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Thoughts and Prayers

Surprise, Surprise: Trump Lawyer Admits Stormy Daniels Payment

After a month of claiming that Donald Trump never had an affair with that woman, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen admitted that he paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about her affair with Trump.

In the most detailed explanation of the 2016 payment made to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, Mr. Cohen, who worked as a counsel to the Trump Organization for more than a decade, said he was not reimbursed by the Trump Organization or the campaign for the payment.

“Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement to The New York Times. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”

Of course, everyone knew that Trump had an affair with Daniels and had paid her off. Nobody ever believed the denials: Trump just denies things, hoping that the nonstop chaos he generates will make everyone forget the impeachable offenses we learned about the day before.

A couple of questions about this: how much money has Trump paid Cohen over the years? How much has money has Trump paid Cohen in the year and half since the payment was made?

It's irrelevant whether Cohen submitted a expense report with a "porn star payoff" line item. That's the reason the wealthy pay lawyers $1,500 to $2,000 an hour: so that they can make problems like these go away as quietly as possible. Cohen will just bill Trump an additional 90 hours for, say, "legal research," "discovery" or the old standard, "services rendered," and poof -- he's made his $130,000 back.

And despite what Cohen says, paying hush money to a porn star weeks before an election is a campaign expenditure -- an illegimate and illegal in-kind campaign expenditure, to be sure, but a campaign expenditure nonetheless.

Had Daniels' story about Trump banging a porn star without a condom appeared while his wife was still nursing their child come out immediately after the pussy grabbing tape, it might have been too much even for the soulless vipers that Republicans had become. It might have cost Trump the election.

It's all part of the pattern that Trump and his family use to buy off politicians and prosecutors to escape prosecution. In 2012 Ivanka and Jared's lawyer bought off the Manhattan DA with a campaign donation to avoid indictment for fraud. In 2013 the Trump Foundation donated $25,000 to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi's reelection campaign in exchange for dropping her fraud case against Trump University, as well as giving her a large in-kind donation of a campaign event at Mar-a-Lago. Other states proceeded with their fraud case and Trump admitted guilt in the form of a $25 million settlement. Pam Bondi screwed over her constituents -- Trump's victims in Florida -- by not pressing their case against Trump: they got nothing, while Trump's New York victims got compensation.

Any one of these illegal transactions should be sufficient to put these people in jail. But, as Trump loves to say, the system is rigged: the rich can get away with anything.

And this is why the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling is the most corrupt and corrupting ruling in American history.

Pulling a Putin

Donald Trump finally released his budget, and of course it massively increases the federal debt. When Barack Obama wanted to jump-start the economy with infrastructure spending in the aftermath of Bush's economic meltdown, Republicans refused, claiming that the federal debt was absolutely horrible.

Now, with the King of Debt as president, Republicans are now completely in favor of having the federal government go on a huge borrowing spree to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and a massive increase in military spending.

Trump ran for president on promises of extracting us from foreign wars. But he has increased troop levels in Afghanistan, and sent troops to Syria and back to Iraq. American troops have died in Africa on secret missions. Trump is on course to start wars with North Korea and Iran. He's starting programs to build new, smaller, nuclear weapons to respond to "extreme circumstances" and non-nuclear attacks. This is the same idiot who wondered during the campaign why we couldn't use nuclear weapons.

But the biggest lie in Trump's budget is the "infrastructure plan." The plan claims to spend $200 billion over 10 years. Notice how they always do these things over 10 years to make it sound like a lot of money? The budget is redone every year, so these 10-year budget proposals are a total joke -- it'll all be thrown out next year.

But Trump's budget actually includes $168 billion in infrastructure cuts to programs that Trump doesn't care about, such as mass transit. So Trump is really only proposing to spend an additional $3 billion a year on infrastructure, which is only a hundred miles of interstate or a couple of big bridges.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated last year that $4.6 trillion is needed for our roads, bridges, ports, drinking water supplies, dams, airports and mass transit. Trump's plan does absolutely nothing to address those needs.

What it does do is to privatize billions of dollars of federal assets, including airports, roads, and federal land. Trump is doing what Vladimir Putin did: give away government assets to his pals so they can get rich.

Trump wants to turn every interstate in the country into a toll road so his buddies can soak you every time you drive to work. Trump wants give his campaign contributors a private monopoly on airports so they get a cut every time you fly. Trump wants to sell federal lands --including parklands -- to Canadian and Chilean mining companies that will leave the land a toxic mess for centuries.

This is the very definition of crony capitalism and corruption.

More Bari Weiss, Please!

If the #MeToo movement is going to succeed, it's going to need more people like Bari Weiss. Logical, rational, civics minded....all traits she has in abundance.

Boo Hoo! Trump Feels So Sorry for His Wife-Beating Aides

Donald Trump is whining again about unfair everything is for powerful, rich, white men, and how their stupid and worthless wives are destroying their lives just because their husbands slapped them around for mouthing off:

President Trump on Saturday appeared to side with men accused of domestic abuse or sexual misconduct, following a week of turmoil surrounding allegations of spousal abuse against two male aides that brought the national #MeToo movement inside the White House.

In a tweet, Trump questioned whether “due process” is being given to those accused of wrongdoing and expressed sympathy for their damaged careers and sullied reputations.

“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning. “Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused — life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”

Yes, Donald, there still is something called due process. And these men have received it. They are still walking around free, and have not been charged with a crime, even though they abused their wives, multiple times. They are not in prison. They were never charged with crimes. Law enforcement is not harassing them or forcing them out of office. They either resigned voluntarily or were fired by you because they embarrassed you.

Their rights have not been violated: no one has beaten, bruised and bloodied them, or falsely imprisoned them. Which is not true for the wives they've assaulted and divorced.

These men have been paid big government salaries for the last year, even though they still only had temporary security clearances. That's because they were still being investigated by the FBI. They had access to top secret government documents even though they had embarrassing secrets that they could be blackmailed with. Secrets dark enough that, when revealed to the general public, forced them to resign.

Their terminations show exactly why people like this should not have security clearances and work for the president.

Yeah, Trump says these guys deny they beat their wives. That's so lame -- everyone knows they did it. How stupid does Trump think we are? Wife-beating is a badge of honor among these clowns. They brag about slapping the missus to keep her in line, just like Trump bragged about grabbing women by the pussy.

These men have no inherent right to work in the White House. These weasels sealed their own fates when they assaulted the wives they had pledged to love and honor till death do they part. These weren't one-time temper tantrums -- Porter has assaulted at least three women. Only now, years later, has he finally been held to account, albeit in the most minor way. Because we all know that by next week Porter will have a seven-figure job working as a lobbyist for some billionaire Republican or foreign government, because he has the ear of the president.

Working for the president is a privilege that should be reserved for people with the highest moral character and integrity. Not lying, cheating, wife-beating scumbags.

But when the president himself is a lying, cheating wife-beating scumbag with the morals of an alley cat in heat, the only people who will agree to service him are incompetent, corrupt and immoral thugs.

An Epidemic of Black Lung in Trump's Coal Mines

Donald Trump got elected with the promise of bringing back coal mining, an industry that has been failing for years. Trump blames renewable energy sources like solar and wind for coal's decline, but the real culprit is fracked natural gas, which is much cheaper and cleaner than coal. Natural gas is also technically far superior because natural gas turbines can spin up in seconds to satisfy shifting power demands, while coal power plants are big, slow dinosaurs.

Trump's big promise was to bring back coal mining jobs. But the problem with these jobs is that working in a coal mine is getting deadlier and deadlier. Miners are coming down with black lung disease (progressive massive fibrosis, or PMF) at an increasingly horrific rate:

"When I first implemented this clinic back in 1990, you would see ... five [to] seven ... PMF cases" a year, says Ron Carson, who directs Stone Mountain's black lung program.

The clinics now see that many cases every two weeks, he says, and have had 154 new diagnoses of PMF since the fieldwork for the NIOSH study concluded a year ago.

That a 50-fold increase. Black lung kills miners by destroying lung tissue: they literally suffocate to death. Last year NPR found that the rate of new black lung cases had increased 20 times, and it has continued to get much, much worse. The only "cure" is a lung transplant.

Why is this happening? Because we're running out of coal:

The NPR investigation also found that the likely cause of the epidemic is longer work shifts for miners and the mining of thinner coal seams. Massive mining machines must cut rock with coal and the resulting dust contains silica, which is far more toxic than coal dust.

The large (and profitable) deposits of coal have already been mined. Yes, there's a lot of coal in the ground, but it's spread very thinly now. It is much more expensive, dangerous and environmentally destructive to mine these inferior seams. Coal is already more expensive than wind and solar in most  parts of the country, and it's only going to get worse.

How has the Trump administration responded to this epidemic? The Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, has literally embraced Robert Murray, a climate change denier and mining executive. Perry's department bent over backwards to propose regulations that would have raised electricity rates for all Americans to give special treatment to coal mining companies.

This is the same guy who has sued HBO and John Oliver for defamation of character, for simply reporting the truth about what is happening in Murray's mines. The guy is a real-life Dr. Evil, as evidenced by an ACLU amicus brief for the HBO suit.

Trump promised coal mining jobs, but what good is a job that destroys the land you live on, poisons your water and and slowly suffocates you while your family members watch helplessly?

A Message From The NRA

The Great Bald Spot

Well, one of Donald Trump's coverups has been exposed: the man is bald. Here's the evidence:

For years Trump has insisted that he's not bald. He has maintained that the thing on his head is his real hair. But, surprise, surprise: he's been lying the whole time. Hair stylists say that it's just a bad weave.

Now, generally I don't make fun of things people don't have control of, like having to wear glasses, baldness, or obesity (which is mostly genetic and societal). But Trump has a long history of making fun of people for things they have little to no control of, like that disabled reporter he mocked in a campaign rally. Then he had the gall to call women like Rosie O'Donnell "fat pigs, dogs and slobs" when Trump is such a porker himself. And in the late 90's he ranted that then-current (and gorgeous) Miss Universe Alicia Machado was fat, embarrassing her in front of a phalanx of photographers. But check out the wattle on Trump when he kisses her (he just can't stop himself!). He was already a fat slob 20 years ago.

So Trump deserves every bit of ridicule he gets for trying to cover up his baldness in such a tacky and phony way.

Trump is ridiculously vain. He thinks baldness is a sign of weakness (Washington and Churchill were such wimps!). After his presidential physical we learned that Trump takes a drug for baldness: finasteride. This has a number of side effects, including many with which Trump is afflicted: confusion, bloating of the face and redness of the skin. And impotence!

Trump even went through a painful and obviously pointless surgical procedure to reduce the size of the Great Bald Spot  (a "scalp reduction"). Afterwards he reportedly yanked out his wife Ivana's hair and raped her (an accusation she withdrew when Donald dangled millions of alimony dollars in front of her).

Trump's hair has always been completely ridiculous. It's an obvious combover, looking like a helmet of hair-sprayed yak fur. Even his daughter Ivanka ridicules it.

Trump's baldness is nothing to be ashamed of or made fun of. What he should be ashamed of is how he insults other bald men, how he lies about his own baldness, and the ridiculous lengths he goes to cover it up, and how stupid the result makes him look. And he has so little self-awareness that he's completely oblivious to all of this.

That makes the Great Bald Spot a perfect metaphor for every other disaster in the Trump administration.

Will He Answer?

Please Do So, Mr. President

Despite all advice to the contrary, President Trump thinks it's a good idea to sit down with Robert Mueller and talk about Russia. I hope that he does. Let's consider both men for a moment.

Robert Mueller is a cool, savvy investigator with decades of experience in criminal justice. As the head of the inquiry into the Trump campaign's ties to Russian intelligence, he has been the consummate professional.

Donald Trump is an arrogant dumb ass.

Who is going to win this battle?

The Memo Was A Giant Yawn

After a week of breathless hand wringing, the GOP and Donald Trump finally released the Congressional Memo that supposedly illustrates how biased the FBI is towards Donald Trump. Before it came out, I was most amused at the notion that this was some sort of smoking gun that Devin Nunes uncovered in the deep, dark bowels of the FBI on a super secret agent spy mission.

THEY WROTE THE FUCKING MEMO!!

By this same measure, I could write a memo about how Donald Trump secretly formed ISIL back in 2011. Then I could release and claim that it was so. Sheesh...

After reading through the memo, I was please to see confirmation that the investigation into Donald Trump and his ties with Russia began with George Papadopolous and his drunken night of bragging. It did not begin with the FISA warrant on Carter Page based on the Steele Dossier. Carter Page was also under scrutiny long before the Steele Dossier.

So, the whole thing was full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Honestly, it's not surprising given the fact that Republicans are madly scrambling to somehow blunt what's sure to be coming this year: an indictment of President Trump for money laundering. 

The Stock Market Just Took a Giant Hit. Will Trump Accept the Blame?

Just the other day Donald Trump bragged in the State of the Union that he was responsible for the increase in the stock market. The market had just hit its highest ever value, 26,616.

Since then -- because of Trump's speech, or the release of the stupid memo? -- the market has plummeted more than a thousand points, to 25,521.

Will Trump accept the blame for that?

To be honest, the market is overheated and a correction has long been overdue. But the real problem is that the stock market consists of scumbags trying to outguess other scumbags. The market dropped because the Friday unemployment report was good and there have been some meager wage increases.

That raises the bogeyman of inflation, a fear Republicans falsely raised throughout the Obama administration. Inflation was always around the corner, they said, and businesses used that as an excuse to keep wages down.

Now that they think inflation's really here they're ready to tank the stock market. It's just a scam to get corporations to fire a bunch of employees, lower wages, increase stock buybacks and increase dividend payouts to shareholders to make their stock more attractive.

Whenever something good happens that benefits the people who actually do all the work that makes the country run, the stock market tanks. The second it looks like companies will have to pay workers more, the greedy bastards bolt or demand a ransom payment. And since CEO bonuses depend on stock price, they always screw the employees to make themselves richer.

That's why communism happened. You can blame Marx. You can blame Lenin. But no one would have listened to Marx and Lenin without the greedy bastards who kept forcing more work out of people for less money.

And the scumbags like Trump and his cronies are trying to force us down that road again.

Best Meme Ever

Trump's CIA Chief Meets with his Russian Bosses

While everyone was oohing and ahing about how Donald Trump managed to deliver the State of the Union speech without drooling or pooping his pants, further evidence of collusion with the Russians went mostly unnoticed by the media:

Two top Russian spy chiefs traveled to Washington last week to discuss counterterrorism issues with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, but the unusual visit also raised concerns among some U.S. officials that Moscow could interpret the encounter as a sign the Trump administration is willing to move beyond the issue of election interference, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.

Pompeo met with Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, and Alexander Bortnikov, who runs the FSB, which is the main successor to the Soviet-era security service the KGB. The head of Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU, also came to Washington, though it’s not clear that he met with Pompeo.

Naryshkin and Bortnikov are both subject to sanctions for Russia's invasion of Crimea and supporting the ongoing guerilla war against Ukraine. They should not have even been let into the country, much less be meeting with American national security officials.

It recalls the meeting that Trump had with Sergei Kislyak last year, when he bragged that he had gotten rid of the Russia investigation by firing James Comey, making Trump sound like some junior employee trying to impress the big boss.

This is unprecedented (or should I say, unpresidented, as Trump seems to think it's spelled). These three Russians are the sworn enemies of the United States, and Trump's national security apparatus is colluding with them.

The evidence that Russia interfered with our election and is continuing to attack American institutions is undeniable, yet the Trump administration totally blew off a law Congress passed to enact further sanctions on Russia.

Trump's Treasury department was supposed to draw up a list of bad Russian actors and sanction them, but all they did was copy and paste a list of Russian billionaires from Forbes' website, fifteen minutes before the deadline.

These people are not professionals -- they're middle schoolers cribbing their homework from the Internet.

Trump is selling this country out to the Russians, and Republicans in Congress are sitting idly by as the worst treason in American history unfolds before their eyes.

White Evangelicals, This is Why People Are Through With You

John Pavlovitz has knocked it out of the park. Here is the open letter, reprinted in its entirety and dedicated, with fondness, to Ed "what the heck" Heckman who trolled this blog for so many years as A. Noni Mouse and still obsessively reads it every day, unable to comment. Ed, your kind has reached the end of their time. Buh-bye...

Dear White Evangelicals, 

I need to tell you something: People have had it with you. They’re done. They want nothing to do with you any longer, and here’s why: They see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy. 

For eight years they watched you relentlessly demonize a black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity. They watched you deny his personal faith convictions, argue his birthplace, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence. They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him.

And through it all, White Evangelicals—you never once suggested that God placed him where he was, you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family, you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities, you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance, you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy, your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership, your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him, you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure. 

You violently opposed him at every single turn—without offering a single ounce of the grace you claim as the heart of your faith tradition. You jettisoned Jesus as you dispensed damnation on him. And yet today, you openly give a “mulligan” to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth—that the mind boggles. And the change in you is unmistakable. It has been an astonishing conversion to behold: a being born again. 

With him, you suddenly find religion. With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution. With him, all is forgiven without repentance or admission. With him you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart. With him, sin has become unimportant, compassion no longer a requirement. With him, you see only Providence. And White Evangelicals, all those people who have had it with you—they see it all clearly. They recognize the toxic source of your duality. They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities. They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus. They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself. They see that all you’re really interested in doing, is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it. They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus—not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth. 

And I know you don’t realize it, but you’re digging your own grave in these days; the grave of your very faith tradition. Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more. You’ve lost an audience with millions of wise, decent, good-hearted, faithful people with eyes to see this ugliness. You’ve lost any moral high ground or spiritual authority with a generation. You’ve lost any semblance of Christlikeness. You’ve lost the plot. And most of all you’ve lost your soul. I know it’s likely you’ll dismiss these words. The fact that you’ve even made your bed with such malevolence, shows how far gone you are and how insulated you are from the reality in front of you. 

But I had to at least try to reach you. It’s what Jesus would do.

Kickback Nation

The real goal of Trump and his enablers has now become clear: get rich off their government connections and government programs.

Trump, of course, holds all his events at Trump properties, making money off the government in the process by charging federal agencies for using facilities at his golf courses, Trump Tower and Mar a Lago required to provide protection for Trump and his family. Which is basically half the time.

Foreigners freely admit they do business with Trump's hotel in Washington to curry favor with the administration.

Michael Flynn cashed in on his position by selling access and influence to Turkey and Russia.

Jared Kushner and his family cashed in numerous ways, from selling green cards to Chinese nationals, to getting money from Russian banks, to using his phony Middle East "peace" initiative as a cover for soliciting cash from Israeli investors.

Montana business associates of interior secretary Ryan Zinke used his position to get an outrageously overpriced contract with Puerto Rico to repair the power transmission infrastructure, until the deal was exposed and canceled.

The border wall is just a giant scam to funnel Homeland Security cash into the pockets of corrupt companies.

Betsy DeVos is dismantling regulations that prevent for-profit colleges and charter schools from ripping off students, as well as screwing over students with gigantic debts to private lenders incurred obtaining worthless degrees from for-profit institutions.

When a photographer leaked a photograph of energy secretary Rick Perry hugging former coal execute and convicted felon Robert Murray, the photographer was fired. Murray was convicted of ignoring mine safety regulations, which resulted in the deaths of nine miners in 2012. Perry tried and failed to give coal mining companies a handout which would have cost ratepayers $12 billion.

The Trump administration is cutting staff at federal prison facilities, sending inmates to private prisons, which are more poorly staffed and have a long history of inmate abuse.

And, of course, the entire tax bill was a huge quid pro quo for Republican campaign donors, a fact which numerous Republican congressmen admitted. Republican Chris Collins of New York said, "My donors are basically saying, 'Get it done or don't ever call me again.'"

Congress passed a law that requires the Trump administration to impose restrictions on Putin and the Russian oligarchs who enable him for Russian interference in elections in the United States and countries like Germany, France and the Czech Republic, but the Trump administration isn't going to enforce them.

You'd think this last action would be sufficient to prove that Trump is directly colluding with the Russians. But Republicans in Congress are instead attacking the FBI with a phony memo.
This kind of backroom dealing and influence peddling is exactly the kind of thing that Trump voters said they hated when they talked about draining the swamp in Washington. But Trump is dialing up the corruption to 11.

The Force of a Gun!

I've been thinking a lot recently about the argument we hear all the time from the gun humpers about how their hard earned money is taken by the force of a gun. For the rest of us adults this is known as paying your taxes.

This argument has always irritated me because it's very two dimensional. The core of what they are saying is true. Not paying your taxes will result in your arrest. The problem is that there really aren't scores of IRS agents raiding the homes of taxpayers across the country. The gun humpers fail to note that years and years will go by with penalty after penalty being assessed until finally, perhaps, someone might come to your door and arrest you...if they get around to it. People who dodge their taxes are lower on the priority list than, say, a murderer or a drug dealer.

The "force of a gun" argument also sets up a cartoon villain in the form of the federal government that they can have an adolescent outburst against. For some reason, the gun humpers need villains in their lives so they can caterwaul about how unfair life is.

What I can't figure out is why they don't just fucking leave. Taxes are going to be around forever. We need them to help keep our country in decent shape. In fact, we need a lot more of them if we want to compete against countries like China. Like the teenager who complains about the rules of the house over his head, the gun humpers should be more grateful that we have such a blessed life in this country and taxes support this life in a very necessary fashion. Further, the gun humpers constantly wine about others who should leave if they don't like our laws.

Perhaps they should heed their own advice.

About the Anti-Christ...

When Barack Obama was president evangelicals were constantly calling him the Anti-Christ. Every time there was a natural disaster they said it was God's wrath for his and our moral failings.

But Donald Trump is a much better candidate for the Anti-Christ: he literally embodies all the Seven Deadly Sins, which I cataloged in a previous post.

In Trump's first term we have had more than 15 natural disasters that cost a billion or more dollars:

• Hurricanes Harvey and Maria
• Floods in California, Arkansas and Missouri
• Wildfires in California and much of the West
• Mudslides in California
• Record heat and cold across the country
• Drought in the Dakotas and Montana
• Dozens of tornadoes in the Midwest
• Severe weather in Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, etc.

Hate crimes against Jews and other minorities are way up.

Americans are killing each other in mass shootings at schools, churches and concerts with increasing frequency and bloodiness. Conservatives choose not to call these acts of terrorism, but bouts of insanity. Trump's ethos of "hit them back ten times harder" has inspired and validated outbreaks of vindictive rage among his followers.

Because of Trump's incendiary and foolish behavior toward North Korea there are serious concerns that we are on the brink of nuclear war: the Doomsday Clock has been moved to two minutes to midnight. Residents of Hawaii thought the world was going to end when they recently received warning of an incoming nuclear missile.

Trump says he we will move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which many take as a sign of impending Armageddon, when the Jews return to Jerusalem.

Then, of course, there's the non-stop lying and boasting that Trump engages in. The Anti-Christ, above all, is known as the deceiver.

Then there are the biblical allusions to the Anti-Christ. I'm no biblical scholar, so I'll leave that to the experts. Here's a post from "God Reports," a Christian website, entitled, "Could Christians be fooled by the antichist?"

In his second letter to the Thessalonians, Paul teaches that before the Day of the Lord the antichrist will be revealed. This coming world ruler will attract followers from all over the world with his magnetic personality.

He will be a financial and political genius.

In Daniel 7 he is referred to as the “man of sin, the “little horn.” Daniel wrote, “This horn possessed eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth uttering great boasts.”

He will be boastful and egotistical, a megalomaniac in his quest for world power. He will come preaching peace. But Daniel says, “through peace he will destroy many.” (Daniel 8:25)

His authority will be overpowering, his hatreds intense, his political techniques first rate. The news media will not be able to resist covering his every move and pronouncement – however outrageous.

Sound familiar? The above was published two years ago, when Trump was still battling the 17 dwarves for the Republican nomination.

It's completely wrong in its characterization of Trump as a financial and political genius -- he's an blundering idiot on all counts -- but somehow he manages to keep all these evangelicals in his thrall through some of demonic power despite the ugliness of his person, his personality, his sins and his words. . . .

The Two Opioid Crises

The United States is going through two opioid crises. The first is the proliferation of opioid drugs to treat every minor ache and pain. The second is the crisis of faith — or rather, the lack of a crisis of faith — in American evangelical circles.

Karl Marx famously referred to religion as the “opium of the people.” The full quote is:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Marx believed that, like opium, religion relieved their pain, but, like opium, it sapped their will, making them complacent. Religion reinforced the status quo, giving power to the elites (the nobility and capitalists) and prevented the people from fighting against real social problems.

In Soviet Russia the government took Marx’s dictum as a warning against a harmful addiction. The Soviets repressed religion, though Stalin’s 1936 constitution guaranteed freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

The Soviets never stamped out religion: they didn't tear down churches or ban literature with religious overtones, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Instead, the Orthodox Church was co-opted by the Soviets and made subservient to the government, but kept at arm's length. Religious minorities who refused to toe the line -- notably Jews and Pentecostals -- were routinely persecuted, imprisoned and murdered, with the blessing of the Orthodox Church.

When he came to power, Vladimir Putin recognized the Soviets' error: instead of suppressing religion, Putin has taken complete control of the Orthodox Church. He has in fact turned everything completely around: now his government goes after atheists and people who break a law that makes it a crime to "insult the feelings of religious believers." Putin has harnessed the homophobia and misogyny of the Church and turned it into official state policy.

The Pussy Riot arrests were just a taste of the theocratic dictatorship that Putin is constructing.

This did not go unnoticed by Donald Trump. Trump has never been a religious man. Every time he mentions religion ("Two Corinthians," "I don't bring God into that picture") it is clear he neither knows about nor cares anything for religion.

Yet he has promised American evangelicals the moon: more restrictions on abortion, the ability to discriminate against homosexuals, denying women access to birth control and any medical treatment they just don't happen to like. He's feeding them the opium they demand.

Trump's entire life history is a catalog of deadly sins that evangelicals used to rail against: lust (the divorces, the womanizing, bragging about sexual harassment), gluttony (he even lies about his obesity), greed (huge tax cuts for himself, the casino gambling, "My whole life I've been greedy, greedy with money"), sloth (exercise uses up finite energy), wrath ("Get even with people"), the envy (the constant obsession with his wealth compared to others), and of course, pride: he can't go five minutes without bragging about himself in the most expansive terms possible, and demands everyone around him constantly shower him with empty praises.

Yet some American evangelicals claim that Trump was ordained by God to be president. When it came to light that he paid a porn star $130,000 to keep quiet about having sex with him just after Melania gave birth to their son, Tony Perkins of the conservative Family Research Council said, "Yes, evangelicals, conservatives, they gave him a mulligan. They let him have a do-over. They said we'll start afresh with you and we'll give you a second chance."

But it's not a second chance. It's the hundredth or thousandth chance: almost every day there's another story of Trump's egregious moral failings, from outright lies, to constant vulgarity, to sexual predation, to banging porn stars, to casual racism, to normalizing Nazis, to giving himself gigantic tax cuts to the elites that Trump promised to take down.

Are evangelicals so doped up on opiods and religion that they can't see they've made a bargain with the devil?