Time to reflect on a few pieces (three, actually) from other writers on some bigger picture thoughts about politics, business, and life.

1. What if restaurants stopped charging for food?

Crazy!! It could never happen in a million years. How would a restaurant stay in business? What are you, some kind of Communist?

First of all, this is not a question I came up with on my own. In fact, rather than being some ridiculous scheme dreamed up by an economic crackpot, it’s something that actually happened. In Minneapolis. And the restaurant survived.

True, the idea began as an anti-sales tax, anti-ICE protest against a government that the owner believed was “actively inflicting daily harm on its citizens.” In the midst of the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis earlier this year, the Post Modern Times cafe began functioning as a free and donation-based restaurant. Customers could choose to pay or not pay for their meals, and the number of customers who didn’t pay was often above 40 percent.

What’s remarkable, though, is that the voluntary payments and donations from everyone else allowed the restaurant to make more of a profit than when it was a conventionally run business. Which is something that makes you go “hmm.”

The cafe also, not surprisingly, began attracting a fair number of diners who normally wouldn’t be able to afford to eat at a restaurant. The NY Times piece noted that the restaurant’s efforts were not “universally embraced” and that some neighbors complained about a portion of the clientele, which included the homeless.

Thus, it’s important to note that Post Modern Times recently went back to putting prices on its menu. They said it was to ensure a predictable stream of monthly income so it could pay its workers a living wage. It’s entirely possible, though unsaid, that it was also a means of being able to better regulate the customers who populate the establishment.

Still, the fact the restaurant made a bigger profit by not charging for food at a time when “42 percent of restaurant owners” report their businesses aren’t profitable gives you something to ponder. And while Post Modern Times has returned to charging set prices, it also now collects donations so it can continue providing a free food program for local residents who otherwise cannot afford a meal.

So the question is whether there are other ideas are out there that would allow a business to make a profit while also acknowledging and aiding the many individuals and families who struggle on a daily basis to survive.

What makes Mr. Alverson’s approach novel is his determination to center his business on an expanded concept of hospitality driven by more than economic survival. Serving customers who don’t have the means to eat at most restaurants brings an ethical component to his recalibrated definition of success.

As Dylan Alverson, the cafe owner, put it:

“It’s kind of this unspoken agreement in America that there’s a group of people that are not worth anything, and they’re treated as such,” he said. “I disagree with that.”

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2. Why are Americans unhappier now than almost ever before?

The United States has weathered some tough times in the past. But Americans these days are unhappier than they’ve ever been, or at least since polling began tracking such things as far back as 70 years ago.

Derek Thompson took on the question in a Substack post and found several culprits, including the fact that Americans spend more time alone than do people in most other countries, that we live in a uniquely negative media and online environment, and that we’re spending much more time on our phones these days (which exacerbates both our feelings of loneliness and our exposure to negative sentiments in the media).

But while these factors all contribute to a general sense of unhappiness, he suggested that none of them by themselves explained such a dramatic drop in dissatisfaction. For example:

I am quite persuaded by the argument that phones and social media are associated with—and, probably, actively causing—a decline in well-being among young people in the U.S. But the rising misery of young people—often rightly associated with rising phone and social media use—has been going on for about 15 years. The more sudden collapse in general wellness that we see … points to an emotional break that happened around 2020. So, even if phones aren’t blameless here … they don’t make sense as the primary culprit.

Thompson then hones in on the reality that the country has lived through an almost constant feeling of crisis for years now, but especially since 2020.

The biological antagonist of the disease gave way to a cavalcade of economic disasters, from supply chain disruptions, to global inflation, to surging interest rates. We are still are living in the midst of an aftershock …

Indeed, the decade has pretty much been a dumpster fire, hasn’t it? A once-in-a-century pandemic yielded to a once-in-a-generation inflation crisis. Wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and the Persian Gulf followed one another in a steady martial drumbeat. Existential fears of climate change gave way to existential fears of artificial intelligence. And all of this took place during a period when Donald Trump hovered over the political realm like some kind of unearthly specter …

As a global health emergency, the COVID pandemic may have ended, but the state of crisis that Americans feel in their day-to-day lives when they make contact with the news has not gone away.

Now, add to this a rise in loneliness, a toxic media and online environment, and a life spent increasingly on screens. And yeah, what you get is a pretty unhappy country.

3. Money Doesn’t Buy Elections. It Does Something Worse.

That’s the title of a piece by Adam Bonica in On Data and Democracy in which he makes the case that “the narrative most Americans hear about money in politics largely misses the real story.”

The real story isn't about the ads you see but the power you don't. It's about the candidates who never run, the policies that never get debated, and the slow, systemic drift of our democracy away from the will of the majority.

Bonica runs through a list of five ways that money influences politics, going from what he considers the least important to the most consequential.

The least important? Those barrages of annoying ads that take over our lives and screens and mailboxes every election season.

Here’s what surprises everyone: the billions spent on campaign ads during general elections have remarkably little power to change voting behavior.

For decades, political scientists have rigorously studied this question, and the findings are overwhelmingly consistent. General election advertising—whether television or online, positive or negative—barely moves the needle when it comes to persuading voters to switch parties.

He also considers such topics as the money spent on voter mobilization, the ability of candidates to gain influence solely through their fundraising prowess, and the billions of dollars that are spent on corporate lobbying efforts.

Now, advertisements and voter mobilization efforts aren’t exactly corrupting to democracy. They are democracy. Which is probably why the list is topped by what the author sees as “money's most dangerous influence” in politics: The rise of an entrenched oligarchy that works relentlessly to control government and policy decisions.

This, he says, is “where the political system becomes fundamentally detached from the will of the majority and tethered to the preferences of a tiny, wealthy elite.”

When the policy preferences of wealthy Americans conflict with those of everyone else, the wealthy always win … The real goal of mega-donor influence isn’t to secure a specific party’s victory but to ensure that the political system, regardless of who is in charge, remains friendly to the interests of extreme wealth. It’s about creating a “heads I get a subsidy, tails I get a tax loophole” policy environment …

He provides examples of how each party has been warped by all of this, from Elon Musk’s extraordinary access to government and federal contracts after spending $250 million to support Trump to Kamala Harris’ abandonment of a policy proposal almost solely on the basis of complaints from Mark Cuban.

But he also notes that, while Democrats rely largely on small dollar donors sprinkled in with some contributions from the wealthy, the Republican Party is the opposite in that “mega-donors giving over $1 million each” actually provided a majority of all contributions to GOP federal campaign committees in 2024.

In fact, in the last two decades, the share of contributions from billionaires to political campaigns has grown from 0.3 percent to 19 percent of all funding! And 8 of the top 10 billionaire donors this year are supporting Republican candidates. Which might explain why the Trump administration has launched investigations seemingly aimed at crippling ActBlue, the Democrats’ leading source of small dollar donations. Without equivalent support from the mega-wealthy, the end of ActBlue would be close to an extinction level event for Democrats’ ability to fundraise.

But even if you take away the debate about whether one party or the other benefits, there is a larger issue involved that transcends partisanship. As Bonica puts it, it’s the reality that:

When a major party becomes so dependent on such a tiny sliver of the population, it inevitably drifts from "one person, one vote" toward "one dollar, one vote."

Like so many other things that are happening these days, this is a danger the Founders were aware of and warned about. It’s a reason they constructed the system of government they did, with so many checks and balances. As John Adams wrote:

Aristocracy will soon commence an Oligarchy, and Democracy, will soon degenerate into an Anarchy … no Mans life or Property or Reputation or Liberty will be secure and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination … to the wanton Pleasures, the capricious Will, and the execrable Cruelty of one or a very few.

The Founders knew there was a danger of an authoritarian leader and/or an oligarchy someday trying to take over the government. What they likely didn’t expect was that the Congress would roll over and let it happen, or that the Supreme Court would essentially endorse it.

If you read the piece, Bonica at the end lists a few efforts at reform that could be undertaken, some of which could be implemented at the state or local level. None of it would be easy, but also nothing is impossible. As he concludes:

The front doors to reform are locked. But that doesn’t mean nothing can be done.

Fewer people seem to be reading books these days. And a fair number of students are arriving at college without the skills to competently read an entire book on their own. But bookstores are still in business. Book clubs are thriving. And when thousands of readers are picking up a copy of “The Odyssey,” well, it shows that books are very much alive and well, even if the total population of readers has dwindled some. The news isn’t all bad.

So let’s talk a bit about books and the state of reading in America, via a number of articles and anecdotes I’ve come across lately.

1. Is it harder to read now than it used to be?

I was struck by these opening words in an article this month from The Guardian …

Do you feel that it’s harder to read than it used to be? Not harder to read emails, texts and social media posts, of course. We’re reading those all day long. Harder to sit down and lose yourself in a book? … Do you feel that you used to have a life-sustaining reading habit … but somehow it’s gone away? It doesn’t feel like a decision that you made. It just happened.

I feel like that. At least more like that than I’m comfortable with … I do still read. Compared with many people, I probably read an enormous amount, but I know it’s not as much as I used to read. And I know where the time has gone.

It is, of course, the damn phones.

The piece was written by the author Naomi Alderman and was based on a Substack post of hers that sparked a viral response by asking that same question and suggesting that people who feel this way could “train” to read more in much the same way they build up to a particular running (or biking or swimming or walking) level. She called it a “Couch to 5k for Reading.”

One of the reasons this topic resonated is that I’ve been pondering much the same thing of late. I’m among those who never stopped reading, but still felt that some of my old reading habits had been replaced by time scrolling on a phone. And even if a lot of it is merely scrolling for news stories or baseball scores, it’s still time that replaced other things in life. So in the past year or two, I’ve made a conscious effort to put the screen down more often and carve out time for things like physical books.

2. The decline of reading among students

I’ve also watched, though, as reading habits in general have declined. For instance, I’ve been surprised to see how reading has changed in high school English classes over time. I now have to sign permission slips for nearly every book a teacher wants my kids to read in school, even for Shakespeare, and one English teacher told me there are some books he doesn’t even try to teach anymore because he has to jump through too many hoops to get approval.

On top of this, while students are still assigned books to read, they just as often read a book together as a class. Which has some value, but it’s not quite the same as plowing through a book by yourself and forming thoughts on it.

• Part of this is that curriculums have changed and teachers now spend more time getting students ready for standardized exams.

• Another part is financial, as many school districts simply don’t have the money to buy these books and don’t want to put the financial burden on students.

• But a big part of it is also that Americans’ attention spans have declined with the rise of certain technologies, and some students now struggle to read and grasp an entire book on their own. In this sense, the decline in book reading assignments outside of class is mirroring what’s happening in our entire society.

Regardless of the reason, however, the reality is that students are reading fewer books for school these days. While researching this, I came across an article from last year in the New York Times titled: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.

Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year … Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.

And this one, by a professor at Amherst College: College professors face an emerging challenge: We know students are no longer reading entire books. This professor has tried to respond to the situation by creating a new course about the value of reading books.

This summer, I enlisted a few colleagues to offer a course, titled “Why read?”, to a few of our students. We met twice a week for three weeks and discussed pieces about the value of reading …

I tried to help them see that when it comes to reading, similar to physical exercise, the most benefit comes with the most exertion. Reading longer things requires patience and attentiveness, it cultivates the capacity to follow an argument or a plot, and it requires sustained effort to decode meanings.

None of this can be construed as good news. Then again, book reading itself isn’t exactly dying off. The percentage of Americans who read regularly has certainly dwindled, but book clubs are popular and millions of people are still reading. Sometimes, even classics from more than two millennia ago …

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3. Book clubs and pop culture can still make reading cool

Book clubs and reading lists

Oprah Winfrey is the longtime benchmark for celebrity book influencers, but there are numerous others who do a nice job of encouraging reading and bumping up the popularity of certain books. A few of the more prominent include Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club, the Read with Jenna club on the Today Show, Natalie Portman’s Book Club, and the Belletrist Community with Emma Roberts.

The Good Books website also tracks books that have been recommended by various well known individuals, so if you desire to know Tom Hanks’ favorite books, or Keanu Reeves’ or Sarah Jessica Parker’s, among many others, you can find them there.

And a few celebrities that don’t have anything to do with running a book club still share lists of their own favorite books. Barack Obama has been releasing these lists since he was in the White House and his twice-a-year recommendations still make news. Friday Night Readers on Substack put together a list of all his recommendations stretching back to 2009. The pop star Maggie Rogers is also known for regularly posting about her favorite reads.

By the way, a book that appears on both Obama’s and Rogers’ most recent lists? A World Appears by Michael Pollan. Hmm.

Movies

Books that are made into movies are an obvious way to get people reading. Just this summer, Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary saw sales increase by 800% after the movie was released. Even more impressive, The Odyssey was not only one of the year’s blockbuster films, but it caused copies of Homer’s Odyssey to fly off bookstore shelves, with sales reportedly multiplying by several thousand percent.

So yeah, the movie actually got people reading an epic poem that runs 500 or so pages and was composed about 2,700 years ago!

And a new podcast

Speaking of Obama, he also made news recently with the announcement that he will soon host a podcast about some of his favorite books. “A Great Book With Barack Obama” will be a six-episode series launching in September and will focus on books that have especially influenced the former president. It’ll include titles by Marilynne Robinson, James Baldwin, Cormac McCarthy, and others.

“Great books have always helped me figure out who I am and what I believe,” said Obama. “The six books featured in this series have stayed with me throughout my life, and each one has something to teach us about the human experience … I hope listeners will be inspired to discover or rediscover books that change the way they see themselves and the world.”

In a social media post, Obama also said:

“At a time when fewer people are able to sit down with a book, it’s important to remember the joy and power that can come from reading.”

4. Encouraging reading … and finding the time

That’s the crux of it all, isn’t it? Fewer people are able to sit down with a book these days, as Obama noted, but it’s still important to remember the joy and power that can come from reading.

But how do we encourage reading, and also find the time to read ourselves?

Well, for starters, I love that Pizza Hut just brought back its popular Book It! program, which gives elementary and preschool students free pan pizzas for meeting their reading goals.

And ideas like Naomi Alderman’s “Couch to 5k for Reading” can surely help. As can any reading challenge that stirs up some motivation, such as these examples on LitHub, or this summer reading adventure devised by the National Book Foundation.

Some people go bonkers with such challenges, but any sort of target goal — no matter how small — can encourage you to pick up that book and forego an hour of screen time a few days a week.

Besides, did you know that if you read just one book a month, you’re already in the top 20% of American readers, according to a survey published by the Washington Post? And two books a month will put you in the top 10%.

If you’re still struggling with trying to find actual time to read, New York Magazine queried 18 well known readers on how they find the time for books. Responses varied, but it mostly came down to taking advantage of times when you might otherwise be doing nothing (or be on a phone by default). Such as before bed. At breakfast. Sitting on the bleachers at your kid’s sports practice. In a waiting room. During a commute to work.

As lifelong reader Sarah Jessica Parker put it when she was a judge for the prestigious Booker Prize and had to read 153 books in seven months (!):

What I would say, as a tip for people who are wanting to find more time for reading, is that you probably have more time in the day than you think. In between appointments or calls or waiting for a bus or a train or at the laundromat; the kind of perfunctory tasks we do every day always present windows and that’s what I’ve always done as a reader … I just never leave home without a book.

5. Can reading books actually lengthen your life?

Finally, if you need another reason to increase your book reading, one study found that people who read books lived longer than those who didn’t.

Obviously, the act of reading can’t by itself make you healthier, though it’s possible that frequent reading improves your cognition and thereby contributes to a longer lifespan. Or perhaps readers were simply more likely to pay attention to health in other ways. In any case, this isn’t a study that shows a cause and effect relationship between reading and health, but it does provide observational evidence that readers may well live longer.

Hey, maybe it’s that little extra motivation you need to pick up a book. In any case, I assume that most people who follow The Riel World are already fans of books. So happy reading!

This is the first in an occasional series of pieces about moments in U.S. history that have triggered or foreshadowed a political realignment and a new direction for one of the nation’s major parties. You can see the introduction to this series here.

William Jennings Bryan and a new path for Democrats in 1896

On July 9, 1896, in the sweltering Chicago Coliseum, a 36-year-old Nebraska politician named William Jennings Bryan strode to the lectern for an address at that year’s Democratic National Convention. During the next 20 minutes, Bryan not only energized the delegates with his words but he also, with a single speech, managed to thrust himself into the pages of history.

Bryan cast such a spell on his audience that day that he triggered a rollicking and spontaneous demonstration on the convention floor. When he finished, people stomped their feet and threw hats in the air. A conga line formed. Some delegates cried. Others grabbed Bryan, hoisted him onto their shoulders, and carried him around the coliseum.

“Everyone seemed to go mad at once,” said a reporter who was on the scene.1

Bryan, who had recently served two terms in Congress, caused this ruckus by giving a speech about the inequities of the gold standard — and also by articulating a new political philosophy for his Democratic Party, a philosophy that threatened to upend a century of political traditions.

The Democrats, you see, were always the party of the working class, but in the 19th century this meant being a conservative, small government party. This went back to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a nation of independent farmers and shopkeepers, and the belief that the best thing government could do for these individuals was to stay out of their lives. Every Democratic president up to the 1890s had mostly adhered to that philosophy.

But the United States in the late 19th century was undergoing great changes with the rise of industrialization, making it a far different country from the agrarian society of of Jefferson’s day. And Bryan had new ideas about the future direction of his party within this changing nation.

Backdrop to the debate that catapulted Bryan to prominence

In 1896, the United States was battling one of the worst economic depressions in its history, one that had erupted three years earlier. Amidst these challenges, there was a great debate over the efficacy of the gold standard, a debate that riveted the nation in a way no other issue had for years. It split both major political parties and is even thought to be an inspiration for The Wizard of Oz, which was published in 1900.

(If you’re interested, see this older post for an explanation of the overlap between 1890s politics and the Wizard of Oz.)

In brief, advocates of the gold standard believed a currency tied to gold was vital to keeping spending and inflation in check, since the money supply couldn’t expand unless a country’s gold reserves were increased. The downside to this policy, though, is that when gold production declined and/or reserves diminished, the money supply tightened and led to deflation.

The current economic calamity had brought about exactly those conditions and the resulting deflation meant that farmers and others were struggling to make enough money to pay back loans or keep their businesses afloat. But because of the gold standard, the government was restricted in how much it could do about the situation.

Meanwhile, even before the economy cratered, the inequalities of Industrial Age had already sparked a populist movement, which was particularly strong in the Great Plains states. A new People’s Party representing the populists had managed to win four states in the 1892 presidential election. Among their many policy proposals was a push for “bimetallism,” or a currency linked to both gold and silver, an idea that gained even more public support by 1896. Proponents believed it would increase the money supply, inflate the economy, and provide struggling workers with access to more cash.

This idea, however, was anathema to bankers who would see the value of their financial holdings decline with inflation. The bankers held great sway in the GOP, which maintained party support for the gold standard. Numerous Democratic leaders — including the incumbent president, Grover Cleveland — also backed the gold standard, believing a change in policy might further destabilize the economy.

Bryan, however, was allied with the pro-silver populists of the Great Plains who wanted to help struggling farmers and workers. He was also part of a growing debate within the Democratic Party over the tensions between a small government philosophy and support for the working class.

By the late 1890s, some Democrats were starting to believe that the Jeffersonian vision of a small government that stayed out of the lives of farmers and shopkeepers didn’t quite fit in an industrial age, when more people lived in cities and worked in factories. Rather, they were coming around to the realization that the powers of government might be needed to aid laborers and farmers and to prevent exploitation by factory owners or bankers.

And Bryan’s speech to the 1896 Democratic convention was aimed exactly at that sweet spot in the national debate.

The “Cross of Gold” speech

One of Bryan’s main themes was that there were “two ideas of government.” Republicans, he suggested, believed that “if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below.” But Democrats felt that “if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.”2

This sentiment echoes all the way to the present day in the debate over trickle-down economics. In 1896, it played into the argument made by Bryan and the populists that government should be in the business of protecting individuals from the excesses of industrialism. By allying himself with this side of the debate, he was suggesting that Democrats use the power of government in ways they had previously avoided. Bryan essentially detonated the blast that pushed Democrats toward progressivism (even though it would take a few more decades before the new politics fully sorted itself out).

But taking this position would have meant little if Bryan had remained a somewhat obscure Nebraska politician. This is where Bryan’s talent as a compelling orator made a difference.

In his convention speech, noted one writer, Bryan “reached out a mighty vocal hand and clutched his listeners by the throat and heart.”3 At the end of his address, while arguing passionately for free silver, he extended his arms as if mimicking being on a cross and then brought the audience to its feet with this final line: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”

Twenty minutes after he began, Bryan had won over delegates and ignited pandemonium in the convention hall. This “Cross of Gold” address is still one of the most famous speeches in U.S. political history and it was responsible that July for Bryan’s surprise victory in the contest to become the Democratic presidential nominee.

After he won the nomination, the New York World observed that “political power has passed from the strong certain hands of the East to the feverish, headstrong mob of the West and South.” Bryan ran that fall with the endorsement of the populists, essentially merging that movement with the Democrats.

Meanwhile, President Cleveland and other pro-gold, small government Democrats refused to support Bryan in the general election. They instead formed the National Democratic Party and nominated Senator John Palmer of Illinois for president. Their calculation was that a third-party candidate who drained Democratic votes and elected the Republican William McKinley was more acceptable than seeing Bryan take permanent control of their party.

As it happened, McKinley did win the 1896 election, by a popular vote margin of 51-47%. He had an assist from factory owners, many of whom included notes in worker paychecks that warned: “If Bryan is elected, do not come back to work. The plant will be closed.”4

However, to the dismay of the Cleveland wing of the Democratic Party, Bryan nevertheless still became a national figure and the presumptive leader of the Democrats. He was nominated for president two more times, in 1900 and 1908, though he lost both elections. Bryan then served as Secretary of State for two years under President Woodrow Wilson, who in 1912 became the first progressive Democrat to win the presidency.

Democrats did nominate a conservative again in 1924 (as a compromise candidate after a 103-ballot convention), but following Bryan’s 1896 nomination the party moved slowly but inexorably in the direction of progressivism. The transformation was complete by 1932 when, under Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrats were finally cemented as the nation’s sole progressive party.

It was a journey that began in 1896, with a “cross of gold” and an electrifying speech at a Democratic convention.

This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Read QUEST FOR THE PRESIDENCY

And don’t forget to subscribe to The Riel World if you haven’t done so already.

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I’ve been thinking lately about how political parties evolve over time … and about some of the events that signal or shape these changes.

Consider:

1. 19th to 20th century Democrats

For most of the 19th century, going back to the days of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, Democrats were a conservative, small government party dominated by Southerners. But early in the 20th century, they shifted towards becoming a progressive, big government party, and over time built more of a base of support in the North.

This was set in motion by such factors as the inequality of the Gilded Age, the influence of populists from the Great Plains states, the 1896 presidential nomination of William Jennings Bryan, and the later rise of a Progressive movement. It took a few decades but by the 1930s all of this came together to transform the Democratic platform and coalition, culminating with the New Deal era led by Franklin Roosevelt.

2. 20th century Republicans

Republicans, by contrast, were originally a progressive party with roots in northern states (see: Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt). They later tilted in a more conservative direction, although for the most part their leaders were more moderately conservative. Calvin Coolidge was a small government conservative in the 1920s, but Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s was very much a moderate. Other GOP presidential nominees during these decades also fell into the moderate camp.

Then, between the 1960s and 1980s, the GOP grew more strident in opposition to federal government programs and in support of conservative social issues, while building a strong base of support in the South. During this era, in fact, the two major parties’ geographic bases of support essentially flipped, with the South moving to the GOP column and northern states moving in a Democratic direction, a switch that was hastened by Democratic support for the civil rights movement.

3. 21st century Republicans

Today’s Republican Party, meanwhile, has shifted again, dramatically overhauling its agenda in just the last decade. The current Trump administration seems OK with utilizing the powers of big government in ways no Republican has done in more than a century, but this time it’s in support of an ethnonationalist and Christian nationalist agenda.

4. A changing Democratic Party?

The Democratic Party hasn’t changed as dramatically, but there are nevertheless growing pressures between the more moderate leaders that have typically led the party of late (remember, Bill Clinton balanced the budget and Barack Obama adopted a health care agenda designed by conservatives, among other things) and the current rise of a forceful left-wing movement.

It’s unclear how this battle will eventually play out. Left-wing candidates are generating a lot of headlines these days, but so far they’ve only won races in large urban areas and deep blue districts, with the exception of a Michigan Senate primary in which a flawed moderate candidate lost to a more compelling newcomer by less than 1%. Moderates have defeated left-wing candidates in plenty of other races, but those headlines don’t generate as many views and clicks for the media and thus we hear less about them. Still, once events are set in motion history is unpredictable, so who knows what the future holds.

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What are some of the events that presage realignments?

In any case, I thought it might be interesting to put together an occasional series of posts that look at some of the key historic events that sparked these political realignments.

What are some of these events? Examples include:

• The surprise nomination of William Jennings Bryan by Democrats in 1896. Bryan was supported by a growing populist movement, he was nominated despite the objection of more conservative Democratic party leaders, and he pushed himself over the top with his iconic “Cross of Gold” speech at that year’s convention.

• The progressive agenda initiated by Teddy Roosevelt, not only during his time in office but also during his third-party 1912 Bull Moose presidential campaign, symbolized by a famous "New Nationalism" speech he gave in 1910 in Osawatomie, Kansas.

• Barry Goldwater’s conservative makeover of the GOP after his surprise win in the party’s 1964 nomination battle. And the role that an actor named Ronald Reagan played in Goldwater’s campaign that year, a role which then led him to launch his own political career.

• The presidential candidacies of George Wallace in 1968 and Patrick Buchanan in 1992, which demonstrated the presence of an ethnonationalist vote in America and foreshadowed the later rise of Donald Trump.

• The 2016 Democratic presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money in that year’s nomination battle and helped inspire more left-wing candidates to run for political office.

None of these events caused realignments entirely on their own, of course. (And the Sanders movement has succeeded so far only in sparking an intraparty debate over policies, but has yet to prove conclusively that it will realign anything.) But each was instrumental in some way in triggering or mirroring larger changes in American politics.

I’m not going to write about all of these incidents together, one after another, but consider this a preview of my next post. Then watch out for various other pieces now and again on the topic. Because I think these realignments are something both to be aware of and to ponder, particularly because we’re smack in the middle of one (the Trump makeover of the GOP), and possibly — or at least theoretically — staring at another one that might be gaining strength (the Sanders movement within the Democratic Party).

Sometimes it’s only by knowing the past that we can begin to understand more about the present.

A couple of recent stories and experiences got me to wondering about the fears that seem to cause so much anxiety for so many people.

• I just got back from a trip to Mexico with my family. It was a much-needed week at the beach, where there was nothing to do but swim and read. Before we embarked on the trip, I was surprised to hear from multiple people warning us about our safety in Mexico. Lots of talk about about violence and drug cartels and dead bodies found at the border.

• A few weeks before that, I spoke to a woman who had just taken a trip to New York to visit relatives. These relatives lived just outside of New York City, with simple and easy public transportation access to Manhattan. So I asked her how much time they’d been able to spend in the city. “Oh, we didn’t go there,” she told me. “It’s too scary, too much violence. We didn’t want to get stabbed on the subway.”

These are different circumstances, but they’re both related to fears of what someone might do to us if we leave the safety of our own environment. They also reflect the reality that as a society we seem to have become increasingly fearful over the years.

It’s not just about crime while traveling. We’re also fearful of immigrants. Of the homeless. Of the new Islamic mosque in our city. Or the person of a different race walking through our neighborhood. And we’re fearful of people with different political values, believing they’re out to deliberately destroy our communities and country.

Fear of crime versus the statistics

The question is whether there valid reasons for these fears?

I can’t take on everything here, but I can at least address the specific fears mentioned at the beginning of this post:

1. For starters, it’s true that Mexico has a higher homicide rate than the U.S. does, largely because of violence linked to drug cartels. So if you travel somewhere that puts you in the middle of cartel violence, your risks do increase considerably. But most visitors obviously stay away from such areas. I’ve made a number of different trips to Mexico over the years, including with my kids, and have experienced nothing but warmth and hospitality from the country and its people.

Consider these numbers:

• The number of Americans who are victims of homicides in Mexico each year is 0.26 per 100,000 visitors (a number that includes those who intentionally or unintentionally find themselves in the middle of a cartel battle).

• Meanwhile, the number of Americans who are victims of homicides in the United States each year is 5.9 per 100,000 people.

So yes, statistically you’re safer as a tourist in Mexico than you are at home in the U.S.

2. As far as New York City, another place where I’ve never felt unsafe, assaults on subway riders happen about “once every 2.3 million rides.” And there are fewer than five shootings on the system per year among over 2 billion rides. Meaning the chance of experiencing violence on the subway is exceedingly small.

Moreover, New York is actually NOT one of the U.S. cities with the highest per capita homicide rates. New York isn’t even in the top 10, despite what many seem to think. It’s ranked 23rd on this list from the CDC, which is topped by St. Louis and Memphis and includes numerous other cities that most people would consider safe, including Indianapolis, Nashville, and Oklahoma City, among others.

3. And if you consider crime in general in the U.S., it’s interesting (or sad) that Americans today have a much greater fear of crime in general than they did a few decades ago even though the crime rate is not higher.

For instance, over the past couple of decades surveys have been remarkably consistent in showing that about two-thirds of Americans believe crime is worse than it was the previous year. So every single year for two decades, a majority of Americans have said the crime rate increased from a year earlier.

But the truth? At least in terms of violent crime, FBI data shows the homicide rate is lower than it’s been for more than a century (since 1900)!

So, statistically, we’re much safer in Mexico and New York (and many other places) than the average person is led to believe. But we live in a world where fear overrules statistics.

“Mean World Syndrome”

This fear of crime is not a new phenomenon, but why does it plague us? More importantly, why are our fears increasing?

Back in the 1970s, the term “mean world syndrome” was coined by a communications scholar to describe the reality that “people who watched a lot of TV believed the world was more violent, more dangerous, and more hostile than it really was.”

They carried a whole mindset. They saw strangers as threats, cities as unsafe, and the future as bleak. Gerbner called this pattern “mean world syndrome.”

Now, fast forward a half-century.

Today, we live in a media environment far more intense than Gerbner ever imagined. Twenty-four-hour cable news. Social media. Algorithms that feed us whatever gets the strongest reaction. Fear has become a constant companion, and it is profitable.

It’s profitable. That’s it, right?

Fear is profitable.

Because why should someone tell you the truth when they can scare you and profit from your fear? When they can keep you turning on the news, or doom scrolling on social media, and make a buck from it?

This probably won’t surprise you, but while these fears do cut across demographics and ideologies, it’s also true that voters “who are more politically conservative believe crime is higher and are more fearful of it.”

You don’t suppose there’s a link between the types of stories pushed by the MAGA media and the fears that build up in their audience, do you?

Fear is not just profitable for the media, but also for politicians

Fear is good for the media, and it can also be good for politicians.

This tactic is as old as politics, of course. John Adams told Americans to fear Thomas Jefferson’s religious beliefs, Franklin Roosevelt told them to fear Herbert Hoover’s economic policies, Ronald Reagan told them to fear anyone who worked for the government.

That’s par for the course in politics, to make voters fear something about your opponent. But now we live in a world where the current U.S. president has made a career out of promoting fear that is light years beyond what any previous occupant of the White House ever attempted. Donald Trump wants people to fear almost everything because the more Americans are afraid, the more he wins. As an op-ed a few years ago in the Los Angeles Times noted:

Trump uses his unfiltered rhetoric to hype up several categories of visceral but remote threats … Social scientists have amassed evidence that when people experience threat … they begin to “tighten.” In physical terms, they tense their muscles, ready for action. In political terms, they begin to crave order and security, often rallying around autocratic leaders who promise to restore safety — which is precisely the psychology leaders like Trump want to produce.

This isn’t just an academic opinion. The president himself is aware of this reality. In his own words:

“Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.”

Real power is fear.

Straight from the president’s mouth.

Richard Nixon knew it too.

“People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach you that in Sunday School—but it’s true.”

And so now we have a president who feeds on these fears for breakfast, who gains strength from promoting them. As Time Magazine wrote:

The world, Donald Trump wants you to know, is “a horrible mess.”

Radical Islamic terrorists are gathering strength. Christians are being executed en masse in the Middle East. Illegal immigrants lurk in the shadows. Gangs operate with impunity in our cities. The U.S. murder rate, the President falsely claims, “is the highest it’s been in 47 years.” Drugs are “pouring” across the border. “Bad people (with bad intentions)” are flooding through our airports.

No President has weaponized fear quite like Trump. He is an expert at playing to the public’s phobias. The America rendered in his speeches and tweets is a dystopian hellscape. He shapes public opinion by emphasizing dangers—both real and imaginary—that his policies purport to fix.

This Time article about how Trump weaponizes fear was written in 2017. Nine years ago. You can’t say we weren’t warned.

What we can learn from the World Cup

So is it any wonder that people live in fear? When the same message bombards us from broadcast news and talk radio and social media and presidential speeches, what are we supposed to think?

As Newt Gingrich remarked:

“Liberals have a whole set of statistics that theoretically may be right, but that’s not where people are. People are frightened.”

Well, yes. Statistics that might be right but don’t matter because people are frightened. But people are frightened because the media and politicians tell them they should be.

Is there any way to combat it, though?

There really is no easy solution. The best thing, honestly, is experience. Unless people experience for themselves that Mexico or New York or other places aren’t as scary as they think, unless they spend time with immigrants or political opponents and discover that they actually aren’t out to destroy the country, well, they’re going to go on being afraid.

One of the best examples of how fear is combated by experience was actually gifted to Americans just this past month by foreigners who came to the U.S. for the World Cup.

Many of them came here apprehensively. And not simply because of dismay over U.S. politics. International visitors see the same things on the news that we do. They see the political divisions, the anti-ICE protests, the white supremacist parades. They know the U.S. has one of the highest rates of gun violence in the world. For a time, there was even talk abroad that fans should consider boycotting the World Cup to avoid traveling to the U.S.

But soccer fans came anyway, because they wanted to see the World Cup. And what they discovered in America amazed many of them. As the Boston Globe reported:

This is not the America they were expecting. After watching our divisive politics from abroad, they actually came here, and met open, everyday Americans…

Take, for example, the now-viral clip from … Laura Lawson, who has been visiting Boston for the Scotland games. One morning earlier this week, she posted an emotional three-minute video to TikTok extolling the many ways her visit had exceeded her expectations.

“The America we are experiencing right now is the America we were promised growing up,” she said. “And to be totally honest, that was not the America we were expecting when we came here. We were very apprehensive. I was genuinely anxious. We were expecting to be met by ICE agents, aggressive police and the political climate that we see on the news.”

What she found instead couldn’t be “further from the truth,” she continued. “The Bostonians are something special.... My faith is restored in the United States of America.”

So if visitors from abroad are apprehensive about coming here because of what they see on the news, but then have their expectations upended in a good way … why wouldn’t the same be true for Americans traveling within their own country or abroad?

The truth is that Americans would have the same experience. They would have their expectations upended in a good way.

• Perhaps if we’d stop watching so many news broadcasts that are predicated on the assumption that “if it bleeds, it leads.”

• Or if we’d stop doom scrolling through social media algorithms that feed us more of the same.

• Or if we’d stop paying so much attention to politicians who gain strength from scaring us.

If we could stop all of that, well, I reckon we’d discover that the world isn’t always as scary as we’ve been led to believe.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to enjoy the beach in Mexico.

There hasn’t been any shortage of articles this past week reflecting on America’s 250th birthday. Although, as many have pointed out, the celebrations have been rather subdued compared to the past. Even in 1876 (shortly after the Civil War and in the midst of Reconstruction), or 1976 (after Watergate and several traumatic political assassinations), there seemed to be more of a shared sense of purpose and celebration among Americans than there is in today’s polarized political environment.

Still, the 250th anniversary of any major historic event is cause for contemplation. So I thought today I’d publish a look at the different ways in which various writers and/or publications have approached the topic of America at 250 (with links to the different pieces if you care to take a look at any for yourself).

1. Five Words That Changed America (New York Times)

July 4, 1776, was the day the Declaration of Independence was formally adopted and read to the public. As such, this is the Declaration’s birthday as much as it is America’s.

Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times therefore took a moment to contemplate the promise and the reality of Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

There is a moment for every American when she first encounters the Declaration of Independence. For most, it comes to her as scripture — the highest and most sacred text in the nation’s civic religion, encapsulated by its moving assertion of human equality: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

This Declaration is a profound statement of values: of a universal aspiration for human freedom. As President Gerald Ford said in a speech marking the nation’s bicentennial, “The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order — the fixed star of freedom. It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.”

As a matter of civic faith, this is what the Declaration means. As a matter of history, however, the story is much more complicated.

2. The USA at 250 (The New Republic)

The New Republic published a series on The USA at 250, encompassing a variety of fun pieces on such topics as the most important works of art in American history (books, movies, songs, paintings), images that have defined the nation, or the most influential Founding Fathers.

Since The Riel World is focused in large part on presidential history, I was naturally also drawn to this look at the most consequential politicians who never became president. Including, among others:

Alexander Hamilton - Not just a Broadway legend, Hamilton helped write the Constitution and then, as the nation’s first treasury secretary, helped establish the U.S. financial system.

Henry Clay - “The Great Compromiser,” Clay held just about every major political job except president: senator, House speaker, and secretary of state at various times.

Barry Goldwater - The Arizona Republican lost badly to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but his campaign and embrace of conservatism transformed the GOP.

Nancy Pelosi - The first female speaker of the House was one of the most talented legislative leaders of any era.

3. Has Trump Changed Democracy Forever? (Politico)

Politico took the opportunity to interview 11 historians on numerous questions related to U.S. history and democracy. The above headline comes from just one of those topics, on which 9 of the 11 historians agreed that the Trump administration “has changed American democracy in ways that will endure beyond this presidential term,” while the other two believed this era was “an aberration in American democracy, which will return to the status quo when Trump leaves office.”

But there is much more to the article, including takes on such topics as: “What makes someone an American?” or “What is the single most important year in American history?”

Or, this one: “What does America need to last another 250 years?” Greg Jackson, a professor at Utah Valley University and host of the podcast “History That Doesn’t Suck,” had this to say:

The United States of 2026 is dramatically different from what it was in 1776 … Undoubtedly, America will change in far and unforeseeable ways by its quincentennial in 2276. Yet, all of that change speaks to a constant. One that is exactly what the United States needs in order to make it to that 500th birthday bash.

That constant is a critical mass of engaged citizens practicing what the Founders called “public virtue.” This isn’t simply voting once a year in November … Crucially, public virtue means thinking of the public good. We must remember that our own individual liberties are best protected by protecting those same rights for our fellow Americans. We can shout, scream and fight over policy to that end — and we should — but that public good view must remain.

In short, I agree with young Lincoln’s assessment in 1838: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Whether or not we’re here in 250 years I can’t say — but it will be our decision.

4. America at 250: We Had a Good Run (The Bulwark)

Meanwhile, Jonathan Last at The Bulwark published an essay in which he wondered how the nation he loves turned dark and towards illiberalism not because of a crisis but rather during an era of (mostly) peace and prosperity:

America is not more unjust or illiberal today than it was in 1800; or 1850; or 1950. But we have moved decidedly backwards: We are a great deal more illiberal in 2026 than we were in 2000, or 2008, or 2016.

What worries me most about the regression is that our lurch toward illiberalism is not the result of hardship or privation—it is the product of success. Americans did not turn to a corrupt strongman because they were suffering through a Great Depression or a World War. Illiberalism was not undertaken out of desperation.

If that had been the case, then we could make excuses for our fellow citizens and hope that, once peace and prosperity return, the illiberal impulse would fade.

Instead, this age is marked by something unseen in the history of our once-great nation: A surge toward illiberalism born of tranquility and wealth.

5. The Founders Warned Us (John Avlon)

And speaking of illiberalism, John Avlon, who has written such books as Washington’s Farewell and Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, wrote a Substack essay arguing that while the current era of illiberalism represents the Founder’s worst nightmare, the right response isn’t to despair but rather to fight for a renewal of democracy.

The founders understood they were embarking on a rebellious project that had never succeeded before. As John Adams scowled, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” It was their aim to build a structure that could withstand the forces that destroyed democracies in the past.

That’s why the founders explicitly warned about the dangers of a demagogue, the poison of hyper-partisanship, the corrosive effects of corruption and foreign influence, the politicization of religion, and the erosion of the separation of powers.

Yes, by those basic standards, we are living through the founders’ nightmare. But the right response is not civic despair but a defiant resolve to reclaim American patriotism and fix what’s been broken so that we can strengthen our democracy to survive the next 250 years.

Iowa City and Slaughterhouse-Five

If you love books, you might know Iowa City as the home of the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop, or as a UNESCO City of Literature. If you’re a sports fan, you likely know it as the home of the Iowa Hawkeyes, where Caitlin Clark became a college basketball legend. And if you’re obsessed with presidential elections, there’s a chance you also know it as the home of the Coffee Bean Caucus.

I have some appreciation for all of these topics, so when I was in Iowa City a couple of years ago I checked out the University of Iowa’s campus, wandered through the city’s Lit Walk, and absorbed the presidential atmosphere at Hamburg Inn No. 2.

I also snapped a photo of this house at 800 North Van Buren Street.

An historic structure known locally as the Vogt House, this happens to be where the author Kurt Vonnegut lived for two years, from 1965-67, when he taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. More notably, it’s where he was living when he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that made him famous.

Perhaps in part because of this, I was motivated recently to re-read Slaughterhouse-Five, which I hadn’t picked up for many years. If you haven’t read it, the novel focuses on the character of Billy Pilgrim, who as a POW during World War II lived through the devastating Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, and who later became a successful optometrist, survived a plane crash, and, curiously, was even abducted by aliens.

The book was a popular anti-war novel and was unique at the time for its non-linear structure. In the story, Billy becomes “unstuck in time” and experiences different moments of his life simultaneously, sometimes waking up at home with his wife, sometimes as a prisoner during World War II, and sometimes surrounded by aliens on the fictional planet Tralfamadore (where he was a zoo attraction alongside a young model/actress who was also abducted).

Vonnegut, as it happens, had himself been a POW who survived the actual Dresden bombing (which killed 25,000 people and reduced the city to rubble). So the novel is partly autobiographical. And yes, it’s sometimes odd and fragmented, but that’s part of the point. Many readers have interpreted Billy’s disjointed perception of his life experiences as an allegory for the trauma of PTSD.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, because after re-reading and pondering Slaughterhouse-Five, I’m thinking that it actually also serves as an allegory (unintended, obviously) for the times we are now living through. Not only does it feel as though we’re “tripping through time” (see next section), but there’s a feeling that reality is fragmented or disconnected, that maybe things don’t quite make sense the way they’re supposed to.

Tripping through time

For instance, Billy Pilgrim spends much of Vonnegut’s novel waking up in different decades. Doesn’t it feel as if we’re all doing the same thing now?

• One day we wake up in the 1890s, in the middle of a new Gilded Age, with inequality rivaling or exceeding the only other era with the worst such excesses in U.S. history. Only this time, instead of vast wealth and influence being accumulated by railroad and oil barons, it’s now being amassed by tech titans.

• Another day it’s the 1920s and a turbocharged nativist movement is trying to cleanse the nation of as many immigrants as possible who aren’t white and Christian.

• Or else it’s the 1950s and we’re fighting another struggle for multiracial democracy. This time, it’s southern states and the Supreme Court working to rid government of Black politicians, while the Secretary of Defense rids the military of Black (and female) officers.

• And some days lately it also feels like the 1970s, as we once again stare down the Iranians and battle an oil crisis.

How, in the 2020s, are we re-living elements from all of these past decades — at the same time?

National PTSD and the absurdity of the news

While reading Slaughterhouse-Five and thinking about the PTSD that Billy Pilgrim (and Kurt Vonnegut) might have experienced, I wondered also whether PTSD could be experienced as a nation.

It seems likely, especially after a traumatic national experience. But what recent event might count as a national trauma? The 2020 COVID pandemic? The 2008 Great Recession? Perhaps, though neither would really be an existential threat in the way that, say, World War II would have been.

But what if you take those two events, which happened within a dozen years, and combine them with the other shocks that society has been experiencing? The worst inequality in more than a century. New technologies that are upending work and social relations. The most extreme political polarization we’ve seen outside of the Civil War era. That could all shake up a society. And, interestingly, the U.S. was going through something similar in the 1960s, when Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five (the Vietnam War, political assassinations, civil rights struggles, urban race riots).

But today we’re experiencing something more, as well. That is, life under the most angry and divisive president we’ve seen in this country for a long time, and possibly ever. A president who has been at the center of a seemingly endless stream of absurdities that wash across the news almost every day of our lives. Is this also stressing us out?

I mean, where to start?

Iran?

The “peace president” (remember that?) started a voluntary war in Iran in an effort to trigger regime change and end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. And then gave up a few months later in the face of spiraling oil prices, leaving an even more militant Iranian regime in control, the nuclear weapons program still in place, and Iran now having huge leverage over the global economy via the Strait of Hormuz.

And the recent Trump “deal” with Iran is actually less favorable than the one negotiated by the Obama administration, which Trump tore up a decade ago. (Even the conservative New York Post says so.)

The military (and Iran War) budget?

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has asked Congress for an extra $87 billion to pay for the Iran War, which has so far cost the U.S. about $113 billion. It has also proposed half-trillion dollar increase in the annual military budget.

For perspective, the current U.S. military budget of nearly $1 trillion is already larger than the total spending of at least the next six biggest militaries in the world (yes, more than China, Russia, France, the U.K. Israel, take your pick … Combined!)

And fyi, it would have cost about $30 billion a year to extend the Obamacare subsidies for health insurance, which the president and GOP punted on because it was too expensive. Yet, we’ve already spent almost four times that much on just a few months of waging war with Iran.

IRS immunity for Trump?

Of course, no one is talking about the Epstein files anymore. Nor are they mentioning that Trump’s own appointees just gave him, his family, and his companies lifetime immunity from IRS tax investigations or audits.

Profiteering from the White House?

Speaking of investigations into finances, you of course remember the outrage over Hunter Biden making $11 million from foreign business deals after trading on his family name while his father was in office.

Strangely, President Trump and his family appear to have made about $4 billion (!) just during his current term in office. Which is, uh, a little more than $11 million, no? These billions are all from brand new business deals, some of them with foreign nationals.

The president’s two sons were actually part of a company that was selling drones to Gulf Arab nations to help them mount a defense against Iranian attacks during a war the U.S. president started. And Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a Middle East envoy even as his private equity firm was raising billions of dollars from Arab Middle Eastern countries. But no conflicts of interest here, right?

You can’t make this stuff up.

As Peter Baker wrote: “The president and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant, normalizing activities that once would have provoked heavy blowback and official investigations.”

And the response from the MAGA movement is, oh, maybe a shrug.

“No” to Dreamers and Haitians, “yes” to white South Africans?

The Trump administration, as we know, has been working to deport as many non-white immigrants as possible, including some Dreamers who have been protected by DACA, and now refugees from places like Haiti after this week’s Supreme Court ruling allowing the president to strip humanitarian protections from more than one million immigrants who are here legally and who have families, jobs, and pay taxes.

Some good reporting has been done on the devastation in store for some of these Haitian refugees now at risk of deportation — as well as the havoc it’s going to wreak on the home health care industry, where many Haitians have found work because it’s in their culture to care for families and the elderly.

On the other hand, it turns out that officials are actually quite open to accepting new white immigrants from South Africa — who account for 6,066 of the 6,069 refugees who’ve arrived in the U.S. since October. They’re even being given welcome bags.

America at 250?

Finally, we’re in the midst of the country’s 250th anniversary celebration, a chance to mark a quarter-millennium of what was at the time the world’s largest experiment with democracy. And how are we celebrating?

• With a UFC fight at the White House, during which a competitor drew cheers when he said: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

• A Great American State Fair that numerous states and musical artists declined to participate in because of concerns that it was too partisan and political.

• And an upcoming July 4th celebration on the National Mall that has been billed as the most spectacular ever Trump rally.

All of which caused CNN to ask: “Is Trump celebrating the country, or himself, on America’s 250th?”

And let’s not forget the newest drama over the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, which was being refurbished in time for July 4th. Unfortunately, the exploding growth of new algae and the peeling paint seems to have been a self-inflicted error (and the result of challenges that have resisted fixes for decades) after Trump awarded a $14 million no-bid contract to a political ally and friend.

So, naturally, Trump is blaming Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, tourists are now being arrested for alleged vandalism for putting their hands in the water, and a fence and surveillance cameras have been set up on National Park land in front of Lincoln’s statue.

Welcome to America, 2026.

A labyrinth of absurdities

I could go on.

And on.

I’m sure you also have your own favorite news item that could be added to this list. The point is that the news has become so absurd, so tiring to follow, that there are days when I just want to throw up my hands. I’m a lifelong news junkie and some mornings now I’m not sure I even want to look at the headlines. Which is right out of the authoritarian playbook, not surprisingly: Flood the zone, confuse the issues, and ensure that people can’t tell up from down anymore so they’ll just give up and stop paying attention.

In any case, this is both my rant and my thought for the week. We’re tripping through time. We’re lost in a labyrinth of absurdities. We’re trying to ward off the stress and confusion that fragments our perceptions. We’re worn down by all the divisiveness and polarization and anger. And yet we have to somehow find a way to keep the faith, to keep on keeping on.

So yeah, I do think it’s sort of like living through a Slaughterhouse-Five presidency.

Parting Thoughts

A 20-second scene from the 1976 movie Network:

Photo credits: All images (except for Iowa City’s Vogt House) via Shutterstock.

America’s 250th birthday is one month from this weekend. It’s been two-and-a-half centuries since a group of colonists in Philadelphia approved the words of the Declaration of Independence and set themselves on the road to forming a new country and an experiment with democracy.

There are plenty of events being held around the country to commemorate the anniversary, though many of the big D.C. events have little to do with either U.S. history or the Declaration of Independence (a UFC fight at the White House, an Indy car race around the National Mall, and a “rally to end all rallies” headlined by Donald Trump). So if these events don’t inspire you, or you’re looking for something a little bit bigger or more meaningful than you can find locally, here’s a different idea: A road trip that takes you to some of the iconic sites associated with the birth of American democracy.

Why not use the occasion to reflect on the history and meaning of democracy in the United States? This particular journey will take you to numerous sites that played a key role in the nation’s founding and in the formation of a new American government. It’s only a 9-hour or so drive from the northernmost to the southernmost points on this trip, but there’s a whole lot of history here. So if you can’t cover it all in one go, no worries, you could still tackle one or more pieces of it, whether this summer or in the future.

In any case, if you happen to appreciate both politics and travel, and particularly if you’ve been wondering lately about this experiment with democracy that was forged 250 years ago, this road trip might be for you.

Boston, Massachusetts: Birthplace of the Revolution

Boston is an obvious place to begin. Not just because it’s at the northern end of this itinerary, but because the Boston area was home to some of the legendary events of the revolutionary era, from the Boston Tea Party to the first shots of the Revolutionary War.

One of the best places to start is at the Freedom Trail, a self-guided 2.5 mile walking tour in Boston that connects 16 sites linked to the American Revolution. The trail begins near the Boston Common and Massachusetts State House. In the early part of the walk you’ll hit such stops as:

• The Old South Meeting House, where a 1773 meeting led to the Boston Tea Party.

• The Old State House, where the Declaration of Independence was read to the public in 1776.

• And the Granary Burying Ground, where John Hancock, Samuel Adams and Paul Revere are laid to rest.

Later, you’ll pass Faneuil Hall, the Paul Revere House, and the Old North Church (of “one if by land, two if by sea” fame). Also nearby is a museum and replica of the Boston Tea Party Ship.

There are also important Revolutionary era sites on the outskirts of Boston, starting with Adams National Historical Park. This is the birthplace and home of two presidents: John Adams and John Quincy Adams. John was the country’s second president and one of the leading figures of the American Revolution. He was a driving force for independence at the Continental Congress and served as vice president under George Washington. He was also the main author of the Massachusetts Constitution, which served as a model for the later U.S. Constitution.

The farmhouse where Adams was born in 1735 is the oldest surviving presidential birthplace in the country, and his home at Peacefield is a wonder of living history, housing an original portrait of George Washington and an early reproduction of the Declaration of Independence. These sites are just south of the city, in Quincy, and close enough that they can be reached via subway from Boston (the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is also on the way, if you’re interested).

The suburban towns of Concord and Lexington, meanwhile, are where the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired on April 19, 1775. At Minute Man National Historical Park you can see Lexington Common, the site of the first battle, and Concord’s Old North Bridge, where the colonial militia fired the first shots against the British.

It was this Concord battle that was commemorated as the “shot heard ‘round the world.” Six decades later, when a monument to the battle was erected by Concord’s North Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson composed a poem for the occasion, which is carved at the base of the statue: By the rude bridge that arched the flood/ Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled/ Here once the embattled farmers stood/ And fired the shot heard round the world.

New York City: The First Capital

There aren’t as many Revolutionary era sites in New York, but the city did serve as the nation’s first capital from 1785 to 1790, and hosted the first presidential inauguration.

Today, you can visit the Federal Hall National Memorial, where George Washington in 1789 took the oath of office and was inaugurated as the first president. You can also see Fraunces Tavern, a popular gathering place for the Sons of Liberty before the Revolution, and the place where General Washington held a farewell dinner with his officers after the war.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Where America was founded

If the first stirrings of independence were sounded in Boston, then Philadelphia is where America was founded. This is where the Declaration of Independence was written, approved, and first read to the public in 1776, and where the U.S. Constitution was debated and adopted in 1787.

Independence National Historical Park in the center of Philadelphia encompasses more than 20 sites, but the main attraction is Independence Hall. It was here that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were born. As you tour the building, you can see the Assembly Room where debates were held, a silver inkwell that was used for signing ceremonies, and the Rising Sun Chair that George Washington sat in during the Constitutional Convention.

Just across the street from Independence Hall is the Liberty Bell Center, home to the most famous bell in American history. Numerous other historic sites are also within easy walking distance. These include:

• Carpenters Hall, where the Continental Congress first met in 1774.

• Graff House, where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.

• Congress Hall, home to the U.S. Congress from 1790 to 1800.

You can also visit:

• The National Constitution Center to learn about the nation’s founding document.

• The Betsy Ross House, home of the woman who sewed the first American flag.

• And City Tavern, a favorite hangout of the Founding Fathers.

On your way out of Philadelphia you may also want to visit Valley Forge National Historical Park, winter home of the Continental Army in 1777–78.

Virginia: Homes of the Founding Fathers

It’s possible to construct a road trip centered just on Virginian presidents, but if you want to focus on the birth of democracy it’s worth your time to see the historic homes of a few key Founding Fathers before circling back to end the journey in Washington, D.C.

1. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville

Monticello is the estate where Thomas Jefferson lived for much of his life. Jefferson first became famous as the author of the Declaration of Independence and served as the country’s third president. Monticello is the only private residence in the country that is a World Heritage site. This is due not only to Jefferson’s political achievements, but also because he was a talented architect who incorporated innovative design ideas into his home.

Also nearby is Ash Lawn-Highland, the estate where James Monroe lived for a quarter century. Monroe was the fifth U.S. president and as a young adult served in the Continental Army, including at Valley Forge.

2. James Madison’s Montpelier in Orange

James Madison, the fourth president, is regarded as the Father of the Constitution. He lived just 30 miles from Jefferson (along what is now Virginia Route 20), at his Montpelier estate. Visitors can tour the home and learn about Madison’s life and philosophies of government.

It was in a library in this home, at a desk that looked out over the Blue Ridge Mountains, that Madison engaged in a comprehensive study of world constitutions prior to the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

3. George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon

There are several Washington sites that may interest you in Virginia, including his boyhood home at Ferry Farm in Fredericksburg and his birthplace in Colonial Beach. But the highlight is just outside Washington, D.C. at Mount Vernon. The property on the banks of the Potomac River was Washington’s home for four decades and looks much as it did when he lived there in the late 18th century. After touring the house, you can pay your respects at Washington’s tomb.

Washington, D.C.: The nation’s capital

The perfect final stop is the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., where the center of the action is along the National Mall. It’s difficult not to feel at least a twinge of awe as you make your way past the buildings and monuments that line the Mall.

If you begin at the U.S. Capitol, it’s a 1.9-mile walk to the Lincoln Memorial. Along the way you’ll pass the White House, which has been the president’s home since John Adams moved there in 1800, and the Washington Monument, a 555-foot memorial to the first president that was dedicated in 1885. Just off the Mall is the Tidal Basin where you can visit the Jefferson Memorial.

If you plan ahead, you might be able to arrange public tours of the Capitol Building or the White House. Also nearby is the National Archives, where you can see original copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution on display in the Rotunda.

Finally, Abraham Lincoln didn’t make his mark on history until eight decades after the nation’s founding, but his profound influence on American democracy has led some to call him the last Founding Father. As such, in addition to the Lincoln Memorial, you might have interest in visiting President Lincoln’s Cottage, where he worked on the Emancipation Proclamation, or Ford’s Theatre, where the 16th president was assassinated.

Photo credits: All photos by Bob Riel, except for the Concord militia monument (via Shutterstock).

There is, as I’ve written, a long history of nativism in America. It comes in waves, taking over entire decades, and it’s often accompanied by some variation of the slogan: “America for Americans.”

In 1856, the nativist Know Nothings ran a strong third party presidential race under the slogan of “Americans to rule America.”

In 1939, a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden vowed to “restore America to the true Americans.”

And in 2024, Stephen Miller, now the White House deputy chief of staff, declared at a Donald Trump rally (also in Madison Square Garden) that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

I was reminded of this history by a few recent news items.

1. Efforts to deport Dreamers

For almost 15 years now, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children have been allowed to stay in the country, attend school, and work, so long as they meet certain requirements and don’t have any significant criminal record. These are the so-called Dreamers, who are now mostly in their 30s. When President Obama established the DACA program in 2012, it was meant to be a stopgap until Congress passed immigration legislation. Despite bipartisan support for the Dreamers, however, Congress has still failed to act.

Now, the Trump administration is not only slowing down the process of renewing DACA applications, it has also begun to deport some Dreamers under the rationale that, since Congress never passed legislation, these individuals have “no right or entitlement to remain in the United States indefinitely.” Even though they were brought here as toddlers or infants and do not know any home other than the U.S.

That has led to situations like this one, where Martin Padilla — who had a job, official DACA status, an American wife, three children, and was a homeowner — was stopped at an airport while on a work trip and summarily deported to Mexico because of an alleged “criminal” history (he had been charged but not convicted of DWI). He fought a long legal battle during seven months in Mexico, where he was disoriented in a country he had little memory of ever living in, and was finally allowed to return to the U.S. to rebuild his life.

This is just one of many similar situations where individuals with official DACA status — who have jobs, families, and no criminal history — have been detained or deported.

2. A move to force green card applicants to apply from abroad

The Trump administration also recently announced that it would like all applicants for green cards to leave the U.S. and submit applications from their home countries.

Why is this problematic? Because most green card applicants are already married to an American or working for a U.S. company. To force them to go through the application process from abroad would mean leaving their spouses and/or their jobs (and in some cases their children) in order to wait months or even years for an application to be approved while they twiddle their thumbs abroad.

One of the goals is supposedly to catch people who initially came here illegally before later marrying an American. But, in the process, it would also ensnare hundreds of thousands of individuals who did everything legally.

Not to mention that, if someone falls in love and marries an American, do we really want to be in the business of breaking up families? For what?

What this really amounts to is an attack on legal immigration from the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. In fact, there is already a bill before the House Judiciary Committee that seeks not to do something about illegal immigration, but rather to pause most pathways to LEGAL immigration.

3. A proposal to bar naturalized citizens from serving in government

Then, there’s U.S Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who just introduced a bill in Congress to bar naturalized citizens from serving in the federal government, whether in Congress, as federal judges, or even in any Senate-confirmed position in a presidential administration.

The argument is that since presidents and vice presidents have to be natural born citizens, the same rule should apply to everyone in the government. Mace said that naturalized citizens could have divided loyalties. She specifically mentioned Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who was born in Somalia and is a favorite punching bag of President Trump and Congressional Republicans.

"Ilhan Omar is just one of many foreign-born members of this government who have made clear, time and again, their loyalty is not here," Mace said. "The American people deserve leaders who put America first. This amendment closes a gap in our Constitution long overdue for closing."

Yeah, I get it, you want to go after Omar. And maybe also Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, another liberal with an exotic name who wasn’t born in the U.S. Or maybe you’d also be happy to be rid of Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono, who was born in Japan and moved to the U.S. with her family as a five-year-old.

But, seriously?

Mace is running for governor of South Carolina and so this proposal was perhaps a chance to burnish her MAGA credentials. Still. Let me point out a few other individuals in Congress who are naturalized citizens who’d be barred from Congress under this bill.

• Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio (born in Colombia).

• Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani of Arizona (born in Mexico).

• Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana (born in Ukraine).

What about cabinet members? Well, Mace’s proposal would have barred Elaine Chao (born in Taiwan) from serving as Secretary of Transportation in the first Trump administration, and as Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush. Chao, by the way, is also Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wife.

Who else? How about:

• Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (born in Germany).

• Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (born in then Czechoslovakia).

Oh yeah, and there’s also that former Secretary of the Treasury whom you might have heard of:

• Alexander Hamilton (born in Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean).

This is not a complete list; there are many other foreign born individuals who have served the United States with distinction. But sure, let’s bar all naturalized citizens from government because we dislike someone from Somalia, or we don’t like immigrants or, I don’t know, maybe because it’s another way to “own the libs.”

4. A century-old story about immigration to America.

Again, these sentiments are not new. Nativist beliefs sometimes spend decades in the shadows and then reappear dramatically to shake up U.S. politics. And they’re pretty much always centered on the same general belief that “America should be for Americans only.”

Part of this is linked to fear of, or bias against, particular racial or ethnic groups. But a lot of it is also driven by a sense that immigrants coming to the U.S. now are mostly coming here illegally, whereas our ancestors did things the “right way” or did everything legally and by the book.

Is that true, though?

For one thing, a century or so ago, there was no such thing as a distinction between legal versus illegal immigration. No visas were needed to emigrate to America, and as long as you passed a health check when you arrived you were almost guaranteed to be granted entry. With only a few small exceptions for certain groups, the United States was essentially a land of open borders when many of our ancestors arrived. It wasn’t until the 1920s that more restrictions were placed on immigration.

Consider this story, for instance:

In 1885 a 16-year-old teenager named Frederick who was fearful of being drafted into the German Army fled his homeland and journeyed alone to New York. He had little money and spoke no English, but joined his sister who was already here. He found a job at a barbershop, then moved a few years later to Seattle and invested in a restaurant. From there, he trekked on to British Columbia and the Yukon, where he and a partner opened a restaurant, inn, and brothel that catered to miners and prospectors. He acquired a good amount of wealth, became a naturalized U.S. citizen, and moved back to New York, where he managed a hotel-restaurant, opened a barber shop, invested in real estate, and raised a family.

Or this one:

In 1903, a different immigrant named Wolf-Leib left what is now Belarus because of growing attacks against Jews in the then Russian empire. This young man also didn’t speak English when he arrived in America, but he sold fruit in New York before later moving to Pennsylvania to join his brother, who’d worked in a laundry-tailor shop and was planning to start his own business. Wolf-Leib also raised a family in America, while he and his brother became the successful proprietors of a chain of supermarkets and department stores.

These are classic immigrant success stories. So many immigrants come to the U.S. with next to nothing, work hard and make something of themselves, become proud Americans, and set down roots that spread out across generations.

This is not an argument for open borders. Immigration controls are necessary these days. But Frederick and Wolf-Leib, neither of whom spoke English or had much money when they arrived, would almost surely not be welcomed in today’s America by the Trump administration or the MAGA movement.

Which is, well, pretty ironic.

Because Fredrick is the paternal grandfather of Donald Trump.

And Wolf-Leib is the maternal great-grandfather of Stephen Miller.

And now Trump and Miller are working to block or deport from the U.S. thousands of hard-working immigrants like their own ancestors, who want nothing more than to build a better life for themselves and to become Americans.

As Miller’s uncle put it in a piece for Politico:

“I shudder at the thought of what would have become of [our family] had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses … been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom.”

Photos: Both photos via Shutterstock.

In early 2025, more than a year ago now, I published a post titled: Trump Jr. vs AOC in 2028? I noted at the time that this wasn’t a prediction but rather a mildly provocative way of asking where American politics might be headed. Well, here we are today, less than six months out from the mid-term elections — after which speculation and plans for 2028 will begin heating up in earnest. So, ready or not, the 2028 election will be upon us before you know it.

I’ve been thinking lately about the directions that each party might go in 2028, which is something I want to explore further in the next months. But first, a few recent developments have made me think it was worth revisiting my earlier post about the possibility of a Trump, Jr. vs AOC matchup. If you missed it, or want to review it, you can read it here.

Here is some of what has me thinking anew about 2028 …

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

I don’t know if a 2028 run is in AOC’s future. She may personally not want to run, or may decide the time isn’t right for her sort of candidacy. Democratic primary voters, in particular, might well feel burned after seeing two female nominees lose close elections in 2016 and 2024, in part because some voters weren’t ready to cast a ballot for a female (it’s a small minority, for sure, but even a 2% bias against female candidates is more than enough to swing a close election). Americans as a whole may just not be ready to elect a woman president. Never mind a 39-year-old Latino female (the age AOC will be in 2028).

If you want a bit of evidence against the possibility of an AOC candidacy, consider that Al Sharpton didn’t include her in his recent forum of potential presidential candidates because, as he said: “I don’t see her edging that way.” Though he did add: “Yet.”

Nevertheless, I don’t think there’s much question that AOC would be a formidable contender should she choose to run. She is the inheritor of the Bernie Sanders movement, for one. She is a strong fundraiser and has a massive following on social media (closing in on 10 million Instagram followers). And, whatever you think of her politics, she’s undeniably one of the most effective communicators on the American political scene today.

As I wrote in my other post:

Trump’s superpowers are his ability to attract attention and his knack for connecting with the working class. AOC has the same attributes, she just does it from the left and with a less vulgar style.

Check out this clip of AOC at a recent forum when she was asked about a possible presidential run. In just two minutes, with a smile on her face, she managed to dismiss talk of her ambition, get in a dig at elites (particularly Jeff Bezos), and draw cheers with a line about changing the country. This is a political skill that many candidates simply don’t possess.

It’s not hard to imagine AOC doing exactly what Trump did in 2016: Win 30% or so of the vote in state after state, while the rest of a large primary field splits the rest of the ballots and leaves her sitting atop the delegate count.

If you want other evidence that a candidate like AOC could energize voters, consider a few recent political headlines.

• There is data from recent polls showing that voters are turned off by both political parties. About half of voters say that neither major party really represents them. AOC is a current officeholder, of course, but she doesn’t come across as part of the political establishment so she’s somewhat immune to the argument that she’d just be more of the same.

• Also, you can see this anti-establishment movement building in real time with things such as Governor Janet Mills’ recent withdrawal from the Maine Senate race. Mills, a sitting governor and the favorite candidate of Democratic party leaders, wasn’t able to raise enough money or gain traction against a political newcomer because voters preferred to turn their backs on the D.C. establishment.

These nuggets tell you something about politics in America today. There is a lot of ferment in the country and voters are searching for a new politics. I’m not saying AOC will be the answer to that, but she certainly can’t be dismissed either.

Donald Trump, Jr.

President Trump has long mused about running for a third term in office. Just two weeks ago he talked about leaving office “eight or nine years from now.” And the Trump Store is still selling Trump 2028 hats. But let’s face it, next month Trump will turn 80 and he seems to be slowing down. Does he really want to run again (even if he could somehow override the Constitution)?

If not, then who is his logical successor?

Obviously, it should be Vice President J.D. Vance. History tells us that it’s pretty much impossible to knock off a sitting vice president who wants the party nomination to succeed an outgoing president. And there are many reasons to think Vance is all but inevitable as the 2028 GOP nominee.

Still, that hasn’t stopped speculation that Secretary of State Marco Rubio might also be a top tier contender. Trump himself has apparently gotten into the habit of polling people around him as to who’d make the better 2028 candidate, Vance or Rubio? And pollster Sarah Longwell recently wrote in The Atlantic about the growing interest in Rubio she’s hearing from Trump voters.

Although Vance might seem like a more natural MAGA heir, many Trump voters see Rubio as a stabilizing force who comes off a lot better than many of his peers inside the administration, including the vice president.

This doesn’t mean Rubio is going to challenge Vance for the nomination. In fact, Rubio has waved off such speculation and insisted he will support the vice president if he runs in 2028. A more likely scenario is that Vance becomes the GOP nominee with Rubio on the ticket as his running mate.

But the real question is this: After selecting Vance as his vice president, why is Trump even asking people whether Rubio would be a better nominee? Does anyone really think he’s considering turning the MAGA movement over to the person he once mocked as Little Marco? Has he had a change of heart about Vance? Does he just think he’s running a White House version of The Apprentice?

Or is Trump, in a backhanded sort of way, not raising up Rubio but rather trying to diminish Vance by comparison?

There’s no evidence this is his goal. But would you put it past him? Because if Vance is diminished, and Rubio isn’t planning to run, well, who else might become the GOP nominee?

Yup, there is a third contender who already polls competitively with Vance and Rubio: That would be Donald Trump, Jr. And there is suddenly a lot of chatter in the zeitgeist about Trump, Jr. as a potential candidate.

So don’t think it hasn’t crossed the president’s mind to keep the White House in the family. As I wrote previously:

Here is what Trump said during a recent interview with Time magazine:

Q. Do you think there will be a Trump dynasty?

A. I think there could be, yeah.

But aside from the allure of creating a Trump royal family in the White House, why else would they want to embark on such an effort?

Perhaps to preserve the the cash cow that the presidency has become for the Trump family?

As Jonathan Last of The Bulwark recently noted (and asked):

The Center for American Progress estimates that the Trump family has seen its net worth balloon to $6.3 billion since January 20, 2025 …

If the Trump family no longer occupies the White House and relinquishes its claim on the Republican party … does that money keep flowing based on the business genius of Don, Eric, Barron, and Jared?

Probably not.

Does this seem like a group of people who would willingly let go of revenue streams that are measured in the billions?

Last suggested that, in his view, Trump, Jr. would be the all but certain nominee. IF he wants it.

DJTJ’s biggest advantage is that if he decides to run, Vance and Rubio will have their knees cut out from under them. Neither would be able to oppose him. A DJTJ candidacy would carry the explicit endorsement of Trump the Father, making it impossible for the vice president or secretary of state to contest the race.

Yeah, makes you think, right?

Oh, and one more thing: Trump’s new buddy Jeff Bezos, who already paid $40 million via Amazon for a documentary about Melania Trump (well above any other bid, and 70 percent of which reportedly went to the First Lady), now has his sights on a new Trump-friendly project:

A reboot of The Apprentice, the TV show that sent Trump’s profile rocketing and set the stage for his presidential run.

With Donald Trump, Jr. as the new host.

Anyway, like I said: This is not a prediction, and it’s still not the most likely outcome. But it’s not as far-fetched as you might think.

Photos: Images of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump Jr. via Wikimedia Commons.

Before Donald Trump, the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms in office was Grover Cleveland. That fact has brought Cleveland’s name back into the news in recent years. Aside from this historical nugget, though, Cleveland and Trump appear to have little in common. Well, except for marriage to a younger woman and a tendency to get caught up in controversy. But even in these cases, their situations are hardly similar.

Cleveland was born in New Jersey to a family of modest circumstances with a father who was a minister. As a boy, he had to withdraw from school at various times in order to help support the family financially. After moving to Buffalo as an adult, he became a lawyer, got involved in the community, and was elected Sheriff of Erie County. This eventually led him to become Mayor of Buffalo, and Governor of New York. Cleveland was almost universally seen as an upstanding and moral individual, and his tenure as a public servant was free of scandal, which is part of the reason he was nominated for president in 1884 and then became the first Democrat to win the presidency since before the Civil War.

That presidential campaign, though, is when Cleveland’s story takes an unexpected turn. During the next decade, he was caught up in several personal controversies or scandals that didn’t seem to square with his reputation for moral rectitude.

So I thought it’d be interesting to take a detour into history here, to recap some of those long ago “scandals” while pondering how morality and headlines change throughout time. Because things that were scandalous back in Cleveland’s time might not be considered a big deal today … but, interestingly, the reverse might also be true.

1884: Cleveland’s campaign and the first presidential sex scandal

When Democrats met to nominate a presidential candidate in 1884, the party lacked an obvious leader and so delegates turned to Governor Grover Cleveland of New York, who had a reputation for forthrightness and honesty. He wasn’t especially charismatic, but the public in 1884 was hungry for integrity in government after a series of corruption scandals during previous administrations. Cleveland fit the bill for what voters seemed to want.

His nomination even drew the support of reform-minded Republicans who spurned their own nominee, James Blaine, in favor of Cleveland. This made it all the more ironic, then, when the country’s first real presidential sex scandal erupted during the campaign and Cleveland was at the center of it.

In July, the Buffalo Evening Telegraph reported that the Democratic nominee had seduced a widow, fathered a child out of wedlock, and then allegedly abandoned mother and son. The mother was committed to an asylum and the baby put up for adoption. In an instant, part of the rationale for Cleveland’s candidacy seemed to collapse. Rather than being known as “Grover the Good,” Cleveland was transformed into a candidate whom some described as “a moral leper.”1

It turned out, though, that the reality of the situation was more nuanced than first reported. Cleveland didn’t deny the romantic affair (he was, after all, a bachelor), but there was some doubt about the actual father of the child, who’d been given the name Oscar Folsom Cleveland. Oscar Folsom happened to be the name of Cleveland’s best friend in Buffalo -- and he was married, whereas Cleveland was single. So, not knowing if the boy was his, Cleveland accepted paternity in order to save his friend from personal scandal. In this telling, Cleveland provided financial support for the woman and baby until the child had to be put up for adoption because of the mother’s alcoholism.

Nevertheless, the story made headlines across the country and his Republican opponents had a field day with the allegations. For the rest of the contest, GOP supporters pushed baby carriages in parades while chanting: “Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa?”

While the details of the case were debated in public, meanwhile, Mark Twain found the whole story bemusing. He mocked the “grown men apparently in their right minds seriously arguing against a bachelor’s fitness for president because he has had private intercourse with a consenting widow.”2

In the end, voters were left to choose between Cleveland’s alleged personal failures and Blaine’s more public scandals, as the GOP nominee had been accused of corruption and also found himself embroiled late in the campaign in the famous “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” controversy. The country elected Cleveland. But just barely, with the electoral vote essentially decided by 1,149 votes in New York.

After Cleveland became president, Democrats added a rejoinder to the Republicans’ famous refrain about Cleveland:

Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa?

Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha.3

1886: White House wedding

Cleveland took office in 1885 and then, a little more than a year later, the bachelor president surprised the nation when was married on June 2, 1886. Cleveland was the first president to be married in a White House ceremony. But an even bigger story was that Cleveland’s new wife was the 21-year-old (!) Frances Folsom, who (not surprisingly) became the youngest First Lady in the country’s history.

As if that weren’t enough intrigue, Folsom was the daughter of Cleveland’s old Buffalo friend, Oscar Folsom, who had died some years earlier in a carriage accident. Cleveland was executor of his friend’s estate and helped look out for Frances from afar. She even called him Uncle Cleve. But when Frances became an adult, their relationship grew into a romantic one.

It’s an unusual story, for sure, one that would no doubt fill the pages and screens of 21^st century media for weeks on end. Just a few years ago, a retelling of the story of Cleveland’s romance with Frances caused some to dub the relationship as “sick” and “disturbing.” There was surely gossip and some wagging tongues in the 1880s, as well, but the age gap was less uncommon then. President John Tyler’s second wife, for instance, was 30 years younger than him. And, lest we forget, Donald and Melania Trump even now have a 24-year age gap. The difference, of course, is that Cleveland’s wife was just 21 when she wed the sitting president.

But for most Americans, the new Mrs. Cleveland became a beloved First Lady. She was seen as a fashion icon and was known to be able to converse in both French and German with diplomats. Her picture adorned campaign posters and buttons in 1888, and Frankie Cleveland clubs even sprang up across the country.

When Cleveland lost his bid for re-election in 1888, Frances told the White House staff: “We are coming back just four years from today.” That, in fact, is exactly what happened, as in 1892 Cleveland won a rematch with Benjamin Harrison and returned to the White House.

The Clevelands, meanwhile, had five children together (the youngest one lived until 1995) and remained married until the former president’s death in 1908. And even though Frances Cleveland later remarried, she chose to be buried alongside her first husband when she passed away in 1947.

1893: Cleveland’s secret surgery

The third remarkable event that occurred during Cleveland’s presidential years was something that Americans didn’t even know about the time. In fact, the story wasn’t revealed for more than two decades.

It happened not long after Cleveland took office for the second time in 1893. It wasn’t an especially auspicious time for the nation, through no fault of Cleveland’s, as the president happened to be inaugurated just as an economic crash was sweeping across the country. This crisis turned out to be the country’s worst economic disaster outside of the Great Depression. It lasted through 1897 and saw railroads go bankrupt, banks and factories close, and millions of workers lose their jobs.

This same year, the cigar-smoking president noticed a fast-growing rough spot on the roof of his mouth. Cleveland was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor and was told he would need surgery to remove it. But given the economic tremors shaking the nation, Cleveland was fearful of alarming the public during a crisis. So the president convinced his doctors to perform a secret surgery!

Thus, in a makeshift operating room on a yacht off Long Island Sound, doctors anesthetized Cleveland and performed major surgery on the president. No reporter and no member of the public had any idea this was happening. Doctors not only cut out Cleveland’s tumor, but also had to remove several teeth and part of the president’s upper jaw, which was replaced with a rubber prosthetic.

The surgery very likely saved Cleveland’s life, but the media was merely told the president was on a fishing trip. Afterwards, when he went to Cape Cod and spent time recuperating from this life-threatening health scare, the public was told the president was vacationing. It was an audacious deception and the country never found out the real story. It only came to light in 1917, nine years after Cleveland’s death, when one of his doctors decided to set the record straight for the sake of history.

1897 to 1908: Cleveland’s post-presidency

It was, all in all, a fairly controversial set of events for a man who was nominated for president in large part on the basis of his honesty and integrity. But aside from that, what’s also interesting is how perception of events and morality can change over time.

• For instance, Cleveland was roundly criticized in the 1884 campaign for his affair with a widow that resulted in a pregnancy, an event that would probably cause barely more than a murmur today.

• On the other hand, he was reproached considerably less for his White House wedding to a 21-year-old, an event that would almost surely create a massive uproar these days.

• And the secret surgery, well, that would likely be controversial both then and now, the only difference being that it may no longer be possible to pull off such a deception.

In any case, it was a unique series of controversies for a man who otherwise seems to have lived a pretty straightforward life. And in retirement, he largely reverted back to a quieter existence, or at least as quiet as is possible for a former president.

After serving two terms in the White House and then leaving office in 1897, Cleveland moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey. There are no surprising revelations from his post-presidential years. The Clevelands took up residence in the Westland Mansion, now a National Historic Landmark, in the historic district not far from Princeton’s campus.

The former president was a beloved local figure and Princeton students used to march to his house after football victories or to serenade him on his birthday. Cleveland appeared to spend 11 contented years in New Jersey with Frances and their children (two of whom were born in Princeton), until his 1908 death.

This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

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There is a long history in the United States of controversy over Catholics and Catholicism. But it has typically involved dismay over Catholic immigrants (Irish Catholics in the 1850s and Italian Catholics in the 1920s, for instance), or questions about whether a Catholic should become president (Al Smith in 1928 and John Kennedy in 1960).

These controversies eventually faded away as Catholics became more integrated into American society and politics. The U.S. has now had two Catholic presidents and numerous Catholic Speakers of the House and Supreme Court Justices. Which makes the Trump administration’s current feud with Pope Leo XIV all the more confusing.

So as to the question in my headline: No, there really is no precedence for such a political feud between an American president and the leader of the Catholic church. But I do have some thoughts on the topic, and on the reaction of MAGA Catholics to this dispute between their president and their pope.

1. Why is the Trump administration feuding with Pope Leo XIV?

Donald Trump, as we all know, will pick a fight with anyone if he’s feeling attacked or senses his political standing slipping. So, not surprisingly, his recent condemnations of Pope Leo XIV aren’t even the first time he’s maligned the head of the Catholic Church (as far back as 2016 he was calling Pope Francis “disgraceful.”) Nevertheless, his all-out, unhinged attack this past week on Leo set a new low bar for presidential criticisms of a pope.

Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy … He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican … Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense [and] stop catering to the Radical Left.

Two days after the president’s rant, Vice President J.D. Vance was speaking before a conservative audience in Georgia and took America’s feud with the pope to an even different place. Whether it was a conscious attempt to up the ante or not, Vance managed to produce this headline:

Yes, the vice president of the United States, a recent convert to Catholicism, chose to lecture the pope on theology.

“I think … one of the issues here is that if you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth.”

A day later, on Fox News, Vance said that Leo should “stick to matters of, you know, what’s going on in the Catholic Church.”

Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that advocating for peace and against war is, in fact, longstanding Catholic doctrine. Which means that Trump and Vance are mostly upset over the fact that the pope dared to contradict their position that an American-led war in Iran was a necessary one.

2. The debate over “just wars”

Vance is also playing semantic games here, as he often does. He criticized the pope for saying that “God does not bless any conflict,” and then pivoted to making this point: “Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated Holocaust camps? … I certainly think the answer is yes.”

Vance knows, of course, that no one can suggest the U.S. should have stayed out of World War II after being attacked, and no one can possibly say it wasn’t a worthy and necessary cause to liberate Holocaust camps. But, crucially, the pope is also not saying this. Vance is twisting Leo’s position, because what the pope said is not controversial if you accept that two things can be true at the same time: God can disapprove of all conflicts, as Leo said, even if there might still be (rare) times when a war is unfortunate but necessary.

The tension between these two statements is at the core of the Church’s doctrine on just war. One war may be just and sadly necessary, but 10 or 20 or 100 other wars can be unnecessary and unjust. As Bishop James Massa of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said this week:

“For over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war. A constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword ‘in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.’ ”

The Iran War, obviously, meets none of these conditions, which is why it would have been a surprise if Leo did not oppose it.

I fail to see how this is difficult to understand.

I also fail to see why Trump and Vance would be so eager to criticize a pope for being against killing. The Church has maintained the same position since before the United State ever existed … and now all of a sudden a U.S. administration takes offense because the Church disagrees with its proclivity for violence?

Moreover, just as an aside, but since the doctrine of just war was first developed by St. Augustine, and since Leo himself is an Augustinian (the first Augustinian to become pope, and himself the former global leader of the Order of St. Augustine) you might think he knows a thing or two about the Church’s teachings on the matter, wouldn’t you? At the very least, more than J.D. Vance would know.

3. The world of MAGA Catholics

The Trump administration’s feud with the pope has made some American Catholics uneasy. But certainly not all of them. Because those who are part of the MAGA movement take their cue from the top and don’t accept any separation from or disagreement with the president. They obviously don’t appreciate sentiments such as these:

“War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations. As the Charter of the United Nations Organization and international law itself remind us, war cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option.”

Interestingly, though, it was not Pope Leo who said these words.

It was Pope John Paul II, speaking in opposition to the Iraq War in 2003. Which sort of undercuts the argument that Leo is a radical leftist who just hates the Trump administration, doesn’t it?

John Paul II was opposed to that war (again, as all popes are opposed to almost all wars) not only because of the Church’s doctrine on just war, but also because of the Church’s emphasis on life. As the National Catholic Register wrote a few years ago: “As John Paul II Taught Us, Opposition to War Is a Pro-Life Principle.”

John Paul went so far as to send an emissary to the White House to try talking President George W. Bush out of attacking Iraq. Bush listened politely but declined. What Bush did not do, however, was to attack John Paul as “terrible for foreign policy” and “catering to the Radical Left.”

Those days of polite disagreement are long gone, and we are all the worse for it.

Instead, we get MAGA minions defending their leader against anyone and everyone, and sending memes like this flying around social media: “Why didn‘t any Catholic leaders demand Biden the “Catholic” president act like a Catholic?”

Is this a serious question? If so, let me refresh your memory: When he was running for president in 2019, Biden was actually denied communion during a Mass, when he walked up to receive the Eucharist. The idea of refusing communion to Biden remained an issue into his presidency, so much so that the New Yorker in 2021 published a piece titled “The Catholic Bishops’ Brawl Over Denying Joe Biden Communion.”

Not only that, but former Senator John Kerry was also threatened with the same thing when he was the Democratic nominee for president in 2004. Why? Because some officials were offended that Biden and Kerry had gone against the Church’s pro-life teachings on abortion.

So let me ask another question: Should J.D. Vance be denied communion because he is now going against the Church’s teachings about just war? Not to mention the Church’s teachings on caring for the poor and for migrants?

No, it should not mean that (in my opinion), just as it shouldn’t have become an issue for Biden and Kerry. Because the church and the state are separate realms and we get into trouble when we start trying to have one police the other.

However, what people on both sides of the political spectrum have to accept and get over is that the Catholic Church is pro-life. Period. It’s pro-life, not pro-Republican, nor pro-Democrat. The Church is against abortion. And it’s against war. And it’s in favor of caring for the poor (i.e., not just pro-life before birth, but also after birth). And it’s in favor of showing compassion for migrants. This is a coherent position, but it’s one that doesn’t fit neatly onto the U.S. political spectrum. And it’s OK that it doesn’t.

But somehow we’ve gotten into this situation where someone who is not adamantly opposed to abortion is deemed to be against the Church’s pro-life teachings. But someone who is OK with killing thousands of innocent civilians in an unnecessary war, or who doesn’t support programs to care for the poor, can still be considered pro-life.

So why was Joe Biden considered unfit for communion (a president who was so religious he used to carry a rosary with him), but J.D. Vance is not seen in the same way even though he is against numerous other of the Church’s pro-life teachings? It’s because, in America, one pro-life issue has become infinitely more important than all other pro-life issues.

So we’re left, essentially, with a world where one’s politics is influencing one’s religion. There’s no other explanation for why one pro-life Catholic doctrine can be grounds for denying an elected official communion, while other pro-life doctrines are seen as up for debate.

And I’d suggest that many MAGA Catholics take this even a step further, as their identity as a Trump supporter often supersedes their identity as a Catholic. That’s why, once the president turned on Leo, some of his Catholic base began disparaging their own pope merely for following centuries of Church doctrine and speaking out against war.

4. Let’s give John Kennedy the final word

In his 1960 campaign for president, John Kennedy faced considerable skepticism over his ability to separate his Catholic faith from his duties as a potential president of Americans of other faiths. So, in a famous address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, he confronted the question head on and delivered this response:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference—and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish—where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

It’s something to think about, at least.

If you’re interested, here is a one-minute clip of JFK delivering that consequential address on faith and politics to ministers in Houston in 1960:

The president, the pope, and the astronauts. I know, it sounds like the setup for a bad joke, but these individuals have made a lot of headlines in the past week or so. And it occurred to me the past few days that these particular individuals — President Trump, Pope Leo XIV, and the Artemis astronauts — represent various prisms through which to view today’s world. Which is what I want to write about today.

1. The Trump administration and the Vatican

Let’s start with President Trump and Pope Leo XIV, who appear to have a simmering rivalry in the global debate over war and peace. This tension didn’t suddenly erupt with the start of the Iran War but goes back several months, at least, to when the Trump administration seemed to actually threaten the pope, or at least the Vatican.

It began when the pope in January delivered an annual address to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps. In the speech, he mentioned what he feared was a growing trend toward war over peace:

War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself.

These words apparently dismayed the Trump administration, prompting Pentagon officials to call a meeting with a Vatican diplomat to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre. This, in itself, was highly unusual: For a Vatican representative to meet with military rather than diplomatic officials. But more remarkable was what happened at the meeting. The White House and Vatican have since downplayed reports of tensions, but the confrontational nature of the talks has been confirmed by several news outlets.

“The United States,” [the Pentagon official said] “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death.

If true, this means that Pentagon officials basically insisted that the Vatican take America’s side or suffer the consequences, including possibly the end of Leo’s papacy. Needless to say, this would amount to unprecedented — and shocking — attack by the U.S. both on the Catholic Church and the Vatican’s independence (Vatican City is, in fact, an independent state).

As one observer noted, while “the entire idea is farcical … the most important part is not the threat to Leo” but rather the fact that some U.S. officials could even contemplate “the idea of a captive church under the thumb of the American presidency.”

2. Does God take sides?

Now, fast forward three months. In keeping with its earlier message to the Vatican that the U.S. can do whatever it wants, the U.S. joined Israel to launch a war against Iran. And administration officials seem to be promoting the idea that, yes, God supports the United States in this endeavor.

Since the conflict began, President Trump has on numerous occasions invoked the idea that the war was being fought with the blessing of God. Such as in this social media post:

Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!

On another occasion, in response to a question, Trump said he believed God supported the U.S. in Iran. “I do, because God is good,” Trump said.

Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Secretary of Defense (still the official name of what the administration calls the War Department), has arguably gone further. At a worship service inside the Pentagon, he asked people to pray for victory “every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Hegseth also compared the rescue of a U.S. pilot in Iran to the death and resurrection of Jesus:

“You see, shot down on a Friday, Good Friday; hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday; and rescued on Sunday,” Hegseth said. “Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday, a pilot reborn.”

Some military officers have filed complaints, saying they’ve been told the war is “part of God’s divine plan.” One commander allegedly “referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ” and suggested that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus.”

Which certainly sounds like the administration believes it’s engaged in a holy war, doesn’t it? With God on America’s side.

It reminds me of the antiwar song, “With God on Our Side,” written by Bob Dylan in the 1960s, in which he mocks the idea that God is on any nation’s side in a war.

Here is an audio version of Dylan’s song, with lyrics:

Or, if you prefer a live version, I couldn’t find a good one of Dylan, but here’s Joan Baez performing it in 1967:

3. The pope, not surprisingly, has his own thoughts about the war

The Catholic Church has generally been against the idea of war for several centuries, acknowledging only that it may be necessary in certain extreme cases, such as in defense against an attack. So it should surprise no one that Pope Leo has spoken out against the Iran conflict, which was entirely a war of choice.

It is notable, though, that the pope has spoken out quite forcefully, and at times in almost a direct rebuttal of President Trump’s effort to frame the war in religious terms.

On Palm Sunday, as reported by the Washington Post, the pope said that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” Leo quoted Isaiah 1:15: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen — your hands are full of blood.”

Then, during an Easter speech, he said this:

“Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them! We are growing accustomed to violence, resigning ourselves to it, and becoming indifferent. Indifferent to the deaths of thousands of people.”

And after the president posted on social media that “a whole civilization will die tonight” (does he even realize that Persian civilization is more than 3,000 years old?), Pope Leo called the suggestion “truly unacceptable.”

A Vatican official later said the pope’s words against the war were less an attack on specific leaders and more a condemnation of the idea of war itself, and especially war carried out in the name of religion.

“His critique is more radical: It does not concern a leader, but the principle that makes war possible. He challenges the logic of force when it claims moral justification, and rejects the use of God’s name to legitimize violence.”

He challenges the logic of force when it claims moral justification, and rejects the use of God’s name to legitimize violence.

Makes sense to me.

4. This week, there‘s also the view from space

Finally, this brings us to the Artemis II astronauts, who this week captivated the world by being the first ones in a half-century to travel to the Moon and who also ventured further into space than any humans had ever flown. Along the way, they graced us with stunning images of Earth from the Moon (two of which are attached to this post).

It was a stunning achievement, one that had me glued to the television along with one of my sons. It’s not often that the news these days can provide us with feelings of awe or transcendence.

And can I just say, before I go on, that we shouldn’t forget the four-person crew that accomplished this feat included a woman and a Black man (and a Canadian!), which should be some kind of message at least to the anti-diversity policies of the current administration. And particularly of the Defense Department, where Hegseth has intervened “to block or delay the promotions of more than a dozen Black and female senior officers,” allegedly in part because “President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events.”

I mean, seriously.

But the main point I want to make here is the new perception of our world that can arise from seeing the planet from space.

This is not a news flash. It’s been discussed many times previously and numerous astronauts have talked about what’s been called the Overview Effect:

When astronauts first see our planet from space, they go through intense emotions. Seeing our home against the blackness of space is a profound experience that leads to a greater appreciation for Earth and its apparent fragility, and a deep connection to humanity as a whole.

Samantha Harvey also pondered the idea in her Booker Prize-winning novel, Orbital, which takes place aboard the space station.

The astronauts in Orbital also muse about the obvious lack of borders as their spaceship sails past continents and mountains and seas that seem “almost endlessly connected.” And it makes them wonder: “Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth?”

Still, this bears repeating because it’s a view that humanity hasn’t been reminded of quite so viscerally for a long time. Everyone has seen photos of Earth from space, but when a spaceship travels to the Moon for the first time in a half-century and sends back high definition images of our fragile planet floating in space, it’s as if we’re seeing it all anew.

And when the astronauts themselves are so articulate about the experience, well, that adds to the awe.

(Please watch this, it’s only 77 seconds and it’s worth it.)

So yeah, take that perspective from astronaut Victor Glover and contrast it with:

• The reality of thousands of bombs raining down on Iran.

• A country of 90 million human beings being threatened with the destruction of their power and water infrastructure.

• The global oil (and gas and helium and fertilizer) supply being choked off at the Strait of Hormuz.

• And countries fighting over whose God is sanctioning what level of death and destruction.

I don’t know that these fresh views from space will actually change anything, but one never knows what seeds are being planted in what minds. If only we could squeeze the leaders of the U.S., Israel, and Iran into a cramped space capsule and launch them into orbit to ponder the meaning of existence (and perhaps the true meaning of their religions) while they hash out differences.

In any case, I’m thankful for the pope. I’m thankful for the Artemis astronauts. And I’m thankful for the injection of a little awe into our daily existence. Because sometimes the world can use a little change of perspective, don’t you think?

On April 1, 2026, President Trump gave a nationally televised speech on the Iran War. Ahead of the address, analysts mused about whether Trump would declare victory and pull out of Iran, or plow forward and send ground troops. So, like millions of other Americans, I tuned in.

Turns out it was an April Fool’s joke on the nation. The address didn’t amount to much more than a rehash of the president’s tweets. Which prompted this response from a GOP political strategist:

“What the hell did he just say?”

And this one from Tom Nichols, professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College:

His address … was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired … The president seems lost.

When it was over, I wondered: Does this president actually have any idea of what he might have unleashed on the world with this war?

So it seemed an appropriate topic for a post. Here is a look at how history might end up viewing this conflict, through the lens of six topics.

1. What will history see as the rationale for this war?

The U.S. has gotten itself into numerous ill-conceived wars, but this one is right up there in terms of confusing rationales. Iran posed no immediate threat to America, and the U.S. government itself believed the Iranians were at least a decade from being able to build a nuclear arsenal.

So the most likely reason was to try toppling the Iranian government. Trump called on Iranians to rise up and “take over your government.” Most observers, though, were dubious there was an opposition in Iran with the power to overthrow the government. And, as the New York Times pointed out:

There are few, if any, examples in history of toppling the government of a large nation — in this case about 90 million people — with air power alone.

But if the Iranian regime survives (which it has, so far), has the U.S. thought through what comes next? And what are the worst case scenarios?

A prolonged campaign could produce a failed state with enriched uranium, destabilize crucial oil routes, threaten Gulf allies, trigger a refugee crisis, and disrupt the global economy. “The worst-case outcome is complete chaos,” said Dana Stroul, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

The final story hasn’t yet been written, so perhaps a strong and more moderate Iranian opposition will arise. Or perhaps Iran will be weakened to the point where it can no longer threaten its neighbors and a new, more cooperative Middle East will emerge. We can hope. But, as of today, those don’t seem to be the most likely outcomes. In which case, history is likely to be pretty confused over why this conflict ever began.

2. Is the NATO alliance weakening?

Trump did seem to confirm during his speech that the U.S. has no plans to force open the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively closed to tanker traffic, cutting off a route that carries 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas. Instead, he has suggested that European nations should take the lead in reopening the Strait.

Build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself.

He has also called NATO members “COWARDS” and said the U.S. would never forget the reluctance of European nations to get involved in the Iranian conflict.

So the president is saying the U.S.-Israeli attack may be responsible for having Iran close the Strait, but America can’t be held responsible for what happens next. In essence: “We broke it, but we’re not fixing it.”

Then again, today he posted this:

“With a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE.”

So really, who knows? Does he, even?

The thing is, though, Europe has a long list of reasons for not wanting to get involved. They were against an attack on Iran, they weren’t consulted by the Trump administration beforehand, and given the strategic advantages held by Iran many of them don’t believe it’s even realistic to be keep the Strait open by force. Also, there’s the reality of how Trump has treated Europe, from trade wars to threats against Greenland, which has stirred anti-American sentiment across the continent.

It should be noted too that Trump initially promised to use the U.S. Navy to escort tankers and keep the Strait open. But then reality apparently set in. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who knows a thing or two about the region, has said that to keep the Strait open it would take 20,000 American troops prepared “to be there for the long haul,” as well as naval forces.

And if Europe doesn’t take on this Herculean task that they never signed up for? Trump has said he might retaliate by ending support for Ukraine in its war against Russia, or even pulling the United States out of NATO altogether.

The NATO alliance, of course, not only binds together the democracies of Europe with the U.S. and Canada, but it has helped keep Europe and the world largely at peace since World War II. To end it would be a huge deal.

3. The future of energy, trade, and the global economy

The future of NATO and the Strait of Hormuz are intricately connected to two other important topics. One is the future of energy, trade, and the global economy. Oil gets the headlines, but the Strait of Hormuz is also a chokepoint for other vital products.

Natural gas:

The U.S.-Israeli war [is] trapping 20% of global supplies of the fuel behind the Strait of Hormuz and sending prices surging … That is a big problem for Europe, which has relied heavily on LNG [liquefied natural gas] to replace Russian pipeline gas since the invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.

Fertilizer:

Iran’s attacks on vessels have also snarled shipments of fertilizer, a third of which flows through the Strait. Fertilizer prices are up some 20% over the last month, which will raise costs for U.S. farmers struggling as a result of the President’s tariffs.

Helium:

“The Gulf is a major exporter of helium [which] is critical for the manufacturing of microchips — including those used to power the global AI boom — as well as for the functioning of some medical devices.”

Do you think we’ll start noticing if a helium shortage curtails the production of semiconductor chips, or causes hospitals to cut back on the use of MRI machines, among other challenges?

And let’s not forget that an increase in the price of oil affects more than gas prices for our cars:

The price of diesel and jet fuel … rise faster than the gasoline that drivers buy at the pump. And that has a disproportionate effect on moving goods around the globe ... Those elevated energy prices could eventually increase the price of practically every avocado, automobile, pair of sneakers, cellphone and drug that is bought and sold around the world.

Now, this could all end with the Strait of Hormuz open and trade once again flowing freely. Then again, Iran is now promising to maintain control of the Strait even after the fighting stops. Reports are that it may charge a bounty for ships to travel there, and perhaps ban tankers from certain countries.

Iran’s control of the Strait is already being called a “direct threat to global prosperity,” and the United Nations is holding meetings on ways to ensure the route remains open. This explains why the Arab nations of the Middle East, who were opposed to starting this war, are now insisting that the U.S. stay and finish the job.

The Strait of Hormuz — which was open and secure before the fighting began — is now a danger zone. And many U.S. allies among the Arab states lining the Persian Gulf, who were skeptical about the war in the first place, now fear that a wounded Iran run by hard-line leaders imperils their populations.

You can see where this is going.

Ending hostilities now could leave the region and global trade in chaos. But finishing the job (i.e., leaving Iran with a new government, or else so weak that it can’t threaten the region) would be a major undertaking that could pull neighboring Arab countries, as well as NATO, into the battle. This is the slippery slope that unintentionally leads to wider wars.

So yes, history is going to notice how this all ends.

4. The future of the U.S.-led world order

The future of NATO is only one part of how this conflict might impact geopolitics and, specifically, the future of the U.S.-led world order that has held serve since the mid-20th century.

This is how the foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan summed up the situation for The Atlantic:

Trump’s conservative friend, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, recently warned that American actions have produced a “crisis in international law and multilateral organizations” and “the collapse of a shared world order.”

Throughout the Cold War and for nearly four decades after it, allies and partners across the globe clung to the American order through thick and thin … This, more than raw might, was what made the United States the most influential power in history.

Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower.

And Ray Dalio, author of “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order,” went so far as to suggest that America’s post-Iran War reputation will hinge on being able to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to global trade:

If the Strait of Hormuz is left in the hands of the Iranians to use as a weapon to threaten American allies in the Gulf and the world economy more broadly, everyone will be hostage to the Iranians, and Donald Trump will be perceived to have picked a fight and lost. He will have left U.S. allies in the region with a huge problem, and he will lose credibility.

As the U.S. faces the possibility of losing credibility with its allies, meanwhile, Russia and China are emerging as at least short-term winners:

Oil prices are rising, generating more than $150 million per day in extra income for Moscow to feed its war machine … All the while, Ukraine is being left to contend with Russia’s missile and drone attacks without the advanced defensive weaponry that’s now being used to protect Israel and the Gulf instead.

China, meanwhile, is watching as the U.S. diverts its military forces from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, where they will likely remain for months, if not years … And China’s rapid transition to renewables and close alignment with energy-rich Russia will leave it well placed to confidently confront the future.

When the U.S. lifted sanctions on Russian oil in an effort to keep prices from spiraling further out of control, it should be noted, “pundits on Russian state TV celebrated the move as a sign of Trump’s weakened position.”

So, in short: The U.S. could potentially emerge from the conflict weakened in the eyes of the world, and Russia now has more money to finance its war against a Ukraine that is more vulnerable to attack. Oh, and the NATO alliance might be crumbling.

Vladimir Putin must be dancing in the Kremlin.

5. The future of terrorism

Not surprisingly, Iran isn’t taking this attack lying down. But with little chance to defeat the U.S. militarily, it’s turning to asymmetric warfare.

Iranian leaders have threatened to attack a host of U.S. tech companies that have operations in the Middle East. Already, there have been successful strikes on an Amazon cloud computing facility in Bahrain and data centers in the United Arab Emirates.

Additionally, Iranian hackers have disrupted the operations of a major U.S. medical device maker. And Iran in the past has targeted American water utilities, in what could be a preview of future efforts. The Associated Press reported:

Going forward, U.S. defense contractors, government vendors and businesses that work with Israel are likely targets, as is critical infrastructure such as hospitals, ports, water plants, power stations and railways.

Iran could also attempt bigger terrorist strikes, as Foreign Affairs noted.

“Iran sees little downside in greenlighting a wide variety of attacks, from small-scale plots to potential mass-casualty events, with little regard for potential repercussions.”

“It is likely wagering that the American public and its politicians lack the stomach to withstand civilian losses, and that, should it successfully carry out a mass casualty event, the political cost of continuing the war will become prohibitive for the Trump administration.”

6. The future of American politics

Finally, we can’t ignore the reality that U.S. politics is going to be impacted by these events. And the longer the war goes on, the more it will change the future of politics.

Remember, an obscure 2002 speech by an Illinois state senator opposing the Iraq War later reverberated through the 2008 election and helped elect Barack Obama president.

Today, political activists and reporters are already dredging up a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that endorsed Donald Trump for a second term as president. The author complained that his “entire adult lifetime has been shaped by presidents who threw America into unwise wars,” and said he was supporting Trump “because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”

The author? Senator J.D. Vance.

Welp. So much for that.

If this war drags on for much longer, and especially if it ends up looking like a strategic mistake, don’t think it won’t affect Vance’s presumed 2028 presidential candidacy. It may not sink him, but it will certainly affect him.

If the U.S. involvement in the war goes on for months, say some people close to Vance, it will have a major impact and the next GOP presidential nominee, whoever it ends up being, will have to explain the war’s rationale to voters in the 2028 election.

While a pretty strong majority of GOP voters say they support the war (don’t even get me started on the ironies there), a generational split seems to have emerged, with young conservatives more opposed to U.S. involvement.

And the true blue America First loyalists are especially dismayed.

Here is Marjorie Taylor Greene:

“Fox News is now the fake news. Brainwashing boomers to support what we voted against.”

And Ann Coulter:

“Watching Fox News assure viewers the Iran war is going SUPER well and Trump is a total stud is like watching the same network assure viewers that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 election and Trump was the winner.”

Well, welcome to the party, I guess. Are you finally figuring out (or admitting) that the MAGA media has been brainwashing gullible Republicans on these issues?

OK, but is a MAGA civil war actually breaking out? I don’t know, because there are obviously still a whole lot of GOPers in Trump’s corner. But it wouldn’t take a major rupture to keep just enough people away from the polls to put a major dent in Republican hopes for 2026 and 2028.

Meanwhile, Democrats are also being affected, albeit in different ways. Consider:

• Illinois Governor J.B Pritzker, who is himself Jewish, is now backing away from his past support of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

• Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just came out in opposition to all U.S. military aid to Israel, in a rebuke to that country’s right-wing government.

• And in a number of Democratic primary races, progressives and moderates are debating whether one candidate “opposed President Donald Trump's bombing campaign strongly enough and for what they call overly close ties with defense contractors and Israel.”

The impact on Democrats will be far less than that for Republicans for the simple reason that it was a GOP president who started the war. But the issue will still scramble politics in unpredictable ways.

Much of the eventual impact, obviously, will depend on whether the war drags on, or ends soon. It will depend on whether it’s a perceived win for the U.S., or whether it descends into a quagmire. It will depend on how much it impacts the price of gas and the greater economy.

But one way or another, you can be sure it will have an impact. An impact we may still be discussing years from now, or reading about in history books.

1. America’s first WrestleMania presidency

I wasn’t expecting to collect many (OK, not any) thoughts on contemporary politics during a session with sportswriters Jane Leavy and Mark Kriegel, but that element of surprise is part of what keeps these events interesting.

At one point, Leavy (who writes about baseball, including the recent book Make Me Commissioner), was talking about how the sport’s descent into analytics may have robbed it of some ability to tell stories and construct narratives. Baseball, she noted, has always been at heart about “a duel.” A pitcher and batter facing off against each other from 60 feet apart. But when algorithms take over the game, she suggested, and begin predicting results with greater accuracy, the drama is lessened.

Kriegel, who has written about boxing, football, and other sports, agreed: “When you reduce everything to probability, you lose the sense of heroism,” he said. And for any sport to be popular, the most important thing is to be able to tell a story.

O.K., interesting as it goes. But then Kriegel added that wrestling is one of the sports most successful these days at crafting these narratives, and at telling the stories that attract fans. He said:

“Maybe it’s no coincidence that we have our first WrestleMania president.”

You know, I’d never thought of it in those terms before but it makes so much sense, doesn’t it?

After all, how has wrestling become popular?

“WrestleMania’s marketing prowess lies its ability to weave compelling narratives [that showcase] WWE’s knack for storytelling and character development.”

And how did Donald Trump forge a solid base of loyal voters that catapulted him into the White House? Pretty much the same way. He creates enemies, tells stories, and drives narratives that attract viewers (i.e., voters). He gets them riled up about Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe and Comrade Kamala and the Radical Left. Aren’t they’re just WWE enemies transferred to politics?

He’s doing the same thing in foreign policy. Trump is going after the alleged drug lord president of Venezuela, Cuba’s Communists and — in the highest stakes battle of all — Iran’s Muslim theocrats. He’s trying to topple three different governments, not because they pose a particular threat to the U.S. but because he doesn’t like them. He even called Iran’s leaders “deranged scumbags” and said it was a “great honor” to kill them.

And then he said this:

"Now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party!”

Isn’t it obvious that Trump sees himself as a Wrestlemania character and everyone else as his opponent? He creates drama by pitting characters against each other and giving Americans someone to root for and against.

And Trump, remember, has a longtime connection to professional wrestling, even going so far once as to battle WWE leader Vince McMahon in the so-called Battle of the Billionaires.

Yes, in the video below that’s your future president getting great delight from shaving McMahon’s head in the ring.

It also won’t surprise you, then, to know that Trump is hosting an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the lawn of the White House this June 14 as part of the celebration of America's 250th birthday.

The dots all connect. Trump is our first WrestleMania president.

2. AI’s influence on writing and thinking

The topic of AI’s impact on writing and thinking was also not the main subject of any one event. But when two authors in two different settings bring up the topic, unprompted, it makes you pay attention.

First, author and professor Joshua Wheeler had this to say:

“When I talk with students about AI, many of them want to know why they should have to write when they can get something from AI faster that is as good or better than what they can produce on their own. What I tell them is that it’s about the process. Because when you write, and when you struggle with the process, you yourself are transformed by it. The act of writing is a vehicle for your own growth.”

Later, in a different session, novelist Brandon Hobson also delved into AI and writing on college campuses:

“If I ever teach freshman composition again,” he said, “it’s going to be with an old blue book. The students are going to have to write in class with no laptops and no chance to use AI. Because I think AI is making a lot of us forget how to think.”

Obviously, AI is going to change our world in many ways, perhaps more than television ever did. And AI can be a tremendous way to find information and to track down resources. But if it’s being used as a replacement for writing then, yes, it’s likely also becoming a replacement for thinking.

3. Why obsession is a prerequisite for bringing nonfiction to life

One of my favorite parts of the book festival was being able to attend two events with authors who write narrative nonfiction. And I was intrigued to hear, over and over again, how obsession with a topic is what drove most of these authors into producing their best works.

One event featured literary star Erik Larson, who has written such bestsellers as The Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts and, most recently, The Demon of Unrest about the five months between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the start of the Civil War.

Larson said one of the more difficult tasks he has is simply choosing a topic to write about. It needs to be a story that contains an “energetic narrative arc to pull readers in,” and he has to be satisfied there is enough research material available to tell a book-length story. Most important, though, he said, is that it needs to be a topic that interests him enough to be willing to live with it for three or so years, the amount of time it takes to do the research and the writing.

Nathalia Holt, who wrote The Beast in the Clouds — about two of Teddy Roosevelt’s sons and their 1929 expedition to the Himalayas in search of what was then thought to be a mythical panda — said much the same thing at a different author event:

“Obsession. Without it, you won’t have the drive to do the research and stick with the story.”

And David Baron, who just published The Martians about an early 20th century craze that swept the country when Americans believed there might be a civilization on Mars, similarly said: “You need to make sure you’re writing about a topic you’re obsessed with.”

In a way, it’s not only a lesson about writing, but also about life. What are you fascinated by, almost to the point of obsession? Whatever it is, focusing on that topic is what will likely drive you to your greatest successes.

Photos: All photos by Bob Riel

It doesn’t happen often, but there have been a few instances in U.S. history where one presidential candidate came onto the scene and was able, nearly by himself, to dramatically transform the nature of a major political party.

• In 1824-28, Andrew Jackson took a sledgehammer to the Democratic-Republican Party (at a time when that party wasn’t facing any major opposition) and, out of its ruins, founded the new Democratic Party.

• In 1896, William Jennings Bryan took a conservative, small government Democratic Party and began reforming it into a progressive movement. Bryan ran three times for president and never won, but the changes he wrought culminated three decades later with the ascension of Franklin Roosevelt, who cemented the Democrats as the country’s progressive party.

• In 1964, Barry Goldwater sparked a revolt against the leadership of a moderately conservative Republican Party and remade the GOP into an anti-government movement. Like Bryan, he never became president himself, but 16 years later Ronald Reagan was elected on the platform Goldwater first espoused.

None of these transformations happened in a vacuum, of course.

• The Jacksonians took power when popular democracy was expanding and many voters took issue with what they felt was the more aristocratic nature of the previous governing party.

• Bryan’s rise came during an era when a progressive populist movement was spreading and people were up in arms over growing inequality and industrialization.

• And Goldwater tapped into frustration among small government conservatives who believed government had become too large (and among racial conservatives in the South who thought too much attention had been paid to civil rights).

We now appear to be at another of those unique moments in history, as Donald Trump is similarly transforming today’s Republican Party. His rightwing populist movement has remade the GOP into an ethnonationalist party. Aside from a couple of issues, today’s GOP has little in common with the party’s platforms from the past half-century.

The question is whether the MAGA movement that Trump has forged will survive when he is no longer the party’s leader. That is, is Trump a unique figure in whose absence the GOP might revert to its more traditional roots? Or, even if his popularity doesn’t transfer, is the MAGA Republican Party here to stay?

It’s a question worth pondering, though there’s obviously no way to definitively answer that right now. It’s too soon, enough history hasn’t happened. However, I do want to point you to the results of this past week’s primary elections in a few states because I think they do provide a pretty big clue as to the strength of the MAGA movement.

The Texas Senate Race

I wrote last week about polls that showed how both the Democrats and Republicans in Texas were in danger of nominating their most unelectable candidate for a U.S. Senate race. It didn’t work out exactly like that, but the final results are still interesting and informative.

Let’s start with the Democrats. Primary voters nominated the party’s more moderate candidate, state Rep. James Talarico, who won a fairly comfortable 52-46% victory against Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.

Talarico, the faith-based progressive candidate whom Republicans most feared running against in November, won by considerable margins among college-educated voters and self-described progressives, who represented a large chunk of the vote in his home area of Austin, while Crockett won overwhelmingly among Blacks and with her base in the Dallas area. The difference in the race appeared to be Talarico’s strength among Hispanic voters, who might have been attracted to the candidate’s focus on his religious faith.

It’s unclear whether Talarico’s victory was the result of his running a better campaign, particularly in Hispanic areas, or whether Democratic primary voters as a whole were more moderate and pragmatic. Or both. Whatever the case, the end result was that Democrats nominated a more centrist candidate who at least has a glimmer of hope of prevailing in November. Now, whether he has a realistic chance of winning is less clear. But there’s no doubt that Republicans are, at minimum, on high alert over the possibility.

Which explains some of what’s happening in the GOP Senate primary.

On Tuesday, when voters had their say, incumbent Sen. John Cornyn just edged state Attorney General Ken Paxton, 41.9% to 40.7%, with Rep. Wesley Hunt much further behind at 13.5%. But since no candidate crossed the 50% threshold, Cornyn and Paxton are headed to a runoff election in three months.

There are two interesting things going on here:

First, the fact that a respected and scandal-free incumbent U.S. Senator attracted less than 42% of the vote in a GOP primary tells you something. Paxton and Hunt, who both positioned themselves as heirs to the MAGA movement, combined for 54% of the vote. If Hunt hadn’t been in the race, Paxton may well have won the primary and ousted Cornyn from the Senate. So, at first blush, given these results and the reality that runoff elections tend to have even lower turnout and to attract even stronger partisans, Paxton would seem to be the favorite.

And second, as I noted, the GOP is sweating the possibility of a Paxton versus Talarico Senate race. As a result, the party has now started pulling out all the stops to try keeping that from happening. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is pressing President Trump to endorse Cornyn, lest Paxton be the cause of Republicans losing control of the Senate. The party is also trying to pressure Paxton to drop out of the runoff entirely to ensure a Cornyn victory in the primary.

Paxton is sending mixed signals, first saying he was staying the race, and then suggesting he’d consider withdrawing, but only if the U.S. Senate would eliminate the filibuster and also pass a law requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Can Republicans find a deal that would get him to withdraw? Who knows, but they’re at least working on it. The fear of losing a GOP Senate seat in Texas is a powerful motivator and it might be the only thing that saves Cornyn.

In the end, Republicans may well retain the seat. It’s Texas, after all. Democrats rarely, if ever, win statewide races there anymore. Still, MAGA is flexing its muscles. The fact that MAGA voters were able to put the GOP in this position in the first place, in a race in which Cornyn should have coasted to victory, is noteworthy.

Beyond the Texas Senate primary: How MAGA are you?

The Texas Senate primary wasn’t the only race where MAGA true believers asserted themselves this week.

In another Texas race, a sitting GOP Congressman, Dan Crenshaw, lost his primary to state Rep. Steve Toth by a wide margin, 56-41%.

Crenshaw, who was first elected to Congress in 2018, is a reliable conservative and a former Navy SEAL — again, not the sort of candidate who would typically lose a primary. His sins? He suggested after 2020 that Joe Biden’s presidential win was legitimate, he supported Ukraine in its war against Russia, and he worked in Congress on the 2024 bipartisan immigration deal. That’s it.

“In the end, I’m doing the job I’m supposed to be doing,” Crenshaw said. “I’m telling you the truth.”

His GOP opponent, however, criticized Crenshaw for not being faithful enough to Trump. And in MAGA world, any distance at all from Trump can be cause for expulsion from the party. Crenshaw thus paid the price for trying to be reasonable and occasionally bipartisan, even if his breaks with the movement were only over a few issues.

As one GOP strategist put it, the central question in the race was this: “How MAGA are you?”

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, another surprising result also showed the power of MAGA voters.

There was actually a strong anti-incumbent trend in North Carolina that saw eight state legislators of both parties lose primaries. In some cases, the results weren’t entirely surprising. Three Democrats who lost, for instance, angered fellow party members by voting with Republicans to override vetoes issued by Democratic Gov. Josh Stein. In one case it was over a bill that required law enforcement to cooperate with ICE, and the Democratic representative gave a speech declaring that “all cultures are not equal.” In these races, then, it was a case of a progressive Democrat ousting a conservative Democrat in a primary, the sort of thing that’s been happening in both parties for years now.

More surprising and more notable, however, was a race where a longtime conservative Republican seems to have lost a primary to a more MAGA Republican.

In that case, Phil Berger, who has been President Pro Tempore of the North Carolina state Senate for more than a decade, is currently losing (by two votes!) in his primary battle with Sam Page, a county sheriff. The race hinges on a recount and on some provisional ballots that have yet to be tabulated.

This is notable because Berger himself is a Trump supporter. He even helped redraw the state’s legislative districts to gerrymander a better electoral environment for the GOP and, because of this, was endorsed by the president. But Page, a small town sheriff who is hawkish on immigration and who’s been enthusiastically at Trump’s side for a decade, was seen as the more MAGA of the two candidates. That gave him enough of a boost to now be on the brink of defeating Berger.

For even more clues, we can also look to a place that hasn’t had a GOP primary yet, Arizona. The state has a Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, who is up for re-election this year. The leading GOP candidate to oppose Hobbs initially appeared to be Karrin Taylor Robson, a well respected businesswoman and attorney who finished second in the 2022 gubernatorial primary. Her opponents were two Congressmen: Rep. David Schweikert, a deficit hawk and a “classic free-market conservative,” and Rep. Andy Biggs, who’s been described as a MAGA warrior.

By now, you can likely guess what has happened.

Robson is a traditional conservative (she used to work in the Reagan and Bush administrations) and, while she polled well against Hobbs, she couldn’t gain traction among GOP primary voters in this particular race. So she dropped out. Schweikert, meanwhile, is the very conservative co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus (not to mention someone who has managed to win elections in a purple Congressional district), but even he is having trouble keeping up with Biggs, who’s been endorsed by Turning Point USA.

Robson and Schweikert are exactly the sort of Republican who would have easily won a primary race a decade or two ago. But they were both eclipsed by Biggs, the MAGA favorite, who leads Schweikert 40-19% in a recent poll of likely primary voters.

The GOP’s transformation is nearly complete

What does this all mean?

It means the MAGA movement is incredibly powerful in GOP politics.

It means being a conservative Republican is no longer enough. Any candidate who shows any distance from the president, or who isn’t seen as 100% loyal to the movement, is considered suspect.

It means the Republican Party is no longer the party of Reagan, it’s the party of Trump and of MAGA.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that a future GOP politician not named Trump will be as successful. Nor does it mean the MAGA movement is going to dominate American politics. What it does mean, though, is that the Republican Party has been transformed.

Let’s go back to the initial question: Can the MAGA movement survive the post-Trump era? The answer would seem to lean towards a yes, even if we won’t know for certain for a few years. Because, let’s be honest, there seems to be little patience among GOP voters these days for Reagan-type Republicans who haven’t professed fealty to MAGA.

So I won’t say it’s impossible, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see a path forward for a traditionally conservative politician in the GOP who isn’t wedded to the MAGA movement. The party’s transformation appears nearly complete.

Americans aren’t very happy these days.

Sixteen months ago, they were angry with the Biden/Harris administration and decided to elect Donald Trump. Now, they’re so upset with Trump’s presidency that more people now believe Biden did a better job in office than Trump is currently doing. And these dismal approval ratings are not only because voters are taking their frustrations about the cost of living out on whomever is in office, although that’s certainly part of it.

The thing is, people are also upset with the Supreme Court, which has seen its favorability plummet to an historic low of 48% (a 22% drop in just five years). Congress is in even worse shape, with only a 17% approval rating. And that number mirrors how voters see government in general, with only 17% trusting politicians to do the right thing.

Meanwhile, people historically tend to approve of their own political party, at least when they’re in power, but even those numbers are falling. According to another survey, one-quarter of Americans have an equally negative view of both the Democratic and Republican parties, a number that’s even higher among independents and younger Americans.

So, what are politicians doing about this state of affairs? Not much, actually. And while they deserve their fair share of the blame for our disintegrating politics, I can’t say it’s entirely their fault. In fact, some responsibility also falls on all of us, as the voters who decry this state of affairs … and, notably, on the structure of the U.S. political system in general.

To understand what I mean, let’s look at what’s happening in Texas at the moment.

The Texas Senate primaries

There is a U.S. Senate election in Texas this year and, strangely enough, voters in both parties might be getting ready to nominate their most unelectable candidate.

On the Republican side, there is a longtime Republican incumbent running for re-election. Sen. John Cornyn, who is a traditional, small government conservative. He’s also a high-ranking member of Senate leadership and has played a key role in whatever successes party members might think the GOP has rung up in recent years, including the fight to put pro-life conservatives on the Supreme Court. Cornyn is 74, but hasn’t shown any signs of aging or slowing down. In short, Cornyn isn’t the sort of Senator who’d typically face a primary battle from other members of his own party.

But then, these aren’t normal times.

Cornyn this year is facing, not one, but two primary challengers, in state Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt. Paxton and Hunt are both running against Cornyn from the right and proclaiming themselves the truer heirs to the MAGA movement. And, as of this writing, Paxton led in six of the last nine GOP primary polls (to two for Hunt, and one for Cornyn).

But Texas is a red state, so if Paxton wins the GOP primary, why might he be less electable than Cornyn, you ask?

Well, it just so happens that Paxton has been busy for years racking up a lengthy list of scandals. Among other things, this includes felony securities fraud charges, as well as an effort by members of his own party to impeach him and remove him from office. A few years ago, some conservative lawyers who worked for Paxton accused him of bribery and abuse of office. The GOP-led Texas House looked into the evidence and voted to impeach Paxton, but the GOP state Senate then declined to convict him.

Democrats have been rooting for a Paxton primary win, believing his toxic reputation among the wider population might actually put Texas in play in the general election. And Republicans have been fretting about the election for the very same reason.

OK, but if Paxton is so controversial, how could he potentially be winning a primary battle against a longtime Senator?

Well, who votes in a primary? The most committed partisans. And Paxton is beloved by the MAGA base for his role as a thorn in the side of Democratic presidents. In his first two years in office, he sued the Obama administration 17 times over such issues as immigration rules, climate change, or bathroom use in schools. Then, when Joe Biden became president, Paxton stepped up the pace and unleashed a blizzard of more than 100 lawsuits in four years. Most famously, Paxton and Texas also led the charge to try to have the Supreme Court stop Biden’s 2020 election.

Turning Point Action has endorsed Paxton for the Senate, while Trump has so far conspicuously refused to endorse Cornyn. So, yes, the MAGA base loves Paxton, despite his unpopularity among much of the rest of the electorate.

Among Democrats, meanwhile, you’d think the party might be jumping for joy, knowing that Paxton might actually be the party’s fall opponent. Right? Except that Democratic voters are in the midst of their own battle between two wings of their party.

Here, the two main candidates are Rep. Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico.

• Crockett, a U.S. congresswoman, has been described as a left-wing “firebrand” and a bomb-thrower who practices a no-holds-barred style of political combat. After announcing her Senate campaign, she released a video of herself staring defiantly into the camera while listening to audio of Trump’s criticisms of her.

• On the other hand, Talarico, a member of the Texas House of Representatives, is a Presbyterian seminarian and former public school teacher who practices a faith-based version of progressive politics. A Time reporter who watched him speak recently suggested that Talarico was that rare Democrat able to “link faith, culture, and politics together in a way that makes sense.”

In this primary race, a majority of polls have Crockett in the lead, including a University of Texas survey that had her up by 12 points. Talarico did receive a late burst of attention recently when CBS reportedly pressured Stephen Colbert to not air an interview with the Democrat, leading the late night host to put the video up on YouTube where it’s so far received about nine million views.

Interestingly, given Crockett’s apparent lead in the polls, many fellow Democrats were upset with her for getting into the race, believing that a left-wing politician with a reputation for anti-Trump combativeness would have no chance in a Texas Senate race. Said one: “She might win a primary, but she ain't winning a general in Texas." Similarly, Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic called Talarico the “closest thing Democrats have to a viable nominee” and torched the party for not seeming to care about trying to win a statewide election.

If true, it means that Democratic primary voters may be doing the exact same thing as Republicans (at least according to current polls, which could change). That is, they’re leaning toward the candidate who is the biggest fighter and the one who is most attractive to the partisan base, while eschewing the option that might appeal to a majority of other voters in the fall.

Indeed, just as Democrats are rooting for Paxton to win his primary because he might turn off independent and centrists, Republicans are similarly hoping that Crockett prevails, a scenario they believe would ensure a GOP win in the fall.

Is it the voters, or is it the system?

The scenario unfolding now in Texas is:

(a) Interesting to watch if you’re merely an observer who doesn’t care who wins. After all, you get to see both parties self-immolate.

(b) Par for the course if you’re an extreme partisan, because of course you want the most right-wing or left-wing candidate to win the primary. You’re a purist who might not care if your candidate loses in the fall, so long as your party doesn’t nominate someone you see as a centrist.

(c) Infuriating if you’re someone who just wants government to work, at least some of the time, and is tired of the fighting and the bomb-throwing and the shutdowns that mark politics today.

And this all begs the question: Is it the voters, or is it the system?

After all, the electoral structure incentivizes parties (or, more accurately, party voters) to nominate the most extreme candidates. The politicians at the most extreme right- and left- wings of their parties are those who generate the most attention and attract the most votes in primaries. And primaries are almost always low-turnout affairs. In 2022, for instance, only 17% of Texas voters cast a primary ballot. This is in part a reflection of the fact that many states don’t even allow registered independents to vote in Democratic and Republican primaries.

It wasn’t always like this, and it’s not like this in every democracy. In many other countries, the parties select the candidates and then there’s an election that allows voters to decide their favorite from among the party nominees. But the United States during the 20th century, and especially after the 1970s, went to a system that gave voters more power to select nominees through primary elections. There were reasons for this, of course, primarily a desire to reduce the power of party leaders in so-called smoke-filled rooms, but it’s also led to the system we have today.

Now, we have a structure in which we allow partisan voters in low turnout elections to choose the most extreme nominees. And then we proceed to a general election in which half of voters complain that neither candidate represents them. A Pew poll from three years ago showed 63% of Americans expressing dissatisfaction with their choice of candidates.

This is what led some states to go to open primaries (sometimes also called “jungle primaries”), where candidates of all parties compete in the same election. All voters are allowed to cast ballots, and then the top few candidates, regardless of party affiliation, go on to the general election. The belief is that this system forces candidates to appeal more to the center. The evidence shows that this might be true, but the sample size is small as only five states have some variation of this system (California, Washington, Alaska, Nebraska, and Louisiana). And, of course, most state leaders have no incentive to move to a system that opens up primaries to voters who aren’t partisans.

In any case, for the time being, this is the system we have. And unless the incentives change, given the increasing polarization of our politics, there are going to be a lot more scenarios in our future like the one unfolding in Texas right now.

Then again, the primary election is March 3 (next Tuesday). Perhaps the primary voters will surprise us and opt for the more “electable” candidates on each side. Mark your calendars and check out the results.

Photos: Cover illustration via Shutterstock. Candidate photos via Wikimedia Commons.

This is my 150th post since starting The Riel World. So I thought it’d be interesting to take a look back at some of the most-read and popular posts of the past 150.

If you’ve been here since near the beginning, this may be a nice review and (hopefully) a reminder of what you enjoy about The Riel World. Or, if you’re newer here, — welcome! — perhaps you can use this to get a better sense for this site and my work. In any case, enjoy this look back at some of what I’ve written and what’s been popular with readers.

1. Most-read posts overall

Three of my six most-read posts were about the 2024 election (see #2). That’s not surprising, as elections, and especially presidential elections, increase media engagement across the board. But what I find intriguing are the three other posts that made it into the top six but which were not about the last election:

• Why the GOP is Struggling to Agree on a Health Care Policy. I love writing about the intersection of history and current events. This does that while touching on a topic that affects all of our lives. Health care history, from Truman to Trump. Key quote:

The irony is that Republicans at one time or another proposed both an employer mandate and an individual mandate, only to then oppose these plans after they were later taken up by Democratic presidents. This set up a kind of bizarro world in which the GOP ended up labeling its own ideas as socialism once they gained support on the other side of the aisle.

• “Treading Upon a Volcano.” In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, some thoughts on political violence, the danger of jumping to conclusions, and prospects for healing a divided nation.

• The Politics of “Wicked” and the Wizard. A piece that landed at the intersection of pop culture, history, and current events. It delved into the historical and political threads running through both the movie Wicked and the original Wizard of Oz story.

2. Most popular posts about the 2024 election

• How One Insult Can Swing an Election. After a Trump rally in which a speaker controversially described Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage,” I looked at the similarities between that and the “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” drama in 1884 that outraged Irish Catholics in New York.

• Normalcy and optimism? Do you remember when Tim Walz became the Democrats’ veep candidate? This looks at the normalcy and optimism that Walz exuded, but also at why Republicans weren’t exactly unhappy with the governor’s selection.

• Choosing Hope, Facing Anguish. Some post-election musings after Trump’s 2024 presidential victory. Key quote:

Am I optimistic? Not tremendously, but I am remaining open to it. Am I worried that Trump is making politics in this country more vulgar and coarse and intolerant, perhaps beyond repair? Yes. Am I worried about the fate of American democracy? Yes. Are there legitimate reasons for people to feel anguished? Yes.

Nevertheless, if Trump fails to leave the country better, then we will all be worse off. And I refuse to root for that.

3. Other popular posts that struck a chord

These three pieces about various topics are distinctive because they rank among the top 25 most read posts and also struck a chord by generating a number of reposts or comments, whether online, on social media, or directly to me:

• Is This How America Unravels? A story about Halloween, math teachers, and tribal rage. It received reposts and comments even from some Europeans who are closely following current events in the U.S. Key quote:

Something happened in the past week that highlighted how American politics, perhaps even America itself, may be unraveling in ways that could make elections seem almost irrelevant. It was a story that started small and then unspooled in bursts of manufactured anger. Anger that put innocent lives at risk for no reason at all, aside from the tribal rage that seethes across the nation.

• An American Pope. Thoughts on the selection of the first American pope and its intersection with U.S. politics. Including some personal thoughts on spirituality, and memories of once meeting Pope John Paul II.

• Trump Jr. vs AOC in 2028? We’ll get to the 2028 presidential election soon enough. And yes, everyone assumes it will be something like J.D. Vance versus Gavin Newsom, or whatever. But these contests rarely work out the way we expect. This looks at two out-of-the-box contenders and a race that might not be as crazy as you think.

This second part of the review focuses on a few different topic areas that I write about somewhat regularly; nearly all pieces here were among the 60 most-read posts.

1. History for Today

Some of the more characteristic posts on The Riel World are my History for Today pieces, where I look at a moment in history that reverberates across time and helps illuminate something about politics today.

• What Could Donald Trump Learn from James Garfield’s Presidency? It’s popular these days to be against the government bureaucracy. And Trump seems to be on a mission to replace more civil service employees with political appointees. However:

James Garfield might tell you to be careful what you wish for. That’s because Garfield’s election to the presidency in 1880, his assassination the following year, and the trauma experienced by his vice president in relation to these events, were all linked to a controversy over the role of civil servants in a government bureaucracy. And they hold lessons for us today, nearly a century and a half later.

• Abortion politics in 2024, the 1872 election, and the first woman presidential candidate. Not many people know that the first woman presidential candidate ran in 1872. Fewer know about the unintended way in which that campaign still impacts abortion politics 150 years later.

• Burning crosses and anti-Catholicism on the 1928 campaign trail. I’ve done several pieces on nativism in U.S. politics, including this piece about when a revived KKK turned against Catholic immigrants during a decade that has many resemblances to the 2020s.

2. Explaining America

A subset of the History for Today pieces, these posts use history to explain particular topics in U.S. politics.

• Three Years that Broke American Politics. 1968. 1994. 2008. These posts cover two topics from each of these years that explain some of the ways American politics has broken down during the past few decades.

• Let’s Talk About How We Pick Presidents. We didn’t always choose presidential nominees the way we do now. This two-part series looks at how the presidential nominating process has changed dramatically over more than two centuries.

• Let’s Talk About the Electoral College. Similarly, the Electoral College didn’t always function the way it does now. Why? What’s changed? And does this system even make sense in the modern day?

3. Presidential travel pieces that also illuminate a contemporary topic

I’ve been to every presidential library and quite a few historic homes of presidents. Sometimes it’s fun to revisit one of these sites, especially when the trip can shed light on something in politics today.

• Visiting FDR’s Home, Pondering the 1930s. Visiting FDR’s home in Hyde Park, New York, and reflecting on parallels between threats to democracy then and now.

• Abraham Lincoln on Democracy. Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois, paired with some of the former president’s quotes on democracy.

• George W. Bush’s childhood home. The Midland, Texas, home of of two future presidents, along with thoughts on how today’s GOP has done an ideological backflip from the traditional Republicanism that marked the party during the Bush presidencies.

3. Essays that thread together a few topics into one theme

Sometimes, diverse topics come together into a single theme in a way that just seems to make sense when they’re threaded together.

• Barack Obama, 10 Years of “Hamilton,” and the Meaning of Hawaii’s Aloha Spirit. The aloha spirit that Barack Obama learned growing up in Hawaii, the celebration of diversity in Hamilton, and thoughts on how America has taken a turn toward tribalism in the past decade. Key quote:

Tribalism, Aloha, Obama, Hamilton. They’re all interconnected in a way. And all are reminders of how America, in the very recent past, seemed so close to adopting some version of Hawaii’s Aloha spirit and to diving into a future that was a little more tolerant, a little more accepting of diversity, a little more happy and hopeful.

• Beaches, Border Crossings, and Richard Nixon. A beach vacation in Mexico that required driving across the border, and which led to reflections on how the U.S.-Mexico border has changed since Richard Nixon casually drove across on Election Day 1960 to get some Mexican food for lunch.

• Patriots’ Day: 1775, 1849, and 2025. The battles of Concord of Lexington, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and the No Kings protests of 2025 against the Trump administration.

5. Political polarization and the American media

This seems to be a frequently popular topic of discussion. The way in which our political polarization is driven by the country’s media environment and the information bubbles in which so many people live. Some different angles on that topic:

• If a story isn’t reported by Fox News, did it really happen? This piece generated considerable discussion on social media when a friend reposted it. It looks at the starkly different media environments that Americans inhabit, and considers how different stories are reported to different audiences.

• When a Disinformation Presidency Meets an Outrage Economy. This post, in the aftermath of the Minneapolis ICE shootings, looks at the spread of disinformation as a political tactic and its impact on a country that is already fueled by outrage.

• Redefining Our Perceptions of the Media in America. A post arguing that we’re defining the media all wrong when we cleave it into conservative and liberal factions. In fact, there are at least four media interest groups: Traditional journalists who still strive for objectivity, owners of the legacy media (who often have different goals than their journalists), a very powerful MAGA media, and a somewhat less powerful progressive media.

I write about other topics, as well, which you can see if you peruse the archive. But this covers the heart of The Riel World, not only some of the main topics I write about but also some of the posts that, as I said, have most struck a chord with readers.

Now, on to the next 150!

A debate over free speech and disinformation

It’s always been easy in this country to stand strongly on the side of freedom of speech. As far as I’m concerned, you’re free to express your opinions without restriction, period. I am free to agree or disagree, to listen to you or to ignore you, but the First Amendment allows you to have and express any opinion, even if the majority of society finds it distasteful.

There is one caveat to this, which is that you shouldn’t express a desire or intent to inflict harm on another person or group. If you declare neo-Nazi beliefs, for instance, I’d vehemently disagree with you, but I’d also stand up for your constitutional right to have that opinion. If, however, you call for violence against others because of those beliefs, that’d be a red line.

Thankfully, the Supreme Court agrees, having ruled that “speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt,” but it can be deemed illegal if there is “a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence.”

So until recently it all seemed mostly cut and dry. Don’t call for violence or harm against others and you have a right to express your beliefs and to say what you will, no matter what I or someone else might think.

But then came the 2024 presidential campaign and a gray area was injected into the debate over free speech.

That is, do we have a constitutional right to disinformation? To deliberately spread not just an upsetting opinion, but demonstrably false information?

It’s an interesting question, and I want to point you to a short clip of the 2024 vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. The first minute or so is most relevant here, as the candidates debate censorship and the First Amendment right to free speech.

Vance is criticizing Walz for suggesting “there is no First Amendment right to misinformation.” And he’s defending the GOP as the true protector of democracy and the Constitution because his party will stand up for one’s freedom of speech rights to to spread alleged untruths.

This issue arose because of the COVID pandemic, when the Biden administration asked social media companies to remove information about vaccines that was false. The GOP argued, in response, that Democrats were suppressing conservative speech.

Interestingly, other countries made it illegal to spread misinformation about the COVID vaccine, on the grounds that these falsities were harming both individuals and society. In the U.S., on the other hand, the argument has been that the government shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth.

In a way, Vance is correct about a constitutional right to spread misinformation, as the Court has ruled that even lies are protected speech, with a few exceptions (i.e., fraud, perjury, defamation). Still, this seemed to me like a unusual stand to take, saying in effect that protecting misinformation, even if it kills people, means you’re the true defender of democracy.

Vance is also playing a bit of a semantic game here, as misinformation is defined as something that you might not know to be false, whereas disinformation is a more deliberate action. Someone spreading false information about vaccines online in 2021 could plausibly not know the truth, but on the other hand the 2024 Trump campaign had to know it was pushing a false story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating their neighbor’s pets (and if not, we know they were told the truth, including by that state’s Republican governor).

Vance, however, defended both the spread of vaccine misinformation online and his own campaign’s disinformation about Haitians, even when it resulted in bomb threats that closed local schools and government buildings in Ohio. Said Vance:

"If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."

In any case, that’s where the debate seemed to have ended, leaving us arguing about whether spreading false information about vaccines and Haitians were legitimate uses of our right to freedom of speech.

But then the Trump administration took office and what was once abnormal became the new norm.

Disinformation out of Minneapolis

One could probably recite a litany of examples of disinformation coming out of the current administration, but the recent clashes in Minneapolis are a perfect case study of how this works in real time and how it can be used by a political party, especially a party in power, to control a narrative.

You know the Minneapolis stories, by now.

• Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman, dropped her six-year-old child off at school and later ran into an ICE operation on a residential street. She may have been there to observe ICE, and her car ended up in the middle of the road, but she is seen on video politely waving cars past while seemingly waiting to drive away. She says to an ICE agent: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Seconds later, another agent tells her to “get out of the f**king car.” She turns to drive away instead and the first agent opens fire, shooting her three times in the face, claiming he feared for his life.

• Then, Alex Pretti, also 37, was at the scene of another ICE operation. He was in the street filming agents, then went over to help a woman who’d been forcefully pushed to the sidewalk. After that, he is pepper sprayed, tackled to the ground, and punched in the face. After an official removes a gun from his pants, two other agents fire 10 shots at him.

In the first case, the Trump administration described Ms. Good as a violent rioter and a domestic terrorist who tried “to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” The president himself said she, in fact, “viciously ran over the ICE Officer.”

In the second case, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared that Pretti had shown up at the scene with a gun and a plan “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called him “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”

Both sets of official statements were released shortly after the incidents, before any facts could credibly be established. Eventually, video from bystanders came to light, pretty easily disproving the administration’s version of events. But the Trump team reacted not by acknowledging the new evidence but rather by doubling down on its stories.

By now, it’s pretty obvious there’s a playbook in place.

• First, get ahead of the story by releasing your version of events as soon as possible.

• Make sure the MAGA media repeats your view of the situation, so you’re able to control the initial narrative.

• Then, when other evidence emerges contradicting your initial statements, double down and refuse to admit anything.

• Blame everything on the media for reporting fake news, or on the “radical left” for fomenting violence.

So now we’ve gone from debating whether individuals can post false information about COVID vaccines online to wondering whether it’s legitimate politics for a president to release false information to the public about incidents where federal agents killed U.S. citizens.

Which is kind of a slippery slope, no? Especially in our current polarized political climate.

Because once the Trump administration made its initial statements about the Minneapolis incidents, the MAGA media did fall in line behind that narrative, causing it to be picked up and echoed by loyalists. And, just as with the false story about the 2020 election being stolen, once something repeated enough it’s eventually taken as the gospel truth, no matter how many times it’s debunked. So even though the administration has started to backtrack on some of its earlier statements, the damage has been done because it’s unlikely to change what the MAGA base has come to believe about the story.

How do I know this? Because I can see it happening in real life, with people I’m connected to on social media.

When disinformation meets an outrage economy

So, for me, the real case study here is not what happened on the streets, nor what the Trump administration said about it, as these topics have been dissected endlessly. I’m more interested now in looking at what happens after the battle lines have been drawn. What happens when a disinformation presidency meets an outrage economy?

An essay in The American Interest described the incentives for outrage these days in our politics and society:

Outrage has become the defining emotional state of our era … A large and growing share of the national economy is now devoted to ensuring that we are kept in a constant state of rage and frustration.

This is intertwined with our current political moment, of course, because the Trump administration is masterful at stoking this outrage. And it’s another warning flare about threats to democracy, because disinformation in politics isn’t necessarily meant to have someone believe a lie, but rather to amplify the extremes and increase polarization. As I said, even if the initial story is debunked, the narrative and the rage don’t go away quite so easily.

I’ve scanned social media in the aftermath of these events in Minneapolis and I’ve been kind of stunned (I shouldn’t have been, I know) by the continued refusal of so many people to admit to the evidence that’s right in front of them in the form of videos. And by the way some people can so easily turn their backs on their own past arguments if it means remaining loyal to their tribe.

The following comments were all written on social media feeds that I follow, so these are not distant extremists, they’re all from people with whom I have either a direct or a second-hand connection.

1. First, in repeating facts even after they were proved untrue:

• Don’t come at law enforcement with a gun and you don’t get shot.

• If the protesters were truly peaceful, these shootings wouldn’t be happening.

Again, no one in either case came at law enforcement with a gun. And these protests have, in fact, been largely peaceful, unless you consider shouting or blowing whistles to be rioting.

2. On the topic of protesting ICE operations:

• That is the risk these rioting idiots take when they interfere with the work of Federal Agents.

• If the paid agitators would go home … none of this would be happening.

• ICE Officers … seem to be the only ones doing their jobs while Mobs are attacking them.

How, I wonder, did these same commenters feel when the protesters in the video below actually attacked police officers, rather than just blowing whistles at them?

3. On the topic of carrying a weapon in public:

• Why would a person there to peacefully protest be armed?!

• The law does not require officers to wait to be shot. This was a tragic—but lawful—use of force.

So now the Second Amendment supporters who’ve been saying the Constitution gives them the right carry guns to protect themselves against the possibility of an overzealous government now believe — what? — that this is only true for right-wing protesters?

Did these commenters believe Kyle Rittenhouse should not have been armed with an AR-15 at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020, when he became a conservative hero after killing two protesters who wanted to disarm him?

And if they really believe one shouldn’t go to a protest with a gun, what is their response to this collection of photos put together by Sarah Longwell? It shows a plethora of right-wingers armed with guns at protests across numerous states over almost a decade. One example:

4. Finally, the response to a peaceful protest at a high school near me:

I also found it interesting that, when a small group of students at a high school near me received permission from administrators to stage an anti-ICE protest (peacefully, during their own time at lunch, and in a quiet corner of the campus so as not to interfere with other students who didn’t want to participate), this was the reaction of the local MAGA community in a neighborhood forum on social media:

• They should be suspended if they want to protest.

• Ummm whhattt? Protesting against our federal law enforcement agency? Hope this makes the news (not in a good way!)

• It’s all fun and games until your child in high school is raped or murdered from an illegal.

• You wouldn’t catch me or my child at any protest because they achieve nothing and I’m not a narcissist who needs to feel superior. And long live Charlie Kirk a martyr murdered by the radical left.

The end result of disinformation

When one reads through such statements, it’s pretty apparent that disinformation has indeed sparked outrage and caused the electorate to fracture further, with each side increasingly being led to believe the opposition is the enemy.

So, is there a constitutional right to spread disinformation? Maybe, technically. But does that make it right, or moral? Is it actually something you want your president to be practicing?

And if you want to know what happens when a disinformation presidency meets an outrage economy, well, it’s this. All of the above. In these cases, the next step is often for voters who no longer know the truth to become exhausted and disengaged, leaving a vacuum that autocrats are all too happy to fill.

It’s Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday on Friday (he was born January 30, 1882), so it’s as good a time as any to take a peek into FDR’s home in Hyde Park, New York, while pondering an unsettling link between his era and our own time.

First, FDR’s home …

The Franklin Roosevelt National Historic Site houses both FDR’s home and his presidential library. The cover photo above is of his home from the front entrance. FDR was born here, in a house purchased by his father in 1867, and he lived there either part-time or full-time for much of the rest of his life, including during his presidency.

This following picture is from a side of the house, which sits on a hill and has a view overlooking the Hudson River Valley.

Here is the home’s library, where FDR sometimes hosted visiting heads of state:

FDR’s bedroom:

A sculpture of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt on the grounds near the library:

And FDR’s private study, where he often worked, read, wrote, or delivered some of his fireside chats via radio to the nation. The study is preserved within the FDR library:

Interestingly, prior to FDR many presidential papers were lost to history. Sometimes they went home with a president after he left office, or were given away, or destroyed, or occasionally donated to the Library of Congress. But as a student of history, Roosevelt determined that presidential papers should be universally preserved. So during his presidency he raised funds for a library to house his papers, and later donated the library to the nation.

At the library’s dedication in 1941, as fascism swept across Europe and the outbreak of a wider war loomed over the world, Roosevelt framed the dedication of the library as an “act of faith” in democracy.

“To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must—above all—believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future …

“It is therefore proof—if any proof is needed—that our confidence in the future of democracy has not diminished in this nation, and will not diminish.”

Speaking of democracy …

FDR’s thoughts about democracy and presidential libraries brings up the other reason I’ve been thinking about Roosevelt lately: The fact that his presidency is when the U.S. overcame some of the greatest threats to democracy in its history.

These threats were fueled in part by the duel crises of the Great Depression and World War II. When Roosevelt was first elected in 1932, for instance, the financial system was so close to the brink of collapse, and so many people were unemployed, that one FDR advisor rated the chance of imminent revolution as “about even.”1

But the dangers to American democracy went beyond even the economic depression, or the global war that would break out less than a decade later. There were real concerns during this era that democracy and capitalism as they existed at the time might not survive.

Fascist governments were then in power in Germany and Italy, while communist leaders governed Russia. Numerous Americans were attracted to one or the other of these ideologies and hoped to import them to North America. And, to be clear, these weren’t just extremists on the fringes of American politics.

1. During Roosevelt’s first term, some Wall Street financiers approached a retired general about raising troops to overthrow the government and install a fascist dictatorship. The “Wall Street Putsch” failed because General Smedley Butler instead reported the conspiracy to the FBI. This was front page news in 1934.

2. There was also a threat from left-wing autocrats, notably Huey Long, a Louisiana Senator and a former governor who’d run his state as a quasi-dictatorship. Long founded a “Share Our Wealth” movement, which called for limiting personal fortunes and redistributing wealth. He had millions of followers nationwide and many Democrats believed Long posed a threat to Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election hopes.

A 2019 article in The Atlantic noted that Long “pursued a populist agenda by aggressive means that many critics saw as autocratic and unlawful.” It compared him to a 1930s left-wing version of Donald Trump, providing “a glimpse of what could happen if a left-wing politician channeled a similar message and disregard for political mores.” Long, however, was never able to test his chances nationally, as he was assassinated in 1935 by a political enemy back home in Louisiana.

So the United States in the 1930s faced signs of rebellion from both the right and the left. What seems lost to history these days is that, as dramatic as the New Deal was in terms of policy changes, at the time it was seen by many as more of a middle ground between more revolutionary ideas. The New York Times in 1936 endorsed Roosevelt as a president who would “provide insurance against radicalism.”2

Fast forward to the present day, eight decades after Roosevelt’s death, and the United States is facing neither a depression nor a world war. And yet, a very particular sort of right-wing movement has roared back to life, dredging up memories of the fascist Wall Street Putsch of the 1930s, the nativists who upended U.S. politics in the 1920s, and the racial conservatives who governed the South in the 1800s.

This sentiment has always bubbled beneath the surface of U.S. politics but now it’s managed to gain more power than at any other time in the nation’s history, aside from in the 19th century post-Civil War South. Those Southerners erected a government and a society controlled by whites and in which Blacks were shut out of democracy for another century, until the 1960s. Today’s autocratic nationalists, meanwhile, are striving to cleanse the nation of as many immigrants as possible.

• They’ve created within the Department of Homeland Security what is essentially a national anti-immigrant police force, with a budget larger than the militaries of many nations (ICE is now not only the country’s largest law enforcement agency but would rank as the 15th highest funded military in the world).

• The government was given permission by conservatives on the Supreme Court (which overturned lower court rulings) to use racial profiling to detain individuals for no reason other than the color of their skin.

• And the Trump administration itself has suggested that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” for their actions.

It’s these policies that led to the crisis we’ve all been following in Minneapolis of late.

So today, as we ponder the fights against autocracy and for human rights, both now and in FDR’s day, we might reflect on this quote, which is carved into the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. And (who knows?) this may well have been written at FDR’s desk back in his private study in Hyde Park.

"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."

This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Read QUEST FOR THE PRESIDENCY

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Photos: All photos (except for the one from Wikimedia Commons) are by Bob Riel.