Garfield is lazy; Garfield is a cat; Garfield likes lasagna.

Is there really much more to say about Garfield? The character is not complicated. Since the comic debuted in 1978, Garfield’s core qualities have shifted less than the mostly immobile cat himself.

But this is 2017 — a time of Internet wars, social conundrums and claims to competing evidence about Garfield’s gender identity.

Wikipedia had to put Garfield’s page on lockdown last week after a 60-hour editing war in which the character’s listed gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like a cartoon version of Schrödinger’s cat: male one minute; not the next.

“He may have been a boy in 1981, but he’s not now,” one editor argued.

The debate has spilled into the broader Internet, where a Heat Street writer complained of “cultural marxists” bent on “turning one of pop culture’s most iconic men into a gender fluid abomination.”

It all started with a comment Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, made two years ago in an interview with Mental Floss — titled innocuously: “20 Things You Might Not Know About Garfield.”

Between the site’s plugs for Garfield DVDs, Davis revealed a few harmless curiosities about the cat: Garfield is named Gustav in Sweden. Garfield and his owner Jon Arbuckle live in Muncie, Ind.

“Garfield is very universal,” Davis told Mental Floss mid-interview. “By virtue of being a cat, really, he’s not really male or female or any particular race or nationality, young or old.”

The remark caused no fuss. At first.

Until last week, when the satirist Virgil Texas dug the quote up and used it to make a bold claim and bold move:

A brief note about Virgil Texas: He’s been known to troll before. The writer once co-created a fictional pundit named Carl “The Dig” Diggler to parody the media and annoy Nate Silver.

But Texas told The Washington Post he was only concerned about “Garfield canon,” in this case.

Texas said he came across Davis’s old quote while watching a five-hour, live-action, dark interpretation of Garfield (yes, really). So he invented a Wikipedia editor (anyone can do it) named David “The Milk” Milkberg last week, and changed Garfield’s gender from “male” to “none.”

Almost instantly, the universe of Garfield fans clawed in.

A Wikipedia editor reverted Garfield’s gender back to male less than an hour after Texas’s change.

One minute later, someone in the Philippines made Garfield genderless again.

And so on. Behind the scenes, Wikipedia users debated how to resolve the raging “edit war.”

“Every character (including Garfield himself!) constantly refers to Garfield unambiguously as male, and always using male pronouns,” one editor wrote — listing nearly three dozen comic strips across nearly four decades to prove the point:

The one where Jon tells Garfield “good boy!” before Garfield shoves a newspaper into his owner’s mouth.

The one where the cat’s “magical talking bathroom scale (probably a proxy for Garfield himself) refers to Garfield as a ‘young man’ and a ‘boy.’ ”

But another editor argued that only one of those examples “looks at self-identification” — a 1981 strip in which Garfield thinks, “I’m a bad boy” after eating a fern.

And Milkberg/Texas stuck to his claims: “If one could locate another source where Jim Davis states … that Garfield’s gender is male or female, then this would give rise to a serious controversy in Garfield canon,” he wrote on the Wikipedia debate page. “Yet no such source has been identified, and I highly doubt one will ever emerge.”

Threads of competing evidence spiraled through Twitter, where one commenter compared the Garfield dispute to Krazy Kat: a sexually ambiguous cartoon predecessor, profiled last month by the New Yorker.

Some hunted beyond the comic section in search of answers, into the ambiguous world of Garfield-themed merchandise and quasi-canonical arguments.

And some took the whole thing as a joke.

But others chided or philosophized: “Why must we care what Garfield is or isn’t?” Jimmy King asked. “Who cares what someone else perceives as him being male or female?”

Many pondered the meaning of Davis’s words in 2014, which were confusing because the creator referred to Garfield as “he” while suggesting the cat was neither he nor she.

A Wikipedia user proposed a compromise — “to provide both genders, each appropriately referenced: ‘Male[1] and/or none[2].” That didn’t get much traction.

Garfield’s gender swapped 20 times over 2½ days (during which his religion was briefly listed as Shiite Muslim for some reason) before an administrator was forced to step in.

Garfield was finally, officially listed as male on Wikipedia — citing four comic strips including one from 1979 in which a veterinarian says “he’s too fat.”

And the page was locked against more edits until March.

Yet a Heat Street writer dragged the argument to the very end of February — citing the spinoff character Garzooka’s “hard pecs” and “prominent bulge” as evidence of “a rugged, heterosexual American MAN.”

That didn’t resolve anything, of course.

Maybe this will:

“Garfield is male,” Davis told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “He has a girlfriend, Arlene.”

Presented with new evidence, the satirist deferred to the creator. “He’s in charge of the canon,” Texas said. “I’m just curious how it squares with his prior statement …

“If I had the opportunity I would interrogate him.”

But Wikipedia has already progressed beyond gender disputes. Now other aspects of the fat, lazy cat are being called into question.

“Forget about his gender and alleged Muslim faith,” a user wrote Monday. “Need we really list Arlene under the ‘spouse’ category?”

More reading:

This is what happens when two Internet nerds battle over politics

With his first-ever ‘Garfield’ musical, creator Jim Davis revels in a dream fulfilled

From our 1982 archives: “The Cat That Rots the Intellect”

On Monday night, this photo began making the rounds on the Internet:

The photo, taken Monday, show White House counselor Kellyanne Conway perched on a couch in the Oval Office as President Trump stands behind his desk and representatives of a number of historically black colleges and universities gather around him.

Conway is kneeling on the couch. Other pictures of the same moment show she has her shoes on.

This has, of course, inflamed the (mostly liberal end of the) Internet.

THE HORROR.

SHE IS DISRESPECTING THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT.

HOW COULD SHE.

And so on and so forth.

This tempest in a teapot is, in a word, dumb. In two words: incredibly dumb.

First of all, every party not in the White House likes to express shock and outrage at the way the other side is treating this hallowed job and office. Republicans were incensed when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama treated the Oval Office with slightly less formality than did Ronald Reagan, who, famously, always wore a suit coat in the Oval Office.

Obama puts his feet on the desk! Obama throws a football!

This is all par for the Internet outrage/partisan police.

It was dumb when Republicans leveled the charge of Obama and Clinton disrespecting the White House. It is equally dumb now.

Then there is the specific context of the photo above. While not captured in most of the photos that initially circulated on the Web, other snaps of the moments following the initial picture show Conway just trying to get in position to take a photo of the gathering.

Anyone who has ever tried to take a big group picture can sympathize.

The simple fact is that this is a totally contrived “controversy” born of some people's blind hatred for Conway and, by extension, Trump and his White House. There is simply no “there” there.

Conway was on the sofa to try to get a good angle to snap a photo. It's not indicative of anything, or revealing of anything. It's just someone trying to take a photo.

We have reached a point in our politics — and Trump was the agitator if not the originator of this latest flash of polarization — in which even the most mundane of events is somehow invested with nefarious symbolism.

This is not only dumb, but it distracts from more serious and consequential debates like Trump's travel ban, his campaign's contacts with Russian intelligence officials and his war against leaks. We're WAY better than this. We need to act like it.

Jennifer Garner has not given up on Donald Trump’s Washington.

The 44-year-old actress spent the weekend lobbying the town’s pillars of power to support early education for poor rural children. She spent Friday on Capitol Hill meeting dozens of top staff members. On Saturday, she delivered the keynote address before the annual National Governors Association winter meeting here. A potential sit-down with Ivanka Trump, who is advocating for more funding for child care, fell apart because of scheduling conflicts, but Garner remained optimistic about a face-to-face discussion soon.

Other Hollywood liberals have shunned the new commander in chief — notably during Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony, when many jokes were told at President Trump’s expense. But Garner, a true-blue Democrat who campaigned for Hillary Clinton last year and held a fundraiser for Barack Obama in 2008, is taking a unique approach: pushing a cause that would benefit the new administration’s political base.

The West Virginia native has long worked to bring assistance to poor, rural communities in desperate need of it. She has no plans to change that just because most of those communities went big for Trump in last year’s election. In fact, she sees an opportunity to hold the president accountable for the pledges he made to the country’s rural working class.

“I’m looking forward to helping him make good on what they saw as promises, a mandate from him, that he was going to make their lives better,” Garner said in a 45-minute interview with The Washington Post.

It’s another indication of how Trump has changed the rituals of Washington. For decades, Hollywood celebrities have used the glow of the Capitol dome to advance personal causes. Some may be less inclined to do so now, when legislative gains might help burnish Trump’s image.

That makes Trump’s presidency a psychological test of sorts for some members of the Hollywood elite, who can either demonstrate their true commitment to the causes they push — or expose their charity work here as more about bolstering themselves.

Very much in the former camp, Garner acknowledged that some of her friends “want to turn their back to this administration . . . [and] just wouldn’t even want to engage.”

Not her. “If he’s willing to help the poor kids who got him elected, then let’s do it. They certainly think he’s going to,” she said.

For nine years, Garner has been on the board of Save the Children, a nonprofit organization. Mark Shriver is president of its political advocacy arm, Save the Children Action Network. Save the Children is known primarily for its international projects, but it has also built out a niche focus on U.S. education programs, particularly in poor rural communities.

That’s Garner’s personal story. She grew up solidly middle class, but she knew plenty of poor children who started elementary school behind and never caught up. They lived in the same sort of communities that Robert F. Kennedy, Shriver’s uncle, visited in the mid-1960s along the Mississippi Delta, shaping the ideas of his 1968 presidential campaign.

Together, Garner and Shriver have urged Congress and state governments to fund reading and literacy programs that include all-day kindergarten. The organization has its own reading programs that it administers in schools and during in-home visits.

They found that children in rural areas are 60 percent more likely to be placed in special education programs when they start kindergarten. Garner has her own intuitive test when she meets small groups of rural children to determine which come from homes where parents have more time and resources to engage with them.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,” she said, singing the nursery rhyme out loud. “Humpty Dumpty had a great . . .”

Some children shout “fall.” Others offer blank stares, because they’re from homes with less educational nourishment. “You just wouldn’t believe the number of kids who have never heard a nursery rhyme,” she said.

Garner and her allies aren’t asking for assistance only for rural America, they’re also pressing for a rewrite of the tax code. And they’re not shy about the approach: political shame.

If a tax package is going to cut rates and red tape for corporations and Trump’s fellow billionaires, the thinking goes, the president had better find a way to expand credits and deductions for the education needs of the families that formed the bedrock of his support.

“If there is tax reform and there’s nothing for poor, working families in this country, and families that are middle class and struggling, that’s not good,” Shriver said.

Garner calls their cause the “bobblehead issue,” because everyone loves to tell her that they support children, but in the end it sometimes seems as though they just enjoy being around a beautiful celebrity.

“Everyone’s nodding and couldn’t agree more, and shaking your hand and want their picture,” she said. “But when the vote is cast, nobody’s out there screaming and yelling for poor kids.”

Garner returned home to West Virginia last year to help raise money after devastating flooding in the state. Reliably Democratic during her childhood, West Virginia ended up giving Trump his largest margin of victory — something she could see coming by talking to people in economically depressed areas.

“People felt like Trump really understood them, that he was going to come in and create jobs for them,” she said. “They felt like they needed something to just turn everything upside down.”

It’s that level of despair that leaves Garner willing to deal with Trump when some of her friends want to offer nothing but resistance. She may even be willing to meet the president.

“Send me a ticket to Mar-a-Lago. I’m ready to go down and have a steak and a good chat,” she said, only half joking about the prospect. “I really think it’s great, if he’s willing to help the poor kids who got him elected.”

Read more from Paul Kane’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Former president George W. Bush rarely weighs in on current political events, but on Monday, he offered some of his most pointed critiques of President Trump's statements and policies in an interview with NBC News' “Today” show.

Asked about Trump's claim that the media is the “enemy of the people,” Bush warned that an independent press is essential to democracy and that denouncing the press at home makes it difficult for the United States to preach democratic values abroad.

“I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy,” Bush said. “We need an independent media to hold people like me to account.

“Power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive and it's important for the media to call to account people who abuse power, whether it be here or elsewhere,” he added.

Bush noted that during his presidency, he sought to persuade people like Russian President Vladimir Putin to respect a free press.

“It's kind of hard to tell others to have an independent free press when we're not willing to have one ourselves,” Bush said.

On Russia, Bush added that “we all need answers” about whether Trump campaign officials had contact with Russian officials in the election. But he did not endorse the idea that an independent prosecutor was necessary. Bush said that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr was an “independent thinker” capable of handling the inquiry.

“If he were to recommend a special prosecutor, then it'd have a lot more credibility with me,” Bush said of Burr.

Bush's interview was pegged to the release of his new book of oil paintings of wounded veterans. But the former president seemed unusually willing to offer criticism of the sitting president from his own party, a departure from his longtime practice of staying out of the fray.

Bush even chuckled as host Matt Lauer reminded him of Trump's colorful description of “American carnage” during his inaugural address, which Bush attended.

Lauer sought to pin Bush down on his position on Trump's travel ban, which Bush refused to endorse.

Instead, he offered a defense of religious freedom, warning that the terror threat is not a religious war but an ideological one.

“I think it's very important for all of us to recognize one of our great strengths is for people to be able to worship the way they want to or to not worship at all,” Bush said. “A bedrock of our freedom is the right to worship freely.”

“I understood right off the bat that this was an ideological conflict and people who murder the innocent are not religious people — they want to advance an ideology and we have faced those kinds of ideologues in the past,” he added.

Pressed to state clearly whether he supports or opposes the ban, Bush would only say “I am for an immigration policy that's welcoming and upholds the law.”

NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND—When President Donald Trump took the stage Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he was greeted with cheers, chants of "USA," and dozens of Russian flags.

Two young, progressive activists from DC, Jason Charter and Ryan Clayton with the group Americans Take Action, purchased tickets to the conference, and handed out nearly 1,000 flags to attendees as a prank. After they were thrown out of the conference, they told TPM they wanted to "shed light on an important issue"—namely, the drip of revelations of backchannel communications between the Russian government and the Trump campaign—and allow people to "get a laugh out of their day."

Charter, 22, told TPM by phone that he and Clayton organized the prank in order to "honor Trump's relationship with Putin." He said almost no one at CPAC seemed to realize the flag he handed them bore the horizontal red, white, and blue stripes of the Russian Federation underneath Trump's name.

"I asked people if they wanted a Trump flag and they took it," Charter said. "Many Trump supporters were proudly waving their Russian Trump flag."

"I think it says a lot about Donald Trump's base and their education level," he added. "I don't want to insult anyone, but I think you should know what the Russian flag is. They are one of the world's major powers, and it's a pretty easily recognized flag."

CPAC staff quickly confiscated the flags, but not before the embarrassing image went viral on social media.

Crowd at CPAC waving these little pro-Trump flags that look exactly like the Russian flag. Staffers quickly come around to confiscate them. pic.twitter.com/YhPpkwFCNc

— Peter Hamby (@PeterHamby) February 24, 2017

In an additional protest, Charter got to his feet while Trump was speaking and yelled, "Fascist!" He and Clayton were removed from the premises by security and told they were barred from returning.

CPAC communications director Ian Walters declined to comment to TPM on the flag incident or the removal of the two pranksters.

Charter, who also organized protests on Inauguration Day that involved shouting passages from the Constitution during Trump's first speech as commander in chief, said he hoped the action pushes Republicans to pay more attention to lingering questions about Trump and former national security adviser Mike Flynn's conversations with the Russian government.

"If Hillary Clinton's senior advisor had to resign due to connections with, say, Chinese diplomats, and had conversations off the record, there would be a major investigation going on," Charter said.

There's a tendency to assume that President Trump is always operating off a master plan that only he can see. That where others see chaos, he sees careful orchestration.

That sense is rooted in the fact that Trump's 2016 presidential campaign constantly looked like it was totally out of control — and then he won. If Trump fooled us all then, what's to say he's not doing it again right now?

Which brings me to the news of the moment: that Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, criticized the chief executive's attacks on the federal judge who put his travel ban on hold late last week. Gorsuch reportedly called those attacks “disheartening” and “demoralizing.”

On its face, this is a remarkable story. The man whom Trump picked to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court is turning on the president just a week after he was nominated. Given how much Trump hates being criticized by alleged allies, it was a stunning comment — and one that lit the political world on fire Wednesday night. How would Trump react? Would he pull the nomination? Attack Gorsuch? Both? Neither? As always with Trump, all options were on the table.

But dig a little deeper and the conspiracy theories begin to seem, well, not so conspiratorial. The whole story originated with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) after a meeting with Gorsuch. Blumenthal said that during the meeting Gorsuch had used the words “disheartening” and “demoralizing” to describe Trump's comment. He said that he then asked Gorsuch if he could publicize those comments and Gorsuch said he could.

Gorsuch spokesman Ron Bonjean, an old Washington communications pro, confirmed quickly that Gorsuch had used the words. And Kelly Ayotte, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire who is shepherding Gorsuch's nomination, put out a statement Thursday morning broadly echoing the truth of the leak. “While [Gorsuch] made clear that he was not referring to any specific case, he said that he finds any criticism of a judge's integrity and independence disheartening and demoralizing,” said Ayotte.

Later Thursday morning in an interview on Fox News, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway seemed to suggest that the episode was an example of Trump's hands-off approach to his court and Cabinet picks. “He is very comfortable with his nominees expressing their own points of view,” Conway said. “He said that when these folks were being grilled by the Democratic senators, who ended up voting against them anyway for no good reason except politics. He said, 'I want them to express their own independent views.' So, the president is very comfortable with that.”

So:

1. Trump's Supreme Court nominee ran down Trump in a meeting with a Democratic senator.

2. He told that same senator that it was okay to tell the whole world about his comments.

3. Gorsuch's two lead handlers largely confirmed the events.

4. Conway used the leak to make the case that Trump is magnanimous when it comes to the people he chooses for important posts.

You can see why people might raise an eyebrow. After all, what better way for Gorsuch to overcome Democratic senators' skepticism about him than to show some independence from Trump? What better signal that he recognizes the clear separation between the executive branch and the judicial branch? Even if you don't believe in conspiracy theories, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better scenario to help establish Gorsuch as his own man, not beholden to the president.

And/but there's this tweet from Trump this morning.

It's not clear what Blumenthal “misrepresents” according to Trump — especially since Bonjean and Ayotte seem to confirm the episode.

The Democratic National Committee, for one, was not fooled. “While Donald Trump’s morning tweets show [White House strategist] Steve Bannon may not have clued him in on the ruse, this is clearly a meaningless White House-orchestrated attempt to help Judge Gorsuch pretend he won’t be a rubber stamp for the Trump administration,” said a DNC spokesman.

No matter whether Trump intentionally engineered this whole thing, the potential outcomes are all to the good for him. First, Gorsuch gets a very high-profile chance to separate himself from the controversial president. Second, Trump allies get to paint him as someone who is very much willing to let people have their own views even if they don't jibe with his. And third, Trump gets to pick a fight with a Democrat over Vietnam service.

In his eyes, that's a win-win-win. And I don't think we can rule out the possibility that this was all part of his broader plan.

Perhaps more than any other time in history, politics appear to be playing a larger role than ever in the Super Bowl. Bill O’Reilly interviewed President Trump in an interview that aired before the game; former president George H.W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, did the coin toss; and some of the ads have tackled controversial social issues such as immigration.

One such ad was imagined by the family-owned company 84 Lumber, which decided to tackle the subject in its first Super Bowl ad. It wasn’t exactly how the company originally planned it, however.

In the ad’s initial iteration, a Mexican mother and daughter, who appear to be on their way to the United States, come across a depiction of an imposing border wall, reminiscent of the one Trump has touted will eventually divide the country from Mexico.

“Ignoring the border wall and the conversation around immigration that’s taking place in the media and at every kitchen table in America just didn’t seem right,” said Rob Shapiro, the chief client officer at Brunner, the agency that worked with 84 Lumber to come up with the ad. “If everyone else is trying to avoid controversy, isn’t that the time when brands should take a stand for what they believe in?”

But while 84 Lumber believed in its message, Fox, which aired Sunday’s game, thought it was a little too controversial.

“Fox would not let us air ‘the wall,’ ” Schapiro said. 

“Of course we were disappointed,” added Amy Smiley, 84 Lumber’s director of marketing. “But ultimately, it’s their network and their decision.”

Smiley said Fox expressed “concerns about some of the elements” in the initial spot and so when the network ultimately rejected the ad last month, she “understood their reasons.”

Smiley said current events played a role in the ad’s rejection, especially all the talk about Trump’s proposed wall.

“…[T]he conversation in the media exploded around this topic, and it evolved into something controversial that made Fox a little too uncomfortable,” she said. 

Fox did not return The Post’s request to comment.

Ultimately, 84 Lumber and Brunner came up with an edit that Fox finally approved and aired on Sunday. Gone is the wall, replaced by a less imposing barbed-wire fence at what appears to be the border.

Called “The Journey Begins,” the ad depicts a Mexican woman and her daughter readying to travel to the United States. Under the old version, the two arrive at the border wall, where their quest appears to end in a cliffhanger.

In the new ending, the mother and daughter are shown holding hands while “See the conclusion at Journey84.com” appears across the screen.

Viewers who go to the website won’t just find the conclusion to the pair’s journey, but also the original, rejected ad.

“We all felt too strongly about the message to leave it on the editing room floor,” Smiley said.

“The commercial that will air during the Super Bowl does not have the ending we originally wanted, but the message has not changed,” Schapiro said. “Our message is that America is the land of opportunity and 84 Lumber is the company of opportunity.”

This post has been updated.

More from Super Bowl LI:

Best of Super Bowl: Patriots’ comeback, top commercials, Lady Gaga’s halftime performance

Tom Brady, Patriots rally to beat Falcons in overtime to win fifth Super Bowl

Tom Brady didn’t just have the best Super Bowl ever. He played the greatest football game ever.

Brewer: Patriots show they’ve got guts with record Super Bowl comeback

Eight numbers that show just how crazy Patriots’ comeback really was

Deflategate ended with Super Bowl LI and Roger Goodell heard the boos to prove it

Trump left his Super Bowl party just as the Patriots began their historic rally

Sean Spicer gets crushed by Super Bowl jokes, one night after SNL takedown

Super Bowl LI reminded a lot of people of Election Night

‘And sisterhood’: Schuyler Sisters put their own spin on ‘America the Beautiful’

Fans feeling weird about Trump-Brady tie find a way to cheer for Patriots without guilt

Couch Slouch: Patriots’ comeback darkens a nation’s already dark hour

Julian Edelman one-upped Julio Jones’s insane fourth-quarter Super Bowl catch

Gisele Bündchen had a classic reaction to the best Super Bowl ever

Police: Super Bowl drunk drivers will be subjected to Justin Bieber ad

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones loudly booed at Super Bowl

$11 for a soda? Super Bowl concession prices were through the roof.

The flag fluttering above the U.S. Capitol is emblazoned with a crescent and star. Chants of “Allahu Akbar” rise from inside the building.

That’s the provocative opening scene of a documentary-style movie outlined 10 years ago by Stephen K. Bannon that envisioned radical Muslims taking over the country and remaking it into the “Islamic States of America,” according to a document describing the project obtained by The Washington Post.

The outline shows how Bannon, years before he became a strategist for President Trump and helped draft last week’s order restricting travel from seven mostly Muslim countries, sought to issue a warning about the threat posed by radical Muslims as well as their “enablers among us.” Although driven by the “best intentions,” the outline says, institutions such as the media, the Jewish community and government agencies were appeasing jihadists aiming to create an Islamic republic.

The eight-page draft, written in 2007 during Bannon’s stint as a Hollywood filmmaker, proposed a three-part movie that would trace “the culture of intolerance” behind sharia law, examine the “Fifth Column” made up of “Islamic front groups” and identify the American enablers paving “the road to this unique hell on earth.”

The outline, titled, “Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Facism [sic] in America,” lists Bannon as the movie’s director, as well as its co-writer with his longtime writing partner Julia Jones. The title page includes the line “A Film By Stephen K. Bannon” in capital letters.

Jones, reached by The Post, declined to discuss the contents of the document in detail but confirmed its authenticity. She added that it was essentially Bannon’s product.

“It was all his words,” Jones said.

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment. Bannon did not respond to several requests for comment.

The film proposal included as possible on-air experts two analysts who went on to advise Trump, although their names are misspelled in the document: Walid Phares, a Lebanese-born Maronite Christian who has warned that jihadists are posing as civil rights advocates, and Heritage Foundation security expert James Jay Carafano, who has defended Trump’s executive order.

Phares could not be reached for comment. A Heritage spokesman said Carafano was not familiar with the project.

The outline offered an early glimpse of Bannon’s belief that the West and “supremacist” Islam are headed for a “fundamental clash of civilizations,” as the outline said. He later expressed this view publicly as chief of Breitbart News, a site that often features articles about radical Islamists and has provided a platform for the alt-right, a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state.

“We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” he said at a 2014 talk via Skype to a group at the Vatican, according to a transcript first published by BuzzFeed. “And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.”

“I believe you should take a very, very, very aggressive stance against radical Islam,” he added, citing ancient battles between Christian and Islamic forces.

Trump, who has known Bannon since 2011, has voiced similar views about the threats posed by jihadist Muslims. During the campaign, he called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on” and said that there is a “great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population.”

At Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast, Trump showed sympathy for Muslim victims of terrorism, saying that “peace-loving Muslims” have been “brutalized” by the Islamic State.

One of Trump’s first acts as president was to issue last week’s travel limits, which temporarily bar travelers from Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Administration officials have said the order is not a “Muslim ban” but is instead targeted at countries whose citizens pose the greatest terrorism risk. However, none of those countries are the birthplace of terrorists who committed recent attacks in the United States connected to extremist Islamist ideology, unlike Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan.

Trump officials are now considering designating as a foreign terrorist organization the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the oldest Islamist organizations in the Middle East, even though experts have said it does not pose a threat to the United States.

The 2007 film summary calls the Muslim Brotherhood “the foundation of modern terrorism.”

Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who reviewed the outline for The Post, called it “propaganda” that was “designed to generate hate against not just Islamists, not just extremists, but Muslims writ large.”

“There’s no way you can look at this and Steve Bannon’s other comments and remarks and say Steve Bannon is a friend of American Muslims,” said Hamid, author of “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World.”

“It’s remarkable that someone involved with a film like this is at the center of power at the White House,” he added.

Tim Watkins, a producer involved in discussions with Bannon about the project, rejected the idea that the film was driven by anti-Muslim bias.

“This is not because Bannon had a hate or dislike for Muslims,” Watkins said. “I believe that he believed that no society is without its radical fringes.”

Watkins said that he and Bannon met with Steven Emerson, author of the 2002 book “American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us” and founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, at an Italian restaurant in Washington and discussed the project. After hearing about Emerson’s research, Watkins said he came up with the idea for the opening sequence featuring the reconstituted American flag flying over the Capitol dome.

“Based on what I heard, it seemed like a documentary in the making,” Watkins said.

Emerson, whose book asserted many Muslim institutions in the West provided ideological support for militants, was listed as an executive producer on the proposal. A section of the film was to be drawn from Emerson’s research archives, according to the document.

“Steve Bannon and I definitely had some interaction at some point about a film, due to a mutual interest in the threat of radical Islamism,” Emerson wrote in an email, describing himself as someone who deeply respects Islam. He added that he did not recall ever seeing the outline, which he said contained material that was not drawn from his work.

“I believe there is a witch hunt and campaign of character assassination being waged against Steve Bannon for his comments against radical Islam like there has been waged against me for many years in order to silence critics of radical Islam,” he said.

The outline used stark language to spell out the dangers posed by Islamist jihadists.

“The ideology is scary, and its ideologues will frighten small children as we bring to light an unbroken chain of ‘thinkers’ who epitomize the culture of hate,” the outline reads.

Part of the film would detail “the rise of a global holy war — financed by the cash flow of oil — to attach and destroy western civilization,” according to the outline.

The proposal names two dozen conservative writers and terrorism experts who could serve as potential on-screen guests, including Robert Spencer, director of the Jihad Watch website, labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim propagandist.

In an email, Spencer rejected that term as “a smear,” adding that he is “no more anti-Muslim than critics of Nazism were anti-German.”

Spencer, who has written for Breitbart and was interviewed by Bannon on its daily radio show, said he did not recall any discussions about the 2007 film proposal. But he said that he found Bannon “to be brilliant and extraordinarily well-informed about both the history and doctrines of Islam.”

The outline warns about “front groups and disingenuous Muslim Americans who preach reconciliation and dialogue in the open but, behind the scenes, advocate hatred and contempt for the West.”

It names the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America as examples of such “cultural jihadists.”

The proposal also lists other “enablers,” including The Post, the New York Times, NPR, “Universities and the Left,” the “American Jewish Community,” the ACLU, the CIA, the FBI, the State Department and the White House.

“The road to the establishment of an Islamic Republic in the United States starts slowly and subtly with the loss of the will to win,” the outline reads. “The road to this unique hell on earth is paved with the best intentions from our major institutions. This political/accommodation/appeasement approach is not simply a function of any one individual’s actions but lies at the heart of our most important cultural and political institutions.”

Bannon’s work on the “Great Satan” project came after the release of his well-received 2004 Ronald Reagan biopic “In the Face of Evil.” That film contained a coda that warned about the threat of “the beast” during a montage of Muslims praying, terrorist camps and people falling to their deaths from the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Bannon then produced political documentaries including “Border War: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration”; “Generation Zero,” an examination of the global economic crisis; and “Battle for America,” which hammered an “out-of-touch, arrogant, and ever-expanding central government.”

It’s unclear why “Great Satan” was never produced. Jones, a political liberal who was Bannon’s screenwriting partner for 16 years, said that after helping him type up the proposal, she did not work on it any further.

President Donald Trump nominates Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House January 31, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — A Southern California city and the federal government on Saturday said they reached a deal to close Santa Monica's airport, ending a lengthy legal battle over the site.

Under the agreement, the city can close the airport after 2028 and carry out plans to turn the 227-acre property into a park, Santa Monica officials said.

In the meantime, the city can shorten the airport's single runway to 3,500 feet from its current length of nearly 5,000 feet, which means larger jets will no longer be able to take off or land, city officials said.

Santa Monica has long sought to shut the airport located amid residential neighborhoods in a seaside city of more than 90,000 people. Residents have raised concerns about noise, air pollution and the risk of planes crashing into neighborhoods.

Shortening the runway — which the city hopes to do within six months — will reduce jet operations by 44 percent, and jets are responsible for 95 percent of the noise complaints received by the city, said Mayor Ted Winterer.

"We think this is a big change for our community," Winterer told the Associated Press. "We can immediately shorten the runway, immediately reducing the impact."

The airport caters to private and chartered planes and has 90,000 take offs and landings a year. About 20 percent involve jets, said Santa Monica spokeswoman Constance Farrell.

Santa Monica has been trying to close the airport for decades. In recent years, the city has dueled in court over the future of the property with the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency tasked with regulating the country's airports.

Federal and local officials have feuded over a 1948 agreement over the transfer of airport property and a grant the FAA issued for airport improvements in 1994 that required the airport to operate for a determined period of time, according to federal court filings.

"This is a fair resolution for all concerned because it strikes an appropriate balance between the public's interest in making local decisions about land use practices and its interests in safe and efficient aviation services," FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said in a statement.

As President Trump prepares to name a successor to Justice Antonin Scalia, the conventional wisdom is that the choice will not change the liberal-conservative balance on the court. After all, this argument goes, if Trump chooses any of the names on his previously published list, the court and the country will simply be swapping one conservative justice for another.

That understanding is incorrect and, as the Senate considers Trump’s nominee and the impact on the court, could be dangerously misleading. This will come as a surprise to many, but in a number of important areas, including the rights of criminal defendants and freedom of speech, the justice was actually quite liberal, as that term is commonly applied. Of Scalia’s approximately 879 opinions, including comments on denials of petitions for certiorari, I have counted 135 as liberal and a number of others as arguably liberal.

No doubt, Scalia was personally a committed conservative and originalist. He relied on that pair of approaches to render conservative opinions on abortion, the right to die, women’s rights, rights of gays and lesbians, obscenity, the death penalty, habeas corpus, the exclusionary rule relating to illegal searches and seizures, regulatory takings of private property, gun rights, establishment of religion, states’ rights, standing to challenge federal regulatory statutes, the scope of the commerce clause, the Freedom of Information Act and more.

Yet Scalia’s commitment to his jurisprudence led him to write many important liberal opinions, although they are less well-known than his conservative decisions, with their often provocative language.

In criminal cases, Scalia was the court’s leading protector of defendants’ rights under the confrontation clause. Because the testimony had not been subject to cross-examination, he disallowed the use of previous grand jury testimony by a witness who was unavailable at trial. He prevented screens to shield child witnesses in child abuse cases from seeing their alleged abusers. Likewise, Scalia was liberal in his interpretation of the double jeopardy clause and the prohibition against ex post facto judicial decisions under the due process clause. He insisted that indictments, to be valid, list all the elements of a crime, and consistently relied on the rule of lenity, which requires criminal statutes to be clear before they are enforced against a defendant. He also broadly supported the right to trial by jury in civil cases, protected by the Seventh Amendment.

Scalia took a similarly liberal approach on questions of what constitutes an unreasonable search or seizure. He protected homes from searches by heat-detectors seeking signs of marijuana plants or dogs sniffing around a house to detect narcotics. He dissented when the court upheld the taking of a DNA sample from the mouth of someone arrested on one offense and then charged with another crime based on a DNA match. Invasive searches to detect the commission of other crimes, he said, violated the Fourth Amendment and due process. He insisted that any interference with personal property by law-enforcement officers amounted to a search that required a warrant or exigent circumstances, such as when the police affixed a GPS device on a suspect’s car without a warrant.

When it came to the Sixth Amendment’s right to trial by jury, Scalia once again was a leader of the liberal position. He insisted that juries, not judges, make the critical decision of whether an action amounted to a hate crime, and therefore was subject to more severe punishment. Scalia made the powerful point that judges were part of the state, and that trial by jury was designed to protect Americans from the state.

On matters involving the First Amendment, Scalia advocated a broad scope for freedom of speech. Notwithstanding Trump’s argument that flag-burners should be subject to criminal prosecution, Scalia joined the opinion of liberal justice William Brennan striking down laws making flag desecration a crime as unconstitutional. He wrote his own opinion striking down a law prohibiting cross-burning that intimidated African Americans. Scalia’s First Amendment prohibited making distinctions based on the content of a statement. He opposed extending the limited protections afforded obscenity to animal cruelty and violence on First Amendment grounds. However, to the dismay of many liberals, he rejected all attempts by those who sought to curtail the influence of money in politics by voting to hold all limitations on campaign contributions and spending unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech.

When the time comes to evaluate Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, we should not be misled by statements that he or she is a conservative in the mold of Scalia. The reality is much more nuanced. The odds are that we are going to have a nominee who not only follows Scalia’s conservative opinions, but also rejects his liberal ones. In short, the court without Scalia is likely to be a lot worse than the one with him still serving.

President Donald Trump officially took over the @POTUS Twitter account on Friday:

The new Twitter background made me wonder: Whose inauguration is this from? The answer:

Maybe the background was Melania’s idea?

In 2009, as their father penned a letter to his successor, the twin daughters of President George W. Bush, Jenna and Barbara, wrote a letter of their own.

Their dad’s letter would be confidential and offer advice, tucked away in the top drawer of the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, where incoming President Barack Obama would find it on his first day of work as leader of the free world. Now a White House tradition, this had been done by every sitting president since Ronald Reagan.

And so as their father prepared to pass the torch, the Bush girls decided they had advice to offer, too — not for the new president, but for his young daughters, Sasha and Malia.

From one pair of first daughters to another, they titled it “Playing House in the White House.”

Barbara and Jenna, then 27 years old, told Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10, to surround themselves with “loyal friends,” to cherish their pets in times when they’d need “the quiet comfort that only animals can provide,” to slide down the banister of the solarium and play sardines on the White House lawn.

Most importantly, they said, “remember who your dad really is.”

Eight years later, with just a week until Sasha and Malia leave the White House, the Bush sisters, now 35, have written a second letter — this time with advice not about living inside the White House, but outside of it.

“We have watched you grow from girls to impressive young women with grace and ease. And through it all you had each other. Just like we did,” they wrote in the letter, published first online by Time magazine. “Now you are about to join another rarified club, one of former First Children — a position you didn’t seek and one with no guidelines. But you have so much to look forward to. You will be writing the story of your lives, beyond the shadow of your famous parents, yet you will always carry with you the experiences of the past eight years.”

Americans have an odd fascination with the idea of first daughters. It has inspired a handful of popular movie narratives — Katie Holmes’s “First Daughter,” the Disney classic “My Date with the President’s Daughter” and “Chasing Liberty” starring Mandy Moore — and was a major plotline in Aaron Sorkin’s popular TV series “The West Wing,” which often wove in the fictional president’s complicated relationship with his three daughters.

The scrutiny these fictional first daughters faced is not unlike the pressure the real ones encounter, and for the past quarter-century, Americans have had only female first children in the White House — Chelsea Clinton, the Bush twins, Malia and Sasha Obama.

And perhaps no first children were confronted with the harsh reality of having a dad in chief as much as Jenna and Barbara Bush, whose father was in the White House during their college years and whose antics with underage drinking drew intense publicity.

The sisters made note of that in their letter to the Obama sisters.

“Enjoy college. As most of the world knows, we did,” they wrote. “And you won’t have the weight of the world on your young shoulders anymore.”

In 2014, a Hill staffer for a Republican congressman resigned amid widespread backlash after she criticized on social media the appearance of Sasha and Malia during the televised traditional turkey pardon on Thanksgiving.

“Dear Sasha and Malia, I get you’re both in those awful teen years, but you’re a part of the First Family, try showing a little class,” the staffer wrote at the time. “Rise to the occasion. Act like being in the White House matters to you. Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar.”

Jenna Bush Hager, who kept her family name after she was married, defended the Obama girls after the incident, saying she felt “fiercely protective of them.”

That sentiment was obvious in the letter she and her sister penned Thursday.

The Bush twins encouraged Malia and Sasha to keep in contact with the people that made their stay in the White House feel normal, including their Secret Service agents, and challenged them to use their political and diplomatic experiences as first daughters for the greater good.

“You have lived through the unbelievable pressure of the White House,” they closed the letter. “You have listened to harsh criticism of your parents by people who had never even met them. You stood by as your precious parents were reduced to headlines. Your parents, who put you first and who not only showed you but gave you the world.

“As always, they will be rooting for you as you begin your next chapter. And so will we.”

Jenna Bush Hager is a correspondent for the “Today” show on NBC and her sister, Barbara, is the chief executive and co-founder of Global Health Corps, a nonprofit organization focused on the global health equity movement.

You can read their letter to the Obama sisters here:

Malia and Sasha, eight years ago on a cold November day, we greeted you on the steps of the White House. We saw both the light and wariness in your eyes as you gazed at your new home. We left our jobs in Baltimore and New York early and traveled to Washington to show you around. To show you the Lincoln Bedroom, and the bedrooms that were once ours, to introduce you to all the people—the florists, the grounds-keepers and the butlers—who dedicate themselves to making this historic house a home. The four of us wandered the majestic halls of the house you had no choice but to move in to. When you slid down the banister of the solarium, just as we had done as 8-year-olds and again as 20-year-olds chasing our youth, your joy and laughter were contagious.

In eight years, you have done so much. Seen so much. You stood at the gates of the Robben Island cell where South Africa’s Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for decades, your arms around your father. You traveled to Liberia and Morocco with your mom to talk with girls about the importance of education—girls who saw themselves in you, saw themselves in your parents, saw who they could become if they continued to study and learn. You attended state dinners, hiked in national parks, met international leaders and managed to laugh at your dad’s jokes during the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon, all while being kids, attending school and making friends. We have watched you grow from girls to impressive young women with grace and ease.

And through it all you had each other. Just like we did.

Now you are about to join another rarified club, one of former First Children—a position you didn’t seek and one with no guidelines. But you have so much to look forward to. You will be writing the story of your lives, beyond the shadow of your famous parents, yet you will always carry with you the experiences of the past eight years.

Never forget the wonderful people who work at the White House. Our greeter as 7-year-olds at our grandfather’s Inauguration was Nancy, the White House florist, who ushered us in from the cold. She helped us make colorful bouquets of winter flowers for our grandparents’ bedside. Twenty years later, Nancy did the flowers for Jenna’s wedding. Cherish your own Nancy. We stay in touch with our Secret Service. They were part of growing up for us: there for first dates, first days and even an engagement and a honeymoon. We know it wasn’t always easy—the two of you and the two of us were teenagers trailed by men in backpacks—but they put their lives on hold for us.

Enjoy college. As most of the world knows, we did. And you won’t have the weight of the world on your young shoulders anymore. Explore your passions. Learn who you are. Make mistakes—you are allowed to. Continue to surround yourself with loyal friends who know you, adore you and will fiercely protect you. Those who judge you don’t love you, and their voices shouldn’t hold weight. Rather, it’s your own hearts that matter.

Take all that you have seen, the people you have met, the lessons you have learned, and let that help guide you in making positive change. We have no doubt you will. Traveling with our parents taught us more than any class could. It opened our eyes to new people as well as new cultures and ideas. We met factory workers in Michigan, teachers in California, doctors healing people on the Burmese border, kids who lined the dusty streets of Kampala to see the American President, and kids with HIV waiting to get the antiretroviral drugs that would save their lives. One tiny girl wearing her finest lavender dress looked young, which she was not. She was little because she was sick. Her mom admitted that she might not live to see these drugs work, but her brothers and sisters would. After meeting this girl, Barbara went back to school and changed her major, and her life’s path.

You have lived through the unbelievable pressure of the White House. You have listened to harsh criticism of your parents by people who had never even met them. You stood by as your precious parents were reduced to headlines. Your parents, who put you first and who not only showed you but gave you the world. As always, they will be rooting for you as you begin your next chapter. And so will we.

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By ROBERT LEONARDJAN. 5, 2017

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Knoxville, Iowa — One recent morning, I sat near two young men at a coffee shop here whom I’ve known since they were little boys. Now about 18, they pushed away from the table, and one said: “Let’s go to work. Let the liberals sleep in.” The other nodded.

They’re hard workers. As a kid, one washed dishes, took orders and swept the floor at a restaurant. Every summer, the other picked sweet corn by hand at dawn for a farm stand and for grocery stores, and then went to work all day on his parents’ farm. Now one is a welder, and the other is in his first year at a state university on an academic scholarship. They are conservative, believe in hard work, family, the military and cops, and they know that abortion and socialism are evil, that Jesus Christ is our savior, and that Donald J. Trump will be good for America.

They are part of a growing movement in rural America that immerses many young people in a culture — not just conservative news outlets but also home and church environments — that emphasizes contemporary conservative values. It views liberals as loathsome, misinformed and weak, even dangerous.

Who are these rural, red-county people who brought Mr. Trump into power? I’m a native Iowan and reporter in rural Marion County, Iowa. I consider myself fairly liberal. My family has mostly voted Democratic since long before I was born. To be honest, for years, even I have struggled to understand how these conservative friends and neighbors I respect — and at times admire — can think so differently from me, not to mention how over 60 percent of voters in my county could have chosen Mr. Trump.

Political analysts have talked about how ignorance, racism, sexism, nationalism, Islamophobia, economic disenfranchisement and the decline of the middle class contributed to the popularity of Mr. Trump in rural America. But this misses the deeper cultural factors that shape the thinking of the conservatives who live here.

For me, it took a 2015 pre-caucus stop in Pella by J. C. Watts, a Baptist minister raised in the small town of Eufaula, Okla., who was a Republican congressman from 1995 to 2003, to begin to understand my neighbors — and most likely other rural Americans as well.

“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good,” said Mr. Watts, who was in the area to campaign for Senator Rand Paul. “We are born bad,” he said and added that children did not need to be taught to behave badly — they are born knowing how to do that.

“We teach them how to be good,” he said. “We become good by being reborn — born again.”

He continued: “Democrats believe that we are born good, that we create God, not that he created us. If we are our own God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something else to blame when things go wrong — not us.”

Mr. Watts talked about the 2015 movie theater shooting in Lafayette, La., in which two people were killed. Mr. Watts said that Republicans knew that the gunman was a bad man, doing a bad thing. Democrats, he added, “would look for other causes — that the man was basically good, but that it was the guns, society or some other place where the blame lies and then they will want to control the guns, or something else — not the man.” Republicans, he said, don’t need to look anywhere else for the blame.

Hearing Mr. Watts was an epiphany for me. For the first time I had a glimpse of where many of my conservative friends and neighbors were coming from. I thought, no wonder Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on things like gun control, regulations or the value of social programs. We live in different philosophical worlds, with different foundational principles.

Overlay this philosophical perspective on the American rural-urban divides of history, economy and geography, and the conservative individual responsibility narrative becomes even more powerful. In my experience, the urban-rural divide isn’t really so much a red state versus blue state issue, it’s red county versus blue county. Rural Iowans have more in common with the rural residents of Washington State and New Mexico — places I’ve also lived — than with the residents of Des Moines, Seattle and Albuquerque.

Look at a national map of which counties went for Democrats and which for Republicans: Overwhelmingly the blue counties are along waterways, where early river transportation encouraged the formation of cities, and surround state capitals. This is also where most investment in infrastructure and services is made. Rural Americans recognize that this is how it must be, as the cities are where most of the people are, yet it’s a sore spot.

In state capitols across America, lawmakers spend billions of dollars to take a few seconds off a city dweller’s commute to his office, while rural counties’ farm-to-market roads fall into disrepair. Some of the paved roads in my region are no longer maintained and are reverting to gravel. For a couple of generations now, services that were once scattered across rural areas have increasingly been consolidated in urban areas, and rural towns die. It’s all done in the name of efficiency.

In cities, firefighters and E.M.T.s are professionals whose departments are funded by local, state and federal tax dollars. Rural America relies on volunteers. If I have a serious heart attack at home, I’ll be cold to the touch by the time the volunteer ambulance crew from a town 22 miles away gets here.

Urban police officers have the latest in computer equipment and vehicles, while small-town cops go begging.

In this view, blue counties are where most of our tax dollars are spent, and that’s where all of our laws are written and passed. To rural Americans, sometimes it seems our taxes mostly go to making city residents live better. We recognize that the truth is more complex, particularly when it comes to social programs, but it’s the perception that matters — certainly to the way most people vote.

To make matters worse, jobs are continuing to move to metropolitan areas. Small-town chamber of commerce directors and mayors still have big dreams, and use their perkiest grins and tax abatements to try to lure new businesses, only to see their hopes dashed, time and again. Many towns with a rich history and strong community pride are already dead; their citizens just don’t know it yet.

Many moderate rural Republicans became supporters of Mr. Trump when he released his list of potential Supreme Court nominees who would allow the possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade. They also think the liberal worldview creates unnecessary rules and regulations that cripple the economy and take away good jobs that may belong to them or their neighbor. Public school systems and colleges are liberal tools of indoctrination that go after what we love and value most — our children.

Some of what liberals worry about they see as pure nonsense. When you are the son or daughter of a carpenter or mechanic and a housewife or secretary who lives paycheck to paycheck, who can’t afford to send kids to college, as many rural residents are, white privilege is meaningless and abstract.

It’s not just older people. The two young men at breakfast exemplify a younger generation with this view. When Ted Cruz campaigned in a neighboring town in 2015, I watched as a couple of dozen grade-school pupils sat at his feet, as if they were at a children’s service at church. His campaign speech was nearly a sermon, and the children listened wide-eyed when he told them the world is a scary place, and it’s godly men like him who are going to save them from the evils of President Obama, Hillary Clinton and their fellow Democrats.

While many blame poor decisions by Mrs. Clinton for her loss, in an environment like this, the Democratic candidate probably didn’t matter. And the Democratic Party may not for generations to come. The Republican brand is strong in rural America — perhaps even strong enough to withstand a disastrous Trump presidency.

Rural conservatives feel that their world is under siege, and that Democrats are an enemy to be feared and loathed. Given the philosophical premises Mr. Watts presented as the difference between Democrats and Republicans, reconciliation seems a long way off.