Look over there! (While democracy burns)

Hello,

Athanasius of Alexandria spent his life defending the divinity of Jesus Christ – the idea that Christ is also God. His insistence on that point, a key Catholic belief, saw him exiled multiple times before his death on 2 May 373. Athanasius was made a saint for his efforts, and the Catholic church celebrates the Memorial of St Athanasius on the date of his death every year.

Imagine how hacked off Athanasius would be, then, to find out that instead of Catholics spending 2 May toasting and cheering him, the day descended into many of them expressing outrage after Donald Trump posted a photo online imagining himself as the pope.

It was just the latest move by Trump in a whirlwind few days in which it seemed, at times, like he was just deliberately looking for new ways to offend people and provoke outrage.

There was his insistence, in the face of concerns about the impact of his trade war, that children only need five pencils and “a beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old” should just have three or four dolls, rather than 30. Then there was his announcement that he was going to reopen Alcatraz – a move that some noticed came after the movie Escape from Alcatraz was shown on his local TV network in Florida.

It’s all pretty horrible stuff, but hopefully Americans aren’t letting the talk of dolls and popes distract them from what else has been going on.

There’s the case, for example, of Trump saying he doesn’t know whether, as president, he needs to uphold the constitution of the United States – just months after he took an oath at the inauguration to do just that. That came as Trump continued to push for his right to deport people from the US without due process, despite the constitution saying otherwise, and courts ruling otherwise.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration can now enforce its ban on transgender people serving in the military, following a ruling from the conservative-dominated supreme court. And also meanwhile, experts have warned that Americans’ health is at risk after Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it would slash its budget and gut its scientific research arm, which, among other things, helped develop guidelines for safe water policy.

That comes as autism researchers and advocates are pushing back against the US Department of Health and Human Services’ plan to create a national autism database – something which one parent of autistic children said could be a “slippery slope to eugenics”. And as experts warned that Trump’s cuts to disaster management will lead to more deaths in extreme weather events, earthquakes and pandemics.

There is also the looming threat that Republicans will cut Medicaid, the government program which provides free healthcare to low-income Americans, to pay for Trump’s tax cuts and mass deportation program.

This is all happening as Trump is waging a war on journalists, whose job is to report on the impact of all these policies. The president has cut funding for public broadcasters, and is suing CBS over its flagship 60 Minutes news show. The government’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates the media, is investigating ABC News and NBC over their 2024 election coverage, while Trump last week called for pollsters for the New York Times, ABC News, the Washington Post and Fox News to be “investigated for election fraud”.

Through his bungling foreign and economic policies, it has become apparent that Trump does not know much about the Art of the Deal. But he does appear to have mastered the art of shouting “Look over there!” while he sets about tearing apart American traditions and institutions.

What would Athanasius think of all this? I dunno, I never met the man. But if he was anything like the majority of Americans, he would view Trump’s first 100 days as a failure.