In President Trump’s White House, scandals compete with each other for oxygen. Deported American citizens are bumped from the front pages by sprawling ICE raids. Leaks at the Pentagon wrestle with the salacious drip-drip-drip of details about Trump’s relationship to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. It’s exhausting.

Trump’s chorus of noise and distraction isn’t strategic, but chaos doesn’t need to be strategic in order to paper over MAGA Republicans’ less visible horrors. Just ask Oklahomans, who just awoke to a world where out-of-state teachers are now required to pass an “America-first exam” meant to test their loyalty to the GOP’s nativist “anti-woke” ideology. If you don’t pass, you don’t teach.

Oklahoma’s effort to conform to Trump’s far-right politics comes as the state faces a near-record teacher shortage. That hardly matters to state Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters. In........

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