Do you remember the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974? I didn’t remember much about it either, except for a vague recollection that there had been a military coup just before elections were scheduled to be held in May of that year. The elections were predicted to be won by Georgios Papandreou’s Center Union, a leftist party that had won elections in 1963 and 1964, the second by a large majority. The right wing in Greece was rattled by the probable election of Papandreou in1967. They were even more alarmed that his son, Andreas, who was even further to the left than his father, would have a role in a new government, so a group of generals and colonels pulled off a coup just before the elections to keep Papandreou from winning.

They ran tanks into downtown Athens, creating mass confusion and fear, and dispatched military units around the country to arrest Center Union politicians, intellectuals supporting Papandreou, the acting Prime Minister, Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, and ordinary citizens who were suspected of leftist sympathies. The coup suspended most of the Greek Constitution, making possible arbitrary arrests and prosecutions without warrants or formal charges. Georgios Papandreou was arrested at his home in a nighttime raid. His son Andreas was chased from his bedroom by soldiers armed with machine guns and rifles with fixed bayonets. He was caught on the roof of his house and surrendered when one of the soldiers held a gun to the head of his 14-year-old son, George Papandreou (who would later serve as prime minister from 2009 to 2011).

There was a military coup in Cyprus in 1974, a failed military coup in Greece in 1975, a failed military coup in Spain in 1981, and martial law was imposed in Poland to put down the Solidarity movement, also in 1981.

I remember sitting here comfortably in the United States, watching all of this happen overseas from the house I had just bought on North Haven Island out in the Hamptons. In this country, a new conservative government led by Ronald Reagan had just been elected, and although Democrats were disappointed, there were no protests in the streets. President Carter and his wife Rosalyn met the Reagans under the White House portico and welcomed them into the White House on January 20, 1981, and as outgoing presidents had done before them, attended Reagan’s inauguration that day at the Capitol.

Later in the 1980’s I met an extremely wealthy woman from one of the leading countries in Europe. Her family owned a huge company that manufactured things you have probably used every day in your life. She had enough money to buy herself an island and get away from it all, if she became unhappy with the politics and behavior of her own country, which had been conquered by Hitler in World War II. Some of her own countrymen had been collaborators with the Nazi occupiers. Having watched coups in Europe and occasional political unrest in her own country, she did not trust that all would continue to be well in Europe, so where did she turn, and what did she do? She traveled to the United States each time she was pregnant and had her babies here, so that they would always have American citizenship as well as citizenship in their own country. She wanted her children to have what we have.

We didn’t have the danger of military coups and rule by junta. Our democracy was healthy. Our government was stable, with our three branches – the Executive, the Congress, and the Judiciary – going to work every day and doing their jobs, reliably if not always agreeably. Our two major political parties differed over issues, politicians occasionally got nasty with each other rhetorically, but we hadn’t had a real upheaval in this country since Richard Nixon was forced out by threat of impeachment over crimes he committed in office. Our elections were a model for the world. U.S. observers were asked by other countries to monitor their elections and help make them “free and fair,” as it was often said.

Our economy was the best in the world. Money came from all over the globe to invest in our stock market. Foreign auto manufacturers imitated U.S. companies and built cars to compete on an equal basis for sales in this country. The United Nations sat on the East River in Manhattan where attempts to settle international disputes without going to war were made every day. Foreign nations maintained embassies in Washington D.C. and U.N. missions in New York City. Our universities, major and minor both, received thousands of applications for admission from foreign students who wanted to come here to be educated so they could go home and be able to compete in the international marketplace of money and politics and ideas. Many foreign graduates chose to stay here and enrich our universities, cities, businesses, and our politics.

This was American exceptionalism – in the words of Ronald Reagan in his farewell address from the Oval Office to the American people, we were a “shining city on a hill,” a beacon of stability and creativity and freedom to the rest of the world.

Who would say that of the United States of America today? One of our two major political parties has not accepted the results of the last election and has ceased behaving like it is part of a democracy. It is making plans for a coup if the next election doesn’t go their way. Even if they win, their plans resemble a coup. Remember the description of Greece in 1967? If Donald Trump is elected in 2024, it won’t look like a win, it will look the installation of a dictator. He has said he will invoke the Insurrection Act on “day one” and will use active duty soldiers to put down demonstrations in the streets. He will use soldiers to enforce the law in any way he wants. He has said he will “go after” President Biden and his entire family. He will use the Department of Justice not to enforce the law but to bludgeon his opponents. He has said he will demand an oath of loyalty to him from anyone who goes to work in the federal government. He has promised to arrest and jail his political opponents. Using the Insurrection Act to suspend the Posse Comitatus Act, he will use the military to carry out arrests and detentions.

We could see tanks on street corners in Washington D.C. as the Greeks saw them in Athens in 1967, and that is if Trump wins. The Heritage Foundation has come up with a document with plans for a Trump administration that reads like a coup-in-place. His henchman Stephen Miller has said a Trump administration will round up tens of millions of immigrants and put them in what amount to concentration camps pending deportation under rules that suspend the normal process involved if a person is to be expelled from the United States. Spokesmen for Trump have even promised to separate children from their mothers at the border again, presumably as part of their roundup of immigrants.

We won’t be a nation of laws. We will be a nation with armed soldiers in the streets and razor-wire camps waiting to imprison anyone who opposes Donald Trump.

That is what our new American exceptionalism will look like. The beacon on our shining city will be a red light: Stop. Stop using the word “gay.” Stop the right to control your own healthcare if you are a woman. Stop the study of American history that talks about slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Stop the free marketplace of ideas. Stop voting rights. Stop free and fair elections.

The Donald Trump plan to Make America Great Again will end our democracy and replace it with a fascist state.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

The pushing and shoving and yelling and screaming and threats and confused gibberish began on Tuesday when former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy elbowed a fellow Republican member of Congress in the kidney in a House corridor. The Kidney-Punched-One was Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett, who was one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy from his speakership last month.

He compounded his crimes against good order and discipline in the House by voting to confirm Baby-Faced-Fetus-Defender Mike Johnson, who since taking control of the House, has spent most of his time attempting to downplay his links to the New Apostolic Reformation, a fringe-of-the-fringe right-wing Christian group that according to NPR, “embraces ‘the Seven Mountains mandate’ which says Christians have a duty to God to take control of the seven pillars of society: business, education, entertainment, family, government, media and religion.”

So, what was Ousted Kevin doing sucker-punching a good and reasonable man like Tim Burchett? I mean, Burchett was the congressman who after the school shooting in his own district in Nashville went to the steps of the Capitol and told reporters, “It's a horrible, horrible situation, and we're not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the second world war, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn't mind losing their life, there's not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’” Burchett went on to opine that the Congress didn’t really have a role in dealing with gun violence other than to “mess things up.”

Burchett would seem to be right down Ousted Kevin’s alley, if it weren’t for the fact that Burchett was one of those who voted to oust Ousted Kevin. That vote earned Burchett what he called “a clean shot to the kidneys.” After McCarthy was confronted by a reporter who witnessed the incident, he denied that it happened, bragging, “If I would hit somebody, they would know I hit them.” McCarthy-ouster Burchett countered, “He just elbowed me in the kidneys ... It was deliberate. It was just a cheap shot.” McCarthy-ouster Burchett chased Ousted Kevin down the Capitol hallway and asked, “Why'd you walk behind me and elbow me in the back?”

McCarthy hit his nyah-nyah button and responded, “I didn't elbow you in the back.”

To which Burchett nyah-nyahed right back, “You got no guts, you did so.”

At which point, the bell rang, and the ouster-versus-oustee caucus went back to the middle school playground of the House floor.

Over on the side of the Capitol posing as The Greatest Deliberative Body in the World, Republican Markwayne Mullin, the junior senator from Oklahoma, was busy picking a fight with Teamster President Sean O’Brien at a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee. Apparently, the two men do not like each other. Last summer, Mullin challenged O’Brien to a mixed martial arts fight at a place of O’Brien’s choosing, after the Teamster chief called him a “Greedy CEO who pretends like he’s self-made. In reality, just a clown & fraud. Always has been, always will be.”

The nyah-nyahing continued back then with Teamster President O’Brien telling Mullin to “quit the tough guy act in these Senate hearings. You know where to find me. Anyplace, anytime cowboy.”

The cowboy from Oklahoma confronted O’Brien at the Tuesday hearing, telling him, “You wanna run your mouth? We can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here. This is the time, this is the place. You wanna do it now?”

O’Brien fired back, “Okay, that’s fine. Perfect. I’d love to do it now.”

“Stand your butt up, then,” Mullin challenged. “You stand your butt up, big guy,” answered O’Brien.

Mullin stood up from his seat in his shirtsleeves and took off his wedding ring, moving toward the stairs at the end of the raised dais, ready for a fight.

“No, no, sit down,” commanded Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), chairman of the committee. “You are a United States Senator. Sit down.”

Meanwhile, back on the other side of the Capitol, at a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Louisiana Republican Rep. Clay Higgins jumped all over FBI Director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Greene accused Mayorkas of being responsible for the death of several people from Dalton, Georgia, because he hadn’t stopped an immigrant smuggler “likely affiliated with the cartels” from killing them. She then turned her wrath on Director Wray, accusing him of using helicopters to track down and arrest leaders of the January 6 assault on the Capitol and “raiding their homes with flash bangs, targeting these people, watching these people, throwing them in jail for them to stay in pretrial in solitary confinement for years before they ever face trial.”

Not to be outdone, Representative Higgins confronted Wray, accusing him of fielding FBI agent provocateurs who conspired with the Proud Boys to attack the Capitol on January 6. “If you are asking whether the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was part of some sort of operation orchestrated by FBI sources and/or agents, the answer is an emphatic no,” Wray shot back.

“You're saying ‘no’”? Higgins said.

“No, there was not violence orchestrated by FBI sources or agents,” Wray replied.

“Are you familiar, do you know what a ghost vehicle is? The director of the FBI certainly should. You know what a ghost bus is?”

Wray, looking confused, replied: “I'm not sure I've used that term before.”

Higgins held up a photograph of buses he said were parked on streets near the Capitol on January 6. “It's pretty common in law enforcement. It's a vehicle that is used for secret purposes. It's painted over. These two buses in the middle, they were the first to arrive on January 6. I have all of this evidence.”

Wray looked bewildered as Higgins went on to spew more conspiracy theories some aide had pulled off the dark web, pointing to two white “ghost” buses.

Well, at least the Homeland Security hearing didn’t devolve into nyah-nyah challenges to engage in mixed martial arts fisticuffs right there in the hearing room.

I would say there may be hope yet if it weren’t for Defendant Trump. He’s bound to call on his supporters to shoot some vermin at one of his rallies before this election cycle is over.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

On Wednesday, the New York Times published an analysis of the results from the Tuesday elections. You would think it would be a positive piece, wouldn’t you? There were Democratic wins across the board. Abortion amendment passes in Ohio! Democrat wins governor's race in deep red Kentucky! Democrats take control of Virginia legislature, fending off move by Governor Sweater-Vest to restrict abortion! Democrats win back a seat on the Pennsylvania supreme court!

Where’s the dark cloud over those results? Well, it’s in the Wednesday Times piece by Nate Cohn in a subscriber-only newsletter called – are you ready? – "The Tilt." Here’s the title: “Tuesday Was Great for Democrats. It Doesn’t Change the Outlook for 2024.”

Of course it doesn’t! They may as well have headlined the good news for the Democrats on Tuesday, “But Her Emails!” Given Tuesday’s results, how does Cohn find a rock in the oyster instead of a pearl? Why, he starts out by putting the Tuesday election in the category of special elections, in which Democrats have had good results ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Cohn tells us that these are so called low-turnout elections, which “favor highly engaged voters,” and it’s because of this that the Tuesday results were so good for Democrats.

There’s a problem with this analysis, however. The election in Virginia to pick state senators and representatives was not a special election; nor was the election in Kentucky to pick a governor. Even though a late poll in the state suggested the election was a dead heat, Governor Andy Beshear beat Republican Daniel Cameron by 67,174 votes. In 2019, Beshear beat his Republican opponent, incumbent Governor Matt Bevin, by only 5,136 votes. As expected, turnout was down in Virginia from the 2021 election, when elections for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general were on the ballot. Democrats held their margin of control in the state Senate, and gained control of the House of Delegates, but according to the Washington Post, the two races that determined control of both bodies were won by Democrats by comparatively wide margins: by three percent in the race that flipped the House, and by three percent in the race that kept the Senate in Democratic control.

Cohn spent a good deal of verbiage reconciling Tuesday’s strong Democratic results with Biden’s poor showing in the Sunday Times/Siena poll that showed him trailing Trump in six battleground states. “The polls and the election results are surprisingly easy to reconcile,” Cohn wrote. “The surveys show millions of voters who dislike Mr. Biden but remain receptive to other Democrats and support liberal causes. The polls also show Democrats with particular strength among the most highly engaged voters, who dominate low-turnout elections like Tuesday’s, while Mr. Trump shows his greatest strength among the less engaged voters who turn out only in presidential races.”

He’s defending the Times/Sienna poll that Democrats don’t like because it shows their guy appears to be weak one year out from next year’s presidential election. He points to political polling before the Tuesday elections that predicted wins by Democrats. In Kentucky, polls varied, but they showed Governor Beshear ahead by two percent to eight percent. He won by five percent. In Ohio, before the election, the abortion rights amendment had about 58 percent support among probable voters. It won by 57 percent. As Teagan Goddard put it in his Political Wire blog, “There were no surprises.”

So, if Democrats did so well on Tuesday in a special election for a state constitutional amendment and in off-year elections for governor and a state legislature, why the terrible results in the Times/Siena poll last Sunday? Cohn puts it this way: “Well, the implication is that the polling shows millions of people who dislike the president but support abortion rights and other Democrats.”

Do you see what’s missing from both the Times headline on Cohn’s story and his analysis of the Tuesday results favoring Democrats?

The name Donald Trump.

Polling was accurate about Democratic support for abortion rights in Ohio, although in order to reach 57 percent of the vote on the constitutional amendment, a whole lot of Republican votes had be in there somewhere. Polls were accurate in the Kentucky governor’s race and the Virginia race to control the legislature.

Where polls get twisted is when Trump’s name is there. I think the results of the Times/Siena poll don’t show Trump’s support as much as they show questions voters have about Biden with inflation high, two brutal wars being fought overseas, and Donald Trump absolutely dominating Republicans in the presidential primary. He is not just the presumptive nominee. There isn’t anyone else Republicans are even close to supporting. So, when a poll comes down to a choice between Biden, whose strength with older Democrats appears strong but questionable among younger voters, and Trump, who has his whole party by the throat, you can see where the numbers are going to go.

Cohn’s analysis in his aptly named column, “The Tilt,” really goes wrong when he writes a column about the Tuesday election in which he, in the words of Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall, “says the results confirmed the findings of their poll.”

Tuesday’s strong results by Democrats don’t confirm a poll that says Trump is ahead in an election that is a year off in the future. Only a newspaper that spent thousands of inches trying to hang something called “Whitewater” around the neck of President Bill Clinton in the 90’s, and just as many thousands of words embroidering “But her emails” into every mention of Hillary Clinton in 2016, would see actual election results favoring Democrats confirming poll results favoring Donald Trump. I mean, there are polls and there are elections, and the only one that counts is the one where actual voters walk into a booth and mark a ballot.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Do you want to know what that is above? It’s a picture of the Gulfstream jet still waiting for Glenn Youngkin on the runway in Richmond, Virginia, on Wednesday morning. The Republican governor of Virginia was supposed to jump on it Tuesday night and fly to Iowa to throw his red sweater-vest into the ring of the Republican primary as the Great Savior who would lead Republicans to victory on the abortion issue that is beating the hell out of them in every election they’ve even flirted with over the last two years. Well, that didn’t happen, and here’s why:

Youngkin was supposed to be the guy who could “talk about abortion,” in the refrain we have heard again and again from Republicans, most recently last night from no less an empath than Stephen Miller, he of the plan to “put babies in cages” once Donald Trump is in office again to solve the problem of immigration on the border. Abortion wasn’t on the ballot in Virginia, but the “reasonable” abortion option pushed by Youngkin was. He promised that if Republicans took over the state Senate and House of Delegates, he would pass a 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. Yep, that was his reasonable plan, the way Republicans thought they could “get past” the issue of abortion. We’ll let women control their bodies until the end of the 15th week in their pregnancy, and then your body is ours. If it turns out the baby has birth defects, like missing its brain, you’re going to carry that baby to term whether you like it or not.

Voters in Virginia went to the polls and cast their ballots for state reps and state senators knowing that Youngkin, the stealth theocrat who didn’t quote the Bible in every third sentence of his speeches, would take away their right to abortion after 15 weeks and give it to state authorities who would have the power to enforce the new, “soft” abortion ban he was pushing.

And you know what? Virginia voters didn’t buy it. Democrats held on to their majority in the Virginia Senate and flipped the House of Delegates, and here is someone voters in Iowa or New Hampshire aren’t going to be seeing anytime soon:

In Ohio, abortion was on the ballot as an amendment to the state constitution which basically overturned the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

Yes votes: 2,186,962 56.6 percent of the vote.

No votes: 1,675,728 43.4 percent of the vote

Here’s a photo of women in Ohio celebrating the vote last night:

In Kentucky, abortion wasn’t on the ballot, but Governor Andy Beshear was, running for re-election against an extremist who supported the state’s ban on abortion with no exclusions for rape and incest. Beshear hammered on his support for abortion rights, gaining the vote of a woman from Shelbyville, who told an interviewer after she had voted for Beshear, “I think it’s a woman’s right to choose, and I don’t think politicians should be involved in that choice at all.”

Democrat Andy Beshear: 693,370 52.5 percent of the vote

Republican Daniel Cameron: 626,196 47.5 percent of the vote

Gov. Andy Beshear and Britainy Beshear on Election Night 2023

Right here in Pike County, Pennsylvania, our own Christa Caceres won a decisive victory in her race for County Commissioner. It’s a bigger win than it might seem. Right now, a company fronting for Amazon is trying to build a massive warehouse just off the Milford exit on I-84 up the hill from town, right on top of the aquifer Milford has used for its water for more than 200 years. The source is called the Milford Spring, and the town was famous during the years Milford was a resort for people traveling by train from New York and Philadelphia to escape the heat in the summers. Christa will be a reliable Democratic vote against that nightmare warehouse as the application for a building permit winds its way through the state and county bureaucracies and eventually the courts. Here’s a picture of Christa overlooking the Delaware River:

The big win for the night was in Ohio, which passed an amendment enshrining the right to abortion in the state’s constitution. Democrats who want to protect a woman’s right to control her own body will have to vote again in two years in Virginia, and two years after that, and two years after that. The Glenn Youngkins of the world are not going to give up, but neither will we.

The biggest message from Tuesday's election results was that polls don’t count. Elections count. VOTE.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

Let’s begin with the New York Times/Siena poll, out just a few days ago. “The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of four to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found. Across the six battlegrounds — all of which Mr. Biden carried in 2020 — the president trails by an average of 48 to 44 percent.”

Boy does that sound bad. Newspaper and cable news chryons have blared the ugly numbers for Democrats ever since the Times headlined the grim news. Who would blame them? News outlets love, and I mean just L-O-V-E bad news, and it doesn’t really matter what it is. The Maui fires in early August. Ninety-nine people died in Lahaina alone. The news showed photos of the burned-out little seaside town for days.

Newspapers and cable news love covering wars. They steadily covered Ukraine’s war against Russian invaders until Hamas terrorists attacked villages and Kibbutzim in southern Israel on October 7. You couldn’t avert your eyes from the images of the dead and destroyed homes in Israel if you wanted to. Just picking up your phone took you there. The news stayed on the Hamas slaughter for a week or so, especially as cable news could continue to show Hamas rockets being intercepted by Iron Dome missiles over southern Israel. Cable news reporters wore helmets and bulletproof vests for the first few days, then their helmets came off, followed by their flak vests as Hamas rocket barrages grew fewer in number.

And just like that, as if a switch was thrown somewhere, the news began showing scenes of Gaza from a distance with explosion after explosion from Israeli air attacks visible at night. Then as if another switch was flipped, they showed images within Gaza of the destruction wrought by Israeli missiles – blown up houses, civilians and ambulance workers carrying victims through the rubble.

Then the coverage included New York City and college campuses where demonstrations against Israel’s response to the Hamas slaughter had hit the streets. The carnage of October 7 had begun to take a back seat to the plight of the Palestinians. You started to hear demonstrators interviewed who called Israel an “apartheid state.” You heard demonstrators calling out a long-time Palestinian slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

On October 18, Israel was charged – incorrectly it turned out – with bombing the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City. Headlines screamed for days that 500 had been killed in the alleged Israeli strike. By the 18^th, it was being reported that 5,000 Gazan civilians had died in Israeli bombing. On October 31, Israel hit a neighborhood in the Jabalia Refugee Camp just north of Gaza City, killing one of the Hamas commanders who was in charge of the Hamas slaughter of Israelis on October 7. First, it was reported that dozens of Palestinian civilians had been killed, then it was hundreds. By November 1, the news was almost entirely about the damage done in Gaza by Israeli bombing, and reports from the region said that at least 8,000 civilians had been killed in Gaza.

This bad news about the war filled television screens every night. The numbers of civilian dead were increasing, and the numbers were ending up in Biden’s lap. He was pushing for a humanitarian pause, but with Netanyahu in the way, it wasn’t happening. All you saw every night was more civilian dead in Gaza and world opinion beginning to turn against Israel. But Biden’s support of Israel’s right to defend itself stayed strong.

And right in the middle of all this, the New York Times decides that now would be a good time to poll Americans about what they think about Joe Biden, who is connected at the hip to Israel and the savage war people are seeing on TV every night, and Donald Trump, who has nothing to do with it. Polls are going to be taken throughout the next 12 months, and support for Biden and Trump will go up and down, but the two weeks between October 22 and November 3, when the poll was taken, was a terrible time to take a poll.

While college demonstrations were occurring all over the U.S. against the Israel-Hamas war, the Times/Siena poll was discovering, to everyone’s astonishment, that “Voters under 30 favor Mr. Biden by only a single percentage point.” This came after several polls over the summer showed that young voters were for Biden over Trump by twenty or more points. What explains that incredible drop in Biden’s support among young people? One thing, and one thing only: the Israel-Hamas war and the incredible carnage it has yielded. Biden was standing by Israel as the news showed scenes of death and destruction in Gaza every single night as the civilian body count went steadily up.

The Times/Siena poll was full of more bad news for Biden: 54 percent of Biden’s own voters thought he is “too old to be an effective president,” while only 19 percent of Trump’s voters found him too old. The poll pointed out that Biden is only four years older than Trump, but no matter, the damage was done. With right-wing media and liberal media, too, talking about Biden’s age every day, what did they expect? The way the age question was worded, it reflected Republicans’ slavish devotion to Trump no matter what, especially on the age issue. Other poll questions will be challenged in coming days, and it does not reflect a turn of the Times against Biden, but rather sloppy wording of poll questions. The same thing was true of polling in 2016, when polls were so wrong about who would win that election.

Donald Trump was busy with his legal trials and tribulations, which everyone, including the New York Times, has seen don’t affect his polling among Republicans, or make his numbers go up. Has he been asked even a single question about where he stands on Israel’s war against Hamas? I can’t think of a direct question he has answered one way or another. Wait a minute. He called Hezbollah “brilliant” at one point, but that stupid remark quickly dropped into the media memory hole.

Gone was the news about the 1,400 Israeli dead on October 7, and the fact that Hamas took 240 hostages. Gone were the scenes of Israeli dead lined up outside destroyed homes in southern Israel. Gone, in fact, was the world’s outrage at the Hamas attack. The world was on Israel’s side, it seemed, only a few days, before support for Israel was replaced with outrage at the killing of Palestinian civilians as Israel tried to kill the Hamas terrorists responsible for the attack on October 7.

The numbers, taken by themselves, look terrible for Israel. The news yesterday was that 10,000 civilians had been killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza. Put up against the 1,400 Israelis killed in cold blood by Hamas terrorists, 10,000 seems lopsided in the extreme. But the 10,000 figure comes from Hamas-controlled Gaza hospitals, is suspected to be inflated, and we will probably never get an accurate figure.

I think the Times/Siena poll is the first time we are seeing the effect of the war on Biden’s support in this country.

Remember the way the New York Times covered the election in 2016? If Hillary Clinton got a hangnail, it was because she caught it on her “emails” Donald Trump was screaming about at every one of his rallies, which the Times was dutifully covering as front-page news. By election day, the Times still had not used the word “lie” even once to describe the daily spew that shot out of him as if from a firehose. Whole stories would be written in 2017 about the agonizing that went on inside the Times and the Washington Post and other news outlets about whether to call Trump’s false utterances lies. When they got around to counting his lies, they quickly surged into the thousands, where they are today, and still going up.

Joe Biden is going to have to live with the wars in Israel and Ukraine. They happened on his watch. But some context is needed. The context that every time Donald Trump opened his mouth in 2016, he was lying about Hillary Clinton and her emails, was missing from the Times coverage of that election. And the context of what is happening right now in Israel and Gaza was missing from the Times/Siena poll as it was taken during the last two weeks of October.

Could the ongoing bad news about the war between Israel and Hamas have anything to do with what people are thinking about Biden, who has a direct connection to the war with his support of Israel, or about Trump, who doesn’t? WTF is this? 2016 Redux at the New York Times?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.

One of the oldest public relations rules in the book is that you can’t have it both ways. Right now, Israel may be prevailing in its shooting war with Hamas, but it’s losing the propaganda war for exactly that reason.

It didn’t have to be this way. Much of the world rallied around Israel after the savage attack the terrorist group Hamas launched on Israel on October 8 that took 240 hostages and killed 1,400 Israelis, the large majority of whom were civilians, including the elderly, pregnant women, children, even babies.

For the next few days, the world recoiled in horror as reports of Hamas atrocities appeared. When Israel began launching airstrikes at what they called Hamas targets in Gaza, there were few complaints. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began massing on the border with Gaza by the tens and then hundreds of thousands, and nobody objected. President Joe Biden and other American politicians issued statements confirming their belief in Israel’s right to defend itself. NATO allies in Europe, including Great Britain, Italy, Germany, and other countries followed suit.

World leaders such as President Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, as well the leaders of other countries have visited Israel to show their countries’ support.

But now, as Israeli airstrikes have surged past 7,000, the death toll of Palestinians killed in Gaza surpasses 8,000, and Israeli combat troops have entered northern Gaza and are engaged in ground combat with Hamas militants, questions have arisen about Israel’s tactics and its strategy in the war beyond its avowed aim to “wipe Hamas from the face of the earth.” It is how Israel intends to accomplish this goal that has become a major concern, even among Israel’s friends and allies.

Last week, after vetoing a U.N. resolution calling for a humanitarian pause in Israel’s attacks on Gaza so that more aid could be trucked in, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was quoted as saying that “humanitarian pauses must be considered” so that more water and food and medicine could be supplied to civilians in Gaza caught in the war between Israel and Hamas. NBC News quoted a Biden administration official saying that the administration now backed a pause “of indeterminate duration” to allow aid to reach Gaza. Israeli officials told NBC that they “hear” the calls for a pause for humanitarian aid, and it was “actively being discussed.” However, Hamas has only intermittently allowed the Gaza gate with Egypt to open for aid, and the State Department has said that Hamas has forbidden the departure of civilians from Gaza.

Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes, primarily on northern Gaza, have continued unabated. On Tuesday, October 24 alone, Israel conducted more than 400 airstrikes. Health officials for Hamas claimed afterwards that those airstrikes killed 700 Palestinians. Hamas casualty figures do not separate out numbers of civilian dead from Hamas militants killed, and Israeli officials regularly call Hamas casualty figures inflated. CNN reported on Saturday that a spokesman for Israel Defense Forces announced that “its warplanes hit 150 underground targets in northern Gaza overnight, striking what it called terror tunnels and underground combat spaces and killing several Hamas operatives.”

Every news channel is reporting that overnight, Israel bombed targets in the Jabalia refugee camp just north of Gaza city in an attempt to knock out a Hamas complex of tunnels and command centers under the camp. A spokesman for the IDF claimed that the strike had killed Ibrahim Biari, who was said to have been one of the senior commanders who planned the Hamas attack on October 7. Photos show at least four massive craters in Jabalia, at least one of them appearing to be more than 100 feet in diameter, and all of them at least 50 feet deep.

It is impossible to know what was there before the bombs hit, but the blast-zone is surrounded by concrete buildings, all with their fronts blown off, what had been living spaces or bedrooms open to the air. Jabalia is not what one would regularly think of as a refugee camp, with tents and makeshift structures protecting refugees from the elements. It became a space for Palestinian refugees shortly after Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, and the place has long since been built into what amounts to a regular city. It is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, according to several sources.

Military experts on MSNBC are saying that the craters are of the kind left by so-called bunker buster bombs. U.S. versions of bunker busters are laser-guided munitions dropped by fighter jets that weigh as much as 4,000 pounds and carry warheads weighing 650 pounds. It is known that there are larger bunker buster munitions that weigh as much as 5,000 pounds and carry 2,400-pound warheads. MSNBC quoted a Hamas hospital official saying that “dozens” had been killed, with “hundreds” injured in the attack.

On Tuesday night, MSNBC was showing footage of damage in Gaza City from Israeli airstrikes. The damage looked like it covered whole neighborhoods, with buildings collapsed into themselves and against one another. The damage looked indiscriminate, similar to what was seen after the bombing of Aleppo, Syria, by Syrian and Russian warplanes.

Military experts on CNN and MSNBC have said again and again that nothing can be determined about the damage done by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City, Jabalia, and elsewhere until investigators can get into Gaza and look at evidence of what was destroyed. That is another way of saying that until then, we’re left with Israel’s reports of its airstrikes and Hamas’ reports of the casualties they caused.

The New York Times on Sunday came out with a deep dive into how Israel missed the cues leading up to the Hamas sneak attack on October 7. It ran on the front page under the headline, “Hubris and Mixed Signals as Hamas Readied Attack.” The story contains some very damning information about Bibi Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians turning down meetings with Israel’s top generals in the months leading up to the attack. With demonstrations in the streets against Netanyahu’s plan to limit the power of Israel’s judiciary, and Israeli military reservists and air force pilots threatening to resign over the issue, the Times report says that General Aharon Haliva, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate, tried to meet with members of the Knesset on July 24 with a report “that the political turmoil was creating an opportunity for Israel’s enemies to attack, particularly if there were more resignations in the military. Only two members of the Knesset came to hear his briefing. One top-secret document he was prepared to share with Israel’s top parliamentary leaders said “that the leaders of what Israeli officials call the ‘axis of resistance” — Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — believed this was a moment of Israeli weakness and a time to strike.”

The Times reported Israel’s top uniformed military leader, Chief of Staff Gen. Herzi Halevi, requested a meeting “to deliver the same warnings to Mr. Netanyahu.” The Israeli Prime Minister refused to meet with him.

According to the Times, before last summer Israel had almost completely dropped its guard with respect to Hamas, choosing instead to consider that Hezbollah, backed directly by Iran, was the biggest threat the nation faced. Hezbollah had military assets all the way across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, and had shelled and rocketed Israel occasionally for years.

“The official assessment of Israeli military intelligence and the National Security Council since May 2021 was that Hamas had no interest in launching an attack from Gaza that might invite a devastating response from Israel,” the Times reported on Sunday. “Instead, Israeli intelligence assessed that Hamas was trying to foment violence against Israelis in the West Bank, which is controlled by its rival, the Palestinian Authority.”

In the days before the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel had sent three battalions of its front-line troops north from their stations on the Gaza border north into the West Bank to deter an expected Hezbollah attack on a religious celebration by ultra-Orthodox settlers there, which along with erroneous intelligence threat assessments could explain why the Gaza border was so thinly defended by the Israel Defense Forces on October 7.

Israel thought Hamas posed such a minor threat that four senior Israeli military officials told the Times they had reduced their defenses so that “The Barrier -- a nearly 40-mile-long reinforced concrete wall above and below ground, completed in 2021 — would hermetically seal off Gaza. There was also a surveillance system at the border based almost exclusively on cameras, sensors and remote-operated ‘sight-shooter’ systems.” Because of Israel’s reduced observation of Hamas movements, training, and electronic communications, Israel’s intelligence agencies completely missed evidence of Hamas training exercises that took place out in the open in broad daylight. Hamas had even constructed a model of an Israeli village behind a bulldozed berm in Gaza where Hamas fighters practiced attacking the mock-village.

The major thing that went unexplained by the New York Times story on Sunday was this: If Israel had relaxed its intelligence gathering about Hamas to the major extent described by the Times, how did they immediately after the October 7 attack come up with so many of what they called “Hamas targets” for Israel’s air force to hit in what quickly became thousands of airstrikes? If they had lost track of Hamas intentions regarding Israel, how did they know where all those Hamas “command and control” centers were in Gaza?

Quite simply, it doesn’t add up: If Israel knew where all the “Hamas targets” were located in Gaza before October 7, wouldn’t they have been more wary of Hamas’ intentions and readied a more beefed-up defense of the Gaza border? If they didn’t suspect that Hamas was planning an attack, as Israel clearly did not, how could they have come up with so many Hamas military targets so quickly that they almost immediately began launching hundreds of nightly airstrikes on Hamas?

It seems unlikely to me that after years of considering that Hamas was not the main threat to Israel – to the extent that they were surveilling the border almost completely with cameras and preparing to defend against an attack with automated remote controlled machine guns -- that Israel was able to immediately ramp up its human intelligence capability enough to know the exact locations of Hamas military headquarters and weapons and ammunition storage locations. So, either one of two things is true: Israel knew all along that Hamas was powerful and well-supplied with troops and weapons and ammunition, and they just chose to ignore it. Or Israel had lost track of Hamas intentions and preparations for war, and because they dropped that ball, they didn’t know where Hamas was storing all its military supplies, so they just started guessing and giving “last known location” targets to its air force and launched air strikes willy-nilly all over the place hoping they would hit some of the places where Hamas is currently headquartered and keeping its military stores.

You can’t have it both ways: You can’t know where all those Hamas munitions stores were – and Israel has claimed to have targeted thousands – and not suspect that Hamas had accumulated them for the purpose of launching an attack. In a social media post on Sunday, Netanyahu tried to blame the October 7 attack on the leaders of his intelligence services and the military. Within 24 hours, he was forced to take it down. He has yet to take responsibility himself for Israel’s failure to defend itself against Hamas.

It turns out that Netanyahu was like George Bush at his Texas ranch on August 6, 2001 when he blew off a CIA report that was headlined, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” As it turned out, we did know where the al Qaeda training camps were in Afghanistan, because after 9/11 we hit them and knocked them out and had Bin Laden on the run in a matter of days. The Bush administration had just chosen to ignore the intelligence, and his mistakes caused more than 3,000 Americans to lose their lives on 9/11 and got us bogged down in one war for 20 years and in another for over ten.

Netanyahu’s mistakes cost Israel the lives of 1,400 of its citizens so far, and we won’t know the total of its military casualties for months, if not years, not to mention the number of Palestinians who will have lost their lives. I’m tempted to quote a lyric of Pete Seeger’s, so I will: When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

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