I had something of an epiphany when I was thinking about the horrific creation by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025.
There you go again. Anything conservative is horrific, eh?
I could say yes when it comes to Trumpanzee Christian Nationalists who call themselves conservatives these days, but that’s not the point. When I was young, the difference between liberals and conservatives was that conservatives thought things were pretty much OK the way they were and any progress should be incremental.
That changed with two things in the early 1980s. First, the election of Ronald Reagan and the essential end of the progressive income tax.America was at its most prosperous in the 1950s when the top tax bracket was at 91 percent. Contrary to what they might claim, that didn’t mean the plutocrats paid 91 percent on all their income. What it meant was that when their annual income reached a certain level, anything above that was taxed at 91 percent.
The top rate was cut to 70 percent in the early 60s and pretty much stayed there until Reagan slashed it to 28 percent in 1986. For nearly 40 years since then, the megarich have fought to keep it under 40 percent. It’s the No. 1 reason income inequality ha grown almost constantly.
The other change was something that had a hidden goal. Rev. Pat Robertson and Rev. Jerry Falwell wanted to get tax deductions for the private schools they had started so that their parishioners’ children didn’t have to go to school with black children, so they started what would become the Christian Right.
They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and Republicans gained strength by combining two groups that had little use for each other. The megarich couldn’t have cared much less about the religious right, and the Jesus folk were happy to trade their support for the support of the irreligious.
So essentially, our politics have gone completely to hell. The last Republican nominee who might have been a good president was Sen. John McCain in 2008, and he had a ridiculous running mate in Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Mitt Romney in 2012 was basically a decent man who at one time or another took both sides of nearly every issue. And after him came Trump, Trump and more Trump.
We’ve all seen the last eight years, the four that he was in office and the four that he wasn’t. He was pretty much the first president of the postwar era who was dangerously pro-Russia and anti-western alliance. He could never have been elected if the electorate hadn’t lost about 20 percent or more of its IQ. The most amazing part is how Trump, maybe the least religious president ever, became a hero to the religious right.
If they had read his ghost-written book “The Art of the Deal,” they would have seen him saying being an atheist was a big help to him in business, especially when dealing with Christians. Or if they had heard that his first wife said the only book she ever saw him read was a collection of Hitler’s speeches.
Democrats helped him in 2016 by nominating the only candidate he could have beaten, and even then, he got 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. He got 7 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020, and while the polls are looking good for him right now, nothing is guaranteed for him.
That’s why Saturday’s so-called assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., is suspicious at best.
He claims he was wounded by a bullet, but word out of the FBI is that he was nicked by a shard of glass when his teleprompter was hit by a bullet. Add to that the fact that the shooter was a registered Republican, and Trump’s exit from the stage pumping his first seems almost rehearsed.
Did he stage it?
That’s not the question.
Can you imagine him staging it?
Well, the man told something like 30,000 lies during his four years in the White House. I think the default position in most cases is that he’s lying.
So the real question is whether you can imagine him doing it. This is the same man whose minions and followers put together Project 2025, which is chapter and verse what Trump wants to do to America even though he denies it because he knows its too extreme for the swing voters he needs.
Sure, he could do it.
He will do anything he thinks he can get away with.
He is that bad a guy.
Maybe even worse.