that Trump's tariff insanity was probably the product of hearing his Nazi gangster daddy spout the nonsense I remember from what were already paleo-Republicans of the 1950s and 60s who claimed that if they had tariffs they could get rid of the income tax. It went along with the more durable desideratum of them funding the federal government through a sales tax, the more regressive the better, the better for the rich to keep the money they made through unillegalized theft. I'm sure that the infant Trump who I imagine already sounded and looked like Baby Huey * repeated such stuff and never learned what a tariff was or who paid it. I think most of his firm beliefs are things he learned in his childhood as a rich brat of a racist real estate gangster, imbibing the racism, the stereotyping of other groups, etc. and, like rich and stupid people generally don't, he didn't change much over the decades. I'm sure he could have easily imbibed the hatred of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in Queens in the period he grew up there. Even when I was first familiar with NYC, the levels of racism among even the college credentialed there rather shocked me even as Trump was already engaged in his daddy's crime organization.
In his war against Pope Leo I remembered that his fascist gangster father and mother were members of Norman Vincent Peale's church - the positive-thinkin'-prosperity gospel peddler married Trump to his first wife - and I wondered if, as I suspected, Peale may have been one of your common anti-Catholic Protestants which I found is something that occurred to others, enough for them to document that he was, in fact, one of the more prominent anti-Catholic Protestants of the period. He led a right-wing pastors group who issued their opposition to John Kennedy's candidacy on the basis of his Catholicism. As one of the more prominent of the media pastors of the time, his opposition was quite significant. I have no doubt that he probably would not have liked many of Kennedy's announced positions and those which a progressive Democrat of the period might be suspected to support.
Peale also opposed FDR and the New Deal, America's involvement in WWII (he was an America Firster), he told Robert Shaw that he didn't want Black People, Jews or Catholics in the choir at his church - something he reportedly regretted saying late in life - maybe like the Mormons deciding that Black People weren't second class as it became legally and so financially problematic for them to hold that doctrine.
I had known that Peale was a Presbyterian, a Calvinist, I hadn't known that he started out as a Methodist who turned "evangelical." Which didn't surprise me. I haven't got Anthea Butler's book on white evangelicalism yet but I'd like to know if she mentioned him, at all. I do remember that when Trump was running in 2016 and he went to his childhood church he asked the pastor if they were Christians, he doesn't seem to have imbibed any idea of that when Peale was the pastor there.
It's not a huge point but it might be a window into the vacuous soul of Trump as he targets Leo and his family for his goons to threaten and perhaps leads them to plot violence against.
* He certainly does now, especially in the pictures of the insufferably annoying cartoon duck with orange fluff on him. And that voice! I can't stand the sound of it.
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