100 Days of Idiocracy May 4, 2025
Dr. Roger Ray
As many of you know, I took a quick vacation to New Orleans to meet some close friends on the week of the election in November. We had, of course, planned to celebrate Kamala’s victory together. We never would have suspected that the party would quickly turn into group therapy. I realize now that we shouldn’t have been, but we were shocked.
My friends announced that they were just not going to watch the news for the next four years. We are older now and you really can’t live a long time if you are in a constant state of stress and rage. I understood what they were saying and a part of me was sympathetic. I don’t want to fill every sermon that I write in the coming years to be a new-every-week version of how horrible Donald Trump is.
But I couldn’t justify trying to turn my back on the world. While I can’t carry a constant load of “hair on fire” rage, I resolved to fall back on the old British encouragement in the face of invasion during WWII – “Keep Calm and Carry On.” The worst president in American history won re-election and this time he has a vendetta and a book of plans for dismanteling democracy. So, the stakes are too high to just stop caring. We just have to learn how to be concerned and involved without being consumed by the anger which may be, as Yoda says, the way to the Dark Side of the Force.
Trump’s first term in office was an international embarrassment but this second term is much more dangerous. I don’t want to breathlessly cry that the sky is falling but let me just, very factually, tell you why I believe that Trump’s presidency is currently turning our democracy into a fascist state.
Please, anyone who can dispute anything that I am about to say, please reply and if I say anything that is not factually true, I will retract my statements:
First, Trump is making expansionist threats, even threatening to use American military might to annex Canada, Mexico, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. He is proposing to add vast tracts of land, stolen from soverign nations in exactly the same way that Putin is trying to annex Ukraine and clearly has designs on restoring the boundaries of the old Soviet Union. With these threats, Trump sacrifices America’s moral high ground in opposing Russia’s expansionist wars and gives a greenlight to China to invade Tiawan. There is no way to spin this that would make Trump look less like Hitler or Putin. This is objectively a nightmare scenario that horrifies our allies.
The second tell is the weponization of the judicial system. Trump accused Democrats of doing this but as in most cases, an accusation from Trump is more like a confession. From the days that he chanted “lock her up” through his attempts to get President Zelenski to manufacture false evidence against Joe Biden in Ukraine, Trump literally forecasts what he is going to do when he accuses someone else of doing something wrong.
He pardoned all of the January 6 insurrectionists, some of whom were guilty of violent crimes against law enforcement, and he is even floating the idea of paying reparations to these convicts for the millions of dollars of damage they did to the Capitol Building. Trump is using the judicial system to deport people who have been denied due process, people who have never been convicted of a crime, paying millions of dollars to a dictator in El Salvador to brutally imprison people who may well be entirely innocent of gang involvement and he is threatening to deport American born citizens in the same say. This is not legal in America. This is what fascists do.
He is further using the judiciary to punish those who have investigated his crimes from his first administration. Whenever anyone tries to hold Trump accountable for crimes of which he is clearly guilty, he accuses them of treason because, to be critical of a dictator is, somehow, treasonous.
Thirdly, I will point out that Trump is filling the government with loyalists who are distinctly unqualified for the positions they are filling. I’m not going to go through the whole list but let me just mention Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense. He had no relevant experience or qualifications for this job. He has a long history of alcohol abuse and sexual assault. He has demonstrated fiscal irresponsibility in previous management of two small charities, and he created an international crisis by revealing military attack plans in an unsecure format on his personal phone. And, even after weeks of controversy around that, he did it again, including his wife and his brother in the text chat about attack plans, surely tipping our hand to the target of these attacks, putting our American airmen in grave danger. He may have been removed by the time we post this sermon but this is the guy that Trump picked for this important job and, it is important to remember, he was approved by nearly all Republicans in the Senate.
These same senators approved of Roberty Kennedy’s appointment to chair the $1.6 trillion dollar department of Health and Human Services even though he has no medical training or experience and has made himself wealthy exploiting gullible people, scaring them away from vaccines, floride, and promoting entirely misleading and ignorantly false things about autism, the measles, and other health conditions. Kennedy claims to have treated his own learning disorder by being an intravenous heroin user for more than a decade. His own family has testified to the fact that he should not be believed or trusted but this road kill eating conspiracy theorists is currently dismanteling our medical science research into the treatment of cancer and other serious illnesses.
Also, there is Linda McMahon, former pro wrestling promotor and now Trump’s appointment as Secretary of Education, who is tasked with shutting down the department of education but in a recent speech in which her speech writers had set her up to publicly praise the addition of AI to public schools, she made it obvious that she didn’t even know what AI is and read it as A1, that delightful, tangy, salty sauce that many of us enjoy with our steaks.
After all of the pontificating the Trump team has done about DEI, they have made themselves into a case study for why DEI regulations are needed.
Rather than hiring qualified people for these important jobs, he is, and I can’t say this delicately, he is choosing very stupid white people whose only qualification is loyalty to their fascist dictator.
Take for example Trump’s press secretary, the 27 year old election denier, Karoline Leavitt. Leavitt is married to a wealthy real estate magnate who is more than twice her age. Leavitt daily displays either a tragic degree of being uneducated or uninformed or, what may be more likely, a penchant for telling outrageous lies. I could point to her infamous exchange about who actually pays for tariffs in which she insists that tariffs are a tax cut for Americans which means she either doesn’t know what a tariff is or she thinks that Americans are dumb enough not to know that Trump’s tarrifs represent the single largest peacetime tax increase on middle Americans. She also spews misinformation about DOGE with such claims as America is spending $200 million for sex changes in Guatemala and dozens of other claimed DOGE cuts which are pure fabrications.
Compare her to Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who was born in France to Haitian parents. She is black, she is a lesbian and as such she checks the boxes of what Trump rails about in his DEI rants… she is an immigrant, her family is from a country that Trump called a “shit hole” country, she is a lesbian and black but she has twice as much education as Leavitt and much more relevant work experience and you cannot point to a single incident of her sharing misinformation. And, she is not the one who had gender affirming surgery, which, though it may be news to Leavitt, her nose job was exactly that. But let’s not be petty.
And a fourth reason why Trump is try ing to turn America into a fascist dictatorship is seen in his efforts to control the media and institutions of higher learning. Trump sued CBS for $20 billion because he did not like the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris before the election. $20 billion sounds like a figure out of an Austin Powers movie but it made CBS start to put pressure on the producer of 60-minutes, Bill Owens, so that he has recently resigned.
Trump is cutting funding to NPR and PBS and is trying to take down Voice of America and has threatened to pull the broadcast licenses of MSNBC and CNN and is restricting access to daily White House briefings to news agencies that give only favorable coverage to Trump. Similarly, he has taken over the Kennedy Performing Arts Center so that even artistic performances which portray Trump unfavorably or even perform works that he does not like or understand can no longer be booked.
He has famously attacked Ivy League colleges, insisting that they cease all DEI programs and he has even tried to restrict what they can teach and who they can hire to teach. Harvard has courageously stood up to the Trump administration, even though there are billions of dollars of research grants at stake. By the way, if you didn’t know it, Harvard has the second largest foundation in the world, second only to the Vatican. When I was there, there were always student protests in Harvard yard demanding that Harvard go tuition free, which seemed like wishful thinking to me until one of my professors told us that Harvard could stop charging tuition and continue to operate in the same way for 400 years based on their current foundation holdings. . . . so, maybe threatening Harvard with withholding money is not likely to be an effective tactic, still, these moves reek of fascist intent to control news, education, the arts, and any form of communication which might educate or inform the public so that voters can better understand what is being done to them.
A fifth tell that Trump is a dictator with fascist goals is in the way that he is using the White House to enrich himself and his largest donors. He shamelessly sells watches, trading cards, gold sneakers, Bibles, crypto currency, as well as his famous hats, and stock in his social media platform, all of which has earned him, potentially, billions of dollars in the same way that corrupt politicians in dictatorships use their office to make themselves fabulously wealthy, and that’s without even delving into how he travels to his own properties to golf and vacation, forcing the government to pay inflated prices for accommodating his security detail and government entourage.
And this image bleeds into my sixth issue . . . This Trump 2028 hat teases the fact that Trump does not intend to leave office when his second term is over. This is not a joke. Inspite of the constitutional limit of two 4-year terms, Trump is already talking about a third term and I don’t know if that means he plans to ignore the constitution and run for re-election or if he just plans to do away with elections and just stay in office. Either way is dangerously crazy but have you noticed the silence of Republican elected officials on this point? In spite of Trump’s low approval ratings and his disasterous destruction of what was the strongest economy in the world, he continues to insist that he is America’s savior and he literally wants to have his image carved into Mt. Rushmore.
Folks, that is six undeniable issues, six points which, I believe, no honest person could look at and deny that Trump is well on his way to disassembling our constitutional democracy and replacing it with a fascist dictatorship. There is more that can be said on this issue but let me move on to a couple of related important observations.
The first is that the Republican Party has demonstrated that they lact the moral conscience and strength of character to stand up to Trump, with only a handful of exceptions who have been largely drummed out the party for failing to fall in line behind this inept and ignorant tyrant. And what pains me even more to say is that the Democratic Party has given us no reason to believe that they have either the courage or the intellect necessary to stand up to Trump.
Trump should have been put on trail in 2021 for insurrection, for election interference, for stealing classified documents, and for emoluments. But while the Democrats held hearings and did a lot of public handwringing, they were evidently afraid to actually enforce the laws, defend the constitution, and put Trump in prison for the rest of his life. They slow walked all of his legal issues, allowing him to run for and win re-election.
Sadly, no one in the Republican Party or the Democrat Party will lead the cavalry over the hill to come and rescue America. Our salvation will have to come from somewhere else. I believe that our only hope lies in an awakened, informed, and an inspired population that can unite to save Democracy.
People that I love and respect have repeated that we must be careful in how we talk to Trump voters. We cannot talk down to them. We cannot tell them that they are stupid lest we alienate them and make them double down on their support for Trump. I just can’t agree with that anymore. Voting for Trump the first time should have been obviously stupid. Voting for him a second time was even more stupid because you had seen how he behaved in office. Voting for him a third time was not just more stupid but it was a decision to choose to be stupid which is much worse than being inherently stupid. I can’t pull punches here. Americans have to wake up and own the ignorant mistake they made in voting one, two, and three times for a man who is trying to destroy the world order that has made the western world wealthy and secure.
In November of 2024, what did voters know about Donald Trump? This will take a minute but this is what voters knew about Trump in November of 2024 and most of them voted for him anyway:
They knew that Trump had incited a violent insurrection against the American government in an attempt to overthrow a free and fair election.
They knew that Trump had horribly mismanaged the pandemic so that more than a million Americans died from Covid, most of whom would not have died had Trump not been such an anti-science moron. People, he actually suggested on live TV that we inject bleach into our bodies to kill the Covid virus. You heard him!
They knew that Trump called neo-nazi demonstrators “very fine people.”
They knew that Trump separated thousands of children from their parents at the border, holding them in dog pens and, in many instances, simply losing them in government bureaucracy.
They knew that he had police use tear-gas on peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square so that he could be photographed holding a Bible upside down in front of a church.
They knew that Trump had tried to ban all Muslims from entering this country even though he made his first presidential visit to Saudi Arabia where he and his family hoped to get billions of dollars in bribes.
In November of 2024, voters knew that Trump had been impeached twice and that he was only saved by a majority of spineless Republicans in the Senate.
They knew that he had the worst jobs record of any American president, ever.
They knew that he had withheld arms shipments from the Ukraine trying to force them to fabricate false legal charges against Joe Biden.
They knew that he had fired the FBI director because he had investigated Trump’s ties to Putin.
He diverted military funds to pay for his southern border wall which he had promised he would make Mexico pay for.
He objectively lied more than 30,000 documented times while in office.
He banned transgender people from serving in the military.
He lied about releasing his tax returns which no one has yet seen.
He hired unqualified family members to work in the White House.
He called veterans who gave their lives in war for our country, “losers and suckers.”
He pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, he pulled out of the Iranian Nuclear agreement, and undermined NATO at every turn.
He insulted our trading partners and allies while talking about being in love with dictators and fascists.
Voters saw how he forced his cabinet members to praise him on camera the way that dictators and cult leaders do.
He actually said that he deserved to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
He called his absurdly loyal vice president a “pussy” for following the constitution and applauded the calls to have him hanged on the Capitol lawn.
Voters knew that Trump made his press secretary lie for him from everything from the size of his inauguration audience to his weight in his annual physicals.
Voters saw how he just drew lines on a map with a sharpie to support his own stupid claims about a hurricane’s path.
He didn’t even have the class to attend his successor’s inauguration.
He apparently sold pardons as he was leaving office through his minion, Rudy Guliani.
I could go on but out of respect for your time and the objective reality that I have already gone on too long, it must simply be said that there is no plausible excuse for the ignorance demonstrated in the re-election of Donald Trump but to continue tpo support him is to choose to be stupid and I cannot beg you strongly enough to gather your self-respect about you and acknowledge that you were horribly wrong and change course. As Soren Kierkegaard famously said, “There are two ways in which to be wrong. One is to believe what is false and the second is to refuse to believe what is true.”
No one can rationally deny the hard swing towards fascism currently underway in the United States and even though I have very little hope for the future of America, we are still the best hope that most people in the world have and so, without caving into cynicism about America’s lack of intelligence, I implore you to unite for democracy and, please, keep calm and carry on.
