Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches by JJ

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Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches

POSTED BY: JJ
UPDATED: Sunday, December 21, 2025 14:24
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Saturday, December 20, 2025 7:09 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The United States of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is slapping his name and face on everything he can, but America’s institutions don’t belong to him.

By David A. Graham |December 19, 2025, 7:11 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/donald-trump-naming-am
erican-institutions/685362/

When President Donald Trump visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 2018, he reportedly showed little interest in the estate or in the first president. But Trump did have a critique of his predecessor. “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” he reportedly said. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you.”

The advice might seem “truly bizarre,” as Mount Vernon’s CEO described the visit to others, but Trump practices what he preaches. Yesterday, the Trump White House announced that the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—which is chaired by Donald J. Trump, who was appointed to that role by Donald J. Trump, who also filled the board with fellow Trump appointees—would rename the venue the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. This was, the Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt opined, a tribute to “the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year” at the center, “not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction but also financially, and its reputation.”

This is a challenging claim from a factual standpoint. As The Washington Post found, ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have tanked since Trump’s hostile takeover of the institution in February. Patrons booed Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance at concerts this year. Events there have taken on an uncanny sheen of decay and mediocrity, my colleague Alexandra Petri reported after attending the Kennedy Center Honors last week.

The announcement is also challenging from a statutory perspective. The Kennedy Center’s name was bestowed by a law passed by Congress and can’t be changed by the board on its own. Tim Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s nephew, wrote on X, “Would they rename the Lincoln memorial? The Jefferson?”

Who’s to stop Trump, though? Workers began changing the signage this morning, and Congress seems unlikely to act; anyway, even if the name isn’t formally changed, nothing will prevent the president from calling it what he wants. Consider the Department of Defense, which the administration insists on calling the Department of War, despite the former name being established by law. Or more apropos, take the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was also established and named by Congress but which recently got a (rather premature) rebrand, with the facade now reading Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace. The gesture here is blunt. The president placing his own name before the nation’s is redolent of dictators in isolated countries—North Korea’s Kim family and Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov, who even renamed January after himself—and long-ago absolute monarchs such as Louis XIV, who is said to have declared, “L’état, c’est moi.”

In line with his view of himself not merely as an elected representative but as father of the nation (or perhaps “daddy” of the nation?), Trump has put his name and image in places large and small. His scowling visage is next to George Washington’s portrait on National Parks passes; for good measure, citizens can now enter parks for free on Trump’s birthday, which happens to be Flag Day, but no longer on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A new pay-for-play visa for the very rich is called the Trump Gold Card. The Treasury has proposed 250th-anniversary $1 coins with Trump’s face on them, a serious deviation from precedent. (The law bars printing money with images of living people on it but does not apply to minting coins.) Does anyone have any doubt what name he’ll put on his boondoggle ballroom at the White House?

This tendency is not new. Throughout his career, Trump has plastered his name on whatever he can, including many buildings, a hideous pair of sneakers, a bottle-water brand, a short-lived airline, a short-lived magazine, and a short-lived steak line. (At a 2016 primary-victory party, Trump displayed steaks bought at a local butcher but claimed that they were Trump Steaks.) The apotheosis came late in his real-estate career, when Trump had mostly stopped developing properties but continued to license his name to other builders. (Some Trump-branded buildings have removed his name in recent years, as his scandals and growing unpopularity have made it a liability.)

The difference is that those things belonged to Trump. The assets of the United States of America do not—they belong to the people. His change to the facade of the U.S. Institute of Peace is just graffiti. Putting his name on the Kennedy Center and parks passes are acts of vandalism of public property, in the most original sense of the word.

Many things in this country are named for former presidents, of course. The performing-arts center was established not by John F. Kennedy but as a memorial to him after his assassination. Trump, by contrast, is rechristening things for himself and then pretending it’s an honor rather than an ego trip. He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 11:11 AM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Immanent Joy of Detrumpification

As the president graffitis his name to beloved institutions and builds monuments to his own vanity, we must focus on how much fun it will be to tear it all down.

By Matt Ford | Dec 20, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/204699/detrumpification-will-be-very-f
un

There was no shortage of bad news to cover in 2025. But I want to end the year by looking to the future and focusing on something more joyous: detrumpification. I spent most of this year—indeed, most of this last decade—thinking about one man. Now, for just a moment, I want to think about what comes after him.

One day, likely by January 20, 2029, Donald Trump will no longer be the president of the United States. The Constitution will bar him from seeking a third term, no matter what nonsense Alan Dershowitz plans to soon publish. It is highly probable that Trump will be replaced by a new Democratic president. America’s economic, social, and moral decline in just the last 11 months makes it unlikely that his successor will win the most votes in 2028.

That new president, whoever they happen to be, will face countless choices about how to rebuild after Trump’s second term. Some things simply can’t be undone. The United States will likely never recover the full trust of our allies in Europe and Asia, who now know that another Trump is always at most four years away. Confidence in the rule of law in this country will remain shaken for generations, as will our reputation as a home for immigrants and a citadel of democratic and constitutional government.

Other damage will be repairable, but only with time and effort. Federal agencies will need to rehire thousands of civil servants to replace those purged by figures like Elon Musk and Russell Vought. Institutional knowledge at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and more will need to be replenished. Funding for academic and scientific research will need to resume. There will be thousands of green-card applications to approve and hundreds of citizenship ceremonies to hold. Criminal investigations will need to be opened, and antitrust litigation must begin again.

For now I want to focus on the less impactful but highly symbolic aspects of detrumpification. It will not be enough to simply reverse Trump’s policies or unwind his executive orders when a new Democratic president takes office. The next administration must commit itself in addition to purging the aesthetic rot of Trump’s second term from our national life. Detrumpification must be celebrated as an act of victory and an exercise in joy.

Take, for example, Trump’s campaign against the Kennedy Center. Congress created the cultural center in Washington, D.C., in 1958 and designated it by law as a “living memorial” for John F. Kennedy after his assassination in 1963. The famed stages and theaters along the Potomac have hosted some of the greatest artists from the United States and from around the world.

Trump has spent most of 2025 desecrating the place. First he purged most of the board that governs the institution. Then he replaced its members with pliable ideologues and sycophantic cronies, capped off by installing himself as the new chairman. In recent months, Trump has been personally overseeing its cultural work. This week, his underlings sought to capstone their cultural vandalism by renaming the center itself.

“I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Twitter this week. “Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation.”

Even the North Korean regime might blanche at this narcissism. Far from “saving” the institution, Trump’s takeover has destroyed the Kennedy Center’s finances and its reputation through boycotts and purges, with ticket sales near pandemic-level lows. The attempted renaming is manifestly illegal since Congress named it after Kennedy by law. With its usual regard for the rule of law, the Trump administration paid no heed. After a half-century of reading “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” the building’s marble edifice now also bears “The Donald J. Trump and” on top of it, as well. (In typical slapdash fashion, the second “the” remains on the facade.)

When those letters come down during the next president’s term, it should not be done in the middle of the night or without any warning.

It is unclear how much of this vandalism comes at Trump’s direction and how much of it comes from subordinates looking to please him. At the beginning of this month, for example, the State Department said that it had renamed the United States Institute of Peace the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. At first, the department slapped some cheap steel letters on the front entrance of the building without any warning. By the end of the day, however, the State Department’s Twitter account formally announced the change “to reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.”

Even the clumsiest and least subtle political cartoonist could not outdo this one. Trump is a weak dealmaker at best: His attempts to bully America’s top trading partners into signing new trade agreements this year have largely failed, and the Supreme Court appears ready to strip him of his favored cudgel. His negotiations on Capitol Hill have gone no further than passing one omnibus budget this summer, after which he abandoned the lawmaking process altogether. “We don’t need to pass any more bills,” Trump bragged in October.

It also goes without saying that the renaming choice is oxymoronic. At Trump’s behest, the U.S. military is currently killing people in small boats throughout the Caribbean and the western Pacific by claiming that they are drug smugglers or, in even more alarmist terms, “narco-terrorists.” Instead of apprehending them and trying them in court, Trump is summarily executing them. The president has also ordered a naval blockade of Venezuela, hoping to topple the regime of Nicolás Maduro, and may yet resort to full-scale military force to dislodge him. Congress has granted no legal authorization for any of this.

Tearing down these nameplates will be as much about telling the truth as anything else. Other tasks will be more complicated. So far, Trump’s most egregious act was the demolition of the White House’s historic East Wing. It came without any public notice or consultation, without any permission from Congress, and without approval from key historical and architectural boards. The president simply hired some construction equipment and began tearing down public property.

Trump hopes to replace it with a massive ballroom for entertaining foreign dignitaries and domestic supporters. I will not bother listing its projected costs, seating capacity, or square footage because it will probably increase again by the time you finish reading this article. The president has continuously revised his plans for the ballroom, each time with increasing grandiosity, and he recently fired the original architect he had hired, at least in part over creative and structural differences.

The corrupt and self-serving project is an ongoing scar on one of the most important public sites in America. And yet part of me still hopes that Trump completes the project before the end of his second term. I can imagine no greater visual for the next Democratic president’s first 100 days than demolishing whatever decadent monstrosity he builds. The ballroom’s proposed architectural flaws will likely necessitate this either way, but the next president should make a real show of it.

What could be done with the site? One would almost be tempted to cordon off the area surrounding the ballroom, hire a demolition crew to pack it with big bundles of dynamite, and wire it up to one of those old-fashioned plungers that Wile E. Coyote uses when he tries to blow up the Road Runner. Perhaps the final push could be synchronized with fireworks on the Fourth of July, or at the stroke of midnight for some other historic anniversary.

Given the historic structures near the site, a less explosive—but still spectacular—option might be safer, though. Either way, there must be an element of public participation in the ballroom’s destruction. When Trump tore down the East Wing, his henchmen concealed the rubble from public view, as if they knew on some fundamental level that it was wrong. The next president should make the ballroom’s fate a cause for public celebration. Families should be there to watch it happen. Music should be played for the crowds. Networks should broadcast it live. Americans should celebrate its demise.

From there, the East Wing should be rebuilt exactly as it was before, as if Trump had never existed. His other “renovations” to the White House should meet a similar fate. White House officials should film themselves taking down the cheap, tacky display of presidential portraits outside the West Wing and the disparaging plaques beneath them. The next administration should make a documentary about tearing out the Mar-a-Lago-style patio that he paved over Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden to install.

Other indignities will lie ahead over the next three years. The U.S. Mint is reportedly planning to issue a dollar coin featuring Trump’s portrait despite the long-standing precedent against using living people on U.S. currency. There have been proposals among Trump’s loyalists in Congress to place him on the $100 or $250 bill, to rename airports after him, to make his birthday a federal holiday, and to carve his likeness into Mount Rushmore.

Detrumpification should go far beyond this, of course. Joe Biden, the previous post-Trump president, tried to balance public calls for unity and reconciliation with prosecutors’ efforts to hold Trump and his allies accountable for their crimes. The next Democratic president might not have that option. Ideally they would prosecute him again for any triable crimes he has committed and pressure the Supreme Court to overturn its disastrous immunity ruling. Trump will also probably take steps to immunize his allies and associates through liberal use of the pardon power, complicating matters further.

For now, it is enough to say that the end of Trump’s presidency must be palpably different from previous changes in administrations. Detrumpification must have a visual and physical record. It must be an event and a celebration. It must be an enduring memory and a warning to anyone who hopes to venerate authoritarian figures on American soil in the future. It must represent not just a political defeat but a societal rejection of Trumpism itself.

What Trump and his allies are doing, after all, is not really about honoring him. These tributes are meant to carry the same message as an unrepaired hole in the wall left by a violent domestic abuser’s fist. The goal is to humiliate and to intimidate anyone who didn’t support him, to imply violence without leaving bruises, and to create a perpetual sense of unease, despair, and dread. To visibly erase his image and his name from American public life would not be a distraction from moving forward but rather a prerequisite for it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 12:13 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments Are In Danger

Trump and the Supreme Court are trying to bring back the Antebellum Constitution.

By Adam Serwer | December 21, 2025, 8:23 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/antebellum-constitution/6
85354/

Last July, while on his way to his job as a security guard at a cannabis farm in California, George Retes was tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and arrested by federal agents conducting an immigration raid. The agents ignored the license plate on Retes’s car and the sticker on his windshield, both of which identified him as a U.S. Army veteran, and did not even bother to determine whether he was a citizen before strip-searching him and locking him up in a cell. Retes was detained overnight without any opportunity to call a lawyer or his family.

“No one deserves to be treated like this,” Retes told this magazine after his release. “To have no rights. It’s just crazy to think about—that they can just mask up and take someone off the street, no questions asked, and you’re just gone.”

Read: A U.S. citizen detained by ICE for three days tells his story

Retes is one of an estimated 170 American citizens who have been detained by federal immigration agents as part of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, according to ProPublica, which warns that the count is both incomplete and unofficial because the federal government is not documenting its own abuses of power. https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-a
rrested-detained-against-will

At least 20 of those citizens, ProPublica found, had been detained overnight and incommunicado—a violation of their constitutional rights. When questioned about these detentions, Trump-administration officials claimed that the citizens had assaulted federal agents—an assertion proved false in many cases by video evidence or an inability by the government to produce serious charges reflecting the accusations. (One thrown sandwich hardly counts.)

Across the country, federal agents are flagrantly and casually disregarding Americans’ due-process rights. And they have been remarkably forthright about how they choose their victims. As Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol commander, told a white reporter: Agents were arresting people based on “the particular characteristics of an individual—how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?”

In Memphis, Reggie Williams told ProPublica that he was instructed by federal agents to keep his ID on him going forward, as though Black residents of the city were emancipated slaves forced to carry freedom papers lest they be kidnapped and returned to bondage. Bovino said basically the same thing after federal agents assaulted a Somali American citizen and refused to free him for hours despite his offers to show them a photo of his passport on his phone: “One must carry immigration documents,” Bovino posted on X. In Chicago, Maria Greeley was zip-tied by federal agents coming off a double shift at the bar where she worked. She had her passport and showed it to them, and still they detained her because, she said, she did not “look like” a Greeley.

This is racial profiling. And the Supreme Court has declined to stop it.

In September, an emergency docket decision effectively permitted this racial profiling by lifting a court order preventing it. “The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a lone concurrence. Although “apparent ethnicity alone” isn’t enough to detain someone, it can be a “relevant factor,” he continued. “Under this Court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.”

What this means in practice is that if you are not white, you cannot go certain places without the risk of being kidnapped by federal agents. That is not “common sense”; it is the nullification of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights under the law.

This decision is only one of the ways that the Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, has been chipping away at the parts of the Constitution dedicated to ensuring equal citizenship to all through rulings on voting rights, immigration, and equal protection. It has done this even as it insists—while striking down affirmative action and school-integration programs—that the Constitution is “colorblind.”

The Constitution of the Roberts Court is not color-blind. It is a Constitution that permits discrimination on the basis of race, but forbids alleviating discrimination on the basis of race. And over the next year, the Court will face more cases that could further erode both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pushing America back toward what some on the right believe is the true, Antebellum Constitution.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments make up the Civil War and Reconstruction amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, but America needed to do more to prevent the resurgence of the slave-owning South’s caste-based society. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments enshrined in the Constitution principles of universal male suffrage, nondiscrimination, and nonracial (birthright) citizenship. Although imperfect—the vote for women was not included—they were a crucial first step toward ensuring that the rights conferred by American citizenship would remain inviolate no matter where you were, and no matter who you were.

After the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, the Supreme Court essentially voided the meaning of these amendments. The post-Reconstruction Court helped pave the way for Jim Crow, showering most of the rights reserved for the emancipated on corporations, allowing states to disenfranchise their Black populations through superficially “color-blind” means, and permitting racial discrimination by both government entities and private actors. The amendments were resurrected during the civil-rights movement, but they are now under assault for a second time by both the Court and an executive branch that is distorting or refusing to enforce antidiscrimination laws about housing, voting, and employment.

A faction of conservatives has never stopped this campaign. As soon as the Reconstruction amendments were passed, people argued that they were illegitimate, a betrayal of the original document—a “rape of the Constitution” as the columnist Frank Meyer wrote in 1964 about Brown v. Board of Education in National Review. In 1965, that magazine published a cover story arguing that the Voting Rights Act, by enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, would effectively “repeal the Constitution to give the Negro the vote.” During the Reagan administration, a young attorney in the Justice Department named John Roberts fought to weaken the law. Originalism, the author Madiba K. Dennie points out, is a convenient vehicle for this project because it prioritizes interpretations from historical periods where women and Black people were excluded from the political process.

In more recent years, the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk complained that the Fourteenth Amendment was a “Marxist revolutionary gateway” for everything the left wanted to push through. The more genteel conservative writer Christopher Caldwell argued that the entire post-civil-rights-movement Constitution was a “rival” to the “constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.”

Roberts’s Court likes to invoke history and tradition, but some justices are perfectly happy to ignore the express intent of the Founders—such as the fundamental belief that the Constitution is meant to change—to further an ideological project. The Roberts Court’s repeated rewriting of the Constitution on Trump’s behalf reveals the antebellum Constitution they envision to be a fraud, a gauzy nostalgia based on the Founders’ worst impulses as slavers and hypocrites. This is an attempt to turn the guarantees of the Civil War amendments back into what James Madison called “parchment barriers,” their meaning perverted to ensure the protection of the strong instead of the weak.

Since 2007, when Roberts struck down a school-integration program while stating that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” the right-wing majority has followed the philosophy that there’s no discrimination if you pretend it isn’t happening. Although the Fifteenth Amendment states clearly that the right to vote cannot be “denied or abridged” on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the Roberts Court has acted as though the only true discrimination is against the right to discriminate.

In 2013, the Court effectively nullified a requirement in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that forced jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to “preclear” their voting-rule changes with the Justice Department. The majority ignored the express language of the Fifteenth Amendment in doing so, and Roberts relied on a doctrine that “all States enjoy equal sovereignty,” a phrase that exists nowhere in the Constitution but was invoked by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the infamous Dred Scott decision: Taney argued that letting Black people be citizens would violate the sovereignty of the slave states. Prohibiting states from passing discriminatory voting measures was a form of discrimination—against states, which matter, not against Black people, who don’t.

In the 2018 case Abbott v. Perez, the Court approved election maps drawn by Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature that diluted the voting power of the state’s growing Black and Latino populations. In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito criticized not the state but a lower court that had rejected the maps. The court, Alito wrote, had violated the “presumption of good faith” on the part of the legislature. The implication of that rebuke is that Texas’s attempting to discriminate against Black and Latino voters wasn’t wrong; noticing the attempt was wrong. The next year, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court concluded that partisan gerrymandering was a “political question” beyond the reach of the courts, paving the way for states to disenfranchise minority populations as a partisan act rather than a discriminatory one, as though the former cancels out the latter.

Trump is now urging emboldened Republican legislatures to gerrymander congressional districts much more in order to voter-proof the Republican majority in the House. His Justice Department sent Texas a letter saying that some of its voting districts “constitute unconstitutional racial gerrymanders” that must now be “rectified.” What that meant, remarkably, was that the districts had been made too diverse. In short, they were not racially gerrymandered enough. When a district-court majority—including a Trump-appointed judge—blocked the maps for being “racially gerrymandered,” it pointed as evidence to the DOJ’s own letter and that department’s complaint that the districts were “coalition districts” or “majority-non-White districts in which no single racial group constituted a 50% majority.”

The Roberts Court then overturned that decision, arguing that the lower court was “upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.” Not only did this repeat the Court’s earlier position that it’s wrong to notice discrimination but not wrong to engage in it, but the decision encourages states to draw discriminatory maps and lie about their intent, knowing the justices have their back.

Later this term, the justices will decide in Louisiana v. Callais whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act allows the creation of majority-minority districts. Louisiana has taken the position that the creation of such districts—a requirement meant to prevent lawmakers from disenfranchising minorities by slicing up districts to render their votes meaningless—violates the Constitution because “all-race based redistricting is unconstitutional.” The irony is that what Republicans want is to do is precisely race-based redistricting. If they prevail, the Fifteenth Amendment, which was adopted to eliminate racial caste, will be employed to maintain it. The only way to reconcile the Court’s jurisprudence with the Reconstruction Amendments, the Harvard Law professor Guy-Uriel Charles told me, is if you “turn the purpose of the Reconstruction amendments on their heads.”

This disenfranchisement will have long-term consequences—and not only in the arms race to the bottom reflected in the Democratic-controlled states that have shown themselves to be willing to retaliate.

As Frederick Douglass declared in 1865, the ballot is a means of self-defense, not simply a right or responsibility: “Without this, his liberty is a mockery; without this, you might as well almost retain the old name of slavery for his condition; for in fact, if he is not the slave of the individual master, he is the slave of society.” Americans of all races will suffer by this weakening of democracy. When lawmakers can entrench themselves in office regardless of public preference, they need not heed the will of the people.

The Fourteenth Amendment is under siege in other ways, too. Attacks on the rights of women (such as the right to not be forced to give birth by the state) and on trans people (who have been banned from serving in the military) also violate the amendment’s assurance of equal protection under the law. It is shockingly easy to find right-wing commentators advocating for the restriction of women’s right to vote and to leave a marriage, and even for employers’ discrimination against women in the workplace.

Read: Does Heritage support discrimination against women?

In the White House, Trump has been undermining discrimination law by refusing to enforce it. The administration has argued that Trump holds the authority to ignore laws banning job discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin for federal employees, and has rolled back enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. Aside from Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced his intention to ignore reports of discrimination or harassment.

Recently, the administration announced that it would not be investigating discrimination on the basis of “disparate impact,” in which discrimination can be proved through effect rather than intent alone. That can sound abstract, but here’s one example: The Trump administration ended a requirement that the state of Alabama provide Black residents with proper sanitation, calling it “illegal DEI.” Not flooding Black neighborhoods with raw sewage, according to the Trump administration, is racist.

The administration is also working to use laws that were meant to prevent discrimination to encourage it instead. Trump has weakened the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ability to fight race- and gender-based discrimination in employment, instead directing it to threaten companies that maintain diversity programs. This week, the EEOC chair explicitly invited “white males” to file discrimination claims. The civil-rights division of the Justice Department has shut down its voting-rights cases while placing the department’s support behind efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. Administration officials have threatened lawsuits against schools and businesses for “illegal DEI,” giving those institutions a strong incentive to maintain an overwhelmingly white workforce so they don’t get sued. In the meantime, the Department of Education has reportedly almost entirely ceased investigations of racist harassment of students. This legal hostility has extended to state censorship of any acknowledgment of race and gender discrimination—save for that against white people and conservative Christians.

None of this is consistent with “equal protection of the laws.” But it is consistent with the Antebellum Constitution’s narrow definition of who “We the People” are.

A future administration could reverse those policies. But Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is different. On the first day of his current term, Trump issued an executive order announcing that babies born in America to undocumented immigrants or people on temporary visas are not citizens. A lower court blocked the order, and later this term, the Supreme Court will hear the case. If the end of birthright citizenship is upheld, the country will be irrevocably altered. Even those whose citizenship is not in question might have to carry proof of citizenship at all times to avoid being kidnapped, detained, and possibly exiled by federal agents in the name of Kavanaugh’s “common sense.”

The birthright-citizenship clause was written into the Fourteenth Amendment specifically to overturn Dred Scott’s conclusion that Black people could never be citizens. Then–Chief Justice Taney’s rationale was simply that Black people were “not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”

Representative John Bingham of Ohio, dubbed the “Madison of the Fourteenth Amendment,” declared that there could be “no greater political atrocity” than denying birthright citizenship, because that would easily lead to a minority being subjected to “absolute despotism.” That the birthright-citizenship clause applies to everyone has been a subject of near-total legal consensus until Trump. There is no “originalist” case against birthright citizenship, but there is a partisan one.

Given the extreme nature of many of the conservative movement’s demands, the Roberts Court may not give into all of them, or at least not all at once. Some legal experts are skeptical that even this Court will allow Trump to nullify birthright citizenship by fiat. But the larger project of restoring the Antebellum Constitution will continue.

Before these amendments, the Antebellum Constitution contemplated the rights and freedom of white men, but no one else. It did not guarantee equal protection under the law. It did not protect the right to vote. It did not outlaw discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, or ethnicity. What it did was protect the right of some men to own other men as property, by definition an affront to the idea that “all men are created equal.”

When the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson asked why “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes,” he was identifying no mere contradiction, but liberty as it was imagined by men who owned other human beings as property. Slaveholders such as John Calhoun saw slavery as inseparable from their own freedom, and they worried that the false doctrine of abolitionism would eliminate that freedom away. “Already it has taken possession of the pulpit, of the schools, and, to a considerable extent, of the press; those great instruments by which the mind of the rising generation will be formed,” Calhoun said. (It seems the “woke mind virus” was telling lies about the great and benevolent institution of American slavery as far back as two centuries ago.)

Defending slavery, however, required invasive uses of power, such as banning antislavery literature and returning escaped Black people to bondage. Many white Americans in the 19th century began to understand that the “Slave Power” curtailed their freedoms as well. And this is what many people forget: Systems of domination rarely spread their blessings widely. The Redemption-era revocation of Black freedoms didn’t result in prosperity for white people writ large, but a Gilded Age in which the upper classes gained unfathomable wealth and economic crises left millions destitute. The nation may have held on to white supremacy, but it also got low wages, a threadbare welfare state, and a society dominated by the rich. Everyone else was too divided by race and class to challenge them.

The blood of Confederate soldiers who would never own a slave watered southern fields because they saw slavery as the cornerstone of their social and economic order. The Populists failed to ameliorate the deprivation of the Gilded Age because white laborers who had more in common with their Black counterparts chose the psychological wage offered by Jim Crow over the literal wages that might be earned through brotherhood. The MAGA elite offers a similar fantasy today, though the number of Trump voters who will see a loved one deported or their paycheck dwindle will eclipse by orders of magnitude those who rub shoulders with donors in his new ballroom.

MAGA’s ruling caste will not be as overtly racially circumscribed as in the past. But we can trace its contours in the Trump administration’s policy decisions and legal victories, and the Roberts Court’s resurrection of the Antebellum Constitution. The path the justices are walking leads to Calhoun’s paradise: an America where a class of stateless children can be denied education and medical care; where people of color must carry identification papers if they don’t want to be harassed, detained, imprisoned, or worse; where workers can be subject to invidious discrimination without recourse; where the military points guns at the taxpayers who fund it; and where the official ideology of the state is vindicated by elections the ruling party cannot lose. It will be a society of the dominators and the dominated. But it will not be a democracy worthy of the name.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 12:24 PM

THG

Keep it real please

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.

https://www.threads.com/@pilarmiami/post/DSGs1ExjA4P/i-dont-know-who-to-give-credit-for-this-quote-but-it-rings-so-true-im-no-support

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

I was amazed how many sick and hateful people there are myself. Clearly a third of this country is off its nut.

T

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 2:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut up, bitch.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 2:23 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up, bitch.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

6ixStringJoker, you prove this point. I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, December 21, 2025 2:24 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump has not delivered on his promise that people would have more cash left over in their wallets. The economic boom he predicted has failed to materialize, as prices continue to rise and unemployment edges upward. The mood in the country is turning.

Americans Did Not Let Joe Biden Get Away with Being So Out of Touch

Only a quarter of Americans are satisfied with their economic circumstances. Everyone else feels like they are just about keeping their heads above water, or not even that. In short, it’s precisely the situation Trump’s predecessor faced well over a year ago. The mood was lousy then, and it’s turning just as sour now.

Trump risks falling into the same trap as his predecessor. Like Biden before him, he is now trying to convince his fellow Americans that the situation is better than they perceive it to be. Trump’s televised speech was a bizarre blend of exaggerations, half-truths and lies. Inflation has not fallen, as he claims. And no one who drove their car to the gas station the next day believes gas prices are back at the level they were two decades ago. Americans were not inclined to let Biden get away with being so out of touch; Trump is now running the same risk.

https://watchingamerica.com/2025/12/20/trump-risks-falling-into-the-sa
me-trap-as-his-predecessor/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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second	12.21 11:11
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THG	12.21 12:24
6ixStringJack	12.21 14:16
second	12.21 14:23
second	12.21 14:24