Pierce said the truth is actually even more alarming.
"In my view, the interview is a clinical study of a man in severe cognitive decline, if not the early stages of outright dementia," he wrote.
Pierce explained that his father and all of his father's siblings have succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease over the last 30 years. The president's speech patterns and his stubborn clinging to a few simple ideas remind Pierce of the same decline he saw in members of his family.
"In this interview, the president is only intermittently coherent. He talks in semi-sentences and is always groping for something that sounds familiar, even if it makes no sense whatsoever and even if it blatantly contradicts something he said two minutes earlier," wrote Pierce.
"To my ears, anyway, this is more than the president’s well-known allergy to the truth. This is a classic coping mechanism employed when language skills are coming apart," he explained, which is why Trump repetitively uses the same pairing of adjectives and nouns, as in "the failing New York Times" and "Crooked Hillary."
"In addition, the president exhibits the kind of stubbornness you see in patients when you try to relieve them of their car keys—or, as one social worker in rural North Carolina told me, their shotguns," Pierce said.
Trump's reflexive anger when he is contradicted or feels threatened, Pierce said, is a sign of a brain struggling to impose order and familiar ideas on a world that he increasingly does not comprehend.
"For example, a discussion on healthcare goes completely off the rails when the president suddenly recalls that there is a widely held opinion that he knows very little about the issues confronting the nation," Pierce said.
"But Michael, I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A.," said Trump to the Times' Michael Schmidt. "I know the details of health care better than most, better than most. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have talked all these people into doing ultimately only to be rejected."
"This is more than simple grandiosity. This is someone fighting something happening to him that he is losing the capacity to understand," said Pierce.
And it’s not just me saying that; a cursory look through Twitter verifies that 2017 was, in fact, the worst one yet. In fact, I can say with a great degree of certainty that the only people who actually enjoyed it are Donald Trump sycophants and that kid who got a free year of Wendy’s nuggets.
But, it can’t all be bad, right? And, in the interest of looking on the bright side (and not falling into a pit of despair), we’ve compiled a list of 7 actually good things that came out of this sh*tshow of a year. Here’s to a slightly-less soul-crushing 2018—one can dream, right?
1. Alabama did not send an accused child molester to the Senate.
It turns out there’s one thing worse than being a Democrat in Alabama! But, just one thing.
The Alabama Senate race was a riveting case study in just what Democrats have to do to flip unlikely Congressional seats next year: namely, not nominate an accused child predator, and maybe make sure Republicans do.
Senator-elect Doug Jones pulled out a miracle finish earlier this month after he defeated Roy Moore, becoming the first Democratic senator from Alabama in 20 years. The race was quite honestly the natural progression from America electing an accused sexual predator as president (a president who, in turn, offered said accused child molester a tacit endorsement).
But in a stunning display of basic human decency, the voters in Alabama ultimately decided to draw a line in the sand and tell the world: we don’t want a child predator representing us!
And beyond that, voters rejected an openly homophobic candidate who once said American was great during slavery and who was twice disciplined by the Alabama State judicial ethics panel for flouting court orders as a judge, instead choosing a former federal prosecutor who helped jail two of the KKK members responsible for killing four African-American girls in the 1963 church bombing. Jones campaigned hard for the state’s black voters and they made him their next Alabama senator. A very good thing.
2. Stephen Colbert hit is stride as the ultimate Trump critic.
Say what you will about comedy in the Trump area, one of the best things about 2017 was Stephen Colbert’s triumphant rise as one of Trump’s sharpest—and funniest—critics.
Colbert’s rating skyrocketed 2017 as he pulled viewers away from late night nice guy Jimmy Fallon. In May, Colbert’s rising star status even drew the ire of the FCC, which threatened to fine the host after he declared Trump’s mouth is only good for “being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.”
“You see a no-talent guy like Colbert,” Trump said in May after the “cock holster” joke. “There’s nothing funny about what he says. And what he says is filthy. And you have kids watching. And it only builds up my base. It only helps me, people like him…The guy was dying. By the way, they were going to take him off television, then he started attacking me and he started doing better. But his show was dying. I’ve done his show. But when I did his show, which, by the way, was very highly rated. It was high – highest rating. The highest rating he’s ever had.”
“The President of the United States has personally come after me and my show,” Colbert said following that remark. “And there’s only one thing to say: Yeeeeeee!”
Yeeee indeed.
3. James Comey joined Twitter.
In 2017, Twitter became less of a fun way to engage with breaking news and more of a harbinger of the apocalypse. Between Trump using the platform to divulge his absurd and often incoherent stream of consciousness and regular people using it to find out that the world is falling apart, few good things came from the website this year.
That is until a scrappy Gizmodo reporter, Ashley Feinberg, managed to unearth Comey’s secret Twitter account, earning praise form the for former FBI director and prompting the man responsible for this year’s most compelling Congressional testimony (what a 2017 statement) to assume his rightful throne as the man Most Likely to Subtweet Trump on Twitter.
Comey apparently spends his days casually tweeting savage takedowns of the president disguised as famous quotes or otherwise seemingly-innocuous messages. Take for example, this Nov. 11 tweet:
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It seems pretty straightforward, right? Except hours before, Trump had ranted against three former intelligence officials, including Comey, by calling them “political hacks” and declaring the former FBI director “a liar.”
A simple, subtle and effective rebuke of the president. We’re here for it.
4. The #MeToo movement sparked a much-needed dialogue about abuse of power.
If the cascade of sexual assault allegations against men in power managed to drag you down this year, you’re certainly not alone. But you know who’s been dragged down for literally centuries? Women.
The #metoo movement—whose participants were honored by Time Magazine as Person of the Year—sparked a national conversation about men in power and forced the nation to grapple with rampant sexism and sexual harassment in every industry and across the ideological spectrum. It’s a rough but necessary conversation, and the strength of those who’ve come forward with their stories cannot be understated.
Maybe in 2018, people can just keep it in their pants?
5. Female leaders flexed their muscles.
By far, the political rockstars of 2017 were the fierce women who stood up their ground—and stood up to bullies. If watching Trump glare at an incredible Daft Punk melody performed by the French military band made you queasy this year, then your best antidote is this clip of the fierce and fabulous? Rep. Maxine Waters smacking down Steve Mnuchin and “reclaiming [her] time”
Then, there was Sen. Kamala Harris, whose epic questioning of Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein—and Republicans’ attempts to silence her—became instant symbols of #TheResistance.
And, of course, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, forever a thorn in the GOP’s side, whose tenacity was memorialized and meme-ified after Sen. Majority leader Mitch McConnell complained (to his own chagrin), “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
In a column posted late on Christmas Day, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson reviewed the first year year under the presidency of Donald Trump and was unimpressed, to say the least.
According to liberal author, 2017 has been "awful, rotten, no-good, ridiculous, rancorous, sordid, disgraceful" -- and we all have Donald Trump to blame for that.
"Many of us began 2017 with the consoling thought that the Donald Trump presidency couldn’t possibly be as bad as we feared. It turned out to be worse," Robinson wrote.
"Did you ever think you would hear a president use the words 'very fine people' to describe participants in a torch-lit rally organized by white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan? Did you ever think you would hear a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations thuggishly threaten that she would be 'taking names' of countries that did not vote on a General Assembly resolution the way she wanted?" Robinson asked. "Did you ever think the government of the world’s biggest military and economic power would reject not just science but also empiricism itself, preferring to use made-up “alternative facts” as the basis for major decisions?"
According to the pundit, "We knew that Trump was narcissistic and shallow, but on Inauguration Day it was possible to at least hope he was self-aware enough to understand the weight that now rested on his shoulders, and perhaps grow into the job. He did not."
"If anything, he has gotten worse," he added.
Robinson went on to focus on how Trump and the White House have all but destroyed political discourse.
"Trump and his enablers have waged a relentless war against truth in an attempt to delegitimize any and all critical voices. He wields the epithet “fake news” as a cudgel against inconvenient facts and those who report them," he wrote. "Can a democracy function without a commonly accepted chronicle of events and encyclopedia of knowledge?"
The columnist also had a few things to say about the "craven" Republican Party that has stood aside as Trump has run roughshod over decency and the law.
"The president’s Republican allies in Congress, who have the power to restrain an out-of-control executive, have rolled over in passive submission'" he wrote. "Many see clearly Trump’s unfitness but continue to support him because they fear the wrath of his hardcore base and see the chance to enact a conservative agenda. History will remember this craven opportunism and judge it harshly."
"Godspeed to the Mueller investigation, but let him worry about that," he concluded. "The rest of us — Democrats, independents, patriotic Republicans — should work toward the November election. Our duty is to elect a Congress that will bring this runaway train under control."
It's almost December 23, which along with frenzied last-minute Christmas shopping means it's time for Festivus.
Initially celebrated by Seinfeld writer Dan O'Keefe and his family, the anti-consumerist holiday went relatively mainstream after being featured in a 1997 episode of the sitcom titled "The Strike." In the episode, Frank Costanza, father of George, details the customs of the "Festivus for the rest of us" -- the wrestling of the head of the household, the bare pole in lieu of a tree, the mundane "Festivus miracles" and, perhaps most importantly, the "airing of grievances."
Seinfeld has been off the air since before the turn of the century, but the Festivus spirit has lived on, and is perhaps no more important than in the Trump era. Below are 10 of the many gripes we'd like to air with President Donald Trump to get into the holiday spirit, in no particular order -- just like the Costanzas would have wanted it.
1. How bad you screwed everyone with the tax bill.
2. Pretending the "travel bans" aren't about Muslims.
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Though your third travel ban was struck down in a Festivus miracle just hours before the dawn of this working-class holiday, many us are more than a little sore at your administration's repeated assertion that your three failed attempts at banning people from the Muslim-majority countries (and, for some reason, Chad) don't have to do with religion. Nonetheless, I do thank you, Mr. President, for making your true intentions known so regularly -- it helped judges strike it down for a third time.
3. Everything you said -- and didn't say -- about the klansmen and Nazis in Charlottesville.
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When we think back to emotional-political roller coaster that was your first year, there's no doubt that your response to the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12 that led to a woman's death will stick out in our minds. After a scripted condemnation of the many shades of white supremacist that flocked to defend the honor of a memorial to a general in a failed, treasonous war, you shocked the nation by saying there were "very fine" people on "both sides" of the fight for and against fascist bigotry.
Despite alt-righters and their more openly violent and brazenly-genocidal ilk committing atrocious acts in the last few months, you've yet to offer any condemnation to this sizable portion of your base -- and your silence speaks volumes.
Compared to Nazis, a rising national deficit and attempts to legally sanction bigotry, your weird pronunciation of the word "China" isn't that egregious -- but nonetheless, it really gets under my skin. It's not even that you're mispronouncing it, per se -- you've been known to incorrectly pronounce the name of at least one American state and once made up the name of another country. But there's something about the leader of the free world saying "China" like that that's deeply unsettling.
5. Suggesting there's such a thing as a "good" government shutdown.
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With everything that's happened in this insane year, I'll forgive you for forgetting the time you suggested the country needs a "good government 'shutdown'" so that you get make the Senate rules more favorable for your party. Luckily, we journalists typically have better memories than you, and that suggestion didn't completely fly under our radar. While it may be cool for you to get the day off and go play golf at Bedminster without the press pool breathing down your neck, it's much less cool for literally the entire country. You made sure to suggest it more privately the next time, but you should have known it was gonna get out. If you want to play hooky so bad, maybe you should just resign.
6. That whole Comey thing.
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Despite it happening all the way back in May, I doubt that you've forgotten this one given that it's been discussed literally every day since you fired the former FBI director. Admittedly, no one has accused you of having the foresight to know just how deep the ripple effect from utterance of your favorite phrase would go, but for god's sake, "Daddy Comey" became a thing after this. Try to think about the bigger picture next time, OK?
7. Turning Roger Stone into a sought-after pundit.
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Before you came along, Roger Stone was best-known for running the gubernatorial campaign for the "Manhattan Madam" whose clients were frequented by Eliot Spitzer. Now, he's a sought-after source for CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times for all things Trump. You even helped him achieve his dream of being written up by Vanity Fair, though not for his role as The Daily Caller's men's fashion editor. Nobody should be listening to this man, but now, everyone is. Shame on you, Mr. President, for subjecting us to this horror.
8. Making Steve Bannon a household name.
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There's ample evidence to argue that the world was a much better place before the existence of Steve Bannon was common knowledge. As if it weren't bad enough that the World of Warcraft-loving former Goldman Sachs banker who allegedly ran a meth-porn house in Orlando, Florida managed to become an influential White House national security adviser. So thanks for that.
9. Calling Colin Kaepernick an SOB.
Pres. Trump discusses kneeling during national anthem at football game: "That's a total disrespect of our heritage" https://t.co/PYcZWSvN5I
When stumping for the first of your two failed Alabama Senate candidates, you managed to insult millions of people when you insisted on calling athletes who took a knee in protest to police brutality "sons of b*tches." There's nothing funny to say about that, really -- it was just really messed up and made the argument that you're a white supremacist that much stronger.
10. Those damned MAGA hats.
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Actually, this isn't even a grievance. With your introduction of these ubiquitous accessories, you've helped countless women know which men to swipe left on with a single glance, and for that, we thank you.
The host played an awkward clip of Vice President Mike Pence heaping compliments onto the president while sitting directly across the table from him during a cabinet meeting. In the video, Trump watched Pence with his arms crossed, his mouth an emotionless thin line.
"Well I guess we know what Trump's 'o-face' looks like," Meyers quipped. "Look at him, even he's like 'Dude, I'm married.'"
After the meeting, Meyers continued, Pence "showed up at Trump's door holding cue cards" a la "Love Actually."
[caption id="attachment_1185390" align="alignnone" width="615"] A manipulated still from "Love Actually" featuring President Donald Trump (left) and Vice President Mike Pence (right). Image via screengrab/Late Night.[/caption]
Evangelicalism doesn’t have a brand problem; it has a product problem.
Ok, Evangelicals do have a brand problem—but they also have a major product problem.
Bible-believing born-again Christians, aka Evangelicals, have had a brand problem since Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority sold the Born-again movement to the Republican party in exchange for political power a generation ago, forging the Religious Right.
The Republican party has been using Christianity’s good name to cover bad deeds ever since, all the while tapping Evangelical media empires and churches as communications and organizing platforms to bring ordinary believers along with the merger. Having become true-believers themselves, Evangelical leaders have offered themselves up as trusted messengers for this New-and-Improved political gospel project.
And it has worked.
Born-again Christians haven’t given up their core beliefs: that the Bible is the literally perfect word of God, Jesus died for their sins, and folks who don’t accept this gift will burn forever in Hell. Rather, most white Evangelicals (and a number of Blacks and Hispanics) have appended parts of the Republican policy agenda and the underlying conceptual framework to this list. Religious beliefs and political beliefs have become, for many Evangelicals, indistinguishable objects of devotion, beyond question. Political tribe and religious tribe now have the same boundaries.
When I outlined Evangelicalism’s brand problem in early 2016, few of us had any idea how bad it could get. Now the world associates the term Evangelical with the Trump election—over 80 percent of Evangelicals gave him their vote—and with the candidacy of theocrat, Roy Moore, who despite credible allegations that he pursued and pawed young teens while an assistant district attorney, received comparable support from white Alabama Evangelicals.
In the aftermath of Moore’s campaign and (merciful) defeat, the minority of Evangelical Christians who found him horrifying are doing some public soul searching—well, except not really. Many recognize only the brand problem and are, more than anything, simply scrambling to get away from the term Evangelical itself. “After Trump and Moore, some evangelicals are finding their own label too toxic to use,” reports the Washington Post. “The term feels irreversibly tainted,” agrees Evangelical author Jen Hatmaker.
Jemar Tisby is president of a faith-based media company catering to Black Evangelicals, but he says that “It’s counterproductive to identify as evangelical. . . . What’s happened with evangelicalism is, it has become so conflated with Republican politics, that you can’t tell where Christianity ends and partisanship begins.”
At Wheaton College, my old alma mater, the Executive Director of the Billy Graham Center, Ed Stetzer, said, “I don’t want ‘evangelical’ to mean people who supported candidates with significant and credible accusations against them. If evangelical means that, it has serious ramifications for the work of Christians and churches.”
At Princeton University, the “Princeton Evangelical Fellowship” renamed itself “Princeton Christian Fellowship” to get away from the negative associations. But is Evangelicalism tainting Christianity itself as a brand? Five years ago, Campus Crusade for Christ–which spends over $500,000,000 annually to recruit and retain Evangelical college students–changed its name to the less transparent “Cru.” Mark Galli, Editor in Chief at Christianity Today, wrote of the Moore race, “There is already one loser: Christian faith . . . No one will believe a word we say, perhaps for a generation. Christianity’s integrity is severely tarnished.”
What even thoughtful Evangelical leaders like Galli fail to recognize is that people shouldn’t believe a word they say—not about politics, not about morality, and not even about theology at this point. The problem isn’t skin deep. Their brand problem is a function of their product problem, and as Emmett Price at Gordon-Cornwell Theological Seminary put it, “Ditching a term is simply ditching a term.” Abandoning the term Evangelical is the most superficial fix conceivable.
Real soul searching would mean asking what it is about the Evangelical worldview that has made Evangelical leaders and ordinary Bible-believers susceptible to courtship by authoritarian, bigoted, sexist, tribal, anti-intellectual greedmongers who dangle the carrot of theocracy. But few Evangelical leaders are asking this question because that would mean revisiting the peculiar status they grant to the Bible itself. And that is off-limits.
When one treats the Bible as the literally perfect and complete word of God—which most Christian scholars don’t but most Evangelicals do—it isn’t hard to find support for every item in the ugly list that now darkens the Evangelical brand. The Bible contains some really bad ideas. The opposite is also true, mind you. It also contains support for compassion, love, generosity, inclusion, and humility—and many other virtues that humanity values widely across both secular and religious wisdom traditions. The Bible is morally inchoate. It documents and sanctifies humanity’s moral infancy; and idolizing the book binds believers to the worldview of the Iron Age, leaving them susceptible to justifying all manner of misbehaviors in the name of God.
That is precisely what the Republican operatives of the Religious Right have done; and as Evangelical leaders got sucked into the merger of biblical theology and conservative dogma, that is precisely what they have done; and as they have spread this infectious product to the followers who trust them, that is precisely what they have done too. At the bottom of this shit-flow sequence sit children born into households of true believers who isolated them in homeschooling and church schools, then send them to institutions like Bob Jones or Liberty University or Wheaton so that, identity cemented, they can carry forward the project unquestioned.
So, Evangelicals have three enormous and interrelated problems with their product at this point. One is that their whole enterprise is built on an indefensible view of the Bible. This has facilitated the merger of biblical Christianity with Republican dogmas and will leave believers vulnerable to this kind of exploitation until the theology itself is fixed.
The second problem is that millions of Christians have now been so thoroughly indoctrinated into Bible-sanctified Republican ideology that it could take a generation to move them away from the beliefs and priorities that elected Donald Trump and nearly elected Roy Moore. It took a generation to bind them into this tangled web and there is no reason to think that journeying free will be easier.
The third problem is that this whole state of affairs has been a profound violation of trust. People trust religious leaders to be honest and moral, and when that is gone little influence remains. Young people who see through the mess are leaving Evangelicalism and Christianity. They are losing faith in faith itself.
This much is clear. Simply swapping in the term Christian for the term Evangelical will only damage Christianity’s brand at large, which Evangelicals have already done—with help, of course, from the Catholic hierarchy. As a former Evangelical Christian, now a spiritual non-theist, I don’t necessarily think of that as a bad thing, but Christians should. Some reformers are attempting real change from within Evangelicalism. Tony Campolo, Rachel Held Evans, Rob Bell and John Pavlovitz, to cite a few are fighting hard to save the soul of a faith they cherish. But a path to broad reformation remains unclear.
In the early days of 2017, before President Donald Trump had even been inaugurated, Fox News' lastmanstanding Sean Hannity resolved that in this fresh new year, he was going to rise above it all, ignore his critics and stop fighting the "clueless failures and wannabes" who have dogged his career of late.
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By "media critics," Hannity was most likely referring to his nemeses at Media Matters and CNN media critic Brian Stelter, who has chronicled Hannity's descent from all-purpose conservative loudmouth to full-on cheerleader for Trump as far back as summer of 2016. Remember those names.
Pres. Trump's eager little thick-necked water carrier Hannity spent the bulk of 2017 eagerly promoting every half-baked conspiracy theory that distracted from his new boss's chaotic first year as president. From the Seth Rich murder story to the CIA framing Russia for hacking the DNC to Uranium One to Robert Mueller is a secret Deep State operative working to overthrow the Trump presidency, Hannity aired them all and then acted like a rescue chihuahua on crystal meth when anyone challenged him on Twitter.
After tweeting fake news stories about Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) soliciting donations from Russia in February, Hannity duked it out with trans rights activist Chaz Bono online, which of course sent Hannity's millions of angry minions galloping Orc-like into Bono's Twitter mentions and hurling anti-trans invective.
In March, the New York Timescalled Hannity out as being a knee-jerk defender of even Trump's "most controversial behavior."
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Writers at the Timeshit back at Hannity, directly refuting his claims about the paper and pointing to how eager he was to participate in a Times profile of him in 2016.
In June, Hannity leapt to the defense of conspiracy monger Alex Jones, calling former colleague Megyn Kelly's interview with Jones a hit piece that he claims was deceptively edited.
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He quickly ended up in a side-spat with CNN.
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Hannity's biggest meltdowns of the year came late in the game season as advertisers began to flee his show thanks to a boycott facilitated by Media Matters and its president Angelo Carusone. Hannity's endorsement of accused child molester and failed Alabama candidate for U.S. Senate Roy Moore gave Media Matters additional fuel for their boycott and in October, he called the media watchdog group fascist totalitarians after Carusone spoke to Stelter on CNN.
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Carusone told Stelter that he and other Media Matters staffers have received death threats in the wake of Hannity's angry smear campaign.
But no one this year appears to have gotten under Hannity's skin like Stelter, who Hannity has called a "little pipsqueak" and accused of being a Clinton operative. In a bonkers rant earlier this month, Hannity called the media critic "Humpty Dumpty" and "a bitter partisan."
The U.S. middle class has always had a special mystique.
It is the heart of the American dream. A decent income and home, doing better than one’s parents, and retiring in comfort are all hallmarks of a middle-class lifestyle.
Contrary to what some may think, however, the U.S. has not always had a large middle class. Only after World War II was being middle class the national norm. Then, starting in the 1980s, it began to decline.
President Donald Trumphas portrayed the tax plan Congress is wrapping up as a boon for the middle class. The sad reality, however, is that it is more likely to be its final death knell.
To understand why, you need look no further than the history of the rise and decline of the American middle class, a group that I’ve been studying through the lens of inequality for decades.
The middle class rises
The middle class, which Pew defines as two-thirds to two times the national median income for a given household size, began to grow after World War II due to a surge in economic growth and because President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal gave workers more power. Before that, most Americans were poor or nearly so.
For example, legislation such as the Wagner Act established rights for workers, most critically for collective bargaining. The government also began new programs, such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, that helped older Americans avoid dying in poverty and supported families with children through tough times. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, set up in 1933, helped middle-class homeowners pay their mortgages and remain in their homes.
Together, these new policies helped fuel a strong postwar economic boom and ensured the gains were shared by a broad cross-section of society. This greatly expanded the U.S. middle class, which reached a peak of nearly 60 percent of the population in the late ‘70s. Americans’ increased optimism about their economic future prompted businesses to invest more, creating a virtuous cycle of growth.
Government spending programs were paid for largely with individual income tax rates of 70 percent (and more) on wealthy individuals and high taxes on corporate profits. Companies paid more than one-quarter of all federal government tax revenues in the 1950s (when the top corporate tax was 52 percent). Today they contribute just 5 percent of government tax revenues.
Despite high taxes on the rich and on corporations, median family income (after accounting for inflation) more than doubled in the three decades after World War II, rising from $27,255 in 1945 to nearly $60,000 in the late 1970s.
The fall begins
That’s when things started to change.
Rather than supporting workers – and balancing the interests of large corporations and the interests of average Americans – the federal government began taking the side of business over workers by lowering taxes on corporations and the rich, reducing regulations and allowing firms to grow through mergers and acquisitions.
Since the late 1980s, median household incomes (different from family incomes because members of a household live together but do not need to be related to each other) have increased very little – from $54,000 to $59,039 in 2016 – while inequality has risen sharply. As a result, the size of the middle class has shrunk significantly to 50 percent from nearly 60 percent.
One important reason for this is that starting in the 1980s the role of government changed. A key event in this process was when President Ronald Reagan fired striking air-traffic control workers. It marked the beginning of a war against unions.
In addition, Reagan cut taxes multiple times during his time in office, which led to less spending to support and sustain the poor and middle class, while deregulation allowed businesses to cut their wage costs at the expense of workers. This change is one reason workers have received only a small fraction of their greater productivity in the form of higher wages since the 1980s.
Meanwhile, the real buying power of the minimum wage has been allowed to erode since the 1980s due to inflation.
In contrast, household median income in 2016 was only slightly above its level just before the Great Repression began in 2008. But according to new unpublished research I conducted with Monmouth University economist Robert Scott, the actual living standard for the median household fell as much as 7 percent due to greater interest payments on past debt and the fact that households are larger, so the same income does not go as far.
As a result, the middle class is actually closer to 45 percent of U.S. households. This is in stark contrast to other developed countries such as France and Norway, where the middle class approaches nearly 70 percent of households and has held steady over several decades.
The Republican tax plan
So how will the tax plan change the picture?
France, Norway and other European countries have maintained policies, such as progressive taxes and generous government spending programs, that help the middle class. The Republican tax package doubles down on the policies that have caused its decline in the U.S.
Specifically, the plan will significantly reduce taxes on the wealthy and large companies, which will have to be paid for with large spending cuts in everything from children’s health and education to unemployment insurance and Social Security. Tax cuts will require the government to borrow more money, which will push up interest rates and require middle-income households to pay more in interest on their credit cards or to buy a car or home.
The benefits of the Republican tax bill go primarily to the very wealthy, who will get 83 percent of the gains by 2027, according to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.
Meanwhile, more than half of poor and middle-income households will see their taxes rise over the next 10 years; the rest will receive only a small fraction of the total tax benefits.
From virtuous to vicious
While Republicans justify their tax plan by claiming corporations will invest more and hire more workers, thereby raising wages, companies have already indicated that they will mainly use their savings to buy back stock and pay more dividends, benefiting the wealthy owners of corporate stock.
So with most of the gains of the $1.5 trillion in net tax cuts going to the rich, the end result, in my view, is that most Americans will face falling living standards as government spending goes down, borrowing costs go up, and their tax bill rises.
This will lead to less economic growth and a declining middle class. And unlike the virtuous circle the U.S. experienced in the ‘50s and '60s, Americans can expect a vicious cycle of decline instead.
Nearly a year ago, intuitively recognizing the Trump administration’s authoritarian aspirations, Polish journalist and activist Martin Mycielski wrote “Year 1 Under Authoritarianism.” In those early, nerve-racking days following Trump’s inauguration, the piece was shared across social media, an ominous portent of what was to come. The document — helpfully subtitled, “What To Expect?” — offered a list of predictions and warnings about Trump’s first year in office, and exhortations to fight back at every turn. In his introduction, published just days after Trump’s inauguration, Mycielski noted the article was based on his own experience in Poland, where extreme-right nationalists have taken over the government, and in a recent ugly demonstration, the streets. The piece should be read as an instructive manual of sorts, culled from firsthand observation of the “populists, authoritarians and tinpot dictators” leading right-wing movements across Europe.
“With each passing day, the [Polish] government is moving the country further away from the liberal West and toward the authoritarian models of the East,” Mycielski wrote. “Hundreds of thousands have protested against every illiberal, unlawful step. Every time we believed it couldn’t get any worse. We were wrong. This is why we want you, our American friends, to be spared the shock, the awe, the disbelief of this happening to you. Let’s hope history proves us wrong and the US wakes up in time…[H]ope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”
Mycielski’s “survival guide” has only become more disturbingly relevant with time, its predictions proved frighteningly accurate. Like Umberto Eco’s guide to fascism, it presciently notes the actions and attitudes that now unquestionably define this presidency; the lies and obfuscation of truth, racist fear-mongering, historical revisionism, purposeful chaos and anti-First Amendment agenda. Manipulation and malice are the Trump regime’s forte. (To see how quickly a country can be remade by a charlatan and his abettors, go back and review some of the earliest entries from Amy Siskind’s weekly list tracking changes under Trump. It’s all pretty scary, especially seeing it unfold in real time.)
But if there’s any hope, it will only come from recognizing the reality of what’s happening here, how much damage is being done, how much earth already scorched. The year has somehow flown by, yet seemed interminable. It’s good to remember the very big, very frightening picture before us, how far we’ve already come, and to consider what recourse we have with complicit and corrupt forces standing in the way. — Kali Holloway
Here is Mycielski’s 15-point guide to surviving authoritarianism.
1. They will come to power with a campaign based on fear, scaremongering and distorting the truth. Nevertheless, their victory will be achieved through a democratic electoral process. But beware, as this will be their argument every time you question the legitimacy of their actions. They will claim a mandate from the People to change the system.
Remember — gaining power through a democratic system does not give them permission to cross legal boundaries and undermine said democracy.
2. They will divide and rule. Their strength lies in unity, in one voice and one ideology, and so should yours. They will call their supporters patriots, the only “true Americans.” You will be labelled as traitors, enemies of the state, unpatriotic, the corrupt elite, the old regime trying to regain power. Their supporters will be the “people,” the “sovereign” who chose their leaders.
Don’t let them divide you — remember you’re one people, one nation, with one common good.
3. Through convoluted laws and threats they will try to control mainstream media and limit press freedom. They will ban critical press from their briefings, calling them “liars,” “fake news.” They will brand those media as “unpatriotic,” acting against the People (see point 2).
Fight for every media outlet, every journalist that is being banned, censored, sacked or labelled an “enemy of the state” — there’s no hope for freedom where there is no free press.
4. They will create chaos, maintain a constant sense of conflict and danger. It will be their argument to enact new authoritarian laws, each one further limiting your freedoms and civil liberties. They will disguise them as being for your protection, for the good of the people.
See through the chaos, the fake danger; expose it before you wake up in a totalitarian, fascist state.
5. They will distort the truth, deny facts and blatantly lie. They will try to make you forget what facts are, sedate your need to find the truth. They will feed “post-truths” and “alternative facts,” replace knowledge and logic with emotions and fiction.
Always think critically, fact-check and point out the truth, fight ignorance with facts.
6. They will incite and then leak fake, superficial “scandals.” They will smear opposition with trivial accusations, blowing them out of proportion and then feeding the flame. This is just smokescreen for the legal steps they will be taking toward totalitarianism.
See through superficial topics in mainstream media (see point 3) and focus on what they are actually doing.
7. They will propose shocking laws to provoke your outrage. You will focus your efforts on fighting them, so they will seemingly back off, giving you a false sense of victory. In the meantime they will push through less “flashy” legislation, slowly dismantling democracy (see points 4 and 6).
Focus your fight on what really matters.
8. When invading your liberal sensibilities they will focus on what hurts the most — women and minorities. They will act as if democracy was majority rule without respect for the minority. They will paint foreigners and immigrants as potential threats. Racial, religious, sexual and other minorities will become enemies to the order and security they are supposedly providing. They will challenge women’s social status, undermine gender equality and interfere with reproductive rights (see point 7). But it means they are aware of the threat women and minorities pose to their rule, so make it your strength.
Women and minorities should fight the hardest, reminding the majority what true democracy is about.
[Editor’s note: This is a rare moment where I believe Mycielski gets it wrong. People of color and women of all races are doing all they can; existence is itself political, but many have already gone above and beyond, taking key roles in resisting. They cannot be expected to “fight the hardest.” We need the people with the most privilege to step up and use their powers for good.]
9. They will try to take control of the judiciary. They will assault your highest court. They need to remove the checks and balances to be able to push through unconstitutional legislation. Controlling the judiciary they can also threat anyone that defies them with prosecution, including the press (see point 3).
Preserve the independence of your courts at all cost; they are your safety valve, the safeguard of the rule of law and the democratic system.
10. They will try to limit freedom of assembly, calling it a necessity for your security. They will enact laws prioritizing state events and rallies, or those of a certain type or ideology. If they can choose who can demonstrate legally, they have a legal basis to forcefully disperse or prosecute the rest.
Oppose any legislation attempting to interfere with freedom of assembly, for whatever reason.
11. They will distort the language, coin new terms and labels, repeat shocking phrases until you accept them as normal and subconsciously associate them with whom they like. A “thief,” “liar” or “traitor” will automatically mean the opposition, while a “patriot” or a “true American” will mean their follower (see point 2). Their slogans will have double meaning, giving strength to their supporters and instilling angst in their opponents.
Fight changes in language in the public sphere; remind and preserve the true meaning of words.
12. They will take over your national symbols, associate them with their regime, remake them into attributes of their power. They want you to forget that your flag, your anthem and your symbols belong to you, the people, to everyone equally. Don’t let them be hijacked. Use and expose them in your fight as much as they do.
Show your national symbols with pride; let them give you strength, not associate you with the tyranny they brought onto your country.
13. They will try to rewrite history to suit their needs and use the education system to support their agenda. They will smear any historical or living figure who wouldn’t approve of their actions, or distort their image to make you think they would. They will place emphasis on historical education in schools, feeding young minds with the “only correct” version of history and philosophy. They will raise a new generation of voters on their ideology, backing it with a distorted interpretation of history and view of the world.
Guard the education of your children; teach them critical thinking; ensure their open-mindedness and protect your real history and heritage.
14. They will alienate foreign allies and partners, convincing you that you don’t need them. They won’t care for the rest of the world, with their focus on “making your country great again.” While ruining your economy to fulfill their populist promises, they will omit the fact that you’re part of a bigger world whose development depends on cooperation, on sharing and on trade.
Don’t let them build walls promising you security instead of bridges giving you prosperity.
15. They will eventually manipulate the electoral system. They might say it’s to correct flaws, to make it more fair, more similar to the rest of the world, or just to make it better. Don’t believe it. They wouldn’t be messing with it at all if it wasn’t to benefit them in some way.
Oppose any changes to electoral law that an authoritarian regime wants to enact — rest assured it’s only to help them remain in power longer.
And above all, be strong, fight, endure and remember you’re on the good side of history.
EVERY authoritarian, totalitarian and fascist regime in history eventually failed, thanks to the PEOPLE.
There’s something familiar about the way the GOP talks about the poor. If you've been paying close attention to Republicans in the House and Senate, they may strike you as being eerily reminiscent of other curmudgeons we normally hear from this time of year—infamous villains like Ebenezer Scrooge from Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." Between defenses of their ruthless attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and their ludicrous justifications for passing a bill that slashes taxes for the rich while hiking costs for the poor and middle classes, Republican politicians are sounding more and more like the grumpy, selfish antagonists from our favorite stories of the season.
Don’t believe it? Take this quiz to see if you can tell the difference between real people and fictional characters. Check your answers at the bottom.
When it comes to the poor, Mitch McConnell's views are virtually the same as Mr. Potter's from "It's a Wonderful Life."
Photo Credit: Liberty Films (Potter, left); Wikimedia Commons (McConnell, right)
1. “I am an old man and most people hate me. But I don't like them either, so that makes it all even.”
a) Mitch McConnell
b) Orrin Hatch
c) Mr. Potter (It’s a Wonderful Life)
2. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence."
a) Paul Ryan
b) Ebenezer Scrooge
c) Mitch McConnell
3. “Are you running a business or a charity ward? Not with my money!”
a) Paul Ryan
b) Mr. Potter
c) Sen. Chuck Grassley
4. “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
a) Sen. Chuck Grassley
b) The Grinch
c) Mr. Potter
5. “Oh, bleeding hearts of the world, unite!”
a) The Grinch
b) Ebenezer Scrooge
c) Orrin Hatch
6. "Are there no prisons? And the union workhouses, are they still in operation? Those who are badly off must go there."
a) Mitch McConnell
b) Ebenezer Scrooge
c) The Grinch
7. “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.”
a) Mr. Potter
b) Paul Ryan
c) Orrin Hatch
8. “Those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”
a) Mr. Potter
b) Mo Brooks, Alabama congressman
c) Ebenezer Scrooge
9. “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning to value the culture of work, so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
a) The Grinch
b) Ebenezer Scrooge
c) Paul Ryan
10. “Uh-huh. You see, if you shoot pool with some employee here, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.”
In 1814, First Lady Dolley Madison helped hide the White House’s famous portrait of George Washington from the British when they burned and sacked the capital. But if the current pack of brigands raiding DC has its way, by the time they’re done, that painting and every other piece of government property that isn’t nailed down will be stolen and put up for sale on eBay.
That’s because a smash-and-grab mob is running the government. If they continue the way they are, every agency, every social program, every benefit and every one of us not-rich-people will take it in the wallet as they rapaciously loot the system.
The tax reform plan is today’s Exhibit A. This is greed, plain and simple, toadying to the richest of the land who write the campaign checks. Simultaneously, Trump, his associates and Congress seem to be lining their own pockets with ill-gotten gains. And all the time trying to pretend otherwise to a public that by a margin of 2-to-1 already realizes that this so-called tax reform legislation is a total scam, a classic bait-and-switch.
On Saturday, Jim Tankersley noted in The New York Times that the package “leaves nearly every large tax break in place. It creates as many new preferences for special interests as it gets rid of. It will keep corporate accountants busy for years to come… [A]mbitions fell to the powerful forces of lobbying and the status quo.
… What emerged on Friday, in the final product agreed to by Republican members of a House-Senate conference committee, was a bill that layers new tax complexities upon businesses large and small, and which delivers a larger share of benefits to corporations and the rich than to the middle class.
And yet on Sunday, Jeff Stein and Mike DeBonis wrote in The Washington Post that with straight faces, members of the GOP congressional leadership were arguing that the bill “is aimed primarily at helping the middle class, brushing aside nonpartisan analyses that show the bulk of the legislation’s benefits would go to the wealthy and to corporations.”
Here’s one of them, Texas Sen. John Cornyn on ABC’s This Week: “This will benefit hard-working American families, people in the lower income tax brackets, and everybody in every tax bracket will see a tax cut.”
Wow. So much smoke is being blown by Republicans you’d think the capital was sitting in the middle of the California wildfires. The tax code already is complicated and they’ve made their rewrite of existing law a hastily thrown together hodgepodge, an ill-informed and ill-conceived mess being rushed through to get a legislative win ahead of year’s end and to unload the gravy train of its goodies before the electoral whistle blows and we throw the rascals out onto the tracks.
There are tons of profitable dodges laced throughout this behemoth thousand-page bill — more than a trillion dollars’ worth. Changes to the estate tax, for example, lowering the top marginal tax rate and slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent. Sen. Bernie Sanders reports that 15 of our largest corporations alone, including Apple, GE, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, will now receive “an additional $236 billion tax cut” on top of the $3.9 trillion in tax advantages they’ve received over the last three decades.
But take a look at this giveaway uncovered by our friend David Sirota at International Business Times (IBT) and his colleagues Alex Kotch, Andrew Perez and Josh Keefe. Over the weekend and on Monday, the investigative team reported in rapid succession that Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, the only Republican member who had voted against the Senate version of the bill but who was now reversed himself, did so shortly after a provision was added that gives a tax break to real estate investors like himself, not to mention Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, their families and many others.
Corker then denied that this was why he had changed his vote, defending himself by saying he had not even read the bill he now was supporting (!), let alone known about the new language. He demanded that Utah’s Orrin Hatch, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, tell him how the favorable provision was added. Hatch said he himself had written it (the Center for Responsive Politics notes that since 1989, Hatch has received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the real estate industry).
Subsequently, IBT reported that not only does Bob Corker’s chief of staff also stand to make out like a bandit from the real estate tax loophole, but so do 14 Republican senators (including Corker)who “hold financial interests in 26 income-generating real-estate partnerships — worth as much as $105 million in total. Those holdings together produced between $2.4 million and $14.1 million in rent and interest income in 2016, according to federal records.”
Our legislators are supposed to come to Washington to do good. Instead they do well, really well, raking in the dollars at the expense of you and me. Income inequality continues to mount, with the top 1 percent controlling some 40 percent of America’s wealth as benefits are stolen away from those desperately in need.
This tax bill is the Christmas gift that just keeps giving — but not to the millions of Americans who could really use some relief, including and especially the poor and working class who bought Donald Trump’s baloney about never being ignored again. They’ll be lucky to get lumps of “clean, beautiful coal” in their stockings.
Donald Trump is wearing thin. He is inherently boring. Everything he says or tweets is so familiar, no matter how offensive, that it’s hard to pay attention to him anymore.
He generates crisis, offence and chaos every day, and yet he is devoid of information. He doesn’t tell us anything that we haven’t already heard. He is like a political thunderhead giving off rolling thunder, but in his case it is rolling chaos.
Nevertheless, let us examine where this chaos may be heading in 2018. There are signals in the madness that do contain information.
Trump’s Asia tour was novel and renewed our attention. To the surprise of many he proved capable of reading from a teleprompter without giving vent to his inner impulses.
Later in Da Nang, Putin said he was insulted by the Russiainvestigation. What Putin likely meant is that Trump had botched Putin’s plans for him: Lifting sanctions, rescinding the Magnitsky Act and recognizing his annexation of Crimea.
Now other nations, 29 in Europe by one count, are investigating the hitherto comfortable money-laundering schemes of Putin’s cronies. The pyramid of money and power upon which Putin is perched is suddenly shaky thanks to Trump’s ineptitude.
Think Michael Corleone and his brother Fredo, the one who screwed up everything.
Subsequent phone chats between Trump and Putin may have offered some solace to the president. It seems that his Russian pal considers the effort to subvert the U.S. election as, on balance, a great success. Nothing really new here: Putin is playing Trump like a fiddle.
As an expert in Caucasian languages and also politics, and someone who advised the Bill Clinton White House on Russia at various points in my career, I can attest that this is a classic move from the Russian playbook. Usually it fails. With Trump on the scene, it succeeded.
Negative signals
Sometimes information can come from negative signals, as in silence when there should be a signal.
The silence I refer to is the inaction of Congress. No one seems to be acting in light of the one overarching fact that shapes everything said and done since election day: Trump, through the Electoral College, is a minority president to an unprecedented extent, and Congress, through gerrymandering, is a minority Congress.
Neither represents what the majority of Americans want. Given a figure like Trump, incapable, abusive, narcissistic, misogynistic, morally empty and inarticulate, (read The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump for a tour of all that is wrong with this grossly distorted man), you could be forgiven for expecting a prompt remedy to this miscarriage of democracy. Most nations, in fact, might have declared the election null-and-void and tried to get it right a second time.
We even hear now of the adjective “Trumpian,” a distillation of the parochial and damaging policies of Trump.
Some, such as Sen. Tom Cotton, may be able to play up Trumpian values to a following with a longing for a “simpler” past, for values based on heritage rather than self-fulfillment and replete with regional and racial resentments.
As Bernie Sanders showed us, however, the youth of America seem to be looking in a different direction. This message of the young seems unexpected to the GOP, and as such carries a good deal of information — information that the Republicans should be scrutinizing.
And then there is Alabama, a signal from a deep-red state that was utterly unexpected by some Republicans as Roy Moore, an accused pedophile, was defeated by the Democrat, Doug Jones. The voters of Alabama, many of them Black, seemingly cast their ballots for simple decency, to have repudiated the moral squalor into which the GOP, both at state and federal levels, had slid by endorsing Moore.
Bannon, Trump, lose credibility
Both Bannon and Trump lost their credibility and political clout by going all out with their endorsements of Moore. There is no obvious way now for them to regain these intangible powers. The signal here is easy to read: The expediencies of political chicanery will not fool a populace that has been exposed to almost a year of rolling chaos seasoned with the occasional dash of Trump’s depravity.
Other Democratic victories are being scored at the state level, not just in Virginia, but in numerous other venues as well. These developments do not bode well for the GOP.
Alabama, however, makes the most recent moves of Congress all the more puzzling.
I refer here to the effort by Republicans to denigrate Mueller, his team and the entire FBI. Not only is this an unprecedented assault on a man of integrity, it is also an assault on an entire institution that represents the federal policing function.
It seems that the Republican-controlled Congress has betrayed its function to uphold the Constitution.
To what end? So that they can pretend that Trump is not a puppet of Putin, when manifestly he is? Is there something so profoundly wrong with Pence that the entire Congress would rather wreck the republic than remove Trump?
The Russia investigation is expanding and drawing ever closer to Trump’s inner circle. There will be more indictments, followed, one must assume, by eventual presidential pardons.
I hear the occasional media speculation that the Mueller investigation will last at least another year before winding up. I doubt that for three reasons:
Firstly, Republicans traditionally pay little heed to the reactions of their supporters and run roughshod over these trusting souls in their scramble to satisfy the interests of their donors.
The new tax law demonstrates this quite plainly. If they fire Mueller, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and whatever is left of the FBI, Republicans seem to think that no one will care. I would suggest otherwise.
The U.S. military, for example, might care. Americans are fond of thinking they are exceptional, but politics has its own laws and the current course set by congressional Republicans leads directly to the sort of disintegration of norms and institutions that are typically rectified by martial force.
Americans might scoff at the suggestion of a military coup annulling the 2016 election and calling for a new one, but in any other nation this would be a real possibility, and I do not see American exceptionalism somehow standing outside the political forces that shape all other nations.
I cannot predict their diagnosis, but I shall offer mine: Fronto-temporal dementia, with a variant of progressive non-fluent aphasia (inability to speak).
In other words, Trump acts in an impulsive, vulgar fashion and eats compulsively because the machinery in his brain to inhibit such behaviour is disintegrating. Further, his speech production area — known as Broca’s area — is also affected, resulting in limited speech and slurred pronunciation. Onset is insidious, but once symptoms are manifest with this disorder, the course is rapid. By next spring, Trump could likely be unable to speak at all if my suspicions are correct.
Slurred speech, or slipping dentures? No one’s quite sure what was ailing Trump at this event in December.
Third, and perhaps most interesting, is the tectonic shift in cultural values spearheaded by women, a shift of the sort seen once or at most twice in a century.
This tidal wave is immediate, surprising, and hence loaded with information. After decades, perhaps millennia, women are sick and tired of being fondled, groped, invasively kissed, sexually harassed and raped. And they are speaking out with justifiable anger.
This is a remarkable revolt against the male conflation of power with passion.
In the court of public opinion these women are believable. Why? Because so many women have suffered precisely such indignities on a routine basis. Here Trump is utterly exposed by his own words as well as by at least 14 women who accuse him of harassment.
History will be damning
Most of us live our lives in the obscuring murk of anonymity, with its impending oblivion, buried in a fog of information.
Those in government, however, because there are so few of them, bear the risk of having their names carried forward to be judged by those yet unborn. Curiously, with a few exceptions, no one in Congress, or anyone associated with the White House, seems to be pondering this future.
I predict that the judgment on Trump and those who cleave to him and his ways will be damning, regardless of the political orientation of those in judgment.
Trump will not only have destroyed liberal norms and laws, he will have utterly discredited conservatism and the wealthy class that supports it.
He will have made of a great nation a small and irrelevant thing. And “Make America Great Again” will take on the tone befitting a Greek tragedy.
“I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.” – Mike Pence, Speech to Republican National Convention, 2017
When (and if) Donald J. Trump leaves office – via impeachment, criminal indictment and conviction, resignation, or the 25th amendment – Mike Pence, his Vice President will become President. Mike Pence does not have a secret agenda – he is all out there: “My Christian faith is at the very heart of who I am,” he said during one of the vice presidential debates. And he means that. Welcome to Christian Theocracy.
When Margaret Atwood’s book A Handmaid’s Tale was converted into a much- watched television series, liberal commentators pointed out that this dystopian nightmare was a fable of life in Donald Trump’s America. They were wrong. Trump’s version of A Handmaid’s Talewould have been filmed at the Playboy Mansion, and would have been full of men grabbing women by the “p****.” No, A Handmaid’s Tale was a horror story of life in Mike Pence’s America.
Trump and Pence are “almost comically mismatched” and while Pence casts his eyes adoringly at Trump in public, the President has taken to humiliating his vice president, openly mocking his religiosity and asking people who have met with Pence “Did Mike make you Pray?”
Pence, whose childhood nickname was “Bubbles,” was raised as a Roman Catholic. During college he became a conservative evangelical Christian. To Pence, secularism is the enemy. In Congress he supported criminalizing abortion, supported “personhood” legislation that would give constitutional protection to fetuses at the point of conception (it is sometimes said that for Republicans, life begins at conception and ends at birth), voted to criminally punish doctors who performed late-term abortions, tried to defund Planned Parenthood, said that global climate change is a “myth,” worked against equal rights for homosexuals, declared that legalizing gay marriage signaled “societal collapse,” opposed efforts to widen hate crime laws to apply to attacks on LBGTQ+ persons, tried to block federal funding for HIV treatments unless they included a requirement to advise against gay relationships, opposed gays serving in the military, and declared that education should teach evolution only as a “theory” and that such teaching must include the theory of “intelligent design.”
As the governor of Indiana Pence signed the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The law allowed private businesses to refuse service to those whose lifestyle they objected to on religious grounds (LGBTQ+). Advocates of the law said it protected religious freedom. Shortly after it became law, business leaders pressured the state to eliminate the law. Pence also signed a bill that required fetal tissue from abortions to be buried or cremated. He also signed an executive order barring the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Indiana.
As vice president Pence has been hosting a Bible-study group for members of the Trump cabinet. The study group is led by pastor Ralph Drollinger, who in 2004 wrote that “Women with children at home, who either serve in public office, or are employed on the outside, pursue a path that contradicts God’s revealed design for them. It is a sin.” Drollinger also characterizes Catholicism as “a false religion” and believes that a wife must “submit” to the husband.
Pence is an ardent adherent of “the Billy Graham rule,” a rule adopted by some evangelical pastors and business executives. In an effort to avoid temptation, followers of the rule who want to both appear to be, and to be above reproach, avoid “. . . every appearance of evil.” After several prominent evangelical pastors gave in to the temptations of the flesh and had sexual relations with women (leading to scandals and fall) some men decided that it was unwise to be alone with women. Pence embraces this rule, admitting that “he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife.” He even refuses to attend events where alcohol is served unless he is with his wife.
Apart from this being an admission of personal weakness (Oscar Wilde once said that he could “resist everything except temptation”), observance of this rule is a clear exclusion of women from full participation in political life. This led The Onion to lead its story on Pence’s Billy Graham rule with the headline: “Mike Pence asks waiter to remove Mrs. Butterworth From Table Until Wife Arrives”.
Following the Billy Graham rule means that women are treated as sexual temptresses, as objects of danger and sin. It also excludes women from important meetings at work simply because they are women. Women are not only made into second-class citizens, not only prevented from equal opportunity in the workforce, but they are possessors of the evil powers of sex that mere men cannot resist. Imagine if you will, that the tables were turned, and a female CEO followed this same rule only preventing men from full participation. Working late? Send the men home. Business lunch? No men allowed.
Some liberal commentators worry that a President Pence might be a more competent version of President Trump, that he would actually be able to work with a Republican Congress and get major legislation passed. While more politically experienced than Trump, it should be remembered that in his twelve years in Congress, Mike Pence did not author a single bill that was enacted into law. Hope springs eternal.
But the real danger of a Pence presidency is how seriously he takes the radical “religious” right’s wish list, and how he might try to impose a narrow set of religious rules on a wary population. Pence believes he is in possession of God’s Truth, and why let a pesky Constitution, or an annoying Bill of Rights stand in the way of God’s will? Heaven help us.
Michael A. Genovese is the author of 50 books. He is President of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University.
A manipulated still from "Love Actually" featuring President Donald Trump (left) and Vice President 
He will have made of a great nation a small and irrelevant thing. And “Make America Great Again” will take on the tone befitting a Greek tragedy.