Weekly Roundup: MAGA’s 2026 Blueprint

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you for our first weekly roundup of 2026, flying solo today. I took a week off last week. It was nice and, frankly, much needed, and convinced, with a great deal of arm twisting, convinced Brad Onishi to give himself a break this week. So pleased to be with you as always. Happy New Year.

Wish we were going to, I don't know, just sit around and sing Auld Lang Syne and maybe talk about things we're looking forward to in the new year, but we're going to dive into various things that confront us in the new year. As I'm sure a lot of you are aware, a lot of you experience, the New Year's a good time for sort of looking back and taking stock and also looking forward. I want to spend some time doing that today, talking about some of the things that have been brewing in the last few weeks, and just sort of looking at what they portend for 2026 and how we're starting the new year in Trump's second administration, as we look forward to things like the 2026 midterms, which are now this year. Here we are.

I want to start by talking about, you know, the really juicy topic of essentially taxes and budgets and public opinion. I went—I don't know why it came to me this week, but in my feed, an article came through, and it's an older article. It's from the summer. There's an article by Ian Berlin, and William Gale that was from August. So it came right in the aftermath of the passage of the one big, beautiful bill into law within the Trump administration. And it's an article that highlights some information that might be like, okay, yeah, no shit. But it's important information, and it's worth pausing on as we head into 2026 and looking back at what has been the signature piece of legislation within the Trump administration, really the only significant piece of legislation within the Trump administration.

The authors are writing in the immediate aftermath of the passage of his signature legislation. And what they're pointing at, what they're looking at, is how unpopular it was at that time. And I think that this is interesting, because we know it remains unpopular now. Everybody on the right, everybody in MAGA world will tell you when they talk about how the elections went, special elections in 2025, and if they're in trouble, and if they're facing headwinds coming into the 2026 midterm elections, they will all tell you that it's a branding issue, that the one big, beautiful bill did great things for America, we just haven't sold it well enough.

Well, it's been unpopular since before it passed. There's never a time when a majority of Americans were saying, this sounds like a great piece of legislation, let's put this through. And what the GOP can't consider, won't consider, is in denial about is maybe it's shitty legislation, and that's why average Americans don't support it. But that's what they're looking at, and that's what I want to sort of pause and reflect on here, because, as I say, the GOP still persists in this. This is still their narrative. The only answer most of them have for what are we going to do to address affordability, which everybody but Donald Trump recognizes is the core issue, is we've got to rebrand, we've got to tell everybody what a great bill this is, and so forth.

You got a few Republicans who've said we need to put forward another piece of landmark legislation, something big, something bold, and so forth. Doesn't seem to be much appetite for that. They know that they can't get Democratic support. And most in the GOP don't think that that's going to happen.

What's my point? My point is, they've been in denial about this since before the legislation passed. And so the article is a useful look back as we kind of look forward. And for me, the question is, why? In other words, why the denial? Why the inability to see it? Why the inability to recognize or even just come out and say, you know, we were elected, we have the majority, these are Republican principles or values or whatever and so on. Instead of, no, Americans just don't get it. It's really good for them. They just don't get it.

Remember, this is the same party that always mocks people on the left for being condescending and telling people what they should want and like and value, and they're not always wrong about that. There can be a pretty elitist strain of that on the left, but they're now trapped into exactly the same kinds of rhetorical ploys that they accuse the left of—of convincing Americans that what they don't like is something that they actually do like, and what Americans manifestly think is not in their interest actually is.

And the question for me is, why? Why this denial? Or why back something so manifestly unpopular? Back last summer, they knew it was unpopular, and nobody was walking away from it for that reason. Why back it? And now, as we get closer into the fall, as we've come through the fall, and now as we're coming into 2026, let's fast forward to something related to this, I think, in terms of popularity and GOP opposition. And let's talk about healthcare subsidies.

Why not? As a few battleground Republicans have said, why not just back them? They're hugely popular. People are worried about affordability, and this thing is popular. It would seem like, yeah, just take yes for an answer. Just back the things, pass legislation enacting or extending the Obamacare subsidies. Do something hugely popular, something that people know hits them in the pocketbook. Why not do that? Why persist in opposing Obamacare subsidies? Why persist in continuing to hold that this bill, this law now that people hate is really, really good for them, and they just don't understand it? Why?

And here's where the article comes in. Here's where the kind of no-shit insight comes through that I think is still worth hovering over. The authors note this. This is a quote from the article: "Scholars have confirmed"—and they cite this so you could go to the article, you could click on it, it will take you to scholarly pieces—"scholars have confirmed the legislative outcomes tend to reflect the concerns of wealthy citizens."

Shocker. This is one of those things where I think it's an intuition that most people have. Wealth gives you power in the United States, and if you have wealth and power, you are more likely to be able to skew the legislative process in the direction you want it to go. And it turns out scholars have spent time studying this and confirm that that is the case.

The article also notes data showing that there's typically a significant divergence between the interests and experiences of the wealthy and the general public. Again, no shit. All you got to do is look at the Elon Musks of the world or the Donald Trumps of the world to see that they don't live in the same world that you and I live in. They just don't. Of course, they have different interests, and the article has a bunch of bar graphs showing this and survey data and so forth.

Why does it matter? Why am I bringing this up? If it's an insight that I think confirms intuitions that almost all of us have, what's the point? Well, here's why I think it's important, because I think it explains a lot of 2025 and I think it anticipates what's going to happen in 2026 and I think it anticipates a lot of what's going to play out over the next year.

So the big, beautiful bill, it mostly benefits the wealthy. We know this, biggest tax breaks for the wealthy, for corporations and so forth, and that has been GOP gospel for half a century or more, sort of crystallized in Reagan and Reaganomics, supply side economics, trickle down economics, whatever you want to call it, that neoliberal economics, that economic model that really has sort of the Reagan stamp on it, that is still gospel truth in the GOP. And it is the idea that wealthy America is the real America. If you want to help America, help wealthy people. The real Americans are wealthy Americans. They're the ones who matter. They're the ones for whom legislation should be crafted. They are the ones who should be helped with the tax code and so forth. If you want to help America, help the wealthy.

So this legislation, in this regard, is just—this is one of those places where all the changes aside, all the ways in which MAGA populism has changed American conservatism, that basic tenet is still there from the last half century. The Trump administration and Trump himself, he has built an oligarchy cabinet, and he has built his model of America on aiding the wealthy and actively taking away money from everyone else. So we're going to see that as we go through today's episode.

How's he gotten away with it? He's done it by masking it, by appealing to culture war issues and fomenting populist anxieties, attacking trans people, attacking people of color, attacking wokeness, fear mongering about the border. All of those things are ways of getting masses of ordinary Americans, economically vulnerable Americans, to back a party and policies that will not help them economically.

And this defined the fall. This is why the administration refused to address ACA subsidies. I've talked about this before. I talk about it all the time. I'm going to talk about it again, and we're probably going to be talking about it in 2026 because there are murmurings in Washington that they're going to have to revisit the Obamacare subsidies, despite the fact that people are already losing their healthcare. This is why the administration refused to address the ACA subsidies, and Donald Trump can blame insurance companies, and that's a line that the GOP started trotting out. It's about attacking insurance companies, except they're the ones who insist on having a privatized healthcare system. They are the ones who insist that healthcare should be a for-profit industry. They are the reason there are insurance companies. So it's not about the insurance companies.

It's because it doesn't serve the interests of the wealthy. The wealthy are not served or aided by having a nationalized healthcare system. They don't need a public healthcare option because they have the money to pay whatever they want or need to pay for healthcare. They don't need subsidies for healthcare. Now, they don't need subsidies for this. They'll take subsidies for business, they'll take subsidies for development, they'll take lower rates on capital gains, they'll take deregulation. All of those things are essentially subsidies to help them make more money. They'll take all those subsidies, but they don't need healthcare subsidies, so there's no reason to support them. It simply isn't in the personal interest of the wealthy. And it's that simple.

Why does the GOP oppose Obamacare and the subsidies? It's for that reason. It is that simple, which is why it's just a bunch of noise coming from the GOP about reassessing the subsidies in '26. They had to do a vote on it in the House, and now there's talk that the Senate is going to have to, but that's just noise, folks. It's not going to go anywhere, because the GOP simply—to reiterate a point that I've made before—they simply don't believe that regular Americans who need help paying for healthcare are entitled to that kind of help. They don't deserve it. If you need help, and this is GOP logic, this is the logic of conservatism, and has been not just for decades, but for centuries. This is the logic: if you are in need, you are unworthy socially. Because if you are in need of something, it means, in somehow, some way, it's a moral failing of yours. You're lazy, or you don't work hard enough, or you don't actualize all your potential, or whatever it is.

So there it is. So I want us to think about that as we go forward, this notion that it's just about serving the interests of the wealthy. And this thread, I want to tie it to another issue that came out this week as a friendly New Year's message. If you want to look at Trump and the Trump administration and the ethos of them, just look at the way they approach things like New Year's. There's no happiness, there's no cheer, there's just anger and vindictiveness and so forth.

So as a friendly New Year's message, the Trump administration announced that it is currently freezing federal childcare funds to all states, and the ostensible reason is to crack down on fraud. Here's the two things that the GOP and Trump world will always throw out as the rationale for what they do: national security—that's a game that goes back a long time in America, certainly goes back to the second Bush administration and the war on terror and all of that—and the other one is fraud.

So the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, says that funding will be restored to states only after they provide additional verification that the funds are not being used for fraudulent purposes. So Jim O'Neill, who's the HHS deputy secretary, and a guy named Alex Adams, who's an assistant secretary at HHS overlooking these funds, said the states would now have to submit, quote, "justification, receipt or photo evidence before we make a payment."

Now, of course, it's unclear what evidence will be required. They just freeze the funds and say we need additional evidence. But there's no policy for this yet. There's no procedure for this yet. There's no mechanism. There is not yet all the work that goes in—if you've ever had to apply for licensure or renewal of a licensure or certification or something online, all the portals you got to go through and upload your documents, and the drop-down list of what documents are acceptable, and so forth—none of that infrastructure is there. It's a federal government that's been stripped bare because Trump fired everybody.

So they put forward this thing that to actually enact it would take more human working hours and more infrastructure, but they've also stripped away the infrastructure and the people who can spend those hours working and so forth. So they haven't explained what this documentation is, how it's going to be submitted, what the policy for review is, timelines, any of that kind of stuff.

We have talked about this since day one: the Trump administration wants to rule, not govern, folks. That's governing—all of that administrative detail stuff, that's what governing requires.

I was an administrator, a department administrator, for a while, and I didn't like it. And part of the reason I didn't like it is I actually don't like administration. I like people, and I like big visions, and I like things like that, but the day-to-day, nitty-gritty administrative details, I don't love it. You got to have that to make a government run, and they don't have that.

So what does that mean? It means that the funds are just effectively gone, because they're going to say, well, we need more evidence. Well, what evidence? Well, you just give us what evidence you have. Well, how do I give it to you? And to whom do I give it? You don't have any people for this. There's not enough people in the office. There's nobody I can talk to. There's no infrastructure.

So this is catastrophic, and of course, it's going to be challenged in court, and states are already saying that this is going to just gut their childcare systems that they have and so on. Where does it all come from? It all comes—the real issue, the start of this is the GOP efforts to target Minnesota and Governor Tim Walz, who we remember is a former vice presidential candidate. Walz is running for a third term as governor. The GOP is hoping to unseat him. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, remember him, one of Trump's buddies, he's running for governor. Trump is backing him, so they're targeting Walz. They're targeting Minnesota.

Minnesota has been embroiled in uncovering a range of fraudulent schemes in the childcare system. This predates Trump. There were prosecutions going on in Minnesota about this under the Biden administration. It's a longstanding issue, and there are real investigations. But that's not what got the GOP up in arms about this. That's not why they're targeting Minnesota.

What caught fire with the national GOP was a viral video produced by a right-wing influencer who claimed to have uncovered massive daycare fraud, and not just daycare fraud, but daycare fraud undertaken—you've probably heard about this—by Somali Americans and called for their deportation and so forth. So once this guy comes along, ostensibly uncovers this and ties it to Somali Americans, all of a sudden the GOP is up in arms about it.

Now other news outlets haven't been able to verify the claims of this influencer, though they've made it all over the news, but the claims themselves tied to minorities from one of the countries that Trump has described as a shithole, his words, that's all the GOP needs. So this has caught fire in MAGA world. So they've targeted Minnesota, accompanied by Trump's typically racist screeds against Somali Americans.

And when they first started talking about freezing childcare funds, everybody assumed that this was just aimed at Minnesota, but now it's expanded to a freeze for all states. And the other question is, why? What does that tell us? One of the things we know about the Trump administration is they want a pretense. They are looking to strip funding and rights from ordinary Americans everywhere they can, and they just want a pretense to do it. This gave them that pretense.

And let me tell you this, it's not about fraud. So I think this is clear in Minnesota, where it's about targeting a blue state with another political opponent as governor. It's just Trump and his vindictiveness. Once again, if it wasn't, they would have started talking about this before a right-wing influencer tied it to Somali Americans and, of course, linking it to a minority group, a dark-skinned minority group, that's just blood in the water for Trump and the MAGA crowd.

But what about the rest of the funds? Why not take the stated concern for fraud at face value? When you talk to Uncle Ron and he says, I don't know why you're so upset about this. I mean, it's just about fraud. We got to root out fraud. These people were defrauding Americans and taxpayers. Why not just take that at face value? Here's a couple reasons.

Number one, fraud is never a concern for the GOP when it's the wealthy or when it's red states, when it's their political allies. They're never concerned about fraud. And I think maybe more significantly than that, as DOGE confirmed—remember that Musk's whole thing, that it was a big deal for the first three months of the administration—fraud is actually really rare. You've heard it's another mantra, another article of faith on the right that fraud is rampant in federal systems, and when they actually go and audit these systems, it turns out fraud is rare, not non-existent, and Minnesota seems to show that, but rare.

So what's the real reason? I think the real driving reason is the GOP's worship of the rich and affluent. Once again, these funds largely go to people who need them. They're not going to people who are hiring private nannies. They're not going to people who won't qualify because their incomes are too high. They're not going for people who can handle a couple thousand, three thousand dollars a month in childcare costs, and it's pocket change for them. Those funds don't go to them. They go to lower income people. They go to rural people. They go to groups that are underserved for various reasons. That's who these funds help.

Once again, that's to say they go to people who are viewed as undeserving by wealthy Americans who don't need those funds. Those Americans, the MAGA Americans, the rich MAGA—that wing of MAGA world, the rich people—they view those funds as nothing but the poor and undeserving stealing their money. That's what those funds amount to. They're not concerned about fraud. The way to say this is they consider the whole system fraudulent.

I have talked to some of these people before in my life, and let me tell you, they'll say things like, well, they should just go out and earn more money. The people who get these funds, in their view, are undeserving. They're taking their money. They're wasting their money. They themselves are a waste. That's the view. That's what they believe, and that's what's driving this.

So the Trump administration, the GOP, they feel the same about these programs as they do about universal healthcare or the ACA subsidies. Those who need it don't deserve it. There shouldn't be ACA subsidies, because we don't have a responsibility to help those who won't help themselves, because that's how they understand poverty or people in need. It's the same thing with healthcare, and as I say, they're looking for a pretense. They want to strip benefits and money and rights from ordinary Americans. That's what they want to do, and Minnesota gives them a pretense to do it. So it's just a pretense to enact another GOP article of faith.

I think it also demonstrates again, and I know I've talked about this, but I think it's worth reiterating what I call the sort of cruelty calculus that drives the right. So let's assume for a minute—let's assume that we can agree, and not everybody agrees on this, but I think this, and I imagine most of you think this too, if you're listening to this podcast—that the purpose of government is to help the people of a given country. What does that help look like? That looks like a lot of different things, but I think it's there to help them. I think that's the purpose of government.

And so I think if people can't afford healthcare, you know, they're trying, they're doing what they can, and they can't afford it, or maybe they're disabled, and they can't work full time or whatever. I think the government should help them. Childcare costs are absurd, and it's funny, you don't even know where they all go, because childcare workers are radically underpaid, and they're doing some of the hardest work that there is. I'm all for supporting childcare and efforts to do that, and a lot more things—universal pre-K, all kinds of stuff.

Now, if you do that, if you have, let's call it a social safety net, is there going to be fraud? Yeah, there's going to be some fraud. There are going to be people who take advantage of the system. There are going to be people who, I don't know, claim kids that they don't actually have, or underreport their income, or say that they got a kid in preschool for a year longer than they're there. I don't know. I don't try to defraud the government. So I don't really know how to do it. But are you gonna have some fraud? Yes, you are. But that's the cost. It's the cost of helping millions and millions of people, and again, all the audits and estimates that look at this, the fraud is very, very small.

I would liken this to companies—if you have a grocery store or a department store or something like that, is there going to be some shoplifting? Yeah, there is. You're gonna take a loss on that. There's going to be some shoplifting. Or there's going to be some produce that you get that goes bad earlier. There's going to be some spoilage. And people write that into the accounts. It's the cost of doing business.

Well, if you're going to help millions and millions and millions of Americans, there are going to be some who take advantage of the system. It's just the cost. It's written in, and you should do what you can to get rid of that. But the cost of helping people is that little bit of a loss.

That's not a GOP priority. For Trump world, for the GOP, for American conservatives, that cost is just too high. So instead of dealing with the cost of a very marginal amount of fraud, we're just going to stop helping people. Another way to say this is there's two options here. There is pay the cost of some loss because of fraud, and the benefit is helping millions of people. The other option is just don't help anybody. Take away those benefits for millions so that you can recoup that little bit of fraudulent cost.

The GOP is willing to do that. They've shown that for decades, and they show it in spades under the Trump administration. Trump and his administration are happy to hurt and sacrifice regular people for the sake of saving a buck. If you were to say, okay, I get it, yeah, there's one kid out of 100—I think that's probably high, 1% is maybe, I don't know, say two—two out of 100 got 100 claims for these benefits, and two of them are fraudulent. But, man, you help 98 people. And, yeah, it sucks about those two, but gotta help the 98 people. GOP is like, nope, we're gonna help zero people, but there won't be any fraud.

It's the same rationale they use for taking away voting rights, economic benefits in other places, and here we have it. So happy New Year, everyone. We're going to freeze your childcare funds. Millions of Americans can't pay for healthcare now, millions more who couldn't because of the lapsed subsidies, all because the GOP worships money and worships the wealthy and serves the interests of the wealthy. That's their real America.

So on that cheery note, I want to conclude today's episode by looking at some examples, further examples. I think that they're tied in similar ways here. But to me, all of this, this notion of taking away people's healthcare, taking away their childcare—I mean, that's the gift, Happy New Year, folks, from the Trump administration. We're gonna take your healthcare and we're gonna take your childcare, we're gonna just take it away. To me, it's nihilistic.

I remember a time not that long ago, a pre-Trump world, when you have people like Paul Ryan. In particular is the one that always struck me. When you have the GOP, they always say that they're the party of ideas. Some of you listening, if you're of a certain age, you'll remember that—the party of ideas. The notion was always that the left didn't have ideas and that the right did. It's the party of nihilism. It's a nihilistic politics. It's a politics aimed at just simply consuming and feeding off of the body politic to feed the rich. That's all it is.

And I want to look at some other examples of this that have come through here recently. So in case there are any people who still hold on to the belief that there's any concern for real people within the MAGA universe, I want to look at a couple examples about the ongoing war on green energy that Trump in particular has undertaken.

So this is from a couple weeks ago, and to bring it up to some more current stuff, but a couple weeks ago, Trump ordered a pause on five large wind projects off of the East Coast. They say a pause. It's initially 90 days, I think, the 90-day comment period, that kind of thing. But these projects, barring court orders, they're not going to go back into effect. And as always, the Trump administration cited national security concerns.

And you might say, okay, yeah. I mean, I've read some things about this. There's some noise out there that maybe the wind farms affect radar signatures or something, and there could be a threat to that. And okay, so, well, Dan, you're making a big deal about it. Maybe it's not just partisan, maybe it's a real national security concern.

Okay, let's go back to the big, beautiful bill. As of this week, the federal tax credit for residential solar systems is gone. So if you're getting solar put on your house, there was a tax break for that that was set to expire in 2034, I believe. Part of the big, beautiful bill just nixed it. Doesn't phase it out. Just as of December 31, 2025, it's gone. If you didn't get residential solar by a few days ago—I'm recording this on January 2—if you didn't already have solar by December 31, you don't get the tax credit.

That's as the GOP attempts to address, quote-unquote, affordability. I live in a part of the country where electrical rates are sky high, sky high, in part because almost no towns or counties here have municipal power. It's all private power companies, and it's colossally expensive. I had solar put on my house a couple years ago. It was expensive, but long term, it's going to save us a lot of money on electrical bills. And I got the tax credits to do it. They helped me do that. It was a huge windfall. I needed that help. It's gone. It's gone.

So the GOP talks about wanting to address affordability, talks about wanting to rebrand and tout the big, beautiful bill, and what it does, all the while, anybody who's looking at their electrical bill and being like, you know what, it might be time. It might be time to try to get a solar array on our house that can offset the cost of this, that can pull some of that money back in our pocket from the grid. Nope. That's gone. As parts of the GOP at least acknowledge skyrocketing energy prices.

If you go around the country and you ask people what are your biggest bills when they talk about affordability, you're gonna hear a lot about groceries. Absolutely. You're gonna hear about gas, but you're gonna hear about healthcare and you're gonna hear about energy. If you go through most people's budgets, monthly budgets, healthcare and energy are a huge chunk of that. And there's other things. Those aren't the only things. There's housing, there's groceries, we can go on and on and on. And the GOP talks about the things they're going to do, but what did they do? They passed legislation making it less affordable and making energy more expensive for average Americans.

All this does, all that it does, is make things worse for ordinary people, and there's no national security concern here. So why? Why do it? It's just this irrational, nihilistic at this point, opposition to clean energy. For years, we heard that clean energy wasn't economically feasible. It's economically feasible. It's a growth industry. The GOP is the party that says they're about economic growth, but they oppose, and led by Trump, whose opposition to all things clean energy is literally irrational. There is no rationale for it. That's all that's driving it. This opposition to clean energy. It's economically damaging. It hurts regular people. It raises costs. It makes things less affordable. It makes energy more expensive. There is no benefit to it. You don't want to have solar on your house? Don't put solar on your house. Nobody's forcing you to. What's the rationale? There is no rationale other than opposition for the sake of opposition, folks. That's nihilism.

And then this week, came across this article that the Trump administration ordered another—it's not the first time it's happened, but it caught my attention because we're in the first week of the new year—another coal-fired power plant, this time in Colorado in Craig, was ordered to remain open. Why ordered to remain open? It was set to be retired. I'm not sure if that's quite the right term for it. I don't think it was fully decommissioned, but it was going to go out of service on Wednesday of this week, and the Trump administration ordered it to remain open.

Now here's the trick. This wasn't a public utility asking to keep a coal-fired power plant open. This wasn't a utility saying overbearing government is telling us we have to shift to cleaner energy models, and we have this perfectly good coal-fired power plant over here. We want to keep using it. Was nothing like that. The company was set to close it down. The company wants to close it down. It's in disrepair because they were going to retire it. It's going to be really expensive to repair, as I understand it. It's not even maybe fully clear what all needs to happen to bring it back up to a serviceable state, and the Trump administration orders it to stay open.

So this is the Trump administration once again. What are they targeting? They're targeting cleaner energy. Public utilities have increasingly gone to different models of energy besides coal, not for ideological reasons, but because it's cheaper for them to do it, and it is more sustainable long term. And yes, there may be some that have a little bit of a social conscience that care about the environment and so forth, but this is a shift. You don't get the language from the utilities industries that we used to get 20 and 30 years ago. No, this is just the Trump administration ordering it to stay open.

Now what will happen? They said that it was to serve customers, but this isn't going to help customers. It's not going to help them with costs. The costs of maintaining this plant and bringing it back up, they're going to be passed on to customers. And again, it's going against the wishes of the utility company. I don't know if it's a public utility company.

Why? What's the rationale? Again, it's just part of an attack on cleaner energy and Trump's weird obsession with continued reliance on coal. We talk about this all the time. When Trump says make America great again, we understand what that means in terms of race and ethnicity and xenophobia and immigration and all that stuff—the, let's call it the racial dimension. But he's also got that economic model. So why he's into tariffs. It's an old school, old, old school model of economics where he thinks tariffs are magic, and he talks about coal all the time.

You would think that he's going home and putting nuggets of coal from his coal scuttle into his fireplace. Trump is, frankly, an old man with an old man's nostalgia and an old man's awareness of economic and environmental issues. I don't mean that he couldn't have different views. He absolutely could, but Trump's not interested in educating himself, and he is stuck in the past. So he's got this weird, irrational, frankly, in this case, again, politically nihilistic emphasis on coal.

So forcing coal-fired power plants to stay open, it won't make energy cheaper. It's going to pass on cost to consumers. It's environmentally dangerous. It's a danger to human health. It's not economically sustainable or beneficial. More nihilism.

And then finally, related to this, in my view, this vision of nihilism—again, just to start off the new year—the Trump administration is slashing FEMA disaster response funds. Happy New Year again. FEMA response funds are slashed. People are losing their healthcare in droves. Environmental degradation is continuing apace, you name it. Slashing FEMA disaster funds, ostensibly about cost and waste, but again, this is going to just come at the expense of people in need. That's all it's going to be. Disasters are going to happen. People are literally going to be without any recourse or any resources, and they are going to be harmed by these cuts. And folks, regular people, the welfare of regular people, that's a cost that Trump is happy to pay, because Trump has never been a regular person. People in his cabinet have never been regular people. The people that Trump considers real Americans have never been regular people. They are not people who have ever been under real economic threat in their life. They don't know what that feels like. It's not something that's ever going to happen to them.

So they have no problem sacrificing ordinary Americans on the altar of their economic prosperity. None. This is just nihilism. That's the nihilistic politics of MAGA. That's the nihilistic politics starting off our new year. The willingness to burn down anything that doesn't serve the interests of the oligarchs or Trump's chaotic, irrational vision of America. That's all that's driving us as we come into the new year.

This is the same guy that has a press conference talking about the benefits of his beautiful, thin blood. That's this guy. That's the guy running the country. So not the most cheerful New Year's message. We'll be, you know, obviously continuing on in the weeks to come, and I think that we'll have some reasons to be more optimistic. But as we look at the Trump administration in the new year, it's a dark time. It remains a dark time. It remains a dark time because we have a nihilistic politics at the helm.

What's my reason for hope? Well, a couple this week. One is federal workers have sued the Trump administration for taking away their benefits covering trans healthcare, and so I think that that's a sign for a reason for hope. We'll see where that goes. Talked for months about the courts slowly catching up to the Trump administration. We'll see how that goes.

But something I found heartening this week were artists abandoning the Trump Kennedy Center. As you know, the Kennedy Center—Trump gets rid of their board, appoints a board of Trump acolytes, and then they vote to rename the Kennedy Center to the Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, or whatever the full name is. That's challenged in court. Apparently it requires an act of Congress to rename that, and they bypassed that. We'll see where that goes.

But as a result of that, there has been a wave of artists canceling their performances at the center, and there were numbers this week out about how their ratings are lower than they've ever been. So people are abandoning the Kennedy Center. I'm going to just call it the Kennedy Center. Or abandoning the Kennedy Center in droves. The Trump acolyte at the helm is lashing out and talking about how they're all leftists, and people should love art, no matter what their politics are or whatever. But people aren't buying it.

And I just find that hopeful. People see what's happening. People are paying attention to that. People are tuning out. I think for the Trump administration, this has got to be a concern as well. If they have low ratings, it means people are literally tuning out. How much will people tune out of Trump and the GOP in 2026, a year of midterm elections? We'll see how that plays out. But the Kennedy Center is a shell of what it was. And I think soon their offerings are going to be on par with TPUSA's promised alternative Super Bowl show, if you remember that. They're going to have alternative programming of entertainment during the Super Bowl. And I anticipate there should be some pretty low ratings for that too.

So I take hope in that. I take hope in people tuning out in a positive way to the Trump administration and in sort of walking away from what he's doing.

Want to thank you for listening. You've done so much for us over not just this past year, but the years before. We can't do it without you. So thank you so much. If you are a subscriber, thank you in particular. You help us keep doing what we're doing. As we've talked about, we've got some new initiatives and some new things coming out in 2026. Want to keep doing that. We do a lot of content. We do a lot of work. You help us do that. So if you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber and would consider doing that, would invite you to do so. You can also do one-time donations for us. Anything helps us keep doing what we're doing.

And we will be back next week with all of the things that we do: the weekly roundup, I'll have a fresh It's in the Code episode out, Brad will be doing his interviews, we will do the things that we do. We are here for you. Please let us hear what you think. You can find us at Straight White American Jesus on our website. If you're a subscriber, you have access to our Discord, and you can always reach me, Daniel Miller SWAJ, danielmillerswaj@gmail.com. Would love to hear from you.

And as I say in It's in the Code, please be well until we get a chance to talk again. Thank you so much.