THE GOP’S OBSESSION WITH SLANDERING AN AMERICAN HERO

 

The latest witch-hunt led by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and a handful of GOP hangers-on against Dr. Anthony Fauci is a tragic and shameful travesty perpetrated against a man who, objectively speaking, can only be considered a scientific hero. The Stalinesque theater of the absurd created by Paul at the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee this past week is a source of shame for not only the Trump-hijacked Republican Party, but for the US as a whole. The mere fact that Rand Paul was able to get away with setting up this throwback to the days of McCarthyism is indicative of the abysmal level of persecutory weaponization to which the Legislative Branch has plummeted with the GOP in charge.

Dr. Fauci has long been the genius far-right anti-science Republicans love to hate. But no one has more fully represented the witch-hunt against him than Senator Paul. Fauci has become a perverse obsession for Paul, one that his powerful position in the GOP-led Congress has permitted him to pursue with utter impunity. This impunity, then, has allowed Paul to raise every sort of unsubstantiated claim imaginable against Dr. Fauci with no need whatsoever to provide convincing evidence of his wild exaggerations and accusations.

As the head of a Senate committee that enjoys the dangerously sweeping powers of Homeland Security, Paul has also been able to entertain his obsession by calling on Fauci to testify under oath, a situation in which his Senate authority has permitted him to not only rake Dr. Fauci over the coals himself, but also to invite other GOP science-deniers to pillory one of the nation’s top scientists during their cross examinations. And to do so in the rudest and least protocolar of ways. Like when Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno shockingly asked Dr. Fauci “who the fuck” he thought he was.

In my own mind, I was thinking that someone with a heart and a brain should stand up and provide a ten-minute summary of who the incredible Dr. Fauci really was, and then say, “Senator, we now know who Dr. Fauci is. The question on the table now should be, who the fuck do you think you are?

Rand Paul

The exchange between Moreno and Fauci was ugly in itself but was made uglier by the fact that Chairman Paul—besides making public intimate entries in Dr. Fauci’s own personal diary, which had been subpoenaed—never bothered to call out Moreno for his language or for the disrespectful way in which he formulated the questions he put to Dr. Fauci during the Senate proceedings. All of this is indicative of the depths of parliamentary perversion to which the Senate GOP has fallen. Its most vitriolic representatives are carrying out a veritable inquisition against defenders of America’s finest traditions and natural enemies of the current regime.

Paul would later compound the vile injustice to which Dr. Fauci was being subjected when he had Fauci’s attorney physically removed from the room, when the lawyer sought to respond to a question put to his client, after advising Dr. Fauci to plead the Fifth Amendment considering that the head of the committee was clearly bent on persecuting him.

It is important to note that the target of Rand Paul’s witch-hunt is a top scientist, with a career spanning more than five decades, during which his scientific work and public service have contributed to saving millions of lives worldwide. Paul’s accusations surrounding Fauci stem entirely from the scientist’s work at the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the COVID-19 pandemic—the ham-handed mishandling of which by the Trump administration cost a million lives in the US alone.

The central issue here is not whether Dr. Fauci made mistakes—every public official managing a once-in-a-century novel pandemic is bound to—but whether the campaign against him has been proportional to the evidence. The historical record clearly demonstrates that it has not. More importantly, we should bear in mind whom we are talking about.

So, who is Anthony Fauci? Dr. Fauci's scientific career is virtually unmatched. A graduate of Cornell University’s medical school, where he was top in his class, Fauci was the longest-serving director of a US scientific agency in history, having headed up the NIAID from 1984 until 2022. In that role, he served as a scientific adviser to seven presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In recognition of that incredible service to the people of the United States, in 2008, then-President George W. Bush presented Dr. Fauci with the Presidential Medal of Freedom “for his determined and aggressive efforts to help others live longer and healthier lives.”

Fauci receives Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush

In a 1988 presidential debate Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush paid Fauci—then practically an unknown in the public eye—one of the highest compliments possible. When the debate moderator asked the elder Bush to name a person who should inspire young Americans as a modern-day hero, the former CIA director and future president didn’t name a sports figure or someone in the military. Instead, he said, “I think of Dr. Fauci—probably likely never heard of him. You did? He's a very fine research top doctor at National Institute of Health, working hard doing something about research on this disease of AIDS.” Clearly, Bush had his priorities straight. Men like Fauci were the true heroes of humanity.

Over the years, Fauci has been a visiting professor at innumerable medical centers, and has received numerous honorary doctorates from universities in the US and abroad.

A young Dr. Fauci with George H.W. Bush

The remarkable continuity of Dr. Fauci’s service under both Republican and Democratic administrations demonstrates that, for decades, he has been regarded primarily as a scientist rather than a political actor. It is only in the wake of the first Trump administration’s disastrous handling of the COVID pandemic that the GOP—and particularly Rand Paul—have sought to turn Dr. Fauci into a scapegoat for the one million COVID deaths that occurred on their watch. It should also be noted that Paul—a product of the Tea Party and its later iteration as MAGA—is basically a vaccine denier, who has campaigned for vaccines to be a choice rather than an obligation. He is, then, part of the problem in the trend toward the return of numerous deadly diseases that are today resurging as a result of ever-lower vaccination rates, after having been defeated through obligatory vaccination in my lifetime.

But as George H.W. Bush pointed out in his brief tribute, Dr. Fauci's greatest contribution predates COVID by decades. In the early 1980s, infection with the HIV virus was essentially a death sentence. Dr. Fauci became one of the world's leading researchers on HIV immunology and treatment. Among his major accomplishments in this field were: helping identify mechanisms by which HIV destroys the immune system; advancing clinical trials that produced effective antiviral therapies; promoting anti-retroviral therapy, and supporting a global HIV research infrastructure. His work directly helped shape scientific policies that eventually turned HIV from a fatal disease into a manageable chronic condition.

Under the administration of George W. Bush, Dr. Fauci also played an influential advisory role in the development of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR is widely regarded as one of the most successful humanitarian health initiatives ever undertaken. According to US government estimates, that program alone has saved more than 25 million lives. Of course, no serious historian attributes all of those lives saved solely to Dr. Fauci. But it is equally undeniable that he was among the principal scientific architects whose expertise helped make those live-saving achievements possible.

As if all of this weren’t enough, Fauci’s work has extended far beyond AIDS and COVID-19 research. He also directed major federal responses to SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, West Nile virus, anthrax and pandemic influenza. Under his leadership, the NIAID became one of the world's premier infectious disease research institutions. His published scientific work numbers more than a thousand peer-reviewed papers, making him one of the most cited biomedical researchers in history.

The Trump GOP has frequently accused Fauci of dishonesty. The record shows that this is a facile, self-serving reading of a complex reality. Throughout the  COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci repeatedly testified before Congress, participated in hundreds of press briefings, responded calmly and cogently to intentionally hostile questions for hours on end, and transparently released scientific data as it evolved. He openly acknowledged the fact that recommendations were fluid and would change as scientific knowledge regarding the novel virus evolved and changed.

His statement that early guidance on masks reflected concerns about preserving supplies for healthcare workers has been broadly criticized, but this was a logical priority within his purview as the head of national efforts to deal with a grave emergency that was overwhelming US medical facilities. And he, furthermore, publicly explained the rationale behind that priority rather than denying it. He reiterated endlessly that uncertainty existed regarding many aspects of COVID transmission, and he repeatedly emphasized that recommendations would evolve with the emergence of new scientific and medical evidence.

Changing advice during a novel pandemic is not in any sense evidence of deception. Rather, it was acknowledgement that new scientific information was being applied and adjusted as more was learned, even as the health authorities were struggling to cope with the pandemic in practical human terms. Such adjustments are not evidence of errors or of someone like Dr. Fauci “not knowing what he’s doing.” They are, instead, proof that scientific knowledge is developing and improving almost daily and that, on that basis, recommendations must also change and evolve in sympathy with those improvements.

No elected official has questioned Dr. Fauci’s motive more aggressively than Rand Paul. The Kentucky senator has repeatedly accused Fauci of lying to Congress, funding gain-of-function research, and responsibility for the pandemic. Yet repeated investigations—including both reviews by federal agencies and independent analyses—have never concluded that Dr. Fauci intentionally lied under oath. The question of how to classify certain aspects of coronavirus research has remained scientifically and legally disputed, but no court has ever found Dr. Fauci guilty of perjury or criminal misconduct.

In the absence of evidence of any wrongdoing on Fauci’s part, Paul’s repeated public accusations, then, function basically as a political red herring, aimed at taking the focus off of the Trump regime’s own disastrous handling of the pandemic, and as a distraction from other Trump failures, like his personal war in Iran, which is rejected by more than three-quarters of Americans polled.

The major boogey man in all of this has been Paul’s “gain-of-function” accusations. He has sought to make it sound like some sort of sinister plot on Fauci’s part to create a supervirus capable of wiping out a huge segment of the population. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to comprehend this, it is important to understand what gain-of-function is and how it works.

Gain-of-function refers to any genetic change that gives an organism a new ability or makes an existing ability stronger. This change can happen naturally through evolution or it can be induced by scientists in a lab. When gain-of-function happens naturally, it is because, over time, genes mutate, as a means of helping an organism survive. But gain-of-function can also be provoked intentionally in a lab, with the aim of learning more about how certain organisms work.

Gain-of-function is commonly used to help create medications, to improve crop yields, or to generate more useful bacteria. But its main use in the medical world is to help scientists better understand novel viruses and how they work, and then, ultimately, to create reliable vaccines to combat them. Clearly, these were activities in which Dr. Fauci was likely to be submersed daily during the pandemic, as scientists raced against the clock to discover a safe and effective COVID vaccine—a task they successfully carried out in record time in different parts of the world from Russia, to Britain, to the United States.

Where Rand Paul and other far-right anti-vax and MAGA actors have sought to hang their arguments are reports regarding the possibility that the COVID pandemic originated with an incident at the Wuhan research lab in China. Fauci was involved in American funding for experiments taking place there. A scientist of Fauci’s caliber and authority would, of course, be involved in research efforts worldwide, in seeking to find cures for highly infectious diseases. But from there to accusing Dr. Fauci of being the veritable architect of the pandemic and of intentionally seeking to cover up the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak is the height of conspiracy-theory fabrication.

The origin of the COVID pandemic has never been adequately proven. Could it have been due to a leak from the Wuhan lab? Sure. This could have happened because of what is known as zoonotic spillover—in which, at some point, a virus might spread from animals to people—or it could have been due to some incident at the lab that no investigation has yet been able to determine. That’s not a conspiracy theory, but a legitimate scientific question that so far fruitless international efforts have sought to resolve.

But the problem comes when a subjective group motivated by political, personal or ideological leanings decides, based on no hard evidence whatsoever, that a mere theory should be taken as fact. The result is what is known as a conspiracy theory, and that is what is behind the continued persecution of one of America’s greatest medical heroes ever.  Despite the fact that there is still no conclusive evidence regarding the origin of the corona virus and the COVID pandemic, Rand Paul and his merry band of MAGA anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have decided that they are going to believe in the Wuhan leak theory and take it as fact. Very likely because it fits their obsession with vilifying Dr. Fauci, whose only arguable crime against humanity has been making every effort to keep spiteful, bitter people like Rand Paul from dying of some terrible disease.

The pitch that Rand Paul and company are trying to sell to the public is that, thanks to Dr. Fauci, US-funded research may have contributed to the pandemic. The argument is a real stretch, since the funding was granted for research aimed at improving the available means of combating dread diseases. If a problem at that lab was, in the end, somehow responsible for the spread of COVID—and again, there is no hard evidence that this is true—it was a tragic and unintentional consequence. To date, no investigation has established that the virus was either intentionally manufactured or released there.

The thing with conspiracy theories is that they have a lot in common with novel viruses like COVID-19. They have an uncanny ability to move and spread from one group to another. Float a claim in some radical online group, and before you know it, it has spread across the length and breadth of the social media universe. It is easy then, to posit that it is based on “well-known facts”—trust us, on this—and to turn it into a powerful political weapon.

And that is precisely where things stand today in the Soviet-style kangaroo-court hearings through which Dr. Fauci is being persecuted. So the biggest take-away from all of this is the question of how mere conspiracy theories can suddenly acquire a veneer of “authority” when pressed into service by bad government actors. 

Complicating the conspiracy theory, Rand Paul has presumed to portray himself as a medical professional of the same caliber as Dr. Fauci, and therefore, an authority worthy of opining on Fauci’s competency. Let’s look at the facts.

Paul indeed graduated from Duke Medical in 1988 specializing in ophthalmology. He finished his ophthalmology training at Duke University Hospital in 1993. That same year, he and his family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he started working in the private sector with the Downing McPeak Vision Centers and the Graves Gilbert Clinic. He later opened his own private practice in Bowling Green as an eye surgeon. 

At the turn of the century, the American Board of Ophthalmology modified its standards of practice, and required specialists in that field to recertify in order to keep their licenses to practice. Paul failed to comply with the recertification standards—whether because he was afraid he would not be able to meet them or maybe just out of bullheadedness—and his license to practice ophthalmology was revoked.

Instead of simply biting the bullet and taking the recertification examination, Rand Paul got together with a group of other disgruntled professionals and they started their very own rival certification board called the National Board  of Ophthamology. Paul was among the first to be recertified to practice medicine by this knock-off board, with other unlicensed medical school graduates following him in basically recertifying themselves to practice. Clearly, getting around the American Board of Ophthalmology recertification examination was the main purpose of the so-called National Board of Ophthalmology, because after Paul and company recertified themselves with the stroke of a pen, their organization waned in importance and was eventually dissolved.

Under that authority, Rand Paul practiced ophthalmology in Bowling Green until 2008, before launching his campaign for the US Senate in 2009. He won his Senate bid in November of 2010.

So let’s look comparatively at the professional performances of Dr. Paul and Dr. Fauci.

Rand Paul graduated from Duke Medical, practiced privately as an eye surgeon, lost his certification to do so, challenged the recertification standards of the medical board with oversight for his profession, started his own certification board and was recertified under his own authority, decided to run for the Senate, and won a seat. Since then, he has opposed obligatory vaccination for epidemic diseases, supported abolition of the Department of Education, opposed healthcare for all, and supported a free-market medical sector. He has also become—for reasons clear only to him and his MAGA base—the number one detractor of Dr. Anthony Fauci, vowing to put the scientist behind bars. He has spent an inordinate amount of time, energy and taxpayer funds going after Fauci for alleged criminal misconduct, based entirely on MAGA conspiracy theories that have never resulted in any criminal findings against Dr. Fauci.    

Dr. Fauci, meanwhile, has become one of the world's leading infectious disease specialists, spent more than fifty years conducting biomedical research, scored monumental achievements in major infectious disease control and prevention, advised presidents of both parties and been praised and rewarded by two presidents from Rand Paul’s own party, contributed to public health initiatives that have saved tens of millions of lives, transformed the lives of HIV-AIDS victims worldwide, and published more than a thousand scholarly papers that have served as gold standard guidance for broad sectors of the medical profession.

Former President Obama joins Dr. Fauci at a school event to
promote COVID vaccination programs during the pandemic

Paul has clearly devoted far more public attention to unreasonably attacking Fauci than to engaging with the broader scientific consensus on infectious disease and seeking to apply the proven science to making his constituents healthier.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is not infallible, nor does he pretend to be. He has acknowledged mistakes and changing guidance during the pandemic, which was an unprecedented public health emergency.

That said, Dr. Fauci should be judged not on the basis of conspiracy theories supported by the anti-science prejudice of the MAGA movement, but on his   half-century of scientific achievement and service to the American people. Measured over the course of that stellar career, Dr. Fauci stands as one of the most influential physician-scientists in modern American history. His leadership helped advance treatments for HIV/AIDS, strengthen preparedness against emerging infectious diseases, and guide public health responses under seven presidents from both political parties.

By contrast, Senator Rand Paul's sustained focus on portraying Dr. Fauci as personally culpable for the pandemic has not resulted in criminal convictions or judicial findings of misconduct of any sort with regard to Fauci. The obsessively nefarious anti-Fauci—and anti-science—campaign mounted by Paul is no more than a political scam designed to assign personal blame to a scapegoat for a complex global catastrophe in which Paul’s party bore a huge measure of responsibility by generating distrust in the science that sought to save lives, and encouraging Americans to “decide for themselves,” rather than strictly adhering to the science as it evolved and became ever more effective.

Rand Paul’s witch-hunt is simple MAGA deflection, and the Senator, taking his cue from the ghost of Eugene McCarthy, is bent on unjustly trashing Dr. Fauci’s extraordinary reputation as a means of stroking his own ego and of gaining points among his anti-science MAGA constituents.

LET’S CALL IT WHAT IT IS – RACISM PURE AND SIMPLE

In the earliest days of Trump Regime 1.0, MAGA—a racist organization par excellence—tried to explain away Trump’s embracing of white nationalist organizations with facile arguments  about “reverse racism”. Reverse racism is, if we’re honest, a made-up term that racists employ to argue that they are not racist. Their argument is that they “have nothing against black and brown people,” but are simply trying to protect themselves and their loved ones against “discrimination”, not that they are seeking to discriminate against minorities, and especially not against blacks in America.

I hate to be the one to break it to everyone, but “reverse racism” is not a thing, and the cat is out of the bag: Trump heads a racist regime, supported by a persistent core of racist voters and donors. Period. These are people who, no matter how damaging the Trump regime has been to their own interests, continue to lean into his authoritarianism because it is based on hating and fearing the same people they hate and fear. And hate and fear are their key motivators.

Now, before you start stamping your feet, ringing your hands and ripping your garments, let me make my case, with facts, not “feelings”. First, I will propose the following: The Trump regime, from the very start, and much more so in its second iteration, has systematically targeted African Americans, and has deliberately dismantled major Civil Rights-Era protections against racial discrimination and segregation. Full Stop.

With his policy-backed support for white Christian nationalists and other white supremacists—amply represented in the congressional majority, and in the majority of the Supreme Court—Trump has sought to turn back the clock, not just to the immediate pre-Civil Rights Era, but to long before. All the way to World War I and Woodrow Wilson, whose administration was, perhaps—before Trump—the most racist in modern history. 

Despite its progressive rhetoric, Wilson’s administration actively reversed decades of federal workforce integration by re-segregating federal offices, restrooms, and workplaces in Washington, DC. In the most notorious of cases during his administration, one black official was forced to work behind screens so that his white colleagues “wouldn’t have to look at him.” Other African American federal workers were forced to work inside cages so that they couldn’t mingle with the rest of the staff. Wilson’s administration suggested that white female staffers felt uneasy in the presence of black male staffers. Restrooms and water fountains were segregated as Men, Women and Colored, and separate lunchrooms were established for whites and blacks.

Just as Trump spoke in his first term of white nationalist neo-Nazis marching in a violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people,” Wilson had no compunction about notoriously screening the highly controversial, pro-Ku Klux Klan film The Birth of a Nation at the White House—an indication that his administration embraced the violent anti-black, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish philosophy of that segregationist cult. Trump has talked openly about predominately black or brown nations as “shithole countries”, and has wondered aloud why the US can’t have “better quality” immigration from “places like Norway.”

"Very fine people..."

Granted, racism is the only thing Wilson and Trump have in common. Wilson was, otherwise, a reform-minded progressive Democrat, who, during his two terms as the twenty-eighth President of the United States, championed a “New Freedom” platform. His policies focused on progressive economic reforms like lowering tariffs, breaking up corporate monopolies, and establishing the Federal Reserve. Trump, instead, has used tariffs as a foreign policy bludgeon, championed the monopolies of his billionaire cronies, and done everything he could to undermine the independence of the Fed.

There is clear and compelling evidence that the Trump regime has intentionally and materially undermined years of hard-fought and harder-won advancement in dismantling systemic racial discrimination in the US. But although Trump himself and members of his Cabinet have arguably said some really stupid, infuriating and hurtful things about diversity, equity and inclusion, the regime’s anti-civil rights stance cannot be fully encompassed in a specific policy speech or even controversial remark. This is a case of actions speaking louder than words, since the regime’s discriminatory bent can be observed in a cumulative pattern of policy changes.

Measured by that standard, the Trump administration has engaged in the most significant rollback of the Civil Rights Era revolution since the nineteen-fifties.

My argument doesn’t require me to prove racial animus inside the minds of policymakers. I don’t presume to see into their minds and  observe the racism there—although, truth be told, it is there, and quite often seeps out in public like vile green pus. But all I need to do is point to how the regime has consistently and provenly weakened the legal, institutional, and administrative safeguards created during and after the great Civil Rights Era to combat discrimination, expand equal opportunity, and enforce constitutional rights. And Trump’s record demonstrates precisely that.

The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s were never intended to simply outlaw explicit segregation. Congress—which actually functioned back then—also created an enforcement system. Among other things, these congressional actions included aggressive Department of Justice investigations, affirmative federal oversight, disparate-impact regulations, and strict voting-rights enforcement, fair-housing enforcement, and equal-employment enforcement.

It is clear that, across each of these areas, the Trump regime has reduced or eliminated enforcement, or at least attempted to eliminate it. Trump’s government has even rescinded some of the most basic of social norms. While racial discrimination remains illegal under federal law, Trump has weakened many of the tools for enforcing compliance. For instance, the Trump regime has revoked the Johnson Era Executive Order 11246 that prohibited federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Trump’s regime has also done away with the “Segregated Facilities Clause” that forbade federal contractors from maintaining “segregated facilities” such as waiting rooms, work areas and water fountains for whites and racial minorities. Indeed, under Trump, the General Services Administration (GSA) specifically directed federal agencies to drop this very explicit clause. 

Of even greater concern, Trump’s Department of (in)Justice has also actively worked with state officials in formerly Confederate states—most notably in Louisianna—to end decades-old “school desegregation consent decrees”. These were court-ordered agreements arising from litigation during the Civil Rights Era. They were aimed at forcing an end to racial discrimination in public schools. The Trump regime’s excuse for aiding and abetting the re-segregation of Southern schools is that the court-ordered agreements “imposed an unnecessary burden on local school systems.”

Trump’s Catch-22 argument for all of these basically unlawful and  discriminatory policies is that “the Constitution is color-blind” and that he is in no way discriminating. On the contrary, he is avoiding racial discrimination (the understood elliptical phrase here being “against whites”). Rather than expanding civil-rights protections, the Trump regime has consistently argued that many of these mechanisms constitute unlawful racial “preferences.” The practical result is that federal agencies investigate discrimination less aggressively than ever before under previous administrations.

One of the regime's defining domestic priorities in its 2.0 phase has been the elimination of initiatives that promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) throughout the federal government. In doing so, the regime has actively sought to make these once positive and progressive terms into dirty words to be eliminated from the official and popular lexicon. Instead of accepting the positive significance of these terms—who but a bigot could argue that diversity, equity and inclusion could be anything but affirmative values?—the regime argues that DEI, in and of itself, constitutes discrimination.

Truth be told, DEI programs emerged precisely because traditional anti-discrimination laws proved insufficient to overcome decades of deeply entrenched racial inequality. The great Civil Rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King once wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” Simple but clear in its concept, this dictum has been the basis for anti-discrimination rules and regulations throughout the more than half-century of the post-Civil Rights era. In short, making a sweeping law that says, “from now on blacks and whites are equal” clearly isn’t enough. Complimentary norms must be forcibly imposed to ensure that this erstwhile federal policy is applied in practical terms across the board.

The Trump regime has not only not done this, but has also actively assaulted DEI. Among other things, it has abolished numerous federal DEI-related offices, prohibited federal diversity training programs, threatened to suspend agreements with federal contractors that support DEI policies, and fostered investigations into universities and corporations that have maintained race-conscious programs despite the regime’s obsession with eliminating them. In effect, this has reversed decades of federal equal-opportunity programs first developed following the ground-breaking Civil Rights Act of 1964.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson has described attacks on diversity initiatives as, “An attempt to erase the history of discrimination while preserving its effects.”

One of the least appreciated achievements of the Civil Rights Era was recognition that discrimination does not always require explicit racist intent. This is truly significant and also patently applicable to the Trump regime. Many modern civil-rights laws prohibit practices that disproportionately disadvantage minorities even when ostensibly neutral. This doctrine is known as “disparate impact”, and it has been a gold standard for housing discrimination cases, employment discrimination, equal education, equal bank-lending, and policing for decades.

But Trump officials have repeatedly attempted to narrow or eliminate disparate-impact enforcement completely. This is important, because, in the absence of  disparate-impact standards, anyone bringing a civil rights suit must frequently prove intentional racism—which sets a significantly more challenging legal burden for the plaintiff. Many civil-rights scholars argue that such a change renders modern discrimination law toothless and  substantially less effective.

Perhaps the most visible and significant rollback—I mean, if we don’t count the fact that Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense, for example, has not only summarily removed from their posts a list of general officers, including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for no reason other than the color of their skin, but has also demonstrated similar discrimination on the basis of gender by removing women from the upper ranks in the Armed Forces—has come in the suppression of black voting rights.

Rather than seeking restoration of Voting Rights Act protections, the regime has consistently supported stricter voting rules, designed to make it harder and harder for minorities to vote and to get a fair shake. Trump’s voter repression actions have included expansion of voter-ID requirements, active gerrymandering, reduced federal oversight at elections in areas where there is a high concentration of minority voters, opposition to expanded early voting, opposition to broader mail-in voting, reduction of polling places in areas of high minority concentration, and support for litigation that narrows federal voting protections. Civil-rights organizations argue that all of these measures disproportionately burden black voters because of long-standing socio-economic disparities.

It is easy to disingenuously argue that these consequences are not intentional. But whether they are or aren’t is neither here nor there, since the practical consequence is reduced minority electoral participation and clout.

The Trump regime’s other pet peeve has been “affirmative action”, and Trump has consistently argued against and sought to dismantle this and other race-conscious remedies. Here again Trump has gotten a hand from his hijacked Supreme Court whose decision has effectively ended race-conscious university admissions. The Court has thus upheld the Trump regime’s skewed and spurious argument of “colorblindness”.

Again, this is based on the false claim that the Trump government is seeking to avoid, rather than encourage discrimination. But, in practice, a so-called “colorblind” system operating atop centuries of unequal racial and ethnic treatment simply preserves historical inequalities. Former Justice Thurgood Marshall warned of exactly this outcome: “The position we seek to defend is not preferential treatment but equal opportunity.” The racist Trump regime self-servingly rejects that clear comprehension of cause and effect.

And then there is the question of housing. It’s worthwhile pointing out that Trump, best known as a real estate developer, has several times run afoul of federal non-discrimination laws in seeking to keep blacks out of his luxury living projects. So there is clearly racist self-interest involved in this case.

The Fair Housing Act was enacted following the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Again, this was federal legislation that went far beyond prohibiting overt discrimination. It also sought to dismantle implicit residential segregation.

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, introduced during the Obama Era, required any local government receiving federal funds to both identify and address patterns of segregation. Trump has unilaterally rescinded the rule. The regime argues that zoning decisions belong to local communities, not to the federal government. But civil-rights advocates counter that removing affirmative obligations effectively guts one of the federal government's main tools for reducing racial segregation in housing.

In education, the Trump regime has not only dismantled that department of government entirely, but has also, mostly through its corrupt DOJ, opposed race-consciou
s admissions to colleges and universities, race-conscious scholarships, DEI programming and diversity-promoting offices, as well as race-based mentoring initiatives.

Trump has fundamentally reversed sixty years of federal action to ensure an equal playing field for minorities and particularly for African Americans. Increasingly under Trump, the focus of federal investigations into universities has ceased to be discrimination against black students, and instead is being placed on punishing institutions for even considering race in admissions or programming.

This is a direct reversal of the historical purpose of federal civil-rights enforcement. And it is based on another false white-supremacist supposition, the gist of which is that young people in inner-city black and Latino neighborhoods are already afforded exactly the same advantages as suburban whites. This is a lie on the face of it, and multiple government studies in the past have made it clear just how false it is. Without federal civil rights protection, minorities are condemned to languish. Remedying that is precisely what the social upheaval of the Civil Rights Era was all about. 

In racially-focused criminal justice action, the passage during Trump’s first term of the bipartisan First Step Act provided his government with the opportunity to point to successful justice reform on his watch. But since then, in practical terms, the regime’s rhetoric and policies have focused on more aggressive and far less accountable policing, the restructuring of ICE as a paramilitary that answers to Trump—not to the Constitution or to the taxpayers—vastly expanded prosecutorial powers, reduction or suspension of federal oversight on police departments in accordance with the Constitution and federal law, and the severe limiting of consent decrees, originally negotiated to prevent racially discriminatory practices by local police.   

  The Department of Justice has substantially reduced or eliminated the use of pattern-or-practice investigations into police departments accused of systemic racial or ethnic discrimination. This has substantially weakened accountability mechanisms developed after repeated findings of unconstitutional policing procedures in local police forces.

Clearly civil-rights progress depends not only on statutes passed into law, but also on the integrity of leadership. Presidents from John F. Kennedy through Joe Biden have generally framed racial equality as a priority national objective.

Trump, meanwhile, has instead consistently portrayed anti-racism initiatives, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, affirmative action, critical race theory, and diversity policies in general as threats to American society—read: white American society. That characterization represents a profoundly racist rhetorical and practical departure from decades of bipartisan presidential language and actions.

No matter how nefarious the racist actions Trump and his Cabinet have imposed, or how pernicious the effect of dismantling each Civil Rights Era conquest that he has ripped out by the roots, the overall pattern tends to be more significant than any individual policy. One way that MAGA tries to take the focus off of the blatantly racist bent of the regime is by defending each policy separately, in terms disingenuously designed to make it appear that the measures are more egalitarian, not less—a tactic into which the white supremacist base can easily lean. Once again, this is the “colorblind” argument that, in any reasonable mind, doesn’t fly any higher than a penguin.

But systematic change is rarely effected by means of a single law, decree or gesture. It takes place on the strength of consistently coordinated actions. Through his essentially racist actions, in his five-and-a-half years as president, and MAGA’S decade of white supremacist support, Trump has managed to effectively weaken civil-rights enforcement, narrow or eliminate anti-discrimination doctrine, reduce federal diversity oversight, dismantle DEI infrastructure, oppose and disband race-conscious remedies, curtail ethnic voting-rights protections, weaken fair-housing initiatives, and reduce federal police oversight, while bolstering an extra-constitutional paramilitary force that answers directly to him and that is, at its core, flagrantly racist. Viewed collectively, these actions represent the most sweeping retreat from the majority Civil Rights consensus in more than sixty years.

Detractors will try to tell you that the Trump regime opposes discrimination against all races equally. But this is basically a racist argument. It is based on the white supremacist “replacement theory”, which essentially posits that there is some sort of conspiracy on the left, through support for black communities and through liberal immigration from brown and black nations, to replace white Americans as the nation’s dominant ethnicity. This is the fever-dream conspiracy theory of an Anglo-centric segment of the population that believes intrinsically and religiously (whether they realize it or not) in the philosophy of iconic white supremacist scholar Madison Grant, whose theory of eugenics proposed that whites were placed on earth to rule and that all other races and ethnicities were inferior and should be dominated by white power. Whites were, Grant proposed, the master race.

Legend has it that when Adolf Hitler was arrested following his failed beer hall putsch in Munich, as he was being led away to prison, he carried a thick book under his arm. When somebody asked what it was, he reportedly held it up and said,  “die Bibel” (“The Bible”). That book that he was carrying to read in prison was The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History by American white supremacist Madison Grant—a work that fully encompassed Grant’s theory of eugenics and that posited that whites needed to re-embrace their “destiny” as the master race and as world rulers.

Truth be told, demographic changes are clearly trending toward a world in which whites will no longer be the predominant ethnicity in most places—including the United States. This is not some anti-white plot, but a fact of life in a world where, just in my own nearly eight decades of life, the world population has burgeoned out of control from two-and-a-half billion to more than eight billion. And as that enormous and exponentially growing population occupies all available space on earth, in spite of any and all political borders and attempts to stem the flow, the tendency will be toward ever more mixed and blended races and ethnicities, with anything like racial “purity” eventually being a thing of the past. And good riddance.

That said, this fact encompasses quite another problem: that of the population explosion, a concern that kept the most aware of my own generation up nights, and that led us to champion contraception and responsible abortion for women and vasectomies for young to middle-aged men, making having a family a choice, not an obligation. In the run-up to the nineties, in their song entitled The Miracle, Queen had an uplifting message for the world: “That time will come, one day you'll see / When we can all be friends.” Whether that message pans out, or whether Humankind continues to engage in xenophobia, racism, territorial isolationism, war and environmental destruction remains to be seen, and depends on future generations, since my own fast-fading demographic has become a lost cause. But one thing is certain. We as humans will either get out of this alive together, or we will perish as the only race there is: the human race.

The historic Civil Rights Movement did not simply outlaw segregation. It built an institutional architecture designed to prevent discrimination before it happened. The defining characteristic of the Trump regime, however, has been the systematic dismantling of that architecture. Whether viewed through the lens of voting rights, fair housing, education, employment, policing, or equal-opportunity enforcement, the direction of Trump’s regime has been remarkably consistent and intentionally racist.

Without a doubt, it is only logical to conclude that the Trump regime has formally undertaken, as an overarching policy, the most comprehensive rollback of Civil Rights-era protections in modern American history. And the practical effects of that rollback have fallen disproportionately on black and brown American communities.

In her dissent in the Supreme Court's anti-affirmative action decision (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 2023), Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the Court was dismantling tools developed in the post-Civil Rights Era to specifically address persistent discrimination. “Ignoring race,” she wrote, “will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.”

In that same Supreme Court case, in which the hijacked conservative majority once again chose to undermine six-decade-old protections for minority rights, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that constitutional colorblindness cannot erase the continuing effects of centuries of discrimination. More to the point, she wrote: “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

And that is precisely the crux of the issue. The Trump regime’s so-called “equality-based” measures are a farse, that ostensibly pretend one thing while championing another. Whatever the letter of these policies might seek to reflect, their end-effect is perniciously racist, and designed to feed and nurture a cult of white supremacy that lies at the very foundation of the entire MAGA movement.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

 

TRUMP V SLAUGHTER – A CRUCIAL SCOTUS DECISION THAT HANDS THE TRUMP REGIME THE KEY TO DICTATORIAL POWER

 

My thanks to Martin "Mick" Andersen for sharng this illustration

Anyone who still cares, even a little, about how the Trump Era is undermining democracy and turning the US into an authoritarian regime, with the aid and comfort of the six so-called “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court, need only read the brilliant dissent of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in the case of Trump v Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, with which her liberal democratic colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson both concurred.

In summary, this is the issue, which is now  a legal precedent, thanks to the six far-right justices and their apparent Project 2025 agenda: The Court’s majority decision in Trump v Slaughter has effectively handed Donald Trump the blueprint for authoritarian rule by dismantling any and all independent oversight over the Executive Branch, thus enabling the transformation of any office of the federal government into a patronage system based on personal loyalty to the supreme leader, rather than on constitutional duty and service to the people of the United States.

Hitler himself could not have come up with a better surrender of the judiciary to the whims of the Führer than Trump v Slaughter. And indeed, history tells us (if anybody bothers to read it, nowadays) that Hitler was unable to establish complete dictatorial control over power in Germany until he managed to compromise the judiciary. He did this by systematically dismantling the independence of Justice, and turning it into a vindictive tool of the Nazi state. This was achieved through a combination of purges, institutional restructuring, and ideological subversion, often carried out in the guise of legality. Sound familiar?

Trump is having an easier time of it, because in nearly every major decision that reverberates in increased Executive power, this Supreme Court has had Trump’s back. It began with a decision  that made him immune to prosecution even if he commits indictable crimes in office. This was the same sort of lenient appeasement that permitted him to run for president again in 2024, despite having been found guilty by a jury of his peers of thirty-four felonies, as well as having been indicted on numerous federal charges, which were forcibly dropped when he won a second term.

A 'friend' of the Court

In the specific case of Trump v Slaughter, what the majority of the Court (ahistorically and undemocratically) posits is that, as president, Trump has the executive authority to fire without cause anyone and everyone that he feels like firing in the federal bureaucracy. This includes what until now have been independent agencies that were not subject to political influence. In particular, it includes Justice Department employees, federal regulators, and inspectors general and their offices, whose job descriptions as such have always, logically, included independence from all political considerations. That is because one of the main specific jobs of these State bureaus is to keep administrations honest by holding them to standards that have historically foiled corruption and despotism.

In her scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed the Court’s decision for making President Donald Trump even more powerful than a king. “No Kings” has never had greater significance, since the Supreme Court decision on Trump v Slaughter is a slap in the face to the great majority of Americans who have been seeking to remind the nation through massive public demonstrations that the Founders’ main premise for rebellion was rejection of absolute monarchies and the abuses they encompassed. One of the main founding principles of the Republic was, then, the definitive rejection of kings and the embracing of representative democracy with three co-equal branches of government.

Instead, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has scrapped Humphrey’s Executor v United States—a precedent that empowered Congress to limit a president’s ability to fire officials at independent federal agencies—and has allowed Trump to remove Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

According to Sotomayor and her two liberal colleagues, “The text of the Constitution, along with its history, the longstanding practices of the political branches, and the precedents of this Court, make clear that Congress may limit the causes for which the heads of Commissions like the FTC can be removed by the President…In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Sotomayor warned that the Court’s majority decision has just made Trump even more powerful than the despotic English monarch against whom the US colonies revolted, since, back then, the British Parliament “often restricted the Crown’s ability to remove even high-level royal officers.”

Sotomayor argued that there was simply no way that the decision in Trump v Slaughter could be considered constitutional. So true was this, she wrote, that the country’s founding Framers had clearly “never intended to give the President the complete set of powers that the English Crown held, let alone more.”

In effect, this hijacked Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Rebecca Kelly Slaughter will surely be remembered historically not as a simple technical dispute over a president’s power to remove a specific federal employee, but rather, as the most consequential transfer of constitutional authority to the Executive in American history. By overturning nearly a century of precedent established in Humphrey's Executor v. United States, the Court’s conservative majority dramatically expanded presidential authority over independent federal agencies—institutions specifically designed by Congress, ironically enough, to restrain executive overreach.

In authoring the liberal democratic dissent, Justice Sotomayor fully recognized the gravity of what had occurred. Her warning was not procedural or technical. It was constitutional and structural.

Her central argument can be summarized simply: The Court has now given the president (this president and thus all presidents in the future) power over institutions deliberately designed to remain independent from the Oval Office.

Capturing the full force of the danger to which this situation exposes American democracy, she wrote: “The result is a President who emerges with far greater power than ever before. It is a power, however, that neither the People, nor Congress, nor the Constitution bestowed upon him.”

These are some of the grave and direct consequences of the Court’s ill-advised but intentional decision on Trump v Slaughter:

1. The Court’s decision, in one fell swoop, gutted independent oversight of the Executive. The modern American administrative state was deliberately constructed so that certain institutions would remain insulated from direct presidential control. Not anymore. These bodies included bureaus like the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the  Federal Election Commission. The Court has now declared that the President can remove officials in many of these agencies at will. That means the agencies designed to check presidential misconduct now answer to the President himself. Those independent offices are now at the mercy of Trump’s cronyism and dishonest dealings, since anyone not toeing the Trump line will be gone. In simple, understandable terms, the referee is now subordinate to the player.

2. The Court’s decision in Trump v Slaughter has, overnight, undone Constitutional rule and institutionalized a “Loyalty State”. In her dissent, Sotomayor repeatedly emphasizes that independent agencies have existed until now precisely because certain government functions should not depend on partisan loyalty.

She writes: “For most of this Nation’s history, Congress and the President together have decided that some Government functions should operate at a distance from partisan politics.” The far-right majority of the hijacked Trump Supreme Court has unilaterally reversed that principle. And the practical implications are enormous. A president no longer needs competent administrators. He can simply surround himself with loyalists and sycophants. In other words, the Supreme Court, which is supposed to uphold American traditions and democratic institutions is, instead, adopting Trump’s cronyism and disregard for checks and balances as the new model for presidential empowerment.

This opens the door to systematic purging of career officials who demonstrate independence, and their replacement with individuals whose primary qualification is obedience to the head of state. This is not theoretical. It mirrors the logic of systems historically associated with authoritarian governance, including a patronage State, a one-party bureaucracy, and a personalized executive regime.

In short, the State bureaucracy ceases to serve in accordance with the Constitution and serves, instead, at the pleasure of the ruler.

3. The Court’s decision has also reversed traditional checks and balances. And that is institutionally grave. The entire US constitutional system was designed around one foundational assumption: namely, that power must check power.

Under this effective system, Congress creates institutions, the courts interpret the law, and independent agencies enforce statutory mandates insulated from political interference.

But this ruling kicks over the table on all of this, fundamentally altering the playing rules so that the game is fixed in favor of a single player. In more technical terms, the SCOTUS ruling embraces an extreme version of the so-called “unitary executive theory.” In other words, from now on, Congress can create all of the formerly independent institutions it wants, but, in the end, the Executive has been handed the authoritarian power to dominate them completely. This signifies a direct transfer by the Supreme Court of institutional sovereignty from Congress to the Executive.

In her dissent, Sotomayor warns that the Court has “distort[ed] the structure of Government to fit the majority’s theory of unitary, total executive control.”  And that phrase, “total executive control” is constitutionally devastating. Because once independent institutions are no longer independent, separation of powers implodes and all power is handed to one office.

4. In short, the Supreme Court decision creates fertile conditions for the establishment of de facto dictatorial power. History demonstrates that dictatorships do not usually begin with abolishing elections. They begin, instead, when leaders eliminate independent institutions capable of constraining them. This ruling creates precisely that possibility. A president can now systematically and summarily remove officials who investigate corruption, enforce campaign finance laws, regulate his or her corporate cronies, protect labor rights, prosecute regulatory violations, or resist compliance with unlawful executive orders.

The end result is that this MAGA Supreme Court, through this one ruling, has returned the country to the bad old days of boss rule and “machine politics”. Perhaps the best and most applicable example of this was the Tammany Hall machine run by William “Boss” Tweed in the second half of the nineteenth century in New York. This is the era of rampant corruption and violence so well depicted in Martin Scorsese’s now classic 2002 film Gangs of New York. Under "Boss" Tweed in the 1860s and 1870s, his Democratic Party doled out citizenship, municipal jobs, food, and housing to newly arrived, mostly Irish and Italian immigrants in exchange for unquestioned electoral loyalty. This structure funded massive graft, such as inflating the costs of the new New York County Courthouse by millions of dollars. It was graft so iconic that the building would be commonly known as “the Tweed Courthouse.”

William "Boss" Tweed

The Court has, then, now institutionalized the tools for the recreation of corrupt boss rule, since, thanks to Trump v Slaughter, it is, since that partisan ruling, the president, ironically, who controls the tools that were designed to restrain presidential abuse.

In classic political science terms, this is the very defining characteristic of authoritarian government: Not a formal dictatorship as such, but the intentional re-tooling of the rules, and of the law, so as to foster a functional dictatorship.

5. As devastatingly major as this ruling is, it is actually a complement to the Court’s earlier expansion of presidential immunity, which had basically given Trump impunity to do whatever he wanted and to go unchecked for as long as he and or his regime is in power. Trump v Slaughter, then, cannot be viewed in isolation. It must, rather, be viewed as part of a far-right Court agenda aimed at removing any and all guardrails against dictatorial presidential power.

In the earlier Trump v United States, the same Court granted presidents sweeping criminal immunity for official acts. Famously writing, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” Justice Sotomayor warned with unequivocal clarity, “The President is now a king above the law.”

But with Trump v. Slaughter, the Court has doubled down. The 2024 ruling shielded the President from indictment or punishment. The 2026 ruling gives the President power to neutralize institutions that might expose his wrongdoing in the first place.

Together these rulings have established a very dangerous Executive formula:

Immunity from consequences.
Control over investigators.
And, control over the bureaucracy through enforceable vows of loyalty, not to the Constitution, but to the authoritarian ruler.

That combination is the veritable architecture for unchecked executive rule, and it now has the Supreme Court stamp of approval on it.

So there you have it, the combined effects of Trump v United States and Trump v Slaughter have created the perfect storm by which  federal government can now be converted into Trump’s personal political machine. Historically, civil service reform in the United States—especially after the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act—has sought to end the “spoils system.” It had become a merit system in which government jobs were no longer being used as rewards for personal loyalty. This ruling fully revives that danger, and you can bet that Trump will put it to bad (the worst) use.

A president now has unprecedented constitutional authority to fill key governing structures with ideological loyalists whose allegiance is personal. Loyalty not to Congress, not to the law, not to the American people, but to the person of the president, the individual, not even to his branch of government.

That fundamentally and profoundly changes the democratic nature of the Republic.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor understood perfectly what was at stake in this nefarious decision. Her dissent is not simply a disagreement over administrative law. It is a warning to the American people that the Supreme Court has radically altered the constitutional structure of the United States. By allowing the president to dominate agencies created to remain independent, and as oversight for unbridled Executive power, the Court has enabled something profoundly dangerous: the conversion of our constitutional government into a personalized executive regime—in short, an autocracy.

As Donald Trump—in his delusional state of psychopathic fever—sought ever more seriously to be the most powerful despot in history, many of us said, “Never fear. There are checks and balances in the system that will never allow that to happen.” We were naïve. I was naïve. We did not count on a GOP dominance of Congress or on its total surrender to a tyrant. Nor did we count on a Supreme Court majority whose self-interested loyalty to a despot would prompt it to betray the Constitution and the integrity of American democracy, and to facilitate authoritarian rule.

In practical effect, the Supreme Court has ripped away the power of the institutions meant to investigate, restrain, and regulate presidential abuse and subordinated them to the president’s whim and will. The corrupt Supreme Court majority has, in a very real and tangible sense, betrayed the democratic history and traditions of the United States, and granted Trump all of the raw authority necessary to make his life-long wet dream of unchecked and unlimited personal power and impunity come true.

And we are all the worse for it.