Donald Trump was well into his second term when I realized — belatedly — how effectively he and his puppet masters have used a strategy they devised to fool us. They called it flooding the zone; I call it political trickery. Trump crony Steve Bannon is widely credited with inventing it to advance the goals of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s second term. It works like this: Trump and his handlers want to radically change an existing policy — immigration enforcement, let’s say. They worry, though, about public opposition to their plans. So they create distraction, generating a flood of news sure to capture media attention — noise about hot-button issues of lesser consequence than the policy they want to change. Examples: Renaming the Gulf of Mexico while they shut down USAID. Talking up one’s opposition to transgender participation in sports while gutting regulations that safeguard the integrity of the financial system. By the time the noise dies down, they’ve snuck their far-reaching policy change by the public. 

 

It took me a while to appreciate how well flooding the zone works. During Trump 1, Bannon and other Trump aides test drove it, but they put it on steroids on day one of Trump 2. Trump and his cult did so much so fast – all of it deeply offensive to me — that it was dizzying, impossible to keep up with. That of course was the desired effect. Anyone who cared about the country was overwhelmed with grief at what was going on. 

 

A friend asked me recently why I hadn’t written about particularly outrageous mouthings by Pete Hegseth. (He equated Trump’s Iran war to a Holy War and invoked the name of Jesus.) I thought for a moment then told her the truth. In the 13-plus months since his swearing in, Trump had so thoroughly flooded the zone — 250 executive orders, 58 memoranda, and 133 proclamations — that my head was spinning, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the damage being done on every side; so, I ended up writing nothing. I have also been reluctant to express a deeper concern  because I thought readers might pooh-pooh it. I was seeing parallels between what was happening in the U.S. under a reckless and emboldened Trump and what happened in Germany in the 1930s. I resisted making the comparison in my blog because I feared readers’ reaction would be a collective “Oh, come on, Buck. Trump could never be as evil as Adolf Hitler.” 

 

The comparison doesn’t seem so preposterous now. Probably not to victims of ICE rotting away in detention in a for-profit prison in Louisiana. Or the families of the 87 crewmembers of Iran’s destroyer, the IRIS Dena, torpedoed off the coast of Sri Lanka by a U.S. submarine. Hegseth bragged about the “quiet death” of the Dena’s crew when the vessel was in Indian waters participating in a naval exercise sponsored by India —  a harmless operation similar to drills that U.S. Navy vessels take part in. Tell the families of the 165 students and teachers killed at the outset of the war when we confused their school with a legitimate (oxymoron warning) target. We first refused to admit the tragic mistake, then didn’t apologize for it. When the truth came out, Hegseth’s reaction was essentially “shit happens.” And tell the residents of Minneapolis who endured the horrors of a bloody, murderous winter in the name of mass deportation.  Ask anyone in those groups of people if they thing the comparison between the rise of the Nazis in the 30’s and the rise of MAGA is unfair.

 

Looking ahead, I wonder what actions by the Trump 2 administration will rate as the most shameful in 5, 10, or 20 years. .Some possibilities:

 

• Shutting down efforts to increase our use of alternative energy while promoting using more fossil fuel. The world’s scientists tell us this will make our planet uninhabitable. Yet Trump is hell bent on going backwards, enabling oil and gas companies — especially the biggest ones — to pile up huge profits.
• Eliminating without warning USAID,  a lifeline to millions of the poorest people on earth. USAID consumed less than 1 percent of our national budget. At the same time, Trump gave the richest Americans big tax cuts and boosted our defense budget to over $1 trillion a year.. 
• Persecuting and deporting thousands of peaceful, gainfully employed immigrants, most of them black or brown, as a way of ethnically cleansing the country. Removing them was cruel on its face; equally offensive was Trump’s justification. He said the deportees were criminals and domestic terrorists.
• Recasting history to deny the evils of slavery, the horrors of Jim Crow with its lynchings, and the struggles of the civil rights movement. Essentially elevating the myth of the South’s Lost Cause to official government policy.
• Allowing the Trump family and its pals to make billions by gaining  access, via the president, to information unavailable to the rest of us, especially in the Middle East and with crypto. This is thievery and corruption of stunning magnitude. 
• Elevating Christian Nationalism to cult level by telling Americans that one can be both a Christian and a nationalist, thereby making a mockery of Christianity. This also flies in the face of the Constitution, which requires separation of church and state.
• Going to war with Iran with Israel as our sidekick — a remote control war in which the attackers push buttons from distant bunkers or drop bombs from 30,000 feet while people below see their neighbors blasted away and their homes pulverized. 
• Shamelessly prioritizing corporate profits and the stock market indexes over everyday citizens’ right to earn a living without working multiple jobs.
• Invading Venezuela to rip off its oil, then immiserating Cuba by eliminating its only supplier of the vital commodity.
• Filling the highest rungs of government with the tackiest, most unserious, incompetent people imaginable; people whose chief attribute is their oft-professed adoration of Trump. 

 

Assuming Americans emerge from three more years of Trumpian dystopia with  our brains and consciences intact, what will we say was the greatest crime of the Trump regime? The success of flooding the zone with shit — Bannon’s term for nonsense like renaming the Gulf of Mexico or tearing down the East Wing of the White House — makes it a tough question to answer. To me, though, such foolishness ranks low on the lengthening list of Trump outrages. I believe his most shameful acts involve systematic cruelty and disregard for human life. He has  deliberately worked to fill the pockets of the rich and keep the poor in their place, powerless.

 

 Trump’s people planned the evil in advance but he methodically executes it. First, he had to win a second term. He did that thanks to the entire Republican Party, Joe and Jill Biden, and millions of MAGA voters. After his victory, all Trump needed to do was be his venal self. That meant brazenly lying about anything and everything and subordinating the common good to enriching himself, his family and his cronies. He had to abjure mercy, compassion and benevolence entirely. He had to appoint to high office a cast of incompetent, unserious people whose main attribute was blind loyalty to him, thus ensuring that every part of government would bend to his will. He had to demonize minorities beyond anything ever seen from a president. He had to choose a successor every bit as calculating and power hungry as he. This he did by drafting J.D. Vance to be his vice president. Trump’s idea of the presidency fit perfectly with his natural instinct for malevolence. If the authors of Project 2025 grimaced when their great leader adorned huge government buildings with his likeness, they kept quiet because Trump is delivering what they want most: a fascist drive to cancel our democracy. 

 

I’ve acknowledged the impossibility of picking one crime of Trump 2 that deserves a No. 1 ranking. However, I think a recent incident deserves a special mention because it hasn’t gotten the attention and opprobrium that it deserves.   It doesn’t involve physical violence or wanton cruelty, but it does show the kind of nation we have become and what disgraceful leaders Trump has put in place.  On March 20, The New York Times reported the following: 

 

Then, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing in the Pentagon, issued a call to the American people for a specific kind of wartime prayer. He asked them to pray for victory in battle and the safety of their troops.

“Every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches,” he said, “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

“Our capabilities are better. Our will is better. Our troops are better,” he said in a recent interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes.” “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.”

As a Christian, I find Hegseth’s use of Jesus’ name to hype Trump’s war on Iran singularly despicable. Turning this malevolent  aggression into some sort of religious crusade is blasphemous. Does this macho jerk realize that crusades were not in keeping with the teachings of Jesus? Does he know that true Christianity teaches nonviolence? Does he know anything about the core teachings of the man whose name he tosses around so carelessly? 

Pete Hegseth embodies all that is repugnant about where America is today. He is a proponent of rabid machismo and a blowhard. He won’t call soldiers soldiers, insisting instead on calling them warriors or war fighters. He renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War. He is a Christian Nationalist. He is oh so quick to dismiss civilian casualties as unavoidable costs of war. He sees our military simply as “good guys” and anyone we attack as “bad guys. And he worships the man who gave him the power to wreak havoc on the world with messianic zeal. Surely high up on Trump’s rap sheet is putting this ignoramus with a checkered past, this Fox News talking head who spouted lies, in charge of our bloated military, then giving him carte blanche to wage war on virtually anyone. Never forget that every single Republican in the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Hegseth and they have supported him ever since. 

No Kings Day 3 is March 28. Be there! You can see the poster I will be carrying at the beginning of this blog. It was designed by a fellow parishioner of St. Anna’s, New Orleans. We are not Christian Nationalists! 

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