The Death of a Word Defines Trump 2.0

The hounds have been released, free to savage every standard of goodness that’s come into being in the US.

The word decency, and all it stands for, is headed to the dustbins of history. It had a good run, dating back to 1567, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, first seen in a translation by Thomas Drant, poet and Church of England clergyman. It came from the Latin word decēntia.

It’s now down to 2 occurrences per million written words, having reached its peak during the decades when the United States and its Constitution came into being.

The definition I believe that best suits the word is from the Oxford Learners Dictionary: 

• honest, polite behavior that follows accepted moral standards and shows respect for others

Although there are about two months left before the next president is inaugurated, absolutely nothing concerning the incoming administration fits that definition. It’s as if the bar has been lowered to the degree that what was formerly bad behavior is now a badge of honor.

The bad behavior starts with mass deportation plans that absolutely will not make the country safer. And if they can’t deport some people, they’ll make them miserable with performative actions designed to denigrate people’s humanity. (See: Bathrooms, US Congress)

Debauchery (another word that’s fallen out of fashion) is the best description of Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz’s behavior, which involved orgies driven by intoxicants, with assorted young women renting out their bodies in return for Venmo and Paypal remunerations.

The former Congressman from Florida has withdrawn his nomination, following media attempts for comments on an alleged second sexual encounter with a minor in testimony before the House Ethics Committee. Reported instances of trafficking in women alone should have been enough for Gaetz to withdraw, but since females are now regarded as breeding stock in MAGA-land it wasn’t considered that big a deal.

Now, I don’t want to sound like prude here; consenting adults should be allowed to have whatever kind of sexual activity they desire, preferably in private. Sharing images of those actions with non-consent of the principles is generally regarded as a criminal act. And as a society, we’ve chosen to designate adult sex with minors as rape in most circumstances. 

Larceny, defined as stealing with intention, is acceptable behavior in this strange new world. Former Attorney General Matt Whitaker, announced as the next United States ambassador to NATO, worked with World Patent Marketing, a shady company that sold toilets for “well-endowed men” among other random things. The Federal Trade Commission ordered World Patent Marketing in 2018 to shut down its operations and pay a settlement of more than $25 million, after the company was determined to be a scam. 

Intimidation is, perhaps, the secret sauce for what keeps MAGA underlings, and fair minded citizens, from opposing the personal desires of Donald Trump. A spokesperson for the incoming president boasted on CNN that Senators who broke from the administration on confirmations would face primaries funded by Elon Musk. 

Not long ago, Racism was considered to be unacceptable. Now it’s been flipped its head, and MAGAts are claiming that Caucasians are being discriminated against. Taking a look at Trump’s incoming officials, it’s fairly obvious that white is right and competency is irrelevant. 

As The Grio rundown on Trump’s picks indicates, there is widespread acceptance of the great replacement theory and hostility toward programs concerning racial or sexual equality.

Competence used to be considered in choosing people who would oversee the government’s functions, but as the nomination of the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, Linda McMahon to be Secretary of Education indicates, loyalty to the President is the ultimate decider.

Her duties, rather than fostering literacy and math proficiency (the only two measures that conservatives like), will be to eliminate her Department and grease the skids for “school choice.”

Our nation’s historic aspiration for an educated populace is to be replaced by mandatory Christian-nationalist indoctrination.

Experience was once considered an asset in naming a Secretary of Defense, in charge of the largest military the world has ever known, a huge public benefit program, and a major driver of the economy. 

Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth’s experiences include a stint in the Army National Guard and as a weekend Fox News host. NPR’s Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman recently reviewed the biographies of those who’ve held the position since the founding of our republic and says. “without a doubt, Hegseth has the least experience."

One experience that Hegseth does have that may have qualified him in the president-elect’s eyes is in paying off a woman who accused him of rape. The police report on that incident has come out, and the accuser told police that she was drugged and woke up with Hagseth on top of her.

Hegseth was one of 12 national guard members who were removed from Biden’s guard detail at his 2021 inauguration after he was deemed “an inside threat” due to his tattoos of symbols favored by extremist Christian nationalists. (A Fox News host is now saying this was an example of religious discrimination in the military.) 

Honesty has always been a desirable quality in presidential administrations, and that’s one word that Health and Human Services pick Robert F Kennedy Jr will never be associated with. Between the dozens of women he’s seduced, the babysitter he molested, and the people who have died due to his spurious claims about vaccines, his record of misleading and flat out lying makes RFKjr a perfect choice to lay waste to government social programs.

Sidney Blumenthal at the Guardian:

• Trump has not appointed RFK Jr for his famous name, though he must receive gratification from possessing for himself this piece of the Kennedy legacy, however tarnished. Bobby Kennedy Jr is there because he says that he will fire 600 experts at the National Institutes of Health, the foremost medical research center in the world – “all these idiots”. And Tucker Carlson vouches for him.

Along with TV Dr Oz in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, the conversion of health programs for elderly and disabled Americans will be shifted over to the private sector. Senior Republicans are proposing caps and work requirements as a way to help pay the cost of Trump’s tax breaks.  

Patriotism is something Americans expect from their leaders, who traditionally have sworn an oath to the Constitution. Given Donald J Trump’s open ambitions about overriding or ignoring our founding document, it would appear that patriotism is being replaced by loyalty to the President. That’s a sad thing, since the founders worked hard to distance our system of governance away from rule by fiat.

Olivia Troye was a national security advisor to Vice President Mike Pence in the White House and held a position at the Department of Homeland Security. She’s got some advice for incoming employees (obviously not the Department Secretaries) of Trump 2.0:

• I’m not going to lie to you. No matter who you are, you are entering a hostile environment. I was fortunate—Mike Pence was a decent, respectful island in Trump’s sea of contempt. It will be much, much worse this time. I implore you as a fellow American to stand firm in the face of adversity, defend our democratic principles, and always put the best interests of the nation, rather than the President, first. You are quite literally our last line of defense in the White House.

I could go on, and I’ll bet you can think of some components of decency being trod upon as the inauguration approaches, but this is it for today. It’s tough not being overwhelmed by what is going on in Washington, and I have to continually remind myself that apathy is what fascists want in the citizenry. 

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News You Outta Know

I read a lot. Here’s what caught my eye for today.

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How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never by Fortesa Latifi at Teen Vogue

• Research conducted by the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime backs up his assertion, finding that an “empathetic, understanding, and open-minded approach” works best. “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms and say, ‘this is where you belong. If those people don’t understand you, they’re just a bunch of triggered snowflakes or whatever,’” Miller-Idriss says. Another tactic, she says, is to point out the commercialization of the manosphere in which everything is for sale including courses, supplements, and crypto-currencies. Pointing out the profit motive of these influencers can be effective, Miller-Idriss says.

• That’s part of what got Tom out of the manosphere, which he says he fell into when he was 27, after leaving the Army and finding himself “stuck trying to look for work consistently, having basically no social support, having no options other than to just work, pay bills, work, pay bills, in an increasingly difficult world to do that.” He was lonely, he says, and the influencers he followed had some pretty good talking points, he thought: men were more affected by things like incarceration rates, workplace death and injury rates, and mental health and no one was taking it seriously.

• Pasha Dashtgard, an assistant professor at the Polarization & Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, says this is a common entry point. “They start their conversations with, ‘men are in crisis and no one’s talking about it. It’s like, that’s true, men are in crisis and we should be talking about it… [but] that opens up, ideologically, the door for them to be like ‘and now, here are the solutions’ and it’s this horrible, toxic nonsense.” But after after a couple months in the manosphere, Tom realized that, while men’s health is a serious subject, he wouldn’t find the answers he was looking for in the manosphere, which was overrun by what he calls “grifters, frauds, or sort of religious zealots.” Now, Tom says he doesn’t actively use the label ‘feminist’ but “considers it part of my worldview.”

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COP29 smells like oil - What’s happening—and not happening—at the biggest and most influential climate summit in the world. By Arielle Samuelson at Heated

• Leaders from nearly 200 countries have come together at the United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan to strategize how to preserve a livable climate. But this year’s conference has been roiled by drama, as talks grind to a halt amidst the fumes from nearby refineries driving planetary heating. 

• For the second year in a row, the chief executive of the climate conference was caught on tape making secret deals for oil and gas. The president of Azerbaijan opened the talks by praising oil and gas as a “gift from God,” then started a verbal feud with France that prompted the French environment minister to boycott the talks. Only days before the conference kicked off, Donald Trump was re-elected, signaling to other nations that the world’s largest economy will once again pull out of the Paris Agreement that the president-elect has called a “rip off.” And more than one week into the talks, delegates are deadlocked as they haggle over exactly how much money they should pay to prevent dangerous levels of planetary heating.

• All this drama is playing out against a backdrop of the actual crisis those 198 countries are there to solve. This year is already on track to be the hottest year on record; the world is polluting more than it ever has; and countries are feeling the consequences of deadly hurricanes, raging floods, and famine-inducing droughts.

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Netanyahu’s Napoleon Moment by Jonathan Broder at SpyTalk

• Unless Israel can pull itself back from its current trajectory, Baron and Saltzman forecast an end to foreign investment in new businesses whose innovations and success gave Israel the nickname of “startup nation.” This cutoff of funding in turn will accelerate a brain drain as Israel’s best and brightest abandon the increasingly religious and authoritarian government for more liberal climes.  And with political and demographic trends pointing to the dominance of Israel’s far right for the foreseeable future, the co-authors predict the country will become “a Jewish version of Iran’s theocratic state”—and a global pariah. 

• Netanyahu now faces his own moment of decision: take the win and use Israel’s current upper hand on the battlefield to leverage a measure of peace and stability in the region, or press on with his quixotic drive toward the mirage of a total, strategic victory. 

• In this heady moment, the Israeli leader would be wise to revisit the fates of Napoleon, Hitler, Hirohito, Nasser and all the other strongmen—even U.S. presidents—whose initial battlefield triumphs tempted them to cross a bridge too far.  Life has a way of punishing such transgressors.