The Mark Kelly Case Is Bigger Than It Seems

By Missy Ryan

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

Of the many questions posed by those gathered in U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s courtroom last week, the most obvious one of all never came up: Why on earth was anyone here in the first place?

 

Until now, the military has pursued only a tiny number of criminal cases against retirees for actions that occur after military service has ended. Until now, the idea that the secretary of defense would accuse a lawmaker of treason simply for disagreeing with him would be laughable. Until now, any free-speech debates concerning sitting members of Congress have led to the conclusion that lawmakers ought to have—to borrow from former Chief Justice Earl Warren—the widest possible latitude to express themselves.

 

And yet there we all were anyway, gathered to see Mark Kelly—the fighter pilot turned astronaut turned U.S. senator—defend his First Amendment rights against an attempt by the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, to silence him and knock down his military retirement rank and pay.

 

As someone who’s covered 10 secretaries of defense, I’ve never seen anything like what Hegseth is doing—not even close. If Hegseth gets his way, he won’t just be punishing Kelly; he will succeed in dramatically curbing the First Amendment rights of all military retirees, some of the very people who have fought to defend such freedoms.

 

At the heart of the case is a November video in which Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers—all veterans of the military or intelligence agencies—address U.S. troops, reminding them that they “can and must refuse illegal orders.” Their goal with the video was to push back against the president’s domestic troop deployments, a trend his critics feared might lead to clashes with ordinary Americans or be used to interfere in upcoming elections. At the time the video was posted, Democrats were also assailing the administration over the legality of its air campaign against suspected Latin American drug boats. The lawmakers did not specify which problematic orders they had in mind.

 

The Trump administration’s response was swift. Adviser Stephen Miller called the video an attempted “insurrection.” Donald Trump declared that the “traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” and reposted suggestions that they be hanged. Hegseth ordered the Navy to look into Kelly’s “potentially unlawful” comments, something he was able to do because Kelly is the only one in the video who receives benefits as a military retiree. (Although some 18 million military veterans are living in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center, a much smaller share of those people reach retirement status.) Kelly now receives lifelong retirement pay and is subject to rules, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In early January, Hegseth issued Kelly a letter of censure over his “seditious statements and his pattern of reckless misconduct,” which, Hegseth said, had harmed military discipline and undermined the chain of command. He also asked Navy Secretary John Phelan (a Republican donor and billionaire art collector with no naval experience) to begin a review of Kelly’s retirement rank and pay.

 

The Trump administration’s attempts to go after Kelly are, several legal experts told me, straightforwardly outrageous and without merit. But even if the judge rules in Kelly’s favor, it’s worth paying attention to this fight, because it underscores the degree to which the Trump administration is seeking to expand executive power in novel ways. Far more is at stake than the retirement benefits of one man.

 

***

 

The U.S. military has sought legal action against its own retirees only in a rare few cases—and those cases have typically involved egregious crimes, such as sexual assault. And although the military can prosecute sitting service members for prohibited speech—to make sure troops stay in line and follow orders, the military has strict rules prohibiting them from insulting public officials or making statements that undermine “good order and discipline”—several former military lawyers told me that no cases have previously been brought against a military retiree for something said after they hung up their uniform. “It’s important for the public to understand the extraordinary power that the administration is asking the courts to bless,” Ryan Goodman, a former Pentagon lawyer who teaches at the NYU School of Law, told me.

 

If the government prevails against Kelly, it will establish a precedent for punishing retirees for statements perceived as out of line by whoever is in charge at the time. (The Trump administration denies that this case has any First Amendment issues to consider, saying that even as a retiree, Kelly has no right to undermine military discipline by encouraging others to question orders.)

 

Even before the Kelly episode, I had heard from numerous veterans about the chilling effect that Hegseth has had. The defense secretary—who insists on being called the “war secretary”—has used social media and speeches to vilify opponents, including former service members. Those who have worn the uniform are now less likely to criticize the administration’s policy or personnel moves, because they fear for their benefits or worry about getting in hot water with current employers skittish about backlash from the administration.

 

During his first term, Trump mused about bringing senior officers whom he disliked, including Stanley McChrystal and William McRaven, back onto active duty and court-martialing them, but Pentagon officials talked him out of it, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper wrote in his memoir. Trump once insinuated that retired General Mark Milley, who served as his second chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed. Shortly after taking office, Hegseth stripped Milley of his security detail.

 

Expanding the military’s ability to control veterans’ speech would be a major and historic reversal of basic freedoms. Retired service members turned public officials have a long history of criticizing Pentagon leaders in ways those leaders might find objectionable. Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the corruption that would come from the unchecked growth of the military-industrial complex, focusing on the power of the people in mitigating “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that would “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” John F. Kennedy beat back the A bomb–loving generals he believed were as dangerous as Nikita Khrushchev. Veterans have often been some of the harshest (and most clear-eyed) analysts of the military’s shortcomings.

 

I was thinking about this history as I watched Kelly stand at attention when Judge Leon entered the courtroom on Tuesday, a combat veteran who was doing just as new recruits are taught: holding his spine ramrod straight, fists curled back, thumbs aligned with the seam of the pants.

 

Leon, who kept his eyebrows positioned in a skeptical V for much of the hearing, seemed to be focused on that history too. How are veterans on Congress’s Armed Services Committees, he asked, supposed to do their job if they can’t criticize the military without fear of prosecution? Leon was visibly wary of the government’s arguments, at times tipping into what appeared to be barely contained bewilderment. At one point, when the Justice Department attorney John Bailey conceded that there were “a few unique things” about the government’s First Amendment–related claims, Leon barked back, “You think?”

 

***

 

Dan Maurer, a former Army lawyer and combat engineer, told me that Hegseth’s decision to pursue administrative disciplinary steps against Kelly—rather than an attempt to court-martial him—was likely because a trial would leave Kelly’s fate to a military jury. When I asked whether such a jury would convict Kelly, he laughed dismissively. “Absolutely not,” he said. Maurer, who teaches law at Ohio Northern University, said he believes that the administration’s objective is more about demonstrating punitive action and appealing to the base than winning in court. “They don’t care what the courts say, because they’re going to depict them as liberal, woke courts,” he said. (Judge Leon was appointed by George W. Bush.)

 

Tim Parlatore, Hegseth’s personal lawyer who now serves as an adviser in his office, suggested that the Pentagon might not pursue a criminal case against Kelly, because doing so would require him to be called back to active duty in the executive branch. This would effectively remove Kelly from his Senate seat and force litigation. “The Constitution prohibits somebody from holding office in two branches at the same time,” he told the Trump ally and Joseph McCarthy enthusiast Laura Loomer in December.

 

This brings up a second way that Hegseth’s orders would expand Pentagon leaders’ powers over military retirees. According to Maurer, who signed a letter from a group of retired military lawyers expressing concern about the actions against Kelly, the administrative procedure for reviewing and possibly reducing a retiree’s rank and pay has never been understood to apply to actions that occur after retirement.

 

Hegseth, who did not attend the hearing, has long expressed his disdain for the military justice system, advocating for lenient treatment of troops convicted of war crimes and deriding judge advocates generals, or JAGs, as pencil-necked “jagoffs.” The Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson said in an emailed statement that can only be interpreted as a non sequitur that Hegseth and his team would “do everything in our power to stop those who seek to harm Americans and the brave men and women defending our Homeland.”

 

But the government’s lawyer seemed to stumble at times, struggling to defend Hegseth’s actions. Leon noted that the cases the government had cited as precedent weren’t a perfect fit; they were either First Amendment cases involving currently serving troops or cases about other kinds of crimes involving retired military personnel. (Bailey argued that they were relevant because retirees can be recalled to active duty to be court-martialed.) Bailey asserted that retiree speech could still undermine good order and discipline, and denied that Hegseth’s actions would extend the reach of the military’s punitive powers over retirees. (“I know you don’t view it that way, but that’s what you’re doing,” Leon responded.)

 

Kelly’s attorney, Benjamin Mizer, urged the judge to shut down the Navy’s review because Hegseth’s public statements had put his thumb on the scales. “He’s not a decision maker who has kept an open mind,” Mizer told Leon. Federal courts have had a history of deferring to the military on national-security matters. Leon will issue a decision by Wednesday.

 

If the government prevails, the silencing of longtime service members would be like barring retired doctors from opining on health policy, Maurer said. When debating matters of war and peace, he said, it serves the public to hear from the very people who have served on the front lines—and lived through the consequences.

 

 

Epstein Files Feeding Frenzy Is No Moral Panic, Expert Declares

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

I have been singled out for censure in a guest op-ed published at MSNOW (the erstwhile MSNBC). So has Quillette proprietor Claire Lehmann. So has Reason contributor Brendan O’Neill. I don’t know how the Washington Post’s Jason Willick escaped the opprobrium that is his due, but he belongs in this odious bucket, too. Our offense was to have seen in the reaction of America’s public figures to the so-called Epstein files the telltale signs of a classic moral panic. It turns out that we’re just not expert enough in the subject to know what we’re talking about.

 

Indeed, in the estimation of Pace University communications and media studies professor Marcella Szablewicz, we’ve gone so far as to “debase the concept of a moral panic” as a means of laundering into the discourse more monotonous complaints about “cancel culture.” You see, Szablewicz “studies moral panics” and is therefore equipped to determine that the “Epstein scandal is not one.”

 

Szablewicz defines her terms. Moral panics “are short-lived,” she contends. They tend to surround a “once-threatening change” in social circumstances, the “fervor” around which dies down only when those changes are “eventually accepted by society.” Most crucially, “moral panics are not just about folks getting emotionally riled up over an issue.” Rather, they are “about people in positions of power and privilege policing the status quo in the face of progress, whether it’s social, cultural, or technological.”

 

I cannot begin to express how tiresome the invocation of this Marxian dialectic — a framework in which everything boils down to power dynamics — has become. It would be a misnomer to call it an argument. It is a thought-terminating cliché. To those who subscribe to it, violence cannot be understood as just violence, nor can crime be merely criminal — not unless we conduct an audit of the social structures the perpetrators spent their lives navigating.

 

If there is a power imbalance between perpetrator and victim (particularly if the victim is the state, and, therefore, all of us), only the erudite among us can fully comprehend what we’re looking at. Common definitions cannot be understood but by a clerical caste that has the requisite knowledge and credentials to interpret events for us. It is a rhetorical trick that intimidates only a narrow, cosseted group of intellectuals who delude themselves into thinking it can be effectively wielded against the rest of us, too.

 

There is more to the author’s argument. “First,” Szablewicz writes, “we may assume that the wealthy white men implicated in the files are the deviant ‘folk devils’ who are threatening to change the status quo.” I have no idea what that means or why an editor at a general-interest publication did not strike it. But at least it precedes a comprehensible contention. Subsequently, Szablewicz alleges that we are “arguing that Epstein’s friends and associates are being unfairly targeted in a so-called witch hunt.”

 

That’s a ponderous misreading of (at least) my argument. What I wrote is that the efforts by lawmakers in Congress to reveal the names of individuals who appear in Epstein-related documents, even if they’re not accused of a crime or even being investigated for their suspected involvement in one, sacrifice proper procedure to the fierce urgency of now. Those who would do the sacrificing are encouraging emotional reasoning over logic, and those emotions are being harnessed by unscrupulous political actors to further their careers, no matter whom they hurt in the process.

 

For example, when Jasmine Crockett’s staff combed through Google with the goal of impugning Republicans whose names appear in these documents, inadvertently maligning and slandering an anonymous American unlucky enough to have been saddled with the name “Jeffrey Epstein,” it was evidence of the illogic of our moment. And it was not harmless.

 

Maybe Crockett just isn’t powerful enough to satisfy Szablewicz’s subjective criteria. She sure isn’t a white male “folk devil.” But the victimization of poor Mr. Epstein is not unique. As the Wall Street Journal’s editors documented, “heinous accusations are circulating against prominent people, without any evidence they’re true.” In our national “frenzy,” as the Journal put it, innocent people are being made victims, and Epstein’s true victims were victimized again when their identities, addresses, and emails were accidentally released in the haste necessitated by Congress’s decision to, in Congressman Clay Higgins’s righteous estimation, abandon “250 years of criminal justice procedure.” That may not matter much to Szablewicz, but those of us who have not succumbed to “frenzy” remain duly protective of the rule of law.

 

Crockett and many others justify their impertinence as a necessary response to the imminent threat in which Epstein placed children — a threat that his untold legions of wealthy and influential abettors surely represent today. “The need to save the children is what gave us the ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s, the junk science around ‘recovered memory,’ and the ‘Pizzagate’ shooting,” I wrote in all my ignorance.

 

Perhaps Szablewicz recognizes these as classic moral panics, even though, blessedly enough, these manias were not “accepted by society” but abandoned. But these were not social phenomena that were imposed on the public entirely from above. There are both top-down and bottom-up components to moral panics.

 

When over a thousand epidemiologists, doctors, social workers, medical students, and health-care professionals signed an open letter deeming “pervasive racism” a “paramount public health problem” at the height of the Covid pandemic, only to promote the notion that breaking social-distancing guidelines was “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States,” was that a moral panic? Was it only the powerful who insisted on it? Or did these professionals sacrifice their reputations in response to the sentiments bubbling up from the digital street?

 

Surely, the very act of questioning whether those who committed no crime deserve permanent reputational damage even if their behavior was ugly and condemnable is enough to render the questioners suspect too. As Willick observed when he stood bravely in opposition to the mob, “the inability to distinguish criticism of a bureaucratic process with support of a person’s behavior is fatal to any sort of public deliberation.”

 

I don’t know if that is a recognized feature of all moral panics. After all, I’m no expert. But I’d much rather argue logic without any claim to credentialed expertise than to retail illogic that is buttressed primarily by my degrees.

The System Works, Sort Of

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

“Don’s double defeat” read the headline this morning at Politico, reeking of triumphalism at the president’s expense.

 

I was mortified. To an Eeyore, a strong dose of unexpected optimism has the same effect that garlic has on vampires. My supernatural power to suck the hopefulness out of any political development was momentarily disabled.

 

But only momentarily.

 

The “double defeat” happened in the span of a few hours Tuesday. First came shocking news that our scummy mafioso Justice Department had asked a grand jury to indict six congressional Democrats over the video they cut last fall reminding U.S. service members not to obey unlawful orders. I thought the FBI’s investigation of the six was essentially for show, going through the motions to appease Donald Trump as he screeched about “sedition.”

 

Nope. The U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., led by “Judge Jeanine” Pirro, actually tried to prosecute members of Congress for accurately stating military policy. And then, the even more shocking news: The grand jury said no. Pirro’s office failed at the most notoriously easy task in American law, and not for the first time.

 

The second defeat came in an even less likely forum—Congress.

 

Leaning ever further into his role as Renfield to the president’s Dracula, House Speaker Mike Johnson sought to pass a rule that would bar lawmakers (namely, Democrats) from introducing bills aimed at repealing some of Donald Trump’s tariffs. Twice last year Republicans passed similar rules for specified periods of time; Johnson wanted another extension, hoping to spare his conference from having to tackle a fraught issue that might soon be rendered moot by the Supreme Court.

 

The Republican Party: Offloading its civic duty to restrain the president onto others since 2016.

 

Nearly every member of the House GOP went along with this latest attempt to outlaw, er, legislating, but this time “nearly every member” wasn’t enough. Three Republicans—Thomas Massie, Don Bacon, and Kevin Kiley—voted no, as did every Democrat. The rule failed, 214-217.

 

The first floor vote on a Democratic resolution to undo Trump’s tariffs passed the House today, with the support of six Republicans. There’s a fair chance that this resolution or one like it will eventually make it through the Senate, which has already passed several resolutions under simple majority rules to rescind presidential tariffs. That would be an embarrassing rebuke for a president whose party controls both chambers.

 

Our system worked, in other words. Our legislature and our justice system checked Trump’s attempts to abuse his power. It’s a great day for the rule of law, no?

 

Sure, I guess. If you’re a chump optimist who cares more about moral victories than outcomes.

 

Justice?

 

What is the outcome that our corrupt DOJ sought by pursuing the six Democrats in Congress? Sending them to prison?

 

Unlikely. Trump may have fantasized about that because he neither knows nor cares anything about law, but Pirro and Pam Bondi surely understood that this wouldn’t end in victory for their side. There’s no scenario in which an American, let alone an elected lawmaker, does time for exhorting agents of the state to follow laws they’re already duty-bound to follow. Federal judges would have made mincemeat of the Justice Department’s case if a grand jury hadn’t done it for them.

 

The outcome the DOJ hoped for (besides getting the president off its back by pursuing the case) was to scare Trump’s enemies by showing them how far it’s willing to go in abusing its powers to harass them. Not even members of Congress are safe from vindictive prosecution by the president’s consiglieres, you see.

 

And they got that outcome. America is a more frightening place for Trump’s critics today than it was yesterday, notwithstanding the result of the grand jury proceedings.

 

I’m sure Bondi and Pirro would have preferred to obtain indictments against the six Democrats, if only to save face, but it wasn’t strictly necessary. Antagonists of the president are now on notice: If you cross him, whether you escape the ordeal of criminal prosecution will depend on your luck in drawing a grand jury with a higher-than-usual skepticism of government allegations. The DOJ itself won’t refrain from trying to prosecute you out of any quaint ethical sense that it’s improper to do so when it knows it stands zero chance of a conviction.

 

It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if the sources for yesterday’s news stories about the grand jury’s failure to indict were Trump loyalists inside the Justice Department, not Trump opponents. To effectively intimidate the White House’s critics, the fact that indictments had been sought needed to be publicly known. Well, now it is.

 

If that’s a “victory” for the resistance, the resistance is a cheap date.

 

The essential thing to remember today is that, realistically, there’s nothing that can be done to halt the blatant, ongoing corruption of the DOJ. (Well, nothing outside the agency, anyway.) Last week National Review’s Andy McCarthy proposed defunding the department if it made supporting the president a qualification of employment, but shutting down federal law enforcement is unimaginable politically for Democrats. Every crime in the United States that occurred during the shutdown would be blamed on the left, whether it fell under federal jurisdiction or not. The GOP attack ads about “defunding the police” would write themselves.

 

A Democratic-controlled Congress could impeach Bondi next year, I suppose, as there’s no shortage of grounds—dubious investigations of the president’s political enemies, cover-ups shielding federal agents who have killed Americans, preposterously sweeping claims about the executive’s constitutional power to license illegal conduct, etc. (If egregious hypocrisy were a high crime or misdemeanor, she’d be dead to rights on that, too.) But what would be the point? Senate Republicans won’t vote to remove her.

 

Even if they did, the cultural rot at the Justice Department would persist. For all her faults, the attorney general clearly isn’t the cause of her agency’s corruption. Replacing her with Todd Blanche won’t fix anything and might plausibly make it worse.

 

Yesterday reminded us again that the Justice Department is an unethical disgrace to the country and will almost certainly remain so until 2029, if not longer. Some victory for the rule of law.

 

Tariffs.

 

What about the tariff vote in the House? What outcome were Mike Johnson and Republicans seeking there?

 

Obviously, they were hoping to protect the president’s power to impose burdensome tariffs on Americans based on nothing more than his royal whim. Well, good news: He still has that power today and, unless and until the Supreme Court takes it away from him, will continue to have it no matter what legislation Democrats manage to move.

 

That’s because our country is now in the same constitutional upside-down on trade that it’s been in for decades with presidential-ordered military interventions. Instead of seeking lawful authority from Congress before acting, the White House acts first and then dares Congress to strip it of the authority it has asserted to do so. And that’s nearly impossible: Since the president will veto any bill that tries to curtail his power, the House and Senate are forced to try to muster all-but-unattainable supermajorities to override his objection.

 

In a world where Republican cowards in Congress cared more about protecting Americans from tariffs than they cared about protecting themselves from primary challengers, that’s doable. In the world we live in, it is not.

 

So the closest thing to a meaningful “victory” that happened in the House yesterday is that the aforementioned cowards will now have to go on record as to whether they support or oppose various measures to limit Trump’s tariffs. And that ain’t nothing, in fairness, in the same way that the grand jury declining to indict the six Democrats ain’t nothing. The president’s trade policies have cost U.S. states $200 billion and counting, or about $1,000 per American household per one study, and they’re currently rocking a 37-60 approval rating, according to a recent Pew Research survey. Tariffs will be a liability for the GOP in the midterms.

 

But how much more of a liability will they plausibly be for House Republicans just because they now have to vote on whether to repeal them? Midterms are referendums on the president’s agenda: If the average voter hates a policy like tariffs, he or she is apt to punish their local GOP congressman for it regardless of how that person voted in the House on the subject.

 

And that’s especially true, I think, if the president has bear-hugged the policy and stubbornly doubled down at every opportunity about how supposedly great it is.

 

Last night, for instance, right around the time that the House voted to kill Johnson’s rule, a clip circulated on social media of Trump boasting in a new interview that he jacked up his tariff on Switzerland from 30 percent to 39 percent because he didn’t like the tone that an envoy from the Swiss government took with him on the phone. That’s the sort of “national emergency” that supposedly justifies his power to set trade policy unilaterally and the logic that now informs momentous decisions on which the fate of many American businesses depends. “Arrogance” doesn’t scratch the surface of describing his hubris.

 

Nothing that happens in the House going forward will save Republican members from the wrath of voters outraged at knowing their livelihoods have become pawns in a spiteful lunatic’s petty score-settling. But if I’m wrong about that, then last night’s defeat was arguably a good thing for the House GOP long-term: It means some members of Mike Johnson’s conference will have a chance to distance themselves from the president’s unpopular tariffs before November by casting a symbolic vote to repeal them.

 

So how was it some important victory for “the system”?

 

The proper response to the executive commandeering the legislature’s power to set trade policy under a patently ridiculous claim of a trade-deficit “emergency” is impeachment. Instead, we’re destined for a series of votes on repeal bills with no hope of achieving their intended purpose, a sort of congressional kabuki theater of accountability. Hooray for the rule of law.

 

A silver lining.

 

Here’s where I surprise you with a bit of optimism, though. In a way, Tuesday was a meaningful victory for Trump opponents.

 

In court and in Congress, the president’s allies were forced by the perverse cultish dynamics of Republican politics to defend bad, disliked policies that will damage their public support. Corrupt toadies deserve the people’s scorn, and yesterday increased the probability that they’ll receive it: I’d call that an example of our political system working.

 

It’s possible, as I said, that the House’s actions on tariffs going forward either won’t matter to voters or will give some Republicans an opportunity to register their opposition to Trump’s policies before November. But it’s also easy to see how having to take those votes might hurt them (which is why Mike Johnson wanted to avoid it, of course). Some GOPers will vote against repealing the president’s tariffs because they’re worried about a primary challenge, but that vote will haunt them in the general election. Others will vote for repeal to protect their left flank in the general election but at the risk of antagonizing Republican primary voters, especially with an enraged Trump demanding consequences for “disloyalty.”

 

The White House’s obstinacy on sticking with tariffs despite their unpopularity is a strategic disaster. It’s only fair that his apologists in Congress should suffer for it, and now some of them are more likely to. The system works!

 

It will also work, I expect, regarding the attempted indictment of the six congressional Democrats. Polls taken late last year showed Americans siding with the six against the administration’s attempts to punish them for sedition, but I’d bet good money that the margin has since widened as anxiety about lawlessness by federal law enforcement has risen. “Don’t obey illegal orders” sounds a lot more reasonable now that ICE agents have begun shooting American citizens.

 

My sense, which I hope is based on more than wishful thinking, is that the president and his administration lost the benefit of the doubt as to their good intentions from some critical mass of the electorate over the last six weeks. If so, then the sleazy, discrediting shenanigans in which our renegade Justice Department is presently engaged—which are by no means limited to harassing Democratic lawmakers—should affirm newly minted Trump doubters in their skepticism and gradually harden opinion against him further.

 

And needless to say, the failed indictment should add rocket fuel to left-wing turnout in November. Our system has no means to stop a corrupt DOJ from behaving corruptly, but handing control of the House to Democrats this fall will at least guarantee some uncomfortable investigations and revelations next year of how an operation run by the likes of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel conducts business behind closed doors.

 

So the system worked yesterday after all. It didn’t work the way it’s supposed to, by preventing abuses of power altogether, but it created a modicum of accountability by supplying voters with two separate vignettes illustrating why the party that runs Washington is unfit to govern and shouldn’t be trusted with power. There’s virtue in that.

Magical Promises and Enduring Principles

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

Most film buffs and wannabe critics are familiar with the term “willing suspension of disbelief.”

 

Basically, the idea is that when you start a movie, TV show, play, or book, you leave your skepticism—as much as you can—about whether something is believable at the door. Of course, that’s not always possible. You can try to believe that it would be easier to teach oil drilling roughnecks how to be astronauts in a week than to train astronauts to drill a hole on an asteroid deep enough for a bomb, but few are up to the task. Still, Armageddon can be a fun watch. Some artistic endeavors ask so much, you can’t even bring yourself to try, like when it was floated that Annette Bening would play journalist Helen Thomas in a movie. Even the producers couldn’t stick with the bit, and it never made it to production.

 

But relatively few people know the origin of the phrase or the original meaning of the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief.” It was coined by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his collaboration with fellow poet William Wordsworth on their groundbreaking work Lyrical Ballads, seen by some as the starting point of English literary romanticism. Coleridge saw the work as having two aims. One was to make the supernatural seem believable, realistic. The other was to make the normal and quotidian seem magical. The two poets divided up these assignments. Coleridge would handle making the superstitious and supernatural seem real to the reader, while Wordsworth would work on enchanting the everyday stuff. He would “give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural.”

 

Now the needle on the gauge of my holding tank of literary knowledge is trending toward the red zone, so I’m going to change gears and talk about politics and political theory.

 

Every political system depends on a certain amount of what we might call myth. Some require a lot more myth than others. In North Korea, the state insists that the patriarchs of the dynasty, the Kims, are divine beings, with superhuman abilities. Kim Jong Il, for instance, could walk at 3 weeks of age and talk at 8 weeks. While at university, he wrote 1,500 books in three years. In his off time, he liked to golf. On one outing, according to North Korean media reports, he made 11 holes-in-one, shot 38 under par, and decided the game held no more challenges for him.

 

America depends on less mythmaking than a lot of countries because it was created around the time of the Enlightenment and was trying to throw off a lot of the just-so stories that justified monarchs and emperors. But we still glorify the founders, and for the most part I think that’s a very good thing. Abraham Lincoln injected a little myth—or at least poetry—into the founding by elevating the Declaration of Independence’s opening words as the mission statement of the country. Again, I think that was mostly a very good thing.

 

America has had many dark chapters and, collectively, has done many bad things. But its ideals—the myths—have directed us toward improvement by acknowledging the errors and trying to correct them as we move toward a “more perfect union.” There’s something to be said about printing the legend, to paraphrase The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. So maybe George Washington didn’t say “I cannot tell a lie” after chopping down a cherry tree. I’d rather live in a country where kids are taught that, at least for a while.

 

Second Amendment enthusiasts often spin up scenarios in which we will need guns to ward off a tyrannical government. Some of these scenarios are far-fetched and implausible. But I’d rather live in a country worried about preventing bad stuff from happening than in a country where people think bad stuff can’t happen.

 

Which gets me back to the willing suspension of disbelief in politics. My point isn’t that it’s bad, but that it’s out of whack.

 

I loathed a lot of Barack Obama’s rhetoric—and the rhetoric about him from his worshippers—not because I thought it was ill-intended but because it was magical. When he said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he imbued himself and his “movement” with messianic qualities. When he secured the Democratic presidential nomination, he proclaimed that the moment would be remembered as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” One writer insisted Obama was a “Lightworker” who would help us “evolve.” There was lots of talk about whether he was a—or the—Messiah, though Oprah Winfrey merely called him “the One.”

 

And don’t even get me started on the ludicrous rhetoric used by and about Donald Trump. All of the talk about him being anointed by God strikes me as even creepier, not simply because it’s so preposterous, but also because it involves so much reality-defying sycophancy. I have a really hard time believing that the Christian God would pick a man who rejects the core of Christian teaching—he doesn’t believe in forgiveness, finds prayer laughable, and looks at the Bible the way an orangutan looks at an iPad (“Oh, this is interesting—I wonder what it does?”). The people who impute genius to him do so the same way Chance the Gardener is viewed as a genius in Being There—it’s the only way to explain his idiocy without feeling like an idiot yourself.

 

The problems with this kind of rhetoric are too numerous even to list here, but the relevant point is that it heightens expectations far beyond anything a mere president can do. The problem with making magical promises is that they will fail, but the failure of magical promises doesn’t invite a return to realism and pragmatism, at least for many—it invites a new round of magical explanations for the failure.

 

It’s sort of like my problem with the soft Marxist rhetoric of Bernie Sanders & Co. They insist everything they want to do is obviously right, obviously popular, obviously doable, and obviously easy—if we just tax rich people more. But you could confiscate the top 1 percent’s wealth and still not achieve half of what they want. Regardless, when they fail, for myriad reasons, the conclusion isn’t “Oh, let’s be more practical and compromise.” It’s “the will of the people was thwarted by unseen forces!” Since they are unconquerably sure their aims are not just achievable but definitionally good, failure must be explained by evil actors working behind the scenes. This reduces to its emotional essence the argument behind vast swaths of Marxism. We all know what is right and what (according to Marx) is inevitable, so any failure or delay must be the handiwork of the ruling classes working behind the scenes to prevent the arrival of cosmic justice. Revolutions never fail; they can only be betrayed.

 

This, by the way, is precisely the logic Trump uses to explain his 2020 election loss. That he won is objectively true because he is good and the people love him. Therefore, his loss can be explained only by a conspiracy involving, variously or in tandem, the Deep State, corrupt Democrats, the Chinese, the Venezuelans, and—at least for some jabronies, but not Trump himself—the Jews.

 

Conspiracies do the same work as magic for the conspiratorial. It’s no coincidence that the fever swamp right talks so much about demons and demonic forces amid all the talk about Zionists and Marxists.

 

This is all reminiscent, to me at least, of the Wordsworth and Coleridge project, in what we might call Lyrical Politics. The normal functions of politics and economics are a façade behind which evil forces work their will. This is one reason why the Epstein files are almost perfectly engineered for this moment. Behind their public reputations, powerful men do demonic things for fun and profit.

 

I’ve been on a kick lately about trying to convince people that democracy is not a guarantor of good results—how could people think otherwise given the last decade or 10?—but a hedge against worse results. Elections are good because they let us fire people; they don’t guarantee that whoever replaces them will be good or even slightly better. But the need to get elected, and to make arguments for why you should be elected or reelected, is healthy. When we try to make claims about what democracy should deliver or what it should mean, we lose sight of what it can deliver and what it is for.

 

And those deliverables are magical enough. As we approach the 250^th founding of this country, we should be celebrating our remarkable achievements. In the long sweep of history, the ability to fire bad rulers is a profoundly radical invention. That invention isn’t just about elections, either. It’s about the separation of powers, the sanctity of individual rights, and the republican idea that different institutions play a crucial part in our novel experiment in self-government. Self-government isn’t just about elections or “democracy,” it’s about the limits on democracy too. We don’t elect a king with some divine (or democratic) mandate to do whatever he wants. We elect a public servant to do a specific job, curtailed and constrained by rules and other institutions.

 

Again, against the timeline of human history, that’s a near miraculous achievement, and we should imbue that achievement with a little more awe and appreciation for its magical qualities.

 

Edmund Burke believed in liberty, rights, and limited government. What he didn’t believe is that they all appeared magically when a handful of philosophers incanted the right words about principles. Instead, he believed that English people carved out a society through trial and error that settled on these principles and sought to nurture them. This story had in it its share of myth and magic, too. But it was a story that sustained and supported the principles. I believe in all of those principles, and I’m glad the founders plucked them from the myth and turned them into something more explicit and enduring. But the advantage of the Burkean vision is that it fosters gratitude for what we have. Because no one really knows how the English stumbled upon their social compact, we should be not only reverential about the providence of it, but extremely cautious about mucking with it in pursuit of magical solutions to its shortcomings.

 

Our politics need a little less Coleridge—fewer tales of demons and hidden forces or divine intercessors—and a little more Wordsworth, i.e., recognition that the system we take for granted has within it a magic all its own. What we have is extraordinary enough, and it deserves more poetic faith.

Five Basic Truths About America’s Most Polarizing Policy Debate

By Conor Friedersdorf

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

“If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”

 

So warned my colleague David Frum in the headline of an April 2019 article about America’s failure to control mass immigration. “Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address,” he wrote. “If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones.”

 

That thesis looked shaky in 2020. Voters declined to reelect Donald Trump; for the first time in more than 50 years, Gallup found that Americans who wanted immigration to increase outnumbered those who wanted it to decrease––a seeming rebuke of Trump’s cruel family-separation policy and attacks on Mexicans and Muslims––and that 77 percent said immigration is a good thing for the United States. Then Joe Biden failed to control the southern border and presided over record surges in unlawful entries. By 2024, a majority wanted less immigration, Trump won the presidency while promising the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history, and an analysis of why voters rejected Kamala Harris found that “too many immigrants crossed the border” was nearly tied for the top reason.

 

Today, Frum’s warning seems prescient: The Trump administration has deployed a force of aggressive masked officers onto American streets while promising “retribution.” They’ve detained, pepper-sprayed, assaulted, shot, and killed Americans. And high-ranking officials have repeatedly gotten caught lying about events captured by citizen video footage.

 

A majority now disapproves of Trump’s handling of immigration. Perhaps Democrats will prevail in their current efforts to force ICE officers to take off their masks and get warrants, or even win back Congress as a result––the MAGA coalition is no less vulnerable than the left to voter backlash. But a Democratic victory in 2026 is not likely to end this cycle, in which majorities hate how both parties handle immigration and ping-pong unhappily between them.

 

I have covered immigration politics and policy for 25 years; here’s my sense of five basic truths that lawmakers need to acknowledge if they want to implement immigration policy that is both popular and in the nation’s best interest.

 

1. Even many of those Americans who say that they want to deport all immigrants who are here illegally would likely not stand by that position in practice.

Lots of MAGA supporters insist that deporting all immigrants in the U.S. illegally is a prudent goal. Some argue that conserving the rule of law requires doing so. “I don’t care if it’s a grandma who’s been here for 23 years and sits quietly on her porch all day long,” the populist-right pundit Walter Curt wrote. “We either have laws or we don’t, we either have borders or we don’t, there is no middle ground.”

Although superficially seductive, that logic is monomaniacal. In the real world, federal laws are enforced by presidents in a manner that predictably fails to catch anything close to 100 percent of lawbreakers, because resources are scarce, trade-offs are real, and maximalist outcomes are simply incompatible with limited government.

 

Consider the example of tax law. Most Americans abhor tax cheats. But they, and especially most conservatives, would oppose deploying thousands of masked, armed IRS agents into whatever American neighborhoods the president fancies and allowing them to search houses, workplaces, and private papers to catch all the tax cheats.

 

Yes, lots of Americans tell pollsters that they want every immigrant who came here illegally deported, but how many would stick to that position if told that it would require house-to-house raids, or that the federal government must choose between spending limited funds on apprehending undocumented grandmothers who stayed after their work visas and spending on other societal needs, such as finding a cure for cancer or paying down the national debt?

 

2. A majority of Americans support some level of immigration enforcement, particularly for unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crimes.

 

If excessive immigration enforcement is incompatible with liberty, insufficient immigration enforcement is incompatible with representative democracy––Republicans are correct that our immigration laws were duly enacted, and every plausible read of election results and polling data confirms that Americans favor some meaningful level of immigration enforcement.

 

Americans’ preferences are clearest on the question of immigrants in the country illegally who have been convicted of violent crimes: According to an Associated Press poll, 83 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat favor deporting them, a position that is also held by 79 percent of Democrats. The persistence of contrary policies in some Democrat-controlled jurisdictions is harmful to public safety and the political interests of that coalition.

 

I support sanctuary cities insofar as that means that local police don’t enforce immigration law, because they want residents to cooperate with law enforcement. But it doesn’t follow that jailers should refuse all cooperation with deportations. If you favor any immigration enforcement at all, who better to focus on than incarcerated bad actors, who can be found without spending any money on searches or deploying federal officers among the public?

3. Refugee crises will happen––and every response likely to satisfy the public requires prior planning.

 

Perhaps the most difficult challenge on immigration is what to do with large, sudden surges of people. The future will bring wars, natural disasters, regime collapses, famines, and more. Barring entry to desperate refugees seems cruel, but letting in large, unanticipated flows of foreigners can cause voters in democracies to feel overwhelmed and empower authoritarians. Escaping this dysfunctional cycle is in the interests of restrictionists and inclusionists alike. All potential solutions come with challenges, but none is more formidable than the status quo. The future will confront us with many such crises. We need a plan.

 

4. Even many Americans who argue for a stricter immigration policy find the demonization of immigrants concerning.

 

It is one thing to deport people and another thing to vilify them while doing so. In my youth, the Republican Party was explicit about the goodness and humanity of most immigrants––see, for example, the way that Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush talked about the issue in 1980. Bush noted that “honorable, decent, family-loving people” were in violation of the law.

Today, in an America where there are many more immigrants, lawful and not, and where violent crime is lower than it was for the entire 1980s and ’90s, data suggest that unauthorized immigrants commit felonies at lower rates than U.S. citizens and immigrants who are authorized to be here. Obviously, some do commit murders and other serious crimes, but it is misleading and incendiary to talk about the entire class as if a large share are violent criminals, or to treat particular ethnic groups as scapegoats for citizens’ financial struggles. Many Americans find such talk unnerving and distasteful.

 

That is not mere political correctness. It is rooted in the fact that U.S. history is rife with examples of the demonization of ethnic-minority groups preceding mob violence against them. I hope America is beyond atrocities like the Los Angeles Chinese massacre, the World War I–era lynching of ethnic Germans, and the Zoot Suit Riots. But humans today are no more evolved than the perpetrators of those atrocities. Insofar as we’re less likely to participate in mob attacks, it’s because of the existence of cultural guardrails—the very ones that the MAGA coalition is dismantling.

 

5. Every high-immigration country has citizens who fear immigration and immigrants. They are least likely to sow dysfunction when their predispositions are understood and to some degree accommodated.

 

The United States has no choice but to tolerate people who fear immigration and immigrants. Although many humans enjoy diversity, a percentage of people in all countries and racial and demographic groups are psychologically uncomfortable with difference. Their discomfort may be to some degree innate, and they are either unable or unwilling to change.

 

America should never allow its xenophobes to persecute immigrants or violate their rights. But people who hold anti-immigrant views are fellow citizens who influence our culture, politics, and public policy––and we can influence whether they do so in ways that are better or worse for immigrants.

 

In The Authoritarian Dynamic, the social psychologist Karen Stenner explains how people with a latent predisposition to authoritarianism get triggered, and how best to respond to preserve a pluralistic society. Her work suggests that liberals should stop framing immigration as a celebration of multicultural difference and instead emphasize ways in which immigrants are just like the rest of us: people who seek safety, opportunity, and a better future for their family. These framings can better assuage the fears of those with xenophobic tendencies, she argues. Stenner suggests that countries implement practical assimilationist policies, such as encouraging and assisting with English fluency. She argues that immigration is most sustainable—and backlash against it least likely to succeed—when inflows of new immigrants are controlled, and subject to known limits rather than unlimited in a way that feels unpredictable.

 

As she puts it in her book, insisting on unconstrained diversity “pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.” And once a society’s authoritarians are activated, the outcome depends in part on how its conservatives react. If they side with authoritarians, repressive policies follow. But under the right conditions, conservatives can be counted on to rally behind pluralism and tolerance. One condition is that they feel reassured “regarding established brakes on the pace of change, and the settled rules of the game,” Stenner writes.

 

If Democrats or Republicans hope to create sustainable immigration policy, that policy must roughly reflect the public will. Instead of efforts to alter public opinion through persuasion, we’ve seen a succession of fringe factions forcing extremist positions on majorities that hate them. Politicians from both parties should moderate according to what voters actually want. Otherwise, endless political failures risk causing many to lose faith in all politics––which is an existential danger to our democracy.

 

 

Virginia’s Gerrymandering Vandalism

National Review Online

Thursday, February 12, 2026

 

Politics ain’t beanbag, as the saying goes, and few areas of it are as grubby and self-serving as redistricting. But even by the low standards of gerrymandering, what Democrats are doing in Virginia is both outrageous and legally dubious. Abigail Spanberger, the state’s new supposedly moderate governor, is scheming with Democrats in the legislature to create an expected ten-to-one Democratic House district map.

 

Currently, Virginia’s eleven congressional districts send six Democrats and five Republicans to the House. That’s essentially a fair representation of the light-blue tint of the state. Over the past three election cycles, Republicans have won 47.6 percent of the vote for House seats in Virginia. Over the past four, counting a Democratic wave year in 2018, that number is still 46.5 percent.

 

Republicans won 40.9 percent of the House seats over the past four cycles — winning four seats in 2018 and 2020 and five seats in 2022 and 2024 — so Virginia’s existing congressional maps can hardly be said to have favored the GOP. They were well within the margin of reasonable maps. Drawn by a nonpartisan districting commission as required by a Virginia state constitutional amendment adopted overwhelmingly by the voters in 2020, all of the districts are reasonably compact and represent distinct regions of the state.

 

Republicans remain reasonably competitive statewide in Virginia, winning between 44 and 47.3 percent of the presidential vote in the past five elections. As recently as 2025, Virginia had a Republican governor, a Republican lieutenant governor, and a Republican attorney general.

 

More to the point in drawing House districts, large areas of Virginia lean Republican. The GOP held a majority in the state house as of 2023 and today is only a step behind Democrats in the state senate, 21–19. In 2024, Donald Trump carried 90 of Virginia’s 133 counties and independent cities. Even in Spanberger’s blowout victory over Winsome Earle-Sears in the 2025 gubernatorial race, Earle-Sears won 83 of them. West of the Brunswick County line, covering some two-thirds of the state’s land mass, Spanberger carried only four counties. She also lost most of the upper Chesapeake area in the state’s east.

 

While these areas are generally less populated than the big cities, they deserve representation. On the current map, three House districts lie mostly west of the Brunswick line, and one covers the upper Chesapeake; all four send Republicans to the House. The other Republican-held seat is an evenly divided district around Virginia Beach, the state’s largest city.

 

Democrats would prefer that Alexandria, Arlington, and the rest of the D.C. suburbs — currently represented by three heavily blue districts — be able to control the rest of the state. So, under the new map proposed by Spanberger in a naked partisan power grab, five different districts snake their way to the Beltway. Of the three districts west of the Brunswick line, one has a long tendril reaching east, and the other has one reaching west to pick off all the Democratic cities in the western portion. By their 2024 presidential votes, these two districts flip from 12.2 percent and 24.1 percent Republican to 8.5 percent and 3.1 percent Democrat, respectively; the upper Chesapeake district shifts from 4.9 percent Republican to 7.5 percent Democrat. Few of these districts now look like communities rather than mapping-software abstractions.

 

True, quite a number of both red and blue states have pushed the envelope in the latest round of mid-decade redistricting, but at least those were states with a heavily partisan statewide tilt. Virginia, a purple state run by Republicans six weeks ago, would suddenly have a House delegation that looks like those of Illinois or Maryland. Worse, it would send representatives from D.C. to D.C., ignoring the distinct interests of Virginians outside the Beltway. All of this simply because of one good Democratic election cycle.

 

The anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative was pushed in 2020 by Democrats in order to prevent Republicans from redistricting Virginia in their favor if (as happened) they took control in 2021. Now that it has become inconvenient, they are simply ignoring their own state constitution. That may not fly with the state’s supreme court, which ought to reject it. So should the voters, who would have to approve the change in an April referendum.

 

Virginia isn’t even pretending to do this for any reason other than to benefit Democrats — and unlike the majority parties in California or Texas, they can’t claim a longstanding mandate from voters for governance by just one side. They ought to be ashamed, and they ought to be defeated.

Trump Busts Another Taboo

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, February 12, 2026

 

In May 1907, the Reverend Dr. William J. Long, a prominent naturalist, penned a number of articles lambasting famously rugged President Theodore Roosevelt for his hunting exploits. Throughout his life, Roosevelt was fond of killing bears, deer, and other wild game, a “savage” hobby that Long excoriated. The naturalist claimed that animals were smarter than humans believed them to be and thus deserved more individual respect.

 

Long gave many examples: He spoke of woodcocks that, after breaking a leg, would create a kind of clay cast and stand on the healthy leg until the clay hardened. He said that wolves knew to kill deer by biting their hearts out through the chest, something Roosevelt mocked as both a mental and physical impossibility. Long further claimed that he watched his pet dog eat a live chicken, and when confronted, the dog lay on top of the carcass and pretended to be asleep to hide his crime. A coon dog never has “consciousness of guilt,” claimed naturalist and Roosevelt supporter John Burroughs in a later New York Times essay.

 

Not one to let a slight go unanswered, the bombastic Roosevelt took to the pages of Everybody’s Magazine to ridicule Long. In an interview, he called Long a “nature faker” and “the worst of these nature-writing offenders.” This prompted Long to send the president a letter accusing him of “bad taste” and “cowardice.”

 

“Unfortunately your high position gives weight, even to your foolish words,” Long wrote, adding that Roosevelt’s assertions were “not worth a gentleman’s consideration.”

 

The New York Times attacked Roosevelt for picking a fight with a private citizen, noting that it was unbecoming for a president to use his office to attack a constituent. “It would seem that a President of sportsmanlike ideals, realizing that he could not fight a private citizen on fair grounds, would feel that he could not fight him all,” the paper wrote after Roosevelt broke his earlier promise to leave Long alone.

 

On this point, at least, the New York Times was right. What was once a shocking breach of etiquette now seems like a daily occurrence, with President Trump berating private citizens on a regular basis.

 

Trump loyalists once understood that attacking civilians had generally been off the table. It’s why they took such umbrage at Hillary Clinton in 2016 deeming “half” of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Shots at Trump were all part of the game, of course — but Clinton turning her ire against his supporters was like an irate hockey player dropping his gloves, skating over to the seats, and starting to punch out the fans.

 

Nonetheless, Trump is willing to shout his disdain for rank-and-file Americans from the roof of the White House. Recall that he reposted an AI-created (we suspect) video of himself flying a fighter jet labeled KING TRUMP, from which feces are released on people protesting his actions below.

 

Just this week, Trump used social media to call U.S. Olympic skier Hunter Hess “a real loser” after Hess expressed “mixed emotions” about representing the U.S. given the trouble happening back home.

 

It isn’t, of course, the first time Trump has openly rooted against U.S. athletes. After the American women’s soccer team was eliminated from the World Cup in 2023, Trump blamed the loss on “Crooked Joe Biden,” hammered media-hungry team star Megan Rapinoe for being too “woke,” and announced, “The USA is going to Hell!!!” (As an inspirational rallying cry, it doesn’t quite match “Win one for the Gipper.”)

 

When expected to call for calm and to express compassion for the recently deceased, as a sane president would, Trump goes the other way. After Renee Good and Alex Pretti, protesters against Trump’s aggressive use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to conduct deportations, were fatally shot in the streets of Minneapolis, the first instinct of the administration was to smear the dead as “domestic terrorists.” (Opinions differ greatly on what roles Good and Pretti played in the incidents that led to their deaths, but in both cases, the initial information disseminated by Trump and his administration was wildly inaccurate.)

 

And, of course, Trump spent months attacking poll workers — regular Americans with regular jobs — in his attempt to push election hoaxes in state after state. In Georgia, Trump cited a “crime” committed by “Democrat workers” Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who he claimed had effectively stuffed voting machines for Joe Biden. After receiving death threats, the two poll workers won $146 million in damages against Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who had spent nearly a full year falsely accusing them of committing election fraud.

 

Trump weighed in on the Super Bowl halftime show by a popular Spanish-language musician who’s a U.S. citizen, calling the performance a “‘slap in the face’ to our country.” As for comedians who mock Trump on their late-night shows, Trump attacks them on social media and has sent his lackeys out to suggest that their network’s broadcast license should be pulled. Remember the wild accusations against Haitian immigrants in Ohio? The president of the United States eagerly spread a lie that they were stealing and eating America’s house pets. Bark-BQ ribs, anybody?

 

When Trump goes after other politicians and members of the media, it’s obnoxious and coarse, but at least it’s within the bare-knuckle arena in which they all agree to battle. But his barbed attacks against his countrymen outside that arena make TR’s outbursts look almost quaint. Nobody signed up to be roasted by America’s insult-comic-in-chief.