Donald Trump is a cruel creature creating a culture of cruelty fueled by lies backed up my compliance from the MAGA cult

I’ve never seen a more vile and disgusting to watch ad.

Echo opinion by David French published in The New York Times.

By now, you almost certainly know the story. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, posted an ad featuring a malicious attack on Amy Acton, Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent. The ad starred Acton’s own mother, a woman named Donna Arthur.

The family story here is evil. Arthur married a man named Cledith Arthur, who became Acton’s stepfather. 

Cledith Arthur was indicted when Acton was 12 for raping her. He fled the jurisdiction rather than face charges.

Donna lost custody of her children, and — as Charles Hilu at National Review reported — she has her own criminal history. She was convicted of theft by deception in the 1990s, and accused of animal neglect in 2021.

It’s hard to imagine a more cruel and evil act than raping a child. There is no betrayal greater than the betrayal of a child by a parent. And then Ramaswamy compounded that betrayal by wielding that evil mother as a weapon against her own daughter.

I’m reminded of Sir Thomas More’s famous line in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons”: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales!”

But for Ohio, Vivek❓

Long ago we learned that there is no bottom for MAGA, and there is still no bottom to this scandal. If Ramaswamy had a molecule of decency, he would take the ad down and apologize. Instead, he attacked Acton. “It is an ad from our campaign,” he said. “I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. Unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues. She won’t debate me. She doesn’t allow cameras at her events.”

At a rally in Ohio, JD Vance, the former junior senator from Ohio and a former Marine Corps corporal (same rank as Adolf Hitler held during World War One) and the president of vice in the United States, weighed in, praising Ramaswamy. “Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar,” he said. (JD Vance is a Roman Catholic convert❗ By the way, Adolf Hitler was also a Roman Catholic.))

Vance, of course, is no stranger to malicious lies. He trafficked in the slanderous “Haitians eating pets” stories during the 2024, presidential campaign. There was never any credible evidence supporting those claims, yet he spread them anyway — even as Haitians faced death threats as the rumors metastasized across the body politic.

At the time, Vance told CNN, “If I have to create stories, aka "lies" 🤥 so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” (By the way, to lie deliberately and to admit you are telling lies is a serious sin.)

After Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, denounced the Ramaswamy ad (though he did not withdraw his support for Ramaswamy), President Trump took to Truth Social, condemned DeWine as a “RINO,” and said: “The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad❓ I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.’ ”

At a rally, Trump said that he told Ramaswamy to “leave it up and look upstairs and say, ‘Thank you God very much, I appreciate it.’ ”

“I only wish I could have had an ad like that against somebody,” he said.

If there were a column hall of fame, Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic called “The Cruelty Is the Point” should hold a place of honor. Rarely has a single piece so completely captured the zeitgeist of a movement.

Trump’s “only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty,” Serwer wrote. “It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.”

Serwer wrote those words eight years ago, when cruelty was already central to the entire MAGA enterprise. Trump supporters delight in Trump’s cruelty, of course, but they also engage in their own vile speech and actions as a virtual initiation rite into the MAGA movement — it’s the way that they demonstrate that they have the courage necessary to take on the left.

Indeed, in a Truth Social post, Trump applauded the “courage” of Acton’s mother. Vance, as I said, praised the ad’s “audacity.” (In other word, the audacious lies🤥)

This perversion of the concept of courage is central to the MAGA ethos. In MAGA’s account of history, the Republican Party before Trump was a collection of cowards and quislings — people who knew the right thing to do but refused to do it because they were desperate for the approval of progressives.

That’s the origin of the famous (in conservative circles) “D.C. cocktail party” smear — the idea that conservative convictions crumble the instant that conservatives get access to elite institutions or the moment that they get the first taste of elite approval. I’ve faced this accusation for more than a decade, ever since I said I could never support Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.

In other words, there are no genuine arguments about policy or morality; there are only two kinds of people: the strong and the weak. (Vance accused Republicans who condemned the ad as “whining.”) Or as Shane Vaughn, a Trump-supporting pastor, said in an online rant defending Ramaswamy: “Quit being soft. Quit being gay. Quit being spineless. Quit falling. We are in a war!” And one way to tell that you’re strong is if the left loathes you. The more the left hates you, the more righteous you are.

In fact, this is a less obvious reason for evangelicals’ continued support for Trump. From a young age, evangelicals are taught that they’ll be hated by the world. They’re taught to prepare for persecution, and when the secular left is angry at them, that’s treated as proof that they’re on the righteous path. It’s a message I heard for much of my life.



In the words of a common saying I’ve heard on the right, “If you’re taking flak, it means you’re over the target.”

As a result, there is a powerful incentive to intentionally trigger outrage. That’s how you establish your credibility. There’s nothing new about this — The Daily Wire, a right-wing media company, has long sold a tumbler that says “LEFTIST TEARS” for example — but with every passing year it gets worse.

A cohort of far-right supporters of Vance, for example, are fond of using the acronym WAGTFKY, which stands for a cruder version of “we are going to kill you,” as a kind of in-group signaling of their own hatred and aggression. They’re living examples of Vance’s own morality. During his campaign for Senate, he made his values clear — “I think our people hate the right people,” he said. 💢😱🤢

And then he put his hatred into practice, in one of the most powerful offices in the land.

That behavior should be self-defeating, and as a potential blue wave looms in November, it might be. Many Republicans are growing very weary of Trump and — crucially — of Trump’s most aggressive supporters. 

One thing that was very clear when I traveled to Texas to report on the U.S. Senate race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is that a meaningful number of Republicans were seething with anger and resentment toward MAGA. They were tired of being bullied. They were tired of MAGA’s corruption. Some were even open to voting for Democrats.

But they were also extremely reluctant to go on the record.

And that shows exactly how MAGA survives. Every act of resistance to MAGA carries a profound cost. The bullies are loud, the good people are often quiet, and when the good people do summon up the courage and decency to decry hatred on the right — as DeWine and many of my friends at National Review have done — they often face the wrath of the president of the United States. They will be the “RINO” in one of Trump’s vicious rants.

Given enough time, every institution takes on the character of its leader. Trump is a cruel creature, he leads a cruel movement, and only the total defeat of both can free the nation from their malign control.

Donald Trump appointed incompetent Pete Hegseth who puts American military at risk for serious short-term and long-term harm

 Pete Hegseth Is a Wrecking Ball

New York Times echo opinion by David French

It is difficult to fathom the damage Donald Trump is doing to America’s national security. He is making our nation more vulnerable than it has been at any time since the cloudiest days of the Cold War.

Trump administration scandals come with such speed and frequency that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. 

One minute you’re reading about potential war crimes in the Caribbean. The next moment there’s a news alert about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s ongoing purge of generals. Then you click over and read a story about depleted stocks of some of America’s most important munitions.

That’s a fraction of the havoc the administration has wrought. In a strange way, the very frequency of the scandals works to the administration’s advantage. Each new story distracts us from the last one, and we don’t have a minute to pause, take a deep breath and look at the whole picture.

Let’s take that deep breath now.

Before I do, I want to be careful not to be too alarmist. Our military is still highly capable, and we have watched it successfully execute some extraordinarily difficult missions during Trump’s second term. The capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and the rescue of two downed American airmen from the heart of Iran were remarkable feats of skill and courage.

There are also signs that the Navy has been slowly, painstakingly making progress toward reopening the Strait of Hormuz — traffic through the strait is well below prewar averages, but some ships are getting through.

Just as the Trump administration grossly miscalculated when it launched its war on Iran, the Iranian regime may have miscalculated when it refused to cease hostilities after winning what would have been a decisive victory through the memorandum of understanding it negotiated with the United States.

It’s comforting — I guess — to know that Hegseth can’t undo the effects of a generations-long commitment to excellence in just 20 months.

That’s the end of the good news. From the top down, Trump is replacing the highly imperfect meritocracy of American public service with an idiocracy, and his corrupt idiocrats are creating profound short-, medium- and long-term harms to American national security.

At the same time, to maintain the stalemate against Iran, the United States is drawing resources from other, more dangerous theaters of potential conflict. There are now no active carrier battle groups in the Pacific region, for example, exactly when China has ramped up its military activities around Taiwan.

The short-term damage is serious enough. Even just to achieve what is at best a stalemate in the Persian Gulf, the administration has created a critical shortage in interceptors that can shoot down missiles and drones and in other precision munitions, including some of our most advanced offensive weapons.

The lack of interceptors is escalating the crisis in Ukraine. Russia is able to pound Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with ballistic missiles virtually at will, creating a critical vulnerability for the Ukrainian war effort. Last week, for example, Kyiv endured the longest sustained bombing campaign on the Ukrainian capital since the opening days of the war.

The Economist also reported that Putin is planning to throw hundreds of thousands of additional troops into the fight, and he’s provoking NATO with a series of incursions so severe (including, according to the German government, an attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany) that it prompted John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, to visit Russia to reportedly warn Putin against any further aggression.

As long as Iran — a longstanding ally of Russia that’s closely linked to its neighbor through the Caspian Sea — remains in the fight, it can continue to deplete our interceptors to the point where it might take years to bring our stocks back to acceptable levels, even if we ramp up production at immense cost.

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of terrible self-imposed wounds to America’s alliances. There are obvious immediate risks, for example, to withdrawing troops from allied nations or shortening military exercises with South Korea, but the damage done by engaging in trade wars with allies and threatening aggression against Greenland (remember that❓) can’t be repaired by just one administration.

Our allies learned an important lesson from Trump’s second election. It’s not just that Trump is mercurial and unreliable, it’s that the American electorate is mercurial and unreliable.

More than 77 million Americans compared Trump’s first term with Joe Biden’s only term and said, “More Trump, please.”

Even if the next Democratic president tries to reconcile with our allies, every allied government will be asking itself, “How long will this last❓” Every prudent allied government will hedge its geopolitical bets, and that can harm the United States in incalculable ways.

Our allies fear not just that they’ve lost Trump, but even worse, they fear that they’ve lost a substantial portion of the American people.

We’ve already seen the consequences of American faithlessness. The Trump administration has pitched a fit demanding allied aid in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, only to be greeted with stony silence. Why should our allies expend blood and treasure standing with an American government that didn’t even have the decency to consult them before launching its costly, poorly planned Middle Eastern adventure❓

Why should they expend blood and treasure standing with America when America is also threatening the independence and sovereignty of NATO member states❓ They are getting enough of that from Putin.

The end result might be a period of extended Western vulnerability as Europe bears the considerable costs (and takes several years to increase its defense capabilities) to deter Russia even while it can’t count on the United States to fulfill its treaty obligations.

The long-term threat is to the character and competence of the armed forces. They are becoming politicized, and the politicization of a military can both destroy its combat effectiveness and turn it into an instrument of domestic oppression.

If you are under the delusion that Hegseth’s purges are about competence more than loyalty — a welcome corrective to the excesses of D.E.I. programs — well then, as we say in the South, bless your heart.

The sycophancy that pervades Trump’s second term is creating perverse incentives. I was struck by a recent piece in The Dispatch (where I used to write and still contribute to podcasts) by Mike Nelson, a former special forces officer who is a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project.

Nelson focused on Chris LaNeve, a lieutenant general and the commander of the 8th Army in Korea. LaNeve video-conferenced in to Trump’s inaugural ball to praise Trump, and Trump praised him right back. “Is this man central casting or what❓,” Trump said, “If I’m doing a movie, I’d pick him to play my lead.”

Trump did exactly that. “In February 2025,” as Nelson writes, “Hegseth fired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short as his senior military adviser and named LaNeve as her replacement.” Months later, Hegseth fired Gen. James Mingus, the Army’s vice chief of staff. And who did the White House name to replace him? You guessed it — General LaNeve.

Army Chief of Staff asked to 'retire immediately' by Donald Trump’s defence sec Pete Hegseth, reported in The Mirror

That’s not the end of LaNeve’s meteoric rise. Again, here’s Nelson, “Six months after that, Hegseth fired the occupant of the Army’s top job, General Randy George,😡💢” who was serving as chief of staff, “and — to quote Gomer Pyle — surprise, surprise, surprise, LaNeve has been serving as the acting chief of staff since and is Hegseth’s pick to permanently fill the job, although he seems to face some pushback from G.O.P. senators.”

Maybe General LaNeve is genuinely gifted enough to merit those promotions — I can’t say — but the chain of events has set a terrible example for future commanders.

Trump’s critics aren’t the only ones alarmed, I’d refer you to the recent resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. As Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan and Michael Scherer reported for The Atlantic, in a recent White House meeting, “Army Secretary Dan Driscoll brought his concerns about the future of the Army under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly to President Trump.”

Driscoll was reportedly worried that Hegseth’s purges were hampering the ability of the Army to transform itself. And this is just as the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are demonstrating that the world is in the midst of another revolution in military affairs, and we are not prepared.

“Hegseth’s purge of the military has been so dramatic,” they wrote, “that with Driscoll gone, the military’s largest service is left without a top civilian leader, a Senate-confirmed top general, a confirmed Army general in charge of operations, or a confirmed commander of Army troops in Europe.”

If you pay close attention to the news, you know that my list of negative developments is woefully incomplete (for example, granting the Pentagon an ownership stake in a Venezuelan oil venture is more reminiscent of the way that the Chinese or Iranian militaries work than the way the United States military is supposed to), but it should suffice to paint a clear picture.

The combination of corruption, stupidity and sycophancy — the Pentagon was recently caught surreptitiously employing conservative media influencers who reliably defend Hegseth online — that pervades the Trump administration is now infecting the Pentagon at the moment that our most powerful enemies are becoming more aggressive.

I loved my time serving my country. It was one of the great honors of my life. If anything, I’m biased toward viewing the military in general and the Army in particular through rose-colored glasses. But my view is getting darker. Terrible leadership of even the most virtuous institutions can have terrible consequences.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that the battlefield is the most unforgiving place on earth.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans created political polarization fueled by hate

Wow, this essay is not classic David French, but in my opinion this exactly the kind of straight talk free speech expression our nation needs.  Of course, the problem is, the people who Mr. French describes do not trust anything they disagree with. 

Does anyone think a healthy nation with a healthy political culture would elect a man like Donald Trump not once, but twice❓

We Have Reached End-Stage Political Polarization.

Echo essay by by David French published in the New York Times.

The eternal return of Donald Trump is a sign of our national sickness 🤒🤢, and a recent Pew Research Center study shows us exactly what that sickness is. We despise each other, and demagogues rise when hatred increases. It’s as predictable as night following day.

In a 25-country survey, which included a cross section of European, Asian, African and American nations, the United States was the only country in which a majority of adults surveyed said that the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens were either bad or somewhat bad. Even countries torn apart by violence and civil strife — countries such as Nigeria and Mexico — had higher views of their fellow citizens.

We’ve known for a long time that America is deeply polarized, and we’ve known the problem is only getting worse. For example, in a 2022, survey, Pew found that large shares of Democrats and Republicans thought of each other as close-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent, and the measurements were getting worse every year.

Both sides hate each other so much that it’s almost meaningless to ask who hates whom the most. In the morality and ethics survey I mentioned at the start of the column, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were more likely to believe that other Americans were unethical or immoral than Republicans. 

But, in the 2022, survey, Republicans were more likely to believe that Democrats were dishonest, immoral and lazy.

If you’re a Republican or a Democrat, the best way to imagine the other side’s view of you is to simply mirror your own attitude. They despise you with the same intensity that you despise them. They view you with the same sense of threat and alarm that you view them.

To say that both sides view each other with equivalent disdain is not to say that both sides are equally dangerous. When a hateful, vengeful man is in the Oval Office, wielding the awesome power of the presidency beyond its constitutional limits, then he immediately becomes the most dangerous person in America.

But the urgent necessity of defending our republic from his assaults on the Constitution, from his intense cruelty, and from his profound corruption shouldn’t blind us to the divisions that helped bring him to power.

American hatred is growing so great that partisans, perversely enough, often view kindness and tolerance from political opponents as a threat. The only good people are people who agree with them. The supposedly decent person on the other side❓ 

We have a name for him or her, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

This reality came home to me once again after the column I published last week. My argument was simple: I very much disagree with James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas on many important issues, most notably his stance on abortion.

At the same time, however, I very much appreciate his condemnation of the politics of hatred and vitriol, and his appeal to the better angels of our nature is giving voters hope that this miserable political moment may one day come to an end.

In a CBS interview days after his primary victory, Mr. Talarico said: “My faith teaches me to love my neighbor as myself. Not just my neighbor who looks like me, or prays like me, or votes like me.”

“I’m tired of being pitted against my neighbor, he continued, “I’m tired of being told to hate my neighbor. And I think in Texas across the political spectrum, there is a deep hunger for a different kind of politics.” One that’s “rooted in love.”

“That old politics that we’ve been suffering under for the last ten years — politics as blood sport, as trolling and owning, as total war, that politics is dying.” 😕 (I can only hope Mr. Talarico is correct.)

That isn’t just a virtuous approach to political differences; it’s a deeply Christian approach to political differences. After all, what does it mean to love our enemies if we do not demonstrate patience and kindness toward them❓(IMO, But not in a condescending way.)

The online response to my argument, however, was volcanic. I was accused of legitimizing heresy. 

Another writer said that I’d suffered an apparent “brain injury.” My appreciation of Talarico’s approach even put the soul of evangelicalism at risk. 

Once again, I was written entirely out of the Christian faith by angry (hypocritical❗) Trumpist evangelicals.

(I did have to laugh at the Babylon Bee’s joke headline: “David French Praises Satan as ‘Most Christian Person in History.’”)

In their minds, I was elevating “niceness” over justice and righteousness. To this way of thinking, Talarico’s manner makes him more dangerous, not less, and it was my responsibility to warn Christian America away from this dreadful man. (IMO Mr. French does not speak for me in this assessment. I admire Mr. Talarico.)

In their anger and vitriol, I saw the mirror image of the far-left intolerance I’ve encountered through much of my career. There are people who can’t conceive of the idea that a pro-life Christian can be a decent person, or that a person who, for example, opposes surgical and medical interventions for youth gender transition, or trans women’s participation in female sports can have any redeeming qualities at all.

I’m fully aware that to them, I’m the wolf in sheep’s clothing because I hide what they see as religious and political extremism behind a veneer of civility and pluralism. 

Civility itself is a questionable value. It’s a version of “respectability politics” when the times call for direct, aggressive action against your evil political opponents.

This approach is profoundly dangerous to our republic. The American constitutional system is, at its heart, a dispute-resolution mechanism. It takes all the differences and divisions inherent in a continent-sized multiethnic, multifaith democracy and channels them into a political system marked by checks and balances and firewalls against tyranny.

In the United States, there should never be any such thing as a winner-takes-all electoral result. Even the worst losers and everyone else in American politics enjoy the protections of the Bill of Rights and the opportunity to try to win again, very soon, in election cycles that arrive with clockwork regularity, every two years.

But hatred puts this system to its most severe test — a test we’ve faced over and over again. It is relatively easy to support the civil rights of people you like (even if you disagree with them). It is profoundly difficult to support the civil rights of people you hate.

Or, as John Adams wrote in his 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia: “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Restrain those vices and we preserve our republic. Indulge them, and we risk its dissolution.

A federal appellate judge, Lawrence VanDyke, issued a truly remarkable dissent — a textbook example of how not to handle disagreement on profoundly important constitutional issues.

The Ninth Circuit had denied a petition to rehear, en banc, an opinion upholding the State of Washington’s Law Against Discrimination against a challenge brought by two Washington spas that banned men and preoperative transgender women “who have not yet received gender confirmation surgery affecting their genitalia.” The spas are Korean spas, where customers are typically nude in communal bathhouses.

Under the current interpretation of Washington’s law, which the Ninth Circuit sided with, women (and some girls) could be exposed to the sight of male genitalia without their consent — an act that, in different circumstances, could constitute indecent exposure or sexual harassment.

I disagree with the Ninth Circuit’s conclusion that the First Amendment does not grant the spa the right to exclude customers with penises from receiving the spa’s services. But I also know that the interaction between nondiscrimination statutes and the First Amendment is complex. There will always be competing and overlapping interests in play, and line-drawing can be difficult.

But this is how Judge VanDyke began his dissent: “This is a case about swinging dicks.”

Yes, you read that correctly. And then he doubled down. “The fact that so many on our court want to pretend that this case is about anything other than swinging dicks,” he wrote, “is the very reason the shocking language is necessary.”

No, the shocking language was wholly unnecessary. It’s worse than unnecessary. It’s further damaging our political culture. It’s a court opinion as a 4chan post — an “own the libs” statement that brings thunderous applause from the angry right but communicates nothing but scorn and contempt for the opposition.

To call for decency doesn’t deny the depth of our disagreements. It does, however, acknowledge the essential humanity of our opponents. I keep thinking about the commitment card that Martin Luther King, Jr. asked his followers to sign before they joined the 1963 Birmingham campaign.

The 10 directives included these admonitions — “Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus,” “Remember always that the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation — not victory,” “Walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love,” and “Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.”

Does anyone believe Dr. King was not dedicated enough to justice? Or that he was ineffective in his quest to transform American culture and politics? His love and regard for others — even as he fought desperately for civil and economic and political rights — were indispensable to his success. They’re what makes reconciliation possible, even if we’re still far from perfect.

I disagree with James Talarico on many things. But I also agree with his desire to reject politics as a blood sport. And unless we can remember — as Dr. King did, with his life perpetually on the line — to seek both justice and mercy, then we’ll be left with neither.