What it’s like when the Trump outrage machine comes for a NW mainstay

Lutheran Community Services Northwest staff member Norma Velasco handing out school supplies at the organization’s SeaTac back-to-school resource fair in August. (Courtesy of Lutheran Community Services Northwest)

Last Sunday, the head of the Lutheran social services outfit in the Northwest woke to find his phone had been blowing up.

“I had texts and calls that had come in overnight from people all over the country, some of them extremely alarmed,” says David Duea, CEO of Lutheran Community Services Northwest in Tacoma.

“We Lutherans,” he joked, “are normally a reserved and quiet group.”

What happened was that at 3:14 a.m. East Coast time, the multibillionaire Elon Musk sent a tweet that implied the Lutherans were involved in criminal activities.

Michael Flynn, once President Donald Trump’s national security adviser before getting fired, had been compiling lists of federal grants that he considered to be “VERY ROTTEN.” In one, Flynn listed some grants awarded to about 15 Lutheran nonprofits, including Duea’s group, describing it as akin to a “money-laundering operation.”

Musk responded approvingly: “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”

DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, the new outfit Trump created for Musk to comb through the federal budget and try to cut spending.

Let me interrupt this column to provide a few tedious reality statements, of the sort that have become required in the slanderous Trump era.

No, the Lutherans are not a money-laundering operation. They use donations and local, state and federal grants to help the poor, which they’ve been doing in the Northwest for 104 years.

No, the payments are not illegal. They’re typical grants, authorized by Congress and administered by the Health and Human Services agency. The Lutherans competed for them with a host of other nonprofit groups.

OK. Back to the story.

Duea jumped out of bed and said his first reaction was that it was a scam. The internet is filled with fakes, and this was surely another one.

“To see money-laundering and such crazy statements, I just thought, ‘No way can this be real,’ ” he told me.

It was, though. If Musk’s tweets are to be taken seriously, which at this point they must be, it meant the Trump administration was coming after the Lutherans.

“The richest man in the world, on behalf of the president of the United States, is targeting us in the middle of the night with completely unfounded allegations,” Duea said. “How are you supposed to respond to that?”

He had an emergency call with other Lutheran agency heads around the country. They decided not to get baited by “shock and awe” and to first turn inward by reassuring their own staff and clients.

In Washington, Idaho and Oregon, the Lutherans’ top line of work is family support and mental health counseling, with food and clothing giveaways, senior help, homeless shelters and so on. They also help refugees who have been brought here legally through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, matching them with host families and providing other support.

Some of their clients were scared and on heightened alert even before the Lutherans got smeared by Flynn and Musk.

“We spent the first 48 hours just trying to make people feel safe,” Duea said.

Musk, though, has 216 million followers on X. His tweet impugning the Lutherans was viewed more than 20 million times.

It was hard to ignore the 10,000-strong comment mob.

“The corruption runs deep,” said one. “Keep up the good work, Elon, the barn has not been cleaned out for way too long.”

“So,” asked another, “the ‘Lutheran’ faith is now a new branch of the ‘Get Rich Quick’ scheme?”

“If it’s illegal, why aren’t people being arrested,” urged another.

We’re less than three weeks into the new Trump administration and we’re talking about arresting … the Lutherans?

Duea said the vetting of any grant is fair game. But he’s gobsmacked they would portray century-old poverty-aid groups as criminal.

I can fill in some possible blanks on that one. One, the Lutherans work with refugees, which makes them suspect to Christian nationalists such as Flynn. There’s a nativist backdrop to this.

Two, Trump and Musk seem to want to erode trust in government regardless of whether the criticisms are true. So what if the lies get debunked? They serve a larger propaganda purpose of casting aspersions on the entire enterprise.

An example was the one last year about Haitian migrants eating pets in Ohio. That was arguably the most vigorously debunked lie in American campaign history. Yet polls showed nearly 40% of adults still ended up believing it. That’s around 100 million people.

“It’s just a couple of tweets, but the damage this kind of stuff can do is extraordinary,” Duea says. “We’re Lutherans, so we don’t want to get involved in fights. But we had all these people speaking out about us, so we felt we had to make some kind of statement.”

He crafted five paragraphs calling what happened “a reckless misrepresentation of organizations dedicated to serving the most vulnerable in our communities.”

“No amount of misinformation will deter us from our mission,” he vowed.

It was “probably the most popular thing we’ve ever posted on social media,” he said. Unfortunately, it had about one-half of 1% of the viral reach of Musk’s post. You can’t match the MAGA megaphone.

The Lutheran group had already had its refugee assistance funding frozen by a Trump executive order Jan. 21. So far, despite Musk’s claims, it has yet to lose other grants, Duea said. It doesn’t seem legal anyway to just start axing previously approved grants. But who knows if that matters anymore?

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,” David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School, told The Washington Post.

Duea noted that by the time I interviewed him, the outrage machine had moved on — to Canada, then to international aid groups and then to the U.S. “owning” Gaza. All in two days.

“We’ll be invading Greenland any day now, and nobody will remember they were ever worrying about the Lutherans,” he said.

More seriously, it’s likely to be a dizzying blizzard just like this these next weeks, with one target or scapegoat after another, each provocation pointlessly chewing up resources, time and attention. If they can go after the Lutherans, they can go after anyone.

Duea said the most important thing is to not yield to it. To not get so cynical that you don’t believe in anything.

“Because truth and love always wins,” he said.

Agree on the love part. But truth, I don’t know. It’s in the fight of its life.

Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com. Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.