A (or One) Skeptic

With this week’s histrionics before Senate Rand Paul’s Committee, it begs the question as to why we’re relitigating the Covid pandemic now, six years, four months and 21 days after it officially started over here.

Are Republicans still mad about mask mandates and school closures now?

And they call us snowflakes?

It seems like there’s a good chance that this is a kind of “wag the dog” distraction from the fact that Donald Trump has exacerbated inflation and that there is no end in sight for his useless war with Iran. 

Otherwise, what’s the point?

First of all, Trump’s contribution to “Operation Warp Speed” is one of the very few successes of his first term as President. At that point, he and Fauci were actually on the same side.

Second of all, Fauci did not impose mask mandates or social distancing requirements or mandatory vaccinations. That was mostly done by various governors and mayors and the CEO’s of hospitals and the like.

Also, who gives a shit whether the Covid started in a wet market or at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? It can’t be proven definitely one way or another. The better science, I am told — and unlike a lot of MAGA types, I’m no fucking virologist — is that it started in a wet market. But if it had started at the Institute, so what? 

Also, the Institute is a research facility under the Wuhan Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It’s not under Fauci’s control, or, for that matter, anyone in the United States government. Fauci served as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and NIAID provided some funding to the Institute through the EcoHealth Alliance. Some of that funding supported coronavirus research involving collaborators at the Institute, and some of that work might have involved “gain-of-function” research.

Also, NIAID did not fund research that would have been prohibited under U.S. policies. This research is used to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics. It is not illegal in any sense of the word.

Now, did Fauci make some mistakes along the way? Of course, who doesn’t? One of them was clearly to leave a kind of “diary” on the servers of Health and Human Services. 

Does he exhibit a certain amount of hubris in those diaries? Yes he does. 

Is that unfortunate? Yes it is.

But as one of my friends likes to say, the last guy who was perfect and they nailed him to a cross.

People seem to forget the scope of this pandemic. It was worldwide.

There were 350 vaccine candidates that entered preclinical or clinical development, and more than 35 ultimately received authorization or approval somewhere in the world. Those vaccines came from well over a dozen countries, including China, Russia, India, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Iran, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Canada, France, and Belgium.

Fauci did not control vaccine development in any of those places, or even here in the United States.

The two mRNA vaccines that were successfully developed were done so by Moderna (in the United States) and by Pfizer-BioNTech (jointly in Germany and the United States). These vaccines were not developed by the government but by private companies, albeit with a lot of assistance from the U.S. Government.

Which was controlled by Trump, not by Fauci.

Experts estimate that about 70.7% of the world’s population received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, that with a world population of roughly 8.1 billion, that corresponds to approximately 5.7 billion. That this probably saved in the neighborhood of 20 million lives.

Out of the approximately 5.7 billion people receiving at least one dose, there are almost no reported cases of deaths resulting from adverse vaccine events. There were a few reported cases of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome and myocarditis and pericarditis, none of which are normally fatal.

Instead of complaining about vaccine mandates, people should be celebrating the absolute miracle that these things were able to be developed in a matter of months, instead of years.

By the way, some commentators have noted ironically that Republicans were able to locate and release Fuaci’s “diary” but have still not managed to release the complete Epstein files.

So get a grip, Republicans. Fauci is no evildoer, and most of what he did was done with the explicit approval of Trump’s first administration. He’s 85 years old and hasn’t been in office for several years.

Maybe you people could focus on something that is actually happening now, like the war in Iran that Trump promised not to start, and clearly has no idea how to end.

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.