The ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran has been announced and may be formally signed on Friday, but larger arguments are unresolved and lingering questions remain. That may be the most revealing thing about the agreement itself.

In a previous essay, I asked what America had gained after 111 days of war. The harder follow-up question now is how secure that gain really is. If the people expected to live with the agreement don’t share the same definition of success, how could a ceasefire declaration resolve the larger dispute?

That’s the unsettling implication.

The question came into sharp relief after listening to Israel’s ambassador to the United States discuss the agreement on NPR. What stood out was not necessarily the substance of his remarks, but their tone. It did not sound like settled language, let alone diplomacy. It sounded like someone still litigating the war.

What made the interview so troubling was not only what the ambassador said, but how he said it. Terms like “madmen,” “murderers,” and “jihadi terrorists” are unusually raw for a sitting ambassador in a public interview, especially in the middle of sensitive negotiations. The language suggested not careful diplomatic calibration, but open skepticism, if not outright defiance, toward the framework.

The problem is greater than any single disagreement over enforcement or verification. The parties involved are measuring success by different standards. For some, success means containing Iran, limiting its capabilities, and avoiding a wider war. For others, success means permanently eliminating the threat. Those objectives can overlap for a time, but they are not the same destination. A ceasefire can satisfy the first while frustrating the second. And when participants do not share the same destination, every agreement contains the seeds of its next dispute.

That is why the tone of the interview mattered. The rhetoric was the surprise. The fragility was the warning.

A durable agreement usually creates incentives for its participants to defend it. A fragile agreement produces caveats, warnings, public positioning, and preemptive blame. People who trust a settlement tend to talk about preserving it. People who do not tend to talk about what happens when it fails.

This is especially true because the hardest questions have merely been deferred. The nuclear issue remains unresolved. If reparations are paid (a dubious claim), who is to say how that money will be spent? The promise of future negotiations is doing much of the heavy lifting. And key participants do not appear to be operating from identical assumptions about what counts as success.

If major participants cannot agree on what success means, they may not recognize it if it arrives. And if they cannot recognize it, they may not defend it when it is tested.

“We hope,” said the ambassador, “that any deal that would be achieved with them would be one which could be verified. I would say distrust and verify.”

“Distrust and verify” may be the most honest phrase in the room.

It is also a warning.

An agreement without trust is fragile enough. A settlement with resentment is something else entirely because resentment is not just distrust; it is distrust with memory, grievance, and a desire to settle scores. Trust can be absent and a deal may still limp along. But resentment is a peace carrying its own future breach inside it.

The sentiments expressed (or inferred) in that interview may not be the cause of instability so much as a symptom of it. The language sounded inflammatory because the agreement does not confront — and may not be able to confront — old, deep-seated animosities between two peoples.

The ceasefire may endure. Future negotiations may succeed. The nuclear dispute may eventually be resolved. All of that remains possible.

But durable agreements rest on a shared understanding of what success looks like. Listening to the public arguments already forming, it is uncertain whether such an understanding exists, or can ever be achieved.

The shooting may have stopped. The argument has not.

If the parties cannot agree on what success looks like, how will they recognize it when it arrives?

After 111 days of war, the United States and Iran appear headed toward an agreement that extends a fragile ceasefire and reopens the Strait of Hormuz.

The most important thing to say about that agreement is also the simplest:

It’s tentative, and tentative is still tentative.

This is not a peace treaty. It is not a settlement. It is not even a final agreement. It is a memorandum of understanding that creates space for more negotiations. After four months of fighting, we have achieved a pause.

Whether that pause proves durable remains to be seen.

Which brings us to the only question that matters.

Not whether the shooting has stopped.

Not whether the markets approve.

Not whether politicians can declare victory.

What did the United States buy with 111 days of war that it did not already possess before the war began?

That is the entire argument.

The administration will undoubtedly celebrate this moment. President Trump has already proclaimed, “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

One might as well congratulate the arsonist for rebuilding the house he burned down.

Yes, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is welcome news. So is the prospect of lower energy prices. So is the possibility that Americans and Iranians will stop killing one another.

But relief and achievement are not the same thing.

Relief is what happens when the fire stops spreading.

Achievement is what remains after the smoke clears.

The cost side of the ledger is easier to measure than the benefits.

The Cost

According to reporting based on Pentagon estimates, the first week of the war alone cost roughly $11 billion. Outside analysts have placed operational costs in a similar range or higher. That figure does not include replenishing munitions stockpiles, maintaining deployments, repairing infrastructure, or any supplemental appropriations Congress may eventually be asked to approve.

Even using conservative estimates, taxpayers have already been handed a bill running into the tens of billions.

Consumers paid as well.

As oil markets reacted to the conflict, gasoline prices climbed and remained elevated for months, affecting the price of every commodity that relies on oil and gas. By spring, national averages had pushed above four dollars a gallon. Estimates suggested the typical household had already absorbed nearly $200 in additional fuel costs.

This is the war you see in the checkout aisle, not in the briefing room.

It is the tax that arrives without legislation.

A few dollars here. A few dollars there. A little more at the pump, a little more on the delivery truck, a little more on the grocery shelf.

War has a way of finding every receipt.

Before and After

So what did America receive in exchange?

Before the war, the Strait of Hormuz was open.

After the war, the achievement being celebrated is that it may soon be open again.

Before the war, Iran was governed by a theocratic regime of hardliners.

After the war, Iran is governed by the same regime.

Before the war, Iran’s nuclear program was a source of dispute and negotiation.

After the war, Iran’s nuclear program remains a source of dispute and negotiation.

Before the war, Iran possessed the ability to threaten regional stability through geography, proxies, and asymmetric tactics.

After the war, it still does.

This is not to say nothing happened.

A great deal happened.

Money was spent.

Lives were lost.

Infrastructure was destroyed.

Markets were disrupted.

The question is whether those costs purchased a strategic result proportionate to the sacrifice.

The Credibility Problem

Trump’s rhetoric provides its own standard.

He spoke of obliterating Iran’s nuclear program. He spoke of destroying missile production. He spoke of defeating regional proxies. At times, he spoke in terms that suggested regime change or unconditional surrender.

Those were not modest objectives.

Yet the emerging agreement appears to be something far narrower: a cessation of hostilities, partial economic relief, renewed diplomacy, and further negotiations over the nuclear question.

That may be preferable to continued war, but it is not the outcome Americans were told they were fighting to achieve.

The nuclear issue itself remains unresolved.

The current framework reportedly postpones the hardest questions for a second phase of negotiations. Perhaps those talks will succeed. Perhaps they will not.

But it is difficult to describe a problem as solved when solving it has been deferred for another sixty days, and, in the minds of many, need no solution at all since one was already in place.

There is also a cost that never appears in budget documents.

Wars create memory.

Every destroyed building, every civilian casualty, every family left grieving becomes part of a nation’s political inheritance.

The people who survive a war often become the people who define the next one.

There may be another consequence as well, one that receives far less attention than military objectives or economic costs.

Before this war, much of the world’s attention was focused on the Iranian regime itself. The story was repression. The story was corruption. The story was the regime’s brutal treatment of its own people.

Today, the conversation is different.

After 111 days of conflict, the regime that began the year defending its own conduct now finds itself presenting as the victim of foreign attack. In some parts of the world, Iran is viewed less as an oppressor than as a country that withstood overwhelming American firepower.

Whether that perception is fair is almost beside the point.

Wars have a way of rearranging sympathies.

If the administration hoped to isolate the regime, it may instead have strengthened its narrative.

If it hoped to focus the world’s attention on Tehran’s abuses, it may have redirected that attention elsewhere.

The Iranian people whose grievances once dominated the conversation have largely disappeared from it.

Which returns us to the original question:

What did the United States buy with 111 days of war that it did not already have before the war began?

The answer may yet change.

Perhaps future negotiations will produce a breakthrough.

Perhaps the ceasefire will evolve into something durable.

Perhaps phase two will accomplish what phase one could not.

But those are future achievements, not present ones.

Still, credibility remains a nagging problem.

Given the administration’s shifting public positions throughout the conflict—deal, no deal, negotiations, ultimatums, deadlines, extensions—skepticism is understandable.

The argument for patience ultimately rests on confidence that future negotiations will deliver what 111 days of war did not.

Many Americans may reasonably wonder whether such confidence is deserved.

For now, all we can evaluate is what exists.

And what exists is a fragile pause, an enormous bill, unresolved disputes, and a strategic landscape that looks remarkably similar to the one that existed before the first shot was fired.

Markets may rally.

Oil prices may fall.

Politicians may congratulate themselves.

But relief is not achievement.

Relief is what people feel when a crisis stops getting worse.

Achievement is what leaves them better off than before.

On the available evidence, the bill is clear.

The benefits are not.

Donald Trump spent Saturday doing what he has done dozens of times before: announcing that a deal with Iran was imminent. The following day brought a less cooperative reality. Iranian officials remained cautious. One figure close to Tehran’s negotiating team posted the following

Note the date: June 14. One wonders if there was an intentional message:

Happy Birthday, Donald.

Yes, perhaps another breakthrough is just around the corner. Perhaps not. At this point, however, the more interesting question is not whether a deal exists. It is why Trump keeps announcing one before it does.

The pattern has become familiar. A breakthrough is declared. The breakthrough fails to materialize. A new breakthrough is declared. Reality declines to participate. Facts are not social climbers. They do not flatter power. Somewhere along the way, declarations become detached from outcomes.

This is the Trumpian pattern. He keeps announcing victories before reality arrives. He declares the matter settled, then behaves as though repetition itself were a diplomatic instrument.

That matters because credibility is not merely a public-relations concern. It is a strategic asset. The more often deadlines pass unmet and agreements remain unsigned, the more adversaries learn that the announcement itself carries less weight than the conditions beneath it.

The operative word in the title of this essay is important: patience. Patience is something Iran possesses in abundance.

Washington operates on election cycles, approval ratings, inflation reports, market reactions, and cable-news deadlines. Tehran operates on a different calendar altogether. The Iranian leadership has survived sanctions, isolation, military threats, covert operations, and multiple American administrations. It thinks in years and decades where Washington often thinks in news cycles.

That asymmetry may be Iran’s greatest advantage.

Not military superiority.

Not economic power.

Time.

Know Thine Enemy

The phrase "Know thine enemy as ye know thyself" is a variation of a quote attributed to Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," emphasizing the importance of understanding both your adversary and yourself to achieve success in conflict.

This is the first lesson of negotiation. You do not need to trust your opponent. You do not need to admire him. You do not need to like him.

You need to understand him.

Iran does not have to trust Trump. It only has to understand him.

If Iranian negotiators believe Trump craves public victories, seeks immediate results, and dislikes prolonged uncertainty, then those observations become strategic assets. Every negotiator studies leverage. Every negotiator studies incentives. Every negotiator attempts to identify the pressures operating on the other side.

That is not unusual diplomacy. That is diplomacy.

Which is why reports suggesting that Iranian officials may be tailoring their communications around Trump’s personality and mental acuity are interesting regardless of whether every detail is true. The reports matter less than the underlying logic.

The logic is sound.

If your adversary is predictable, predictability becomes leverage.

And Trump is often remarkably predictable.

Geography as Leverage

For all the attention devoted to nuclear facilities and military strikes, Iran’s greatest leverage remains something far simpler.

Geography.

The Strait of Hormuz still sits where it has always sat: a narrow corridor through which a substantial share of the world’s energy supply passes. It remains the quiet fact underneath every dramatic headline and every presidential declaration.

As we noted in our previous essay, The Art of Humiliation, Iran’s greatest leverage was never necessarily a bomb. The Strait of Hormuz gives Tehran something potentially more useful: the ability to threaten a chokepoint through which a significant share of the world’s energy supply moves. It gives Tehran leverage that no missile strike can eliminate and no diplomatic announcement can wish away. Geography, unlike policy, does not change with the news cycle.

Thus, Iran did not need a nuclear weapon to acquire leverage. It already had one.

A missile can be intercepted. A centrifuge can be bombed. Geography is more stubborn.

That reality has not changed simply because another statement was posted on social media.

Nor has the second reality.

Time.

Iran can wait.

Trump cannot.

Every month that passes carries political costs for Washington that Tehran does not experience in the same way. Poll numbers move. Gas prices move. Markets move. Election calendars advance. The pressure accumulates on one side far more quickly than the other.

The Danger of Hubris

Which brings us back to the central misunderstanding that has haunted this conflict from the beginning.

The administration appears to have assumed that overwhelming power would produce political control.

Instead, it discovered something every great power eventually learns.

Superior force does not eliminate political reality. It merely changes the terms on which reality presents itself.

Understanding as Leverage

Power is most vulnerable when the other side understands it better than it understands itself.

That may be the most important lesson of this entire episode.

Iran does not need to trust Trump.

It does not need to like him.

It does not need to believe him.

It only needs to understand him.

The humiliation is not that Trump may fail to get the result he wants. It is that the administration entered this conflict believing military superiority would translate into political control, and Iran has spent the entire episode demonstrating that force and control are not the same thing.

Iran did not have to defeat the United States. It merely had to refuse to cooperate with American assumptions.

That is a lesson history teaches repeatedly and great powers repeatedly ignore.

The British learned it.

The Soviets learned it.

The United States learned it in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Now, in a different form, Washington is learning it again.

There will undoubtedly be more announcements.

More deadlines.

More threats.

More declarations that victory is near.

But the lesson remains unchanged.

You do not control the outcome simply because you possess the greater force.

You control the outcome only if the other side cooperates with your assumptions.

Iran has shown little interest in doing so.

And reality, irritatingly enough, remains equally uncooperative.

As has happened many times during his Iran misadventure, Donald Trump spent Thursday moving between alternate realities. In one version, the United States was preparing additional strikes on Iran. In another, a peace agreement was already finished, with only the formal paperwork left to complete. Iran, inconveniently, appeared unaware that peace had already arrived.

This is not new. The administration has announced victory, imminent victory, peace, imminent peace, decisive success, and final success so many times that one begins to suspect it views chronology as an optional feature of statecraft.

Perhaps that is strategy. The faithful certainly insist it is. They describe the constant oscillation between threat and reconciliation as sophisticated coercive signaling: keep adversaries guessing, keep allies off balance, keep everyone uncertain about what comes next. That is one interpretation.

Another is that reality keeps refusing to cooperate.

The deeper problem is not merely contradiction. It is the widening gap between rhetoric and reality. In war, words are not decoration. Allies must believe commitments. Adversaries must believe threats. Markets must believe signals. Once that relationship starts to break down, uncertainty becomes its own strategic actor. And uncertainty is now doing quite a lot of work.

The administration appears trapped by an assumption that has undone stronger governments than this one: the belief that overwhelming power automatically produces political control. Military power can destroy targets. It cannot guarantee outcomes. That distinction matters because Iran’s greatest strategic asset was never simply its nuclear program. It was geography.

The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a shipping lane. It is one of the world’s most important economic chokepoints, a narrow passage through which vast quantities of global energy flow. Washington has spent years treating Iran’s nuclear ambitions as the central source of its leverage. Yet the current crisis has exposed a more immediate reality: Iran already possesses an instrument capable of inflicting global economic pain.

It has weaponized geography.

A missile can be intercepted. A centrifuge can be bombed. Geography is more stubborn.

That may be the administration’s most consequential miscalculation. Power has a way of creating intellectual blind spots. When you possess the world’s most capable military, it becomes tempting to assume every problem has a military solution. What gets overlooked are the constraints that cannot be bombed away.

One can almost imagine the moment of realization: the briefings, the maps, the dawning recognition that the narrow strip of water everyone already knew existed had suddenly become the most important piece of terrain in the world. “Damn,” someone must have thought. “We didn’t think of that.”

No, you didn’t.

Empires rarely do.

The British discovered it. The Soviets discovered it. The United States discovered it in Vietnam, rediscovered it in Iraq, and then found it again in Afghanistan. Superior force does not eliminate political reality. It merely changes the terms on which reality presents itself.

Iran understood this from the beginning. It did not need to defeat the United States. It merely needed to endure. Time, after all, can be weaponized every bit as effectively as geography.

Washington operates on election cycles, news cycles, quarterly earnings reports, approval ratings, and market reactions. Iran’s leadership thinks in decades. Every month the conflict drags on increases pressure on the White House while imposing comparatively little political pressure on Tehran. The asymmetry is obvious once seen and hard to ignore thereafter.

This is where the humiliation enters the story.

Not the humiliation of military defeat. No serious observer thinks Iran has somehow overpowered the United States. The humiliation is more subtle, and more durable: the United States employed overwhelming force and still failed to impose a decisive outcome.

That is not the same thing as losing. But it is very far from winning.

Trump has spent much of his public life operating from a simple assumption: apply pressure, escalate if necessary, and eventually the other side yields. The formula has often worked because the other side wanted something from him, feared him, depended upon him, or simply lacked the resources to resist. Iran occupies none of those categories.

It has absorbed punishment, refused submission, and continued insisting upon its own terms. He is discovering, perhaps for the first time in public life, that a bully can run out of victims.

The irony is that every new declaration of victory tightens the trap. The more often success is announced, the harder it becomes to explain why additional threats, additional strikes, additional negotiations, and additional concessions remain necessary. Each proclamation narrows the distance between rhetoric and reality until reality begins winning the argument.

That is what Jeff Heller captured in a single cartoon. A man strikes a hornet’s nest and immediately begins announcing that the hornets have been obliterated. The hornets, meanwhile, continue behaving like hornets.

The lesson is older than politics: You control the outcome only if the other side cooperates with your assumptions.

Iran did not cooperate.

The hornets rarely do.

Neither, for that matter, does reality.

The flesh-eating fly has returned to Texas, and almost immediately the political instinct has done what it does best: it has reached for a villain instead of a fact.

The current New World screwworm outbreak appears to have surged in Panama in 2023 before spreading north through livestock and wildlife populations across Central America and into Mexico. The first confirmed U.S. case in the current outbreak was detected in a calf in Zavala County, Texas, on June 3, 2026.

Here is a useful Texas A&M breakdown.

There is, at present, no evidence that the parasite was introduced into the United States by human migrants crossing the border. Agricultural and animal-health authorities have consistently described the threat as a northward biological spread through animals and the screwworm fly itself.

Yet almost before the facts were established, the search for political blame began.

Some quickly linked the outbreak to immigration and the oft-repeated charge of blaming Joe Biden.

Others pointed toward Trump administration budget cuts, weakened government capacity, and hostility toward scientific expertise.

Within hours, the flesh-eating parasite had become another participant in America’s endless partisan food fight.

It was, in other words, already dead before it arrived: not a parasite, but a prop.

The problem is not that people are asking questions. The problem is that many have already decided on the answers.

Two Claims, Two Standards

There is an important difference between these statements:

• A parasite spread northward through animal populations.

• Immigrants brought the parasite.

The first is a scientific claim. It can be tested, investigated, and either supported or refuted by evidence.

The second assigns responsibility to a group of people. That does not make it impossible. It simply means the evidentiary burden should be higher.

What evidence demonstrates that migrants introduced screwworm into Texas?

So far, none has been presented. That absence is not a gap in the reporting. It is the reporting.

The same principle applies elsewhere in the debate.

Consider this pair of claims:

• The Trump administration’s cuts directly caused the 2026 screwworm outbreak.

• Cuts to surveillance, research, and prevention make outbreaks more difficult to detect, contain, or prevent.

The second claim is relatively easy to defend. Public health, agriculture, emergency management, and environmental protection all depend on monitoring systems that identify problems before they become crises.

The first claim is considerably harder to prove.

To establish direct causation, one would need evidence that specific programs were cut, that those programs would likely have altered the outcome, that warnings were ignored, and that the outbreak probably would not have occurred otherwise.

That is a much higher bar.

A timeline here matters.

The screwworm had already surged in Panama and been reported in Mexico in 2024, while Joe Biden was still president. In early 20205, under DOGE, the Trump administration cut the CDC’s Central America monitoring program. That does not eliminate the possibility that the funding cut weakened containment or made later spread harder to stop. It does mean the outbreak was already in motion before the cuts, which makes direct-causation claims much harder to sustain than claims about degraded prevention capacity.

The timeline is the inconvenient part. Screwworm surged in Panama in 2023 and had already reached Mexico before the 2025 funding cut. So the cut cannot honestly be described as the origin of the outbreak. It may still have weakened the wall against it, but that is a very different claim from saying the wall caused the fire.

The point is not that one side is right and the other wrong. The point is that both sides should be held to the same standard.

Extraordinary claims require evidence.

The Prevention Paradox

What makes this discussion difficult is that prevention is uniquely vulnerable to political attack.

When prevention succeeds, nothing happens.

No outbreak occurs. No livestock die. No emergency is declared. No headlines appear.

Politicians see a budget item. Voters see nothing at all.

The success is invisible.

Then funding is cut because the problem appears to have vanished.

In reality, the problem appears to have vanished because the preventive system was working.

Agricultural surveillance, veterinary monitoring, laboratory networks, and rapid-response programs suffer from this paradox constantly. Their greatest achievement is often the absence of a disaster.

The same logic applies far beyond screwworms.

Disease surveillance. Levee maintenance. Wildfire mitigation. Bridge inspections.

When nothing happens, the system is dismissed as bureaucracy.

When something happens, the same system is suddenly recognized as indispensable.

That does not prove that budget cuts caused this particular outbreak. It merely explains why experts often defend institutions that appear unnecessary precisely because they have been successful.

Nature Does Not Negotiate

The temptation in politics is always to transform events into morality plays.

Someone must be blamed.

Someone must be vindicated.

Someone must become the villain.

Nature is not interested.

The screwworm does not care about immigration policy. It does not care about political ideology. It does not care whether a bureaucrat was efficient or incompetent, whether a governor was conservative or progressive, whether a talking point originated on MSNBC or Newsmax.

It simply does what nature intended. It reproduces. And it does not ask for permission, nor for a press release, nor for a partisan explanation.

That indifference is worth remembering.

For years, Americans have increasingly treated politics as a contest between competing narratives. Facts are often selected to support conclusions already reached. Evidence becomes secondary to identity.

Then reality occasionally interrupts.

A virus emerges.

A hurricane arrives.

A bridge collapses.

A flesh-eating parasite crosses a border.

At that moment, biology and physics become indifferent referees. They do not care what story we prefer.

The screwworm outbreak is therefore about more than agriculture.

It is a reminder that evidence still matters.

The documented explanation is straightforward: the parasite spread north through animal populations from Panama into Mexico and ultimately into Texas.

Perhaps new evidence will emerge. Perhaps some current assumptions will prove incomplete. Science is always subject to revision.

But until that evidence exists, the responsible answer remains the same.

Not: Who can we blame?

But: What do we actually know?

That question is less emotionally satisfying than a villain.

It is also how serious people distinguish reality from narrative.

A note from the author

Early in my radio career at KFBK in Sacramento, CA, an angry listener called to complain. His uninterrupted 90-second rant concluded: “The other night you sounded like a liberal,” he said. “Tonight you sound like a conservative. I don’t know what you are!” He slammed the phone down.

My answer then is the same as it is now: sometimes the evidence points left, sometimes it points right, and sometimes it points somewhere neither side particularly likes. Our obligation is not to defend a tribe. Our obligation is to follow the evidence.

There is, in the unfolding spectacle of this war, something almost indecently absurd: a conflict announced with apocalyptic urgency, prosecuted with theatrical bravado, and now “concluded” so many times that its supposed ending has become a kind of running farce.

We are told, repeatedly, that hostilities are ceasing—even as they continue. We are assured that victory has been achieved—even as its objectives quietly dissolve. We are invited, in short, to believe that words mean whatever is most convenient in the moment, and nothing at all in the aggregate.

Consider just one eye-popping statistic:

On Monday, Donald Trump claimed yet again that a deal to end the war was near. According to a CNN compilation, since the war began roughly 100 days ago, Trump has made that claim 38 times, meaning that every 65 hours, the war was coming to an end.

One is almost tempted to admire the innovation: a war that ends every 65 hours, on average, while somehow continuing in between.

This is not mere confusion. It is collapse—of clarity, of purpose, and ultimately, of truth.

The original case for war was stated with unmistakable finality. Iran, we were told, stood on the threshold of nuclear capability—mere weeks away from acquiring a weapon that would irrevocably alter the balance of power. The timeline was urgent, the necessity absolute, the alternative unthinkable.

And so, on February 28, the bombs fell.

Within weeks, however, the administration’s central justification for the war encountered an inconvenient complication.

On March 18, the Director of National Intelligence testified under oath that Iran was not, in fact, building a nuclear weapon. The assessment stood in direct contradiction to the rationale that had been presented to the public.

The president did not challenge the evidence, present new intelligence, or attempt to reconcile the discrepancy.

He simply said:

“I do not care what she said.”

And with that, the case for war was reduced to its most honest form: not intelligence, not evidence, but insistence.

It is difficult to improve upon that as a summary of the governing philosophy at work.

What followed was a series of declarations so grandiose, so detached from subsequent reality, that they now read less like statements of policy than like fragments of a discarded screenplay. Iran’s nuclear program would be “obliterated.” Its missile infrastructure reduced to dust. Its ruling regime brought to heel, if not outright swept away. All of this within four to six weeks.

Yet here we are, more than three months on, confronted with the stubborn persistence of facts.

The nuclear program endures.
The regime remains.
The missiles, it would appear, still fly.

This week, Iran shot down a U.S. Apache helicopter—using air defenses that were, we were told, already “obliterated.” The United States responded with strikes on Iranian radar and missile systems which were, presumably, already destroyed several times over. What, then, shot down the helicopter? One hesitates to suggest a slingshot, but the alternatives grow increasingly awkward.

The Pentagon highlighted the successful rescue of the downed crew by an unmanned naval drone—the first of its kind. A remarkable technical achievement, to be sure. But also a convenient headline, one that draws attention away from the more obvious question: how is an “incapacitated” adversary still shooting down American aircraft?

At some point, the word “obliterated” loses all meaning. One begins to suspect the word signifies not destruction but aspiration.

Or perhaps repetition. After all, there are only so many times one can “obliterate” the same air defense system before it begins shooting back out of sheer irritation.

This pattern is not incidental. It is the conflict. The enterprise has ceased to be even nominally tethered to reality. Deadlines were announced and abandoned with ritualistic regularity. “Unconditional surrender” gave way to mediated talks. “Total victory” yielded to extended ceasefires, which themselves required constant extension to accommodate the inconvenient fact that the enemy had not agreed to stop fighting.

At one especially revealing juncture, Iranian attacks on U.S. forces were deemed insufficiently severe to constitute a violation of the ceasefire—thus preserving, at least rhetorically, the illusion that the ceasefire still existed.

A ceasefire in which being shot at does not count as a violation is less an agreement than a linguistic exercise.

It was, in its way, a perfect metaphor: a war redefined downward until it no longer counted as war, a failure rebranded until it resembled success.

And then, inevitably, came the quiet abandonment of the war’s original purpose.

The stockpile of enriched uranium—once presented as the intolerable threat that necessitated immediate action—was, by mid-May, recast as “perhaps not necessary” to secure. This was not announced as a revision of strategy, or even acknowledged as a contradiction. It simply appeared, like so much else in this conflict, as a statement unburdened by memory.

Not necessary.

The phrase hangs there, almost impressively indifferent to the fact that it nullifies the entire rationale for the war that produced it.

Thus the circle closes.

So what, exactly, was achieved?.
• No regime change.
• No nuclear disarmament.
• No surrender.
• No deal.

What the war did produce was far more concrete:.
• Thousands dead.
• Oil spiking to $120 a barrel.
• Gas prices doubling at home.
• The Strait of Hormuz effectively shut down for weeks.
• A global energy shock.
• A more unstable region.
• And a newly empowered Iranian leadership with every incentive to escalate further.

Even diplomatically, the results have been humiliating. Trump, who once tore up Obama’s Iran deal as “the worst in history,” now finds himself chasing a weaker version of that same agreement—this time on Iran’s terms, and through intermediaries like China and Pakistan.

The “ultimate dealmaker” destroyed the only deal that existed, started a war he could not finish, and is now searching for an exit he cannot control.

One might call this irony, were it not so costly.

For the costs, unlike the victories, are quite real. They are measured in the dead, in the destabilized, in the price of energy and the disruption of global trade. They are measured in a region further inflamed, in alliances further strained, and in adversaries newly emboldened by the spectacle of American incoherence.

They are also measured, less tangibly but no less significantly, in the erosion of seriousness itself.

War, properly understood, is an instrument—terrible but purposeful—deployed in pursuit of defined political ends. It demands clarity of objective, discipline of execution, and a willingness to confront reality as it is rather than as one wishes it to be.

What it cannot survive, at least not honorably, is improvisation masquerading as strategy.

And that, in the end, is the truest indictment of this episode. Not merely that it has failed—though it plainly has—but that it was never constructed in a way that could succeed. It was conceived in exaggeration, launched in contradiction, and sustained in denial.

Even now, as helicopters fall from the sky and retaliatory strikes are announced with familiar language of resolve, we are told once more that a deal is near, that victory is at hand, that resolution is imminent.

We have heard this before.

Indeed, we have heard it so often that the war has, by some counts, ended dozens of times already—each conclusion as provisional, and as illusory, as the last.

The administration promised peace through strength. What it delivered instead was war through improvisation. A conflict launched in certainty, sustained by contradiction, and now prolonged by the refusal to acknowledge either.

Three months later, the objectives remain unmet, the enemy remains standing, and the promised victory remains perpetually just a few days away.

The war may yet end.

But the gap between proclamation and reality is already its most enduring legacy.

I recently received a letter in the mail from PragerU, that bastion of online enlightenment. Knowing their reputation, I approached it the way one handles hazardous waste—useful as fodder for an essay, perhaps, but not something to ingest without chemical-resistant gloves.

Sure enough, it proved to be a masterpiece of the fundraising arts, penned by CEO Marissa Streit, who might as well be channeling a late-night televangelist in her quest to save America’s soul—and, naturally, to refill the collection plate.

“We’re in a fight for America’s future,” the letter begins gravely. “Our country is at a crossroads.”

So far, we are firmly within the established literary tradition of the panic solicitation, a genre in which civilization is always moments away from collapse unless the recipient immediately reaches for a checkbook.

“Our children are being taught to despise their own country,” Streit warns.

“How many young people,” she continues, “openly said they side with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro after his capture.”

One suspects the number of American teenagers who could identify Nicolás Maduro in a police lineup could comfortably fit inside a mid-size elevator.

“America is under siege,” the letter continues, urging readers not to remain silent as the nation approaches its 250th birthday. PragerU, she assures us, teaches young people the founding principles that allow generations of Americans to pursue happiness.

Naturally, the appeal concludes with the real purpose of the exercise: a request for a tax-deductible donation. Hurry, the letter urges, “before we lose cultural momentum.”

This slick blend of panic, patriotism, and fundraising hustle is not unusual in American political life. What makes it interesting is the name at the top of the letter.

PragerU.

The rot beneath, however, is exactly what one might expect.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the nadir of American intellectual life had been reached with the advent of cable news shouting matches and social media prattling. But no, the entrepreneurial spirit of the American charlatan knows no depths to which it will not gleefully plunge. PragerU is an organization whose very name is an exercise in fraud. It is, after all, not a university by any definition that wouldn’t send Socrates reaching for the hemlock a second time.

This glorified YouTube channel, the brainchild of talk radio demagogue Dennis Prager and his associate Allen Estrin, represents that peculiarly American synthesis of commercial hucksterism, religious deceit, and political reaction that would be just as comic if it weren’t now being injected directly into the bloodstream of public education. That this pseudo-educational outfit has been approved for classroom use in Florida, Oklahoma, Montana, and New Hampshire is an indictment of the very notion that we collectively give a damn whether the next generation can distinguish fact from propaganda.

The University That Isn’t

Let us begin with the essential dishonesty at Prager U’s core. When they discovered that founding an actual university would require the inconvenient expenditure of $250 million and the even more burdensome task of hiring actual scholars and producing actual knowledge, they pivoted with admirable cynicism to what Estrin called “the medium of internet video.” Of course. Why bother with the tedious work of education when you can produce slick 5-minute videos that provide all the intellectual nourishment of a fast food meal and leave viewers with roughly the same effect on their cognitive health?

The funding sources alone should give any thinking person pause. Fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks have poured millions into this enterprise alongside the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, that venerable patron of movement conservatism. One might ask, “What interest do fossil fuel magnates have in children’s education?” The answer becomes grimly apparent when one examines Prager U’s content on climate change, which promotes systematic denialism and argues with breathtaking sophistry that fossil fuels are actually good for the environment.

The Deceitful Content

Now to the content itself, which manages the impressive feat of being simultaneously vapid and venomous. Consider their treatment of American slavery, surely one of history’s great crimes and a stain that no amount of constitutional waterwashing can cleanse. In an animated video titled “Leo and Leyla meet Frederick Douglass,” PragerU has the temerity to put words in the mouth of that great abolitionist, having him describe slavery as a compromise that was worth it to achieve American unity. This is rather like having Anne Frank pop up to explain that the Holocaust, while regrettable, was necessary for German industrial development.

The historical Douglass, shortly before his death, when asked how to advance civil rights, responded with one word repeated three times: agitate, agitate, agitate. PragerU used a cartoon Douglass, by contrast, to essentially counsel compromise, to wait, to trust the system. Their animated Douglass even takes a swipe at radical activists who refuse all compromise and prefer to set things on fire, a barely veiled attack on the Black Lives Matter movement that would be subtle if subtlety weren’t anathema to everything Prager U represents.

The video cherry-picks Douglass’s description of the Constitution as a glorious liberty document while conveniently omitting his denunciation in the same 1852 speech. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” he stated, “You may rejoice, I must mourn.” And his pointed question about whether black Americans were included within the pale of this glorious anniversary.

This is historical necrophilia, the violation of a great man’s memory in service of a contemporary political agenda.

The Frederick Douglass desecration is simply the most egregious example in an extensive catalog of mendacity. PragerU has spread demonstrable falsehoods about COVID 19, promoted climate change denial, including false claims about polar bear populations and the relationship between fossil fuels and environmental health, and produced videos arguing that fascism is a left-wing ideology, a claim so historically illiterate that it insults both history and literacy simultaneously.

Academic research has found that PragerU has fundamental overlapping ideologies of the extreme right and employs information laundering and persuasion techniques used on online platforms by white supremacists. Their anti-LGBTQ content is particularly vicious, including a film titled DTrans: The Dangers of Gender Affirming Care, launched with a $1 million marketing campaign, because nothing says educational nonprofit quite like spending a million dollars to terrify parents about their transgender children.

But perhaps the most revealing moment came at a Moms for Liberty convention when Dennis Prager, accused of indoctrinating children, didn’t deny it. He said, and I quote, “All he heard was people saying that he indoctrinates kids, which is true.” He admitted, “PragerU brings doctrines to children.” And then he asked, “What is the bad about our indoctrination?”

There it is, the quiet part said out loud. At least the Soviet propagandists had the decency to pretend they were doing something other than indoctrination.

The Rot at the Core

One cannot discuss PragerU without addressing the religious rot at its core. The organization explicitly markets Judeo-Christian values as educational content, and their Leo and Leyla series includes time travel adventures to meet biblical characters, all of which is now being peddled in taxpayer-funded public schools. This, from a nation whose constitution explicitly prohibits religious establishments and whose First Amendment exists precisely to prevent the kind of sectarian indoctrination that PragerU is now delivering to captive audiences of children in government-run classrooms.

The god-bothering is central to PragerU’s mission. Prager himself, an Orthodox Jew who once earned the sobriquet the “Jewish Billy Graham,” has stated that he created PragerU to combat what he regards as leftist and secular indoctrination in universities. Ah, yes, that tired persecution complex of the permanently aggrieved. The organization’s stated mission is to promote what it calls Judeo-Christian values as a bulwark against secularism.

One might gently suggest that if your worldview cannot withstand scrutiny from educated people, the problem lies with your worldview rather than with education itself.

PragerU wraps itself in the flag with the fervor of someone who mistakes nationalism for thought and jingoism for argument. They claim to promote the American values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while simultaneously arguing against a $15 an hour minimum wage, promoting anti-immigrant sentiment, and defending the electoral college with sophistries that would embarrass a freshman debater.

One video grotesquely claims that slavery was a part of life all over the world. It was America that began the conversation to end it, a statement so disconnected from historical fact that one scarcely knows where to begin. The Republic of Ragusa outlawed the slave trade in 1416. Britain abolished slavery throughout its empire in 1833, France in 1848, and numerous other nations preceded the United States. The United States didn’t manage abolition until 1865, and only then after a catastrophic civil war that killed over 600,000 Americans. To claim that America began the conversation requires not merely ignorance but a Trumpian hostility toward truth.

That any state department of education would approve this drivel for classroom use represents a civilizational failure of the first order. We are talking about material that has been rated as having low factual reporting by Media Bias/Fact Check, and questionable overall credibility with multiple failed fact checks on climate change, race, and Covid 19. Historians, researchers, and educators have uniformly condemned these materials as misleading, distorted, and inappropriate for educational settings. Yet here we are watching as Florida, that laboratory of educational malpractice, and other states incorporate PragerU’s materials into taxpayer-funded schools.

This despite the fact that prominent historians like Andrew Hartman call their Frederick Douglass video an appalling misuse that mischaracterizes his role in US history. And University of Pennsylvania education professor Jonathan Zimmerman describes PragerU as a political propaganda machine that promotes mistruths about climate change, slavery, and a whole host of other things.

The Real Replacement Theory

What PragerU represents is the systematic replacement of knowledge with ideology, of critical thinking with catechism, of history with hagiography. It is the prostitution of pedagogy in the service of plutocracy, seasoned with a healthy dose of theocratic yearning and white grievance politics. The tragedy is that we have reached such a nadir of civic and intellectual standards that state governments will eagerly inject this poison into classrooms, wrapped in the flag, and bearing the false credentials of educational legitimacy.

One thinks of Jefferson’s dictum that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Perhaps we should add that eternal skepticism is the price of education and that we have failed to pay that price. PragerU thrives because of certain American values, specifically the values of anti-intellectualism, religious absolutism, and the conviction that patriotism consists of never questioning one’s country except to complain that it has insufficient piety. If this is what we’re teaching our children, then perhaps we deserve the ignorant, superstitious, and easily manipulated citizenry we’re so assiduously cultivating. The ghost of Frederick Douglass, that genuine American hero, must look upon this travesty with the same horror he once reserved for the auction block itself.

PragerU is a lie wrapped in a fraud, served with a side of historical revisionism and religious fundamentalism, all funded by fossil fuel money and packaged with the production values of Saturday morning cartoons. That it has found its way into American classrooms is a civic catastrophe that future generations will study as evidence of how easily a democracy can abandon its commitment to truth in favor of comforting fictions and profitable propaganda.

And Dennis Prager’s question, “What is the bad about our indoctrination?” deserves an answer. Everything, Mr. Prager. Absolutely everything.

The trouble with some political arguments is not that they are wrong, though they certainly are, but that they are made in such determined bad faith that correction feels almost beside the point.

The trigger this time, at least in California, was the primary election. And, as it always does, the conspiratorial cry returned in the familiar key of voter fraud.

As the ballots were still being counted—which, in a state that relies heavily on mail-in voting, is not some sinister anomaly but a predictable feature of the process: the usual fraud sirens began wailing again. The refrain was familiar: the count is slow, therefore suspicious; late ballots are changing the margins, therefore rigged; Democrats are benefiting from the system, therefore the system must be corrupt.

The logic is as thin as a church wafer and just as frequently waved over the heads of the faithful. California’s own officials and election procedures explain the slow tabulation, but explanation is not what the performance requires. It requires grievance. It requires victimhood. It requires the consoling certainty that one has been cheated by some den of thieves rather than defeated by the arithmetic of a democratic count.

Ever present in all this is Donald Trump, who has spent years turning electoral loss (among other things) into a public sacrament of victimhood. He seized on the California count to reprise his old fraud fable, as he has done so many times before, with the same stale indignation and the same contempt for evidence.

This is the same man who, in 2020, pressed Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” him 11,780 votes, an appeal with all the subtlety of a mob shakedown, who encouraged efforts to overturn certified results in multiple states, who was central to the fake-elector scheme, and who ignited the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6. That such a man now presents himself as the guardian of electoral integrity would be funny if it were not so corrosive. One would have to be willfully incurious not to notice the absurdity.

Here, the analogy to religion becomes useful. A deeply committed believer is not merely advancing an argument; he is protecting a structure of meaning. The claim itself may be secondary to the emotional shelter it provides. If the believer’s worldview is challenged, the challenge is received not as a test but as an assault.

And so it is with political tribalism. The accusation of fraud becomes less a statement about ballots than a declaration of identity: we are the wronged, the righteous, the stolen-from. In that posture, evidence is not a remedy. It is an insult.

And let us be honest: there is a difference, at least in most cases, between religion and this kind of political fanaticism. Most believers are not trying to overturn election results, seize voting systems, or make public institutions kneel before their private certainties, let alone demand conversion to their faith. Their delusions—if one insists on being charitable enough to call them that—are usually kept within the walls of the temple, the church, the mosque, the synagogue. Political delusion, by contrast, is always looking for a lever.

I have had this argument before, in radio, in print, and in endless other variations of interaction. It is always the same species of nonsense, only the costume changes. The Moon landings were faked. The Earth is flat. Vaccines contain microchips.

One might argue that the sky is green. No amount of evidence matters once the proposition has become a badge of belonging. Look up, say the sane. It is plainly blue. The scientific explanation is not obscure. But no. Still green. And if you persist, you are no longer correcting a falsehood; you are participating in the cover-up. That is the genius of the fraud myth: it inoculates itself against contradiction by making contradiction part of the conspiracy.

Robert Reich—economist, professor, former Secretary of Labor—captured the emotional cost of this kind of politics in a recent personal story. Families, friendships, and communities have been fractured by a political order that has taught millions of people to treat disagreement as disloyalty. That, too, is part of the damage.

Donald Trump is often blamed for this reality. That is not correct. He is not the whole disease, though he is certainly a spectacular carrier. He is the vulgarizer, the intensifier, the monetizer of something that was already rotting in the culture long before: a system that rewards outrage, feeds selective ignorance, and mistakes emotional saturation for thought.

The California meme about “the fix is in” belongs to that same universe. So does the ominous, vague talk about “break-the-glass” contingencies, which in context was a political warning about a possible Democratic lockout in the top-two race, not a secret plot to nullify Republican voters. Add the prospect of ICE agents near polling stations as an intimidation tactic, and the atmosphere becomes even more combustible.

But context is exactly what the fraud industry cannot afford. The entire enterprise depends on stripping away context and replacing it with insinuation. Suspicion is the product; facts are merely raw material to be dismissed.

That is why the coming midterm cycle may get uglier still. If federal agents are waved around polling places — or if the threat of that spectacle becomes part of the atmosphere — then the message to voters is not subtle. Fear is the point. Disorientation is the point. The more anxious people are, the easier it becomes to tell them the republic itself is under threat and only extraordinary measures can save it. And once that door opens, the people selling panic are never the ones who pay the cost.

Election denialism is not the only venue for such delusion. Consider this comment from another thread:

Obama and his policies and character have now shown how destructive his fundamental changing of America the racism, trans ideology BLM, ISIS pallets of cash to Iran and then the pull out of Afghanistan was to me him and Biden were the worst presidents besides LBJ and Carter ever and never did the media attack them in a 24/7 media cycle either!

It appears as a comment among others to a meme posted on Facebook, a meme so drenched in projection that one hardly knows whether to laugh or sigh:.

The irony is almost ceremonial. However, for purposes of this discussion, we need not treat this meme or the comment posted to it as the main event, embarrassingly baseless though the claims are. It is enough to see it for what it is: a familiar mixture of grievance, selective memory, and factless fantasy dressed up as patriotism.

That is the larger pattern in miniature: the refusal to submit one’s claims to the discipline of evidence, followed by the demand that everyone else accept them as serious simply because they are shouted with conviction.

Certitude like this is not a virtue. It is a warning sign.

This is where Christopher Hitchens becomes especially useful, and where Ben Franklin remains depressingly contemporary. In his many debates with religionists, Hitchens insisted that the burden of proof is on his opponent: if you make the claim (that god exists), present the evidence. Franklin understood that ignorance is not merely foolish; it is politically dangerous. Put the two together and you get the central insight of this essay: a democracy cannot survive long in a culture where the loudest assertions are treated as self-validating and the most obvious facts are dismissed as partisan annoyance.

The sad truth is that some people do not want to know whether the sky is green. They want the green sky because anything else — any other color — tells them they were robbed, that they are right, and that they need never examine themselves.

That is the real fraud. Not the ballot count. Not the mail-in process. Not the tedious mechanics of democracy in a large and complicated state. The fraud is the performance of certainty in the service of fear.

And once fear becomes a creed, the lie no longer has to persuade. It only has to belong.

In this first full week of June, it’s worth giving more than a passing thought to Robert F. Kennedy. He was assassinated on June 5, 1968—nearly sixty years ago—in what felt like the final blow of a tumultuous decade that had already seen more than its share of gut‑wrenching events. And there was still more anguish to come.

I was just a boy then. My mother woke me from a sound sleep to give me the news. Ours was a very “current events” family. New York’s many newspapers sat untidy about the house. News radio was on each morning, and we always watched the nightly news during dinner, discussing the issues as they bellowed from the 13‑inch black‑and‑white TV on the counter. Well, I didn’t discuss; I just listened to my two older brothers, my father—a WWII veteran—and my mother, a native of Italy whom he brought back to America to be his wife. It was an education.

Awakened by the news that night, I was hit by the grim weight of an America that had entered the decade with great optimism and was now coming apart at the seams. The following morning, one of the New York dailies branded its front page with a headline in 70‑point type: “Now RFK.” Nothing more needed to be said. I have been a news junkie ever since.

Bobby Kennedy was everything his older brother was and then some, and everything his younger brother never could be. But what has always struck me about him isn’t his promise, the tragedy of losing a brother to an assassin’s bullet, or the near‑certainty he would win the presidency.

Instead, it’s what he did two months earlier—something that stands as a moment when political leaders conducted themselves with a wisdom, class, grace, and humility that today seems more like a wisp of memory, an errant wish.

That night, April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Kennedy, on the campaign trail, was scheduled to address a crowd assembled for an outdoor rally at 17th and Broadway on Indianapolis’ north side.

Running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Kennedy faced a difficult, even dangerous task. His African American audience in this Black neighborhood was unaware of King’s assassination. Aides worried the crowd would erupt in violence upon learning the news, as was already beginning to happen in cities across America that night. Kennedy had no Secret Service protection. Local police had made clear they lacked the resources to control any major outburst. Aides suggested he cancel the appearance.

He didn’t. But instead of the rousing stump speech the crowd expected—the kind he had delivered earlier that day in South Bend and Muncie—Kennedy broke the bad news in a surprisingly short speech—barely five minutes—simple, honest, compassionate, and extraordinary in that the remarks were delivered extemporaneously, with just a few notes he’d scribbled on the back of an envelope only moments before.

I have some very sad news for all of you,” Kennedy began, “and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

The wail of the crowd, the raw screams, were painful and palpable. But rather than an escalation of any kind, the cries subsided as people waited for what Kennedy would say next:

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. On this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black—considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible—you can be filled with bitterness, hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization—black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.

There was near‑total silence now as Kennedy empathetically spoke next of his brother’s death—something he’d never done publicly—and then quoted from the Greeks. “My favorite poet,” he said, “was Aeschylus. He once wrote, ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”

He then asked the audience to return home, to say a prayer for Dr. King’s family and “to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love … and let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

Perhaps the crowd did just that, for unlike so many other cities that night, violence did not erupt in Indianapolis. Instead, the crowd applauded and went home, surely anguished but without any desire for revenge.

The speech received little notice at the time; King’s assassination dominated the headlines for days. But listening to it years later, it has a lasting resonance. You sense that the audience believed in Kennedy’s leadership qualities. No one doubted the intent of his words. Also evident is Kennedy’s respect for the people in the crowd: he spoke to them bare, without audience research, focus‑group analyses, or data‑mined targeting that guides today’s politicians with carefully crafted, manipulative oratory. No political consultant would ever recommend a reference to Aeschylus. Indeed, how many political leaders are even that well‑read?

In other words, Kennedy was not told what not to say. Instead, he was armed only with his intellect, thoughtfulness, benevolence, and temperament. A statesman. Looking back, I often think Bobby Kennedy was the best president we never had.

Given the quality of presidential candidates from recent scrums and the candidates to come, one wonders if there is a Lincoln, an FDR, a Gandhi, or a Churchill in our future. Not to say that these were perfect men or that either John or Bobby Kennedy were perfect men; they weren’t. But they had a gravitas and a grace that seem lost on almost all of our politicians today. Do any of the lawmakers in our current political environment compare to such leadership? Who could deliver that speech today that Bobby Kennedy gave that night? I’m not sure I can think of a single lawmaker who could.

Most of our best leaders had the resilience to get through troubling times. A true leader does so without malice, pettiness, or petulance. They bring a quality of humility and self‑reflection, a willingness to learn from mistakes, and an ability to turn failure into success, doing so in a way that evokes and inspires our best values and ideals—our better angels, as Abraham Lincoln once called them.

The philosophers and statesmen of early Rome repeatedly declared that leaders must be men of great moral clarity.

“Esto exemplum aliis.” “Be a pattern to others,” Cicero said, “and then all will go well.”

“Noble examples stir us up to noble actions,” Seneca noted.

We have the opposite today. I don’t know if that’s the fault of our political figures or the fault of the voters who put them in office, since we certainly have voters who act as insufferably as the lawmakers they elect.

Sadly, the generation of leaders forged in the cauldrons of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War has passed from the world stage. Their absence created a vacuum, and that vacuum has metastasized into the current system: the media ecology that thrives on outrage, the primary system that punishes nuance, and the social media dynamics that turn politicians into brands and opponents into demons. That structure now makes moral clarity expensive and often fatal to a career.

Poll after poll has confirmed that trust in our political institutions is at historic lows, whether because of personal scandals, lewd comments, lying, or what voters perceive as a general lack of scruples. And if today’s polling data is to be believed, no love is lost upon the current president. Disappointment has grown among the electorate, and the approach of the midterms will only sharpen that sense. So the serious issues facing our nation and the world—which demand mature, focused leadership—continue to go unaddressed and unresolved.

Does moral leadership matter? What are the consequences of political power without a moral foundation? What does it say about us when those are the kind of leaders we choose, or that we have to choose from?

We get the government we deserve, it is often said. I would amend that: We also get the candidates we deserve. But what about the candidates we need? We lament all the ways our candidates are unworthy of elected office. We declare them to be unworthy of our votes. But are we worthy of anyone who is worthy of elected office? I sometimes think the best people to run for office are smart enough not to. Why bother when knowing society will savage your life, tear you apart, demonize and denigrate you and your family just because you’re the wrong party, the wrong sex, the wrong color—or maybe you’re not religious, or you’re educated in subjects that “can’t get you a job.” Or, perish the thought, the inevitable disagreements over policy issues.

Maybe we lack great leaders because there is something dishonorable required by the expectations of the democratic political process and the media system in which one would have to engage should one seek elected office.

What has happened? Why are there so few great statesmen offering to lead this nation into its future? Or am I waxing nostalgic and wishing for something that never really was?

I have no answers to those questions, and I wouldn’t dare seek them from vapid, repulsive frauds whose only talent their mastery of performative politics. But these are questions worth reflecting upon, and vital that we all do so. If we can muster even half the maturity, dignity, goodness, and courage that Bobby Kennedy did that night nearly sixty years ago, maybe, just maybe, we’ll find the moral character as a people to truly pursue that more perfect union the framers envisioned and make gentle the life of this world.

I received an email critiqing my essay, the 60 Minutes Massacre, and thought it was worth publishing in full. It’s sharp, substantive, and raises a serious challenge to my essay. It also deserves a response:

Here’s the critique:

Your piece mourns 60 Minutes as adversarial journalism's last redoubt, suffocated by Weiss, Bilton, and the Ellison venture-capital logic. Pelley’s outburst—"murdering" the program—becomes heroic last stand. Fair as theater. Less so as analysis.

You’re right that 60 Minutes earned its reputation through tough reporting and real institutional weight. But that history doesn’t cancel the deeper point: prestige can harden into self-protective habit, and adversarial journalism can become selective, curated, and complacent long before an outside owner shows up with a knife. The decline of linear TV news is not just a story of political pressure; it’s also a story of fragmentation, audience drift, and distrust built over years.

Weiss’s appointment isn’t the contradiction you paint. Installing her at CBS under Skydance (post-merger realities, debt loads, audience hemorrhage) was a deliberate attempt to widen the aperture in an institution long accused of narrowness. You frame this as “accommodating power” and rehearsing “state media” under Trump gravitational pull. This is the laziest form of projection: the same crowd that spent years in open institutional resistance, selective fact-checking, and “democracy dies in darkness” branding now cries autocracy at the first ownership-driven correction.

Ego-driven outsiders often destroy value; that’s a fair critique of tech-adjacent dilettantism applied to serious craft. Yet the alternative—eternal deference to accumulated tenure—produced the very sclerosis demanding intervention. Firing holdouts who publicly accuse leadership of murder isn’t “thought control.” It’s asserting control over a newsroom that treated the prior consensus as sacrosanct. Institutions die from immunity to accountability more often than from reform.

Ellison bought an asset bleeding relevance. Weiss isn’t a apparatchik; she’s an irritant to the old priesthood precisely because she rejects the old faith. Outcomes will judge: if sharper, less preachy reporting broadens reach without sacrificing rigor, the taxidermy charge fails. If it becomes hollow branding and cultish signaling in the other direction, torch it. History is littered with prestige outlets that confused their brand with immortality.

Journalism's purpose isn't preserving 1970s formats or mass-audience illusions; it's truth-seeking amid fragmentation. Sacred cows deserve no exemption—least of all from their own priests. Whether Weiss and Bilton are butchers or surgeons remains to be seen. Pretending the pre-purge version was unassailable vitality is the real nostalgia for myth.

I’ve written a follow-up essay in response.

The problem with writing about a wounded institution is that everyone arrives with a theory of the wound. Some insist the patient was healthy until the surgeons arrived. Others insist the surgeons arrived because the patient had been sick for years. Both positions can be true, and when they are, the argument becomes much more interesting than the usual tribal pageant of praise and blame.

That is the strange and slightly disquieting place this moment has brought us to with 60 Minutes. One can look at Scott Pelley’s departure, the internal upheaval at CBS, and the increasingly familiar spectacle of legacy media executives speaking the language of “change,” and see either a necessary correction or a vulgar act of managerial vandalism. The temptation, as always, is to choose one of those interpretations and march off in triumph. But institutions are not as obliging as political slogans. They do not collapse neatly into morality plays.

There is no doubt that 60 Minutes was once a standard. It was also, at various moments, a legacy institution with all the virtues and defects that phrase implies. It earned its reputation through serious reporting and a large audience, which is not nothing. But it also existed in an earlier media order, when television still enjoyed a cultural centrality that made its authority feel broader and deeper than it may have actually been. Some of its legend was earned. Some of it was merely preserved by repetition, like an old suit kept in a closet because no one quite knows whether it has gone out of style or just out of use.

That matters, because nostalgia is a poor historian. It tends to remember the bravest moments and forget the ordinary compromises. It remembers the years when 60 Minutes was feared by public officials, corporate executives, and political operatives, but less often dwells on the ways legacy media could also become insulated, self-regarding, and curiously selective about which powers it preferred to interrogate. Every institution that survives long enough develops habits of emphasis. Those habits are not always virtues simply because they have acquired a patina of age.

This is where the criticism of the first essay lands its best blow: not on the personalities, but on the assumption that decline began yesterday. The harder question is whether 60 Minutes was already weakening before the current upheaval. Audience fragmentation, cord-cutting, and the erosion of linear television’s dominance all predate the latest corporate rearrangement. The CBS Evening News was already weakened by audience fragmentation, but fragmentation does not explain a product that has become noticeably worse under its new stewardship. If the old model was already losing its cultural monopoly, then the issue is not whether reform was needed. Of course it was. The issue is whether the people now claiming to perform the reform understand what they have inherited well enough to alter it without destroying the thing that made it worth changing.

That distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between stewardship and possession.

Ownership confers the right to change something. Stewardship imposes the obligation to understand it first.

Those two ideas are often confused by people with substantial money and very little memory. They look at an institution as a thing that can be acquired, optimized, repackaged, and resold. The professional sees something else entirely: an organism of practices, loyalties, standards, and accumulated judgment. The financier sees an asset. The journalist sees a culture.

And that, in the end, is why so many modern interventions in media go wrong. Not because change is bad, but because change is often undertaken by people who mistake access for knowledge. They arrive convinced that the people who built the institution were sentimental relics, and that what the place needs is not understanding but a new management theory and a decent launch video. There is always a moment in these transformations when someone in power declares the old culture “broken” and imagines that this is itself a form of diagnosis. Usually it is just a confession of impatience.

Bari Weiss is an easy target only for the lazy. That is precisely why she should not be treated lazily. She is not the first editor or publisher to promise improvement, renewal, or a cleansing breeze through a stale newsroom. Those promises have a long and often embarrassing history. The problem is that renewal is not the same as stewardship. A person can be contrarian, rhetorically agile, and deeply invested in ideological combat without being suited to preserve the delicate, hard-earned habits that make an institution function at all.

In other words, one can be an interesting person and still be the wrong person for the job.

That is not an insult. It is a category error.

The same is true, in a different register, of Nick Bilton. He may be intelligent, energetic, and perfectly capable in other arenas. But a newsroom is not a lifestyle brand, and an investigative institution is not a platform to be “reimagined” by people who confuse executive confidence with editorial authority. Walking into veteran rooms with swagger and catered pastries is not leadership. It is a performance of leadership. The distinction matters because institutions are full of people who can smell the difference from a mile away and usually don’t bother to hide their contempt for it.

And yet contempt is not always wrong. Sometimes it is simply accurate.

The best leaders enter institutions asking why they succeeded. The worst enter convinced they have already solved the puzzle. That is where the managerial mind so often goes astray: it mistakes the visible machinery for the source of value. It thinks the logo is the product, the office is the culture, and the corporate memo is an act of governance rather than an intrusion upon it. Then the ratings soften, the staff grows wary, the audience drifts, and management stands in the wreckage wondering why the old incantations no longer work.

This is where the critique becomes most useful, because it insists on the possibility that the institution was already frail. That is not an exculpation of the new owners. It is a warning. A frail institution can be repaired, but it can also be ruined more quickly by people who think fragility is just another word for freedom.

What complicates matters further is that the merger itself did not occur in a vacuum. No conspiracy theory is required to see that when a president is nursing a grievance, regulators have leverage, and a seller stands to gain a fortune, the merger can become an instrument of accommodation. Once that happens, it is easy to see why people inside the newsroom, and those on the outside looking in, begin to question whether the arrangement is merely business or something more. The merger may be legal, but that does not make it innocent. And once ownership has been arranged under pressure, the question of what owners think they now possess becomes impossible to avoid.

Was 60 Minutes being murdered, or was it already slowly dying? The answer may be “both,” which is often the answer in life and almost never the answer in public argument, where people prefer their villains neat and their martyrs unsullied.

What should not be lost in the sorting of blame is the central fact that decline does not absolve stewardship. A weakened institution still deserves competent care. A tarnished reputation still requires humility. A news organization that has lost some of its authority does not need to be taught contempt by people who mistake reinvention for permission to trash the place.

The broader media world makes this even clearer. Newspapers, radio, and television have all been battered by profit pressures, technological change, audience migration, and the appalling managerial habit of treating durable institutions as disposable assets. Some of the damage was inevitable. Some of it was self-inflicted. In too many cases, the people in charge were far more interested in monetization than preservation, and far more confident in their tools than curious about what those tools had replaced. The internet did not merely arrive; it was also misread by institutions that assumed their own permanence.

That is the real lesson here. Not that the old media was pure, or even especially wise, but that ownership without understanding almost always produces destruction disguised as modernization.

If the present management at CBS can improve 60 Minutes without hollowing it out, then the skeptics will have to revise their judgments. That is fair. But the burden of proof lies with the people making the changes, not with the people observing the wreckage and refusing to call it progress out of politeness. A newsroom does not need to be embalmed, but neither should it be handed over to those who regard embalming and surgery as the same art.

So perhaps the most honest conclusion is this: the critique is right to warn against romanticizing decline. Institutions can rot long before the new owners arrive. But it is equally right to warn against the opposite error, which is to suppose that every disruptive intervention is therefore wise. History is not kind to people who confuse acquisition with competence.

Some things can be owned without being understood.

That was the first essay’s charge. The second is this: understanding is still required, even when an institution is already in trouble. Especially then.

And if that seems obvious, it is only because so much modern management has made a career of overlooking it.

There is a particular kind of vandalism that does not arrive with spray paint or broken glass. It arrives in tailored suits, speaks in the language of “strategy,” and leaves behind institutions gutted so thoroughly that even the memory of their purpose begins to feel like nostalgia for a myth.

What has been done to 60 Minutes belongs squarely in that tradition.

Scott Pelley’s departure is not the story. It is merely the symptom—the visible fracture after a long internal collapse. When a journalist of his tenure feels compelled to accuse his own leadership of “murdering” the program, one can safely assume this was not a disagreement over formatting, scheduling, or presentation. It was a final protest against people who no longer understand the institution they inherited and appear remarkably uninterested in learning it.

We are told, as we are always told in these moments, that institutions must evolve.

Quite right.

Evolution implies adaptation in service of survival. This is not evolution. This is taxidermy performed by amateurs: the outward shape preserved just well enough to fool the inattentive, while everything vital has been removed.

The recurring delusion of modern management is the belief that ownership confers expertise. Buy a newspaper and one imagines oneself a publisher. Buy a television network and one imagines oneself a broadcaster. Buy a social media platform and one imagines oneself a philosopher-king.

Reality is less accommodating.

Institutions are not logos, trademarks, or line items on a balance sheet. They are accumulated habits. They are cultures. They are standards maintained by generations of people whose names never appear on annual reports. The financier sees an asset. The professional sees an organism.

Ownership confers rights. Stewardship imposes obligations. The first is transactional. The second is interpretive. Confusing the two is how institutions are lost.

And this is why so many takeovers end the same way. New management arrives convinced that everyone before them was a fool—or “doesn’t get it.” Experience is treated as clutter. Tradition becomes an obstacle. Expertise is mistaken for resistance. The people who built the institution are informed that they are standing in the way of progress.

Then the audience leaves.

Enter Bari Weiss.

Weiss has built much of her public identity around opposition to ideological conformity. It is a compelling brand. Yet what makes her stewardship of CBS so striking is the extent to which it appears less interested in challenging power than accommodating it.

The contradiction would be amusing were the consequences not so serious.

Journalism exists for one reason above all others: to make the powerful uncomfortable. This was the hallmark, the DNA that made 60 Minutes what it was. The moment it begins adjusting itself to accommodate the sensitivities of political authority, it ceases to function as journalism and becomes something else entirely.

One need not speculate about motives. The effect is visible enough. A newsroom once celebrated for its independence now appears more concerned with avoiding confrontation than pursuing it. Whether this is done to curry favor, minimize risk, appease regulators, satisfy investors, or simply avoid unpleasant phone calls is almost beside the point.

The effect remains the same.

Weiss says she fired Pelley because trust was broken.

Au contraire: trust was broken the moment CBS decided Bari Weiss was the answer.

Weiss’s counterpart in this exercise, Nick Bilton, completes the tableau.

Bilton’s background as a technology reporter, screenwriter, and filmmaker is not in dispute. What is in dispute is the wisdom of placing someone with virtually no experience in broadcast news at the helm of one of the most demanding journalistic institutions in American television.

Experience is not everything.

Its complete absence, however, is almost always noticeable.

Particularly to the people expected to defer to it.

Walking into a room filled with veteran investigative reporters armed with executive swagger and catered pastries is not leadership. It is the performance of leadership.

The best leaders enter institutions seeking to understand why they succeeded. The worst enter convinced they have already figured it out.

What binds these figures is not merely inexperience or ideological fashion. It is a shared assumption that institutions are interchangeable assets—things to be repackaged, optimized, monetized, and redirected according to executive whim. Their internal cultures are treated as inconveniences rather than the very source of their value.

It is venture-capital logic applied to journalism.

The results are precisely what one would expect.

Hovering over all of this is the unmistakable gravitational pull of political power—specifically the Trump-era understanding of it, in which loyalty becomes the supreme virtue and independence is regarded as a character flaw.

Again, no conspiracy theory is required. One need only observe outcomes.

When journalists begin anticipating the preferences of political authority rather than challenging them, the distinction between independent media and managed media becomes increasingly difficult to discern. If this is not state media, it is at minimum rehearsing the posture.

The tragedy here is not that a legacy program has been mishandled. Legacies are not entitlements. The tragedy is that 60 Minutes represented something increasingly rare in modern American media: adversarial journalism conducted before a mass audience. It was one of the few places where presidents, corporations, billionaires, military officials, and public figures could still expect to encounter difficult questions rather than carefully managed conversations.

That tradition does not die dramatically. It is suffocated.
— Meeting by meeting.
— Hire by hire.
— Compromise by compromise.

Until one day a veteran anchor is shown the door and everyone remaining is expected to applaud what they are witnessing as progress.

Some things can be owned without being understood.

And when that distinction collapses, stewardship gives way to management, management to manipulation, and manipulation—inevitably—to decline.

Pelley, whatever else one thinks of him, understood the difference between holding a job and holding a line.

In journalism, that distinction still matters.

There is always another job. There is never another reputation.

He leaves with the one asset that cannot be purchased, inherited, leveraged, or acquired through merger: credibility.

The new management possesses everything else.

The tragedy for them is that journalism remains one of the few professions where credibility is the only thing that ultimately matters.

As for the future of 60 Minutes, it will likely continue, as diminished things often do—recognizable in form, unrecognizable in substance, and endlessly cited by its caretakers as proof that nothing essential has changed.

But something has changed.

For generations, 60 Minutes represented a simple proposition: that the powerful be held to account, that uncomfortable questions served the public good, and that journalism’s highest obligation was not to authority, shareholders, or political fashion, but to the truth.

There was a time when the last thing any public official, corporate executive, or political operative wanted to hear was, “A reporter from 60 Minutes is here and would like a word.”

That reputation was not purchased. It was earned.

And now it has been bartered away.

So let us bid farewell—not merely to a television program, but to a standard.

The people who built the institution understood that journalism does not exist to serve power, but to scrutinize it.

The people dismantling it do not.

So good night.

And good luck finding what remains.

The New York Times recently published a piece asking Trump voters a familiar question: how do rising gas prices affect their support for the president? The premise is understandable. Economic discomfort often shapes political behavior. But the framing reveals something deeper—and more troubling—about both the electorate and the media that covers it.

If voters are primarily evaluating a presidency through the price of gasoline, then we are no longer talking about citizenship in any meaningful sense. We are talking about consumer preference.

The article cites polling showing that large majorities of Trump voters approve of his handling of both war and the cost of living, even as gasoline prices have surged and affordability concerns have intensified. It is a remarkable political achievement: convincing people that the fire is under control while they are standing in the smoke. More remarkable still is how quickly people learn to mistake the smell for normality.

But the more unsettling question is not what these voters think. It is what they do not appear to know—or have decided is not worth knowing.

Modern political coverage is obsessed with how voters feel. It is far less interested in what voters know.

There is little evidence, in these interviews, of engagement with the broader realities of governance: the erosion of institutional norms, the use of public office for private gain, the weakening of alliances, or the long-term consequences of economic and environmental policy. Instead, we see a narrowing of political judgment to immediate, personal cost. Gas prices become not just a concern, but the concern.

This is not merely a failure of information. It is a redefinition of what politics is for.

A citizen asks what kind of country he is helping to build. A consumer asks what something costs today. Increasingly, our politics mistakes the latter for the former.

What is striking is not merely that some voters overlook corruption, dishonesty, or assaults on democratic norms. It is that many appear to rank such matters below fluctuations in the price of gasoline. We have arrived at a politics in which constitutional government is treated as an abstraction while the cost of filling a pickup truck is treated as an emergency.

The media, intentionally or not, becomes complicit in this narrowing of democratic expectations. Journalism that asks only how much voters paid at the pump risks confusing consumer sentiment with civic judgment. It mistakes the mood of the marketplace for the health of the republic.

But it is the wrong measure.

A functioning democracy requires citizens capable of distinguishing between cause and effect, between global events and domestic policy, between short-term discomfort and long-term consequence. It requires some baseline awareness of how power is exercised and to whose benefit. It requires, at minimum, an understanding that leadership is about more than the price of fuel.

None of this absolves political opposition from responsibility. If voters perceive little difference between administrations on the issues they feel most directly, then those offering an alternative have failed to make their case in terms that resonate. But meeting voters where they are should not mean affirming the smallness of what they are asked to consider.

The deeper problem is cultural as much as political. A public conditioned to think in terms of immediate gratification will struggle to evaluate long-term risk. A media ecosystem that rewards simplicity will struggle to convey complexity. And leaders who thrive in that environment will have little incentive to challenge either.

The result is a feedback loop of lowered expectations and diminished accountability—one in which the standards for leadership decline just enough each cycle to accommodate the next disappointment.

Gas prices matter. But they are among the smallest measures of a presidency. When they become the deciding factor, it is not just a sign of economic anxiety. It is a warning about civic atrophy.

The article asks voters how they feel about the price of gasoline. The more important question is whether they understand the cost of indifference.

For a brief and delusional stretch, Graham Platner was cast as the answer to a question Democrats have been failing to answer for the better part of a decade: how do you beat Susan Collins?

Then came the texts.

Not whispers, not the usual last-minute ambush, not some shadowy opposition file dropped at maximum velocity, but something closer to political self-immolation, almost quaint in its predictability: his own wife shareing with a former campaign aide, sexually explicit messages he had been sending to other women, in what appears to have been a good-faith attempt to get ahead of the story. A charming notion. As if modern politics has ever rewarded preemptive honesty with anything other than accelerated ruin.

The ruin, naturally, arrived right on schedule.

And so a race that briefly looked competitive now looks familiar: another promising candidacy reduced to damage control, another party staring at its own reflection and wondering how this keeps happening, as though the answer were not staring directly back at them.

Standards, Selectively Applied

But Platner is not the story. He is the specimen.

What he illustrates—what American politics now demonstrates with exhausting regularity—is that character is no longer a standard. It is a convenience. Something invoked when useful, ignored when cumbersome, and redefined as necessary.

Republicans, having long since surrendered whatever claim they once had to moral seriousness, are in no position to object. A party that has spent years explaining that Donald Trump’s conduct is irrelevant, exaggerated, or perversely admirable, does not get to rediscover the Ten Commandments when a Democrat sends indecorous text messages. Moral outrage, like credibility, does not survive that level of selective application.

Democrats, however, deserve their own share of ridicule, if only because they continue to pretend that they are playing a different game. They speak, often earnestly, about norms and decency and the importance of character, and then reliably produce candidates who make those appeals sound like satire.

Not because their sins are equivalent to Donald Trump’s—they are not—but because they are sufficient enough to collapse the contrast. And in politics, the contrast is the argument.

So the result is a kind of bipartisan pantomime: both sides gesturing toward standards they no longer enforce, both sides insisting that this time is different, and neither side persuading anyone who was not already inclined to agree.

Voters Learn the Lesson

Voters, for their part, have adapted.

They have not, as is often lazily claimed, abandoned the idea of character. They have done something more ingenious and more damaging: they have made it conditional.

If a candidate serves their interests—political, cultural, emotional—then personal failings are reclassified as private matters, or else dismissed as the predictable debris of public life. If a candidate does not serve those interests, those same failings become disqualifying evidence of unfitness, if not outright depravity.

This is not a collapse of standards. It is the strategic deployment of those standards.

Platner’s situation fits this model perfectly. To his supporters, the messages are regrettable but irrelevant—consenting adults, a troubled marriage now salvaged, nothing that rises to the level of public concern. To his detractors, they are a window into something larger: poor judgment, questionable discipline, a man unfit for higher office.

The facts remain constant. Only their interpretation is subject to the weathervane of partisanship.

And this is how a political system quietly abandons the idea that character is foundational. It does not announce the change. It simply begins behaving as though it were true.

What We Reward

The downstream effects are visible everywhere, starting with who runs in the first place.

Candidate recruitment has become an exercise in mutual avoidance. Truly viable, broadly credible figures—decent human beings—decline to enter difficult races, calculating—often correctly—that the process is not worth the indignity. In their absence, the field fills with candidates whose chief qualification is their ability to survive a primary electorate that prizes intensity over judgment and purity over persuasion.

The state of Maine is not unique in this respect, merely illustrative. For months, Susan Collins was treated as untouchable, which discouraged serious challengers. When the race tightened, the bench was thin, the alternatives unconvincing, and the eventual frontrunner was someone buoyed more by factional enthusiasm rather than by any overwhelming case for competence or discipline.

This is not an accident. It is the system working as designed. As we have designed it.

Primaries reward the committed, not the cautious. The colorful, not the competent. The entertaining, not the enlightening. They elevate candidates who can excite a base, not those who can reassure a broader electorate. And once those candidates emerge, the general election offers less of a corrective than advertised, because voters have already internalized the logic: the stakes are too high to be choosy.

So they aren’t.

They rationalize. They excuse. They compare. They ask not whether a candidate meets some baseline standard of conduct, but whether he is preferable to the alternative. And in an era where the alternative is always described as catastrophic, the answer is almost always yes.

Lowering the Floor

Hovering over all of this, like a permanent distortion field, is Donald Trump. Not simply as an individual, but as a precedent.

He did not invent moral compromise in politics. He removed its ceiling. He demonstrated that there is effectively no level of personal misconduct that cannot be absorbed, explained, or outright celebrated, provided the political returns are sufficient.

Once that demonstration is complete, it does not remain confined to one party. It becomes ambient. It lowers expectations across the board.

Which is how you end up in a place where a candidate exchanging explicit messages is not immediately disqualifying, but merely… debatable. Contextual. A matter for discussion panels and partisan sorting.

“Compared to what?” becomes the operative question. And compared to what, indeed.

All of which leads to a final, quieter absurdity.

There remain, scattered throughout the political landscape, figures who are, by any traditional measure, decent: personally disciplined, professionally competent, temperamentally stable. Susan Collins, whatever one thinks of her voting record, fits this description. She is not scandal-prone. She is not chaotic. She does not wake up each morning as a new crisis.

And for this, she is often treated as inadequate—too moderate, too cautious, too uninteresting to inspire the fervor modern politics seems to require.

I’m not here to say you should vote for Susan Collins. But we say we want better people. We say we are tired of the spectacle, the embarrassment, the endless parade of compromised figures asking for our trust while demonstrating why they do not deserve it.

But when presented with the alternative, we hesitate. Or worse, we yawn.

And then, inevitably, we get another Graham Platner.

Not an aberration. Not a shock.

He is not the problem. He is the product.

May 29, 2026 — A federal judge has ordered that Donald Trump’s name be removed from the Kennedy Center within 14 days. The performing arts center must also remain open, despite Trump announcing a two-year closure for extensive renovations.

Let me repeat that for the people in the back: Trump lost. A judge said no. The name is coming off. And honestly? I’m enjoying the moment. A lot of people probably are.

For years, we’ve watched journalists sit in White House press conferences, taking verbal beatings from a man who treats them like punching bags. They just sit there. They take it. They nod. They ask the next question. Never once does anyone say: “With all due respect, sir, you’re wrong.”

But today? Today, someone finally stood up to the bully. How fitting that it should happen on the day of John F. Kennedy’s birth, the very man whose legacy this building is meant to honor.

The Legal Reality: The Law Actually Mattered

Here’s what the judge actually said in his 94-page ruling:

“Congress designated the Kennedy Center’s name, and only Congress holds the authority to alter it.”

Let’s translate that from legalese into English: The board broke the law.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote that it was “crystal clear” the arts complex was named for JFK. The board overstepped its statutory authority by adding Trump’s name without Congressional approval.

Trump’s response? He’s “instructing the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer.”

Translation: “I’m giving it back to Congress because they won.”

Except Congress already owns it. Trump is acting like he’s doing them a favor by returning what was never his to take.

The Post That Broke the Internet (and My Brain)

When Trump found out his Kennedy Center graffiti was to be removed, he did what he does best: posted a 600-word tantrum on his failing social media platform. The thing is two pages longer than the Iranian ceasefire agreement. Literally.

Aaron Rupar, who does a great job staying on top of current events posted a video on Bluesky that scrolls through the post at a fast pace. He’s right to scroll through it, leaving the reader with only one possible reaction: “My goodness, did he really write all that?”

The post is basically a masterclass in Trump’s psychology: when confronted with a clear legal defeat, he doesn’t engage with the law at all. He attacks the judge, invents safety crises, claims victimhood, and threatens to abandon the whole thing.

The most stunning line: “There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I.”

Said by a president who literally broke the law by renaming a federally-mandated monument without Congressional approval.

Some underling probably used AI to compose it, then picked a few words to FULLY CAPITALIZE for emphasis. Trump wouldn’t have the patience to listen to someone read that to him, let alone write it himself. Goodness, could he even string that many words together?

Here’s what he claimed versus what actually happened:

The irony with Trump’s post:

1. Trump claims the judge is “not swayed” by safety concerns — but Cooper explicitly said the board didn’t properly consider the closure at all, and that repairs “urgently needed“ can proceed without closure

2. Trump says he’s “instructing Commerce to transfer to Congress” — but Congress already owns it through the statute. Cooper wrote that Congress “bestowed the name“ originally

3. Trump calls it “structurally dangerous” — but Cooper heard the expert testimony and found the board’s process was illegal, not that the building is safe

4. Trump blames “Radical Left” — but the judge appointed by Obama actually allowed the renovations to proceed, just not the illegal closure

The ruling is 94 pages of careful statutory interpretation, not a political hit job. Cooper even wrote that he’s not dictating management decisions—just enforcing the law that Congress passed. This is the opposite of Trump’s “shocking” and “unfair” narrative.

Oh, but I know how they can stop this:

1. Emergency appeal to SCOTUS. Shadow docket.

2. Sue the judge for $10 billion.

3. Don’t comply with the order and blame it all on the board members

4. Have the Deputy AG can weigh in about this being “lawfare” and “activist judges.”

Great idea, huh? (NOT!)

They might try the emergency SCOTUS appeal (probably get denied), then drag their feet for a few weeks, then remove the name while claiming they “had no choice.”

The Profit Argument

Trump wants to argue that the Kennedy Center was millions of dollars a year. False. The Kennedy Center was financially healthy before Trump took over.

In fact, it became ‘financially nonviable’ when Trump took over and artists refused to perform there. Talk about a blind spot. It’s like the arsonist complaining that the building burned down.

Of course, Trump certainly knows a thing or two about losing money given those six bankruptcies, including a casino. How do you go bankrupt running a casino?

But here’s the fine point of it: not everything needs to be a profit-making venture if they enrich people’s lives or benefit the nation. Besides, even if it was hemorrhaging cash, whose to say any money Trump might save wouldn’t be grifted by him, wasted on garbage vanity projects, or spent on wars. Sorry, not wars; I mean “conflicts.”

And then there is the beautiful detail one can’t help but laugh at: the Trump name isn’t even the same font as the rest of the signage. It’s close enough at first glance, but look closer. The width is off, too. Just so bad the longer you look at it.

It’s the perfect final detail, the physical manifestation of Trump’s entire approach. Here is a man whining about profitability when signage is so cheaply done it’s not even the same font. It is a crude, poorly executed version of what it’s pretending to be—just like Trump’s entire approach to the Kennedy Center. The font mismatch is the final insult to the institution.

The Character Lesson: The Underside of a Bus

Here’s what this reveals about Trump’s character: Trump demands absolute fealty from everyone around him, but he has zero actual loyalty to anyone in return.

The Kennedy Center board was populated with Trump loyalists. They purged the original board. They installed him as chairman. They voted unanimously to add his name. They voted to close for two years.

And now that they lost? He’s hanging them out to dry.

“I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into NEVER NEVER LAND,” he wrote.

Translation: “Not my problem anymore.”

This is the same playbook he’s used for a decade:

The pattern is clear: If you’re a MAGA supporter who’s sacrificed your career, your reputation, your relationships for Trump, your fate is inevitable: The moment you become inconvenient, you’ll be gone. The moment you’re a liability, he’ll burn you.

The Kennedy Center board just got burned. They thought they were loyalists. Trump thought they were useful tools. Tools get replaced when they break. That’s the lesson.

The key question here:

Is this the kind of character we expect of a leader—any leader—let alone the President of the United States?

No. We expect leaders to:

• Honor commitments

• Accept responsibility

• Protect their people, all of them

• Show basic human decency to those who served them

• Have integrity—a word Trump doesn’t understand

Trump’s behavior with the Kennedy Center board is a microcosm of his entire presidency:

• He demanded loyalty from Flynn, then let him go to jail

• He demanded loyalty from Comey, then fired him, mocked him, and set the Justice Department after him.

• He demanded loyalty from his cabinet, then Bannon, Pence, and others all got burned

• He demanded loyalty from the Kennedy Center board, now he’s leaving them high and dry

Trump:

• Uses people until they become liabilities

• Then blames them publicly

• Then walks away without looking back

• And maintains zero reciprocal obligation

He’s President of the United States—the most powerful person on earth—yet he’s acting like a disgraced mob boss who’s cutting ties with his crew before they get arrested. That’s not leadership. That’s survival at any cost, with no regard for anyone else.

That is not a leader. That is a user.

Priorities. Yours or His?

A larger point here worth consideration: What exactly does this man prioritize?

Leaders of a nation, especially one as diverse as ours and with as many challenges as we have, it makes you wonder: is this a man who has his finger on the pulse of what troubles everyday Americans? His name on the center, that proposed arch, the ballroom… are any of those things going to bring down prices, help Americans with medical bills, make them feel good about the direction the country is going in?

A perfect example: Trump has made voter fraud a priority. We’ve heard endless talk about fraudulent voting. Let me be perfectly clear. It’s is complete and total bullshit. The evidence leaves no doubt that occurrences of voter fraud are infinitesimal. The Federalist Society has done the research over decades of data and found the fraud rate is five cases per 10 million votes.

Read that again: The Federalist Society—an organization as loyal to Donald Trump as any—found that over the course of decades, the incidence of voter fraud is five cases per 10 million votes.

NPR has just reported that replacing aging voting equipment will take years and billions of dollars. You would think someone who whines about “fraud” would prioritize fixing this equipment. Nope. He’d rather spend tax dollars on ballrooms, arches, and printing bills with his picture on it.

The Cautionary Tale

You can picture it now, dear reader: Trump loyalists in fevered outrage. Trump Derangement Syndrome, they’ll declare. He lives in your brain rent free!

But this is less a jeremiad on Donald Trump, low-hanging fruit that he is.

No, the treatment of the Kennedy Center board members, those loyal foot-solders, is a cautionary tale: If you are a loyal Trump supporter, one of the MAGA faithful, you have to ask yourself, “Is this how he would treat me?”

How could any among the faithful not consider that possible fate?

This is the most dangerous psychological blind spot among the MAGA faithful. The answer is: Yes, absolutely, this is exactly how he would treat them—and eventually, many of them will realize it too late. Just ask those board members. They prioritized loyalty to a man who, when he no longer had any use for them, sold them out. They learned the hard way what it means to be the frog to Trump's scorpion.

The Kennedy Center is a national memorial to JFK, a performing arts institution, and a symbol of American culture. Trump’s view was to deface it with his name—putting his name on someone else’s memorial. Who does something like that?—and his response to losing control of it is to blame everyone else for a problem he alone created, casting everyone else asunder like political roadkill left behind after one of his self-inflicted train wrecks.

That’s not leadership. That’s not governance. That’s pure, unfiltered narcissistic rage, and anyone—anyone—is a potential target.

This is one of the things narcissists hates most, being told no.

Incidentally, it’s also one of the things the pedophile hates most, being told no. Yes, that was a sarcastic stab, and well deserved. Sorry snowflakes.

So we understand how this feels like a schadenfreude moment for many Americans, a “we told you so” moment. A moment to cheer, to laugh, to make fun; someone finally told Trump no.

For the first time in a long time, the law won.

Nice to see that the law (the Congressional statute) actually mattered, given Trump’s tendency to dismiss such things.

Sad to see, however, that it required a lawsuit rather than a Congress run by Republicans—those law and order Republicans—to apply that law. Not that this should surprise given either their sycophancy or their fear of defying him.

A Legacy in One Sentence

It is probably the most accurate way to describe Donald Trump’s legacy as a president:

“If it doesn’t have my name on it, I don’t want anything to do with it!“

Which reminds me: Trump’s name is all over those Epstein files, so there’s that.

Now remains the question: Who will set up a streaming camera to capture the removal of Trump’s name? It will surely be captured by someone, the video posted online, going instantly viral.

Perhaps we can enlist one of the recently fired 60 Minutes journalists to do some color commentary.

Wouldn't that be a fitting final act in a drama he wrote himself.

There are moments when a piece of writing does not merely argue a point, but opens a door.

Christopher Armitage’s recent essay alleging deep ethical improprieties surrounding Chief Justice John Roberts does precisely that, and it arrives in a familiar political environment—one already saturated with distrust, interpretive certainty, and institutional suspicion.

To be clear, Mr. Armitage has laid out a serious and extensively researched case. One need not dismiss his work to feel unsettled by it. Indeed, the unsettling nature of it is precisely what makes it worthy of consideration. The essay raises questions many Americans would prefer not to ask about an institution we desperately want to believe still stands above the political and ideological fray.

The Allegations

Armitage’s allegations are not vague insinuations or social-media innuendo. They are specific, detailed, and severe.

Armitage presents a detailed case—no pun intended—that, over a 16-year period, Chief Justice Roberts failed to properly characterize more than twenty million dollars in household income tied to law firms that appeared before the Supreme Court. Put more plainly, the firms paying Roberts’ household income were, at the same time, firms appearing before the very Court over which Roberts presided.

He further argued that this pattern of financial entanglement raises serious ethical concerns under judicial conduct standards, and he indicated an intention to pursue formal disbarment proceedings.

In a follow-up essay, Mr. Armitage draws comparison to prior judicial removals, including the 2010 impeachment of federal Judge Thomas Porteous, suggesting that Roberts’ conduct falls within a historically recognizable category of sanctionable behavior, including removal from the bench.

Whether these claims ultimately withstand scrutiny remains an open question. But they are not nothing. And in the current climate, “not nothing” is often enough to trigger immediate interpretive collapse—either into outright conviction or immediate dismissal.

That collapse is precisely what interests me. These allegations raise profound questions about disclosure, ethics, influence, and the public legitimacy of the nation’s highest court.

But compelling as Mr. Armitage’s case is, allegations are not synonymous with proof, and an outcome is yet to be had.

This is where another question lurks beneath the surface of Mr. Armitage’s argument, one perhaps even more troubling than the allegations themselves:

What happens to a republic when every question immediately hardens into certainty? What happens to a republic when uncertainty can no longer survive the journey from question to understanding?

Here is where modern America increasingly struggles. We live in an age that increasingly rewards conclusions over inquiry. Suspicion becomes indictment. Concern becomes conviction. Every allegation must either prove total corruption or complete innocence. Every institution must either be defended absolutely or condemned entirely. Every public figure becomes hero or villain, patriot or traitor, savior or threat.

And so the modern temptation is not merely toward outrage, but toward certitude—arrogant, uncompromising certitude. Dogmaticism, even.

I confess freely that I am not immune to it myself. I have written pieces sharp enough to draw blood. Some subjects deserve forceful language. Some events deserve moral clarity. But age, experience, and no small amount of disappointment have gradually convinced me that democratic self-government depends less upon our capacity for certainty than upon our willingness to continually reexamine it.

Not only the things we do not think about, but the things we do.

That distinction matters. It is easy to interrogate beliefs we already oppose. Far harder is questioning assumptions we have emotionally integrated into our identity—the things that feel so obviously true that we stop examining them altogether.

Yet this, perhaps, is the central obligation of citizenship in a constitutional republic.

The Framers never promised perfection. In fact, the phrase “a more perfect union” is itself an acknowledgment of incompletion. The American experiment was never presented as a finished achievement immune from scrutiny. It was presented as an ongoing pursuit—iterative, corrective, perpetually unfinished. We pursue perfection in the hope that we may achieve excellence.

That pursuit is exhausting. Almost Sisyphean in nature. The stone rolls back downhill generation after generation:

• corruption reappears

• tribalism reappears

• complacency reappears

• self-righteousness reappears

• the concentration of power reappears

And each generation must decide whether it still possesses the civic temperament required to push upward once again.

That is why questions matter. Not performative questions designed merely to insinuate. Not cynical questions asked in bad faith. But genuine inquiry—the willingness to pause amid the noise and ask:

• What exactly is happening here?

• What are we becoming?

• What have we normalized that once would have alarmed us?

It is here that the controversy surrounding the Supreme Court becomes especially troubling.

For decades, Americans increasingly transformed the Court into something it was never meant to become: an ideological battlefield through which presidents, senators, activist movements, donor networks, and media ecosystems seek to secure political victories unattainable through ordinary democratic means. Judicial nominations became apocalyptic struggles. Justices became avatars of tribal identity. Every vacancy became an existential crisis.

This is not entirely the fault of the justices themselves. They inherited a poisoned environment. They were handed a system that increasingly treated the Court not as an independent constitutional body, but as a political weapon with lifetime appointments.

Yet institutions do not survive merely because their corruption is understandable. The Court possesses neither army nor purse. Its authority rests almost entirely upon public confidence in its legitimacy. That legitimacy depends not merely upon the absence of provable corruption, but upon the public belief that justice remains meaningfully detached from wealth, influence, ideological engineering, and political favoritism.

And Americans appear increasingly aware that an erosion is taking place.

A Court Under Strain

Public confidence in the Supreme Court has fallen sharply in recent years. Roughly seventy percent of Americans viewed the Court favorably just five years ago. Today, that number hovers closer to half the country. Growing majorities now support reforms once considered politically untouchable: term limits, enforceable ethics rules, and greater transparency surrounding judicial conduct.

That decline did not emerge from nowhere.

It emerged from the cumulative effect of ethical controversies, ideological warfare surrounding nominations, increasingly polarized rulings, and a growing public perception that the Court operates within an accountability structure far weaker than the institutions over which it passes judgment.

Which is why allegations like Armitage’s strike such a volatile nerve. They do not arrive in an atmosphere of trust. They arrive in an atmosphere already saturated with suspicion.

Separately—and importantly not connected to Armitage’s allegations—there have also been renewed political calls for impeachment. Representative Steve Cohen has filed articles of impeachment against Chief Justice Roberts, citing broader grievances about the Court’s conduct and decisions rather than the specific ethical claims raised in Armitage’s work.

The significance of such efforts is not their likelihood of success. It is what they signal about the current institutional climate: that even the symbolic threshold of impeachment is increasingly being used as a vehicle for expressing dissatisfaction with the Court itself.

Whether one views such efforts as justified, performative, or misplaced, they nonetheless contribute to a broader reality: the Court is no longer insulated from formal expressions of political distrust, even when those expressions arise from unrelated premises.

The Logic of Suspicion

And here, I confess, my own cynicism begins to surface.

Would Americans like an explanation from Roberts? Certainly. I would. One need not presume guilt to believe serious allegations deserve serious answers. Yet recent history offers little reason for confidence that meaningful public inquiry will occur. We have watched ethical controversies surrounding Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito generate outrage, defenses, denials, and partisan trench warfare, but comparatively little that resembled transparent institutional accountability capable of restoring broad public trust.

That is not healthy for a constitutional republic.

Cynicism, left unchecked, corrodes democratic culture. But institutions themselves often manufacture cynicism when legitimate questions are met primarily with silence, opacity, or procedural insulation.

Which leaves citizens in an increasingly uncomfortable position:

• aware enough to distrust

• uncertain enough to hesitate

• and frustrated enough to suspect the truth may remain forever just beyond public reach.

A Sisyphean pursuit indeed.

The Rush to Certainty

That is why ethical questions surrounding the Court matter so profoundly, whether they ultimately implicate Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, or anyone else.

What makes Armitage’s essay so troubling to ponder is that John Roberts occupies a uniquely symbolic place within this discussion. Roberts long cultivated the image of the institutionalist—the restrained jurist standing above partisan warfare, the steward of judicial legitimacy, the cautious minimalist attempting to preserve public faith in the Court itself. Which is precisely why allegations surrounding him land with such force. If even Roberts cannot convincingly maintain the appearance of institutional detachment, Americans naturally begin asking whether such detachment is still possible at all.

You see where we are here. But asking the question is not the same thing as rendering the verdict. This is where I part ways with the modern appetite for instant moral finality.

Does Armitage’s case justify impeachment? Disbarment? Historical condemnation? I honestly do not know. Perhaps some of his claims will ultimately prove overstated. Perhaps others deserve far more scrutiny than they have received. Serious questions exist. Serious overreach may exist as well.

But overreach itself has become one of our defining civic pathologies. One side escalates. The other side counter-escalates. Soon everyone is prosecutor, jury, and executioner simultaneously. Inquiry gives way to tribal mobilization. The goal ceases to be understanding; all that matters is victory, to be declare the winner of what is no longer civil debate but a childish shouting match, or worse, the verbal equivalent of a barrom brawl.

That does not strengthen democratic culture. It hollows it out.

The Trumpet, Druids, and Lady Justice

Which brings me, oddly enough, to composer Charles Ives.

In his haunting orchestral work The Unanswered Question, a lone trumpet repeatedly asks a musical question into an indifferent universe. The woodwinds attempt increasingly frantic answers, growing more agitated with each effort, while serene strings continue underneath, detached and unmoved. Ives, who made his living as an insurance salesman, called the strings “The Silence of the Druids,” a stillness untouched by the struggle for meaning occurring around it. The piece ends with the trumpet proclaiming the question one last time. The strings do not answer again. The piece fades to silence.

Today, one might interpret those Druids differently. Not as wisdom, but as insulation. The modern “safe space,” ideological or cultural, where only like-minded voices are permitted to disturb the silence. Where certainty is protected from inquiry. Where the question itself becomes unwelcome.

But the trumpet persists. It keeps asking.

Perhaps that is the true task of citizenship in a free society: not the achievement of perfect certainty, but the maintenance of honest inquiry. The willingness to continually examine our institutions, our assumptions, our tribes, our leaders, and ourselves.

Lady Justice does not lift her blindfold in this moment to pronounce sentence.

She lifts it and asks: “What in heaven’s name is going on here?”

And perhaps the moment we stop asking such questions is the moment self-government itself begins to fail.

It sounded like a throwaway line, the kind Donald Trump produces almost casually. He said it during a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday:

“I don’t care about the midterms.”

He said it while discussing the war in Iran, as if brushing lint off his sleeve. For Republicans heading into a difficult election cycle, it was the sort of sentence you’re not supposed to say out loud.

Predictably, the line detonated in the entirely predictable way: outrage, reposts, moral condemnation, and the familiar discovery that Trump is, in fact, a boor. Yes. Thank you for the breaking news.

The quote mattered less for its rudeness than for what it exposed. For anyone who has been paying attention, it was something else: a statement of method.

Trump framed it as strength. He wouldn’t be rushed into a deal by electoral pressure. Others might worry about November; he doesn’t. He even pointed to a “prelude” to the midterms—his endorsed candidate, Ken Paxton, knocking off John Cornyn in Texas—as proof that everything is proceeding exactly as it should.

But that framing collapses on contact with reality.

Republicans on the ballot are looking at stubbornly high gas prices, renewed inflation pressure, and a volatile geopolitical backdrop. Voters are looking at their monthly bills. Trump, meanwhile, is looking at himself. If you understand Donald Trump, you understand that this is not an insult; it’s the operating principle.

Call it narcissism if you like, but that almost understates the point. The more useful lens is consistency. Trump does not treat politics as a shared enterprise with consequences beyond himself. He treats it as a stage on which outcomes matter only insofar as they reflect on his dominance.

That’s why this wasn’t a gaffe. It’s the pattern.

It aligns neatly with his earlier admission that Americans’ financial struggles don’t weigh heavily on his decision-making. It fits with the steady parade of vanity projects and distractions that orbit his presidency. If something enhances his image, it commands attention. If it doesn’t, it fades into irrelevance.

There is, however, a certain crude cunning to it.

By declaring indifference now, Trump is constructing an alibi in advance. If Republicans lose seats in November—as incumbent parties tend to do in midterm elections—he has already detached himself from the outcome. He wasn’t focused on the midterms. He wasn’t managing the map. The failure, therefore, belongs to someone else.

Strength on the surface, insulation underneath.

This is the part Republicans understand but cannot say. They are tied to a figure who does not experience political success or failure collectively. Victory is his. Defeat is yours.

That leaves them with a choice that is less strategic than existential.

They can embrace it—run entirely within Trump’s gravitational pull, amplify the spectacle, and hope that primary-style intensity translates to a general electorate that is, historically, less impressed by it. Or they can attempt distance—talk about prices, stability, competence—and risk being treated as disloyal by the very base they need to survive.

There is no elegant third option, only varying speeds of political self-harm.

Trump’s comment simply strips away the pretense that he is calibrating any of this with their interests in mind. He isn’t. He never has. Allies, institutions, even voters themselves are useful to the extent that they reinforce his ego—and disposable the moment they don’t.

History, on this point, is not subtle. When voters feel squeezed, they punish the party in power. The Iran conflict’s pressure on energy prices only sharpens that instinct. Democrats don’t need to invent a message; they need only point to the cost of living and ask who is paying attention.

Trump has already answered. He has opted out of caring about the outcome.

At bottom, what we are seeing is not indifference as a quirk, but indifference as a governing philosophy. Politics is not about stewardship, or even ideology. It is about attention, dominance, and self-preservation. The party, the agenda, the moment—they exist as extensions of him, not obligations he serves.

One might expect a president to have a dier lens, to think in terms of coalition, continuity, or legacy. Instead, the aperture is fixed, as it always and always will. If something reflects well on him, it matters. If it doesn’t, it fades into irrelevance.

“I don’t care about the midterms” is not a lapse in discipline. It is the absence of any reason for discipline to exist. It is his governing philosophy, stated plainly.

The question now is not whether Trump cares. He has made that clear. The question is whether Republicans can continue to pretend that he ever did—and whether voters decide that pretending still works.

Donald Trump says a breakthrough with Iran is imminent.

Iran says: not so fast.

Then the White House says negotiations are complicated.

Then Trump threatens military action again.

Then markets spike or plunge depending on which administration official is talking that hour.

Then Iran says there is no finalized deal.

Then some Republican lawmaker appears on television praising Trump for “bringing Iran to the table.”

And around and around we go.

At this point, the public is not watching diplomacy. It is watching narrative management—an administration desperately trying to project control over events that increasingly appear beyond its control.

The most absurd line of the week came from House Speaker Mike Johnson, praising Trump as “the only one who could get Iran to the negotiating table.”

Yes. Only Trump could get Iran to negotiate the reopening of a strait that was already open before this conflict began.

This isn’t diplomacy as usual. It’s the farce in miniature: the inevitable mess that follows starting a war you never needed in the first place. We are now being asked to celebrate negotiations aimed at stabilizing a crisis largely created by the administration itself.

Same Old Deal, Now With Extra Blood and Bills

And what exactly is this “historic breakthrough” supposed to produce? By the administration’s own leaks and optimistic declarations, we are apparently inching toward:

• reopening the Strait of Hormuz,

• phased sanctions relief,

• indirect nuclear talks,

• discussions over enriched uranium,

• and some form of inspections framework.

You know—the kind of stuff we already had under the JCPOA.

Remember the JCPOA? The agreement that included inspectors on the ground, cameras on centrifuges, and verifiable constraints on enrichment? The agreement Trump tore apart because Barack Obama’s fingerprints were on it?

Yes, that deal.

So after all the swagger, all the chest-thumping, all the talk about “strength,” “maximum pressure,” and “better deals,” we may ultimately end up with a weaker or equivalent version of the very framework Trump destroyed—except now after a regional war, global shipping disruption, surging energy prices, economic instability, tragic civilian casualties and regional devastation.

Some achievement.

Amateur Night at the Diplomacy Casino

And what makes this even more maddening is the administration’s inability to stop overselling developments that plainly are not finalized. Trump declares a deal is “largely negotiated.” Iran immediately contradicts him. Marco Rubio says progress is encouraging. Tehran says no agreement is imminent. Markets react wildly to every headline while diplomats quietly admit negotiations remain stuck in “back and forth.”

This is amateur night at the diplomacy table. The constant “breakthrough imminent → Iranian denial → renewed threats → repeat” cycle resembles a casino more than a coherent foreign policy.

Nothing captures the administration’s incoherence more perfectly than announcing fresh airstrikes in Iran late Monday while simultaneously insisting a diplomatic breakthrough is imminent. The message now appears to be: peace is progressing beautifully, please ignore the explosions.

Every 48 hours the public gets another “breakthrough imminent” headline, only to discover hours later that the supposed breakthrough exists mostly in Trump’s social media posts and cable-news soundbites.

This matters, because credibility, once squandered, does not simply disappear. It mutates.

Politicians rarely admit error, but Trump especially thrives on dominance optics. Admitting that asymmetric diplomacy is messy, slow, and involves swallowing some pride would humanize the process. Instead, the refusal to level with the public—the refusal to say “we’re working through it, this takes time”—only fuels the frustration. The administration has gotten in over their heads, and now they’re trying to gloss it over with performative certainty.

When Credibility Collapses

When governments exaggerate, contradict themselves, overpromise outcomes, and visibly lose control of events, people begin searching for explanations elsewhere. Some reasonable. Some ridiculous. But all rooted in the same vacuum of trust.

Conspiracy theories do not emerge in a vacuum. They flourish where credibility collapses.

This is exactly what happens when governance becomes branding, when optics replace strategy, and when credibility is squandered faster than reality can sustain.

That does not mean every suspicion is true. It means incompetence, opacity, confusion, and constant narrative whiplash create the conditions where speculation gains traction. When an administration repeatedly promises total control while visible reality keeps contradicting it, people begin assuming there must be another motive because the official explanation no longer feels stable enough to believe.

And frankly, can anyone really be shocked by that at this point?

The Cult of Not Connecting the Dots

What’s almost as infuriating is watching people refuse to connect Point A to Point B. Some will understandably call them stupid, as dumb as a box of rocks. No, that’s not it. It’s more of a defense mechanism. They’ve invested too deeply in the political identity, the narrative, the sense of belonging. Admitting the detour was pointless would mean questioning far more than one foreign policy misadventure. It would mean questioning themselves, their own credibility, their own integrity. It’s far easier to just double down, shout insults, redeclare their fealty.

This administration boasts, retreats, boasts again, then quietly lowers expectations after the hype machine overheats. It is the geopolitical equivalent of the boy who cried wolf—except eventually the public starts wondering whether there ever was a wolf at all.

Who’s Really Driving This Farce?

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are growing increasingly nervous, not just over Iran, but over collapsing public confidence more broadly. Gas prices spike. Grocery prices remain stubbornly high. Inflation ticks upward again. The war is unpopular. Polling softens. Midterms loom. So every few days another announcement arrives declaring diplomacy is right around the corner, followed shortly thereafter by Iranian officials publicly swatting the administration back down to earth.

Iran, for its part, appears to understand Trump perfectly.

Tehran keeps negotiating indirectly, keeps signaling flexibility without concession, keeps publicly denying the White House’s triumphalist framing, and keeps preserving leverage. Iranian officials have repeatedly emphasized that core nuclear questions remain unresolved and that no final agreement exists.

Which raises an uncomfortable question:

Who exactly is driving this process?

Because from the outside, it increasingly looks as though the administration is reacting to events while trying desperately to appear as though it is orchestrating them.

The Most Infuriating Reality

And underlying all of this is the most infuriating reality of all: none of this had to happen.

Nobody needed to “bring Iran to the table” if the table had not first been kicked over for political branding purposes.

Nobody needed to celebrate reopening a shipping corridor that had functioned before the conflict.

Nobody needed to pretend a recycled inspections framework is a revolutionary diplomatic achievement.

We already had an agreement. Imperfect? Of course. But functional, enforceable, and achieved without detonating an entire region first.

Now, after all the destruction, instability, televised machismo, and “historic” declarations, we may end up right back where we started—only poorer, bloodier, and more distrustful than before.

And if that turns out to be the final destination, history may record this not as some great strategic triumph, but as one of the most expensive exercises in political vanity ever inflicted on American foreign policy.

Sources:

https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/article/trump-says-us-doesnt-want-to-rush-into-a-deal-with-iran-but-ongoing-talks-are-constructive-214848004.html

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/potential-60-day-ceasefire-table-115520367.html

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/ted-cruz-thom-tillis-and-other-republicans-criticize-trumps-emerging-iran-deal-153625510.html

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/back-and-forth-delays-iran-deal-white-house-says-agreement-still-not-sealed-report/articleshow/131299663.cms

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-says-conclusions-reached-many-topics-potential-us-memorandum-no-deal-2026-05-25/

https://time.com/article/2026/05/23/iran-war-deal-news-trump/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/25/iran-and-us-play-down-hopes-for-imminent-breakthrough-in-war.html

https://abcnews.com/International/live-updates/iran-live-updates-peace-deal-work-progress-rubio/?id=133278077

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/us-military-says-conducted-self-defense-strikes-targets-iran-rcna346839

Ed’s note: This essay is intended as a companion to a previous Memorial Day essay, “Memorial Day: We Say We Remember,” which focused on the human cost of war and the meaning of remembrance itself. It has been republished. I invite you to read it, then return to this essay as a follow-up.

The original Memorial Day—then called Decoration Day—was fixed to May 30th in 1868, when General John Logan designated the date so flowers would be in bloom to decorate the graves of Union soldiers killed in the Civil War. The day was meant to be solemn, intentional, and anchored to the calendar itself. Only later, after generations of observance, did Congress move it to the last Monday in May under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968.

The stated reason was convenience: standardized observance, predictable schedules, three-day weekends for federal workers.

But something changes when remembrance becomes movable.

We move the graves of our soldiers by moving the calendar. We do not change the dead; we change the way we remember them.

We do not move our own birthdays for convenience. If your birthday falls on a Wednesday, then Wednesday is when it arrives. The date matters because the date is part of the meaning. Birthdays remain fixed, personal, and nonnegotiable.

Commemorative days once worked the same way. Lincoln’s Birthday was February 12th. Washington’s Birthday was February 22nd. Memorial Day was May 30th. These were not simply days off; they were civic interruptions. They arrived when they arrived and demanded pause whether convenient or not.

A fixed commemorative date forces interruption. A movable holiday encourages accommodation.

That distinction matters more than it first appears.

May 30th arriving in the middle of a workweek forces the culture to stop and remember. The interruption itself becomes ritual. It intrudes upon ordinary life and briefly reorders priorities. The date asks something of us.

Moving Memorial Day to a Monday changes the emotional architecture of the observance. Remembrance no longer stands apart from leisure culture; it merges into it. The day becomes easier to absorb into travel plans, retail promotions, campground reservations, appliance sales, and the unofficial start of summer.

None of this means people should not gather with family, barbecue, travel, or enjoy the long weekend. Americans have always mixed remembrance with ordinary life. But there is still a meaningful difference between a holiday that interrupts commerce and one that has been carefully integrated into it.

That difference reveals something uncomfortable about modern civic life: we increasingly treat the calendar not as a ledger of memory, but as a utility schedule optimized for convenience.

And convenience is never neutral. Once a sacred observance is reorganized around accommodation, commerce inevitably fills the space created by that accommodation. What was once a fixed national moment of reflection slowly softens into atmosphere.

A day dedicated to those who died in war deserves more dignity than a scheduling adjustment.

Memorial Day is not a consumer occasion. It is a funeral writ large across the national calendar.

If we truly believe that the men and women who died for this country should be honored, then the least we can do is preserve the precision of the day meant to remember them. Not because changing the date dishonors the dead directly, but because it changes us. It changes the habits of remembrance. It changes whether memory interrupts our lives or merely accompanies our leisure.

Memorial Day should trouble us. Not just because of past sacrifice, but because it forces a harder question upon the living: Are we still worthy of those brave men and women?

Moving the date for furniture sales and road trips may answer that question more honestly than most people want to admit.

There they go again, those stout guardians of the Republic, those self-proclaimed profiles in courage who discover their spines only after the arival of the coup de grâce.

Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, freshly evicted in his primary by voters weary of his occasional lapses into constitutionalism, has done what any self-respecting lame duck does: he has flipped on a war powers resolution aimed at reining in Donald Trump’s military actions against Iran. For months, he voted no—reliably, repeatedly, seven times, by some counts—calculating, one assumes, that fealty might yet save him. Now, with the hide irretrievably lost, principle bursts forth like a sinner at a revival tent show.

Freedom’s just another word for nuthin’ left to lose, as Janis Joplin acidly observed. How right she was. How nauseatingly predictable our lawmakers are.

In an NPR intervew, podcaster and political analyst Chuck Todd distilled the dynamic with admirable bluntness: until very recently, Cassidy and Texas Senator John Cornyn—another victim of Trump’s pettiness—were “holding out hope they could at least keep the president from endorsing in their race.”

Sit with that for a moment. Not hoping to persuade the president. Not hoping to defend Congress’s constitutional prerogatives. Not hope of advancing sound policy. Hoping—quietly, anxiously, pathetically—to avoid the Great Endorser’s wrath, that singular veto power in the modern GOP. Cornyn, denied the blessing and now facing Ken Paxton in a runoff, will likely feel “no allegiance” should he scrape through, Todd predicts. Allegiance? To what? To the voters? To the Constitution? Or to the transactional god of reelection?

That is the job now. It always has been. We dress it up, of course. We talk about strategy and coalition-building and party unity. But the operating hierarchy of the modern lawmaker is brutally simple:

1. Keep your job

2. Placate whoever can help you keep your job.

3. And somewhere, trailing distantly behind, the constituents. Oh yes, them, tossed the occasional bone of rhetoric while the real business of power proceeds.

It is a spectacle that would have made even the most jaded Roman senator blush. These are not statesmen; they are incumbents. The job is the point. The title, the pension, the staff, the fawning donors, the cable hits. They manage up, rather than legislate down. Principle is for the pamphlets. When the primary challenger looms like the Ghost of Elections Past, they bend the knee. When defeated, they suddenly remember that Congress has a role in maintaining a check on the Executive—or at least pretending to.

Cassidy’s volte-face is particularly rich. A physician by training, one of the few Republicans who voted to convict Trump after January 6, he spent years threading the needle: loyal enough to survive, independent enough to retain a shred of self-respect in the mirror. His reversal is not courage. It is permission. The permission granted by defeat to finally do what risk once forbade. Before the primary, a vote to constrain Trump was dangerous; after it, the same vote is costless, even cathartic. That is not a change of heart. It is a change in incentives.

And that, more than anything, is the indictment.

Cornyn’s situation is less resolved but no less revealing. Denied Trump’s endorsement and facing a challenge from his right, he has spent months navigating the same narrow corridor—careful not to provoke, careful not to alienate, careful above all not to jeopardize his standing with the one man who can scramble the entire race with a word salad post on social media. Todd’s prediction that Cornyn would feel “no allegiance” if he survives is less a forecast than a diagnosis of the disease: allegiance is contingent, a function of political need. When the need disappears, so, too, does the loyalty.

What passes for principle in this environment is often just timing.

This is not new, of course. We have seen this pattern too many times to pretend it is incidental. Announce your retirement and watch the sudden flowering of independence. Lose your primary and discover the Constitution anew. Fall out of favor and rediscover your voice. It is not that these men lack consciences; it is that their consciences are subordinated to their careers until the career is no longer salvageable.

Washington calls this pragmatism. It is, more plainly, careerism. Or, more crudely, prostitution. The prospect of unemployment concentrates the mind wonderfully on eternal verities. Nothing left to lose, indeed.

Politics has always attracted the ambitious and the adaptable. But the Trump era—both iterations—has refined it to a crude, almost parodic clarity. In private, many Republican lawmakers have long treated Trump as a liability—undisciplined, erratic, even dangerous. In public, they align, endorse, excuse. Not because they are persuaded, but because they are frightened—afraid of primaries, of donors, of exile. What analysts call Trump’s grip on the party is little more that a party who’s members are little more that terrified invertebrates. The left has its own equivalents, naturally: the sudden discovery of institutional norms when power shifts, the selective outrage over executive overreach. Hypocrisy is the human condition in elected form. What grates is the shamelessness, the transparent careerism masquerading as statesmanship.

Years ago, while driving a cab in New York City (yes, I used to do that), a driver pulled up next to me at the light and threw a a sandwhich wrapper and empty coffee cup out the window into the street.

I looked at him with that WTF look and said, “What, you couldn’t throw it in the garbage can?”

He said, ”So what. The city’s a dump. Besides, everybody does it.”

That shrug is the quiet creed of institutional decay, how standards erode without anyone ever quite deciding to abandon them. Do what everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it. I will never understand it, yet it applies with depressing accuracy. This from a nation that lectures the world on individualism, on rejecting the collectivist herd of socialism and its dreary siblings. Yet here we are, a citizenry that abhors “sheep” in theory but rewards the most ovine behavior in its representatives.

And so we are not bystanders to this; we are participants. We hire these people. We pay them. And too often, we signal—through apathy, through tribal loyalty, through selective outrage—that we will tolerate the grift so long as our side wins, because tribal loyalty feels better than accountability. We are, in that sense, a remarkably undemanding employer. You cannot rehire the same clowns, cycle after cycle, and then wonder why the circus never gets any better.

We should despise the courtier class, the men who prostituted their intellects for proximity to power—whether Clinton’s or Bush’s or Trump’s, or anyone before that. Look no further than the rogues’ gallery now staffing the current administration and its outer orbit: Marco Rubio, once calling Trump a “con man” and warning he would be a disaster; JD Vance, who privately and publicly likened him to Hitler and cultural heroin; Ted Cruz, who decried his “New York values” and called him a pathological liar; and Lindsey Graham, who labeled him unfit, dangerous, and a threat to the rule of law.

These were not mild reservations. They were moral indictments—until the calculus shifted. Now they worship at the altar with the fervor of fresh converts, all for the spoils: cabinet posts, relevance, future ambitions, the warm bath of power. This is what happens when a man mistakes shamelessness for principle and discovers, too late, that he has no principle left to betray.

It is why we must come to understand, and be willing to concede the understanding, that moral courage is not the absence of fear but the willingness to act against self-interest when it counts. These senators—Cassidy and Cornyn—fail that test spectacularly, as do far too many others. They stand for nothing except the perpetuation of themselves. When the primary sword falls, they reveal the hollowness: no fixed star, only the weather vane of survival.

The republic deserves better than men who treat conscience as a luxury good, deployed only post-defeat. It deserves representatives who vote their principles before a political extortionist forces their hand—win or lose. Until voters punish the fealty and reward the spine, the dance will continue: grovel, survive, betray at leisure—deference when it matters, defiance when it doesn’t, and a belated rediscovery of conscience at the precise moment it becomes politically free.

Freedom for the lame duck is just another word for the irrelevance he or she so richly earned. The rest of us are left to live with what they were unwilling to risk while it still mattered.

We keep calling these people leaders. More often, they are just exquisitely well-paid followers... like us, but with better perks.

There are scandals, and then there are acts of such shameless executive self-dealing that they seem to have been written by a committee of satirists who had lost all faith in satire. The Trump administration’s so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” belongs to the second category. It is not justice. It is not redress. It is not even law in any respectable constitutional sense. It is a taxpayer-funded loyalty scheme dressed up as civic virtue, wrapped in the flag, and stamped with a coy little numerological wink of $1.776 billion—1776—as though the republic could be flattered into surrender by a patriotic decimal point.

Let us begin with the obscenity of the form. A sitting president sues his own administration over the 2019 IRS leak of his tax returns—in fairness, a grievance with some intelligible basis. But rather than allow ordinary law and ordinary courts to resolve it, Donald Trump transmutes the suit into something grander and infinitely more corrupt: a sprawling compensation scheme for—the quote is gagworthy— “victims of weaponization and lawfare,” financed by the public, administered by his own appointees, and built to dispense cash and official apologies through 2028. This is not a settlement. It is a political transaction masquerading as litigation, using the Judgment Fund—a permanent appropriation established by Congress to pay court judgments and settlements against the United States—as a personal piñata.

This is not a settlement in the ordinary sense. It is a purported agreement that uses the language of law to evade the discipline of law. The executive does not get to invent a compensation system for its own political tribe and then ask to be praised for restraint. Congress controls spending. Courts exist for review. Judges exist for a reason. Yet here the machinery of government is being used to manufacture what amounts to a discretionary patronage fund, and the administration would like us to admire the solemnity of the process.

The process, naturally, is as brazen as it is vulgar. Trump stands on both sides of the bargain: complainant, beneficiary, and, through Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (his former personal lawyer), the architect of any payout. A five-person commission heavy with presidential influence will decide claims on the vague, elastic grounds of “lawfare.” We are assured there are “no partisan requirements.” How reassuring, indeed. The architecture, the rhetoric, the timing, and the first claimant tell another story.

The Fund Attracts its First Fly

It took mere hours for the fund to attract its first supplicant: longtime Trump ally Michael Caputo, seeking $2.7 million for the supposed indignities of prior scrutiny. The politically connected know opportunity when they see it.

Here we have someone who worked for Gazprom, the Russian state-owned multinational energy corporation, and who worked for Putin, trying to improve his image in the U.S., who has lived in Russia and Ukraine, who became one of many subject to investigations into Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Maybe live a cleaner life. But hey, free money.

Here we see what happens when a fund is designed not as a neutral legal remedy but as a magnet for the politically connected. If this were truly a mechanism for all Americans wronged by government overreach, it would not look so much like a call to the faithful. One wonders whether Hunter Biden will be able to apply for money for being targeted by his father’s administration.

Worse still, the whole scheme launders political vengeance through the language of restitution. “Anti-weaponization” is the sort of phrase that should make a literate person wince. It is Orwellian in the most obvious sense: a word chosen not to clarify reality but to conceal it. We are expected to applaud a fund that claims to oppose abuse while institutionalizing it. That is not anti-weaponization. That is weaponization with better branding and a lower-quality moral conscience.

The Greater Offense

But there is something worse, something far more insidious in this so-called “agreement.” Unmentioned during Monday’s announcement was a one-page document called a “Release of Claims,” in which the United States government—your government—“forever bars and precludes” itself from pursuing any tax claims, audits, or related actions against Trump, his family, his organization, and affiliates.

Consider the farce: a president who has spent years railing against supposed “weaponization” of government has now secured a declaration protecting himself and his circle from government scrutiny altogether. To him, accountability is always persecution; he is always the victim. Now, accountability is no longer possible.

In effect, this single page shields the entire Trump orbit from future government action. Past and pending matters are dismissed; future scrutiny is contractually restrained—a government bound in perpetuity. It is a republic made to sign its own blindfold. If that is not corruption, then corruption has ceased to mean anything at all.

The deeper corruption, however, is not merely that this fund exists, but that it normalizes the conversion of political grievance into budgeted entitlement. If you can sue the government, abandon the suit, and emerge with a taxpayer-funded mechanism for rewarding your faction, then the distinction between law and loot begins to dissolve.

Future administrations will notice. They will be tempted. Why wouldn’t they be? If one side can transform grievance into a compensation system for loyalists, the other will eventually be tempted to do the same. That is not balance. It is institutional decay.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that a Democratic administration had created a multibillion-dollar compensation apparatus to reward its allies for being “targeted,” with payouts flowing to the politically connected under a hand-picked board. The right would be contorting itself in paroxisms of apoplecty. Cries of tyranny, corruption, theft, and probably an existential crisis, all before breakfast. Instead, we are told to regard this as a reasonable administrative innovation.

Congressional Reaction

And what say members of Congress?

House Democrats filed an amicus brief in federal court Wednesady asking a judge to stop the fund from being created.

Meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson, right on cue, told reporters he had no comment, claiming he didn’t really know anything about the matter. This is the go-to routine for the useful idiot, the political equivalent of a man standing in a burning house and admiring the drapes.

Some Republicans expressed qualms, though ever so delicately. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for instance, said he was “not a big fan” of the plan. How adroitly supine.

But there were others, like one-time Trump-critic-turned-bootlicker Ted Cruz, that exquisitely craven specimen of political ambition disfigured into a career. When questioned by a TMZ reporter about the possibility of Jan 06 insurrectionists being able to file for recompense despite assaulting officers, invading and even defecating in the Capital Building, Cruz immediately deflected by reaching for the old magic trick: What about Biden? He never did answer the question.

It is his nature, the pathetic reflex of a coward, made even sadder by the fact that TMZ now seems more willing than the professional press to drag these people into the light and ask them to account for themselves. One almost wants to applaud, not because tabloid journalism has suddenly become noble, which would be absurd, but because the humiliation is so perfect. When a celebrity outlet is doing the public’s work and the prestige press is clutching its access cards and whispering about norms, the republic is already in a bad way.

Unaswered Questions

One question that follows from all of this. If the IRS is now barred from pursuing past tax matters involving Trump, his family, and affiliated entities, then presumably the president is no longer under any meaningful audit. So the excuse that prevented the release of his tax returns for years has evaporated. The public can finally see them now, yes? Will we? The incredulity of your laughter is duly noted.

On Substack, Joyce Vance raises the more unsettling question: what exactly is Donald Trump trying to hide? No person with a functioning conscience invites this much scandal unless the protection purchased is considered worth the cost. With Trump, the pattern is rarely mysterious for long. He is usually either insulating himself from scrutiny or monetizing access to power.

It is tempting to think this is merely about shielding past conduct. That may be too narrow a reading. It may also be about preparing the ground for future conduct—creating conditions in which abuses can be committed with less fear, less scrutiny, and greater confidence that accountability itself has been neutralized.

Trump just might be able to shoot that person on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, after all.

George Orwell understood, before most politicians had even learned to lie with a straight face, that the most dangerous rulers are not those who openly confess their appetite for power, but those who drape it in the language of virtue. That is the special vulgarity of this Trumpian “anti-weaponization” fund: it is not merely corrupt, but corrupt in a costume. The pigs have not just come to the table; they have rewritten the menu, reserved the best seats, and asked the public to applaud while it pays the bill.

In the end, the beasts do not merely resemble the men; the men become pigs, and then insist that this is what justice looks like.