Another take on the SOTU.
NY Times, opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr., 27 Feb 2026: Why Trump’s Fearmongering Is Falling Flat With Voters
President Trump did the nation a big favor in his State of the Union message: He brought home the dark secret behind his success. His one and true genius is hating on other people — Democrats always, immigrants and racial minorities (Mexicans one day, then Somalis), trans people, mythical election fraudsters, street criminals, drug dealers, foreign enemies and anyone else he finds it convenient to hurl a brick at.
The next paragraph makes an interesting point:
His speech was thus an unhappy marriage of bloody images designed to scare people and borrowed glory as he handed out medals to those who earned the honors by accomplishment and bravery, not flimflam. Mr. Trump demonstrated something too often overlooked: He can win when he’s not the incumbent and can go on the attack (2016, 2024), but he leads his party to defeat when he has to govern and fails to deliver (2018, 2020).
Going on with advice about what Democrats should do. And concluding:
If there’s one thing Democrats in the center and on the left agree on, it’s that the party has to reverse its declines among working-class voters. Mr. Trump is making their job a lot easier. The president used to be quite good at hiding his solicitude toward the very wealthy who contribute to his political and personal coffers. Not anymore. How many clips and photos have you seen of Mr. Trump happily hobnobbing with the superrich? And how many with men and women toiling on assembly lines or in warehouses? His alignment with billionaires is so obvious that even his loyal white working-class supporters are beginning to break away.
The left’s anti-oligarchy messaging is often seen as conflicting with the anti-authoritarian, pro-institution messaging of more moderate Democrats. But Mr. Trump is leading an increasingly authoritarian government dedicated, above all, to his own narrow interests and to those of very wealthy people who help him achieve his ends. By definition, opposing his authoritarianism requires opposing the forms of oligarchy on which his power depends.
To distract attention from this battle, Mr. Trump regularly tries to provoke hostility toward the groups he hates. Maybe he could pull it off if Americans were happier about the economy. But since so many feel let down, the message of his diatribes is that the only thing he can deliver after 13 months in office is fear itself. It’s a tired act. A presidency built on reruns is rapidly losing its audience.
Will Trump fans ever get tired of his wretched behavior and rote performative hate?
\\\
The latest example of gratuitous cruelty. Following up on an item noted yesterday.
Slate, Christina Cauterucci, 27 Feb 2026: Kansas’ Anti-Trans Driver’s License Law Was Cruel Enough. This Detail Makes It So Much Worse., subtitled “What’s the matter with Kansas? Its lawmakers are bigots. That’s the matter with Kansas.”
The article’s subtitle echoes this 21-year-old book (which I have not read). Beginning with just-the-facts:
On Thursday morning, the state of Kansas invalidated the personal identification documents of more than 1,000 residents. A new law that went into effect requires state-issued IDs to reflect each person’s gender assigned at birth, instantly nullifying all driver’s licenses held by trans Kansans who’d gone through the process of changing the gender marker to reflect their identities.
Affected Kansans were informed that their licenses would become meaningless pieces of plastic with letters that went out from the Kansas Division of Vehicles this week. “Please note that the legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials,” it read. “This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately.”
This strikes me as another example of how Republicans/conservatives think that by passing a law they can make people they don’t like simply disappear, at least from public life.
What’s the ‘detail’? That it goes into effect immediately.
The swiftness of the law’s rollout adds an additional layer of cruelty to a measure that was already set to destabilize trans people’s lives. With credentials that do not match their gender identities, many trans people will be outed when their IDs contradict the gender a cashier, bouncer, police officer, or other ID taker expects based on their appearance. In the best-case scenarios, this will be merely time-consuming or annoying. In other cases, it will cause public humiliation. In still others, it could put a trans person’s safety at risk.
Not to mention, as noted later in the article, “Kansan taxpayers will be on the hook for all the money it will take for the state to defend this law in court.”
Why can’t conservatives just leave well-enough alone? Why does the mere existence of trans people so threaten them? Some conservatives, I gather, are Libertarians, and presumably are fine with letting people live their chosen lives without government interference. But most conservatives are religious scolds, intent on instilling their simplex black-and-white view of the world upon everyone.
\\\
Two items from JMG. Why would the current administration do these things??
- (From South Florida Sun-Sentinel): Florida Cuts Off “Affordable Access” To HIV Medications
- Well, because conservatives don’t like gay people, and anyone with HIV/AIDS is presumed to be gay. Also, as Joe notes: “Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado is a raging anti-vax QAnon nutbag.”
- (From Associated Press): US Hockey Star Condemns White House Over Its AI Video Depicting Him Lobbing F-Bomb At Canadians
- “American hockey player Brady Tkachuk said Thursday that he did not appreciate a doctored TikTok video shared by the White House that made it look like he was disparaging Canadians after winning Olympic gold, calling it fake and something he would never say.”
- Again, why would the White House do this?? Do disparage Canadians?? I don’t think that’s quite it.
\\\
A couple more thoughtful pieces.
Washington Post, Ryan Burge (a professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis), 27 Feb 2026: The ‘God Gap’ in politics is a symptom of a deeper problem, subtitled “The decline of mainline churches has left us more polarized.”
This is partly about the writer’s experience as a part-time pastor in an American Baptist Church, and how its attendance shrunk over the years, and how it finally closed. Stepping out to the larger picture:
One of the defining features of American religion and politics is the “God Gap.” This is the idea that Republicans depend on the votes of Christians (particularly White Christians), while Democrats rely on the growing share of Americans who claim no religious affiliation. The data from the 2024 presidential election makes the difference clear.
Among Trump voters, 71 percent were Christians and about 60 percent were White Christians. Meanwhile, supporters of Kamala Harris were almost evenly split between Christians and the nonreligious (42 percent versus 45 percent). When the average American thinks about the political leanings of the average Christian, it’s more than likely that they conjure up a Trump supporter.
Comment: For years now, I’ve naively assumed that the compassionate messages of Jesus were better aligned with Democratic values of progress and inclusion, rather that Republican values of racism and advantaging the wealthy. I’ve been wrong.
But as someone who has studied American religion and politics through hundreds of surveys and thousands of data visualizations over the past decade, I must remind people of a simple fact: It hasn’t always been this way.
In the early 1970s, a majority of White evangelicals identified as Democrats, and even through the early 1990s, an attendee of a White evangelical church was just as likely to be a Democrat as a Republican. Though about two-thirds of White Catholics were Republican voters in the 2024 presidential election, they were a core part of John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960.
What’s changed? Polarization.
But in an America that always wants to code institutions and individuals as “left” or “right,” the mainline refusal to be pushed into one political corner may have led to its ultimate demise. In 1975, 30 percent of all American adults were mainliners. Today that figure stands at just 8.5 percent and will quickly slide to 5 percent as the baby boomers in the pews depart.
There are several graphs throughout this piece… The writer concludes, without speculating why this polarization has occurred (I would look to Ezra Klein), thus:
In a political climate that shuns compromise, we need the mainline more than ever. But unfortunately, this once-proud tradition is a shadow of its former self. And now we are left with right-wing evangelicals and left-wing atheists yelling at each other from the edges of the American religious landscape with little left between. The decline of moderate congregations is not only hurting American religion; it’s also hurting American democracy.
\\\
Still working my way through Philip Glass, up to his opera Orphée (1991). Here’s a sample.
