The confirmation of Todd Blanche as Attorney General of the United States has been kabuki theater of sorts. We were hopeful that three Republicans had the backbone to turn down this man who has broken the Department of Justice. Surely, the Senate would not confirm a man who is so subservient to Trump. The DOJ is supposed to be at arms’-length from the President. Blanche is under Trump’s thumb.
Blanche is the one who negotiated a deal to create a $1.776 billion slush fund for insurrectionists and Trump allies as well as a sweet deal for Trump, his sons, and their business NOT to be audited by the IRS, a gift to them of at least $100 million, probably more.
I imagined that there would be outrage towards the man who refused to release the Epstein files. The guy who spent two days interviewing sexual predator Ghislaine Maxwell, then arranged for her transfer to a minimum security prison where she received special treatment, as if she were a privileged guest, not a convicted pedophile.
Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski will vote against confirming Blanche. In Collins’ case, this is a pattern. She votes against her party only when her vote is not needed.
Most shocking are the “yes” votes of Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, and–today–Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. All three were driven out of the senate by Trump. Till is resigned because Trump threatened to primary him. The other two were primaried by Trump choices and lost.
They had reason to stand against Trump, and they had reason to have a spine. But in the end, all three caved.
And Todd Blanche will head the nation’s Justice Department, where he will continue Trump’s agenda and his vendettas.
We live in strange and dangerous times. For the first time in memory, maybe ever, the rule of law itself is under attack. Our Dear Leader has threatened judges who rule against his wishes. He and his lawless administration ignore decisions they don’t like. He installed a Supreme Court majority who were vetted by the far-right Federalist Society. That majority proceeded to overturn Roe v. Wade, despite their repeated pledges not to do so, and to gut the Voting Rights Act, terminating guarantees of equal rights for Black Americans.
At this time when the rule of law itself is disregarded by the President, who is himself ruled only by whim and self-aggrandizement, two retired judges expressed their concern in The Guardian.
Judge Michael P. Connelly and Judge Robert F. Orr wrote:
Last October, US lawyers, judges and rule-of-law advocates traveled to Warsaw as guests of the Carter Center. Neither of us was among them. But when our colleagues returned, their stories inspired us.
They told us about judges and lawyers across central Europe who had been surveilled, smeared, prosecuted and sometimes jailed for standing between political power and courts meant to remain independent.
And they kept going.
Poland’s example was especially compelling. When its government sought greater control over the judiciary, Polish judges put on their robes and marched through Warsaw. Judges from across Europe joined them in what became the March of 1,000 Robes.
Then they left their courthouses and traveled through towns and villages, explaining what an independent judiciary means to a farmer, shopkeeper, parent or business owner. They talked about law not as an abstraction, but as protection against arbitrary power.
They understood a truth Americans can no longer overlook: judicial independence cannot survive merely because judges believe in it. The public must understand why it matters.
That lesson brought us on to a bus.
Last month, shortly after the United States celebrated its 250th birthday, the Justice in Motion tour traveled from western Pennsylvania through Ohio and into Michigan. Thirty sitting and retired judges, lawyers and advocates handed out pocket constitutions, met students and asked a question Americans do not consider often enough: what does the rule of law mean in everyday life, and what happens when we take it for granted?
In Columbus, we did something neither of us imagined during our years on the bench. We put on our robes and marched from the federal courthouse toward the supreme court of Ohio, carrying purple flowers, an international symbol of judicial independence.
American judges do not ordinarily march in the streets. Nor should they. The judiciary derives much of its legitimacy from restraint. Judges do not campaign for particular outcomes or answer criticism with press conferences. They speak through their decisions. But these are no ordinary times.
And our Polish colleagues taught us that silence can carry its own risk.
Our march was not about Democrats or Republicans, nor about defending particular judges or decisions. It was about defending the system that allows legal disagreements to be resolved according to law rather than political power.
One of us was elected to the supreme court of Ohio as a Democrat. The other was elected to the supreme court of North Carolina as a Republican and is now an independent. Through two long careers, we have disagreed about plenty.
That is precisely the point.
The rule of law is not a partisan possession.
Both sides enter a courtroom with the right to be heard. Judges must apply the law to the facts without regard to which party is more powerful, popular or politically useful.
Sometimes judges get it wrong. That is why we have appellate courts. Sometimes courts issue decisions that elected officials or citizens strongly dislike. That is unavoidable in a constitutional democracy.
The answer is appeal, legislation where constitutionally permissible, or constitutional amendment. It cannot be intimidation, retaliation for unpopular rulings or the suggestion that compliance with lawful court orders is optional.
Once adherence to judicial decisions depends upon whether the politically powerful agree with them, we have left the rule of law behind.
In Wooster, Ohio, about 150 people gathered across from the historic courthouse. The discussion was not about red America or blue America. It was about ordinary life.
The rule of law is why you can deposit money in a bank and expect it to be there tomorrow. It is why contracts mean something, property can be protected and an individual citizen can enter a courthouse and challenge the government.
These protections seem ordinary only because generations before us built institutions strong enough to make them ordinary. When the rule of law works, it is almost invisible.
Judges are trained – rightly – to exercise restraint. During our years on the bench, we spoke through our rulings. That tradition is essential to maintaining confidence in an impartial judiciary.
But restraint should not be confused with silence about the survival of the institution itself.
When judges are threatened because of their rulings; when an adverse decision is answered not with an appeal but with demands for retaliation; when courts are judged legitimate only when they produce politically desired outcomes, those who understand the system have an obligation to explain what is being lost.
Our Polish friends understood this before we did. Their circumstances differ from ours, and comparisons should be made carefully. But the lesson travels well.
The rule of law does not defend itself. Neither does an independent judiciary. Constitutions are pieces of paper unless citizens and public officials possess the courage and habits necessary to honor them.
Four days on a bus will not persuade a nation. The purpose was more modest: to begin conversations, one community and one citizen at a time, about institutions Americans have been fortunate enough to take for granted.
That work belongs not only to judges and lawyers, but to all of us.
The rule of law is not something judges possess. It is something citizens inherit.
And every generation must decide whether to preserve it.
What’s giving us hope now
Justice Robert F Orr (retired): What gives me hope is the scope of individuals and groups now focusing and talking about the rule of law and the independence of our judiciary. Our bus trip had a great mix of backgrounds and experience both in the judges participating and meeting us at stops as well as the young people who amplified the message across various media platforms. It’s genuinely a national movement.
Justice Michael P Donnelly (retired): What gives me hope is the genuine appreciation we encountered during the bus tour for the role of an independent judiciary in protecting individual rights and civil liberties. The people we met understood that these freedoms, defended at great sacrifice throughout our history, cannot be taken for granted – and that each generation must be willing to stand up for them.
Michael P Donnelly is a retired justice of the supreme court of Ohio
Robert F Orr is a retired justice of the supreme court of North Carolina. Both participated in the Justice in Motion tour organized by the Democracy Rising Collaborative and Keep Our Republic
Bo French is an uber-bigot who is running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission. Don’t be misled by the title. The Railroad Commission has very little to do with railroads. It oversees the oil and gas industry in Texas and wields enormous power over an essential industry.
You might want to learn about Bo French, because he is running for an important statewide seat. Also because he voices the sentiments of the dark underbelly of American political life.
Last week Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Railroad Commission of Texas, sent out a bizarre fundraising email. Framed as a reminder of the 108th anniversary of the Communist overthrow of Russia, the email included an AI-generated image of his Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, smiling in the chambers where the country’s then-ruling Romanov family was executed in 1918. Rosenthal, French’s campaign continued, has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed” the Romanovs, and has plans for his own “infernal revolution” of Texas. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam,” the email continued.
If you’re wondering what, exactly, a century-old Russian coup has to do with the railroad commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, then you’re likely not alone. But among a small audience—those attuned to white supremacist dog whistles—the accusation almost certainly perked up some ears.
You see, Rosenthal is Jewish. And while French did not explicitly name the Bolshevik revolutionaries who overthrew Russia a century ago, the email appears to be nodding to an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims there is a Jewish Communist cabal intent on controlling the world and stamping out Christianity. Known as Judeo-Bolshevism, the theory was crucial to Adolf Hitler’s rise and a key justification for the Holocaust. It remains central to the worldviews of many modern fascists, who maintain that communism—and, by extension, immigration—are tools used by Jews to destroy the West and white people.
In a statement to Texas Monthly, Rosenthal called French’s post “true to form.” The Texas House member from the Houston area and longtime mechanical engineer in the oil and gas industry continued: “While I’m working on substantive solutions for the people of Texas and our energy grid, his whole campaign is about pejorative and racist attacks.”
Neither French nor his campaign responded this week to numerous requests for an interview, or to clarify whether he intended to invoke the conspiracy theory. But his other recent posts make clear he has a deep familiarity with esoteric racist views that were once largely confined to fringe corners of the far right.
This week, in response to a video that purported to show nonwhite people trespassing in a restricted part of Yellowstone National Park, French posted a quote from “The Camp of the Saints”—an obscure French dystopian novel that depicts immigrants as diseased, feces-eating hordes and has enjoyed a recent resurgence among the global white nationalist movement. “Your universe has no meaning to them,” French wrote on X to his 80,000 followers, without revealing the source of the quote. “They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door . . .”
Citing fears of “gay race communism,” an impending “massacre of heritage Americans,” and the nation ending up like modern South Africa, French has called for the United States to “be Rhodesia,” the African pseudostate in the sixties and seventies in which Black people were violently oppressed by a ruling white minority. Rhodesia has inspired numerous racist killers—most infamously Dylann Roof, the self-described “Last Rhodesian” who massacred nine Black congregants at a South Carolina church in 2015.
“We are all Rhodesians now,” French wrote in January.
It wasn’t long ago that such views were largely relegated to the online backwater of the neo-Nazi movement or manifestos left by fascist mass shooters, according to Wendy Via, a veteran researcher of the far right and cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “They are well-known to people who study extremism,” Via told me. “But they’re not well-known to even your average racist. These are the ideological basis for the white supremacist movement.”
Even if they’re not yet widely accepted, she said, such views are slowly being normalized by President Donald Trump, the scaling back of moderation on many social media websites, and the proliferation of the “great replacement” theory—which claims there is an intentional, often Jewish-driven, effort to demographically replace white people in Western countries. In May, for instance, Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander-at-large under Trump, spoke to a global conference of neo-Nazi-affiliated activists and extreme far-right political figures who had gathered in support of the “remigration” movement, which seeks to forcibly remove people of color, including legal citizens, from their countries. (Detractors have another name for such efforts: “ethnic cleansing.”)
In Texas, French has been a key purveyor of similarly extreme rhetoric, and he helped make anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry mainstream in the broader state GOP. He’s called for 100 million people—nearly a third of the American population—to be deported, and for two nonwhite Texas House members to be stripped of their citizenship and removed from the country. He wants some Native Americans—“third world savages”—to be kicked out of America too. French says Texas needs to “ban Islam” and “round upevery Muslim” for deportation. Last week he toldhis followers it was “time to go round up all the Chinese and send them packing!” McCarthyism and the Christian Crusades, he argues, didn’t go far enough. And this week he referred to America’s “not in labor force” population—an economic term for nonworkers that includes retirees, students, and those with serious handicaps—as “low IQ parasites.”
When Donald Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion, it was a breathtaking display of arrogance and greed. An independent contractor leaked Trump’s tax returns in 2019, along with the returns of other very wealthy people.
A few things to know about this event: the individual who leaked tax returns was convicted and sent to prison. The leaking of tax returns occurred while Trump was President. Trump was expected to release his tax returns as other presidents had done since —, but he never did.
Federal Judge Kathleen Williams made clear that she found the lawsuit fishy, since it was not an adversarial proceeding. As she pointed out, when Trump sued the IRS, he was essentially suing himself since he was in charge of the department he was suing. She was coming close to the conclusion that the lawsuit had no adversary and was possibly a fraud on the court.
Before she issued a ruling, Blanche and Trump announced that they had reached a settlement: Trump would drop his suit in exchange for the Justice Departnent agreeing to set up a fund of $1.776 billion to pay people who had been unfairly targeted and harmed by the federal government. They also agreed that the IRS would not audit Trump or his family (it was never clear whether the agreement covered audits up until 2026 or audits past and present.) Since Trump owed the IRS about $100 million, this piece was very important to him.
Judge Williams issued a ruling and declared the entire agreement void. She said that Blanche and Trump could not even call what they had done a “settlement,” because the terms they agreed to had no legal force.
Senators from both parties were outraged by the slush fund, which they believed would give payouts to the January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump friends such as Rudy Giuliani and others who helped his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Acting Attorney General Blanche assured them that the slush fund was dead but he refused to put it in writing.
When Trump nominated Blanche to be the Attorney General of the United States, two Republican senators said they would block him unless he produced a letter revoking his agreement with Trump.
Friday’s dismissal of the Department of Justice case against David Hearn for vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool came days after Hearn’s lawyers asked for transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to the indictment. The lawyers noted that the government’s only witness testified that the pool was already damaged before Hearn went near it, and that the witness could not quantify the cost of any damage Hearn might have done over and above the cost of repairing the existing damage. The lawyers told the court there were “irregularities in the government’s presentation of the evidence to the grand jury” that “call into question whether the grand jury was misled.”
The Department of Justice has been caught repeatedly misleading grand juries or committing misconduct in getting indictments. Hearn’s lawyers were suggesting that the Department of Justice engaged in the same misconduct in the indictment of David Hearn for damaging the bottom of the reflecting pool.
In their filing, they noted that a judge and former federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia had recently stated that “[g]enerations of presidential administrations and public officials” have reinforced the idea, called the “presumption of regularity,” that public officials do their jobs properly, operate in good faith, and follow correct procedures. But, the judge noted, “In just six months, the President of the United States may have forfeited the right to such a presumption.”
On July 28, J. David McSwane, Pratheek Rebala, and Carla Astudillo of ProPublica reported that judges across the country are calling out lawyers for the Department of Justice, questioning whether they can be trusted to tell the truth and whether they are operating according to centuries-old norms. Judges have called behavior by Department of Justice lawyers “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly,” and otherwise dishonest.
The degradation of the Department of Justice, which is charged with defending the rule of law for the American people, into an instrument of Trump’s political wrath has been illustrated in the fight over the confirmation of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to attorney general.
Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.
Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”
On July 29, Devlin Barrett and Alan Feuer of the New York Times reported that the Secret Service agents who interviewed Comey in May 2025 were told to send a summary of that interview as quickly as possible to Trump on Air Force One. Trump’s close involvement in the case, the authors wrote, “is one of the most glaring examples to date of the degree to which Mr. Trump now directs federal law enforcement actions.”
On July 28, Comey’s lawyers filed motions to throw out on the grounds of vindictive and selective prosecution the federal charges Blanche brought against him. They noted that Trump had repeatedly made it clear he wanted Comey indicted, even going so far as to put his former special assistant Lindsey Halligan into office as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where she indicted Comey just four days later. (That appointment was later found to be invalid.) The filings from Comey’s lawyers appear to show that FBI officers engaged in warrantless surveillance of Comey.
Like the lawyers in the Hearn case, Comey’s lawyers suggested that “irregularities in the grand jury process influenced the grand jury to return an indictment.” Like Hearn’s lawyers, they asked the court to “disclose the transcripts and audio recordings of all proceedings before the grand jury in this case” or to review them himself to make sure they followed the law. In a previous case against Comey, they note, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick found that the government’s actions raised “genuine issues of misconduct” that were “inextricably linked to the government’s grand jury presentation.”
Blanche’s indictment of Comey to please Trump colors another of his actions: he backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund but is clearly Trump’s main interest: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
That slush fund/nonprosecution deal has been a sticking point for Blanche’s Senate confirmation to attorney general, as two Republican senators—John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—want him to put in writing that the deal is as dead as he claimed it is in his confirmation hearing before they agree to support his nomination. But he has refused to do so. On Thursday, Trump suggested he was willing to withdraw Blanche’s nomination until Cornyn and Tillis are out of office, leaving him as acting attorney general.
Then, at 7:03 Friday morning, Trump threw a monkey wrench into this fight by posting that in fact, he emphatically supports the slush fund. He appears to reject the idea that it is dead, and seems to be counting on Todd Blanche to implement it, exactly as critics have said.
Trump seems to have been thwarted from getting his way quietly by putting Blanche in as attorney general without any promise to kill the slush fund and its accompanying promise not to prosecute Trump or his associates for crimes associated with their tax filings. And so, on Friday, Trump filed notice that he and the rest of the parties to the “agreement” will appeal the July 13 ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams. She said that the suit that led to the $1.776 billion slush fund and the accompanying nonprosecution promise was filed to “manipulate the judicial process.” Williams said the Justice Department could not claim the deal it made with the Trumps was a judicial agreement.
At 7:32 Saturday morning, Trump posted: “If Senators Cornyn and Tillis, both upset because I wouldn’t Endorse them (they lost, and quit, respectively!), aren’t going to approve Todd Blanche, one of the most respected professionals, according to everybody, in the Country, to be the United States Attorney General, then I will keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill, which takes care of those who have been so badly treated by the Crooked Joe Biden (and Obuma!) Administration (I get nothing, although I was treated horribly!), PASSED. Todd Blanche was a voice of reason! It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT”
After Richardson had posted her commentary, near midnight last night, CNN reported that Todd Blanche released a written statement declaring that he was rescinding the slush fund. This was what Senators Cornyn and Tillis had demanded, and it appeared that they are likely to vote to confirm him tomorrow.
The document released Sunday also limits the addendum to that agreement that offers the president and members of his family immunity from tax investigations — a sticking point for Cornyn. The senator wanted Blanche to explicitly acknowledge that it applies only to past tax investigations against the president and those listed in the IRS lawsuit.
The Sunday order says the measure “applies by its terms only retroactively” and that it applies only to “the named parties in the lawsuit” referenced in the agreement.
Bottom line: Blanche abandons the slush fund but reaffirms that the IRS will not audit Trump or his family or the Trump Organization for any tax cheating in the past. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote, this was Trump’s main interest, not the slush fund.
So if Cornyn and Tillis are satisfied, Trump gets what he wanted: freedom from having his tax returns audited retroactively. This saves him at least $100 million, possibly much more.
And if Blanche is confirmed, Trump gets what he’s always wanted; his Roy Cohn in charge of the Department of Justice, pursuing his enemies and defending Trump’s actions.
L.C. Francis authors the blog “L.C. Francis Open Society for History and Civics.” In this post, he imagines how Benjamin Franklin would react if he could time-travel to the present day. He titled this one “A Republic in a Costly Costume.”
His subtitle is:
Benjamin Franklin visits Washington and finds the experiment alive, wounded, witty, dangerous, and leaning toward the very monarchy it was built to resist.
“Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.” — Benjamin Franklin, writing as Silence Dogood, No. 8, published in The New-England Courant, July 1722.
Dear Friends,
Yesterday, I wrote about Adams and Jefferson, two bitter friends who died on the Fourth of July, fifty years after the Declaration. But for weeks, another question has been on my mind: what would one founder think if he returned for America’s 250th birthday?
On this Sunday morning, after the fireworks have quieted and the crowds have gone home, I did not want to hand you another stack of bad news. I did not want to build another time machine just for cleverness. I chose Benjamin Franklin because, of all the Founders, he might be the least surprised by what he found in Washington in 2026.
Franklin was intimately aware of monarchial tendencies because he had known kings, ministers, courtiers, printers, mobs, frauds, scientists, diplomats, and men who mistook applause for wisdom. He would not arrive appalled by our foolishness. He would arrive amused, worried, and already reaching for his pen, because sometimes a Republic needs to hear the truth from a man who understood both human weakness and the strange miracle of self-government.
I visualized him observing the ruined East Wing, the ballroom adjacent to the People’s House, the painted Reflecting Pool, attacks on the press, a craving for royal attention, and an occupant of the People’s House who is more eager to be admired than to serve our Republic.
Then Franklin writes home…Hope you find this insightful & enlightening.
Dispatch on the Status of Our Republic
Washington City July 5, 2026
My Esteemed Friends,
Having been conveyed, by means I cannot explain, into a future age that corresponds to 250 years from our time, and finding myself in the city your posterity has raised for the administration of the Republic, I have thought it prudent to send you a few observations before I am returned, if I am permitted to be returned to our time.
Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson will be pleased to hear that our Republic still exists in form. Elections take place, courts at the national, state, and local levels continue to interpret the law, newspapers continue to publish, and the public debates with such fervor that I almost thought the entire nation was a printing press.
Yet I confess that the condition of the Executive office gave me pause.
We once quarreled with George III because no free people should be governed by the vanity of one man. I now find, to my astonishment, a chief magistrate who appears to regard that monarch not as a warning but as an interior decorator. He favors ceremony, obedience, personal loyalty, public flattery, and buildings large enough to persuade small minds that greatness has occurred.
I had hoped your descendants would remember that we rejected monarchy not because crowns were uncomfortable, but because men wearing them became so.
The President’s residence, also called the People’s House and meant as a duty-bound home, has been significantly transformed. A wing was removed, and a ballroom was added. Donors gather nearby, contractors appear pleased. The words reflect public service, but the atmosphere feels like courtly flattery. I’ve strolled through Versailles and seen men bow so deeply they could pick pockets unnoticed. Now, even the Potomac seems to have acquired a touch of French elegance.
I am told this is all done for greatness. I have found that when a man must constantly proclaim his greatness, the evidence is usually still under construction.
As a printer, I paid especially close attention to the press, and this issue grew more serious the longer I spent in this era. The current President doesn’t just dislike criticism; all public figures dislike it, though some handle it more gracefully. This gentleman, with a countenance the color of an apricot or a persimmon, seems to believe himself to be the reincarnation of the courts of France and, therefore, the press should praise him, obey him, change geography in his favor, and apologize whenever inconvenient facts emerge.
One news service was punished for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico on command, as though a president could improve geography by signing it in a larger hand. Broadcasters have been threatened. Reporters are treated as enemies when they ask questions rather than bring incense. Lawsuits are brandished like royal decrees. It reminded me of old George III, though fairness requires this confession: George was born into a monarchy. He did not have to assemble one from wounded vanity, public entertainments, donor money, and several coats of gold paint.
Permit an old printer to be plain: a free press is not an ornament of liberty. It is one of its tools. A government that fears printers has already confessed more than printers have written.
I also observed that nearly every citizen carries a small glowing glass into which he may speak a question and receive an answer before his own judgment has had time to put on its shoes. This instrument is astonishing. It fetches a fact, composes a letter, translates a tongue, summarizes a book, and offers counsel with the confidence of a lawyer who has not yet found the statute. Much of what it provides is helpful, though some is incorrect. Its rapid delivery might lead a lazy mind to equate speed with wisdom.
I say this as one who loved invention: no machine, however clever, can spare a Republic the burden of discernment. A device may gather the lightning, but only judgment can make the rod.
Nevertheless, I do not lose hope.
I observed citizens carefully counting votes. I saw judges trying to keep the law from becoming a command. I saw teachers, librarians, clerks, veterans, reporters, and ordinary Americans doing the quiet work no ballroom can replace. They receive little applause, which may be why their service remains valuable.
When we gave the people a Republic, I warned that keeping it would be their burden. Upon further reflection, after visiting our Republic for the first time in 250 years, I would only add this: beware the man who loves the symbols of our country more than its restraints. Beware the patriot who attacks the press, flatters himself with marble, and treats public office as family property. George III lost America by misunderstanding Americans. It would be a poor anniversary indeed if Americans returned the favor by misunderstanding George III.
Tell our friends in Philadelphia that the Republic has not failed. The forms remain: elections, courts, printers, laws, and that blessed American habit of arguing with everyone within reach.
But the balance has shifted toward one man’s office in a manner that would please Mr. Hamilton, satisfy much of Mr. Adams, send Mr. Jefferson searching for ink and a quill, and prompt Paul Revere to get back on horseback. The President now stands so enlarged that many citizens seem less interested in restraining him than in being near enough to admire the glow.
This is the warning I carry home: a Republic may keep its papers and still lose its posture. If the people do not soon pull power back toward Congress, the courts, the press, the states, and themselves, they may wake to find they have not crowned a king but have trained themselves to obey one.
Our democratic experiment continues, but it now dangerously leans toward the very thing we crossed an ocean of trouble to resist.
I remain, as ever, Your affectionate friend and humble servant, B. Franklin
P.S. I hope this dispatch finds you in good health and, if possible, in better shade than I presently enjoy, for the heat here is dreadful. I am told the current chief magistrate has intellectual doubts that the climate itself can change, which is a curious position in an age that can weigh the stars, split the atom, and yet still offends itself by consulting a thermometer.
Andy Spears reports that the Walmart billionaires are supporting MAGA Marsha Blackburn in the race for Governor of Tennessee.
The Waltons of Arkansas are totally committed to eroding public schools and privatizing public funding, so Blackburn is promising to expand state support for vouchers.
Spears writes:
The youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton is now on the Marsha Blackburn bandwagon.
The latest campaign financial report indicates that pro-Blackburn Team Tennessee PAC received $100,000 from Walton in the last reporting period.
The Walton family has long supported private school discount coupons – otherwise known as school vouchers. These schemes divert funds from working-class families to wealthy families to use as tuition discounts at private schools.
Walton joins payday predators Advance Financial, Pennsylvania billionaire and privatization advocate Jeff Yass, the CEO of Jimmy John’s, and General Motors in supporting Blackburn and her reverse Robinhood economic and education agenda.
Blackburn has pledged to further expand Tennessee’s $300 million school voucher scheme if the 74-year-old career politician wins the Governor’s race.
Last week, Trump gave an address to the nation about malign attempts by foreign powers to influence our elections. He said that China was meddling in our elections, but the documents he released pointed to Russia’s efforts to help him. When he ran against Biden in 2020, the documents showed, Russian propaganda tried to portray Joe Biden and his son Hunter as recipients of foreign bribes; multiple investigations never produced any evidence for these claims.
Ironically, MSNOW points out, Trump has eliminated the federal agency that helped protect election security. You have probably never heard of that agency (CISA), so he correctly assumes that you won’t notice.
Now the Department of Himeland Security says it will offer election security only to states that hand over their voter rolls.
It’s important to remember that the U.S. Constitution gives states the power to control their elections, not the President or any federal agency.
President Donald Trump says he is worried about foreign interference in U.S. elections. That was the reason he gave when he released declassified intelligencedocuments last week that ended up undercutting his own baseless claims about rigged elections.
In his primetime address on July 16, Trump said the U.S. “must take urgent action” to protect voting infrastructure against foreign actors. But shortly after taking office last year, Trump gutted a key agency designed to protect America’s elections from exactly that.
It’s called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an office created during Trump’s first term. CISA is one of the main federal partners for states on election security, sharing intelligence on potential threats to voting infrastructure and providing quick regional support.
After Trump returned to office, the cyber agency housed under the Department of Homeland Security took a major hit. Elon Musk’s DOGE fired more than 100 workers, including election security advisers. More than 600 others were placed on administrative leave, were reassigned or took buyouts.
Now the Trump administration is telling states they will only receive resources if they hand over voter rolls to be screened through a new federal database that a judge recently deemed unlawful in its current form.
That database is known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, which experts and a federal judge are concerned has a high error rate that could disenfranchise voters.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said CISA will release an “election infrastructure plan” in the next 30 days — barely three months out from the midterms, which will determine which party controls Congress.
“If they participate in the SAVE program, we’ll provide the resources and training to support state election integrity,” Mullin said last week. “We’re not trying to change the outcome.”
‘They’re flying blind’
Multiple current and former senior election and national security officials told MS NOW that they could not recall a time when the federal government held back resources and money meant to secure America’s elections.
And multiple state election officials have said they are not receiving any briefings on possible foreign threats to election security from the federal government. Such briefings were once a regular occurrence, they said.
During the first Trump administration, “we were collaborative — carrots rather than sticks,” said one of the former officials, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. The second Trump administration is “very much focused on sticks.”
One election official in a swing state said the difference from 2024 is stark, saying that “it’s every state for themselves.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns about retaliation from federal officials. During the last cycle, the state official said they had a regional federal cybersecurity expert “on speed dial” who could “see the whole puzzle.”
That doesn’t exist anymore, and without it, the state election official said, “we’re less informed on the pattern of the attackers and are slower to respond.”
“I’ve literally never heard anybody effectively say ‘to keep you safe, you have to give me what I want,’” said the swing state election official, referring to DHS threats to withhold resources if states don’t hand over sensitive voter data.
The risks compound at the local level, they added: “Does [a clerk’s] laptop have the IT infrastructure to defend against an attack from Iran? That’s what keeps me up at night.”
Cait Conley, a West Point graduate and combat veteran who served as the senior adviser to the director of CISA during the Biden administration, accused Trump of gutting the agency and sowing doubt about the security of U.S. elections in his speech last week.
“If Donald Trump were truly concerned about election security, he would not have fired hundreds of federal workers whose jobs were to secure our elections,” she said. Conley is now running for Congress in New York as a Democrat.
I am once again posting a fascinating account of an important district in Texas. The district is Tarrant County. It’s the third largest district in Texas. For a long time, it was reliably red. Now, we learn in Michelle H.Davis’s post, it is close to turning blue.
You can help by sending contributions of any size to candidates she describes. I was moved to send $100 to Alisa Simmons, whom she describes near the end of the post. Any of the candidates mentioned would appreciate $10, $25, whatever you can afford.
The best part of the post is that it gives you a flavor of why these races matter. Like the contest for leadership of the prison, where more than 70 prisoners have died while in custody since 2017.
This is the third installment of this series, where we’re looking at election data from the largest counties to see where we need to be for our hypothetical big blue wave in November. If you missed our previous installments:
Harris and Dallas, the only counties with higher populations than Tarrant, are reliably blue and need to focus on turnout. Tarrant, on the other hand, is where the battleground is. It’s a swing county because Republicans have held the reins of county government for too long. 2026 could be the year that changes.
Twenty years ago, Tarrant County was over 75% white and the largest red county in America.
Tarrant County
And of course, we know that Demographics are not destiny, but we can see in Tarrant County that votes have been trending blue for a long time.
More than that, there’s a heavy burden on Tarrant County, just like Harris and Dallas. In 2024, 7.96% of all Texas Democrats lived in Tarrant County. And in a state as big as Texas, that’s a lot of weight to pull.
And the redistricting, the whole reason Tinderholt is running for Simmons’ seat in the first place, is because the Commissioners Court redrew Precincts 1 and 2, the only Democratic-held seats, and O’Hare admitted on camera it was to lock in a Republican majority. Simmons and her fellow Democratic commissioner had the UCLA Voting Rights Project analyze the new maps, and the conclusion was that every proposed map packed Black and Hispanic voters into a single district to dilute their power everywhere else. Lawsuits were filed. They got dismissed on procedural grounds. The map stands for 2026.
But something has shifted in Tarrant County. Democrats have been sweeping local races, and Taylor Rhemet’s win was the cherry on top.
Last year, Democrats flipped multiple school boards in Tarrant County. This year, they flipped several city council races across the county. And on January 31, Democrat Taylor Rehmet beat Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a state Senate seat that hadn’t gone blue since 1991. Not close, either. 57% to 43%, in a district Trump carried by 17 points just over a year earlier. Wambsganss outspent him by two million dollars. She’s the chief communications officer for Patriot Mobile, the outfit that’s spent the last several years funding the Christian nationalist school board takeovers.
Hispanic voters did that. In some of the heavily Latino precincts on Fort Worth’s north side, Rehmet outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers by more than 50 points. That’s a mobilization story, the same one I’ve been telling you about Harris and Dallas counties, except this time it happened in a district that hadn’t elected a Democrat to that seat in 35 years. Rehmet and Wambsganss go at it again in November for the full term, and if Tarrant Democrats can do what they did in January one more time, that seat is gone for good.
Down at the State House, the map is a little friendlier, if you squint.
Five Republican-held House seats anchor themselves in Tarrant County, and depending on how big this wave gets, we could see two of them flip. Maybe four. Maybe all five, though that’s the kind of year Democrats haven’t had here in three decades.
HD93 and HD96 are the two to watch first. HD94 is Tony Tinderholt’s old seat, now open since he’s bailing to run for Simmons’ commissioner spot, and Democrat Katie O’Brien Duzan is running there. HD96 has an open seat left by David Cool, defending against Democrat Ebony Turner, in a district that’s been quietly drifting for years.
HD98, Giovanni Capriglione’s old seat covering Keller, Colleyville, and parts of Southlake and Grapevine, is open too after his retirement, with Democrat Cate Brennan running.
HD94 and HD97 round out the list, the kind of districts that turn competitive the moment turnout ticks up, exactly like it just did in SD9.
Two of these flip in a decent night. Four flip if Tarrant does in November what it just did in January. And if all five go blue, that’s no longer a wave. That’s Tarrant County telling the rest of Texas the fight is already over.
Congressional seats to watch.
Tarrant now sits inside four competitive-adjacent congressional districts, and all four have a name on the ballot worth knowing:
TX24: Beth Van Duyne vs. Kevin Burge, a Marine Corps veteran who worked in the DIA and served in Biden’s White House Situation Room. Not a top-tier flip on paper, but this is the district that got carved through Tarrant’s fastest-diversifying suburbs, and it’s the one to watch for over-performance.
TX12: Craig Goldman vs. Heli Rodriguez-Prilliman, a Fort Worth entrepreneur running her first race. Goldman inherited Kay Granger’s old seat, and this is the most Tarrant-heavy of the four districts.
TX25: Roger Williams vs. Dione Sims, who won her primary runoff outright. This district picks up Arlington and Grand Prairie, the same ground that just delivered Rehmet’s win.
TX06: Jake Ellzey vs. Danny Minton, though only a sliver of this district touches Tarrant at all, it may be the most populated part of the district.
None of these is the marquee pickup Rehmet already delivered. But they’re the four names that turn a good night in Tarrant into a great one down-ballot, and if the county keeps trending the way Rehmet has shown it can, one of them stops being a long shot sooner than people think.
Now let’s talk about Alisa Simmons, because she’s the whole ballgame.
Simmons is the Precinct 2 commissioner Tim O’Hare told to sit down and be quiet, and this November, she’s running to replace him.
Before politics, Simmons spent 12 years as a broadcast journalist and then 18 years running budgets and public safety communications for the Tarrant County 9-1-1 District, the kind of job where you learn exactly how county government works and exactly where it breaks down. She spent ten years as president of the Arlington NAACP, served as second vice president of the Texas NAACP, and sat on the ACLU of Texas board. She ran for HD94 in 2020 and lost, then won her Precinct 2 commissioner seat in 2022. Since then, she’s been the loudest, most consistent voice on that court, demanding accountability from the jail, fighting the defunding of Girls Inc., and opposing the elimination of free rides to the polls.
When O’Hare and his Republican majority redrew her own precinct to make it harder to hold, Simmons ran countywide instead. And on March 3, she didn’t just win the Democratic primary for County Judge, she buried it.
Her platform is exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s spent years watching this county’s dysfunction up close. A full Department of Justice review of jail operations, independent oversight with actual teeth, and a direct reckoning with the 76 lives lost in that facility since 2017. She’s running on affordability, on fiscal responsibility that doesn’t require dipping into reserves to cover basic obligations, and on ending what she calls the constant partisan theater that’s replaced actual governance on that court. In her own words, it’s time for the Tarrant County government to get to work instead of getting into shouting matches.
I expect her to win in November. I’m not just saying that because I like her, although I do, a lot. I’m saying it because the numbers back it up, because O’Hare’s own party is nervous enough about Tarrant that they’re gerrymandering commissioner precincts mid-decade instead of just running on their record, and because Simmons has already shown she can win a race Republicans specifically redesigned to make sure she couldn’t.
So what does it actually take to get there?
Turnout, same as always. Tarrant County has nearly 1.5 million registered voters, and the difference between a good night and a great one lives entirely in the precincts that already agree with us and just haven’t been asked to show up yet.
The Hispanic vote that swung so hard left for Rehmet in January has to swing that way again in November, and it will, if the same organizing that worked in that special election gets replicated at scale.
The Tarrant County Democratic Party fielded its broadest slate of candidates since 1994 this cycle. That’s not an accident either. That’s what happens when people stop waiting for demographics to save them and start building the infrastructure to ensure demographics actually show up.
Tim O’Hare knows what’s coming. That’s why he’s spent his entire tenure trying to outrun it instead of earning it. Alisa Simmons is the one running straight at it.
Tarrant County doesn’t need to wait for a statewide wave to matter.
It needs its own county government back, and it’s closer than it’s been in thirty years.
Rehmet already broke the seal. Simmons is next. Somewhere between two and five House seats are up for grabs. The good old boys know it, which is why they gerrymandered instead of governing.
Show up, and Tarrant stops being the excuse Texas Republicans hide behind. It becomes the county that ends them. And in 2026, Democrats take back Tarrant County.
Greg Olear is a gifted journalist and thinker who has a terrific blog. He writes about politics, literature and whatever he wants.
This is his obituary for Mitch McConnell, who has been a toxic force in our nation’s politics. Mitch is probably not dead yet but we should remember his toxic legacy.
Olear writes:
What with Donald Trump losing wars to Iran, using the Justice Department and the FBI as his vendetta agencies, sic’ing his murderous ICE Gestapo on innocent residents, building concentration camps, hawking presidential pardons, fucking up the global economy, destroying our institutions, bulldozing the White House, bankrupting farmers, plundering on a galactic scale, withholding the money he owes to the woman he raped, fluffing Putin and Netanyahu, spewing crazy shit, and behaving every day like a complete and total asshole…
…and with the erstwhile Senate Majority Leader off the grid for a full month with some undisclosed medical issue and presumed dead…
…and with the media focusing its attention on the Renfieldian Lindsey Graham, who we know for sure bought the farm…
…with all of that, it’s easy to forget just how much demonstrable harm Mitch McConnell has done did to the people of the United States and to American democracy.
Since his funeral appears to be imminent, it’s only right that we give the Turtle his (dead) flowers.
When Donald Trump put his short orange fingers on Lincoln’s Bible in January of 2017, Mitch McConnell was already one of the worst Americans to ever draw breath. As of that date, no individual in my lifetime—not Nixon, not Kissinger, not even Ronald Reagan—had done more damage to the United States than the malevolent Gentleman from Kentucky.
I wrote a short piece about it on my now-defunct online magazine in July of 2017, under the title “Worst Americans: Mitch McConnell.” It read:
Rather than participating in the governance of the country through the time-honored tradition of compromise, he spent eight years as a living, breathing roadblock. The current Senatorial system of obstructionism has his fingerprints all over it.
He engaged in a SCOTUS staring contest with Obama concerning the Merrick Garland nomination and did not blink until Neil Gorsuch, a pro-corporation-anti-human conservative of the worst kind, was sworn in. This will have malefic impact on our country for the rest of my natural life.
When debriefed on the extent to which malignant Russian intelligence forces were compromising the presidential campaigns and the election, he threatened to accuse Obama of playing partisan politics if he went public with the bombshell. Once again, Obama acquiesced. With the election over, and no Constitutional clause for an invalidation of the result, he is in a position to make noise about this act of war by an enemy power. He has done nothing.
His wife, Elaine Chao, is the daughter of the Taiwanese shipping magnate James S.C. Chao, who is responsible for both personally enriching his son-in-law and for contributing to his campaigns, which would be fine if not for the big cocaine bust nobody paid any attention to. Elaine Chao serves in Trump’s cabinet, because of course.
He censured Elizabeth Warren for attempting to read a letter by Coretta Scott King at the confirmation hearing of inveterate racist and Putinist collaborator Jeff Sessions.
He is the prime mover in the Senate of the campaign to repeal Obamacare. The toxic healthcare bill he’s floated would throw 23 million people off insurance and lead to thousands of deaths and bankruptcies. It would also have a deleterious effect on the economy, as many thousands of jobs would vanish if the ACA were repealed. He doesn’t care. At all.
The story of his recovery from polio being financed by the government is bogus, but he did suffer from the disease as a child, and he did recover thanks to a program put in place by FDR. That he is actively seeking to deny medical care to so many sick children (that’s who’s on Medicaid, mostly: children) speaks volumes about his loathsome character.
He’s sympathetic to the Confederacy.
Worst of all, and quite unlike almost every Republican involved with Trump, he’s astonishingly good at his job. He wants us to die and go bankrupt and be ruled by the laws of the Christian right and continue to have our elections stolen by the Kremlin. And he’s savvy enough to make it happen. As GOP strategist Rick Wilson said, “Washington is littered with the bodies of people who underestimate Mitch McConnell.”
He’s the worst person in America. And arguably the most dangerous.
That’s hardly an exhaustive list. And it was written far too early to cite the second impeachment, which McConnell handled even more abominably than he did the first.
[O]ur system of government gave the Senate a specific task. The Constitution gives us a particular role. This body is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal. We’re not free to work backward from whether the accused party might personally deserve some kind of punishment….
[F]ormer President Trump is constitutionally not eligible for conviction….But after intense reflection, I believe the best constitutional reading shows that Article II, Section Four, exhausts the set of persons who can legitimately be impeached, tried, or convicted. It’s the president, it’s the vice-president and civil officers. We have no power to convict and disqualify a former office holder who is now a private citizen.
Thus did McConnell concoct a technicality that allowed Trump to run for office again in 2024—even though, as Mitch well knows, under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, Trump is ineligible to serve.
In December of 2019, in “Obstruction is the New Secession,” one of the first pieces at PREVAIL, I expounded upon McConnell’s role as sand in the gears of democracy:
DEMOCRACY IS NOT, and was never intended to be, a zero-sum game. The winners are not supposed to take everything. Change comes slowly and incrementally—often frustratingly so, for progressives. But the flip side is that the United States has worked pretty damned well for a quarter millennium, becoming arguably the greatest nation the world has ever known, because of the willingness of its political parties to compromise.
In the run-up to the Civil War, Congress bent over backwards brokering one compromise after another, in a valiant attempt to preserve the union. These compromises infuriated Northern abolitionists (“This word compromise, when applied to human rights and constitutional rights, I abhor,” trumpeted Thaddeus Stephens in 1850), just as they vexed the Southern slaveholders. Ultimately, the peace did not hold—the differences between slave and free were irreconcilable—but the point is that, in an era when members of Congress sometimes kicked the shit out of each other, politicians still went to great lengths to compromise.
Compromise only works when both political parties are willing to budge. If one of those parties abdicates its responsibility to represent the American people, if it exists simply to obstruct the work of the other—if it flat-out refuses to compromise, ever, about anything—the US system of government, always a fragile thing, breaks down.
After the election of 1860, the Southern states said, “Fuck it. We’re not working with Abraham Lincoln no mater what,” and they seceded from the Union. After the election of 2008, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans said, “Fuck it. We’re not working with Barack Obama no matter what,” and proceeded to obstruct every single thing he tried to do, large or small, national security be damned. To avoid compromise, the South chose Civil War. To avoid compromise, McConnell allowed Moscow to sabotage the 2016 election. Both acts are tantamount to treason. (That the Party of Lincoln slowly morphed into the Party of Obstruction is a sad irony).
Obama, after spending most of his first year in office coaxing the recalcitrant Republicans to work with him, eventually gave up, and, like Lincoln, used the vast powers of the office to take action without the rival party’s input. This worked, sure, but it was not without consequences. As I wrote in “Obama the Terrible” in February of 2014, after the story broke about the president’s drone strikes on suspected terrorists:
If a terrorist can be blown to smithereens at the whim of a single individual, then so can I, and so can you. If a terrorist can be held indefinitely without trial, then so can I, and so can you….
Today, the man with his finger on the button is the genial Barack Obama, a man I voted for, a man I like and admire, a man whose judgment I trust. The president strikes me as grounded, guarded, pragmatic, and smart. Whatever some may believe, Obama is not Hitler. But the next guy might be. And therein lies the terror. Not recognizing this clear and present danger is Obama’s greatest failing as president.
While he has not yet gone to these terrifying lengths, the despotic Donald Trump has certainly exploited the “executive order” precedents set by the frustrated Obama. The GOP refusal to compromise—to so much as allow a vote on Supreme Court nominees and House bills!—begat both Obama’s executive power grab and the “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 election (in Mueller’s words), which McConnell through his cynical inaction aided and abetted. The result is Donald Trump—corrupt, venal, vain, petty, criminal, installed and controlled by Vladimir Putin—presiding over the most powerful executive branch in recent memory.
Many factors contributed to this outcome, yes. But the root of the problem is the Republicans’ refusal to compromise. The GOP are not small-d democrats any longer. Mitch McConnell and his confederates are the modern heirs of Christopher Memminger, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis. Which should come as no surprise:
Fortunately, the Confederate States of America did not have a state TV network spewing pro-slavery propaganda to North and South. There was no Fox & Friends to normalize the brutal war crimes of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sean Hannity was not there to fawn over James Henry Hammond and extol the virtues of the Mudsill Theory. Nor did Jeff Davis have a Rudy Giuliani scurrying around Transylvania, calling into question Robert Lincoln’s ties with the Pullman Palace Car Company. If so, the Civil War might have played out quite differently.
The GOP does not want to Make America Great Again; it wants to make America white again—and, especially, to keep the White House white. This is a tall order. Like the antebellum South, the demographics do not favor the GOP. The country is becoming more diverse each year. White people will soon be a minority in the United States. The demographic shift could well turn Texas blue—which would be the death knell for the Republican Party. A blue Texas plus blue California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey mean a Democrat POTUS for the foreseeable future.
McConnell surely understands this. He knows he’s running on borrowed time. If he can’t control the executive branch, or Congress, he has to infiltrate the judiciary—the only one of the three branches whose members, conveniently, serve for life. So far, this objective has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Obstruction has seen to that.
When it became clear that McConnell would never allow the Senate to vote to confirm Merrick Garland, President Obama should have gotten creative. FDR would have ordered Garland to take the seat after a waiting period of 60 days—something, anything to ensure not only that Garland took his rightful place on SCOTUS, but that the politics of obstruction failed spectacularly. Instead, Obama avoided a fight, assuming that Hillary Clinton would win and it would all be moot. This colossal error, an obvious blunder even at the time, guarantees a conservative judiciary—and perhaps, depending on the fragile health of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, an extremely conservative one—for decades.
The lesson is this: If the new president finds herself with a blue House and a blue Senate, she needs to be relentless. She needs to move quickly, decisively, and fearlessly. Yes, she should attempt to engage the GOP. But at the first whiff of obstruction, she should ignore them completely going forward. It is not her responsibility to beg them to do their fucking jobs. Let the Republicans go to Canossa if they want a seat at the table—and once they are at the table, let them do more than refuse to play along. The politics of obstruction must be eradicated, just as the Confederacy was. Traitors should have no voice in the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
The irony is, since I wrote that six and a half years ago, Donald Trump has eradicated the politics of obstruction. Ruling by executive order, by decree, by lawfare and intimidation, he has plowed through the feeble roadblocks set up by the opposition. By controlling the executive and judicial branches, he has made Congress moot.
The other irony is, even in semi-death, McConnell continues his life’s work of obstruction.
Yes, Trump has eclipsed Mitch McConnell as the worst American of my lifetime. So have other monsters Donald has empowered: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Stephen Miller, etc.
But without Addison Mitchell McConnell III, there would be no Donald Trump. Remember this: Mitch fed the cancer. He nurtured the tumor. He prevented the oncologists and surgeons from administering treatment. And knowing he possessed the singular cure, he chose to sit on his hands as the terminal disease ate away at our democracy.
That is the sum of his life’s work. That is his ignominious legacy.
Andy Borowitz is one of the nation’s most notable humorists. For years, he wrote for The New Yorker. Now, he writes on Substack, where this commentary was posted.
I remember when Senator Graham was Senator John McCain’s best friend. John McCain was a true war hero. He was shot down over Hanoi, and he spent five years as a prisoner of war. He was offered the chance to get an early release, but he said he wouldn’t leave until the other POWs were freed. Graham adored him until he was dead, then attached himself to Trump. Trump mocked McCain, and said McCain was not a hero because he got captured. This from a man who dodged the draft because of “bone spurs.” And Graham forgot his friend.
Like many Americans, I mourn the sudden passing of Lindsey Graham. I had hoped he would live long enough to be tried for treason.
Let me define my terms. A true traitor collaborates with the enemy despite knowing better. For that reason, someone like Sen. Tommy Tuberville could never be considered a traitor, because he knows nothing.
And then there’s Lindsey.
For the better part of a decade, the senior senator from South Carolina was enmeshed in an on-again, off-again—but mainly on-again—bromance with Donald J. Trump.
It began when both men were running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the time, Graham had some pretty harsh words for his GOP rival.
“There’s only one way to make America great again,” he said. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
Snap! But Lindsey was just warming up. He’d go on to call Trump “crazy,” “a jackass,” and “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who “shouldn’t be commander-in-chief.”
“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” he said, “and we will deserve it.” Why was he so sure that Trump would lose? “Donald Trump is the most unelectable Republican I’ve seen in my lifetime,” he said.
As for Trump’s mental health, Lindsey offered this succinct diagnosis: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy.”
Just one year later, when the crazy xenophobic jackass was chain-slurping Diet Cokes in the Oval Office, Graham decided to revise that assessment somewhat.
“What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president,” he told CNN.
This sort of flip-flop worked so much better before the invention of Google. But Lindsey seemed to hope that by piling praise on the man he once wished would go to hell, we’d forget about all that mean stuff he’d said before. By 2018, Graham was bizarrely claiming that Trump “deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and then some.”
In his quest to suck up to Trump as strenuously as possible, Graham hurled himself into self-abasement as if it were an extreme sport. When Trump relentlessly insulted the memory of John McCain—purportedly Graham’s best friend when they were Senate colleagues—Lindsey responded with astonishing nonchalance.
“I don’t like what he says about John McCain,” Graham told Bloomberg. “But when we play golf, it’s fun.”
Yes, Lindsey apparently lost his moral compass somewhere in the sand trap of the Trump National Golf Club. That’s why it was so striking when he seemed to express genuine outrage on the floor of the Senate after Trump incited the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
“Trump and I… we’ve had a hell of a journey,” he said. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my god, I hate it… but today, all I can say is ‘Count me out. Enough is enough.’”
Alas, Lindsey’s appearance on the right side of history turned out to be a head-fake, as his hell of a journey with the insurrectionist-in-chief was far from over. Like his fellow quisling, Mitch McConnell, Graham voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial. And once it became clear that launching a coup against the US government wasn’t a deal-breaker for 99 percent of the GOP, Lindsey was hitting the links with the wannabe junta leader once more.
“I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot,” he told Axios two months after January 6. “I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history. And we’re going to move forward.”
Lindsey just couldn’t quit him.
All of the events I’ve recounted thus far are sufficient to qualify Graham as a traitor. His defenders, though, might raise a mitigating factor: his hawkish stance against the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.
In this regard, Graham was always on the same page as his Senate pal McCain. Responding to George W. Bush’s gullible assessment of the murderous Russian (”I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”), McCain quipped, “I looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters—a K, a G and B.”
But Graham might have topped McCain in his detestation of Putin. Calling him a “war criminal” and “not a legitimate leader,” in 2022 he proposed assassination as the swiftest way to end the war in Ukraine: “I just want him to go…I wish somebody had taken Hitler out in the ‘30s.”
When the International Criminal Court, in a somewhat less draconian measure, issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023, Lindsey hailed the decision: “To forgive and forget Putin’s war crimes—that are occurring on an industrial scale—would irrevocably damage the Rule of Law-based world order established at the end World War II.”
That “Rule of Law-based world order” was shredded in the Oval Office last year when Trump and JD Vance disgracefully ganged up on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for having the audacity to suggest that Putin might not be a trustworthy fellow. Aware of Graham’s longstanding hatred of the man he called a war criminal, I eagerly awaited his rousing statement of support for Zelenskyy.
Instead, Lindsey told reporters, “What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don’t know if we could ever do business with Zelensky again… I have never been more proud of the president. I was very proud of JD Vance standing up for our country.”
That kind of statement made many people wish Lindsey would go to hell. Done.
Diane Ravitch's blog 