The collapse of Matt Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general by Donald Trump was an unforced error in which Trump used political capital, saying he was going to fight to the end. It will be a recess appointment, we heard. And Trump gave big, “No!” when he was was asked by a reporter just days before Gaetz’s withdrawal if he’d want Gaetz to pull out.

But with more coming out in the media about Gaetz’s alleged sex with a teen—whom he reportedly paid—and with Trump’s and JD Vance’s unsuccessful calls to GOP senators to rally around Gaetz, the saga ended. And it was a big loss for Trump.

Now it appears to be happening all over again with Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, whose most recent job has been as a far-right host of a talk show on Fox on the weekends. After Trump’s transition team adamantly said Trump ws standing by Hegseth, reports are surfacing that Trump is about to dump him—and possibly replace him with Ron DeSantis, who he demeaned and attacked in the primaries, among a few other contenders.

There’s been so much written about Hegseth’s inexperience, his white supremacist tattoos, his desire to purge the military of “wokeness,” and the rape allegation against him—which he denies even though he paid his accuser in a non-disclosure agreement.

But this week we learned Hegseth’s own mother called him an “abuser” of women while NBC reported that colleagues at Fox were concerned about his drinking, smelling alcohol on his breath, and hearing him talk about his hangovers before going on air in the morning.

One current and two former Fox employees said they felt like they needed to “babysit” Hegseth because of his drinking and late nights. “We’d have to call him to make sure he didn’t oversleep because we knew he’d be out partying the night before,” one of them said. Another said, “Morning TV is stressful, and more times than not Pete made it even more stressful.”
Hegseth sometimes arrived with only 20 minutes or less before the show began, according to those three sources, stressing out his colleagues.

And then there was the blockbuster report from The New Yorker, which reported on Hegseth being carried out of events for the veterans group he led, hurling violently racist chants and identifying women who worked for him as “party girls and non-party girls”:

A previously undisclosed whistleblower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team.
The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club.
In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting, “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

This may all have been the last straw for GOP senators, and Lindsey Graham was the first to publicly crack yesterday. Then came The Wall Street Journal report last night that Trump is thinking about replacing Hegseth with DeSantis.

Later reports said he was considering several people because a lot of people around him can’t stand DeSantis. This is a real shitshow!

From The New York Times:

Mr. Trump has made clear to people close to him that he believes Mr. Hegseth should have been more forthcoming about the problems he would face getting confirmed, according to two people with knowledge of his thinking.
The combination of events could determine whether he hangs on as the expected nominee. Mr. Trump is openly discussing other people for the job, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom he defeated in the Republican presidential primaries and with whom he has had a contentious relationship.
But the number of people in Mr. Trump’s world who dislike and distrust Mr. DeSantis—and bitterly recall the campaign he ran against the president-elect—is vast. Those people are discussing other options, including whether Mike Waltz, the Florida congressman whom Mr. Trump picked as his national security adviser, could slide into the job, expecting he would be confirmed fairly easily by the Senate.

There’s also talk of Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee as a replacement for Hegseth.

It’s possible Hegseth will hold on as he continues meeting senators, but this looks like another collapse, as the opposition is growing.

And it all shows there is no vetting in the Trump team and no planning of any kind. There’s no three-dimensional chess either, in which Trump is putting out these extreme nominees in order to get others passed. When you’re replacing Gaetz with someone who would have been easily confirmed in this right-wing Senate from the beginning—former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi—and looking at establishment, well-vetted governors and senators to replace Hegseth, it shows there was no plan, and you’re running scared.

This is all just Trump impulsively throwing out names—Gaetz was decided upon while Trump was flying with him, and Gaetz hitched a ride after two senators had turned Trump down for the attorney general position—and then expending capital. If there’s any planning, particularly in the case of the reckless and dangerous insurrection defender Kash Patel, named as FBI director nominee—who some GOP senators are worried about—it’s about Trump trying to placate the extremist figures who helped get him elected and what a payoff.

People like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Roger Stone pushed for Gaetz and Hegseth—and Patel. Trump is showing that he’ll heed their recommendations and try to install these dangerous, anti-American elements into the Cabinet. They’re also pushing for Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence (also facing resistance from GOP senators), among others.

But beyond that, there’s no planning. Just impulse. Trump plucked Representatives Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Waltz of Florida for positions in his administration before all the votes were counted in the very narrow races for the House. Majority Leader Mike Johnson pleaded with Trump to stop poaching House members—Gaetz too was poached but then resigned to avoid the Ethics Committee report—but Trump wouldn’t listen.

Now the last House race in California was called last night, and Democrat Adam Gray flipped the seat, beating incumbent John Duarte. That means the GOP has the narrowest majority in history, and with Stefanik and Waltz resigning, there will be several months in which there’s a one-seat majority, 217-215. (In the House, if there is a tie it means a loss for whatever bill is put forward.)

This is a disaster for the GOP in the House, which Johnson couldn’t control with a slightly larger majority. And Trump made it worse. Again, no planning, all impulse. All of this works to the benefit of Democrats, who can use a lot of maneuvers to muck things up in the House, and if Johnson has just one or two members not present, it’s gridlock, let alone if they don’t play along with what the majority wants.

This will help Democrats kick things down the road as they plan to take back control of the House in 2026, which is now slightly less than two years away.

None of this is to downplay that Trump is going to do many horrible things, many of which we can’t even imagine right now, but much of which we’ve been given ample warning about. But one thing is coming into view: Even with all of these people Trump has brought in who know a lot more about how to put together an authoritarian government, his impulses will always lead.

So far, that’s caused him to hobble himself, making stupid mistakes as Republicans get nervous and Democrats make noise about the extremism of the nominees. They have got to make a lot more noise.

And let me just add, the claims in the corporate media that President Biden’s pardon of Hunter Biden will give Trump some sort of permission to pardon criminals—including the January 6th insurrectionists—are idiotic and flat-out wrong. Trump would be pardoning hardened criminals no matter what. The public sees the reasons why Biden, pardoning his son (who was selectively targeted by Trump’s Justice Department beginning in 2018), was acting as a father.

Trump, on the other hand, will be acting as a thug and a tyrant. He will impulsively overplay, as he already has with these nominees—and he’s not even president yet. As in his first administration, all of that must be used as Democrats move to win back Congress and the White House.

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Where to begin with this caller to my SiriusXM program this week?

Jason from California seemed nice enough at first, calling in to say he is a “Reagan conservative” and remembers a time when we didn’t have the “name-calling” while having political discussions. He said he listens to my SiriusXM show to get to hear the “other side.”

But when he said Trump, for whom he voted, is responsible for “a lot” of the name-calling—the understatement of the year—I knew this was going to be more delusion. It was also a way to make me seem like the unreasonable one once I responded forcefully to his distortions. They always try this one, but I tend to believe that it doesn’t work—not when they’re pushing defamation. (You’ll be the judge of that.)

The discussion on the program had been about the Oklahoma School’s Superintendent, Ryan Walters, who’s been purchasing “Trump bibles”—with plans to spend millions of taxpayer dollars—to be put in all school classrooms in the state. Several of the largest school districts said no to a video he also wanted all districts to play in class—a prayer for Trump—and the state’s attorney general said the districts had a right to reject this insane demand.

You can watch a CNN interview with the extreme Christian nationalist Walters right here:

- YouTube www.youtube.com

But Jason from California thought it was fine to put the bibles in the classrooms—including the bible sold by Trump, who makes money off of it—because every Oklahoma county is "red,” and it offsets that we’re supposedly teaching the “homosexual lifestyle” in many schools.

Huh?

You can only imagine where the conversation went from there, as my blood started boiling. The idea that these people are lecturing us about anything with regard to sexuality—and no school is teaching any lower grades about sex acts—while they support a man who is a rapist and bragged on tape about grabbing women by their vaginas is beyond galling.

By the end of the discussion, Jason said he’d “absolutely” leave his daughter alone with Trump, to which I could only respond that he is a bad father. (If you think I was a little too angry—or got too crass—you are welcome to offer that constructive criticism.)

Listen in here and let me know your thoughts!

There have been many post-mortems looking at how certain minority groups voted—and how they supposedly shifted their vote—but there’s been very little written about one particular minority group: LGBTQ voters.

And yet, in context, LGBTQ voters displayed the kind of influence as a bloc that politicians should be paying attention to moving forward.

I suspect part of the reason they’ve not been focused on is because these voters don’t fit an overwhelming corporate media narrative that positions Donald Trump as having broadened and diversified his coalition—because LGBTQ people actually went the other way.

According to the NBC News Exit Poll, LGBTQ people doubled their share of the electorate, from 4% in 2020 to 8% in 2024, which is nothing to sneeze at. (Researchers have shown the percentage of the LGBTQ population appears to be roughly equal in all of the states.) And 86% of LGBTQ people voted for Kamala Harris—well over 10 million voters—a big increase from the 71% who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Donald Trump saw a sharp decline in support from LGBTQ voters, from 25% in 2020 to just 14% in 2024.

It’s true that national exit polls should often be taken with a grain of salt. Sample sizes of minorities are often small. Sometimes other polling of specific groups contradicts the national exit polls’ results.

For example, Matt Barreto of BPS Research told Axios that the exit polls showing a majority of Latino men voted for Trump—somewhere in the 52% to 54% range—were wrong. He said his polling found 56% of Latino men supported Harris, explaining that his polling is more accurate because he had a larger sample size and it was conducted in multiple languages.

Still, his result was less than the 59% that the national exit polls reported Joe Biden winning Latino men by in 2020. So, there was some movement, just not as much as the corporate media suggests. There’s also a lot of discrepancy, depending on which exit poll you look at, about Black male voters and whether they moved slightly toward Trump or not at all.

But regarding LGBTQ voters, the shift in the national exit polling is big enough—and the growth in the percentage of the electorate is large enough—to assume that something happened. While many other groups moved toward Trump a bit—or saw less turnout in some places—LGBTQ people went in the opposite direction.

I believe a few things came into play. The toxic masculinity that marked the Trump campaign was as threatening to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as it is to many women. (Harris overwhelmingly won Black women, and, though Trump won white women, Harris did better with white women than Biden did in 2020).

The Trump campaign’s bro culture on steroids, exemplified by the white supremacist elements of Trump’s base as well as among the many young right-wing and even independent male podcasters Trump courted, often telegraphed homophobia and transphobia. Even if it wasn’t overt, it sent a message that you’re not included if you’re queer.

And the blatant anti-trans messaging from Trump and the GOP—and the vicious ads they aired in media markets—horrified almost the entire LGBTQ community.

JD Vance idiotically said during the campaign, in an interview with Joe Rogan, that Trump would probably win what he called “the normal gay guy vote.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won, just, the normal gay guy vote, because, they just wanted to be left the hell alone. Now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it that they’re like, ‘No, no, we didn’t want to give pharmaceutical products to 9-year-olds who are transitioning their genders.

That was evidently very wrong. First off, as far as many in Trump’s base are concerned—including the aggressively anti-LGBTQ Christian right—there is no “normal” gay anything. They believe we’re all abnormal—freaks and sinners. Secondly, the idea that some great majority of queer people—or the “normal gay guys”—would vote for Trump because they were eager to throw trans people under the bus is clearly false.

I’m not saying all cisgender gay, lesbian, and bisexual people support all trans people—there are fissures, as there are in any movement—but I believe most do, understanding the clear connections we have about our bodies and our privacy and about how those who hate us view us.

Beyond that, Trump and the justices he put on the Supreme Court are a threat to marriage equality and anti-discrimination laws protecting gay, bi and lesbian people, especially in public accommodations. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was marrying gay couples going back to 2004 as a district attorney in San Francisco—before being shut down by the California Supreme Court—and enforced protections as California attorney general while being outspoken as a U.S. senator.

The other thing I would say is that queer people know a fascist when they see one.

They know what it’s like to be scapegoated. And, if they know their history, they know the brutality and violence LGBTQ people experienced in the past at the hands of strongmen. So do Jews, of course, who also voted overwhelmingly for Harris—by 79% in one exit poll—which must have angered Trump, who demanded their vote at rallies and even berated them, claiming they owed it to him for his support of Israel.

Pre-election polling showed a majority of Jewish Americans, who represent a diversity of opinions on the war in Gaza, believed Trump was more supportive of Israel, while they also believed Harris would handle the war better. Whatever their opinions, however, they know a fascist when they see one and voted in big numbers against Trump.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, any move to blame transgender people or distance the Democratic Party from LGBTQ rights would be harmful to the party. The media finger-pointing has had some people calling for overcorrections that are not only morally wrong; they’re bad political strategy.

Trump, when all is said and done, will have won the popular vote by roughly 1.5%, the smallest popular vote win in a quarter of a century. The margins were tight in the battleground states. If the issue of inflation and the economy played the role they appear to have, and if the anti-incumbency fervor that gripped the world because of inflation was key, the last thing Democrats should do is push away constituencies that stayed loyal as well as those in the base who support those constituencies’ rights.

At the risk of repeating myself: trans rights and LGBTQ rights in general have galvanized young voters, who embraced equality in elections over the past 10 years and often helped put Democrats over the top. And then there are the families and friends of LGBTQ people.

It’s a polarized time, and elections are going to be very close indefinitely. Having been 8% of the electorate in 2024 and voting 86% for the Democratic presidential candidate, LGBTQ people showed they’re a pivotal and loyal voting bloc that is key for Democrats in any future election.

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It’s been less than two weeks since the election, but we can see Donald Trump and the GOP moving rapidly in their efforts to take sweeping authoritarian control of our government and give enormous power to the president.

Let’s be clear first, and just completely vaporize the media narrative: Trump didn’t get a mandate, much less a landslide.

He will, according to estimates, win the popular vote by 1.5% after all votes from California are counted. Kamala Harris will have won more of the popular vote than Hillary Clinton (who of course won the popular vote against Trump). Winning the seven battleground states Trump won by narrow margins—and with just 50% of the popular vote—doesn’t come close to President Obama’s 385 Electoral College vote win and 53% popular vote win.

And yet, Republicans said Obama had no mandate, and no one called it a landslide.

So we need to emphasize that, even as Trump claims a mandate and grabs for absolute power. And grabbing he is.

Trump last week demanded that the Senate allow for recess appointments of his cabinet members—basically, thwarting the advise and consent rule and having nominations subject to a Senate vote. The three senators vying for leadership (the secret ballot will be held Tuesday night), all publicly complied with Trump’s wishes.

This is just pretty much ditching the Senate—dictator on day one.

Democrats can keep Congress from going into recess, but they’ll need to use the filibuster. Does any of us think the GOP, responding to Trump’s rantings, won’t then consider getting rid of the filibuster?

MAGA minions are violently angry, railing on X at anyone in the media who says something that seeks to keep Trump in check.

Trump named his long-time white supremacist aide Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, a pick that doesn’t require Senate confirmation and which elevates one of the most racist Nazi emulators we’ve ever seen in government.

Trump is putting anti-immigration hardliner Tom Homan in charge of the border, naming him “border czar.” Homan, who vows mass deportations, had already worked in Trump’s administration the first time around, carrying out its most brutal actions as ICE director.

Homan helped write Project 2025 and attended a white supremacist conference, which he claims was an accident, telling HuffPost he didn’t know what it was about. But then, fearing that distancing too much from the conference organized by Nick Fuentes might put him in political peril, he called Huffpost back to say, “I’m not saying this is a bad group. I’m saying I don’t know.”

Homan recently said on “60 Minutes” that if deporting undocumented immigrants who’ve been here for many years—and who have children who are American citizens—means deporting whole families, then whole families, including those citizens, “can be deported together.” On Sean Hannity’s program on Fox this week, he tried to backtrack, saying they will be starting with convicted criminals who are undocumented.

But that’s only a fraction of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., and most are serving time in prison and will be deported upon release, as has been happening for many years. Trump is talking about deporting 11 to 20 million people, and the vast majority of those people aren’t criminals by any stretch of the imagination. They’re law-abiding people who are contributing to our communities—they’re our co-workers, friends, and families—and they are propping up entire industries, filling jobs because of labor shortages.

Trump has also named the MAGA-crazed puppy-killer Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor, as his Homeland Security director. Putting this woman, who has little experience but who’s shown her brutality—which is the most important qualification to Trump, after loyalty—in charge of not only immigration but of thwarting domestic terrorism and overseeing FEMA and disaster relief is pretty horrifying.

Elise Stefanik, the upstate New York MAGA warrior for Trump, has been chosen by Trump as ambassador to the United Nations, while Marco Rubio is his pick for Secretary of State. The fact that Stefanik and Rubio—two bulls in a small china shop—are the closest MAGA can come to “diplomatic” shows just how devoid of any talent there is in the MAGA ranks. I mean, it almost makes you nostalgic for the days of Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley!

The former Republican House member from New York, Lee Zeldin, will be in charge of stripping the Environmental Protection Agency for the big oil companies, while MAGA loyalist and conspiracy theorist Rep. Mike Waltz has been tapped as Trump’s national security advisor. As of right now, there’s also talk of putting Florida Rep. Byron Donalds into the administration.

And this is just the very beginning, folks. It’s going to be very bad; let’s not sugarcoat it. But advocacy groups like the ACLU are gearing up for the fight on all fronts. And Democratic governors in states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois are vowing to block Trump’s deportations and many other actions. Democrats in the House and Senate have to steel themselves too.

And there are signs of the typical Trumpian screwups that only benefit Trump’s opponents. Republicans are now worried that Trump—who could care less about anyone else—is choosing too many members of Congress for his administration when the GOP will have a very narrow House majority and hold the Senate by a few seats. As the Washington Post reports:

If Republicans only have a one-, two-, or three-seat margin in the House, the vacant seats could jeopardize their majority or put it dangerously close to a de facto Democratic majority if a Republican is absent, giving them the power to block legislation and push through legislation. It’s a scenario that came close to happening several times in the current Congress.

That also means there will be vacant seats and special elections that Democrats can win. And nobody should think that Democrats can’t win special elections in even the reddest places, since they did just that after Trump took office in 2017, went to the extremes, and horrified people.

Democrat Conor Lamb won an open seat in 2018 in a district in Pennsylvania that Trump won by 20 points. We even won the open Senate seat in Alabama when Trump backed his buddy Roy Moore for the Senate, and Democrat Doug Jones won the race.

Beyond special elections, we’ve all got to start planning right now for the 2026 midterms, with the goal of taking back the House and Senate. Ditto 2028. We’ve grieved, and talked about the hate and racism which the majority of voters were fine with bringing back into the Oval Office, something that stunned us all.

Now it’s time to begin organizing and focusing on the fight as Trump and MAGA move quickly to consolidate power.

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In February of 2023, I had a discussion on my SiriusXM program with Dr. Seth Norrholm, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at Wayne State University School of Medicine. He’s a translational neuroscientist and psychologist and one of the world's leading experts on PTSD and fear.

A listener to my program, Rick from Minnesota, who also posts in the comments here on The Signorile Report quite often, suggested I re-post the interview here with the audio in light of the election results on Tuesday and the collective trauma many are experiencing. I thought that was a good idea.

Right now, so may people are feeling stressed and still in grief and despairing. Often, before you can even think about taking action you need to deal understand the trauma.

Listen now · 18:41

Norrholm explains how the trauma from MAGA plays out and affects us much like PTSD.

But I’ll be honest. Looking now at what he had to say then, there is no quick, easy fix. I had asked him, What would heal us?

“Accountability,” he said. “Without some kind of sweeping accountability to remove what I've called the cancer that is in our political system, there's not going to be any meaningful healthy change.”

He meant that seeing Trump brought to justice would help to bring an end to the trauma. That, while it perhaps seemed possible in February of 2023, is not going to happen now through any court.

But Trump still can be brought to justice by our active engagement as citizens—for example, by fighting to help Democrats retake the Senate in 2026, as well as the House (if they don’t take it this year). And standing up to Donald Trump via mass mobilizations, which we’re seeing organized around the country. And certainly defeating MAGA in the 2028 presidential election.

I know it’s too early, perhaps, for many of you to even be thinking about that, still grieving from this past Tuesday night. But I thought the interview would be helpful, because, before thinking about how to engage in actions, we need to have an understanding of where we are.

Listen above to the discussion. Below is a transcript, edited slightly for clarity.

—

Michelangelo Signorile: So I wanted to talk a little bit first about -- and it's something I don't think a lot of people have discussed -- what the entire country has experienced collectively, and how it has affected people emotionally and mentally. With regard to Donald Trump's administration and certainly the kind of brutality that he emboldened —the fear he created for a lot of people. A lot of people still feel that. They don't want us to even play clips of him speaking [on this program]. And also, of course, there are the people who emulate him as well.

Dr. Seth Norrholm: If you look at the last seven years now, the way it was before, you could really look at your life in terms of two views.

One, I call a micro scale, which you think about as your family situation, your housing situation, your job, the things that you have a lot of control over. And there's also the macro scale, which is your role as a citizen of the United States, the citizen of the world, your role in terms of your stewardship of the earth and its environment for the next generation. So there was a time pre-Trumpism where you could really focus on your micro scale and then maybe if you were interested in politics, if you wanted to affect change, if you wanted to dive into that storm, you could, but you could live pretty much in your micro scale.

And maybe there would be issues like taxation or prices rising and things like that that might affect you, but you could, as a citizen, remain in your micro scale and not engage with politics and just let it be. And if somebody said, “Let's talk about the upcoming election,” you could appropriately say, “I don't want to talk about politics or I don't follow politics.” And that was pretty well accepted and appropriate.

But what happened with the ushering in of the Trump age is suddenly what was happening on the macro scale in terms of our government and elected officials and their policies and their beliefs and their actions was suddenly having a strong influence on our micro scale. So we could no longer separate those two parts of our life where they were making decisions that were detrimental to our health, that were potentially deadly in terms of consequences.

One of the first examples I point out is the response to Hurricane Maria in 2017, in which the Trump administration slow-walked the response and in many ways was racist in their response because they viewed Puerto Rican Americans as being somehow different and inferior in much the way you would if you thought like a racist. And what happened then was 3000 Americans lost their lives.

And that was really a precursor to what we saw with the pandemic, where, again, this self-serving malicious form of government was anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-closing. You know the famous words, “We’re going to open up again by Easter of 2020,” where policies were actually potentially deadly to Americans. And so you suddenly just couldn't ignore what was happening politically because there was such a potential for it to be dangerous to you.

MS: And you talk about this as a collective PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, that many people in the country have experienced. And I'm curious: Is that something everyone experienced, whether they are those who fear and despise Trump, or those who are in his cult?

SN: So let's first define PTSD. It is an illness related to your experience of a traumatic event in your life and then it has consequences that affect you mentally and and behaviorally.

And it's usually, you know, the prime example is a combat veteran who was traumatized while they were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. They come back to the states. And even though they're in a safe environment, they still act as though they're in the war zone. And so there are elements of the collective psychology that are similar to PTSD.

But I just want to be clear that relative to your question, not everybody viewed Trumpism as a traumatic event. But there were certainly hundreds, if not thousands of people with real PTSD related to Trumpism. For example, if you were in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria, or if you were on the front lines in March and April of 2020 and you saw all these traumatic deaths because of the the start of the COVID pandemic.

MS: Or what he did to people at the border and separating families and putting kids in cages.

SN: Right. Right. So it's a collective PTSD or traumatization in the sense that there was suddenly this danger we all had to be aware of. And whether that was domestic terrorism through people who were, you know, Trump loyalists or MAGA-ites who carried out — you know, the gentleman who blew up a city block in Nashville.

And in situations like that, the loyalists follow this dangerous path. So suddenly there was this new fear and threat in America, which is “What is going to happen to my life and my livelihood based on what I'm seeing?” And it was really almost on a daily basis for that four year term.

One of the things that you see with PTSD is what we call hyper-vigilance, where you're constantly on guard and on alert for something threatening. That is very much the situation that many of us found ourselves in during that presidency because we just didn't know what the next thing was going to be.

And in fact, we had leadership that was opposing all the positions that would potentially keep us safe, like pulling out of the Paris Accord, like, you know, international relations, courting Putin, courting Kim Jong Un, so actually seeking out danger.

It was completely justified and appropriate for people to have this newfound sense of fear because we had never seen this before from our leadership. Sure, we had presidents you may not have agreed with. There was the example of Nixon where there was corruption — but never on this scale and never on such a consistent basis.

MS: Right. And even still with, of course, Trump losing the election, Joe Biden winning, we had the insurrection. We have the Big Lie. We have these people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others in power. That fear and that PTSD is still there. For many people it hasn't gone away.

SN: Yeah. The analogy I like to use a lot is Trump was an abusive president, meaning he did not care about the well-being of Americans unless they were loyalists or said nice things about him, to use his words. And so, you know, there was a situation where you're at risk and there are potential dangers surrounding you. And what you see now is these parrots and these mouthpieces who are imitating Trump because they saw that that approach could be successful.

And so if you think about Trump as being the abuser and the American people as being the abused spouse or partner, what's happened now is there's been no accountability.

The analogy I like to use is the abused spouse who sees the police outside their house and they're walking up to the door and the abused spouse opens the door and the police say, “You know, we have no evidence,” or, “You know, it's your word against his. There's nothing we can do.”

And so the abused partner or spouse watches the police walk away and just has this fear and dejection because their abuse is being completely ignored and there's been no accountability. So that's what we've been seeing in the wake of January 6th, as there's been no accountability for upper level leadership, including the president and his cabinet and and his advisors.

There's been no accountability at that level. And so what you've seen is there were 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election of Joe Biden, and many of them are sitting members of Congress. They're getting in front of microphones and they're basically telling the abused populace, “Oh, we're going to keep abusing you, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

MS: And that's so important. And something I hadn't thought about. How the lack of justice, seeing any justice, any indictments, anybody going to jail, how that has traumatically affected people, how that has had a mental and emotional effect on them.

Very important. And I'm glad you brought that up. And you talk about the Republican Party now, and you just were alluding to it as becoming this place where people with pathological behavior can thrive. So we had Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, and others who were incredibly extreme and erratic and promoting white supremacist and QAnon ugly lies. And that's bad enough.

But then we get George Santos, who is completely and totally fabricating his background. Now, we also have another freshman member in Florida, Anna Paulina Luna, who also seems to be in the same vein — changed her name, changed her biography, used to be an Obama supporter. I mean, everything that comes out about George Santos, like we don't even know who he is. You're putting that in an even newer category the Republican Party is accepting. And you talk about him as having a personality disorder.

SN: Yes. So I look at the genesis of individuals like George Santos in terms of what we saw unfold over the past seven years. Certainly if you were paying attention to the campaign in 2016, you saw who Trump was.

You saw him insult John McCain as a war veteran. You saw him mocking a disabled reporter. You saw the the Access Hollywood tape come out. So you were given all kinds of information as to how unqualified this person was. And I would even go further to say we recognize as mental health experts how dangerous he was. And what you saw was he ultimately got elected.

And for the most part, the mainstream media did not call him out on these things. Sure, there was, you know, MSNBC. And what people would call the left media would address these things. But it was never publicly called out and clearly wasn't disqualifying.

So what that did was, it created a level of permissiveness in terms of candidates, in terms of what they could get away with. And in a large sense, what was being rewarded now was this malicious, ill intent and self-serving bias and deception that we equate with people who have personality disorders like antisocial personality, which is by definition doing things that are against the interest of other people and in some cases taking pleasure in it.

And before the age of Trump, if you are talking to friends or family and said, “I think I'm going to run for Congress, but I'm going to lie about who I am back in, let's say, in the 90s and early 2000s,” that you would think that that family member or that adviser would say, “You can't do that. They're going to vet you. You're going to be caught in the lie.”

But what we saw over the years of Trump was, you know, if you watch Seinfeld, you remember George Costanza. His stance was, if you believe it, it's not a lie. And what we saw with Trump was, if you tell it enough, it's not a lie.

So there was this permissiveness of lying. You get to the point where people that I have classified as personality disordered, meaning they have no moral compass, they have no thought about consequences. They lie with impunity. You know, it was inevitable that you would have somebody who can completely create a caricature of themselves and get elected because they would use the Trumpism approach, which was just keep lying about it and push back. And if there's any accountability, you know, you can do your best to evade it. And sometimes you can evade it for years.

MS: Right. And it's interesting, you mentioned people around them who might say, hey, don't do this and how it kind of becomes a collective thing, perhaps. I mean, we don't know that so much with George Santos, but I mentioned the other congressperson, Anna Paulina Luna. In her story, her mother seems to be part of this, too. Her mother vouches for her story. But the rest of her family, everybody else says, no, none of that is true. So it's it's sort of like someone else is in on the lie and the promoting of this permissive behavior.

SN: Right. And you can imagine a situation where when Santos was putting this idea together, he had people to look at as models and potentially reach out to in Marjorie Taylor Greene or others who are openly free with deception and lying and basically rewarding him and encouraging him by saying, “Yeah, you can do that. And in fact, we value your votes [in Congress]. So we'll take you.” And you need to look no further than the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House to see how a small group of deceptive loyalists can hijack Congress for days.

MS: Absolutely. And it’s so important to talk about what this means from the perspective of a neuroscientist and a psychologist about what has happened to the Republican Party and what has happened to all of us and the entire country in terms of what we're experiencing. I really appreciated talking about this and getting into this angle of it. I think it's very important.

SN: I appreciate having the time to speak about. If I can make one closing comment: I often get asked, you know, what's the future of America look like or how do we get quote unquote, healthy again?

And I think what we were talking about a few minutes ago with accountability, you know, that needs to be the fixed —- you need to have the insurrectionists face consequences. You know, banishment from Congress. You need to have Trump face consequences for his role in the insurrection. So without some kind of sweeping accountability to remove what I've called the cancer that is in our political system, there's not going to be any meaningful healthy change.

MS: Perfect way to end it. What do we all need to do? And yes, it's about justice and and hoping that we see that happen — in Georgia, or in the Justice Department, somewhere soon.

In 2016, when Pennsylvania was called for Trump and he won the election in the early hours of the morning, I had tears in my eyes as I lay in bed and posted on social media that we would fight. It was a complete aberration, I remember thinking, a jarring anomaly.

Last night, as the returns were coming in, again stunning so many of us, I felt differently.

I didn’t see it as some fluke in the making, as in 2016. Then, Hillary Clinton was hounded by the exaggerated email story, which surfaced again, thanks to FBI Director James Comey, days before the election, only to be a nothingburger. Clinton had not campaigned in Wisconsin at all. There was deep Russian interference from early on in the election.

Trump was a celebrity who had no political record, and a lot of people just voted for him without knowing much about his positions. Many people didn’t vote at all, thinking Clinton would win, because the polling was so out of whack. Third parties took just enough of the vote to pull from Clinton. Clinton won the popular vote, but the injustice of the Electoral College brought Trump to victory.

This time, however, Donald Trump won a majority of American voters in the popular vote. He won after having been a dangerous, brutal president who harmed many people, stripped the rights of Americans, put extremists on the Supreme Court, and mismanaged a pandemic, allowing millions to die. I could go on, but the bottom line: we can’t say people didn’t know him.

So last night, I didn’t cry. I felt anger and outrage, more than anything else, at those millions of Americans who willingly voted for someone who would harm this country and hurt others and even themselves. And I’m still feeling that anger right now.

Trump was even more cruel, racist, and misogynistic in his 2024 campaign than in any prior campaign. And yet, he won the majority of voters expanding his rural vote but also cutting into some of the suburban counties and urban counties just enough.

Exit polls are to be taken with a grain of salt, as they're always off and often revised later. But we can look at them directionally rather than precisely. According to those polls, Trump improved upon his 2020 results with Black voters, just a little, and with Latino voters—particularly Latino men—by a more substantial amount, in both rural areas and urban areas. And he improved quite a bit with young voters and people voting for the first time.

That was all enough to put him over the top. He started with his floor, his base of support. Unlike losing presidents of the past, who just faded away, very unpopular with their parties, Trump had used the Big Lie to make his base see Democrats, not him, as the losers and, more nefariously, as degenerates who stole the election. This kept his base with him for four years, even after first being jarred by January 6th. They pushed aside the attempt to overturn the election and the violence, already predisposed to forgive him. And stuck with him. Then it just became about adding a few more people here and there.

As a con man, he was able to do that. But we can’t overlook that his base and any new voters backed him knowing 100% what Trump was about. They backed him even though the Democrats had a very good candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris who ran a pretty flawless campaign—and no, I’m not going to get into the blame game I’m already seeing some Democrats engage in—a candidate who spoke to their needs at the moment regarding the economy, offering actual, detailed plans.

Trump’s misogyny, his cruelty, his racism, and his history of hate were embraced by those voters. You can say many overlooked them, but that’s still an embrace. Some may have liked his bigotry more than others—getting off on his attacks on the left, on his perceived enemies in Congress, on marginalized groups—but that doesn’t make those who didn’t like it any less responsible for their actions.

Much of what happened last night can be traced back to the COVID pandemic and how our whole world was turned upside down. The isolation and then the economic turmoil caused real shockwaves for many Americans. President Biden did an enormous, historic job at passing legislation to bring this economy back to a juggernaut, the envy of the world. GDP is surging; unemployment is 4%. Wages are up.

But for too many voters, the jolt of inflation—and the fact that prices would never come down even if the inflation rate itself slowed dramatically—was heavy. This election split along education lines, even as it cut across racial ones—non-college educated vs. college-educated—and obviously then across income brackets and those who could buffer the shock of inflation better than others.

Those most affected just didn’t grasp how inflation soared as a result of the economic turmoil of the pandemic and supply chain shortages and just blamed Biden—with the help of Republicans fanning exaggerations about spending and falsehoods, and a corporate media that was complicit. And they didn’t see how Biden was revitalizing the economy as Trump and Republicans played into their unease and promised to make things better.

Too many of them believed that because their own finances were in a better place before the pandemic it was somehow due to Trump—who, in reality, did nothing to make their lives better and, in fact, caused more economic inequality with his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The fond memories of the economy in the pre-pandemic Trump years were actually because of the rebuilt economy that President Obama left Trump.

Republicans and Trump exploited these voters’ short memories—many of the youngest voters today, don’t forget, were 15 or 16 years old during Trump’s presidency, and, like most teenagers, weren’t paying much attention to national news. Republicans exploited the lack of awareness among many about how the economy works, how Covid shocked it, and what Biden was doing.

Again, we could blame the media for this too, as I have many times, but it still doesn’t absolve these voters of their responsibility. They were warned many times in this campaign, and the truth was laid out for them. Many simply got caught up in the cult and became unreachable.

Millions of Americans voted for a man who will cause prices to spike dramatically when he imposes his 20% tariffs across the board on foreign goods. They will see members of their families, their colleagues, their neighbors and their friends, taken from their homes and sent off to camps to be deported. They will themselves experience the horrors of the Dobbs decision on women’s health, either personally or with regard to women in their lives. They will see their transgender family members or friends demonized and harmed.

They will watch discrimination against minorities—Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people of color—play out before their eyes, and sometimes it will affect them personally, as members of those groups themselves. They will see marriage equality weakened and may see entire departments of the government abolished—like the Department of Education—as Project 2025 is put into action.

Part of me wants many of those who voted for Trump to experience this as punishment—particularly those who voted on the economy and now will see prices soar from the tariffs. That’s how angry I am.

But I realize we have to fight to protect the vulnerable, no matter how uninformed they are. And the truth is, millions more among the groups that will be affected by a Trump presidency—the majority of most of the groups I mentioned—voted against him and for a new future with Kamala Harris. Many of them worked day in and day out to get her elected, worried about their own rights and the threat to democracy.

So, we have to realize that, while also realizing that the country has changed, that through a few votes here and a few votes there, Trump has remade his coalition and willingly got people to vote for his authoritarian agenda even as it will hurt many of them. We have to face that we’re in a different landscape, and our duty now is to protect people who will be hurt, stand for the truth, and still fight for democracy, as painful as this will be to do.

Grieving is important—and the anger I’m feeling is part of that—but in a short time we have to get beyond it because transformations will happen rapidly. As in other countries that faced authoritarians, we’ll need to be the pro-democracy movement. And we have to steel ourselves for the fight ahead.

Lots of people wondered why on earth Donald Trump accepted an invitation to speak at the Libertarian Party convention in Washington over the weekend, where he was booed and jeered as he urged attendees to support him.

The answer is pretty simple: He needs votes.

Some would say President Biden also needs votes, yet he didn’t accept an invitation to speak to the group. And sure, Biden, too, needs votes. The difference is that Biden, who would likely have been met with the same hostile reaction, has lots of room to grow and nail down support among his traditional Democratic base and among independents still on the fence or not yet focused. He doesn’t need to waste his time with desperate moves.

Trump, however, knows he’s hit his ceiling. Even The New York Times polling guru Nate Cohn, who’s come under criticism for his often sour analysis of Biden’s strengths as well as for the NYT/Sienna poll’s comparative tilt toward Trump, last week wrote about “the shaky foundation of Trump’s lead” (more on that later down).

Trump’s never received 50% or more of the national vote (he got 47% in 2020, when he lost, and he got only 46% in 2016, though the Electoral College squeaked him over the top against Hillary Clinton). He relied on third parties in 2016 to pull from Clinton in the three blue-wall states critical to his win.

But this year is different. RFK Jr., the biggest third-party candidate, is so far either pulling from Trump and Biden equally in several surveys or, more alarmingly for Trump, pulling more from Trump than Biden.

And in fact, RFK Jr., an avowed anti-vaxxer who spoke at the Libertarian Party convention just before Trump, was well-received by the group. In his speech, he went on the attack against Trump for his pandemic measures, speaking to an audience that is staunchly against government mandates of any kind. They cheered him on.

It’s unheard of for a major-party candidate—Trump is the presumed GOP nominee—to speak at another party’s convention. But again, Trump is desperate. Much of this was evident in Trump’s pathetic pleading during his speech, in which he begged for the Libertarian Party nomination—which was delusional—and said, at the very least, if they didn’t nominate him they needed to vote for him.

“Nominate me or at least vote for me, and we will win together,” Trump urged, as the crowd howled and scoffed.

“You have to combine with us,” he pleaded, “in a partnership.”

The crowd largely jeered and booed him, chanting, “Hypocrite!” and “No wannabe dictators!”, angered about everything from the pandemic lockdowns and running up government deficits to Trump’s plans to use the military against citizens and his promise to have the Department of Justice punish his perceived enemies.

Trump, not used to speaking to a group that isn’t full of adoring fans, made it all worse by lashing out at the crowd and belittling the party for never getting beyond 3% of the national vote in the past.

Needless to say, insulting potential supporters is clearly not the way to go in nailing them down.

The Libertarian Party, which claims to support small government and individual freedoms, is a mish-mash of people and ideals, and often hypocritical itself. Previous Libertarian Party candidates, like Gary Johnson, who was the party’s presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016, while supporting low taxation and opposing gun restrictions, staunchly supported marriage equality and abortion rights.

This year, however, those latter issues were muted, as a far-right faction of the Libertarian Party, the Mises Caucus—a MAGA-ish group that is opposed to abortion and which in fact invited Trump to speak—had taken over the leadership in an ongoing power struggle. To the consternation of many within the party, abortion rights had been removed from the party platform.

Still, in his speech, Trump stayed away from abortion, a staple of his stump speech, in which he ludicrously claims Democrats are murdering babies after birth. And while he did mention the “border crisis” that he would “end,” he didn’t make his usual promise to have the military round up millions of immigrants and put them in camps.

But that wasn’t enough to stop the crowd from booing him, even as his own supporters were in the back of the room trying to drown out the jeers with cheers.

Trump has seen what’s happening in the GOP primaries, where, for an incumbent Republican president (he’s a quasi-incumbent, having been president before), his support is weak. Nikki Haley has gotten a sizable portion of the vote, even after she dropped out. Those voters are people who aren’t happy with Trump. Many will vote for him anyway, but some won’t, as they’ve said in interviews, and that could hurt him.

Trump, unable to ever get above 47%, needs every vote he can get. He and his campaign also saw what happened in 2022, when polls predicted a red wave that didn’t happen, in large part because he’s a drag on the party. Either because of his pride after the way Haley attacked him or because he figures Haley’s voters, which include suburban women and educated voters, are gone to him, he isn’t even making a play for Haley’s voters—not yet anyway.

But he saw the libertarians as ripe, especially since some in the leadership supported him.

We also know that Trump, strapped with massive legal bills that are partly paid for by his campaign dollars as well as the RNC’s fundraising, is desperate for cash. He’s not done a big, costly rally in a swing state in a few weeks—despite claiming he was going to use his days off from his trial to do so—instead going to events like the NRA convention in Texas or having rallies in blue states (Wildwood, New Jersey, and The Bronx) close to the trial, where he also tries to raise money in small-dollar donations from attendees who haven’t been tapped out in the way those in battleground states have been at rally after rally he’s hosted.

So I imagine the Libertarian Party convention in DC was an opportunity for fund-raising too. But it turned into a humiliating slap in the face for Trump, a reminder that he is despised and hated by people who are also no fans of President Biden but whom he thought would provide fertile ground for him to pick up votes.

Trump saw RFK Jr. impress the crowd and actually get nominated at the convention to be the party’s nominee (Trump was not), though he lost among a big field to Chase Oliver, who is believed to have pulled votes from GOP candidate Hershel Walker in Georgia’s 2022 Senate election, where he ran as the Libertarian Party candidate, forcing a runoff in which Democrat Raphael Warnock won and expanded Democrats’ control of the Senate.

Oliver, now the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, could pull votes from Trump. And clearly, RFK Jr. impressed libertarians with his anti-vax crusade and was cheered at the convention. He could take some of their votes as well.

As the Times’ Nate Cohn noted, (in what I’ve come see as a sort of CYA piece after he’s done a few click bait pieces that make things seem dire for Biden):

There’s one big flashing warning sign suggesting that [Trump’s] advantage [in New York Times/Sienna polling] might not be quite as stable as it looks.
That warning sign: His narrow lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news, and who don’t regularly vote.
President Biden has actually led the last three Times/Siena national polls among those who voted in the 2020 election, even as he has trailed among registered voters overall. And looking back over the last few years, almost all of Mr. Trump’s gains have come from these less engaged voters.

Surely Trump’s campaign’s own polling is showing the same thing. So it’s clear that he went to the Libertarian Party convention desperate for votes, knowing that his support is very soft. And instead of getting that support he desired, Trump learned that he's reviled by many he thought would be behind him, and that he’s got a lot of problems heading into this election.

A chapter of the virulently anti-LGBTQ Moms for Liberty in far-off Pennsylvania is disbanding—with some members creating a different group under a different name—in response to the bombshell out of Florida that sent shockwaves across the country: Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler admitted to Sarasota police that she had sex with another woman, while her husband, Florida GOP chairman Christian Ziegler, has been accused of raping the same woman.

The Pennsylvania chapter’s actions are just one example of how the scandal is rocking an organization that began in Florida but now has 285 chapters in 45 states as of July 2023 and has already faced a stinging national defeat as Moms for Liberty-backed school board candidates lost big in states across the country this past Election Day—from Iowa and Minnesota to Pennsylvania and even Florida itself—as concerned parents organized to defeat this monstrous threat.

The last thing Moms for Liberty needed was a sex scandal that exposed the rot at their core and the duplicity the group is built upon, which its opponents can now point to in school board races moving forward. But that’s what they got.

And the Florida GOP is in turmoil that is not going away any time soon.

There have been calls for Christian Ziegler—who’s not been charged but has been under investigation for two months—to resign, including from Governor Ron DeSantis, as his presidential campaign, already destabilized as he trails Donald Trump by 40 points in polls, is now dealt another blow. DeSantis has been very closely associated with both Zeiglers and even endorsed Bridget Ziegler for re-election to the Sarasota County School Board, something she proudly blares from the top of her web page.

Christian Ziegler is defiant, so far refusing to step down even as a few Republican legislators in the state have demanded his resignation, joining DeSantis—which exposes DeSantis as exceedingly weak (in addition to being a hypocrite who has no problem with Donald Trump running for president with 91 felony charges and having been found liable for rape). It’s true MAGA form, a la Trump and even George Santos: never quit, no matter how corrupt they expose you to be.

But think about it: Even if the rape allegations are not true, Ziegler, a culture warrior and someone who holds himself and his wife up as moral Christians, admitted to police that he had consensual sex with a woman other than his wife and was in a three-way with two women. He claims that the woman, with whom he and his wife Bridget had sex together last year—something Bridget Ziegler confirmed to police—had consensual sex with him when he went to her home two months ago.

(The woman, per police reports and court records, said she agreed to have sex with both of them again, but when Bridget couldn’t make it at the last minute, she canceled, telling Christian Ziegler, “I was mostly in it for her.” That's when, she alleges, he barged into her home shortly thereafter and raped her without a condom.)

The fact that the religious-morality-obsessed GOP would accept Christian Ziegler staying on, promoting family values as an admitted adulterer and menage e trois enthusiast even if he didn’t commit rape—and that he would expect them to—shows how devoid of morality and delusional the MAGA-crazed GOP in Florida truly is.

Bridget Ziegler, meanwhile, is right now still the chair of the Sarasota County School Board, a radical board that was once liberal but which she and other Moms for Liberty-backed extremists took over, leaving only one liberal on the five-person board, a gay man, Thomas Edwards.

This woman not only created the group that injected hate into schools, viciously attacking LGBTQ children, teachers, and parents, and spurring the banning of books in districts across America; Bridget Zeigler also helped Ron Desantis write his “don't say gay” law.

And she was standing right behind DeSantis while he signed the law—a law that demonizes children and parents who are no different from her.

Whether she identifies as bisexual or not—and I couldn’t give a damn who she has sex with or how she identifies, if not for the hypocrisy—she was living a complete lie while harming others. Ziegler and her husband, using his influence as GOP chair, then promoted the expansion of the law earlier this year, making it even more restrictive and applying it not just to lower grades but for high school students as well.

DeSantis, who, with his wife Casey—bedecked in her 1950s dresses and evening gloves—has molded his image and their marriage as a traditional Christian marriage from some bygone era (which never actually existed), And they did this in tandem with their power couple friends, the Zieglers, culture warriors who DeSantis used—and who used DeSantis—to build up their stature and their clout, positioning themselves as morally superior, casting judgment on other people’s lives.

Christian Zeigler, as GOP chair, kept a tight grip on Republicans in the state, keeping them behind DeSantis as DeSantis bolstered Ziegler’s power. Ziegler, as a political consultant, worked to help re-elect DeSantis and worked on his presidential campaign. DeSantis appointed Bridget Ziegler as one of the five members of the board he created—the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District—when he passed a law stripping Disney of its self-control and putting it under the control of the newly created board.

And there was Bridget Ziegler with Casey DeSantis, as the governor’s wife kicked off her extremist “Mamas for DeSantis” group late last year. (Casey DeSantis later launched a national “Mamas for DeSantis” group to help her husband’s sagging presidential bid, including a video that was criticized as being grotesquely homophobic and transphobic.) Ziegler wrote on her Facebook page:

It was an incredible honor to host Florida’s First Lady in Sarasota on her Mamas for DeSantis tour, where over 300 people packed the room from Sarasota, Manatee, DeSoto, Lee, & Collier County - all pumped up and ready to work our tails off to ensure a re-election victory for America’s Greatest Governor, Governor Ron DeSantis!

But now the whole house of cards has collapsed. Ron and Casey DeSantis are running as fast as they can from the Zieglers—they have enough problems with Ron’s floundering campaign, and this could just do it in—but the Zieglers are defiant and refuse to get off the stage.

There have been calls for Bridget Ziegler to resign from the Sarasota County School Board. Florida GOP State Rep. Spencer Roach of North Fort Myers said not only that Christian Ziegler should resign “immediately” as GOP chair, but Bridget Ziegler should step down from the Sarasota school board, according to Florida Politics.

But it doesn’t seem Bridget Ziegler is going anywhere either—at least not yet—which is astounding as she has, again, admitted to having sex with a woman while she has demonized queer people as “groomers” in the role she’s serving in.

The Florida GOP has adapted to duplicity and weathered scandals—it was, after all, re-crafted by Ron DeSantis—so it’s hard to know if any of this will change the GOP there. But it’s certainly another opening for Democrats to drive home yet another issue that shows the GOP isn’t interested in governing as it promotes lies and hate.

And whether the Zieglers step down or not, it does look like their careers are going nowhere now—which is a good thing—as they’re now both radioactive. Surely Christian Ziegler was looking at running for higher office, and so was Bridget Zielger. Both were grooming themselves—and being groomed—within Florida’s GOP and hoping DeSantis would be a big boost for them in the future. But not only is DeSantis’ influence waning as the presidential run craters; he’s called on Ziegler to resign, and clearly there’s now a lot of bad blood.

Bridget, meanwhile, is an uber-hypocrite who now has nothing to run on since smearing LGBTQ people was her one issue. It’s an understatement to say her credibility is completely shot. And Moms for Liberty chapters across the country will continue to face the fallout, in addition to the resistance from an organized base of parents opposed to their extreme agenda and who will have more ammunition. It couldn't have happened to a better bunch.

Last week, Tim Miller, the gay Bulwark writer who was communications director for Jeb Bush’s campaign in 2016 but left the GOP, tweeted out that Matt Gaetz appeared to be “outing” the GOP Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Missouri Congressman Jason Smith.

You can watch the clip from Gaetz’s podcast here. Gaetz is extremely peeved that Smith attacked him for triggering the removal of Kevin McCarthy as House speaker. Gaetz played a clip of Smith saying, “Let me just tell you, if Matt Gaetz’s lips are moving, it’s only lies that’s coming out of it,” and calling Gaetz a “foolish liar.”

The vengeful Gaetz respondeed by saying Smith is the one who is “living a lie” and that every Republican in Congress knows about it:

Jason Smith says if my lips are moving, I’m lying. Well, you know what? If Jason Smith is breathing, he is living a lie. There might not be another member of Congress who lives a lie every day more than Jason Smith. And Jason Smith knows exactly what I’m talking about. And by the way, so does almost every member of the House Republican caucus.

So, there’s a good deal of projection in Jason Smith calling me a liar when it’s Jason Smith who literally has to live a lie. And I honestly pity him for that because you know, it wouldn’t be something that– I wouldn’t live that way. I’ll just put it that way. So, Jason, I would check yourself before you come at me with any accusations of being dishonest about what I say, when you’re dishonest about how you live and what you do.

So what do we know about Smith?

He has voted anti-LGBTQ for years—in office since 2013—with a score of zero from the Human Rights Campaign. He condemned the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision in 2015, saying he has “never wavered in my commitment to the biblical definition of marriage.”

Like most Republicans in the House, Smith voted against the Respect for Marriage last year, which protects same-sex marriage, and voted for the spending bills this year that added dozens of anti-LGBTQ provisions.

But unlike most Republicans in the House, Smith is 44 and single. And one of his closest friends in Congress for years—someone he traveled with on lavish trips—was none other than Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock, the closeted gay House member who resigned in 2015 amid a scandal that focused on his outrageous misuse of government funds, and eventually was indicted in 2016 for fraud and theft of government funds, among other charges.

Schock finally came out of the closet, announcing, “I am gay” in 2020.

Schock voted anti-gay throughout his time as a member of Congress—including against the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell"—even as rumors swirled about his sexual orientation. In earlier years, before becoming a House member, he flat-out denied he was gay, but during his time in Congress, he did everything to deflect from directly answering the question when asked.

When I approached him at the Republican National Convention in 2012 and asked if the rumors were true, he expressed outrage that I could even ask the question—but didn’t outright say no.

Asked on the floor of the RNC…to respond to those who’ve believed that Schock is gay and also view his vote against “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal was a vote against members of his own group, Schock responded, “Those questions are completely ridiculous and inappropriate.” He added, when asked if he is confirming that he is not gay, “I’ve said that before and I don’t think it’s worthy of further response. I think you can look it up.” Schock then walked off, abruptly ending the interview.

Of course, Schock was totally gay, as he would later confirm—and voting against LGBTQ people. And during that time, one of his closest friends in Congress was Jason Smith.

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Attention was brought to their relationship when the spotlight focused on the luxurious trips Schock was taking, often spending taxpayer dollars. As reported by The Hill in 2018:

Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) joined his close friend Aaron Schock on campaign and government trips and exotic vacations in 2014 that are being scrutinized by federal investigators looking into alleged spending abuses by the former congressman, who resigned in March.

Revelations that Smith, 35, accompanied Schock on the campaign trip come the same week The Hill reported that Smith has hired Schock’s former chief of staff, Mark Roman, who managed the congressman’s office at the time of his spending scandal.
There’s no indication that federal prosecutors have questioned or sought records from Smith, but his participation on trips now under criminal investigation could drag one of Schock’s closest friends in Congress into his legal mess and undermine Smith’s political image as a humble, salt-of-the-earth fiscal conservative. The news has also led to chatter on Capitol Hill, where Roman’s hiring by Smith surprised many.

That story also reported on a trip that Smith took with Schock to Brazil along with two other House members, most of which was paid for by the Brazilian government.

But after the official business, the Hill reports, Schock, Smith, and several of their male aides headed to the Brazilian beach town of Canoa Quebrada, a gay-friendly resort spot.

Smith and Shock also went to Argentina with their aides, and the Hill reported on how unusual it was for members to take their aides on lavish vacations:

Later that December, Schock posted Instagram photos of himself, Smith, Roman, and Schock’s photographer, Jonathon Link, hanging out at a vineyard in the famed Mendoza wine region of Argentina and whitewater rafting the Andes rivers of Potrerillos. Schock paid Link thousands of dollars in taxpayer and campaign money to snap dramatic photos of him around the country and around the world.
Many of those photos ended up on Schock’s Instagram account. Some GOP aides said it was odd for lawmakers to be taking their staffers on exotic vacations.

As noted, one of the aides on both the Brazil trip and the Argentina trip was Roman, who, as the Hill reports, many were surprised Smith hired as his chief of staff, since he was managing Schock’s during the time of the spending scandal. Roman has now moved up from being Smith’s chief of staff to being staff director of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, which Smith chairs.

All of this makes Gaetz’s podcast that much more interesting. Gaetz has been a MAGA supervillain doing what he can to take down the GOP establishment, causing complete chaos. And information is power, especially if it’s being used as a weapon.

I have no problem with the truth being reported about a public figure when it’s relevant—such as if that person is voting anti-LGBTQ. And Gaetz is actually outing the entire GOP here, noting that every Republican knows about Smith’s alleged closet—while most of them rail against LGBTQ people. I’d just rather see solid facts than innuendo used as a threat.

So please, Matt Gaetz, flesh out all the details, and let’s hear about all the other GOP hypocrites. We’re all here for it!

A report published last week by Andrew Kaczynski at CNN on Christian nationalist House Speaker Mike Johnson reveals his involvement with Exodus International, the notorious so-called “ex-gay” group that engaged in harmful and bogus “conversion therapy”—now banned in 26 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and more than 100 municipalities—which claims to turn queer people straight.

Exodus International shut down in 2013, apologizing for its dangerous “cure” therapy. It faced lawsuits, but, like other such groups, it also had one other big problem: Just about all of its leaders and others associated with the group consistently left the group and came out as gay. They would often then talk about the psychological harm “conversion therapy” caused, as major medical associations have emphasized, explaining that there is no such thing as “ex-gay.”

The bottom line: People who are so obsessed with homosexuality, to the point of being deeply involved in promoting “ex-gay” therapy as well as leading such efforts, are often trying to suppress something about themselves.

We’ve seen this with countless anti-gay politicians and preachers, too, from Rep. Ed Shrock and Senator Larry Craig to Ted Haggard and Eddie Long. A study of implicit bias published in 2012 concluded what many of us long thought: the most strident homophobes are often closeted homosexuals.

“This study shows that if you are feeling that kind of visceral reaction to an outgroup, ask yourself, 'Why?'" co-author Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, said in a statement. "Those intense emotions should serve as a call to self-reflection."
"Sometimes people are threatened by gays and lesbians because they are fearing their own impulses, in a sense they 'doth protest too much,'" Ryan told LiveScience.

Johnson, as an attorney for the Christian nationalist Alliance Defense Fund (now called the Alliance Defending Freedom and involved in high-profile anti-LGBTQ cases at the Supreme Court, including an attempt to overturn conversion therapy bans), worked closely with Exodus, in particular on an ADF project called Day of Truth. That was an annual event in which the ADF challenged LGBTQ rights groups by disseminating, as CNN reports, “information about what Johnson described as the ‘dangerous’ gay lifestyle.”

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Randy Scobey, a former executive vice president at Exodus who eventually left and came out as gay, worked on the Day of Truth with ADF—and worked directly with Johnson—and described to CNN what it was about:

“It was bullying those who were trying to not be bullied,” said Scobey, who now lives openly as a gay man. “That was one of the public ways that the Alliance Defense Fund worked with us.”

CNN’s Kaczynski reports on “videos put out by Exodus and ADF on their standalone Day of Truth website [that] featured two Exodus staffers speaking about how teens didn’t need to ‘accept’ or ‘embrace’ their homosexuality. The videos featured testimonials of ‘former homosexuals’ and ‘former lesbians.’”

And Johnson himself went so far as to make a video for Exodus:

One video featured Johnson, who was later quoted in a press release on Exodus International’s website ahead of the event, saying, “An open, honest discussion allows truth to rise to the surface.”
Johnson promoted the event heavily in the media—through radio interviews, comments in newspapers, and an editorial.

This comes on top of everything else we’ve learned about Johnson, from his fighting to keep homosexuality criminalized to his attempts while in the Louisiana legislature to allow for discrimination against same-sex couples and his sponsorship and introduction just last year in the House of a federal “don’t say gay” bill that would demonize LGBTQ students, teachers, and parents. As I noted in reporting on that last week, even a Republican Baton Rouge councilman called Johnson a “despicable bigot of the highest order.”

What is underlying this intense focus by Johnson, an all-out obsession with homosexuality? The words he uses to describe sexuality seem to be a key. Back when he was working with the conversion therapy group, Johnson described gay sex as a "behavioral” choice.

“I mean, our race, the size of our feet, the color of our eyes, these are things we’re born with and we cannot change,” Johnson told a radio host in 2008, as reported by CNN. “What these adult advocacy groups like the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network are promoting is a type of behavior. Homosexual behavior is something you do, it’s not something that you are.”

And just last week, in an interview with Sean Hannity, even as Johnson is now trying to do damage control and soften his background as a Christian extremist, he used the same terminology: “I respect the rule of law,” he claimed, referring to the Obergefell marriage equality decision. “I genuinely love all people, regardless of their lifestyle choices."

So he is still calling homosexuality a “choice,” just as when he was promoting ex-gay therapy. Anyone who believes sexual orientation is a choice has made a choice. (In fact, even conversion therapy advocates have expressed that, explaining they are simply controlling or managing “urges.”) They are either bisexual or they’re gay and suppressing it, choosing to do so (even if it’s ultimately futile and damaging). There are simply no two ways about it.

When it comes to human behavior, if you need to work really hard to choose to refrain from doing something—like eating a big bowl of ice cream—then it means you really like it. And when it’s something that religion has taught you is an abomination, you’ll go to extreme lengths, including oppressing others, to battle something deep inside yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with talking about this in regard to Johnson, especially as he is now House speaker and everything about him should be thoroughly vetted. And with so many indicators, journalists should continue doing the investigating—and not shy away from this aspect—and ask questions, including directly asking Johnson.

On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court decided to take up the case of a Texas justice of the peace who was sanctioned because she refused to marry same-sex couples based on her religious beliefs—and she’s planning to take her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wait, you must be asking yourself, Haven’t we been here before?

Yep.

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Kim Davis, you’ll remember, is the infamous Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples back in 2015 based on her religious beliefs after the Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell marriage equality decision that year. Davis was sued and ordered by a federal judge to begin issuing licenses. She appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which turned away her appeal.

Davis still wouldn’t issue licenses and was eventually jailed for contempt of court. She was released after five days—only after she agreed that she wouldn’t interfere with deputy clerks granting licenses even as she took her name off of them.

Lots of people thought that settled that. And perhaps it did.

But perhaps not.

Donald Trump, of course, remade the Supreme Court, which took a radical shift to the right. And Justice Clarence Thomas may have foreshadowed what’s to come regarding granting government officials the right to discriminate in the scathing statement he wrote when the high court denied Kim Davis’ appeal in 2015, a statement that was joined by Justice Samuel Alito:

As a result of this Court’s alteration of the Constitution, Davis found herself with a choice between her religious beliefs and her job…
..Davis may have been one of the first victims in this Court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision, but she won’t be the last.
..By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the Court has created a problem only it can fix.

So it was clear in 2015 where these two would take things if they got the chance—that is, if fellow extremists joined them on the court down the road—even though their argument was absurd and hypocritical. Government employees’ religious beliefs haven’t entitled them to discriminate against groups of people. In the case of clerks issuing marriage licenses, surely they couldn’t use religion to turn away an interracial marriage or a Jewish couple, even if it they believed it went against the tenets of their particular faith.

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Fast forward to 2023, and that is not so clear anymore. The current Supreme Court—with Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, put on the court by Trump—has ruled in favor of blatant discrimination, all in the name of religious freedom. And Thomas and Alito may now have the chance to “fix” yet another “problem” they claim the court created.

The Waco, Texas, justice of the peace at the center of the current case, Dianne Hensley, refused to perform same-sex marriages in 2019 based on her religious beliefs as a Christian. She was formally sanctioned by the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct. She filed a lawsuit, arguing her rights were violated under the Texas Religious Restoration Freedom Act. The case was dismissed by a state district judge, and that decision was upheld upon appeal. Hensley then appealed to the very right-wing Texas Supreme Court, and it decided on Friday to take her case.

Hensley’s lawyers at the First Liberty Institute, a Christian nationalist law firm with ties to corrupt, viciously anti-LGBTQ Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, are using the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last June in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, in which the court’s conservatives ruled that a Colorado web designer can’t be forced to serve same-sex couples seeking wedding websites based on her religious beliefs—even though no same-sex couple had actually sought the web designer’s services. Per the Texas Tribune:

Justin Butterfield, an attorney for Hensley at First Liberty Institute, has maintained throughout the lawsuit that religious liberty is Hensley’s right as a citizen.
“303 Creative affirmed that religious liberty is not a second-class right in America,” Butterfield wrote in an email to The Texas Tribune. “We look forward to vindicating Judge Hensley’s rights in the Texas Supreme Court.”

Dale Carpenter, chair of constitutional law at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, told the Tribune he believes this is one of a “slew” of cases that will try to expand the reach of 303 Creative. He seems skeptical that that will happen, telling the Tribune that the Colorado case has little to do with Hensley’s case because the 303 Creative decision applies to private businesses, while Hensley is a government official.

But will that matter to the Christian nationalist-friendly Texas Supreme Court and ultimately the current U.S. Supreme Court?

We’ve seen this Supreme Court spin out whatever it wants on a whole variety of issues, from affirmative action and abortion rights to student loan debt and immigration. This court’s motto is: Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

And we know there’s a will because Thomas told us there is—with Alito joining him—in the statement he issued in 2015 regarding Kim Davis.

“If Judge Hensley were to actually win this case, it would basically gut a good portion of marriage equality that we got,” Ash Hall, an ACLU of Texas policy and advocacy strategist, told the Tribune. “Your ability to get married then would be dependent on your ZIP code and kind of what resources were around you.”

Hall said the ACLU isn’t surprised by Hensley using the 303 Creative case either, and has expected such lawsuits would be coming down the pike. No one can predict what the Supreme Court will do. So we shouldn't be shocked if the court expands its abominable decision in 303 Creative to allow even government employees to treat gay and lesbian couples as second-class citizens.