly a week after his military parade fizzled and more than five million Americans turned out to protest his administration, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. had bombed three Iranian nuclear sites: Fordo, Natanz, and Esfahan. He assured the American people that the strikes “were a spectacular military success” and that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” “Iran,” he said, “must now make peace.”

A meme post has gone around on Facebook in the past couple days, which mimics and mocks Trump, from Emperor Hirohito:

We have completed our very successful attack on Hawaii. All planes are now outside of America air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Pearl Harbor. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great Japanese Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Richardson:

For the first time in history, the United States dropped its 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—twelve of them—on another country.

(An odd coincidence of my own, as mentioned previous post, is that I re-read the book Fail-Safe this past week, and watched the movie version last night; a 60-year-old story about the United States dropping atomic bombs for the first time in history. In that case, by accident.)

Moving on with Richardson. Trump’s next standard move, yet again, is to walk back his claims.

It was a triumphant moment for the president, but as reporter James Fallows noted, the bombing of Iran would never seem as “successful” as it did when Trump could still say the nuclear sites were obliterated and Iran and its allies had not yet made a move.

Today administration officials began to walk back Trump’s boast. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said it was “way too early” to assess the amount of damage. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said that “no one, no one, neither us, nobody else, could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged.”

Tonight David E. Sanger of the New York Times reported that there is evidence to suggest that Iran had moved both uranium and equipment from the Fordo site before the strikes.

Trump, of course, is berating any reports that cast any shadow of a doubt of his claims of total victory.

And then the story of the past couple days takes a weird turn into God talk.

In last night’s speech to the nation, Trump appeared to reach out to the evangelical wing of MAGA that wanted the U.S. to intervene on Israel’s side in its fight against Iran. Trump said: “And I want to just thank everybody and in particular, God, I want to just say we love you, God, and we love our great military, protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

*Everyone* thinks God is on their side. After patriotism, it’s the refuge of the scoundrel.

And yet, MAGA seems split on these events. Richardson again:

But while the evangelicals in MAGA liked Trump’s bombing of Iran, the isolationist “America First” wing had staunchly opposed it and are adamant that they don’t want to see U.S. involvement in another foreign war. So today, administration officials were on the Sunday talk shows promising that Trump was interested only in stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions, not in regime change. On ABC’s This Week, Vice President J.D. Vance said explicitly: “We don’t want to achieve regime change.” On X, poster after poster, using the same script, tried to bring America Firsters behind the attack on Iran by posting some version of “If you are upset that Trump took out Obama’s nuclear facilities in Iran, you were never MAGA.”

Some right-wing extremists are condemning Trump for starting a new war, more or less, since he vowed to stop the endless wars started by previous presidents.

JMG, 23 June: MTG Accuses Trump Of “Complete Bait And Switch”

This is especially rich:

Salon, Alex Galbaith, 22 Jun 2025: “Back then we had dumb presidents”: Vance explains key difference in current Middle East war

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There’s something analogous between the cluelessness and myopia of the current administration, beholden as they are to conservative ideologies despite evidence about the real world, and the cluelessness and myopia of the religious, even the intellectually religious, despite the same.

Recent examples of the intellectually religious include stories about William F. Buckley (e.g. in this post), who denied intellectual freedom as “superstition” because he felt the Catholic religion of his childhood was the absolute truth of the universe, and that recent Ross Douthat book in which he advised that religion is good but especially *his* religion because that’s the one that’s true.

The bridge:

The Daily Beast, Catherine Bouris, 22 Jun 2025: Trump’s Strange God Talk Has People Concerned, subtitled “The president’s multiple mentions of ‘God’ in his Saturday address raised eyebrows among his critics.”

And then this, as noted before, several times. Why are so many Americans obsessed with defending Israel?

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 20 Jun 2025: MAGA Evangelicals Expect The Israel/Iran Conflict To Bring About The End Times

..[R]eligious-right activists have been nearly unanimous in their demand that the Trump administration lend its full support to Israel in the growing conflict.

The reason for this is that Trump’s evangelical base believes that the Bible commands them to support Israel in order to bring about the return of Jesus Christ and the End Times, as former Rep. Michele Bachmann explained during a recent “World Prayer Network” program.

“This is the one thing a president can’t get wrong according to the Bible, according to Joel 3,” Bachmann said. “A president can’t get Israel wrong. They can’t. This is the one most decisive issue that will either take down a presidency or it will lift up and create great promise for a presidency.”

“This is a spiritual battle,” she continued. “Israel’s at her greatest hour of need right now, every nation on Earth should thank Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu. We should all kiss the ground and be so grateful that Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister and that he had the guts to take on this greatest evil terror state that has defined plans. And so the United States, in my opinion, we need to be decisive. This is not a negotiation. It can never be a negotiation.”

As neither a Christian nor a Jew, I find this dangerously nonsensical. Every religion thinks it’s the only one that possesses the absolute truth. Now the world is on the brink of war, perhaps nuclear war, because of rival supernatural claims to the ultimate truth.

It’s like living in someone else’s fantasy novel.

• • How fake police wear uniforms, and secret police (ICE) wears face masks;
  • Robert Reich on the most regressive bill in history;
  • The lack of conservative humor;
  • Becoming aware of Rebecca Solnit;
  • And short items about how Trump cut the suicide prevention hotline for gay people; how support for Israel, no matter what it does, is justified as “Biblical”; and how “deeply religious” is an alarm bell.

So last week a man dressed up as a policeman shot several Minnesota Democrats and killed two of them. Meanwhile, ICE goes around nabbing people off the street while wearing no uniforms at all, providing no credentials of being law enforcement, and masking their faces. The situation is getting worse. Trumps fans, not paying close attention, presumably think this is what they voted for.

Slate, Sam Adams, 17 Jun 2025: Does America Have Secret Police Now?, subtitled “Of all the things this Trump term, the rapid normalization of masked law enforcement disturbs me the most.”

This is partly about yet another arrest of a politician.

…I watched the video of federal agents handcuffing New York City Comptroller Brad Lander inside an immigration courthouse in lower Manhattan after he demanded to see a judicial warrant for the migrant man they were attempting to arrest. Lander, who is also running for mayor in New York’s Democratic primary, is a familiar face around the courthouse. The agents knew exactly whom they were taking into custody: Minutes beforehand, a reporter heard one asking another, “Do you want to arrest the comptroller?” But who those agents were, or even who they worked for, is more difficult to pin down. Because, in what has become a familiar—and, if you spend enough time on the internet, practically daily—sight, they were hiding their faces behind masks. Even as the New York Times’ story on the situation carried the headline that Lander had been “arrested by ICE,” in the body of the article, the reporter hedged his bets, identifying the individuals only as “several men who appear to be law enforcement officers.”

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Similarly, is this what Trump fans voted for? I continue to think that conservative voters are being snookered into supporting Republican politicians who pander to their religious scruples, while the priorities of the politicians are to get elected and cut taxes for the wealthy, their biggest supporters.

Robert Reich, 16 Jun 2025: The Most Regressive Bill in, well, History, subtitled “Trump Republicans want to take from the poor and working class and give to the rich”

Friends,

The giant Trump Republican bill now before the Senate — Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” — cuts taxes for high earners and reduces benefits for the poor and working class.

This would make it more regressive — harming low-income Americans while benefiting high-income Americans — than any major tax or entitlement law in many decades, if not in history, according to new estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.

Now, when you look at this graph, it looks alarming. Such high and low spikes. But the height of the spikes may be an artifact of graph software (like that on my Apple Watch that adjusts the scale of steps watched whenever the range includes an unusually high number of steps on a given day) and not malicious intent.

Reich has a point. Republicans manage to advantage the rich and disadvantage the poor, every single time. But when you think about it, 2.3% or even 3.9% will probably get lost in the noise. People won’t notice.

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One of my Facebook friends posted this today:

Thinking about the No Kings marches of last weekend. I was struck, as always, by the happy number of clever signs, everything from poetry to puns — but I don’t remember seeing anything comparable from right-wing gatherings.

Am I missing something here?

I’ll quote (anonymously) two of the comments:

It strikes me that right-wing people have both (1) little creative ability at the level of protest signs and activities, and (2) absolutely ZERO sense of humor. All I ever see when driving past right-wing demos or seeing them on TV is just hate, hate, hate.

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I think conservatives are driven more by fear and emotion than by logic and intelligence. It’s awfully hard to be witty when you’re scared and angry. Their humor tends towards insults and slurs as a result.

I’ve noted the parts about lack of sense of humor before. Trump, e.g., only smiles when he’s smirking or sneering. He’s never actually happy or joyful.

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I am gradually becoming aware of Rebecca Solnit, whose posts I now see on Facebook. She’s a writer of a couple dozen books; Wikipedia says “She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.”

She’s just started a new newsletter at Meditations in an Emergency (not at Substack, for what that’s worth).

She was interviewed on KQED’s Forum this morning: Rebecca Solnit on Approaching These Times with Hope, Imagination and Perseverance.

I mention this because in the radio interview she discusses her distinction between “isolationists” and “interconnectionists.” And said many profound things. The former aligns with conservatives who think they can live alone and don’t need government. The latter align with those who see the world globally and understand that global problems cannot be solved locally. It’s another perspective on the great divide in the expression of human nature. I’ll check back to see if KQED posts a transcript, and/or figure out which of her many books might discuss this topic.

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Salon, Garrett Owen, 18 Jun 2025: “Devastated and heartbroken”: Trump cuts LGBTQ+ youth services on 988 suicide hotline, subtitled “The Trump administration ends the option for LGBTQ callers to speak with specialists in LGBTQ mental health”

They removed the Press 3 option. Conservatives seems not to mind if gays commit suicide.

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Once again, support for Israel is rooted in Biblical theology — despite any atrocities the modern state of Israel might be committing.

JMG, 18 Jun 2025: GOP Rep: US Must Defend Israel Because “It’s Biblical”

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And this situation rings true.

The Bulwark, Mona Charen, 18 Jun 2025: The Growing Threat of Homegrown Religious Extremism, subtitled “The alleged Minnesota assassin was known as a ‘deeply religious’ Christian man. That should be an alarm bell for all of us.”

Because “deeply religious” means irrational. And deeply tribal, and antagonistic to people unlike themselves.