On Trump as Symptom not Cause

 

On Trump as Symptom not Cause

May 16, 2026

Essentially everyone in the world in which I live despises Donald Trump. I despise Donald Trump too. I despise him as a grossly immoral person and as a would-be fascist dictator hell bent on destroying American democracy. Donald Trump and his army of bootlickers certainly appear to be causing a great deal of harm in the United States and in the world, and, indeed, that is precisely what they are doing. Yet there is an underlying truth in our world that it is easy enough to forget or to ignore. Donald Trump would not be able to harm anything or anyone if the American electorate had not made him president not once but twice. The second time they elected him, he even garnered a majority of the popular vote as well as the necessary electoral college votes. Trump didn’t make himself president, the American people and the American constitutional system of electing the president did.

It is, therefore, perfectly appropriate to see Trump less as a cause of harm and more as a symptom of something far deeper than one deranged, immoral, incompetent man. A healthy society would never have made Donald Trump president. So since we did make him president we have ask: What is so unhealthy in our country that a fascist charlatan like Donald Trump could win two presidential elections? That question may be as hard to answer as it is easy to hate Donald Trump, yet I think there is an answer. That answer, I believe is: Change and privileged people’s resistance to and even fear of change.

So what is changing in this country that could explain the rise of Donald Trump and his American fascism? The simplest answer to that question is: Demographics. The United States of America was founded on white supremacy. White immigrants from Europe and their descendants considered themselves to be so superior in every way to Black and Indian human beings that they hardly considered those people to be human at all. I needn’t go into all the gory details. We all know about race-based slavery. We all know how white Americans took essentially all of the land that had been the home of Indian Americans, nearly eradicated their cultures and languages, and even very nearly exterminated them as a race of people.

Slavery ended with the Civil War of course, but American white supremacy certainly did not. Racism continued to rot the cultures of both the American south and the American north and west in forms other than slavery but with effects not much less horrific for non-white Americans. Until quite recent decades, white Americans controlled absolutely everything in this country that was not created by and specifically for people of color. Whites were the majority, and they ruled everyone else for the advantage of the whites at the expense of essentially all others.

In recent decades, that has started to change. Whites are still a majority of the population, but they are a significantly smaller majority than they used to be. People of color are playing ever larger roles in American life. There are very substantial Latin communities in many states. There are large Asian communities in many states including people from countries like Vietnam who previously were scarcely represented among us. There are more Muslim Americans than there ever used to be. Despite the deep-seated racism of American culture, people of color are more visible and powerful in American life than they have ever been before.

As a result, a great many white Americans, primarily but not exclusively poorly educated white men, feel threatened. They know, at least subconsciously and probably consciously as well, that their position of privilege in American life is ebbing away. These white racists used to be able to watch television and see only an occasional Black entertainer or athlete. Now people of color appear all over the TV networks. Perhaps most threateningly for these American racists is the fact that we’ve even had a Black president.

White privilege has always been foundational for the self-identity of most white Americans. It is perhaps an old saw, but it’s still true. The poorest, least educated, least sophisticated white American could say to themselves: Well, at least I’m not Black. The color of their skin gave them a sense of superiority even over a Black president. They learned white supremacy from the moment they were born in a culture rotten to the core with it. And they know that their position of privilege is eroding away.

Then, along comes Donald Trump. He’s white. He’s male. He’s straight. He may be richer and more sexually immoral than most Americans by far, but he’s still “one of us.” And he plays right into the fear that so many white Americans feel over their eroding status of authority and supremacy. He gives American racists “dog whistles,” things that may not be overtly racist  but which a great many people hear as racist. He calls torch-carrying, Nazi-loving fascist thugs “fine people.” He calls on a gang of white, racist thugs to “stand back and stand by.” He has virtually no people of color in his life. Indeed, early in his business life, the government sued him for racial discrimination in housing he and his father controlled. He plays to the worst things in American culture, things a great many Americans don’t think are bad at all but which constitute their view of themselves and of the world.

And, in true fascist fashion, he gives frightened, angry white Americans a scapegoat for all of their problems. He gives them “immigrants.” Mostly, perhaps, “illegal immigrants,” but really just immigrants. Immigrants, he tells them, are murderers and rapists. They both steal American jobs and freeload off of public services, he tells them. It matters not at all to either Trump or his audience that not one of those things is true just as it mattered neither to Hitler nor to millions of Germans that what Hitler said about Jews wasn’t true. It is appallingly easy to turn angry, frightened people against a designated enemy; and that’s true even if a person’s fear and anger are mostly subconscious.

That is precisely what Trump has done with his brutal campaign against immigrants. All immigrants. Documented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants who are nonetheless here legally seeking asylum. Even naturalized American citizens who were once immigrants. Many of us complain, rightly, about the rough and unconstitutional ways Trump’s ICE thugs treat immigrants, but we must remember. The cruelty is intentional. it plays directly into the fear inherent in Trump’s supporters and the anger that fear engenders. It is a purely fascist tactic, and it does for Trump what brutality always does for fascists. It may drive some people away; but it attracts more people than it repels as long, that is, as it is directed against the fascists’ designated enemy and not against the fascist’s supporters.

So yes, Donald Trump has caused, is causing, and will cause a great deal of harm to American democracy and to American and other people; but as well as being a cause of harm, Trump is a symptom of an underlying disorder in American society and American culture. He is a symptom of the fascistic reaction of white American racists to their perceived, and real, loss of privilege and power in today’s changing demographics.

We will be rid of Trump one day. He is, after all, as mortal as the rest of us. But getting rid of Trump will not solve the underlying problem that produced him in the first place. American white supremacism will still be there in all of its evil manifestations. It probably isn’t possible to cure the fear and anger that produced Donald Trump. At least, I don’t know how to cure it. What we must do is contain it. We must turn out intelligent, morally sensitive voters in such enormous numbers that the American fascists’ attempts to subvert American democracy fail. The MAGA mob is, after all, a rather small minority of the American people, and the support for Donald Trump is declining every day. My plea today is only that we be aware of what’s really going on in this country and that we be vigilant in keeping it from destroying us.

 

A Call to Nonviolent Revolution

 A Call to Nonviolent Revolution

May 2, 2026

The late, great John Lewis called on us all to get into "good trouble." Our country needs "good trouble" today as much as it ever has. Not violent trouble, but good trouble. The way things stand in this country politically and economically is simply unacceptable. Somehow, we must undo the Supreme Court's destruction of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We must stop Trump's illegal and immoral attack on Iran. We must stop our country's support of Israeli genocide in Gaza. We must create a truly just tax system. We must create a tax-based system of universal health care. We must solve our horrific problem of homelessness. We must, at long, long last, overcome our country's original sin of racism in all of its overt and hidden manifestations. Politics as usual are not going to do it. The country's wealthy power structures are too effective in stopping it from happening. We need a revolution. A nonviolent revolution to be sure, but a political, economic, and social revolution nonetheless. We need a truly mass movement that says to the power structures: No! We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!

Does a nonviolent revolution cause trouble? Of course it does! It causes trouble for the power structures that perpetuate economic and political injustice. It causes trouble for the country's racists who are doing everything they can to "keep niggers in their place." It causes trouble for the country's sexists who do everything they can to keep women "in their place." It causes trouble for those who would take this country backwards in time, back at least to the 1950s if not to the 1890s. It causes trouble for the economic and political forces that make the United States, along with Russia, the most violent, militarily aggressive country in the world. In other words, it causes trouble for all of this country's current economic and political power structures.

Now, we usually think of trouble as a bad thing. People, especially children, "get into trouble" when they do something bad. If you're mad at someone you might say "Boy am I gonna get that guy in trouble!" We speak of a "troubled relationship" when a relationship isn't what it should be. A socially disruptive person "causes trouble." The police prepare for "trouble" when there is going to be a large demonstration of any kind. Trouble, after all, means difficulty or problems. We see trouble as a bad thing not a good thing.

But when things are bad enough, trouble is exactly what we need. We need John Lewis' "good trouble." Nonviolent trouble, but still trouble. The Civil Rights Movement, at least in its nonviolent manifestations, was good trouble. So were nonviolent protests against the Vietnam war. The "no kings rallies" of recent times have been good trouble. The Black Lives Matter movement was good trouble. So was the Me-Too movement against sexual assault. Injustice and oppression of any kind call for a response of good, nonviolent trouble.

Calling for a nonviolent revolution is, of course, calling for something outside of the country's normal political systems. A great many Americans look to those systems for solutions to whatever they think the country's problems are. Your humble author has no such faith in his country's normal political systems. He lacks that faith for a couple of reasons. One is that those systems elected the fascist Donald Trump president not once but twice, the second time after he had instigated a violent uprising against the US Constitution and had been convicted of 34 felonies. The country gave control of Congress to Trump's bootlickers in the Republican Party, and the Republican Party has, on the whole, done nothing to stop the outrages Trump commits every day.

So why not rely on the Democrats? Well, the Democrats are certainly better than the Republicans. Most if not quite all of them are much better than the Republicans. The Democrats in Congress, however, and although a minority, have not done everything they could to stop Trump. Perhaps more importantly, the policies and programs the Democrats propose, to the extent they have any at all other than replacing Trump and the congressional Republicans, do not go nearly far enough. They do not call for slashing the so-called defense budget. They do not call for tax reform that is anywhere near radical enough to create justice. They do not call for a tax-based universal health care system. As nearly as I can tell, they have no plan for addressing homelessness at all. When they oppose Trump's Iran war, they do it mostly only on the grounds that he didn't seek congressional authorization first, a purely technical and the most insignificant of the numerous valid objections to that war. Yes, the Democrats are better than the Republicans, but they aren't nearly good enough to deal with this country's rank injustices. So no, our normal political system does not hold the solutions to our problems.

Now, I have used the word "nonviolent" many times in this piece, so it is, I suppose, necessary for me to say exactly what I mean by "nonviolent." Nonviolence is the refusal to inflict physical harm on any human being. In a nonviolent revolution, no one on the side of the revolution would intentionally, knowingly, or negligently inflict physical harm on any person. Period. No exceptions. That's what the revolution being nonviolent means.

Yet, of course, the revolution is not passive. It is actively, assertively attempting to turn the political and economic structures of the country completely upside down. It is attempting to put the people in charge politically and economically in place of the uber-rich power structures that rule the country today. The revolution will use every nonviolent tool available to it to bring about the desired upheaval in the country's power structures.

Which means that the nonviolent revolutionaries may on occasion violate the law. After all, the civil rights marchers in the south in the 1950s and 1960s violated the racist laws of the southern states at every turn. For the most part, at least, they did it nonviolently, but they definitely violated those laws. They violated laws against unlawful assemblies. They violated laws establishing segregated public facilities. They nonviolently violated any law that created and enforced the Jim Crow system of the south that denied people their rights and their dignity simply because of the color of their skin. Violating some law or other may well come with the conduct of the needed nonviolent revolution.

So, since your humble author is an ordained Christian minister, he must ask the question: Can a Christian morally engage in conduct that is intended to be disruptive and may well be illegal? Many Christians who belong to the so-called "historic peace churches" would probably answer that question "No." They take Jesus' prohibition of violence to require pure pacifism. They, when they are being true to their tradition's teaching, will sit passively by in the face of evil. They will probably pray against the evil, but they will not act against it.

We can respect the way these historic peace traditions oppose violence and wish for peace. We cannot, however, accept their position as truly Christian. Their refusal to act against injustice misunderstands Jesus' commands. Jesus commands nonviolence, but he does not command passive acceptance of evil. His teachings call for creative, assertive, but always nonviolent resistance to evil. For an explanation of that teaching, see the chapter titled "Jesus' Third Way" in Walter Wink's book The Powers That Be. Jesus never advocated or tolerated violence, but neither did he ever call on the people simply to accept injustice.

So, there we are. The United States of America is in terrible condition. It has never been the earthly paradise so many Americans have claimed it to be, and it is today, if anything, in worse shape than it has been in for a long time. It is in worse shape because of the concentration of immense wealth and political power in the hands of a very small number of greedy people. It is in worse shape because of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that has put him in power. It is in worse shape because MAGA justices control the US Supreme Court and at least some of the lower federal courts. It is in worse shape because millions of Americans allow their fear and their bigotry to lead them to vote for politicians who actually work against those Americans' best interests. It is in worse shape because politics as usual have utterly failed to create a country truly based on freedom, on "liberty and justice for all."

And so. This ordained Christian pastor, who for most of his life has been an ardent advocate of Jesus' teaching of nonviolence, reasserts his commitment to that profound teaching and calls on the American people to engage in a mass, nonviolent uprising against the power structures in this country. Jesus didn't come to be our souls' passkey into heaven. He came to call us to "kingdom work," the work of establishing what he called "the kingdom of God" on earth. Of course, we aren't about to work for the establishment of a true kingship. We work, rather, for the creation of what we can call the realm rather than the kingdom of God. The realm of God is on earth not in heaven. It is not "of this earth," but it is in and is all about this earth. It is an earth in which people live together in peace. It is a world in which we achieve that peace never through violence but through the establishment of distributive justice everywhere on this lonely, tiny planet.

Doing that requires a revolution. Yes, historically speaking, revolutions have nearly always been violent. The "revolution" that founded this country, which was really only a war for independence, was horrifically violent. The French Revolution that followed it turned horrifically violent. The Russian "revolution" of 1917 and the Chinese revolution of the 1940s were both violent beyond comprehension. The revolution this country needs must avoid falling into the trap of violence at all costs.

And there have been nonviolent revolutions. Except in Romania, the revolutions of the communist countries of central and eastern Europe against the Soviets were nonviolent, and they succeeded in establishing democratic governments. The Scandinavian countries have established social democracies that come a lot closer to the realm of God than the United States does, and they have done it nonviolently. Most European countries have done something at least similar to what the Scandinavian countries have done if not quite as complete. Revolutions are often violent, but they are not necessarily violent. The revolution I call for here must be radical. It must be thorough. It must overturn most if not all of the power structures that control this country today. And it must do it nonviolently. May it be so.

More on the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act

 More on the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act

April 30, 2026

The more I think about what the Supreme Court did yesterday to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the madder I get. That decision is white supremacy in action and nothing else. It undoes decades of work on overcoming American racism. It slaps all who marched in the Civil Rights Movement in the face, and it says to those who gave their lives in that movement that their martyrdom doesn’t matter. It takes the US back decades in time, to an era when white supremacy was unchecked and Blacks has essentially no rights at all. At least it does that with regard to voting. Will the bigoted majority on the Supreme Court attack the Civil Rights Act of 1964 next? I would be more than appalled if they do, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. Strict constructionists want the Constitution to mean only what it meant in 1789. But in 1789, our so-called Founding Fathers owned slaves as did nearly every wealthy person in the south and some wealthy persons in the north. The Constitution said a slave was only 3/5 of a person. People were owned, held, and sold as chattel property. We’ve still got a long way to go, but we have nonetheless come a long way since then. The racist majority on the Supreme Court wants to take us backwards not forward, and, because the Supreme Court has the final say on what the law is and what the law means, there isn’t one God-damned thing we can do about it. A Supreme Court decision that is only a ruling on a federal law can be overcome by changing the law; but a Supreme Court decision based on an interpretation of the Constitution can be overcome only if the Court itself overturns it or the Congress and the states amend the Constitution. That certainly isn’t going to happen. So Black Americans are fucked when it comes to voting, and that means we’re all fucked when it comes to voting. I don’t actually believe in damnation, but nonetheless I’ll say: God damn the majority of justices of the United States Supreme Court.

SCOTUS Guts the Civil Rights Act

 This is the text of a letter I sent today to our local newspaper;

On April 29, 2026, the United States Supreme Court delivered what may turn out to be the final, fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It ruled that states may not adjust congressional districts to improve the chances minority communities have of having actual representation in Congress. That result completely ignores the reality of racial discrimination with regard to voting in this country, but it's even worse than that. We can be sure that the Supreme Court will do nothing to stop states from gerrymandering districts to see that minority communities do not have representation in Congress. That too is racial gerrymandering, but it is a type of it of which the Supreme Court majority, Donald Trump, and Trump's MAGA supporters approve. The issue is not racial gerrymandering. It is who benefits from a state's racial gerrymandering. The Supreme Court says whites do, and we all have to live with that unconscionable conclusion, a truly tragic result.

On Human Sexuality

 On Human Sexuality

April 26, 2026

Just saw once again a TV Allstate ad in which two young people who want to spend time together don’t because her family roots for North Carolina and he roots for Duke. I mean, how stupid can you get? I thought: Two young people want to spend time together. That’s a good thing. Will they go somewhere and have sex? Well, as long is the sex is consensual and done safely, what’s wrong with that? Sorry Christian tradition. You have handled human sexuality so badly that all I can do is reject nearly everything you’ve ever had to say about it and adopt an ethic based love that doesn’t say sex is inherently sinful. It’s not. It can be one of life’s greatest joys. We are, after all, sexual people. That’s how God created us. Yes, sex has to do with reproduction, but there is a whole lot more to human sexuality than that. It is physically more pleasurable than anything else; but, beyond that, it is the most intimate thing two people can do together. It can bring two people closer together better than anything else can. Yes, it is emotionally fraught. It can be and far too often is abused, used for harm rather than for good. But that doesn’t make sex inherently sinful. It isn’t. Misuse of it it, but all kinds of things that are good can be misused for evil. Sex is not unique in that regard. Christianity has for so long seen sex as something inherently evil, something the church has to control and limit, something people really shouldn’t want to do except with a marriage between one woman and one man. In other words, Christianity has for ages, perhaps always, so gotten human sexuality all wrong, that we really do need to reject traditional Christian sexual dogma and get real about what human sexuality really is and about the constructive role it can play in people’s lives beyond the very narrow context in which Christianity has said it’s morally permissible.

April 7, 2026

 I am taking a new antidepressant for my clinically diagnosed depression. It may be working. But my asshole president Donald Trump has me plunged into depression nonetheless. He has said he will destroy Iranian civilization tonight if they don’t open the Strait of Hormuz, which was, of course, open before he began his illegal and sinful war. I don’t know if he’ll order it done. I don’t know if the US military will obey him if he does, any order he may give for them to do it being, obviously, illegal under both domestic and international law. I just know that even if he doesn’t or they don’t, I live in a pariah country. I live in a country led by a madman and in which no one is willing or able to stop him. I live in a country in which something like 40% of its people support this madman and his insane actions and statements. I fear that my tax dollars, already being used for grossly immoral purposes, will be used to finance genocide. I pray for peace. I wish I had better hope that it will come.

A Review of Trump's Fascism

 

There simply is no doubt that Donald Trump is an American fascist and that he is working to impost his fascism on the rest of us Americans so he can rule as an unquestioned dictator. It may be worth reviewing the ways is the Trump administration fascist. After all, to oppose a foe you need first of all to understand the foe.

Donald Trump and his government are fascist in at least these ways:

They reject the rule of law at every level including refusing to be bound by the limitations the constitution puts on presidential power. Trump thinks of the US Department of Justice as his personal attorneys as he orders them to investigate bogus claims against his political opponents.

They attempt to suppress freedom of the press. They call correct news reporting fake news; and now they are threatening broadcasters’ licenses if they don’t fall in line with Trumpist propaganda about the Iran war.

They send armed thugs called ICE to attack and even kill peaceful Americans who are not American terrorists though it calls them that until it is proven that they are not.

They think they have every right to attack militarily any country in the world that it wants to. Trump has used military force against more nations than any other US president.

The Trump administration lies nearly every time any of its people says anything in public. It lies so often and so obviously that it is not so much trying to get people to believe its lies as getting people to believe either that they cannot know what is true or even that there is no such thing as truth, a classic fascist tactic.

Trump has put in his administration only people who are loyal to him personally. All employees of the federal government are supposed to be public servants who are loyal to the constitution not to any individual, not even the president. Trump fires countless numbers of people like that so he can staff the entire federal government with people who will bow the knee to him every time, something on which fascist dictators always insist.

Because he has only bootlicking loyalists around him, there is no one in the administration who will tell Trump any truth Trump does not want to hear. Under Stalin, everyone was so terrified of him that no one would tell him the truth. Indeed, people were so afraid of him that no one wanted to be the first to stop applauding when he appeared in public. We aren’t there yet, but Trump sure would love it if that were true of us Americans and him.

They kowtow to the country’s ultrarich by giving them tax cut after tax cut and stopping the federal government from regulating any industry they don’t want it to regulate.

They keep enormous portions of the population so poor that they pay attention only to how they’re going to put food on the table and get any kind of health care. They slash benefits for people in need as it bows and scrapes to its wealthy supporters.

They make us a pariah nation on the world stage. They do it by attacking our traditional allies, thank God so far only verbally though Trump has threatened to use military force to take Greenland from NATO ally Denmark. They do it by imposing tariffs on goods from foreign nations that disrupt the world economy. They do it by throwing American military might around in a manner not entirely dislike the way Nazi Germany and the USSR used to do. And they do it by Trump simply being an idiotic clown in the presence of other world leaders.

Perhaps you can come up with other ways in which Trump and his administration are fascist, but these are the one that occur to me today. I find it all so discouraging. Indeed, it feels so overwhelming that despair seems to be the only response available to me. I wish it were otherwise. I hope and pray that one day it will be, but, for now, fascism is what we have and what we have to deal with.