Next week: Trump unveils his new invisibility cloak

Donald Trump has always been pretty much an addled Facebook grandpa, but those tendencies are definitely getting worse. As my colleague Sophia Tesfaye wrote yesterday, Trump reposted a blatantly fake AI-created video in which he appeared to promise that all Americans would soon have access to “med beds,” a supposedly brand new technology that will restore “every citizen to full health and strength.”

Yep, Trump seems to have fallen fell for the especially lame conspiracy-theory claim that somebody, somewhere, has invented “Star Trek”-style machines where you just lie down and everything that’s wrong with you is healed. I’m surprised he didn’t also claim we’re on the verge of teleportation. 

What’s scary about this is that barely anyone can be bothered to care anymore. Trump is an avatar for the brain-dead willful ignorance of all the people who voted for him. There’s a collective sense of resignation among the saner portion of the population: If people choose to believe amazingly stupid things, there’s not much the rest of us can do to save them.

“Christian persecution” turns out to be a Christian doing the persecution

There were two shocking mass shootings over the weekend, one in Michigan and one in North Carolina. The Michigan one got more media attention in part because it was more dramatic. The shooter even set a Mormon church on fire. But mostly that happened because Trump immediately seized on it as further evidence that Christians are suffering from incredible oppression, which is basically the same narrative MAGA folks are using to exploit Charlie Kirk’s murder. 

But at least for now, it looks likely that the Michigan shooter identified as a Christian himself, and was also a big-time Trump supporter. He seems to have targeted Mormons because he believed they were heretics. This was in no way a “targeted attack on Christians,” as Trump claimed. Instead, it was a targeted attack by a self-described Christian on people he didn’t see as the right kind of Christians. 

The rise of Christian nationalism has depended on a wide range of different Christian groups with long histories of mutual dislike — right-wing Catholics, traditional evangelicals, charismatics and, yes, Mormons — agreeing to overlook their differences to wage war on secularism and liberalism. They still don’t all agree on doctrines of faith, for sure. But they all believe that secular culture has made it harder to force their beliefs on other people. 

But as historian Randall Balmer and I discussed in an August episode of “Standing Room Only,” religion actually does better under secularism. This shooting helps to illustrate why. If you establish Christianity as the official religion, then people will start fighting over which version of Christianity gets that role. And that fight, as the history of Europe makes clear, can turn violent fast. It’s more productive for religious folks to live and let live, even if that means they have to tolerate atheism, feminism, marriage equality and other secular realities that right-wing Christians hate. 

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Of course Joe Rogan has an opinion on Tylenol

The fallout from RFK Jr. and Trump falsely telling pregnant women that Tylenol causes autism continued over the weekend. Joe Rogan had to weigh in on this, naturally enough, because it appeals to two favorite themes of his show: medical disinformation and sexist nonsense. He got really mad about pregnant women who are posting videos of themselves taking Tylenol on social media, and Rogan of course insisted that they know less about this than President Drink Bleach and Secretary Brain Worm. 

All of this underscores the intense underlying sexism at work here. In reality, most pregnant women are deeply concerned about their baby’s health and in regular communication with a doctor. As many women who posted these videos have pointed out, they’re taking Tylenol because their doctor told them to — but their moral character and their intelligence are being impugned by know-nothings with no moral compasses to speak of. Most people don’t commit as many acts of evil in a lifetime as Trump and Kennedy knock out in a weekend. 

This speaks to one of the main selling points of MAGA ideology, the idea that authority flows from one’s status in old-fashioned social hierarchy, and not from things like education, knowledge or experience. In this view, women are inherently idiots because they are women. Trump, who is objectively an idiot, “knows” more than a pregnant woman who has detailed conversations her doctor about what’s safe during pregnancy, simply because he’s a rich white man. She’s supposed to do what she’s told, without question, because maintaining that hierarchy of power is what really matters. 

That’s an attractive proposition for mediocre white men, I guess, but it comes at the expense of literally everyone else. 

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What we're reading this week

• 
  

  “Why the Democratic Party Fears Its Best Candidates,” Paul Waldman, Cross Section

• “What the Right Really Means When It Says ‘Free Speech,’” Sarah Jones, New York

• “Charlie Kirk and the ‘Third Great Awakening,’” Stephanie McCrummen, Atlantic

• “Gen X women don’t have the bandwidth to figure out why they feel so terrible,” Andi Zeisler, Salon

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