Former President Donald Trump speaks during his campaign rally on the beach in Wildwood, Saturday, May 11, 2024. (Tim Hawk for New Jersey Monitor)

Donald Trump took the stage in Racine, Wisconsin, Tuesday afternoon crowing the praises of  Milwaukee, a week after he was reported to have said the city where the Republican National Convention will take place in July “is a horrible city.”

At an outdoor arena in Downtown Racine on the shores of Lake Michigan, Trump went on to spend an hour and a half describing President Joe Biden’s presidency as a disaster that he will end if voters return him to the White House in November after a four-year absence.

“We were respected all over the world. None of this stuff would have been happening that’s happened now, with Russia and Ukraine and the attack on Israel,”  Trump declared.

“We’re going to make it better and bigger and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “But you had a president who put America first — I put America first. They don’t put — under kooky Joe Biden the world is in flames, our border is overrun, inflation is raging, Europe is in total chaos, the Middle East is exploding, Iran is emboldened, China is on the march, and the worst, most incompetent, most corrupt president in history is going to drag us into World War III.”

Well into his speech, Trump ticked off a couple of hot-button topics — mocking transgender athletes competing on women’s teams and vowing as president to deny funding to any school district with vaccine mandates.

And throughout he returned to the claim that the 2020 election, which Biden won by 21,000 votes in Wisconsin and 7 million votes nationwide, was rife with voter fraud, a charge that has been repeatedly refuted.

But the bulk of his speech returned again and again to immigration as he reeled off debunked claims about the flow of immigrants into the U.S. across the southern border. Trump also rewrote the economic and public health history of his last year in office and amplified false claims about Biden’s mental acuity.

A day of firsts

The adulation for Milwaukee with which Trump opened his speech marked his latest pivot on the subject of the RNC convention city since his comment calling it “a horrible city” in a closed-door meeting with Republican members of Congress a week ago. Trump initially admitted the comment, saying he was speaking of crime and the city’s 2020 vote count, which he lost decisively, and several of the Wisconsin representatives present corroborated the choice of words.

Trump later denied the account on his social media platform, however. And Tuesday he declared, “I love Milwaukee,” as supporters cheered. “I was the one that picked Milwaukee,” Trump claimed. “I was the one that had these nice people that, they say, ‘Oh he doesn’t like Milwaukee.’ I love Milwaukee. I said you’ve got to fix the crime. We all know that you’ve got to make sure the election’s honest. But I’m the one that picked Milwaukee.”

While Milwaukee city and civic leaders conducted an aggressive campaign to make the city the GOP convention site, its selection was all but assured after the city of Nashville withdrew from the competition.

Trump had planned to spend his nights during the convention at the Trump hotel in Chicago, according to the New York Times, citing three people who had been briefed on Trump’s logistics. “That changed midafternoon on Tuesday, after reporters for The New York Times and an ABC station in Chicago contacted his campaign for comment,” the Times reported.

The Racine visit marked the first time Trump addressed the Milwaukee “horrible city” claim in Wisconsin — just one of three firsts for the former president.

It was also Trump’s first visit to Racine County since 2018, when he joined then-Gov. Scott Walker at a groundbreaking for the Foxconn development that Trump promised would be the “eighth wonder of the world.” Despite a deal giving the company $700 million in local taxpayer funds and a prospective $3 billion in tax credits, Foxconn never achieved its promise to  employ 13,000 people. Trump made no mention of Foxconn Tuesday.

That fulfilled a prediction that Kelly Gallaher, chair of the Racine County Democrats and a long-time critic of the Foxconn project made earlier in the day.

“I would not be surprised if he doesn’t actually mention it at all,” Gallaher said after a press conference Democrats held to deliver a counter message to Trump’s visit. “It’s the whopper of failed projects.”

The Democratic Party bought time on an electronic billboard visible to southbound drivers through Racine County on Interstate 94. Alternating messages played on Trump’s “horrible” comment and contrasted the loss of jobs in Wisconsin when Trump was in office against job growth under Biden.

Rep. Greta Neubauer (D-Racine), said that Microsoft’s investment in the Foxconn site, putting a $3.3 billion data center on some of the land originally developed as part of the Foxconn project, “would not have happened without Joe Biden and his work on the CHIPS Act” — a 2022 bill to boost domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and other high tech components.

The Biden administration has also directed federal support for community health, electric buses and violence prevention to the community, Neubauer said.

“Racine is a working class and middle class community, and we need President Joe Biden who will look out for us rather than Donald Trump, who is only running for president to enrich himself and his friends and the wealthiest people in this country,” she said.  “I’ve been out knocking on doors and talking to people in Racine County and I think that they understand that President Biden is fighting for them.”

Criminal indictments ‘a badge of honor’

Tuesday was also Trump’s first visit to Wisconsin since he was convicted of 34 felony counts by a New York City jury for falsifying business records to disguise hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 presidential election outcome.

Trump blamed his conviction — on charges of violating New York law and brought by a New York prosecutor — on a “weaponized” U.S. Justice Department that had no role in the case.  Returning to the subject later, he boasted about the number of criminal cases still pending against him.

“Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of honor,” Trump said. “Remember, I got indicted more than Alphonse Capone.”

After riffing on the 1930s Chicago mobster’s reputation for brutality, Trump said, “Never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never ever let them take away your freedom. That’s why they want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.”

Immigration took up more than half of the speech, however, with Trump asserting that “this is an invasion of our country.”

He attacked the executive order that Biden announced earlier Tuesday, which provides protections from deportation for long-term undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens as well as faster work permit approvals for people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Trump claimed the Biden administration policies were a ploy to flood the voter rolls with noncitizens — a claim that in January PolitiFact assigned its most extreme rating for falsehood, “Pants on Fire!”

“Inflation has killed our economy,” Trump said, asserting that inflation “was 10 for the last couple of years.”

“And if you add different categories, I think inflation is between 40 and 50%,” he said. “They say it’s at 22%, 22% — a lot,” he said, although who “they” are wasn’t clear in context. “That’s a record, but I think you could double it.”

According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, inflation spiked to just under 9% in June 2022 and has been falling since then, reaching 3% in February.

When he was president, “we had gasoline down to $1.87 a gallon,” Trump said.

According to the federal Energy Information Agency gas prices in late April 2020 dropped below $1.80 a gallon. That was also when the U.S. registered a record low in monthly vehicle travel, coinciding with the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic during which much of the population stayed home.

Trump also gave shoutouts to former Govs. Tommy Thompson, who gave a fiery introduction, and Scott Walker, as well as Republican U.S. Reps. Glenn Grothman, Derrick Van Orden and Bryan Steil. He attacked Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who is running for a third term, and gave Eric Hovde, the likely Republican nominee to challenge her, a three-minute time slot.

“All of you and you are gonna fire Joe Biden and Tammy Baldwin,” Hovde told the crowd. “Let’s take back America. Make America Great. And restore the American Dream.”

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and X.

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Thanksgiving dinner. (Drazen Zigic | Getty Images Plus)

For the author of a book on gratitude Diana Butler Bass has what might be a surprising admission: Gratitude didn’t come naturally to her.

Bass published “Grateful,” her 12th book, five years ago. But before writing it, “I would not have considered myself a naturally grateful person,” she says. “I always struggled with cultivating gratitude, or even trying to understand why I should.”

Writing the book has helped change that for her, she says. She came out of the experience “realizing that gratitude is both a feeling — one that arises naturally as a response to beauty or wonder or an unexpected gift — and it’s also an ethical choice,” Bass says.

As she redefined gratitude for herself, she also redefined it for her audience in provocative new ways.

Gratitude is a spiritual practice, “and like any other practice it takes time. It’s hard,” Bass says.

Nevertheless, writing the book pointed her to evidence that historically, gratitude has had a darker side. It has often been part of a system of hierarchy, she writes, that reinforces social divisions and solidifies power in the hands of a few at the expense of many.

At the same time, Bass says, as a form of personal spiritual discipline, gratitude can be a call to social justice on behalf of everyone, everywhere, at a time when social ties are fraying and severed.

“If more people pursued it with seriousness — both in being open to when that feeling of gratitude shows up in our lives, but also in cultivating it and nurturing it in families and communities — that’s a very practical way that some of what has been broken may be restored,” Bass says.

A historian and public theologian, Bass has been a leading liberal Protestant chronicler of contemporary American Christian thought as it intersects with culture, politics and generational change.

Her research for “Grateful” began in 2015 and kicked into higher gear when she saw a survey reporting that 78% of Americans told pollsters they felt “strongly thankful” in the previous week.

That astonished her. She’d read research about the beneficial impact of gratitude. “There’s great social science evidence that says that gratitude helps people create and bind communities,” she says.

Yet in political surveys leading into the 2016 presidential election year, she saw little evidence of that sort of outcome. Instead, campaign rhetoric and public responses revealed “a really fraying political and social culture and the level of stress and unhappiness that Americans were experiencing,” Bass says.

Viewing the poll in which eight in 10 Americans professed to be “strongly thankful” against the backdrop of that political discourse, “the numbers didn’t match the reality.”

The subsequent election of Donald Trump as president made the disconnect even sharper for her. “And those questions, those concerns we have about our culture have not abated,” Bass says. Indeed, the dissatisfaction and dislocation, “loneliness, isolation, fear — all of the things that gratitude should address, have done nothing but increase in our culture.”

Digging into the “gratitude gap,” as she dubbed it, Bass came to an eye-opening conclusion.

In American culture especially, “we don’t recognize that we have tied gratitude to an invisible structure,” she says. “We think about it as a transaction — somebody gives me something and I have to do something in return. There’s a real quid pro quo mentality that we’ve attached to gratitude.”

Besides being transactional, this sort of gratitude system also has a hierarchy. “Benefactors, the people who give gifts, are on the top. And beneficiaries, the people who receive gifts, are on the bottom,” Bass explains.

Judgment colors both parties to that transaction. “Benefactors are richer, better, more moral,” she says, acting out of a sense of obligation, with the implicit superiority that carries.

Meanwhile, “beneficiaries are somehow poor, or needy, or maybe freeloaders to be more negative,” Bass says. “And the poor should be grateful for what they receive from either the government or from private individuals.”

This hierarchy of gratitude wasn’t a Yankee invention. Bass traces it back to ancient Rome and that culture’s economic system with a structure of gifts given from rich to poor that bound the poor to the wealthy. And it went on to be replicated in the civilizations that followed.

Throughout history, however, the ritualized system of gratitude and bondage has also sparked challenges. In ancient Rome, critics warned that “it binds the poor to the system of dependence and transaction,” Bass says, so they are “essentially enslaved by their debt of gratitude for their entire life — there will be no way they could ever discharge the debt.”

The critics also charged “that it corrupts the wealthy,” she adds — enabling benefactors giving away their wealth to “target it to places where they feel like they’re going to get the most back.”

Bass sees just such a critique in the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus tells his disciples not to give a banquet for rich friends or family members who can repay them. Instead, he tells them to “go out in the streets and invite the poor and the outcasts and the lonely because they cannot repay you,” she observes. “Jesus is directly critiquing the Roman practice of quid pro quo around the practice of gratitude.”

Adam Smith, author of a foundational text on capitalism, was another critic, writing in the 18th century, that “the hierarchically structured quid pro quo, would eat away at the foundations of what he perceived to be moral capitalism because it allowed the rich to rig the system so that it would benefit them almost solely,” Bass says.

“That whole structure is very much part of the United States culture,” she says — and is especially strong among American men, who surveys show are the least likely to report gratitude.

“You’re supposed to be an individual and stand on your own,” Bass says. The ideal of American individualism modeled on the characters portrayed by movie star John Wayne “undermined the ability for us to see that there was any different structure to gratitude.”

In her book Bass offers such an alternative structure: a round table. “There is no head of the table, but instead everyone is seated at the table,” Bass says, with the bounty there for everyone to share.

Seeing the gifts of the universe that way, “the issue is the fact that they’re not distributed correctly,” Bass says. “They’re hoarded, they’re not shared. The image of the table takes away the idea of a single benefactor. Instead, it places benefaction in the nature of the universe, or the nature of God.”

With that change of perspective, she says, can come an understanding “that our job is to make sure there are enough chairs around that table, and to make sure that the food is passed to everyone who is seated there. Everyone is a beneficiary, and all are called to invite and share.”

She hopes theists, humanists and the entirely secular can all share in seeing that they live “in an abundant universe,” regardless of whether they believe the bounty is the work of God or generous humans.

It is possible, Bass says, to see occasions for gratitude in the worst times. “You’re never thankful for injustice or evil or sin or disease,” she cautions. “Those are not the good gifts of the universe. Those are not the good gifts of God.”

But there can still be moments when people encounter gifts “even in the worst of circumstances,” she says. She notes that the writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote that “by keeping a sense of gratitude through the worst possible experiences of human existence, he held on to his own humanity.”

Bass has been rereading the New Testament “through the eyes of a nonhierarchical vision of society and gratitude,” she says. “That’s been revolutionary, to understand that my own sacred text has a deep criticism of hierarchical and transactional gratitude, and it has it at its heart.”

She has friends of other faiths — Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim — who have told her that they see the same critique in their scriptures. “I think that at the heart of our religious traditions, there really is this nonhierarchical vision,” she says — one that gives “a very important call to learn to see the world in a new way.”

For Bass, exploring gratitude has brought special joy for the potential for interfaith and even “post-religious possibilities” — “of people really being able to sit around the same table,” she says, regardless of creed or lack of one.

Whatever their faith, they can “understand that we, all of our lives, are guests,” Bass says. “And that we each bear wisdom, the wisdom of our ancestors, the wisdom of the traditions we inherited, the courage of our own convictions — all of those things. And that we can sit and share and eat together.”

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.

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