Deaf, Dumb and Blind

As George Carlin said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that.” Yeah, and think of how 80% of Evangelical Christians voted for Trump in 2016, and again in 2024. An NBC poll shows 71% of Republicans identify as MAGA, up from 55% before the 2024 election. 36% of American voters are now MAGA, up from 29%. Trump supporters are less educated, on average, and years of education are strongly correlated with IQ. Post-2024 election research shows that Christian support was crucial in Donald Trump’s 2024 landslide victory, showing that Christians made up 72% of the electorate and gave Trump 56% of their vote. Although Harris won a larger share of the non-Christian vote than Trump’s share of the Christian votes, Christians outnumbered non-Christian voters by more than a five-to-two margin—delivering the decisive Nov. 5 victory to President Trump. Wikipedia says that anywhere from 6 to 35% of the United States population is evangelical, depending on how "evangelical" is defined.

Socially conservative evangelical Protestantism has a major cultural influence in the Bible Belt, covering almost all of the Southern United States, including all states that fought against the Union in the Civil War. In 2007 Barna Group reported that 8% of adult Americans were born-again evangelicals, defined as those who answered yes to these nine questions:

1. "Have you made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today?"

2. "Do you believe that when you die you will go to Heaven because you have confessed your sins and have accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?"

3. "Is your faith very important in your life today?"

4. "Do you have a personal responsibility to share your religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians?"

5. "Does Satan exist?"

6. "Is eternal salvation possible only through grace, not works?"

7. "Did Jesus Christ live a sinless life on earth?"

8. "Is the Bible accurate in all that it teaches?"

9. "Is God the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today?"

The most relevant one here is Number 8. It seems apparent that most non-rich Trump supporters who are self-described Christians are also Bible literalists. Can anyone dispute that they are, by definition, of low intelligence? The dumbing-down of the American citizenry has been coincident with the increasing sophistication of televised advertising and entertainment, especially since the Reagan years. It is also linked to the poor level of civics education schools now provide. Children who grew up in the 50’s and 60s took Civics class, and knew enough to recognize Trump’s threat to democracy and US government stability.

Throw into the mix the charlatans who are leading these people, like Lance Wallnau, the oil-industry marketer turned entrepreneurial theologian who is the leading prophet and strategist of the rapidly growing New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a revivalist campaign. He claims to have heard the Holy Spirit in 2015, telling him that the 45th chapter of the Book of Isaiah would reveal the identity of the 45th president, then consulted the text—which is about the pagan king Cyrus anointed by God to rescue Jews from captivity in Babylon—and concluded that the ‘heathen from Queens’ had been similarly anointed.

In 2021, I was persuaded by the dumbest relative I know (born and raised in the Northeast) to attend his evangelical church service. During the ten minutes that I could stand listening to him, he reminded his flock to read a section of the Bible about King Cyrus, who had never once been mentioned during the few years of my youth that I was forced to attend weekly catechism classes at the local Catholic School. I’m not sure if he even knows that King Cyrus is code-speak for Trump, or if he gets his sermon outlines from some kind of head office. This relative who, by his own admission, nearly flunked out of grade school, had been “saved” while a student at a state university in 1996, and soon thereafter became a pastor. In the 2000s, he told me how he had told a member of his flock that, if she opposed legal abortion, she “had to” vote for George W. Bush.

The way the MAGA base has instantly, repeatedly accepted many of Trump’s accusations about the previous administrations being the cause of their problems made it obvious that his core constituency had no understanding of how the legislative, executive and judicial branches operate, what their responsibilities are, and how they keep each other in check.

Trump’s April 8, 2025, executive order, “Protecting American Energy from State Overreach,” reads less like policy and more like a case study in pathological grandiosity and cognitive distortion. This edict, a brazen assault on the planet’s future, slipped under the radar, overshadowed by Trump’s louder acts of self-sabotage—wrecking the economy, defying court orders, and dismantling habeas corpus with the reckless abandon of a man untethered from reality. These distractions, whether calculated or compulsive, serve a dual purpose: they feed his insatiable need for attention while shielding his quieter, equally destructive loyalty to big oil donors, whose financial fealty ensures they’ll never face a jury for their role in climate catastrophe.

Trump’s order seeks to obliterate states’ rights to regulate pollution and protect their natural resources, a direct attack on federalism rooted in the Tenth Amendment. His directive to Attorney General Pam Bondi—to sue states and cities for daring to enforce climate laws, from car emission standards to factory regulations—proclaiming that Americans must “heat their homes, fuel their cars, and have peace of mind” free from supposedly more costly green policies, betrays a delusional disconnect from reality: renewable energy, driven by technological advances, is now cheaper and more reliable than coal. Yet Trump clings to fossil fuels, not out of reason but out of a symbiotic bond with his donor class.

His rejection of climate science—despite near-universal consensus that carbon emissions drive escalating hurricanes, floods, and wildfires—echoes the defense mechanisms of an individual shielding a fragile ego from inconvenient truths. His order’s assault on state-led climate efforts, which experts call the last hope for timely mitigation, suggests a refusal to engage with long-term consequences, a hallmark of impulsivity and short-term reward-seeking. By fast-tracking fossil fuel expansion, gutting EPA protections, and killing wind energy projects, Trump externalizes the costs of his denial onto future generations, a classic maneuver of displacing guilt onto the powerless.

The fossil fuel industry, too, exhibits its own pathology. After decades of gaslighting the public with anti-science propaganda, many CEOs now admit their products fuel climate destruction, some even labeling it an “urgent threat.” Yet their pivot to green energy investments while slow-walking mitigation reeks of strategic narcissism—acknowledging the problem just enough to dodge accountability while maximizing profits. Trump’s order, born from March meetings with these oil barons seeking protection from “polluters pay” lawsuits, is a quid pro quo that betrays a shared pathology: both the president and his donors prioritize self-interest over collective survival.

The media’s role in this saga reflects a societal attention deficit disorder, amplifying Trump’s chaos while neglecting the creeping threat of climate policy sabotage. Coverage fixates on the visceral—boats on roofs in Florida, wildfire scars across the Rockies, Phoenix’s early 100-degree days in 2025—but shies away from the causal threads of carbon emissions and regulatory failures. This sensationalist bias, catering to a public conditioned for instant gratification, mirrors Trump’s own inability to sustain focus on abstract, systemic issues like climate law or the Tenth Amendment’s grant of state police powers to curb pollution. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Federal Power Act, which empower states to set stringent standards and choose their energy sources, are not just legal frameworks but bulwarks of public health—yet Trump’s order seeks to dismantle them, revealing a cognitive blind spot where governance is mistaken for personal fiat.

Trump’s broader pattern of executive orders—on immigration, tariffs, and now climate—suggests a profound deficit in perspective-taking and intellectual humility. His ignorance of state-federal dynamics, despite prior presidential experience, points to a rigid cognitive style, resistant to learning or adaptation. The $38 trillion annual cost of climate disasters, as estimated by Forbes, is a burden he deflects onto states and cities, accusing them of “extortion” while shielding oil tycoons from liability. This projection of blame underscores a refusal to internalize responsibility, a trait that endangers not just policy but the social contract itself.

The human toll—lives, homes, and businesses lost to intensifying disasters—looms largest for future generations. The Sunrise Movement’s leader decries the order as “an illegal, disgusting attempt to force everyday people to pay for the rising toll of climate disasters, while shielding the richest people in the world from accountability.” Trump’s actions, driven by avarice above all, sacrifice the vulnerable to appease the powerful, leaving a legacy of environmental and moral wreckage. He’s not a leader so much as a symptom—of denial, greed, hatred and, at base, terminal stupidity.