With Friday’s arrival, North Carolina began mailing absentee ballots to voters who requested them for the November election. Other states will follow suit.

That makes what’s happening inside the United States Postal Service a lot more than a story about software.

Imagine a county elections office preparing to mail 10,000 ballots to voters who are legally entitled to receive them. The ballots have been printed, addressed, and prepared for shipment.

Then one barcode fails a scan.

With the new system the Postal Service is developing to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order on voting by mail, that one mistake could mean the whole batch gets rejected and sent back to the election office.

Not one ballot.

All 10,000.

So voters won’t get them. The election officials have to figure out what went wrong. The ballots have to be processed again, and the calendar keeps moving.

Unlike a software project, Election Day doesn’t have a setting called “we’re working on it.”

That is the extraordinary warning contained in a whistleblower disclosure released by Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. The disclosure describes the development of a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal as rushed, poorly tested, and potentially incapable of handling the task the administration has assigned it. The whistleblower says the system is being built on an election-year timetable that would normally be considered absurd for a project of this complexity and importance.

According to the disclosure, the Postal Service began work on the system in mid-June. Requirements have reportedly changed repeatedly. Some instructions were given verbally rather than in writing. In some cases, developers were given only days to test changes.

And then there is the “zero-fail” problem.

The system is reportedly designed so that a problem with a single ballot barcode in a bulk shipment can cause the entire batch to be rejected.

This isn’t just a small technical problem. It’s a major bottleneck.

And it matters because the Postal Service has never traditionally been the institution deciding whether a voter gets a ballot.

That job belongs to election officials.

States administer elections. Local election officials determine who is registered and, under state law, who is entitled to receive an absentee ballot.

The Postal Service has a different job. It carries the mail.

That distinction may sound mundane, but it isn’t.

I should add something personal here.

When my radio career ended, I began working for the Postal Service. Ten years now. I know the professionalism and integrity of the people who move America’s mail. Postal employees don’t decide who deserves to vote. They don’t decide which political party wins. They don’t decide whether a voter is eligible.

We deliver the mail.

Reliably. Impartially. Under enormous pressure.

One of the first things you learn when hired by the Postal Service is a fundamental concept known as the “sanctity of the mail.” We strive to sort and deliver the mail as quickly as possible, and we never knowingly obstruct the mail stream. We don’t read our postal patrons’ mail. We respect our customers’ privacy.

It seems that the current Postmaster General, David Steiner, does not observe that sanctity.

The Trump administration’s new system changes that relationship. It creates a federal process for submitting information about voters and their ballots to the Postal Service before those ballots are mailed. The stated purpose is election security: preventing ballots from being sent to people the federal government determines are ineligible.

But that puts the Postal Service in a role it has never traditionally played.

If Steiner allows the administration to turn the nation’s mail carriers into an instrument for obstructing or curtailing legally authorized mail, then this isn’t simply a question of administrative judgment. It’s a departure from one of the institution’s most basic professional principles.

The Postal Service is supposed to carry the mail.

Not decide whose mail should get through for political reasons.

The Postal Service is supposed to carry the mail. It is not supposed to decide whose mail should get through.

And that raises an obvious question.

Why is the Postal Service being turned into a gatekeeper for a process traditionally administered by states and local election officials?

And what happens when the gate itself malfunctions?

The whistleblower’s answer is alarming: potentially millions of voters could be affected.

The administration would presumably describe the new system differently. Its argument is that mail voting needs stronger safeguards against fraud.

Let’s be clear: election security is important. Every legitimate vote should be protected. Voter eligibility should be verified. Ballots should be tracked and secured. We should investigate and prosecute fraud wherever it occurs.

But adding more bureaucracy doesn’t guarantee more security, and a system isn’t safer just because it has more ways to fail.

The irony here is hard to miss.

For years, Donald Trump has claimed—without evidence—that voting by mail is vulnerable to fraud. Yet the evidence doesn’t remotely support the idea that American elections are being stolen through widespread mail-ballot fraud.

Consider the Heritage Foundation, hardly a bastion of liberal election reform. They have curated and maintained a database of documented election-fraud cases going back to 1982.

Based on data from the Census Bureau, the Elections Project, and multiple independent analyses, the number of votes Americans have cast in presidential, midterm, and primary elections since 1982?

Three billion.

From that number, the Heritage database has found 1,561 cases of fraud. That’s a Fraud Rate of (1,561 ÷ 3,000,000,000) 0.00005%, or 5 cases per 10 million votes.

In short, fraud exists. A vast conspiracy to steal elections does not.

Fraud should be prosecuted.

But isolated fraud isn’t evidence that the voting system itself is fraudulent.

That difference is important because a problem that doesn’t exist is being used to justify an extraordinary new federal mechanism.

The fraud claim is the pretext.

The ballot portal is the mechanism.

Chaos is the political payoff.

For some, the payoff may be something worse.

That last part requires some care.

The whistleblower’s report doesn’t prove there’s a plot to steal an election. But it does show that the system may be dangerously ill-prepared for the job it’s being asked to perform.

However, this isn’t just a question of intent. If you know a system will probably fail and use it anyway, the harm it causes isn’t erased just because its creators say they meant well. That’s especially true when what’s being delayed or denied is a constitutional right.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a scathing 23-page rebuke of the Supreme Court’s decision allowing Trump’s mail-voting changes to move forward, warning that the Court’s intervention had injected “chaos and uncertainty” into the upcoming midterm elections. A “Kafkaesque nightmare,” she called it.

Chaos isn’t politically neutral.

Confusion favors the people who already understand the system.

Delay favors people with the time and resources to overcome it.

Uncertainty is even worse when you’re not sure if your vote will be counted.

Consider the people who depend on mail voting.

The elderly or disabled who can’t easily travel to a polling place. A student living away from home. A military family. A rural voter hundreds of miles from the nearest convenient polling place. A caregiver who can’t simply take several hours away from a job or family obligation. Someone who works a schedule that makes Election Day in-person voting difficult. (Why we haven’t changed Election Day into Election Weekend is beyond me.)

The point is, for some, voting by mail isn’t just a choice. It’s their only way to vote.

That is why the North Carolina calendar matters.

The real question is whether the system moving those ballots will make voting more reliable, or just add a new way for things to go wrong.

The legal fight is still unfolding. A federal judge has blocked implementation of the USPS rules while the litigation continues, and the administration has appealed. The Supreme Court has already weighed in on an earlier stage of the dispute, but that wasn’t the final resolution of whether the Postal Service’s subsequently issued rules could lawfully be imposed on the states.

So this story isn’t over.

Which is exactly why we need to pay attention right now.

Because another possibility here is more subtle than simply stopping mail ballots.

You can make voting difficult without formally banning it.

You can create delays.

You can create uncertainty.

You can create rules so complicated that voters aren’t sure they’ve followed them correctly.

You can make election officials spend their time troubleshooting a federal system instead of serving voters.

And when something goes wrong, you can point to the resulting confusion and say:

See? Mail voting doesn’t work.

That’s the genius of political chaos: it can create the very problems it claims to warn us about.

This isn’t the first time Trump has attacked voting-by-mail. He’s repeatedly portrayed it as inherently corrupt even while using mail voting himself.

But the larger objective isn’t necessarily to eliminate every mail ballot.

It may be enough to make the process less predictable.

When voting is predictable, so are the results.

And predictable results are precisely what a politician who has spent years teaching his supporters not to trust elections fears most.

That brings us to the suspicion that hangs over all of this.

Is Donald Trump trying to rig the 2026 election?

I don’t know.

Neither, I suspect, does anyone outside the administration who isn’t actually involved.

But here’s the thing: people don’t become suspicious of politics for no reason.

People don’t look at Donald Trump and wonder whether he might bend election rules because they’ve suddenly developed an irrational distrust of government.

They wonder because Donald Trump has spent years giving them reasons to wonder.

He refused to accept his defeat in 2020. He continues to insist that the election he lost was stolen. Without evidence, he’s repeatedly attacked voting by mail as inherently corrupt while using it himself. Now his administration is trying to impose a new federal mechanism on the very process he’s spent years telling Americans they shouldn’t trust.

That doesn’t prove that he intends to rig the 2026 midterms. It does something: It makes the question reasonable.

And that’s why we should resist the temptation to reduce this story to a partisan argument about whether Trump “likes” mail voting.

The issue is more fundamental.

Who gets to decide whether an eligible American receives a ballot?

The answer has traditionally been clear: state and local election officials, operating under state law. The Postal Service’s job is to deliver it.

There’s a good reason for that division of responsibilities. A postal carrier shouldn’t have to decide whether you deserve to vote. A federal computer system shouldn’t end up with that power just because someone made a mistake with barcode design. And a president shouldn’t be able to turn the nation’s mail carriers into political gatekeepers merely by declaring that an ordinary voting procedure has become a federal security problem.

There’s still time to prevent that, and voters also have time to protect themselves.

If you intend to vote by mail, don’t wait until the last minute. Know your state’s deadlines for requesting and returning a ballot. Track your ballot if your state provides that service. And know what your state allows you to do if you requested a mail ballot and it never arrives.

No single national procedure fixes a problem like this. The rules vary.

That’s part of the point. Election administration is largely a state and local business. Which means the best source of information about your ballot isn’t Donald Trump’s social-media account, a viral Facebook post, or some guy on YouTube.

It’s your local election office.

And if your ballot doesn’t arrive, don’t assume your vote is lost.

Find out what your state permits.

Go vote in person if that’s the remedy available to you.

Ask questions.

Make sure your friends and neighbors know what to do. This is your Constitutional right. Protect it.

And then vote.

Not because everything is fine. Because the only way to deny them the chaos they’re engineering—if that’s the intent—is to show up anyway.

Because there’s something else we should remember, even with all the legal debates, computer systems, barcodes, and political arguments.

A ballot isn’t a piece of junk mail.

It isn’t a privilege handed out by the president.

It isn’t a favor from the Postal Service.

It’s the physical expression of a citizen’s right to take part in their own government.

The people who carry it should be trusted to carry it.

The people who administer elections should be trusted to administer them.

And the people who are legally entitled to vote shouldn’t have to survive a federal bureaucratic obstacle course before they’re even allowed to receive the ballot.

North Carolina is the first to send those ballots by mail.

The rest of the country is watching what happens next.

All of us should.

There is something almost deceptively modest about the Supreme Court’s latest decision concerning Donald Trump’s ballroom.

The Court didn’t declare that Trump has the legal right to demolish part of the White House and replace it with a 90,000-square-foot monument to his own taste. It didn’t finally decide whether the project is lawful. Nor did it, in so many words, announce that the president is the owner of the building in which he happens to live.

It simply allowed construction to continue.

Five justices voted to stay the lower court’s injunction while the underlying legal fight proceeds. The East Wing is already gone. The government says it is now building a replacement East Wing incorporating a below-ground military installation and an above-ground ballroom. By the time the courts have finished arguing about whether the president had the authority to do this, there may be considerably less left to stop.

That’s the sleight-of-hand that’s at work here: build first; litigate later.

The lower courts had confronted the central question more directly: What gives a president the authority to demolish a substantial portion of the White House and replace it with a massive new structure without specific congressional authorization?

The Supreme Court didn’t answer that question.

Instead, it ruled that the National Trust for Historic Preservation probably lacks the legal standing required to bring the case. And it was careful to say that it was not deciding the project’s legality.

That distinction is the most troubling part of the decision.

The President Is Not the Owner

The D.C. Circuit supplied the sentence that ought to haunt this entire episode:

“Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House.”

There it is. The whole argument in eleven words.

The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It does not belong to Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or anyone else who happens to occupy the Oval Office. It belongs to the country.

The president is a tenant. And tenants, ordinarily, don’t get to knock down the building because they’ve decided the floor plan is insufficiently impressive.

Yet Donald Trump has never been able to distinguish between ownership and occupancy. That’s been his pattern with everything he touches, with buildings, with businesses, and with institutions. And now, with the White House.

We’ve watched him gold-plate virtually everything within reach of his small and restless hands. We’ve watched him confuse scale with importance, expense with excellence, and gold with taste. Give him a building and his first question seems to be how much larger it could be.

So the ballroom isn’t an aberration. It’s a physical expression of the man—90,000 square feet’ worth.

Well, of course. Trump has never met a superlative he didn’t mistake for an accomplishment. His administration has described the project in terms of unprecedented grandeur and national necessity. He doesn’t just build things. He builds the greatest things.

Except that large is not the same thing as grand. A warehouse is large. An aircraft hangar is large. A football field is large. You can build a room big enough to swallow several state dinners whole and still produce something spiritually small. And this promises to be spiritually small on a monumental scale.

The ballroom isn’t just a building. It’s an emblem of a presidency that treats the White House as a development site, legal restraints as inconveniences, and public institutions as obstacles to be removed.

Unless, of course, they simply roll over.

The Court’s Escape Hatch

The Supreme Court’s majority didn’t say that the National Trust was wrong about the ballroom’s legality. It said the Trust was probably the wrong plaintiff to make the argument.

That’s a very different thing.

The Trust’s challenge included a claim by one of its members, a historic-preservation scholar who has regularly visited and studied the White House and argued that demolishing the East Wing and radically altering the site inflicted a concrete aesthetic injury. The majority concluded that her objection was not sufficiently particularized to establish Article III standing.

But that reasoning is hardly inevitable.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined in dissent by the Court’s three liberal members, argued that this wasn’t a case of someone simply disliking a government project. The plaintiff had a specific, longstanding, personal and professional connection to the White House as a historic site. In Roberts’s view, that was precisely the kind of aesthetic injury the Court’s own precedents have recognized.

Roberts made the folly of the majority’s reasoning plain. As he put it, under the Court’s doctrine a person may be able to establish standing by saying, in effect, “I want to look at a crocodile.” Yet a historic-preservation scholar who wants to look at the White House—and objects when a large part of it is demolished—may have no standing at all.

It’s a wonderfully ridiculous legal distinction.

It’s also a serious one, because if a historic-preservation scholar who regularly visits, studies, and values the White House cannot establish a legally cognizable injury when its historic character is radically altered, then who can?

The answer may eventually be: Congress. And that’s where this seemingly ridiculous argument over a ballroom becomes something much larger.

The Power of the Purse

Congress has the power of the purse. That’s not an obscure parliamentary custom. It’s one of the Constitution’s central structural protections. Congress alone decides what the federal government can spend and what it can build. It controls federal property. It appropriates public money. It’s supposed to be the branch that prevents presidents from treating the public treasury—and public buildings—as an extension of their personal desires.

Chief Justice Roberts’s dissent goes directly to that point. He argued that the ballroom project was likely unlawful because Congress has prohibited construction on federal public grounds in the District of Columbia without express congressional authority. And Congress, as Roberts noted, didn’t enact legislation specifically authorizing the demolition of the East Wing and the construction of a vast new ballroom.

That’s not an argument about interior decoration. It’s an argument about separation of powers.

Congress appropriated $2.475 million for the ordinary maintenance and repair of the Executive Residence in the relevant fiscal year. Roberts argued that this hardly authorized the president to use hundreds of millions of dollars to demolish the East Wing and erect a massive new structure, even if money comes from private donations.

In other words, “privately funded” does not mean permission to renovate a public building site. The White House is public. The authority being exercised is public. The constitutional question isn’t just about who writes the contractor’s checks. It’s about who decides what happens to the people’s house.

The Constitution contains no private-donor exception to the separation of powers.

And this is where the ballroom becomes a particularly vivid example of a much larger problem.

The Trump administration has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to let it proceed with actions that lower courts have found legally questionable while the larger disputes remain unresolved. The Supreme Court has repeatedly intervened. The administration doesn’t necessarily win on the legal merits. It wins something else.

Time.

The Emergency That Isn’t Temporary

Emergency orders are supposed to be temporary measures. They are not final decisions after full briefing, argument, and considered resolution of a case’s merits.

But temporary judicial permission can produce permanent executive reality. That’s the problem.

The Supreme Court’s interim-relief docket has become an increasingly consequential government mechanism. Already, during the 2024–25 term, SCOTUSblog’s statistical analysis showed that the Trump administration filed 27 of the Court’s 55 substantive emergency applications. In the 21 cases with clear outcomes, the administration received relief in 19—roughly 90 percent.

Those numbers don’t prove that the Supreme Court is simply doing Donald Trump’s bidding. Nor should they. But they demonstrate an extraordinary pattern in which emergency applications repeatedly allow contested executive actions to proceed before the underlying legal questions have received final resolution.

This is key. The Court can say—correctly—that an emergency order is not a final ruling on the merits. But an order doesn’t have to be final to have permanent consequences.

Money can be spent. People can be fired. Policies can be implemented. Institutions can be dismantled. And buildings can be demolished.

The ballroom provides the perfect example.

The president orders the demolition. The lower courts say: Stop. The administration asks the Supreme Court for emergency relief. The Supreme Court says: Continue—for now.

The construction continues. And eventually, perhaps, the Court decides whether the president had the authority to do what he has already done. But what if it doesn’t? Too late.

By then the ballroom may be completed.

That’s how power works when it’s impatient enough. It destroys first, litigates afterward, and counts upon the fact that demolition is usually more permanent than a court order.

The Court calls the ruling interim. The concrete does not.

A Security Necessity?

The administration has described the project as a security necessity, incorporating underground facilities and other protective infrastructure.

Some of those features already exist in the White House. Others may be necessary. The White House requires security. No serious person disputes that. But necessity is not a magic word. It doesn’t turn every presidential desire into a national emergency. It doesn’t transform a ballroom into a constitutional imperative just because the administration has attached security facilities to it.

And the dissent points to a particularly awkward fact. The government had previously told the district court that work on the underground security facilities was driven by national-security concerns independent of the ballroom above them. The lower court’s injunction didn’t halt that underground work. It barred the ballroom construction, except to the extent that above-ground work was strictly necessary to protect the site and the work beneath it.

One wonders: couldn’t the underground work have been done without demolishing the East Wing? Or was that just a cover story—no pun intended—to justify a vanity project?

So the issue was never whether the White House may protect itself. It was whether the president may use a legitimate security need as an architectural Trojan horse—bringing with it a 90,000-square-foot ballroom that Congress never authorized.

The question remains: Who authorized this?

The Ballroom as Trump

And yet, for all the constitutional seriousness of this dispute, it would be a mistake to pretend that the ballroom itself is incidental.

It’s not. It tells us something about the president who ordered it.

Trump has spent a lifetime confusing scale with importance. He has confused expense with excellence, publicity with achievement, and the possession of wealth with the possession of worth.

The White House, to him, appears to present a particularly irritating problem: It’s already famous. It doesn’t need his name or a gold leaf. It doesn’t need to be bigger. It doesn’t need a marketing campaign.

The Washington Monument doesn’t advertise its height. The Lincoln Memorial doesn’t require a chandelier to communicate gravity. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial doesn’t require marble columns to make its somber point.

These places work because they ask the visitor to think beyond the ego of the people who built them.

Trump’s ballroom asks us to think of Donald Trump. That’s the difference between grandeur and grandiosity.

There’is another irony worth noticing.

Trump’s most fervent supporters are constantly told that this sort of thing is part of a restoration of American greatness. But very few of them will ever set foot inside that ballroom.

They may buy the hats and wave the flags. They may chant the slogans and contribute what they can. But the finished room will belong to the people who have always occupied Trump’s version of populism’s VIP section: donors, dignitaries, wealthy patrons, political courtiers, and anyone else sufficiently useful to merit an invitation.

The ballroom is populism as practiced by a man who has never confused the public with his preferred guests. Trump’s idea of public service is the public serving him.

The office supplies the grandeur. He supplies the appetite. The country supplies the history. He supplies the branding.

Imagine spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a room in which Donald Trump can eat McDonald’s.

The House Is Bigger Than the Man

There’s a temptation to dismiss all of this as another Trump extravagance.

Another gaudy building. Another vanity project. Another example of the president’s spectacularly mediocre taste.

And yes, it’s all of those things.

But symbols are not trivial. Buildings are not trivial. The spaces a nation preserves, demolishes, and constructs tell us something about what it believes itself to be.

Trump is a cultural vandal. No culture is safe from his thuggery—not the culture of law, not the culture of institutions, not the culture of public restraint, and certainly not the architectural inheritance of a republic that once understood that its national house was more than a stage set for one man’s ego.

But the more important question is not whether Trump is a vandal. We already know that. The question is what happens when the institutions standing between the vandal and the building begin opening the gates.

The president is a temporary tenant. The building is not. The occupant leaves. The country remains.

That’s why the question was never really whether Donald Trump has good taste. He doesn’t. It’s whether the country would permit a temporary tenant to behave like the owner.

The Supreme Court hasn’t answered that question with finality. It says that it hasn’t decided whether the ballroom is lawful. It’s decided only that the plaintiff probably lacks standing and that construction can continue while the larger question waits.

But in constitutional life, delay is not neutral. A building can rise while a case is pending. An institution can be dismantled while a court studies the briefs. An “interim” order can do permanent work.

Anyone who promises to tear it down gets my vote.

If I get a vote.

Once upon a time, perhaps, the Supreme Court understood that its job wasn’t just to decide what a president could get away with. Its job was to decide what the Constitution allows.

The ballroom is still being built.

So is the precedent.

A friend said something to me during a discussion about climate change, and it gave me pause. Keep in mind he already believes climate change is a hoax.

I’d made what seemed like an obvious point. No matter what we argue about—warming temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, melting glaciers, rising seas, all the big, noisy pieces of the climate-change argument—our kids are still going to be here.

His response wasn’t that the science was wrong, or that climate change had been exaggerated. It wasn’t that the proposed remedies were too expensive, too intrusive, too impractical, or too likely to enrich the usual collection of people who fly private jets to conferences about saving the planet.

Those are arguments. We can have those arguments.

His answer was simpler.

“When I’m dead, I won’t have any worries. Those alive can worry about whatever.”

That startled me.

He wasn’t really arguing about climate change. He was answering a different question.

Why should I give a shit?

He didn’t say those exact words, but I know the guy, and the tone was clear. It’s a hell of a thing to say out loud.

What We Inherited

Most of us understand, at least in theory, that our obligations don’t end when we do.

Parents save money their children may spend after they’re gone. People plant trees they’ll never sit under. Engineers design bridges they won’t live long enough to see replaced. Scientists pursue ideas whose usefulness may not become clear until their names have vanished from the lab door. Workers built cathedrals knowing they’d never see the roof finished. A teacher teaches a kid who may grow up to do something the teacher will never hear about.

Think about that for a second. Human beings do this odd, beautiful thing. We make plans whose end we know we won’t see. We accept costs for benefits we’ll never collect. We build things for strangers.

Why?

Because the future is real even though we won’t be in it.

Civilization is deferred gratification made physical.

We live in homes we didn’t build. We drive on roads we didn’t pave. We drink water from systems we didn’t design. We benefit from schools we didn’t finance, research we didn’t conduct, parks we didn’t save, and institutions put together by people whose names we’ll never know.

We inherited all of it.

That doesn’t mean the people before us were saints. They weren’t. They gave us wars, debts, pollution, injustice, neglected infrastructure, and plenty of other problems they left sitting in the middle of the road. But they also built things meant to outlast them.

So the question isn’t just what they owed us.

It’s what we owe the people who come after us.

The Future Has No Vote

Here’s the thing: The future has a problem.

It has no vote.

It can’t make a campaign contribution. It can’t hire a lobbyist. It can’t show up at a city-council meeting, or sit in on a corporate earnings call and say, “Excuse me, but maybe next quarter isn’t as important as the next generation’s water supply.”

The future is represented only by the conscience of the present.

And conscience is having a rough time of it.

Granted, people have always been shortsighted—politicians, captains of industry, or voters more interested in the pothole outside their own house than a problem fifty years away.

The difference is that today’s systems make short-term thinking not just tempting but rational—at least if you’re trying to keep your job, meet a target, win an election, or survive the next news cycle.

The CEO gets judged on this quarter. The politician gets judged in the next election. The news operation gets judged by clicks this afternoon. The social-media machine gets judged every second. The consumer gets trained to want everything now, now, and yesterday.

And the people who’ll be around thirty or fifty years from now?

They don’t get a vote.

They don’t get to say, “Maybe fix the bridge before it falls.”

They don’t get to say, “Maybe don’t leave us with the bill.”

They don’t get to say, “Maybe you ought to consider the possibility that you were wrong.”

The future can’t speak for itself.

It depends on us to do that.

Climate Is the Test

That’s why climate change is such an interesting test. It isn’t the only long-term problem we have, but it may be the one that most directly asks whether we can think beyond ourselves.

The central proposition is no longer a serious scientific mystery: human activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuels and the greenhouse gases it releases, has warmed the planet. The IPCC says human-caused climate change is already affecting weather and climate extremes worldwide, and that the risks worsen as warming increases.

That doesn’t mean every flood is caused by climate change.

It doesn’t mean every drought proves a prediction.

It doesn’t mean every policy proposed in the name of climate action is smart, cheap, honest, or likely to work.

Those are different questions.

But uncertainty about every last detail isn’t the same as not knowing there’s risk.

We understand that everywhere else in our lives.

You buy fire insurance even though you don’t know whether your house will burn down.

You wear a seatbelt even though you don’t expect to crash.

Engineers inspect a bridge because waiting for it to collapse is not what anybody would call a maintenance plan.

You fix a roof without demanding that someone tell you which Tuesday next month the storm will arrive.

The climate argument isn’t really an argument for certainty.

It’s an argument for prudence.

What are you willing to risk being wrong about?

Suppose the scientists warning us are substantially wrong about the scale or timing of some future harm. Suppose some climate policies turn out to be wasteful, clumsy, expensive, politically corrupt, or just plain dumb.

That’s a fair concern. We can all point to examples of governments turning good ideas into an expensive bog.

We may spend too much. We may subsidize foolish projects. We may write bad regulations. We may make some very costly mistakes.

If we act and climate change turns out not to be as dangerous as feared, we may have spent too much money. We may have made some dumb decisions.

But we may also have cleaner air, less pollution, better technology, a more diverse energy system, and less dependence on fuels whose price and supply can be held hostage by countries that don’t wish us well.

Now turn it around.

Suppose the broad danger is what the evidence says it is.

Suppose we know enough to act, but we decide the cost, inconvenience, political hassle, and endless cable TV arguments are just too damn annoying.

Climate science doesn’t offer a single prophecy or one neat little picture of the future. The models give us a range of projections, depending largely on what we do next. Some of those futures are seriously disruptive. Some are potentially catastrophic.

My friend wouldn’t read those projections. He’d mock them.

But mocking a projection isn’t the same thing as disproving it.

Climate models don’t need to predict the future with perfect precision for the risk to demand serious consideration. The range of possible futures is serious enough that pretending uncertainty means “nothing to worry about” is intellectually irresponsible.

The consequences won’t be borne equally. If we choose to delay, deny, or just refuse to think about the risk, we don’t get to pick who inherits it.

It may be our children. Or grandchildren. It may be people in poorer countries who had almost nothing to do with creating the problem. It may be people living near a coast, people trying to grow food, people who can’t afford to rebuild a home, or people not yet born.

The point is not that any of us can see the future perfectly.

The point is that we don’t get to leave someone else with the bill for a risk we failed to take seriously.

Permission Not to Care

There is something we should acknowledge here: indifference doesn’t always just appear out of nowhere.

Sometimes somebody has an interest in helping it along.

The fossil-fuel industry’s history with climate science is complicated, but the broad outline isn’t. Congressional investigators have documented evidence that major companies possessed relevant scientific information decades ago, while industry groups and allies promoted doubt about climate science and fought efforts to limit emissions.

The useful thing about doubt is that if you’re making money from the thing being questioned, you don’t have to persuade everybody there’s no danger.

You just have to make enough people think nobody really knows.

That’s enough.

If people think the science is too uncertain, they can tell themselves there’s no need to act yet. If they think every climate policy is a scam, they don’t have to think about which policies might work. If they think every warning is hysteria, they don’t have to ask what happens if the warning turns out to be right.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Tobacco companies didn’t have to prove cigarettes were healthy. They needed to keep people uncertain long enough to delay regulation, lawsuits, public understanding, and consumer loss.

Turn knowledge into controversy. Keep the argument going. Make certainty the only standard anyone will accept.

Then people get a respectable-sounding excuse not to consider that they may be wrong. And once you never have to consider that you may be wrong, you never have to decide what you owe the people who will live with the consequences.

Somebody Did It for Us

The reason my friend’s comment bothered me isn’t that he and I disagree about climate policy.

People disagree about policy all the time. They should.

It bothered me because it made me wonder whether we’re losing the capacity to think of ourselves as temporary custodians of anything.

The corporation takes the profit now and pushes the cleanup cost down the road.

The politician gets through the next election and leaves the repair for whoever comes next.

The government postpones maintenance. The consumer takes the convenience. The society takes what it can. The benefit is immediate. The cost gets sent forward.

The future is particularly easy to exploit because it can’t walk into the room and object. It can’t vote. It can’t sue or organize. It can’t say, “Excuse me. That’s going to be my problem.”

So we push things forward.

Until forward runs out.

But here’s the thing. Before we got here, somebody gave a shit about us. Somebody planted trees. Somebody built hospitals and libraries. Somebody maintained roads. Somebody funded research. Somebody preserved parks. Somebody built the water system. Somebody wrote building codes. Somebody repaired bridges before we drove over them.

Somebody decided that people they would never meet deserved a better chance than they had. They did it for us. We were born into the accumulated work, restraint, sacrifice, maintenance, and foresight of people who didn’t know us and had no guarantee we’d appreciate any of it.

Civilization is an inheritance, too. And we don’t get to act like we earned every bit of it simply because we happened to arrive after it was built.

The Grocery Cart

Ya wanna know what I do?

Get this: Out in the grocery-store parking lot, I put stray carts back in the cart rack.

Not just mine. The other ones too.

A cart sitting loose in a space. A cart left halfway down the lot. A cart parked just right so the next wind can send it into somebody’s door.

It takes thirty seconds.

Nobody knows I did it. Nobody has to know. Nobody thanks me. No one needs to. Y’know why? Because I don’t give a shit about the praise.

That’s not why you do it.

You do it because somebody shouldn’t have to deal with a problem that didn’t need to exist. You do it because you can.

Because it’s right.

Now that is stewardship in miniature.

The people before us planted. They repaired. They built. They preserved. They did things whose rewards they would never see and whose beneficiaries they would never meet.

They did it for us because they gave a shit.

Now it’s our turn.

Funny this should come up after I’ve written several essays, in one way or another, about what happens when people stop questioning what they think they know.

I always try to be subtle about that in my writing. Subtlety is one of the last remaining pleasures available to a writer, particularly in an era when people mistake subtlety for weakness and nuance for surrender.

But sometimes subtlety has its limits.

A friend shared a video from that ever-reliable source of factual information: Instagram. I took a screenshot. You see it above. The video is below.

It’s a serious facepalm moment.

The shirt asks: “Ever wonder why there are no Democrats on Mount Rushmore? Yeah, me neither.”

Well, yes. I have wondered. And the answer is quite simple: historical political parties aren’t frozen in amber. Their names may survive, but their coalitions, regions, priorities, and ideological commitments change—sometimes slowly, sometimes dramatically.

The shirt isn’t really asking a question. It’s offering a tribal wink. It lets the wearer feel historically informed without having to be informed. It’s for people who confuse a party label with a political belief: “Republican” is good because Lincoln was a Republican. “Democrat” is bad because Democrats once defended slavery and segregation. Case closed. Own the libs. Pass the potato salad.

Except history isn’t a fantasy football league in which a party gets permanent possession of every admirable person who ever wore its jersey.

George Washington, for one, would have found the whole thing absurd.

Washington belonged to no political party. In his Farewell Address, he warned Americans about what he called “factions”—political groups organized around passion, self-interest, and the appetite for power. He feared that party loyalty could make Americans enemies of one another, overwhelm the public good, and leave the country vulnerable to ambitious men who knew how to exploit division.

That was not exactly an invitation to put him on a T-shirt as proof that your present-day political tribe is morally superior.

Then there is Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was a founder of the Democratic-Republican Party—often called the Jeffersonian Republican Party—which fractured after 1824. Andrew Jackson’s wing eventually became the Democratic Party, making Jefferson’s party a historical ancestor of today’s Democrats, though certainly not an ideological twin. Its coalition, regional base, beliefs, and political meaning have changed beyond recognition.

Jefferson’s party opposed the Federalists and their more nationalist vision of government. It favored a more limited federal government, stronger state authority, and an agrarian political order. Over time, its descendants became dominant in the South, where slavery was central to the economy and white supremacy was embedded in political and social life long before the Civil War—and remained violently entrenched for generations afterward.

Those are not the defining commitments of modern American liberalism.

The party system that eventually evolved into today’s Democratic Party also produced the Southern Democrats who defended slavery, segregation, disfranchisement, and Jim Crow. This is the part conservatives love to announce, usually with the theatrical confidence of someone revealing that water is wet.

Yes, Southern Democrats defended those things. That is true.

It’s also true that those Southern Democrats were the conservative force in American politics: defenders of an old racial order; advocates of “states’ rights” when those rights protected slavery, segregation, and white rule; believers in local control when it reinforced racial hierarchy; and devotees of tradition when tradition meant preserving inequality.

That doesn’t make them liberals because they happened to call themselves Democrats. It makes them conservatives—sometimes violently so.

The Republican Party was born in reaction to that kind of conservatism. Founded in 1854, it brought together opponents of slavery’s expansion into the western territories. Its position wasn’t initially identical to immediate abolitionism; its defining purpose was to stop the expansion of slavery and the political forces defending it. It became the party that elected Abraham Lincoln, preserved the Union, and, in the crucible of war, destroyed slavery.

Lincoln’s Republicans were the reform party of their era: anti-slavery-expansion, pro-Union, supportive of national development, and willing to use federal power in ways their Democratic opponents resisted.

That doesn’t mean Abraham Lincoln was a 2026 Democrat. It means that anyone using Lincoln’s party registration as proof that modern Republican politics possesses some inherited moral superiority is drawing history with a crayon.

Lincoln believed in national power when national power was needed to hold the country together. He signed the Homestead Act, which opened land to settlers; the Morrill Act, which established land-grant colleges; and legislation that helped create a transcontinental railroad. During the Civil War, he used the authority of the federal government to preserve the Union and issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Try putting that on a T-shirt.

Theodore Roosevelt may be the funniest figure on the shirt—from a modern conservative perspective, anyway.

Yes, Roosevelt was a Republican. He was also one of the great Progressives in American history: a trust-buster, conservationist, regulator, and believer in using federal power against concentrated corporate power. He believed that industrial wealth and corporate power required public restraint. He pursued antitrust cases, strengthened railroad regulation, backed consumer protections, and dramatically expanded federal conservation efforts.

He wouldn’t fit neatly into today’s Democratic Party. Nobody from 1905 does. But his governing philosophy belongs much closer to the tradition of reform liberalism than to the anti-regulatory, corporate-accommodating, government-is-always-the-enemy politics of the contemporary Republican Party.

By 1912, Roosevelt had broken with the Republican establishment and run for president on the Progressive—or Bull Moose—ticket. Its platform called for stronger federal oversight of large corporations, labor protections, public-health and workplace standards, democratic reforms, and women’s suffrage.

Translation for the MAGA crowd: that means voting rights.

The Progressive Era brought major efforts to confront political corruption, unsafe work conditions, child labor, corporate monopolies, poverty, public-health failures, and the exclusion of women from the vote. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t a single unified movement. And it was deeply compromised by the racism of its own era. But it was unmistakably a period in which reformers argued that government had a responsibility to check private power and improve the lives of ordinary people.

That’s not exactly the modern conservative ideal, is it. It’s pretty much the opposite of the modern conservative ideal. In fact, today someone might call it—gasp!—socialism!

Now, here’s the part the T-shirt can’t accommodate because that would take more than ten seconds of brain power to think about: the parties didn’t just wake up one morning and exchange identities.

The realignment took decades. It involved regional shifts, changes in economic interests, racial politics, and coalitions. But the pivotal issue was civil rights.

As national Democrats increasingly embraced civil-rights legislation and voting rights in the mid-twentieth century, the party began to lose much of its white Southern conservative base. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed with support from both parties—46 Senate Democrats and 27 Senate Republicans voted for it—but the most determined congressional opposition came largely from Southern Democrats, many of whom had long defended segregation.

Consider Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, one of the country’s most committed segregationists. A lifelong Democrat who ran for president in 1948 on the segregationist States’ Rights Democratic ticket, Thurmond formally joined the Republican Party two months after the Civil Rights Act became law. He didn’t change his racial politics. He changed his political home.

In the decades that followed, white Southern conservatives increasingly became Republican voters. The party names remained the same, but their regional bases, racial politics, governing coalitions, and the ideological center of gravity did not. Scholars call that process realignment because it was—not a magical overnight “switch,” but a long political migration.

So, yes: the shirt is technically correct in one narrow and useless sense. None of the four men on Mount Rushmore was a member of the party that today calls itself the Democratic Party.

But George Washington had no party at all. Jefferson belonged to a party ancestral to the Democratic Party but separated from it by two centuries of political evolution. Lincoln led a Republican Party defined by opposition to slavery’s expansion and a willingness to use federal power for national purposes. Theodore Roosevelt represented a Progressive Republicanism that today’s Republican Party has mostly abandoned—or would call socialism if it were proposed before lunch.

The shirt doesn’t prove there are no Democrats on Mount Rushmore.

It proves that the man wearing it doesn’t understand the difference between a party label and political history.

Ah, but then came the classic double-down from my friend:

“A Democrat will never be on Mt. Rushmore. Never.”

Well, Mount Rushmore is finished. They carved the faces between 1927 and 1941. No other president will be added, period.

But that isn’t the point.

The point is that Mount Rushmore isn’t a monument to modern Republican ideology. It’s not four MAGA hats chiseled into granite. It’s not a scoreboard on which Grandpa gets to claim Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt as fellow travelers in the war against “the libs.”

Jefferson belonged to the Democratic-Republican tradition from which the modern Democratic Party eventually emerged. Lincoln led the nation through its defining moral crisis and used federal authority to destroy slavery. Teddy Roosevelt attacked concentrated corporate power, protected public lands, championed social regulation, and ultimately ran under the banner of a party called Progressive.

So no, there are not four modern Republicans on Mount Rushmore.

There is one man with no party, one man from a party ancestral to the Democrats, and two Republicans whose versions of Republicanism bear little resemblance to the party that now wears that name.

Sorry, Grandpa. You may not be stupid.

But if the T-shirt is doing all the talking, perhaps it is because the man wearing it has nothing to say once someone asks a follow-up question.

Updating: On Thursday, Aug 27, Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario Lake America. When asked why, he told White House reporters, “Well, they haven’t treated us very well; they’re nasty people.”

We await Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to sign the equivalent, an Order in Council, renaming Lake America Lake Epstein.

The essay that follows has been updated.

It seemed more than coincidental. The timing was almost too perfect—one of those small alignments of circumstance that felt less like happenstance than satire arranging its own props.

On the same day I watched a documentary about Mike Wallace, I read two separate reports about Donald Trump, reports so absurdly consonant with the man’s character that I could almost hear Wallace’s dry, incredulous voice cutting through them, were he alive today to interview him.

One concerned the Kennedy Center, a national institution apparently vulnerable to demolition, diminution, or disgrace because Donald Trump’s name might not receive its appointed share of marble and grandeur. He has threatened to tear down the center if his name is not restored to the building.

The other folly concerned Lake Ontario, which Trump has proposed renaming “Lake America” after trade talks with Canada broke down. Two days later, he followed through on that threat, by executive order.

“They haven’t treated us very well,: he told White House reporters. “They’re nasty people.”

One could imagine Wallace, his silence as pointed as his contempt.

“Mr. President, are you really prepared to tear down the Kennedy Center because your name will not be restored to it?”
“You renamed Lake Ontario because Canada offended you. Is that your understanding of presidential power?”
“What national interest is served by renaming a lake because you’re angry with Canada?
“And do you understand that this sounds less like presidential leadership than a child, enraged that the game is no longer going his way, announcing that he will take his toys and go home?”

In 1985, Wallace interviewed Trump, then a loud New York real-estate promoter with an appetite for publicity and a reflexive belief that the country had gone to hell because insufficiently tough men were running it. Even then, he had the same stock prophecy: unless somebody acted, “the country and the world are in big trouble,” and soon there would be “not going to be a country” or “a world.”

Four decades later, the warning has not matured into thought. Instead, it has curdled into a governing style.

Trump doesn’t merely react to events; he personalizes them. Institutions are not institutions; they are stages upon which his ego must be affirmed. Allies are not allies; they are people who have not yet disappointed him. Nations are not nations; they are rivals to be humiliated, props to be moved about, or targets for retaliation when the applause falters.

To Trump, the Kennedy Center isn’t a national cultural institution with a history, a public purpose, artists, workers, audiences, and obligations extending beyond any one administration. In “Trumpworld,” it becomes an insult machine: if it doesn’t flatter him adequately, it deserves punishment. Canada isn’t a democratic ally with which the United States shares commerce, geography, defense commitments, and the world’s longest undefended border. It’s a supporting player that has missed its cue to kiss the ring.

And Lake Ontario is not a lake. It’s just another artifact from the prop room.

That is the essential obscenity. The subject is never really the Kennedy Center, Lake Ontario, Canada, or any other object, animate or inanimate. The subject is Donald Trump: his wounded pride, his demand for submission, his furious need to turn any perceived loss into a spectacle of revenge.

Trump has always had a knack for turning his own psychic deficiency into a public embarrassment. He has never encountered an institution he couldn’t mistake for a mirror, a criticism he could not translate into persecution, or a disagreement he could not repackage as treason. The adult world, with its rules, limits, inherited names, independent persons, and inconvenient memory, has forever seemed to him an intolerable affront. How dare it exist without his permission.

We understand a toddler’s tantrum. A child has not yet acquired emotional proportion, patience, self-command, or the ability to distinguish a passing disappointment from an existential insult. A president—indeed, any adult—is supposed to have mastered such things before taking on the demands of life, much less swearing an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

Trump has done the reverse. He has elevated his most juvenile impulses into a political philosophy. He treats restraint as weakness, criticism as betrayal, and public office as a license to settle scores. Then he calls the resulting chaos strength.

His idea of public authority combines a little Charles Foster Kane from Citizen Kane with a great deal of Veruca Salt from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It’s the wounded magnate who, confronted by the final wreckage of his own life, destroys the room of the wife who has left him; it’s the child who insists that the world give her what she wants “nowww!”

Kane is the darker image. A powerful man, frustrated by a reality he cannot dominate, destroys the physical evidence of his own failure. Veruca is the comic shorthand: “I want it now,” followed by rage when she doesn’t get her way.

The comparison is not meant to say Trump is literally either figure. It identifies their shared trait—unbounded entitlement—and the executive power Trump has given it.

This is not the strength his admirers insist they see. Strength entails proportion: the capacity to distinguish an injury from an inconvenience, national interest from personal pique, a grave act of government from the narcotic pleasure of making someone else submit. Trump’s version is the theatrical substitute: an ungoverned appetite presented as authenticity.

Children throw tantrums because they’ve yet to learn that the world does not rearrange itself around their desires. Trump’s tragedy—and ours—is that he has reached the presidency without ever learning the lesson. Worse, he has persuaded a substantial part of the country that the tantrum is evidence of courage.

Mike Wallace would have understood the performance at once. He would not have needed to shout. He would simply ask the question, wait through the evasions, and return to it.

Wallace: “When you do not get what you want, Mr. President, why is your instinct not to make the case, negotiate, or accept the limits of office? Why is it to threaten to break something?”
Trump: “Nobody has done more—”
Wallace: “That was not my question.”
Wallace: “Do you believe the United States exists to serve your grievances?”
Wallace: “And if not, why do you so often behave as though it does?”

The great appeal of a Mike Wallace interview was not shouting or theater. It was the steady removal of every available escape route. The powerful and evasive man was deprived of his flattering host, obliging audience, staffer rushing in to change the subject, and the chance to overwhelm the room with noise.

Wallace did not need a clever insult to “destroy” a subject. He placed the record before him, plainly and precisely. The evasion came. Then Wallace returned to the question. Again. And again.

The point was not humiliation. It was accountability: the proposition that power does not acquire the right to evade scrutiny merely because it is loud.

Eventually, the subject had nowhere left to pass the blame.

That was the attraction: watching a scoundrel, dead to rights, forced—however briefly—to see himself as the rest of us did. It was a Dorian Gray moment. The handsome public portrait was set aside; the ugly, hidden canvas brought into the light.

But Wallace’s question does not end with Donald Trump.

It’s easy enough to sit safely in the comfort of our living rooms and diagnose him: the grievance, the vanity, the rage at limits, the reflex to turn every rebuff into an act of war. It’s easy to shake our heads at the latest insult, threat, or descent into language that would embarrass a badly raised child.

Tsk, tsk.

We might then ask: Why does he keep doing it?

Part of the answer is obvious. He does it because it works. There are always cameras and microphones. There is always a Republican official ready to call the outburst “toughness.” There is always a television interviewer willing to absorb a barrage of abuse—“Are you stupid?”—and move politely to the next question. A threat against an institution, an ally, or a basic norm becomes another day in the Trump cycle: covered, remarked upon, then quietly filed under that’s just him.

But “that’s just him” is not an explanation. It’s an abdication.

And that brings us to the more consequential question—not why he does it, but why we let him.

Why do we allow a president to speak and behave in ways we would instantly correct in a child? Why do elected officials who call themselves defenders of order and character look away, explain it away, or call it strength? Why do interviewers accept abuse as a professional inconvenience, then proceed as though the abuse had no bearing on the fitness of the man dispensing it?

What parent would accept this behavior from a child? What teacher would accept it in a classroom? What employer would tolerate it from an employee? If a child, told no, threatened to smash the furniture, rename the family dog, or destroy the game because its rules did not flatter him, the adult in the room would not call it strength. The adult would call it a tantrum.

Yet when Trump performs the presidential equivalent—treating institutions as personal property, allies as enemies to punish, and public symbols as trophies to vandalize when they no longer gratify him—too many people call it leadership.

A child who learns that screaming produces attention, concessions, and frightened silence does not stop screaming. He learns the value of screaming. A politician who learns that insult, humiliation, and perpetual grievance produce applause, loyalty, ratings, and immunity from consequence, learns precisely the same lesson—with incomparably more destructive instruments at hand.

Trump is not a force of nature. He is a man whose every public outburst has been met, somewhere, by a microphone, a cheer, a rationalization, a cowardly silence, or a vote.

A president’s behavior is not a private failing unfolding in isolation. It is a national transaction. He performs; we reward—or, more commonly, dismiss. He violates a boundary; we explain why the boundary was never important. He insults; we look down, smile nervously, change the subject, and advise one another not to be distracted from the “real business at hand.”

But the real business is precisely whether a man incapable of governing his own anger should be trusted with governing the country.

We cannot send him down the chute like Veruca Salt. We cannot wait for a dying whisper of “Rosebud” to explain the wreckage. But voters can do what responsible adults do when they discover that every outburst has been rewarded: stop rewarding it. Impose consequences. On lawmakers. On the media. Anywhere, and everywhere. But we don’t.

And so the Toddler in Chief is not merely indulged; he is enabled, and we are the enablers.

That may be the portrait we least wish to examine. We prefer to imagine that Dorian Gray is somebody else: the vain man before the mirror, the public liar, the aging narcissist whose hidden corruption gathers in a locked, dusty room.

But every society has a portrait hidden away in dust and darkness. It is fashioned not only from the sins of the man at the center of the story, but from the accommodations of everyone around him: cowardice calling itself prudence; silence calling itself professionalism; indulgence calling itself loyalty; weariness calling itself realism.

That is us.

We do not have to admire Donald Trump to enable him. We need only decide, again and again, that the latest outrage is not worth confronting. We need only accept that this is another day at the office. We need only keep moving.

The dusty room is in our own minds. It is where we store what we know but would rather not examine: that a public degradation becomes possible because enough of us grow accustomed to watching it; that a man can turn the presidency into the scenery of his tantrums only when a country decides that tantrums are the price of admission.

The portrait awaits—not of Trump alone, but of us.

All of us.

How many times have you thought that a lot of Americans are just plain dumb?

Especially since Donald Trump arrived on the political stage?

It’s not hard to reach that conclusion. Sometimes you run into someone so detached from reality that the only honest response is: You cannot possibly be that stupid.

And let’s be honest: sometimes people are that dumb. A lot of ’em. Others have never been particularly interested in thinking very hard about anything. But stupidity is not the whole explanation. Being dumb is not the same as being incurious. And being incurious is not necessarily the same as being incapable of knowing better.

Some are clueless because they haven’t had the chance or the tools to learn. Others are oblivious because they don’t care enough to find out. The first is a circumstance. The second can be a choice, and choosing ignorance can become a vulnerability.

If you don’t care enough to understand how something works, you’re much easier to manipulate by someone who does.

That is where the huckster comes in.

The huckster doesn’t need to make you stupid. He only needs to recognize what you’re willing to give up in order to avoid the discomfort of thinking for yourself.

Maybe certainty is easier than doubt.
Maybe belonging is worth the price of independent judgment.
Maybe being wrong hurts more than being ignorant.
Maybe, for some people, the psychological payoff of certainty is worth whatever reality demands in return.

Whatever the reason, someone capable of knowing better can find that knowing less is a better bargain, because it offers the comfort of identity, the shelter of a tribe, or a story about the world that feels better than the truth. It’s a trade-off: you sacrifice truth and independence for emotional safety.

That’s far more dangerous than simple ignorance. Once not knowing becomes part of who you are, correction feels like an attack. And once correction feels like an attack, evidence—reality itself—becomes the enemy.

This vulnerability isn’t unique to Trump supporters. But Trump recognized it, cultivated it, and turned it into political power.

It’s not as if he descended on an otherwise rational republic like some foreign pathogen. He didn’t hypnotize a nation that had been thinking clearly the day before he arrived.

He recognized a vulnerability that was already there.

And he knew exactly what to do with it.

Trump is hardly the “stable genius” he claims to be. He is, in fact, often the man about whom one says: You cannot possibly be that stupid.

Trump’s intelligence, such as it is, is not that of a deep thinker; it’s transactional and theatrical. He has an instinct for grievance, spectacle, status, and the emotional rewards of giving you an enemy. He knows how to turn ignorance into identification, resentment into belonging, and outrage into attention.

That millions found this reassuring is both alarming and telling. He understood that many followers would forgive his blatant ignorance if he could make expertise seem elitist and ignorance seem authentic.

His remark after winning the Nevada primary in 2016 makes the point: “We won with the highly educated. We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” That comment doesn’t prove that Trump regarded everyone without formal education as unintelligent. It proves something more significant: he recognized a constituency alienated from credentialed authority, and he knew exactly how to appeal to them.

He didn’t merely lack knowledge. He made a performance of not needing it. He flaunted his ignorance like a badge of honor, and millions applauded. He spoke with absolute confidence about matters he never bothered to understand. Facts were optional. Precision was suspect. Doubt was a weakness.

Instead of turning away, vast audiences leaned in.

Why?

Because thinking is hard. It requires effort, humility, and a willingness to accept that you might be wrong. It requires something modern political culture increasingly treats as intolerable: correction.

Trump offered a holiday from all of that.

He told people they were already right, already wise, and already victims of sinister forces that mocked them for being insufficiently enlightened. The problem wasn’t that they might have been mistaken. It was that someone had kept them from seeing the truth.

His truth.

The real danger was never Trump’s ignorance. It was the affection it inspired—and the political power that affection made possible.

The Crime of Knowing

Expertise is not a moral failing. It’s the result of hard work, discipline, accumulated knowledge, and a willingness to be corrected by reality.

Sure, scientists can miss the mark. Historians can get it wrong. Journalists can misreport. Experts can make mistakes. That’s exactly what makes expertise valuable: it has built-in ways to identify and fix errors.

Trump’s approach flipped that idea on its head. Those who had more knowledge than he did were suddenly viewed with suspicion just because they were informed. Scientists, journalists, historians, civil servants—anyone who dared to say the evidence didn’t back him up could easily be labeled as part of a conspiracy.

If Trump’s comment that he loved “the poorly educated” was meant as a joke, it was more revealing than funny.

He tapped into a growing resentment towards expertise, giving it a platform and making it politically useful. Consulting evidence could be portrayed as a sign of weakness. Deferring to expertise became manipulation. Changing your mind became surrender.

The political power of this inversion was clear: those who dedicated their lives to understanding the world were cast as villains, while those who shunned learning were recast as the real truth-tellers.

Knowing less actually became something of a moral high ground.

H. L. Mencken, who never mistook contempt for lack of style, once famously observed that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of “the great masses of the plain people.” The cruelty of the line is obvious. So is the political truth beneath it: money and power lie in discovering what people would rather believe than examine.

That is not simply stupidity. It is something more politically consequential: a culture in which erudition is socially maligned, and ignorance is socially protected.

When Belief Becomes Identity

I’ve long maintained that the real enemy of reason isn’t ignorance but certainty without justification.

Trump embodied this perfectly.

He didn’t ask people to truly understand the world around them. Instead, he gave them a way to stop worrying about whether they actually did.

If you felt confused, it was because the experts were lying to you.

If you were angry, it was because the intellectual elites despised you.

And if something contradicted your beliefs, the contradiction became proof of a conspiracy.

Trumpism turned anxiety into anger, uncertainty into certainty, and ignorance into a badge of moral superiority.

This is why the usual fact-checking response often misses the mark. The problem is not simply that people have been given false information. The problem is that belief has become identity.

Once that happens, evidence no longer arrives as information. It arrives as an accusation.

Admitting you were wrong doesn’t just mean changing your mind; it means admitting that you were foolish, that your tribe deceived you, and that your enemies were actually right.

It’s often easier to label reality as corrupt than to reconsider your own views. That’s why Trump’s lies weren’t seen as liabilities; they were tests of loyalty. Accept the lie, and you belong. Question it, and you betray the tribe. Intelligence becomes a threat because it asks the question identity fears most:

What if I’m wrong?

The Politics of Spectacle

I have never concealed my contempt for the conversion of politics into entertainment. Trump did not merely participate in that degradation. He perfected it.

He understood that attention, not accuracy, was the true currency of modern political life.

He did not argue. He interrupted.

He did not persuade. He dominated the spectacle.

Television had already trained America to confuse visibility with importance. Social media intensified the lesson. Trump became its most successful practitioner.

Nuance does not trend. Complexity does not shout. Qualification sounds like weakness.

Every outrage drew attention. Every correction became material for the next outrage. Fact-checking could be dismissed as censorship. Criticism could be converted into persecution. The more outrageous Trump became, the more attention he received; the more attention he received, the more his followers interpreted criticism as proof of his victimhood.

The cycle reinforced itself.

Trump did not have to prove he was right. He only had to make it seem as though being challenged was evidence of his persecution.

Democracy and the Right to Be Wrong

Democracy cannot survive on ballots alone.

It thrives on citizens who can tell the difference between genuine arguments and mere propaganda, separate evidence from mere claims, and distinguish confidence from actual knowledge. Most importantly, it needs citizens who are open to changing their minds.

That last requirement is often overlooked. Democracy is not a system designed to guarantee that we will always make correct decisions. It’s a system designed to make correction possible.

Elections are one mechanism of correction. A free press is another. Courts, science, and public debate are others. All depend on the same underlying assumption:

Reality does not care what we believe—and will prove that we can be wrong.

Anti-intellectualism attacks that assumption at its core.

When expertise is disregarded and evidence becomes optional, democracy devolves into a battle of identities and emotions instead of rational arguments. The question stops being “Is this true?” and becomes: “Who said it?”

Truth becomes tribal, and once beliefs become badges of identity, correction becomes nearly impossible.

This is why the problem is larger than Trump.

Trump didn’t create the American distrust of expertise; he just exposed how politically powerful that distrust had become. He stripped away the pretense that knowledge was universally admired, that expertise commanded respect, and that critical thinking was valued as a civic virtue.

He discovered something deeply useful:

A population that views correction as humiliation is extraordinarily easy to manipulate.

Intellectual Adulthood

The solution isn’t to long for an imaginary time when Americans were better informed. Nor is it technocratic arrogance—the assumption that experts should be trusted simply because they are experts.

Experts are not priests. They are not infallible. Their claims should be tested, challenged, and revised.

But skepticism is a tool of reason, not a weapon against it. The answer to bad expertise is better inquiry, not contempt for knowledge itself.

That requires something increasingly unfashionable: intellectual humility.

We have to become comfortable saying I don’t know. We have to tolerate complexity without demanding instant answers. We have to distinguish uncertainty from incompetence and confidence from knowledge. Accepting that we can change our minds when new evidence arises isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s the entire point.

Education should be about more than just preparing for a career. A citizen who can recognize fallacies, weigh evidence, question authority, and distinguish assertion from proof is much harder to manipulate.

And we have to stop treating thinking as something elitist.

Nothing is more elitist than a political system that flatters people by suggesting they don’t need to understand anything, while giving power to those least capable of understanding its consequences.

Thinking is not denigration or ridicule. It’s about a willingness to face reality with honesty and humility.

No painless remedy exists for a culture hostile to correction. No charismatic savior, technological miracle, or new political movement can substitute for the slow, unglamorous work of thinking.

Trump exposed something larger than a political vulnerability. He exposed a moral temptation: the urge to surrender judgment because certainty feels more comforting than grappling with doubt.

The antidote cannot be another strongman, another spectacle, or another comforting lie.

A free society can’t wipe out ignorance. It cannot eliminate experts who are wrong. It cannot eradicate propaganda. It cannot banish demagogues. What it can do is cultivate a citizenry open to being corrected.

What if I’m wrong?

That isn’t a flaw.

It is the basis of democracy.

Did you happen to see this headline on Monday, or something like it?

“Supreme Court Clears Way for Trump’s Mail Voting Restrictions Ahead of Midterms.”

That’s the kind of headline a lot of people saw. And it is not entirely wrong. The Court did hand the Trump administration a meaningful procedural win, lifting one court order that had blocked parts of Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting.

But the headline leaves out the most important part: the Supreme Court did not rule that Trump’s plan is constitutional. It did not say the President has the authority to remake mail-in voting rules. It did not order anyone’s ballot to be withheld. And it did not decide that the administration’s eventual restrictions will be legal.

Still, this is not nothing.

The Court did not give Trump a green light. But it did remove one roadblock and give his administration more room—and more time—to try to build the system it wants.

What the Court Actually Did

By a 6–3 vote, the Court lifted one lower-court injunction against Trump’s March executive order dealing with mail-in voting and citizenship verification.

The executive order tells the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state lists of people it considers confirmed U.S. citizens. It also directs the Postal Service to develop rules involving mail ballots, state participation lists, barcodes, tracking requirements, and related procedures. In its broadest form, the plan could allow the Postal Service to refuse to send mail ballots to voters who do not appear on a state-provided list.

The Supreme Court’s majority did not decide whether that is legal.

Instead, it said the states challenging the order had sued too soon. The justices treated the executive order itself as an internal directive—a set of instructions to federal agencies—not a finished policy that had already injured the states.

The Court’s language was unusually clear on this point:

“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell.”

In plain English: We are not saying this plan is legal. We are saying the states have not yet shown enough concrete harm to block the order itself.

That is a procedural ruling, not a decision on the merits.

Why It Still Matters

It would be a mistake to say, “Nothing happened here.”

Something did happen. The Court removed one legal restraint that had stopped the administration from moving forward with some parts of its plan. That gives Trump’s agencies more time to compile citizenship information, work on election-related enforcement, and keep developing new mail-ballot procedures.

And timing matters.

We are only weeks away from the midterms. States are already preparing ballots, finalizing procedures, training election workers, and—in some places—getting ready to mail ballots. Changing voting systems at this stage is difficult even when everyone agrees on the rules. It becomes far more difficult when federal agencies, state election offices, courts, printers, postal workers, and voters are all trying to figure out new requirements at the same time.

The administration’s plan is not a switch someone can flip overnight. It would require accurate data, cooperation from states, new systems, new instructions, and potentially redesigned ballot envelopes with tracking requirements.

But that doesn’t make the plan harmless. A policy does not have to be fully up and running to create confusion. Uncertainty itself can affect voter behavior. If people are told—or believe—that their mail-in ballot may not arrive, may not be accepted, or may require additional steps, some will give up, make mistakes, or miss deadlines, which, frankly, may be Donald Trump’s ultimate goal.

That is why this ruling deserves attention even though it’s not the final word.

The Other Court Order

There is another key fact that gets lost in many of the headlines.

A separate nationwide injunction still blocks the Postal Service from enforcing the tighter mail-in ballot rules—unless and until it’s modified or lifted on appeal.

The Supreme Court did not lift that order. So the Postal Service cannot simply begin refusing to transmit ballots based on the executive order’s participation-list system.

That means the nightmare version of the story—Trump immediately cutting off mail-in ballots to voters across the country—is not what happened today.

Further lawsuits are certain if the administration tries to put its plan into practice. The Court itself left that door wide open. Once there is a real rule, a real enforcement action, or real evidence that voters or states are being harmed, the legal arguments will be different and much more concrete.

The lower courts have already found serious problems with the order. They concluded that key provisions may go beyond the President’s authority and interfere with powers the Constitution largely leaves to the states and Congress: deciding how federal elections are run.

So the legal fight is far from over.

The Real Danger: A Legal Timing Trap

The dissenting justices saw a problem in the Court’s approach.

Their concern was simple: if states challenge an election policy early, courts may say the harm is too hypothetical. But if they wait until the policy is fully implemented, courts may say it is too close to an election to make changes.

Too early, no standing. Too late, no time.

That can become a legal trap—especially when the federal government controls the pace of rulemaking and implementation. The administration can take months developing a policy, insist that any early lawsuit is speculative, then roll out concrete rules close enough to Election Day that courts are reluctant to interfere.

That’s not an abstract concern. Courts regularly warn against changing election procedures close to an election because last-minute changes can confuse voters and administrators. The problem is that a government can use delay to create the very confusion it later cites as a reason not to intervene.

That’s why the Court’s decision is more consequential than a routine procedural footnote, even though it wasn’t a final ruling on the legality of Trump’s order.

The Evidence Still Isn’t There

Trump’s public justification for the order is that mail voting—and voting by noncitizens—has created a major fraud problem in American elections. As I’ve written many times before, the evidence does not support that claim. Isolated cases of illegal voting occur and should be prosecuted, but serious reviews, audits, and studies consistently find them to be statistically infinitesimal, not a systemic threat capable of changing election outcomes.

Trump himself has voted by mail in Florida, even while regularly depicting the practice as inherently suspect. That contradiction doesn’t resolve the legal question, but it does say something about the political nature of the argument.

The Supreme Court didn’t rule that Trump’s fraud claims are true. It didn’t have to. The Court ruled on a procedural question—whether the states had sued too early—not on whether the administration had identified a real problem of meaningful scale.

No Panic, No Complacency

The most honest reading of Monday’s decision is neither “democracy has ended” nor “nothing to see here.”

Trump did not win a final ruling approving his mail-voting restrictions. The Court expressly said future implementation may still be illegal. Another nationwide court order remains in place. And the administration faces serious legal, logistical, and political obstacles if it wants to impose broad new restrictions before November.

But the Court did give the administration a procedural advantage. It gave federal agencies more room to prepare and more time to press ahead. It also created more uncertainty for states and voters during an already tense election season.

That is not a green light. It’s a yellow light.

And in an election year, a yellow light can still cause a very real pileup.

We have you surrounded!

Put down the em dash, step away from the rhetorical question, and keep your hands where we can see them. You have the right to remain silent, though if you choose to say anything with more than one subordinate clause, it may be used against you in the court of internet opinion.

Yes… the AI Police are everywhere now. They patrol classrooms, comment sections, LinkedIn, Substack, X, and whatever remains of Facebook. They have learned their trade from a fast-growing cottage industry of “tells”: phrases, punctuation marks, sentence patterns, and allegedly suspicious habits said to expose the chatbot lurking behind the curtain.

An em dash? Probable cause.

A word like “delve”? Call for backup!

A three-part construction? We may be looking at a major criminal enterprise.

“To be sure”? Jesus Christ, somebody get the yellow tape.

The latest common wisdom is that one can identify artificial intelligence by its prose. Not by examining a draft history, interviewing the author, tracing sources, comparing earlier work, or locating some actual evidence of machine assistance. No. No, no. We are now assured that the machine reveals itself in its fondness for transitional phrases, rhetorical questions, parallel constructions, formal vocabulary, tidy conclusions, and, naturally, the em dash.

This is a useful arrangement for people who enjoy the emotional satisfactions of forensic expertise without the inconvenience of acquiring any.

Now there’s a sentence that should trigger a few AI alarm bells.

But let’s begin with a concession the AI Police almost never hear from their alleged suspects:

They are not entirely wrong.

Current language models have habits. They lean toward smooth transitions and over-complete lists. They like a measured contrast: “This is not about X; it is about Y.” They can produce that faintly airless, corporate-inspirational tone in which every mundane observation arrives dressed for a keynote address. They hedge when they ought to state, state when they ought to prove, and occasionally end a paragraph as if they have just delivered the closing narration of a documentary about resilience.

Fine.

Notice the habits. Criticize them. Laugh at them. I do. Even when i write them.

But a pattern is not proof.

An em dash is a pattern. “Delve” is a pattern. A polished transition is a pattern. A three-part list is a pattern. Formal diction is a pattern. A rhetorical question is a pattern.

A good sentence, even, can be a pattern.

None establishes who wrote the words.

“This sounds machine-generated to me” is a perfectly legitimate impression. “This contains several characteristics associated with current AI output” is a reasonable observation.

However, a conclusion stating that “this was written by AI because it uses an em dash” is not literary criticism, or technological sophistication.

Or even common sense.

It is forensic cosplay. (How’s that for a measured contrast?)

The mistake is elementary but increasingly popular: stylistic recognition is being confused with critical judgment. Somebody sees a feature they have been taught to associate with AI, and suddenly they’re not just registering an impression. They’re announcing provenance. The dash becomes a fingerprint. The word “salient” becomes DNA evidence. A semicolon is now the proverbial shovel in the trunk.

This is how little lists metastasize. Someone notices a tendency. The tendency becomes a rule. The rule becomes a test. The test becomes certainty. And certainty, as usual, becomes content.

There is a second problem, one less amusing and more revealing.

When the AI Police ask, “Does this sound like the way humans write?” what they often mean is:

“Does this sound like the way most people I encounter write?”

Those are hardly the same question.

Most people, quite reasonably, do not write essays all day. They write emails, texts, Slack messages, work notes, social media posts, grocery lists, and messages to their spouse asking whether they need a dozen eggs. They’re not failing at literature. They’re communicating.

“Are we still on for Tuesday?” is good writing if all you’re trying to do is “determine”—excuse me, “find out”—whether you’re still on for Tuesday.

“Running ten late” is fine if you’re running ten minutes late.

“Can you send the attachment again?” has hardly ever sent anybody into rapture, but it has probably done more useful work than much of the writing praised in graduate seminars.

Slack? Slack isn’t prose so much as a workplace hallway with punctuation. A text message is often a thumb-driven distress flare. The average email is a delivery vehicle, and nobody should expect the driver to arrive quoting William Hazlitt.

There is nothing wrong with any of this kind of writing.

Functional prose is not failed prose. It is prose doing the job it was hired to do.

But the fact that people do not ordinarily write their grocery lists in the manner of Hazlitt or Emily Dickinson does not mean Hazlitt was a chatbot.

Dickinson might have been, though.

Way too many em dashes.

But the AI Police seem to have made the prose of communication into the control group for all human writing. When they run into a 2,000-word essay by someone who has spent decades with Dickens, Dickinson, Orwell, Didion, Woolf, Baldwin, Hitchens, and the rest of those irritating people who treated English as larger than a project-management thread, the piece can look statistically unusual.

Just like that last sentence.

Of course it does.

It’s not a Slack message.

The fact that a reader is unfamiliar with a register doesn’t make the register artificial. It may simply mean the reader has not encountered much of it lately, if ever. (“Read any good books lately?”)

That is not a moral failing. People have lives. They have jobs, children, bills, obligations, disasters large and small. Nobody is required to spend an afternoon with The Common Reader before being allowed to send a calendar invitation.

But perhaps a little humility is in order before declaring that the unfamiliar must be synthetic.

Which brings us to Christopher Hitchens, who—though unavailable for comment—serves as a convenient test case.

Hitchens is almost perversely well suited to the experiment. His prose is full of the things now liable to attract suspicion: elaborate sentences, elevated diction, rhetorical balance, historical and cultural allusion, confident assertions, carefully controlled rhythms, and the occasional word that seems to have escaped from a graduate seminar and wandered into public life.

In other words, he’s exactly the sort of writer a crude checklist might mistake for a machine.

Curious, I fed random Christopher Hitchens essays into several AI detectors. The results were reassuringly ridiculous. One informed me that the prose bore the marks of artificial intelligence and offered, with the cheery condescension of a mall kiosk, to “humanize” it. Click here, it suggested, “to repair the weak spots”—or, more generously, “to make it more human.”

Apparently Christopher Hitchens needed a machine to teach him how to sound human.

Other platforms pronounced the same passages human-written. Hitch, no doubt, would have been relieved. One machine found a bot; another found a man. The only settled conclusion was that neither had read Christopher Hitchens.

One can only wonder what Hitchens would have made of this. I suspect he would’ve been less interested in whether the machine had mistaken his prose for artificial intelligence than in the peculiar confidence of the people who believed that the machine’s judgment required no further inquiry. A machine trained on the accumulated language of human beings had decided that one of those human beings needed help sounding human.

Hitchens would have found that difficult to resist.

The experiment does not prove that every detector is useless, or that every suspicious-looking essay is the work of a human genius who happens to enjoy a semicolon. It establishes something less dramatic and more useful: a known human writer can possess enough traits associated with the current definition of AI output to trigger a false positive from a machine designed to distinguish machine writing from human writing.

That is not a minor technicality.

It is the entire issue.

The detector is not asking, in any meaningful sense, “Who wrote this?” It’s asking how much a given passage resembles the statistical characteristics it has learned to associate with certain categories of text.

Those are radically different questions.

The first concerns authorship. The second concerns resemblance.

Pattern is not provenance.

A detection culture that can mistake Christopher Hitchens for a chatbot has not solved the problem of artificial intelligence. It has announced a problem with its own reading.

And then there is the pleasing circularity of it all.

Just picture it: a human writes a passage. A machine reads it and decides it doesn’t sound sufficiently human. The machine then offers to correct the human’s humanity.

Think about that for a moment.

A machine telling a human how to be more human.

One need not be a Luddite, a romantic, or even a serial user of em dashes to find this a little strange.

The machine isn’t really saying, “You are not a person.”

It’s saying something considerably more bizarre:

“Your writing does not resemble the statistical profile I have learned to recognize as human. Would you like me to alter it until it does?”

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, one possibility is that writers begin sanding themselves down to satisfy the detector. They remove a dash they actually wanted. They replace a precise word with a dull one. They break a sentence because it’s too well constructed. They trade an eccentricity of rhythm for the bland little phrasing that will pass unnoticed by a machine whose picture of humanity is, apparently, “21 percent Hitchens.”

And there we arrive at the real danger.

It is not only the false accusation.

False accusations matter, particularly in classrooms and workplaces where a percentage score can become an accusation of dishonesty, and permanent damage to a reputation. Even the companies selling these systems now acknowledge that their results are not definitive. Vanderbilt University states plainly that there are “no foolproof methods” for detecting generative-AI use and that AI-detection scores should not be the sole basis for an academic-misconduct allegation. Turnitin’s current guidance says its AI-writing model can misidentify both human and AI-generated writing and should not be used as the sole basis for adverse action.

In other words, even the AI Police’s own equipment comes with a warning label.

But there is a subtler danger: a generation of writers learning to write toward the detector, not toward the thought.

That is the road to a great leveling-down.

We may all be safer, perhaps, once every sentence has been smoothed into the approved register: short enough, plain enough, under-punctuated enough, suitably unobjectionable, free of suspicious allusion and overeducated vocabulary.

No semicolons.

No dashes.

No “moreover.”

No “to be sure.”

God forbid anybody should use “erudite” without first producing a birth certificate and three forms of identification.

I, for one, will not survive the regime. Surely I would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to life without parole in a windowless room, forced to read nothing but Donald Trump social-media posts.

God almighty, where is my cyanide?

And there is another problem with the entire enterprise.

Even if the AI Police become better at identifying today’s machine habits, the machines will change. The detectors learn the tells. The models change. The detectors learn the new tells. The models change again.

This is not a better mousetrap. It is an arms race. The police arrive with a checklist. The machines read the checklist. The checklist becomes obsolete. A new checklist appears. A new cottage industry follows. And around we go.

The AI Police versus the AI writers.

Meanwhile, some poor bastard sitting at his keyboard is thinking:

For Christ’s sake, I just like semicolons.

The irony is that the better the machines become at imitating the surface characteristics of human prose, the harder it becomes to distinguish machine from human by surface characteristics alone. And the more the detectors chase those characteristics, the more likely they are to mistake unusual human writing for artificial writing—or to mistake conventional artificial writing for ordinary human prose.

The proper response to the AI boom is not credulity. Nor is it romantic denial.

We should question the text. We should question its sources, claims, familiarity, evasions, and suspiciously frictionless conclusions. We should question the machine that produced it, if it did. We should question the machine that claims to detect it.

And most of all, we should question the thrill of our certainty of having caught someone.

Maybe the prose is synthetic.

Maybe it’s just bad.

Maybe it’s polished, cultivated, clichéd, or trying too hard.

Or maybe it belongs to someone who simply likes em dashes.

The point is not to suspend judgment.

The point is to know what kind of judgment you are making.

A reader can criticize prose without pretending to know its provenance. A teacher can question a student’s work without turning a probability score into a verdict. An editor can say that a passage feels generic, flat, overstuffed, or suspiciously familiar without pretending that an adjective has incriminating fingerprints.

And a reader can encounter a sentence that sounds unfamiliar without immediately assuming that unfamiliarity is evidence of a machine.

After all, the history of literature is full of writers who would probably fail today’s informal AI-police checklist.

Some of them even used semicolons.

Some used em dashes.

Some knew words with more than three syllables.

Some wrote sentences that were actually supposed to be read rather than scanned.

Imagine that.

So yes, question the prose. Question the claim. Question the detector.

But maybe question the AI Police, too.

Especially the AI Police.

Every so often the same performance plays out like a time-worn ritual. Someone waves the Dow or the latest GDP number at you and declares the economy is doing just fine.

The subtext is rarely hidden: if you’re not fine, the problem must be you—you’re confused, ungrateful, or just bad with money.

But the Dow is not the country.

A record stock market can sit right next to families locked out of homes, grown kids still needing their parents for a down payment, steady jobs vanishing, and a generation deciding the middle-class life they were promised no longer exists. It can also coexist with a federal debt now topping $40 trillion saddled with an annual interest payment on that debt costing a trillion dollars a year.

That’s not a contradiction. It’s our current operating model.

Our economy has gotten very good at producing wealth and very bad at producing security. It can mint enormous fortunes while leaving the average bloke unable to afford a house, see a doctor, have a child, retire, or even survive a few months without a paycheck.

You see, the stock market tracks the expected profits of publicly traded companies. It doesn’t tell you whether wages are keeping up with the cost of living. It doesn’t tell you whether a family can buy a house without help from their parents. And it certainly doesn’t tell you whether the jobs people can actually get still offer dignity, stability, or a future.

And so we are left with a central American delusion: a rising market is treated as proof of a rising country.

It isn’t.

America never lost the ability to create wealth. It lost the will to make that wealth mean security for the people who live here.

The debt is a choice

The national debt has crossed $40 trillion. The federal government is running huge deficits, and the cost of just servicing that debt is becoming one of the biggest line items in the budget. Higher interest rates mean more public money goes not to building anything, educating people, caring for the elderly, or preparing for the future—but to paying interest on decisions already made.

This isn’t just serious, it’s insane. But it shouldn’t be discussed with the usual moralizing nonsense about government acting like a family with a maxed-out credit card.

Governments are not families. They issue currency. They collect taxes. They build infrastructure, fight wars, fund research, handle depressions and pandemics, insure old age, and make investments whose payoff is measured in decades, not months.

The question isn’t just how much we borrowed. It’s, “What did we borrow for, and who benefited?

Borrowing to build infrastructure, get through a depression, defeat fascism, handle a pandemic, or fund productive public investment is not the same—economically or morally—as borrowing to lock in permanent tax cuts for people already sitting on extraordinary wealth.

And yet, here we are.

We’ve all heard the story about “tax-and-spend liberals.” Far fewer people talk about borrow-and-spend conservatives.

Cut taxes, especially at the top. Keep spending where it’s politically useful. Maintain the expensive commitments. Then, when the deficits get embarrassing, announce that the country can no longer afford the programs ordinary Americans rely on.

The debt has risen under presidents of both parties. Wars, recessions, financial crises, pandemics, entitlement programs, tax policy, and rising interest costs all played a part. Any honest account has to say so.

But there’s a recurring political pattern that’s harder to ignore: tax cuts are sold on the promise that growth will pay for them. When that doesn’t happen, the resulting deficits suddenly become the reason we have to cut something else.

The cruelty is almost elegant.

First, give away the revenue.

Then announce that the country cannot afford civilization.

That is why the debt debate should not begin with, “How much are we spending?”

It should begin with: who is being asked to pay, and who is being allowed to keep the gains?

The boom was never normal

Underneath much of our economic politics is another assumption: America once possessed a permanently great economy, and somebody stole it from us.

Depending on who’s talking, the thief is China, immigrants, unions, taxes, Democrats, globalization, welfare, environmental rules, or whatever villain is convenient that particular day.

But what if the golden age itself was the anomaly?

The United States emerged from World War II in a position almost no other country could match. Europe and Japan had been bombed into rubble. America’s industrial infrastructure was intact. We had vast natural resources, a huge domestic market, a manufacturing base supercharged by the war, and unmatched financial power. Much of the industrial world needed rebuilding.

We were perfectlly positioned to supply the goods, the capital, the technology, and the military power, and did so. It was a remarkable achievement.

It was also something we rarely admit: it was a one-time historical circumstance.

The postwar middle class did not arise because of some eternal law of American greatness. The war gave us an extraordinary starting position. Domestic policy decided how widely the resulting prosperity would be shared.

Strong unions mattered. Progressive taxation mattered. Public investment mattered. So did expanding education, infrastructure, homeownership, Social Security, collective bargaining, and rising productivity. American industrial dominance mattered too—along with the fact that many competitors were still digging out of the rubble.

Circumstances created the opportunity. Policy determined who benefited.

The result was extraordinary. But extraordinary is not the same as permanent.
By the 1970s, Europe and Japan had recovered. Foreign competitors were genuinely competitive. Oil shocks hit American industry hard. The auto companies struggled against cheaper, more efficient imports. Steel and other manufacturing sectors lost ground.

The rest of the world had caught up.

Of course it had.

Why wouldn’t it?

The mistake we made was believing that America’s temporary place at the top of the industrial order was a birthright. We were handed an enormous historical advantage and mistook it for proof that we were simply better.

When the circumstances changed, the question should have been: what kind of economy do we need now?

Instead, the country increasingly asked: how do we get the old one back? And somehow we resented the foreign competitors who managed to gain ground here simply by being, well… competitive.

That is when nostalgia became economic policy.

We refused to adapt

There were other choices.

America could have invested heavily in modernizing industry, retraining workers, modernizing infrastructure, funding research and education, expanding health coverage, strengthening labor protections, and managing a real transition into a more competitive global economy.

Instead we increasingly chose financialization, deregulation, union busting, offshoring, tax cuts, and a political philosophy that treated government itself as the problem.

Corporate America discovered that workers elsewhere could often do the same work for less moneu. Capital became mobile.

Labor did not.

Then Americans were sold a particularly useful story: the problem wasn’t the way capitalism was changing—it was the people below them.

Immigrants. Foreigners. Union workers. Government employees. Welfare recipients. Anyone, really, except the people who owned the capital.

This was not inevitable. It was a political choice.

We didn’t lose the postwar golden age because foreigners cheated us out of some birthright. We lost it because the unusual conditions that produced it simply could not last—and because the political system increasingly chose to protect concentrated wealth rather than help ordinary Americans adjust.

The country that prided itself on innovation became politically addicted to nostalgia.

We want the future to look like the era of the postwar boom.

It won’t, and never will.

The demographic bill

Now the arithmetic gets harder.

For decades, the United States knew the Baby Boom generation would retire. This was not a surprise. It was not an act of God.

It was arithmetic.

As Baby Boomers retire, the ratio of beneficiaries to workers paying into the system shifts. Lower birth rates in the generations that followed compound the problem. The 2026 Social Security Trustees report projects that the combined trust funds (Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance) will be depleted in 2034. That doesn’t mean the program vanishes—continuing payroll taxes would still cover roughly 83 percent of scheduled benefits. The retirement-only fund is projected to run dry in late 2032, and Medicare’s Hospital Insurance trust fund in 2033.

These programs are not disappearing. Their financing problem is real.

That makes the question more devastating, not less: why has the richest country in history spent decades treating an entirely foreseeable demographic transition as though it were insoluble?

The country can afford Social Security and Medicare. The question is whether it is willing to collect enough revenue to pay for them.

The Social Security taxable wage base is $184,500 in 2026. A worker making $90,000 pays payroll tax on every dollar. Someone earning millions pays it on only a fraction of their income.

That is not a law of nature. It is a political decision.

We can raise the cap. We can eliminate it. We can change the tax rates, how capital income is treated, and how corporations are taxed.

What we cannot do is pretend that arithmetic does not exist.

The labor contradiction

The demographic problem collides with the labor problem.

America is aging. It needs workers—not just doctors, engineers, and software developers, but home-health aides, farmworkers, construction workers, caregivers, restaurant staff, child-care workers, warehouse workers, and millions of people doing hard, often invisible work the rest of the country relies on.

This makes the immigration debate economically incoherent.

Large parts of the American economy have been built on the quiet assumption that someone will do difficult, dangerous, and physically grinding work for wages many Americans refuse to do. Then we act shocked when the people doing those jobs turn out to be immigrants.

The answer cannot be mass deportation.

But neither can it be comfortable dependence on an exploited migrant underclass.

The humane answer is to change the underlying economics: enforce wage and labor standards, create workable legal pathways, protect workers from abuse, rebuild union power, and stop rewarding companies whose business models depend on human desperation.

That would disrupt some business models.

Good.

A business model that relies on exploitation is not entitled to public respect.

If America needs more workers because it’s population is aging, but also needs those workers to stay cheap and politically powerless, then it faces a choice.

Either workers are valuable enough to pay accordingly.

Or the economy only works because someone else is absorbing the cost.

Rise of the machines

And now comes artificial intelligence—the next chapter in the same story.

Every technological revolution has eliminated some jobs and created others. AI will do both. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections do not point to simple, economy-wide mass unemployment: total employment is still expected to grow about 3.1 percent between 2024 and 2034, even while certain administrative and clerical jobs shrink and some technical roles expand.

But that does not settle the important question.

Who owns the technology? Who captures the productivity gains? What happens to the workers whose labor is no longer required?

Suppose AI makes a company twice as productive. If workers share in the gains through higher wages, shorter hours, better benefits, and real retirement security, then the technology can improve ordinary life.

But if the gains flow mainly to shareholders, executives, and the owners of the machines—while displaced workers are told to retrain and figure it out on their own—then AI becomes just another way to shift power from labor to capital.

The postwar economy ran on a rough but workable cycle: workers earned wages, those wages supported consumption, payroll taxes funded public programs, and broad prosperity helped hold the system together.

The modern economy is drifting toward a different cycle: technology produces more, companies need fewer workers, and the returns flow upward.

That creates a problem no quarterly earnings report can solve. The American fiscal system still depends on people working. Workers pay income and payroll taxes. They buy goods and services. They sustain businesses, communities, and public institutions.

What happens when the nation’s most powerful corporations acquire technologies designed to need fewer workers, while the nation’s political system insists that its safety net is already too expensive?

We will have built a very productive economy that has less and less use for the people expected to pay for it.

That is not technological inevitability.

It is a political choice.

The economy we built

This brings us back to the Dow.

The stock market can soar while ordinary economic security deteriorates. Corporate profits can rise while workers lose bargaining power. Productivity can rise while wages stagnate. GDP can grow while homeownership slips out of reach without inherited wealth.

AI can make companies more efficient while making workers more disposable. The federal government can run up $40 trillion in debt while politicians insist the real fiscal emergency is whether an unemployed person gets too much help.

We socialize costs and privatize gains.

Capital is rarely treated as disposable. It is subsidized, protected, insured, rescued, and, when necessary, bailed out. Labor is told to retrain.

We bail out institutions when their failures threaten the system, then lecture individuals about personal responsibility. We protect accumulated wealth while treating retirement benefits as an unaffordable luxury. We depend on immigrant labor while demonizing immigrants. We need workers to support an aging country while making it harder for those workers to enter and stay.

Then, when people become angry about all of it, we give them a culture war.

The political genius of the culture war is that it gives people something to fight about that cannot possibly explain why their mortgage costs what it costs, why their health insurance costs what it costs, or why their employer just eliminated 400 jobs.

It gives Americans everywhere to look except upward.

There is an old cliché: “I want a president who runs the country like a business.”

Be careful what you wish for.

A business exists to produce returns for its owners. A country exists to provide a durable, decent life for the people who live in it.

An economy run solely for asset holders can look spectacular from the trading floor while becoming unlivable from the kitchen table. Debt can mount. Obligations can be pushed downward. Jobs can disappear. Wealth can be extracted.

And the people who benefit can point to the market and declare success.

The choice

The postwar American economy was not a permanent birthright. It was an extraordinary convergence of historical luck and political choice.

America came out of World War II uniquely positioned to prosper. It then decided—through stronger labor institutions, public investment, expanding education, progressive taxation, and a real willingness to share productivity gains—that the resulting prosperity would be spread more widely than before.

When the circumstances changed, we faced another choice.

We could adapt: build an economy that could still provide security in a more competitive, globalized, aging, automated world.

Or we could mythologize the past, protect those who had already won, and blame everyone else for failing to bring back the good old days.

Increasingly, we chose the mythology.

Now the debt is here. The demographic shift is here. The labor contradiction is here. Artificial intelligence is arriving. The old economic arrangements are not coming back.

The question is not whether America can still create wealth. It plainly can.

The question is whether Americans still believe that the purpose of an economy is to create security for the people who make it work.

That would require real choices: genuinely progressive taxation; heavier taxes on capital gains, inherited wealth, and highly profitable corporations; a higher or eliminated Social Security wage cap; stronger labor standards and unions; a workable, humane immigration system; serious public investment; and a commitment that the gains from technological progress go to the public as well as to the owners of the technology.

None of that is free. All of it is preferable to the alternative: an economy that treats a growing share of its own people as surplus.

Because a nation cannot remain politically free for long when its workers, retirees, immigrants, young people, and eventually its white-collar professionals are all taught the same lesson:

They are economically disposable.

But the Dow is not the country.

GDP is not the country.

Billionaires are not the country.

An economy is not successful just because the people who own the most of it are successful. An economy is successful when the people who make it work can build a life: afford a home, raise children, survive illness, retire with dignity, and face technological change without being told their usefulness has expired.

We used to understand that.

We will have to again.

If one were to conjure the political equivalent of a bad toothache—persistent, irritating, and entirely preventable—one would land squarely on the phenomenon of Donald Trump. The very existence of this political spectacle, this gaudy carnival barker now occupying the highest office, is almost beside the point. What’s alarming is what his success reveals about the rest of us: a country that has decided it no longer has much use for thinking, for reflection, for questioning.

It is the triumph—or perhaps the curse—of a calculated, almost aggressive ignorance. Not the humble, almost self-effacing ignorance of someone who knows he knows nothing, but the arrogant, chest-thumping variety that mistakes volume for veracity and simplistic repetition for reasoned argument.

Donald Trump is its perfect mascot. He doesn’t just ignore facts and history; he treats them as optional, even suspicious. And a large part of the country looks at that and feels validated, affirmed. They’ve been told for years that the so-called elites—the thinkers, the writers, the professors—have somehow betrayed them. Trump hands them a simpler story: those people were never on your side to begin with.

I’ve always held a special contempt for anyone who, intentionally or not, has degraded public discourse and flattened the landscape of human curiosity. Trump’s rhetoric does precisely that. It targets complexity, nuance, and the simple act of doubting yourself—the three essential pillars of any free and rational mind. The half-finished sentences always unburdened by subordinate clauses are no accidents. They are a signal, catnip for the intellectually lazy that says: You don’t have to read. You don’t have to think hard. You don’t have to know. This is his first and most potent appeal: The world is simple, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to con you. It is the sedative for people who are already tired of feeling talked down to. It is the apotheosis of philistinism.

The appeal of Donald Trump is inextricably linked to his conspicuous vulgarity. His public persona is a carefully curated tapestry of gaudiness, petty vendetta, and the sort of tasteless display one might expect from a third-rate real estate mogul—which, of course, he is. Yet in a nation often seemingly plagued by the suffocating politeness and focus-group-tested blandness of conventional politicians, this kind of crudeness can look like radical virtue. He speaks the unspeakable not through courage or wit, but through sheer, unadulterated lack of inhibition. He is the boorish uncle at Thanksgiving you tell your children not to talk to.

For his supporters, the broken norms aren’t a problem. They’re the point. He’s sticking it to the people who spent years telling everyone what they were allowed to say. Fair enough, as far as it goes. The trouble is that Trump’s version of “saying the unsayable” isn’t sharp or subversive. It’s just low. He doesn’t raise the level of the conversation. He drags it down until the cheapest impulse starts to feel like a political philosophy, which then convinces millions that their most ungenerous, knee-jerk impulses are in fact noble and deeply profound.

At the heart of it all is the narcissism, a narcissism so complete it borders on solipsism—the private conviction that only he is the genuine article. The country, the government, the whole machinery of politics exist mainly to reflect his greatness back at him. In ordinary life that kind of self-absorption is exhausting. In politics it can look like strength. He never admits a mistake. He never stops telling you how spectacular he is. Every failure is someone else’s fault. He presents himself not as a humble servant of the public but as the irreplaceable hero, the one man who can fix everything simply by being himself. “I alone can fix it.”

To people hungry for certainty, the performance is reassuring. You are absolved of the hard parts—raising questions, weighing contradictions, sorting details, of thinking at all. Your savior has arrived. You just have to believe.

That is the gift.

Historians have warned about this pattern for as long as there have been charismatic figures with a messianic complex. Relinquishing personal judgment to a singular figure is the first and most fatal step toward something far darker.

Trump’s politics are not built on principle. They are built around the claim that he is always right, always wronged, and always fighting for people who feel the same way. The appeal runs deeper than Trump himself. It grows out of a long-running resentment among those who believe they have been pushed aside or looked down on. They feel sneered at by cultural elites, mocked by the press, and left behind by an economy that has rewarded people and places far from their own lives. Trump does not offer much in the way of hard solutions. What he offers is payback. He gives people permission to despise the institutions they already believe despise them. He tells them the system is rigged—not mainly by the rich, but by the educated, the media, and the cultural establishment.

That is the demagogue’s oldest trick. He will save us from this threat we didn’t even know existed. Fear precedes deliverance. Demagogues rarely invent themselves as saviors until they have first invented—or inflated—a danger. Trump is especially good at making a political majority feel like a persecuted minority. He turns questions of shared responsibility into a simple battle between “us” and “them”: the pure patriotic heartland versus the insidious forces of political correctness, globalism, diversity, and whatever else is said to be weakening the nation. Every setback becomes an emergency. Every opponent becomes an enemy. Every ordinary disagreement in a democracy becomes proof that somebody is plotting against “real America.” Once people accept that picture, personal loyalty to Trump becomes part of the bargain. Only he sees the danger. Only he can defeat it. Anyone who doubts him is treated as a traitor.

This is grievance politics in its rawest form, whether it comes dressed as religion or as nationalism. It is a cheap, powerful, highly addictive opiate, dulling the pain of economic struggle while directing the anger toward cultural scapegoats. Life feels simpler when someone else is to blame for everything that ails you.

None of this would have reached such scale without institutional failure. The media, too often preoccupied with access and the next day’s narrative, repeatedly proves unwilling or unable to challenge the cascade of falsehoods and insults with any sustained rigor. Republican lawmakers, fearful of a social-media thrashing or a primary challenge, largely remain silent or choose accommodation over principle. Charisma alone doesn’t put someone in the White House. Enablers do—some by active complicity, others by reticence. Silence, as the saying goes, is consent.

Acknowledging these failures does not mitigate the responsibility of the man who exploited them; it merely records the conditions that allowed the exploitation to succeed.

Once those guardrails failed, the whole arena turns into television. Trump is a creature of the camera. Every rally, every post, every offhand remark is designed to keep the eye moving so no one has time to notice how little substance is underneath. The relentless present-tense crisis, what some have dubbed “flooding the zone,” has a useful side effect: the suppression of memory, of history. A country that can’t remember yesterday is easy to convince that today’s strongman is the first person who ever truly understood it. The spectacle keeps us watching. It also keeps us from seeing.

A free society depends on a shared memory of what happened, who said what, and to never forget. Trump’s constant creation of an alternative reality—the gaslighting of the electorate—is a direct assault on that basic idea. By forcing the media and the public to chase the latest absurdity, he gets something more dangerous than the day’s attention: the erasure of accountability. The falsehoods pile up, the corrections fade, and eventually the public grows too tired to sort through any of it. We are always watching the show, but rarely able to step back and see what it is doing.

In the end, the enduring appeal of Donald Trump is a symptom of a deeper cultural and economic shift: the rise of a kind of insecure success that measures worth in money, status, and public display.

This is not really about class theory. It is about taste and values. Trump represents the successful yet deeply insecure arriviste—the man who has accumulated wealth but not wisdom, power but not grace. His supporters are drawn to his version of success: the gold plating, the hyperbolic boasting, the relentless emphasis on winning at all costs. It is ambition stripped of moral or intellectual limits. Trump is the fantasy of the self-made man who owes nothing to tradition, decorum, or public responsibility. There is something both repellent and revealing in it: capitalism without a cultural brake, success without standards beyond the size of the deal. Donald Trump is the ultimate unfortunate outcome of prioritizing the transactional over the spiritual, the immediate over the eternal.

Whether this is a gift or a curse, history will be the final judge. For now, for us, Trump presents a bleak, troubling question: What happens when a nation decides that money is the only measure of genius and a bully is the only believable voice of authority?

There is a moment in conversation when you realize you have stopped listening to what someone is saying and started listening to how often they say it.

“Like.”

“You know.”

“I mean.”

“Basically.”

“Literally.”

“Really.”

“Sort of.”

“Kind of.”

The words themselves are innocent enough. Most have perfectly legitimate jobs. The problem begins when they stop doing those jobs and become verbal furniture—pieces of language that fill the room without furnishing it.

And once you notice them, they are almost impossible not to hear.

The problem isn’t that people use filler words. We all do. Conversation is not writing. Speech is improvised, and the brain sometimes needs a second to catch up with the mouth. A hesitation, a repetition, even the occasional “um” is perfectly human.

But there is a difference between pausing because you are thinking and talking because you haven’t thought yet.

When you know what you think, you don’t need as many words that merely buy you time to figure out what you think.

That is what fillers often are.

And sometimes the best word is no word at all.

Susan Stamberg, the longtime NPR broadcaster, once observed that silence can be more compelling than words. She was right.

Silence does something that filler cannot.

It tells the listener:

Think about it. I’ll give you a second.

A good speaker doesn’t merely put thoughts into the listener’s head. A good speaker sometimes creates enough space for the listener to have a thought of his own.

That requires confidence—not only in what you are saying, but in your ability to stop saying it.

You learn this as a radio broadcaster.

As a morning-show host, I was conversational. As a talk-show host, I was trying to do something different.

Gene Burns was my model. His radio career at KGO and earlier at WRKO is well established. He was a remarkable talk-radio host, not because he sounded polished, but because he sounded as though the thinking was happening naturally in front of you. I knew that his opening remarks were delivered extemporaneously. No script, and not a “like,” a “y’know,” or even an “em,” in the bunch. He knew his subjects well enough that preparation did not make him sound prepared.

It made him sound fluent.

It’s an important distinction.

When you know your subject, you don’t have to search quite so hard for the next sentence. The thought is already there. The words are simply how you bring it into the room.

That doesn’t mean there are no pauses.

There should be.

A pause can be the most articulate thing a speaker says.

The great extemporaneous speakers understand this. Barack Obama does. Christopher Hitchens did. Different men, different politics, radically different temperaments, but each possessed an unusual command of language in real time. They could answer a question without sounding as though they were reaching into a drawer for a preassembled response.

They knew what they wanted to say. And then they said it.

That sounds simple. It isn’t.

To speak extemporaneously is to compose in public. You have to understand the question, retrieve the relevant knowledge, decide what matters, choose the words, establish the rhythm, and deliver the thought—all while another human being is waiting for you to finish.

When it works, it can sound effortless. When it doesn’t, we hear the machinery. And sometimes the machinery becomes all we hear.

Like, literally, you know

This is where like becomes interesting. Not because like is uniquely terrible. It isn’t. It is a useful and versatile English word. But when it appears every few seconds, it ceases to convey meaning. It becomes a placeholder. And a placeholder repeated often enough begins to obscure the thing it was supposed to hold.

The same is true of “you know,” “I mean,” “basically,” “literally,” “really,” “sort of,” and “kind of.”

They can all be useful when they mean something. They become linguistic duct tape when they don’t.

There is also something else happening. The listener has to process the filler along with the thought. Eventually the filler becomes so predictable that the brain begins to anticipate it. Attention shifts from What is this person saying? to How many more times is he going to say “like”?

That is the inevitable tune-out. Nobody wants to listen to uninformed thought. Or, more precisely, to thought that hasn’t been thought out.

There is an old saying, attributed at various times to Lincoln, Twain, and others, that goes something like this: better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

Whoever actually said it understood something about language: Speech is not compulsory. You don’t have to fill every silence merely because it exists.

Sometimes you can just shut the fuck up.

New Yorkers have understood this for generations. We just tend to phrase it more colorfully.

The poverty isn’t a small vocabulary

This is where I think the argument gets more serious.

We often talk about the decline of language as though the problem were that people don’t know enough words.

Not necessarily.

Someone can possess a large vocabulary and say almost nothing. Someone else can use a handful of ordinary words and communicate an extraordinarily complicated idea.

The problem is not always vocabulary. It is precision.

Eloquence isn’t having more words. It’s needing fewer of them to say exactly what you mean.

That’s why invented words aren’t automatically bad, either.

Language has always invented itself. “Brunch” is a perfectly good word because it names something that needed naming: neither quite breakfast nor lunch. “Smog” works because it describes something that is neither simply smoke nor simply fog.

Those words add meaning.

But then we get “gianormous.”

What exactly did “gigantic” fail to accomplish?

Was “enormous” unavailable?

And then there is “signage.”

Signage? How about “sign”?

If you put up ten signs, you have signs, not ten sinages.

Somehow we decided that what used to be called signs now requires a management-level noun.

This isn’t linguistic evolution. It’s mostly just linguistic inflation.

Good invention gives us something new. Bad invention gives us another syllable.

And that distinction matters because words are not merely decorations for thought. They are the tools by which we separate one thought from another.

When everything becomes everything

Consider what happens when language loses those distinctions.

Every disagreement becomes a “crisis.” Every policy becomes “historic.” Every political opponent becomes an “enemy.” Every mistake becomes an “attack.” Every exaggeration becomes “literally.” Every assertion becomes a “fact.”

And every speech becomes a torrent of words whose relationship to one another is increasingly difficult to determine

You know the kind of speech I mean, and by who. We’ve all heard those word salads. The problem isn’t that the words are complicated. It’s that the words don’t appear to be doing any work together.

A speaker can say a great many things without actually making an argument, or saying anything at all. That’s when you hear such ramblings and think to yourself, “What the hell is he talking about?”

A New Yorker might phrase that more colorfully.

This matters far beyond our annoyance at political speeches. Language is how we distinguish things. A disagreement is not necessarily a crisis. A political opponent is not necessarily an enemy. A failed policy is not necessarily tyranny. An unsupported claim is not necessarily a lie. A lie is not merely something we don’t like hearing.

These distinctions matter. Especially in a democracy.

Democracy requires citizens capable of distinguishing among degrees of error, evidence, certainty, responsibility, intention and consequence.

If every disagreement is an existential battle, then compromise becomes betrayal. If every opponent is an enemy, then persuasion becomes weakness. If every assertion is delivered with absolute certainty, then evidence becomes an inconvenience.

And if language itself becomes inflated, automatic and imprecise, we lose some of our ability to recognize the difference.

That is the political danger of linguistic poverty. Not that people speak incorrectly. That people become less capable of saying precisely what they mean—and recognizing precisely what someone else means.

Precision is not the same thing as formality

There is a trap here, though, and I don’t want to fall into it. Because if this essay ends by telling everyone to speak proper English, then the third essay in this series is going to have me hoisted on my own petard (if you’ll forgive that Shakespeare reference).

Language does not have to be formal to be precise. It does not have to be grammatically pristine to be expressive. And it certainly does not have to sound like an English professor to be intelligent.

I’m a native New Yorker. I speak Brooklynese.

You gotta problem wit dat? The pahkin’ lot is right ovadare.

My native dialect has spent decades violating the conventions of formal English with an enthusiasm that would make an Oxford don reach for the smelling salts.

We drop letters. We swallow syllables. We turn what are you doing? into whaddaya doin’?

The G at the end of doing has apparently resigned. R sometimes goes missing entirely.

And somewhere along the way, approximately 40 percent of the consonants have apparently gone on vacation.

Yet there is nothing impoverished about the accent. Quite the opposite.

A classic New York expression can carry an astonishing amount of meaning in very few words.

“Not for nothing, but…”

You know what’s coming.

“You kiddin’?”

That’s not merely a question. That’s, “Don’t be an f**kin’ idiot.”

“Fuhgeddaboudit.”

Depending upon how you say it, it can mean forget it, you’re out of your mind, that’s impossible, that’s amazing, don’t waste my time, or this conversation is now officially over.

We got our expressions, too, like nobody else.

“There’s a bus in five minutes. Be under it.”

That’s not poor language. That’s linguistic compression. It is a culture taking language and making it its own.

Which is precisely why the problem isn’t slang, Or accents. Or dialect.

It isn’t even informality. The problem is automaticity.

A person can speak the King’s English and say absolutely nothing.

A guy from Brooklyn can say, “Whaddaya mean?” and communicate an entire philosophical position.

Choose your words

That, finally, is what we are losing.

Not English.

Not grammar.

Not even vocabulary.

Attention.

The attention to language required to notice when a word is carrying meaning and when it is merely occupying space The attention required to stop instead of filling silence. The attention required to distinguish large from enormous, wrong from evil, an opponent from an enemy, uncertainty from falsehood. The attention required to know when a sentence needs another word—and when it needs one fewer.

This is not a call for linguistic purity.

English has never been pure. It is a glorious mongrel, assembled over centuries from invasions, migrations, trade, conquest, immigration, invention and sheer human mischief.

Thank goodness.

Language lives because people change it. But living language and impoverished language are not the same thing. One creates. The other defaults. One bends language toward meaning. The other bends meaning toward whatever words happen to be available.

Perhaps that is the connection to the first essay in this series.

Reading teaches us to stay with a thought long enough to ponder it. Writing forces us to decide exactly what that thought is. Speaking gives that thought to someone else.

All three require the same thing: don’t do it automatically.

Think about what you mean. Then find the words. And if you can’t find them yet, that’s okay. There’s always another option.

Silence.

There is a small test of political adulthood that too many Americans now fail: imagine the president as your child. He isn’t, of course. He’s an adult, elected by millions of other adults to lead the country. But imagine, for a moment, that he were yours.

Not in the sentimental sense. In the disciplinary one. Imagine a child who cannot accept “no”; who takes correction as persecution; who treats every lost argument as grounds for a rematch; who expects teachers, referees, judges, and parents to keep changing the rules until the result finally flatters him. No adult worthy of the name would call this strength. He would call it a problem.

He would tell the child to sit down, calm down, and learn the first hard lesson of civilized life: the world is not required to rearrange itself around your wounded feelings.

But put that child in a blue suit, provide a motorcade, a staff, and the presidential seal, and a great many otherwise grown people discover nobility in the tantrum. The sulk becomes strategy. The grievance becomes authenticity. The incapacity to concede error becomes “fighting.” And the sore loser is promoted into a tribune of the people.

This is not leadership. It is infancy with executive authority.

A president need not be meek. He may be stubborn, confront bureaucracy, resist fashion, dispute an adversary, and pursue an unpopular cause. Indeed, there are moments when he must. But stubbornness is fidelity to a principle; childishness is fidelity to oneself. A statesman persists because the country requires it. An egotist persists because he requires it.

The difference is not subtle. A serious leader knows when a fight has been lost, when a ruling is binding, when an agreement must be lived with, when an error must be acknowledged, and when retreat is not disgrace but judgment. He knows what he cannot do as well as what he can. He understands that power is not the ability to make every frustration disappear.

Trump’s defining political instinct is not simply to win. It is to deny that any loss, verdict, agreement, or limitation can be final if he possesses the power to reopen it.

A court rules. A jury decides. A prosecutor declines. A prior administration reaches an agreement. In a functioning republic, such outcomes may be criticized, appealed where the law allows, revised by lawful politics, or replaced by later policy. But eventually they must be absorbed. Finality is not a technicality. It is the condition by which law, diplomacy, and democratic life cease to be an endless brawl.

Trump cannot abide it.

Consider the pattern. A jury found for E. Jean Carroll and awarded damages; Trump has continued to seek appellate relief in the separate $83.3 million defamation case, even as the Supreme Court declined to review the earlier $5 million verdict. Prosecutors dismissed the Reflecting Pool vandalism case after the factual premise of the allegation came apart; recent reporting indicated that White House officials explored whether a new charge might nonetheless be brought. And after the Supreme Court held that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, Trump issued two new executive orders aimed at restricting birthright citizenship in more specific circumstances.

These episodes are not identical, and pretending otherwise would weaken the indictment. An appeal can be lawful. A revised executive order may properly test a legal boundary. A prosecutor may, in principle, reassess a dismissed matter. The issue is not that the law permits review or reconsideration. It is the governing disposition that treats an adverse outcome not as a result to absorb, but as an affront that must eventually be made to yield.

That is not the rule of law. It is a second bite at the apple of petty vindictiveness.

The special danger is not reconsideration. It is a governing habit in which an adverse ruling, a contrary verdict, or a predecessor’s settlement becomes intolerable until the government has been deployed to reopen it.

And then there is Iran.

Iran is not another lawsuit, and foreign policy is not a civil judgment. Presidents may reconsider inherited arrangements, and no diplomatic agreement should be exempt from scrutiny merely because it bears a predecessor’s signature. Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the nuclear agreement negotiated in 2015 among Iran, the United States, and other powers—was expressly accompanied by the restoration of U.S. sanctions and a stated intent to seek a different deal.

But the distinction makes the pattern more alarming, not less. In law, an effort to reopen a judgment may consume time, money, and institutional credibility. In foreign policy, the repudiation of an inherited settlement can carry consequences measured in regional instability, military escalation, and human lives. The relevant question is not whether a president may revise an earlier agreement. Of course he may. It is whether the desire to demonstrate that a predecessor’s settlement cannot stand begins to displace sober calculation of the costs of undoing it.

A jury verdict can cost money. A reckless prosecution can cost an innocent person his peace, reputation, and livelihood. But decisions about Iran can put lives at risk. Once the old compulsion to reopen, repudiate, and prevail reaches the arena of national security, the personal impulse has acquired consequences that other people may be asked to pay for.

The common feature is not simply grievance. Grievance is a feeling. This is an operating method: grievance furnished with lawyers, prosecutors, executive orders, diplomatic pressure, and at the furthest edge, the power to send Americans into war.

The presidency is not a therapist’s couch. It is not a private courtroom, a nursery, or a vending machine for grievance: insert another coin, pull another lever, demand another verdict. It is an office held in trust for the country. Every hour devoted to relitigating a personal humiliation is an hour stolen from the nation’s actual business. Every institution bent toward gratifying one man’s resentment becomes a little less capable of serving everyone else.

A sore loser in private life may sulk, complain, write foolish letters, and bore his friends with the archaeology of old defeats. A sore loser with the machinery of the state can compel prosecutors, judges, diplomats, civil servants, and soldiers to enter the drama. He can convert his inability to accept an answer into a national emergency.

That is the real meaning of the sore-loser presidency: not merely a man who resents losing, but a man who has acquired the power to make everyone else relive the loss with him.

What happens when finality—the indispensable condition of law, diplomacy, and democratic life—is treated by the president as merely another obstacle to his self-esteem?

The answer is more disturbing than the question: the country never gets to move on, because he never does.

Every adverse ruling becomes provisional. Every jury verdict becomes a provocation. Every prosecutor who declines becomes an enemy who must be overruled. Every agreement that preceded him becomes a challenge to his supremacy. The nation is conscripted into the endless reenactment of one man’s defeats, asked to spend its authority, its attention, its peace, and perhaps its blood so that he need never endure the ordinary adult indignity of being told no.

That is not strength.

It is wounded vanity equipped with the machinery of the state.

Donald Trump’s power was never his alone. It required a stage, an audience, and a room full of people willing to keep the performance in motion.

Trump’s first power was theatrical. He understood that attention could be converted into authority—that spectacle could overwhelm scrutiny, that insult could pass for strength, and that the performance of certainty could make uncertainty look like weakness.

His audience understood something as well. It understood that certainty could become belonging. To accept Trump’s version of events was not merely to share an opinion; it was to join a community in which doubt looked like disloyalty, correction felt like condescension, and every challenge became proof that the faithful were under attack.

But performance and belief are not enough to explain what followed. A performer needs a room. The performance depends on people willing to keep the lights on, preserve the ritual, and declare that the show may go on. And that work fell to people who possessed the power to restrain him: elected officials, party institutions, media organizations, and others whose authority made them more than spectators.

They were not always deceived. Often, they understood perfectly well where the boundary was. Many had named it themselves. They knew what Trump was capable of; they knew the difference between disagreement and degradation, between a lie and an argument, between political defeat and an assault on the rules by which political defeat is accepted.

The betrayal was not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. Hypocrisy is too small a word for it. The betrayal came when those who knew the boundary concluded that defending it would cost more than crossing it.

The failure was that the assault was too often accepted as the price of remaining in the room.

Lindsey Graham: the abandoned boundary

Lindsey Graham knew where the boundary was. He had been describing it for years.

In 2015, as Trump’s candidacy gathered force, Graham called him a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He said Trump did not represent the Republican Party or the values for which American service members fought. Trump’s rhetoric, Graham warned, endangered soldiers and diplomats, empowered the enemy, and undercut “everything we stand for.”

The following spring, after Trump had become the presumptive Republican nominee, Graham made the judgment still more plainly. He said he could not support Trump “in good conscience,” because Trump had not displayed “the judgment and temperament to serve as Commander in Chief.”

These were not the complaints of a man who had failed to understand Trump. Graham understood him. He understood the recklessness, the cruelty, the appetite for insult, the disregard for institutional restraint. He had named those things before Trump’s power made naming them expensive.

Then came January 6.

After the Capitol had been attacked and the Senate returned to complete the electoral count, Graham rose to reject the effort to overturn the election. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, he said, had been “lawfully elected.” Trump and Graham, he added, had been on “a hell of a journey.”

“I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. But today, all I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

For a moment, this sounded like the restoration of a boundary. Graham had been Trump’s ally, defender, and confidant. But the attack on the Capitol—the attempt to retain power by refusing the terms of electoral defeat—appeared finally to have made the bargain impossible.

The next day, Graham said that Trump’s actions had been “the problem, not the solution.”

That should have settled the question. It did not.

When the House impeached Trump for incitement of insurrection, Graham did not argue that January 6 had been insignificant. He had called the attack a day that would “live in infamy.” Nor did he claim that Trump bore no responsibility. He had said precisely the opposite. Instead, Graham urged the Senate to dismiss the impeachment article, calling a trial “vengeance and political retaliation” rather than an act of national healing.

He then voted to acquit. The Senate fell ten votes short of the two-thirds required for conviction; Graham was among the 43 senators who voted not guilty.

Afterward, he acknowledged that January 6 was “one of the saddest days in American history” and would remain part of Trump’s record. But he condemned the impeachment effort as one “driven by passion and hatred,” arguing that the House had sought to assign Trump “complete and total blame.”

There it is: the difference between recognizing a boundary and defending one. Graham’s “enough” was sincere in the shocked aftermath of an attack. It was not enough to sustain the consequence that his office gave him the power to impose.

A line that produces no consequence is not a line. It is theater.

Ted Cruz: the boundary laundered

Graham shows us one form of surrender: recognizing the boundary and then refusing to enforce it. But there was another, more consequential form. What happens when a politician does not merely retreat from a boundary, but uses the authority of his office to make crossing it sound responsible?

Ted Cruz provides the darker version.

Cruz knew what Trump was.

During the 2016 primary, Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar,” a “sniveling coward,” and “utterly amoral.” He said Trump did not know the difference between truth and lies and “lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth.”

The conflict was not abstract. Trump had insulted Cruz’s wife and promoted a conspiracy theory about his father. At the Republican convention that summer, Cruz refused to endorse his party’s nominee, instructing delegates instead to “vote your conscience.”

Then, in September, he endorsed Trump.

Cruz described that decision as the result of “extensive reflection, prayer, and soul-searching.” He justified it in the language of policy—above all, the Supreme Court—and the binary choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The endorsement was not yet the deepest surrender. Politicians routinely subordinate judgments about character to judgments about policy. It was, however, the first step in a more consequential transformation. Cruz had not revised his earlier description of Trump. He had simply decided that the description no longer governed his conduct.

Five years later, that decision acquired a constitutional dimension.

On January 2, 2021, Cruz and ten other Republican senators announced that they would object to electoral votes from states they called disputed unless Congress created an Electoral Commission to conduct an “emergency 10-day audit.” The senators said the electors should be rejected as not “regularly given” or “lawfully certified” until that audit was complete.

Cruz presented the proposal in the language of institutional seriousness. He spoke of an obligation to protect election integrity, restore public confidence, and give Americans a credible forum in which evidence could be considered. The proposed audit, he argued, would be impartial and objective; if the claims failed, the commission could reject them.

But Congress had convened to perform its constitutional task of counting electoral votes that states had certified. Cruz was asking it to interrupt that task, postpone the result, and create an extraordinary process in response to Trump’s refusal to accept defeat.

The objection to Arizona was made before the Capitol was breached. But when Congress returned later that night—after the attack had stopped the count and made unmistakably clear the stakes of Trump’s false claim—Cruz still voted to sustain it. The Senate rejected the objection, 93–6.

Cruz did not merely fail to impose a consequence on Trump. He helped give Trump’s refusal of defeat the language of procedure, legitimacy, and constitutional duty.

Graham’s failure was to leave an already-drawn line unenforced. Cruz’s was to use the authority of the Senate to make crossing the line sound responsible.

Marco Rubio: surrender became a job description

Graham shows what happens when a senator recognizes a boundary and refuses to enforce it. Cruz shows what happens when a senator uses the authority of his office to make crossing that boundary sound responsible.

Marco Rubio shows something else: what happens when the former critic becomes an administrator.

Rubio knew what Trump threatened.

In 2016, he called Trump “a serious threat to the future of our party, and our country.” He warned that Trump’s slogans, celebrity, and insults were not enough to govern a democracy. Trump’s campaign, Rubio said, was tearing down, mocking, or abusing the ideas on which the country depended: equality of opportunity, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.

That was not a warning about ordinary political disagreement. It was a warning about a style of power: the use of insult in place of argument, spectacle in place of judgment, and personal grievance in place of constitutional restraint.

Rubio eventually made his accommodation, as so many Republicans did. But his story did not end with an endorsement, a vote, or an appearance at a rally. He became secretary of state.

That distinction matters. A senator can defend a president. A Cabinet officer operates the machinery through which a president’s instincts become policy.

In March 2025, Rubio defended the administration’s expanding use of immigration authority against foreign students and other noncitizens associated with campus protest activity. He said the State Department was revoking visas every day, that he had reviewed the cases himself, and that those whose activity ran contrary to American foreign policy should lose the privilege of remaining in the country.

The policy involved allegations of support for Hamas, ties to disruptive movements, vandalism, and other conduct that the administration regarded as contrary to the national interest. Rubio insisted that the government had the authority to deny and revoke visas, and that visitors who participated in such movements should leave.

The issue, he said, was not freedom of speech.

“This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with.”

The question was not whether every individual whose visa was revoked had engaged only in protected expression, or whether every case involved the same facts. The question was what Rubio did with the constitutional concern itself. Faced with a government policy directed at politically active noncitizens—one involving protest, association, speech, immigration status, and the power of the state to remove a person from the country—he removed freedom of speech from the administrative vocabulary.

The former senator who had warned that Trump mocked and abused freedom of speech had become the secretary of state explaining why freedom of speech was beside the point.

That is normalization. Not the claim that an extraordinary exercise of power has never occurred, or that the government lacks all authority over visas. Rather, the insistence that the extraordinary has become ordinary—that a question once regarded as central can now be defined away.

The same transformation appears, at a larger and more consequential scale, in Iran.

As a senator, Rubio treated the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran as dangerously inadequate. He argued that sanctions relief would help Iran strengthen its conventional military capacity and pursue a nuclear weapon. The agreement was never a cure for every problem involving Iran; its limits, verification terms, sunset provisions, missile restrictions, and treatment of Iran’s regional conduct were all subjects of legitimate dispute.

But the agreement did establish constraints, verification, and sanctions relief as the basic architecture of diplomacy. The IAEA verified Iran’s implementation of its JCPOA commitments during the agreement’s early years; Iran began exceeding some of those limits in 2019. (Coincidentally, Trump had pulled the U.S. out of the agreement the year before, in 2018.)

Now, Rubio is no longer a senator predicting what a president’s foreign policy might unleash. He is secretary of state, responsible for managing the reality that followed. During the Iran war, he defended the administration’s position that sanctions relief could come only in exchange for Iranian commitments to give up nuclear activity—a negotiation still built around the very elements that the partisan critic had once treated as inadequate: limits, verification, compliance, and sanctions relief.

The point is not that Rubio was obliged to embrace the JCPOA, or that a later agreement must be identical to it. It is that the administrator eventually confronts realities that the partisan critic could wave away.

Rubio did not simply learn to defend Trump. He learned to administer the consequences of defending him.

At some point, surrender ceases to be an act of loyalty. It becomes a job description.

The press: Remaining in the room

Graham, Cruz, and Rubio possessed formal political power. Graham could have voted to impose a consequence. Cruz could have refused to lend Senate authority to Trump’s false claim. Rubio could have declined to make Trump’s departures from democratic norms sound like ordinary government.

The press possessed a different kind of authority.

It could not convict a president, certify an election, or direct the machinery of the state. Its power was collective professional legitimacy: the power to decide what it would participate in, what it would normalize, what terms it would accept in exchange for access, and whether an attack on one journalist would be treated as an attack on the institution itself.

That power was not insignificant. It was one of the few powers Trump could not simply command.

Trump’s assault on the press was never merely a matter of bad manners. Long before his return to office, he had made attacks on journalists central to his political performance—calling reporting he disliked “fake news” and branding the press “the enemy of the American people.” The purpose was not only to discredit a particular story or reporter. It was to train his audience to see independent verification as an act of hostility and a question as an act of insubordination.

The personal insult was part of the method. A reporter asked a question; Trump avoided the answer by attacking the reporter’s intelligence, motives, appearance, or professionalism. The question disappeared beneath the spectacle. The journalist became the story. And then the next reporter waited to be recognized.

That is where the press confronted its own bargain.

The ordinary response was understandable. Ask the next question. File the story. Correct the lie. Preserve access. Do not create a scene. Do not make the journalist the issue when the president is the issue. Return tomorrow and ask again.

Each instinct had a professional logic. Together, they created a condition in which Trump could degrade a reporter in public and still retain the cooperation of the room.

Silence in the room is not neutrality. When one reporter is attacked and the institution carries on, silence becomes permission.

The test of institutional solidarity was never whether every journalist should shout back at a president, or whether every hostile exchange required a dramatic confrontation. The press had to cover Trump. It had to keep asking questions. It was not obliged to become an opposition party.

But it did possess the standing to establish a boundary.

A reporter could have said:

“You are speaking about a colleague, and you are speaking to all of us. You may decline to answer the question, but you do not get to demean a journalist and expect the press corps to behave as though nothing happened.”

And if the president refused to withdraw the attack or answer the question, the press corps could have left. All of it. Not in anger, not as theater, and not as a refusal to cover the presidency. Simply as a collective declaration that access did not require submission.

Let the cameras show the empty room.

That counterfactual matters because it identifies the power the press had but rarely exercised. The problem was not an individual reporter’s lack of courage. An individual journalist who protested risked being isolated, denied access, or recast as partisan. The problem was the absence of a collective institution prepared to make clear that an attack on one reporter was an attack on the conditions under which all reporters worked.

By 2025, the cost of accepting Trump’s terms had become more concrete. The White House barred the Associated Press from pooled events because the organization continued to use “Gulf of Mexico” in its style guidance. It then announced that the White House press team, rather than the White House Correspondents’ Association, would determine the daily composition of the press pool.

The press did resist. The Associated Press sued. The White House Correspondents’ Association objected that the change would allow the government to choose the journalists who covered it. A federal judge later ordered the administration to restore AP access, ruling that the government could not punish the organization over its editorial choices.

Those actions mattered. They were neither trivial nor futile. But they also revealed the larger institutional pattern. The resistance came through statements, litigation, and the slow machinery of formal remedy—after access had been withdrawn and after the White House had asserted the power to reshape the pool. The WHCA, according to Politico, did not organize a boycott of pooled events to demonstrate solidarity with the AP.

The daily ritual of access continued. The underlying premise remained available to Trump: that the press needed the room more than the room needed the press.

That was the bargain. Access came to be treated as synonymous with journalism, even when access was offered on terms designed to weaken the independence that made journalism valuable.

The press did not cause Trump’s assault on accountability. Nor did every journalist or news organization accommodate it in the same way. Many reporters did difficult, adversarial work under conditions deliberately made more hostile. But an institution can resist in fragments and still fail to defend itself as an institution.

The senators surrendered votes and constitutional authority. The press risked surrendering something different: the authority to say that independent journalism was not a privilege granted by power, and that no president could demean one of its members without encountering the collective weight of the profession.

Trump needed the room.

The press discovered that it did not have to stay in it.

The choice remains

The press was not alone. Law firms, corporations, universities, cultural institutions, and others confronted versions of the same calculation. What would resistance cost? What access, funding, influence, protection, or institutional stability might be lost by insisting that a boundary remain a boundary?

The answers differed. The bargain did not.

Some institutions surrendered votes. Some surrendered constitutional restraint. Some surrendered judgment to the routines of government. Some surrendered independence in exchange for access. Few announced that they had surrendered. Most described what they were doing as prudence, professionalism, realism, unity, or survival.

That is how surrender becomes systemic. It does not require a declaration of loyalty, much less a conspiracy. It requires only that enough people decide, separately and repeatedly, that the cost of resistance is greater than the cost of accommodation.

Donald Trump’s power was never his alone. It began as performance: the conversion of attention into authority. It endured through belief: the conversion of certainty into belonging. But it became durable through surrender: the conversion of independent institutions into participants in a system whose rules they no longer set.

The danger was never simply that Trump would cross every line. He has always crossed lines. The danger was that the people charged with enforcing them would decide that enforcement was too expensive.

Trump needed the room.
The audience wanted what he offered.
And the people with the power to leave decided they could not afford to.

But that is not the same as saying they could not leave.

None of this is inevitable. The same institutions that learned to accommodate can learn to say no. A senator can treat a boundary as something that produces a vote. A Cabinet officer can refuse to define a constitutional concern out of existence. A press corps can decide that access is not worth accepting the terms of its own degradation.

The remedy is neither theatrical nor mysterious. It begins when people with independent authority use it—together, in public, and with consequences.

Trump’s power depends upon a continuing act of participation. The performance requires a stage. Belief requires an audience. Surrender requires people who decide that leaving the room is more costly than remaining in it.

But that calculation can change.

A boundary is not a boundary because someone can describe it. It is a boundary only when someone is willing to defend it.

The choice is theirs.

But those who refuse to defend it can be held accountable by the people whose trust makes their authority possible.

That choice is ours.

The Burden of Thinking

Let us begin by discarding a comforting fiction. Donald Trump did not arrive in an otherwise rational republic and proceed to dismantle it. He succeeded because he encountered a political culture already weary of the demands of thinking.

Thinking is work. It requires doubt, revision, and the occasionally humiliating recognition that one has been wrong. It asks us to distinguish a fact from an assertion, an explanation from an excuse, confidence from competence. It insists that the world may be more complicated than our anger would prefer it to be.

Certainty asks none of this. Certainty is immediate, flattering, and emotionally efficient. It turns confusion into clarity, insecurity into indignation, and the ordinary discomfort of not knowing into the reassuring conviction that someone else is lying to you.

That is why the true enemy of reason is not ignorance. Ignorance can be corrected; certainty without justification resists correction. It is the conviction that one already knows enough, owes no one an explanation, and need never revise a belief merely because the evidence has changed.

Donald Trump did not invent America’s suspicion of intelligence. He inherited it, flattered it, and gave it a flag to wave.

Skepticism Is Not Anti-Intellectualism

None of this means that expertise should be treated as infallible. Skepticism is not a vice. It is one of the safeguards of an open society. Institutions make mistakes. Experts disagree. Authorities sometimes conceal information, protect their reputations, or simply get things wrong. A citizen should be able to ask questions without being told that the very act of questioning is irresponsible.

But skepticism and anti-intellectualism are not the same thing.

Skepticism asks: What is your evidence?

Anti-intellectualism asks: Whose side are you on?

The difference matters. Expertise is not a claim to omniscience. It is the product of training, accumulated knowledge, disciplined inquiry, and a willingness—at least in principle—to have one’s conclusions tested and corrected. An expert can be wrong. That is not an argument against expertise. It is an argument for the process that allows errors to be discovered and corrected.

The healthy skeptic therefore challenges an assertion because the evidence may not support it. The anti-intellectual rejects the evidence because it came from the wrong person, the wrong institution, or the wrong tribe.

That is where skepticism becomes something else.

The problem begins when suspicion itself becomes the evidence.

Once an expert is presumed corrupt simply because the conclusion is unwelcome, there is no longer anything to investigate. A scientific finding can be dismissed as political. A statistic can be rejected as manipulated. A journalist can be declared biased before the reporting is examined. A judge can be called corrupt because the ruling was unfavorable. The conclusion comes first; the accusation is constructed afterward.

This is not skepticism. It is immunity from correction.

And that is the crucial distinction. Skepticism leaves the door open to evidence. Anti-intellectualism closes the door and then congratulates itself for refusing to be fooled.

Trump Perfects the Transaction

There is an enormous political market for certainty.

People do not turn to certainty only because they are uninformed. Sometimes they turn to it because uncertainty is exhausting. The world is complicated. Problems have competing causes and incomplete solutions. Decisions involve tradeoffs, and almost every serious answer begins with some version of it depends.

That is not an especially satisfying product.

Donald Trump understood the alternative.

He could offer an answer before the question had been fully asked. He could identify the villain before the evidence had been examined. He could turn a complicated problem into a contest between people who were supposedly on your side and people who were supposedly against you.

The attraction was not simply that he spoke plainly. Plenty of people speak plainly. It was that he made complexity itself feel suspect. You did not need to understand the problem if you already knew who was responsible for it.

That was the transaction.

Trump offered confidence without comprehension, grievance without self-examination, and belonging without the inconvenience of being wrong.

The bargain was emotionally efficient. If the economy was bad, someone had betrayed you. If immigration frightened you, someone had opened the borders deliberately. If an election went against you, someone had stolen it. If an institution contradicted you, the institution was corrupt. The answer did not require investigation because the villain had already been supplied.

And the reward was not merely the satisfaction of having an explanation. It was the satisfaction of having a side.

This is where Trump’s particular form of anti-intellectualism becomes politically powerful. He does not merely tell people that experts are wrong. He turns disagreement with experts into evidence that the experts are hostile to them. He does not merely reject correction. He makes resistance to correction feel like independence.

The result is a peculiar kind of empowerment. You do not have to know more to feel that you know better. You do not have to understand the evidence to reject it. You do not have to solve the problem to identify the people who supposedly caused it.

You only have to know who belongs to us.

And that is a much more powerful political offer than a policy program. A policy can fail. A prediction can be disproved. A promise can be measured against what actually happened. But belonging is harder to falsify. Once politics becomes an argument over identity, changing your mind is no longer simply changing your mind.

It can feel like changing sides.

When Belief Becomes Identity

There is a difference between holding a belief and building an identity around it.

Most of us change our minds from time to time. We discover that something we believed was incomplete, mistaken, or simply wrong. It may be embarrassing, but it need not be devastating. A proposition can be discarded without requiring us to discard ourselves.

That changes when a belief becomes part of who we are.

Political beliefs are especially vulnerable to this transformation because politics is rarely just about policy. It is about belonging. We identify with parties, movements, communities, histories, grievances, and people we believe understand the world as we do. We learn which arguments belong to our side and which ones belong to theirs.

At that point, disagreement begins to carry a different emotional weight.

A challenge to a belief can start to feel like a challenge to the person who holds it. A correction can feel like condescension. An inconvenient fact can feel like an attack. The person presenting the evidence becomes more important than the evidence itself.

The question changes.

It is no longer simply: Is this true?

It becomes: What does believing this say about me—and what does rejecting it say about the people I belong with?

This is how political judgment becomes identity protection. We become more willing to accept information that confirms the group and more suspicious of information that threatens it. We do not necessarily examine every piece of evidence and consciously decide to reject it. Often the process happens before examination begins. We know who said it. We know what side they are on. We know what conclusion they want us to reach.

And that can be enough.

When a belief becomes a biography, correction no longer feels like learning. It feels like erasure.

This is why political movements can survive contradictions that would destroy an ordinary argument. A failed prediction does not necessarily discredit the person who made it. A disproven claim does not necessarily weaken the believer’s commitment. Instead, the failure can be absorbed, explained, redirected, or attributed to the hostility of outsiders.

The belief survives because something larger than the belief is being defended.

The self is being defended.

And once that happens, admitting error becomes expensive. It may require more than saying, I was wrong. It may require saying, The people I trusted were wrong. The people I distrusted may have been right. The anger I felt may have led me somewhere I did not want to go.

That is a much harder admission.

Trump understood how to turn that ordinary human vulnerability into a demand for political loyalty.

Lies as Loyalty Tests

Once political belief becomes identity, falsehood acquires a new function. It no longer matters only whether a claim is true. What matters is what happens when the claim is challenged.

This is where Trump’s politics becomes particularly effective.

A false claim is made. Evidence contradicts it. The contradiction creates a choice: reconsider the claim, or defend it. But when the claim has become attached to the group, reconsideration carries a cost. It can look like weakness. It can look like betrayal. It can mean conceding that the people on the other side were right about something.

Defending the claim, by contrast, demonstrates loyalty.

The defense becomes the point.

This helps explain why some political falsehoods survive long after the evidence against them has become overwhelming. The claim has ceased to function merely as a proposition about the world. It has become a marker of membership. Those inside defend it; those outside question it.

The more obviously the claim is challenged, the more valuable the defense can become. Conceding a minor error might be harmless. Conceding an error after years of insisting upon it can mean admitting that the people you trusted were wrong, that the people you distrusted may have been right, and that you helped defend what never deserved defending.

The psychological incentive therefore runs in the opposite direction from the intellectual one.

Evidence should make us more willing to reconsider.

Identity can make us more determined not to.

And this is where Trump’s political gift becomes consequential. He does not merely ask his supporters to believe him. He repeatedly creates circumstances in which defending him becomes a demonstration of belonging. The question is no longer simply whether his claim survives scrutiny. It is whether you will stand with him when scrutiny arrives.

His followers are not simply asked to believe him; they are asked to protect him from the consequences of belief.

The false claim that the 2020 election was stolen is the clearest example. The claim did not wither after state and federal courts rejected dozens of challenges, federal election-security officials reported no evidence that voting systems had deleted, lost, or changed votes, and Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department had found no fraud on a scale sufficient to alter the outcome. Each failed challenge merely created another occasion for allegiance: a court became corrupt, an election official became weak, a recount became a cover-up, and anyone who acknowledged the outcome became part of the betrayal. The question was no longer whether the election claim could survive scrutiny. The question was whether one would continue to stand with Trump after scrutiny had arrived.

That protection can take many forms. A contradiction becomes context. A failure becomes sabotage. A falsehood becomes exaggeration. A damaging fact becomes evidence of a conspiracy. An obvious mistake becomes proof that the people pointing it out are part of the problem.

The mechanism is remarkably efficient because every defense solves two problems at once. It protects the belief, and it protects the believer’s place within the group.

Eventually, the distinction between loyalty to the person and loyalty to the truth becomes almost impossible to maintain.

And once that happens, asking someone to acknowledge that they were wrong is no longer merely asking them to change their mind.

It is asking them to choose.

The Civic Consequence

The consequences of this arrangement extend beyond any individual falsehood or political movement. Democracy does not require citizens to agree. It requires them to remain capable of being corrected.

That distinction is easy to overlook because disagreement is so visible. People argue. Parties fight. Elections divide the country. Institutions reach different conclusions. None of this, by itself, is a democratic failure. A free society is supposed to contain disagreement.

The danger comes when disagreement is no longer an argument over what is true, but a test of whom one is willing to believe.

Once belonging depends upon never conceding, evidence becomes an enemy and correction becomes betrayal. A person who cannot acknowledge error becomes increasingly dependent upon the people and institutions that reassure him he has made none. A political movement built around that dependency becomes increasingly hostile to anyone capable of saying otherwise.

And the damage does not stop with the people who hold the belief.

A democracy depends upon a continuous process of correction. Voters correct politicians at the ballot box. Courts correct abuses of power. Journalists correct false claims. Scientists correct earlier conclusions when better evidence appears. Citizens correct one another through argument. None of these mechanisms is perfect. All of them are vulnerable to error. But they share a necessary premise: that being wrong is survivable.

Trump’s politics makes that premise harder to sustain.

If admitting error means admitting that your enemies were right, then the incentive is to deny the error. If changing your mind means changing sides, then changing your mind becomes a form of disloyalty. And if loyalty is the highest political virtue, the truth becomes negotiable.

That is how a political culture loses its capacity for self-correction—not because everyone suddenly becomes incapable of knowing the truth, but because too many people become unwilling to pay the social price of acknowledging it.

Democracy does not require citizens to agree. It requires them to remain capable of being corrected.

Trump did not ask his followers to think. He asked them to feel certain.

The danger is what happens when certainty becomes more important than truth.

The most misleading thing about Donald Trump is also the most obvious: the noise. The boasts, the insults, the unfinished sentences, the abrupt changes of subject, the compulsive need to place his own name at the center of every event, every thing. It almost seems too crude to require serious analysis. One is tempted to dismiss it all as the familiar racket of a vulgar man with a microphone.

But the noise is not incidental. It is the method.

Trump did not invent America’s anti-intellectualism. He did not create the national appetite for easy answers, public grievance, or the comforting belief that expertise is a con devised by people who think they are better than everyone else. What he did was recognize those impulses, flatter them, and turn them into a political style.

What we are witnessing is not mere ignorance, but its theatrical inversion. This is not the humble admission of not knowing—the beginning of inquiry—but the aggressive performance of not needing to know. It is a posture in which complexity becomes a trick, precision becomes weakness, and doubt becomes a species of betrayal.

Trump’s speech is the natural language of that posture. The looping digressions, the conspicuous lack of precision, the anecdote standing in for argument, the claim announced with total confidence and then abandoned without consequence: these are not necessarily defects to be corrected. They are signals to be received. They reassure the audience that one need not read, think, remember, or understand in order to possess an opinion.

He does not simplify the world. He flattens it.

Donald Trump is not a political thinker. This is not a controversial observation, except among those who have confused repetition with conviction and confidence with knowledge. He has no governing philosophy beyond the preservation of Donald Trump. No principle is safe from revision if revision is required to keep him at the center of the picture, and no failure may be acknowledged if it can instead be transferred to a subordinate, an enemy, a predecessor, a governor, a newspaper, a judge, an immigrant, an ally insufficiently grateful for his attention, or the country itself.

Trump’s first political talent is not persuasion. It is self-exemption.

This explains much that otherwise appears incoherent. His contradictions do not trouble him because coherence is not the point. The purpose of his speech is not to establish a position that can later be judged against facts. It is to occupy the stage, dominate the moment, and leave the audience with the impression—always the impression—that he has been right, strong, wronged, and indispensable.

In Trump’s flattened world, evidence is not something to be weighed. It is something to be accepted, rejected, or rewritten according to whether it flatters the man at the center of the frame.

He does not offer knowledge. He offers relief from the burden of knowledge.

Serious thought requires effort. It requires one to live with uncertainty, reconsider assumptions, concede error, and occasionally discover that one has been a fool. Trump offers an easier path: You are already wise. You are already right. You have not been mistaken; you have been deceived. The people who challenge you are not asking you to think more carefully. They are trying to make you feel small.

There is a reason this works. Trump’s appeal has always depended upon counterfeit versions of admired things.

Wealth becomes gold lettering, private jets, towers with his name on them, and the ceaseless insistence that he is rich. Strength becomes humiliation of the weak, abuse of subordinates, and the inability to retract an error. Intelligence becomes the ability to call someone else stupid before they can ask a follow-up question.

Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man, a weak man’s idea of a strong man, and a stupid man’s idea of a smart one. Not because his supporters can be reduced to those categories, but because he sells wealth, strength, and intelligence in their cheapest imaginable forms.

He is their souvenir-shop replica.

His need for attention is equally naked—an unquenchable thirst for reassurance, recognition, and permanent occupation of the public mind.

His thirst for attention is equally naked. Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote The Art of the Deal, has described Trump’s need for reassurance and public attention as an “unquenchable thirst.” The image of the fearsome dealmaker has become increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of events beyond his ability to command.

Trump does not simply seek approval. He seeks permanent occupation of the public mind. Praise verifies his greatness. Criticism wounds his vanity. The wound is then converted into grievance, insult, and—where power permits—retaliation. Even mockery can be repurposed as evidence that he is under attack, yet remains the indispensable subject of every room.

For most public figures, attention is a means. For Trump, it is oxygen.

This is why one must understand the difference between refusing to be distracted by Trump and ignoring what Trump does. No responsible citizen should avert his eyes from an executive order, a war, a corruption scandal, an attack on an institution, or a threat to the rights of fellow citizens. But neither should the press or public agree to become unpaid members of Trump’s production crew.

Not every insult is an event. Not every lie is an unresolved question.

The media’s familiar excuse—we only report the story; we cannot become the story—has become an alibi for moral and intellectual passivity. Reporting does not mean laundering nonsense into legitimacy. The great muckrakers of the early twentieth century did not believe neutrality required them to describe filth as an alternative point of view, or falsehoods for “alternative facts.” They investigated, named, and exposed it. Fiercely. Unapologetically.

Trump’s lies deserve the same discipline. State the claim. State the fact. Identify the stake. Do not let the lie become the show.

And do not wait until the press conference is over to append the bloodless phrase “without evidence” from the comfort of a newsroom or the upholstered irrelevance of a cable-news panel. That is the media’s useless escape hatch. The challenge belongs in the press conference, in real time: What is your evidence, Mr. President? Will you provide it? Ask again when he evades. Demand an answer when he changes the subject. Doggedly. Unapologetically.

That would certainly command the undivided attention of the country—just not the sort Mr. Trump prefers. It is, however, the sort a democracy requires.

The latest midterm maneuver is a perfect miniature of the Trump method. Facing Republican anxiety about the coming elections, Trump has said voters may be angry, but that they are angry at congressional Republicans—not at him.

It is a masterpiece of narcissistic bookkeeping.

Failure may exist. Public dissatisfaction may exist. Republican losses may even exist. But none of it may be entered under Trump’s name.

The party may lose; the leader must remain immaculate.

This is not strategy in the ordinary sense. It is an emotional reflex. Trump cannot acknowledge shared responsibility because shared responsibility implies responsibility. The Republican Party is useful to him as a vehicle, a cheering section, a protection racket, and a collection of people available to carry blame when the vehicle hits a wall. But he cannot permit it to become an equal partner in success or failure. There can be no equal partner in a drama whose sole legitimate protagonist is Donald Trump.

The degradation this produces is not merely rhetorical. It alters the meaning of public life.

A country cannot deliberate when every fact is first forced to declare its loyalty. It cannot govern competently when evidence is treated as a personal insult and expertise as treason. And it cannot hold power accountable when the powerful man’s every failure is instantly converted into somebody else’s betrayal.

Trump’s supporters often mistake this refusal ever to concede for toughness. They mistake the public display of contempt for courage. They mistake the ability to insult, threaten, and evade, for proof that he cannot be controlled.

But a man who cannot admit error is not strong. He is captive—to his vanity, to his audience, and to the increasingly elaborate fictions required to preserve both.

That captivity becomes dangerous when the man is president.

The world does not measure American strength by the decibel level of its leader’s boasts. Allies measure reliability. Adversaries measure seriousness, restraint, competence, and the capacity to distinguish a real threat from a personal grievance. A president who constantly strains credulity may retain the faith of loyalists who need the performance to be true. But the rest of the world sees something else: a country whose political system has made room for a man unable to separate the national interest from his own reflection.

Trump did not create America’s anti-intellectual habits, its grievance industry, its appetite for spectacle, or its suspicion of democratic restraint. He found them waiting for him. He gave them a face, a voice, a television-ready rhythm, and most importantly, permission to regard their worst impulses as proof of authenticity.

That is why Trump is not merely a political problem. He is a cultural exposure.

Trump will eventually leave the stage. Everyone does. The more consequential question is what happens to the audience when he does.

If the performance survives the performer—if another figure can inherit the same contempt for evidence, the same appetite for spectacle, and the same promise that loyalty matters more than judgment—then the problem was never merely the man.

It was the appetite that made him possible.

America’s most powerful weapons, it turns out, have one unforgivable defect: they exist in reality. They must be manufactured, counted, transported, maintained, replaced. They cannot be conjured out of instinct, bravado, or a Truth Social post. They do not care how many times a president insists that America has “the greatest military in the history of the world.”

Reality keeps its own schedule.

According to The Washington Post, Donald Trump confronted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at Camp David after learning that the United States had burned through alarming quantities of long‑range precision weapons and missile‑defense interceptors during the war with Iran. Trump reportedly wanted to know why he hadn’t been told sooner. Hegseth reportedly blamed his deputy. The White House called the reporting fabricated. Pentagon officials insisted no one had misled anyone.

One begins to suspect that Trump isn’t really angry with Hegseth. He’s angry that reality refuses to cooperate.

Reality versus the talking points

For months, administration officials assured Americans there was no meaningful shortage of critical munitions. Hegseth went on television and told viewers there was “no shortage of munitions,” dismissed concerns about depleted stockpiles as a “manufactured story,” and accused critics of exaggeration.

Yet the Pentagon is now asking Congress for tens of billions of dollars in additional military funding to replenish weapons consumed during the conflict. Independent analyses indicate that Patriot missile inventories have been depleted by roughly two‑thirds and that nearly 80 percent of certain key interceptors have been expended defending bases against Iranian missiles and drones. Even Hegseth, under questioning, has conceded that replacing these systems will require “months and years” of production.

Those claims cannot comfortably occupy the same sentence. You cannot simultaneously say there is “no shortage” and ask lawmakers for a vast emergency replenishment package because your stockpiles have been drawn down.

The issue isn’t that America has no weapons. It’s that specific categories of weapons—the expensive, sophisticated missiles that underpin America’s strategic advantage—cannot simply be restocked because the Commander in Chief decides he would like a bigger finale.

The industrial base is not a streaming service. You cannot click escalate and expect another season to appear.

Reality has an unfortunate habit of interrupting political mythology.

When government becomes performance

All of this reveals something larger than a dispute over inventories. It shows what happens when government becomes performance.

Television rewards confidence. Politics increasingly rewards certainty. Social media rewards spectacle. War rewards preparation.

Those are not the same skills.

We now have, essentially, a weekend TV show host serving as Secretary of Defense, reporting to a former reality‑TV star serving as Commander in Chief, attempting to wage a reality‑TV war with Iran. Hegseth, a former National Guard officer turned cable personality, presents war as a test of “warfighters” and resolve. Trump presents it as a show—“the biggest attack since World War II”—in which firepower is a prop, proof that his America is as mighty as he says it is.

The script has long been familiar. Deny the problem. Attack the reporting. Blame a subordinate. Send Congress the bill.

That isn’t strategy. It’s crisis management by public relations.

Logistics, briefly

Military professionals have always understood that logistics are strategy. Firepower captures headlines; supply chains determine victory.

The Second World War wasn’t won simply because America built better weapons. It was won because America built more of them, transported them farther, repaired them faster, and replaced them continuously. The Berlin Airlift succeeded not because of inspirational speeches, but because aircraft, fuel, maintenance crews, spare parts, and schedules functioned with astonishing precision. Even our rations tell the story: from Nabisco and Domino Sugar in the First World War to M&M’s, Hershey, Camel, Hormel, and Wrigley in later conflicts, civilian industry was enlisted on a massive scale to keep soldiers supplied.

Military power has never been measured solely by what you can fire. It is measured by what you can sustain.

That’s why this column isn’t really about missile counts. It’s about leaders who went to war as if logistics were a detail someone else could sort out later.

Elections, audits, and the bill

Trump has often claimed that he knows “more than the generals,” citing his teenage years at New York Military Academy as proof of his mastery of “military strategy and tactics.” In business he showed mastery of something else: high‑interest loans, failed casinos, stiffed contractors, and walking away from the wreckage when the numbers no longer added up.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, you cannot stiff production schedules. You cannot bully a Patriot interceptor into appearing on a launcher faster than the factory can build it. You can intimidate Republican officeholders; you cannot intimidate the chemical composition of solid rocket fuel.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon—the same institution now pleading poverty on interceptors—has failed eight consecutive financial audits. Auditors have identified broad “material weaknesses” in how it tracks and verifies assets. In September 2025, the department went on a $93.4 billion end‑of‑year spending spree, emblematic of a culture more adept at racing to obligate funds than at counting what it actually owns.

Elections have consequences. We put people in charge who confuse confidence with capacity. We placed a showman in charge of the most complex supply chain on Earth and surrounded him with courtiers who treat the daily briefing as the main theater of war.

The collision with facts

The consequences are only beginning to show. Iran has used cheap missiles and drones to force the United States to expend expensive interceptors, gaining leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and complicating any claim that America controls the world’s most important shipping lane. Washington has spent months insisting that America possesses unmatched military power, but months into the conflict, the administration now finds itself confronting strategic constraints it plainly did not anticipate while it’s negotiating position is seriously diminished.

Reality does not negotiate. Factories cannot be bullied into producing interceptors faster. Chemistry doesn’t care about campaign slogans. Assembly lines don’t respond to executive orders. Physics has never once checked Truth Social before deciding how long it takes to manufacture a missile.

Eventually every government collides with those facts. The competent ones prepare for them. The incompetent ones blame somebody else.

That appears to be where we are now. After months of insisting that stockpiles were fine and that talk of shortages was “manufactured,” the administration finds itself asking Congress for billions to rebuild the very arsenals it pretended were not being dangerously depleted. This is not simply an accounting problem. It is a governing problem.

Missiles don’t care about campaign slogans. Production schedules don’t care about Truth Social. Reality is indifferent to political mythology, and eventually every government discovers the same thing: you cannot negotiate with facts.

One question I’d genuinely like to hear asked in the White House briefing room:

“Mr. President, if Iran offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz tomorrow on one condition—that you publicly acknowledge losing the 2020 election—which would be more important to you: reopening one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, or preserving the lie?”

Some questions answer themselves.

And if the numbers still don’t add up, well… perhaps the Pentagon can just find 11,780 more missiles.

Reality will keep its own schedule.

American politics has developed a familiar ritual.

A primary election happens. A candidate wins. A faction gains momentum. Within hours, the verdict arrives: the party has moved left. Or the party has moved right.

The recent Michigan primary produced another round of that analysis.

Sometimes those conclusions are accurate. But they often confuse visibility with velocity. A movement that has been developing for years can appear to arrive overnight.

The pendulum did not change direction. We are simply watching it move faster.

Schlesinger’s Pendulum

Every generation believes it is living through an unprecedented moment.

Usually, it is wrong.

The names change. The crises change. The arguments change. But American politics has always moved through periods of expansion and contraction, reform and reaction, confidence and doubt. The country pushes in one direction until the consequences of that movement generate a counterforce. Then the pendulum begins to swing back.

Few historians captured that rhythm better than Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Writing in The Cycles of American History, Schlesinger argued that American politics moved through recurring phases of public purpose and private interest. Periods of reform were followed by periods of retreat. The nation turned outward, then inward. It embraced government as an instrument of collective action, then grew skeptical of government power. The energy of one era eventually created the conditions for its own reversal.

It was not a theory of inevitability. Schlesinger did not believe history operated like a machine. The pendulum was not attached to a clock. Human beings still made choices. Leaders still mattered. Movements still rose and fell.

But there was a rhythm.

A generation would experience one set of political assumptions as common sense. The next generation, having inherited the consequences of those assumptions, would often challenge them.

The New Deal produced a conservative reaction. The social movements of the 1960s produced a backlash that helped define the late twentieth century. Even the Reagan era became a reaction against the assumptions of the decades before it.

The pendulum swung.

For Schlesinger, this was not a flaw in American democracy. It was part of its design. A self-correcting system does not move in a straight line. It adjusts.

That idea remains one of the most useful ways to understand American political history.

It also raises a question that Schlesinger could never have anticipated.

What happens when the pendulum begins moving faster?

Schlesinger wrote in an era when political change unfolded at the speed of human experience. Newspapers arrived once a day. Television news arrived at fixed hours. Political identities formed over decades, often passed from parents to children. Movements built organizations. Arguments developed over time. Public opinion shifted gradually enough for institutions to absorb the change.

The pendulum still moved.

But it moved slowly.

Today, the conditions surrounding political change are fundamentally different. Information no longer travels at the speed of newspapers, television broadcasts, or even conversation. It travels instantly. Political arguments that once developed over years can now ignite in hours. A local controversy can become a national battle before the facts are fully understood. A political identity can be reinforced not through decades of experience but through a constant stream of confirmation.

The pendulum remains. The question is whether it has accelerated.

Schlesinger understood the direction of history. He could not have anticipated its speed. And that distinction may be the key to understanding American politics in the digital age.

The Pendulum Still Swings

The easiest way to dismiss Schlesinger’s theory is to mistake a pendulum for a straight line.

Political movements rarely announce themselves as temporary. Those who live through moments of change often believe they are witnessing the final triumph of their ideas. A movement wins an election, reshapes institutions, changes public expectations, and begins to assume that history has finally arrived at the correct conclusion.

Every political movement prefers to believe it won because history finally recognized its wisdom. History is usually less flattering. More often, one side wins because the other side has exhausted the public’s patience.

That is the pattern Schlesinger identified. The forces that create political change also create the conditions for a reaction. Reform movements expand government’s role because they see problems that existing institutions have failed to address. Eventually, however, the costs, contradictions, or unintended consequences of that expansion create skepticism. The public begins looking for a different answer.

The pendulum moves.

The conservative movement that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century was, in many ways, a response to the liberal consensus that preceded it. The New Deal coalition had transformed American politics, but the social upheavals of the 1960s, the economic challenges of the 1970s, and growing distrust of government created an opening for a different vision.

The Reagan era was not an accident. It was a reaction.

But reactions themselves eventually produce reactions. The political assumptions of the Reagan era shaped American politics for decades. Lower taxes, deregulation, skepticism of government—these became defining features of the conservative movement. Yet over time, the consequences of those ideas created new debates and new pressures.

The pendulum began moving again.

The rise of Donald Trump represented a dramatic break with traditional Republican politics, but it did not emerge from nowhere. It reflected long-building frustrations among voters who believed existing institutions had failed them, that cultural changes had moved too quickly, and that political leaders had become disconnected from ordinary concerns.

At the same time, the Democratic Party was undergoing its own transformation. Younger voters, college-educated voters, and many voters in urban and suburban areas moved toward a more progressive vision of government and society. Issues involving race, gender, climate, economic inequality, and institutional power became increasingly central to Democratic identity.

The country was not moving in one direction. It was reacting.

That distinction matters.

But victory is never the end of the story. Victories create governing responsibilities. Governing creates consequences. Consequences create reactions. The cycle continues.

That was Schlesinger's insight.

The changing composition of both parties reflects this process. Republicans have become increasingly conservative, while Democrats have become increasingly liberal. The share of Democrats identifying as liberal has risen substantially since the early 2000s, particularly among younger and more highly educated voters.

But these shifts should not be understood as evidence that one side has finally discovered political truth. They are evidence of the pendulum at work.

The important question is not whether American politics still moves in cycles. It does. The important question is why those cycles now appear to be accelerating.

For most of American history, ideological change unfolded over generations. A political movement would rise, govern, produce consequences, and eventually generate a response. The process was slow enough that citizens and institutions had time to adapt.

Today, that assumption may no longer hold. The pendulum still swings. But something has changed.

The rhythm of political change has been overtaken by the speed of political reaction.

The Digital Compression of Political Time

The digital age did not change the direction of political history. It changed its velocity.

Technology solved one problem while creating another. We have moved from an era of information scarcity to an era of information abundance. More people have access to more information, faster than any previous generation in history.

But information and understanding are not the same thing. Knowledge can travel instantly. Wisdom cannot.

The same systems that allow citizens to communicate, organize, and participate also reward speed, emotion, and conflict. Social media platforms are not designed primarily to encourage reflection. They are designed to maximize engagement. And engagement is often highest when content provokes the strongest reactions.

Outrage travels. Nuance does not.

Algorithms do not ask whether an argument is thoughtful, accurate, or constructive. They measure whether people stop scrolling, click, comment, share, and return. The result is a political environment where the most emotionally powerful messages often receive the greatest amplification.

Fear becomes a form of currency.

Anger becomes a form of distribution.

Identity becomes a form of insulation.

Within networks of like-minded users, the feedback loop becomes even stronger. People encounter information that confirms what they already believe, while opposing views appear not merely incorrect but threatening. Political disagreement becomes less about competing ideas and more about competing realities.

This does not mean algorithms created polarization; America had polarization long before social media. But algorithms changed the environment in which polarization operates. They compressed time.

A 2025 field experiment involving more than 1,200 X users found that changing their exposure to posts expressing partisan animosity shifted feelings toward the opposing party by more than two points on a 100-point scale. The researchers compared that change to roughly three years of historical growth in partisan animosity.

The significance of that finding is not the number itself. It is the speed. Political attitudes that once evolved gradually can now intensify rapidly. A controversy that once might have taken months to enter the national conversation can now become a defining political battle within hours.

The pendulum has not changed direction. It has changed velocity.

This may be the most important distinction between Schlesinger’s era and our own.

He understood that political movements create reactions. What he could not have anticipated was a communication system capable of accelerating those reactions almost immediately.

The old political cycle depended on time. The new political cycle runs on momentum. And momentum, once amplified, becomes difficult to control.

This creates a challenge unlike anything previous generations faced. Democratic societies require disagreement, but they also require deliberation. Institutions exist partly to slow things down—to force reconsideration, compromise, and correction.

That slowness was once viewed as a safeguard. Today, it increasingly feels like a weakness.

The problem is not simply that citizens disagree more intensely. The deeper problem is that the speed of political emotion may now exceed the capacity of democratic institutions to process it.

Courts deliberate. Legislatures debate. Constitutions restrain. Citizens decide. All of these processes operate on human time; the digital world operates on algorithmic time.

And the question that follows is unavoidable:

Can a democracy designed for deliberation survive in an age of acceleration?

The Leftward Movement and the Politics of Acceleration

The Democratic Party is no longer the party it was in the late twentieth century. Younger voters, college-educated voters, and many voters in urban and suburban communities have moved toward a more progressive vision of government and society. Issues involving economic inequality, climate change, racial justice, gender identity, and institutional power have become central parts of the party’s political identity.

The shift did not happen overnight. But it accelerated.

Over the past quarter century, the percentage of Democrats identifying as liberal has increased significantly, with the sharpest movement occurring in recent years. The change has been especially pronounced among highly educated voters and younger generations, groups whose political identities have increasingly been shaped in a rapidly changing cultural environment.

That movement reflects genuine ideological change. But ideology alone does not explain the speed. Several forces converged.

The election of Donald Trump accelerated existing divides. His rhetoric, governing style, and challenge to traditional political norms produced a powerful reaction among many Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters. The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade intensified debates over the role of government, personal autonomy, and the meaning of individual rights. Demographic change, educational patterns, and shifting cultural attitudes all contributed to a party that increasingly defined itself in opposition to a changing Republican coalition.

And this is where Schlesinger’s pendulum becomes useful again.

Political movements are often shaped as much by what they oppose as by what they seek to create. The energy behind one side frequently comes from dissatisfaction with the other. A movement gains strength not only because it persuades people, but because its opponents provide it with a reason to organize.

The rise of progressivism in the Democratic Party was, in many ways, a reaction to the perceived excesses of the conservative era that preceded it—and to the Trump presidency’s norm-shattering governance.

But reactions have consequences. Every political movement eventually faces the challenge of governing rather than resisting. The same energy that helps a movement rise can become a liability if it prevents self-correction. The coalition that defeats one era must eventually decide how it intends to govern the next.

This is where acceleration creates a new danger.

In previous eras, political movements had more time to adjust. Leaders could lose elections, revise arguments, and moderate positions before the next major shift. Institutions, voters, and movements had space for reflection.

Today, political identity forms faster and hardens sooner.

A position adopted in response to one controversy can become a defining marker of group identity within weeks. A debate that begins at the margins can quickly become a test of loyalty. Once an idea becomes embedded in a digital community, changing one’s mind can feel less like intellectual growth and more like personal betrayal.

That dynamic affects both parties.

The right experienced its own version of accelerated transformation. The Republican Party did not become what it is today solely because of one election or one person. It reflected years of cultural conflict, institutional distrust, and voter frustration. Donald Trump did not create all of those forces. He harnessed them.

The pattern is the same. Political movements are born from real grievances. They gain energy from opposition. They grow through organization. But in the digital age, their growth can be accelerated by systems that reward certainty over complexity and intensity over reflection.

The problem is not that America has ideological movements.

A democracy requires them.

The problem is that movements now develop in an environment where reaction often arrives before reflection.

The pendulum still swings, but it reaches the other side faster.

Keeping Up With the Pendulum

The temptation in American politics is to believe every election settles something.

It rarely does.

Political movements convince themselves that they have finally broken through—that history has chosen a side. But each victory carries within it the conditions of a future challenge. The policies, institutions, and assumptions that define one era eventually generate the pressures that reshape the next.

The pendulum moves.

It always has.

The question facing America today is not whether it will swing back. It will. The question is whether the nation can navigate those swings in a political environment that has fundamentally changed.

Schlesinger understood that democracy requires adjustment. A healthy political system absorbs pressure, corrects itself, and changes course when necessary.

But self-correction requires time—and time has become the scarce resource in modern politics.

Democracy was designed to be deliberate—to consider carefully before reaching judgment. A legislature debates. A court weighs evidence. Citizens hear competing arguments and decide. The founders understood that passion could overwhelm judgment, so they created institutions that would slow political action and force debate, compromise, and reconsideration.

The slowness was intentional. It was a feature, not a flaw.

But deliberation requires something the digital age increasingly treats as a weakness: patience.

We are building a political culture in which response often precedes reflection. The conversation moves so quickly that citizens are pressured to take a position before they have fully understood the question. It increasingly resembles a room where everyone is speaking, everyone is interrupting, and no one is waiting long enough to understand what the other person is trying to say.

The problem is not that Americans disagree. Disagreement is the lifeblood of democracy. The problem is whether we still have the patience to disagree productively.

Political emotions now move faster than institutions were designed to respond. Citizens encounter controversies instantly. Leaders are pressured to react immediately. The space between an event and a public demand for action continues to shrink.

The challenge is not simply polarization. It is velocity.

A society can survive disagreement. It cannot survive a system in which every disagreement becomes an emergency before anyone has had time to understand it.

Technology will continue to accelerate political life. The question is whether citizens, leaders, and institutions can develop the habits necessary to remain thoughtful in an environment that rewards the opposite.

Can we distinguish information from wisdom?

Can we distinguish urgency from importance?

Do we have the patience to sit with complexity long enough to think?

These questions cannot be answered by algorithms. They cannot be answered by political parties. They cannot be answered by one election.

They must be answered by a culture.

Schlesinger believed American history moved in recurring rhythms rather than straight lines. He was right. Political movements still rise, govern, overreach, and provoke reaction.

What has changed is not the direction of history. It is the speed.

The digital age has not repealed Schlesinger’s theory. It has accelerated it. The pendulum still swings, but it now covers in months what once required decades.

Whether American democracy can withstand politics at algorithmic speed may become the defining question of the twenty-first century.

And the answer will not be determined by technology alone. It will be determined by whether we—the citizens who make democracy possible—can keep up.

We all say we want the country to heal.

We say it because the alternative is too bleak to contemplate: a republic in which every disagreement hardens into hostility, every political identity becomes a tribal badge, and every shared institution becomes another battlefield. Sooner or later, every democracy that survives a period of political extremism confronts the same uncomfortable question. If the country is ever to move forward, people who once stood on opposite sides of the divide must somehow find a way to live together again.

But that aspiration immediately collides with a harder question.

Who, exactly, should we trust?

Not who should be forgiven. Not who can occasionally be right. Not even who can be politically useful. Those are different questions, though our politics increasingly treats them as though they were interchangeable.

The real question is this: after a prolonged betrayal of the public trust, how does a republic decide who deserves to exercise that trust again?

That question extends far beyond Donald Trump or the MAGA movement. Every democracy eventually faces it. History is filled with moments when political movements fracture, old loyalties dissolve, and yesterday’s faithful suddenly discover reasons to distance themselves from yesterday’s certainties. The names change. The civic dilemma does not.

Recently, a photograph brought that dilemma into unusually sharp focus.

Marjorie Taylor Greene sat smiling beside Tucker Carlson at Carlson’s Maine lodge. Around them gathered a collection of conservative politicians and personalities who, until recently, had occupied different corners of Trump’s political orbit. Some had begun criticizing him over Iran. Others had grown uneasy about foreign policy or spending. None would have been mistaken for opponents during the years when loyalty mattered most.

The image produced predictable reactions.

Some celebrated it as evidence that Trump’s coalition was finally beginning to crack. Others dismissed it as cynical repositioning by people sensing which way the political winds might be blowing. Both reactions contain a measure of truth.

Neither answers the deeper question.

Before deciding what to make of Greene—or Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie, or anyone else—it helps to ask what standards we are actually using.

Because a person can be correct about a particular issue while remaining profoundly untrustworthy. A person can be politically useful without becoming morally rehabilitated. And a person can deserve forgiveness without automatically deserving public office.

Those are separate civic currencies.

We confuse them at our peril.

Politics has developed a peculiar habit of treating repentance as qualification. It is a curious national vanity to mistake belated insight for virtue. Someone spends years enabling a destructive movement, discovers a new vocabulary after the movement begins to fracture, and suddenly we are invited to believe that redemption and restored leadership are one and the same.

They are not.

Public office is not a confessional. Nor is it a sacrament distributed to anyone who finally says the right words.

Mercy is one of civilization’s great virtues. A society incapable of forgiveness eventually devours itself.

But institutional memory is a virtue too. We forgive people in ordinary life without automatically restoring them to positions of extraordinary responsibility. A judge who has betrayed the bench is not immediately returned to it because remorse appears sincere. An airline pilot whose negligence cost lives is not handed the controls simply because he now understands the consequences of his actions. We don’t confuse parole with promotion.

Politics, oddly, often does. We speak as though a single act of repentance erases years of deliberate choices. As though yesterday’s architect of deception becomes tomorrow’s guardian of democratic norms simply because circumstances have changed.

But democracy asks more of us than generosity. It asks for judgment.

The office matters at least as much as the officeholder. Public authority is not a personal possession. It is held in trust on behalf of everyone else. That makes the standards for regaining it necessarily higher than the standards for receiving personal forgiveness.

Which brings us back to Greene.

The question is not whether one of her criticisms of Trump is correct. It may well be.

Nor is the question whether amplifying that criticism might prove politically useful. It might.

The question is whether either fact tells us anything meaningful about whether she has earned the public trust she once spent so freely.

Those are not the same question.

They only look like it from a distance.

This is why that photograph stayed with me long after the news cycle moved on. It wasn't really a picture of Marjorie Taylor Greene at all. It was a picture of a question every democracy eventually faces: what do we do with yesterday's loyalists when they become today's critics? Before answering that question, it helps to recognize that not all political journeys are alike.

Patterns of Loyalty

Once we separate correctness from trustworthiness, recognizable patterns begin to emerge.

They are not rigid categories. Human beings have a way of refusing to fit neatly into our moral filing cabinets, and politics is no exception. People change. Some grow. Some merely adapt.

Still, patterns matter. Historians do not compare movements by peering into private souls. They compare conduct. They compare what people consistently did when events demanded a choice. Democracies make similar judgments every election cycle. We cannot see another person’s conscience. We can only evaluate conduct over time.

Viewed that way, the Trump era has revealed several recognizable patterns.

There are those whose loyalty became effectively immune to evidence. For them, Trump ceased to be a politician subject to ordinary evaluation and became something closer to an identity. Every contradiction required another rationalization. Every failure became someone else’s fault. Every criticism confirmed the existence of enemies. Once politics reaches that point, persuasion becomes almost impossible because evidence is no longer the currency being exchanged.

At the other end are the principled defectors. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger did not wait until dissent was fashionable or politically profitable. They broke ranks when doing so carried an obvious cost. Whether one agrees with their broader politics is beside the point. Character is often measured not by the opinions someone holds, but by the price they are willing to pay for holding them. Their credibility rests less on what they said than on what it cost them to say it.

Between those poles lies the group that has always interested me most.

Call them the ring-kissers.

Marco Rubio. Lindsey Graham. Ted Cruz. J.D. Vance. Others belong on the list.

These were not people who failed to recognize the danger. Quite the opposite. Before Trump became politically indispensable, many described him in language that history will remember. They questioned his temperament, his character, his fitness for office, even the threat he posed to constitutional government.

Then they reversed themselves. Not gradually. Not because new evidence emerged. Not after a long period of reflection. They reversed themselves because the political incentives changed—which is another way of saying that principle lost an argument to appetite. They did not revise their principles; they rented them.

This is a critical distinction. Changing one’s mind is not a moral failure. We should hope thoughtful people revise their views when reality demands it. But abandoning convictions one has publicly defended in exchange for proximity to power is something altogether different. It tells voters that principle was conditional—that it remained intact only until ambition presented a better offer.

That is why trust, once broken in this way, becomes so difficult to restore. The problem is not that these politicians were once wrong and later right. The problem is that the public learned something enduring about the hierarchy of their commitments. When principle and power collided, power won.

And then there are the late dissenters. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Thomas Massie. Tucker Carlson. Others.

The photograph is almost too perfect: the fallen apostles of MAGA, gathered over milk and chocolate-chip cookies to announce that Donald Trump has betrayed them. But before we accept the announcement as evidence of moral awakening, we might ask a more inconvenient question: What, precisely, did they believe they were supporting all those years?

This is where the easy judgments begin to fail.

Their criticisms may be entirely sincere. They may also be partly strategic. Most likely, they are some unstable combination of conviction, disappointment, political instinct, and self-preservation. Human motives are rarely pure, especially in politics.

That ambiguity is precisely why Greene is such an interesting case.

She is neither a principled defector nor a lifelong loyalist. She occupies the uncomfortable middle ground where democracies must make their hardest judgments. A conscience discovered after the invoice arrives is still a conscience. It is simply not yet a credential. If someone who spent years defending a movement begins criticizing it only after the movement turns against her, how should we understand that change?

The answer for me, at least, is that timing matters.

There is a special kind of courage in speaking while silence remains profitable. There is a different kind of courage in speaking after one has already paid the price. Both deserve recognition. They are not, however, the same thing.

Janis Joplin captured the distinction in a single unforgettable line: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Political life has its own version of that truth. A conscience that appears only after the career has begun to unravel may still be a conscience. It simply has not yet demonstrated the same thing as one that spoke while the stakes were highest.

None of this means Greene—or anyone else in her position—should be ignored.

Quite the contrary.

This is where attorney and former Republican Ron Filipkowski offers an important corrective.

He argues that when prominent figures inside the movement criticize Trump, Democrats and Trump critics should resist the urge to reject them reflexively. Internal fractures weaken political coalitions. They expose contradictions. They encourage others to question what once seemed unquestionable. From a strategic standpoint, amplifying those voices can be both rational and effective.

He’s right. But he is answering a different question than the one this essay is asking.

He is asking what is politically useful. I am asking what makes someone politically trustworthy. Those are not competing questions. They are simply different ones.

A late dissenter may help expose a dangerous movement. That is useful. A former insider may reveal information unavailable to outsiders. That is useful. A politician may be absolutely correct about a particular issue after years of being disastrously wrong about others. That, too, is useful.

None of those facts, standing alone, tells us whether that person has earned back the public trust required to lead. Listening to someone is not the same as following them. Using someone’s argument is not the same as restoring their authority.

And that distinction may be one of the most important democratic habits we can preserve.

Never Again?

There is a phrase that surfaces after nearly every political scandal.

“People deserve a second chance.”

They do.

The question is whether a second chance always takes the same form.

We often speak as though there are only two possibilities. Either someone is forever condemned by their worst decision, or they are fully restored the moment they acknowledge it.

Real life is rarely so tidy.

We understand this almost instinctively outside politics.

A surgeon who develops a substance abuse problem may recover, rebuild a life, and earn the respect of family and friends. None of that automatically entitles him to resume operating next Monday.

A judge who knowingly abuses the law may deserve compassion as a human being. The robe, however, represents something larger than the individual who once wore it.

In either case, we recognize a distinction that politics often forgets. Forgiveness concerns the person. Trust concerns the office.

Those are related virtues. They are not identical ones.

That distinction becomes especially important in a constitutional republic because public office is not private property. It is held temporarily on behalf of everyone else. Citizens are not deciding whether someone deserves grace. They are deciding whether to entrust that person with authority over millions of strangers.

Those are different moral calculations.

Which is why I hesitate whenever I hear someone say,

“Well...at least they’re on the right side now.”

Perhaps they are. That matters. But it is only the beginning of the conversation. The harder questions come afterward.

Why now? What changed? What did it cost them? What have they risked? What have they acknowledged?

Those questions are not acts of vengeance. They are acts of civic prudence. Trust has always depended upon memory. In fact, memory may be one of democracy’s least appreciated virtues.

Authoritarian systems often demand forgetting. Yesterday’s slogans disappear without explanation. Today’s allies become yesterday’s enemies. The past is rewritten to serve the present.

A free society has a different obligation. It remembers. Not because memory prevents forgiveness. Because memory gives forgiveness meaning.

If we refuse to remember what someone did with power, then we are no longer extending grace. We are practicing amnesia. And amnesia is a poor foundation upon which to build public institutions.

None of this means people cannot change. They can. History would be intolerable if it offered no possibility of moral growth. Some of the most admirable public figures are those who eventually repudiated convictions they once held with absolute certainty.

Growth should be honored. Confession should matter. Repentance should matter.

But repentance is demonstrated less by words than by what follows them. Has the person acknowledged the harm they helped create? Have they accepted responsibility without qualification? Have they remained consistent even after the applause faded. Have they sacrificed anything that mattered?

Time answers those questions better than headlines ever can.

Perhaps that is why I remain skeptical of political conversions announced in real time. The public almost always demands immediate verdicts. History rarely provides them.

That is why Marjorie Taylor Greene interests me less than the reaction to her. Some people seem eager to declare her permanently irredeemable. Others appear equally eager to welcome her as proof that the coalition is collapsing.

Both impulses strike me as premature. One mistakes skepticism for bitterness. The other mistakes usefulness for trust.

A republic should indulge neither. It should be patient enough to watch. Patient enough to remember. Patient enough to distinguish between someone who has merely changed position and someone who has demonstrated a change in character.

Character, after all, is not measured by discovering the correct answer after the examination has ended. It is measured by what one was willing to risk while the outcome remained uncertain.

That is why the earliest dissenters occupy a different moral category than the latest ones. It isn’t that they were necessarily wiser. It’s that they chose differently when the consequences were highest. The ring-kissers, however, chose something else. They did not change their minds so much as change their price.

And that is why the question of trust cannot remain a question about them alone. It eventually becomes a question about the standards we are willing to enforce for ourselves.

Citizenship, Memory, and the Hard Work of Trust

So where does that leave us?

Not with a clean verdict. Not with a tidy roster of the redeemed and the permanently barred. And not with the comforting fiction that political betrayal can be solved by waiting until the headlines move on and then pretending the damage never happened.

It leaves us with an older civic obligation: judgment.

A republic cannot function if it treats every apology as absolution. It cannot function if it confuses regret with reform, or usefulness with virtue, or a new tone with a new character. But it also cannot function if it makes no room for anyone to change.

Democracy depends upon forgiveness among citizens. It does not require amnesia about leaders. Personal mercy and public judgment are not competing virtues. They are complementary ones.

So the task is not to choose between mercy and memory. It is to practice both without surrendering either.

That is harder than it sounds. Mercy asks us to resist the pleasure of permanent condemnation. Memory asks us to resist the temptation of easy reinstatement. One without the other becomes dangerous. Mercy without memory is amnesia with good manners. Memory without mercy becomes a form of civic vengeance, an endless political freeze in which no one is ever allowed to evolve and no one is ever allowed to return.

The republic needs something more exacting than either of those extremes.

It needs citizens who can distinguish the person who has changed from the person who has merely repositioned himself. It needs voters who can tell the difference between a useful critic and a trustworthy leader. It needs journalists, commentators, and ordinary people alike to understand that a correct statement does not erase a corrupt record, and a dramatic break does not necessarily amount to a moral one.

That is why the question at the center of this essay is not really about Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Marco Rubio, or Lindsey Graham, or any of the other familiar names from the Trump years. It is about us. About whether we have the discipline to remember what public power was used for. About whether we can recognize sincerity without being bullied into gullibility. About whether we can forgive without forfeiting judgment.

Political life will always pressure us toward simplification. It wants fast alliances, quick absolutions, instant condemnation, and permanent tribal categories. But citizenship is supposed to be more demanding than that. Citizenship asks us to think in time. To look for patterns. To weigh cost. To notice who spoke when speaking was dangerous, and who spoke only after danger had already passed.

That is not cynicism. It is seriousness.

If this essay has any claim to usefulness, it is not that it tells the reader whom to hate. It is that it asks a more difficult question: what standard should a free people use when deciding whom to trust again?

The answer, I suspect, is slower than politics likes, and less dramatic than social media prefers. It is earned over time. It depends on consistency. It requires confession that is more than performance, sacrifice that is more than symbolism, and a willingness to be measured by what one did when one’s choices still mattered.

Some people may still meet that standard. Others may not. But the burden cannot be lifted simply because the movement has fractured or the moment has changed.

And perhaps that is the final lesson here: the republic cannot survive without forgiveness. Neither can it survive without memory. The hard work of citizenship is learning the difference.

That, more than any one politician’s fall or repentance, is what remains after the spectacle passes.

“It’s too long.”

My wife was not trying to wound me. She was trying to improve me, which is often more dangerous.

Not wrong, perhaps. But not the whole story either.

She had just finished one of my Substack essays and offered the sort of advice every writer eventually hears: if you want a larger audience, write shorter pieces.

My first instinct was defensive. We already have platforms for short: X, TikTok, Instagram. If someone wants a thirty-second opinion, the culture has provided a generous menu. Why should every idea be shrunk until it can be swallowed without chewing?

But her remark stayed with me because it may not have been about my writing at all.

It may have been about us.

That thought returned while I was reading Rose Horowitch’s Atlantic essay, The Age of Reading Is Over (gift article), and watching the PBS NewsHour discuss America’s post-literate habits. The diagnosis is hard to ignore. We have not stopped encountering words. We have stopped spending sustained time with them.

Books. Essays. Arguments that expect the reader to linger rather than scroll.

The usual suspects are easy enough to identify. Phones. Algorithms. Shrinking attention spans. All of that may be true, at least in part. But it is also the sort of explanation that lets us feel modern while remaining superficial.

I suspect the deeper problem is this: Reading is not mainly how we acquire information. It is how we practice revision.

A good book asks something that social media almost never does. It asks us to remember what we thought on page twelve when we arrive at page two hundred. It asks us to hold competing ideas in our minds without demanding an immediate winner. It asks us to postpone certainty long enough to discover that our first reaction was only that—our first reaction.

Reading teaches one of democracy's least celebrated virtues: the habit of self-correction.

Nearly every essay I have written over the years has circled the same question: How does a democracy lose its capacity for self-correction?

You think you’re writing about conspiracy theories, institutional distrust, political hero worship, propaganda, and our growing preference for certainty over evidence.

Ultimately, it’s about something more fundamental.

Before a society loses the ability to correct its government, do its citizens lose the habit of correcting themselves?

Reading trains the habit of self-correction. Not because books are sacred objects, but because they demand a particular kind of humility. A book may frustrate you. It may bore you. It may even insult your preferences.

It continues anyway.

It does not refresh itself every seven seconds to keep you emotionally engaged. It does not rearrange itself around your impulses. It waits for you to catch up. One suspects this is why it has fallen somewhat out of fashion.

The Constitution understood something similar. It does not promise a perfect Union. It promises “a more perfect Union.”

People occasionally smile at the phrase as though it were awkward grammar. No. It is one of the most profound political ideas ever written.

The point is not perfection. The point is correction.

The amendment process is not an admission that the Constitution failed. It is an admission that human beings do.

Democracy is not merely majority rule. It is an institutional arrangement for correcting the mistakes of majorities.

Science works this way. Journalism, when it is behaving itself, works this way. The law, on its better days, works this way.

None of them begins with the assumption that they are infallible. They begin with the assumption that they may be wrong. That is not weakness. It is strength.

Authoritarianism begins somewhere else. It begins with certainty. It speaks in conclusions. It prefers conclusions to inquiry. It treats doubt as weakness, revision as embarrassment, and questions as disloyalty.

There are contemporary examples close at hand, though one scarcely needs to name them. Or him.

The temptation is older than any single politician. Our age merely supplies the lighting.

That is why the decline of reading should trouble us more than the decline of books.

Books are objects. Reading is a discipline. It is one of the disciplines through which free people learn to say the hardest words in the language:

“I may be wrong.”

My wife may still be right, of course. My essays may be too long. They often are. Verbosity is not a synonym for seriousness; sometimes it is merely long-windedness with footnotes.

But if self-government depends upon citizens capable of following an argument longer than a feed item, then perhaps the problem is not that essays have become too long.

Perhaps we have become impatient with the kind of thinking they require.

The real question is not whether Americans are reading fewer books. It is whether we are still practicing one of the habits that makes self-government possible.

Reading has never been merely about books. It has always been one of the ways free people practice becoming worthy of self-government—citizens willing to revise their own conclusions before demanding revisions from everyone else. It is how we learn to revise ourselves before attempting to revise the world.

Modern civilization depends on thousands of systems most Americans never think about: reservoirs, treatment plants, pumps, valves, substations. Their greatest success is that they rarely attract attention. When they do, something has usually gone wrong.

This week, something did.

Coordinated cyberattacks targeted more than thirty municipal water systems in Minnesota and at least five other states. For hours, systems designed to operate quietly in the background became visible in the only way infrastructure ever should: by failing.

Federal and state investigators quickly converged on a likely culprit. According to multiple reports, the methods and indicators pointed to Iranian-backed hackers. The attacks fit a pattern U.S. officials have seen before. The evidence remains under investigation, but the preliminary assessment from those charged with protecting the country’s critical infrastructure was remarkably consistent.

Then the President of the United States dismissed it.

“I don’t think so,” Donald Trump said during a Cabinet meeting when asked whether Iran was responsible.

“I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent.”

He went further, calling Governor Tim Walz “the corrupt governor of Minnesota.”

This was not a dispute over technical evidence. It was the rejection of his own government’s preliminary findings in favor of a political insult.

The attacks were not confined to Minnesota. Water systems in multiple states were affected. Yet by the President’s logic, the governor of one state somehow bears responsibility for cyberattacks reaching far beyond his jurisdiction.

The lie does not scale.

More troubling still is what the performance reveals.

Imagine being the President of the United States and displaying more hostility toward an American governor than toward the foreign government you’ve waged war against and that your own investigators believe attacked American infrastructure.

That inversion of priorities is not accidental. It reflects a style of politics in which partisan theater consistently outranks institutional responsibility. The performance matters more than the evidence. The audience matters more than the truth.

There is another layer to this story.

Over the past year and a half, this administration has reduced funding, staffing, and operational capacity at parts of the federal cybersecurity apparatus, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), while other cybersecurity functions across the federal government have also faced significant reductions.

Whether those decisions affected this particular incident is impossible to know from the evidence currently available. But what is beyond dispute is the sequence.

• Critical infrastructure is attacked.

• Federal investigators identify a likely foreign adversary.

• The President rejects their assessment.

• Then he blames a domestic political opponent.

Presidents have many roles and responsibilities, but one of the oldest and most fundamental is this: when the nation faces an external threat, a President is expected to represent the nation—not merely the faction that elected him. That duty is almost pre-political. Washington would have understood it. Lincoln would have understood it. Roosevelt would have understood it. Reagan would have understood it. Even intensely partisan presidents generally shifted into a different register when confronting a foreign attack on American infrastructure.

What makes this response so striking is not merely that it appears to contradict investigators. It contradicts a basic expectation about the office itself. The presidency exists to unite the country against common threats, not to redefine those threats as opportunities to attack fellow Americans. A foreign adversary targeted American infrastructure, and this president’s first instinct was to target an American governor.

That inversion is more than political. With this president, it is an indifference to the office itself.

And then a deeply troubling question follows, because it is no longer merely who attacked America’s infrastructure. It is whether Americans can still expect their own government to speak honestly when it does.

That matters because trust is itself a component of national security.

When presidents dismiss their own investigators without evidence, future warnings become easier to ignore. Cooperation between federal and state officials becomes more difficult. Citizens learn to sort information not by its credibility but by its political usefulness.

Eventually every emergency becomes another tribal contest over whose narrative wins.

Twenty years ago, V for Vendetta imagined a government that consolidated power after attacks on civilian infrastructure—including a water treatment plant.

At the time, that scene felt like dystopian fiction. Today, the scene resonates for a different reason. Not because it predicts reality, but because public trust has deteriorated so badly that many Americans instinctively wonder whether extraordinary events are being manipulated for political advantage.

That instinct is unhealthy.

A democracy depends upon citizens resisting unsupported claims, even when they distrust those in power. The fact that so many people now find such scenarios psychologically plausible says less about this week’s cyberattack than about the cumulative damage done to public trust over many years. Once confidence in public institutions is systematically eroded, suspicion becomes the default setting.

Water systems are supposed to be politically invisible. They serve Republicans and Democrats alike. Hackers do not distinguish between red counties and blue ones.

A president shouldn’t either.

When a foreign adversary targets American infrastructure, the first obligation of the presidency is to identify the threat honestly and marshal the nation’s defenses. The first instinct should never be to convert a national security incident into a partisan attack.

Every successful cyberattack teaches our adversaries something about our vulnerabilities.

Every lie told about those attacks teaches them something about us.

And every time this president treats a crisis as a venue for soothing his own ego, he diminishes the office—making it smaller than the Constitution envisioned, while convinced he is larger than the office itself.