A (or One) Skeptic

One of the cases that was decided by the Supreme Court in this last term is a case called National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC. It’s not a major case, really. It’s just another step in the direction that the Court has been heading in for a while, which will ultimately lead to billionaires just being able to buy elections. We’re not there yet. But we’re getting close.

The seismic case in this whole issue is, of course, Citizens United v. FEC, decided in 2010, in which the Court overruled the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold Act and opined that corporations were people with a 1st Amendment right to political expression.

Nonsense.

It is so self-evident that corporations are not people.

Corporations are a very useful business entity that are run by people.

Corporations do not have beliefs.

Corporations do not have feelings.

Corporations cannot be put in jail.

Corporations are less alive than our current AI models.

Corporations are run by people (who do not, by the way, have to be Americans, or be eligible to vote).

Corporations have mechanisms for how decisions are made for those corporations, but those mechanisms involve voting and other formal ways of deciding what a corporation is going to do.

So everybody knew that this was nuts.

Second, spending money is not the same thing as speech.

Spending money can amplify speech, but it does not have the nuance, the layers, the complexity of actual speech.

So everybody knows that this is also nuts.

You can think of the Citizen’s United decision being like the following scenario: imagine you’re on the Boston Common, right at the Park Street station, on a soapbox, with a bullhorn, and you’re inveighing passionately for some cause. Also on the Boston Common is a speaker system with the kind of speakers they use at Gillette Stadium, run by someone who opposes your views. While you’re shouting the speaker system is blaring the voice of your opponent at Gillette decibel levels.

The Citizen’s United decision would claim that this is fair.

Oh yes, the decision also included the rights of unions to engage in spending. Really, who cares? Unions have been on the decline for 50 years, and there’s nothing to indicate that is going to change. And the Court has been consistently anti-union (see the Janus decision if you don’t know what I mean) that it was clear this was just a distraction.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a 90 page dissent, one of the longest in the court’s history. In the dissent, he predicted, among other things, that:

• Corporations would dramatically enhance their role relative to political parties;
• Rules against coordination would be functionally  unenforced (see Elon Musk’s America PAC running Trump’s ground  game in 2024);  
• Public faith in democratic institutions would erode;
• There would be an explosion of outside political spending;
• Dark money and the collapse of transparency would follow;
• Congress and the states would be crippled in their ability to respond.

All of these have proven to be true.

And it turns out that Justice Anthony Kennedy (as with so many conservative opinions) was just not attached to reality.

Which brings us to the National Republican Senatorial Committee case. This one is not a game changer, as I’ve already previously said. It just takes us another step in the direction of billionaires being able to buy elections. At issue here were limits on coordinated spending between national party committees and individual candidates, enacted in 1972 after President Nixon tried to get members of the dairy industry to pledge $2 million to his campaign in exchange for his promise to push for price supports for the milk industry. This is the kind of quid pro quo transaction the Congress wanted to prevent. And that was still in place until the Supreme Court decimated it. 

Technically, the majority held that political-party coordinated-expenditure limits violated the First Amendment, because they were “not proportionate, necessary, or narrowly tailored” given the other less-speech-restrictive tools available to the government.

Okay, whatever.

This would only be convincing if there was an ounce of credibility to the notion that corporations have “beliefs” and spending gazillions of dollars constitutes “speech.”

I do need to point out several particular ironies with the conservative line of thinking on this that we haven’t discussed before: 

First, in a world where conservatives are in paroxysms about the possibility that one “illegal” alien may have voted someplace somewhere at some point in time, they have no way of assuring (or even seem to be concerned) that Russian mobsters aren’t using a series of shell companies or 501(c)(4) organizations to send oodles of money to American political campaigns. Even for something less nefarious, like when the Irish boss of a multinational corporation —who is not an American citizen or eligible to vote — makes decisions on where and when his corporation makes donations to American political action committees, they’re not concerned.

Second, corporate officers and directors are getting a second bite of the apple that the rest of us don’t get. They already have the ability to spend as much as $7000 ($3500 for a primary and another $3500 for a general election) to support any given candidate during a two-year election cycle. Nothing prohibits them from compiling a curated list of 1000 political candidates they want to support — now, with the help of AI this would be easy-breezy — so they could theoretically spend $7 million (or more) on their chosen candidates in one election cycle. And now, they also get to decide whom their corporations are going to support.

Finally, the “appearance of corruption” problem. This cat has been out of the bag for a long time and there will be no stuffing it back in. What is by now clear to even the most casual observer that billionaires can simply buy elections. Elon Musk was the single largest donor of the 2024 election cycle, backing Trump through a super PAC which he founded and funded and gave roughly $250 million total to support Trump’s campaign. That PAC ran get-out-the-vote operations in swing states, paid canvassers, and ran ads. 

Or take the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis. After Citizen’s United the financial industry began dumping money into both Republican and Democratic campaigns. The housing bubble bursts, the “too big to fail” banks are rescued, no banker goes to jail.

This is what people see. Nobody believes that money has not corrupted the entire process and nobody believes that any of the “protections” that Kavanaugh cites have any actual meaning.

I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks trying to unpack what the Supreme Court did at the end of its last term, because the Court did a lot. But let’s take it one step at a time. 

So first of all, we need to celebrate our victories, and in Trump v. Barbara (June 30, 2026) we have a complete victory on the “birthright citizenship” question. 

People have argued about whether the decision was 6-3 or 5-4 or 5-1-3 (it was 5-1-3) but the point is that it was a victory. Chief Justice Roberts gave birthright citizenship a full-throated endorsement, and he was joined in that endorsement by the three liberal justices and Amy Coney Barrett. 

The issue is now settled. It doesn’t matter that the score was closer than it should have been because it’s not coming back to the Supreme Court anytime soon. And, in the process, both Alito and Thomas opened themselves up to strong judicial critiques that challenge their scholarship (although I realize it won’t really matter to them).

In any case, Roberts wrote a historically grounded majority opinion tracing an unbroken line from English common law through the leading case of Wong Kim Ark to the present. The three dissenting Justices each have specific vulnerabilities. 

Thomas argued the Citizenship Clause was a race-specific remedial measure aimed only at freed slaves (which contradicts his decades-long insistence on a colorblind Constitution). Thomas’s position also produces a logical absurdity: if the Clause applied only to freed slaves, then its operative force was exhausted when the last freed slave died, making it a constitutional dead letter applicable to nobody alive today.

Alito’s separate dissent advanced an “allegiance theory” under which a person can be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States only if they owe their complete and exclusive allegiance to the United States. However, the allegiance theory has a serious logical vulnerability: if exclusive allegiance is constitutionally required, then dual citizens (of whom there are an estimated 7 to 15 million in the United States) might be deprived of their citizenship altogether, and would no longer have the protections of the 14th amendment (or frankly any other amendment).

Kavanaugh’s concurrence resolved the case on the narrowest possible grounds: that the executive order violates a federal statute (8 U.S.C. §1401(a), enacted as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952). He essentially played coy and never reached the constitutional question. 

That’s why the score is 5-1-3.

There were some outraged memes about why, if the 14th Amendment only applies to freed slaves, doesn’t the 2nd Amendment only apply to muskets.

Point taken.

Thomas is an extreme ideologically-driven hypocrite, and one could write a book about it.

People already have.

But in this case he lost.

So today we don’t have to worry about what a nut job he is. We can postpone that worry until the next Supreme Court term begins in October and it turns out that Thomas is still alive.

But birthright citizenship is here to stay, and this is a win for the good guys.

With today’s decision allowing the state of Alabama to go back to using its racially gerrymandered congressional map in the wake of the decision in Louisiana v. Callais (April 29, 2026), the Supreme court has now specifically allowed Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama to use these new maps, which Republicans think will buy them an advantage.

Maybe, maybe not.

(The Callais decision also effectively greenlighted redistricting in Florida, Tennessee, and potentially others without further SCOTUS action needed.) 

The danger for Republicans in this strategy is clear. As a share of all 204.6 million registered voters nationally, only 43% of registered voters have declared a party affiliation at all. Of those who have, roughly 45.4 million are Democrats and 39.2 million Republicans. The rest are either unaffiliated or in states that don’t collect party data. 

So the general national picture, where data exists, is roughly Democrat ~37%, Republican ~31%, Independent/unaffiliated ~28–32% (with independents the fastest-growing group by a wide margin).

Notice that Democratic registration exceeds Republican registration nationally by about 6%. That is not nothing (although these shares have clearly been substantially diluted by Republican gerrymandering, which has been far more aggressive than Democratic gerrymandering).

We Democrats love to fight our battles with one hand tied behind our back.

But, by gerrymandering so aggressively, Republicans have also created many districts where their traditional 10 point advantage with voters leaning Republican are now only a 2 or 3 point advantage. 

It doesn’t take that big a swing (especially with Independent voters) for those advantages to be wiped out in states where we’re looking at a 2 or 3 point differential. And if things keep going as they are now — closed state of Hormuz, gas prices still climbing, grocery prices still climbing, and a President who has explicitly stated that he doesn’t give a shit about how the regular people are faring economically — for this to be a historically difficult election for Republicans.

Is that a guarantee?

Of course not.

Republicans have done alarmingly well whenever Trump has been at the top of their ticket.

But he won’t be at the top of their ticket this time around.

Republicans currently hold a 218–214 majority in the House, with 3 vacancies. That’s an effective margin of just 4 seats. Democrats need to gain a net of only 3 districts to win a majority, while Republicans can lose no more than 2 districts and retain control.

I’m just saying.

Be careful what you wish for, my Republican friends.

The Texas Republican party, as is by now well known, decided to nominate their current Attorney General Ken Paxton to be their candidate to replace outgoing Senator John Cornyn in the Senate. Cornyn has served in the Senate since 2002, and will have served 24 years when he leaves office. He is a mainstream Republican and reported fundraising machine, none of which helped him in his primary effort against Paxton. He will be 74 years old when he leaves office.

Paxton, who has been Attorney General since 2015 (and is this the chief law enforcement officer in Texas) has compiled a rather concerning record of legal troubles and infractions. To wit:

• In 2011 Paxton — then a state legislator — encouraged other legislators to invest in McKinney-based company Servergy without disclosing that the startup was paying him to do so. Subsequently (while running for Attorney General) the Texas Securities Board reprimanded him and fined him $1,000 for soliciting investment clients without being registered as required by law. Paxton admitted wrongdoing but chalked it up to administrative oversight.
• In 2014  there was a minor (but telling) incident when Paxton pocketed a $1,000 Montblanc pen that had been mistakenly left by a lawyer at a courthouse metal detector. Security footage revealed Paxton had pocketed it. After a phone call, he returned the pen.
• In 2015, just a few months into Paxton’s tenure as Texas Attorney General, a grand jury indicted him on felony charges of duping investors in a tech company. He was accused of recruiting more than $840,000 from investors while not disclosing that the startup was paying him to do so. He pleaded not guilty. The case was ultimately resolved through a pretrial diversion agreement rather than a trial verdict. 
• In 2016-2017 the U.S. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission also filed a civil lawsuit against Paxton in connection with the fraud accusations, but that suit was dismissed by a federal judge because of technical defects in the complaint. (The dismissal did not resolve the separate state criminal case, which continued for years afterward.)
• In 2020 seven top employees in Paxton’s office reported him to federal investigators, alleging he had abused his position as Texas AG to assist Austin real estate developer Nate Paul (who had also donated to his campaign). Some deputies resigned; four who were fired later filed a whistleblower lawsuit.
• In 2023 the Texas House impeached Paxton after it unveiled 20 articles of impeachment based on abuse of office and bribery charges. The House voted 121–23 to impeach Paxton — only the third time in history the legislative body had impeached an official — suspending him from office. The allegations centered on Paxton using his office to benefit Nate Paul, interference in federal investigations, and retaliation against the whistleblowers who reported him.
• The Texas Senate subsequently acquitted Paxton 16-14 on most of the articles (a few received less support). Trump had openly pressured senators to acquit Paxton.
• In 2024 his state securities fraud case was finally resolved. A pretrial agreement was entered in March 2024, requiring him to complete community service and pay restitution. Paxton did not have to enter a plea under the deal. Specifically, he was ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution and complete 100 hours of community service and 15 hours of legal ethics education.
• In 2025 a Travis County district court judge agreed the former aides were improperly fired and awarded them $6.6 million on their whistleblower charges.

And that, my friends, is your Republican Senate candidate from Texas.

The Republican party in Texas poured a lot of resources into Cornyn’s campaign, but he got smoked nonetheless. The final tally was Ken Paxton 63.5% and John Cornyn 36.5%. Cornyn tried to curry favor with Trump in the last months of the campaign to no avail. Trump endorsed Paxton, who is his kind of guy.

Now Paxton faces off against James Talarico, a fresh-faced Bible-quoting 37 year old 8th generation Texan, in a race that is likely to be genuinely competitive. The RNC will be pouring a lot of resources into this race, and are already up to their dirty tricks, implying that Talarico is transgender and (gasp!) a vegan. But Texas will be in play for the first time in a long time, so there’s good news in that.

From the first time that I ever heard of Donald Trump — and honestly, I don’t remember exactly when that was, but it was probably through People Magazine — I thought that he was an obnoxious character, the poster child for the “Ugly American.” Since then, of course, my opinion of him has gone lower and lower.

But even I never thought that I’d see something this ridiculous.

Trump, as is well known, doesn’t know a single Bible-verse. If he believes in anything he believes in the “Prosperity Gospel,” a religious movement, primarily within Protestant Christianity, that teaches a direct link between faith, financial giving, and material wealth. 

The central teaching of that “gospel”  is that God rewards true believers with financial prosperity, physical health, and worldly success. Adherents believe among other things that financial wealth is a sign of God’s favor and blessing, that poverty or illness reflects insufficient faith or spiritual failure, and that positive confession — speaking success and wealth into existence through prayer — can materially alter one’s circumstances.

In other words, it’s perfect for Trump.

This image was actually too much even for many in the evangelical community, and Trump actually took it down. But imagine the level of delusion that somebody must have to post something like this. Just imagine!

Having established in Part 1 of this two-part essay that Republicans have abandoned or reversed many of their proclaimed principles in their support of President Trump, it’s time to look at the most common explanation: identity fusion.

Identity Fusion

Identity Fusion is a psychological concept describing a state where a person’s sense of personal identity becomes deeply merged with a group identity.  While most people identify with groups (such as a sports team, a nation, a religion) they still maintain a clear sense of themselves as separate individuals. In identity fusion, that separation breaks down.  Research suggests identity fusion is often triggered through shared suffering or hardship. 

Some psychologists have proposed the idea that human reasoning didn’t evolve primarily to find truth, but to win arguments and justify our existing positions to others. People naturally seek, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm what they already believe. When presented with contradictory evidence, many people actually dig in harder (a well-documented phenomenon called the backfire effect or belief perseverance). Jonathan Haidt‘s work suggests that moral and social judgments are largely made intuitively and emotionally first, with conscious reasoning coming in afterward to rationalize the conclusion already reached. A number of experts have speculated that it is one of the reasons that a substantial minority of Trump supporters will not stop supporting him, regardless of what he does.

So, what is it about Trump, his personality, his character that their identities have been fused with? This is the question that we’re trying to address today. There are two groups in particujlar who have been noted for their hard-core, unshakeable support of Trump: (1) evangelical Christians and (2) working class white men.

Evangelical Christians

Evangelical Christianity is a broad Protestant movement that is spread across Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and many non-denominational churches. What sets it apart is the emphasis placed on a conscious, personal decision to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Being “born again” is generally considered essential, not just nominal church membership or infant baptism. Faith is understood as a personal relationship with God, not primarily with an institutional or inherited identity. While mostly politically conservative, especially in the United States, are evangelical there is actually a broad spectrum of political beliefs that are part of evangelicism.

In any case, for evangelicals who do feel fused with Trump,  here are the primary reasons that it appears that they do so:

1. They see Trump as an “embattled protector,” who defends them against a hostile American culture that is dismissive of traditional morality.
2. They have shared grievances and a persecution identity, and view themselves as being under attack (especially from the legacy media).
3. They see his norm-breaking behavior as a rejection of elite moral gatekeeping and admire his willingness to use power unapologetically.
4. They also admire his protection of hierarchy and authority, emphasizing strong masculine leadership and order over pluralism.
5. They overlook his personal failings and see Trump as an “imperfect vessel” to achieve a righteous purpose.

White Working-Class Men

It is not only evangelicals that feel fused with Trump, but also other groups. In particular white men without college degrees. The key reasons for this appear to be (1) economic nationalism and the belief that their jobs have been taken by immigrants; (2) perceived loss of cultural status; and (3) the pervasive sense that others have advanced at their expense. (There is also some overlap, obviously, with the resentments of evangelical Christians, previously cataloged.)

Not all of Trump’s supporters are fused with his identity. Those who are not are (frankly) easier to cleave away from Trump and are the ones who are most likely now to be saying “I didn’t vote for this” (Yes you did, but we’ll save that argument for another day). Other groups and their general reasons for supporting Trump include (1) traditional conservatives who support Trump primarily because he is anti-regulation and opposed to “woke” or progressive social norms; (2) conservative Catholics who are primarily concerned about abortion and gender questions; (3) anti-establishment voters who distrust government, media, and elites, and who love the fact that Trump “disrupts” the political system; and (4) suburban and business-oriented Republicans (often college-educated and higher income) whose primary motivations may be tax policy and deregulation.

Also, it must also be acknowledged that racism is an important factor in support for Trump. How important a factor is currently part of a heated debate. There is plenty of evidence that “racial resentment” is often highly correlated with support forTrump. On the other hand, it is also true that Trump increased his support from Black and Hispanic voters from 2016 to 2020 and again from 2020 to 2024. Significant numbers of Trump voters previously voted for Obama in 2008 or 2012. Economic anxiety, cultural displacement, distrust of institutions, and a sense that coastal elites look down on working-class Americans all appear to be significant independent factors. 

But still, the racial resentment is what it is.

The Cruelty Question

Finally, the thing that has always struck me personally is how cruel President Trump is. It’s hard not to notice. For some of his voters, the cruelty is clearly the point. And there is actual evidence for this in surveys and polls: a well-documented motivator for some Trump supporters is causing distress to people they dislike. It’s why they’re so delighted in “owning the libs.” It’s confirmed by rally behavior that we’ve all seen, such as when Trump mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski during his first campaign. And “owning” after all is about “dominating,” “defeating” and (especially) “humiliating” those we don’t like.

Conservatives have justifiably felt some resentment at us on the left for condescending to them. We have made mistakes, no question. But after inflicting this incompetent malignant narcissist on the rest of us for another four years, our resentment is also completely justifiable. As fans of relationship psychologist John Gottman know, there is no more destructive emotion in any kind of relationship, whether personal or more global, than contempt. And let’s be honest, that’s what we’re all feeling for each other these days. It’s going to take a long, long time to repair this situation.

Well, by now it’s clear that there is not a single thing that the MAGAverse and Trump supporters used to claim that they believed in that they are not willing to disregard or contradict. The whole thing has become almost comical, as the scale and breadth of their hypocrisy becomes apparent. When the contradictions become so stark and obvious, even the most sophisticated cognitive gymnastics will eventually break down. The “don’t tread on me” crowd has turned into a “comply or die” crowd at a whiplash-inducing speed. 

This is the first part of a two-part article that will first examine the hypocrisy itself. The second part will look into some of the psychological reasons for the loyalty of the MAGA crowd, a lot of which centers on identity fusion. Set forth below are examples where Republicans completely threw out beliefs that they allegedly stood by.

Juan Orlando Hernández vs Nicolas Maduro

In December of 2025 Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former President of Honduras. When asked about why he pardoned him, Trump mumbled that claiming he had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” and that his prosecution was a political “setup” by the Biden administration, even though Hernández had been convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and related firearms offenses in a federal district court. In trying to justify his decision to capture Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Trump initially talked about Venezuela as a narco‑terrorist operation and framed the surrounding military campaign as a major anti‑drug effort. Trump then pivoted to admitting that he wanted to have Venezuela’s oil — estimated to be the largest in the world — and claimed (without evidence) that U.S. oil companies would rebuild Venezuela’s infrastructure and that the intervention “won’t cost us anything.” Where were the Republican objections when Hernández was pardoned? Nowhere in sight.

Ashli Babbit vs Rene Good

Ashli Babbit, a 35 year old Air Force veteran, was part of the mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Babbitt was part of the group that reached the Speaker’s Lobby, a hallway directly adjacent to the House chamber. This area had been barricaded with furniture by officers attempting to prevent the mob from entering. To gain entrance, the rioters smashed the glass panes with flagpoles, and other objects. Babbit tried to climb through whereupon USCP Lt. Michael Byrd fired a single shot into her shoulder. A subsequent investigation found (1) that Lt. Byrd reasonably believed he was defending members of Congress and officers from imminent harm, and (2) the mob was actively attempting to breach the final barrier protecting the House chamber.

Exactly five years and one day later, Rene Good, a 37‑year‑old Minneapolis resident and mother of three, was sitting in her Honda Pilot, stopped sideways in the street, as part of the group of people who were observing ICE operations in Minneapolis. ICE agents then yelled contradictory instructions at her, including one that demanded she get out of the car. Good briefly reversed her vehicle, then began moving forward very slowly and to the right, turning away from ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who ultimately fired on her with three shots, killing her. If that wasn’t enough, Ross called her a “fucking bitch” and refused to allow her medical treatment, even though a physician was on the scene. She bled to death in her car.

Yet conservatives somehow see the killing of Rene Good as justified while seeing the shooting of Ashli Babbit as unjustified. They went from “don’t tread on me” to “comply or die” in a microsecond.

Kyle Rittenhouse vs Alex Pretti

Kyle Rittenhouse is the young man, 17 years old at the time, who, on the night of August 25, 2020, brought a Smith & Wesson AR‑style semiautomatic rifle to Kenosha, WI, where he did not live. There were “black lives matter” protests (including some property damage) were occurring after the police shooting of Jacob Blake. During various encounters Rittenhouse fired on  and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, then fired on and killed Anthony Huber, and finally fired on but only injured Gaige Grosskreutz. In November 2021, a jury acquitted him on all charges, where in all three cases Rittenhouse had claimed self-defense because someone was allegedly trying to disarm him. 

Five-and-a-half years later we have the murder of Alex Pretti. On January 24, 2026, around 9:00 a.m., Pretti, a 37-year old ICU Nurse, was directing traffic around federal vehicles and filming federal agents with his phone in Minneapolis, only about two miles from where George Floyd had been suffocated to death back in 2020. At one point, he stood between an agent and a woman whom the agent had pushed to the ground, placing his arm around her protectively. As a consequence agents pepper-sprayed Pretti, and wrestled him to the ground, removed the gun that Pretti was legally carrying, and then fired at least ten shots within five seconds, continuing even after Pretti lay motionless. The two agents who were identified as having shot Pretti are two experienced border agents from South Texas who, somewhat ironically, are named Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez.

And what happened to the right’s ferocious defense of the Second Amendment? It went right out the window. Suddenly no one is allowed to bring a gun to a protest. Under the new rules of engagement a uniformed officer could have shot Kyle Rittenhouse dead, no questions asked.

Iran War vs. Other Middle-East Wars

One of the memes that was floating around since Trump joined Israel in attacking Iran on February 28th is that if we voted for Kamala Harris oil prices would spike and the USA would start a new war with Iran, and indeed, many of us voted for Kamala and indeed oil prices have spiked and we started a new war with Iran. One of Trump’s principal campaign promises was that  he would get us out of “forever wars” in the Middle East — even though in November of 2024 we were not in any forever war in the Middle East — and that he would not start any new wars.

And here we are.

Trump’s rationale for starting a war with Iran has been a moving target if there ever was one. At first it was alleged to be regime change and eliminating the nuclear threat (even though Trump alleged he had done that already last year), but after assassinating Ayatollah Khamenei and some of his top leadership team, it turns out he’s been replaced by Mojtaba Khamenei, his own son, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is effectively still in command. Trump has literally trotted out various arguments in calls to different journalists to see how they would “play” with those journalists. Trump’s justifications include, among other things (1) an “imminent threat” self-defense rationale, claiming that Iran was about to attack various Western targets; (2) that Iran had gone back to building up its nuclear program (even though the program had been “obliterated” in last year’s attacks); (3) a regime change and liberation narrative under which the Iranian people would be liberated from radical dictatorship  and could “take over” their own governmen; (4) an economic resource argument, under which Trump and the United States would take control of Iranian oil; and (5) a religious framing of the attacks as a holy war intended to bring about the return of Jesus and the Rapture (this idea has been promoted more by Pete Hegseth than Trump himself)

Of course, the most likely rationale for attacking when he did was that it represented a “wag the dog” strategy to distract from the Epstein files. Also, Bibi Netanyahu saw an opportunity to take out the Iranian regime, which has been a thorn in Natanyahu’s side for a very long time. Iran has been in support of a number of quasi-state actors — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, the Houthis in Yemen, the Al-Ashtar Brigades in Bahrain, and various Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria — that have long wanted to drive the Israelis back into the sea.

Regardless, it is clear by now that Trump joined the attack on Iran impulsively, at the urging of Netanyahu, with no backup plan, despite the fact that people warned him that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz. And with no exit strategy. He is reported to be “already bored” with the war, which he thought he would complete as quickly as the raid on the leadership of Venezuela.

Qanon vs Epstein Files

And last but not least, we have Qanon vs the Epstein files. QAnon is, of course, a wide-ranging conspiracy theory movement that began in 2017 on anonymous message boards which posits that there is a secret global cabal of powerful elites that control governments, media, finance, and culture, and who are running a child-trafficking networks, harvesting children’s blood for rejuvenation, and manipulating world events for personal gain. There is no actual evidence for the Qanon theory.

The Epstein files, on the other hand, refers to several different sets of documents, released at different times by courts, the Department of Justice, and investigative reporters all dealing with the activities of financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. These include court-ordered releases (Giuffre v. Maxwell), DOJ releases from the criminal investigations, materials seized from Epstein’s properties, and redacted court filings from related civil suits. The most recent releases are those from the Department of Justice pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law on November 19, 2025.

Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign centered on several recurring themes, and these included (1) the restoration of a “lost” America (Make America Great Again), (2) immigration and border security, (3) the cost of living and economic nationalism, (4) retribution and anti-establishment grievances (especially against  his personal enemies) (5) opposition to foreign wars (6) opposition to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and other culture war issues, and (7) a promise to release the Epstein files. This promise fit naturally into his campaign themes around exposing a corrupt elite.

All thinking people know by now that Trump is actually the personification of a corrupt elite. It’s estimated that Trump and his family have increased their wealth by $1.4 to $1.8 billion since his return to office, but it could be as high as $3 to $4 billion. We won’t know until Trump is out of office and we have a chance to examine the various ways his family ended up making money. Like Trump’s taxes, we may never know.

As for the Epstein files, there are as many as 38,000 references to Donald Trump, according to multiple outlets reviewing the publicly released and redacted document cache from the Department of Justice, which is more than anyone other than Ghislane Maxwell and Epstein himself.

Republicans have responded awkwardly to the disclosures, and certainly not in unison. At various points members have called for full transparency, have argued that mentions are not evidence, have accused Democrats of politicizing the issue, and have urged the DOJ to release all the remaining documents.

Every accusation is a confession. That seems to be the new slogan when it comes to Republicans accusing Democrats, conservatives accusing liberals and progressives.

After what he posted in the wake of the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle by their very own son, our Cryto-pedohile piece of excrement of a President really has hit a new low. Rob Reiner and his wife died in about as cruel a fashion as you can die: being knifed to death by one of his own kids. Imagine lying there, with the life ebbing out of you, knowing that one of your own kids had done this to you.

And what did President Trump do? Made it all about him.

Trump has, of course, done many worse things which will have an impact on many more people, but in terms of personal behavior, it doesn’t really get lower than this. According to Trump, the cause of Reiner’s death was the “massive, unyielding, incurable affliction called TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

At this point, anyone who does not have Trump Derangement Syndrome is no longer a sentient human being. This guy is so hopelessly out of touch, so intentionally cruel, so blatantly self-deluded, that any sentient human being would be revolted by his presence. In the same post, Trump goes on to crow that the Trump administration has “surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness,” with the “Golden Age of America upon us.” Somehow, miraculously, Trump and his obsession with tariffs has not yet wrecked the American economy. (Why that is so will be the subject of a future post.) 

Trump really is disassociated from reality. I don’t know if the problem is that he can no longer discern reality or he can no longer say anything truthful because it is too painful for his fragile ego to bear. Is his cognitive dissonance so strong that anything but complete fantasy is unacceptable?

Regardless of what is true for Trump personally, the majority of Republican professionals clearly have a much better sense of the truth than he does. These Profiles in Cowardice will eventually have to answer for their crimes, but that may be too little too late. It will be to our everlasting shame that this piece of shit is the President of the United States, is the “leader of the free world,” is supposed to be an exemplar of morality for the rest of us.

MAGA Republicans, every day that you defend and excuse this guy, every day that you also claim to be part of a “Christian” nation, you piss away the very little credibility you have left. No one is going to care about you anymore. We’ll all be like, “can’t afford health care?”, “losing your family farm?,” “having an ectopic pregnancy?”, well too bad. Good luck getting that sorted out in the state where you come from.

We’re done already. After three more years of this guy, we will be unrecoverable.

You might have missed it, but a sad event took place last week in the legal cases against Donald Trump. It was the final dismissal of the case in Georgia. The one where they had Trump on tape, saying,

“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. I just want to find 11,780 votes. Give me a break fellas.”

They had this mothereffer on tape! They had him on tape!

And we still didn’t get a conviction.

So, let’s review. The Georgia case was one of the four cases that together, accounted for Trump’s 91 indictments.

1. The case in New York, in which Trump was accused of the falsification of business records to hide his payments to Stormy Daniels, and which led to his conviction on 34 counts.
2. The case in Florida, in which Trump was accused of mishandling classified documents, which Judge Aileen Canon slow-walked to death.
3. The case in Washington D.C. stemming directly from the January 6th insurrection, which eventually also ran out of time, despite Jack Smith’s best efforts.
4. This Georgia case, brought by D.A. Fani Willis, revolving around Trump’s phone call and the conspiracy to overturn votes in Georgia.

The Georgia case had one big advantage, which is that it was brought under state law, so that Trump would not be able to pardon himself.

From the start, Fani Willis made several mistakes. First, she made the case too large. It eventually involved a conspiracy between 18 named defendants, plus Trump, which made it a behemoth to prosecute. Second, she began a romantic relationship with her lead prosecutor, Nathan Wade.

Oh boy.

Wade had been hired in November of 2021 as a “special” prosecutor to help oversee this large and complicated case. This romantic relationship was a nothingburger, it made  no difference to the prosecution of Trump. It was less of an ethical conflict than Trump engages in every single day. And yet, it derailed the case.

First, it should be acknowledged that it’s generally a bad idea for anyone at the top of a chain of command to get romantically involved with a subordinate. 

In short, Fani Willis should have known better.

But there was no actual ethical or financial conflict.

Some of the attorneys for defendants other than Trump alleged (without proving) that the arrangement was akin to a “quasi-kickback scheme” because Wade (who was being paid by Willis’s office for his work on the case) used some of those earnings to fund shared vacations with Willis.

This is absurd. It presupposes that Wade chose to prosecute people because he wanted more money from Willis’ office, whereas the reality was that Willis had had trouble finding someone willing to undertake this massive and complicated prosecution in a very politically charged environment. All indications are that she became involved with Willis sometime after he came on board.

Nevertheless, on March 15, 2024, trial judge Scott F. McAfee ruled that Willis’s relationship with Wade created a “significant appearance of impropriety,” which caused Wade to resign from the case.

Not good enough for the Georgia Court of Appeals, which ruled 2–1 in December that Willis (and her entire office) still had to be disqualified due to the “appearance of impropriety” arising from her relationship with Wade.

Willis appealed, but later the Supreme Court of Georgia declined to take up the case, thereby making the disqualification final. That triggered the transfer of the case to a new prosecutor, in this case Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.

He, in turn, decided this week that “there is no realistic prospect that a sitting President will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial,” so it would be “futile and unproductive” to push forward with the case.

He’s not wrong about that.

Also, complicating the case now is the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, which would have required the courts to litigate which of the president’s many bad behaviors counts as “official acts” and is therefore immune from prosecution.

Commentators noted that Skandalakis’s decision to drop the charges was “not surprising” since his agency does not have the resources to prosecute such a complex case with numerous co-defendants.

Fani Willis, in the meantime, was re-elected District Attorney of Fulton County in November of 2024 with 68.1% of the vote, contradicting the notion that her voters were upset with her for her indiscretion with Nathan Wade.

Far from being the victim of a “witch hunt,” Trump has proven, again and again, to basically be the luckiest son-of-a-bitch alive with respect to legal matters. By now it’s clear that he’s never going to see the inside of a jail cell, and frankly it would be impractical (if not just impossible) to imprison a former President with his secret service protection. But the same is not true for most of Trump’s subordinates and associates.

Trump will die a very rich man, and maybe the greatest grifter of all time. 

From now on, it can never again be said that “no one is above the law.” Clearly Trump is above the law. He is the cherry on top of a massively distorted legal system in which the powerless are punished and the powerful mostly get away scot free. It will be interesting to see if the legal system ever catches up with the flagrantly corrupt Elon Musk. I’m not betting on that.

As we wait for the release of the Epstein files, a question arises as to how and why these particular files became so important. We have to set some context for all of this. Epstein wasn’t the first and won’t be the last powerful rich white guy to take advantage of women.

Pizzagate

For context, let’s go back to the “Pizzagate” conspiracy in which Qanon followers and other MAGA types came to believe that Democrats were running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza shop in Washington D.C. 

Huh?

How did they come to believe this?

Well, that turns out to be a long story, and involves John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair, whose personal Gmail was hacked and published by WikiLeaks. In those emails there were a bunch of references to people ordering pizza at a D.C. restaurant called Comet Ping Pong (which has ping pong tables inside). For some reason a lot of right wing types decided that the references to pizza were actually references to child abuse, and that the restaurant was the center of a child prostitution ring.

Why did they decide this?

Who the hell knows.

It’s what happens when you become more and more detached from reality.

Eventually, on December 4, 2016, 28-year old Edgar Maddison Welch drove to Washington D.C. from North Carolina, armed with an AR-15-style rifle and a .38-caliber handgun, to “save the children.” Miraculously, he didn’t kill anyone. 

That really should have been the end of it.

But, of course it wasn’t.

Epstein’s Island

MAGA conspiracy theorists were still convinced that Democrats were somehow promoting child sex rings and child pornography, and switched their inquiry to their involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. In particular, Qanon followers believe that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic child molesters in league with the “deep state” is operating a global child sex trafficking ring, and that Donald Trump is secretly leading the fight against them.

As if!

Epstein — although largely non-denominational — has (of course) been a long-time close friend of Donald Trump. There are many photos of Epstein and his “girlfriend” Ghislane Maxwell hanging out with Donald and Melania Trump. At some point, in the mid 2000’s, Trump and Epstein had a falling out. It’s not clear why. Competing theories include (1) that Epstein “took” spa staff from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, and (2) that it was the result of a real-estate conflict when Trump and Epstein both bid for the same Palm Beach property (Maison de L’Amitie) and fell out over it.

Who knows.

Their relationship had clearly soured by the time Trump became President.

Bill Clinton and Other Democrats

Now, why do so many MAGA types believe so ardently that Epstein was intimately involved with Democrats?

Again, who knows for sure. Some of it seems to have to do with their animus against Bill Clinton, who did have contact with Jeffrey Epstein — although never as much as President Trump — and their general belief that Democrats are somehow sordid and immoral.

Whatever.

For his part, Bill Clinton had limited contact with Jeffrey Epstein. What is verified is that Clinton took several flights on Epstein’s private jet in the period around 2002–2003, in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation. Epstein also visited the White House during Clinton’s presidency. Records show Epstein made multiple visits between 1993–1995 when Clinton was President. But that was well before his June 30, 2008 guilty plea to “Solicitation of prostitution” and “Solicitation of prostitution with a minor” charges in Florida state court.

Having more contact and viewing him as a personal friend was Larry Summers, the former President of Harvard and United States Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton. But even with Summers there is no evidence that Summers knew of Epstein’s sex trafficking, or did anything illegal. 

Then there is Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel. The former leader of the Labor Party, Barak is neither American nor a Democrat. But he’s a “progressive.” Again, there is no evidence that Barak knew of or participated in Epstein’s illegal activities.

Scientific Funding

Like a lot of bad people, Epstein was a complicated guy. On the plus side, he contributed enormously to the funding of scientific research. For example:

• Epstein was a significant private donor to MIT’s Media Lab, and is known to have contributed $525,000 personally, another $250,000 from his foundation, and another $125,000 from other donors he “solicited.”
• Epstein donated approximately $6.5 million to Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.
• Epstein donated somewhere between $250k–$500k to The Santa Fe Institute, which focuses on complexity science.
• Epstein donated approximately $500,000 to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
• Epstein donated to various individual scientists, including Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss (Arizona State University), Marvin Minsky (MIT), and George Church (Harvard geneticist)
• Epstein funded or hosted private scientific gatherings in the Virgin Islands and New Mexico, and including on his own island.

At the time that all of these luminaries were seeking funding from Epstein, he had only been convicted of two solicitation offenses. Should they all have refused to do business with him at the time?

Now we know, in light of the 2019 investigation into his sex trafficking of minors and related charges that Epstein had engaged in very bad things. But that is a post-hoc realization, after his “suicide” while waiting for the charges to be resolved.

Trump’s Pledges

During the 2024 campaign Trump promised several times to “release” the Epstein “files” as part of an overall pledge of transparency and open government. He apparently thought, at the time, that there would be material embarrassing to the Democrats in those releases. But, as is typical of Trump, they were not clear promises, just vague assertions. In June 2024, on Fox & Friends, when asked “Would you declassify the Epstein files?” Trump said “Yeah, yeah, I would.” In September 2024, on the Lex Fridman podcast, he said he would “certainly take a look at it,” and that he’d “have no problem” releasing additional Epstein-related documents. Still, this is what his MAGA supporters determined he would do.

By the time he was in office and Pam Bondi had had a chance to look at what was in the “files” — and it’s not exactly clear what the files encompass — they must have had a change of heart. 

But by then everybody, including his supporters, really wanted to know what’s in those files.

For example, people want to know what it meant when Mark Epstein wrote to his brother “Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba?” (That email appears in a set of documents released in November 2025 from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein to the House of Representatives in response to a subpoena.)

Now that the Epstein Transparency Bill has been signed into law, I guess we’ll find out the answer to some of these questions. The materials are more likely to be embarrassing  to Trump than to Democrats, and having made such a show of refusing to release them — including having his boy, Speaker Mike Johnson refuse to swear in Adelita Grijalva for 50 days after her special election victory on September 23, 2025 — people really want to see what the hell is in these files.