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Ongoing opposition to Donald J. Trumps presidency continues a trend that began during the election campaign: a singular focus on the man and his foibles, as if those who supported him did not get enough of the hashing and rehashing of those same weaknesses before Election Day. Many of us in the opposition are still acting surprised that he is such a consummate con artist, liar, bloviator, narcissist and so on, in office as he was on the campaign trail.

What were we supposed to expect? That Trump was only lying to get into office and would stop doing so out of respect for the majesty of the presidency? That his narcissism would be attenuated somehow by the demands of the office? That he would suddenly become a ratiocinative person just because he is now president? That his racism would evaporate because, somehow, the presidency is a cure for that disorder?

Trumps triumph has little to do with the man himself, whatever his strengths and weaknesses or even the genius of his campaign strategies. It has more to do with where the nation is, where we its people or at least a salient segment of us are, and the state of our public life and discourse and the institutions that provide the vessels in which they unfold. Our vituperations against Trump will not deny him a second term if those fundamentals do not change significantly. Of course, if we are lucky, the man will self-destruct. Dont count on it.

Ours is a degraded country epitomized in a degraded electorate, degraded media and degraded institutions political, educational and bureaucratic.

We still have a two-party system, but in name only. The dominant Republican party is in thrall to a membership that no longer can distinguish between truth and falsehood and is ever eager to dismiss that distinction when confronted by or caught out in blatant falsehoods. The partys leadership is so hell-bent on power and the actuation of its destructive ideology that it unapologetically deploys scorched-earth practices, in or out of power. Republicans have transmuted into a tribe marked by unanimity of opinion or, failing that, ideological purity that brooks no dissent or makes its transaction costs prohibitive; absolutely petrified of the vengeance of a followership it has nurtured to this level of destructive baying for blood; unmindful of, if not actively willing to abet, the damages it does to the most important of our time-honored institutions and practices.

Improving on their bad behavior in 1996, when the Republican leadership stayed away from the funeral for Secretary of Transportation Ron Brown who had died in the service of his country not one member of the congressional GOP broke ranks, for eight years, in their undisguised war on the first black person to be president of this country. This shameful display was consummated by the unprecedented refusal even to consider Merrick Garland, a distinguished jurist of the second-highest court in the land, in order to force the Supreme Court to operate short-handed either indefinitely or until they could secure the open seat for their tribe. When they did, they handed the seat to a judicial hack peddling the snake oil of constitutional originalism, the same doctrine that had doomed Robert Borks nomination back in 1987. A seat on our Supreme Court has become a feudal preferment.

Our current fulminations do not address the electorate that voted Donald Trump into office. If they elected him once, flaws and all, why would they not elect him again? If they dont, it will not be because they have found him to be a singularly flawed person. Focusing on and highlighting Trumps failings has the ironic effect of burnishing his credentials among his followers. Remember, this is exactly how his opponents or, as his supporters call them, the liberal elites, the coddlers of criminals, the embracers of illegal aliens and so forth are expected to view him.

This is where we need to confront the most significant degradation that our country has undergone in the last 30 years; a period and a process inaugurated by the election of Ronald Reagan.

During the Reagan years we made the transition to substituting style for substance; that was when communicating became more important than what was being communicated; when the war on thinking became a framing trope of our public life; when we went from an industrial power with a dominant manufacturing economy to a financial one in which McMoney became king, and then transmuted again into a service economy. To boot, we became the worlds No. 1 debtor nation. That was when running for public office stopped being about what candidates would do for us and became denominated by what candidates would do to certain of us. That was when we found a way in public discourse to elide the strictures of the civil rights movements outcomes by making an art form of dog whistles. That was when invoking the bogey of political correctness became a refurbished refuge for scoundrels until, with the election of Barack Obama, a full-blown atavistic epidemic of name-calling and outright demonization of nonwhite groups, native or immigrant, broke upon the land. That was the beginning of a relapse to the good old days when white was right and nonwhites knew to stay in their place.

Academia and the intellectual class cannot claim innocence in the debacle that is life under Trump for most of Americas inhabitants. The widespread diffusion of less sophisticated variants of postmodernism, deconstructionism and post-structuralism in our higher education institutions has led to the proliferation of motley nihilisms, ranging from mild to severe, undermining truth claims, making fashionable the miniaturization of social life, political movements and even protest traditions. The upshot is that the right wing has found a way to weaponize doubt in favor of the noble lie, peddling outright falsehoods while placing the onus on the rest of us to show why those lies are not true and making it almost impossible to have genuine debates about the gravest issues of life and death.

We now inhabit a world of alternative facts and outright falsehoods promulgated by our president and his minions in the White House. Those only rankle a few of us in what their supporters readily demonize as the elites or the unpatriotic, humorless political correctness police, and have become par for the course for the electorate that elected Trump and handed him a Republican Congress.

I would not like to be misunderstood. Yes, individuals are important in the evolution of historical processes. No doubt Trumps personality and his knack for exploiting the basest aspects of human nature for personal gain, money, fame and now power must not be ignored or underestimated. But he did not create, nor could he have created, a situation in which our basest characteristics are there for the taking.

Our challenge now is to reconnect with the angelic in us and to stop playing suckers to the likes of Donald Trump to cease placing them at the center of our public life, much less at the helm. This may be on the order of actuating the punchline from Bertolt Brechts satirical The Solution, which calls for the government to dissolve the people and elect another. Of course we cannot dissolve the American people or create them again from nothing. We need to effect a sea change in them to prevent a renewal of the Trump incubus in 2020.

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Donald Trump will be a two-term president unless the opposition can find a way to change America - Salon

President Donald Trump, who has all but ruled out disclosing his tax information, claimed on Sunday that he could release his tax returns soon, following the completion of a routine IRS audit.

It could happen soon. I dont know, he said in an interview on CBS Face the Nation. I think its pretty routine, to be honest with you. But then Ill make a decision.

Last week, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin declared that Trump has no intention of releasing his tax returns, which he repeatedly promised to do while running for president but falsely claimed that he couldnt because hes being audited.

The IRS has said that nothing prevents individuals from sharing their own tax information, including being audited.

In avoiding a basic practice of transparency for elected officials, Trump became the first president in four decades to not disclose his tax filings, leaving many unanswered questions about his finances and business practices.

When Mnuchin last week unveiled the Trump administrations tax plan, which would benefit wealthy people like Trump, it renewed calls for the president to unveil his tax information.

On Sunday, Trump refuted his treasury secretary, claiming that he might release his tax returns and bragged about the supposed size of them.

Well, I never spoke to him about it. Honestly, hes never asked me about it, Trump said of Mnuchin. I said, number one, Im under audit. Right now, Im under audit. After the audit is complete. Its a routine audit, but I have a very big tax return. Youve seen the pictures. My tax return is probably higher than that from the floor. When you look at other peoples tax return, even other wealthy people, their tax return is this big. My tax return is this high.

Trump said that its very unfair that he was being audited.

I have been under audit almost, like, since I became famous, OK? he said.

In defending his decision to not release his taxes, Trump and his administration have repeatedly argued that the matter is settled because he won the election without having released them.

Earlier this month, press secretary Sean Spicer also brought out the audit excusein declaring that Trump would not release his taxes this year. But like Trump, he did not rule it out completely,when asked if it was safe to say that the president will not release his tax returns at all.

Well have to get back to you on that, Spicer said.

Read the rest here:
Donald Trump Keeps Up Charade That He Might Release His Tax Returns - Huffington Post

When I wrote a piece a few days after the election, The Mike Pence (Donald Trump) Assault On LGBTQ Equality Is Already Underway, I hoped against all hope that something might change to alter what was already happening during the Trump transition.

But in fact, much of what I reported has materialized in the first 100 days. And theres reason to believe the second 100 days will be worse.

In the first 100 days Trump installed viciously anti-gay individuals in his cabinet and throughout the government departments, all of whom were brought forth from the Mike Pence-run transition team, from Ben Carson and Roger Severino to Tom Priceand Jeff Sessions. Trump and Sessions, the attorney general, already rescinded guidanceon fighting discrimination against transgender students across the country, and had the Justice Department halt litigation against North Carolina regarding HB2 and the equally discriminatory law that replaced it. The Trump administration decided there was no need to move forward with the Census Bureaus planned data collection on LGBT Americans, thereby keeping LGBTQ people invisible.

Though Trump made a little bit of a spectacle of not rescinding President Obamas executive order banning anti-LGBT discrimination among federal contractors, his administration later quietly issued an order ending data collection among contractors about such discrimination thus allowing for it. Similarly, the administration stopped collecting data on discrimination against elderly LGBTQ people. Trump removed Eric Fanning as Army Secretary, appointed by President Obama and the first openly gay Army Secretary in history, and has now nominated an anti-LGBTQ Tennessee legislator, Mark Green, to the job a man who sponsored a bill allowing discrimination against LGBTQ people and who has called transgender people evil.

And perhaps most consequentially, Trump placed on the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch, a constitutional originalist in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia by his own description and someone whose idea of religious liberty is a direct threat to LGBTQ rights.

But heres why the next 100 days and after that could be far worse: Trump is continuing to plummet in approval ratings and he needs his base to back him and to back the GOP more than ever if he has any hopes of re-election and of keeping Congress in the hands of the GOP in 2018 and beyond. He just barely made it in 2016, and any softening of any part of his base will spell doom. The anti-LGBTQ religious right turned out for Trump in numbers as great or greaterthan every previous recent Republican presidential candidate.

Christian right activists are already demanding much more. They were hoping a religious liberty executive order which would allow for widespread discrimination against LGBT people would have been issued already, and were disappointed when the Trump administration early on said a leaked draft of it wasnt coming soon.

But Trump transition official Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow at the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, told me in February it was indeed coming, and was being fine-tuned to withstand a legal challenge. Last week USA Todayreported that a group of 51 GOP legislators in the Housesent a letter to the White House asking for the order to be signed:

[We] request that you sign the draft executive order on religious liberty, as reported by numerous outlets on February 2, 2017, in order to protect millions of Americans whose religious freedom has been attacked or threatened over the last eight years.

These are anti-LGBTQ legislators who backed Trump and who represent the armies of the Christian right. Theyre pressuring him to move ahead with the anti-LGBTQ agenda he promised. Though the media downplayed it, Trump courted these people at events and through their media during the campaign, promising everything from protecting religious liberty to getting the Obergefell marriage equality ruling overturned.

Again, if Trump has illusions of winning re-election, and helping the GOP in Congress, he knows he must deliver to his base, and wont be able to lose any of it. If you thought the GOP was done with the issue of marriage equality, for example, you need only to look at House member Randy Weber of Texas, who last week wept as he asked God to forgive the U.S. for making marriage legal for gays and lesbians at an event attended by the GOP House leadership (including Paul Ryan), which didnt challenge him.

The Christian right isnt satisfied with what they see as the crumbs Trump has given them in the first 100 days. Theyre demanding much, much more, and Trump, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom courted the Christian right and believed they needed evangelical voters for re-election, will feel compelled to deliver. (And one could argue that Reagan, and to a lesser extent Bush, didnt need that religious right base for re-election as much as Trump desperately does.)

Thats why the next 100 days and beyond are even more treacherous, and why well have to pay great attention and fight back hard.

Follow Michelangelo Signorile on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/msignorile

The rest is here:
Why Donald Trump's Second 100 Days Will Be Even Worse For LGBTQ Equality - Huffington Post

As they gave President Donald Trump high marks for his first 100 days in office, a trio of conservative radio talk show hosts at a Riverside conference Sunday, April 30 urged congressional Republicans to get their act together and pass the presidents agenda, especially repealing Obamacare.

Its OK to disagree. Its fine to be a divided caucus if at the end of the day, you come together and take 75 percent of what you want and call it a win, Dennis Prager told an audience of more than 800 at the Fourth Annual Unite IE Conservative Conference.

Republicans generally do not perceive the threat that the left is to our society, he added. This is the Achilles heel of the Republican Party If you do understand it, then any victory is a victory.

The conference, which took place at the Riverside Convention Center, offered a chance for conservatives to gather, network and be inspiredin a state thats been hostile ground for their beliefs.

This years conference focused on the first 100 days of the Trump administration, which hit that mark Saturday. Radio host Hugh Hewitt, who served as a panelist for four debates of GOP presidential hopefuls, gave Trump a solid B, saying the Republican real estate mogul and reality TV star needs to fill more judgeships.

Another radio personality, Larry Elder, gave Trump an A+, calling the nomination and confirmation of conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch far and away the presidents most important accomplishment.

Prager gave Trump an A- and apologized for resisting Trumps quest for the GOP presidential nomination.

I am starting to love this man and I thought I would never say that in my life, Prager said.

Unlike liberals, Trump doesnt care if America is loved, Prager said, adding: The recipe for peace on Earth is not for America to be loved, but feared.

The audience in the convention center expressed their support for Trump through the applause. The loudest cheers came when event co-emcee and local radio host Jennifer Horn asked how many in the crowd gave Trump an A, with fewer claps for those who give him a B and the lightest applause for those giving him a C.

The conference also featured Joel Pollak, senior editor-at-large of the conservative news site Breitbart and author of the book How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution.

The unifying message that brought a New York former liberal Democrat together with conservative audiences in the Midwest and South and everywhere else we can think of was the pushback against the mainstream media, Pollak said, adding that Trump addressed issues like immigration and trade that were ignored by the Republican and Democratic parties.

Anti-Breitbart sentiment was on display at a morning protest outside the conference. About 50 protesters waved signs with slogans such as Evil Lurks and its Name is Breitbart, Impeach Vladimir Trump, Facts Still Matter and Hire a Clown, Get a Circus.

Lecia Elzig of Riverside held a sign with provocative Breitbart headlines seen as offensive to women, including Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.

Elzig said she respected the right of conference-goers to assemble. Were just here exercising our constitutional rights, she said.

More:
Why there were cheers for Donald Trump in Riverside - Press-Enterprise

Photo: Peter Beste

Jack Donovan a 42-year-old skinhead icon and right-wing extremist lived the gay life once. It was in the 1990s, after he left his parents blue-collar home in rural Pennsylvania to study fine art in New York, when he danced go-go in gay clubs hung out with drag queens and marched for gay pride. But then he dropped out, learned how to use tools and work as a manual laborer, studied MMA, and decided he wasnt gay just an unrepentant masculinist.

I am not gay because the word gay connotes so much more than same-sex desire, Donovan announced, under a pseudonym, on the first page of 2006s Androphilia: A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity (echoing, probably unintentionally, the speech Tony Kushner wrote for Roy Cohn in Angels in America). The word gay describes a whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics. He appropriated a new term, androphile, to describe a man whose love of masculinity includes sex with other men.

Gay men are remarkably prominent if not exactly abundant in the alt-right universe. Take the infamous Milo Yiannopoulos, who powered a meteoric rise and fall on the sheer cognitive dissonance between his flamboyant self-presentation and callous politics. (When Out magazine profiled Milo, the storys writer Chadwick Moore came out as a conservative.) Or artist turned reporter Lucian Wintrich, who joined the White House press corps when Trump-cheering blog Gateway Pundit (edited by a gay man) received its first credential. But even those men seem relatively mainstream when you compare them with Donovan, who has contributed to dapper white nationalist (and friend) Richard Spencers journal, advocates for a form of anarcho-fascism, and founded a chapter of a masculinist tribe called the Wolves of Vinland, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. (One member recently served time for burning down a historically black church.) Which makes sense when he shows me photos from their neopagan fight-club rituals, which sometimes involve nooses.

To hear Donovan tell it, his sexuality is a nonissue. Its a point echoed by several of his peers, who dont see their political views and sexual identities as contradictory but complementary. Masculinity is a religion, and I see potential for androphiles to become its priests, Donovan wrote in Androphilia, to devote themselves to it in a way that men who understand their manliness through women in quantifying the number theyve slept with or measuring mens rights against womens rights cant. And so androphiles like Donovan have found common ground with the gender-traditionalists and male-advocacy groups elsewhere in the messy carnival of the new right, where reactions to women range from outright hostility to benign disinterest.

And theyre not interested in queer solidarity, either. Apart from Camille Paglia, of course, I cant think of any interesting lesbians, gay white nationalist James OMeara told me in an interview. Or as Donovan said, I think most of them are so married to feminism that I dont think thats even an option. To say nothing of trans issues, which most gay alt-righters rejected (I know three transgender people in our movement, Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson offered, before arguing against the designation. White nationalism should be straight but not narrow, he said, inadvertently repeating a slogan popularized by an anti-bullying LGBT nonprofit.) Donovan sees himself as a member of the earliest generation of gay men who could be free to ditch the victim mentality of queer politics. In Androphilia, he praises activists who fought to decriminalize gay sex and to combat institutional indifference to AIDS It would be remiss not to credit the Gay Rights Movement for fighting against this sort of oppression, intolerance, and intentional negligence, he writes, but having achieved relative tolerance for same-sex-oriented people in mainstream culture, and having brought an end to police harassment and widespread discrimination, the Gay Rights Movement has turned to nitpicking. He isnt against identity politics. Hes loud and proud about his race and his gender traits that, unlike his sexuality, do not make him a minority. Ten out of ten minorities agree that being a minority can really blow, he explains in Mighty White, an essay defending white nationalism in those who fear losing, or in some contexts have already lost, majority racial status.

Donovan whose partner of 20 years is a Trump supporter of Mexican descent supports white nationalists, but denies belonging in their ranks. I just think thats a silly goal, he says of the so-called white ethnostate. Whiteness, he points out, is an American approximation of nationality, which doesnt make as much sense as, say, German nationalism which he became familiar with when he delivered a speech praising masculine violence at a far-right German nationalist convention near Leipzig in February. Violence is a component of Donovans gang theory of masculinity, an idea he became so enamored of that he felt he could not actualize as a man until he had a gang of his own. Enter the Wolves of Vinland, a club started near Lynchburg, Virginia, by brothers Paul and Matthias Waggener, a pair of avid bodybuilders who love blackmetal bands (a.k.a. National Socialist Black Metal bands). The sons of an Orthodox priest, the Waggeners have said in interviews that they experimented with drugs, satanism, and gangster shit before discovering neopaganism, also known as heathenism, which became the foundation of their club.

The rest of the Wolves are not homos, and we dont consider ourselves a white-nationalist or alt-right group, Donovan clarifies by email. White nationalists and the alt-right do, however, seem to consider them kin, judging by the frequency of pro-Vinland programming in white-nationalist and alt-right media. One thing those groups share is an intellectual foundation of gender and race essentialism: Our women are females, theyre females, and our males are masculine, and we dont look for sameness between sexes, Paul Waggener told Greg Johnson in an interview. To be masculine, a man doesnt need to have sex with women although he should probably be stronger than women, and hold his own in brawls, and have tactical skills, and provide. And he should be brave, which is why Donovan gets so irritated when hes accused of homophobia. Thats a construction. Thats a silencing word and its meant to emasculate, he says. When you say someones phobic, youre saying that theyre afraid. Thats why they call men phobic constantly theyre transphobic, theyre homophobic, theyre afraid of women. Political correctness is just a way of calling a man a coward. (When it comes to language, Jack is more sensitive about ideology than sexuality. He still doesnt like the word gay but occasionally uses it for conversational expediency and punch lines about being gay with his boyfriend about their new pet dog.)

Who feels fear, and why, and whether their fear is rational, seems to be at the heart of the mainstreams tension with the alt-right. If a man gives a speech called Violence Is Golden, is that scary? What if his audience includes white nationalists? And if hes gay, does that change, well, anything? Not really, says historian Jim Downs, author of Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation. If you look at every movement, youre going to find these moments of unexpected orientations and identities that seem anomalous within a movement. But if enough people join a club, inevitably, some wont be straight. There were gay Nazis, Downs points out. But follow where the story leads you: They get massacred. What seems safe at one moment can be taboo a moment later, and traits that are liabilities in one context can be elsewhere. As recently as 2004, Republicans bragged about opposing gay rights to rally the base, while supporters like John Kerry avoided the topic. Today, longstanding opponents of gay rights are the ones who avoid the question or set aside long-held beliefs in the name of pragmatism.

I think gays can be particularly useful to the alt-right, Alternative Right editor Colin Liddell told me. Our movement is a revolutionary and taboo-busting movement, and gays have the right psychological equipment for that. And, because of their lack of immediate family, gays often have a stronger feeling for their wider family. The left has successfully displaced this sentiment to the fake gay community or to leftist causes in general, but the true wider family for gays is their particular tribal or ethnic group.

Donovan seems to be living proof of that theory but not, perhaps, by choice. When I ask if hed like to have children, he replies, If I did, it would be with a woman. Hes jealous of the multigenerational experience that straight couples can have just by fucking. Their DNA becomes entwined, playing out together for generations, even after theyre dead. The tribe lives on. Ive been really lucky, he continues. The guy Im with, hes my family. We just got a dog together, and were being gay for the dog. He laughs. Im very lucky and, I think, very unusual in that sense. I think a lot of homosexual men end up being alone. I think its very unstable and very lonely. Its not something thats like if I met a young man who would say, Hey, you know, Im questioning, Id say, Dont. I would advise them, unless there is no other way, I would say, If you have the choice between men and women, be straight.

*A version of this article appears in the May 1, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

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The Philosophical Fascists of the Gay Alt-Right - New York Magazine