More on Donald Trump
February 24, 2026
Tonight President Donald J. Trump will give his annual State of the Union speech to Congress. Essentially everything he will say will be a lie. But then, essentially everything he ever says is a lie. Most members of Congress will be there, though some Democrats apparently have the nerve and the good sense not to be. Here are some thoughts, written here a short time before Trump's set of lies is set to begin.
Nearly all of Trump's supporters are white Christian nationalists, and the more I read about white Christian nationalism the more convinced I become that this country is not just rotten to its core with racism. I’ve known that for a long time. It is also rotten to its core with stupidity. White Christian nationalists are just flat stupid about reality. About what the facts of the country have been in the past and what they are today. They insist that the US was founded as a Christian nation. It wasn’t. They insist that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are based on Christian principles and express Christian values. They aren’t, and they don't. They insist Christians are under attack in this country today. They aren’t. They say liberals are trying to stop them from practicing their faith. They aren’t. They think God sent us Donald Trump to save the nation. God so obviously did not do that that this one is even harder to get your head around than are the others.
Here’s the truth. This nation was founded on rationalistic principles derived from the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries CE. The Declaration of Independence clearly shows this truth. It says: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” It doesn’t say, “We hold these truths to be divine revelation.” The US Constitution almost ever mentions religion, but when it does, it does so to keep religion out of the government not in it. Not all, but many of the so-called Founding Fathers were Deists not Christians. No one is trying to stop white Christian nationalists from practicing their faith. We’re just trying to stop them from imposing it on everyone else and to stop them from inflicting the harm of others that they seem to think their ideology requires them to inflict.
Donald Trump is everything any Christian must vigorously though nonviolently oppose: He is stupid. Nearly everything he says is a lie. He is grossly immoral. He is narcissistic. He cares about no one but himself and maybe his immediate family. He violates his oath of office at every turn. Although this hasn’t quite been proven yet (largely, perhaps, because Trump's Department of Justice won't obey the law requiring them to release the Epstein files), he may be a pedophile. He is a racist. He is misogynistic. He abuses immigrants the way the Nazis abused Jews at the begging of the Nazi’s control of Germany. He uses them as an innocent target demographic on whom he can blame things that are in no way their fault and whom he can use to whip up his rabid supporters against them to distract those supporters from what the causes of the country's problems really are. He is a convicted felon. He is, in fact, trying to turn our federal government into an authoritarian, indeed fascist, regime with him as its dear leader. He has no belief or faith in democracy whatsoever. To him, if he or his people lose an election, it can only because of election fraud (of which there is virtually none in this country) and rigging of the election by his opponents (which just doesn’t happen). He has committed more impeachable offenses than anyone can keep track of. I know of not one good thing about the man.
Donald Trump is a lethal threat to American democracy and the rule of law. No person of good will could possibly support him whatever the person’s faith or political beliefs may be. Yet millions of Americans who self-identify as Christian nationalists, nearly all of them white of course, have voted for him for president three times and elected him twice. They see him as some kind of savior. I can only believe that they support him because he gives them permission from the highest office in the land to be their worst selves. Because he makes their stupidity and their bigotry somehow socially acceptable and, indeed, even virtuous. American democracy will survive only if we can overcome the immense damage to our country that he has done, is doing, and will do in the future.
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