Democrat Barack Obama’s party suffered historic losses in that 2014 elections. Given his even worse approval numbers, Trump’s Republicans are in deep trouble, and by their actions it is clear they know it. But let’s take a broader view beyond the Rs and Ds.

Trump’s low job approval is not only an electoral disaster in waiting for Trump, it’s bad news for the country looking beyond the Nov. 3 elections. If Trump gets thumped - and this has become a nationalized election with a president who refuses to acknowledge his own unpopularity - and if he faces one or two Democratic houses in Congress, the chaos and bitterness of the first half of Trump’s second term could look like a harmless little splash in the Reflecting Pool by comparison.

Trump, whose self-adoration is his primary political motivation, has already demonstrated how far he is willing to go to flaunt presidential powers by executive orders, by toppling foreign governments, launching wars in global tinderboxes, and making bellicose threats and taking extreme economic actions against long-time allies. A Trump fixated on his legacy and where he ranks in the annals of presidents, a Trump who recently told the New York Times that only “my morality” constrains him, could launch a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have not seen since the Civil War.

It needn’t be that way. That’s why the reports of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, meeting secretly with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, were significant. Was this ostensible olive branch of Trump’s doing, a recognition of his low approval and the reality that he will be facing a newly empowered Democratic representation in Congress? If so, that would be potentially good for the country.

But if it that meeting took place outside Trump’s tacit approval, was it a back-door plea from TrumpWorld to help brace for what those in his inner circle know full well what a rebuked Trump could do? That would be a very bad omen.

Over his last two years in office Obama largely fought a rearguard action to protect his sweeping health-care Affordable Care Act signature legislative accomplishment. But he did get a few things done with a newly strengthened Republican Congress after the 2014 elections. A five-year highway bill was passed. Congress and Obama agreed on several key improvements/updates of the federal health system, including billions more for medical research, of which some has now been stripped away by Trump2.0.

But even with Obama’s willingness to compromise to protect his legacy, the signature moment of those final two years divided the country down the middle and laid the groundwork for the partisan-first legislating of the last decade-plus. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even consider Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. That illustrated how much of the final two years of Obama’s term was performance politics and positioning for an advantage in the 2016 election, which Trump won despite losing the popular vote.

A Trump smarting from a rebuke at the ballot box - an election verdict that he will almost certainly question and undermine and maybe even try to stop - is not a pretty possibility.

Executive orders intended to provoke (renaming giant bodies of water at will), or enrich himself (one of his first EOs helped create a fiscal environment through which Trump has made more than a billion dollars in cryptocurrency) would abound. Crackdowns on media and higher education and political enemies would escalate. The looting of the treasury for personal grievance or financial gain or self-aggrandizing building projects, and billionaire-friendly stripping of federal oversight powers would abound. The middle-of-the-night rhetoric would only get harsher and more unhinged.

Think Nixon, talking to the portraits of ex-presidents in the middle of the night, with social media.

A bill of impeachment out of a Democratic House could set TrumpWorld on fire. I would bet my last dollar that that topic came up in the Jeffries-Kushner secret meetup. And that Kushner sought some kind of assurance that it wouldn’t happen.

Trump hovers in the mid-to-upper 30s in approval, while leading into the second mid-term election of his eight-year term, Obama’s approval was in the low-to-mid 40s. Obama was facing severe political headwinds in the sixth year of his presidency from an uneven economic recovery from the economic shock he inherited in his first term, to a disastrous technical and PR rollout of Obamacare, to the ongoing threat of ISIS and other terror groups who were beheading people and burning them alive on social media.

Trump’s are largely self-inflicted: Tariffs, which have exacerbated the inflation he promised to curtail; launching a dangerous war in the Middle East after promising no new wars; increasingly unhinged social media attacks and self-adoring posts; a refusal to follow a promise and a law he signed to release everything the government has on the convicted pedophile and billionaire buddy Jeffrey Epstein; and seat-of-the-pants political ploys described as policy aimed at the Nov. 3 elections, that threaten entire industries that heavily supported him, like beef producers.

In that 2014 election, Obama’s party lost 13 House seats, shrinking its membership to 188. The Republican’s 247-188 majority margin was its largest since 1928. Democrats lost a whopping 9 seats in the Senate and the GOP took control for the first time in eight years.

So now Obama is settling into history as a mixed result. Pioneering on the cultural front as the first black president, disappointing on others.

Trump is headed for a worse verdict if history adheres to the poll lessons.

Trump won’t like seeing that comparison to 2014, considering that he seems obsessed with ranking himself against other presidents, which he did this past week while declaring himself above all others.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/117169524235378493

Proving the point of how much he hates the comparisons, how much he can’t stand not being adored, Trump today threatened on social media to sic the FCC on pollsters that he claims are making up the public’s disapproval of his presidency. Another day, another totally anti-conservative, authoritarian threat.

Don’t like the numbers? Unleash the power of Big Government on those conducting the polls. Make up your own. Someone close to Trump once called that “alternative facts.”

• Odds of Trump suspending the mid-term elections while citing Democratic cheating: 20/80. That should scare the hell out of any thinking American, but do you disagree?

• Odds of Trump ordering National Guard troops to station at polling places in states where Republicans are in danger of losing elections: 50/50.

• Odds of some National Guard troops refusing those orders: 30-70.

• Odds of Trump ordering the seizure of ballot boxes in states where there is an Election Day hiccup, real or (most likely) imagined in the Trump-twisted mind of a hyperventilating conspiracy theorist on social media. 60-40.

• Odds, if any of the above scenarios transpire, of the 2026 election becoming a constitutional crisis that will fall to a Supreme Court that, against all conservative restraint impulses and small-government ideology, has concentrated more power in the presidency: 100/0

• Odds of Trump declaring the Reflecting Pool completely fixed and more beautiful than the heavens themselves and yet still blaming presidents back to Woodrow Wilson and phantom pool rioters for the damage actually caused by his motorcade to the shoddy installation: 100/0

• Odds of Trump renaming the Statue of Liberty the Donald J. Trump Tribute to Freedom and Liberty: 5/95. If someone happens to show him the previous line, the odds go to 100/0.

• Odds of the Kennedy Center being a pile of rubble by Election Day: 70-30. A court injunction may not even save it.

• Odds of the many senior Pentagon officers axed by Pete Hegseth collectively writing a sobering letter the week before the election warning of the political indoctrination and illegal orders being foisted upon the rank and file, and of sinking morale because of the pressure put on our service members: 50/50. I wish it were higher, but why haven’t we seen these Americans who served America do that before now?

• Odds of Trump posting junior high level memes showing him dropping loads of crap on Americans, or that depict him as a healing Christ walking on water, or that show Trump as a muscular superhero vanquishing liberal: 100/0 ….. oh, that’s right, he’s already done that.

• Odds of Trump doing something so egregious, so off-the-wall monstrous, so threatening to the Constitution and the global economy that it engenders widespread protests and opposition from Republicans in Congress: Zero. Zilch. No odds whatsoever.

• Odds of Trump demeaning a reporter doing their job, particularly if they are doing it well: 100/0, particularly if that reporter is female: 100/0.

• Odds of Democrats campaigning with a cohesive, believable, understandable, and effective plan to address the real problems they say Americans are worried about: 5/95. If it hasn’t happened by Labor Day, it ain’t gonna happen.

• Odds of a majority of voters holding their noses on election day: 90/10.

• Odds of a tinpot dictator - say a certain little, rotund murderer of North Korea - deciding to test Trump’s autocrat-bro friendship by sending a few probes across the southern border: 20/80. It may be higher, but I’m too scared to write it down.

• Odds of Trump escalating the war in Iran to divert attention from impending electoral disaster: 50/50. The dog isn’t wagging its tail just yet, but it’s getting nervous.

• Odds of the rest of the Epstein files being released while Donald Trump is president, despite him being in violation of the law he signed: 0/100

• Odds of those files being released in reasonably good time if Democrats take control of one or both houses in November: 1/99. Trump is the most litigious president in history.

• Odds of those files showing Trump doing really bad things. 20/80.

• Odds of those files showing friends and billionaire buddies of Trump doing really bad things. 100/0.

• Odds of someone saying, if the Epstein files ever are fully shown to the public, that Trump will always be known by the friends and billionaire buddies he kept and tried to protect over victims: 100/0.

• Odds of Trump picking a fight with an entirely new country, beyond Canada, every NATO ally, some Mideastern allies, and Greenland: 100/0. My nomination: New Zealand. Why not? They’re small and don’t have much embedded wealth to pay tribute to Trump.

• Odds of Trump winning all 37 golf tournaments he plays in over the next 70 days: 100/0.

• Odds of an AI hostile takeover of the world’s communications: 1/99. We’d better act before it goes any higher. Right, Grok?

No, the worst part is the loss of friends. But it doesn’t have to be if you follow a simple rule that I’ve found helpful:

Take a purposeful moment to consciously remember something about them that made you warm, or made you laugh, or even made you cry. Reach out to the friends who remain. Do it regularly, and often.

Those friendships will continue to fill your lives even after the friends are gone. The gift never ends.

Mel Antonen was my best friend. Many of you may remember him as one of America’s top baseball writers for USA Today, before a very rare disease took him during Covid.

Mel, a true South Dakota baseball fan named Mike Freeman, and I would regularly lunch and discuss hot-stove issues, occasionally get pennant-race fever, even when the futility of Twins’ fanship dominated all baseball discussion regarding the Land of Sky Blue Waters. Occasionally, we would go with him to games he covered, and then query him all the way home about the free food and beverage in the press box. Of which he would always say he paid for - or, more correctly, his company paid for.

Freeman and I called him “Al Beat” because “AL Beat” was the name of his column, and Mel loved it. It perfectly fit his mirth-seeking, self-deprecating personality. He was the least arrogant and most down-to-earth national journalist I ever knew, largely because he valued his small town childhood in Lake Norden, S.D., today’s population 651, as his greatest asset. He walked on equal ground with Hall of Famers and little old men and ladies in their lawn chairs sitting down the left field line at Norden’s baseball diamond, where in the summer you can still see the lights of the baseball field - and many others in small towns - for miles over eastern South Dakota prairie.

Small towns like the ones that Mel and I and Freeman were raised in can be kind and inviting, but they can also be smothering and gossipy. The good part of that combination is people can spot a big-shot phony a mile away. That’s why, I think, Mel could relate to anyone who met him on equal grounds. In one of his sports gigs, a late-night national radio sports show, he attracted an unusual clientele: Truckers who liked baseball. He’d talk to them for hours, often beginning the conversation with “whatcha haulin’?”

Classic Americana from Al Beat. He had grown up around farmers and carpenters and factory workers and truckers. In a almost all-white town with a history of hosting barnstorming black players, including Satchel Paige, for exhibition games, when Major League baseball wouldn’t allow Negro League players on the field. Mel’s dad connected him to epic stories like the time that Satch was late for a game in Norden because he went fishing with a couple of locals and the fishing got good. Mel talked to Lake Norden folk the same way he talked to baseball superstars. Everyone was just a human with their story to tell. He lived to associate. He loved friendship.

I’d known him since childhood, played against him as teenagers in American Legion baseball. He went 1 for 4 against me in a District baseball championship game, but I was the winning pitcher - a fact which almost always ended up in any baseball argument we had well into our 60s, somehow, some way. I still have the yellowed newsprint boxscore.

Mel and I worked for a time in the same newsroom and we rejoiced in his presence in our two boys’ lives, especially when it was around baseball. He loved to talk to the Little League teams I coached and would often demonstrate the different batting stances of Major League players that the little kids followed. Mel got more out of it than any one. Once, he coached a team with me, and for years we regaled the story about the tiny right fielder who liked the flowers in foul ground better than on the field, and inevitably ended up there, on his haunches, examining a bug or whatever. We gave up trying to reposition the boy in fair territory, or even to stand up. Then one game, the kid looked up at the crack of the bat and saw a fly ball heading straight at him - and held up his glove and caught it in foul territory. We laughed until we hurt then, and in every retelling.

I know now that Mel was also gifting me when he was gifting my kids, and they help me appreciate the traits of Mel I see in his kind and funny son, now off to college, raised by a strong, adventurous mother through the always-challenging high school years after Mel’s death.

I have similar memories with Jeff and Dennis and Bob and Marie and Mindy and all those who have blessed me with friendship through good times, and bad. People you can start an hour’s conversation with a simple, “what’s up?” I miss them all, terribly, every single day.

We’re downsizing now, going through lots of pictures and trinkets and memories. Re-emerging are all of the gifts Mel gave our kids through the years. A poster of an alphabet of baseball players in contortions to depict the letters was a favorite. That’s moving west with us, where grandchildren are playing baseball. Fresh memories of old stories. I’ve laughed out loud many, many times going through it.

Which leads to this photo.

You might say this was the perfect photo of Mel, because as he was giving hitting advice to a future Hall of Famer, he HAD to know it was going to come back on him in some fashion or another.

Freeman and I couldn’t have set it up better.

Luckily, a photographer caught the moment - and Mel gave us the picture!

Just suffice it to say that it was a photo that unleashed a thousand barbs over ensuing years. “Well, of course, Mel, Junior was listening to you - you hit .280 in Legion!” Or, “Mel, were you talking about that time you took my “fastball” to left field on that single?” Or, “Mel, did Junior laugh, cry or walk away shaking his head?”

Mel laughed at every single barb. Cackled and got teary-eyed sometime when laughing alone wouldn’t do. Heck, there were times he’d invoke the time he gave Junior a lesson just to get the repartee started. I am positive that whenever we meet again - in a dream, or in some great beyond, or in a moment of unexpected reflection still in this world - that he has prepared a comeback to this particulr post.

I yearn for his take on the strange AL Central pennant race no one seems to win. Certainly, he’d have an insight and perspective unique only to him. Laced with inside human interest bits from the field and clubhouse and press box. Which is what made him great at his job.

One time, Mel called Freeman from spring training in Florida and complained about how many traffic lights he had to suffer through between his company-paid hotel and the ballparks where he’d spend sunny days watching grown men play a boy’s game. To a couple of in-the-trenches politicos/journalists working long hours in a snowy February in Washington, D.C., that sounded more like heaven than inconvenience. Freeman reminded him of that.

The call was a setup. Mel knew what the reaction would be, dang him. That complaint became, shall we say, a point of discussion over lunch at Harry’s for approximately the next 17 years.

Clearly, Mel knew how good he had it. And every day I try to remember how good we had it with him.

She died today at age 80, three days after she told a reporter that she was working on new projects even though she had health challenges. One of those “projects” sounds like a life’s mission: A Broadway musical, entitled “Dolly: A True Original,” which (we hope) is still scheduled to open on Jan. 19. It would have been her 81st birthday. She was also re-recording her classic, “Light of a Clear Blue Morning.”

Here are the opening lyrics of that song:

It’s been a long dark night
And I’ve been a-waitin’ for the mornin’
It’s been a long hard fight
But I see a brand new day a-dawning
I’ve been looking for the sunshine
You know I ain’t seen it in so long
But everything’s gonna work out just fine
And everything’s gonna be all right
That’s been all wrong

‘Cause I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of a brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
Oh, and everything’s gonna be all right
It’s gonna be okay

The girl from Tennessee became an all-American woman. Few, maybe even none, in public life have maneuvered the cultural minefields of the last 50 years like she has and still made a huge, positive impact on her country. She steadfastly eschewed traditional politics, gave generously of her wealth, yet still ably plucked deep and resonating chords that, unlike politicians who spew bravado and dissension, truly made America a greater nation.

In “9 to 5,” she, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda schemed and retaliated against a sexist, harassing boss, Dabney Coleman, in the midst of cultural stress of subordination and harassment of women in the workplace. It was a comedy about the stratified life of American businesses, but it was dead serious in its message, and Democrats and Republicans - back when both had their eyes wide open - identified with the women and cheered for them. Except, maybe our president, who when that movie came out was a baby New York developer lusting for the celebrity that later came, the celebrity that he bragged gave him the right to sexually assault women at will. Donald Trump will never be Dolly Parton.

She never let people in on her deepest political thoughts, but she followed the Bible she often quoted in her acts. Her hit “9 to 5” song from the movie sang the stories of working women everywhere. She spoke in support of the LGBQT community and Black Lives Matter. She donated $1 million to Covid research, and through her Imagination Library she donated more than 270 million books to American children under the age of 5. At $3 a book, that approaches a billion dollars. An estimated 1 in 7 American children have benefitted.

In the cauldron of the 2016 election, she came closest to getting pulled into the political fire. She said Hillary Clinton could be a good president, said she would “certainly be behind her” if Clinton defeated Donald Trump, but after some called it an endorsement, she said it was not so. She had banked enough grace from living a lifetime of grace to be believed and let up easy by the online hordes, thank God. Dolly often said that she had as many Democratic fans as Republicans, and coming from a deep-red state like Tennessee, that’s not an easy thing to say out loud. Might have been in 1980, but not so much today in the era of Trump.

But she had something to say about politics in general.

She sang this in her 2023 hit, “World On Fire,” the lead single of her new album “Rockstar:”

Liar, liar, the world’s on fire
What you gonna do when it all burns down?
Fire, fire burning higher
Still got time to turn it all around

Now, I ain’t one for speaking out much
But that don’t mean I don’t stay in touch
Everybody’s trippin’ over this or that
What we gonna do when we all fall flat

Liar, liar, the world’s on fire
What we gonna do when it all burns down?

I don’t know what to think about us
When did we lose “In God we trust?”
God Almighty, what we gonna do
If God ain’t listenin’ and we’re deaf too?

Liar, liar, the world’s on fire
What you gonna do when it all burns down?

Up to you to decide to whom she was referring.

In 2021, Dolly revealed she had twice turned down Trump’s invitation to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not because of politics (although I am not so sure that today it would not be twisted into a political pretzel). The first was because her late husband, Carl, was ill. (He died in March, 2025, and they were married for nearly 59 years).

The second reason she didn’t receive the Medal of Freedom was that she did not want to travel during COVID (a decision the rabid online anti-vaxxers would almost certainly today ridicule as subservience to the government, but gracious Dolly thankfully got a pass on that, too).

Then, when Joe Biden became president, the topic came up again. Dolly said she’d probably politely decline that one, too, so as to not appear to be too political.

“Now I feel like if I take it, I’ll be doing politics, so I’m not sure,” she told reporters at the time. “I don’t work for those awards. It’d be nice, but I’m not sure that I even deserve it. But that’s a nice compliment for people to think that I might deserve it.”

That’s called humility. About purposefully thinking of others and avoiding anything that would get neighbors fighting. Achingly refreshing in an era where the president, literally, hijacks Nobel Peace prizes, literally cannot wait for someone to drape him with made-up medals from a corrupt international soccer organization so he does it himself, and sends out increasingly vile and unhinged social media screeds against his perceived political enemies.

Dolly was Taylor Swift before Taylor Swift, a seamless crossover from her country roots into pop music and Hollywood. She influenced and wrote songs for other female superstar singers, including Whitney Houston.

She nurtured humility as a birthright. Empathy was her calling card, mercy her clarion call. You had to live all three to survive a childhood as one of 12 kids who grew up in a log cabin on the lip of the Great Smoky Mountains, in a little village called Pittman Center, population 454 in the last census. Her father, a sharecropper and tobacco farmer, struggled all his life with illiteracy - hence, his daughter’s Imagination Library

She was a child prodigy who never bragged about it. Johnny Cash introduced her onstage for her Grand Ole Opry debut in 1959. She was 13.

The day after graduating high school, she moved to Nashville. For over 60 years, more than one-fourth of the history of our nation, she sang and wrote and acted and smiled and uplifted. She moved people, she made a difference, she loved and she encouraged. She did it all without being scorched in the hellfire of American politics. She proved the Biblical admonition of letting her acts define her. She left a trail to follow. Over six decades, almost one-fourth of the history of this republic.

She was truly a great American, one of the best - if not THE best - to come out of the 20th Century and Baby Boomer generation, and more of her are needed than ever before.

Supposedly set in the future of 2017, the ad was directed by the now-famous director Ridley Scott (“Black Hawk Down,” “Thelma and Louise,” “The Martian” and others) and paid for by Peter Grace, who ran a special commission for then President Ronald Reagan that was supposed to find ways to curb deficits and get the country’s fiscal house in order.

The federal debt was approaching $2 trillion in 1986. It just surpassed $40 trillion this week, creating a flareup in Washington, D.C. from scolding politicians, almost all of whom have supported, at one time or another, federal budgets gushing red ink. The Democrats generally favor social spending in their largesse, the Republicans defense and security spending. Together, it’s a toxic potion that threatens the stability of our nation’s government and our economy and depends on political pandering for election victory. No one gets elected saying we need to cut your benefits and raise your taxes or your kids will suffer.

In that W.R. Grace ad, an old man asks a child prosecutor: “Are you ever going to forgive us?”

Cowardly executives at CBS, NBC and ABC refused to run the ads, calling it too controversial, too partisan, although critics pointed out that debt should concern all Americans. (Now you see where the cowards at these networks who have bent the knee to President Trump’s shakedowns draw their inspiration. Risk aversion to damage to the brand, even if it would benefit the country, is paramount in big-media boardrooms).

Today, that ad looks prescient and highly relevant. The threat has only grown in the 40 years that have passed, and in particular over the last two decades. This century, the federal government’s debt has grown more than sixfold. Even accounting for inflation, that’s an immense burden added to the challenges of future generations.

The $40 trillion threshold set off a flurry of recrimination and finger-pointing on social media. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the new chair of the Senate Budget committee, said that the debt was immoral and needed to stop “NOW.”

Critics pointed out that the 10-year budget blueprints Johnson just released predict annual deficits of $1.5 trillion. Johnson was a big seller of Trump’s 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill” that slashed taxes, primarily for the most wealthy, by a projected $4 trillion to $4.5 trillion over the next decade.

Johnson was vilified on social media and on the hot-air cable channels. “YOU are the problem,” one poster responded. Others raged against the rank hypocrisy of career politicians suddenly returning to the issue. But Johnson shouldn’t be singled out. Truth be told, the debt mountain is a product of generations of Americans and politicians who have been too selfish and too partisan to fully step up to the problem, too willing to reward politicians too cowardly to tell the truth.

Donald Trump’s silence on this latest milestone is a window into the bigger theme of his second term. Unrestrained by the veteran, moderate conservative Washington actors that he filled his cabinet with and relied upon in his first term, he is now surrounded by a cadre of right-wing sycophants who, like him, only want to win the moment over the media and the devil Democrats. The only future Trump seems to care about is one illustrated by monuments and statues to himself. On the morning that Political DC was talking about the $40 trillion debt, Trump instead trolled on social media an image showing his profile etched into the bottom of the Reflecting Pool, that reclaimed swampland where he and his petty, self-aggrandizing “leadership” has kept the country transfixed for far too long on things of no lasting consequence and even less meaning, while the earth trembles beneath us all with war and threats of financial catastrophe.

It wasn’t always this way with Trump. In the 2016 campaign, he used the debt to illustrate Washington’s incompetence and indifference to the Average Jane. The attacks resonated, and for good reason. Any thinking American with a checkbook intuitively gets the fiscal dangers we’re passing to successive generations. He warned that the U.S. would turn into Greece, which teetered on bankruptcy and required multiple international bailouts and draconian fiscal restraints, if out debt ever surpassed $24 trillion. The debt, Trump said, was “a time bomb.”

Well, if it is a bomb, he’s helped make it far more lethal. A stunning 29 percent of the debt that has accumulated over 250 years - roughly $11 trillion - has exploded under less than six years of Trump’s presidencies.

He is the opposite of a fiscal conservative. He is a no-tax-and-spend-big idealogue.

That’s why we hear crickets. Trump clearly doesn’t care any more about the debt he will leave his successor. If he did, he’d be trying to draw the country toward the hard solutions necessary to confront this crisis. Instead, he trolls like a middle schooler on social media and threatens the legitimacy of the coming election.

But there’s more to it than just neglect. Trump has experience in these fiscal perils. He took six companies into bankruptcy. None of it hit him personally, although he came close once to having to file personal bankruptcy. Through all of these baknruptcies, others paid or benefitted, though. In the wake of every bankruptcy, unpaid employees, stiffed contractors, and lawyers were left picking through the bones were left to fight it out, while Trump moved onto the next great deal.

Helluva way to run a business. Helluva way to run a country.

Maybe Greece wasn’t so bad after all.

Then not 20 minutes later, the throbbing chug of helicopters followed the same overhead pattern. Throw in the occupying National Guard army and you’re just a martial law decree from a tinpot capital.

Globally, subconsciously, it’s hard not to think that we’re in a phase even more perilous than after 9-11. Then, the question of leadership was whether it could rise to the moment, to bring the country together. George W. Bush did that, for a fleeting few weeks, before the embedding partisanship returned, before his vengeance against Iraq for trying to kill his father overwhelmed his ability, or willingness, to believe the truth about Saddam Hussein’s weapons.

The question of leadership today is the exact opposite. The question is whether the president can descend back into reality from his fantasy world of AI social media memes and declarations of powers he constitutionally does not have. Reminds one of Berlin 1944, when Hitler was moving around phantom armies on big maps and Joseph Goebbels continued to twist public opinion so an entire culture committed genocide. It was all a fatal fantasy that cost tens of millions of lives.

Can Donald Trump, whose self adoration keeps him constantly asking what he can do to get ahead of someone or something in every moment of every single day, de-escalate anything? No one can truthfully deny the creeping sense that Trump, who promised no more wars, cannot survive without them now - politically, economically, militarily. His craving of conflict, his need to be the center of everything, can only be satiated with escalating fights on every front, big and small. From the Reflecting Pool to the nonsensical fights with Canada, South Korea, Ukraine, he must be fighting with someone about something. Even female reporters who ask questions any American president should be asked.

Donald Trump is emotionally, psychologically, mentally incapable of restraint, compromise or necessary acquiescence. And we are far less safe as a result.

If Trump was elected in 1936 rather than 2016, the world would be a far different, and darker place, than the one he inherited a decade ago.

His craving of praise from despots and dictators to stroke his enormous ego, his open declaration that he only goes with winners, would have made him especially vulnerable to buttering up from Hitler and Mussolini in 1939, 40, 41, when Nazi armies and Mussolini’s Fascist brigades were conquering in three continents. Hitler and Goebbels would have read Trump as easily as, say, Vladimir Putin has read Trump for a decade. Trump would have gone to Berlin. Hitler would have praised him, convinced him this was Europe’s fight.

That would have prevented, or at the very least delayed, the crucial alliance between the U.S. and Britain that won the war. Trump would not have stood steadfast against the rising tide of Nazism the way FDR did. And an already active anti-war, pro-Germany movement in the U.S. led by the aviator Charles Lindbergh, would have stood guard at Trump’s right flank. The Proud Boys would be proud.

THIS is why Trump's buttering up to dictators and despots is frightening and dangerous. He has chased away all allies and created running room for Kim Jung Un Putin, Xi, and other despots and thugs.

One amateurish and maybe even unintended signal from the haplessly overmatched Trump to one of these nut jobs and the world is on fire.

The stakes are so high. And no one in Congress has either the smarts or the power or the courage to stop this. They are making America less safe, too.

No, I’m talking about the blue bunny. Miller’s two-year-old daughter’s stuffed animal, the one that helps soothe her to sleep at night. The one that Miller allegedly withheld from his daughter to get back at his ex-wife in a bitter and now public fight. I will make a judgment on this: Anyone who would do this does not deserve to be within two continents of public office.

It’s not the first blue bunny that pulled at the heartstrings in 2026.

Remember 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos? The little boy in Minneapolis wearing a blue bunny hat and toting a Spiderman backpack, who along with his father, Adrian Conejo-Arias, was detained by ICE after they drove home from pre-school? The images of that little boy, standing on an icy street while masked ICE agents detained his father, will forever be associated with the ICE raids of 2026.

You may remember that that wasn’t the end of the story for Liam. He and his father were taken to a family detention center in Dilley, Texas, before a federal judge ordered their release. He kept wearing the bunny hat even in detention.

In April, a federal judge denied the family’s asylum claim, and the case is on appeal. Deportation may follow. The rule of law will decide that. But the image of the little boy in little-boy clothes standing in the cold will be forever associated with this country’s failed immigration policies.

Two days later, another Minneapolis child’s image - this of 2-year-old Chloe Renata Tipan Villacis - hit the news. Her father, Elvis Tipan-Echeverría, was another Ecuarodian in the country illegally and facing deportation. Father and daughter, too, were flown south to to the same detainment facility in Texas and briefly detained. That case is in appeal, too. And viral images of Chloe, in light pajamas on a cold Twins Cities street, are burned into this era’s memories, too.

In February, ProPublica reported on children in Ice Detention. Another child image went viral, that of a letter of a 13-year-old boy named Gerson Lopéz Garcia. His writings, in Spanish and English, described crowded conditions and limited resources at the same Dilley Center that Chloe and Liam were taken. It ended with “I want to go home,” and a self-portrait of him crying. Another symbolic moment of the burden placed on children by a broken immigration system. And there has been no public update of Gerson’s plight since being detained.

Shame on the politicians of both parties for not solving this issue long ago, before the partisan trenches became so deep that it unloads children into a no-man’s land of trauma, detention and uncertainty. Shame on administrations that allowed floods of undocumented immigrants to cross borders, and shame on politicians who exploit the issue and inflame emotions with Wild West round-’em'-up policies that get people killed.

And shame on politicians, like Miller, who hold hostage a two-year-old’s blue bunny.

Jesus Christ spoke a lot about the innocence and humility of blessed children, and what adults can learn from them. He challenged arrogant and cynical adults questioning his authority and his preaching to be more like children. Matthew 18 recounts one exchange with his disciples and onlookers in which Christ calls a child into their midst.

“Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” Christ said, according to John. “Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

It would be easy now to challenge Donald Trump to open up of those Bibles he sells but never reads. Or to rue the immorally incompetent immigration policies of Joe Biden that created the heightened hatred-of-the-other atmosphere for the demagogue’s return. But maybe a good look in the mirror would be the best prescription.

I’d like to say we Americans are better than this. Better than ever again putting a child into these predicaments. Better than ever using a child’s bunny as a hostage to adult disputes. But we continuously elect politicians too afraid to tackle problems or too willing to exploit them. So are we really better than this?

You relish the view. Eyes to brain to heart, it reminds you of the beautiful possibilities of life, even though that brain keeps reminding the heart that it won’t last long. Nature’s way requires the flowers fade and die, the brain keeps reminding you. Such a cynic, that brain. But that same brain is also telling you that next year, the view could be even better. The heart can again be comforted. The plants teach us a lesson in these moments.

All seasons pass. Life continues. The cool rebirth of spring that surrendered to this season of heat and death may seem a distance away, in human terms. Fall and winter will intervene. The plants will die back, the flowers falling away, surrendering the stage to the gray chills of the coming seasons. Everything will rest and get ready for the exciting re-start.

These past 11 years in America have been the dog days that fade every color. The brilliance of what’s possible - humans co-existing in mercy and respect - has been fatally tested by the scolding-hot rhetoric and cruelty of the Trump Years. Not all of the sweltering heat is Trump’s doing, for sure. But he is the leading actor in a play that has gone on for over a decade, one that has left Americans with a weariness we have not seen since the Vietnam War and the stagflation and shortages of the ;70s.

Jimmy Carter called it malaise. I call it a helpless barrier to hope. So much is wrong with the world, but what can one person do about it? Whatever we call these times, many, many people in my social and social media circles seem weary more than anything. The world often seems uprooted and upside down. “Alternative truth” is a dressed-up version of propaganda. Politicians who try to appeal to fair play and mercy and accommodation are attacked like weak weeds in the garden. There is actual war going on in the Middle East, but the president refused to call it that. Semantics Trump reality. There is also a war on empathy led by his unelected wingman, Elon Musk.

If you’re paying attention, if you truly believe in the American principles of everyone getting a fair shake, it’s natural to be weary. Exploiting divisions to wield political power is not leadership, it’s the opposite of leadership. I believe that even many Republicans, good people who understand that blending differing beliefs enrich the gardens of humanity, think that Trump’s relentless mission to dominate every headline has gotten old and wilted.

Occupied and overwhelmed by Trump’s chaos, corruption and misdirection, we have been focused way too long on little weeds that should not matter - like this stupid fight over the Reflecting Pool - and not nearly enough on the blights that threaten us all: Massive and rapidly growing government debt, the politically motivated attacks on institutions that should nurture our society, the frightening advancement of AI and its already demonstrated rogue capabilities, the looming collapse of Social Security and other government foundations, a war in a tinderbox that threatens to turn into a bigger war, the utter lack of respect in the public square.

A trillionaire attacks mercy and empathy, assaults the very legitimacy of self-governance from the front porch while exploiting it for selfish purposes in the back yard. Elon Musk could not wield the tremendous unelected power he does without the the largesse of the government he so hates. We taxpayers paid for many of the first seeds he planted.

This season IS passing, and we will see how much in November, when the Republicans face a divided Democratic Party. Trump can’t run again in two years, no matter how much he keeps teasing about it. The fight to succeed him will almost certainly disappoint his MAGA core, potentially lead to a reckoning with mainline Republicans who have been excommunicated by Trumpers. If you truly believe the Big Lie that our elections are corrupt (but only when Trump loses), why bother voting after he leaves office?

The nature of history tells us that populist movements led by charismatic politicians, or that gather around controversial causes, last roughly a decade.

The Know Nothings, a nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-establishment movement, lasted roughly a decade leading in the Civil War, then got swallowed up by bigger issues of slavery and an insurrection that killed roughly 2.5 percent of the American population.

The Populist Party - the namesake of populism - lasted much of the decade of the 1890s, before William Jennings Bryan captured and folded it into the Democratic Party, and both faded. Some of these populist movements helped force good changes, such as the direct election of U.S. Senators, but they also exposed an ugly side of the American character: the suspicion of foreigners and ignorant condemnation of the “Other.” They constantly blamed others for their situation in life.

Sound familiar?

I am not predicting the end of Trumpism. History is different now. Its faster and infinitely more complex. The light-speed velocity of online life and its institutional assault on truth has an oversized impact on our politics, yet the ability for average citizens to express themselves has never been greater, So in a world where everyone has a microphone don’t expect the chaos that begets weariness to end. And with this new media comes an extrapolated opportunity of bad actors to influence millions. And in this environment, demagogues and authoritarians can succeed demagogues and authoritarians, as we have witnessed with our neighbors to the south.

Still…..there is a wilting. Some of the loudest Trump voices have turned into his loudest critics. His approval ratings are in historically bad territory, whether he believes them or not. Acts get old, fast, when yet another promise that an end to the war is near follows 38 previous promises that the end to the war is near.

Nature has a way of correcting things. When a plant dies or a weed is pulled, their place next spring may be taken by a creation of a different color. Just as beautiful or maybe even more, one can hope. But definitely different.

Let’s get one thing clear. Even if he matches the estimated $288 million he reportedly spent to get Donald Trump elected in 2024, that kind of spending means nothing to Musk. He plopped down $44 billion to turn Twitter into an X cesspool of conspiracy theories, lies, rage posting and propaganda.

If he spent again at the 2024 level, Musk would be spending roughly the equivalent of him spending a fiftieth of a penny relative to his wealth. One-fiftieth of the coin we no longer mint.

How easy is this for him? It would not even be the equivalent of a penny falling out of your pocket. It would not put a dent in his $1 trillion net worth, which is more than the Gross Domestic Products of all but 21 countries in the world. Musk is richer than the GDP of countries like Ireland, Belgium, and roughly 170 other nations.

Spending at that $300 million level would certainly make a difference in the election this fall, as it did for Republican turnout, among other things, in 2024. Polls are showing that many rank-and-file Republicans are not enthused about voting this November. Republicans traditionally don’t turn out, relatively speaking to other Americans, in off-year elections. According to Axios, Musk seeks to remedy that with cold, hard, cash.

What’s this miniscule (to him) investment bought him other than a seat at the table and a password to government data, perhaps even data about you, for his DOGE bros?

Plenty - starting with stopping or slow-walking government lawsuits and regulatory actions against Musk or his companies, down to Donald Trump firing a Department of Agriculture inspector general who was investigating Musk’s company, Neuralink, over allegations of animal mistreatment.

Here is a Grok synopsis of what Musk has gained under Trump from investigative reporters at the Los Angeles Times, CNBC, Forbes and other media, along with congressional investigations:

• “The Justice Department dropped a case against SpaceX related to alleged discrimination in hiring asylees and refugees.

• “The Labor Department canceled a planned civil rights review of Tesla.

• “A National Labor Relations Board matter involving SpaceX moved into settlement talks.

• “More than 40 other federal agency matters involving Musk companies showed no public action for months (described as potentially dormant).

• “Broader reporting indicated the administration halted or withdrew dozens of enforcement actions against tech firms, including Tesla and SpaceX. A Senate Democratic staff report estimated Musk companies faced at least $2.37 billion in potential liability from pending actions before the inauguration, many of which stalled or were dismissed.

• “EPA enforcement activity against Tesla (Clean Air Act, hazardous waste) and SpaceX (Clean Water Act) was affected by significant staff reductions and restructuring.”

Most of the heavy spenders in ‘24 were Republicans, according to the campaign finance web site opensecrets.org. Behind Musk, Timothy Mellon - heir to his family’s 19th-Century based industrial and banking empire - gave about $197 million to GOP candidates. Miriam Adelson, widow of the gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson, gave $148 million. Illinois-based shipping, packing and industrial supply donors moguls Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein gave $143 million. All of the industries mentioned above are (or were) highly regulated by the federal government and by states.

The top Democratic individual donor was former New York Mayor and former Republican Michael Bloomberg, who gave $64 million.

Musk’s buying access and action is one of the most underreported stories, of many, in Trump’s Blitzkrieg second presidency. The press is struggling to catch up and under attack by Musk, Trump, and many in the billionaire class. America’s attention zone is constantly flooded with Trump-related stories that, in normal times and in times when leaders could feel shame, would be huge scandals.

Crypto scams that have cost loyal supporters big money. Pardons to investors in Trump enterprises. No-bid contracts going to Trump cronies and family members. Clueless 19-year-olds wantonly slashing federal programs because Trump turned the keys to the henhouse over to the fox. The utter disdain for checks and balances imbued in our republic’s DNA. The weaponizing of every facet of government to service Trump’s insatiable ego and gold-plated bottom line.

Oh, and according to press reports, Tesla paid zero federal income taxes in 2025 on about $5.7 billion in profits. One fine tax system this country has.

There’s your deep state, now out in the open, throwing money at campaigns like there’s no tomorrow.

It’s going to take years to understand what’s happened the last 18 months.

Hard to believe, but it was 10 years ago today when, in the midst of the bizarre Hillary Clinton email Wikileaks dump, Donald Trump stood before the press at his Trump National Doral golf course and said this:

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

The bull had broken loose in the china shop. A decade of smashing norms and breaking rules had begun. Politics not only no longer end at the water’s edge, as the saying had gone for centuries, but a candidate of one of our two major parties was openly inviting a foreign adversary to meddle in our presidential election.

The plea was a shocker and would have sunk a normal candidate. Trump’s campaign tried to walk it back by claiming he was joking, but we now know it was only the beginning of a new era in which Donald Trump operates as if the conventional rules of politics and behavior in the public square do not apply to him. Even inviting foreign influence in our election is acceptable if it benefits Trump.

For the past decade, through three presidencies, including Joe Biden’s, we have collectively been pulled downward by Trump’s self-aggrandizing grandstanding, his bending and breaking of Constitutional and societal norms, and his utter disdain for truth. The words that literally came out of his own mouth 10 years ago today are particularly ironic because he has convinced millions of his followers that Russian influence in elections on his behalf were false claims, when in fact the CIA and other American intelligence agencies have said the exact opposite.

You see the false claims all over social media from Trump supporters. “Russia! Russia! Russia!” they post, before demanding the jailing of those who actually understand and acknowledge what happened. Trump himself complains endlessly about the “Russia hoax.”

It may not be collusion, but it was certainly invitation.

The CIA, FBI and National Security Agency concluded in a report released two weeks before Trump became president in his first term that “we assess with high confidence that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election?”

That Intelligence Community Assessment found that Russian attempts to influence our election were “a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort” compared to previous American elections. Russia’s goals, the intelligence analysts concluded, were designed to undermine faith in our democratic process and to demean and denigrate Clinton before the world and American voters.

Here’s a key finding, the one that gives the lie to Trump’s mocking “Russia, Russia, Russia:”

“We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.,” the report said.

And: “We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”

How did the Russians do this?

According to the report and other CIA findings a month earlier, Russian hacks had tapped into the Democratic National Committee’s email trees and then leaked material to Wikileaks. The Russians funded state television operations shown in this country whose primary purpose was not news but propaganda and undermining faith in democratic processes.

Finally, according to the report, the Russians paid online trolls in America to disseminate propaganda, much of it aimed to either defeat or discredit Clinton, who led in the polls virtually throughout the presidential campaign of 2016.

We now know the surprise of election night 2016. Trump won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. The intelligence committee’s report did not conclude whether these Russian efforts had an effect on the outcome of that election, and we may never know. But there were attempts, and saying there weren’t doesn’t make it so.

And it hasn’t stopped, through Biden and again with Trump.

Just before the 2024 election, Biden’s Department of Justice indicted a Russian media operation and two Russian citizens for attempting to influence that election and American public policy by paying American right-wing “influencers” to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with Moscow’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and other Russian interests.

The indictment said almost $10 million had been funneled through shell companies, mainly a Tennessee-based media company, and press reports said that hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly were paid to right-wing, Trump-supporting influencers. Three of them - Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin - issued statements or retweeted claims that they were “duped” into accepting the money.

Johnson has 4.1 million followers on X (Twitter), 6.1 million YouTube subscribers and 2.2 million Instagram followers.

Pool has 2.72 million X followers, 458,000 on Instagram, and roughly 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.

Rubin is followed by about 1.6 million on X and upwards of 600,000 on Instagram, with roughly 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.

The indictments, under Trump’s DOJ, have gone nowhere.

https://apnews.com/article/russian-interference-presidential-election-influencers-trump-999435273dd39edf7468c6aa34fad5dd

The South Dakota Republican served in the United States Senate from 1948-1973 after five terms in the U.S. House. He was a prominent anti-Communist, and as a member of the Army-McCarthy special committee investigating alleged Communist infiltration of the government, was often shown sitting aside the controversial Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy. Here’s a typical scene: Mundt is the one on the left. (Credit to © Allan Cash Picture Library / Alamy)

On Nov. 23, 1969, three years before his term was to expire, Mundt suffered a severe stroke that made him virtually persona non grata. He couldn’t attend committee hearings, speak legibly, and his right arm and and leg were paralyzed. But for three years, he resisted calls for him to resign and be replaced. Instead, his wife Mary and his staff essentially took over duties in his office.

Mundt did not cast a vote on the Senate floor for the last three years of his term. He missed about a thousand votes, according to those that keep track of such things.

He remained in office even after fellow Republicans stripped him of his committee assignments. He had held two of the key assignments in the 1950s: Appropriations and Foreign Relations. The Vietnam War was raging, protests and riots were engulfing American cities, and there were major fights over tax reform.

In retrospect, Mundt’s stubborn refusal to resign looks incredibly selfish and arrogant. Overnight, his sparsely populated home state had gone from punching above its weight by having a veteran senator in the middle of Cold War and Vietnam debates, to a placeholder who had surrendered to nepotism. South Dakota was represented by one senator in one of the most critical periods in American history.

It’s that kind of experience - a politician hanging onto power despite being unable to serve, and the nepotism that ostensibly filled that void - that has contributed to the public’s loss of confidence in their government and political system since the end of World War II.

If the online hordes are having problems with Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Norden, being appointed to his seat, imagine what kind of rhetorical abuse would Mary Mundt have faced had social media been around in 1969?

Which brings us to McConnell. His term runs out at the end of the year, so the calendar is not as much of an issue as it was with Mundt.

But he has not been forthcoming with how serious his condition is, and the “proof of life” photo without independent verification of his condition has set off the usual conspiracy nuttiness in the Moon-Landing-Denier/Elvis-Island/2020-Was-Stolen Cabals.

And what is an issue, and what draws the comparisons to Mundt, is vacancy in the midst of crisis. With the 53-47 Republican edge in the Senate and it being so closely divided on so many issues, a single vote sometimes can loom over the other 99. Kentuckians deserve better. Americans should expect more.

Is McConnell too ill to vote?

What would happen, for instance, if the war in Iran got further out of hand with the reckless Donald Trump stopping and starting hostilities like war was a turnkey operation, saying he is negotiating one day while bombing Iran the next and threatening to bomb it into pre-history the day after that? What would happen if Congress suddenly did its job and forced a war resolution debate? How important would that single vote be?

And even if Republicans decided to dump the filibuster to pass the controversial voting security bill Trump has been pushing, and Democrats have attacked as voter suppression in surprise, would McConnell’s inability to cast a vote be a decider? He’s voted against the SAVE Act in the past.

McConnell and his supporters are trying to run out the clock. He, like Mundt. is not being transparent about his true condition. And these politicians wonder why faith in the institution McConnell has said he loves is at historic lows.

Here’s what McConnell said in 2024: “I love the Senate. It has been my life. There may be more distinguished members of this body throughout our history, but I doubt there are any with more admiration for it.”

It may be his life. But he doesn’t own the seat.

The story is very reminiscent of one I chronicled almost five decades ago,

In 1980, as a young reporter, I covered the South Dakota Senate race between Republican Rep. Jim Abdnor and Democratic incumbent Sen. George McGovern. It remains my favorite assignment, and the work I did in hyper-local reporting, first from the city and county level, then to a Senate race of national significance, very much helped prepare me for covering national politics for most of my career.

(That route, by the way, is rare today. Many national political reporters, especially in their early careers, have never covered a city or county commission, never have had to face people personally in their coffee shop or the grocery store after the stories were published, never have been made to understand that the purpose of politics is not the nasty horseraces but at its essence is about actual policy that affects people, and that the best try to understand the beliefs of all people in the public squares. This is a real crisis for American journalism, and local news deserts will increasingly be a bane on our national conversation. Why journalism schools haven’t forced this into the national conversation is one of my biggest disappointments).

But I digress.

In 1980, the national mood, like today, was highly suspicious of anything related to the DC status quo. Abdnor, although a Washington creature himself, attacked McGovern for forgetting his roots. Abdnor was tapping into a deep sentiment I dubbed then, and still do, the “too big for your britches” syndrome. The same line of attacks helped end Tom Daschle’s Senate leadership career two-plus decades later. Ironically, Daschle has been replaced by a Republican, John Thune, who has, like Daschle, has spent a good part of his Senate career in national leadership.

But back to ‘80. Eight years before, McGovern had been trounced by Richard Nixon in the ‘72 presidential election, and although McGovern narrowly survived re-election in 1974, the big-britches label stuck firmly to McGovern six years later.

As Election Day approached, the usual pheasant-hunting photo ops by politicians graced the airwaves of KELO and other state TV stations. It was all optics, and every politician played that game. Hunting pheasants, more than almost anything, makes you a true South Dakotan (fishing for walleye and attending State B basketball tournaments is right up there).

Then I got a tip.

McGovern had actually had to purchase an out-of-state hunting license, because he had no South Dakota driving license and could not show that he primarily lived in the state. A young clerk told a U.S. senator that if he couldn’t prove state residency through something like a driver’s license, that he had to buy an out-of-state license. She stood her ground. The law was the law. That was America in 1980.

The story was devastating to the McGovern campaign, as Michael Freeman will attest as an Abdnor aide from the other side of the political fence.

That front-page story encapsulated, in an image any South Dakotan could understand, what a million other stories couldn’t: That McGovern wasn’t a true South Dakotan.

But part of the truth also that McGovern was intensely loyal to his state and, unlike other South Dakota politicians who went Washington, he spent a great deal of his retirement in my beautiful home state. But here was a symbolic moment, served up on a platter to Abdnor. Something a simple act before the campaign began.

Abdnor went on to win easily, and McGovern, and a half dozen of other prominent Democratic senators, were swept away by the Reagan landslide of 1980.

That’s why the bad campaign preparation by this Lindell, this election denier who has lost in court for lying and slandering 2020 election actors to promote his conspiracy theories, is so appalling. Wouldn’t the first box you’d want to check be the one that says you actually can vote for yourself in said election?

It’s a wide window into his slipshod, clueless, paranoia. What kind of governor would someone be if they’re not even aware enough to register to vote in the state they want to govern?

But at least he has Trump’s endorsement. To some people, nothing beyond that will matter.

And that’s America in 2026, folks.

https://www.startribune.com/mike-lindell-trumps-pick-for-governor-isnt-registered-to-vote-in-minnesota/601868792?utm_source=copy

2020 wasn’t stolen, and no amount of Trump asserting it so will make it so. And yet this week we had another coward’s row of Trump cabinet nominees refusing to say he’d lost the 2020 election. Their fear of his retribution is greater than their belief in facts.

Pre-speech reporting suggests Trump will provide new details on how foreign governments have tried to influence our elections. Of course, he will portray himself as a victim. Neither claim is news. In fact, there is ample evidence of Russian attempts to boost Trump from the very beginning of his political life.

In January of 2017, as Trump was preparing to be inaugurated for his first term, the Director of National Intelligence released an unclassified report entitled, “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections.”

It alleged that Russian strongman Vladamir Putin personally ordered a campaign to undermine the faith in American elections and to denigrate Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The Senate Intelligence Committee, controlled by the Republicans, said the same thing in its own report.

It eventually resulted in a barrage of hacked Clinton emails dumped into the public domain by Wikileaks and other online sites. That same report referenced above said Russian hackers got the emails through Democratic National Committee breaches.

In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a reminder. Donald Trump publicly asked for help from the Russians to keep leaking.

As long as it benefitted him, Russian interference was okay.

I’ll let Trump speak for himself. “Russia, if you are listening, I hope you are able tofind the 30,00 emails that are missing,” he said in a press conference (where he tried to shush another female reporter, sound familiar?) “I think you will be mightily rewarded by our press.”

Of the Russians, Trump said: “They probably have them. I’d like to have them released.”

And, “if Russia, or China, or any other country has those emails, I’d like to see them.”

That, friends, is an open invitation for two competing superpowers to meddle in our elections. It can’t get any clearer than that.

Here’s a link to the video:

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/watch-trump-call-on-russia-to-find-clinton-s-emails-tell-reporter-to-be-quiet-733375555707

Some of the early reporting tonight says Trump is expected to focus on Chinese interference in our elections. We’ll see. Once Trump gets behind a microphone, no one - even he - knows what will come out, especially if the grievance bile is high enough in his throat.

Trump’s safe elections crusade has nothing to do with you or me, or fair elections.

It is all about his re-litigation of an election he lost, and his inability to understand that in the election of 2020, a vast majority of Americans didn’t want him in the job, no matter which foreign adversary interfered.

Interviewing him in Senate hallways, I always thought that it felt like I was interviewing Andy of Mayberry with a little Don Knotts thrown in. (Youngsters, look it up). Never took himself too seriously, which is why he could rationalize being one of the biggest flip-floppers in modern American history. He always wanted to be wingman to the powerful. But later in life, after his best buddy John McCain died, that urge took him from the McCain’s sunny optimism to Trump’s dark self-idolatry, and Graham’s politics took a 180-degree turn. His shape-shifting took him from the clarity of his denunciation of Trump as a presidential rival in 2016, to golf-buddy apologist for MAGA’s faux Americanism and Trump’s perpetual promotion machine of 2026.

Lindsey just wanted to hitch a ride through the brightest spotlights. When he DID variate from that chameleon cloak - like those few days when he joined the majority of Americans in feeling the horror of January 6 - he quickly got put it back on to reclaim that relevancy. He was more awed by Trump’s ability to rile up a crowd than his own ability to stand for a principle.

Don’t take my word for it. He said so himself.

A lot has been said and written about him after his sudden death. I think it’s best, in remembering him, to let him tell the tale.

For most Americans, it started with his short-lived run for the presidency in 2016. He’d ridden the bus with McCain during McCain’s loss to Barak Obama in the rowdy presidential campaign of 2008, and I think he ran in part because he loved that rolling banter so much that he wanted to recreate it as best he could. He was the funny sidekick. For Graham, the performance was the point. He did have political principles, such as a robust foreign policy that saw war as a viable option, whether you agreed with him or not. But mainly, he just liked being on the perimeters of fame and power.

But his loyalty could be purchased with the promise of a shared spotlight. He was the closest thing to Zelig we had in this current Senate. (Youngsters, again - look it up).

Running for president in late 2015, he said this about Trump, who was surging in the polls: “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

He claimed later he didn’t vote for the man he called a “kook.”

Now, many Americans who agreed with him then still feel that way.

By 2019, a year after McCain died, and the flip-flop was evident. I have always maintained we would have had a far different Lindsey Graham had McCain been alive today. McCain, by virtue of his tenacity and hero status and across-the-aisle appeal alone, would have been a far more powerful anti-Trump force in the GOP than the banished Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney or Adam Kinziger.

By 2019, Graham was a lead cheerleader for Trump’s re-election. He took a bigger role in advising Trump on judicial nominees. He traveled with him on Air Force One, in that term and in the current one.

The New York Times asked Graham in late 2019 about the flip flop. It was pretty simple, really, he said. He had always put staying relevant atop his political goals.

“From my point of view, if you know anything, it’d be odd not to do this,” he told the Times. He claimed that after seeing Trump’s appeal, he leaned into his belief that politics at its core was “the art of what works and what brings desired outcomes.”

In other words, he was getting the bully-boy foreign policy that he liked, the conservative judges that he recommended, and - I might throw in - he thought that this Trump guy was knee-slapping entertaining and his spotlight could be shared. Just like it was with the boys on the McCain bus.

Then Trump invited the rioters to Washington, D.C. and sent them up the Hill to stop the peaceful transfer of power. For a moment, Lindsey stood on his own ground.

In a Senate floor speech the night of the riots (when lawbreakers threatened to hang Mike Pence and assaulted police officers and smeared their feces around the Capitol), Graham was visibly mad.

The wingman had had enough. He decried the violence of the Trump-inspired mob, lamented a friendship shattered.

“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” he said. “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, first thing you’ll see. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

He then went on to tell the truth in a line that is now getting him eviscerated in crazy right-wing media post-death screeds: “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are lawfully elected and will become the President and the Vice President of the United States on January the 20th.”

But the chameleon returned.

By May of 2021, he was back in the fold. Other Republicans, including the former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, were doing their own flip flops, and reconnecting with a bitter ex-president they’d denounced. The chameleon instinct won over decency, principle and history. Today’s Congress is filled with Trump sycophants too afraid of losing relevancy to stand fast against his authoritarian impulses. What will they say when he’s gone?

“Can we move forward without President Trump?” Graham said four months after trying to separate from him. “The answer is no. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”

Many Americans believe the exact opposite. Unlike Graham, they did in 2016, and they do today.

The days of repose and reflection and time to allow the facts to catch up after a notable public figure’s death are long gone. One can imagine what loony tunes the Loomers of the world would have come up with at JFK’s assassination, or what vile Young Turk nonsense would have immediately started oozing after Ronald Reagan was shot.

Lindsey Graham's father died of a heart attack at 69. The son was 71 when he died this weekend and he had just returned from a long flight from Ukraine, a threat to any elderly human with heart issues. The senator’s office said he died from a heart attack. The answer to what caused his death could be as simple as the failure of a human heart.

But of course the predictable happened. Like moths to a flame, unhinged right-wing conspiracy theorists like Laura Loomer began dishing out wild paranoia, like the Russians killed Graham. Her loyal online mobs duly amplified it. Of course, their social media rage-profit meters went “ka-ching.” They are truly the lowest of our nation’s so-called “influencers,” and are the real “enemies of the American people.”

Even Donald Trump’s first presidential press secretary, Sean Spicer, added to the conspiracy paranoia with an it-looks-fishy post.

Soulless politicians like Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina tried to make it about them. The Republican, who just finished last in a gubernatorial primary, posted a “Godfather” movie meme suggesting she was ready to be “pulled in” to run for Graham’s still- warm seat. Such classless ambition is, unfortunately, not that rare these days.

Lefty Young Turker Ana Kasparian posted “Good riddance” almost immediately on X shortly after the news of Graham’s death broke. The post went viral, with many calling her a ghoul, which is a golden label for rage profiting. The more hatred you stir, the more money you make. Her compatriot, Young Turk host Cenk Uygur, mocked Graham with this: “Lindsey Graham has moved on to the next step in his journey, trying to convince Hades to attack Zeus and Poseidon.”

I got into an online discussion with someone who declared that “we will never know” the truth about Graham’s death. If this is the jumping-off point of reaction to public shocks in this country, we are hopelessly out of control of our collective destiny.

I don’t believe that, either as an individual or with respect to our country.

The greatest American, Abraham Lincoln, at age 28, saw all this coming. He predicted what we are going through right now.

Our greatest president warned that the greatest threat to the future of the republic was the rise of an aspiring authoritarian so good at demagoguery and propaganda that he would, like Napoleon or Caesar, try to make himself an unquestioned leader of immense power with exclusive claim to the truth. This future tyrant would be aided, Lincoln, said, by the likes of the very people who today are assembling in online conspiracy mobs like we’re seeing in the early wake of Graham’s death. They are not only assaulting truth in the moment, but they have dangerously corrupted public conversation with an ideology that nothing is to be believed at all except their wildest and most unfounded claims. And every word uttered by Donald Trump.

Mob rule had taken hold in the days leading into Lincoln’s 1838 speech at the Lyceum in Springfield, Ill. Highly publicized lynchings in Vicksburg, Miss., and St. Louis and the murder of an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Ill. had shaken the country. Lincoln was referring to these three episodes in this passage:

“Whenever the vicious portion of our population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity; depend upon it, this Government cannot last,” Lincoln warned. “By such things the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it; and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few, too weak to make their friendship effectual.”

Mob rule would, Lincoln said, make good Americans so helplessly disassociated from and distrusting of their own government they’d eventually give up.

Mob rule is attempting to take control again. Everyone witnessed what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. That was an actual, on-the-ground mob inspired solely by Donald Trump. He pardoned his mob, tried to pay the violators with your tax dollars. Day after day, the online mobs are trying, but we hope will eventually fail, to rewrite the history of that awful day.

Now, in the aftermath of Graham’s death, the online mobs are at it again with their conspiracies and venality and declarations that truth can never be known. They attack not only the truth, but the institutions that we have established over 250 years of hard trying to uphold the self-evident truths Jefferson embedded in the Declaration of Independence. And, make no mistake, this mob is organized around the Oval Office, energized by Trump’s vile falsehoods.

Judges who rule against Donald Trump on Constitutional grounds are either stupid or corrupt, or both. Law is to be flaunted if you don’t agree with it. Journalists, whistleblowers and political opposites who try to hold him accountable are traitors and “enemies of the American people.” Trust Trump, not what you see with your own eyes. Trust the guy who puts out AI social media memes of him dropping feces on American citizens from a fake jet. Trust the guy who thinks nothing constrains him but himself.

Trump told the New York Times in January, less than two months before he started a dangerous war in Iran, that the only limits to his global power were “my own morality. My own mind It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Lincoln had a prescription for this: Decent people, stand up. Here, from his 1838 speech, he is talking about the future Donald Trump:

“Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us?” And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs. Distinction will be his paramount object; and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”

The sole goal about Graham’s death right now should be to get to the truth, and nothing else. Claiming that the truth will never be known is a surrender to fatal cynicism. These online mobs in this moment without any proof whatsoever are building another infrastructure of conspiracy around Trump’s insatiable power grab. Their fealty and paranoia, combined with Trump’s lust for power, are precisely what Lincoln warned against.

Don’t let them win the moment, the hour, OR the day.

Stick to the facts if you post or converse.

Call out obvious falsehoods when you see or hear them.

Ask for proof.

Resist all the easy, lazy, cynical takes. Each and every one of them.

Our job as a citizen is the hardest of all. More than ever, that is the job of the true patriot - right, left or center.

I mention this both for full disclosure, but also in appreciation of the great work that folks do there in trying to tell the American Story in its full and inclusive (yes, I used that word) complexity. Now Donald Trump, as usual, thinks he’s the sole narrator of the American narrative and he’s trying to rewrite it, one exhibit at a time.

The man who, in one of the biggest whoppers of the Trump era today blamed “the Islamic Republic of Japan” for recently attacking a U.S. aircraft carrier, wants to rewrite American history into pure propaganda.

On July 4, on the 250th Anniversary of our nation’s founding, Trump’s White House released a 160-page report attacking the Smithsonian that is so slanted and paranoid and in denial of the fits-and-starts and struggles of American history that it would not make a passing grade in a 9th Grade civics class. It makes false, implied claims that the Smithsonian is anti-American to its core, when it is arguably our most uniquely American institution and more responsible than any of keeping our history alive and inclusive. Trump’s report, entitled “Saving America’s Story,” does so through a lens so narrow and so encumbered by denial of basic facts that some of the narrative made me laugh out loud.

It should be re-titled, “Distorting America’s Story So Donald Trump Likes It.”

The report complained that at the National Museum of American History, “the Founders are minimized, if not entirely excluded; traditional patriotic narratives are treated with suspicion, if not outright contempt; and the basic symbols and stories that once helped unify Americans are presented not as reasons for gratitude and inspiration, but as objects to be inherently questioned, dismantled, ‘problematized,’ and reinterpreted to achieve ideological ends. To the extent that there is a story told at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, it is not one of ‘the victory of freedom and genius of our country’ but one of regret, tragedy, and shame.”

Recognizing that “regret, tragedy and shame” in our annals and vowing to correct it is the quintessential patriotic act. Compared to the despots leading Russia and China and Turkey that Trump so admires, Americans’ willingness to confront our past failures makes us a beacon to the world. This is the kind of whitewashed history that Putin would write.

The report goes way into the weeds in laughable critique. At one point its authors complain that promotional banners for the 250th anniversary had “squiggly lines” instead of pictures of Founders, although it concedes the banner did include red and blue to go with the white background.

Here’s a typical critique, this one about the American History Museum’s exhibit on slavery, which was legal in the first four-score-and-change years of the republic.

“Another didactic entitled “In Pursuit of Fairness” shamefully divides Americans based on race by reducing the decades-long effort to eradicate slavery—pursued by Americans of every background and color—to a racial lens, noting that, ‘Since the inception of our nation, African Americans fought to abolish slavery, achieve equality and freedom, and overcome segregation through a variety of means: legal recourse, political persuasion, public protests, and non-violent demonstrations,’ and that ‘many have found…tragic irony in the phrase, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Rather than celebrate the ideals, heroes, and exceptional achievements of Americans of all backgrounds, the Smithsonian’s American Aspirations exhibit critiques America’s alleged contradictions and divides Americans by race. In so doing, the exhibit is the latest example of how the Smithsonian is working to ‘problematize’ and discredit American history during our Nation’s 250th anniversary year and is illustrative of the NMAH Interpretive Plan’s curatorial 123 guidelines, which instruct staff to, “whatever the topic,” bring exhibits back to a radical ideological framework as part of the Smithsonian’s “commitment to relevance.”

Everything about the underlying theme depicting the founders that the report blasts is true and relevant to every single American.

There WAS and REMAINS a conflict between the “all men are created equal” aspirational declarations of the Founders and the lived experiences of those left out of the initial promise: Slaves and women, for starters. Many founders who extolled freedom and equality for all DID enslave people. These are not “alleged contradictions.” They are observable, provable, tragically persistent facts. Denying them does not “celebrate the ideals, heroes and exceptional achievements of Americans of all backgrounds.”

It sullies heroes’ memories by downplaying the barriers they overcame. It tells Americans they can’t handle the truth. It is insulting AND dangerous at the same time.

The founders knew their own contradictions. It’s why the Constitution aspires to a “more perfect union,” why it does not say the union it established - replete with that horrific institution of slavery - was perfect.

To say we are still striving for a more perfect union more than two centuries later is the truest and most pro-American history one can write. It makes us stronger, not weaker.

Trump’s take on American history is replete with evidence that he has read little of it. He claimed the Continental Army captured airports. He didn’t seem to know that Frederick Douglass died two centuries past; or that Southern states seceded before Lincoln took office; or that British troops, not Canadians as he claimed, burned the White House in the War of 1812.

He cannot separate history from his own extreme case of self-adoration and self-promotion.

The photos and placards of past presidents that he’s put up in the White House - you may remember it as the display that has a picture of an auto-pen rather than Joe Biden - are his most visible attempt at writing history himself. The language under the most recent ones - his rival presidents - is childish and laughingly inaccurate, filled with personal revenge and falsehoods. It’s the clearest case of how Trump tries to distort history to revolve around him. The “history” reads like a series of his rage tweets.

On Biden, for instance, the White House placard claims, falsely, that the 2020 election was the “most corrupt” in American history, implying Biden wasn’t honestly elected. In almost six years, neither Trump nor his cohorts have proven this on any level, and - indeed - most deep examinations of that vote, many of them by fellow Republican elected state officials, have not come up with any proof at all. Trump’s take on 2020 is built entirely on lies and disproven conspiracy theories.

The White House placard on Barack Obama claims that “Obama also spied on the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Donald J. Trump, and presided over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, the worst political scandal in American History.” Trump’s own Department of Justice and FBI debunked these claims.

The placards on other presidents often avoid mention of scandals, such as the Teapot Dome under the corrupt Warren G. Harding. Their omission is a declaration by Trump that such corruption is part of the office.

In other contexts, Trump repeatedly mischaracterizes the tariff positions of previous presidents William McKinley and Andrew Jackson to push his own tariffs.

He often tries to make others’ histories about him, such as his repeated claims that his uncle taught the Unabomber in college. That’s a lie.

He mocked history by hijacking a worthy recipient’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Yesterday, we were one of the first to tour the newly opened underground chambers beneath the Lincoln Memorial. The “Lincoln Memorial Undercroft” exposes the granite columns holding up the huge memorial that stands on reclaimed swampland along the Potomac River. It extols the engineers who built it and the politicians who funded it.

But the exhibit under Trump’s National Park Service display at the Lincoln Memorial barely scratches the surface of the challenges and decisions of our greatest president (although Trump puts himself right there with the Four Faces on Mount Rushmore). It says nothing about the controversy surrounding the 1922 dedication of the memorial itself. Nor does it really acknowledge the struggles to hold the Union together that continue. If you doubt that last claim, you are denying that hundreds of khaki-clad, masked white supremacists flying Confederate flags marched on the streets of our Capital on July 4, 2026.

I’ve done a fair amount of research on Lincoln and on the Lincoln Memorial for my Smithsonian tours. I adore Lincoln, believe he was and remains the quintessential American, and that he arrived at precisely the right time in history. His humility, humor and steadfast commitment to fairness and principle, his superhuman ability to put himself in the shoes of the lowest-held Americans, was precisely what the country needed to hold the union together in its darkest days. His characteristics are the opposite of Trump’s, and carving Trump onto Mount Rushmore with him would be an abomination of American history.

Lincoln would be the first to acknowledge that there were failures in his own time in public office and that his yearning for true equality remains an elusive goal in 2026, particularly for the descendants of enslaved black Americans. Lincoln was reported saying many times that “history is not history unless it is the truth.”

In his 1862 message to Congress, when the outcome of the Civil War and the preservation of the Union was very much in doubt, Lincoln recognized that uncomfortable truths were an essential part of history.

“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history,” Lincoln wrote. “We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

But at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922, one attended by his lone surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, history was whitewashed. The lone black speaker, Robert Moton, was censored by former President William Howard Taft, who in 1922 was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the head of the Lincoln Memorial Commission. Moreso, a controversy erupted when a Marine attempted to direct black attendees into segregated sections, and reportedly used a racial slur in the process. Several black guests left the monument’s dedication in protest.

Moton was second principle of the Tuskegee Institute, the college founded by Booker T. Washington.

Days before the ceremony, after Taft had seen a draft of Moton’s speech, he sent a telegram telling Moton to cut 500 words, and that “in making the cut you find more unity and symmetry by emphasizing tribute and lessening appeal. I am sure you wish to avoid any insinuation of attempt to make the occasion one for propaganda.”

In other words, do not talk about the unfinished business from Lincoln’s presidency. Avoid the realities that America in 1922 was deep in the throes of segregation and Jim Crow. That poll taxes and other barriers kept blacks from voting. That the Lost Cause doctrine celebrated treasonous southerners. That there were 57 recorded lynchings in America in 1922. That the Ku Klux Klan was making a comeback in the Midwest.

Moton intended to bring forth the memory of Lincoln to make a case that these facts showed that Lincoln’s ambitions of equality for all Americans were far from accomplished. Taft would have nothing of it.

As a result the ceremony, and Moton’s keynote, was almost all a laudatory memory of the greatness of Lincoln, while denying the persistent inequalities in the country he dearly loved, 67 years after his death.

Here is one passage from Moton’s draft that did not make it:

“No more can the nation endure half privileged and half repressed; half educated and half uneducated; half protected and half unprotected; half prosperous and half in discontent; yes, half free and half yet in bondage.

“My fellow citizens, in the great name which we honor here today, I say unto you that this memorial which we erect in token of our veneration is but a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we together can make real in our national life, in every state and in every section, the things for which he died.”

A truth, unheard.

Here’s another obliterated passage:

“So long as any group within our nation is denied the full protection of the law, that task is still unfinished….
”But unless here at home we are willing to grant to the least and humblest citizen the full enjoyment of every constitutional privilege, our boast is but a mockery…before the nations of the earth….
”A government which can venture abroad to put an end to injustice and mob-violence in another country can surely find a way to put an end to these same evils within our own borders.”

It spoke directly to the sacrifices of all American soldiers in the recently concluded World War I, including black soldiers who returned home to Jim Crow and segregation. If they fought tyranny abroad, why should they suffer it at home.

Trump today is trying to do what Taft did 104 years ago. He pushes censorship and whitewashing. fact. He aggrandizes mythology, paints over the unjust acts of the past, denies that such injustice must still be confronted.

He propagandizes patriotism.

The true American patriot takes to heart the founders’ observance that striving for that more perfect union is a work in progress.

Lincoln got it. Trump never will.

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A third of the country will condemn the slivers of partisanship and the irony of a draft dodger extolling military power and prestige, and call it just another Trump blast of air. A third will not notice or care. And third of the country will see it as Trumpian normal.

The latter is MAGA, boiled to its essence. If it fits Trump’s purposes, even if it’s built on paranoia and partisanship, it must be patriotic and profound and those who reject it must be un-American. Even though tradition and fairness would have conspicuously avoided any hint of partisanship for the country’s good. Now, when this speech goes into the time capsule, future historians will mark it as an undeniable reminder of how divided this country is in this moment of the 250th anniversary of its founding.

The veterans of the past, some of them World War II soldiers now 107 years old, deserved the stage. But so did the dreamers and healers and selfless servants of today. The former are easing into their gentle rests of nostalgia and history. The latter can be the authors of the coming history. If we listen to them.

·”Our country is just getting started, because the best is yet to come,” Trump said, in what was his most encompassing moment. “This is only the dawn of the Golden Age of America.”

It was reminiscent of the innate optimism of Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill.” But that was a simpler claim when the Cold War divided the world into two spheres.

“Golden Age” today, under Trump and in a far more chaotic paradigm, has wildly divergent meanings. Is it the aspiring dreams of those on the bottom? Is it the economic boom Trump has promised, but not delivered? Or is it the gilding, the excessive focus on wealth and material things, the expressions of opulence in gaudy gold fixtures in the Oval Office, and the craven and arguably criminal exploitation of he office to enrich himself?

In the middle of a week-long Fox News orgy pushing the Trump-focused celebration, our president appeared in ads hawking Trump Watches.

What other president before him would have had the audacity to demean the office like that?

“We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American Way,” was one of the lines of a song during what was dubbed the biggest fireworks show in history.

No, it’s not, not nearly. The American Way is sacks of American farmers’ grain shipped to the starving. Our medical innovations save millions, maybe billions. Our technology inventions have closed centuries of information gaps. Our history of welcoming immigrants, so twisted and distorted this century with bad policies and exploitative Trump rhetoric, has also defined us in our gentler moments of the past. We twice shed the blood of hundreds of thousands of American boys to save Europe from itself. And after the last of those two wars ended, we took the lessons from the first world and fed those who started it. We saved a continent from starvation.

THAT is the American Way.

It was quite a night in your Capital. There were delays and sputtering starts. The massive fireworks display culminated with a rolling boom that rattled windows miles away. The rain stopped for the speech and the fireworks, then fresh storms rolled through the DC region. Premonition? The storms of the weather and the storm that is a Donald Trump speech pushed the fireworks into July 5.

The militaristic tone and the focus on power of Trump’s speech probably was unavoidable. He is fixated on power. No president has ever worshiped the weapons of war like this one, perhaps because so many of our greatest presidents fought in them and knew enough to not mythologize them. Trump couldn’t help bragging about how the American Navy sent its far inferior Iranian cohort to the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Trump revels in bended knees, but never his own.

America at its best is so much better than the arsenal of raw power and heroic battlefield exploits that Trump focused on. We properly honor our veterans, but we have not survived 250 just on heroism on battlefields in wars that never end.

Mercy, conciliation, persistence, a belief in fairness and human rights and the opportunity to climb an economic ladder, honesty and integrity in our leaders, a willingness to admit our past transgressions - all of these very human traits have often pulled us away from our worst moments.

Not now. Not with this man in our White House.

“We won big here, really big,” Trump said of the last election. He accused his political opponents of trying to “beat the American spirit out of us. alienate us from our history, and to make it impossible to even answer the question, what does it mean to be an American.” Standing on land literally seized from Sioux Indians in violation of 19th Century treaties they signed with the federal government, Trump accused his political opponents of falsely saying it was “stolen land.” It was. The Supreme Court said so 45 years ago.

He bragged about American inventions, and singled out air conditioning. Facing an Independence Day speech in 100-day heat tomorrow, no wonder.

In the heat of the summer, Armageddon-style storms often gather and build to 30,000-foot monsters on the Plains east of the Black Hills, where the Four Faces of Mount Rushmore are sheltered. All week long leading into the 4th, we witnessed one turbulent natural performance after another.

One unleashed 131-mile-an-hour straight winds, one of the strongest straight-wind measures ever recorded on this continent, decapitating roofs in small towns, toppling giant electricity-generating windmills, and rekindling climate change debates.

Another shot horizontal bolts of lightning across our temporary lake home at 4 a.m., announcing its awe-inspiring dominance with a deep baritone of rolling thunder and winds that bent trees 30 degrees.

And a third, a gargantuan gathering of green and gray reminiscent of the horizon-blotting blobs of the movie “Independence Day,” set off tornado sirens in small towns and unleashed sideways sheets of rain at 60 miles an hour. Here is the leading edge of that July 2 storm over Watertown, S.D.

If you grow up in South Dakota, you learn early from storms like this that you’re not in charge of anything.

Yet Donald Trump thinks he’s in charge of everything. For over a decade, he has been the storm.

But storms always end, and there is always an aftermath. Always a calm to assess the damage. Always people to come in and clean up the mess, as they have been doing in the proud hamlet of Highmore, South Dakota, which was especially damaged in the 131-mph winds.

And therein lies a challenge. Who will clean up after Trump?

Who will restore faith in an office he’s commercialized and personally exploited, down to selling Trump watches in commercials between Sean Hannity’s fawning MAGA interviews on FOX News on Independence Day Eve?

Will it be Democrats, many of whom seem dour and defeated on this 4th of July, at a time when they should feel optimistic, politically, against a president with low approval ratings? Democrats who overwhelmingly tell pollsters they are not proud of their country on its 250th anniversary?

Can it be Republicans who have looked the other way on the the pillage of the office and the attacks on separation of powers and a free press?

The storm will pass. What of the aftermath?

“There’s never been a July 4 like this one,” a radio ad for Freedom 250, that increasingly partisan party-planning committee assembled by Trump, blares. “There will never be again.”

Literally, that’s hard to dispute, but not in the way Donald Trump and his administration would want it seen.

If you’re an American and paying attention, every day is a never-been-before day under Trump.

Each dawn in TrumpWorld brings soul-testing twists and stomach-churning turns. Nothing is constant except the never-ending stream of hyperbole from the 47th President and his taxpayer-paid flacks. His second term has been one ceaseless chyron of spectacular superlatives and junior-high-level praise for the 47th president.

“Like you’ve never seen before” is Trump’s favorite phrase, the mantra of his second term. Except in many cases, we have seen it before, and we most certainly will long after he is gone.

We are that House Divided that Lincoln warned us against. Part of America sees this 250th anniversary as a pinnacle of patriotism, part sees it as the selfish celebration of the greatest divider the American presidency has ever known.

THAT observation is NOT hyperbole.

We should have seen it coming. In “Art of the Deal,” Trump bragged about his ability to make mere minions believe his “truthful hyperbole.” I call it fantastical lying. You be the judge. Either way, the phrase “truthful hyperbole” is right up there with “alternative facts” in the Trump-Merriam dictionary.

Here’s Trump’s key “Art of the Deal” passage (my bold ital.) :

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”

Therein lies Trump’s presidency in one paragraph. It explains why the truth really doesn’t matter if the promotion succeeds. It shows why he is most comfortable with billionaires and pardoned crooks who dream big even though they might break a few laws. Why he sees average citizens as little people without dreams, satiated by inspiration from the Gatsby Class. Bravado over bravery explains why Trump can threaten to end Iran’s civilization one day but, when the going gets tough in ending the war without looking like a complete failure, put the onus of success or failure on his Vice President, J.D. Vance.

Is calling an 80-year-old, overweight man with swollen ankles, bruised hands and a propensity to doze off in meetings the healthiest president who ever lived an “innocent form of exaggeration?” For sycophants on social media who buy obvious truth shades like that, it certainly is a “very effective form of promotion.”

And now as we approach the Big Patriotic Moment, the biggest birthday celebration ever, the Mother of all Majestic Memories. we must remember that MLK, Jr. proclaimed on the National Mall in his “I have a dream” speech that he had been to the mountaintop.

How will Trump soar even higher?

No, mere mortals cannot comprehend the heights of hyperbole Trump will ascend to in his July 4 address, one in which will almost certainly go down in the history books as the greatest address ever given. Greater even than Jesus Christ on the Mount. Just you watch: Trump will put to shame Lincoln’s two-minute Gettysburg Address, JFK’s “ask not” admonition in 1961, and Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

The address for the ages and beyond could go on for hours. Nothing too great or too small will be forgotten. He promised!

On social media, Trump said it will be the “most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA.’ “ (His caps, of course).

Let’s hope it doesn’t end like that rally on January 6, 2021. A rally that Trump promised beforehand would be “wild,” and one in which there had “never been anything like it.” A rally in which he claimed, falsely, that “we won this election and we won it by a landslide” and “they rigged it like they have never rigged an election before.”

Again, a lie. Not “factual hyperbole.” A lie.

The upcoming July 4 celebration will include, Trump bragged, “the largest fireworks show in history” and the “largest formation of Joint Military Music and Ceremonial performances in History.” (The multiple Union Army regimental bands marching with the 160,000 troops and serenading General Sherman in the victory parade down Pennsylvania Avenue a month after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox want a word).

No, this will be more epic, Trump promised. The fireworks and the military bands will be part of the “grandest displays of patriotism that the world has ever seen.” (Grander, even, than New York City’s ticker-tape parades after World War II or the triumphant march of the American Army’s 28th Division through Paris after that city’s liberation on Aug. 29, 1944. It will be THAT grand).

It all has been building to this moment: policy chaos like we’ve never seen before. A war he promised not to start ending with a potentially worse deal than Barack Obama cut with a ruthless Iranian regime. Policies pushed, then dropped, sometimes in the span of hours. Epic levels of denial and diversion. The most transparent administration in the history of the world. Except for the Epstein files and the insider trading and the no-bid contracts to friends and donors.

Oh, yes: Like something you’ve never seen before. Down to the last details.

Who’s up for a nasty, partisan take on the Reflecting Pool like we’ve never seen before? Will the soaring rhetoric end with Trump parachuting into its true-blue waters?

For President Zelig, nothing is too small to micro-mismanage, down to the PH level of the Reflecting Pool. Not only did he paint the bottom of the pool a beautiful “American flag blue,” but it is by far the most beautiful blue you’ve ever seen.

Until it peeled and became toxic paint turds in the July 4 punchbowl.

The thing with runaway hyperbole is that it leads so easily into big lies. If you can convince people that your version of blue is the purest and most appropriate ever conceived, and that someone else is always - always - at fault for your failures, then it’s not much of a hyperbolic leap into framing anything around a lie. No matter how this bloody mess in Iran ends, will Trump frame it any other way than a massive win for his superior intellect and negotiation skills?

Once you start believing your own hype, there is no act too craven or selfish to keep reaching for more short cuts to accolades and self-congratulation.

Didn’t get the Nobel Prize you thought you deserved? Steal someone else’s.

Tired of people lionizing the memory of JFK? Slap your name on top of his on the building Congress dedicated to the assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Then blame “corrupt” judges for making you take it down.

Yes, it’s all that easy for this grand master of hyperbole. As easy as draining a swamp.

In normal times, the symbolism of a refreshed and clear Reflecting Pool, a feature of the National Mall, might have proverbially given Americans the chance for self-examination and repose on our country’s 250th anniversary. A time to reflect on all the challenges we have survived.

Instead, the comical and predictable failures of AlgaeGate - the return of the green slime, the defective paint, the false claims about the pool’s condition before and after the muckup, Trump’s ongoing obsession - just sent us once again through a Trump-MAGA looking glass. Replete with green-eye-shaded Trump sycophants extolling the Donald’s great taste yet again.

The blue-green slush is a perfect example of Trump’s micro-mismanagement and how so much of it has turned into slime. Although $14-$16 million of wasted taxpayer dollars should be nothing to sneeze at, a few million here and there is peanuts to Trump, who, despite holding office for only a little over five years, has presided over the accumulation of a quarter of the nation’s $40 trillion debt.

I repeat: One in every four dollars of debt held by the U.S. has come under the presidencies of Donald J. Trump, who promised to pay off the debt in his first term in office.

Jimmy Carter got thrown out of office, in part, because Americans thought he was paying too much attention to granular details of no relevance whatsoever to Americans suffering from double digit inflation AND interest rates. I put this in the same category. AlgaeGate is needlessly divisive and so far in the weeds of what Trump should be paying attention to that one wonders if he will ever pay, politically, to these nonsensical diversions. We’ll see if Trump suffers the same fate as Carter through surrogate congressional candidates s in the November mid-term elections.

In the midst of a war that has cost American lives and $100 billion of its treasure, while stepping up his insults of allies like Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the president was dictating the hue of blue he wanted painted on the bottom of the Reflecting Pool. Never mind that it was a bad color for the pond, in part because it added to the pool water’s temperature in summer sunlight and heat, creating even more perfect conditions for the algae they wanted to eradicate.

Trump wanted American Flag Blue, so Trump got American Flag Blue.

Damn the ecologists, blue paint be spread.

Micro-mismanagement blown into a ridiculous AlgaeGate scandal. No-bid contracts and fix-its that cost taxpayers more and more. Another case of colorful Trump FUBAR.

Up until Flag Blue for the Reflecting Pool, Trump’s obsession with gold dominated his micro-obsessions and prompted an endless string of needless fights. Under his direction, the White House has been garishly adorned with gold, and if the Big Bad Ballroom gets built, what portion of the estimated $600 million will be pure gold? (And who believes the $600 million estimate? Trump has lied about its size and who will pay for it so often it may take years to sort out the true cost to taxpayers).

His relentless promotion of the ballroom is an example of his micro-mismanagement. So was his narcissistic takeover of the Kennedy Center that resulted in his name being slapped atop that of our most recent assassinated president. Trump envisioned that as another palace of gold with his name on it.

Now, rebuked in the courts, Trump was forced to take down the name. But the controversy was so unneeded, the expenditures so misappropriated, that it has become another metaphor to Trump’s selfish recklessness. As testament to his juvenile pique, the building’s front is now covered up with a gigantic canvas shield. If Trump can’t see his name on the building, no one will see Kennedy’s either.

And now: AlgaeGate.

The irony of all this? It’s not the first time a fight over algae has slimed American politics. Two Florida Trump allies - Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Republican governor and now Sen. Rick Scott - were first elected to their current jobs after a 2018 election campaign that was heavily about algae.

In the summer of 2018, a devastating invasion of “HABs,” or “harmful algal blooms”, hit Florida’s Gulf Coast. One was cyanobacterial, or toxic blue-green algae; the other, Karenia brevis, also known as the “red tide.” The algae killed marine life, caused the closing of beaches and fishing areas, and sickened humans and animals.

Scott was heavily attacked by Democrat Bill Nelson for pushing policies - cutting environmental oversight, downplaying the threat of climate change - that Nelson said led directly to the algae crisis.

Scientists pointed to excessive nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural runoff, pollution from septic tanks and wastewater facilities, and natural waterway impediments for a lot of the problem. Scott was mocked as “RedTideRick” on social media, and his critics said he’d abandoned his 2014 pledge to be Florida’s “greenest governor ever.” But in the end, Scott survived by a razor-thin 10,000 or so votes out of more than 8 million cast.

DeSantis won almost as narrowly, by roughly 32,000 votes over Democrat Andrew Gillum. DeSantis blamed “big sugar” for being the source of the lot of the algae problem, and he promised to clean it up.

In 2020, DeSantis signed Florida’s Clean Waterways Act, which set up stricter rules on septic systems and wastewater treatment, and encouraged better agricultural runoff practices, and mandated higher penalties for sewage spills. His administration has also appropriated billions for research, beach cleanups and more innovative mitigation practices.

The Reflecting Pool was built in the early 20th Century and dedicated in 1922 as a reflection for the newly dedicated Lincoln Memorial. There was a sad history associated with that area and the Lincolns long before.

The Memorial and pool were built on filled-in swamplands and a rancid canal leading into the Potomac River. It was often contaminated with human and animal carcasses, some surreptitiously put there to hide crimes or other transgressions. It stunk horribly in the summer.

The canal ran just south of the White House, and 60 years before, Lincoln’s youngest sons, Willie and Tad - like many Washington, D.C. kids of that era - played in the water and its infested surroundings.

In February of 1862, just as the Civil War was turning into the protracted, bloody catastrophe that would overshadow Lincoln’s term in office, Willie died at age 11 of typhoid fever. Many thought then, and now, that he got the disease playing in the putrid water.