Bear with me as I ruminate on the end of CBS News as we once knew it and what American journalism tells us about American democracy.

I go way back with CBS.

My first real broadcasting job was at a CBS radio affiliate and I remember the (rookie) challenges of properly timing the lead into the hourly news cast. Too quick and you created dead air. Too slow and you clipped the “stinger” at the head of the news cast. 1

Walter Cronkite was, and remains, a broadcast news legend and a personal hero.

Dan Rather made an appearance at my college while I was engaged in getting a degree in broadcast journalism. I recall that he was asked - this was about 1973 - if there was really a “liberal bias” in journalism?

Rather’s answer has stuck with me all this years. He said, I’m paraphrasing, “every beginning reporter spends time covering the police station on Saturday night, and you see and experience all kinds of human and societal problems - drugs, alcohol, child abuse, domestic violence and more. Given that front row seat on how our society doesn’t work for many people it’s not all that surprising that many reporters lean liberal, and think there must be a better way.”

I’ve always considered journalistic “objectivity” a myth. No one is wired to be objective. The goal is fairness and, yes, as Rather said, fairness with empathy and understanding.

Or as the great reporter Neil Sheehan once said, the objective is to get as close to the truth as one ever can.

What has been happening to CBS - and to way too many vastly important news organizations - is not about nostalgic longing for a Cronkite sign off or a Mike Wallace 60 Minutes interview. What is at stake is what happens in a democracy when the truth seekers and truth tellers are silenced or disappeared.

The meltdown at CBS under a regime that is determined to placate an authoritarian government in order to make a corporate deal is a tragedy for the talented people trampled in the stampede to make money, but it is also a tragedy because a free, vigorous, truth seeking press is absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. 2

Wires and lights in a box

The Ed Murrow quote at the top of this piece is from his famous speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) in 1958.

You really should read the whole thing.

Murrow candidly and brilliantly diagnosed what ailed broadcasting, both news and entertainment, in his long ago speech, and it is impossible to read it today without realizing how correctly he forecast the future:

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and, at times, demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this. It is, after all, not easy for the same small group of men to decide whether to buy a new station for millions of dollars, build a new building, alter the rate card, buy a new Western, sell a soap opera, decide what defensive line to take in connection with the latest Congressional inquiry, how much money to spend on promoting a new program, what additions or deletions should be made in the existing covey or clutch of vice-presidents, and at the same time-- frequently on the long, same long day--to give mature, thoughtful consideration to the manifold problems that confront those who are charged with the responsibility for news and public affairs.

Murrow might have been describing David Ellison, the new owner of CBS, and the vastly inexperienced Bari Weiss who he put in charge of the news division.

More Murrow:

Sometimes there is a clash between the public interest and the corporate interest. A telephone call or a letter from a proper quarter in Washington is treated rather more seriously than a communication from an irate but not politically potent viewer. It is tempting enough to give away a little air time for frequently irresponsible and unwarranted utterances in an effort to temper the wind of political criticism. But this could well be the subject of a separate and even lengthier and drearier dissertation.

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Murrow could turn a phrase as when he bemoaned “five, six, or a dozen contraceptive layers of vice-presidents, public relations counsel and advertising agencies” who dominate the business of selling stuff over the air. Then he really turned it up.

Maybe he could see a Donald Trump in the nation’s future:

… this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But in terms of information, we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.

Murrow was pleading for television, and television news in particular, to be more that it had already become in the late 1950’s. He could envision enlightened corporate CEO’s investing in serious journalism that examined the nation’s many problems, and to those who claimed then - and now - that the great unwashed public wouldn’t watch or pay attention, Murrow said: What’s the alternative?

To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.

More and more it is clear that we have the wires and lights in a box.

Assaults on journalists are assaults on truth

The strongest, most consistent pages in Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook are his persistent lies about elections being stolen and his lie that journalists are dishonest. Those lies are the foundation on which Trumpism rests. (Well, of course, there is also Trump’s personal corruption, but as bad as that is it does not fundamentally threaten American democracy as the two big lies do.) 3

And what is happening at CBS is not happening in a vacuum. David Ellison wanted to buy CBS and Shari Redstone wanted to sell so the network in essence paid a bribe to Trump - a $16 million bribe - to grease the deal. The “settlement” was for a nonsense lawsuit “completely without merit” and, not by coincidence, it involved 60 Minutes.

Stephen Colbert called it “a big fat bribe.” CBS cancelled him.

Bari Weiss, never having worked in broadcast journalism, was hired, it’s now clear, to clean house at 60 Minutes in service to placating Trump.

And, of course, Trump essentially confirmed all this by attacking Scott Pelley, the 37-year veteran of CBS News, who was fired last week from his job at 60 Minutes along with the broadcast’s executive producer, two other correspondents and several others who have been with the storied program for years.

Trump called Pelley a member of the “stupid, crooked people that don’t care about your country.”

What a crock, but a necessary crock in the Trumpian strategy to delegitimize independent journalism.

As Pelley told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times:

You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment. You become a journalist because you love the country. And while all the other descriptions that the president used about me might be applicable, not that one. [Tears up] There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. That is why I am a journalist.

Pelley confirmed to Garcia-Navarro, as other fired CBS correspondents have, that Weiss tried to interfere with 60 Minutes reporting to soften or alter stories in ways favorable to the Trump regime.

“There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News,” Pelley told The Times.

None of them are perfect

Journalists are people with opinions, experiences, maybe some expertise, but few would claim to be above criticism or immune from error. Most of the journalists I’ve known, and there have been many, have the same motivation that Scott Pelley has.

They want to provide information to a distracted public, including information that is occasionally uncomfortable to otherwise very comfortable people. They make mistakes. They often stress the trivial or the unimportant. Some of them take themselves way too seriously. They also have kids and mortgages and except for a rare few pretty meager salaries.

Yet they are motivated to cover the school board and the state legislature and try to explain how things really work and why.

They also report on Watergate, the Moon landing, the excesses of the CIA, and the mistakes in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. They report on evil men like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. And they continue to expose Donald Trump’s corruption.

The best of them resist the kind of political pressure that a Bari Weiss has brought to CBS. The best of them try hard not to be Fox News. The best of them hope that if they are ever confronted with what the 60 Minutes staff has faced that they will behave like Pelley, reminding the rest of us what the craft of journalism is all about.

Our history will be what we make it

One final Ed Murrow passage:

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps in color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, AND PAY LATER.

I hope 60 Minutes survives in something like the form that has made it the most successful television news program in history. I doubt CBS News will survive what is happening to it, or that CBS writ large will ever completely recover from such avarice, corruption and incompetence.

Consider CBS a metaphor for the country.

The once “Tiffany Network” destroyed by greedy people for specious political reasons. And those indefensible actions encouraged and excused by a raging, aging demagogue who has the gall to label journalists crooked or lacking in patriotism.

Never has fearless, speak truth to power journalism been more important.

We should pause to honor the courage and decency of a Scott Pelley and his colleagues and embrace what they stand for, but then immediately recommit to rejecting the greedy, grubbing people who have forgotten, if ever they knew, what it is to act in the public interest rather than their own.

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It’s a metaphor for the current propaganda masters in charge of what was once the American government.

The Trump Administration is into erasure.

They have stripped the Justice Department website of information about the convicted insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capital on January 6, 2021. They are trying to make sure any record of this administration’s crimes and corruption doesn’t survive beyond January 2029. Grants to study history have been suspended. The East Wing is rubble with the explanation for why an absolute fable. The Fox News weekend host heading the U.S. military has essentially banned journalists from covering the Pentagon.

You may have wondered why there is so little first hand reporting on the American military “excursion” in the Persian Gulf. Unlike other American wars, say World War II, the Iraq War or Vietnam, when journalists were able to report from at, or near the frontlines, the Trump War is not be televised except when the propaganda masters make a grainy video available to Fox News or the president and his minions bloviate from the West Wing.

Trump’s wars will produce no Ernie Pyle or David Halberstam or Peter Arnett. There will be no independent reporting because authoritarian regimes don’t tolerate independence. The reportedly widespread damage to American military bases and equipment in the Middle East as a result of his undeclared war with Iran goes largely unreported because no American journalist is allowed to see what all Americans should see.

Except at the gas pump, or if you’re a farmer at the fertilizer supplier, the cost of the “excursion” is in no way documented. We have only the vaguest idea of what it is costing. A safe assumption is that it is costing several billion more than we’ve been told.

All this is just the way authoritarians like it.

But propaganda depends on more than just deleting someone from a photo or restricting access to information. To realize its full power the control of information requires a willful suspension of belief.

To believe propaganda in the midst of our current circumstances is to deny what can easily be seen with your own eyes. Just the way authoritarians like it.

And that brings me to the late senator from Texas, John Cornyn.

The predictable Texas massacre

Nearly everything important that can be said has been said about Cornyn’s miserable defeat in the Texas Republican primary this week, but I do want to underline - in the spirit of the title of this piece - how a decade (or more) of denial in the conservative movement found a four-term U.S. senator carry just two (2) of Texas’s 254 counties against an opponent credibly characterized as the most corrupt politican in the entire country. 1

Here’s the best thing I read about John Cornyn, from Texan Michael Wood:

I hope John Cornyn is remembered for what he is: an incompetent and cowardly senator who put himself before his country.

I texted a politico friend about Cornyn’s coming defeat, and the friend replied that, yes, Cornyn is a victim of the disease that has infected one of our country’s two major parties.

Victim? Oh no. John Cornyn is not and never was a victim. Actually, he has had more agency in our country’s existential fight against Trumpism than roughly 99.999% of Americans. In 2021 there were exactly 100 people who could have put this sad and sorry chapter of American history behind us for good, and in that moment John Cornyn hid behind Mitch McConnell’s skirt, who was himself hiding behind a completely contrived constitutional justification for letting Trump get away with an attempted coup—as if McConnell himself wasn’t the reason the Senate trial was delayed until after January 20.

Fifty-seven United States senators were able to do the right and obvious thing and voted to convict and bar that evil man from ever holding public office again, including seven Republican senators. John Cornyn, however, could not do what his oath of office required. I’m sure the senator was very lawyerly and eloquent in his explanation of why the man sitting in the seat of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln shouldn’t have been held responsible for the feces his mob spread all over the walls of our seat of government—but you know, and I know, and John Cornyn knows, that this little man didn’t want a primary challenge six freaking years later.

And yet again the world is shown the fruits of every Faustian bargain ever made: you sell your soul, and in the end you lose your soul without even getting the object of your desire.

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Denial is more than a river in Egypt

To do what John Cornyn did - ignore Donald Trump’s deceit, his vileness around January 6, recognize him as profoundly unfit for the office, and then pander for his endorsement six years later - requires a level of denial of reality (not to mention a character deficit wider than the Rio Grande) that most of us would reject from a friend or family member.

America’s conservative party has become the Party of Denial. Cornyn is just the latest to find that by even willingly denying reality you can end up embarrassed, disgraced, and soon well forgotten.

Cornyn’s party is in denial about Trump’s war of choice of Iran and how it has stunningly rewrote the geopolitical script in the Middle East and beyond. They keep repeating the fiction about the economy and inflation.

They ignore or deny virtually every one of Trump’s authoritarian moves from the silly and costly ones - a “ceremonial” arch, for example - to the profoundly damaging ones - gutting the USAID, a move that almost certainly has killed thousands in developing countries and worsened an Ebola outbreak. I could go on and on.

Nothing to see here is the motto

And, in fairness, it’s not just MAGA world or those, like John Cornyn, trying to out fox Mar a Lago Man who willingly play the denial card.

Former first lady Jill Biden said she was “frightened” by her husband Joe Biden’s 2024 debate performance and thought he was having a stroke.

“I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or since. Never,” Jill Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning’s Rita Braver in an interview airing Sunday on CBS.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “As I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke.’ And it scared me to death.”

Please.

It took about a New York second for Jill Biden’s comment to end up on the ash heap of political history:

A former senior Biden campaign advisor told Politico that Jill Biden’s recent comments on her husband’s 2024 debate performance are “revisionist history.”

Said the person: “She and a handful of other close advisors around President Biden kept gaslighting us, telling those of us on the campaign we were the ones who were wrong, and that he just had a ‘bad night.’ I think she saw the reputational harm this caused her and is therefore taking a new position.”

The less-than-celebrated Democratic autopsy prepared following the 2024 election is largely more denial. Here’s some of what PBS said of the report:

The report is far from comprehensive, and it avoids some of the most critical factors in the 2024 race.

For example, it doesn’t address President Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term at 81, despite widespread concerns about his age. Biden dropped out after a faltering debate performance, and Harris was quickly anointed to replace him at the top of the ticket.

The content of the autopsy was “incomplete” because some too smart by half folks had to excuse their own denial. Meanwhile the handling of the report by the national party amounts to political malpractice.

Let me try to get beyond the Democratic denial, and the reality involved in a basic question: why can’t the Biden’s, and the Clinton’s for that matter, just go away?

All denial aside, Democrats lost the White House in 2024 because:

• Many Democrats willingly suspended belief about Joe Biden’s advanced age and how has decline was playing with most Americans. (Republicans are embracing the same denial with 80-year old Donald Trump.)

• They ignored the southern border issues and inflation, handing those images to Trump to distort and amplify.

• When Biden, who said, we should remember, that he would only serve one term, finally withdrew after his awful debate performance, the party tried to rally behind Vice President Kamala Harris instead of finding some way to capture the nation’s attention with a real debate about who should lead the party.

• Harris, already saddled with Biden baggage, proved to be a minimally effective candidate who made numerous mistakes, including when asked if she would do anything different than Biden said, nope.

There is surely more to be said about the Democratic party denial, and like the conservative party, reality for Democrats begins with shedding denial of the reality looking you in the face.

Denial is not a political or any other kind of strategy. One can hope that through the murky haze of their own believing denial Democrats find their way out of the wilderness in November because Republicans aren’t going to even try.

Here’s Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic:

After losing in a blowout, Cornyn immediately pledged to support the ticket, including the opponent he had described as a fraud and a moral leper. Nobody expected anything else of him. The senator from Texas died, politically speaking, with his boots off.

Call me old fashioned, but I think the country - at least most of it - is tired of the unrelenting stream of bullshit from its president. People increasingly dismiss the Congress as a feckless institution populated by old men just waiting for their post-congressional lobby gig, while they trade stocks and avoid real issue. And the Supreme Court, oh, the Court, is viewed as an extension of the ruling party, not fair and impartial judges, but a political body dominated by a couple of angry old men hankering for a return to the 1930’s.

Khrushchev: a model?

Most Americans - particularly in the 21st Century - would not look to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Josef Stalin’s successor, for anything like inspiration, particularly when it comes rejecting denial and embracing reality.

But seventy years ago Khrushchev delivered a remarkable speech - four hours long - to his Communist Party comrades in Moscow. In that speech he denounced the brutal excesses of the Stalin Era and arguably changed history.

The speech was never to be published, but was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and reported by John Rettie in The Observer in 1956:

That was only three years after the death of Stalin, mourned by the great majority of Soviet citizens, who saw him as a divine father. So soon afterwards, here was their new leader telling them they had made a cataclysmic error: far from divine, Stalin was satanic. The leaders who inherited the party from the old dictator agreed that Khrushchev should make the speech only after months of furious argument - and subject to the compromise that it should never be published.

Its consequences, by no means fully foreseen by Khrushchev, shook the Soviet Union to the core, but even more so its communist allies, notably in central Europe. Forces were unleashed that eventually changed the course of history. But at the time, the impact on the delegates was more immediate. Soviet sources now say some were so convulsed as they listened that they suffered heart attacks; others committed suicide afterwards.

Such a reckoning will come to the United States.

The only questions are how long will it take and how much damage will be done as we wait? And how many heart attacks will there be?

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The paper is special in Idaho - and the country - for being fiercely independent and outspoken on its editorial positions, a not always comfortable position for a family-owned newspaper in a very conservative state.

I wrote the piece below for the Trib this week … thanks to those good folks and to all of you.

Let’s consider a hypothetical, a hypothetical that after this week may not be all that fanciful.

Let’s say it’s 2029.

Former Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly, a decorated Navy veteran, has been elected president of the United States. In a close 2028 election Kelly defeated former Vice President JD Vance. Vance had the endorsement of Florida billionaire Donald J. Trump but was also weighed down by the former president’s political baggage, including ethical and policy failures for which he was never held accountable. Now Trump is relaxing at Mar a Lago, enjoying as much as a man in decline, out of shape and 83-years old can, the billions he made while president.

It was quite a run for the Orange Man.

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Now a Democratic president has inherited his piece of this new Trump Era reality. As Richard Nixon infamously said, after he’d been forced from office by the Watergate scandal – “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

It can be quite a run for the next guy.

Let’s imagine a Democrat - or anyone else - doing this

Mark Kelly, who had been investigated by Trump’s Pentagon for reminding active duty military personnel that they have a duty to reject an illegal order and then was investigated a second time for allegedly improperly discussing the shrinking U.S. weapons supplies during Trump’s long war with Iran, decides it’s time for payback.

If Trump can do it, Kelly thinks, anyone can do it.

As president, Kelly sues his own Department of Defense (DOD) for $10 billion in damages for impugning his reputation just as Trump once sued the IRS, an agency under his control.

In fact, Kelly, like Trump, is actually suing himself. He’s in total control of how his case and his claim will be disposed of. Maybe, like Trump, Kelly strikes a deal with himself that hands over $1.8 billion from DOD – your tax dollars – that in turn will be doled out, without transparency, to Kelly’s friends, political supporters, even family members who feel they were also damaged by the allegations against the new president.

Trump supporters are outraged by this corruption. How can Kelly get away with this they shout on Fox News? Why can’t Kelly be stopped? Maybe Congress should be a check on such vile corruption, but Democrats control the Congress so why bother?

The new standard has been established. Anything goes.

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End of hypothetical

If Donald Trump’s corrupt “settlement” with the IRS stands over the release of his tax returns the barn doors are blown off political corruption in America. Literally nothing will be off the table. Democracy becomes kleptocracy, “a government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.”

Welcome to the new American political reality.

I know, believe me I know, how the MAGA Republican base love their greedy kleptocrat. He could stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue in New York City and shoot someone, as he has said, and they’d stand by their man.

Their kleptocrat can trade millions in stock in companies he owns and then in turn promotes, he can accept lavish gifts from foreign governments in defiance of the Constitution, he can destroy the East Wing of the White House and then demand that congressional Republicans spend a billion dollars – your money – to create a fantasy ballroom, he can pardon insurrectionists, some who reoffend after their pardons, he can even loot the Treasury of $1.8 billion because you folks who love him apparently love him more than you love decency, common sense or not being corrupt.

“It is hard to imagine that any previous president would have thought he could engage in such an audacious act of self-dealing,” said the New York Times.

“Sue the government he runs, then settle the lawsuit with himself by barring the Internal Revenue Service from auditing his past returns. And as part of that deal, hand over $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to his allies.

“President Trump has used the federal government to advance his own personal interests and those of his family and allies more expansively and openly than any past occupant of the White House. Any review of history would suggest that it is not even close.”

Yup. But we love the guy, but will we love this blatant corruption when a Democrat is in charge?

Oh, and ask Sen. Risch, if you ever see him in Idaho, how he feels about the guy who rampaged through his Senate office on January 6 getting some of your $1.8 billion? Was that guy “targeted” by the federal government and improperly prosecuted? Maybe his payoff from the Trump slush fund will help keep him whole until his next act of political violence.

And if you ever see Sen. Mike Crapo, the chair of the Finance Committee, you might ask him, since he has oversight of the Treasury and the IRS and could stop this if he cared to, how he feels about embracing White House corruption on a scale that has vastly beyond anything in the country’s history.

It was once true in American politics that the coverup of a scandal or a crime turned out to be worse that the ethical of legal transgression of a president – think Warren Harding and Teapot Dome, Nixon and Watergate or Bill Clinton and that blue dress. But with the current occupant there isn’t a coverup. The crimes, the trashing of Constitutional prohibitions, the corruption and self-dealing is all out in the open.

You only miss what is going on by not caring, by looking away and by retreating into hackneyed partisanship.

Hackneyed partisanship looks like this: He’s our guy so it’s just fine if he loots the Treasury, engages in insider trading and, by the estimate of Forbes, enriches himself by a cool $1.4 billion just since he took office in 2025.

Tolerating this, allowing it to happen, not caring because you only root for your team and not for democracy will embed this corruption – this kleptocracy – deeply in the American system. The next guy will feel empowered to steal his share from you.

You might comfort yourself by thinking it won’t happen, that this is a one off just because we’re dealing with rapacious real estate developer who will eventually go away to count his loot.

You can say with some confidence that a man with Mark Kelly’s character would never pull this off.

But what about the next guy, or the next?

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His voyage from principle to pander means Cassidy, an incumbent senator and chairman of a major committee, ends up in third place in a primary, soon out of office and, one hopes, haunted for the rest of his days by abandonment of his Constitutional oath, his professional beliefs and what once passed for his character.

Cassidy is toast because the only thing that matters to the modern conservative movement are the whims, grievances and authoritarian aspirations of our American nightmare.

Cassidy is now a footnote to that nightmare and a pretty good example of how conservatism became Trumpism and why one suspects there is never any going back for the craven, character deficient elite class of Republicans.

Let’s briefly recount the arc of Cassidy’s career. He was once what passed for a “moderate” in the Republican Party, a semi-wonkish physician - a gastroenterologist - who rose to chair the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Years ago Cassidy helped found a clinic that provided health care for uninsured patients. After hurricane Katrina he helped turn an abandoned KMart into an emergency medical center. Once a Democrat, Cassidy served in the state legislature, the U.S. House of Representatives and finally the Senate.

His great conservative transgression that turned Donald Trump into an enemy was Cassidy’s vote to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection, a vote that got Cassidy censured by the Louisiana Republican Party.

Then Cassidy, knowing he faced re-election this year, pivoted, or tried to, to regain the blessings of a Trump endorsement. Cassidy’s shameless vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary was surely, at least in Cassidy’s mind, the ticket to re-election. Instead it became the source of his debasement.

Cassidy was not a vaccine denier. Kennedy is. Kennedy had to get past Cassidy’s committee to win confirmation. Cassidy’s vote could have stopped the months of abject nonsense and lasting damage to American public health that Kennedy has caused.

A physician who believed in the vast utility of vaccines could have made a stand on principle and facts. Instead Cassidy put his re-election before the well being of his constituents and his country. It doesn’t get much more craven than that, but once again this is the story of the modern Republican Party that stands for nothing but a vehicle for Trump’s corruption, venality and self interest.

Long-time Louisiana political observer and historian Bob Mann wrote:

… Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.

To quote James Carville in the New York Times earlier this week, “Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the Devil, and he didn’t get anything for it.”

Except that’s not entirely true.

What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.

I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.

I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.

Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.

It might have been different

Imagine an alternative world in which Bill Cassidy had stopped RFK, Jr. and, in turn, became a national spokesman for science and common sense in health policy. Cassidy might have spent the last year engaging in a campaign for hearts and heads of the vast majority of the American people who reject the sledgehammer Kennedy has taken to decades of scientific advancement.

Cassidy was, after all, the chair of the critical committee in the Senate. He had the history and credentials to be effective in the face of such stupidity.

Cassidy almost surely would have lost re-election in Louisiana. The Cult of Trump is very strong. But he could have left the Senate with his long reputation for seriousness more or less intact, and his role in politics might have been remembered as a profile in courage.

Yet in the the alternative, to appropriate the language of The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin, Cassidy agreed to “subordinate himself to Trump.”

Meanwhile, the Cult of Trumpism rolls along with more and greater corruption every day, more trashing of everything from vaccine policy to the NATO alliance, more denial by congressional Republicans that this rot has no bottom.

Just today, as we momentarily remember another Republican senator who squandered his character for less than nothing, Donald Trump engineered a deal with himself to loot the federal treasury of nearly $2 billion of our dollars to create a slush fund to fluff his friends. It’s the kind of corruption that Vladimir Putin might blush at, but not the Republican Party.

I began this piece with a quote from the Corrupter-in-Chief, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

As usual, Trump was wrong. It’s all too real and it is happening, and guys like Bill Cassidy tolerated it, ignored it and ultimately tried to profit from it.

Cassidy got what all of them deserve.

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Instead of blatant pro-discrimination language conservative politicians needed to use code words to convey the message, or even better coded images that subtly but still unmistakably sent a racial message. 1

As the Mississippi Encyclopedia notes about one such memorable moment:

On 2 August 1980, with the presidential election heating up, [Ronald] Reagan arrived at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, (Mississippoi) where thirty thousand cheering people greeted him. His speech for the most part offered standard campaign rhetoric, but he generated a national political firestorm when he announced, “I believe in states’ rights.” Though Reagan had spoken those words for decades and had in fact used them in Mississippi two years earlier, they resonated differently in Neshoba County, where civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had been murdered during the Freedom Summer just sixteen years earlier. Since the Neshoba visit was the first campaign appearance after the Republican National Convention (though not the official launch of the campaign), the appearance at the fair continues to possess a contested place in Reagan historiography.

The dog whistles are coming from the White House and the Court

A lot of ink has been spilled around the question of whether the once-sainted Reagan was dog whistling to conservative white Southern voters who had voted in large numbers in 1976 for a fellow southerner, Georgian Jimmy Carter.

It’s easy to forget today that Carter won every state in the old Confederacy with the exception of Virginia in defeating Gerald Ford in 1976. That sentence is a measure of how much American politics has changed in the last 50 years.

There really is little doubt, I think, that Reagan was, rather deftly, playing the race card with his talk of “states’ rights.” The former California governor had opposed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and his political brain trust knew the newly christened Sunbelt represented his path to the White House.

As Rick Perlstein, the great historian of the evolution of the American conservative movement from Dwight Eisenhower to Reagan, has written about Reagan and his use of “states’ rights” at that Mississippi county fair in 1980:

These are the most reliable code words Southern demagogues could deploy to activate their audiences’ most feral rage against African American civil rights. Ronald Reagan, whose unshakable belief in his own purity of motivation was his defining trait, surely got to immediate work persuading himself that in uttering them, he was referring to all federal intrusion into local affairs, from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the Department of Ed - the same thing he always excoriated.

Reagan’s most recent biographer, and in my opinion the best and most evenhanded of many who have written about him, is Max Boot. In his outstanding book - Reagan: His Life and Legend - Boot says:

… ever since Reagan’s first campaign in 1966, he had repeatedly used code words such as “jungle paths” and “welfare queens” while constantly denouncing civil rights legislation. In 1980, Reagan added loaded new terms to his lexicon - not only “states’ rights” but also “The War Between the States,” the preferred term for the Civil War among partisans of the Lost Cause, which he used in the South. He told a reporter in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South.”

I recount this history to make a point that is too often overlooked in contemporary political reporting, and particularly in the reporting of the mad rush now underway to reapportion state legislative and congressional districts in a half dozen southern states. This opportunity, presented to conservative state legislatures thanks to extraordinarily partisan decisions by an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, highlights that race politics, or perhaps more correctly resentment politics centered on race, has been at the heart of American conservatism for generations.

In this context it perhaps shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the John Roberts Supreme Court, the most conservative Court since the 1930’s, has destroyed the Voting Rights Act and effectively declared open season on “majority minority” districts across the South.

This Court is following through on a long-term project to demolish what Reagan’s rhetoric, or Barry Goldwater’s or George H.W. Bush’s never could - remove civil and voting rights as an effective tool to battle discrimination. 2

From Reagan to Trump

Ronald Reagan was considerably more measured in deploying the coded language of race than the current occupant of the White House, but the target for the rhetoric of each man has always been the same - white, mostly rural, disaffected Americans who never have, and perhaps never will, accept that the United States is a multi-racial democracy.

Donald Trump and much of the modern Republican Party has junked the “dog whistle” for much more direct and blatant language.

Trump has repeatedly referred to Black members of Congress, including House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, as “low IQ individuals,” he’s labeled African nations “shit hole countries” and regularly attacks a Black female ABC New White House correspondent.

“Such a stupid question that you asked,” [Trump] said, addressing Scott directly. “We’re fixing up the reflecting pond to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and you say, ‘Why are you fixing anything up?’ Because you can understand dirt, maybe better than I can, but I don’t allow it.”

“This is one of the worst reporters,” he added, turning to a group of construction workers who had accompanied him. “She’s with ABC fake news, and she’s a horror show … a question like that is a disgrace to our country.”

As far as I can tell no so called mainstream media organization has written about Trump’s attacks on journalist Rachel Scott, but in Trump World we kid ourselves if we believe for a second the president isn’t focused on Scott’s race.

In fact, the White House wanted the exchange detailed above to be widely seen, highlighting it in a social media post.

As thuggish and bigoted as Trump’s language about race has always been, it has not been remotely repugnant enough to disqualify him among his most ardent fans. It’s impossible not to conclude that what is in the man’s heart is also in theirs.

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John Roberts mission

Which makes the disastrous bigotry of the conservative Supreme Court helmed by John Roberts all the more harmful to American democracy. Donald Trump, much as he might have liked to, could not destroy the Voting Rights Act. His Supreme Court has.

Even before the final dagger in the heart of the law that sought to bring Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities into the mainstream of American political life, Roberts had been on a decades-long crusade, whether he would ever admit it or not, to deny the essential truth of voting being at the very heart of a multi-racial America.

Here’s Pema Levy and Ari Berman earlier this year in Mother Jones:

Democracies are built on the right to vote and choose representatives. The United States finally recognized this right for all people with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But over the last five decades, Roberts has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that skirmish when Congress overwhelmingly voted to strengthen the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, helping craft a string of rulings kneecapping the law, starting with his 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision overruled Congress and freed states with histories of discrimination to change their voting rules, spurring the creation of 115 voter suppression laws in more than 30 states. Many were inspired by Trump’s election lies.

In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance—if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out—by writing in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In the decision, Roberts pinkie-swore that courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting,” but now the Supreme Court is on the verge of making that nearly impossible. After October’s oral arguments in a Louisiana redistricting case, observers expect Roberts and the GOP justices to declare that districts drawn to preserve representation for voters of color are either unconstitutional or subject to insurmountable barriers. It’s a decision that would turn the 14th and 15th Amendments—passed under Reconstruction to give formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal rights—on their heads, and turbocharge Trump’s gerrymandering push. Such redrawn maps could shift up to 19 seats to the GOP in 2026 and “really runs the threat of just creating permanent GOP control of Congress,” Doerfler warns.

All that was predicted - dismantling Black represented districts and wholesale partisan gerrymandering - before the Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais.

Now it has finally come to pass.

Chief Justice Roberts has cultivated a much more sophisticated, scholarly approach to white supremacy than a Strom Thurmond, a George Wallace or a Jesse Helms ever did but Roberts has been vastly more successful that those white supremacists. That much of the press continues to portray Roberts as a conventional conservative, as he famously said “calling balls and strikes” on the Court is not only incorrect, but hideously so.

Ask yourself who beyond Roberts has exercised more effective power in the decades-long conservative mission to destroy equality for minority voters?

Put it bluntly: Under the pernicious guise of protecting democratic institutions and granting deference to state legislatures, Roberts - along with five other ultra-conservative justices - has used his version of the Constitution to weaken American democracy. His Court has become nothing less than a blatantly partisan extension of the American ultra-right political movement.

Roberts’ legacy will be as shameful as that of Chief Justice Roger Taney before the Civil War, and certainly just as damaging to the ultimate moral and Constitutional necessity of empowering minority citizens in a multi-racial democracy. 3

The dizzying speed with which this Supreme Court inspired trashing of minority rights it is playing out is simply stunning.

Tennessee

In Tennessee the Republican legislature’s super majority last week wildly gerrymandered the majority Black city of Memphis, demolishing the only congressional district in the state represented by a Democrat. And all of this is happening just three months before a primary election.

As the New York Times reported:

Democrats, noting that about two-thirds of Memphis voters are Black, said it was a blatant attack on hard-won gains for fair representation in a state shaped by slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement.

“Perhaps the legislature should explain why Memphis should continue to be part of the state of Tennessee,” said State Representative Antonio Parkinson, a Memphis Democrat. He suggested that the city should break away from the state.

“You’re constantly beating on us,” he said. “Allow us out.”

Louisiana

Much the same in Louisiana as my friend Bob Mann wrote on Substack:

So here we are again, watching another round of racial gerrymandering dressed up in the usual Louisiana political costume jewelry: “election integrity,” “traditional districts,” “communities of interest,” and whatever other phrases they workshop between campaign checks from petrochemical executives and private prison lobbyists.

The whole thing would almost be funny if it weren’t so grotesque.

Then, Republican state Sen. Jay Morris of West Monroe decided Louisiana politics needed a little extra seasoning from the Jim Crow pantry.

At a legislative hearing on redistricting, Morris turned toward the audience and snapped at the Black executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party: “Shut up, boy.”

Boy.

Not “sir.” Not “please be quiet.” Not even the standard legislative “the gentleman is out of order.”

Just “boy.”

In Louisiana. At the state Capitol. To a Black man. In 2026.

Louisiana Republicans are, as Bob wrote, now the party of “shut up, boy.”

Alabama

And Brian Lyman wrote in The Alabama Reflector:

It’s spring in Alabama. But it’s winter for democracy.

And we are left facing some cold truths. We do not live under the clear dictates of the U.S. Constitution. The only laws are the vindictive whims of the U.S. Supreme Court.

We thought we were rebuilding, however haltingly and imperfectly, the multiracial regime lost after Reconstruction. But Alabama is still Alabama. And self-serving, self-justifying power is the state’s only civic virtue.

Reconstruction Ends Again

The First Reconstruction ended in 1877, when thanks to a corrupt bargain, national Republicans got the White House in exchange for withdrawing the last federal troops remaining in the South after the Civil War.

White Southerns, mostly Democrats after the Civil War, pledged to President Rutherford B. Hayes that they would respect Black voting and civil rights, but that didn’t happen.

As the Miller Center says:

… white southerners quickly turned their backs on their pledges, systematically disenfranchising black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation. Democrats in the South created a segregated society that used terror and violence to oppress African Americans.

The era of Jim Crow was ushered in and remained the mostly uncontested law of most of the land for nearly a century, flourishing alongside the Klan, segregation and rejection of a multi-racial America.

The Second Reconstruction came with the protests of the 1950’s and 1960’s that helped produce the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965.

People died fighting for the simple right to vote.

The foundation of that Second Reconstruction was shattered with the Roberts Court’s Shelby County decision in 2013, and the foundation gave away entirely with the Callais decision on April 29, 2026.

We should remember that the Supreme Court once unanimously ended racial segregation in public schools and the Justice Department once sent government officials to the South to register Black voters and often went to Court to defend the right to vote.

Today, dominated by ultra-conservatives determined to erase American history, the highest court in the land and the Justice Department - created by Republican Ulysses S. Grant in the midst of the First Reconstruction - have switched sides.

Truly “the only laws are the vindictive whims of the U.S. Supreme Court,” and what passes for fairness comes from a feckless Justice Department that takes its orders from a doddering bigot intent on retribution against his “enemies.”

Defending a multi-racial democracy

We are very much back to a pre-civil rights moment, with White southerners disenfranchising Black voters primarily, despite what they say, because they crave political power more than they value a representative, multi-racial democracy.

We come full circle.

Those white legislators in Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama and elsewhere profess lofty motives in defense of their privileged majority. They would (almost) never betray, publicly at least, the old racial stereotypes like calling a Black adult male a “boy.” They might mumble “states’ rights” to a partisan crowd, but would take great exception to being called a bigot or a racist, even as they warmly embrace the most openly racist president since Woodrow Wilson. 4

This is a long, long story, and we are living in the most recent chapter.

In many ways race and politics and resistance is the essential story of the United States.

I’ll leave you with this.

“Race played a role in every election,” Stu Stevens, one of Ronald Reagan’s most insightful and acerbic aides once said. When Reagan said, “states’ rights” that told the guy in Mississippi or Alabama that we can take care of the n_____.”

As Max Boot writes in his Reagan biography, Reagan, the candidate, had been warned, by among others, his pollster that using the coded language of “states’ rights” would be problematic, especially in a state still raw from civil rights protests and murders.

The language might not register well with suburban white voters, Reagan was told, “but Reagan did not care. This was the dark side of his pragmatism: He was willing to tap into dangerous and disreputable prejudices to win the presidency while insisting to everyone, even himself, that his intentions were pure.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

As a country, directed from the marble halls of the Supreme Court and shaped by generations of conservative political actors tapping into dangerous and disreputable prejudices, we have taken another profoundly backward step.

Now we will see wholesale partisan and racial gerrymandering, denial of minority representation, and at every level of our politics the hate filled language of bigotry and resentment.

Some will argue “this is not who we are,” but it is what we have allowed to happen.

Reconstruction has ended again. What kind of country comes next?

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Six hundred peaceful marchers, most of them Black Americans, were marching that Sunday from Selma to Montgomery demanding voting rights. As the marchers began to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge spanning the Alabama River on the outskirts of Selma they were attacked by 160 Alabama state troopers and sheriff’s deputies, some on horseback others wielding night sticks or whips while wearing gas masks.

Many of the marchers were knocked to the ground or forced to sprint away or face real harm. Some, like young John Lewis, then the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and later a congressman from Georgia, were not able to get away and were savagely beaten. His injuries required Lewis to be hospitalized.

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Bloody Sunday and Congressional action

As I wrote in my study of Senate leadership in the 1960’s:

“Nothing, not the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, not the ambush murder of Medgar Evers, not the Birmingham police commissioner turning fire hoses on protesters, not even a church bombing that killed four young African American girls galvanized the country like ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma.”

Millions of American saw the shocking images from Selma on television in their living rooms and that brought alive the human stakes – and risks – in the struggle for voting rights.

Bloody Sunday in Selma was front page news almost everywhere. The Billings Gazette played the story on page one, below the fold, and with a stark headline: “Clubs, Whips, Gas Rout ‘March for Freedom.’”

The Montana Standard in Butte led with the story and spread a graphic photo on its page one, a picture of a helmeted Alabama state trooper ordering “a prostrate woman to her feet” after troopers broke up the march. The photo caption noted that the woman appeared to be unconscious and was eventually carried away by two fellow marchers.

The news played a bit differently in the American south. The voting rights marchers in Selma were a “problem” made worse by “outside agitators.”

Alabama, it was said, could handle it’s own problems.

It’s doubtful Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a Montana Democrat, saw that ABC News report from Selma.

Mansfield’s idea of a pleasant Sunday night was to enjoy a quiet dinner with his wife, Maureen, and read a book. His tastes ran to murder mysteries and historical fiction. But the violent events in Selma outraged the former Butte copper miner and University of Montana professor.

By Wednesday, as Mansfield told reporters in Washington, D.C., three days after Bloody Sunday he was working on his own voting rights legislation, apparently in part because he was concerned that President Lyndon Johnson might not act quickly enough in the wake of the outrages in Selma, directed toward Americans simply demanding the right to vote.

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With Bloody Sunday in Selma as a powerful and disturbing catalyst, over the next several weeks Mansfield, as he had a year earlier, worked in total cooperation and with absolute candor with Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, to pass the historic Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. It wasn’t easy.

Southern segregationists and white supremacists in Mansfield’s own party vigorously opposed the legislation that would encourage voter registration and end literacy tests. Some Republicans argued that the legislation amounted to federal overreach and violated a state’s ability to manage its own elections. But those criticisms were the barely disguised desire of white southerners to continue historic “state’s rights” efforts to make minority voting difficult or even impossible. Additionally Mansfield and Dirksen, as they had with the Civil Rights Act in 1964, needed to overcome a 24 day Senate filibuster, and they did.

Years later Mansfield said he considered the Voting Rights Act the most significant legislation passed during his 24-year Senate career.

Section 2 of the Act prohibited discriminatory practices, including state level redistricting efforts that historically tended to dilute minority voting and deprived Black and Latino voters from electing Black and Latino candidates. Another section of the law instituted a “pre-clearance” test that allowed the Justice Department to evaluate changes in voting or registration practices in areas with a historic record of preventing or suppressing minority voting.

And then came the Roberts Court

Last week the six decade legacy of Mike Mansfield, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, the Freedom Riders and the many martyrs who fought and even died for voting rights was demolished by an ultra-conservative Supreme Court.

The Court, blinkered by a generation long disgust for federal legislation addressing the right to vote, has blithely forgotten the long, twilight struggle to bring American minority voters into the mainstream of American politics.

The conservative, Republican appointed majority on the court was careful, apparently for the sake of appearances, to not seem to directly overturn the Voting Rights Act, but there is little doubt that by continuing, over more than decade, a long series of decisions that have gutted the law, the nation’s politics has been radically altered.

The hugely partisan and historically ignorant decision last week was the latest and finally fatal blow that will almost certainly eliminate many Black majority districts and further stoke a hyper partisan death struggle over gerrymandering.

Some commentators have declared the Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais the worst high court decision since the Dred Scott ruling prior to the Civil War, and on par with the much lamented late 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision declaring that racial segregation – separate but equal – for Blacks and Whites in America was permissible. 1

“The VRA has not been dealt a ‘blow,’ wrote Atlantic editor Vann R. Newkirk II:

“the decision did not merely defang it. The law is dead, and no matter what happens in the coming elections, politics in America has been forever changed. For most of the nation’s history, the former Confederate states have worked hard to minimize the political influence of Black residents in particular. Now they have full cover to do so again.”

The ink was barely dry on the 6-3 decision before Republicans in Louisiana, Alabama and Tennessee signaled immediate efforts to redraw congressional boundaries, in most cases to eliminate “majority-minority” districts represented by Blacks.

In Mississippi conservatives are celebrating the decision as a way to redistrict the state’s only Black congressman, Bennie Thompson, out of the seat he has held for years. Thompson represents a district centered on the state capital, Jackson, that is predominately Black, but the state legislature can now freely dilute that minority strength. Mississippi’s Black population is 38% of the state – the largest percentage in the country – but the decision could well mean that minority voters in Mississippi will no longer be able to elect a Black candidate. 2

As the New York Times reported:

“Critics of the decision expect that any reconfiguration will not only endanger Black incumbents, some of whom have held office for decades, but also threaten a rising generation of Black Democrats in the South, who already have few avenues for ascending in politics.”

Some expect the Court’s effective nullification of the 1965 law will trickle down to local offices at the city, county and state legislative level, crimping off what has been a steadily expanding pipeline of minority political talent.

“This case has the potential to essentially stop Black political representation from advancing in the way that we know it,” Emmitt Y. Riley III, a political science professor at Sewanee, the University of the South, told the Times.

Law professor Joshua A. Douglas wrote in The Washington Monthly that the Court majority in the recent Louisiana case:

“pretends that race no longer matters in American politics and offers extreme deference to state legislatures, whom we should trust less, not more, to craft fair rules for all voters. The combination makes it virtually impossible for litigants to turn to the federal courts when states enact laws that exclude some people from the democratic process.”

Montana’s Mansfield, who did as much as anyone to bring about the Voting Rights Act, was never one to claim credit for the remarkable and often enduring legislation he helped pass. In fact, he often downplayed the impact of civil and voting rights legislation on his Montana constituents – the state’s Black citizens in the 1960’s were never more than 1% of the population – even as many Montanans wrote him making the same arguments against voting rights legislation as those made by southern segregationists.

But Mansfield believed unequivocally in equality, and he held two steadfast beliefs: faith in the Constitution, as well as the importance of the Senate under the Constitution in confronting the biggest issues facing the nation, and a conviction that the only sure way to bring about lasting positive change in American society was through the tireless work of bipartisan agreement that, while not always perfect, moved the nation steadily toward a more perfect Union.

For most of the 61 years since Mansfield helped engineer passage of the Voting Rights Act – the legislation passed the Senate 77-19 with a higher percentage of Republicans voting yes than Democrats – it was the fixed consensus of courts, politicians and most voters that the VRA was the single most important political step since the Civil War to ensure equality for all citizens in a multi-racial society.

The Supreme Court has now finished the destruction of that once settled reality.

As Lyndon Johnson, a Texan who began his political career as a segregationist and is remembered today as a great champion of civil and voting rights, said in signing the Voting Rights Act:

“It is difficult to fight for freedom. But I also know how difficult it can be to bend long years of habit and custom to grant it. There is no room for injustice anywhere in the American mansion. But there is always room for understanding toward those who see the old ways crumbling. And to them today I say simply this: It must come. It is right that it should come. And when it has, you will find that a burden has been lifted from your shoulders, too.”

Unfortunately, the Mansfield dream of equality and political opportunity for all Americans has now been erased from this good and quiet man’s enormous legacy as the longest serving majority leader in Senate history.

While it is dangerous to offer judgments about what historical figures would make of our contemporary world it can, I believe, safely be said that Mike Mansfield would be appalled that the United States Supreme Court has ignored both troubled history and a continuing political reality that has time and again diminished or even sought to erase the rights of minorities.

It will take a new birth of freedom and a new commitment to voting rights for all Americans to undo this historically noxious decision, and a new Mike Mansfield – should we be fortunate to have such a person – will have to lead the way – again.

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The Hungarian authoritarian, Viktor Orbán, got dumped by angry voters tired of his corruption and their country’s sputtering economy.

It has been and remains a mystery to me why any American political leader would embrace this guy. That many have is a testament to how far out in deep right field large portions of the modern Republican Party has gone.

Case in point.

Back when he was still a Fox News talking head, Tucker Carlson embraced Orbán, even producing a documentary about him 2021.

This was before Trump 2.0, of course, but here is what The Guardian wrote at the time:

Robert P Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, said: “It’s right on brand in many ways for the kind of things that we saw in the Trump administration. This week Tucker Carlson explicitly referred to ‘the danger of Christian culture being blotted out’ both in Europe and the US.

“It is really is an ethnic religious nationalism that we’re seeing here. The enemies are people who have darker skin and are not Christian. You see a lot of anti-Islamic sentiment there and a lot of closing of borders. Tucker Carlson picked up talking points right out of the KKK [Ku Klux Klan] handbook talking about white replacement.”

Orbán’s style of leadership also echoes Trump’s “I alone can fix it” demagoguery. His government and its allies have taken control of roughly 90% of media outlets, he has undermined the independence of the judiciary and he is tightening his influence over the electoral system. Last month Hungary’s parliament passed a law banning gay people from featuring in school educational materials or TV shows for under-18s.

This is what American conservatism has become, or hopes to become.

Here’s Italian historian Steven Forti, a student of the strong men of the European far right, in an interview with Le Monde:

The main tenets of Orban's doctrine – rejection of immigration and minority rights, sovereignism – are well known and not particularly original in the history of the far right. What stands out more is Orban's practice of "mimicking democracy": formally respecting democracy and the rule of law (including the principle of elections, from which he has now emerged defeated), while simultaneously undermining institutions from within – undermining parliament, controlling the press, changing the constitution. After Vladimir Putin, Orban was the first leader within the European Union to break out of the classic dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism.

Some break out. And so very familiar.

Now comes an out of touch, intellectually challenged congressional back bencher from Idaho who, despite the repudiation of Orbán at the polls, was praising him in the days after his recent defeat.

I mean, come on, when you’re in a hole …

Not the sharpest pencil in the box

On April 22, just ten days after Viktor Orbán, the corrupt, authoritarian leader of Hungary, was ushered out of office in a historic landslide – Orbán ruled the country for 16 years and systematically disbanded its democracy – Idaho’s First District Congressman Russ Fulcher said something that was truly vile and wildly, stunningly inaccurate.

While the entire sane world, and the vast majority of Hungarians, were celebrating Orbán’s smashing defeat at the polls, Fulcher was offering lavish praise.

The historian Anne Applebaum who has frequently written about Hungary and Orbán told National Public Radio that Orbán’s ouster was a product of a grassroots uprising against his corruption and his thuggish dismantling of a once thriving democracy.

“I think it was accumulated experience. I mean, look, this is a very corrupt system. The corruption was beginning to affect people’s lives - a deterioration of health care, of education, very high inflation. And I think that was coupled also with the revelations that happened at the end of the campaign, of Orbán talking to Vladimir Putin, of his foreign minister talking to the Russian foreign minister and appearing to collude with them against the European Union.

“You know, Hungarians still have a fresh memory of being occupied by the Soviet Union, and for a lot of people, even younger people, this was too much and people started chanting at his - both at Orbán’s rallies and at opposition rallies, Russians go home. And I think that was really the nail in the coffin.”

Kenneth Ross, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote:

“One consequence of Orbán’s stifling of dissent was that he lived in a classic autocratic echo chamber. He heard what he allowed to be said. But leaders who trust their gut as a source of brilliance make big mistakes. Among Orbán’s was his corruption – the lavish estates of his family members while ordinary Hungarians scraped by, his use of government funds to pay off cronies rather than provide services that Hungarians need. Despite his promotion of family values, his associates pardoned the deputy director of a children’s home who had been convicted of covering up child sexual abuse. His close cooperation with the Russian government backfired.”

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Orban’s opponent, now the Hungarian prime minister, Péter Magyar, highlighted all these abuses and won a super majority in the parliament.

Yet, somewhere in the muddled, blinkered mind of the Idaho back bencher, Russ Fulcher, Hungary under Orbán was some kind of bulwark against, what, fair elections, free speech, anti-corruption?

“Hungary became the tip of the spear in the fight against globalism under Viktor Orbán, and an invaluable ally to the United States,” Fulcher wrote on his Facebook page.

A valuable ally? Orban personally blocked European Union support for Ukraine’s existential fight against Russian aggression and broadly alienated staunch American allies. If Orban were any friend of any American it would have been Putin’s pal Donald Trump.

But Fulcher had more to say:

“Recently, I had the honor to meet with Hungary’s leadership and discuss Orbán’s successful pillars of Peace, Sovereignty, Freedom, and Security. It’s my hope that their new leadership will see the value in maintaining these principles.”

Semi-loyal American politicos

In their book Tyranny of the Minority, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt portray Viktor Orbán as the modern world’s most successful autocrat who used the trappings of constitutional government to undermine democracy.

Orbán, they write, changed how judges were appointed in Hungary in order to pack the judiciary with his supporters, effectively dismantling an independent judicial system. Under Orbán, Hungary’s public media was “restructured” to eliminate coverage of the ruling party’s opponents in favor of “nakedly partisan” disinformation. Thousands of journalists lost jobs, while private media outlets were harassed and fined. Institutions of higher education were punished for any program that failed to toe the party line and Orban used his power to pervert the electoral process, ensuring that his party would stay in office until Hungarian voters recently said they had enough.

Here’s Fulcher’s take on the near unanimous verdict of America’s allies that Hungary under Viktor Orbán was an illiberal, autocratic, near dictatorship:

“In Congress, I will continue to support a strong, enduring U.S.-Hungary relationship that perpetuates freedom of speech and sovereignty of nations. This partnership is more pertinent now than ever given unfolding events around the world and America’s relationship with its traditional allies.”

Well, Fulcher did get something right.

America’s traditional allies were appalled by Viktor Orbán and said so loudly and clearly. France, the UK, Germany, Canada and the sane western world rejoiced in his defeat. The United States under Donald Trump is the outlier.

Where did Fulcher, never having impressed his constituents or his colleagues with a grasp of much of anything beyond ultra rightwing talking points, get these insane ideas? Why would an American congressman behave so bizarrely, embracing, days after he was overwhelmingly ushered out by his own voters, a man widely reviled as a friend of Putin and an enemy of democracy?

Fulcher is clearly taking cues from the fringes of MAGA world (and Tucker Carlson) and the American vice president.

The White House patron saint of lost causes, JD Vance, flew to Hungary to campaign for Orbán even as many observers were predicting Orbán’s ouster. That act, in and of itself hugely inappropriate interference in another nation’s election, is evidence of how anti-democratic Fulcher and the movement he embraces have become.

In this context it must be remembered that Fulcher, displaying historic rejection of democracy’s fundamentals, refused to certify the 2020 election of Joe Biden, on the same day an armed mob attacked the U.S. Capital.

Levitsky and Ziblatt, among others, term such behavior as being “semi-loyal” to democracy. Fulcher and others in this clan claim to support democracy while “turning a blind eye to violence or antidemocratic extremism.”

“Indeed, throughout history, cooperation between authoritarians and seemingly respectable semi-loyal democrats has been a recipe for democratic breakdown.” And here we are.

Idaho’s First District has often been represented by ultra radical rightwing provocateurs. Helen Chenoweth, who served incoherently in the late 1990’s, was MAGA before it existed. While Bill Sali, who occupied the seat (for a single term from 2007 to 2009), was described by the late Idaho political scientist Jim Weatherby as an inept “right wing wacko.” Jim was being kind.

Fulcher’s in the same class, but arguably worse. At a time when American democracy is facing huge assault from authoritarian forces around the world, and from the White House, Idaho has sent a dangerous “semi-loyal” fraud in Congress.

Fulcher’s praise for Viktor Orbán should be his final straw.

If Facebook had existed in 1934 would these jokers have been posting praise of Benito Mussolini? Leave your answer in the comments.

Still at some point in the not too distant future you hope these authoritarian adjacent Republicans - the Mike Lee’s, the Russ Fulcher’s, the Tucker Carlson’s - finally get their comeuppance, just like Viktor Orbán got his.

The world will be better for it.

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Side note: I think the King did a fine job of speaking to the real stakes for freedom, free speech, fair elections, etc., that so many of our fellow countrymen (women) can’t or won’t confront, but I also think it would have been far better for His Majesty to call the whole thing off.

At this terribly fraught moment what a powerful antidote to Trumpish it would have been to see British prime minister Keir Starmer - he makes the call, after all - to just cancel the King’s visit.

The limpet that is the British PM might have cited a half dozen reasons for Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’s brother to stay away: the safety of the British monarch in gun happy America, the senseless war against Iran, the threat presented by the United States to NATO, the wholesale abandonment of Ukraine, and not wanting to have dinner with a convicted felon.

You get the drift.

Starmer doesn’t know, as many politicians, business leaders, and journalists on this side of the Atlantic also don’t know that confronting Trump’s dictatorial ways is always the best course.

You can’t placate him. You can’t make a deal with him because he’s a lying con man. You cave to him and you get what you deserve. Just ask those big law firms that paid Trump tribute or the media companies that caved to his demands.

What did they get? Not an invite to the State Dinner; only diminishment and embarrassment.

Still, the King came and wowed the Congress which will by now have forgotten all the good things he said. Then Charles made off to the White House to offer jokes about a Trump demolished East Wing of the White House, a level of destruction even the British Army didn’t accomplish in 1814.

We live in such a crazy, uncomprehending world that it can be difficult to fully grasp the perversity of how far a once strong American democracy has fallen.

Which takes me back to that dinner list.

Oligarchs have dinner with kings

There were, of course, billionaire “friends” of Trump a plenty, as Forbes noted:

Marc Andreessen: Trump donor and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, worth an estimated $1.9 billion.

Jeff Bezos: Trump critic-turned-friend and Amazon founder, worth an estimated $268.4 billion.

Tim Cook: Another former Trump foe who has developed a relationship with the president during his second term, the Apple CEO, who recently announced he will step down in September, is worth an estimated $2.8 billion.

Pepe Fanjul: Longtime Trump friend and key donor, the Palm Beach sugar magnate and his family control a real estate and sugar empire we estimate to be worth more than $4 billion.

Jensen Huang: The Nvidia CEO, a key influencer of White House artificial intelligence policy, is worth an estimated $181.9 billion.

Robert Kraft: New England Patriots owner and longtime Trump friend, worth an estimated $13.8 billion.

Howard Lutnick: Commerce Secretary and former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO, worth an estimated $7.4 billion.

John Paulson: Trump megadonor and hedge fund manager, worth an estimated $4 billion.

Isaac Perlmuttter: Longtime Trump friend and major donor, the former Marvel head is worth an estimated $5.2 billion.

Steve Schwarzman: Blackstone CEO and Trump donor, worth an estimated $39.9 billion.

In Russia you might call this gang of rich white guys oligarchs - extraordinarily, eye watering rich guys who have pledged personal fealty to the corrupt ruling power in order to maintain their money and privilege. These guys happily sell out friends and country because their money and influence rests not on any real principal or belief.

It’s all about the money and apparently the proximity to power, even if it is personally corrupting to be close to such blatant corruption.

As the writer Michael Tomasky - he’s the editor of The New Republic - says “oligarchy does have an economic element to it; in fact, it is explicitly economic. Oligarchy is the rule of the few, and these few have been understood since Aristotle's time to be men of wealth, property, nobility, what have you.”

So, of course, these billionaires, each having made an economic pact with Trump, were at dinner with a king, well, one king and one who would be a king.

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Congressional toadies

The usual suspects from Congress were in attendance: Speaker Mike Johnson, who usually feigns ignorance about any Trump insult, death threat or undeclared war, but in this case apparently read his invite and showed up. As did Senate majority leader John Thune and his second in command John Barrasso.

Idaho’s James Risch, not exactly in oligarch territory but still among the richest men in the Senate, attended. Risch chairs the Foreign Relations Committee but you would hardly know it since he’s refused to use that platform to explore why and to what end the country is at war with Iran. As Risch, who served a short stint as a governor before going to the Senate, once infamously noted, being a governor is real work, while being in the Senate was essentially a piece of cake. He had his piece last Saturday night.

The real fake news

Donald Trump likes to talk about “the fake news,” so he had them out in force to check out the King and Queen. Fox News was very well represented with hosts Bret Baier, Maria Bartiromo, Ainsley Earhardt, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingraham and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott all in attendance.

Trump’s favorite newspaper, the New York Post, was represented by editor-in-chief Keith Poole.

And Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy was there. The New York Times called Ruddy Trump’s most reliable supporter in the far right media ecosystem. “In this day and age, people want something that tends to affirm their views and opinions,” Ruddy said in 2020 and he broadcast lies about the 2020 election being stolen.

Then Times media writer Ben Smith said this of Ruddy:

Nobody I’ve ever covered treats an audience with the blithe disdain of Mr. Ruddy. He has them watching a great story — a thriller, a whodunit — about a stolen election. He thinks they’re stupid enough to fall for it, dumb enough to keep watching even after the fantasy inevitably dissolves, buying the supplements and the books and, crucially, tuning in to channel 1115 in large enough numbers that, eventually, the cable companies will pay him.

Ruddy was a perfect guest for that dinner last weekend. And, yes, millions of Americans have fallen for it and they keep falling.

The Republican Supreme Court goes to dinner

There were no Democrats at the dinner with King Charles, a fact that most accounts of the dinner gave little attention, but which as such things go was widely inappropriate and entirely without precedent.

No “main stream media” figures were invited. No figures from music or culture. Northern Ireland golfer Rory McElroy might have been the only person at this dinner most of us would have enjoyed talking with.

And the six GOP appointees to the Supreme Court were there, but not the three Democratic appointees.

In normal times, with a bipartisan guest list and with a celebration of U.S. - British friendship on the menu, having members of the Court in attendance would be totally normal. But this was not normal.

The American far right’s decades long strategy to create a partisan court has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Trump considers the six conservative judges as extension of his authoritarian takeover of American democracy.

Here’s Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, a student of the Supreme Court:

“The problem here is the symbolism, that these six justices — and only these six — were there. It does nothing to disabuse the appearance that the court is playing partisan political favorites, an impression this court should be invested in avoiding.”

The Saturday dinner only confirmed what every reasonably informed, democracy loving American has long known. Creating partisan courts that provide near total immunity to a president or use a secret “shadow docket” to decide cases benefiting the administration without offering discussion or hearings is classic antidemocratic tactic.

Then on Monday the Supreme Court, right on cue, effectively killed the last important part of the Voting Rights Act virtually assuring a future dramatic decline in Americans of color serving in Congress.

The Court majority’s companion sanction of wholesale gerrymandering, particularly disenfranchising Black and Latino communities, is a truly egregious backsliding of voting rights.

But such a move has long been a fever dream of the antidemocratic American far right. Now, along with overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting many environmental protections and vastly expanding presidential power, that dream has come true.

Imagine being Chief Justice John Roberts or Samuel Alito, the author of Monday’s opinion, sitting in the gilded White House among the billionaires, the right wing media media hacks, and the Congressional bootlickers.

They must have felt as though they had finally arrived.

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Cheers. Onward.

A very good day to remember the late Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator who was its inspiration.

Gaylord Nelson deserves being remembered for a host of reasons, but bringing environmental activism to “the mainstream of American life and politics,” as his biographer Bill Christofferson has written, is as a good a reason as any.

As the current president does everything possible to dismantle environmental protections, gutting the Forest Service, embracing the sell off of public lands, trashing green energy, installing industry shills at EPA and the Interior and Energy Departments and remains chronically ignorant of America’s conservation ethic, the man from Clear Lake, Wisconsin would likely be marching in the streets to oppose it all.

Saving the Earth - always an uphill fight

There may be some comfort - cold as it is - to remember, as my old boss Idaho governor and Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus liked to say, “not all the dinosaurs are in the tar pits.”

In other words, the charter members of the flat earth society, the climate deniers, the “rape, ruin and run” crowd have always been with us.

Those who believe the only good tree is one on the back of a logging truck or that no pristine mountain is worth more than an open pit mine have their place in our history, but so do those who stood up and said - STOP.

Gaylord Nelson was among the first modern American politicians - with apologies to Teddy Roosevelt - to effectively harness public interest and concern about the environment, and years before the first Earth Day he begin to push back against the mindless exploiters and the greedy despoilers.

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That one-time Oregon politician is long gone and long forgotten, but the sentiments he expressed are, sadly, still very much with us.

This makes Nelson’s legacy arguably more important on this Earth Day than on the first Earth Day in 1970. As Nelson once said:

Is there anything more vital in the long view of history than the proper protection and conservation of our fresh water lakes, rivers, and streams, our wilderness, the soils and the forests, the air we breathe, the bugs and birds and animals and the habitat in which they live? I think not.

Gaylord Nelson served in the Senate when that body was inhabited by serious people in both political parties. Nelson’s smarts, personal integrity, common sense and deep commitment to real American ideals made him widely respected across the political spectrum.

He opposed the Vietnam War before it was politically safe to do so, he championed protections for some of America’s greatest places - the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin, among others. He recognized the dangers of DDT and the necessity of consumer protection. He championed the Wilderness Act when it passed in 1964.

When, in 1999, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked a panel of historians to identify the most significant figures in Wisconsin during the 20th Century, Nelson ranked high behind only Fighting Bob La Follette, the conservationist Aldo Leopold and the iconic architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Nelson lost re-election in 1980, a victim of the Reagan landslide that year when a 38-year old hard right wing Republican lightweight, Robert Kasten, out campaigned him and won, in part, on the strength of Reagan’s long political coattails.

True to character Nelson used the lame duck session of Congress after his 1980 defeat to pass more conservation legislation for Wisconsin and the nation.

If you took a moment today to reflect on the wonders of nature, the value of clean air and water, the importance of preserving wild places, you were honoring the legacy of Gaylord Nelson.

The current crowd trying hard to undo such a legacy will not, I believe, succeed. They misjudge the American people.

Nelson’s kind of decency may have been momentarily eclipsed by the nastiness and bitterness of our politics, but we are remembering him today, and not those who opposed what he stood for.

Here’s to Gaylord Nelson: Champion of the environment, father of Earth Day, a great American.

Thanks for following along. If you find value in these essays please share with friends or anyone who might be interested. All the best.

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About me: I am a Nebraska native, grew up in South Dakota and migrated in Idaho after college to work in broadcast journalism. In 1986, I joined the “comeback” campaign of a legendary Idaho political figure – Cecil D. Andrus – who eventually served four terms as governor and four years as Secretary of the Interior, not bad for a Democrat in a very conservative state. I had a small role in helping Cece Andrus win his last two gubernatorial terms. I did communication and crisis consulting work, and since “retiring” to the beautiful north coast of Oregon have written three books on U.S. Senate history. I’m working on a new book on another legend – this one a legend in journalism.

You can find my books here:

I write this Substack to scratch my itch to connect history with current politics. I hope, in some small way, to contribute to understanding of this perilous moment for our democracy, for free speech and facts.

I mean we have the FBI director, the president’s son-in-law, Pete Kegseth, the big beautiful ballroom, dismissal of charges against the punks that actually had a plan to overturn the 2020 election, etc. etc.

As historian Garrett Graff wrote Monday:

Washington can only pay attention to a scandal or two at a time — add in a headline-grabbing crisis, whether it’s ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, and now two months of war with Iran that have spiraled into the greatest energy disruption in history — and there are all sorts of should-be-big-deal scandals that don’t get the oxygen or sustained media focus that they should.

Times columnist Thomas Edsall says:

Everything happens in such a rapid and scattershot way with Trump that it is easy to forget what happened as recently as last year.

Or last week …

One of the scandals Garrett Graff mentioned as being difficult to keep track of suddenly - like BOOM - re-entered the public dialogue late yesterday.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer was abruptly dumped.

We hardly knew her.

Chavez-DeRemer, among other things, apparently told her staff to make sure she always had the vino necessary to do her job.

Chavez-DeRemer was a remarkably insignificant and wildly incompetent selection to head the Labor Department in the first place, but the GOP Senate rubber stamped her nomination because, well, Donald Trump thought she was up to the job, and the Republican Senate has disappeared into little more than a performative platform where angry old white guys go to get on cable TV.

But, truly - isn’t Trump good at this personnel stuff?

This is his third Cabinet member to go in a little over a month. There will be more. The betting markets have several favorites with Pete Hegseth and Howard Lutnick currently neck and neck.

Well, at least the former Secretary of Labor now has more time to spend with her wine refrigerator, if not her husband.

Here’s CNN on the Labor Department “resignation”:

For months, the Labor Department’s Inspector General’s Office has been investigating a complaint that Chavez-DeRemer was having a sexual relationship with a member of her security team, as well as other allegations of inappropriate behavior, such as sending staff to pick up liquor and attempting to use business trips as excuses for personal travel, according to a Department of Labor source with knowledge of the situation.

For example, Chavez-DeRemer had expressed a desire to go to events such as a UFC fight in Chicago, a Morgan Wallen concert and to see friends and family in various states, and asked staff to design work trips that would provide her openings to attend those events, the source said.

Let’s just say Chavez-DeRemer was not exactly Frances Perkins. You can Google that, and doing so may make you think that at once upon time in the distant past Cabinet secretaries were, well, serious, competent people who actually deal with real things.

But I digress. There are other scandals out there, my friends.

Case in point.

Enforcement of antitrust laws may cause your eyes to glaze over, but it is kind of a big deal in the big picture of how big and ever bigger businesses operate in our late stage capitalist world.

Trump recently fired the woman - it’s always a woman - who actually knows something about antitrust law. You might have missed it.

We should pay attention.

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Anatomy of a nomination

On February 12, 2025, Idaho Republican Congressman Mike Simpson entered, what for a House member is, often unfriendly territory. Simpson visited the Senate that day on a mission that he clearly enjoyed.

“It was a true honor to introduce my friend Gail Slater before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for her confirmation as Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust,” Simpson wrote later in social media. “President Trump made a very smart choice — the right choice, in nominating Gail for this position.”

The congressman lavished praise on the president’s nominee underscoring that he had known Gail Slater for years, they had eaten at each other’s table and that she was an immensely qualified professional.

Slater is the wife of Simpson’s former longtime chief of staff, Lindsay Slater, the staffer widely credited for Simpson’s most important legislative success in 2015, wilderness designations in central Idaho, including the Cecil D. Andrus Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness.

Gail Slater, before entering Trump’s orbit, was a policy adviser to then-Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and before that had a top policy position with Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, and before that, worked at the Federal Trade Commission.

“In these roles, she learned the nuts and bolts of antitrust enforcement,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said during Senate consideration of Slater’s nomination. Grassley stressed the bipartisan support the appointment engendered, including a letter from former antitrust division chiefs under Republican and Democratic presidents.

“The antitrust division will flourish under Ms. Slater’s strong leadership, and I’m proud to support her,” Grassley said before the Senate voted 78-19 to confirm the nominee with family ties to Idaho. That’s as close to a bipartisan endorsement as is possible in today’s starkly divided Senate. Every Republican including Idaho’s two senators, Jim Risch and Mike Crapo, voted for Slater.

Then the reality of Trumpworld descended.

Almost exactly a year to the day after Simpson’s introduction of Gail Slater, she was gone, fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi, two months before she would be fired herself.

The firing, like most things in the Trump administration, was abrupt and without explanation. Slater said only she was leaving with “great sadness and abiding hope ... It was indeed the honor of a lifetime to serve in this role.”

News organizations were left to speculate why the eminently qualified Slater had been canned.

The Guardian, citing unnamed sources, said Slater lost support from her former boss, now Vice President JD Vance, while Fox News said Trump wanted Slater gone because she hadn’t been aggressive enough advancing affordability efforts. This is the same Trump, of course, who has spiked world oil and American gasoline, fertilizer and natural gas prices with a war against Iran that he can’t explain and struggles to end.

The more likely explanation for turnover in the Antitrust Division — Slater is only one of several senior Justice Department officials to depart — is that the Trump administration really doesn’t care about enforcing anti-trust laws. Trump personally picks the corporate winners he wants to win, as he did by publicly putting his tiny thumb on the scale in favor of Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. 1

News last week that United Airlines was exploring a merger with American Airlines contained another important clue of just how unserious the administration is about protecting the public interest versus the corporate and pro-Trump interest.

As Reuter’s reported last week:

“United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby pitched a potential merger of the two carriers to U.S. President Donald Trump in late February, according to two sources familiar with the matter, but industry officials were quick to highlight the formidable antitrust obstacles such a deal would face.”

For whatever reason American Airlines soon put the kibosh on any merger, but the fact that United’s CEO floated the idea with the president is a big tell.

If Trump wants a deal to happen, his Justice Department, sans an antitrust chief actually committed to enforcing the law, would greenlight any merger, particularly if a company doing a deal hires the right lobbyist or makes a well-timed corporate donation to build a White House ballroom or a triumphal arch.

Two attorneys at the national law firm Snell and Wilmer wrote recently that Slater’s

“departure signals a new era of selective federal antitrust enforcement. As federal enforcement priorities shift, state attorneys general are stepping into the vacuum. For companies navigating antitrust risk, the enforcement landscape is fragmenting — and becoming far less predictable.”

The key words there are “selective federal antitrust enforcement,” or more precisely selective enforcement based on the president’s friends and enemies.

One of those friends is well-connected MAGA friendly lobbyist Mike Davis, who was hired by Hewlett-Packard to help ensure the that the Justice Department approved the company’s $14 billion deal in 2025 with Juniper Networks. DOJ’s antitrust division under Slater initially indicated its opposition to the deal and Davis, according to the Wall Street Journal, resorted to threats.

“If you don’t approve this settlement, I will destroy you. I will destroy your job at the DOJ,” Davis is reported to have told Slater, an account contained in a sworn statement from one of Slater’s top deputies, who has also been fired.

By the Journal’s account, Davis just went over Slater’s head for approval, while demanding repeatedly on his social media feeds that she should be fired.

Two months later, DOJ approved the HP deal, apparently after Slater was told she’d lose her job if she objected. She lost her job anyway, and we may never know the full story as to why. Shortly after Slater’s termination, the administration handed Live Nation, the ticket monopoly, a separate sweetheart deal. 2

Filling the swamp

This is the real “swamp” that Donald Trump promised to drain, a cozy world of billionaire CEOs, sleazy lobbyists and corrupt executive branch officials who are making a killing dismantling the law and regulations, many in place for decades, that attempt to balance a capitalist free market with the broad public interest that never benefits from excessive concentration of economic power.

At least Sen. Grassley had the guts to express some dismay at Gail Slater’s defenestration.

“Sorry to see her leave,” Grassley said, in praising her populist approach to protecting consumers.

By contrast, the silence of the lambs fell over the Idaho delegation, and particularly Congressman Simpson.

Simpson learned long ago that no one is safe in a political party where expertise and independent thought are never tolerated. Gail Slater learned that lesson the hard way.

Simpson’s great and talented friend was fired for trying to enforce the law.

Simpson said not a word.

Many of these “deals” are now in court in actions advanced by state attorneys generals. Congressional Democrats have tried to get information about the real decision making process at DOJ, without much success.

And the corruption continues unabated.

The Curse

I began this piece with a quote from the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who long ago wrote a little book titled The Curse of Bigness.

Brandeis spent much of legal career before joining the Supreme Court as an opponent of monopoly, or as he simplified it - bigness.

Here’s Christopher Ketcham on the essence of the Brandeis view:

The threat that behemoths like Standard Oil posed to the republic, wrote Brandeis, was their concentration of economic power and decision making to the extent that they were effectively a state within the state, operating under their own laws. Many of the trusts were shattered, in a long struggle that Brandeis pioneered. It was his advocacy that helped push into effective action the antitrust mechanisms in government (the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, the Federal Trade Commission), which led to the breakup of Standard Oil and many of its sister monopolies by 1911. “American development can come on the lines on which we seek it, and the ideals which we have can be attained, only if side by side with political democracy comes industrial democracy,” Brandeis wrote. “It is the relatively small man who pre-eminently needs the aid and solicitous care of industry and government. We have, gentlemen, to bear all the time that democratic view in mind.”

Want to bet that Donald J. Trump has never heard of Mr. Justice Brandeis?

Epilogue

In a classic insider DC story at the time Gail Slater was appointed as assistant attorney general for antitrust, POLITICO suggested that her appointment was a test of how serious MAGA world was about antitrust enforcement, particularly against Big Tech companies.

Reading the story more than a year later takes you back to a fantasyland where Donald Trump was surely going to be a rational, policy oriented president.

How’s that working?

The most interesting quote in the POLITICO piece was this:

“I think a big challenge for Gail is, how impulsive will the president be?” says William Kovacic, a former chairman of the FTC, appointed by then-President George W. Bush and who says he’s heartened to have Slater — with whom he worked at the FTC more than a decade ago — in her new post. “You can’t say, ‘My god, shut up,’ because then you’re fired. So you cross your fingers and hope you’re not a target.”

At Slater’s Senate confirmation hearing she was asked by Illinois Democrat Richard Durbin:

… how she would respond if Trump asked her to bring an enforcement action against a firm out of retaliation, his political interests or personal grudge. “I do not expect that President Trump would make such a request,” Slater responded.

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The evidence is all about us.

Retire the traveling trophy of political corruption formerly held in order by Grant, then Harding and Tricky Dick Nixon.

Donald Trump, unlike the FIFA peace prize, now owns a real trophy.

He is the “Master of Corruption.”

The level of corruption burns

Trump’s pardon of convicted cocaine kingpin and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández comes easily to mind as an example of the depth of the administration’s corruption.

As The Guardian reported at the time of the pardon.

… prosecutors maintained that Hernández accepted $1m from former Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in 2013 while successfully running for his first Honduran presidential term. They also said that Hernández’s government set up Honduras to serve as a pivotal waypoint – or “superhighway” – of cocaine coming from South American nations including Colombia and Venezuela.

Hernández was extradited to the US to face the drug and related weapons charges in April 2022, roughly three months after finishing his second presidential term. A jury convicted him on 8 March 2024 after a three-week trial.

He was being held at a federal prison in West Virginia when Trump pardoned him, leading to his release from custody …

So, Trump is blowing up boats and killing people in the Caribbean claiming he is stopping the flow of drugs, but at the same time he is pardoning a real drug kingpin.

Trump is well on his way to pardon or give clemency to a couple of thousand convicted criminals.

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Getting one of these get out of jail cards isn’t free. From NBC News:

Seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump has become big business for lobbying and consulting firms close to the administration, with wealthy hopefuls willing to spend millions of dollars for help getting their case in front of the right people.

“From a lobbying perspective, pardons have gotten profitable,” said one lobbyist whose firm has received such calls.

Very profitable, as in up to $5 million per pardon profitable.

“It’s like the Wild West,” a Trump ally and lobbyist said. “You can basically charge whatever you want.”

The increased use of the pardon power has some familiar with the process concerned about the appearance of financial and political favoritism that can erode confidence in the clemency process.

I don’t know about you, but I’m the suspicious type and wonder if just a bit of all that money is ending up in, well, the pockets of a baggy blue suit.

And Trump is reportedly promising pardons to White House and administration enablers:

According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump has repeatedly promised pardons to administration officials on multiple occasions, including during one recent meeting at which he reportedly said he’d “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval” before he leaves office in January 2029.

Trump crime family

Then there are the crypto scams, the donation of a few tons of steel to Trump’s golden ballroom from a Luxembourg operation that then rather miraculously got a lucrative tariff break, the $400 million Qatar jet that Trump plans to make off with when he’s done pillaging the government, the outrageous commingling of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s business dealings with his wholly irregular and unofficial “diplomatic” role, Melania’s bribeumentary financed by Jeff Bezos, etc. etc.

Here’s Reuters on the Trump offspring cashing in on crypto:

The Trump brothers’ efforts have been a whopping success. In the first half of this year, the Trump Organization’s income soared 17-fold to $864 million from $51 million a year earlier, according to Reuters calculations based on the president’s official disclosures, property records, financial records released in court cases, crypto trade information and other sources. Of the first-half total, $802 million – more than 90% – came from Trump crypto ventures, including sales of World Liberty tokens.

That $864 million payday represents actual income – cash flowing, free and clear, into Trump family coffers. Reuters’ calculations were reviewed by half a dozen crypto and real estate experts and a certified accountant who has studied the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s approach to crypto.

No one will mistake Don, Jr. and Eric Trump for brilliant business minds, and that fact clearly gets to the essence of Trump’s corruption:

“These people are not pouring money into coffers of the Trump family business because of the brothers' acumen,” said Washington University law professor Kathleen Clark, who specializes in government ethics and was commenting on Reuters’ findings. “They are doing it because they want freedom from legal constraints and impunity that only the president can deliver.”

It’s the corruption, stupid

I’m old enough to remember when Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, got in trouble for his cozy ties to the Libyan government. That low grade sleazy incident involved a fraction the money the Trump family has been raking in, yet resulted in a full-blown Senate investigation and a good deal of appropriate public shaming of both Carter brothers.

We clearly live in very different times. Ethics and propriety at the top of the government are now optional.

Even the Supreme Court seems to agree that almost anything goes.

But that still does not mean that corruption sells well politically.

The election results from Hungary on Sunday could represent more than just the ousting of a reprehensible rightwing authoritarian and signal a public reckoning with the fact that Viktor Orbán, like his pal Donald Trump, has been looting, grifting and corrupting in high office.

A POLITICO analysis concluded that Orbán’s corruption was a big part of what finally caught up with him:

The great populist had mislaid his popular touch and failed to appreciate that he was being undermined by some of the same failures that have weakened strongmen the world over: rampant corruption and cronyism, a kleptocratic ruling class, and deteriorating infrastructure. They all served to strengthen Magyar’s hand and intensify his challenge.

“You could see it and sense it at the campaign rallies, where there was a tangible enthusiasm at the opposition rallies, but not at the government ones,” Orbán’s biographer Pál Dániel Rényi told POLITICO.

It also meant that the outside interference of MAGA and European populists, such as France’s Marine Le Pen, the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and Italy’s Matteo Salvini, who like Vance turned up in Budapest to campaign for Orbán, was just a wasted effort. So too the endorsement by Germany’s Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), who had told Hungarians in a video: “Europe needs Viktor Orbán.”

Orbán’s corruption, like Trump’s, extended to real estate, including a palatial mansion and a golf course. The parallels are striking, Orbán even demolished - East Wing-like - a 150 year old castle to build his mansion, adding a rail line and soccer stadium. He’s a big soccer fan.

Just before the decisive election in Hungary, NPR described some of the pushback against Orbán, particularly about the money he has lavished on himself:

Some of those [visiting Orban’s mansion] climbed up a ladder to see above the wall that encircles the Orbán family palace.

One by one, they peered into the landscaped and pool-filled grounds and beyond that — the Neoclassical mansion of their prime minister.

Júlia Molnár, 27 years old, stepped down from the ladder and shook her head. Her voice trembled with anger as she spoke about what she saw.

“It’s infuriating, and I’m very glad that people are finally brave enough and conscious enough to come here and actually put in the effort to show up and see for themselves and not let the media give them the perspective that they should have on this,” Molnár said.

She lamented the opulence of her prime minister’s residence when so many in her country are so poor.

Hungary’s lesson

Were I advising a Democrat running for Congress or the Senate this year I’d recommend ending every speech with something like this:

“I want to go to Washington end the wholesale corruption that Republicans have allowed and Donald Trump and his family have profited from. The country needs a deep cleaning.”

An anti-corruption message that includes ending stock trading for members of Congress, bans bets by public officials on political outcomes, and gets at least some of the corrupting influence of money out of politics, is a winning message.

Hungary offers a lesson. We shouldn’t miss it’s importance.

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I launched this Substack a year ago this month. And thanks to all - no, really thanks - to all who have followed, commented on and supported my work.

Means a great deal. If you think there is any worth here please share with friends, family and crazy uncles.

All the very best.

Two things are certain: Donald Trump’s war on Iran was (apparently) an extraordinary display of 21st Century technology and powerful military might, and also an astounding, even historic strategic defeat.

I say “apparently” with regard to military might since, face it, we don’t really know.

There have been precious few journalists in any location that might confirm the overall military success of Operation Trump Face Plant.

We basically have the word of Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, or as he is reportedly called inside the Pentagon Dumb McNamara.

We may never know the extent of damage inflicted by Iran on U.S. assets in the Middle East or how many U.S. personnel have been injured.

It’s like we went to war in Vietnam and there was no David Halberstam or Neil Sheehan or Malcolm Browne to report what really happened.

We really don’t know much beyond Hegseth’s bluster and Trump’s demented claims.

What is certain is that Trump, as they say, screwed the pooch.

Massive self-inflicted wounds to American credibility and leadership. U.S. ability to rely or even influence traditional allies severely damaged. Untold negative impacts on world economic stability.

The financial cost will be staggering.

The reputational damage likely last beyond the life of many of us.

And the strategic wins go to Iran, Russia and China.

You might say it’s more or less what you would expect to happen when you put a guy who bankrupt a casino in charge of the U.S. military and turn him loose with no adult supervision.

Oh, well, at least he didn’t bomb them back to the Stone Ages (sic).

There is no Trump plan beyond “winning” the next news cycle.

Here are some of things that I think worry about.

1. Iran will now have even more motivation to develop a nuclear weapon. Trump has now twice claimed the total destruction of Iran’s nuclear capability, but since it’s Trump saying it you can’t believe a word he says. A lesson of the modern world for nations like Iran is simply get your own nuke.

2. While Iran will almost certainly press ahead to have a nuclear weapon it’s also realized that it has had a powerful deterrent all along - closing the Strait of Hormuz. As The Atlantic’s Nancy Yousseff wrote today, “over the course of this war, Tehran discovered that a deterrent already exists that can shock the world’s economy and force a cease-fire with the world’s superpower. It was always right there, winding its way along the Iranian coast toward the Arabian Sea.”

3. Trump has no capacity to learn from mistakes, his or anyone else’s. But that is no excuse for the rest of us. He doesn’t read history. U.S. sponsorship of the coup deposing Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 is mostly forgotten in our country, not in Iran, so he can’t learn from that experience. But that is no excuse for the people around him. Trump completely under estimated the Iran regime. Had he ever read anything about Vietnam he would have known the error in such thinking. A lazy, stupid, arrogant man has blundered his way to the brink of existential chaos. He will, of course, do it again … and again.

4. What will he do next? Try to end the U.S. relationship with NATO? Start blustering again about Cuba? Pivot back to Greenland? We know he will desperately try to move on to the next bit of chaos. It is what he does.

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As Trump Swings on Iran, Congress Is Absent and G.O.P. Leaders Mum

We also know that there will be no significant Republican reaction, let alone opposition to Trump’s disastrous behavior.

Here’s the New York Times on congressional Republicans gutlessly going along, silently:

It was the latest instance of congressional Republicans, who have deferred to Mr. Trump on matters large and small since he began his second term, ceding their prerogatives and much of their power to the White House. In this case, their relative silence also helped them avoid wading into what has become a messy intraparty debate over the war, as elements on the right criticize the president for plunging the United States into what could be a prolonged and costly conflict.

In moments of giddy fantasy I think surely these Republicans will start finding ways to distance themselves if only in the interest of political self preservation. The party’s polling is brutal. The midterm election is a little over six months away, after all.

But the fleeting feeling that sanity just might return passes as I apply a cold cloth to the forehead and admit the obvious - it’s not going to happen.

Congressional Republicans might have stopped him in 2016.

They had a chance during the first impeachment.

They could have - and easily so - convicted him after January 6th and he would have been relegated to the place he belongs - the dust bin of history.

They might have rejected him in 2024.

There is no bottom. None.

Any politician who can justify that presidential “message” - and that happened just 48 hours ago - is not going to stop this crazy bastard.

As Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, said recently:

“I think anybody who follows politics right now can tell there are no principles left in my party,” Christie said during an interview at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on Monday night. “And even for people who agree with some of the stuff the president is doing, if you’re really honest with yourself, you know it’s not based on principle. He wakes up every morning and tries to figure out what is the best thing for him to do in his self-interest that day, and that day only. And if it changes the next day, he’ll change.”

And so will the Republican Party.

The protests must continue.

The lawsuits must continue.

The press scrutiny must continue, and become more direct and urgent.

The voter registration drives must be determined and effective.

No one will save us or democracy. It’s up to us.

Pray to God it’s not too late.

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To say that the reviews were, well, less than flattering would be like saying Nero’s fiddle was out of tune while Rome burned.

Here’s POLITICO, a reliable barometer of conventional political wisdom in our nation’s capital:

To a number of GOP strategists and local party leaders involved in key congressional and gubernatorial races, the message was too little, too late and too jumbled.

“What the hell did he just say?” one GOP strategist in a battleground state wrote in a text to POLITICO after the president’s address, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “A quick recap and a path forward would’ve been helpful. Instead, it was nonsense left for Sean Hannity to articulate.”

Loyal readers know that I have long believed that Donald Trump is on a one way downhill slide into ever more radical derangement. His ability to grasp the reality around him, informed not by factual information and critical thinking but by generations of lies, conspiracy theories and personal expediency, has diminished on pace with his mental and physical decline.

The president is not well.

But that diagnosis isn’t the full story of what unfolds before us hourly.

In Trump 2.0 the president has surrounded himself with the most comical, corrupt and incompetent collection of clowns ever assembled outside of a Ringling Brothers hiring fair.

Trump has now fired two of these jokers in the space of a week. That’s good news.

The bad news is that he won’t be able to upgrade through replacements. There is no Trump minor league of normal waiting in the wings.

The clown show is baked in.

The idea that an individual with a sense of ethics, fidelity to the law and the Constitution and enjoying some sense of self respect would willingly join this circus is simply fanciful thinking.

Oh, some may think they can stay above the ethical sludge and stand aside the moral rot, but they are kidding themselves. And we kid ourselves, too, if we believe any of what we are seeing is even remotely acceptable or can possibly get any better any time soon.

Their very strange world is our very strange world.

When every job description in the Trump Administration requires simply pleasing the Clown-in-Chief, while appearing on TV as often as possible to spout nonsense and traffic in lies, it only stands to reason that you’ll get a Kristi Noem and a Pam Bondi.

They are gone now. There will be no better replacements.

Going to the dogs

It is hard to keep track given the chaos and corruption of the last 14 months that Trump, and his now defenestrated attorney general, Pam Bondi, have some history that predates Jeffrey Epstein’s files and trying to prosecute James Comey.

Here’s the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) way back in 2016:

Trump and Bondi are entangled in a major political scandal involving a $25,000 illegal contribution made by the Trump Foundation, a non-profit charitable foundation, to a political group supporting Bondi’s election. Bondi personally solicited the contribution from Trump himself, and received it around the time it was reported that her office was investigating Trump University. After the contribution, Bondi’s office told reporters there was no investigation into Trump. The Trump Foundation told the IRS it made no political contributions and instead of listing the Bondi group, listed a Kansas organization with a similar name to which they could legally donate.

OK, that sounds familiar.

Here’s more from POLITICO at the time Bondi was nominated to be attorney general shortly after the 2024 election:

In 2016, news emerged that Trump paid a $2,500 fine because his foundation improperly donated $25,000 to Bondi’s political election committee in 2013 before her office opted not to pursue a fraud investigation into Trump University. Trump eventually paid $25 million to settle fraud complaints against the now-defunct university.

Bondi said she was unaware of Trump University complaints at the time and that the contribution had nothing to do with her office’s decision not to pursue the case. Trump has said he admired Bondi for never backing away from him amid the controversy.

Bondi was also a good pal with Lara Trump and she worked at one point for the same Florida lobbying firm as Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff.

Such cozy back scratching and junking a legal action in a trade for an appointment is, in this administration, just your typical Thursday.

Bondi is off, so Trump says, to an important job in the private sector that will be announced very soon. She’ll be able to spend more time at home redacting with her family, as Jim Fallon says.

As for that very important private sector job, there must be a 7-11 in Palm Beach that needs a night manager. Stay tuned.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot.

Bondi was actually Trump’s No. 2 pick to run the Justice Department. The original idea for the nation’s top law enforcement officer was Florida man Matt Gaetz. You remember him, right?

Here’s NPR from December 23, 2024:

The House Ethics Committee on Monday released its long-awaited report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., after looking into sexual misconduct allegations against him.

The committee found there was “substantial evidence” Gaetz violated House rules, state and federal laws, “and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”

Among other accusations, the committee found Gaetz engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl in 2017, and used or possessed illegal drugs on multiple occasions from 2017-2019, including ecstasy and cocaine.

As bad as Pam Bondi has been we coulda had that guy. Almost did, in fact.

But before we leave the now unemployed Pam Bondi I feel compelled to remind you of this:

Bondi was involved in a custody battle with Hurricane Katrina victims over a St. Bernard she adopted in 2005 after the dog was separated from his family during the storm.

The family had been trying to find the dog and Bondi refused to return him. She accused the family of neglecting the animal, an allegation they denied.

The family sued, and the dispute lasted 16 months until the two sides settled before trial. Bondi returned the dog to the family with food and medication.

Well, she didn’t shoot the dog, which is something I guess.

But we do know who did. Shoot her dog, I mean.

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Cricket’s assassin

The mere fact that Kristi Noem wrote a book that, among other things, detailed how she killed her dog - poor Cricket - for being a rambunctious puppy and also decided a farm goat had no reason to live because, well, she didn’t like the goat would have been enough in most galaxies for someone to say - hey, let’s not appoint her to an important government job, OK?

Nope.

In Trump 2.0 being creepy and flaunting it is a major qualification.

In the end, however, it wasn’t her profoundly destructive and deadly leadership of the Department of Homeland Security that kicked Kristi to the curb but rather her lavish spending on a TV ad campaign featuring herself. When she tried to pass it all off as having Donald’s approval her jig was up.

In other words, it wasn’t her cringy puppy killing, the murder of two peaceful protesters in Minneapolis, the scandalous deportation policy or even her, eh, “relationship” with her sort of chief of staff that broke Noem’s pick.

In short, she embarrassed the most embarrassing man in the world and that’s what got her.

It’s charming in a way to read various accounts that speak of “stumbles” by Bondi that led to her sacking, but she didn’t stumble. She humbled herself before a psychopath who always believed the only real job was to please the master, and at that impossible task she failed.

As corrupt as she is she wasn’t corrupt enough.

Actually like Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem was a walking, talking political disaster before she came to Washington. Her tenure as South Dakota’s governor was one scandal after another, one bit of self dealing after another, one bit of incompetence after another, but that counted for nothing in clown town.

She embarrassed Trump. That’s what counted.

Incompetence brings no comeuppance with this regime. Blind loyalty is insufficient, too. Success at survival is only measured by the Stephen Miller standard: one must become as unhinged and evil as the boss.

That is the only ticket to staying in the circus of Trump World.

The firings will continue

Late yesterday news broke that a former Fox News weekend host fired the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Randy George, a four-star West Point grad with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As The New York Times reported:

Two weeks ago, General George asked Mr. Hegseth to meet with him to discuss the removal of the four officers from the one-star list, as well as the general’s view that Mr. Hegseth was interfering unnecessarily in Army personnel decisions overall, the officials said. Mr. Hegseth refused to meet with General George about the matter, they said.

Last week, Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist who is close to Mr. Hegseth and President Trump, posted on social media that the defense secretary was “seriously considering” removing General George. Ms. Loomer has also repeatedly attacked Mr. Driscoll.

General George also had a close relationship with Lloyd J. Austin III, Mr. Hegseth’s predecessor and a former Army four-star general.

Two other senior general officers were also dismissed yesterday. Here’s NBC’s coverage:

Hegseth has fired numerous officials during Trump’s second term. Last year he fired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, after an initial assessment by the agency in June indicated that U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were less expansive than Trump had said.

Before that, Hegseth fired Navy Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, who was the U.S. military representative to NATO’s military committee. Parnell at the time cited “a loss of confidence in her ability to lead.”

Hegseth’s other firings included Joint Chiefs Chairman CQ Brown Jr.; Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh, who headed the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command; the Navy’s top admiral, Lisa Franchetti; and the head of the Coast Guard, Adm. Linda Fagan.

Other reporting from CNN indicates that the former Fox News weekend host will replace General George with General Chris LaNeve, the current Army vice chief of staff:

LaNeve got Trump’s attention in the hours after his inauguration, when LaNeve called into the Commander in Chief’s Ball with his troops from South Korea.

“Sir, on behalf of the brave men and women who serve under my command and the thousands of dedicated service members that are part of the joint team in Korea, congratulations on your victory as the 47th President of the United States,” LaNeve said on a video call. “Welcome back, Mr. President.”

Trump praised LaNeve, saying, “Is this man central casting or what?”

“They’re not going to play games with you. That’s good,” Trump added, according to an official transcript of the event. “I like to see that. Nobody is playing games with that man.”

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence and call me alarmist, but I think all this is some evidence - just a tiny bit of evidence - that Donald Trump is trying to politicize the U.S. military.

And this is happening during a war the ol’ boy still can’t explain and can’t find a way to end. What could possibly go wrong?

The calls to central casting will accelerate now. The Labor secretary, the FBI director, maybe the Commerce secretary and certainly others are heads on the great man’s chopping block.

I don’t have enough space today to talk about the FEMA official who said he was teleported to a Waffle House or Kristi Noem’s boob fetish husband or RFK, Jr’s raccoon penis.

The chaos and incompetence will continue because these guys are weird and they will double down on dangerous and strive to be just evil as the boss. That how they survive as a straphanger in their and our very strange world.

Have a nice weekend.

Gulp.

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For one hour, 37 minutes and 20 seconds, while the nation faces a war without purpose in the Middle East, the world economy is rocked by a spike in oil and natural gas prices and Putin is smiling because Trump removed economic sanctions, the president of the United States mumbled, rambled, told pointless stories about Sharpie pens and his big ballroom and received a tongue bath from his Cabinet lackeys.

You can watch it on C-Span, but don’t if you have a weak stomach. It is truly gut wrenching.

As I’ve written (many times) before, Trump is an old, degenerating, mentally unbalanced demagogue. Watch that obscene slobberfest in the Cabinet Room and tell me differently.

But here’s my question today: amid all the Trumpian chaos, confusion, corruption and craziness why do the men and women who continue to prop up this reprehensible individual continually debase and discredit themselves by doing so?

How many times can a person sell their soul, mortgage their backbone and skin their knees squatting before the throne of a legitimate buffoon?

Apparently the answer is - endlessly.

Welcome to No Kings Weekend. It could not have come at a better time.

But why? Why do this kind of fluffy sycophancy to a politician - any politician?

Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who is reportedly Speaker of the House of Representatives, just flatly debased himself this week giving a “new” award to Donald Trump. It was utterly cringeworthy.

Late night host Jimmy Kimmel said it’s now clear why Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House and is building a huge ballroom - he needs the new ballroom as a trophy chest.

“My favorite part, when they give Trump these awards, is when he comes out with a look of surprise on his face,” [Kimmel] added. “And the saddest part is, he seems to be genuinely honored by these imaginary accolades.

“Look at him, how happy he is,” he said after another clip of Trump standing beside Johnson on stage. “All the grace and elegance of a gorilla at a wedding.”

Imagine rising to the absolute top of congressional leadership and then spending every single day slobbering over the president - any president - and over and over again verbally kissing his ample hind quarters on TV.

I love my family and friends, but - maybe it’s just me - I don’t gush over them all the time. First, it’s not necessary. They know how I feel and I do tell them, but the level of idolization by the people around Trump is beyond rational belief. If any of us behaved like Mike Johnson or Trump’s Cabinet around our own friends and family they’d wonder why we were acting so silly and more than a little creepy.

The explanation for people like Speaker Johnson is, I think, simple. He’s decided that the only way to “work” with Trump is to praise him as the best thing since sliced bread, and in doing so keep the braying MAGA base from turning on him.

But the impact for the rest of us in way more serious.

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Many of these people display the behavior of the proliferating AI chatbots that tell lonely, needy people just what they want to hear.

AI gives us a clue

Stanford researchers actually looked into what happens when an AI chatbot - or a Mike Johnson - serve up lavish, unreasonable praise. You can see what happens to Trump when the lickspittle BS gets really deep. He loves it, really loves it. A crooked smile comes out of his pancake makeup and he beams like a kid getting a blue ribbon for participating in punt, pass and kick competition.

Here’s some of what the Stanford researchers concluded:

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used for everyday advice and guidance, concerns have emerged about sycophancy: the tendency of AI-based large language models to excessively agree with, flatter, or validate users. Although prior work has shown that sycophancy carries risks for groups who are already vulnerable to manipulation or delusion, syncophancy’s effects on the general population’s judgments and behaviors remain unknown. Here, we show that sycophancy is widespread in leading AI systems and has harmful effects on users’ social judgments.

What could go wrong with the fawning brown nosing? Potentially quite a bit with both AI and in human terms:

High-profile incidents have linked sycophancy to psychological harms such as delusions, self-harm, and suicide. Beyond these cases, research in social and moral psychology suggests that unwarranted affirmation can produce subtler but still consequential effects: reinforcing maladaptive beliefs, reducing responsibility-taking, and discouraging behavioral repair after wrongdoing. We hypothesized that AI models excessively affirm users even when socially or morally inappropriate and that such responses negatively influence users’ beliefs and intentions.

When Trump, who we know lives in his own cloistered information bubble, is fed a steady diet of what he wants to hear by people who - like Mike Johnson - act like he’s the greatest individual who ever walked on water, he believes it. Truly believes it.

A more well-adjusted, self aware, critically thinking individual, in other words not Donald Trump, would likely behave as our friends and relatives would.

You said what? Are you off your meds? What are you smoking, dude?

Trump’s response is to believe the BS, fluff his enormous ego and convince himself that he is indeed the greatest.

Trump’s delusions are constantly on display and powerfully reinforced when no one calls him on the fantasies, but instead gives him another phony award.

Trump claims he has wiped out inflation, that the war he started isn’t a war but an “excursion,” that the fighting is over even as more American’s are seriously injured in Saudi Arabia, and that the U.S. doesn’t need its NATO allies.

He’s even fantasizing about naming the Strait of Hormuz after himself and he’s putting his signature on our money. My money clip is going to rust, or turn orange.

His maladaptive beliefs border on the insane, including over and over again claiming the 2020 election was rigged without any proof beyond beyond the conspiracy theories of the cranks around him and the noises in his own head.

And Trump never accepts responsibility, the fault is always with someone else. You wonder who he’ll fire before the Iran fiasco plays out?

The walking, talking sycophantic AI chatbots around Trump, rather shockingly, mirror, in human form, the findings of the Stanford researchers who studied AI:

Although affirmation may feel supportive, sycophancy can undermine users’ capacity for self-correction and responsible decision-making.

Act with urgency

The American experiment is in mortal danger. We have become an utterly unserious country, presided over by an utterly unserious anticipatory monarch. The turd polishers around that man will not change, sorry to say.

They must be defeated. They must be protested. They must be called out by those of us who haven’t become preformative chatbots.

As the wise and clever Internet commentator Dave Pell says, there is a greater chance that AI changes then that Republican office holders do.

Don’t worry. If big tech eventually does tone down the lickspittling, bootlicking, groveling, kowtowing adulation and unctuously servile toadyism, you can always replace it by having yourself a cabinet meeting. 1

Get out there and let your voice be heard.

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All Trump is really sure of is that he is glad to have outlived a guy who should be remembered as a genuine American hero.

I cannot bring any new light to the steaming pile of misinformation that Trump and his enablers have created around the 2016 election, but - if you’re interested - I can recommend a few extraordinarily well sourced pieces that illuminate Bob Mueller’s investigation and his larger legacy.

After this commercial break read on …

Debunking

First up is Cathy Young’s piece in The Bulwark - MAGA’s Mueller Myths - where she, among much else, addresses the smear that Mueller was a Democratic tool and also in some way a “senile” figure head:

How are we to square the image of Mueller as a deranged Javert hounding a beleaguered Trump and trampling all over innocent people’s lives with the claim that the Mueller report completely exonerated Trump and, in the words of Ohio congressman Mike Turner, “effectively ended the Russia hoax by concluding that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia”? In fact, neither is correct. Let’s dig in to these and other persistent right-wing myths about the “Russia hoax,” several of which have started popping up again in the days after Mueller’s passing.

Young debunks seven myths, including the persistent Trump lie that he was the “victim” of a “witch-hunt” by Democrats, the media and Bob Mueller:

One may speculate about the degree of Trump’s complicity in Russian interference. But let’s not forget that he literally did everything humanly possible to make himself a suspect, both before and after the election. Remember the July 27 press conference in Florida where he responded to the news of Russian hacking attacks on the DNC by inviting the Russians to find Clinton’s missing emails? (Literally within hours of his statement, Clinton’s personal and campaign accounts were targeted in phishing attacks originating from Russian officials.) Remember when he kept talking about how much he loves WikiLeaks at campaign events? (In 2018, even the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee cautiously criticized “the Trump campaign’s periodic praise for and communications with Wikileaks” as “highly objectionable and inconsistent with U.S. national security interests”—naturally, with no mention of Trump’s own WikiLeaks lovefest.) Remember when, on May 10, 2017—the day after he fired FBI Director James Comey—he bragged about it to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, in an Oval Office meeting, calling Comey “a real nutjob” and adding that the “great pressure” he had faced over Russia was now “taken off”? And remember when, standing next to Putin at the 2018 Helsinki Summit, he said that he believed the Kremlin dictator’s denial of Russian election interference—choosing to trust him over the U.S. intelligence community? If it was a witch hunt, Trump was doing an Oscar-worthy impersonation of a witch.

MAGA may want Mueller to be the villain of the Russiagate story. But in reality, the Trump/Russia investigation was a fitting conclusion to his long career of service to this country—and no amount of MAGA myth making will change that.

You could bookmark this piece for the next time your crazy uncle starts ranting about “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

It was no hoax.

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Mueller founds the sleazeballs

This second excellent piece is from former U.S. attorney Joyce White Vance. She does some additional myth busting in her Civil Discourse Substack:

Even though Mueller couldn’t get the Russians he indicted before a court in the U.S., he managed to educate the American people about how Russia tried to interfere in our elections. Trump pardoned five of the Americans Mueller convicted: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and Alex van der Zwaan. Manafort and Stone were convicted by juries. Flynn, Papadopoulos, and van der Zwaan pled guilty in court, each acknowledging under oath—Flynn twice—that they were pleading guilty because they were guilty, and for no other reason.

That’s Bob Mueller’s legacy. He uncovered the truth when it was difficult to do so and held people accountable. That’s a sharp contrast to the president who has criticized him. Bob Mueller was fair and decent, and he played by the rules, including respecting the rule of law, which may seem quaint in the time of Trump. Ultimately, criticism of Mueller’s report and his work is an indictment of what Trump has done to our country. The Mueller investigation and its results speak for themselves.

I’ve long thought some of the most damaging evidence Mueller’s investigation uncovered involved the sleazy characters Vance mentioned - Manafort, Stone and Flynn, in particular.

That all three continue to walk free isn’t a part of Mueller’s legacy, but it is a part of Donald Trump’s.

The Senate investigation

The third piece of work is the bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that was released, with some redactions, in 2020. It’s worth noting that the chairman of the committee then was Republican Richard Burr of North Carolina, and then Senator Marco Rubio was a member of the committee.

The Senate report doesn’t reflect entirely in Mueller’s own investigation, but it does substantiate much that he discovered.

In the section of the report on Russian active measures - that’s the committee’s language - to influence the 2016 election, there is this about Paul Manafort and his connections to Russian oligarchs and intelligence operatives:

Prior to joining the Trump Campaign in March 2016 and continuing throughout his time on the Campaign, Manafort directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik, Deripaska, and the pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine. On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik. The Committee was unable to reliably determine why Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy with Kilimnik or with whom Kilimnik further shared that information. The Committee had limited insight into Kilimnik's communications with Manafort and into Kilimnik's communications with other individuals connected to Russian influence operations, all of whom used communications security practices. The Committee obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may may have been connected to the GRU's hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.

It remains amazing to me that Senate Republicans who sat on that committee and signed off on that report - Risch of Idaho, Cotton of Arkansas, Lankford of Oklahoma, Cornyn of Texas, Collins of Maine, Moran of Kansas - still carry water for Trump, notwithstanding his deep involvement with the Russian efforts.

Mueller: the man and his legacy

Finally, this piece about Bob Mueller may well be the last word on his legacy.

Garrett Graff is a historian of the FBI and the intelligence community, among other things, and in the course of his reporting he came to know the reclusive Mueller pretty well.

His piece is really great:

In the summer of 2001, [Mueller] was nominated and confirmed 98-0 as the sixth director of the FBI. In the years ahead, he would become the first to complete the ten-year term imposed after Hoover’s half-century reign and would be extended by Congress and President Obama another two years, this time by a vote of 100-0. In the end, he was appointed to senior roles in six consecutive presidential administrations of both parties.

Bob Mueller might have been the last person in the US government that both parties agreed upon and respected beyond reproach.

I highly recommend Garrett’s Substack - Doomsday Scenario.

Above all we shouldn’t let Robert Mueller’s accomplished and ethical life be tainted by the putrid hate of our national embarrassment.

Mueller deserves much better than that. Hell, we all do.

Thanks.

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I told her as nicely as I could that the only people who were deranged - other than the president himself - were those who didn’t see Donald Trump as a profoundly loathsome, deeply disturbed, wildly dangerous man who constitutes an unprecedented threat to the country and the world.

And that was before the pardons of 1,600 insurrectionists, the wildly corrupt profiteering off the White House, the mindless violence of ICE agents and Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East.

If you think none of this is normal you are not the deranged one.

The real Trump derangement

The willful acceptance of the continuing deterioration and perverseness of Donald Trump by his Cabinet, GOP members of Congress, rightwing media, most of the high tech world, a host of billionaires and the so called MAGA base represents an act of mass derangement that makes the Jonestown Massacre look like a Sunday school picnic.

Three examples - Iran, Robert Mueller and U.S. Marines - that should have stopped the group described in the previous paragraph flat in their tracks, but of course derangement at this level has no finish line.

Iran whiplash

I woke up this morning wondering if it would be a TACO Monday or a huge sell off on Wall Street with a further escalation in world oil prices.

Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO) it turns out, but not before a wretched whiplash of Trumpian nonsense.

As Politico put it:

The possibility of negotiations to end the war, conveniently announced prior to the markets opening, saw stocks jump and the S&P leap to one of its best days since before the war started, per AP. The price of crude oil fell to around $100, down from its $120 peaks last week.

Not so fast: Iranian state media quickly contradicted Trump’s post, raising doubts about how far along any negotiations actually are. They denied that direct talks have happened between the U.S. and Tehran, labeling Trump’s statement as a bid to lower energy prices and buy time, per Axios’ Barak Ravid.

And another grain of salt: This is the latest war assessment we’ve gotten from the president, which has so far ranged from the U.S. “winning” to the military potentially “winding down” to more promises to “obliterate” Iran’s energy sector. All the while, the Pentagon has Marines en route to the region, and while Trump may see an off-ramp, Israel does not. They plan to continue operations while avoiding Iran’s energy sector, though they were told about Trump’s post ahead of time, Bloomberg’s Dan Williams reports.

But Trump doubled down today, telling reporters before boarding Air Force One to Memphis that both sides have engaged in “very, very strong talks” with “major points of agreement.” Trump’s diplomacy duo — Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — are leading the talks, which kicked off yesterday and will continue by phone today. “We have a very serious chance of making a deal,” Trump said. He insisted that “they called.”

So … who do you believe: a deranged American president or a murderous Iranian Revolutionary Guardsman hunkering down in a bunker in Tehran?

Asked about Iran’s denial, Trump said “they’re going to have to get themselves better public relations people,” adding the conflicting reports may have been a miscommunication. Trump declined to specify who the U.S. is talking with on the Iranian side but that they’re “very solid” people. Axios reported Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan indirectly passed messages between Washington and Tehran over the weekend.

Iran also doubled down: “No negotiations have been held with the US, and fakenews is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped,” Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, wrote on X.

Trump left the door open to the U.S. jointly controlling the Strait of Hormuz, which would be a significant change to the regional power dynamic. “Maybe me, me and the Ayatollah ... whoever the next Ayatollah is,” Trump said. The leadership question is looming over Iran as Trump continues to dangle the specter of regime change. He told reporters he doesn’t consider Mojtaba Khamenei to be Iran’s new supreme leader.

The five-day trial period for talks could set the groundwork for settling the war — or risk further bombing, as Trump framed it. But the president signaled that the deal Iran is “very willing” to make includes an agreement to get rid of their nuclear weapons — a central sticking point. But he also said he can’t “guarantee” a deal.

Oh, the whiplash - the war is about “regime change” or “missiles” or “nuclear weapons” that were “totally obliterated.”

No, no it’s not a “war” its an “excursion” the war is “over” or its “winding down” or “we need NATO allies to step up” or “we don’t need their help” or “we’ll bomb their electrical system” and “the Strait of Hormuz is open” or it’s not.

And Cuba.

Maybe he should fib just a little and says he knew Elvis really well.

I don’t know, call me deranged, but all this sounds pretty deranged …

DJT hates real Americans

And this. Absolutely disgusting, not to mention deranged.

Before we move on to the next rancid outrage or hear some crank say this is just Trump deflecting attention from (fill in the blank) an incoherent and disastrous war; the Epstein Files; the price of gasoline; his own declining mental and physical health …

Let’s get very real about what it is.

It is the lunatic raving of an acutely unwell man. Period. It’s not deflection, it’s psychotic behavior from the man with the nuclear codes. It is truly Trump being Trump, an old, diminished man child who demolished the East Wing and put his name on the Kennedy Center and turned the Oval Office into a casino where the house always wins.

And anyone unwilling to confront this reality after all this time - like the lackey at the Treasury Department or the Senate majority leader or any number of “in the know” pundits - is truly deranged, as well.

Immensely. Deeply. Stupid.

Let’s talk about those U.S. Marines on the way to, presumably, the Strait of Hormuz.

From the Substack Gold and Geopolitics:

The United States is sending 5,000 Marines into the Persian Gulf to seize Kharg Island, a speck of land 15 miles off the Iranian coast that handles 90% of Iran’s oil exports. This is, on paper, a reasonable military objective in the same way that sticking your hand into a beehive is a reasonable way to acquire honey. It is technically correct. The bees would disagree. 1

And this …

To reach Kharg Island, the Marines aboard the USS Tripoli and USS Boxer must first sail through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has mined. The strait is also, as of this week, a toll road. The IRGC verifies vessels on VHF radio and charges up to $2 million per transit, payable in cash, cryptocurrency, or barter. At least eight ships have paid. Iran’s parliament is legislating the arrangement formally, because even revolutionary theocracies require a compliance department.

A White House source told Axios they need “about a month to weaken the Iranians more” before attempting this. One month. Of a war Trump described as ‘winding down’ on Friday - three weeks in, which by his count is basically four days… Both statements were made, as far as anyone can tell, by people who occupy the same government and occasionally share a building.

A former Navy SEAL called the plan “insane”. A retired Vice Admiral called it “a massacre-in-making scenario”. A retired Rear Admiral pointed out that even if they seize the island, Iran simply turns off the pipeline at the other end. Frankly, I think they’re being extremely polite. This is a clusterfuck of historic proportions and everyone who’s ever held a rank knows it. 2

Brynn Tannehill in The Atlantic:

U.S. troops may well take Kharg Island, only to endure ballistic-missile strikes, drone attacks, and petrochemical smoke, all without a reliable means of obtaining logistical support. The result could be a grinding war of attrition that more closely resembles the battle space in Ukraine than it does the “shock and awe”–style campaigns that Americans are used to. Iran has given every indication that it would likely escalate by striking oil-and-gas facilities in the region, just as it did to Qatar and Saudi Arabia after the Pars South gas field was struck. Ground casualties and the destruction of oil infrastructure throughout the region would almost certainly create pressure on Donald Trump to pull out; but extracting troops under loitering munitions is dangerous, and aircraft on the ground are prime targets for these circling drones.

This “excursion” has the makings of a nuclear age equivalent of the 1942 Jubilee raid at Dieppe on the north coast of France, a poorly conceived, poorly planned, under equipped attack that left thousands of mostly Canadian soldiers dead or captured.

As one history has described it:

Dieppe was a pathetic failure. Sixty years later, it seems obvious that Jubilee was a bizarre operation with no chance of success whatsoever and likely to result in a huge number of casualties. In August 1942, British and Allied officers did not have yet the knowledge and combat experience to make a proper assessment of the risks of such an operation. This catastrophe was useful precisely in providing that knowledge which was later to make victory possible.

All honor to the Marine Corps and they know such history and its lessons.

Their commander-in-chief, however, is a rank idiot about such things, an idiot in every direction surrounded by enabling fools.

There is no bottom

More from Politico late Monday:

NATE SWANSON, a career Iran expert who left the State Department in July, said he thought Iran perceived itself to be at a point of maximum leverage. He pointed as evidence to the U.S. lifting sanctions on Iranian oil on Friday, something he noted the Obama-era Iran agreement didn’t do.

“It was done solely based on market conditions,” Swanson said. “We didn’t get anything for it. So it’s just a huge victory for Iran, they probably see this and think they can replicate this model in return for the Strait. So I understand why Iran would be interested in talking right now.”

ROB MALLEY, who negotiated for President JOE BIDEN to try to restore the Iran nuclear deal, compared the moment to 2021, when he said Iranians would put out rosy updates on talks.

“It had nothing to do with reality but they’d say it because they wanted to firm up their currency,” he said. Today, he said, “The Trump administration wants to claim a deal is at hand not because it’s true, but to stop the markets from collapsing and oil prices from spiking.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to the accusation, but White House press secretary KAROLINE LEAVITT earlier told POLITICO, “These are sensitive diplomatic discussions and the United States will not negotiate through the news media.”

It will come for all of us

Our narcissistically unaware toddler has blundered the world into an astonishingly dangerous place. He’s motivated by revenge, empowered by his ignorance, frightened by his decline and reliant on the worst White House staff and Cabinet in the nation’s long history.

Gillen Tener Martin wrote recently in The Washington Monthly of Trump’s mantra: “I Could Do Anything.”

… learning experiences don’t seem to affect the delusional and vainglorious as they might the rest of us. Trump took to Truth Social [last] Tuesday to pivot from petulantly demanding that NATO countries help secure the critical oil and natural gas shipping lane, the Strait of Hormuz, and instead petulantly claim we don’t need their help: “speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE!”

But, of course, we do. Even a military superpower needs allies in war, and allies are hard to find when war is waged on specious grounds without a diplomatic endgame. Under different circumstances, the president being forced to reckon with the consequences of his actions may have brought solace—even glee—to some. Alas, the repercussions of this mess will come for us all.

That’s right. It will come for all of us. Even those who aren’t deranged and see the present moment very clearly indeed.

Trump , deranged as he is, literally could do anything and history tells us whatever it is will be dangerously, hubristically stupid.

And it will all come for you, too, John Thune and you, too, Mike Johnson and you, too, Scott Bessent and all the others who know better but simply lack the character and the guts to tell our flailing, fraudulent Wizard of Oddness to take a flying … well, you know what.

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But the Senate has become nearly as bad, which may help explain why Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin is willing to bail out of the Senate in his first term for a likely dead end job as secretary of Homeland Security.

It’s well established that Mullin is among the Senate’s most obvious knuckle draggers, a true lightweight, but still in the U.S. Senate that once existed leaving for a second level Cabinet position would have next to unthinkable.

Combine this race for the exits with the increasing possibility that Republicans lose the majority in the House and perhaps the Senate and it raises, I think, the likelihood of more “succession planning” in the GOP.

A quirky law in Idaho - of all places - presents the opportunity for one of the Senate’s most partisan and calculating members, James E. Risch, to pull a fast one.

Will he? Who knows, but the circumstances and the law certainly make it a possibility.

The Daines Gambit

Republican Sen. Steve Daines, the senior member of Montana’s congressional delegation, recently joined the cavalcade of senators and members of Congress exiting life in what used to be a co-equal branch of the federal government.

Ten Senate incumbents — six Republicans, four Democrats — are not seeking reelection this year, while at least 35 House Republicans are quitting Congress. Some are running for something else. Others, like Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky senator, are just old. McConnell is 84. Others, reading the electoral tea leaves that increasingly indicate a GOP shellacking in November, may just want to avoid defeat.

While it was big news that Daines, a Donald Trump favorite and past chairperson of the GOP Senate campaign committee, is quitting, the even bigger news was the way he did it.

While literally everyone expected Daines to coast to easy reelection this year, he waited until the absolute last moment — three minutes before the filing deadline in Montana — to pull out. This subterfuge allowed Daines’ handpicked successor, the little known U.S. attorney in Montana, Kurt Alme, to immediately file for the Senate seat. The scheme was so well coordinated that minutes later Trump, Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte and the state’s other GOP senator, Tim Sheehy, endorsed Alme.

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If you’re into the brashness of power politics, you might give Daines points for very sneaky plotting. But many, including some in his own party, said the whole business was, as the Brits say, “too cute by half,” prompting questions about whether the senator was deeply cynical or just unethical. Daines’ move, after all, precluded any real GOP primary for his seat and also kept potentially competitive Democrats from entering the race.

The blowback of this corrupt deal may, ironically, mostly smear the untested Alme — he’s never sought elected office before. Even in very conservative Montana, the state’s very independent voters might — just might — conclude sleazy deals in high office are remarkably underhanded. 1

Now from reality to speculation, because literally nothing is beneath Trump-Age Republicans in an effort to cling to power. Some Idaho history is in order.

A quirky Idaho law

In 1917, the Idaho Legislature apparently realized that it needed to create a process to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate. Just three years earlier, for the first time since the adoption of 17th Amendment to the Constitution providing for direct election of senators, Idaho voters selected James H. Brady, a Republican, as the state’s first popularly elected senator. Before the 17th Amendment, senators were elected by the legislature. And with the adoption of that amendment, Idaho seemed to have neglected to provide a legal basis for filling a vacancy caused by resignation or death.

The statute the Legislature adopted in 1917 declared that any Senate vacancy would be filled by gubernatorial appointment, a standard procedure in most states. But the Idaho law has another important provision that also appears in several other states:

“... however, that in case a vacancy occurs in the position of United States senator from the state of Idaho within thirty (30) days of any general election, no election for United States senator to fill said vacancy shall be held at such general election.”

That’s right. A timely resignation could cancel a Senate election.

Imagine this scenario: Republican Sen. James Risch — he’ll be 83 in May — is currently seeking reelection. Risch is doing his best to avoid any move that would further tie him to Trump’s unpopular Iranian war — even though Risch chairs the Foreign Relations Committee — or the president’s failure to fulfill his campaign promises to lower prices and release Justice Department files related to Trump’s old pal, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Assume the Iran war and the economy continue to deteriorate during the next several months, while independent Senate candidate Todd Achilles continues to build name identification and support. Perhaps Risch — never a particularly popular politician — suddenly looks vulnerable. He’s a political survivor, but what if he’s stayed too long and knows it?

What if along about Oct. 1, Risch is looking — perhaps his best outcome — at another Senate term in the minority with no chairmanship or, at worst, looking at a defeat to end his career. Or maybe his 83 years begin to catch up with him and he decides to spend more time with the family to enjoy the millions he’s accumulated in public office?

What if the lifelong politician decides he can effectively pull a Steve Daines and handpick his successor?

If Risch were to resign after, say, Oct. 5, his resignation would trigger the provision that voids any election for an Idaho senator until the next general election. Gov. Brad Little would appoint a successor who would serve for two years before facing voters in November 2028.

Under such a scenario, would Risch influence Little’s appointment? What do you think?

Would voters have anything to say about such a shuffle? The law is the law, and Little would give Risch’s successor a two-year head start on a Senate career. Voters would be left to watch it unfold rather like it has in Montana.

Too much speculation? Consider this: In 1917, the Idaho Legislature — brace yourself — was controlled by Democrats, with Democrat Moses Alexander as governor. The state’s two senators — Brady and William Borah — were Republicans. Democrats made the Senate vacancy process that is still in effect a top legislative priority in 1917. Why?

In January 1916, Idaho newspapers were full of news that Sen. Brady was seriously ill. The Moscow Daily Star-Mirror, for example, reported “Brady’s Illness Serious,” and said the senator was advised to avoid work and take a long rest. The Capital News in Boise said party leaders “are not a little troubled and worried over his condition,” and the Shoshone News-Press said friends despaired “for his life” due to Brady’s heart condition.

Brady eventually, and temporarily, regained his health and returned to Senate duties. But in January 1918, he died suddenly of a heart attack. Alexander appointed a Democrat to fill the vacancy and the “within 30 days” provision didn’t come into play, and it never has. But it is still sitting on the books.

During the 2025 Idaho legislative session, a bill was introduced to remove the 30-day provision and to require the governor to schedule a special election rather than make an appointment to a Senate vacancy. It never got a hearing and died in committee. The Idaho Freedom Foundation rated the bill a top priority.

Inquiring minds might ask why the issue has been raised now after 109 years?

Maybe ask Jim Risch if he really plans to stay in the Senate until he’s 89.

Steve Daines may have given him an idea.

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The winner was a Republican senator from Virginia William L. Scott.

In order, apparently, to prove the assertion, Scott called a news conference to deny it.

There have always been people - almost always men - who make you wonder why genuinely stupid people get elected to high public office.

Well, as they say, it’s a representative democracy so stupid people need representation, too.

We may miss Kristi Noem

Which brings me to Markwayne Mullin, the junior senator from Oklahoma and the man, assuming the Senate confirms him, Donald Trump wants to replace the scandal plagued Kristi Noem at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Mullin’s only apparent qualification for the job, just like Noem, is that he always says nice things about Trump. Otherwise, as they might say in Oklahoma, he couldn’t pour piss root beer out of a boot with instructions on the heel.

Therefore, he’ll be great.

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Here’s a clip of Mullin from January where he broke into a rage during a confirmation hearing for, eh, Pete Hegseth.

Something about senators being drunk and getting divorced. It’s a great clip. Markwayne meant to say “give me a break,” but said “give me a joke.”

Oklahoma has … given us a joke, that is.

And quite an admission from Mullin as he defended Hegseth:

“The only reason I’m here and not in prison is because my wife loved me, too.”

Behind every successful man …

And here Mullin says it was “a misspoke” - not that he had misspoken, but it was a misspoke - when he said what’s happening in Iran is a war.

But, oops, Mullin had repeatedly claimed we are not at war. So he tried to walk the comment back to, well, not great effect.

Mullin made his first national splash when he threatened to rumble with a witness during a Senate committee meeting. That great boxing referee Bernie Sanders shut it down. A classic bit of Senate history.

More recently the former owner of a plumbing business has been in the news because his investment portfolio has done pretty well since he relocated from Oklahoma to Washington, DC.

Here’s The New York Times:

A few days after Christmas, Senator Markwayne Mullin’s expansive stock portfolio got significantly bigger.

Mr. Mullin reported buying shares in Chevron, the only major U.S. oil company producing in Venezuela. Five days after the purchase, President Trump attacked Venezuela, demanding that its leadership give better terms to U.S. oil companies. Chevron’s stock price has since jumped, even as the market as a whole has slipped.

The Chevron transaction, which Mr. Mullin reported in January, was among as much as $2.8 million he invested in 31 companies on Dec. 29 — and part of a pattern of large and frequent trades that has made him one of the most prolific stock buyers in Congress.

There is no indication that Mr. Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who has said he speaks with Mr. Trump “all the time,” had inside knowledge of the administration’s plans before those stock transactions. Federal law doesn’t prohibit members of Congress from trading stock, even in industries overseen by committees on which they serve.

It would appear that when Mullin isn’t on cable TV, which is very often, or jumping up during a committee hearing to punch a witness, he’s doing a whole lot of stock trading:

Mr. Mullin’s transaction records reveal not just frequent trades, but successful ones too. From 2024 to 2026, the returns on Mr. Mullin’s stock purchases outperformed the market by 8 percent, according to Bruce Sacerdote, a Dartmouth economist who examined Mr. Mullin’s trades at the request of The Times and has researched stock trading among members of Congress.

“None of this is evidence of insider trading,” Mr. Sacerdote said. “This could be blind luck.”

Blind luck.

This guy should work for Charles Schwab.

And, God help us, we may miss Kristi when she’s gone.

Islamophobia as a campaign tactic

Mullin has competition for the title of dumbest senator - maybe vilest, too. Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn football coach and GOP senator from Alabama, is definitely in the running.

Tuberville, a Republican candidate for governor, has engaged in increasingly strident attacks on people of the Islamic faith over the last several months. Last week, Tuberville posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “the enemy is inside the gates,” including an image of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York with a picture of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim and the first person of Asian descent to hold that position.

Tuberville, his field goal attempt blocked, reached for a classic:

“When asked whether Muslim Americans in Alabama could have found his post offensive, Tuberville said he’s ‘got some great Muslim friends’ and that he spoke to ‘two Iranians in Alabama this past week about the war. Obviously, they’re Muslim,’” The Hill reported.

Google him. There is a lot more.

Alabama is, again, not sending its best.

Senator Foghorn Leghorn

On a per capita basis the House of Representatives certainly more stupid than the Senate. But with more than four times as many politicians to pick from you’d expect that from the House. I’m sure we all have our favorites.

And then there are guys who play stupid as part of their schtick, a particularly strong example back in the Senate.

Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy really isn’t as stupid as he seems, but he can be both (kinda) funny and crass when he goes all bayou.

Kennedy goes for the Foghorn Leghorn vote with his syrupy southern drawl, but in real life he’s an honors graduate of Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia Law School. He earned a second law degree from Oxford.

Not dumb, but occasionally plays dumb on the TV. Here’s The Guardian on Senator Leghorn:

Kennedy has made a name for himself by delivering “folksy”, sometimes racist statements in an exaggerated southern American accent that has been likened to being somewhere between that of Mr Haney, the con artist from the former CBS sitcom Green Acres, and Foghorn Leghorn, the cartoon rooster who appears in Looney Tunes. The latter comparison is so striking that New Orleans’s Times-Picayune newspaper once posted a quiz featuring a series of eccentric statements that was headlined: “Who said it: Sen John Kennedy or Foghorn Leghorn?”

In a Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy once told a Cornell law professor born in Soviet-era Russia: “I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade” – insinuating that she was a communist or a foreign agent. The remark came about three years after Kennedy drew ridicule from some quarters for spending a Fourth of July holiday – which recognizes the US’s independence from the UK – in Russia with leaders of his country’s rival power.

Separately, in a tough-on-crime, pro-police campaign ad, Kennedy ended the video by saying: “Look, if you hate cops just because they’re cops, the next time you’re in trouble, call a crackhead.”

When Kennedy voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to dismantle vaccine science he said:

“To my friends who are upset, I would say with respect, you know, call somebody who cares.”

But it’s all an act, a performance from Lower Hicksville, as long-time Louisiana political observer Bob Mann told The Guardian:

“That role is of a clever hick who, while unsophisticated, is always quick with a put-down for smug city slickers,” Mann said. “If you view him through the lens of someone who is affecting an attitude, the words don’t have to make complete sense. It’s the image and the attitude that count.”

One proof point that Kennedy isn’t as crazy as he often seems: his recent questioning help push Kristi Noem out of a real job. All he had to do was ask a question about whether Kristi had Donald Trump’s permission to feature herself in a $220 million ad campaign.

Kennedy knows where his Trump is buttered.

“I say, I say, boy, you pay attention when I’m talkin’ to ya … “

Now you just watch what comes next, ya hear. Senator Leghorn will lead the charge to confirm the Okie Stock Trader.

The United States Senate has always been something of a haven for odd ball characters, unrepentant racists, clowns, clods and presidential wannabees.

We tend to remember the good ones - George Norris, Howard Baker, Fightin’ Bob LaFollette, Mike Mansfield, Everett Dirksen, Frank Church, Mark Hatfield, Warren Magnuson - while mostly forgetting the cranks and the mountebanks.

So does it matter that a few of our elected representatives are not the sharpest pencils in the box? Remember, it is a “representative” democracy.

As one of the less than sharpest pencils, Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska, once noted in defending G. Harrold Carswell, a truly awful Richard Nixon nominee to the Supreme Court in 1970:

Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.

At least Senator Hruska didn’t call a news conference to utter one of the greatest lines in Senate history, but he had the good sense to make that comment on the Senate floor where the Constitution says you can say pretty much anything no matter how dumb.

We can’t have all Hruskas, don’t ya know.

Ours is a new Age of Mediocracy. We haven’t reached bottom yet, if there is a bottom.

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The Daily is part of States Newsroom. If you don’t know of these good folks and the work they do to bring quality journalism to many, many states you should. Follow some of them and contribute if you can.

So, I wrote about the Senator Steve Daines scheme, in part, because I saw some parallels with similar bit of Montana political chicanery - that word means “trickery,” by the way - nearly 100 years ago.

Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines set bipartisan tongues wagging last week when he pulled off an audacious scheme – one commentator called it an “arrogant and just deeply cynical move” – to ensure that his handpicked successor received an uncontested shot at a six-year term in the United States Senate.

Daines, who was widely believed to be coasting to a third Senate term with no serious GOP primary opposition, abruptly ended his own candidacy – with no public notice – minutes before the filing deadline so that Kurt Alme, the state’s little known U.S. attorney who has never held elective office, could slip into the race. Had other high profile Republicans been in the know about Daines plans, a primary election would almost certainly have attracted a host of candidates, potentially from both parties.

The Daines maneuver had to have been long in the planning, and near absolute secrecy was essential to its success. The only people who appear to have been in on the plan were Donald Trump, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte and Daines Senate colleague Tim Sheehy, all Republicans who immediately endorsed Alme.

The reaction was swift, if stunned. The Washington, D.C. publication The Hill saying, for example, “The Montana Republican’s decision left lawmakers slack-jawed …”

At least a few Republicans condemned Daines sleight of hand, and former Senator Jon Tester, one of the Democrats Daines said he was trying to keep out of the race, bluntly said: “None of us were running. [Daines] f—ed his own party.”

There is an old political axiom that holds that every politician – Daines surely included – longs to pick their successor and American political history is full of similar stories.

Last year Illinois Democratic Congressman Jesús “Chuy” García, for example, masterminded something similar, allowing his chief of staff to file for his seat apparently knowing that he was going to retire. Garcia’s decision, like Daines’s, drew bipartisan condemnation, with Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey saying it “was undemocratic and should not be allowed.” The full House voted to reprimand Garcia.

There is some Montana political history that bears remembering in the context of Daines’ audacious maneuver. And a secret, backroom deal in Montana in 1933, also involving a coveted Senate seat, illustrates why historically these too-cute-by-half insider maneuvers rarely redound to the credit of anyone involved.

On March 2, 1933, Montana’s senior senator, Thomas J. Walsh of Helena, died suddenly while enroute to Washington, D.C., where he planned to join the Cabinet of president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt had tapped Walsh, a distinguished and widely respected senator, to be his attorney general. Walsh’s nomination was widely hailed, and it was expected that he would resign the Senate seat he had held since 1913 when confirmed by the Senate. Walsh’s unexpected death compressed the timeline for a replacement and put the political maneuvering into high gear.

As in most states, Montana law empowers the governor to fill a Senate vacancy when it’s caused by resignation or death. In 1933 Montana’s governor was Democrat John Erickson of Kalispell, described by one observer as “a gentle, sleepy, colorless conservative” with close ties to the state’s politically powerful corporations, particularly the Anaconda Mining Company and Montana Power, the influential “twins” of the early 20th Century Montana’s economy.

Montana’s other senator was a pugnacious Butte lawyer, Burton K. Wheeler, a Democrat, and a staunch opponent of the “twins” who fancied himself the power in the state party. While a good deal more progressive that Erickson, Wheeler believed he could influence the governor’s Senate appointment, and he set about making sure he could. Above all Wheeler was determined to prevent an arch political enemy, another Butte lawyer and Anaconda lobbyist, J. Bruce Kremer, from receiving Erickson’s endorsement.

Wheeler had ample reason to think that Kremer had the political juice to get the nod to replace Walsh. Kremer had long been a member of the Democratic National Committee, a therefore an experienced, well connected national and Montana power broker with close ties to the incoming Roosevelt administration. Anaconda and Montana Power supported his Senate ambitions believing Kremer would be a foil to Wheeler’s influence in Montana and in the Senate.

Wheeler, never shy about bullying his way to a desired outcome, pursued his own audacious three-part strategy to thwart Kremer’s ambition and make certain the state’s open Senate seat would be occupied by a politician Wheeler was comfortable with and could dominate.

In the first step of Wheeler’s strategy he summoned top Anaconda and Montana Power officials to a hotel room in Helena and read them the Riot Act. They must drop their support of Kremer, he said, or Wheeler would consider it a declaration of political war by the corporations. The corporate executives reluctantly agreed, but Wheeler was determined to make sure.

The next day – step two of his strategy – Wheeler brought the corporate bosses together with Erickson to make sure the governor heard firsthand that the business interests were no longer backing Kremer.

Yet, there still remained the question of who would replace Walsh. Wheeler had a strategy to answer that question, as well.

Like Steve Daines in 2026, B.K. Wheeler in 1933 executed an audacious scheme that reworked Montana’s political landscape for years to come and, at least temporarily, cemented his own grip on political power.

“I then persuaded Erickson to resign as governor,” Wheeler cynically and matter-of-factly explained years later, “and let the lieutenant governor, Frank Cooney, appoint him as Walsh’s successor in the Senate.”

Erickson apparently needed little encouragement – Erickson’s wife also liked the idea – and the governor agreed to switch offices. Erickson submitted his resignation on March 13, 1933 and 11 minutes later, new Gov. Cooney appointed him to fill Walsh’s Senate seat.

It appeared to be a clear victory for Wheeler, but the scheme engendered serious political fallout. Wheeler had politically knifed an old foe, thwarted his corporate adversaries and secured a lackluster and compliant colleague in the Senate who would never become a political threat. But things didn’t work out nearly as well for others involved in what became known as a “corrupt deal” over a Montana Senate seat.

One newspaper in the Flathead, Erickson’s backyard, accused him of “selfishness” and predicted “that future events will deal out justice” to a man who would shortly be forgotten.

Montana federal judge George Bourquin, a future Senate candidate himself, was outraged by the deal and wrote a scathing letter to every member of the Senate urging them to refuse to seat Erickson.

“This huckstering, horse trading, barter and sale of great public office … has been consummated by (Erickson and Cooney) to their large personal and financial advantage,” Bourquin said. The judge suggested that the Senate should find that Erickson couldn’t be seated because he had vacated the governor’s office for a fraudulent reason.

The Meagher County News, not knowing as most Montanans did not know that Wheeler had engineered the political swap, opined that Wheeler was disingenuous in denying that any deal had been struck, since with Erickson in the Senate, Wheeler would control all Montana patronage. By supporting Erickson, the paper said, Wheeler “tars himself with the same pitch that smears the new senator.”

The Montana Standard in Butte defended Erickson trading the governor’s office for the Senate floor saying, as Senator Daines also seems to suggest, that by anointing a candidate his party can avoid a lengthy and costly campaign that might cause party turmoil. Montana Democratic leaders in 1933 behaved much the same, generally supporting the Wheeler-Erickson-Cooney deal or choosing the expedient of simply keeping quiet.

The Senate ultimately seated Erickson, but not before Wheeler had to admit that the deal he engineered was unorthodox, but under Montana law not illegal.

Still the political fallout continued, and a few months later when Erickson had to face a special election to fill the remainder of Walsh’s term he lost the Democratic primary to Butte attorney James E. Murray, who would, ironically, become a bitter Wheeler adversary. That special election, vaulting Murray from local party politics in Silver Bow County to Senate prominence, began his 26-year Senate career.

Erickson, who had never lost an election while winning three times statewide, finished third in the special election primary and sank into political obscurity never again holding office.

There are no perfect parallels with Erickson switch to the Senate in 1933 and Daines coronation of his preferred Senate candidate this month, but there is one commonality. The ultimate outcomes of political maneuvers of this kind, even given the sharp political polarization Montanans confront today, are extremely unpredictable.

John Erickson certainly didn’t plan on spending a mere 20 months in the Senate after vacating the governor’s office, and Erickson, popular before the deal, likely couldn’t anticipate his popularity plummeting as far and as fast as it did. And Frank Cooney died of a heart attack in 1935 never overcoming the taint of his role in the “the deal.”

B.K. Wheeler, the architect of the long ago Montana Senate deal, increasingly expanded his reputation for ruthless political maneuvering, a reputation that many Montana Democrats – Jim Murray, Mike Mansfield and Lee Metcalf, among others – came to resent and reject. Wheeler, eventually losing the support of his party, lost his own Democratic primary in 1946.

The fallout in the Daines-Alme deal, if there is any fallout in our age of hyper-partisanship, may be just as unpredictable, particularly if voters conclude that the scheme was too cynical, too unfair or just plain unethical.

The Daines maneuver is likely to be remembered as a Montana test of whether expedient cynicism and norm shattering behavior, effectively minimizing the opportunity for voters to have their say in the stewardship of a seat in the United States Senate, carries any real consequences.

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NOTE: My biography of Senator Burton K. Wheeler - Political Hell-Raiser - was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2019.

Perhaps that is the only thing my very sensible dad would have had in common with the man who puts his Florsheim’s under the Resolute Desk.

Trump has a thing, apparently, for Florsheim shoes.

All things being equal I’m an Allen Edmonds man, or Johnston and Murphy. I had a pair of Florsheim’s once upon a time. Didn’t like ‘em.

I’m guessing Marco Rubio doesn’t like his new pair either. Even though they are the aspiration shoe for the average guy …

Wait, what?

For those of you who don’t follow the really important news I am here to report that Donald J. Trump, your president with the too long neckties, the too baggy blue suits that hang uncomfortably on his 80-year old frame with the jacket seldom buttoned, and (reportedly) with lifts in his shoes has been “gifting” (no, not grifting) a particular style of Florsheim shoes to certain special people.

Marco Rubio, the man reported to be Secretary of State, has been photographed wearing his pair of these shoes in a photo that frankly looks like every family photo when a three year old toddler slips into dad’s shoes and everyone wants a picture and has a laugh.

Nice socks, though.

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The common wisdom on the Internet is that Rubio wore gift shoes two sizes too big rather than upset the big boss by acknowledging that, well, Trump got his shoe size wrong pretty much at the same time he was getting the Strait of Hormuz wrong.

Vice President JD Vance reportedly also received a pair of Trump Florsheim’s, as did members of the Cabinet, Sean Hannity, the Fox News talking head, and Senator Lindsey Graham, because of course he did.

The Wall Street Journal broke (in) this story that was picked up around the Internet - narrow, wide and extra wide - with extra wide obviously the size Rubio has been stumbling around in.

Here’s The Guardian with the footnotes:

Sitting behind the Resolute desk, Donald Trump fixed his gaze on JD Vance’s and Marco Rubio’s feet. “Marco, JD, you guys have s—y shoes,” said the US president, consulting a catalogue and asking their shoe size. Rubio said 11.5 and Vance 13. Trump leaned back in his chair and remarked: “You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.”

The story is recounted in a Wall Street Journal newspaper report that tells how officials, advisers and visiting allies are quietly acquiring leather dress shoes courtesy of Trump, who presents them with the enthusiasm of a travelling salesman.

Cabinet meetings, lunches and Oval Office drop-ins can abruptly turn into discussions about footwear.

“Did you get the shoes?” he will ask colleagues, according to several people familiar with the ritual quoted by the Journal. Some have even found themselves trying them on in the Oval Office.

One female White House official observed wryly: “All the boys have them.” Another added: “It’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them.”

Trump’s shoe leather largesse will do little to dispel perceptions of his White House as a boys’ club. Research by the Brookings Institution found that his administration is the least diverse this century. In his first 300 days, the total share of women confirmed by the Senate was just 16%.

Let’s just affirm that the loyalty of members of this administration to the mob boss is pretty absolute.

The Florsheim model on offer retails for $145, but the cost of wearing them is priceless. Blisters included.

Central casting crowd

We know that this administration is obsessed with “optics” - black oxfords included - which means how things look to we mere mortals.

Trump has often tipped us off to his shoe optics fetish by saying that a Cabinet member or Air Force general is “right out of central casting,” which may explain why Pete Hegseth is in a job where he can do maximum damage, while displaying very Trumpian central casting bonafides.

I mean, come on, doesn’t Pete just scream "MAXIMUM DAMAGE !!!” Maybe his oxford are too tight.

The administration - Trump at least - does not like the optics of a U.S. Tomahawk missile destroying a girls school in Iran and killing 165 civilians, so the president who is always on top of everything said he didn’t really know anything about the missile attack after saying that it was maybe an Iranian Tomahawk. Which really is impossible.

The shoe-supplier-in-chief was too busy, perhaps, checking the sale section of the Florsheim website to know that if …

… the U.S. role in the attack is confirmed, it would rank among the military's most deadly incidents involving civilians in decades. Congress created a special Pentagon office to prevent the accidental targeting of civilians but it was dramatically scaled back by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth soon after he took office last year.

No photos!

Missile Pete is also very much an optics guy and it seems he didn’t like some of the recent pics of himself looking very much like a what a deranged former Fox News host looks like.

Here’s one account of this Pentagon photogate:

Press photographers are no longer permitted to take photos inside the Pentagon press briefing room after several outlets published “unflattering” photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, two people familiar with the situation told the Washington Post.

On March 2, Hegseth held a press conference with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to brief the press on the U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February.

Shortly after, wire service photographers – such as those from the Associated Press, Reuters and Getty Images – published photos of the defense secretary speaking with the media. This is typical for nearly all press conferences held by a government official.

As Tom Jones, a really great media columnist, wrote at the Poynter website:

Boy, oh boy. These guys in the Trump administration. Just when you think they can’t get any more petty and thin-skinned and, to paraphrase one of their favorite words, snowflaky, they find another way to bellyache about something.

Is it on the other foot yet?

But back to the optics.

With the war against Iran going so well, with oil flowing from the Middle East and gas prices coming down and with regime change kicking in all that is left is for the many, many men from central casting to take a little time off for a … shoe shine.

Or they might want to check on the status of the lawsuit Florsheim’s parent company has brought against the Trump Administration to recover illegal tariff revenue that the company has had to pay by passing along costs to shoe wearing Americans.

New York Magazine sizes that up:

In March 2025, Milwaukee Business Journal reported that Weyco [parent company of Florsheim] was rushing “1 million shoes to U.S. ahead of China tariff hike.” A week after “Liberation Day” on April 2, the Associated Press quoted Florsheim’s warning that doubling the tariffs on leather imports from Asia “means a significant cost increase that will impact consumers.” Last summer, Florsheim told several outlets that the company had been forced to raise prices by about 10 percent because “[t]he tariff escalations have created disruption and uncertainty in the shoe industry like we have never seen before.”

In December, Weyco filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, asking the U.S. Court of International Trade to “declare the president’s unprecedented power grab illegal.” The company also requested a refund, with interest, of the $16 million it paid in tariffs last year, if the policy were struck down. Last month, when the U.S. Supreme Court did just that, Florsheim co-authored a piece for The Contrarian titled “Business Leaders Welcome SCOTUS Tariffs Decision.”

I tell ya, the optics on this are terrible, but if the shoe fits, or even if it doesn’t.

We gotta admit our central casting crowd is always on the back foot.

We interrupt this nonsense to return you to a war that Donnie Loafer says is already “won.”

Meanwhile, the bombing will continue until the other shoe drops.

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About me: I am a Nebraska native, grew up in South Dakota and migrated in Idaho after college to work in broadcast journalism. In 1986, I joined the “comeback” campaign of a legendary Idaho political figure – Cecil D. Andrus – who eventually served four terms as governor and four years as Secretary of the Interior, not bad for a Democrat in a very conservative state. I had a small role in helping Cece Andrus win his last two gubernatorial terms. I did communication and crisis consulting work, and since “retiring” to the beautiful north coast of Oregon have written three books on U.S. Senate history. I’m working on a new book on another legend – this one a legend in journalism.

You can find my books here:

I write this Substack to scratch my itch to connect history with current politics. I hope, in some small way, to contribute to understanding of this perilous moment for our democracy, for free speech and facts.