- Trump’s worldview is stuck in 1989;
- Thinking the 1990s were better than today is nostalgia bias;
- D.C. is not the hellscape Trump claims it is (of course);
- More about that annoying busybody who opposes gay marriage and has nothing better to do than to try to impose her religious scruples on the entire nation;
- More about the Christian nationalist who thinks women shouldn’t have a right to vote, with perspective from Heather Cox Richardson;
- How the leader of the Family Research Council thinks we will be fine, fine, under a [Christian] dictatorship;
- And an essay at The Atlantic suggests Trump fans might eventually rebel against his incompetence.
Trump seems stuck in 1989. (Is that when America was last Great?)
Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 12 Aug 2025: Man Whose Mind Is Trapped in 1989 Orders Military to Crush the Concept of Homelessness, subtitled “What is the National Guard supposed to do here? Shoot the zoning laws?”
For journalists, one of the problems with covering Donald Trump is the disconnect between the president’s statements and reality. The reason Trump says that something is happening might not be the actual reason it’s happening. Sometimes, the reason he says he’s doing something changes on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes he says he’s doing something but isn’t doing it at all! It’s a lot of fun, and this week we have a new twist on the game: Trump’s explanation for what’s going on in Washington wouldn’t even make sense if he were telling the truth about it (which he isn’t).
…
So, because of carjackings and homelessness, the city needs to be occupied by the military. Does this make sense? How are 800 members of the National Guard, one for every 54 acres of city space, supposed to make a significant impact on random car theft, much less on homelessness? … Carjacking and homelessness in the District of Columbia are also going down, not up, and while you could argue that the U.S.’s baseline level of violence itself is unacceptable, what good are small one-by-one deployments to individual cities going to do about that?
And:
As I am not the first person to observe, Trump generally behaves as if the current year is somewhere in the late 1980s or early ’90s. At that time, cities like New York, Oakland, Washington, Chicago, and Baltimore were in fact experiencing record levels of crime. (Hell, George H.W. Bush went on TV holding a big old bag of crack!) This is no longer true. Overall crime rates are much lower than they were at that time, and in some of the cities that Trump tends to single out, they’ve fallen even faster than the national average. Compare the national decline in the homicide rate since its 1991 peak to Washington’s decline as documented in this post; for its part, New York is now about as dangerous as Omaha.
\
Flip side. Another theme of this blog. And no, that isn’t when America was last Great.
Vox, Bryan Walsh, 12 Aug 2025: Stop romanticizing the 1990s. The data shows today is better. subtitled “Nostalgia is lying to you about how good things were.”
Let me introduce you to four of the most dangerous words in politics: “the good old days.”
Humans have a demonstrated tendency to remember the past as better than it actually was. It’s called “nostalgia bias,” and it can lead to us unfairly comparing the conditions of the present to some better imagined past. Memory, as the political scientist Lee Drutman wrote in a smart piece last year, is like a record store: It stocks both the hits and stinkers of the present, but only the hits of the past. “The old days were full of stinkers, too,” he wrote. “It’s just nobody replays the stinkers.”
Main points of the essay: the 1990s featured 1) a far more violent country; 2) a much poorer world; 3) a nearly unchecked HIV pandemic; 4) a less tolerant, less educated population.
\\\
Don’t believe anything Trump says.
Slate, Christina Cauterucci, 13 Aug 2025: I Walked Through Trump’s D.C. Hellscape. It’s Now Clear What Exactly the Feds Are Doing Here., subtitled “It’s not what the president would have you believe.”
No one would want to live in the District of Columbia of Donald Trump’s fever dream. At a press conference on Monday, the president described a city “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” a place teeming with “roving mobs of wild youth” and “drugged-out maniacs.”
That was his excuse for deploying 800 National Guard troops and 500 federal agents to patrol the city and harass unhoused people for living on the street.
So she goes for a walk, along the Mall.
What I witnessed was an idyllic scene of American tourism. A nerd in a Millennium Falcon shirt made a beeline for the Air and Space Museum. A French-speaking couple took videos of each other trying to mount their Lime scooters. A set of parents and their adult children sat in the shade of some trees, giddily sucking down Rocket Pops. A time traveler from 2014 used a selfie stick to get a shot of her whole family in front of the Capitol.
And so on.
As much as I loved viewing D.C. through the Oakleys of a DEA agent, it feels silly to take what federal officers are doing in the city even a little bit seriously, because the fantasy of D.C. as some crime-addled hellhole is a deliberate invention. Violent crime in the District recently hit a 30-year low. The members of the D.C. National Guard who have begun policing the city live in and around the city; many of them must realize that a woman using a walker while drinking a beer in the park with her family does not pose a threat to public order. But the age-old tale of the lawless, dystopian city is still a tantalizing myth to people who have never spent significant time in one, or who have a racial and political interest in demonizing urban communities.
Soon enough, Trump will withdraw the troops and claim victory. Nothing will have changed.
\\\
Despite the evidence provided by the Vox item above, the fourth point, we still have people like this.
Why are certain Christians so bothered by other people’s business? Why don’t they just outlaw non-Christianity while they’re at it?
Salon Amanda Marcotte, 13 Aug 2025: The Christian right claims marriage equality is persecution, subtitled “Conservative justices are aching to declare that Christians are oppressed by other people’s marriages”
(So, the mere *existence* of other religions, and of the non-religious, are such an offense to Christians they need the Supreme Court to intervene?)
She [Kim Davis] has spent the last decade proclaiming her alleged victimhood to establish her Christian martyr bona fides. When she ran for reelection in her rural Appalachian county in 2018, she lost by 8%. Now she’s asking the Supreme Court to rule that the only way to preserve the religious freedom of anti-gay bigots is to strip marriage rights away from LGBTQ people.
The argument is so preposterous it feels unlikely that even this far-right Supreme Court, complete with three justices appointed by President Donald Trump, would struggle to pretend that the mere existence of other people’s marriages constitutes oppression of Christians. Unfortunately, it’s not as crazy as it seems — especially after this year’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which functionally allowed a minority of hyper-religious parents to ban all books mentioning LGBTQ people from schools on the grounds of “religious freedom.” …
Are Christians like these merely arrogant? Entitled? Snowflakes? How about evil?
\
More here.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 13 Aug 2025: Once again, Kim Davis wants the Supreme Court to destroy marriage equality, subtitled “The disgraced Kentucky clerk hasn’t won any of her legal battles, but she and her Christian lawyers are now hoping to undo same-sex marriage nationwide”
This is a woman who, in chronological order, married Husband 1, had twins with Husband 3, divorced Husband 1, married Husband 2, divorced Husband 2, married Husband 3, divorced husband 3, and then remarried Husband 2.
(Just like Jesus wanted.)
How did she justify her personal life with the whole “sanctity of marriage” thing? Simple. “God still wasn’t in the picture” until Husband 2’s mother died, she wrote in her book, and they went back to church in 2011. So she wasn’t a hypocrite, everyone; she just wasn’t a Christian yet.
In fact, in that book, she chalked up the whole hypocrisy charge to “divine irony.” God took a woman married four times and used her to defend marriage against the gays. Isn’t that so mysterious of Him?!
Isn’t it odd that so many Republican politicians have had multiple marriages and divorces and cheating on one wife before marrying the next? Trump? Santorum? Yet they claim they are defending the “sanctity” of marriage. I haven’t figured this out. (Feel free to comment!)
\\\
Along the same lines.
Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 8 Aug 2025: Pete Hegseth Promotes Douglas Wilson Interview Saying Women Shouldn’t Have Right to Vote
\
Let’s see how Heather puts this.
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: August 9, 2025
Last Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which Christian nationalist pastors express their opposition to the idea of women voting. “I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” said Christian nationalist Doug Wilson. In his repost of the video, Hegseth wrote “All of Christ for All of Life.”
But the government of the United States of America is not, and never has been, based in Christianity. In his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” framer of the Constitution James Madison explained that what was at stake in the separation of church and state was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental, unalienable human right—that of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
The United States of America is based not on religion but on the law. The country’s founding documents are the Declaration of Independence, which established the principle that all people are created equal, and the U.S. Constitution, which has gradually expanded since it was first written, increasingly recognizing the equal rights of all Americans.
These are the basic principles of which many MAGA and many Christians either are ignorant of or actively flout. For all that they claim to worship the Constitution, they are hypocrites.
\
But don’t worry, this other Christian guy assures us that dictatorships are good and we’ll enjoy them! (As long as they’re Christian dictatorships.)
JMG, 13 Aug 2025: Hate Group: Trump’s Takeover Of DC Will Make People Understand “Dictatorships” Are Actually Good For Them
After all, what is a dictator? What is a fascist? What is a Nazi? If Americans are shown a Washington, D.C. free of crime, safe to wander, perhaps even restored and beautified, and told, “That’s a dictatorship,” then they may just decide that dictatorship is agreeable. They may just decide that the world could do with a few more dictators.
The problem is that it never, ever, works out that way. See: North Korea.
\\\
Finally, could this actually be happening?
The Atlantic, Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr., 10 Aug 2025: Trump’s Unforgivable Sin, subtitled “Voters have proved willing to tolerate corruption, but there’s one thing they won’t ignore.”
(Spoiler: ineptitude.)
Tens of millions of Americans voted for President Donald Trump in the belief that he would be competent. They might not have been thrilled that Trump is a convicted felon, or pleased with his role in the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Many worried that he posed a threat to democracy. But enough were willing to overlook all that, because they convinced themselves that Trump would be an effective chief executive, that under his stewardship their lives would get better and the country would prosper.
…
A little more than half a year into Trump’s second term, however, the public’s confidence in his skill as a chief executive is shattering. In a recent AP/NORC poll, only about one-quarter of U.S. adults said that Trump’s policies have helped them. Roughly half report that Trump’s policies have “done more to hurt” them, and about two in 10 say his policies have “not made a difference” in their lives. Remarkably, Trump failed to earn majority approval on any of the issues in the poll, including the economy, immigration, and cutting government spending.
With details and examples. Concluding, with a reference to THE GREAT GATSBY:
Trump is smashing up things on a scale that is almost unimaginable, and he seems completely untroubled by the daily hardships and widespread suffering he is leaving behind. And the president is hardly done. The pain and the body count will rise, and rise, and rise. It will be left to others to clean up the mess he has made. Some of the damage may be repaired with time; some will be irreparable. Democrats should say so. It’s their best path to defeating his movement, which is the only way for the healing to begin.
