The Trump scam

I liked Brian Beutler’s succinct and spot-on take on Trump’s twitter attack on the Koch brothers today:

Here’s the Republican Party in a nutshell. President Trump and the Kochs pretend to feud, while simultaneously teaming up to loot the country, and install as many Republicans as possible in all branches of government. The Koch network will make just enough low-decibel noise about Trump’s unpopular immigration and trade policies to give Trump cover to pretend he’s bucking “globalists.” Trump plays a similar game with pharmaceutical companies, who have benefited enormously from Trump’s corporate tax cuts, and can thus brush off Trump’s disingenuous complaints about drug prices as part of the cost of doing business. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump described it as a “culture-wars-for-the-poor, tax-cuts-for-the-rich approach to politics.” Let them eat tweets, I guess.

And here’s some from Bump’s extended take:

But Trump’s pitch is twofold: I have conservative judicial picks, and I cut their taxes and made them richer. How on earth could the Kochs take issue with Trump when he made them richer? It defies understanding.

Thanks to a combination of hyperpartisanship, Trump’s willingness to say things that others wouldn’t and a stronger economy, Trump’s tenure as president has been an explicit manifestation of what once was a tricky balance. For years, many Republicans have worked to effect sweeping cuts and benefits for the wealthiest Americans while maintaining a non-wealthy voting base by engaging in robust cultural fights.

Trump has nearly perfected it.

He will argue, of course, that his economic policies have been an unalloyed good for the American worker. He did so in that tweet disparaging the Koch brothers. But his track record doesn’t quite match that rhetoric…

The president’s core policy priorities are centered on the sort of fearmongering that past Republicans often considered only more obliquely. Illegal immigration, criminal gangs, crime in general: These are the core problems Trump points to in his appeals to voters. [emphases mine] Crime is at near-historic lows nationally, a fact that Trump has sidestepped since the campaign. The racial undertones of Trump’s focal points are barely submerged and occasionally peek through into the light, as when Trump disparaged “s—hole” countries such as Haiti and African nations. Is kneeling at NFL games something worth the president’s attention? No, but Trump recognizes that combining racial tension with disingenuous arguments about patriotism — and even sprinkling some class warfare on top — can be a winner.

Past politicians tiptoed around using race for political purposes. Trump doesn’t, and hasn’t paid any price with his supporters.

Why? Because Trump is willing to not only engage in cultural wars, but to embrace and embody them. Trump has made needling the left a central part of his administration, to his base’s delight. This whole theme of “owning the libs”? Might as well be Trump’s reelection slogan.

And, let’s be crystal clear here– this would not be such an effective strategy for Trump if a huge portion of the Republican electorate were not politically animated by xenophobia and racial animus.

We have criminalized 1970’s and 80’s parenting

This NYT Op-Ed “Motherhood in the Age of Fear” from Kim Brooks, based on her new book, is so good.  I’ve certainly complained here before about just how incredibly stupid we are about modern parenting, but this really brings a lot of different strands together in a particularly compelling and disturbing way.  You really ought to read the whole thing:

We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second.

We read, in the news or on social media, about children who have been kidnapped, raped and killed, about children forgotten for hours in broiling cars. We do not think about the statistical probabilities or compare the likelihood of such events with far more present dangers, like increasing rates of childhood diabetes or depression. Statistically speaking, according to the writer Warwick Cairns, you would have to leave a child alone in a public place for 750,000 years before he would be snatched by a stranger. Statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked. But we have decided such reasoning is beside the point. We have decided to do whatever we have to do to feel safe from such horrors, no matter how rare they might be.

And so now children do not walk to school or play in a park on their own. They do not wait in cars. They do not take long walks through the woods or ride bikes along paths or build secret forts while we are inside working or cooking or leading our lives…

I was beginning to understand that it didn’t matter if what I’d done was dangerous; it only mattered if other parents felt it was dangerous. When it comes to kids’ safety, feelings are facts.

As one mother put it to me, “I don’t know if I’m afraid for my kids, or if I’m afraid other people will be afraid and will judge me for my lack of fear.” In other words, risk assessment and moral judgment are intertwined…

That same year, an Arizona woman named Shanesha Taylor was chargedwith two counts of felony child abuse and sentenced to 18 years of supervised probation, all because she had no child care and had to leave her two younger children in the car while she went on a job interview.

In a country that provides no subsidized child care and no mandatory family leave, no assurance of flexibility in the workplace for parents, no universal preschool and minimal safety nets for vulnerable families, making it a crime to offer children independence in effect makes it a crime to be poor.

I spent plenty of time alone in the car when I was a kid.  I wandered all over my neighborhood learning independence.  It was great.  And the point is not anecdote, but as a society we have completely given into irrational fears about child safety. That’s not okay.  And our public policy with regards to parenting sure as hell should not be reflecting that.

Quick hits (part II)

1) Though I’m not much of a Bernie fan, I am a pretty big fan of Elizabeth Warren.  Enjoyed this Rebecca Traister profile of her as the vanguard of Trump opposition.

2) Emily Yoffe on how “zero tolerance” is almost always a bad idea.  Amen!

3) The plastic straw ban gains momentum.  And yet:

The Ocean Conservancy’s 2017 Coastal Cleanup Report compiled beach cleanups around the world and found that the most common trash item found on beaches is cigarettes, followed by plastic bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, and bags. Straws and stirrers placed seventh on the list, at about 3 percent of the total trash. Bloomberg News estimates that on a global scale, straws would probably only account for 0.03 percent of total plastic waste by mass. Another study found that an estimated 46 percentof the debris in the ocean is abandoned fishing equipment.

Seriously, though.  My family uses re-usable water bottles all the time.  We bring our bags to the grocery store, we bring plastic home from fast-food restaurants to recycle.  Some, I’m not going to be lectured to because I still like drinking with plastic straws.

4) Chart from Axios.  Forget drugs– it’s all about hospital and physician prices!

5) Fortunately, I almost never have occasion to go to the trendy restaurants of today.  They are, indeed, too damn loud!

6) Anne Applebaum on the Russian threat:

This matters because Butina is at most the tip of the iceberg, one of the sillier, more junior players in a broader game. Far more important are Russian oligarchs bearing bribes or Russian hackers probing vulnerabilities in our political system as well as our electrical grid. To push back against them, as well as their equivalents from the rest of the autocratic world, we will need not only to catch the odd agent but also to make our political funding systems more transparent, to write new laws banning shell companies and money laundering, and to end the manipulation of social media. It took more than a generation for Americans to reject the temptations of communist authoritarianism; it will take more than a generation before we have defeated kleptocratic authoritarianism too — if we still can.

7) Bill Browder (the man responsible for the Magnistky Act) on Trump.

8) Civil War re-enactment is a dying world.  In part, because it is increasingly difficult to ignore the social-historical context of the War and focus just on the military specifics.

9) Forget batteries, we already have an affordable and efficient way to store energy on an industrial scale.  Use it to pump water uphill.  Seriously.  They are no considering a major project at Hoover Dam.  Also, a good Planet Money on this approach, recently.

10) Though I think we sometimes go too far in truly ambiguous cases (often, involving alcohol) about sexual assault policies, as far as what we teach our children and encourage in society, I really liked this take that “consent” is too low a bar.”

11)

Quick hits (part I)

1) Really interesting feature on the difficulty of making life after hate for former hardcore white supremacists:

Confronting white supremacists online and in the streets may feel personally gratifying and politically urgent. Yet as liberals and the anti-Trump “resistance” fawn over Life After Hate, deradicalization activists argue that much of what the left thinks it knows about shutting down racist extremists is misplaced. When it comes to changing individuals, denunciation may counteract rather than hasten deradicalization. If that seems like surrender, consider that some researchers who study hate groups think we should view violent extremism not only as a problem of ideology, but also as a problem of addiction: a craving for group identity, adrenaline, and the psycho­logical kick of hatred. As with substance addiction, there may be no silver bullet for curing extremism, only a lifelong battle to leave such impulses behind. As Peter Simi, a sociologist at Chapman University in California, puts it, “You probably don’t ever fully move on from violent extremism.” The uncomfortable truth is that the best way to reform racist thugs may be to offer them precisely what they aren’t willing to offer others, and precisely what many people in this polarized political moment feel they least deserve: empathy.

2) Goop (Gwynneth Paltrow’s monetized pseudo science) the magazine is not happening with Conde Nast (publisher of New Yorker, among others) because quality magazines insist on fact-checking.

3) The reality is that Paul Ryan is an horrible person who has protected Trump at every opportunity:

That’s important defensive work on behalf of Trump, and Ryan has been deeply engaged in it

Far more numerous, however, are Ryan’s sins of omissions: things he could have done to strengthen the Mueller investigation, protect it from interference, and subject the Trump administration to real scrutiny.

Ryan could have blocked Nunes from releasing that memo in the first place, and removed him from his chairmanship. He did not.

Ryan could condemn House Oversight Committee Chair Trey Gowdy and House Judiciary Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte for holding farcical hearings on FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok meant to cast the whole effort to investigate Trump’s Russia conduct as a witch hunt.

He could threaten to strip Gowdy and Goodlatte of their chairmanships unless they commit to launch investigations into Trump’s fraudulent charity, into his potentially corrupt real estate deals abroad, and into the possibility that Trump actively collaborated with Russian intelligence, WikiLeaks, or both. He could urge them to subpoena Trump’s tax returns and search them for irregularities. He has not done any of that.

Ryan could bring the Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act, a bipartisan bill that would protect Mueller against arbitrary firing, to the House floor for a vote, or force House Goodlatte to consider it in committee. He has not; he hasn’t even endorsed the bill.

Ryan could force a floor vote on the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a bill with 200 co-sponsors (two of whom are Republicans) to create a National Commission on Foreign Interference in the 2016 Election to investigate what exactly happened with Russia’s interference. He hasn’t endorsed the bill, let alone brought it up for a vote.

Ryan could also force a floor vote on a version of the Senate’s Secure Elections Act, which would get rid of paperless electronic voting machines that are hackable and push states to engage in routine audits to verify election results are legitimate. Mainstream Republicans like Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) are on board. Ryan is not.

A recent report by Politico Playbook suggested that congressional Republicans think all the criticism they’re receiving for carrying water for Trump is unfair. The message, Playbook reported, boiled down to, “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT US TO DO?” They claim they’ve held sufficient hearings and slapped enough sanctions on Russia.

The litany above is what I want them to do, and the person who could make them do it is Paul Ryan. He could remove Devin Nunes with the stroke of a pen. He could bring floor votes on the above legislation whenever he wants. He could whip votes for the legislation too, and push Mitch McConnell to move it in the Senate.

That he doesn’t do any of that, and in fact actively enables the cover-up, is telling. Ryan genuinely believes that the cause of slashing corporate taxes and tax rates for rich Americans is worth collaborating with a reckless administration in an elaborate attempt to cover up wrongdoing. He makes that choice every day, and it should blacken his historical legacy.

4) I do find the controversy about Mesut Özil, the meaning of nationality in Germany, and the German soccer team pretty fascinating.

5) Why don’t more men take their wife’s last name?

And so it is that, even after generations of feminist progress, the expectation, at least for straight couples, has remained: Women take the man’s last name. Seventy-two percent of adults polled in a 2011 study said they believe a woman should give up her maiden name when she gets married, and half of those who responded said they believe that it should be a legal requirement, not a choice. In some states, married women could not legally vote under their maiden name until the mid-1970s.

The opposite—a man taking his wife’s name—remains incredibly rare: In a recent study of 877 heterosexual married men, less than 3 percent took their wife’s name when they got married. When her fiancé, Avery, announced that he wanted to take her last name, Becca Lamb, a 23-year-old administrative assistant living in Washington, D.C., told me that, at first, she said no: “It shocked me. I had always expected to take my husband’s last name someday. I didn’t want to do anything too out of the norm.”

6) I had no idea who James Gunn was but I think Disney was totally wrong in firing him.  And I also think we should not be aiding conservatives in weaponizing old tweets.

7) Sea-level rise is wreaking havoc on NC beaches.  But our Republican legislature requires we pretend otherwise.

8) Is there anything more pathetic than all the racist white people who insist that it is minorities and the anti-racists who are the problem when it comes to race?  David Roberts: on the reaction to his twitter “white people” poll:

Substantively (if you can call it that), there were two basic reactions. One is to say that I’m a racist, or liberals are the real racists, because they keep calling attention to race and dividing people up by race, while conservatives are just trying to be individuals and judge people by the content of their character. It’s the “No puppet! You’re the puppet!” of racism.

The other kind of response was, to paraphrase: Of course white people are good for America, white people are America, and America, like every other shithole nation white people conquered, would still be a shithole if not for white people.

(I’m not going to pluck out individual tweets and embed them here because I don’t want to drag individuals on Twitter into a public dispute like this; you can read the thread to see if I’m characterizing it accurately.)

These are mutually contradictory points, of course. “You’re the real racist, and white people rule.” But they are both very familiar in conservative rhetoric and both delivered behind the same aesthetic, using the same keywords, in the same jumbled tone of fury and contempt.

9) I quite loved Billy Joel back in the day (pretty much never listen any more, though still have a soft spot for “Matter of Trust”).  Loved this NYT interview on what he’s up to and why he stopped recording new songs.

10) Speaking of music, had a great time seeing Weezer (for the third time) this past week.  Though, I realized it seems like rock and roll (i.e., guitar-driven rock) really is dead these days.  Given my negativity towards jazz, this little bit in a “rock and roll really is dead” piece really set me back:

Top 40 radio, which has always been for teenagers, is mostly devoted to post-rock pop and hip-hop. In 2016, rock is not teenage music.

Rock is now where jazz was in the early 1980s. Its form is mostly fixed.

Well, damn, nothing I love like catchy, guitar-driven music.

11) A victory for the Impossible Burger.  I remain a techno-optimist on widespread, affordable, and tasty plant-based meat in our future.  Good for our environment and good for humane treatment of animals.

World’s largest Mosque?

I’m finding the new Sacha Baron Cohen show a bit hit and miss (I guess he’s always been), but damn is this segment a hit.  Enjoy.

Coolest map ever

If you haven’t yet checked out this NYT interactive map with precinct-level data, set aside and do so.  So much fun.  Could hardly even stop getting my 12-year from exploring it with me tonight so he would go to bed.  (We especially loved the random voter island feature).  I also loved looking up everywhere I’ve ever lived (reddest = Southwestern Lubbock, Texas). The accompanying article on the highlights of the map is terrific too.  So many cool patterns.  Here’s the pattern in the South.  it’s almost as if race matters in America.

If you are out of NYT articles for the month, find a way– just too cool.  I’m definitely going to be having fun with this in many future political science classes.

And, because my son Evan was shocked to realize just how geographically concentrated the Democratic population is (and you should hear him rant against all the racist white people), here is a map that I showed him of counties which comprise half the population of the US (grew up in one, went to grad school in one, live in one):

How to cover Trump’s tweets

Ignore them.

Of course, there’s a case to be made that what the President says in inherently newsworthy.  That said a lot of “the president X ….” doesn’t really apply to Trump in the same way.  Hard to ignore the President’s bellicose bluster with Iran, but I think there is a very good case for completely ignoring the president’s inane and 100% false popping off about other matters, like this:

I’m very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election. Based on the fact that no President has been tougher on Russia than me, they will be pushing very hard for the Democrats. They definitely don’t want Trump!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2018

Nobody’s been tougher on Russia!!  Riiight.  And we have Eastasia always been at war with .

Anyway, if you are going to cover it, I like the approach the Post seems to be taking of late:

“Without evidence [emphasis mine], Trump claims Russia ‘will be pushing very hard for the Democrats’ in 2018 midterms”

Of course, that could almost be the default for covering Trump, “Without evidence, Trump claims…” or “In a series of falsehoods, Trump claims…” or “in direct contravention of reality, Trump claims…”  etc.

A simple agenda?

Here’s Drum’s proposal for a simple, post-card size agenda for Democrats:

Works for me.  And here’s the thing, both Drum and I are center-left, policy wonk types, but other than quibbles with “real borders” (judging by the comments to Drum), this seems like something pretty much everybody across the liberal spectrum can endorse.  And, yeah, the devil is totally in the details on all this.  But that never stopped Republicans from proposing things.

How the corporate tax cuts are great for average Americans

Kidding, of course.  Here’s the key chart and the Vox article about it:

Wages were supposed to rise after Trump's tax cuts. Instead, they’ve fallen https://t.co/LactYzTE7a via @bopinion pic.twitter.com/qUdfYQK1En

— Bloomberg (@business) July 21, 2018

It’s not that corporations don’t have more money — it’s that they have no particular reason to give that money to workers.

The Republican tax bill has been a major windfall for corporations and the wealthy.

According to estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the top fifth of earners get 70 percent of the bill’s benefits, and the top 1 percent get 34 percent. The new tax treatment for “pass-through” entities — companies organized as sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, or S corporations — will mean an estimated $17 billion in tax savings for millionaires in 2018. American corporations are showering their shareholders with stock buybacks, thanks in part to their tax savings, and have returned nearly $700 billion to investors this year.

When the tax bill was passed, a number of corporations announced bonuses and investments. Some of those were recycled news, and regardless, while a $1,000 one-time payout is a nice boost, it is not a sustained benefit to workers in the same way a wage increase is.

Some Republicans have even admitted that the tax cuts aren’t the boost to workers they promised. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) this spring said there is “no evidence whatsoever that money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.” President Donald Trump has already started talking about a new tax bill that would reduce the corporate tax rate even more and make temporary tax cuts for families and individuals permanent.

Of course, these basic facts were widely predicted before the tax cuts were passed.  But Republicans never were actually concerned about helping the wages of ordinary Americans.  They just wanted the rich to get richer.  And they succeeded.

Diversity and partisanship

Nice analysis from Brookings’ William Galston:

A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey released earlier this week found that while 64 percent of Americans regard increasing demographic diversity as mostly positive, there are deep partisan divisions: Democrats believe that it’s mostly positive by an overwhelming margin of 85 to 13 percent, as do Independents by 59 to 34 percent, but 50 percent of Republicans regard it as mostly negative, compared to only 43 percent who favor it.

A closer look at the data reveals the sources of this cleavage. There are no gender differences, and age differences are much smaller than expected, with 57 percent of Americans 65 and older taking a positive view of rising diversity. Racial and ethnic differences are significant but not dispositive: 78 percent of both African-Americans as Hispanics see diversity as a plus, but so do 56 percent of white Americans. Much the same holds for regional differences: although 72 percent of respondents from the West and Northeast approve of increasing diversity, so do 60 percent of Midwesterners and 57 percent of Southerners.

The key drivers of partisan division are educational and religious differences among white Americans. Sixty-nine percent of whites with a BA or more have a mostly positive view of demographic diversity, compared to just 50 percent of whites without college degrees.  [emphases mine] As for religion, 52 percent of white Catholics and 56 percent of white mainline Protestants think rising diversity is mostly positive. By contrast, just 42 percent of white evangelical Protestants favor these changes, while 52 percent think they’re mostly negative. Two-thirds of whites without college degrees supported Republicans in the 2016 elections, as did eight in 10 white evangelicals.

The bottom line: the core of the Republican base is deeply uncomfortable with the central demographic trend of our time, which public policy is powerless to resist. Even if the U.S. slammed shut the doors of immigration, differences in birth rates between native-born citizens and newer arrivals would ensure the steady erosion of the population’s white majority, albeit at a slower pace.

Go ahead Democrats, “abolish ICE” and provide “Medicare for all”

Really liked this piece in Vox from Dylan Matthews that summarizes a lot of Political Science on how little issues actually seem to matter in elections.  The conclusion is the Democrats need not be so tepid and don’t need to fear more bold policy pronouncements:

An unspoken assumption of most political punditry is that the political positions taken by, and the policies supported and enacted by, politicians play a significant, perhaps decisive role in determining the outcomes of elections.

This is the premise of basically every piece of commentary about, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise victory in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th District…

Each of these arguments has specific problems. But all of them share one big issue: They dramatically overestimate how much the actual issue positioning of candidates matters for how people vote. [emphases mine]

What I want to propose is a null hypothesis for political punditry: Outside of truly extreme proposals, there’s basically no plausible position a politician or political party can endorse or enact that will have a meaningful impact on their likelihood of retaking political power. The US has for decades had a stable system where liberal and conservative policy coalitions (which have sorted out under the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively) semi-regularly alternate in power, with long periods of divided rule and gridlock in the middle. Dramatic shifts in the ideological makeup of both parties during that same period did not upset that alternation of power. It continued apace.

The upshot of this phenomenon is that parties should be a little less nervous about sticking to their guns and arguing for what they believe, whether or not it polls well. Call it, if you like, the “do what you want” theory of politics…

But as a baseline position, I think assuming a null effect is a more reasonable guess than assuming that voter preferences are heavily influenced by candidates’ issue statements. We just have too much evidence that this isn’t how voters really make their decisions.

Instead, we see evidence that Democrats and Republicans exchange power at regular intervals, in spite of massive changes in the beliefs of those parties’ elected representatives. Maybe it’s time to argue that parties should adopt positions by arguing for those positions on the merits, not because they’re electorally useful or mandatory…

“Most people have strong feelings on few if any of the issues the government needs to address and would much prefer to spend their time in nonpolitical pursuits,” University of Nebraska political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse write in their book Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work. “The people as a whole tend to be quite indifferent to policies and therefore are not eager to hold government accountable for the policies it produces.”

There’s tons of research reaffirming this finding. The University of Michigan’s Donald Kinder and Louisiana State’s Nathan Kalmoe show in their book Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Publicthat most Americans don’t really have stable ideologies in a way that matters. This isn’t an original insight of theirs; they view themselves as replicating the work of Philip Converse, who laid out a similar argument in 1964.

American voters aren’t down-the-line liberals or conservatives the way the people they elect are. Astonishingly, what a respondent said their ideology was — liberal, conservative, moderate, etc. — had “little influence over opinion on immigration, affirmative action, capital punishment, gun control, Social Security, health insurance, the deficit, foreign aid, tax reform, and the war on terrorism.” Ideology seemed to matter on LGBTQ rights and abortion, but even that went away after they controlled for religion…

“Numerous studies have demonstrated that most residents of democratic countries have little interest in politics and do not follow news of public affairs beyond browsing the headlines,” Vanderbilt’s Larry Bartels and Princeton’s Christopher Achen conclude in their 2016 book Democracy for Realists. “They do not know the details of even salient policy debates, they do not have a firm understanding of what the political parties stand for, and they often vote for parties whose long-standing issue positions are at odds with their own.”

Good stuff (as almost always) from Matthews, but I was a little disappointed that he did not include what strikes me as the best evidence for the fact that Democrats should just be more bold– Republicans have continued to have widespread electoral success despite embracing all sorts of unpopular policies.  Paul Waldman addresses this in a recent column about pundit advice (especially from James Comey) for Democrats to move towards the center:

While that may seem perfectly logical if you’re a political junkie, in the real world it seldom works. The reason is that most voters don’t think in ideological terms. They aren’t maintaining a running tally of positions candidates have taken, then assigning each candidate a score (plus 1 for her positions on abortion and health care, minus one for her position on NAFTA), then seeing which candidate’s total comes closest to the ideological score they’ve assigned themselves. That’s just not how voters make decisions.

Nobody understands this better than Republicans. After all, it’s the reason they can keep winning elections despite the fact that most of the things they want to do are absurdly unpopular. Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, stopping any increase in the minimum wage, taking away protections for people with preexisting conditions, opposing even universal background checks for gun purchases? These are not popular ideas. Yet Republicans don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether they’re moving too far to the right, because they find ways, like stoking culture war issues and playing on racial resentment, that push them over the finish line.

Personally, I’m for reforming ICE and for universal health care (not necessarily Medicare) for all (because, damnit, policy details matter).  But, politically, Democrats may as well go for it.

The Trump Jesus

Oh my, oh my.  I started reading this Washington Post article this morning about Southern Baptists in Alabama trying to reconcile their faith and their love of the amazingly God-less and amoral man that is Trump.  I stopped reading because it was long and, look, pro-life judges!  Later on, though, I discovered via twitter that I had missed the best part.  Damn, motivated is strong with partisanship, but it can be even stronger with religion.  Check this out from a “Sunday school teacher” (and the  best evidence yet to stop using that phrase as the marker of a decent person):

And there was Sheila Butler, who sat on the sixth pew on the right side, who said “we’re moving toward the annihilation of Christians.”

She was 67, a Sunday school teacher who said this was the only way to understand how Christians like her supported Trump.

“Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation,” she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian — allegations that are false. “He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in.”

“Obama woke a sleeping nation,” said Linda.

“He woke a sleeping Christian [emphases in original] nation,” Sheila corrected.

Linda nodded. It wasn’t just Muslims that posed a threat, she said, but all kinds of immigrants coming into the country.

“Unpapered people,” Sheila said, adding that she had seen them in the county emergency room and they got treated before her. “And then the Americans are not served.”

Love thy neighbor, she said, meant “love thy American neighbor.”

Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the “legal immigrant stranger.”

“The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’ ” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.”

To her, this was a moral threat far greater than any character flaw Trump might have, as was what she called “the racial divide,” which she believed was getting worse. The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”

Good God.  It’s almost like an Onion parody of a Southern Christian.  Alas, that’s the reality.