MAGA MAY REJECT JD VANCE

 

As the vice president for President Donald Trump's second term, JD Vance has done the usual thing that people do in that position: play cheerleader to the president, giving interviews and speeches that promote the administration's policies.  While there was a time in Vance's political career when he was openly critical of Trump (he even once mused that Donald Trump could be America's Hitler), his lust for power has lead him, like so many members of the Republican party, to fawning praise of every presidential statement and action.  The party has, of course, taken notice, and after he gave a good debate performance in the vice presidential debate last year, most Republicans saw him as the logical choice to run in 2028 (assuming that Trump doesn't find some way to stay in office!).

But to a certain segment of the MAGA movement, there is a problem with Vance's ascension, and it's for the worst possible reason: his wife, Usha Vance.  Why they might have a problem with her leads to what is the single most driving force  of the entire MAGA movement: fear of white erasure in the US.  Of all of the issues that Trump has latched to over the years, none has hit as hard with his base as this one.  For example, recently Jeremy Carl, President Trump’s nominee to lead the State Department’s outreach to international organizations, was asked at his confirmation hearing about a book he wrote in 2024 called “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.”  He was also asked about various anti Semitic comments he has made in the past, saying “I made some comments in interviews about minimizing the effect of the Holocaust that were absolutely wrong.  And I’m not going to sit here and defend them.”  The fact that a man with such an obvious and hateful past of bigotry could possibly be appointed by the Trump administration shows just how much the current Republican party has become enthralled with the so called "Great Replacement Theory, which states that elite leaders in Western countries want to replace white people (usually at the behest of Jews)  with non white immigrants.

Just read social media posts and interviews with Trump's most passionate base, and you will hear one white person after another ranting about "illegals" and saying that they all have to be thrown out.  To the MAGA loyalists, the Great Replacement Theory isn't a theory, it's a matter of faith.

Which brings us to Usha Vance.  She has mostly stayed out of making political statements while her husband has been a loyal Trump lapdog, but her mere presence may become a problem for her husband.  She was born in the US to immigrant Indian parents and has had a distinguished career as a lawyer.  But none of that will matter to the MAGA base, what will is the fact that she is both an Indian and a Hindu, the first second lady to be that ethnicity and religion. Already, the loathsome right wing influencer Nick Fuentes has verbally assaulted Vance and Usha, calling him a "race traitor" for marrying her and saying that he is now starting  a "Never Vance" movement.  It would be easy to dismiss a Holocaust denying misogynist like Fuentes, but, sadly, the man now has some sway in the MAGA movement, shown when the more mainstream influencer Tucker Carlson had him on his show recently for a painfully friendly interview.

While I like to think that most Americans won't care that our next first lady may be a Hindu, to get to the White House, Vance will first have to survive the Republican primary process, and with registered GOP voters it probably will be an issue.  While Vance has been a loyalist on the immigration issue as vice president (recently, when Trump went on a bigoted,  anti Somali immigrant tirade, Vance banged on a table in approval, like a hateful little drummer boy), that may not matter when the MAGA faithful see his wife as the embodiment of everything they hate.  It all comes down to a simple question: will the modern, hateful Republican party support a presidential candidate who's wife isn't a white Christian?

PART OF A PATTERN

 

As most Americans already now know, President Donald Trump recently posted on his social media account a picture portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys.  Although the White House at first tried to blow off the anger over this brazenly bigoted  image (which Republican South Carolina Senator Tim Scott called "...the most racist thing I've seen out of this White House") by saying it was just part of Lion King internet meme, the post was eventually taken down.  Trump, as usual, refused to apologize for posting this image, saying it was the fault of an unnamed staffer.

While it's good to at least see the image taken down, this hardly should have been a surprise given the history of bigoted statements and actions Trump has taken over the years.  Way back in the early 70's, Trump and his father Fred were fined by the Nixon administration for refusing to rent their properties to Black people.  Years later, in 1990, he took out a full page ad slamming the 5 teenage boys (none of whom were white) who confessed to raping a woman in Central Park, New York.  He even called for them to get the death penalty.  When the five were later exonerated and released from prison, he refused to apologize.  And, of course, his main entrance into politics came when he was still a TV star and he decided to latch on to the so called birther theory, repeatedly saying without an ounce of proof that then president Barack Obama was not a legitimate president.  And then in his first term, he infamously said that there were "wonderful people on both sides" about a white supremacist rally and again refused to take it back.  And then in the 2024 campaign he latched onto an offensive stereotypical  lie about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, saying that they were eating dogs and cats. 

More recently, on December third, Trump went on what can only be called a bigoted, xenophobic rant about Somali immigrants,  saying "we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”  and added some cruel insults about Somali immigrant and House member  Ilhan Omar, a frequent target of his hatred.  Race, and again, hatred of Somali immigrants,  was the main  factor in his decision to send ICE to the city of Minneapolis; that decision came in the wake of an investigation into possible government fraud that was in progress in which 98 people, mostly Somali immigrants, were charged.  Latching onto this investigation, Trump has had ICE specifically go after the Somali population in that city, even though, according to the Minnesota Reformer, over 90% of the Somali immigrants there are American citizens.  

And Trump has continued his hateful tirades against Somalis; recently, while speaking on Dan Bongino's podcast, he said that "...we’ve got to get them out...Ninety-two percent don’t work."  In actuality, according to the 2024 Census Bureau, only 28% of Somali immigrants are not working, but when has Trump ever let the truth stop him from building a hateful head of steam?

Really, racism matched with xenophobia  has been the keystone for the entire Trump era of the past ten years, as he opened his presidential campaign in 2016 saying that Mexican immigrants were "...bringing drugs, bringing crime, they're rapists...",  and has pledged to deport every undocumented immigrant in the country, stating offensive lies all the while.  And as if there was any more need to see just how bigoted Trump's entire movement has been, look to the only group of immigrants that he has welcomed to the country with open arms: white South Africans that he claims are fleeing persecution in their country, even though there is no evidence of such persecution.  (In an utterly cringe inducing moment, last year Trump berated South Africa  President Cyril Ramaphosa during a White House meeting, forcing him to look at what he claimed was evidence of White South Africans being targeted, even though that evidence was later proven as false according by  the BBC News and other outlets).  

Given all this history of hatred from Trump, is his latest example really such a surprise?  If the video had been an isolated incident, one that he apologized for,  it wouldn't matter as much, but it's really just part of a pattern of behavior that goes back decades.  And, sadly, his bigotry and xenophobia is seen as good not bad by the Republican faithful.  It's what they want in a leader.

ANOTHER WEEK OF INCOMPETENCY AND CHAOS

 

One of the depressing things about the American voters decision to give Donald Trump a second term in the White House is their inability to remember the utterly wild chaos and incompetency that swirled around him in his first term.  Remember the attempt at a Muslim ban?  His saying that a white supremacist  rally had "wonderful people on both sides"?  The multiple failed attempts to start a so called  infrastructure week?  And that was all before his pathetic handling of the pandemic.

And yet, even by Trump's standards, the last week has been crazy: first, there was his misguided attempt to have the US take over Greenland, culminating in a speech he gave at a summit in Davros, Switzerland in which he outright demanded Greenland be sold to our country, and he threatened his usual round of tariffs against countries that opposed the takeover .  He didn't care that all of this flew in the face of a strong majority of Americans not supporting the takeover, along with even stronger majorities of people in Greenland opposing it.  Really, the whole idea seemed to spring from Trump's own childish desire to be remembered as a president who expanded the country, along with his even more childish anger at not being given the Nobel Peace Prize.   Thankfully, after making that speech, Trump seemed to almost completely give in, calling off the tariffs and saying that instead some vague plan about America having more influence in the region was going to be negotiated. His main reason for giving in seems to be that the US stock market plunged after his tariff threat. All of this would be laughable, with Trump's usual macho bluster falling far short of reality, if it weren't for the fact that he has done permanent damage to the NATO alliance, with some of our oldest and strongest allies now saying that they cannot trust the US to do the right thing anymore.  The next day, in response to Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada spoke and said that “Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”  This is in the wake of Canada making a deal with China to allow their electric vehicles, which are banned in the US, to be sold in Canada.  Once upon a time the idea that one of our oldest allies would be making trade deals with a Communist country would be unheard of,  But now, given Trump's wildly erratic use of tariffs against Canada and other allies, China is actually seen as the more stable business partner.  Really, why should Europe and other American allies trust the US after Trump berated them for adopting renewable energy in his speech, and even said "your countries are all going to hell" in a speech at the UN earlier this year.  He has said all this, even as, as John Kerry pointed out in an editorial in the New York Times, "Europe is America’s largest trade and investment partner, responsible for some $2 trillion in annual trade, more than $5 trillion in mutual investment and millions of jobs straddling the Atlantic Ocean." 

So NATO, the powerful alliance of over thirty countries  that helped prevent the world from falling into a third world war, has been badly damaged by a president who wanted to take over another country like a greedy child demanding more dessert.  And that was just during the first part of the week.

Yesterday, the ICE occupation of Minneapolis became deadly once again, with Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, being shot while being held down on the ground by ICE agents.  While the Trump administration reflexively tried to call him an armed  domestic terrorist, it must be said that the gun he was carrying was legally registered, he was not threatening ICE agents with it at the time of the shooting (in fact, it clearly appears in videos from the scene, that the gun had already been taken away from him), and that they shot him ten times while he was on the ground..

And along with the shooting deaths of Prettin and Renee Good a few days ago, there have also been videos released of ICE agents pepper spraying people on the ground  dragging people into vans, and openly racial profiling, all carried out by poorly trained, masked, vicious, thug agents,  These are the kind of images we used to see in dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile in the 70's, ones  that would have been unthinkable in the US before the Trump era.  While it is good to see that Trump's approval ratings have plummeted in recent polls (and, of course, Trump has threatened to sue the pollsters!), it still is deeply unsettling that tens of millions of Americans voted for a man who promised just this kind of chaos in our nation's cities.

Yes, the sad fact of the matter is Trump will be a transformative president, just like he wants, but that transformation will be the normalizing of brutality, cruelty, hatred and distrust of our allies  and corruption.  And we're only one year into his second term.  

THE POLICE STATE IS HERE

 

During the first Donald Trump term, his administration carried out child separation policies at the border that were so cruel that even Trump himself first tried to blame them on his predecessor Barack Obama before ending them.  Sadly, the American public seemed to have forgotten this terrible policy when they voted him in for a second term in 2024, even as his supporters at his rallies held signs reading MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW.  That extremist desire has lead to Trump acolyte Stephen Miller pushing  U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into making more and more arrests.

Right now we have masked, armed government thugs grabbing people off of our streets because of the color of their skin or the accent that they use.  Gone are the words about getting out all the gang members or drug dealers, now we're seeing law abiding people who have been part of their communities for years being brutalized and held against their will.  American citizens wrongfully swept up have been released after suffering through days of tortuous treatment, with no recourse to sue for false arrest.  And while this all may be done in the name of throwing out" illegals", a recent chart in the New York Times shows that the arrests have focused on states like Illinois and California, states that did not vote for Trump in 2024.  If all the Trump administration wanted to do was deport undocumented immigrants, they would have focused on a border state like Texas, but this really more about revenge than deportation.  (The same could, of course be said about his sending National Guard troops to "protect" blue cities, which has been thankfully halted by the courts).   

Things really came to a head a few days ago when an ICE agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good, a 37 year old mother.  Just hours after the shooting, the Trump administration tried to justify it by saying that she had tried to weaponize her car; they even  branded her as a domestic terrorist.  But the videos that have been released of the shooting clearly show that she was just swerving her car to avoid the agent, and at the very least she did not deserve to be shot three times at close range.  But this is Trump's America now, where this woman is called a terrorist by the same president who pardoned over 1600 January 6th protesters, 200 of whom had been convicted of assaulting law officers.

We should have all seen this coming; a few months ago, when Trump signed a budget bill that gave billions of dollars to ICE, which has been recruiting for new members with blatantly xenophobic advertising, it was obvious that it would lead to an increased crack down in blue cities that would inevitably lead to unnecessary violence and death.  For Trump, this is nothing new: remember how he encouraged his followers to attack protestors at his rallies, or cheered a congressman who assaulted a reporter?  Or how about the reports that he watched the rioting unfold on January 6th with more delight than horror; obviously this is a man who loves the idea that his loyalists are so faithful that they would fight and kill for him. So not only does Trump not care about the shooting of Good, he sees the protests against it as an excuse to increase the number of troops in Minneapolis, even threatening to declare Martial law, although he thankfully hasn't done that yet.

America's slide into what can only be called fascism, with Trump's private army doing his bidding, has been accomplished in only a year.  It's amazing how national ideals can crumble when one leader with a cult like hold over his followers, a docile congress and a mostly obliging court system can run rampart over things that once would have seemed unthinkable.  But here we are.  I've never felt more ashamed to be an American than right now.

WE WILL RUN THE COUNTRY

It was just weeks ago that I asked the question, is America stumbling into a war with Venezuela?  Well, today I got my answer: Venezuelan Prime Minister Nicolás Maduro and his wife were taken into custody by the US military this morning.  They are soon going to face drug related charges. Before the attack  President Donald Trump  gave no acknowledgment to congress, nor any real explanation to the American public about it.  It could be seen as an illegal assault, given that only congress has the right to declare war on another country.  At the very least, Trump could have looked at the polls that showed strong majorities of Americans opposing military action in Venezuela and addressed the people's concerns before the attack.  But instead he just acted without warning or approval, behaving like the king he thinks he is.

After the assault, Trump did address the nation, but he was frustratingly vague in both his explanation for the attack or what happens next.  Ominously, he said that  the United States would “run the country” until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could be made.  He even mentioned the possibility of sending American troops to Venezuela. 

Clearly, the taking of Maduro was a relatively easy thing to do, but what lies ahead will almost certainly not be.  Venezuela is a country of almost thirty million people, and is around twice the size of California. Just what will it take for America to be able to "run the country"?  If we do send troops to the country, will this be seen a major betrayal from a president who ran on a platform of not starting wars?

The important thing to remember here is that, despite what Trump says, Maduro was not taken out because of his ties to drug dealing (most of the drugs from Venezuela go to Europe instead of the US), he was taken out to give the US access to Venezuela's massive oil reserves.  Although one other reason is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio may see  removing Maduro as a stepping stone towards eventually overthrowing the Communist government of Cuba, an ally of Venezuela.  Also, Homeland Security Advisor and raging xenophobe Stephen Miller reportedly sees  a war with Venezuela as an excuse to use the 18th century law, the Alien Enemies Act, a way to legally deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans currently living in the US.  So perhaps it's no surprise that Trump wanted this attack, as it allowed him to look tough on drugs, Communism and immigration while also gaining access to more oil for American oil companies, all at once

Look, now that the die is cast, I hope that everything goes the way that Trump says it will; that an orderly transition to a democratically elected leadership takes place without the need for American troops to occupy the country.  But I don't think it's likely.  Just how bad this all turns out remains to be seen.