It’s been a hectic few weeks.

Iran launched a drone and missile attack on Israel that was almost completely repelled by Israeli air defenses—with the help of intel from its Arab neighbors. (!) So maybe Jewish space lasers are a real thing after all.

Over in Washington, the chief advocate of the space lasers theory, Marjorie Taylor Greene, began trying to oust Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House for being insufficiently fanatic.

Numerous red states threatened librarians with prison time for disseminating books that Republicans dislike. (Hey, in science fiction, are the people banning books and throwing librarians in prison usually the good guys or the bad guys? Asking for a friend.)

What else? Oh, the Supreme Court parsed whether the January 6^th insurrectionists really did anything wrong, with Sam Alito (and to a lesser extent, an unrecused Clarence Thomas, whose own wife was part of fomenting that insurrection) suggesting that the people who attacked the Capitol were just “protestors” and that punishing them would chill free speech. (#legitimatepoliticaldiscourse)

It would also put a dent in bear spray sales.

Out west, Arizona made abortion almost completely illegal with no exceptions, affirming a law from 1864, a time before it was even a state. In response, Donald Trump—evidently operating in that same Civil War mode—seemed to think bleating “states’ rights” was a winning strategy for addressing the ensuing outrage.

And speaking of The Former Guy, topping the news last week, for the very first time in our history, the United States has charged a former US President with criminal offenses and put him on trial. Two of the jurors initially chosen for the case departed within a day, one of them stating that they felt intimidated by the defendant’s well-established pattern of winking incitement of his followers to physical violence against his enemies. Meanwhile Trump fell asleep in court two days in a row, and a protestor set himself on fire outside the courthouse, Thich Quang Duc-style.

Some would have us believe that the New York case is trivial, a tawdry tale of paying hush money to a porn star, and a partisan mountain-making out of molehill material. But others have pointed out the blatant dishonesty of that spin, which is shamelessly partisan in its own right. When one gets beyond the lurid surface, what this case is really about is a presidential candidate who was already on the ropes from the Access Hollywood tape—whose own party was running away from him like he was radioactive—trying to avoid another sex scandal hot on its heels, one that would almost certainly have delivered the presidency to Hillary Clinton on a silver platter.

Luckily for Donald, Jim Comey was about to come to his rescue.

In the The New Yorker, Eric Lach writes:

Would Trump have lost the 2016 Presidential election if Stormy Daniels had gone public with her story? Prosecutors in Manhattan think maybe so.

Trump faces thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records, which the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, claims was part of a scheme to “conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election.” The case has become known as the “Stormy Daniels hush-money case,” which has made it easier for the public to dismiss, because it seems like small potatoes. In fact, the argument that the prosecutors have made in court filings is focussed on something closer to election interference. The case is about Trump lying his way into office.

So this case isn’t some trifle; it’s about cheating in a presidential election, and lying to cover it up. Trump didn’t have Michael Cohen buy Stormy Daniels’s silence in order to keep Melania from learning about a one-night stand, as he and his defenders would have us believe.

He did it to bamboozle the American people in order to win the White House.

TRY TO SEE THINGS MY WAY

It remains to be seen how the New York trial plays out and what it portends for the other three criminal trials that await Trump, in Florida, Georgia, and DC. But what I’d like to write about this week is something far simpler: The pleasure of not having political arguments any more—at least not with anybody in a red baseball cap.   

I was late to Facebook; I got on in January 2017, right after Trump’s inauguration, because I needed to vent and commune with like minds—precisely the “echo chamber” aspect of social media for which it is so often criticized. (I also didn’t start drinking coffee till I was over 50. But I hear good things about this band “the Beatles.”)

In those early days of the Trump administration, we were still fruitlessly trying to operate under the rules of American politics ante…which is part of what Trump exploited to win the election and what got us into that mess in the first place. That meant being told to “give him a chance,” and having arguments with Trump supporters who kept insisting that he wasn’t so bad (“Hillary’s much worse!”) and that at any moment he was going to “pivot” and become “presidential.”

Good times.

These days American political discourse, legitimate or otherwise, is a lot more efficient. At this point, if someone cops to supporting Trump, that’s all you need to know and the conversation can cease immediately. That declaration is an automatic credibility destroyer; nothing that person can say on the subject of politics ought to be given a shred of credence following that admission (which, incredibly, is often in the form of a boast).

And that is quite a relief.

Nowadays, on those occasions when I read a puzzling op-ed, or a tweet, or any other sort of editorial comment that seems to support a questionable position—usually one with a whiff of revanchist right wingism about it—the first thing I do is look into the author’s politics. If a quick check of the Internet reveals that they are a Trump supporter—which it often does—I consider the case closed without a nanosecond spent considering any possible merit to the argument in question, even if it is not connected to Donny. A Trump button on your lapel is an announcement of unredeemable villainy, and a forfeit of any claim to seriousness.

Is that mulishly doctrinaire on my part? I believe it is not. This is not 2017 anymore. By now, nothing can justify support for Donald Trump: not the border, not judges, not tax cuts (all of which are odious anyway, in my book, but never mind).

And that saves me loads of time. Time that I can devote to my rock opera adaptation of “Welcome Back, Kotter,” done in Esperanto.

This is not to say that we can relax. Trump may yet go on to win the White House again, as mind-boggling as that may be, in which case we will be plunged into a nightmare in which arguments with fascists will be the least of our worries. In fact, they may become extinct for different reasons, because any criticism of the Dear Leader will be punishable by arrest. (Think I’m exaggerating? Look back on what you thought was impossible in May of 2015.) But for now, bickering with assholes like Jamie Dimon, Chris Sununu, and guys in black pickup trucks blaring “God Bless the USA” are not on the agenda.

Doing everything we can to beat Trump in November is.

JESUS, ETC.

Like most FB newbies, when  I first got on the platform I argued with randos incessantly, until I realized how bad that was for my mental health, and what a sheer waste of time it was. I almost never do it anymore, and on those rare occasions when I do find myself foolishly drawn into a donnybrook, I immediately feel sick and regret it.

The “block” function is my friend, I’ve learned, self-care wise.

But I recently got into a fight with someone over an AI image of Jesus hugging Trump. The original image was clearly created without irony, but in this re-post, it was accompanied by a sarcastic remark by an anti-Trumper. (“It was at this point that Jesus realized his wallet was missing.” Pretty funny, IMHO.)

My antagonist wrote: “No matter what side you’re on, this is in bad taste.” As his politics were unclear, I genuinely wondered if he meant the original AI image, or the sardonic comment about it. So I asked.

What ensued was a stream of vitriol, a refusal to engage in any substantive way, and a flurry of ad hominem attacks on me. (On the Internet? Shocking!) We went back and forth a few times as I tried my tactful best just to get him to explain what bothered him, but even my politest and most innocent requests were met with the angry insistence that somehow they were veiled insults meant to “control” him.

In short: the dude was angry. 

The irony was not lost on me that this incredibly irate fella also professed to be a follower of Jesus Christ, and so devout in his piety that he was offended even by a painting of the Messiah. Enraged “Christians” whose belligerence belies the teachings of their hero are nothing new, of course. But encountering one face to face—or at least over fiber optic cables—was bracing.

I was really taken aback by that, but only because I was out of practice. In the old days, when I stupidly engaged with trolls more regularly, that sort of hair-trigger hostility was par for the course in conversation with Trump supporters. And one has to wonder why that is.

USED TO BE A SWEET BOY

Another Facebook tale.

Like many of us, I have reconnected with lost lost friends and classmates via social media. One such person was a kid I knew when we were all of 14, whom I’ll call Troy. We were both Army brats living on a Stateside post that shall remain nameless. He was a sweet kid: goofy and funny, a comedy nerd like myself, and a Python fan. (It was 1977.) When I saw him on Facebook after more than 40 years out of touch, and reached out, he politely wrote back to say, hey, good to reconnect, but just so you know, I think we might have some pretty different politics.

Fair enough. I checked out his profile and was surprised to find that he had indeed become very conservative, including vocally pro-NRA. A lot of his posts were quasi-libertarian, with oblique swipes at Biden, and at “wokeism,” and the subject of DEI in particular. There was a lot of rah-rah pro-military stuff as well, but nothing overtly pro-Trump.

But I didn’t feel the need to get into any of it with him, and I didn’t. We stayed cordial and non-political as I fooled myself into thinking maybe he hadn’t totally gone over to the dark side.

Then, in September 2020, when it was reported that Trump had denigrated US war dead as “losers and suckers,” I wrote him privately to ask, Army brat to Army brat: “Come on, man. You can’t possibly defend this.”

His response? “I don’t believe it’s true.”

So there you have it. As Troy showed, Trumpists have a unique ability to deny facts about their boy that are inconvenient to their own professed principles and worldview, no matter how definitively proven or empirically godawful, or both. (See also: free trade, Russia, NATO…the list goes on.)

I knew in my bones that the “losers and suckers” comment was true—it just felt far too Trumpy and on point to have been made up. And the story was subsequently confirmed by no less than Trump’s own White House chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine four-star who lost a son in combat in Afghanistan. In the process (and by way of defending his comrade General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs whom Trump had recently called a traitor), Kelly also delivered a scathing assessment of Trump, whom he would later call “the most flawed person” he’d ever met:

What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.” A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are “losers” and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason—in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.

SOUR TIMES

When Kelly said that, I thought about reaching out to Troy and rekindling the discussion. But seeing online that he was still solidly right wing, and knowing that the reply would not be, “I was wrong—Trump’s a piece of shit,” I didn’t have the heart.

But recently Troy and I got into it again. He’d posted one of his snickering, passive-aggressive comments, this one accusing the left of suppressing free expression. (I realized that he still had a sense of humor, of sorts, but that it had curdled into the bitter cynicism prevalent on the right.) I couldn’t resist gently pushing back.

His reply was disingenuous, suggesting that a lot of conservatives were not Trump fans, and implying that he was among that cohort, but in the next breath saying he understood why, because of the “abortion” (his term) that Biden had made of America. (Odd choice of words, no?) I called bullshit, noting that he was trying to distance himself from Trump while at the same time defending him, and asked him to just own it, if in fact he supported the man.

But it was actually Troy’s wife (whom I don’t know at all) who came after me, teeth bared, and we sparred a bit. With classic Trumpy evasiveness, she avoided my questions, jumping from subject to subject with a heavy dose of whataboutism, defending book bans in Florida and deploying the now-commonplace right wing perversion of Martin Luther King to argue for racist policies that King would have abhorred, and along the way lecturing me on how well-read she was. Never a sign of security and strength.

But above all, like the dude I mentioned earlier, she seemed openly pissed off when I tried to be nice, accusing me of being “fake” for writing things like, “Even though we don’t see eye to eye, I’m sure we both want only the best for our country, even if we disagree on what that is and how to achieve it.”

(Am I missing something here? Maybe my attempts at civility do feel transparently false or sarcastic, at least to these people, even though I assure you that I am completely genuine. I feel as sad for these folks as I am mad at them. Maybe that comes across as condescending. Maybe my contempt for their policy positions makes those professions of empathy and common cause seem absurd. Or maybe they themselves cannot imagine sincerely wishing well to someone on the other side of the aisle, and therefore find it impossible to imagine that anyone else can.)

The bottom line is that these people are so angry. That is not news: It’s the same grievance that we have seen animate virtually all of Trumpism from the jump, bordering on nihilism, and poured into the empty vessel that is Donald, an avatar for all their fury. As I say, in my more generous moments, I can feel their hurt. How much pain do you have to be in to be that livid all the time? But then there are other moments when I remember that these are grown-ass adults who have no excuse for foisting their pathology on the rest of us, and who are culpable for the damage that they do.

And Troy—a well-educated white male, middle class or better, the son of a career Army officer just like me—can hardly lay claim to membership in any kind of beaten-down demographic. He ain’t no Appalachian coal miner, or laid off Rust Belt auto worker. Despite his ostentatious valorization of the military, he didn’t even serve himself…..but I did. The real issue, as with many right wingers, seems to be an unjustified displeasure over the erosion of his privilege in the interest of historically marginalized folks.

But I hear you saying, “Hey, King’s Necktie, you’re not exactly a beacon of sunshine yourself.” True. But at the risk of sounding like I’m rationalizing, I would suggest that my anger is what Buddhists call wrath: a righteous outrage at injustice, not some misplaced personal grudge that the civil rights movement put an end to separate water fountains.

I do realize that right wingers will make the same claim to righteousness…..I just think they’re wrong. As I have often said, one person shouting that the Earth is flat and another that it’s round are not equally right just because they’re shouting at equal volume.

LET THEM EAT CAKE (AND HAVE IT TOO)

My old pal Troy is representative of a kind of “conservative” who wants to be treated like a respectable pre-Trump Republican even as they support a version of the erstwhile Grand Old Party that has openly embraced fascism. But there is another version of this right wing archetype that eschews hostility for the façade of “reasonableness.” Which is despicable in its own way.

There may be no better example of that demographic than New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who, in his usual patronizing manner, and apropos of Alex Garland’s new movie Civil War, this past week assured us that fears of political violence in the US are ridiculous.

Given Ross’s crappy track record as a prognosticator, the fact that he’s pooh-poohing the odds of a second American civil war are very worrying. How this guy still has a job at the Times baffles me. (Maybe the payroll department thinks it’s the Washington Times he works for.)

Earlier I mentioned New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who, like Douthat, is the kind of allegedly “reasonable” Republican whose support for Trump is the sort of thing that might enable the sonofabitch to win. That support is in its own way more cowardly and despicable than that of the hardcore redhatted MAGA faithful, and certainly more cynical.

Last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos pressed Sununu—a Nikki Haley supporter until she dropped out of the race—on his endorsement of Trump, given the governor’s recognition of all the vile things the presumptive GOP nominee has done, an attempted coup above all.

“You believe that a president who contributed to an insurrection should be president again?” Stephanopoulos asked. (Good job, George!)

“As does 51 percent of America, George,” Sununu sneered. “I mean, really. I understand you’re part of the media, I understand you’re in this New York City bubble or whatever it is, but you got to look around what’s happening across this country.” Sununu went on to make specious claims about inflation and the border before adding that it’s “that type of elitism that the average American is just sick and tired of, and it’s a culture change. That’s what I’m supporting.”

Let’s recap. First off, Sununu suggested that he was fine with fascism as long as lots of other people are. (His 51% figure is wildly wrong and deceitful, however. The number is more like 30%, even though, in our antidemocratic system, that may still be enough for Trump to win. But even a genuine majority that thrilled to authoritarianism would not make its triumph any more morally defensible.) Then he trotted out the tired reverse snobbery about the media and city dwellers and people of privilege—said the son of a former White House chief of staff and governor who followed his dad into that office.

In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last neatly summarized the implications of Sununu’s odious stance:

Trumpist authoritarianism can only succeed when elites like Sununu give him cover.

Sununu isn’t a Trumpist. He doesn’t believe in MAGA populism. And he has no political future in the Republican party—he’s as anathema to MAGA as he would be if he were a Democrat. And yet, Sununu has been willing to campaign for Trump. To lie for Trump. To humiliate himself for Trump.

Why? Is he a dishonest scoundrel? A coward? Or a fool?

Sununu is part of a large class of Republican elites who have been not just willing, but eager, to play dice with liberal democracy.

To be fair and precise: Douthat does not identify as a Trump supporter, but his constant apologia for the man is tantamount to it. In fact, in the same way that Sununu is more craven than the unapologetic mass of MAGA, Douthat is even more craven than Chris. If you’re gonna be a fascist, do us a favor and be honest about it.

But I don’t need to argue with Douthat and Sununu any more than I do with erstwhile childhood friends, or their wives, or the Facebook rando who hates the sacrilege of AI Jesus and his BFF Donald. Their allegiance to Trumpism is self-damning.

YOU BET YOUR LIFE

To conclude, let me return to my online contretemps with Troy.

When he weighed in again, he was more succinct in reply to my blunt question about whether he supported Trump. “If it’s a choice between Biden and Trump,” he wrote, “I’ll vote for Trump every day and twice on Sunday. You know, like Democrats do.”

Per my policy, that was all I needed to know, and everything else we might talk about was ephemeral, including the original debate about free expression. “Nothing more to discuss after that,” I wrote. “Let’s let history decide which one of us chose more wisely.”

“Happy to take that deal,” he answered, with the unearned confidence of a Ron Burgundy.

And then I blocked him, and his wife, and his little dog too.

Personally, I like my odds.

*******

Photo: Palin & Cleese. “An argument is a collective series of statements intended to establish a proposition. It isn’t just saying, ‘No it isn’t’.”

“Yes it is.”

“No it isn’t!”