It's incomprehensible to many of us that people could support a president who, in Bernie Sanders' words, "is compulsively dishonest, who is a bully, who actively represents the interests of the billionaire class, who is anti-science, and who is trying to divide us up based on the color of our skin, our nation of origin, our religion, our gender, or our sexual orientation."
Based on various trusted sources and a dab of cognitive science, it's fair to conclude that there are three main reasons for this unlikely phenomenon.
1. Trump's Followers Believe They're Better Than Other People
Nationalism, exceptionalism, narcissism, racism. They're all part of the big picture, although it's unfair to simply dismiss Trump people as ignorant racists. Many of them are well-educated and wealthy. But well-to-do individuals tend to feel entitled, superior, uninterested in the people they consider beneath them, and less willing to support the needs of society. Thus many wealthy white Americans are just fine with Trump's disdain for the general population.
Poorer whites also feel superior, in the sense that they're reluctant to give up their long-time self-assigned position at the top of the racial hierarchy.
Trump and the Republicans don't seem to care at all about poor people, especially people of color. It's nearly beyond belief that they'd allow a father to be torn away from his family after living in the U.S. for 30 years; that they'd allow tens of thousands of Americans to sleep outside in subzero weather; or that they'd ignore the women and children being blown up by our bombs in Yemen.
2. They're Driven by Hatred for Their Perceived Enemies
According to an ancient proverb, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. For many besieged Americans, the friend is Donald Trump, the enemy of his followers' enemies, based on his belligerent put-downs of so many target groups that have been recklessly blamed for America's problems. He's been against a 'lying' media, 'job-stealing' immigrants, 'business-stifling' environmentalists, 'elites' like Hillary Clinton who are thought to look down on struggling middle-class whites, and the LGBTQ community and pro-abortion groups, which threaten the religious right's 'traditional' values to a point they consider much worse than Trump's moral depravity.
Their greatest enemy may be the traditional politician, who has allowed the middle class to falter. Trump is unconventional, different from anyone before him. As long as their president is disrupting the status quo, change is happening, and any change, his supporters believe, is likely to defeat one or more of their enemies.
3. They Refuse to Admit They Were Wrong
In fact, the more they're proven wrong, the stronger their resolve. This is called cognitive dissonance. It's common for conservatives to construct their personal beliefs on a moral basis, to adhere to them in the face of any controversy, and if necessary to reshape the evidence to fit these beliefs. Many conservatives continue to fall for Trump's hyperbole about a "booming" economy and new jobs and better times to come.
Conservatives even tend to believe that inequality is part of the natural order, and that any attempt to change it is senseless. Cognitive dissonance kicks in for them when they are confronted with the overwhelming evidence for a collapsing middle class. Rather than re-evaluating their beliefs, they go to the other extreme and defend the widening fracture in U.S. society as a natural consequence of an imagined meritocracy. Incredibly, according to one poll, in 2014 only 5 percent of the U.S. population believed that the government should be addressing inequality.
So Now What?
In his rebuttal to Donald Trump's State of the Union address, Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-MA) said, "This administration isn't just targeting the laws that protect us; they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection."
...that we are all worthy of protection. That will only happen with a progressive candidate who believes that a strong society makes successful individuals, not the other way around.
Perhaps there is no coincidence that in the same week that the Department of Justice confirmed Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, seventeen young Americans were gunned down by a troubled young man who had easy access to a military-style rifle.
The people who cry the loudest about protecting themselves from the government through possession of their guns look the other way when a politician and his son engage in what many think is treasonous activity with the Russians. So long as that politician pledges to save their guns—and explain away every mass shooting—these NRA fanatics care little about the rancid attack on our democratic system of government.
But the corrosive effect of guns on our democracy has a long and sickening history. Guns have destroyed American idealism.
Fifty years ago, a man murdered one of our greatest sons with a high-powered rifle in Memphis. In so many ways, Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream died with him. Dr. King was thirty-nine years old. It is hard to comprehend how much he accomplished in his short life, but even harder to grasp how much we lost when that one bullet transected his spinal cord and left him prostate on a hotel balcony. We cannot begin to measure the loss.
When he was gunned down, Dr. King was planning his Poor People’s Campaign. Conceived as a modern day camp-in much like the Bonus Army assemblage of World War I veterans who descended on Washington, D. C., in the summer of 1932 to demand cash payment of their service certificates, Dr. King envisioned a march originating out of the South of legions of poor people who would stay in the nation’s capital until Congress passed antipoverty legislation.
Dr. King had come a long way from his days in opposing Jim Crow laws. From his brief experience in northern ghettos, beginning in Chicago in 1966, Dr. King began to see his mission as greater than civil rights. He expanded his vision to all America’s poor. Henceforth, his cause was not just about the right to vote or where one might sit on a bus, it was about human dignity and human worth. In a country overflowing with resources and wealth, there was no excuse for poverty.
In this new undertaking, Dr. King was joined by New York Senator Robert Kennedy. President Johnson had made the “war on poverty” a keystone of his Great Society, but his credibility and legitimacy were drained by his gross error in escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War. So Bobby Kennedy joined the race, injecting new hope, energy and youthful optimism into a presidential contest that had been a dirge, as LBJ and Richard Nixon trudged their way to the expected nominations of their parties.
Gun violence ended it all within two short months in 1968.
On March 31, Dr. King was invited by the dean of the National Cathedral to deliver a sermon to Washingtonians. The dean was Francis Sayre, born in the White House as Woodrow Wilson’s first grandson. Sayre wanted to provide Dr. King with a forum to reassure the citizens of Washington that his poor people would not bring violence with them.
Dr. King needed to make this speech because he had joined a march in Memphis to protest the working conditions of city sanitation workers, but it was a rally he had not planned and it eventually got out of hand when adolescents began rioting in the streets. One young black male was killed.
King was determined to prove that the violence was an isolated incident, one that could be managed in a second march that he and his people would carefully organize. Thus, he planned to return to Memphis on April 3.
But before returning to Memphis, he gave his last sermon in the National Cathedral. He spoke about the needs of the poor and how Jesus had indicted people of means not because they were wealthy, but because to them the poor were invisible.
“We are not coming to tear up Washington,” Dr. King told his audience. “We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty.”
He explained himself: “We read one day, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility of the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.”
That night, Lyndon Johnson told a national TV audience that he would not run again for president. He undoubtedly was shaken by Senator Eugene McCarthy’s strong showings in initial primaries, but more likely he feared the entrance of Bobby Kennedy into the campaign just two weeks earlier.
Dr. King returned to Memphis days later and gave one of the most prophetic speeches of American history when he all but predicted his death the next day. “Longevity has its place,” he said as portentous thunderstorms rattled around the Memphis region, “ but I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.”
The night Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Bobby Kennedy was in Indianapolis, but he was scheduled for a major campaign appearance in Cleveland the next day. He and associates stayed up much of the night composing a short address he would deliver to a packed house in a hotel ballroom where a special session of the City Club of Cleveland was scheduled.
Known today as the “mindless menace of violence” speech, much of RFK’s short 10-minute talk was on gun violence in America. “What has violence ever accomplished? he asked. “What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause can ever be stilled by an assassin’s bullet.”
He called a sniper a “coward” and an uncontrolled mob “the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.” “Yet,” he admonished, “we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.”
Two months later, Robert Kennedy was himself the victim of gun violence.
And he was wrong about the toll of gun violence: it has killed the martyr’s cause. Richard Nixon won the election in 1968 and began to dismantle the Great Society and the nation’s war on poverty. From his time until now, the nation has turned from addressing the root causes of poverty to a “lock them up” mentality. The number of black men in prison has grown exponentially.
Nixon’s cynical “law and order” administration resulted in many of his highest officials, including the Attorney General, going to jail, mainly over obstruction of justice charges and lying to investigators.
Our democracy cannot tolerate treason with the Russians, just as it cannot survive the pernicious impacts of gun violence. Fifty years ago, guns took some of our greatest leaders, men who gave moral meaning to our national purpose and hope to the hopeless. We have not seen their likes again.
And now this Congress and President watch mindlessly as our children are slaughtered, not as Bobby Kennedy said in “far-off lands,” but in our own neighborhood schools.
I'm a Republican who served under Bush and Whitman: Let's ban AR-15s | Opinion
By Alan J. Steinberg I need not dwell on the catastrophe of the Parkland, Florida mass murder last week. Such killings have become the new normal in America. In five of the six deadliest mass shootings of the past six years in the United States (Newtown, San Bernardino.
As teenagers in Parkland, Florida, dressed for the funerals of their friends – the latest victims of a mass shooting in the U.S. – weary outrage poured forth on social media and in op-eds across the country. Once again, survivors, victims’ families and critics of U.S. gun laws demanded action to address the never-ending cycle of mass shootings and routine violence ravaging American neighborhoods.
The 14 children and three adults shot dead on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were casualties of the nation’s 30th mass shooting this year – defined by the Gun Violence Archive as involving at least four victims including the injured – and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. A question on many minds is whether this massacre will finally compel Washington to act. Few commentators seem to believe so.
If advocates for reform despair, I can understand. The politics seem intractable. It’s easy to feel powerless.
But what I’ve learned from a decade of studying the history of the arms trade has convinced me that the American public has more power over the gun business than most people realize. Taxpayers have always been the arms industry’s indispensable patrons.
Gun maker Simeon North made this flintlock pistol around 1813.
Balefire/Shutterstock.com
Washington’s patronage
The U.S. arms industry’s close alliance with the government is as old as the country itself, beginning with the American Revolution.
Forced to rely on foreign weapons during the war, President George Washington wanted to ensure that the new republic had its own arms industry. Inspired by European practice, he and his successors built public arsenals for the production of firearms in Springfield and Harper’s Ferry. They also began doling out lucrative arms contracts to private manufacturers such as Simeon North, the first official U.S. pistol maker, and Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin.
The government provided crucial startup funds, steady contracts, tariffs against foreign manufactures, robust patent laws, and patterns, tools and know-how from federal arsenals.
The War of 1812, perpetual conflicts with Native Americans and the U.S.-Mexican War all fed the industry’s growth. By the early 1850s, the United States was emerging as a world-class arms producer. Now-iconic American companies like those started by Eliphalet Remington and Samuel Colt began to acquire international reputations. Even the mighty gun-making center of Great Britain started emulating the American system of interchangeable parts and mechanized production.
This is an advertisement for a Remington rifle in the Army and Navy Journal in 1871.
Army and Navy Journal
Profit in war and peace
The Civil War supercharged America’s burgeoning gun industry.
The Union poured huge sums of money into arms procurement, which manufacturers then invested in new capacity and infrastructure. By 1865, for example, Remington had made nearly US$3 million producing firearms for the Union. The Confederacy, with its weak industrial base, had to import the vast majority of its weapons.
The war’s end meant a collapse in demand and bankruptcy for several gun makers. Those that prospered afterward, such as Colt, Remington and Winchester, did so by securing contracts from foreign governments and hitching their domestic marketing to the brutal romance of the American West.
While peace deprived gun makers of government money for a time, it delivered a windfall to well-capitalized dealers. That’s because within five years of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the War Department had decommissioned most of its guns and auctioned off some 1,340,000 to private arms dealers, such as Schuyler, Hartley and Graham. The Western Hemisphere’s largest private arms dealer at the time, the company scooped up warehouses full of cut-rate army muskets and rifles and made fortunes reselling them at home and abroad.
A soldier fires the Sig Sauer P320, which the Army has chosen as its new standard pistol.
U.S. Army
More wars, more guns
By the late 19th century, America’s increasingly aggressive role in the world insured steady business for the country’s gun makers.
Consider Sig Sauer, the New Hampshire arms producer that made the MCX rifle used in the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre. In addition to arming nearly a third of the country’s law enforcement, it recently won the coveted contract for the Army’s new standard pistol, ultimately worth $350 million to $580 million.
Colt might best illustrate the importance of public money for prominent civilian arms manufacturers. Maker of scores of iconic guns for the civilian market, including the AR-15 carbine used in the 1996 massacre that prompted Australia to enact its famously sweeping gun restrictions, Colt has also relied heavily on government contracts since the 19th century. The Vietnam War initiated a long era of making M16s for the military, and the company continued to land contracts as American war-making shifted from Southeast Asia to the Middle East. But Colt’s reliance on government was so great that it filed for bankruptcy in 2015, in part because it had lost the military contract for the M4 rifle two years earlier.
Overall, gun makers relied on government contracts for about 40 percent of their revenues in 2012.
Competition for contracts spurred manufacturers to make lethal innovations, such as handguns with magazines that hold 12 or 15 rounds rather than seven. Absent regulation, these innovations show up in gun enthusiast periodicals, sporting goods stores and emergency rooms.
An activist is led away by security after protesting during a statement by NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, left, during a news conference in response to the Connecticut school shooting in 2012.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
NRA helped industry avoid regulation
So how has the industry managed to avoid more significant regulation, especially given the public anger and calls for legislation that follow horrific massacres like the one in Las Vegas?
Given their historic dependence on U.S. taxpayers, one might think that small arms makers would have been compelled to make meaningful concessions in such moments. But that seldom happens, thanks in large part to the National Rifle Association, a complicated yet invaluable industry partner.
The NRA, founded in 1871 as an organization focused on hunting and marksmanship, rallied its members to defeat the most important component of that bill: a tax meant to make it far more difficult to purchase handguns. Again in 1968, the NRA ensured Lyndon Johnson’s Gun Control Act wouldn’t include licensing and registration requirements.
In 1989, it helped delay and water down the Brady Act, which mandated background checks for arms purchased from federally licensed dealers. In 1996 the NRA engineered a virtual ban on federal funding for research into gun violence. In 2000, the group led a successful boycott of a gun maker that cooperated with the Clinton administration on gun safety measures. And it scored another big victory in 2005, by limiting the industry’s liability to gun-related lawsuits.
Most recently, the gun lobby has succeeded by promoting an ingenious illusion. It has framed government as the enemy of the gun business rather than its indispensable historic patron, convincing millions of American consumers that the state may at any moment stop them from buying guns or even try to confiscate them.
This helps explain why the share price of gun makers so often jumps after mass shootings. Investors know they have little to fear from new regulation and expect sales to rise anyway.
Yet almost never does this political activity seem to jeopardize access to lucrative government contracts.
Americans interested in reform might reflect on that fact. They might start asking their representatives where they get their guns. It isn’t just the military and scores of federal agencies. States, counties and local governments buy plenty of guns, too.
Take Smith & Wesson, maker of the AR-15 Nikolas Cruz just used to kill his teachers and classmates at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Smith & Wesson is well into a five-year contract to supply handguns to the Los Angeles Police Department, the second-largest in the country. In 2016 the company contributed $500,000 (more than any other firm) to a get-out-the-vote operation designed to defeat candidates who favor tougher gun laws.
Do voters in LA – or in the rest of the country – know that they are indirectly subsidizing the gun lobby’s campaign against regulation? Concerned citizens should begin acting like the consumers they are and holding gun makers to account for political activities that imperil public safety.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on Oct. 9, 2017.
Many academic disciplines can be consulted to explain the on-going tragedy of the Trump administration. History can give us a sense of the precedents, the shameful nativist tradition in groups like the Know Nothings and the John Birch Society. One could use the language of sociology to explain how the white working and middle classes enthusiastically supported a candidate manifestly not in their interests. An economist could model how stagnant wages and the increasing financial gulf resulted in an anti-status quo vote with disastrous consequences while ironically bolstering the elite. A foreign policy analyst could examine the ways in which Trump embodies a revanchist anti-liberalism, a nascent internationalist fascism which serves as a worrying harbinger of future reaction. Rhetoricians could analyze how Trump’s oratory, often maligned as a jumble of word salad, was carefully calibrated with social media to market the politician. So many hot-takes and columns have been devoted to a man who is so obviously odious that you’d avoid sitting next to him on the subway; so much of our mental energy has been consumed with this self-evidently damaged soul. As Katy Waldman wittily asked in an insightful column for Slate last month: “What’s left to discuss when you’ve discussed everything, and nothing has changed?” So, from my perspective, one of the most insightful methods of approaching Trump is theology.
I speak not just of the ways in which a profoundly irreligious man is able to conveniently don the minister’s figurative frock when it serves his purposes, mouthing spiritual inanities and corrupted civil religion as he did at the State of the Unio. All empty faith, dog whistles, and red meat to his base. Rather, I write of the actual metaphysical qualities which define a man so rapacious, lustful, gluttonous, lazy, entitled, wrathful, and most of all vainglorious. Theology is capable of explaining a man who has so emboldened evil, as philosopher Susan Neiman has argued. And if Trump’s soul is so diseased, what does it imply about our nation that he’s been empowered to lead it?
I’ve already written about Trump’s unholy alliance with conservative white evangelicals before; in a manner far more effective than myself, religion writer Jeff Sharlet has considered the same question. Sharlet points out that it does no good to only observe that there is a hypocrisy about Trump’s religious supporters, since Trump’s religion is its own kind of twisted faith. Sharlet writes that “no other major modern figure has channeled the tension that makes Scripture endure, the desire, the wanting that gives rise to the closest analogue to Trumpism… the American religion of winning.” There is much that can be said about this particular strain of reactionary, jingoistic fundamentalist Protestantism, and the actual role it has played in right-wing politics from antebellum justifications for slavery through the latest incarnation of fascism that is Trumpism. But when I say that theology can be used to explicate Trump’s spiritual malignancy and the unfortunately outsize role that he plays in our national consciousness, I mean not simply tracing policy connections between various religious interest groups, but considering the metaphysics of the man’s soul itself – and the disastrous effect such a sadly shriveled thing has on the rest of us.
Trump’s is the sort of personality which John the Revelator would have been able to insightfully parse, while meditating in ecstasy on some Patmos grove. The president’s very personality can seem Caligulan, a type of Nero for an American colosseum who rather than giving us bread-and-circuses bestows on us never-ending tweets. As that biblical author was able to (albeit in allegorical form) critique the tyranny of the most powerful rulers of his world, so too can theology illuminate the diseased consciousness of the most powerful man in our world.
Historians like Timothy Snyder and Masha Gessen have deftly charted the similarities and connections between both past and present authoritarianisms around the world with Trump’s current manifestation of that odious political methodology. And yet, Trump’s embodiment of authoritarianism seems so finely calibrated to the American psyche, combining as it does those myths of the boot-strapping rugged individualist, the revival preacher, and the snake-oil salesman, that it’s important to consider not just what’s sui generis about Trump, but indeed what’s particularly American about him. Writing in The Atlantic, historian Julian E. Zelizer astutely observes that it feels difficult to consider Trump because “Americans see too much of themselves in him. He is the mirror that exposes the nation’s contradictions.”
Trump’s performance of a certain type of fast-food engorged, porn-obsessed, corpulent, digital depravity is so manifestly an incarnation of our worst national ideals, that the closest parallels to Trump as an authoritarian seem not to be a Viktor Orban or even a Vladimir Putin, but rather the Roman emperors. That is to say that more than any other aspiring dictator, Trump most reminds me of the sovereigns who presided over a similarly decadent empire in decline, this one some two millennia ago; which is why the vocabulary of Patmos might be that which is adequate for this particular moment.
Elizabeth Bruenig at The Washington Postchannels the analytical acumen of an Augustin or an Aquinas when she observes that Trump is “insulated from consequence by power, money and fame in a way not imaginable to the ordinary person. He is the freest man alive.” She recounts all of the strange, childish, abusive, and petty actions of Trump, from spying on dressing beauty queens to demanding two-scoops of ice-cream at White House dinners while everyone else is only allowed one. Trump exemplifies a nihilistic, selfish freedom, one where there are no consequences. But there is also a sense, as Bruenig perhaps implies, that Trump is ironically the least free of men as well. Quoting Aristotle, she observes that “where absolute freedom is allowed, there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man.”
Trump’s world, as deftly if salaciously recounted in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, is a petty, small, miserable, anxious, angry one. Images of the bathrobe clad leader of the free world madly pawing at his phone with KFC greased fingers. Who among you would actually want to be Donald Trump? What emerges is a portrait of one who has accumulated everything he wants, even the presidency, and yet who does nothing to enrich or empower the citizens whom he ostensibly governs on the behalf of, preferring to enact revenge on his perceived enemies. Of a man so limited and incurious, so incapable of any fraternal, romantic, or loving connection with another human being (seeing all relationships as simply transactional) that he is seemingly incapable of genuine laughter, being only partial to the sneer. Laughter, such a basic human response, which the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda said was the “language of the soul.” What Charles Dickens or even Christopher Marlowe could have made of a spirit as ugly as Trump’s!
Or C.S. Lewis, who so effectively married the imagination to the theological. As clear-headed an observer of both human goodness and fallenness as any author, there is a passage in his classic of Christian apologetics, 1945’s The Great Divorce, which seems to presciently describe our current president. Structured as a dream vision, Lewis describes the psychology of figures in both heaven and hell, including a character led about on a chain by a demonic dwarf who represents his myriad appetites, and who has been spirited to a heaven he cannot experience from a hell which he cannot escape. Lewis writes that he never “saw anything more terrible than the struggle of that Dwarf Ghost against joy. For he had almost been overcome. Somewhere, incalculable ages ago, there must have been gleams of humour and reason in him.” So it is with a creature like Trump, for whom whatever has happened to him in the past has resulted in this joyless and unempathetic man, a being who told a group of evangelical voters “I'm not sure I have ever asked God's forgiveness” (and yet so many still support him). Lewis understood that sophisticated theology teaches that hell isn’t some geographical location reached by drilling into the earth (or fracking?), but rather that hell is a perspective, a mindset, a distance from man and from God. The 17th century poet John Milton described it as such in his epic Paradise Lost, when his Lucifer exclaims “Myself am Hell;/And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep,/Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide;/To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.” A Trumpian image, isn’t it? The fallen demon so divorced from any connection and so deep in his own perdition that he mistakes his excess and his power as a type of happiness.
In suggesting that there must be something hellish about the experience of being Trump, I am not trying to engender any sort of sympathy for the man. Questions of his redemption are between him and those he harms, and then to whatever God he directs his prayers. Instead, I worry about what the implications are that such a man occupies so much of our attention, colonizing our very consciousness, dominating not just our livelihood but our inner lives.
Does such a small, angry, cruel man not risk making all of us small, angry and cruel? Does the bully pulpit threaten to turn us all into bullies? That is not to minimize the very real material repercussions of his policies, or the callousness and cruelty of his administration. The assaults on immigrants and workers, women and LGBTQ individuals, Muslims and African-Americans are sadly very real. But I also fear the intangible results of his rhetoric, of his perspective, and his emboldening of hate. If Trump is in his own hell, I worry that every day he threatens to pull us into it with him. Mephistopheles’ said in Marlowe’s 16th century play Dr. Faustus that “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” something I understand every time I receive a new push notification. This is the peculiar logic of the autocrat – he demands attention and you no longer have the option to direct your interests outward, to be free of him. His ultimate ideology is narcissism, and his only faith is himself.
But if Trumpism is just a new manifestation of that particular type of dark religion, we can answer its machinations with our own faith. For though the means of resistance must always be directed outward, we also cannot neglect the inward. Necessity compels us to march, organize, protest, and most of all vote, but it also compels us to reflect, meditate, and pray. We need not regain the system for the price of our souls, for to carve out a place of identity independent of Trump is not that narcotic of ignorance, but rather the building of our own personal independence from the authoritarian, who will one day thankfully be gone (as all authoritarians ultimately are). Where his life is empty, ours must be full; as he is incurious, we must be alive to wonder; where he is brimming with hate, we must at least try to embrace love. For ultimately, that is not only the most effective rebuke, but also simply that which we are fighting for.
Ed Simon is the Editor-at-Large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. A frequent contributor at several sites, his collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post Religion will be released by Zero Books in November of 2018. He can be followed at his website or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.
When Trump and his followers refer to “America,” what do they mean?
Some see a country of white English-speaking Christians.
Others want a land inhabited by self-seeking individuals free to accumulate as much money and power as possible, who pay taxes only to protect their assets from criminals and foreign aggressors.
Others think mainly about flags, national anthems, pledges of allegiance, military parades, and secure borders.
Trump encourages a combination of all three – tribalism, libertarianism, and loyalty.
But the core of our national identity has not been any of this. It has been found in the ideals we share – political equality, equal opportunity, freedom of speech and of the press, a dedication to open inquiry and truth, and to democracy and the rule of law.
We are not a race. We are not a creed. We are a conviction – that all people are created equal, that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and that government should be of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Political scientist Carl Friedrich, comparing Americans to Gallic people, noted that “to be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact.”
That idealism led Lincoln to proclaim that America might yet be the “last best hope” for humankind. It prompted Emma Lazarus, some two decades later, to welcome to American the world’s “tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
It inspired the poems of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and the songs of Woody Guthrie. All turned their love for America into demands that we live up to our ideals. “This land is your land, this land is my land,” sang Guthrie. “Let America be America again,” pleaded Hughes: “The land that never has been yet – /And yet must be – the land where every man is free. / The land that’s mind – the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME –.”
That idealism sought to preserve and protect our democracy – not inundate it with big money, or allow one party or candidate to suppress votes from rivals, or permit a foreign power to intrude on our elections.
It spawned a patriotism that once required all of us take on a fair share of the burdens of keeping America going – paying taxes in full rather than seeking loopholes or squirreling money away in foreign tax shelters, serving in the armed forces or volunteering in our communities rather than relying on others to do the work.
These ideals compelled us to join together for the common good – not pander to bigotry or divisiveness, or fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions.
The idea of a common good was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare” – not for “me the narcissist seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”
Yet the common good seems to have disappeared. The phrase is rarely uttered today, not even by commencement speakers and politicians.
There’s growing evidence of its loss – in CEOs who gouge their customers and loot their corporations; Wall Street bankers who defraud their investors; athletes involved in doping scandals; doctors who do unnecessary procedures to collect fatter fees; and film producers and publicists who choose not to see that a powerful movie mogul they depend on is sexually harassing and abusing women.
We see its loss in politicians who take donations from wealthy donors and corporations and then enact laws their patrons want, or shutter the government when they don’t get the partisan results they seek.
And in a president of the United States who has repeatedly lied about important issues, refuses to put his financial holdings into a blind trust and personally profits from his office, and foments racial and ethnic conflict.
This unbridled selfishness, this contempt for the public, this win-at-any-cost mentality, is eroding America.
Without binding notions about right and wrong, only the most unscrupulous get ahead. When it’s all about winning, only the most unprincipled succeed. This is not a society. It’s not even a civilization, because there’s no civility at its core.
If we’re losing our national identity it’s not because we now come in more colors, practice more religions, and speak more languages than we once did.
It is because we are forgetting the real meaning of America – the ideals on which our nation was built. We are losing our sense of the common good.
“We are not in a static situation,” Dr. John Gartner said, at a presentation on presidential mental health and nuclear weapons in Washington on Monday. “We are in a deteriorating situation. And every day that goes by we are at greater risk of total nuclear annihilation.”
The sporting competition in South Korea has governments and leaders spouting bromides of peace and friendship, at least for a couple of weeks. There is talk of reconciliation between North and South Korea, independent of White House wishes. South Koreans are fascinated by the "Ivanka Trump of North Korea."
All the while, the danger posed by Trump’s control of nuclear weapons continues to grow, says Gartner, founder of Duty to Warn, a group that argues President Trump is not mentally fit for office. He spoke at a National Press Club forum sponsored by Need to Impeach, the campaign bankrolled by billionaire investor Tom Steyer.
The unanimous conclusion: Trump is not qualified to make decisions about nuclear weapons.
Airman Trump
Psychiatrist Steven Buser explained how he evaluated nuclear personnel for the U.S. Air Force’s Nuclear Personal Reliability Program. According to PRP standards, “only those military personnel with the highest degree of reliability, trustworthiness, conduct and behavior will be allowed to work in the vicinity of nuclear weapons.”
“What if those same standards were applied to our president?” Dr. Buser asked. “What if President Trump instead was Airman Trump?...Would I feel comfortable in certifying Airman Trump as being safe to be around nuclear weapons?”
“What if I had reliable information that Airman Trump had cyberbullied others regularly on Twitter?” Buser went on. “That he had sexually abusive behavior toward women; that he was prone to erratic personal states; that he showed paranoia about being surveilled by others or unjustly persecuted; and that he had a history of highly distorted, if not untruthful statements.”
“Would I certify Airman Trump as being safe around nuclear weapons? My answer was, absolutely not.”
Dr. Gartner said Trump’s mental health “is deteriorating and is going to continue to get worse.”
“If you watch interviews that Trump did in the 1980s and '90s, he not only spoke in complete sentences, he spoke in polished paragraphs. Compare that to interviews and public speech today: his vocabulary is thin, reasoning is loose. He repeats himself. He is actually impaired in his ability to complete a sentence or form a thought without derailing into some kind of irrelevancy.”
“When someone begins to deteriorate cognitively, anything that was bad about their personality gets worse,” Dr. Gartner said. “When people are in a state of pre-dementia they become more impulsive, more paranoid, less conscientious, more aggressive, more irritable.”
And eventually, “they begin to become psychotic.”
Malignant Narcissism
The implications for presidential decision-making on North Korea policy are frightening, said Jim Doyle, former systems analyst at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who specializes in nuclear weapons systems.
The most desirable characteristics in a nuclear decision-maker are “rationality, the ability to weigh actions and consequences,” Doyle said.
“Characteristics that would be undesirable,” he continued, “would be somebody who is impulsive, easily angered and frustrated. Somebody who seeks confrontation, has a high sense of bravado or is vindictive. In addition, it probably would be undesirable to have somebody who didn’t have the ability to empathize or see the situation through the eyes of their potential adversary.”
But a complete lack of empathy characterizes Trump’s malignant narcissism, said Jacqueline West, a psychoanalyst in New Mexico.
“When we say ‘Trump is being narcissistic again,’ we get it that he is egotistical. We get it that he is dominating. What we don’t get is that he’s dangerous.”
The malignant narcissist, she said, “grows up with a tremendous determination to dominate, to win at all costs, and they sacrifice the integration of conscience and the capacity for empathy. He is involved in a ‘kill or be killed’ reality.”
Latest Developments
Dr. Gartner worries that the investigation being conducted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller “is pushing [Trump] toward pushing the nuclear button.”
“It would solve all of his problems,” Gartner said. “He will not care about the destruction it causes other people. It will be irresistible to transform him from feeling like a victim of a witch hunt to being an omnipotently destructive victor.”
That may sound paranoid to some, but who could deny that fear of Trump’s irrationality has a rational basis, especially in recent developments on the Korean Peninsula, where the president has promised to bring “fire and fury” to “Little Rocket Man" if he threatens the United States.
The Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, released earlier this month, articulates a more aggressive interpretation of past U.S. policies with a lower threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
Despite the Pentagon’s reluctance, Trump has demanded options for a "bloody nose" strike on North Korea.
And most ominously, when Victor Cha, Trump’s hawkish choice to serve as ambassador to South Korea, published an article stressing the United States has no viable military options in North Korea, Trump withdrew his nomination.
“A new Korean war is now perhaps more likely than not in 2018,” tweeted Stephen Saideman, a scholar of U.S. foreign policy at Canada’s Carleton University.
President Donald Trump never seems to miss an opportunity to take a deeply upsetting national tragedy and somehow make it even worse. From his determination to equivocate after the death of Charlottesville protester Heather Heyer to his latest tone-deaf debacle -- the jaunty "thumbs up" gesture the president flashed when posing for a photo with first responders to Wednesday's massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL.
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The Trumps sped through their hospital visit and the president's hasty press conference at the Broward County Sheriff's Office before the motorcade swept off into the night and deposited the chief executive and his spouse at a Studio 54-themed "disco party" at Mar-a-Lago.
Much of the nation recoiled from Trump's show of insensitivity.
Nothing in the 2nd Amendment prevents sensible gun rules | Opinion
By Cass R. Sunstein The use of the Second Amendment, to block consideration of sensible gun control measures, is a national disgrace. And conservatives themselves have explained why this is true. For decades, conservatives have objected to the use of constitutional provisions as a political weapon, insisting that controversies should be resolved in democratic arenas instead.
On Wednesday, St. Valentine’s Day, I had just printed out an article from the CNN website headlined, “Exclusive: Gun lobbyist helped write ATF official’s proposal to deregulate.” Minutes later came news of gunfire at a high school in Parkland, Florida. By nightfall, 17 were dead.
Ronald B. Turk, acting deputy director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, submitted that proposal at the beginning of the Trump administration. But before he turned it in, Turk asked for help with his draft from Mark Barnes, “a lawyer who has lobbied for the National Rifle Association, a gun show trade group, and gun manufacturers.”
According to CNN’s Jose Pagliery, the white paper “suggested a number of ways to reduce the agency's regulation of gun manufacturers, dealers, owners and international trade. All of these reflected priorities of the gun industry.”
Among lobbyist Mark Barnes’ contributions, he suggested a call for the ATF to conduct “a new sporting purpose study” of the AR-15 and AR-47 semiautomatic assault rifles. He wrote Turk, "These firearm types are now standard for such sporting activities as bore (sic), coyote, and prairie-dog hunting. ATF should re-examine it's (sic) almost 20 year old study to bring it up to date with the sport shooting landscape of today.” In the final version of his memo, Turk repeated this almost word for word.
Sporting activities? These are weapons, vicious killing machines. An AR-15 is what 19-year old Nikolas Cruz bought for his rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland. AR-15-style rifles were used in the Newtown, Connecticut, killings in 2012 (28 dead); the San Bernardino, California shootings in 2015 (14 dead); Orlando in 2016 (49 dead); Las Vegas in October 2017 (58 dead) and a month later, Sutherland, Texas (26 dead).
These are not sports weapons and they sure as hell don’t belong in the hands of any civilian, much less the mentally disturbed. In 2016, just after the Orlando shootings, Peter Rhee, a trauma surgeon at the University of Arizona, told Sarah Zhang of Wired magazine that the damage to the human body done by a bullet from an AR-15 “looks like a hand grenade went off in there.”
Zhang wrote:
“The bullet from an AR-15 might miss the femoral artery in the leg, but cavitation may burst the artery anyway, causing death by blood loss. A swath of stretched and torn tissue around the wound may die. That’s why, says Rhee, a handgun wound might require only one surgery but an AR-15 bullet wound might require three to ten.”
Unless, of course, it kills you immediately, a likely outcome. A couple of years ago, the family of the AR-15’s inventor, Eugene Stoner, said they were certain that he designed the rifle as a military weapon only and did not intend its use for hunting or worse: "He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events."
Yet here’s the National Rifle Association – contributor of nearly $30 million to Trump’s presidential campaign and some $20 million to 2016’s GOP Senate candidates -- lauding the AR-15 as “America’s Rifle,” praising its “ability to be modified to your own personal taste,” and delighting in a Twitter account’s gushing that the weapon has “so, SO, SOOOO many accessories.”
Good grief, it’s a deadly weapon of mass destruction, not Barbie’s Dream House.
And here’s Remington Arms, which in past years marketed its AR-15 Bushmaster to the testosterone-addled with slogans like “Consider your man card reissued” and, “Forces of opposition bow down. You are single-handedly outnumbered.” Imagine how words such as those might sound to an angry teenager like Nikolas Cruz, his rage and apparent white supremacist beliefs urged on by fantasies of firepower and revenge.
So now there are 17 dead in Parkland, Florida. They are grieved by their families and by the other kids and teachers who survived this 21st century St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. They are mourned by the rest of us, even the hypocritical officeholders who offer their “thoughts and prayers” while sucking up to the NRA for campaign cash, and who defend the right to own as many big, deadly, terrorizing guns as anybody wants in the name of a constitutional amendment originally designed not to encourage the wholesale butchering of man and beast but to provide civilian militias with muskets.
On Wednesday, the day of the killings, I printed out that CNN article relating yet another example of Washington’s undrained swamp, a lobbyist working with a Federal employee to deregulate and make it even easier to buy and own guns.
On Thursday, I looked back at the piece I wrote after October’s Las Vegas killings and realized that with just a change of date and location and the replacement of a couple of quotes, the words were as valid in the wake of the Parkland killings as they were in the wake of Vegas.
That’s because killing begets killing and as sure as the setting of the sun, there will be more senseless, multiple slaughters of the innocent. But there’s a difference this time. Early this week, Remington Arms, maker of the AR-15 Bushmaster and other guns, filed for bankruptcy, citing declining sales and falling revenues.
What’s more, there’s a realization growing that’s greater than in a long while, a realization that come November, we have a good chance to vote a lot of these venal, toadying-to-the-gun-lobby bastards out. Admittedly, that may cause Remington and other gun makers’ sales to rebound as the NRA and others once again stir fears of Democrats seizing weapons.
But two years later, unless impeachment and conviction have clicked in, we can go after the president himself, the fatuous leader for whom guns are not only the nation’s “man card” but a way to pander to his almighty base and keep campaign cash rolling in from the gun lobby.
In truth, the commander-in-chief who denounced “American carnage” in his inaugural address revels in that carnage and relies on it to keep him at the top. On Election Day 2020, you can make that come to an end.
Michael Winship, senior writing fellow at Demos and president of the Writers Guild of America-East, was senior writer for Moyers & Company and Bill Moyers’ Journal and is senior writer of BillMoyers.com.
The only greater certainty than another mass shooting in this country is the likelihood that it will be met with inaction. Since the 2012 massacre of 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there have been a staggering 1,607 mass shootings across the U.S., nearly 240 in schools. Each has been met with useless thoughts and prayers from craven conservative politicians, all of whom insist there’s never a right time to discuss gun control. The fatigue incurred from the whole circular spectacle makes it feel like it might just be easier to start labeling lawmakers either “pro-child murder” or “anti-child murder.”
It’s impossible to reason with the disingenuous logic that mass slaughter is just the cost of freedom, and not a consequence of NRA-owned politicians, which is why even the mildest gun reform seems impossible. Sandy Hook proved the GOP is willing to take donor dollars to look away from dead American children. The correlation between levels of gun ownership and gun deaths has similarly failed to rouse GOP political will, as have arguments that military-style killing machines should be kept off U.S. streets. While the “mental health problems” of white “lone wolf” shooters bring Republicans to crocodile tears, Trump signed a bill making it easier for mentally ill people to buy guns just a year ago. The knowledge that toddlers accidentally shoot more Americans annually than foreign terrorists do didn't stop Iowa Republicans from proposing a bill to let “1-year-olds, 2-year-olds, 3-year-olds [and] 4-year-olds...operate handguns,” leading one Democratic lawmaker to observe, “We do not need a militia of toddlers.” Perhaps relatedly, studies find the reflexive GOP tendency following mass killings is to make gun laws more, not less permissive, as evidenced by Florida Republicans’ attempts to loosen state gun restrictions just 24 hours after the Parkland massacre.
Ending mass shootings might seem like a hopeless cause in light of all this, but that kind of thinking ignores the historic infallibility of racism to move American political mountains. The shift in the public face of poverty from white to black helped take us from the New Deal to the destruction of the welfare state; conversely, as drug addiction has gone from being an "inner city" (read: black) to a "suburban" (read: white) problem, the state has transformed from carceral to compassionate. A movement—both visible and vocal—to arm black Americans en masse would fire up GOP political will toward gun control, and probably at speeds currently unimaginable. Second Amendment hardliners often engage in bad-faith references to America’s racist gun control history at convenient moments, namely when trying convince wary black folks, who statistically are overwhelmingly pro-gun control, to join the chorus calling for unfettered gun access. There are too many reasons to question their sudden commitment to anti-racism in those moments. That said, there is historic precedence for the mere idea of black gun possession leading directly to white American efforts at gun control.
These policies even predate this country’s official nationhood. The Splinter’s Daniel Rivero points to the “first gun control law,” passed in Virginia in 1640, which “explicitly banned black people from owning guns, even if they were not slaves.” The 1857 Dred Scott decision prohibited blacks from becoming American citizens, in part because citizenship would confer the right “to keep and carry arms...inevitably producing discontent and insubordination...and endangering the peace and safety of the State.” Post-Civil War “Black Codes” were adopted throughout much the South, making gun ownership by freed blacks illegal. The Atlantic notes that to “enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities....The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.”
Martin Luther King, who received endless death threats and was the target of a house bombing in 1956, applied for an open carry permit, but was denied by Montgomery, Alabama’s racist police force. When the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, in accordance with California law, began openly carrying weapons to patrol Oakland’s neighborhoods, the state legislature quickly crafted, and Gov. Ronald Reagan quickly signed, the 1967 Mulford Act ending public carry. On the heels of race riots, Congress Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, followed by the Gun Control Act of 1968, which Georgetown historian Adam Winkler notes included a provision to restrict “‘Saturday Night Specials’—the cheap, easily available guns often used by [black] youth.” The legislation was the first federal gun law in nearly three decades, and proved lawmakers would rather institute widespread gun control measures than potentially have a widely armed black populace.
More recently, the understanding that the Second Amendment serves only to protect America’s white citizens was reified with the 2014 police murder of John Crawford III, who was holding an airgun in a Walmart located in Ohio, an open carry state. The same is true of Philando Castile, a licensed gun owner who had just informed cops he was carrying when Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez unloaded five fatal shots into his body. (The NRA was conspicuously mum on the issue.) The Christian Science Monitor cites research from Jennifer Carlson, author of “Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline,” who noted discrepancies in the Michigan licensing practices that stood until 2015.
She found differences in how gun boards operated in Michigan's majority-black Wayne County and majority-white Oakland County. Black concealed-carry applicants in Wayne were routinely lectured and quizzed in public forums – what she calls “degradation ceremonies.” White gun owners in Oakland, meanwhile, were addressed without lectures in hearings where they could plead their case in a semi-private room. (Michigan has since done away with the gun boards.)
White folks' deep-seated fears of black folks will always ensure pushback on arms in black hands. These attitudes, it will surprise zero black people, are yet more pronounced among white gun advocates. That is, the intensity of gun fervor in white Americans often correlates directly with racist attitudes, and by extension, fears and stereotypes about black criminality, thus creating a perceived need for more guns. Researchers note that “for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism there was a 50 percent increase in the odds of having a gun at home.” Similarly, Jason McDaniel and Sean McElwee analyzed data comparing white racial resentment and gun attitudes and emerged with the near-obvious conclusion, “Opposition to gun control—like opposition to immigration, Sharia law, and ‘political correctness’—has become linked to things that racially resentful whites fear." It seems pretty likely that, were the media face of gun ownership to become black, calls to institute legislative controls would suddenly fill the halls of Congress.
By the most recent tally, just 19 percent of African-Americans have a gun in their household, compared with 41 percent of whites. But new fears about rising racist violence, an increase in the number of hate groups and the everyday transparent bigotry of the Trump administration are reportedly helping drive up the number of African-American gun buyers. Imagine that this leads to thousands, even millions, of black folks joining the NRA, applying for concealed carry licenses, starting gun clubs around the country and attempting to exercise our rights as citizens. Racism would, as it always has, perk up and put a stop to that, and fast. The official numbers aren’t yet in, but if the needle on black gun ownership noticeably moves, it will be taken as cause for alarm and time to politically act. And once again, black folks will have saved America from itself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “infamy” speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war against Japan is among the most famous in American history. In that address, though, Roosevelt did not ask for a declaration of war against Nazi Germany. Hardly anyone now remembers FDR’s remarkable statement just one week later explaining why we were fighting Hitler. It was to save the Bill of Rights.
On December 15th, 1941, the nation celebrated the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights as the first “Bill of Rights Day.” As part of that commemoration, the President delivered a ten minute radio address. These were Roosevelt’s first public comments since Hitler’s announcement—on December 11th 1941—that the Third Reich was at war with the United States. Thus, what FDR said that night was effectively our declaration of war on Nazism.
In his remarks to “Free Americans,” the President began: “No date in the long history of freedom means more to liberty-loving men in all liberty-loving countries than that fifteenth day of December, 1791. On that day, 150 years ago, a new Nation, through an elected Congress, adopted a declaration of human rights which has influenced the thinking of all mankind.” “Prior to the year 1933,” he continued, “the essentially validity of the American Bill of Rights was accepted everywhere at least in principle. But in that year 1933, there came to power in Germany a political clique which did not accept the declarations of the American bill of human rights.” “The entire program and goal of these political and moral tigers,” FDR said, “was nothing more than the overthrow, throughout the earth, of the great revolution of human liberty of which our American Bill of Rights is the mother charter.”
Roosevelt then gave his audience a grim account of life in Germany without the Bill of Rights. An individual “has no right to a soul of his own, or a mind of his own, or a tongue of his own, or a trade of his own; or even to live where he pleases or to marry the woman he loves.” Indeed, “his only duty is the duty of obedience, not to his God, not to his conscience, but to Adolf Hitler; and that his only value is his value, not as a man, but as a unit of the Nazi state.” “To Hitler,” the President went on, “the government, as we conceive it, is an impossible conception. The government to him is not the servant and the instrument of the people but their absolute master and the dictator of their every act.” “To Hitler,” he added, “the church, as we conceive it, is a monstrosity to be destroyed by every means at his command. The Nazi church is to be the National Church, a pagan church, absolutely and exclusively in the service of but one doctrine, one race, one Nation.”
The President vowed that this nightmare would not be America’s fate. “What we face, is nothing more nor less than an attempt to overthrow and to cancel out the great upsurge of human liberty of which the American Bill of Rights is the fundamental document.” “It is an attempt,” he told his listeners, “which could succeed only if those who have inherited the gift of liberty had lost the manhood to preserve it. But we Americans know that the determination of this generation of our people to preserve liberty is as fixed and certain as the determination of that early generation of Americans to win it. We will not, under any threat, or in the face of any danger, surrender the guarantees of liberty our forefathers framed for us in our Bill of Rights.” FDR concluded on this defiant note: “We covenant with each other before all the world, that having taken up arms in the defense of liberty, we will not lay them down before liberty is once again secure in the world.”
By placing the Bill of Rights at the heart of America’s cause for fighting Nazi Germany, President Roosevelt helped give the first ten constitutional amendments a special place in our national culture that they had not always possessed. Eleven years to the day after FDR’s declaration of war on Hitler, an original parchment from the First Congress containing what became the Bill of Rights was placed in the Rotunda of the National Archives alongside the original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. At that ceremony, President Harry Truman—Roosevelt’s successor—explained that “the Bill of Rights is the most important part of the Constitution of the United States—the only document in the world that protects the citizen against his Government.”
As a Florida community reels from the nation's latest mass shooting—the 18th school shooting in the first 45 days of 2018—President Donald Trump is pushing for a new federal budget that would call for cuts to programs that aim to keep guns out of the hands of people with criminal records.
The National Criminal Records History Improvement Program and the NICS Act Record Improvement Program provide funding to states to improve their reporting of domestic violence and other violent crimes in order to include perpetrators in the national background check database for gun purchases.
While not all Americans agree on gun laws, roughly 90 percent of Americans supportuniversal background checks. Trump's budget would slash funding that improves background checks by about 16 percent, from $73 million to $61 million.
"President Trump claims that he wants to build 'a safe, strong, and proud America' but his actions do not live up to his words," Robin Lloyd of Giffords, the gun safety advocacy group, told the Huffington Post. "Instead of strengthening the nation's background check system to make sure it effectively keeps guns out of dangerous hands, he slashed funding to this critically important system, which will significantly undermine its effectiveness."
The shooting that killed 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas last September offered clear evidence of the importance of a strong background check system. The gunman had been convicted of domestic abuse but the crime did not show up in a background check because the Air Force, from which he'd been discharged, hadn't entered it.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on Oct. 9, 2017.