Bondi Booted as Christians Target Women's Right to Vote

Trump's spiritual adviser compared him to Jesus Christ, a growing movement seeks to strip women of the right to vote, and thousands of veterans are losing their homes.

Good evening. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America.

Trump’s attorney general is out: fired for not being cruel enough. His spiritual adviser compared him to Jesus Christ at a White House Easter lunch. The administration’s voter suppression bill is quietly targeting the very women who helped elect him. And thousands of veterans are losing their homes because the VA pulled their lifeline with one week’s notice.

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Now, let’s jump in.

Trump Fires the Attorney General Who Wasn’t Vindictive Enough

Attorney General Pam Bondi has been fired. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has been tapped as acting interim attorney general.

The firing has been building for months, and the reasons are exactly as alarming as they sound. Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with Bondi, with one person familiar with White House deliberations saying that while he likes her personally, he doesn’t think she has “executed on his vision” in the way he wants.

That vision, in practice, meant one thing: prosecuting his political enemies.

The irony is rich. Bondi bent the DOJ to the will of the White House unlike any attorney general in modern history, firing civil servants at Trump’s directive, investigating the president’s perceived enemies, and curbing enforcement disfavored by Trump allies. It wasn’t enough. Grand juries kept rejecting cases, and judges kept throwing them out.

The signature moment may have been her February hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. Epstein survivors sat in the gallery in white. Democrats asked Bondi to turn around and apologize to them for the Justice Department’s release of their personal information without proper redaction. Bondi declined, and instead started speaking about Merrick Garland.

But Trump didn’t fire her over any of that. The message is clear: Bondi’s failure wasn’t that she weaponized the Justice Department. It’s that she didn’t weaponize it well enough.

Trump’s Spiritual Adviser Compared Him to Jesus. The White House Deleted the Video.

If waging war with Iran and being found liable for sexual assault makes someone “Christ-like,” we have been reading very different Bibles.

Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain stood before more than 100 faith leaders in the White House East Room on Wednesday and compared Trump to Jesus Christ, breaking at least three commandments in the process.

White-Cain, who runs the official White House Faith Office — a real government position, funded by your tax dollars — justified it by saying that Trump has supposedly been betrayed, arrested, and falsely accused, just like the Son of God. And, just like Jesus rose from the dead, Trump rose above it.

The White House has since deleted the footage, but not before it spread widely across social media. The archived full video remains publicly accessible, which just means more attention has been drawn to it by deleting it.

None of this should be surprising once you know that White-Cain has previously declared the White House to be “holy ground” and stated that “to say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”

This is not a fringe figure who snuck past the velvet rope. This is who runs the Faith Office, who apparently didn’t even read the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.”

Some Christians Want to Take Women’s Right to Vote Away Entirely

A movement is growing among conservative Christians who have identified the single greatest threat to American civilization: their wives having opinions at the ballot box.

The New York Times profiled the movement this week, focusing on pastor Dale Partridge. The Arizonan has built a following calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and replacing it with “household voting.” One household, one vote: the husband’s.

It has friends in high places. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a clip last summer of pastors in his denomination arguing that women should be barred from voting. Anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, who spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention, has endorsed household voting.

Unmarried women, supporters acknowledge, present something of a logistical puzzle, though they suggest fathers, brothers, or uncles could stand in. Gay couples have no place in this system and are not expected to.

None of this is imminent as policy. Repealing the 19th Amendment would require approval from three-quarters of states. But Partridge himself told the Times he expects red states to eventually erect barriers to women’s suffrage.

Some obstacles may arrive sooner than people think. The SAVE America Act would require proof of citizenship documentation to register to vote. An estimated 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate that matches their current name because they took their husband’s last name when they married.

Research shows that conservative and Republican-leaning women are statistically more likely to have changed their surnames after marriage, meaning the bill falls hardest on women who voted for the people pushing it.

Veterans Are Losing Their Homes. The VA Pulled the Lifeline With One Week’s Notice.

The Trump administration is happy to make veterans. It’s taking care of them afterward that seems to be the sticking point.

More than 10,000 veterans have lost their homes through foreclosure sales since May of last year, the highest pace of foreclosures for VA loans in a decade. Another 90,000 veterans are currently heading toward foreclosure.

This didn’t happen in a vacuum. The VA’s rescue program, known as VASP, had been working: it gave more than 33,000 veterans who were behind on their payments new, low-cost mortgages. Then the Trump administration took office and killed it.

The human cost is clear. One veteran interviewed, Shante Benfatto, served in Afghanistan and is rated 100% disabled by the VA. She and her husband fell behind on payments when he was between jobs. They tried for months to get into the VASP program, but their lender didn’t complete the paperwork before the VA shut it down. They are now paying hundreds more per month on a modified mortgage they didn’t want and can barely afford.

The VA says it’s working on a new program, but it still won’t be up and running for months. Industry groups warn that even when it arrives, it could push veterans’ monthly payments up by hundreds of dollars compared to what other homeowners pay.

These are people who served the country. The administration told them — with one week’s notice — that the country was done serving them back.

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