This Type of Religion Kills

When I wrote my 2013 novel about the threat posed by the far right and its theocratic objectives, one of the heroic characters campaigning for separation of church and state says he would defend with his life the freedom of conscience and religion of all Americans, including his opponents. 

This used to be my view, until “religion” came to mean something very different.   Take Greg Locke, the pastor at the Global Vision Bible Church near Nashville, who, as reported by the Washington Post, has stated the following during his “sermons”: the pandemic is “fake,” the death count is “manipulated,” and the vaccine is a “dangerous scam” made of “aborted fetal tissue.”   This week, he went a step further: “Don’t believe this delta variant nonsense.” If “you start showing up [with] all these masks and all this nonsense, I will ask you to leave.”   Lest you think his views on COVID and vaccination are not political, he has clarified his position, preaching to his congregation that  President Biden is “a sex trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.” 

This man and his views are not simply tolerated, they are subsidized by the tax deductibility of contributions to his “church” that permit his hate-filled bilge to be amplified and spread.  And because he speaks under the cloak of “religion” his speech and actions are increasingly exempted from laws that would otherwise render them illegal.

Under both global norms and traditional Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, freedom of expression has been limited in situations where necessary to prevent harm to others.   Examples include libel and slander, obscenity, sedition, incitement to unlawful behavior, disclosure of classified information or trade secrets, copyright violation, the right to privacy, public security, perjury, practicing medicine without a license, etc.   And we all remember learning that falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is not tolerated, because the resulting injuries and deaths are foreseeable.   But yell “God told me there’s a fire,” and it’s OK?

If we had access to the relevant statistics we could calculate the probable number of people who will die because “Pastor” Locke convinced his flock that the pandemic is a “fake” and that God requires them to remain unvaccinated.    But now consider that roughly a third of Americans attend similar services, and the number of resulting deaths is in the hundreds of thousands.   This type of religion kills.  And to permit, privilege and subsidize it – when the nation’s number one public health and economic priority is to achieve high rates of vaccination – is insane.  

We’ve seen this all before.  Frederick Douglass, in his magnificent July 4 (actually July 5) address in 1852 called out the American church’s perversion of Christianity in support of slavery: “These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form.”

The Nightmare Is Not Over

I, like a solid majority of my countrymen, will celebrate the end of the national train wreck that was the Trump presidency.  But that celebration must be tempered by a sober understanding that the nightmare will not end until the competitiveness of the GOP no longer depends on the lunatic fringe.

NBC News reported yesterday that the vast galaxy of the far right is splintered into two principal groups.  One is largely motivated by QAnon adherents who believe that Inauguration Day will be the climactic realization of their prophecy, when Trump will force a 10-day countrywide blackout that ends in military tribunals, the mass execution of his political enemies, and a second Trump term.  You read that right, mass execution.  On the other hand, the cluster of various anti-government hard-core Trumpists call this magical thinking, and insist on more practical and proactive steps to bring about the required violent insurrection and a second term for Trump. 

Sure, kooks and zealots have been around for a long time.  Before, they were few in number and isolated.  Now, they are united by the internet and number in the tens of millions.   Before, their vile nonsense could be spoken only in furtive meetings of militias and hate groups, now the President of the United States has given them permission to speak it out loud.   Before, they were despised and ridiculed by both major political parties, now, they are indispensable to the political fortunes of one of those parties, whose leader calls them “good people” who (even as they attempted to reverse the election through violence) he “loves.”  

The result? As of three days ago, polls showed 30% of the GOP had a favorable view of QAnon, and a few days before that (but in both cases after the attempted insurrection), 49% of Republicans opposed proceeding with the inauguration of the new president.   When 30-40 million Americans lose faith in democracy, anchor their politics in preposterous delusions, support an authoritarian demagogue, and remain essential to the fortunes of one of our two established political parties, our constitutional democracy remains in peril, despite the coming transfer of power.

It is tempting to take some comfort in the good sense and relative grounding of the slim majority of GOP voters who are embarrassed by QAnon and reject the stolen election delusion, but it would be a mistake to expect that embarrassment to translate into abandonment of the GOP on future election days.  Even after the shambolic catastrophe of the past four years, more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016.   Why?  This is the era of identity politics, and when shifting your partisan allegiance requires you to swap out your essential sense-of-self for a different one, it becomes very hard to do.  As a result, solving this problem in the long term cannot depend on the Democrats reliably and consistently defeating the GOP in elections, instead it requires that the GOP/conservative movement reform and transform itself from within. 

The question for the country is whether the Republican leadership is likely to ostracize the kooks, repudiate Christian nationalism and white supremacy, and wean its members away from the dangerous hallucinogen that was Trumpism and its supporting pathologies.

Of course, from a moral and patriotic standpoint, we have every right to require that the GOP do this as a condition to retaining its standing as a legitimate political party, i.e., one sworn to work within the constitutional system.   But that’s not the question.   The question in front of us is will existing or emerging leaders on the right actually do it. 

The matter will be decided by political calculation, not moral suasion.  Will Trump become toxic?  Not likely – more likely a martyr to the cause.  Does the path to power within the party come from gaining the mantle of Trump, which in turn will mean deifying him in the manner of Chavez and Castro?  That was the orthodox expectation that caused 147 Republican Congressmen to throw democracy under the bus in pursuit of personal power.   But perhaps after January 6 that expectation is changing?   But even if the Trumpian cult has been weakened by January 6, will support of the Christian nationalists, white supremacists, and other extremists continue to be only path to victory in a GOP primary, as it has been from a time long before Trump?  Probably, unless . . .

Two recent incidents remind us of the role of money in politics.  One is how quickly the media suspended promoting conspiracies regarding Dominion voting machines when the company sued them for the billions in damages caused by these fantasies.  The other is how many companies have made their own economic calculation regarding the unacceptable cost to their businesses of supporting the GOP sedition caucus, advertising on Fox hosts promoting the stolen election falsehood, and doing business with the Trump Organization.   Money may be the sole lever than can persuade the GOP to escape its domination by kooks and extremists, and take the difficult step of rebuilding a coalition that can win without them.   Money also can help break the grip of Fox, which controls the information flow to the conservative half of the country.  Ironically, Fox started as the house organ for the conservative movement, but during the Trump administration turned the tables and instead ended up dictating policy and messaging to a media-obsessed President with few ideas of his own.   Withdrawn advertising and boycotts can incentivize Fox to reinvent itself as once again doing actual journalism, perhaps still with a right-leaning bent, but recognizing the diversity of views on the right and never again acting as the author and enforcer of a prevailing orthodoxy.  

The other lever that could influence the political calculation of the GOP is legal peril.   The Biden administration, while respecting the First Amendment, must diligently prosecute the myriad criminal infractions by armed militias, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, promoters of conspiracies, and far-right extremists of all sorts, and amplify the risk of legal jeopardy for all who support them.   When the Trump administration’s own national security apparatus calls them the leading national security threat to the United States, the Biden Justice Department has an opening to act as aggressively as they would in the case of foreign terrorism. 

While these levers can provide incentives, breaking the grip the far right has on the GOP requires envisioning and then building a GOP coalition that can win without the far right.  This is a huge opportunity for ambitious young conservatives.  Ironically, Trump’s 2016 coalition showed the way by appealing to middle class voters excluded from the economic booms of the past decades.   

Ironically, to save America, Democrats and independents must work to make it possible for the GOP to reinvent itself in a way that provides conservative Americans with an alternative to fascist authoritarianism.  This will be hard for progressives to accept.  But if the GOP remains in the grip of Trump, or a post-Trump GOP remains in the grip of the lunatic right, then, as David Axelrod put it, the events of January 6 will prove to be a “dismal landmark on the way to ruin.”

The Other Pandemic

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) provides that a diagnosis of delusional disorder is made if a person has “non-bizarre” delusions (meaning things that could happen in real life, such as being stalked by someone, as opposed to, say, seeing flying elephants) for at least one month and does not have the characteristic symptoms of other psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia. 

Recent polls showed that 52% of Republicans believe that Trump won the election and 56% of Republicans believe that the QAnon conspiracy theory is “mostly or partly true” (33% believe it is “mostly true”).     As a reminder, Forbes magazine described the QAnon thesis as follows:   “President Trump is defending the planet from a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles (consisting mostly of Hollywood celebrities, liberal politicians and "deep-state" government officials) who are running a secret child sex-trafficking ring”  (the ever-sober Forbes omitted the more sensational non-core elements of QAnon belief, such as these same folks harvesting children’s blood).  

Both these delusions are not only unsupported by any evidence, but are easily disproven (and have been).   On their face, in the usually more restrained words of Forbes, they are “preposterous” and “outlandish.”   They are not opinions or beliefs, they are delusions.

With at least 245 million voting age Americans, 30% of whom most recently identified themselves as Republican, that means that about 38 million of our fellow citizens suffer from the delusion that Trump won and 24 million believe the QAnon conspiracy to be “mostly true.”

So as we enter 2021 America finds itself in the grip of two pandemics.  COVID has infected over 14 million Americans.   The 24-38 million delusional Republicans, most presumably being non-schizophrenic, and having persisted in these delusions for over a month, comprise a pandemic far more severe and perhaps more consequential than COVID: a pandemic of delusional disorder.  

While this disorder, unlike COVID, does not generally threaten the lives of the afflicted, it does make them vulnerable to mendacious politicians, con men, and hucksters of all kinds (the current President leading the way by conning mostly small donors, following the election, out of $200 million).   Most importantly, though, this second pandemic does threaten the life of the country.   Democratic government cannot be sustained with over half of one of our two political parties afflicted by a disabling delusion.   I say “disabling,” because you cannot freely exercise your rights as a voter when your judgment and discretion have been warped or coopted by a delusional conviction.    And the democratic system collapses when a critical mass of citizens no longer accepts elections as free and fair.

This second pandemic should be receiving equal time on the news feeds, nightly news, and front pages.   Psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists should help us understand the causes of this outbreak of mass hysterical delusion.  David Brooks argued that conspiracy theories take hold among “low status” groups that feel powerless; but within weeks acknowledged that this didn’t explain why “the neurosurgeon down the street” (neither low status nor powerless) believed that the election was fraudulent.  We have a strong grip on the causes and proper treatment of COVID-19.  But we don’t yet understand the delusional disorder pandemic, and until we understand it, we won’t know how to treat it.

Ultimately, this pandemic of delusion ­­– and not COVID ­– will present the knottiest challenge to the new Biden administration.  Left undiagnosed and untreated, it will power and sustain hyper-partisanship, political dysfunction, and the fracturing of the nation into irreconcilable camps through the Biden administration and beyond.

An Election Morning Fantasy

Please indulge the idle fantasy of a quiet election day morning.  I’m dreaming that this is the speech delivered by the winner:

My fellow Americans, and I mean all Americans, those who voted for me, those who voted for the other guy, and those who didn’t vote at all.   

 I’m not going to make a victory speech. While I appreciate all who worked hard for our campaign and who came out to vote, I want to be clear – what happened today wasn’t and isn’t about me.   What happened today was about something else.

During the campaign the thing I heard over and over from Americans of all political persuasions is that they didn’t like this division of our country into warring red and blue camps, not one bit, and that they were looking for a leader who could unite us, not divide us.    That starts tonight.

First, the yelling has to stop.  I am going to speak to Americans as the intelligent good people they are, not just some mob to be fired up and manipulated.   How can we expect Americans to trust their government if their government doesn’t trust them?

Second, this is a moment when we all need to step back and focus on our deepest values.  When I was a child, I used to go to my grandmother with my problems.  Her advice was often the same:  the ends don’t justify the means.  It doesn’t matter how much you want something, she would say, that doesn’t justify doing something you know is wrong.   You can always make up a story to convince yourself that lying or cheating or mistreating someone to get what you want is OK.  That’s what weak people do, and before you know it they don’t know right from wrong.

Think about it, folks.  That’s where our politics went off the rails, and it all came to a climax during the past four years.    Our leaders lied and lied and lied and said it was for a good cause.   And they broke America’s word, betrayed our allies, embraced dictators, separated children from their families – so many things we all knew were wrong – and said it was OK because they needed to do it to achieve their political goals.  That stops tonight.  America tells the truth, keeps the faith with our allies, and does the right thing. 

The third thing is that we’re going to put the “public” back in public service.  Another one of my grandmother’s favorite sayings was “it’s not all about you.”   Well, folks, that’s not an easy message for a budding politician to hear.  But I heard it, not only from my grandmother but from the nuns at my school.  I learned that all the great virtues – kindness, compassion, charity, love – are all about escaping the trap of the ego, escaping the illusion that it’s all about you.  And folks, it’s also at the heart of public service – putting the interests of the country and its people above your own.  

So tonight, I want to say the following to everyone in government and who may wish to join my administration:  Your loyalty must be to the constitution and the country, not to me.   You must speak truth to power – telling me what I don’t want to hear is your highest responsibility.  And to our career public servants – the military, the scientists, diplomats, intelligence and law enforcement officials – all those who have spent their lifetimes building up expertise and putting that at the service of their country – you must be honest, independent and above politics.  Your role is to serve the country, not the political interests of the party in power or of the incumbent President.   Your job is to come up with solutions to the problems faced by the American people, not a stream of gestures and actions intended to please my political base. 

I cannot heal this country’s wounds alone.   I need help.   Here’s what I’m going to be asking for in the coming weeks:

·      Every American should ask herself or himself where they are getting their information.   Are you exposed to diverse points of view?   Do you ask yourself every time you are on-line who is the source of the information you are seeing?  If you need medical information, please be sure you’re getting it from a doctor.  If it’s a question of science, make sure the information comes from a scientist.    Be on your guard.  Every time you go on line extremely powerful forces – including political extremists and America’s adversaries – are trying to manipulate you for their own purposes.  Don’t let them.   

·      I ask the press to step back and think seriously about its responsibility for America’s current division.   I ask you to clearly separate your journalistic and editorial content.  I ask you to tone it down – please turn down the volume.  I ask you all to help rebut the misinformation and conspiracy nonsense that spreads its poison online, to turn to real experts, not political pundits or ideologues with an agenda, as the guests on your shows and sources for your stories.  You are not the enemies of the people, you are the guarantors of the people’s liberty.

And to each American I ask that you give us a chance.   One of the lowest moments in American politics during my lifetime was when the other party announced at the beginning of President Obama’s term that it would do everything possible to ensure that the President failed in everything he did.   America then faced terrible problems – not political problems, but real world problems affecting every American that needed to be solved, not to mention challenges from adversaries around the world.  Of course each side could advocate for the solutions it favored – but to wish for failure and obstruct everything just because it was being done by the other party was a terrible thing.    It’s cost was enormous.   And this legacy was compounded by the more recent practice of putting politics above even basic competence.  These things left us with a health care system that fails millions and is too expensive for those it does service, with millions of unemployed, unconscionable wage disparity, an addiction epidemic, families feeling hopeless and whole communities feeling left behind.  It’s left us, the world’s richest country, with one of the world’s highest death rates from COVID and a virus still spreading unchecked.  It’s left us with problems of racial and social justice which are long, long overdue for solution, crumbling infrastructure, and country already bearing the ravages of unchecked climate change.  America’s standing in the world has plummeted and its crucial alliances are frayed.  Let’s agree to have spirited debates on exactly how to tackle these problems, but let’s agree to work together to solve them, one way or another.   

I didn’t win a great victory tonight, I answered a cry for help.   Today America hired me to do a really tough job.   But I can’t succeed unless we back away from the precipice that Abe Lincoln warned us about when he said that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”  This will require every one of you, however you voted, helping to change the way we’ve been doing politics in this country.  I promise to you that I’ll do my part, and I hope and pray that you do yours.

Last Chance

We don’t have to wait until November 3.  The President has told the American people they cannot rely on the results of the election as fair or honest.  The results, he says, “may never be accurately determined.”  So much for the election.  Where does that leave us?

First, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.  He’s not waiting for the news cycle to throw up the normal electoral glitches and mistakes, which can then be inflated and distorted to fit his narrative.  He’s actually working every day to ensure that the election is mired in conflict, suspicion, intimidation, violence, endless litigation, and overall chaos.  It will be a mess. 

The naïve might ask, why undermine the election now, when it’s still possible (very possible, actually) that he could win.  That’s easy.  In Trump world, you can turn on a dime, with no accountability for what came before.   Before the midterms, American was under attack by massive caravans of violent mobs.  The risk was so great that the military was mobilized to the southern border to repel the attack.   The day after the election, did you hear another word about caravans?  No.  They disappeared as if they had never existed in the first place.  That’s what happens with election fraud if Trump wins.  Turns out it wasn’t so bad, and his overcoming it just adds to the luster of his glorious victory.

Thanks to Trump, the sole remaining prop to our democracy – public faith in the election system - is gone.  Somewhere between 34-45% of Americans will take him at this word:  the election cannot be fair.  Scan the global press:  America’s many friends around the world are devastated.  Its enemies are jubilant.

Can anything be done?  The most critical law enforcement and other governmental institutions have been gutted or politicized, so they won’t help us.  Republicans in Congress (and most Republican governors) have forfeited any expectation that they will do the right thing.   Pew surveys show American’s trust in their public institutions at historic lows.

So it’s up to us, both as individuals and acting through the civil society institutions in which we participate.   Look at the wave of commitment to anti-racism this summer – it’s on the home page of almost every organization.  We need the same kind of commitment to this election.  American elections work.  Trust the vote.  The messages are simple and they must come from local officials, celebrities, influencers, big tech, college presidents, trade associations, charities, doctors, unions, and artists.  You must demand it, and it has to happen now.

Are you scared and angry?  If not, all is lost.  Take a look at a Trump rally video; look at the anger, at the righteous certainty.   These people are motivated.   An imbalance of passion between extremists and moderates is natural.   So you need to become an extremist – not on any of the ideological or policy issues that divide the parties, but an extremist in defense of the one last thing we might possibly be able to agree on:  American elections work.  We need to trust the vote.  After all, what’s the alternative?  Without trust in elections, there is only the chaos in which demagogues flourish, and prosperity, security, and freedom collapse. 

Inversions

Reading the Republican convention coverage this morning, I noticed one reporter after another expressing bewilderment at the GOP strategy of taking all the worst vulnerabilities of the Trump record, and meeting them head-on by asserting the opposite:  Trump saved America from the pandemic, is the immigrants’ best friend, battles for the rights of women and minorities, has restored respect for America in the eyes of the world, etc. Those reporters need to study their history.

Spinning and rationalizing are the stuff of normal politics, and even public lies are in the traditional toolbox in circumstances where the politician is unlikely to get caught.  But the distinctive break from prior norms ­ – amply evident in Trump’s 2016 campaign and from the first days of his administration – is the continual assertion of the opposite of easily verifiable facts (e.g., calling the embarrassingly thin inauguration turnout the biggest in history, calling the GOP’s walloping in the 2018 midterms a “big victory,” etc., etc.). 

This shift from manipulative spin to aggressive assertion of the direct inverse of easily verifiable facts has long been understood to be a clear symptom of the transition to authoritarianism:  

 “O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’  ‘Four.’  ‘And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'”  (George Orwell, 1984, Part 3, Chapter 2)

 In 1984, authoritarianism requires a citizen to “reject the evidence of [his] eyes and ears” and makes common sense itself “[t]he heresy of heresies.”  Slogans are all unabashed inversions: War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength!   At rallies, people chant inversions over and over.  Inversions stream 24/7 from “telescreens,” as they do now into millions of households via Fox. Orwell was doing nothing more than fictionalizing the shifts to authoritarian rule he had observed during his own life and projecting how the rise of technology would increase, rather than mitigate, the risk.

So here we are.  Fox News, conceived by Roger Ailes as an ideological propaganda juggernaut, is “fair and balanced.”  The Mexicans, who of course oppose the wall, will “pay for it.”   When world leaders shake their heads in disbelief and horror at Trump’s latest blunder, he says they all called “to congratulate me.”  When North Korea becomes more aggressive following the rogue regime’s legitimization by the US, Trump has “brought peace to the Korean peninsula.”  Trump not only bungled, but exacerbated, the pandemic, and convention viewers are told he has been the “one leader” who “was right” about the virus and did an “incredible job.”

Inversions both train and test loyalty, the quality most valued by Trump.  Inversions, which make no sense, train the brain to reach its conclusions based on the authority of the source and one’s membership in the group.  Your capacity for empirical observation and independent judgment withers.  Faith in the party (or strongman, in this case) and loyalty become the only virtues.  And enthusiastic acceptance of the core inversions becomes the essential test of loyalty.   

On November 3, we will find out how many million Americans, looking at four fingers, will answer, “five.” 

The Platformless Party

There have been many historic turning points in American politics during the past four years, but few as astonishing as yesterday’s decision by the GOP to forego a platform.

Every four years since at least 1856 each party, meeting in convention, has published for the information of the American citizenry its position on the issues of the day.  The platform – in some countries it is called a “program” or “manifesto” – is a basic instrument common to all mature well-functioning democracies.   It states where the party stands, and the policies it intends to implement if elected.

But now it’s official.  The GOP has completed its transition from a traditional political party with ideology, ideas, policies and positions, to a populist movement built around a person.  The Republican convention yesterday officially resolved that the party’s agenda is whatever Donald Trump says it is from time to time. 

I actually admire the convention’s transparency.   It would be completely disingenuous to formulate, record and publish any agenda or policy positions that extend beyond the broadest of political platitudes (Make America Great, America First) because Trump would not in any way consider himself bound by any of it.   The GOP is telling us, with admirable frankness, that if we elect Trump the party’s policy or position on any particular issue will be whatever Trump decides makes him look best in the moment.   No ideology, principle, or policy coherence will prevail over the uninformed Tweeted impulses of the “stable genius.”  While the admission may be honest, it marks the end of democracy as we have practiced it in this country for two centuries.

We must treat every race, from U.S. Senator to local dog-catcher, as a referendum on this now-official position of the Republican party.

Today was even worse. Trump said:  "The only way they can take this election away from us is if it's a rigged election," a statement that precludes the possibility of the people choosing someone other than Trump as the next President. Autocratic authoritarianism is not a risk. It’s here.

The Nightmare Just Got Worse

Every public official who took an oath to defend the constitution should be considering today what actions are within his or her power to salvage the election of 2020 and, with it, American democracy. 

The President admitted on Thursday that he opposed additional funding for the United States Postal Service in order to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in ballots.  A major Trump donor (installed at the head of the USPS to replace an independent career employee) has orchestrated removal of critical high volume mail sorting machines.  The Post Office warned states considering mitigating COVID impacts through the use of mail-in ballots that they would face delays in delivery of ballots, making it impossible to know how many people actually voted or whether or when all the votes had been counted.   All this comes on top of a successful campaign by the President and Fox to turn the mechanics of voting into a partisan issue, with 76% of Republicans now accepting the Trumpist line on mail-in ballots and fraud.  None of this is hidden.  Larry Kudlow told CNBC that  “voting rights” are a “really liberal, left wish” and “not our game.”   Of course we knew this based on years of voter suppression efforts by the right.  Still, it is shocking to hear it said out loud.

If we have a COVID election without mail-in ballots, it will cause the election to fail.  If we have an election where mail-in ballots are used but not timely delivered by the post office, it will cause the election to fail.  If we are unable to conduct an election in which almost all the country has confidence, it will be the end of a 231 year record of democratic transfer of power (something we have long taken for granted, but which the rest of humanity knows is a precious gift, both hard to achieve and hard to maintain).

I call on all the living ex-Presidents, of both parties, to issue a joint statement calling for an end to efforts to undermine and delegitimize the election. 

I call on the House of Representatives and a broadly based group of leaders from every segment of civil society to call on the world’s premier independent international election monitors, the European Commission’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, to commence immediately to monitor the 2020 U.S. federal election and issue periodic reports.  

Trump’s ego demands that any election he does not win be delegitimized.  It will be satisfied by nothing less than the fulfillment of his prophecy of après moi, le déluge.  There is no damage to the country and its people that is too high a price to keep up appearances and feed his twin narratives of victimization and greatness.

With Trump, it is hard to untangle the consequences of his incompetence and his malevolence.   But at this point it doesn’t matter.  He has already vandalized the federal government and undermined most of the political norms that supported the success and durability of our political culture.   It seems he will not be satisfied unless the destruction of established institutions is complete.