This afternoon, maybe even as you read this, I will be in a long surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital to remove a nasty high-grade malignant tumor from my ethmoid sinus. It is a distant cousin of the cancer blob I had cut out in 2020, after an unnecessary Covid test speared loose a hunk of tumor I did not know was there. The pandemic saved my life once, and it put me in contact with the crackerjack medical team at the world’s best otolaryngology unit that will save it again.

Sinus tumors are rare – though I prefer the term “exceptional” as only hundreds of people a year battle these bastards. After what will be a rough post-surgery recovery, I will get radiation and maybe a lagniappe of chemotherapy. But I will not be savoring my amazing Italian wine collection. After my 2020 surgery, I lost my sense of smell for about six months, and my taste overall for a little less than that. My olfactory receptors were removed from my left nostril, but I started with a bloodhound’s nose so half of that was plenty to keep. Wine was still complex and wonderful as soon as I recovered from that surgery’s trauma. But not this time, not with this surgical plan.

The question I am asking, and also suggesting for you, is what other wine did I store and not drink?

What other wine can I drink when this is all done?

Before I knew cancer was back, I had a conversation last month with someone about getting over it the first time. I told her, as I have often said, “you cannot un-hear that your body is trying to kill you.” She immediately asked me: “what did you change?”

I gave two answers, one applied to work and one to home.

First, I said cancer made me adopt a professional policy of only giving the same good advice twice. The younger version of me would lay awake at night grinding on how I might get clients over the hump on a strategic decision they were resisting. Cancer in 2020 made me a more disciplined advisor. Sen. Dave McCormick, whose winning campaign I helped guide in 2024, often says he is glad he “got the post-cancer Brad.” As a former CEO and Army officer who has made a career of perfecting leadership, he could see that I had developed perspective on how to sit on a running horse, in jockey terms, and dig in my heels only, and exactly, when it was critical.

On the personal side, I told my friend that enduring cancer in 2020 made me put my kids’ big moments at the top of my priority list. The first time I left the house after surgery, too early of course, was to coach my daughter’s rec softball team. It was excruciating and exhilarating at the same time. Then, over her four years in high school, I missed exactly one re-scheduled, rained-out prep game to my knowledge, and I have yet to miss my son playing football - though this Friday night’s scrimmage is in doubt. There was one freshman baseball game, with one at-bat, up Interstate 270 at rush-hour that I could not reach. I made it to the recitals, the voice contests, the awards ceremonies, the parent chapels and school plays. I made them all, save one where she had just four lines. I skipped work meetings that were billed as essential. I rebooked CNN hits. I even ducked out on TV commercial shoots when I could not schedule them around the ball games and plays. I kept the main thing the main thing, and still do. Thank goodness cancer found me right before my kids hit the high school phase of important activities instead of finding me afterward, because I could have easily screwed this up based on my prior professional trajectory.

But I did still store up the wine.

My collection is mostly Barolo, the King of Italian wine, though there are some Barabaresco bottles, some California strays, and a handful of cheap but complicated Sangrantino vintages from Umbria that few Americans have discovered yet. I got hooked on single-cru wines, meaning they are made with grapes grown on the same small patch of ground, with the same sunlight. Over time I have listed toward the steeper crus that surround the village of Serralunga D’alba, deciding that the Prapo cru is the best, though the higher-elevation Monvigliero cru is also a charm and Lazzarito a treat.

Art Credit: brunolo.nl

I have long-ish Barolo verticals by G.D. Vajra, my favorite producer, in the delicate Bricco Delle Viole and the easy-drinking Ravera crus, bottles of which I bought my surgeon and his assistant the week after my 2020 tumor resection, with a promise we would all drink them simultaneously when I hit the five-year-all-clear mark that cancer patients universally point toward.

That celebration happened last fall, and statistically speaking, I should not be fighting the same tumor in Year Six. But tumors do not keep calendars. Now I must undergo a medical path that will certainly obliterate my ability to savor Italian wine but save my life in the process. It is a fair trade that I am willing to make.

The imminent loss of my ability to appreciate this stored asset is making me contemplate what else I under-savored over the last six years.

One thing is vacations. Our family did not take one this year; we just did not carve out the time. My wife and I also punted our 25^th Anniversary trip for the third year in a row. We now intend to take it in December after radiation, paired up with a speech I am giving. But I am a little ticked off we have not done it three times, instead of skipping it three times. Early in our marriage we took a great anniversary weekend every year and they are life highlights for me; we are highly compatible in travel habits and those trips bring out our beautiful integration. We fly by the seat of our pants, having the same high tolerance for uncertainty. We once went to Europe with exactly nothing planned for the last half of our itinerary until after we were on the continent. The resulting spontaneous side trip to Chamonix, hiking and then sitting poolside staring up at Mont Blanc with no agenda, was the unexpected dead-stop recharge we needed.

After this current crap is over, she and I will take more trips. Spending time with her, doing whatever she wants, has to be elevated as an aspiration on my post-cancer agenda. We have spent 19 years doing a darn good job of child-rearing together and I think the post-parenting phase of “us” also will rock.

I also intend to read more books. Substack has been a great addition to my life because it took over some of my X doom scrolling, but it also has been a parasite sucking away time I formerly devoted to literature. That needs to be rectified, as I am only halfway through Cormac McCarthy’s library and that is unacceptable progress for a 56-year old East Tennessean. Reading books overall has cratered in our society, so I am not alone in that, but I can do my part.

I volunteered more after cancer for charity and church initiatives I care about – but some of that may be attributable to aging as much as surviving. All of us should inventory our give-back quotient as we hit our peak executive years when we can do the most good. Stacking cans at the food bank is great but coming up with a plan to get weekly milk deliveries is more impactful.

Showing up has always been a good trait of mine – friends’ funerals, moving days, performances have always hit my calendar – but I will probably up my percentage closer to 100 after this. Church services in general have been a bigger deal in my life since 2020 – my faith did not need an accelerant, but my worship discipline did. I recommend it. Cancer probably made me a little bolder in publicly professing my own faith – or a little less self-conscious about acknowledging it, even if it was live on CNN. I recommend that, too, and I predict I will be even more uninhibited now.

Live music is something I probably did not expect to elevate based on a medical diagnosis, but it will happen this time. Some of the highlights of my middle age have been great concerts. A show on a New York City rooftop this summer with my wife and kids and the Turnpike Troubadours, my favorite band, was the single best two hours of 2026 for me. The next Turnpike show in Richmond in October should coincide with commencement of my radiation and I hope to make that happen. Since my musical daughter loves shows too, and my son and I share a genre taste, I will pro-actively put big shows in concrete on the calendar, even if we must travel to get there.

The next few days will be a rough ride after at least seven hours of surgery - followed by a couple miserable weeks on the couch with my face full of surgical packing as I taper pain meds. I will binge shows on all the streaming platforms and grumble that college football is not yet here while staring down my fat but snuggly dog. Together, he and I will make a longer mental list of things I intend to do with the next, hopefully long, tranche of borrowed time God has given me.

You can make that kind of list, too, without the anesthesia and face-packing I will get, as all of us are on borrowed tranches of God-given time whether we learn that from a radiologist or not.

Drink the wine.

Make the game.

See the show.

Tell the people you love that you love them, out loud.

Pray a little more - and throw in a prayer for your favorite columnist.

Substitutions Allowed: I have not always made my Monday morning deadline to publish The What For, but I have not missed a publication week since it started in April 2025. For the next two weeks, I will have guest columnists pulling the rope for me, starting with comedian Paul Ollinger of . His column is an offshoot of his great podcast, for which I sat down last year as a guest. Paul and I are old college pals, but do not hold that against him. You can check out my column triggered by my sit-down on Paul’s podcast and listen to our chat at WHEN ARE YOU THE HAPPIEST?

More Emoting: Almost a year ago, as I closed in on the five-year-post-tumor mark, I expressed some of these same principles in a prior column. You might enjoy them from that celebratory perch better than this more anxious one. Check out MINUTES TO MEMORIES.

The Cellar: Not every column I write spills my guts about my hopes and fears, but some do. You can skip over those and find political analysis or front porch pith on our associational situation in this great land, with over 100 columns on the website. You also might re-read OLD DOGS AND OLD MEN, my award-winning, and prescient, fret from a year ago about my health and my dog’s. We had to say goodbye to Bonnie, the 12 year old Boston, on Friday, just to add one more thing to cry over this week as her battle with brain cancer got to be too much to continue. Last year, before she or I was diagnosed, I wrote:

“The curse of having dogs is that we out-live them. The blessing might be that they age fast enough to escort us through the phases of our own lives we know are hard upon us.”

PHOTO CREDIT: gdvajral.it

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Before the Democratic Socialists of America crash the comments section and shut down this site, let me clarify that Epcot’s $150 admission price and the cost of getting to Florida does filter out the lowest economic strata in our country, so Disney’s crowd is statistically representative of the people in America who can afford it. Can we at least start there?

Ethnic diversity abounds at Epcot Center. Black, white, Latino, Muslim, Jewish, Christian – you will find them all. And the tropical temperatures at Disney require enough exposed skin to reveal that the one thing that unites Americans at this particular divided time in our culture is an affinity for tattoos. I love to gamble, and I think there’s a pari-mutuel game waiting to be staged at the gates of Disney gambling on the percentage of park entrants in a particular hour who do not have tattoos. I am pegging the opening line for the over/under at 15 percent.

Physical limitations are not a great divide at Disney, as the park does a great job accommodating wheelchairs, canes, and other mobility devices. Because a trip to the Happiest Place on Earth is a multi-generational bucket list item, plenty of older people with physical challenges make the hard effort to do the parks, and the company makes it possible.

Walt Disney World’s role as a gathering place for Americans is a great example of our country’s prioritization of private spaces. We pour big after-tax money into our locations for gathering, large and small. Next week, a contractor will rip up my back yard and install a large patio for year-round socializing – something unheard of in Europe, even for people with more money than I have, but ubiquitous in America’s suburbs.

Drive through the upper-middle income housing tracts that ring cities like Nashville or Charlotte or Kansas City this November on a Sunday afternoon and you would find house after house with gatherings in an indoor-outdoor space, equipped with a Blackstone griddle and a flat screen TV for watching the National Football League. Americans assemble, in packs of eight and ten, with seven-layer-dip and a six-pack of beer as a hostess gift, to watch our beloved gladiators.

In most of the rest of the world, they do their football watching differently, in very public spaces and larger groups. I was in Jerusalem on July 19 for the World Cup Final and watched it outdoors, in a public plaza with about 300 strangers buying drinks from a beer stand and sitting in chars they brought themselves. The Arab youths waved flags and loudly rooted on Spain – whose government has aggressively adopted the Palestinian political cause – while the Jewish crowd mostly rooted for Argentina. That group was as diverse as the mass I found at Epcot, with ultra-Orthodox young men sporting peyot, or side-locks, sitting next to clusters of hijab-wearing women and yuppies wearing replica soccer jerseys emblazoned with Messi’s name and number.

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Anyone who has traveled Europe outside the touristy downtowns of its major cities knows that the piazza, or plaza or platz, or kikar of a village is the hub of evening activity. People come to meet up, hang out, or to just kill time. Some have argued that Europe’s more collectivist ethos makes this commons more natural, and they might be onto something. The relaxed and pointless gathering of people probably has a lubricating social effect and literally establishes common ground, the metaphor for what we are suddenly missing in America politically.

It occurred to me as I watched the Cup final that if common ground could be had in Jerusalem, literally the most polarized city in the world, where the debate over who owns what is ancient and unsettled and the subject of rocket fire several nights a week, then we can accomplish it here. The fact that I, a card-carrying American Exceptionalist, is saying anything in Europe is better should be flagged, if not reported to the authorities.

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In 2016, Hillary’s presidential campaign was an overt, and brain-dead, appeal to gender. Signs and stickers bore the simple slogan: “I’m with her.” Her election night party – expected to be a victory party – was held under the massive glass ceiling of the Javits Convention Center in New York, metaphor at the ready. The voters rejected the cartoon appeal, and they should have, as like so many other things that campaign tried, it insulted all our intelligence.

Clinton’s Senate campaigns in New York had been far more substantive and voters rewarded her for them. But Hillary’s political career is hard to separate from her cohort’s gender-first politics. Her debut in national politics came in 1992, when she and her husband Bill campaigned as a “two for one” co-ticket, and her Democratic Party made a push in the same year to elect female Senators. Journalists dubbed it “The Year of the Woman” as the Senate’s female contingent went from 2 to 6, and the number of women in the House zoomed from 30 to 48.

Emily’s List – an acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast (it makes the dough rise)” – emerged in 1992 as a national political force to bootstrap female candidates who did not have strong local fundraising networks. It worked. The group claims its impact quadrupled in that one election, pushing it past the $10 million mark. Today, it raises six times that amount and is a force in any Democratic primary it chooses.

But women come from both parties, and the liberals elevated by Emily’s List in 1992 were not the only women crashing Congress. Republicans added two women Senators from Maine in the next two cycles, and one of them, Sen. Susan Collins persists there to this day. By the time Hillary lost to Donald Trump in 2016, there were 21 women in the Senate – more than a ten-fold increase over 25 years.

Collins’ ongoing re-election bid in Maine is a key piece of my theory that The HiIllary Era of American campaigns is over. Until recently, Collins’ opponent was Graham Platner, a crass jerk credibly accused of abuse by past girlfriends and who maintained an account on a tech platform cops say is frequented by sex predators. By all rights, the #MeToo movement, and powerful pro-women political groups like Emily’s List, should have pulled out all the stops against Platner. Instead the group issued a harsh statement about him, endorsed his primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, and then let her run out of money two months before the primary. Raising money is what Emily’s List does; when it lets its candidates go broke, we should take note.

The most prominent liberal woman in the Senate today, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), unapologetically boosted Platner, calling him “my kind of man,” even as he ran against Mills and Collins, a pro-choice Senator who voted to confirm all three liberal women sitting on the Supreme Court today. Warren’s push of Platner against pro-choice women of her own generational cohort told us gender is well down the list for her. She may be doing more to end gender politics than anyone, which is rich.

In today’s nationally-watched Michigan Senate primary, the Emily’s List’s candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens, is expected to lose big to Abdul El-Sayed, who has Warren’s backing.

Emily’s List also lost in the Texas Senate primary in March, when firebrand Rep. Jasmine Crockett was bested by mousy male James Talarico. In the 1990s, the Democratic women in the Senate campaigned together for other women. Not anymore. Warren and all but one of the Senate’s Democratic women left Crockett to fend for herself in that race, and she fell just six points short.

If Stevens loses tonight in Michigan, the only Democratic woman Senate challenger remaining on this year’s map will be Mary Peltola in Alaska.

Otherwise, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, chaired by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, an architect of the #MeToo movement, will be using its money to try and reduce female representation in the Senate. Collins, Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL), Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) and Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) and Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY), nominees in open female-held seats, will all be targets for defeat by male candidates backed by Gillibrand and the erstwhile “party of women.”

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Emily’s List will not be helping any of those Republican women fend off their male opponents, either.

If the most prominent female Senator is working overtime to thwart female candidates in Democratic primaries, and the female Senator with the party’s purse is spending money to help men beat women, and the richest women’s political committee stands down, do we really have a credible battle of the sexes in the upper chamber anymore?

Gender splits definitely still exist in elections. As a CNN commentator, I was peppered throughout October of 2024 on news shows about “the gender gap” and asked what my party was going to do to solve it. In the end, the gender gap helped elect Trump, who got 55 percent of the male vote compared to Kamala Harris’s 53 percent of the female vote. Journalists report “the gender gap” as a failure of Republicans to attract female votes but rarely talk about it in reverse. It is just a math problem – and not as relevant a math problem as the marriage gap.

Married women often vote more like married men than like unmarried women. Harris carried unmarried voters by 13 points but lost married voters by 14 to Trump. Unmarried men, too, vote further left than married men – splitting their votes almost evenly in 2024. Taking on mortgages, tax bills, and child rearing, it turns out, are more relevant to maturing voters than chromosomes are.

All pure political movements morph as they age into emptier quests to alloy for raw power. The crusade to elevate women into the Senate has devolved, too, to just a crude cudgel wielded only when convenient to help Democrats in November. Perhaps next we can get everyone to admit it.

The Big Prize: The National Society Of Newspaper Columnists recognized me last month as the 2nd Place finisher in the Lifestyles category of its annual column contest. The winning entry paired OLD DOGS AND OLD MEN, a story that has become more real since I penned it, and TAPPING OUT. You might peek back at both of them. It is a real honor to be tabbed in the same contest that has elevated columnists I grew up revering like Sam Venable and Roger Ebert, and current stars like Rick Telander and Jason Gay.

Breaking Bread: Last week’s column COME TO THE TABLE struck a nerve, and I have enjoyed your comments back to me about your own family table traditions. I also want to use the piece to plug the great artwork of the Grushovenkos, a married couple in Greenville, SC whose paintings I have come to love. Their oil-on-mason-board piece ENOUGH TO SHARE is one of my prized possessions.

All The Columns: You can find every column I have written since last April here at The What For website. Let me know if you dig up something that strikes your fancy. It is never too late to smash that “like” button or “restack” a winner on the Substack app.

A teenaged vegetarian lives in my house who I love more than anything besides her brother, and this week she called me to account for my incessant grumbling about her dietary dissent.

“Why are you still mad about this after this many years?”

It was a fair protest and it forced me to dig under my petulance.

Cooking has always been a love language for me, though I am not as good at it as my mother was. I thumb through cookbooks for inspiration, have an Instagram feed full of recipes, and take pride in being good at cooking a few hard things and several easy ones that satisfy my clan. But it is not the slicing or the sauteing or even the grill temperature tweaking that stokes my endorphins. It is the passing of plates and the sharing of sustenance and opinions at the table that feeds me.

The societal value of the shared meal is not a novel concept. Christianity’s most sacred ritual is moored to it. The sermon at my church each week ends with an admonition to “come to the table” and our symbolic sharing of a cup and loaf binds our community together not just with each other but with 21 centuries worth of pilgrims before us.

This was on my mind a week ago today as I sat down to eat with a group of fellow travelers in Israel at Tishreen, a faded limestone café with a red and white canvas awning in the Latin Quarter of Nazareth that looks old enough to have been a watering hole for the crusaders.

The tabbouleh, labneh, and Fattoush salad were on the table before we arrived. Our group did not wait for the server to appear to start passing them around and tearing off pieces of pita for the smearing, with conversation clamor to go with it. We had spent nearly a week trekking around Israel by then and especially at mealtime, we had become a unit.

Maybe it took lunching in Jesus’ hometown – which his earthly incarnation would not recognize, as his tradesmen’s bedroom village to the massive Roman construction project at nearby Sepphoris has now grown into a city of 75,000 Muslims and Christians in the world’s only Jewish state – to make the connection in my mind.

Famed food writer Michael Pollan says the sharing of meal is not just suited to religions, but to fostering free society.

“the family meal is very important. It’s the nursery of democracy. I mean, it really is. I mean, it’s where we learn and where we teach our children how to share, how to take turns, how to argue without offending, how to learn about the events of the day. I mean, I learned all this at the table.”

The shared table is also where we learn community. My favorite painting in our house is called “Enough to Share” by Signe and Genna Grushovenko and it depicts a group of country folk in the 1970s or 1980s gathered around makeshift tables outdoors at a covered-dish supper. It could easily be depicting an event at my great grandmother’s house in Appalachia. Another painting of theirs in the same vein called Grace evokes the time-honored Southern tradition of “dinner on the grounds” after worship services at church, a foundational element of my childhood at the Pine Ridge Baptist Church in Sugar Grove Valley of East Tennessee.

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Soil, land, and the rights to it have driven human polity since there have been humans. Who owns what dirt and what rights come with that?

Dave Weigel of Semafor wrote this week about the obsession Democrats have had with land acknowledgement statements, verbalized at public campaign events since the 2020 freak out that mutated the party’s DNA toward a permanent oppression template. Weigel notes that even Page Cognetti, the Mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, engages in this silliness. Cognetti is running for Congress in one of the Democrat’s top target congressional races this year, a swing seat in a region with about as many graduate degrees as a honky tonk. Swing voters are down on Trump but scared of lefty extremism. Land acknowledgement hooey is clearly terrible politics for Cognetti but she does it anyway -- because dirt matters to liberals.

Dirt does not matter to American lefties when it comes to Israel, of course. The fact that the Jews have called the Kidron Valley home for 5,000 years does not mean they are entitled to even stay in a VRBO in the eastern precincts of Jerusalem, much less have a temple there, under the prevailing DSA screeds. And a land acknowledgement statement from these kooks for Israelis is out of the question.

Dirt also matters to liberals when it comes to birthright citizenship, an issue on which I disagree with President Trump. If a pregnant woman gets her feet onto United States soil before she gives birth, her baby is undeniably American according to Democrats who would shiver at the notion of admitting she is undeniably a woman.

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Vice President J.D. Vance, who argues against birthright citizenship, and also contests the notion that America is really an idea more than a tribe, believes dirt is important, provided it is the same dirt your grandparents have shared with you. As the sixth generation raised on the same piece of property, I get that attachment to family land, but I am more attached to the premise of the Declaration of Independence’s preamble.

It is possible the President will spend much of the fall campaign arguing about birthright citizenship. I think that tactic is a risk for him because it brings out the crazies and jeopardizes his vital progress cultivating a new Republican voting bloc among hard-working aspirational Latinos. But an election-dominating debate in that policy quadrant is also a sucker bet for Democrats, who always find a way lose immigration debates, and sometimes on purpose. Everybody has political risk.

A smarter play by the President would be to argue about dirt with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is trying to become the face of the national Democratic Party, a pedestal Republicans should help him achieve, in spite of his talent.

Mamdani’s ideas about dirt are radical for our country – he just put a million apartments into rent control, exerting government control over the ownership of the dirt on which they sit. Republicans would much prefer to fight the affordability issue on the two parties’ differing ideas about dirt than we would on the price of gasoline, at least at the current time. As much of a sugar high as rent control offers to the Democrats’ Gen-Z and Millennial base, the economic science of it is that it drives up prices for everyone else and stifles construction of new housing that could offer natural supply-based price relief.

Mamdani’s open socialism, though fast becoming fashionable In Democratic primaries, is anathema to the center of American politics because of the frontier ethos in our national civic DNA. People came to our shores to work dirt that they own, not work it for feudal overlords, and all of socialism is perpendicular to that fundamental notion. Savvy Democratic thinkers know this urge toward the far left is a strategic cul-de-sac, but they are failing thus far to slow down the stampede. They are failing because impulse toward collectivism is at the heart of liberal theory on domestic policy dating back to the New Deal realignment of a hundred years ago.

We see it in bike lanes and imminent domain fights in local elections and in offshore drilling moratorium debates in Congress. Once one decides the majority’s objectives trump private property rights, the spiral toward confiscation for any deemed public good is inevitable. I am confident our frontier ethos will dominant those fights the bigger they get. Even as our politics realigns and the GOP’s fealty to laissez faire economic policy blurs, we would be wise as Republicans to let the Democrats drag us into a dirt fight.

M is for Michigan: The hottest race in America this summer is the Michigan Democratic primary, where Chuck Schumer and every Democrat in Washington who understands politics is trying to stop Abdul El-Sayed from becoming the party’s standard-bearer in a crucial open senate race, over the objections of dumber political minds like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and their acolytes in the Senate’s far left wing. Check out THE M STATES for more. No matter who wins this primary, the losers will not get over it.

The Contagion: Michigan’s primary is just the latest outcropping of the Civil War in the Democratic Party radicalized by losing to Trump, again, in 2024. Check out CRAZY IS CONTAGIOUS for a bigger lens look.

The Vault: Every column, from every week, dating back to April 2025 is on The What For website. Have a look!

Graham has been one of the chamber’s most effective dealmakers, and deals are the coin of the realm with a rulebook that makes every Senator a king, able to block progress on almost anything single handedly. The place only works through compromises large and small. President Donald Trump told CNN Sunday morning:

“If I had a big problem with a certain Democrat he could work it out and that’s something no other Republican could do.”

That does not mean Graham just moved the Democrats in question – it also meant he moved Trump, until he got them both to a place where they were equally unsatisfied and thereby able to acquiesce if not agree. Graham was good at it because he tried to be good at it, and he traded political capital back home for the privilege. His footsie with Democrats on thorny issues like immigration meant he always drew credible primary opponents in right wing South Carolina; this year won an acceptable but unimpressive 59 percent from Republicans as he sought his fifth Senate term.

Find me any other Senator who willingly and constantly irritates his own electorate short term to achieve what he thinks is right for the nation. You will not. Even if his assessments of the national interest were imperfect - and they were - you have to admire his wagers.

In death, Graham is being hailed on cable news for his nonstop shuttle diplomacy, doing the hard work to keep America engaged in defending the Western premise, whether that meant pushing Republicans to stay on the side of Ukraine or tent-poling the bipartisan support for Israel and NATO. Democrats and internationalist Republicans who fault the dovish J.D. Vance wing of the GOP, and wring their hands over any critique of our feckless European allies, should be offering the highest eulogies for Graham. He did not rake Trump on foreign policy; he moved Trump on foreign policy. And the doing is so much more important than the talking.

Their unlikely friendship has brought scorn on Graham from too many in the middle and the left, when it should have brought accolades. Graham had been one of Trump’s sharpest critics as a longshot contender for President in 2016, to which Trump said:

“He was tough and smart and that’s why I got to know him…He was tough and nasty but I was nasty, too.”

It is a testament to both men’s flexibility that they got over their row, and any sane person would deduce Trump has been a better president because of it; Trump himself does.

This globe-trotting and dogged commitment Graham had to projecting American power abroad for good was vital. But that was just one of the South Carolinian’s twin missions, and maybe the more replaceable of the two.

It is not hard to see Sen. Dave McCormick or Sen. Tom Cotton assuming Graham’s role in foreign policy. Both share his understanding of America as the greatest force for good in the planet’s history, and both have the bandwidth to orchestrate complicated international maneuvers. It is harder to conclude which Senator will take Graham’s mediating place in the Senate’s “advise and consent” role in judicial nominations.

Graham took the old-fashioned position that Supreme Court nominees who were qualified were entitled to his open mind in their confirmations. That led him to vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010. Both had been rated “well qualified” by a unanimous vote of the American Bar Association’s standing committee on the federal judiciary – which Graham took as “the gold standard.”

But then Democrats broke everything.

In 2018, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats orchestrated an unethical ambush of another nominee unanimously rated “well qualified” by the ABA, Brett Kavanaugh, cooking up a sketchy allegation of teenage misconduct and trotting it out at the last minute in an attempt to sink the nomination. Graham did not let them get away with it. His fiery Senate speech holding the committee’s Democrats and Democratic staff accountable for their chicanery made him a legend among conservatives. In eulogizing Graham today on CNN, Trump called the speech “a top ten, maybe top five moment in the history of the senate” and most of us on the right agree with him.

Graham, who had the moral high ground of years of good faith cooperation, pulled back the curtain and revealed that the Democrats had been holding back their flimsy allegation against Kavanaugh for months, and had recommended lawyers to his accuser, without divulging it to the nominee or Republicans on the committee. His speech still rings in our ears:

“If you wanted a FBI investigation, you could have come to us. What you want to do is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020. You’ve said that, not me….When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said hello because I voted for them. I would never do to them what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics. And if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to this guy.”

The next confirmation for a Justice, whether it comes because Sam Alito’s wife decides she wants to live her golden years un-tortured by online idiots, or because actuarial tables catch up with Clarence Thomas, or diabetes gets Sonia Sotomayor, will certainly be a bigger sham than the Kavanaugh charade, and as such could end up one of America’s ugliest episodes. Outside or inside the committee, I am not sure who will assume Graham’s role trying to bridge the divide.

The ABA has already signaled it will no longer be a bipartisan voice of reason. It became a willing co-conspirator with the lefty’s trickery on Kavanaugh, finding a way to wink at its own recommendation of him, then letting a left-wing minority of its committee soft-pedal the ABA’s recommendation of Amy Coney Barrett despite a sterling record.

As an ideologue, I do not think it always appropriate to vote for the other side’s ideological nominees, but I accept that a Senate with some aisle-crossers is more functional than one without.

With Graham’s death, a maximum of six members of next year’s 100 Senators will have ever crossed the aisle on a Supreme Court nomination, even once. The Committee where bench nominees are vetted is in worse shape. Graham’s death leaves the Judiciary Committee with just one member in either party who has ever voted to confirm a Supreme Court nominee of the opposite party: Chairman Chuck Grassley, but he turns 93 this fall.

Sen. John Cornyn and Sen. Thom Tillis, both deal-makers, will leave the committee and the body this year. Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee are next in seniority but both are polarizing. Democrats will put Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in charge on their side, and he has a long history of weaponizing his office for partisan baloney. Sen. Amy Klobuchar is next behind him in seniority but she, too, is likely to be gone to the Minnesota Governor’s office. The future is more partisan.

If you hate Washington being a partisan war zone, mourn Lindsey Graham. If you think America should defend freedom and the West in foreign war zones, mourn Lindsey Graham. If you are neither of these, or are, but remain disinclined to mourn Lindsey Graham due to your own syndromes, stay quiet while the rest of us do.

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Primary Problems: The real show in this year’s elections is not whatever happens in November; it’s the ongoing hostile takeover of the Democratic Party by lunatics. At least Chuck Schumer is fighting back, which is more than you can say for Hakeem Jeffries. My column last week details the fight in THE M STATES.

Supreme Function: The one body of our government currently performing at its highest level, maybe ever, is the U.S. Supreme Court. The raft of decisions issued at the end of the current term last week managed to leave neither partisan side happy overall - and that is a sure sign of the court’s deliberativeness. I wrote an ode last year to The Kavanaugh/Barrett Majority and it is worth a look back at LET YOUR EARS OPEN YOUR EYES.

The Cabinet: We are coming up on 16 months of The What For, and chances are you have missed a few columns that are all posted at the website. As a general rule, I publish a new column each Monday morning at 7:16 am, but sometimes I go early due to breaking news - like this column - and other times I am a day or so late, but mostly you can get fresh pith with your coffee each Monday morning, so sign up today.

Photo Credit: LindseyGraham.com

Hundreds of headlines have focused on the failed repairs to The Reflecting Pool, a project that has now bedeviled multiple administrations, or physical additions to the White House unauthorized by Congress, also a fixture across multiple administrations. But not near enough ink is being spilled over the philosophical bloodletting in Senate primaries waged in Minnesota, Massachusetts and Michigan.

In all three races, candidates who in any other year would be deemed plenty liberal, if not too liberal, are fighting for their political lives and trailing in the polls.

When these three primaries are over in August, we will be able to add their results to the butt-kicking Graham Platner applied to Gov. Janet Mills in Maine – also an M State – and project idea of what kind of Democrat will get as a presidential nominee in 2028.

Of the three August races, the Wolverine State’s contest is the only one to crack the Beltway consciousness, as anti-Israel radical Abdul El-Sayed is the front-runner for the nomination in the country’s most closely contested open Senate seat against Rep. Haley Stevens, the liberal House member who is the choice of the DC consultant class.

The Washington insiders see this race as so important they just squeezed a third competitor, State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who was arguably the hardest Democrat to beat in a general election, out of the field. They are desperate to avoid having a likely loser in El-Sayed dragging down the ticket in what is now one of America’s major political battleground states.

In Massachusetts, Rep. Seth Moulton, a pragmatic liberal who has been willing to call out the stupidity of the activist left occasionally, is challenging the old orthodox lefty Sen. Ed Markey, who has the backing of Bernie Sanders.

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Until super-intelligence solves the aging dilemma, we can assert with reasonable confidence that almost all Americans get to remember just two of our country’s major birthdays, and tomorrow we have one, the semi-quincentennial of the republic.

News coverage of this event is drenched in partisan animosity, a ledger of who hates Donald Trump and why, which is to say it is no different than media coverage of every other piece of information, as our platform overlords seek to maximize rage clicks for advertising cash. We should not waste our brain space on that temporal shortcoming of our information economy and instead ponder where our country is, and is heading, apart from the personalities currently animating its politics.

In 1976, I was a first grader, swept up in the unifying energy of the bicentennial. I collected commemorative stamps and coins and swag my traveling bachelor uncle brought back from the big bash in Philadelphia. I went into the voting booth that fall for the first time with my dad – he told me he had to vote for Gerald Ford to cancel out mom’s vote for our fellow Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter. The race was my first exposure to the meanness of politics, too. I specifically remember a Newsweek cartoon that summer depicting a big elephant named Ford kicking a little elephant named Reagan and laughing at it. My mother admonished me to not find amusement in others’ defeats – a foreshadowing of her disapproval of the negative campaign ads that have been a staple of my professional life.

My dad was building a house that year – literally, with his own hammer on weekends – and grappling with 9 percent mortgage rates on every chunk he borrowed. Considerably higher than today’s 6 percent rates, the optimism it took for him to take that leap of faith seems improbable by anyone in this era. My mom was grinding through college at night while teaching school by day, putting the two of them on the lip of the middle class, kicking their legs and digging in their elbows to pull out of the blue-collar, house-trailer origin of their marriage.

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In 1926, my grandfather Ben Hendrickson was born as America celebrated its 150^th birthday. He may not have known much about it even if he had been older, as electricfication was still a decade away from the hills and hollers of the Tennessee Valley. Over the next few years, his subsistence farm family would see their peach orchard permanently wiped out by brown rot and blight, forcing them to sell the only crop on their land that required no luck at all – trees. They would spend the next decade denuding our hills but escaping the Depression with our DNA intact, a tradeoff I find reasonable. While there was little reason for my grandaddy or his siblings to be optimistic in 1926, they stood on the edge of modernity and would all end their lives living in air-conditioned bedrooms they did not have to share, flying jet airplanes to see grandchildren in exciting places – luxuries unimaginable to dirt farmers at the 150^th.

In 1876, my great-great grandfather Benjamin Hendrickson was a 14-year-old who had certainly dropped out of school by that point, as no one in my family went to high school for even a day until my parents’ generation. He likely had a hard life in the isolation of Appalachia and would have just buried his 31-year-old mother the year before. Square in the middle of a three-generation stretch of my ancestors who were born and died on the same piece of dirt, his was a generation that merely survived, scratching out an existence from the rocky ground with mules and iron plows. Not only did he not ever see much of the world outside our Gap, he also likely only heard of it through the front porch stories of his father, a Civil War infantry private in the Union Army.

My family’s pioneer ancestor would have been a 13-year-old somewhere in North Carolina when America celebrated its 50^th birthday. As a young adult, Rev. Sam Hendrickson would cross the Smoky Mountains and after a brief respite at their foot, move to settle the land where I, like five other generations of my family, was born. I do not know if our people were Baptist before he rambled to the edge of the earth, but his status as minister surely cemented it. The gumption it took to uproot life and risk everything probably required a faith few of us today can muster.

As my family unit and I celebrate the semi-quincentennial this week on vacation, I have been asking my kids where they think they will be in 10 years, or in 20. They roll their eyes at me but play along. I ask them where they get information now, and how they think they will get it in the future. They do not know it yet, but on the car ride back from the beach I will query them on bigger questions like their level of optimism about their country and its people.

At our nation’s next big birthday, both my teenagers will be retired and I will surely be gone to greater glory. Will they charge through the next 50 years with the homesteading optimism of Rev. Sam? Or the grit and work ethic of my dad? Will they lean on faith in a higher power to get through adversity, as everyone in their American line before them has? Though they have grown up with every advantage, and their country has dominated the world for longer than any living memory, there still are important choices they must make.

America has tripled in size since Ben Hendrickson was born on the eve of the Depression. The share of our country with a college degree has tripled since 1976, when my mom was still working on hers. We have eradicated the slop-jar poverty that was the norm for my family and most in 1876. Despite the bad news of our algorithms, our country’s march has been inexorably forward on almost every economic statistic, even as our culture – and its bedrock institutions like marriage – have frayed.

Big birthdays are times for intentional reflection, for each of us and our nation. Unless you are in Gen-Z, you may not get another big bang like this one for your country. Enjoy your 250^th - and dream big.

The Coming Civil War: Reading the rhetoric of the far-left candidates who have been winning Democratic primaries this summer has made me look back on last year’s Independence Day column that pondered the perils of secession. Check out A REPUBLIC IF YOU CAN KEEP IT.

Party Pooping: I started worrying about the potential for this 250th to be a polarized mess of a party well over year ago. Check out CAN POLARIZED PEOPLE PROCEED TO PARTY or if you prefer, read my advice to President Trump to use the national bash on the mall tomorrow as Jerry Ford might have in THE JERRY FORD MOMENT.

This week’s primaries in New York put the emerging quackery on full display as two incumbent Democrats were defeated by nutters and in a third district, retiring legend Rep. Nydia Velasquez could not get the Brooklyn Borough President through the primary to replace herself.

Brooklyn, for the uninformed, is also home to putative House Speaker-In-Waiting Hakeem Jeffries. The fire is awfully close to the feet of the throne. The celebrants at the victory party for newly-minted Democratic Socialists of America Congresswoman Claire Valdez shouted “you’re next” when Jeffries visage appeared on TV screens at their bar. They can make it happen too, as his district is just a 15-minute ride on the L and G trains from that exact bar where the DSA partied.

When the operatives for Jeffries, Velasquez, the AFL-CIO, and AFSCME cannot impose their will on a tiny 66,000-person primary electorate in Brooklyn and Queens, alarm bells should be going off. What’s worse – they could not even get close, losing to Valdez by 20 points.

The inmates are officially running the Democratic asylum, and crazy is contagious. The kookiness expressed by Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, the 32-year-old grad student who ousted Congress’s Hispanic Caucus Chairman, a man who is the first member of Congress to have started his American story as an illegal immigrant, will infect the platforms of Democrats nationwide.

The Democratic electorate has been drifting leftward for a generation, with Gallup reporting that the share of Dems self-identifying as “very liberal” has doubled since 1995. But as religiosity has been all but pushed out of the coalition and DoorDashing Gen Z-ers take it over, a new kind of bourgeois militancy is shaping the party. They mouth allegiance to socialism – two-thirds of Democrats now view it favorably while only 42 percent say the same of capitalism, and new stars like Valdez propose truly socialistic ideas like nationwide rent control.

But despite the DSA name, Marxian economic theory is not what motivates these quacks. It is the more fundamental Marxian notion of upheaval, smashing the bedrock underlying the establishment, that animates Fifth Column movements like this one. We saw this not too long ago on the Republican side when the Tea Party emerged in reaction to the 2008 Wall Street bailout engineered by President George W. Bush and anxiety that GOP Hill leaders like Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were not up to the task of opposing the identity politics and anti-carbon crusade ushered in with the Obama Administration.

As a strategist who lived through that era as a lead advisor to House Republican campaign efforts, I can tell you that the mutineers’ real target was not the other party, but our own, and Rand Paul still proves it every day. In the same way, the DSA’s objective is not taking out Speaker Mike Johnson; it is unseating or wholly capturing Jeffries, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, and anyone else in power who by action or perceived inaction has allowed Donald Trump to exist. Rationality and math do not co-exist with tiki torches once the lynch mob has formed, so do not try to make it make sense.

Subtly, whether they know it consciously or not, every normie Democratic politician in America not named John Fetterman has been nudged a few degrees leftward this week as they watched the New York primary play out. They will indulge a touch more extremism on border policy – Chevalier says all deportations are immoral. They will not fix the Democratic platform on criminal justice – Chevalier is against prisons and policing overall. And next Congress they will get too scared to back arms sales to Israel, even though deep down they know the Jewish State is a bulwark protecting freedom everywhere.

New York is not representative of America, and certainly three groupings of 40,000 like-minded Democrats in the city’s U.S. House primaries are not a random sample. But they will have an outsized influence. As the Sinatra song says, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere and the DSA brand is Broadway-tested and ready to hit the road.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who backed the loons this week, will find his ambition unsatiated by only influencing primaries in his own town, and unlike Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose mantle he is inheriting as Kook In Chief, he has real political skill. Mandami’s endorsement in other House primaries in other states will yield floods of low dollar donations to his candidates. His spirit will animate pundits. I sat on a CNN panel as New York’s returns flowed in and two lefty commentators from Los Angeles next to me said liberals in their city ask “why can’t we have a Mamdani?”

Soon enough, there will be plenty Mamdanis to go around. And that should scare us all.

Ground Zero: The real epicenter of what is happening in the Democratic Party is not New York; it’s Maine, where left-wingers overthrew sensible Democrats in the U.S. Senate race the party simply must win in order to ever hold control of Congress’s upper chamber. I wrote about that in THE PLATNER PREDICAMENT.

The Big One: The mid-terms are huge but 2028 is not far away and the ongoing DSA rebellion will drive the presidential race. Republicans would ordinarily not be favored to replace Trump with a GOP successor, but Democratic extremism could make it possible, and Kamala Harris could be the catalyst. Check out THIRD TIME IS THE CHARM.

The Catalog: Lest you think I only critique Democrats, be assured my analysis covers my own party’s screw-ups too. We botched the Texas Senate primary and you can read my take in YOU BREAK IT, YOU BUY IT, along with a hundred more columns at the website archives.

The National Railroad Passenger Corporation – a proper noun name which appropriately connotes its monopoly status and government slovenliness – is one of the world’s worst passenger train systems. As a CNN commentator, I utilize Amtrak often between Washington and New York – which happens to be the only part of its network that is economically self-sufficient. All of us self-important people shuttling between the country’s economic and political capitals on the East Coast subsidize every other mile of train-riding in America. Well, we partially subsidize it; the taxpayers are also on the annual appropriations hook for $2 billion to allow our nation to pretend that a Chicago to Memphis train (dubbed the City of New Orleans) or a forever-empty Richmond to New Orleans train (the Crescent) or a no-demand Charlottesville to Cincinnati choo-choo (known as the Cardinal) make any economic sense at all.

The DC-to-Manhattan train is the best possible experience one can have on Amtrak, which is a back-handed compliment. The cars are the newest, if one takes the higher-end Acela service. The speed is the highest, if one gets an express train with limited stops. And theoretically the staff running the thing is the most elite of the company’s entire payroll. But it still stinks.

When I say it stinks, I mean it literally stinks. The bathrooms are not in the ballpark of clean, even on the first run of the day, despite a janitor being on board sometimes. There are no paper towels, leaving one only two options for drying one’s hands – a low-wattage, slow-responding dryer that I am sure won some kind of environmentalist award for using little energy, or the old sling-the-water-off trick. Most riders opt for the latter, which contributes to a sticky bathroom floor you are reminded of with the next 20 steps you take outside the bathroom. I realize this is a gross paragraph, but I am trying to perform a public service here.

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The Café Car on these upper-end trains that entered service last summer could potentially be an upgrade from the beat-up livery Amtrak uses on other routes, as it has a “grab and go” cooler section that theoretically would allow customers to bypass the cashier line that is perpetual on these trips. But there is one problem: after almost a year of deployment, Amtrak still has not made the self-checkout kiosks on these new trains operational. If WalMart or Safeway was running this company, we would all be driving the trains ourselves, but on Amtrak, we still cannot even scan and pay for our own candy bars.

While the new NextGen series of Acela cars was plagued by years of technological delays, cost over-runs, and design flaws, I suspect the kiosks are a deliberate human problem. When you buy anything in the Café Car on any Amtrak train, you undergo what is perhaps the longest point-of-sale transaction in the western world. A pokey little card reader first asks if, in fact, $8.50 is the right price for your canned drink. To affirm, you find a microscopic button that indicates “yes” and try and press it without simultaneously covering the “cancel” button with your skinniest finger. Then you are asked if you would like a tip, with several helpful suggestions, also only accomplished with the tick-sized button. Finally, you approve a final price and cajole the balky little bugger to accept the chip of your credit card.

This multi-step process leaves everyone in line behind you fuming as they assume their best Warrior Two yoga pose to ride out the jostling of what are really freight rail tracks that were built for the cruising comfort of cows and not humans. The only people satisfied are some members of the Transportation Workers Union – who get the tips and have license to move slowly while microwaving cheeseburgers.

The yoga skill comes in handy for phone calls too, as without the sensible addition of premium phone booths in this Zooming age, one’s only polite option is to step out of the seating area and into the vestibule between cars, to engage in a conversation while surfing the track curves at 70 miles an hour and trying not to accidentally open the doors. Amtrak attempted to ameliorate the bouncing ride by utilizing a suspension system called Tiltronix that had worked on a European train called the Pendolino. But in true government monopoly form, Amtrak did not just procure Pendolino rolling stock off the shelf. Instead, it combined three different proven train models, exacerbating production delays, a truth that, once learned, explains why the final product still underwhelms.

Visiting Europeans may be impressed by the architecture of our best train stations – the entry hall at Union Station in Washington is one of the most impressive chambers in a city with plenty of them, Philadelphia’s 30^th Street Station is elegant, New York’s spiffy repurposed Moynihan Train Hall is at least clean, and humbler stops along the way in places like New Haven, Alexandria, and Richmond are the architectural equals of peer stations in comparably sized European hamlets. But they will not love the ride.

To fully experience the best of American transportation we should rent our guests a Ford F-150 or a Mustang convertible and point them toward open asphalt, with instructions to not miss a Buc-ee’s, a Stuckey’s, or a Cracker Barrel. American history is the story of the American road. A people that willfully made our way west to tame a continent cannot be comfortably confined to the unalterable route and limited concessions of a choo-choo train operated exclusively by our incompetent government. Welcome to America, Euro friends - and happy trails.

Staying In Character: Lest you think my grousing about Amtrak is out of character, I also am plenty critical of the other regressive mode of transportation passenger rail’s biggest backers love: bicycling. These two 19th-century technologies are bad fixations of the American Left, among many. Read WHEN PROGRESSIVES ARE REGRESSIVE. I do however love a few airports, as you will read in THE LAST SWAN.

The World Cup: Soccer is not my jam, but I sure am glad all these foreigners came to spend money in our stores and see freedom’s bounty up close. My attempt to comment on the sporting event itself needed help from my friend Ben Angle. Check out DRINKING UP THE WORLD CUP.

The X Files: If you missed anything along the way, or want to check out my Father’s Day column BULLPENS AND BAILOUTS, click on the website. My kids’ youth sports career has been fodder for several columns, and I spent Father’s Day at a high school football summer camp, calibrating risk in my mind, as I had previously outlined in MAN-MAKING DAYS OF AUGUST.

“I’ve been out here wondering when you were going to come and get me,” she said on another one of my visits to the mound, and not in the kind of voice that pines for a rescue.

My reticence to pull her out of the pitcher’s circle was not some aching to keep her in the limelight, but a compulsion to make her push through adversity. And to be fair, I did it with my other pitchers, too. They would walk the bases full, clearly demonstrating it was not their day, and I would let them walk a few runs in, or throw a wild pitch that sent things out of control. It was usually painful, but sometimes, I got to watch them bite their bottom lips and rally to get out of the jam – making all the other disasters worth it.

Organized sports offer one of the only opportunities suburban kids have to square up to challenges no one else can resolve on their behalf. I encouraged both my kids to pitch, because of its unique pressure. The ultimate accountability that comes with knowing 17 other people cannot carry on with their enjoyment of the game until you prove you can consistently hit a strike zone about 14 inches wide is worth some growth. My son hung up his mitt in high school, but has found greater physical adversity, along with the stamina demand of a 10-month-a-year commitment, in football.

Not knowing if you have put them through enough stress-testing is one of the harder parts of raising teenagers – and it reminds me of not knowing whether they were going to break in half as infants. The terrorizing realization that first night home from the hospital that you are fully in charge of the well-being of the 7-pound bundle of nerves snoozing in front of you is the first moment you glimpse parenting’s requirements with clear eyes. Prior to it, watching other parents deal with babies and toddlers is no more informative than a trip to the zoo is training in zoology.

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BRAD: Ok Ben, my attention span is limited, so give me one good reason to pay attention.

BEN: It is probably a lot to ask for you to grasp the sport in this short time, but I know you have done a few stadium construction campaigns in politics, so you might take interest in the debate of stadium naming in the FIFA World Cup.

BRAD: Well you do know me, though my intelligence may be insulted. I will bite. What’s the controversy?

BEN: FIFA protects their official, global sponsors by requiring all host stadiums to remove all non-FIFA signage including assigning neutral, city-based names to the stadiums. Lincoln Financial Field will become Philadelphia Stadium, Arrowhead will become Kansas City Stadium, you get the idea. American media likely will not comply, just check the World Cup game schedule on ESPN and you’ll see the branded stadium names listed as the host sites.

BRAD: Arrowhead does not reference a corporation, but I think I follow you, and I do hope our media refuses to comply with the Euro silliness. Long live capitalism!

BEN: Perhaps you’ll want to play a drinking game every time the FOX commentators mistakenly reference SoFi Stadium instead of Los Angeles Stadium when the US kicks off against Paraguay on June 12^th.

BRAD: Any sport in which Paraguay is a threat is going to have a hard time keeping my attention, even in a drinking game.

BEN: There’s one more sports business story. The 4-time World Cup winning German National Team has worn Adidas (a German company) kits since 1954, but they are switching to Nike (a US company) for World Cup 2030. Public outcry from fans and political figures alike spread across Deutschland when the change was announced in 2024, but the Germans are still saying “auf Wiedersehen” to the iconic 3-stripes. Imagine UNC ditching the Jordan brand, Maryland dropping Under Armour or the NFL punting away Wilson footballs – the American kind.

BRAD: So we finally found a way to beat the Germans in something related to soccer - which matters more to them than to us. I can cheer that. But something tells me American soccer fans – who I think skew liberal – will not exactly love seeing America win at anything these days.

BEN: Of course you had to get to politics, and there always is some. This year the start of Seattle’s LGBTQ pride weekend coincides with a round robin game at Seattle Stadium featuring . . . Iran vs Egypt. FIFA controls what happens in the stadium, so two countries that criminalize homosexuality will play while a segment of the Seattle community celebrates outside the stadium gates.

BRAD: Something tells me the Iranian and Egyptian fans will not be packing their rainbow gear – though maybe a few will buy a rainbow or two once they are safely stateside.

BEN: Gear is always an issue for soccer fans, and it is evident in the way U.S. fans are reacting to our team this year. It does not yet have an identity, and fans are not all warming to our kit.

BRAD: Kit? Like a mess kit? A first aid kit?

BEN: The kit is the jersey. I thought you watched Ted Lasso?

BRAD: I was multi-tasking. What can I say? I only paid close attention during Hannah Waddingham’s scenes.

BEN: Nike will outfit our team this summer, but plenty of fans are choosing to don the 1994 Adidas ‘denim’ kit (lacking the 1994 US soccer logo on the Adidas website). Walk into any sporting goods store that sells soccer jerseys and you’ll likely see both. Fans of all ages are nostalgic for 1994 USA World Cup gear; choosing to remember something that many don’t remember. The talent gap between the 2026 team and 1994 team favors this year’s team, by a wide margin. But the authentic cast of characters from ’94 endeared themselves to every soccer fan of the time – Meola, Balboa, Lalas, all your favorites – and, based on the denim jersey’s comeback, are still winning over US soccer fans. Only 1 player on this year’s team was alive in 1994 (Tim Ream); McKennie, Pulisic, Adams and the rest of the team have some work to do to be remembered the next time the USA plays host. Winning a lot of games will help.

BRAD: With Europe hating on the Trump Administration, why do I suspect the referees will make sure the Americans do not win many games. Soccer officiating is so opaque to me.

BEN: Many soccer rules are subjective. One nation’s dive is another nation’s passionate pursuit of scoring a goal. More cameras will capture the action from more angles than ever before, but that won’t stop some of the best athletes on the planet from being knocked to the ground when an opponent grazes them in the penalty box. This tournament has already given me the chance to talk to my kids and the two soccer teams that I coach about different cultures, different styles of play and different expectations for every competing country. We will experience the thrills, the injustices and the advancement/elimination of every team through our own personal paradigms. Helping my kids learn about other cultures and other countries will be one of the biggest wins of the summer in the Angle household.

BRAD: Well I hope they do not need to learn math, because there is too little scoring and nobody tells you how much time is really left in the half thanks to the penalty clock. I do not get why they have to hide it and let the referee be a tyrant. We should adopt a special transparency rule for games played in America.

BEN: I would not expect FIFA to allow that, but I would expect the World Cup to change soccer in America going forward. Before USA 1994, the only soccer player our parents could name was Pele. That tournament was the catalyst that launched MLS. It arguably led to so much interest in soccer in the US that our broadcasters and streamers now compete for the media rights to major soccer leagues and tournaments around the world. Then our team was a multi-year experiment based in Mission Viejo, CA, where they were a collection of non-professionals training daily for the chance to represent the crest. Now, our players are polished professionals who compete in the biggest leagues around the world, and many of them had opportunities to play for other countries (England, Nigeria, Mexico, Germany, Portugal, Netherlands, etc.) but chose the US National Team.

BRAD: I lived here for part of 1994 and remember the games at RFK Stadium – and I recall the city government took like ten years to take down the way-finding signs on the interstates. Why did DC not get any games in this Cup?

BEN: Like most things with FIFA, that is a decision shrouded in mystery. But do not worry, our town, Alexandria, Virginia, will host the Croatian National Team for its training at Episcopal High School. If not for two guys named Messi and Ronaldo, the greatest player of his generation, Luka Modric, might be spotted strolling down King St. in Old Town Alexandria later this month.

BRAD: Lucky me. I would be glad to buy him a beer at Landini’s – so long as he does not make me watch two hours of soccer with one goal.

BEN: I see I have not persuaded you, but you should take comfort that the turf in most stadiums and training grounds used in the World Cup will be maintained by turf experts from the University of Tennessee.

BRAD: Now you are singing my song: Rocky Top…you’ll always be…home sweet home to me…

BEN: Oh well, maybe next World Cup, Brad, but thanks for having me on The What For to chop it up - and go U-S-A!

My Beef: One of my problems with American soccer is its insistence in emulating European soccer in its nomenclature. As patriots, we should make our soccer conform to our sports naming practices. Get some mascots and situate that title after your city name, like a respectable American outfit. Check out my rant MASCOTS AND MEMORY.

Trying to Lose: Control of Congress is on the line and the last few weeks it has seemed like neither party wants to win. Democrats this week nominated the rhetorically violent, Nazi-tattooed Graham Platner in Maine after Republicans tabbed the walking scandal Ken Paxton in Texas. Read my straight takes in THE PLATNER PREDICAMENT and YOU BREAK IT, YOU BUY IT.

The Vault: If you like today’s dialogue column you also might like POSTCARD FROM BROADWAY, which turned out to be prescient this week, as Joshua Henry did in fact win a Tony Award this week. It is one of 100 jewels - jewels, I tell ya - in The What For archives.

Republicans trail in the generic ballot mirroring Trump’s sagging approval ratings. Gas prices are high. Congress is gridlocked. And the one initiative that had promise to turn things around – the war in Iran that was long overdue and initially demonstrated Trump’s best trait – is unresolved. Calibrating a Goldilocks end to a war – not giving away too much nor risking too much to squeeze a true surrender – is proving difficult for a president who loves peace.

But the President has one big card that he, and he alone, can play: the 250^th birthday celebration of the United States. The last time the nation celebrated something this big, the President at the time, Jerry Ford, leveraged the occasion into a theme for his campaign. Ford turned an election that started out as a blowout into a coin toss, and within that comeback is a lesson for this President.

(Photo credit: White House Office Photographic Collection)

Trump loves America and has embraced the birthday of the nation as a personal cause. He should take care not to hug it to death by casting it in his own image. His objective must be to make the nation’s birthday about the nation, a unique executive power of a sitting president. He should invite – or dare, as his temperament is more suited to do – the Democrats to celebrate it with and beside him. His approach should show a desire to preside and not to prevail. He should ask Americans to feel as good about the country as he does – and ask them to dream with him about what it can do. He can do this: at its core, Make America Great Again is an optimistic slogan.

Ford had a campaign theme song in 1976 that did just this. Its catchy chorus, which animated his TV ads, oozed optimism: “I’m feeling good about America and I’m feeling good about me.” Ford, governing in the wake of the oil shock, the Watergate scandal, and a Vietnam war that ended poorly, did not ask voters to agree things were perfect, but that they were improving – “it’s better than it used to be” was the lyric in the theme song’s bridge.

I was in elementary school for that national birthday and remember that virtually everything seemed to have bicentennial branding – on product labels at the grocery stores, commemorative coins, festivals, everything. You could not miss the marks of our national good feeling; even as a kid I got the message. My teenagers today chuckle at the photo a local news photographer took of young me wearing the Uncle Sam hat I made in a school contest for the celebration. I add it here so you can laugh too.

Our country has thus far been too polarized to celebrate the 250^th heartily together, but Trump has one last shot to do it. Pulling America together to praise our past might make all of us feel better about our present.

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This week on Flag Day, June 14^th, which also happens to be his birthday, he will convene a Mixed Martial Arts fight on the grounds of the White House. Democrats everywhere are rolling their eyes at it. The DC press can hardly contain its disapproval. But most regular Americans in swing states will love, or at least like, it. Three weeks later, on July 4^th the President will host a birthday celebration on the National Mall in Washington that has already been politicized as performers who do not like Trump drop out of the lineup. The public will hate that. A Great American State Fair will happen on the Mall overlapping that show – an under-touted event that is the perfect backdrop for a surprise shift in attitude by the President.

Trump’s social media posts have contemplated converting these events into parties about Trump and not parties about America. That is 180 degrees the wrong idea for the President’s own fortunes.

Trump is most comfortable in combat, but for the next two months, as this celebration of the semi-quincentennial peaks, he should collaborate. He should sincerely ask Democrats to lay down their political sabers and put aside their dislike of him and celebrate with him. He should eschew any mention of his birthday during the MMA fight. He should invite some of his saltiest critics in the music world to fill in the gaps on the July 4^th concert, and party with Trump superfan Kid Rock on stage. He should ask Stephen Colbert, the comedian who hates him, to serve as an emcee alongside Fox host Sean Hannity, or some other unlikely partner.

If the President makes clear that his interest is uniting all the country, in this moment when even the most disengaged voter might pay attention, he has the potential to hydraulically lift on his own approval ratings. There are few chances to break type in politics, and fewer still for a politician as well-defined as Trump to get a fresh appraisal. He should take this opportunity.

At least 45 percent of the voters in the country are negative on this Administration and are immovable. Another 45 percent, or so, sees it as a bulwark against an out-of-control left wing. The remainder in the middle is non-ideological, cynical about both parties, and willing to swing between elections or stay home. Those are the voters still up for grabs who will decide the mid-terms. They vote on issues and vibes. They overweight momentum and tone. Showing the skill to switch gears on the national birthday might be the sentiment shift this President needs to make the second half of his term successful.

The Maine Thing: Mainers will go vote tomorrow in the Democratic primary for Senate and suddenly lefties all over the country are rationalizing a vote for a truly awful character, a reversal of their moralizing about Republicans backing flawed candidates over the years. I warned this problem was coming back in August in a lightly-read column called CODE RED IN MAINE and then theorized about the choice last week in THE PLATNER PREDICAMENT.

Credit Clarence Thomas: The celebration of our semi-quincentennial is kicking into high gear and I think you should check out Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s excellent oration setting the table for the party. Read THE SPEECH OF THE YEAR.

Deep Cuts: It’s beach read season, so why not take The What For along? With 100 or so columns, there’s surely one you have not seen, like maybe POSTCARD FROM BROADWAY, in which my resident show tunes expert accurately predicted, way back in January, Joshua Henry’s big TONY Award win last night for RAGTIME. Spin through the vault.

• No on confirming Pete Hegseth

• Yes to Impeach President Trump on Ukraine

• Yes to Impeach President Trump on January 6th

• Yes to confirm Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

• No on confirming Justice Amy Coney Barrett

• Yes to confirm Justice Elena Kagan

• Yes to confirm Justice Sonia Sotomayor

• Yes to the Affordable Care Act

• No on repealing the Affordable Care Act

• Yes to the Obama Stimulus Law

• Yes to the Biden Infrastructure Law

• Yes to both big gun control bills in 2013 and 2022

• Co-sponsor of a law to codify Roe v. Wade

That is not the record of a sitting Democratic Senator. It is the voting transcript of Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). Democrats say they want every Republican to be exactly what Collins is, yet she is Public Enemy Number One for the left in this year’s mid-term elections. Worse, they are lining up behind a despicable lunatic, privileged-prep-schooler-turned-oysterman Graham Platner, to beat her.

Journalists report Platner has a history of racist, anti-gay, morbid rhetoric online. He’s had to apologize for slurring the mentally disabled. He has been linked to the hookup site Kik, which a convicted child molester called a “predator’s paradise” in an interview with CBS News. Platner’s former campaign director says he sexted with a dozen women via Kik; his current campaign confirmed only “as many as six.” The Wall Street Journal reported “Platner’s campaign said the candidate had long deleted the app from his phone but hadn’t deactivated his account.” Does that not make one think he wants to use the app again later?

Platner has previously admitted “I’ve got a pretty flexible moral compass,” which would be necessary to keep a Nazi death squad symbol, the Totenkopf, tattoed on one’s chest for 18 years before covering it up, only after it became a political liability in this campaign.

Platner’s professional life ought to be equally unappealing to Democrats. Other than a stint working as a bartender at The Tune Inn, one of the best dive bars on Capitol Hill, Platner has mostly done things Democrats hate. He volunteered to go to Afghanistan as a Marine to “have an adventure and kill some people.” Once mustered out, Platner signed up to go back to war as a mercenary, working for Blackwater, the defense contractor reviled by liberals. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders even wrote a bill to outlaw Blackwater’s contracts – but of course now Sanders is endorsing Platner.

On June 9, Platner will become the Democratic nominee for Senate in the number one target race in the country. The paradox is that Platner is not the only choice on that Senate ballot.

Maine Democrats will pick him over the two-term incumbent governor, Janet Mills, a perfectly normal politicians who also did two tours as Attorney General. Mills, who shot into the national news last year sparring with President Trump at a White House governor’s luncheon, flopped in the Senate race and got so broke she had to suspend her campaign.

Question Two in our Quiz: Is Platner the stronger candidate against Collins?

Collins has won five elections in Democratic Maine as a Republican. The state has one of the highest voting participation rates in the country. She cannot be defeated by merely turning out irregular Democrats; they do not exist. To beat Collins, a chunk of her long-time loyalists must be flipped - and many have already voted for Mills. Normal political logic would tell you Mills is hands-down the more electable option.

Question Three is what is Platner’s Appeal?

Voters do not always choose based on electability – as Texas Republicans demonstrated last week in elevating scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton over proven winner Sen. John Cornyn. Sometimes they pick on pique.

As I said on CNN this weekend, Platner’s badness is a feature, not a bug, for grass roots Democrats. They are not turned off by his Nazi tattoo; they see it as a badge of ruthlessness, and they are hell bent on sending ruthless mercenaries to Washington to do combat with Trump. The more awful stuff they learn about Platner, the more they see him suited to the task. When Platner calls on lefties to shut down society to protest political positions, they get goose bumps, as I wrote last November in CODE RED IN MAINE.

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I have seen this movie before. In 2015, I watched hours of focus groups of Iowa caucus goers come to grips with the need to embrace a candidate whose moral compass they found lacking. “I think maybe he might give Hillary all she can handle,” I recall one Des Moines man saying of Donald Trump. Trump, for many Republicans, was a contract political hit man – an outsider to conservatism, a foreigner to the culture war, a gold-plated populist conundrum, but a brawler of the highest pedigree. Though his relationship with the ideological right has deepened over the years, his highest and best use remains thwarting the left.

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Facing a midterm climate already tilting toward Democrats who want to impeach, convict, bankrupt and jail him, Trump decided to bet the jury box on pique. Furious at the Senate Republican Conference for not dumping the filibuster rule that lets Democrats block his legislative agenda, Trump decided to shoot a hostage in the Texas Senate primary runoff – longtime incumbent John Cornyn. What indicates that was his motive? Look at Trump’s victory posts on social media, lauding Cornyn as a “friend” who had a “truly great career.” This was serving notice, not enmity.

To be fair, Cornyn was already in trouble. In statewide office since 1990, the courtly lawyer probably overstayed his remit in today’s rowdy GOP. Cornyn got only 42 percent in the March primary, a death knell for any incumbent with seven state wide victories under his belt. Even though Cornyn got the most votes in that primary, Texas’s runoff law requiring 50 percent for nomination – a dumb hoop created by Democrats in the Jim Crow era – required him to stand for nomination again this week in a runoff against polarizing Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Trump stayed out of the March race, but waded into the runoff after Senate Republicans resisted his entreaties to re-write Senate rules. Cornyn, as old a bull as any stabled in the Senate barn, was the perfect proxy for a peeved president. The runoff was tied when Trump made his endorsement May 19^th, but the roof caved in on Cornyn immediately, yielding a 28-percentage-point rout. After Trump’s endorsement also toppled Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) earlier this month, he has surely made his point. He can persuade primary voters to break almost any Republican’s career.

But breaking is a different skill than sewing, and that is a task the President now faces on two fronts. In a Senate with a 4-seat GOP cushion, Trump now must deal with Cornyn and Cassidy, who could rightly want revenge, in addition to retiring nemesis Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), maverick Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), chapped at Trump for taking out his protégé, Rep. Tom Massie in Kentucky’s House primary, moderate Senators Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and John Curtis (R-UT), whose political brands are built on distance from Trump, and Sen. Thom Tillis, who chose to not seek re-election this year and speaks candidly about his beef with the President’s approach. Eight dissenters in a four-seat majority is tough math, and all eight have little to lose.

Trump has plenty to lose, and he knows it. If Democrats take the house, he gets impeached. If Democrats take the Senate, a majority will vote to convict him – on any charge, no matter how bogus. A two-thirds vote is required to remove a President, so he will survive, but that is not the history he wants to make. That is why the Texas gambit was such a gamble.

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Some of my mom’s remaining belongings are easy for us to move beyond. For the first time, in my life, as of next week, no home in our immediate family will have an interior arranged display of pussy willows – the fuzzy wetland reed that inexplicably became a 1970s decorating craze that mom just could not give up. Her warm earth tone décor overall, including botanical paintings, ornithologically accurate life figures, and prints of historical quilt patterns and other upscale country touches has no audience in subsequent generations of our family. Her women’s devotional books, and technical books on gardening in her adopted state of Texas also will likely not endure as heirlooms.

Other stuff was harder to toss. The sieve colander she used to can homegrown tomatoes is something I would like to think I would use - doing one episode of canning each summer is part of my living tribute to her - but I think I will just stick with blackberry jam and save the shelf space.

I also hated to part with a three-foot tall stack of educational games for children she purchased in the last months of her life. Her objective with those was to teach my son, who was almost five years old then, to read. A master reading teacher by profession, she had big plans for that last summer that the aggression of her tumors did not let her execute. We took the whole stack of those games to the Goodwill, unopened.

Seeing so many physical monuments to that place in life where she was – and where my kids and niece and nephew were – in 2014 was the tough part. My daughter and niece now have year of college behind them. My nephew almost has his degree. The little boy she was trying to teach to read, my son, is now a 275-pound offensive lineman on his high school football team. Their time with mom is but a speck of their lives, even though it was definitional to her. A primary school teacher with a high-end nurturing instinct, she had prepped her whole life to be grandma.

Going through what was left of her belongings was like finding the kids’ childhood trapped in amber, in the only place you still could find it. Their stuff at our house has grown up and out with them, mostly. An electric guitar took the place of a painting easel; the X box crowded out Legos. But not at “mimi’s house.” My dad moved several years ago a few miles away, to be around the corner from my sister, but that move did not purge the grandma collection. It was easy to just ship the same boxes. But now, as Dad goes to an exciting and welcome new chapter in a much smaller senior living environment, the reckoning of hoarding is here. Square footage demands it.

The recognition of all the time that has passed and the subsequent grandmothering opportunities missed is not easy. But the triage had its advantages. As his parents, siblings, and in-laws died over the years, Dad inherited some of their memory boxes – stuff I had not seen and he had not organized. We found my dad’s high school senior year report card – better than mine, to my surprise; a dose of humility I probably needed. We found his father’s World War II draft cards and realized my dad’s birth in 1944 may have saved him from shipping out – it was the only year Papaw was classified “1-A,” eligible for military service. There were photos of my grandmother as a teenager and my mom as a child – things that somehow never made it into Mom’s possession when she was alive, or at least before cancer took over.

Until this week, I had never seen a photo of my mom’s maternal grandfather. He ran off in the Depression, ashamed he could not provide, to Seattle, where he met a new woman and started a new life. Yet in the bottom of an envelope filled with tiny, blurry black-and-white snapshots, there he was: Edd Strickland, standing next to the wife he would soon abandon.

That night I tried to add the photo to my family tree on Ancestry.com, prompting a new hint from the AI-powered internet – a clear-as-day photo from the Seattle police blotter, a mugshot when Edd got picked up for drunk driving in 1939. His death certificate showed he died young. My grandmother never quite got over her dad leaving her, and she might be gratified to know he did not find paradise out west.

Shortly before mom died, we had a long and honest conversation with dad and my sister. Our kids were splashing in the neighborhood pool that night, and by the grace of God occupied themselves for an extended period time so that the four of us, our little unit, could let her talk and fill the quiet cancer wrought on the rest of us. She said that she was looking forward to heaven but depressed that the kids would remember so little about her.

Sadly she was right about that – but I still do, and we did not throw that knowledge away. Hold on to a few photos and maybe even a report card. You do not yet know just when you will need to see them.

More About Mom: One of the very first columns I wrote after starting The What For was a Mother’s Day tribute to my mom. Many of you have found the site since then, so you might enjoy HAVE YOU CALLED YOUR MAMA TODAY?

Third Strike: It is still surprising to me that my column proposing GRANDMOTHER’S DAY had the lowest open rate of any column in a year. It gained some in the last week, but I might keep linking it here in the flashback section until it catches up to par.

All The Things: If you missed my analysis last week about Kamala Harris, or any other of my hundred or so columns, they are all here at The What For website.

And here are those pussy willows….look close before they are all gone.

In a sane human timeline, Harris’ political career would be as dead as Adlai Stevenson’s and for the same reason; she had two chances and botched them both. But the current American electorate is immune to reassessment or reflection, so Harris still flourishes. That means we should watch Harris’ every move, and what she did last week was define the contours of the Democratic agenda – again.

I make my living assessing and coaching candidates but misjudged Harris once. Before the first debates in June of 2019, Harris looked to me like the most formidable potential nominee of the 29 Democrats who ran that year. Her experience as a prosecutor meant she had the resume to go against Democratic stereotypes and run on a tough-on-crime platform – as she had done in her race for California Attorney General. As a woman who had already broken a political glass ceiling, she could grab the fuel that powered Hillary Clinton’s “I’m With Her” movement. With a long career in the San Francisco Bay and Silicon Valley, Harris had home court advantage with Democratic tech industry mega-donors. As a sitting Senator, she had ready access to cable network green rooms any day of the week.

But then the campaign started, and Candidate Harris proved much worse than Resume Harris. She took every kooky left-wing idea to its most extreme iteration. She called for de-criminalizing illegal immigration. She called for eliminating private health insurance. She backed sex change operations for prisoners, at taxpayer expense. She promised gun bans by executive order. In doing so, Harris helped drag the entire field to the far left – except Joe Biden, who was promptly propped up by power brokers as the Democratic nominee as soon as he won a single primary – and before he could lose the next one.

Biden, the lone remaining normal Democrat, was jammed into the nomination only because Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren had hijacked the whole process leftward.

Harris got her second turn in the drivers’ seat of American politics in 2024, when she pulled a power move and thwarted calls for an open primary or convention after Biden proved too feeble to carry the banner to November. Despite running against Trump, who was unpopular with swing voters, Harris got beat in every single swing state – and let Trump improve his vote share in 90 percent of American counties. The Democratic National Committee did a post-mortem on Harris’s loss, as one would expect, but they have refused to release it, keeping Harris’s career outside the hospice diagnosis.

After passing on a 2026 comeback in a California governor’s race with a lackluster field she would have surely swamped, Harris now seems to be pointing toward another presidential run and she is back to her old kooky self.

In an online appearance sponsored by a group called Win With Black Women last week, Harris called for a “no bad ideas” approach for Democratic brainstorming. She lost me at the title. There are far more bad ideas than good ones in American politics and anyone who asks us to suspend judgement on that is disqualified.

But give Harris credit. She took the word “bad” off the label because what came out of her mouth next were a string of noxious notions.

• Statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

• Packing the Supreme Court.

• Getting rid of the electoral college.

• Disciplining Supreme Court Justices who “lied” in their confirmation hearings.

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I was lucky enough to have two unique and remarkable characters as my grandmother and my grandmother-in-law. They were both self-made, daughters of upper south paupers, stubborn, Depression-raised, devout and confident beyond the circumstances of their birth. That is where their similarities end, except for my affection.

My mom’s mom grew up on a dirt floor. She insisted on the appellation “Grandmother” instead of the more traditional Appalachian titles “mamaw” or “granny” because she was just 41 years old when I came along and while she could not deny the facts of our relationship, she refused to let me call her something that implied she was old.

The 1940 census lists her and her mom as “servants,” lodging on someone else’s land in the Tennessee foothills. They could not have been poorer. Her dad ran off in the shame of his inability to provide when she was a toddler, and her mom took to the fields to work alongside men to keep her children out of the county poorhouse.

Grandmother was barely a teenager when her mother died in surgery, and she soon ran away with a young man from the sawmill to get married in Ringgold, Georgia, the quickie wedding town of the South. The Peach State let kids get married at 15; Tennessee did not. Neither of them made it past the eighth grade in school, but luckily the federal Manhattan Project that had taken Grandmother’s childhood home to make the atomic bomb provided her employment opportunities for the rest of her life.

She eventually joined the security force guarding the Oak Ridge defense installation, carrying a .38 Special revolver on her hip – a glass ceiling crack for women in those days. She was a union woman, in the OCAW – the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union – though I remember when she went on strike one summer she told me the only reason she supported the walkout was because it gave her plenty of time to go fishing with me. I cannot tell you whether we fished 3 or 30 times that summer, but I recall one occasion distinctly. We were in the right place at the right time for a grasshopper hatch and reeled in largemouth bass until our arms hurt - the kind of thing that only happens once in life, if you are lucky. That was just the start; I got 37 years with her, and whole decades of her prime.

Her Depression mentality was never extinguished, and her hobby was clipping coupons and collecting labels from food packaging to send off for promotional rebates – thousands of dollars of rebates per year, $1 at a time. Our family poked gentle fun at her industrial scale redemption – which enlisted the neighbors to save box tops too. But when it was time for me to go to grad school it was that money, her money, she lent me for tuition. She was one of a kind.

My wife’s beloved Kentucky grandmother also broke the mold. She skipped grades to finish high school at 16 and Berea, the highly-regarded work college, was what she could afford. Like every other student, she worked on campus to cover her tuition, haggling her way into the job of hostess at the campus dining room. A hostess she always was, and a paragon of southern manners. It was unnecessary to consult Emily Post for any occasion, because “Grandma B” could answer your questions from memory. Her tables were always set, she dressed purposefully for every occasion, made a guest list to play cards on Saturday nights, and was the queen bee of her country county - the first woman to head the local Farm Bureau and the financial patron of the public library.

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Her dogs – all of them, sequentially – were named “Governor” and lived outside. She was ready for a long talk about politics whenever she saw me, and quizzed me about “my people” and our home in Tennessee, and I was more than happy to oblige.

They were both tough flowers, who kept loaded firearms by their bedsides as they persisted in living alone into old age. “If you try to come in here late at night, I’ll leave you laying,” Grandma B made clear. When I surreptitiously took away my Grandmother’s ammunition, she replaced it within a week.

We buried Grandmother six weeks before my daughter was born, and named our baby after the vanished Tennessee community where her great Grandmother grew up.

Grandma B lived a century, long enough to make an impact on my kids, and they saw her buried in the sparkly pink metal casket she picked out for herself. Someone asked if we were “burying Grandma or Liberace” – and she would have gotten a kick out of that.

I do not know what those two women expected to come of their lives as they stared down poverty in the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky as teenagers. But I know I inherited a lot of their wealth, in non-monetary form. From Grandmother, I learned to be grounded, grateful and skeptical. Grandma B let me glimpse the raw material of the wonderful young woman I married, and an inkling of some of the great things she would become. Happy Grandmother’s Day, and spread the word.

Today’s column is free. Please forward it and encourage others to check out The What For!

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Hit That Send Button: It has been a month, but my wedding anniversary ode to marriage is still racking up clicks. Check out SEND MORE FLOWERS to see what my panel of happily married men had to say about the institution - and forward it around.

The Tyranny of Toys: My recent column BICYCLE BOLSHEVIKS has generated a lot of local reaction here in Northern Virginia. If you liked it, check out the 30,000-foot version of the same argument in WHEN PROGRESSIVES ARE REGRESSIVE.

The Archive: If you missed last week’s column on Justice Clarence Thomas’s inspiring speech in celebration of America’s 250th - THE SPEECH OF THE YEAR - or any of the 95 other columns I have written, check out The What For website.

For decades, Thomas asked few questions in the Court’s oral arguments and spoke infrequently in public, leaving his written dissents and concurrences, often unsigned by any other justice, to speak for him. But in his career’s orange twilight, Thomas delivered what will likely be The Speech of The Year in our country’s semi-quincentennial.

Speaking at the University of Texas, Thomas addressed the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with the reverence of a man who made fidelity to it the lodestone of his judicial compass.

In a recent essay for National Review titled “America the Durable,” Yuval Levin noted that American discourse, from the founding forward, has been fraught with “political hypochondria” about the fragility of our republic. “Every generation has questioned its own capacity to sustain its political inheritance,” Levin writes. The durability of the experiment, which has outlasted all its Enlightenment peers, is owed to constant anchoring by well-situated minds like Thomas’s.

For Thomas the statement of origin for our rights, inalienable because they come from our Creator and not our consensus, is both anvil and forge – the fire that drives our governance of each other and the un-dentable surface against which all compromise is hammered out.

“Our rights and our dignity are inherent. They do not come from others and they do not come from the government. And our government derives its legitimacy and its authority from our consent. We do not derive our rights from our government.”

It has become fashionable on the left in America to write down the Declaration’s primacy in our modern political system – relegating its preamble to decorative puffery, making it of only modest importance in its own time, and little to none in ours. This dismissal is a sort of anti-originalism. The scrubbing of the distinction between the rights negotiated by men versus those inherited by humanity shifts America’s founding itself, from 1776 to 1787 when the Constitution was approved, with its Article V amendment hatch and exploitable “elastic” clauses.

This shifting is intentional. If America is but a chain of compromises shaped by majoritarianism, as expressed inside the Constitution’s scaffolding, it does not rest on any foundation of inherent truth, with cheap humanism its animating principle. If rights emanate from divine providence, however, egalitarianism is the drive train and the majority-made institutions the dependent chassis.

Thomas’s speech in Austin drew this distinction cold, separating the Constitution’s “form” of our government from the Declaration’s delineation of “purpose.”

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“None of our rights come from the government. All of the government’s authority comes from our consent, and the structure and limited role of government is to assure that it does not exceed the authority to which we have consented or intrude on our natural rights. The Constitution is the means of government. It is the Declaration that announces the ends of government. The Constitution achieves this purpose by protecting our natural rights and our liberties from concentrated power and excessive democracy.”

For Thomas, that consent, the expression of democracy through elections and representation and even amendments to the Constitution, is a means and not an end. “We the people can never legitimately consent to the violation of our God given equality,” he told the crowd in Austin, as he has often told the court.

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As a political consultant to House Republicans, I knew people on that field. As a youth baseball parent in Alexandria, I could visualize the setting exactly when I got news of the tragedy. On a foreign trip with bipartisan peers, I wrote off Hogkinson’s political motive at the time. “He was just crazy – they are all crazy,” I remember telling a Democratic friend with me.

Today I would like to amend my conclusion. Aspiring political assassins like Hodgkinson and Cole Allen, the man apprehended Saturday night armed to the teeth and trying to shoot his way into the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, are certainly mentally unstable. The psychological threshold one would have to cross to fire intentionally at public officials to make a political statement is one only traversed by the truly disturbed.

We should also square up to the possibility that the demonization of President Trump by the edgiest voices in the left-wing ecosystem has created a nurturing hothouse for the kooks.

The New York Post obtained what it says is Allen’s manifesto, sent to family and friends just ten minutes before he stormed the security screeners at the Washington Hilton. Given the ghoulish intent of Allen’s plan, the striking aspect of his explanation is how normal it is, provided you spend any time traversing BlueSky, lefty Twitter, or the comments section of news articles.

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” Allen allegedly wrote. “In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.” These are sentences that could easily be lifted from a Facebook rant of any one of 50 million grass roots liberals. We have all seen these posts – by similarly aggrieved, regular-but-unhinged American lefties. Today, well-accepted liberals are musing about whether or not this event was faked, with hundreds of legacy media outlets they ostensibly trust in on the theater. It has gone too far.

Democracy can only exist in discursive soil, rich with dissent and retort. Criticizing this President – or the previous one – is a patriotic act, when done in the spirit of advocacy. But so is praising them. Yet somehow, some way, we have lost the transitive dependence of both actions; they thrive in tandem, and off a baseline of mutual respect for the motives of both sides.

To be sure, respect for the arguments of the left is not always thick and reliable on the right, and in this space and as a commentator on CNN, I have been critical of incivility on my side of the divide, including the President’s own rhetoric. He is plenty guilty – calling the press corps “the enemy of the people,” and admitting “I hate my opponent and I don’t want what’s best for them,” among a long list. He needs to do better, and sometimes, like after Saturday night’s scare, in a magnanimous press conference, he does.

Public officials threatened with violence span the partisan spectrum. Capitol Police report a sharp rise against threats to members of Congress. A Democrat State Senator in Minnesota was assassinated last summer with her husband. A politically motivated arsonist set Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro’s house on fire.

But threats against Trump-era Republicans fit a pattern. A man faces attempted murder charges for showing up at Trump’s OMB Director’s home talking about a “fascist takeover.” A man was sentenced to eight years in jail for plotting to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh over the Dobbs decision.

And on social media this weekend, Trump critics essentially blamed the President for nearly getting shot, egged on by pros who use the same language we saw in Allen’s manifesto. This left-wing reaction is on a through line with other events. In the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, college professors were fired or suspended for celebrating Kirk’s death. Virginia’s Democratic Attorney General Jay Jones was elevated to that post despite having fantasized about the death of his Republican opponents.

Outside the White House Correspondents Dinner, protesters waved signs reading “Death to All of Them” and “Death to Tyrants.” These sign-bearers might be nuts, too. Or maybe they are just grass-roots liberals echoing the eschatological fervor they get fed online.

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