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Former President Donald Trump

No, We Won't Be Having A 'Normal Election' In 2024

Does anybody really believe the United States is going to have a “normal” presidential election in 2024, with Joe Biden and Donald Trump as the nominees and a peaceful resolution? Or will chaos and disorder take the nation to the brink, as MAGA supporters appear to wish?

Among several possibilities I can imagine, “normal” seems the least likely.

If Biden had paid attention to me—absurd, I know, but bear with me for the sake of argument—the Democrats wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s possible to agree with the president that Independent Counsel Robert Hur’s editorializing about his mental acuity amounted to an unfounded partisan smear without thinking that Biden’s in the clear politically.

(Will Democrats never quit falling for these fakers? Why must all “independent” investigations be conducted by GOP apparatchiks? For sheer fake sanctimony, this guy resembled that psalm-singing hypocrite Kenneth Starr. Bringing the president’s dead son into it was, as Biden said, an outrage. Also, I think, a craven lie.

Nothing in his 330-page report supports it. That said, the most appalling thing about the president’s ill-advised press conference following the report’s release was the conduct of the White House press corps, who screamed at Biden like a troop of baboons.

I noticed that CNN, when it re-broadcast the exchange, muted the sound. As my old friend James Fallows noted almost 30 years ago in his book “Breaking the News,” the White House press corps often acts “with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public’s views much less than they reflect the modern journalist’s belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.”

But last week’s performance was over the top. You won’t see sports journalists treating NFL players the way the White House baboons treated Biden, because, well, they wouldn’t dare.)

That said, everybody knew what the President meant when he identified the president of Egypt as the leader of “Mexico.” The whole exchange took place in the context of an otherwise important (and overdue) warning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States is losing patience with Israeli brutality toward Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Biden, a lifelong stutterer, had simply transposed two words. He knew what he meant, and so did everybody else. So what?

Politically speaking, however, the timing could hardly have been worse. The baboons were screaming because they sensed weakness, and everybody in the troop wants to be in on the kill. The political reality is that upwards of 62 percent of voters told a recent NBC News poll that it’s a “major concern” that Biden might not have the “mental and physical health” for a second term as president. He has aged visibly during his term.

That’s the political reality the president appears reluctant to confront even now. I’m guessing he’ll have to some time between now and the Democratic National Convention in August. As things now stand, he’s gone from being the only name-brand Democrat who could defeat Trump to maybe the only one who can’t. Always a political realist, I suspect Biden will come to see that.

Meanwhile, only 34 percent expressed similar concerns about Trump, an obese 77 year-old who wears orange pancake makeup and adult diapers, but who does appear comparatively vigorous on stage regardless of what stimulants he inhales or what poisonous nonsense he emits.

Such as this treasonous nonsense only last week:

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?,’” Trump said at a rally at Coastal Carolina University. “I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent.’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”

Never mind his cowering before Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, nor his envisioning NATO—maybe the most successful military alliance in world history—as a protection racket.

Trump's "Sir" stories are always brazen lies. Does ANYBODY believe this conversation actually took place? If so, it would be easy to document. But nobody will so much as try, because reporters having such a big time picking on Biden's verbal miscues are too intimidated. Or because they think nobody believes him.

Nobody but the most far-gone MAGA idolators, that is.

However, barring a bizarre and constitutionally absurd intervention by the US Supreme Court in the coming days, Trump and his right-wing media allies’ ability to control the national political conversation will come to an abrupt end on the first day of his trial for inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

His conviction, highly likely in view of the voluminous evidence against him, would be the end of Donald John Trump politically. Then comes the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, where the evidence is even stronger.

So no, nothing’s apt to be “normal” about the 2024 election.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

If Joe Biden Were As Demented As Donald Trump, He'd Be Forced To Retire

If Joe Biden Were As Demented As Donald Trump, He'd Be Forced To Retire

No wonder Trump won’t show up on a debate stage. He’s gotten to where he can barely keep it together in front of the adoring throngs at his campaign rallies. Somewhat smaller throngs it must be said, but, hey, it’s January, and everybody’s seen The Trump Show many times by now.

Even so, that was a real humdinger the great man emitted the other day, when he confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, blaming her for failing to provide adequate security during the January 6 riot. Psychiatrists call it “decompensating.” Ordinary people call it “losing your marbles.”

Courtesy of Mike Tomasky in The New Republic, here’s a transcript of what Trump said: “By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6. You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley … you know they … do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it? All of it! Because of lots of things. Like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people. Soldiers, National Guard—whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t wanna talk about that. These are very dishonest people.”

That’s right, sports fans, Trump confused the then-Democratic Speaker of the House with his Republican presidential rival and former UN Ambassador. Not once, but several times. All in service of one of his most absurd lies: that he offered Speaker Pelosi soldiers to defend the U.S. Capitol from the same mob he’d urged to “fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore.”

Also that the House Select Committee that investigated the events of January 6 possessed this exculpatory evidence, but destroyed it. Yeah, sure they did. And all of Humpty Trumpty’s horses and all of his men couldn’t put it back together again.

In reality, numerous White House aides testified that Trump spent hours enjoying the spectacle on TV, even as they begged him to call off the mob. Then at 2:44 pm, with the crowd having erected a gallows and chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump sent out a tweet: “Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

That is, to prevent the Electoral College vote and award the election to Donald Trump. The election he’d lost by 7 million votes.

But, yeah, it was all Nikki/Nancy’s fault.

And if you believe that…

Well, what won’t you believe?

Tomasky asks an interesting question. If Nikki Haley herself hadn’t made an issue of Trump’s senility, would the news media even have covered the event? Probably not. They’ve been ducking it for months, even as the deterioration in the former president’s affect has grown steadily clearer.

Here's the self-proclaimed “stable genius” on the topic of wind turbines, which he claims are driving whales crazy: “I never understood wind. You know, I understand windmills very much. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything.”

Now I don’t want to brag, but I could never get that drunk. But, of course Trump famously doesn’t drink. Instead, he boasts about acing a screening test for dementia. Going on six years ago.

Now, if Humpty Trumpty were a doctor, lawyer, a veterinarian or a hair stylist, his clients would tiptoe quietly away. A presidential candidate, however, is to many people a fantasy figure—a combination sideshow barker and shaman, credited in the popular mind with powers he does not and never will have. So, it’s not a practical decision. Tribal loyalties are involved.

During my lifetime, the most astonishing example of mass psychosis I’ve seen was the Jonestown Massacre of hundreds of religious devotees by suicide—the origin of the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Second was the Branch Davidian catastrophe in Waco, where evidence showed cult leader David Koresh helped massacre his followers.

No, Trump’s MAGA movement is nowhere close. Even so, it’s going to be interesting to see how his followers react as his psychological and intellectual decompensation proceeds under the enormous pressure of a presidential campaign and a series of criminal trials.

Tomasky points out that given the media obsession with Joe Biden’s age—Fox News and others televise his every verbal or physical stumble relentlessly—for the president to commit anything like Trump’s Nikki/Nancy blunder would probably result in his being forced to withdraw.

And properly so, as far as I’m concerned.

Anybody who’s ever had a relative or close friend disappear over the event horizon into dementia knows the story. Trump will have better days and worse days, but it’s a one-way journey to nowhere.

Meanwhile, it’s not the MAGA faithful that scare me; it’s the cynics and opportunists who think they can flog him across the finish line.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Can Trump Win In 2024? Probably Not, But He Will Certainly Cheat Again

Can Trump Win In 2024? Probably Not, But He Will Certainly Cheat Again

Theoretically speaking, the United States will be having a presidential election in 2024. Everybody acts as if it’s a sure thing. Political “horse race” coverage dominates the news. Debates, rallies and candidate speeches take place. Newspapers and TV news outlets publish polling results every few days. Every-body’s familiar with the ritual, and everybody plays along.

That’s the whole point of rituals. All the solemn mummery of holding a presidential election, right down to the balloons and silly hats, exists to reassure the public that everything will be alright. That’s why phony democratic elections are the essence of dictatorial regimes around the world.

Everybody plays the game. Russia, China, Myanmar, you name it. Record voter turnout is assured. Vladimir Putin will no doubt win a thunderous majority.

But real democracies can be fragile things.

Let’s try an analogy from the sports page. Consider the recent national collegiate football championship. What would we say about it if one team, say the Michigan Wolverines, showed up with assault rifles and vowed to shoot referees who threw penalty flags adverse to them?

Well, we wouldn’t call it a football game.

So how can we call it a proper election when everybody knows that the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, one Donald J. Trump, will refuse to accept defeat? Adam Serwer puts it this way in The Atlantic: “there is something naive to assuming that Trump would accept such a verdict from the electorate a second time when he didn’t accept it the first time. Neither a close election nor a sound defeat matters when Trump can induce his supporters to believe any fiction he conjures.”

And there appears to be little doubt that he can. The GOP front runner’s campaign appearances in Iowa have been almost phantasmagoric of late. He has gone so far as to post a TV commercial on his Truth Social website claiming that he is God’s Chosen One.

Narrated in the electronically-recreated voice of the late radio pitchman Paul Harvey, the ad begins like this: “And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said, 'I need a caretaker.' So God gave us Trump."

Got that? Trump’s birth was divinely inspired.

Try to imagine the hullabaloo if President Joe Biden even hinted at such a thing. They’d say the old fool had clearly lost it. “Dementia” would be the kindest diagnosis.

Instead, what Biden did say in a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, was that Trump is an unpatriotic sore loser, and nothing more.

“Trump lost 60 court cases, 60. Trump lost the Republican-controlled states. Trump lost before a Trump-appointed judge—and then judges. And Trump lost before the United States Supreme Court…

“Trump lost recount after recount in state after state. But in desperation and weakness, Trump and his MAGA followers went after election officials.”

Biden described Trump’s actions and inaction during the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol as “among the worst derelictions of duty by a President in American history: an attempt to overturn a free and fair election by force and violence.”

And Trump’s response? He went all sixth-grade bully on the President before an audience of Iowa supporters.

“Did you see him? He was stuttering through the whole thing,” Trump told a crowd in Sioux Center, Iowa. “He’s saying I’m a threat to democracy.”

“’He’s a threat to d-d-democracy,’” he continued, pretending to stutter. “Couldn’t read the word.”

Many in the audience, who, of course, hadn’t seen Biden’s speech, chortled.

“The remark was not true,” the Washington Post reported. “Biden said the word “democracy” 29 times in his speech, never stuttering over it.”

As if that wasn’t low-down and infantile enough, Trump dragged the late Sen. John McCain into it, mimicking McCain’s inability to raise his arm over his head due to injuries sustained under torture in a North Vietnamese prison camp.

Trump was never fit to shine McCain’s shoes. Not that he’d know how. The great tribune of the common man hires butlers for that.

Outraged MAGA supporters should do themselves the favor of watching the video of these incidents before sending me threatening e-mails. Otherwise, knock yourselves out.

Alternatively, check out the video of Trump telling a credulous Lou Dobbs the other day that thanks to Joe Biden, gasoline now sells for “5, 6, 7 and even $8 a gallon.” I don’t know about you, but I filled up yesterday for $2.37.

Another few months of Trump’s screeching and whining and all but the dullest MAGA cultists are apt to catch on. So no, I think there’s little chance of Trump winning a national election.

But that’s not the point, which is that there’s no possibility of this profoundly disordered man conceding defeat, and every chance that the authoritarians mobilizing behind his candidacy—the Steve Bannons and Stephen Millers—will be far better prepared the second time around.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Why The Trump Cult Is So Appealing To Fundamentalists

Why The Trump Cult Is So Appealing To Fundamentalists

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is fundamentalist at its core—with fundamentalism being understood as a psychological rather than a religious concept. Pretty much every large-scale public movement, secular or sacred, has its share of extremists, and as the religious columnist Paul Prather has argued: “remove the labels, close your eyes and quickly the fundamentalists in one group start sounding uncannily like the fundamentalists in all other groups, as if they were reading from the same script.”

It's another word for fanatic.

Most Trumpists call themselves “conservative,” which used to signify a belief in limited government, low taxes, free trade and freedom of conscience, but which under Trump signals tribal loyalty and revenge. This explains what some see as the central paradox of the MAGA movement, that a congenital braggart who pretty much embodies what Christianity has traditionally called the Seven Deadly Sins—greed, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, pride and wrath—has come to seem the embodiment of faith for millions of Republican evangelicals.

Trump spent Christmas Day typing up and posting laments and threats in ALL CAPS on his Truth Social website, targeting “JOE BIDEN’S MISFITS & THUGS, LIKE DERANGED JACK SMITH.” They’re “COMING AFTER ME,” he warned “AT LEVELS OF PERSECUTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR COUNTRY???...looking to destroy our once great USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

A bit lacking in the spirit of the holiday, some would say.

Not to mention he's the world's biggest crybaby

But they would be wrong, the MAGA faithful would insist. George Orwell captured the essence of the whiny strongman in reviewing the British edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf way back in 1940, after the German dictator had driven Germany to war, but before it was clear that he had doomed his country to catastrophe.

Hitler, Orwell wrote, "knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, [and] short working-hours …they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades."

Orwell understood Fascism’s appeal to an aggrieved population. While European and North American democracies, he wrote, told people, in effect, that “'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

Orwell also understood the personal psychology of the crybaby conqueror: “The initial, personal cause of [Hitler’s] grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.”

Sound like anybody we know?

That said, I do believe Trump when he says he never read Mein Kampf. Too long, too many big words. Donald Trump never learned anything from a book. He stole his whole act from 1950s professional wrestlers at Sunnyside Gardens in Queens—specifically from Dr. Jerry Graham, who swaggered around boasting that “I have the body men fear and women adore.”

The hairstyle too, a bleach blonde pompadour that taught a generation of wrestling fans how a “heel” behaved—that is, basically like a cartoon Nazi. The man was a masterful showman who aroused thousands to frenzy with balsa wood chairs and fake blood capsules. He was as fat as Trump too, although there was muscle under the lard.

Likewise, Donald Trump needed no books to absorb the lesson that non-white immigrants are “vermin” poisoning the nation’s blood, or that (white) people in Minnesota, as he assured an audience there the other day, are genetically superior. He learned those things at his slumlord father’s knee. Fred Trump was arrested at a Manhattan Ku Klux Klan rally some years before The Donald was born. This business about racehorse genes is straight KKK dogma. It's always appealed to people who fear outsiders.

But back to the great man’s hypnotized fanbase. Paul Prather credits David French with defining fundamentalism’s essential nature. He argues that whether religious or political, all “fundamentalist cultures exhibit three traits: certainty, ferocity, and solidarity. He says certainty is the key to the other two traits.”

“The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt,” French has written. “In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.”

Doubters should see this column’s e-mail feed, although I must say the Trumpist faction has been relatively restrained of late. Maybe they’ve given up on me, or maybe reality has begun to creep in at the edges.

One way or another, fundamentalist cults always implode; often violently, but sometimes not.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

The Incomprehensible Cruelty Of Those 'Pro-Life' Texas Republicans

The Incomprehensible Cruelty Of Those 'Pro-Life' Texas Republicans

Try as I may, I simply cannot comprehend the thinking of Texas Republican officials who forced a 30-year-old mother of two to flee the state to secure a legal abortion to spare the doomed fetus in her womb from terrible suffering, preserve her ability to bear a third child, and possibly her life.

Kate Cox, the Dallas woman who sued the state over its impossibly vague law forbidding her doctors from administering life-saving care, could simply have gotten on an airplane in the first place. But after four emergency room visits due to cramping and pain from her doomed pregnancy—she was 20 weeks along, and her baby had been diagnosed with trisomy 18, a fatal genetic disorder that often kills mothers too—she may have felt she couldn’t risk it.

Or shouldn’t have to.

“I kept asking more questions, including how much time we might have with her if I continued the pregnancy,” she wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “The answer was maybe an hour — or at most, a week. Our baby would be in hospice care from the moment she is born if she were to be born alive.”

But her doctors feared—accurately, as it turned out—that they could lose their medical licenses or go to prison if they terminated the pregnancy.

If Cox were a barnyard animal, a cow say, no veterinarian would have hesitated to relieve her agony. After all, cows are worth a lot of money. 30-year-old wives and mothers, not so much.

Have they never loved a woman? Do they not have wives, sisters, aunts, or cousins? Have they forgotten their own mothers, these stern Texan moralists led by the state’s recently-impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton, a MAGA stalwart? Apparently, they have.

If she didn’t want to suffer and die, Kate Cox shouldn’t have gotten pregnant. Or had sex with her lawfully-wedded husband to begin with. Religious authoritarians of every kind and description, seemingly in every benighted jurisdiction around the world, are always about that.

In Iran as in Texas, shaming and controlling women’s sexuality is always Job One for the holiest among us. Except when they’re getting caught molesting children or indulging in group-gropes, it appears to be pretty much all they think about, the anointed ones.

(Actually, it appears that abortion is legal in Iran to preserve the life and health of the mother. Always supposing she covers her hair, of course.)

Along with petitioning the Texas Supreme Court to reverse the (Democratic) judge who ruled in Kate Cox’s favor, Paxton sent stern letters to area hospitals, warning of dire legal consequences for any institution that dared to interfere with God’s will that she and her baby suffer for her sins.

He reminded them of Texas’ so-called “bounty law,” enabling any private citizen to sue anyone who "aids or abets" an abortion and to earn a $10,000 reward. Theoretically, I suppose, Cox’s husband could be found guilty.

The Texas Supreme Court, as expected, played along, in effect forcing the unfortunate woman to flee the state to relieve her suffering and preserve her ability to have a third child. The Texas Right to Life organization thought the ruling entirely appropriate: “The compassionate approach to these heartbreaking diagnoses is perinatal palliative care,” the organization said “which honors, rather than ends, the child’s life.”

Notice whose well-being isn’t so important? Kate Cox’s. Her two children’s. Her husband’s. Apparently, It’s God’s will that they suffer. As in, say, the Seventeenth Century.

Given that, according to the Mayo Clinic, roughly some twenty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, variations of Cox’s sorrowful ordeal are playing out in every state that has enacted draconian abortion bans. Facing voter backlash, “pro-life” politicians are hunting cover. "We got to approach these issues with compassion, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on CNN recently, “because these are very difficult issues and nobody would wish this to happen on anybody."

GOP presidential aspirant Nikki Haley, calling herself pro-life, served up this word-salad: "We don't want any women to sit there and deal with a rare situation and have to deliver a baby in that sort of circumstance any more than we want women getting an abortion at 37, 38, 39 weeks. We have to humanize the situation and deal with it with compassion."

Amen to both.

But if you want to know how Florida’s “heartbeat” abortion law works in practice, read “The Short Life of Baby Milo” in the Washington Post. Born without kidneys or lungs as doctors had predicted, Milo survived outside the womb for 99 agonizing minutes. They could have spared him and his mother the agony, but for Florida law.

Ten-year-old rape victims, women compelled to give birth to their half-brothers… The beat goes on. And will continue, it’s clear, as long as it’s politicians, “activists” and judges making the calls instead of women and their doctors.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

How Unscrupulous Stefanik Punked Those Elite University Presidents

How Unscrupulous Stefanik Punked Those Elite University Presidents

Watching coverage of The Three Equivocating Presidents on TV, I found myself marveling that such a trio of seeming nonentities had been put in charge of prestige universities in the first place. Never mind the Ivy League, I told a friend. The athletic director at the University of Arkansas would have explained himself far better. Of course, that fellow faces hostile public inquisitions all the time.

Despite the chronic ugliness of campus politics, academic administrators are less familiar with televised interrogations. By trying to please everybody, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT ended up satisfying nobody.

Never mind that the gist of what they said was entirely correct. Whether or not students or faculty should be punished for expressing anti-Semitic tropes on campus depends completely upon context. Are they expressing an unpopular opinion about the Israeli-Palestine conflict or actively threatening violence? The first is permissible, the second is a crime.

Particularly in Republican hands, a congressional hearing is anything but a search for understanding. Basically, the three academics allowed themselves to be sandbagged by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), previously famous for embracing the White Supremacist “replacement” theory alleging that American Jews are conspiring with elitist Democrats to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants for the purpose of out-voting white Christians.

That’s what those torch-bearing geeks who marched across the University of Virginia campus a few years back chanting “Jews will not replace us” were talking about. It’s also the reason a crazed gunman murdered ten black people in a Buffalo supermarket in Stefanik’s own state.

But American Jews, who mainly vote Democratic, are one thing; Israeli Jews quite another. As a self-described “Ultra MAGA warrior,” Stefanik has no problem using QAnon rhetoric to describe political opponents as “pedo grifters.” It will be recalled that then-President Trump also had no problem with the Charlottesville marchers, which as somebody who spent four of the best years of my life on the University of Virginia campus, I confess to taking personally.

How Stefanik trapped the three college presidents in their own rhetoric was outlined in a brave column by the New York Times' Michelle Goldberg, a proud Jew. First, Stefanik got Harvard’s Claudine Gay to agree “that the use of the term ‘intifada’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.”

But a call for armed resistance during a war isn’t the same thing as a call for genocide, and Gay was foolish to play along. Having declared that such “hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me,” she found herself intellectually disarmed when Stefanik came back later in the hearing demanding to know why Harvard students weren’t being expelled for using it.

But “intifada” means rebellion, not genocide. Also, it’s entirely possible to express sympathy for the Palestinian cause without supporting Hamas. “After all,” Goldberg wrote, “even if you’re disgusted by slogans like ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ their meaning is contested in a way that, say, ‘Gas the Jews’ is not.” Although it’s also true that Harvard probably leads the Ivy League, and probably the USA, in “cancelling” speech deemed offensive by protected categories of people.

In that sense, the three presidents can be said to have been hoist by their own petard. No less an authority than former Harvard president Lawrence Summers has written that “it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses.” A veteran controversialist, Summers wouldn’t have been so easily buffaloed by the likes of Elise Stefanik.

Meanwhile, I’ll tell you who should resign: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose incompetent scheming set this whole appalling disaster in motion. But that would require a sense of shame, and there’s no sign he’s got any. He’s the Vladimir Putin of the Middle East.

Over years, Netanyahu’s government funneled hundreds of millions in cash to the extremist, murdering lunatics of Hamas, whose monstrous terrorist attack on October 7 began the slaughter of innocents it was meant to provoke.

Netanyahu’s Likud faction did that even as it encouraged extremist Jewish “settlers” to seize Palestinian property in the West Bank by violence on the (pardon me) mad premise that God had promised “Judea and Samaria” to the Jews and that Palestinians who’d lived there for centuries had no valid rights.

By encouraging Hamas fanaticism, Netanyahu openly intended to prevent a “two-state” solution. As many centuries of European history can attest, the slaughter of infidels is what happens pretty much whenever God becomes the head of state. What’s going on in Gaza today fits the very definition of genocide. Except it’s not Israeli Jews being massacred.

How like us to quibble over legalisms in the face of catastrophe.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Moms For Libertine! And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Pious Frauds

Moms For Libertine! And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Pious Frauds

It’s gotten to where it’s almost axiomatic in American politics: Show me somebody who gets TV face-time railing against others’ sexual sins, and I’ll show you somebody hiding naughty secrets. The latest example is an amusing scandal involving “Moms for Liberty,” the Florida-based right-wing organization that made its name by publicizing what this column described as “queers under the bed and the preposterous idea that the nation’s public-school librarians and grade-school teachers are plotting the sexual subversion of small children.”

One correspondent framed it this way: “Newest children’s title approved for Florida school libraries: Bridget’sTotallyNon-Gay Three-Way.” Cruel, but funny. The Bridget in question being Bridget Ziegler, the Sarasota spokes-model and co-founder of Moms for Liberty and her husband Christian Ziegler. Among other things, the lovely Mrs. Ziegler is credited with helping inspire Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law forbidding teachers from mentioning the existence of homosexuality.

See, it turns out that husband Christian stands accused of raping the woman with whom he and Bridget had been sharing sexual liaisons of the two-women, one-man variety so popular with porn movie producers. Sarasota police released a heavily-redacted investigative report containing the words “raped” and “sexually-battered.” The allegation is that Christian Ziegler, the elected chairman of Florida’s Republican Party, showed up at the alleged victim’s place seeking a more traditional two-way adulterous encounter.

According to an affidavit obtained by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, and reported by Lucian K. Truscott IV, the woman demurred, explaining “sorry, I was mostly in it for her.”She says Ziegler proceeded to take her by force. His lawyer told the Washington Post that when all the evidence comes out, Ziegler will be “totally exonerated.”

Criminally, perhaps. Politically, not a chance. You see, Ziegler told Sarasota police that the encounter was consensual, and offered as evidence a video he’d made. I expect that’s one selfie you won’t be seeing on Facebook. The cops have also taken possession of all Ziegler’s electronic devices. The accused also argues that he’s being persecuted for his political views.

Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis has said Ziegler should resign from the GOP chairmanship. The governor hasn’t said anything about Bridget’s position on the Sarasota County school board or the special taxing district he created to punish the Disney Corporation, in which capacity the fair Bridget has in the past accused the company of making cartoons corrupting children.

Almost needless to say, the Zieglers are also big Trump allies. Because nothing enhances one’s credibility with right-wing Christians like being strong with the old pussy-grabber.

Bridget Ziegler has also admitted a sexual encounter involving her, her husband, and his accuser, but says it only happened the one time. A cynic might suspect she knows that the woman can prove it. It would appear unlikely that there’s just the one video.

Politically, Moms for Liberty has done the Republicans more harm than good anyway. Banning books, attacking teachers and librarians, and picking on vulnerable LGBTQ students has turned out to be less popular among voters than many imagined it would. Recent school board and state legislative elections in Pennsylvania and Virginia in particular resulted in candidates associated with the group losing pretty much across the board. It appears that voters aren’t happy about being told their local schools are run by perverts and subversives.

Perhaps in consequence, pious frauds in general are a little more cautious about accusing everybody else of sexual libertinism of late. Erin Burnett had a fascinating segment on her CNN program last week about a book called The Revivalist Manifesto for which GOP House Speaker wrote a laudatory foreword in 2022.

Basically, it was one of those deals where a political crony back home in Shreveport produced an extreme-right screed that played very differently in the nation’s capital. The author, one Scott McKay, a Louisiana blogger, is all about the so-called Gay Agenda. He’s particularly exercised by Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, variously described as “openly and obnoxiously gay,” and as displaying what the author calls “queer sanctimony,” whatever that is. He describes him as a complete nonentity with no qualifications for public office apart from his sexual identity.

Never mind that Buttigieg is a former Rhodes Scholar, an Afghanistan war veteran and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. The insinuation is that no sanctimonious queer could possibly know anything about harbors, railroads, and trucks. In the real world, the secretary is widely credited with solving the post-Covid supply-chain problems that contributed so much to monetary inflation.

McKay also spends a lot of time on the QAnon-endorsed “Pizzagate” fantasy, accusing name-brand Democrats of child sexual abuse orgies conducted in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant that has no basement.

But why go on? Speaker Johnson, who has an extensive history of denouncing the “homosexual agenda,” now says he never actually read the manifesto he promoted, and disagrees with its slurs.

I wonder who’s next.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

The Political Press Should Stop Playing Fortune Teller -- And Just Report

The Political Press Should Stop Playing Fortune Teller -- And Just Report

Here is my big prediction for November, 2024: the Arkansas Razorbacks will not lose to Alabama in football.

The two teams don’t play each other.

Otherwise, I’ll leave the prognostication to the football-obsessed guys on SportsTalk radio. In Little Rock, where I live, they talk of nothing else for weeks and months at a time. As a card-carrying Yankee living in SEC country, I’ve long wondered what is wrong with these people? It’s pretty much all college football, all the time. Many act as if their lives depend upon it.

Even as a guy who begins every day with the sports page, married to a (baseball) coach’s daughter who thinks it’s normal to watch a ballgame pretty much every day, and who often watches with me, these people wear me out. It’s one reason I’ve made relatively few friends among Southern men.

Hey, y’all, lighten up. It’s supposed to be fun. You know, a game.

When it comes to guessing the future, however, even the most perfervid SEC football fan has nothing on the national political press. Day after day, we’re told who’s trending up or down, and which candidate is most apt to win the 2024 presidential election. Pollsters are treated like oracles, seers who can envision future political events and tell us what’s going to happen.

The cable TV news networks are, if anything, even worse. With hours to fill every day, they bring us oddsmakers and necromancers of every kind and description, pronouncing upon who’s trending up, down and sideways. Has Nikki Haley edged ahead of Ron DeSantis? How is Joe Biden trending today as compared to yesterday? Literally. Political websites such as 538.com and Real Clear Politics consist of little else.

And yet the most remarkable thing about the lot, as my old friend James Fallows has pointed out on his “Breaking the News” Substack, is how relentlessly wrong most of them are most of the time. Never mind the widely predicted congressional “Red Wave” of 2022 which simply failed to materialize. Consider this month's election results in Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia.

In the supposedly “red” state of Ohio, voters passed an amendment by a strong margin putting reproductive rights into the state’s constitution. In equally red Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear was re-elected easily over a Trump-endorsed opponent, while Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s plan to push for a 15-week abortion ban in Virginia was stymied when voters there turned over both houses of the state legislature to Democrats.

None of these results was widely forecast to happen.

The Ohio abortion-rights referendum, Fallows writes “was one of many ‘surprisingly’ large victories for Democrats and progressives in post-2016 elections, and of similarly ‘unexpected’ setbacks for GOP culture-warriors once exposed to voters outside the MAGA base. What should the press learn from these repeated surprises?”

Basically, to quit playing fortune teller and do some real reporting about what’s going on in the country. “The political press” Fallows notes “is very bad at forecasting how elections will turn out. Its track record is worse than for other professional groups whose supposed expertise is predicting future outcomes. Weather forecasters, let’s say. Or bookies. Or economic analysts or military strategists. And the gap appears to be widening. Weather forecasts are stunningly more precise than a generation ago. Political prognostications seem if anything worse.”

Consider, for example, the big play given by the New York Times to a poll published one year before the 2024 election showing Joe Biden losing to Donald Trump in a half-dozen “swing” states. (Going back to the Clinton administration, you can pretty much depend on the allegedly liberal newspaper to rain on any Democratic parade.)

Fallows brings history to bear on the topic. In 1983, for example, Ronald Reagan trailed Democrat John Glenn by eight points according to Gallup. In 1984, he won a thunderous majority.

In 1995, polls gave Bill Clinton little chance of being re-elected. He won by nine points in 1996.

According to Gallup, Barrack Obama trailed a “generic Republican” rival by eight points one year before the 2012 election. He defeated Mitt Romney comfortably.

None of which means Joe Biden has re-election in the bag. What it does show is that telephone polls have never meant much this far out from an election, and that given peoples’ widespread reluctance to answer unknown callers, they’re now probably less useful than ever. You’d do about as well using wooly bear caterpillars or persimmon seeds to predict the winter weather. Huckleberry Finn’s magic hairball also comes to mind.

Given the number of imponderables out there in the world—the U.S. economy, the Hamas-Israeli war, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and so on —expending time and energy on political opinion polls would be sheer folly. Better some real reporting about what’s going on in people’s lives and how they’re coping than the latest horse race tips from Fox News or CNN.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

troubled Trump

Biden May Have Lost A Step -- But Trump Is Dazed, Confused And Kooky (VIDEO)

So here’s my story: I’m a year younger than President Biden, two years and change older than Donald Trump. Healthwise, I’ve always been lucky. Having turned 80 last September, it’s still all systems go.

My most annoying physical disability is called plantar fasciitis, in vernacular terms a sore heel that comes and goes. There are basically two treatments: no more walking in Crocs, and stretching. Given the rate at which my contemporaries are vanishing over the event horizon, it’s practically a blessing.

But I do keep forgetting the term “plantar fasciitis,” and have to consult my wife or Google from time to time to recall it.

A couple of weeks ago, I drove the whole gang down to the Dog Park for their daily outing. It’s mandatory. They all four know exactly what time it is, and when we’re supposed to go.

No Dog Park, no peace. The excitement grows as get closer, ending in a crescendo of canine vocalization. The big dog, Aspen, allegedly a collie/Great Pyrenees mix I’m beginning to think is more husky than collie, points his nose at the sky and howls like a wolf. The two basset hounds mimic him. Marley, the cowboy corgi and the brains of the operation, yaps maniacally.

Getting them safely through the gate without breaking your own leg can be a challenge.

So the reader will perhaps understand how I came to leave the key in the ignition and the motor running for the duration of our two hour visit the other day. Given the rate of auto break-ins and pilferage, it’s a wonder the vehicle was still there—although it does have rather a pungent odor.

Even so, the blunder left me shaken. I felt like an idiot.

I also no longer drive on the freeway. I simply don’t see well enough to go 70 miles per hour. I’ve lost confidence.

So no, somebody like me does not need to be president.

And neither, I’m afraid, does Joe Biden. Yes, he has aides to define plantar fasciitis as necessary, and doesn’t do a lot of his own driving anymore. The contrived videos they show constantly on Fox News very much exaggerate his verbal and physical slips. Anybody can trip. Saying “Iraq” when you mean “Ukraine” is also understandable, so long as you correct yourself.

That said, although he appears in excellent health, the odds of Biden’s remaining hale and hearty for five more years are worsening by the day.

Nobody wants to see the 25th amendment invoked, least of all, I should think, the president himself.

Then there’s Trump. Chances are, as former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, also a one-time U.S. Attorney, tried to inform jeering Republican loyalists recently, that the former president will be a convicted felon, and possibly an inmate in a federal penitentiary by Election Day 2024.

But even if he escapes conviction, Trump’s own age-related infirmities have become ever more visible of late, to the point where even some Republicans have begun to notice. In speeches he babbles, confusing names and places and stumbling over words on the teleprompter. During recent court testimony, Trump alibied that he’d been too busy managing foreign affairs crises to pay serious attention to a 2021 financial statement.

Nice try.

But in 2021, of course, Trump was no longer president.

ABC News’ Jonathan Karl has pointed out that until quite recently, the former president has gotten a free ride, as our esteemed national media can only imagine one gaffe-prone politician at a time. The former president, he noted “confuses basic facts, says some rather strange things, but there isn’t much attention paid.”

But leave it to that great humanitarian Ron DeSantis to step in. Professing to be sad to see the great man stumble, his campaign posted an online compilation of “fumbles, accidents and confused moments” by Trump so far this year. Taken together, it’s almost shocking even to a connoisseur of the former president’s manifest incompetence like myself.

It's one thing, for example, for Trump to confuse the Catholic strongman of Hungary (Viktor Orban) with the Muslim dictator of Turkey (Recep Tayip Erdogan.) His subsequent remarks, moreover, made it clear that he has no idea where each country is located on a world map—claiming they both border on Russia. Neither does.

Trump confused the Bush brothers, blaming Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for invading Iraq. Um, that would be former President George W. Bush.

He boasted of having defeated President Barack Obama in 2016, and claimed that only he could prevent World War Two, which even most Trump supporters know ended in 1945, a year before he was born.

Trump gave an effusive greeting to GOP voters in Sioux Falls, South Dakota while actually speaking in Sioux City, Iowa. Understandable, perhaps.

But if Biden had done it?

No wonder, DeSantis says, Trump’s handlers won’t let him debate.

But then why would he?

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Mike Johnson

Does Johnson Really Believe All That 'Biblical' Shuck And Jive? Nah

Everybody in the South has known somebody like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA): an amiable, polite, well-dressed religious crackpot who’s either completely out of his mind or pretends to be for career purposes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

If you’re an ambitious politician someplace like his hometown of Shreveport, there’s no penalty for professing belief in all manner of absurdities calculated to reassure God-intoxicated true believers in backwoods churches that you’re one of them. Everybody understands, especially the people who put up the money.

There’s nothing in the Bible, for example, that compels Johnson to profess disbelief in climate change—although he could probably manufacture something, if challenged. There are, however, plenty of oil and gas wells around the Ark-La-Tex, as the area around Shreveport and Texarkana is called, and the people who own them mean to extract every cubic centimeter from the ground and turn it into cash. The bulk of Johnson’s campaign funds come from the petrochemical industry.

Never mind that finding oil requires hiring geologists that understand the actual age of the earth, some 13.8 billion years, rather than the 6600 decreed by Answers in Genesis, the Kentucky theme-park Johnson once represented, with its life-sized Noah’s Ark exhibit and sea-faring brontosauruses. The congressman has insisted that the Bible story represents historical truth.

It’s the same with evolution. As a creationist, does he take his children to physicians who reject biological science as a Satanic lie? Even in Shreveport, those can be hard to find. So, it’s all a shuck and a jive. Almost everybody who’s been to college—Johnson has two degrees from Lousiana State University—understands the rules of the game, and everybody plays along.

In media interviews, Johnson is anything but shy about advertising his piety, recently describing himself to Fox News propagandist Sean Hannity as “a Bible-believing Christian.” To understand his views, he said “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

A skeptic might observe that Scripture has been interpreted in rather a lot of different ways over the centuries. To Johnson, however, it’s only in Southern Baptist churches in North Louisiana that perfect fealty to God’s word has been achieved. All others are heretics or worse.

Also during his interview with Hannity, however, Johnson displayed a newfound willingness to accept political reality. He told his host that gay marriage is a settled issue and that there’s no national consensus on abortion. In the past, he has blamed legal abortion for mass shootings: also, feminism, no-fault divorce laws, and the “sexual revolution.”

"When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable,” he told a New York magazine interviewer in 2015, “then you do wind up with school shooters.”

Because to the fundamentalist mind, only two possibilities exist. Either you agree with them on every issue, or you’re “of the devil” and an enemy of God. Indeed, Johnson has compared same-sex marriage to the right of "a person to marry his pet."

Which come to think of it…

Who starts purring madly when I climb into the marital bad at night? My wife or Martin the cat? Who gets up early to read the newspaper, and who stays wedged by my side? Have I chosen the wrong gender and species?

But I digress. Rep. Johnson claims firmer views. See, when the U.S. Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” it really means that Protestant fundamentalism rules.

Similarly, when Thomas Jefferson wrote that “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God,” he really meant to establish a Biblical republic based upon a literalist reading of scripture. That this is absurdly ahistorical matters hardly at all. It’s called “Christian Nationalism,” and millions in the so-called Red States have chosen to believe it.

Theirs is an embattled faith. According to Johnson, “it is only and always the Christian viewpoint that is getting censored. The fact is the left is always trying to shut down the voices of the Christians.”

And yet God has elevated a champion. “I believe God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment,” he said during his first speech upon being elected Speaker.

And that champion’s main purpose, he has made clear, will be elevating, Donald J. Trump, that thrice-married, career adulterer, pussy-grabber and adjudicated rapist to the presidency. Johnson was one of the prime movers among GOP congressmen trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, crafting absurd legal arguments even the Republican-majority Supreme Court rejected out of hand.

Think about it: Trump re-installed in the White House.

Wouldn’t that be a glorious day for the Lord?

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Iowa's Little Tyrants Have Actually Banned Orwell's ​​​"1984," Because Sex​​​

Iowa's Little Tyrants Have Actually Banned Orwell's ​​​"1984," Because Sex​​​

Show me a book-banner, and I’ll show you a would-be tyrant. The same applies to individuals who seek to promote mandatory speech: What you’re forbidden to read; what you must say. Almost always, such efforts involve everybody’s favorite pastime: judging the intimate lives of others.

Here in Arkansas, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently went to war against what she described as “woke nonsense” supposedly belittling real women like herself, a mother of three. Arguing that “the left” has “decided ‘woman’ is a dirty word” she issued an executive order—in Iran they’d call it a fatwa—banishing from public documents a bunch of words nobody’s ever seen there.

Rather than “chestfeeding,” Sanders decreed, public documents must use “breastfeeding.” Instead of, “birthing person,” they should say “birth mom.” And so on. During her press conference, the governor became annoyed with a reporter who asked where she’d found the forbidden terms. She cited a Health Department statement warning “pregnant people” to avoid contaminated water.

Good advice, most would think.

Skeptics wondered if Sanders might be trying to distract voters from a ludicrous controversy involving the state’s purchase of a $19,000 lectern from her own PR consultants, not previously known to sell office furniture. Some have noticed that the cost—several times what a similar item sells for on Amazon—closely matches the round-trip, business class airfare from Little Rock to Paris, where the same consultants recently enjoyed the governor’s hospitality during a French air show.

But nobody knows, and the absurd controversy, also involving suspect emails and doctored invoices, goes on even as Gov. Sanders safeguards Arkansas women from “woke” jargon nobody’s ever heard.

Up in Iowa, meanwhile, that state’s aggressively “Christian” governor has signed a bill requiring public schools to remove books depicting a “sex act”—vague language that, as reported by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post, has sent librarians around the state into a fear-based frenzy of book banning.

A short list of classic novels removed from school libraries around Iowa includes Ulysses by James Joyce, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Brave New Worldby Aldous Huxley, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Forrest Gump by Winston Groom.

But the one that really caught my eye was George Orwell’s 1984, the anti-totalitarian classic and the most politically influential novel of the 20th century—unless it was Orwell’s Animal Farm—and one that until quite recently was required reading on high school curricula. I’d go so far as to say that an enemy of that book is an enemy of democracy.

But yes, Orwell believed that the thing that would most horrify readers about Big Brother’s tyrannical government was its intrusion into peoples’ intimate relations. So 1984 tells the story of a doomed love affair between the protagonist, Winston Smith, a re-write man in the Ministry of Truth who alters historical documents to agree with party dogma, and Julia, a co-worker who wears the sash of the “Junior Anti-Sex League” to disguise her secret life.

Their clandestine meeting in the woods outside London is described in terms suitable for a family newspaper: “Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory,” Orwell wrote. “It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”

Alas, there’s a video screen in their slum hideaway so the lovers get arrested and tortured for their sins. 1984 is anything but an endorsement of eroticism.

No matter, the book is banned from Iowa schools, about as sinister and farcical a literary event as one can imagine.

Do the pious religious exhibitionists of Iowa imagine that adolescents are being corrupted by reading novels in the library? Do they not understand that most are carrying internet-capable cell phones in their pockets? If they want to read Orwell or watch pornography during study hall, that will be no problem.

Not that pious conservatives are the only literary scolds on the scene. I have recently spent the better part of two weeks enthralled by Robert Galbraith’s 941-page epic The Running Grave: A Cormoran Strike Novel, and regret only that it’s over. Show me a man who hasn’t got a crush on the British detective’s resourceful partner, Robin Ellacott, and I’ll show you a man who has never loved an imaginary woman.

Galbraith, of course, is the pseudonym of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, probably the best-selling English novelist in history. But you won’t find The Running Grave reviewed in any of the usual places, because the author has sinned against left-wing dogma on “transgender” issues and been relegated to “un-person” status among the bookish.

It all started in a dispute over whether a transgendered woman who’d committed rapes as a man should be incarcerated among biological women in a Scottish prison. Rowling thought not, and as she appears to rather enjoy public controversy, has made herself a pariah on the gender-obsessed left.

It’s always people’s sex lives, isn’t it?

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner, a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Israel Wants Revenge On Hamas -- But Netanyahu Shares The Blame

Israel Wants Revenge On Hamas -- But Netanyahu Shares The Blame

For all his personal eccentricity, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats said it best in his 1919 poem The Second Coming. In the wake of Hamas’s monstrous atrocity against Israeli civilians, it appears that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are filled with passionate intensity.”

Which is exactly how the murdering lunatics of Hamas, would-be suicidal martyrs, wanted it. The instinct is for tribal revenge. “We are fighting human animals,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in announcing Israel’s intention to cut off electrical power, wate,r and food to Gaza’s civilian population as its bombing campaign began.

Beasts, that is, not human beings.

Traveling Israel in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, New York Times correspondent Isabel Kirshner found author Dorit Rabinyan, whose 2014 autobiographical novel All the Rivers, sparked controversy by describing a love affair between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian Muslim man.

Now, however, Rabinyan seeks revenge.

“I know it’s not noble of me,” she told the reporter. “I know there is suffering on the other side, but the other side took hostages and slaughtered so violently, with so much passion, that my compassion is somehow paralyzed.”

The novelist doubtless speaks for millions of Israelis, those who consider Prime Minister Netanyahu a bigot and a fraud, and who protested his Likud government’s policy of encouraging so-called “settlers” to seize Palestinian property in the West Bank and expel impoverished former owners to Gaza, the world’s largest prison camp.

Tribal instincts once aroused are hard to subdue.

Perennially warlike Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton was even less ambivalent. “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza,” the Republican lawmaker told Fox News, “Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas—Hamas killed women and children in Israel last weekend.”

Exterminate all the brutes, he may as well have said.

And then what?

Messianic and insane, Hamas hopes to provoke Israel into committing crimes against humanity. Its goal is not so much to liberate Palestine as to exterminate Jews. The terror group’s charter recapitulates every anti-Semitic slur dreamed up since the Middle Ages. Hamas blames Jews for everything from the French and Russian revolutions to World War Two—all part of a Jewish conspiracy to usher in that ancient delusion. One World Government.

Me, I’ve never encountered a Jewish person naïve enough to believe such a preposterous fantasy was either possible or desirable.

Based upon his own history, there’s no reason to think Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can restrain himself from a massacre of innocents. He’s too compromised, too captivated by Israeli religious fanatics, too weak.

(Indeed, even as I write, news comes that Israel may have bombed a hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds of civilians—if true, a war crime worthy of Vladimir Putin. Israel's defense ministry denied bombing the hospital and said that a misfired Hamas or Islamic Jihad rocket caused the explosion.)

While it’s hardly mentioned by American cable news channels promoting “Israel at War,” the Times of Israel has reported that the Egyptian government says it gave pointed warnings to Netanyahu that Hamas was planning a big attack, and that he basically blew them off. He claims it never happened. It appears, however, that the embattled Prime Minister, facing trial on criminal corruption charges, may have imagined that a terrorist attack would make him stronger.

“For years,” the newspaper explained, “the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

The idea was to weaken Palestinian moderates trying to negotiate a “Two-State solution” while trying to buy off Hamas fanatics. Netanyahu was quoted at a Likud party function in 2018 “saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, editorialized: “The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu.” The prime minister, they wrote, failed by “establishing a government of annexation and dispossession…while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.”

According to Noga Tarnopolsky in the New York Times, “[f]ormer prime minister and former Israeli army chief Ehud Barak blamed Netanyahu on Sunday for ’the greatest failure in Israel’s history.’ That same day, Moshe Yaalon, an opposition legislator and former Israeli army chief of staff, said in an interview that ‘every day that Netanyahu remains in power puts Israel in danger.’”

Party politics aside, in a small country like Israel, these are widely-respected figures of real authority. Polls show that Netanyahu’s support has cratered.

If he had any integrity, the Prime Minister would resign, and take his arrogant and stupid policy of playing games with homicidal lunatics with him.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Mike Huckabee

Why Violent Threats Are Driving Our Politics Now

Maybe I’m losing my mojo. For all the chatter about political violence out there, this column hasn’t drawn a death threat in months. Maybe not even this calendar year.

They used to come in fairly regularly. One time, a junior high gym teacher in Pennsylvania said he was coming to get me over a smart-aleck joke about the baleful effects of civics education by football coaches. Another guy used to send handwritten letters threatening to rape and mutilate my wife.

Then there was the Special Forces veteran who imagined I’d written something disrespectful about Irish Catholics. (There are a lot more war heroes among angry emailers than the public at large, I’ve noticed.) Perhaps intemperately, I advised him to get lost.

“Your basically a coward,” he responded.

What is it about right-wing soreheads and apostrophes, I wonder? MANY ALSO PREFER TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES IN ALL CAPS. Another mystery. I see something written that way, I press delete. Doesn’t everybody?

But let’s get serious. Out in the real world, there’s growing evidence that threats of violence are playing an increasing role in political decision-making. No less an eminence than Mike Huckabee — onetime Baptist preacher, former Arkansas governor, current TV quack-remedy peddler — has warned that unless Donald Trump is declared the winner of the 2024 presidential contest, the nation will turn from “ballots to bullets” to settle the issue.

TV preachers just love alliterative wordplay, which rarely fails to arouse the influential Moron-American community.

In Little Rock, the Huckster’s daughter, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, recently failed to overhaul the state’s Freedom of Information Act, which was supposedly necessary to protect her family from threats from “the radical left.” (In Arkansas, the radical left is anybody that believes in speed limits and stop signs.) Cynics thought Sanders was more aggravated by the Blue Hog Report, a blog that used the law to show that she’d commandeered a state police airplane to travel from Fayetteville to Rogers — adjoining cities. Documented flight time: 11 minutes. Queen Sarah, some call her.

Anyway, the GOP-dominated state legislature denied Sanders her FOIA overhaul, passing a significantly scaled-down version instead.

More seriously, though, Sen. Mitt Romney says that his recently announced retirement from politics results, in part, from an increasing barrage of death threats. Romney told biographer McKay Coppins that he’d recently been forced to spend $5,000 a day on private security for his family.

According to Coppins, as quoted in The Atlantic: “One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?”

Put that way, it’s hard not to sympathize. It’s one thing to be an obscure newspaper columnist who goes unrecognized at the dog park, and another to be a Washington politician whose face appears on national TV.

Almost needless to say, these threats emanate almost entirely from the spiritual descendants of Oklahoma City truck bomber Timothy McVeigh: racially obsessed white nationalists. Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has spoken of similar fears, as has former Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer. Both aroused right-wing ire by speaking out against the Trump-inspired MAGA rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

No need to kid ourselves about where it’s coming from. Pretty much all mass shooters turn out to be infected with right-wing dogma. According to Philip Bump in the Washington Post, “Analysis from the Anti-Defamation League published this year found that, in the past five years, there have been more than 170 deaths linked to right-wing extremism. Three have been linked to extremism on the left.”

Last year, Sen. Lindsey Graham predicted that there would be “riots in the streets” if Trump was indicted for willfully and deliberately storing top-secret nuclear weapons documents in a publicly accessible country club bathroom. Trump himself, of course, was only too happy to amplify the remark. He continues to hint that outrage about his upcoming criminal trials will spark violence.

And yet nothing has happened. Why? Well, at the expense of sounding like a pre-Trump conservative, because the authorities have been ready. In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, two things have become clear: First, you’ll lose the battle; second, you’ll end up doing serious time in a federal prison.

All the plotting and posing by Proud Boys chieftain Enrique Tarrio got him 22 years in the slammer.

Boo-hoo-hoo.

Look, this is America. Of course, there will be violence. Shocking, sickening violence. But the Trump/McVeigh faction is still going to lose.

Reprinted with permission from Sun Times.

No, Biden Isn't Terribly Unpopular (And He Polls Better Than Trump)

No, Biden Isn't Terribly Unpopular (And He Polls Better Than Trump)

Time was when getting caught in a malicious lie about a rival would have ended an American politician’s career. We no longer live that way. Just the other day, Donald Trump unleashed a series of falsehoods attacking President Biden that would have shamed a carnival barker.

Speaking to a rally in South Dakota, Trump delivered a series of mocking claims, beginning with the allegation that the administration was using made-up jobs numbers when the truth is that only 2.1 million jobs have been created during the president’s 30 months in office. The actual statistics show somewhere over 13 million—including near-record growth in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) during the recovery from the 2020 Covid slump.

Then Trump got personal. “He makes up these stories, like there’s a picture of a fighter jet…[mocking] You know like ‘I used to be a fighter jet pilot.’ Then there’s a picture of a truck. ‘I used to drive a truck.’ The worst is, did you ever see his golf swing? He said he’s a six-handicap! A six handicap is a good golfer. This guy can’t hit a ball… I think that’s the biggest lie of all, if you want to know the truth.”

Trump shakes his head in feigned disbelief as the crowd laughs and applauds. (Never mind that there’s a best-selling book by veteran sportswriter Rick Reilly called Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump describing how he races down fairways in his golf cart, kicks opponent’s balls into ponds, drops his own onto the green, etc. Filled with interviews of golf pros and caddies, it’s actually quite funny.)

So is Trump’s performance, or would be if you didn’t know—South Dakota isn’t exactly a golfing hotbed—that every single word of it is a malicious lie. Joe Biden has never claimed to be a truck driver or a fighter pilot. Don’t you think you’d have heard?

Biden has mostly made self-deprecating jokes about his golf game, commenting that “the course record remains intact” after his initial outing as president. Back in 2018 he carried a USGA handicap of 6.7, according to Golf News Net, which is pretty good—no surprise as Biden was an accomplished athlete as a young man. But he’s never boasted about it.

Anyway, who cares? As a politician, Trump himself is treated by audiences and reporters alike as a stand-up comic. Which would be fine if he stuck to stage performances. Alas, polls show that millions of gullible Americans believe even the most absurd of his inventions. Deep-thinking pundits are writing columns about Biden’s great unpopularity, which reality-oriented blogger Kevin Drum shows is largely a function of false memories.

I like Drum because he’s an engineer by training who lives in Orange County, California and is congenitally immune to inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom. Recently he posted a graph comparing the “favorability” ratings of the last several presidents at the equivalent point in their respective administrations. It turns out that they all hovered in the forties. It comes with the territory. Biden’s in no worse shape politically than Clinton, Obama, or Trump.

Only George W. Bush, thanks to the strong patriotic surge in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was in better shape. However, Dubya’s disastrous second term drove his approval down to 24 percent by 2008.

So, no President Biden isn’t deeply unpopular with the public, and certainly not in comparison with Trump, whose negatives are markedly worse even in Fox News surveys. That said, polls mean very little at this point in the election cycle, and have pretty much failed to predict the results in any of the last several national contests.

Remember the vaunted “Red Wave” in 2022? Never happened. People pretty much don’t answer their phones unless they know who’s calling. The whole business of public opinion polling is an increasingly shaky enterprise.

I suspect it’s pretty much the same with the whole Fox News-generated Hunter Biden saga. Supposedly a majority of Americans believes Joe Biden has violated the law in his dealings with his wayward son. Apart from not paying his taxes on time, however, it isn’t even clear what crimes the younger Biden’s alleged to have committed. It’s not against the law to work for a foreign corporation, nor to drop Daddy’s name in business meetings.

If it were, there wouldn’t be a Trump sibling walking around free, much less cashing humungous checks from Saudi Arabia.

Doting father that he is, I quite doubt that Joe Biden fills out Hunter’s IRS form 1040. Nor that after decades in public life with no sign of financial impropriety, he suddenly got greedy in his 70s. However, Fox News imagineers appear to have persuaded millions of viewers that with all the manure they’ve shoveled, there must be a pony.

Gullible cynicism regarding politicians is always fashionable. But if they go ahead and impeach the president, they’d better produce that pony.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

The 'Woke' Satire Of Jonathan Swift Stings Ron DeSantis Where It Hurts

The 'Woke' Satire Of Jonathan Swift Stings Ron DeSantis Where It Hurts

Being something of a smart aleck, I’ve sometimes joked that while I may look white, actually I’m Irish. All eight of my great-grand parents were born there. Indeed, there was a time during the Great Potato Famine of 1845-52 when my ancestors were treated rather worse than Black slaves in America. Millions of Irish peasants starved even as the country exported plentiful foodstuffs guarded by British soldiers.

As valuable property, Black slaves never died of hunger.

So, the Irish fled to America in “coffin ships,” so-called because many thousands failed to survive the journey. The best way I know to understand this historical tragedy is to read Joseph O’Connor’s terrific novel Star of the Sea.

(Joseph is the older brother of Sinead O’Connor, the singer whose recent death was mourned all over Ireland. A talented family, the O’Connors of Glenageary.)

Nor were the Irish, being Catholic, particularly welcome in America. But so what? None of that has affected my own life in any practical way. Nor have I noticed that Irish-Americans behave better than anybody else when it comes to race.

(In the old country, of course, they’ve only recently quit murdering each other over what’s basically a 17th century religious quarrel.I once asked a correspondent in Belfast how they could tell each other apart, as on TV they all looked like my uncles and cousins. The shoes, she responded. The shoes!)

My first great literary hero was the immortal Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift. The first time my wife saw tears in my eyes was visiting his tomb in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He’d died in 1745, author of perhaps the most penetrating anti-racist essay in the English language. An Anglican clergyman marooned for life in his native Ireland, Swift thought of himself as an Englishman.

But the appalling poverty of the native Irish troubled him, so he wrote A Modest Proposal, a pseudonymous essay proposing a useful reform: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.”

The author expressed confidence that his proposal would be well received by absentee English “landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”

The 1729 pamphlet was published anonymously, because had its authorship been proven—although pretty much everybody in Ireland could guess who’d written it—Swift could have been imprisoned, or worse.

Anyway, here’s where I’m going with all this: Because I am, in fact, white, and because Irish history threatens no vested American interests, nobody has ever suggested that my studying it is in any way improper. Nor, certainly, tried to ban it. Had Swift been a Black man, I’m sure, his works would be illegal in Florida. Arkansas too.

Consider the scene in Gulliver’s Travels where the gigantic hero extinguishes a fire in the Lilliputian Queen’s chambers by pissing on it. (The author’s response to Queen Anne’s ingratitude for services done the crown.) Not to mention the scene where enormous teenaged Brobdingnagian girls perch tiny Gulliver on their nipples. Whoa, Nelly!

Moms for Liberty, which is what they’re calling the United Daughters of the Confederacy these days, would banish the novel from every library in the land.

I think my favorite moment during the absurd controversy over Florida and Arkansas’ efforts to ban Advanced Placement African-American History classes from being taught in public schools, was when Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Department of Education published a letter claiming that “The content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law" [my emphasis].

Meaning they can’t explain it. Not what they intended to say, I suspect. This is what happens when you enlist semi-literate ideologues to defend us white folks from…

Well, from what?

As near as I can tell, from history itself, and from the idea that Black citizens of a state where chattel slavery was legal until 1865 and Jim Crow segregation laws replaced it right up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and where race riots and lynchings were not uncommon just might have a perspective on its history different from the white majority’s.

DeSantis’ slogan is literally “Florida is where woke goes to die.”

In Arkansas, Gov. Sarah Sanders too derides the very idea of an African-American perspective as “critical race theory,” and “indoctrination.” Black people have no legitimate point of view and it’s literally illegal to say otherwise in a public-school classroom. Here in the United States of America.

So where does that leave somebody like me, an aging white man whose education in these matters has been sadly neglected?

Thinking maybe I need to take that African-American history course.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President..

How Sarah Sanders Is Trying To Bring Back The Bad Old Days In Arkansas

How Sarah Sanders Is Trying To Bring Back The Bad Old Days In Arkansas

Sometimes pictures do tell the story. When Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders staged a photo op for the signing of her vaunted LEARNS Act, an education “reform” shoved through a rubber stamp legislature with virtually no debate, she chose a private school in North Little Rock. Not a single Black face was in evidence. Most prominent were a half-dozen handsomely dressed little white boys wearing neckties.

The staging was clearly no accident, and the message was obvious.

The main purpose of the bill is to boost Arkansas private schools at the expense of public education by awarding tax-paid “vouchers” of up to $7000 a year to help parents pay tuition at what it’s considered rude to call “seg academies.” Most will go to well-heeled suburban families.

Indeed, the bill's long-term impact is clear: It would re-segregate Arkansas schools by, race, by class and by religion.

As former Little Rock school superintendent Baker Kurrus put it in the Arkansas Times, for most kids in under-funded rural and inner-city schools, “a school voucher might as well be a coupon for half off at Tiffany’s.”

Exceptions for talented athletes would surely be made. Otherwise, it’s back to 1956, which appears to be when America was last great in the minds of Huckabee/Trump Republicans determined to restore a lost Golden Age.

That’s the year before President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne to escort nine brave Black students into Little Rock Central High School in the face of a howling mob summoned by Gov. Orval Faubus, to the state’s eternal shame.

Today, there’s a statue of the Little Rock Nine on the state capitol grounds, clearly visible from the governor’s office. There’s also a fine museum on the Central High campus run by the National Park Service, commemorating the traumatic event, which fixed the state’s image as a bigot’s paradise for a generation. I have seen native Arkansans burst into tears upon viewing the exhibits.

Herself a Central High graduate, Sanders has expressed pride about a fine speech her father, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, gave there during a 40th anniversary celebration. He outshone President Bill Clinton.

Sarah Sanders wouldn’t give that speech. Like her patron Donald Trump, she’s most comfortable on the attack. Back in 2017, you may recall, she told reporters inquiring about the firing of FBI Director James Comey that the White House had gotten messages from “countless” FBI agents who’d lost faith in his leadership. (Trump himself celebrated in the Oval Office with Russian diplomats.}

Asked under oath by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, Sanders admitted there were no such messages. She blamed “a slip of the tongue.”

Because that’s exactly who she is.

Everybody who disagrees with her educational reforms, Sanders goes on Fox News to say, is a member of “the radical woke left mob” she’s protecting Arkansas schoolchildren from. "I think the best thing that conservatives can do, that are living in blue states,” she added, “is move to Arkansas. It's really simple…[W]e're going to make sure that the kids are protected and that they're in good learning environments."

Protected from stuff like transgender bathrooms, which if you think were ever a significant problem in the state…

Well, as Mark Twain put it, “you don’t know Arkansaw.”

Something else Sanders thinks students need protecting from is Black history. On the day before schools opened across the state, her Education Department abruptly ruled that it would not award course credits and wouldn’t fund an Advanced Placement course in African-American history administered by the College Board—a course offered in more than 700 schools in 40 states.

Sanders explained: “We've got to get back to the basics of teaching math, of teaching reading, writing, and American history. And we cannot perpetuate a lie to our students and push this propaganda leftist agenda, teaching our kids to hate America and hate one another. It's one of the reasons that we put into law banning things like indoctrination and CRT [critical race theory]”

Got that? Black history is, by definition, a subversive lie that it’s forbidden to tell.

Then came a surprise. Little Rock Central High School announced that it would offer the course and find private funding. It was quickly followed by North Little Rock and public high schools in the state’s academic communities: Fayetteville, Jonesboro, and the Air Force base city of Jacksonville. The University of Arkansas announced that it will award course credit for students scoring well on the exam.

In response, Sanders’ Secretary of Education—a Ron DeSantis acolyte—has demanded that the schools submit their lesson plans to prove they are not breaking state laws against “indoctrination.” Black History being inherently subversive, you see. At this writing, it’s not clear whether the schools will comply.

Either way, this one appears headed to federal court, where the Sanders administration will lose on First Amendment grounds.

It’s an Arkansas tradition.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Why That Blowhard Bully's Conspiracy Trial Must Be Televised

Why That Blowhard Bully's Conspiracy Trial Must Be Televised

Here’s the thing about Donald Trump: he’s not a real mobster, just a mouthy blowhard who plays one on TV. A trust-fund preppie surrounded by bodyguards all his life. Bodyguards and lawyers, not gangsters and hit men. It’s a good bet the big man himself has never so much as had a fistfight. Never even played a contact sport. A country club bully and notorious golf cheat.

So when he tries to intimidate people — judges, prosecutors, witnesses, whoever — it’s always over the telephone or in ALL CAPS social media posts in the middle of the night, weasel-worded to preserve deniability.

“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” he tweeted the other night after carefully behaving himself in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s courtroom. Basically meaning he’ll run his mouth in the hope of inspiring some weak-minded MAGA fool to do something crazy.

Let’s you and him fight. That’s how Trump rolls. Remember back on January 6 when he urged the mob to march down to the U.S. Capitol to “fight like hell, because if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore?” He also promised he’d be marching with them. But, of course, he was a no-show; watching the riot for hours on TV while aides begged him to act.

Trump’s idea of a fight is a scripted professional wrestling event.

Comes the trial in Judge Chutkan’s court, it will be more of the same. Because he doesn’t dare face cross-examination, Trump won’t be testifying, and will need to restrain himself lest the no-nonsense jurist lock him up for contempt. No courtroom outbursts and no mugging for the cameras.

No stupid red MAGA hat.

Which is pretty much why this trial—arguably the most consequential criminal trial in US history—must be televised nationwide, (hell, worldwide), so that Trump’s deluded supporters, can witness his humbling. I agree with Court TV founder Steven Brill, who argues in a New York Times op-ed that “Americans Will Believe the Trump Verdict Only if They Can See It.”

Although federal court rules currently forbid cameras, those rules are not graven in stone. The Founding Fathers clearly meant for jury trials to be public. That’s why courtrooms have large galleries, just not large enough, in this instance, when the potential audience numbers in the millions, a legal Super Bowl.

“The last thing our country and the world needs,” Brill writes “is for this trial to become the ultimate divisive spin game, in which each side roots for its team online and on the cable news networks as if cheering from the bleachers.”

The process of changing the no-TV rule begins with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who should definitely recognize the potential harm to the judicial system’s prestige, and ultimately its legitimacy, if Trump’s trial were to devolve into a contest among cable news spin doctors.

Already, Trump apologists argue that he has a First Amendment right to say anything he pretends to believe about who won the 2020 presidential election. But that’s not what he’s charged with. Trump can (and surely will, albeit not under oath) say anything he likes about that.

What he can’t do, however, is enter into a conspiracy using fraud and deceit to prevent the votes from being tabulated and certified in violation of the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Unless he goes with an insanity defense, his subjective delusions don’t matter.

Prosecutor Jack Smith has compiled scores of examples of Trump being credibly informed that his allegations of fraud had been investigated and dismissed. Almost without exception, the witnesses will be Republican elected officials, Trump supporters, most of them, who, like Vice President Mike Pence, put country above party. Smith’s indictment quotes one such GOP official to the effect that “it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

Kevin Drum explains that “The prosecution doesn't have to prove that Trump knew he was lying…The standard of proof stops short of requiring mind reading: "Reckless disregard of whether a statement is true, or a conscious effort to avoid learning the truth, can be construed as acting 'knowingly.' "

No, not everybody will be persuaded. Many in the MAGA cult are clearly beyond reason. But if nothing else, the sheer tedium of a weeks-long federal trial will wear down all but the most deluded.

As for Boss Trump’s mobster act intimidating witnesses, that’s not happening. Most have already defied him in person—there’s a tape of Trump threatening to prosecute Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger for refusing to play ball—and have previously testified to the January 6 Commission.

Tough sentences handed down against January 6 rioters have also had a calming effect. Nobody’s eager to do prison time for a loudmouth politician in a baggy suit.

Americans have every right to witness this spectacle live.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of The Hunting of the President..