The Democrats’ Time for Choosing

By Gregg T. Nunziata

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

 

As America celebrates its 250^th anniversary, its constitutional system is plagued by profound dysfunction. The elegant architecture of checks and balances constructed by the Founders has devolved into a Caesarist presidency, a supine Congress, and an overtaxed judiciary governing a people ungrounded in civics and helplessly divided by toxic partisanship. Whether one believes Donald Trump is the cause, an accelerator, or merely the product of this state of affairs, the end of his presidency will offer a historic opportunity to repair and strengthen the Madisonian design.

 

The next president will face a choice: to strengthen democracy for future generations or to fuel the forces that threaten its survival. The country faced a similar choice after the first Trump administration's disastrous conclusion—and chose poorly. The costs of those failures compound daily. To fare better next time, we must understand the mistakes of 2021 and begin charting a better course today.

 

The republic survived Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat at the ballot box in 2020 thanks to a handful of men and women who did the right thing under extraordinary pressure. But the country entered the Biden administration with shattered norms, weakened constitutional guardrails, and collapsing public faith in our institutions. The moment called for sober leadership and a reconstructive agenda, neither of which arrived. We continue to pay the price for that failure.

 

***

 

History will harshly judge Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and other congressional Republicans for enabling election denialism, flinching from impeachment, discrediting congressional inquiries into the attack on the Capitol, rehabilitating a disgraced former president, and delegitimizing attempts to hold him criminally accountable. The Supreme Court, too, in its poorly reasoned presidential immunity decision, shares some of the blame for our current predicament.

 

Much has been written in recent years about the failure of the right to defend our constitutional values, including by me. Less has been said about Democrats’ historic failure to meet the moment. Since 2016, Republicans have lacked courage, but Democrats have lacked commitment. As a presidential nominee, Joe Biden told the Democratic National Convention, “We have a great purpose as Americans … to save our democracy.” But Biden and his party catastrophically failed to strengthen democratic institutions when given the opportunity. Time and again, Democrats simply did not govern as a party that seriously believed its own rhetoric.

 

The flawed and partisan manner in which then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats handled the second Trump impeachment, before and after Biden’s inauguration, set the tone. The decision, for instance, to delay delivering the articles of impeachment to the Senate explicitly placed the incoming administration’s agenda above the important national reckoning over January 6, allowing Republican resolve to fade. It also enabled the (flawed) legal argument that the Senate had lost jurisdiction to act once Trump left office, which Republicans would later cite to justify acquitting the former president.

 

In the 2022 midterms, Democrats actively promoted far-right candidates and election deniers in Republican primaries in service of short-term political gains. Worse, with a Democrat in the White House and a majority in Congress, they never prioritized the hard bipartisan work of strengthening democracy through serious legislative reforms. Nor did they hold their own accountable for breaches of democratic norms, not when Biden attempted to bypass Congress to forgive billions in student debt, nor when his CDC ordered a national eviction moratorium without legal authorization, nor when Biden left office with a flurry of pardons, including of his own family, nor when prominent Democrats espoused wildly reckless anti-court rhetoric in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

 

This failure to reinforce our democratic system cannot be blamed on an absence of ideas. During the first Trump administration, congressional Democrats championed the Protect Our Democracy Act (PODA), a package of reforms to strengthen Congress, reinforce presidential guardrails, and increase political accountability. The legislation included ideas with solid Republican pedigrees that could have served as a basis for much-needed bipartisan reforms. Separately, former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer and Bush Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith offered additional bipartisan ideas in After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.

 

Yet these ideas simply were not a priority for congressional Democrats once Trump left office; they showed no interest in partnering with Republicans on good-government reforms. Although PODA passed the House once (on a near-party-line vote) in the first year of the Biden administration, the energy behind reform quickly dissipated. Congressional Democrats, instead, put much more effort into the For the People Act, a wish list of progressive voting reforms, which predictably proved a legislative dead end.

 

The Biden White House also seemed to have its ambitions elsewhere. Rather than focusing on returning the country to normalcy and the presidency to its constitutional limits, the White House openly compared Biden to Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, presidents who dramatically—and sometimes unlawfully—expanded the power of government and their own office. Never mind that Biden never had the congressional majorities or force of will that those two presidents enjoyed.

 

Congress managed one exception to this bleak track record: it reformed the Electoral Count Act (ECA), which governs how Congress tallies electoral votes and certifies the presidential election winner. Trump and his allies had exploited ambiguities in that old, poorly drafted law to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Importantly, Congress amended the law to clarify the limited, ministerial role of the vice president during the counting process. Notably, unlike the other failed reform efforts, this legislation began as a bipartisan project in the Senate, with the clear intention of strengthening democracy, not punishing or aiding any party or agenda.

 

Notwithstanding the ECA-reform exception, Biden-era Democrats did not prioritize fortifying our democratic institutions. Perhaps, with their man in office, they no longer saw the wisdom of restraining the presidency. Perhaps, with Trump disgraced, they thought the dangers to democracy had passed. Whether from hypocrisy or hubris, they missed a potentially fertile moment for meaningful bipartisan reform.

 

The decision to forgo bipartisanship and instead to seek praise from progressives had the further effect of breeding deep cynicism. Rather than a return to normalcy, the Biden years saw aggressive pushes left on social and economic policy, from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Democratic rhetoric about defending democracy rang hollow since Democrats in power did not prioritize it over the policy priorities of progressive activists. Moreover, after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision, Democratic senators declared the court illegitimate and extremist. The president himself said the court had decided to “upend the scales of justice” and that the decision was “a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court.” Later, he would claim that “extremism is undermining public confidence in the court’s decisions” and call for imposing “reforms” on the court as a response. Democrats’ pleas for checks and balances are hard to take too seriously when that’s how they responded to an adverse decision from the one branch of government outside of their control.

 

Because of choices like these, Democrats during the Biden administration left the country more fragile, making Trump’s reelection more likely and his return to office more dangerous.

 

***

 

As the midpoint of Trump’s final term in office approaches, and his approval ratings sink to historic lows, Democrats reasonably foresee a return to power. They must begin thinking seriously about what they will do if they get a second chance to heal the civic damage done by Donald Trump. The American electorate deserves to hear those plans sooner rather than later.

 

Democrats must ask themselves what they object to most strenuously about this administration: that it pushed the country to the right or that it undermined the rule of law, checks and balances, and our democracy? If it's the latter, they must be prepared to prioritize spending political capital on reforms to strengthen our democracy over advancing progressive pet projects. The failure to do so would miss a historic opportunity and repeat the grave mistakes of the Biden presidency.

 

Yet undeterred by the Biden administration’s costly missteps, leading Democrats have already expressed a desire to build on President Trump’s expansive uses of executive power—just in a progressive direction. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an early contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination, candidly admitted as much: “In order for us to correct the abuses that are happening now, we have to act the same in similar capacities that Trump has given himself.”

 

Failure to heal our institutions would be bad; doubling down on their destruction would be catastrophic. It would trap the country in a vicious cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation where every increasing norm violation is justified by the childish refrain, “They started it.” Worse still, a future Democrat might introduce purported institutional “reforms” designed not to strengthen democracy, but to entrench themselves in power for decades.

 

Famed Democratic strategist James Carville recently drew attention to this approach when he said on his Politics War Room podcast: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should make Puerto Rico [and] D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F—k it. Eat our dust.”

 

Carville’s typically colorful language reflects a real attitude gaining purchase in some Democratic circles: Should they return to power, they must change the rules of the game to keep them there. This is particularly evidenced by their reactions to court rulings concerning voting and elections. Leading Democrats have called for the next president to expand the size of the Supreme Court, with the obvious goal of netting more favorable progressive outcomes. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and likely next speaker of the House, made these intentions plain: “We’re going to have to do something about this Supreme Court. And let me be very clear: everything is on the table. Everything to deal with this corrupt MAGA majority.”

 

These proposals echo the infamous “court-packing” plan of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, designed to create a rubber-stamp Supreme Court more hospitable toward the president’s agenda. A Democratic Congress rejected that plan, calling it a “direct violation of the spirit of the American Constitution” that would destroy the independence of the judiciary. In a warning that today’s Democrats would do well to heed, the Senate Judiciary Committee further wrote: “Manifestly, if we may force the hand of the Court to secure our interpretation of the Constitution, then some succeeding Congress may repeat the process to secure another and a different interpretation and one which may not sound so pleasant in our ears as that for which we now contend.”

 

Some progressives speak not just of packing the court, but also of stacking Congress to favor Democrats. The party has long championed statehood (and two U.S. Senate seats) for the District of Columbia, where Democrats regularly net more than 90 percent of the vote in presidential elections. Breaking with its historic position, the DNC recently approved a measure to add Puerto Rico to the union, no doubt driven by the expectation that it will also become a reliable Democratic-voting state. And Senate Democrats increasingly express an eagerness to abolish the filibuster, which historically protects the political power of the Senate minority. Relatedly, former and perhaps future presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris indicated her opposition to anti-majoritarian protections in our system, saying there is “real shaking up that we have to do of the rule and the structure” and seemed to support left-wing voices calling for the abolition of the Electoral College.

 

Taken together, these “reforms” constitute a plan for dominion, not democracy. If Democrats go down this road, they will not only fail to repair the damage done by Trump, they will accelerate the collapse of American democracy. There’s a better path forward.

 

***

 

If Democrats truly believe that the Trump administration has embraced authoritarianism and they wish to oppose it, they must govern that way. That means committing to restoring norms and limited government, paring back executive power, and revitalizing checks and balances. Doing that in an effective and durable way requires working with Republicans. And it will mean prioritizing democracy over progressive policy goals.

 

Substantively, a post-Trump democracy and rule-of-law agenda offers a multitude of opportunities for bipartisan collaboration. Americans across the political spectrum oppose the weaponization of government to target political enemies, corrupt pardons, and self-enrichment by politicians, to take a few prominent examples. Democrats appalled by President Trump’s abuses of emergency powers might consider the leading legislation to address this problem, the bipartisan Article One Act, long-championed by Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee. The parties disagree, of course, about where the blame lies for past transgressions. But, at least in theory, they could agree on reforms preventing them in the future. This is urgent work.

 

The next administration may also propose more structural reforms to strengthen our system. Limiting gerrymandering to once a decade would be a modest but salutary step. Reforms to improve the appointments and confirmation process, including the abuse of the Vacancies Reform Act, which allows the president to bypass confirmation entirely, should be on the table. Adjustments to Senate procedure that might reform, but not end, the filibuster are reasonable. Even reforms to the court, such as mandatory retirement ages or term limits, might be part of a bipartisan policy agenda. But any structural reform that yields an immediate partisan advantage should be dead on arrival. And if an otherwise sound proposal would yield partisan advantage if adopted today, it should include delayed effective dates, leaving the party that ultimately reaps its benefits to chance.

 

Democrats, back in power, will also hear loud calls from their constituents that Trump and members of his administration should face a reckoning for abuses of power they may have committed while in office. Abuses of power should, indeed, have consequences if we do not wish to invite more in the future. On the other hand, punitive efforts may well seem disproportionate or vindictive in individual cases and raise the risk of a tit-for-tat cycle of “lawfare.” Criminal punishment should be a last resort (and may be foreclosed on the federal level by pardons), and a preference should be given to less punitive measures: civil accountability, bar discipline, and, more fundamentally, clear documentation and a public record of wrongdoing designed to shame and dissuade future abuse. The healing and future stability of the country must take precedence over score-settling, even if it means less-than-satisfactory costs imposed in specific cases.

 

Self-interested electoral politics should also encourage this approach. A Democratic presidential candidate who fights for the American system, not just his or her coalition, has the prospect of winning a comfortable majority for the first time in 20 years—potentially breaking the toxic cycle of polarized politics that has regrettably taken hold. Other countries that have reversed democratic backsliding have often done so through grand coalitions, as recent victories for democracy in Poland and Hungary demonstrate. Our two-party system makes such an approach challenging, but there are ways Democrats can capture its spirit. It’s likely too much to ask that a Democratic presidential candidate consider a Republican as a running mate. But promising to appoint Republicans to key positions, including and especially in the Justice Department, would be an important olive branch.

 

But personnel is not enough. A Democratic candidate who wants the support of right-of-center Americans must paint a vision of the future that includes them. He or she must, at a minimum, forswear any attempt to pack the Supreme Court, which is vital both to constitutional stability and an important concession to those skeptical that Democrats would ever unilaterally disarm. An even more powerful concession would be to endorse a constitutional amendment permanently setting the size of the court at nine members. This would take court-packing off the table forever and would be an enormous sign of good faith. Such a move could even be paired with another reform that might find more enthusiastic backing from the left. Democrats, of course, would remain free to criticize the current court and work to fill vacancies that arise in due course with nominees more reflective of their jurisprudential preferences.

 

***

 

A Democratic presidency in the immediate aftermath of the Trump administration might find uniquely fertile political ground for reform: Republicans may suddenly rediscover the utility of guardrails around the presidency, and Democrats, so recently traumatized by the Trump years, might be willing to impose them even when they hold the White House.

 

Donald Trump’s inability to understand his role as head of state, representing all Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—has led to our current crisis. Any Democratic candidate for president who truly wishes to heal our republic must be ready to put our democracy ahead of his or her party. And that means embracing a system that has a meaningful place for the voices of those who lose the next presidential election. Such a president would inevitably disappoint the left, but generations to come would owe them a debt of gratitude.

Water Damage

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

The state of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is a sort of moron-populist version of Chernobyl. In both cases, the government’s incompetence and corruption created a vexing ecological problem. And in both cases, the government undertook to cover up its culpability in the matter.

 

The difference is that the problem that vexed the Soviets was a cataclysmic nuclear meltdown. The problem that’s vexed the White House is algae.

 

The pool saga began as a project to beautify the structure by making its water a glistening blue. From the jump, per the New York Times, the White House cut corners by not addressing the real problem, the pool’s pipes. Instead it awarded a no-bid contract for a quick fix to a firm owned by a Trump donor—except that the quick fix, applying sealant to the pool’s bottom, didn’t solve the issue of water leaking between the concrete slabs.

 

Days after the renovation was finished, the pool had more algae in it than at any point in June over the last five years.

 

Workers were dispatched last week to dump hydrogen peroxide and “advanced nanobubbler technology” into the water to kill the algae. In short order, pieces of blue material from the newly treated bottom began peeling off and floating to the surface. The algae? Still not dead.

 

This weekend the president admitted that contractors will “probably be forced to release and drain much of the water in order to do the necessary repairs.” But it wasn’t a botched job that he blamed for the embarrassment; it was “SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE” who had “seriously vandalized” the pool by supposedly ripping off chunks of the blue sealant.

 

Former Fox News talking head turned U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro dutifully vowed zero tolerance for pool-peelers. And she meant it: One man arrested by Park Police on Friday claims he did nothing more than touch a piece of floating debris before the cuffs were slapped on. At last check, armed members of the National Guard had been hastily deployed to stand watch over a basin that’s now almost as green as the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day.

 

It’s all so stupid. And because it is, there’s no way to write about it without being seduced by metaphor or drawing Grand Lessons About Trumpism from it.

 

Our friend Andrew Egger drew one last week. Plowing ahead with a suspiciously easy solution to a complex problem and making a preposterous mess of it explains the war in Iran as well as it does the reflecting pool, he observed. The secret sauce of kakistocracy is ignorance paired with hubris, the belief that all policy failures can be remedied by a bold leader eager to impose his will, and that’s what we’ve gotten on both fronts—with predictable results.

 

Another lesson from the pool fiasco arrived this weekend when the Guard was dispatched, the ideal finishing touch on a renovation process that had already been distinctly Trumpist in its method. Scapegoating phantom “vandals” for the peeling sealant and calling in the military to deal with them is an unwitting self-satire of strongman fragility, inventing enemies and turning an absurd problem into a quasi-emergency because the president can’t bear to accept blame for having screwed up the project so badly.

 

You’ve heard of Hanlon’s Razor? The White House has its own version: Never attribute to one’s own stupidity that which is adequately explained by another’s malice.

 

There’s a third lesson, and this one also points back to Iran. Between the war on algae and the war abroad, Trump has never looked more pitifully impotent than he does right now.

 

The perfect metaphor for his first year back in office came when, without warning, he demolished the East Wing to make way for his precious ballroom. That episode captured the political zeitgeist of 2025: Americans had elected a caudillo who cared not a bit about the country’s civic traditions and would bulldoze them—literally—to get what he wanted, whether the other branches liked it or not.

 

The reflecting-pool idiocy is the perfect metaphor for his presidency in 2026, coinciding as it does with our national humiliation in Iran. Postliberalism promises effective problem-solving through energetic authoritarianism, but as things stand, not only can’t the authoritarian in chief forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, he can’t even successfully clean a public pool in D.C. The zeitgeist has flipped.

 

‘America cannot do a damned thing.’

 

The negotiations in Switzerland this weekend advertised a major intangible benefit for the Iranians. They’re going to have many opportunities to humiliate the president and his country in the months ahead. And they’re going to take them.

 

Celebrating the impotence of the United States has always been important to the regime. Ruhollah Khomeini famously crowed during the hostage crisis of 1979 that “America cannot do a damned thing,” a line that became a revolutionary slogan. Another hostage crisis played out this year in the Strait of Hormuz and again America couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do a damned thing to end it.

 

When, during the endless negotiation process to come, the Iranians get the occasional chance to remind the world of it, they’ll seize it. They already have.

 

They did it on Sunday via stagecraft when their delegation arrived for talks with J.D. Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff. The Americans were allowed to enter the room first, inadvertently (but accurately) signaling that our country is more eager for peace than the enemy is. When the Iranians finally showed, they were supposed to pose for a handshake and photo op with the vice president—but refused.

 

Then, after the event began, they walked out.

 

The walkout was their response to new comments by the president, who’s losing his mind at hawks here and in Israel condemning his deal as a Munich-tier sellout by a feckless weakling. On Saturday, with the summit looming, Iran announced that it had closed the strait again to protest new Israeli attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. That made Trump look like a schmuck and he knew it, and he let it all out the following day in a phone interview with Fox News.

 

“We’ll take over the rest of your country…. I’ll blow the s—t out of them,” the president reportedly said of the Iranians, sounding every inch like the talk-radio call-in guy from Queens that he is at heart. At one point he fantasized about the U.S. seizing control of the strait and charging 20 percent tolls on transiting oil tankers, leaving it ominously unclear whether he meant Iran’s tankers or all tankers. He went on to warn the enemy that if they close the strait again “you won’t have a country,” then threatened the regime’s diplomats in Switzerland: “You won’t even make it back to your f—king country.”

 

That’s when the Iranians left the summit, the diplomatic equivalent of extending a middle finger. (They did eventually return.) What was stopping them? Trump has given them every reason to believe he won’t restart the conflict, even admitting that he sought peace because he feared the standoff in the strait would cause a global recession if it persisted. Iran can afford to flout his belligerence. America cannot do a damned thing.

 

Well … America could exit the deal, I guess, if the ongoing humiliation became too much for Trump to bear. At some point his enormous vanity will supersede his desire for lower gas prices. For Iranians, the trick in embarrassing the president is to limit themselves to minor insults that hurt U.S. prestige while continuing to participate in negotiations, giving the White House an incentive to let those insults slide.

 

That’s why they returned to the summit after their walkout, I’m sure. They’ll never get a deal from the United States sweeter than the one they’ve just received; sanctions on the country’s oil exports have already been waived and some frozen assets have been returned, per the Iranian foreign minister. They’d be fools to let their interest in showcasing Trump’s impotence alienate him to the point that he quits negotiations.

 

So instead, I expect, they’ll casually belittle America whenever possible, bait its leader into pathetically and ineffectually threatening to restart a military campaign that’s already failed, and keep talks going at all costs to try to extract extra concessions. Call it the art of the deal, Tehran-style.

 

The most artful element, though, is the wedge it’s driven between the U.S. and Israel.

 

Israel cannot do a damned thing.

 

Humiliating Trump wasn’t Iran’s core goal in severing the White House’s interest in peace from the Israelis’ interest in security. Its goal was strategic: The regime wanted to weaken its most dangerous regional adversary by creating a rift between that adversary and its more powerful patron.

 

And damned if they didn’t succeed. It’s a master stroke.

 

For all the hype about the $300 billion reconstruction fund that hopefully won’t ever happen, the greatest long-term victory for the Khomeinists under the deal was getting the U.S. to agree to include Lebanon in its terms. That incentivizes the White House to use its leverage over Jerusalem to restrain future Israeli attacks on Hezbollah. Going forward, Trump could have peace or Israel could have its right of self-defense, but it’s one or the other.

 

Guess which one he’s going to choose. “The president told me he is disappointed Israel can’t put Hezbollah away,” Fox News reporter Trey Yingst reported after interviewing Trump on Sunday. “He went on to say, ‘They can’t do anything without knocking buildings down’ and that he is close to giving it to Syria. He is talking about empowering Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa to actually go into southern Lebanon and fight Hezbollah.”

 

In fact, the biggest news out of this weekend’s summit was an agreement between the U.S. and Iranian delegations to create a “deconfliction cell” that includes Lebanese representatives—but not Israelis, it appears—to “ensure the adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.” In other words, the U.S. will be responsible for restraining a sovereign nation from acting in its national security in parallel to Iran restraining a non-state terrorist proxy that acts at its direction.

 

All of that is in Iran’s strategic interest, needless to say. But it also serves the Iranian goal of making a spectacle of American impotence. How many countries have lost a war so decisively that they functionally switched sides as part of a peace deal, shifting from working with an ally to weaken a mutual enemy to working with that enemy to weaken that ally?

 

Vance has even begun to jab at Israel and its supporters in his frequent public appearances defending the deal. “What is your exact proposal?” he wondered, addressing the hawks in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet. “You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.” In another interview he scolded advocates for the Jewish state by pointing out that “it’s just not the case that every criticism of Bibi Netanyahu’s policy decisions leads to antisemitism or is antisemitic.”

 

He even gave Israel the Zelensky treatment during his remarks in the White House briefing room on Friday. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally I have anywhere in the entire world,” Vance warned, reminding Israelis that “over the last few months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.” Has Israel said thank you once?

 

Vance has his own political reasons for pitting himself against the Jewish state. It puts him on the right side of American public opinion; it reminds his anti-war Israel-hating Lindberghian base that he’s still one of them; it ingratiates him to the president by reframing Israelis’ justifiable shock at the mortifying terms of the Iran peace agreement into selfish ingratitude toward Trump; and it earns him some goodwill from the Iranians whose cooperation he needs for this deal not to blow up in his face.

 

But there’s no way around the fact that the vice president aligning himself with critics of the White House’s ally in this conflict is a remarkable testament to U.S. impotence in 2026. Because America cannot do a damned thing to force Iran to reopen the strait, our least bad play is to keep the Iranians happy by making sure Israel cannot do a damned thing either.

 

It occurs to me that the United States under Trump now has, or will soon have, no very close allies left. For most of my life, Canada, Great Britain, and Israel each had “special relationships” of various sorts with Washington; upon being reelected, the White House immediately set about destroying the first, is hard at work on destroying the second, and seems increasingly willing to risk the third if Iran’s hostage-takers demand it. If it’s true that you can’t be a superpower without allies, our national impotence in this moment is more severe than it looks.

 

That’s also why a silly story like the reflecting pool has captured the imagination of so many Trump critics otherwise preoccupied with war and peace. Whether in Iran or at the Lincoln Memorial, the president’s supposed grand fixes to longstanding problems keep making those problems considerably worse. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, then doesn’t know how to undo what he’s done, and then inevitably defaults to blaming others for sabotage—whether that’s Israel or reporters allegedly “vandalizing” the pool by handling pieces of sealant debris floating on the surface.

 

In the case of the pool, all that’s missing is offering the algae $300 billion to withdraw.

 

How does a strongman behave once the entire world, save for about a third of his own country, loses all confidence in him? We’re going to spend the next two and a half years finding out. But probably not well.

This Is Your Brain on Partisanship

By James Kirchick

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

 

In the summer of 2018, a Republican political communications firm named Definers Public Affairs circulated a document to technology reporters titled “Freedom from Facebook Potential Funding.” It encouraged journalists to examine the opaque financial sponsorship of an outfit called the Freedom from Facebook Coalition that was composed of a hodgepodge of liberal activist groups committed to breaking up the social media platform and regulating it like a public utility. Given how “at least four of the groups in the coalition receive funding [from] or are aligned with George Soros[,] who has criticized Facebook,” the document revealed, it was “very possible that Soros is funding Freedom from Facebook.”

 

Facebook had hired Definers the previous year to help it navigate the media and political firestorms that had been igniting around the internet giant since the 2016 presidential election, which many critics were claiming Facebook had somehow engineered in Donald Trump’s favor. The most powerful of those critics was Soros, who had delivered a speech at the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos assailing Facebook as a “menace to the world.” When Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his colleague, then Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, testified before the Senate in July, Freedom from Facebook protesters sat in the audience displaying signs depicting them as a double-headed octopus straddling the earth.

 

Though the document was written in the style of an opposition-research memo, its content—a series of citations from mainstream media outlets demonstrating the many connections between Soros’s nonprofit Open Society Foundations (OSF) and Freedom from Facebook—was, in the words of BuzzFeed, “largely innocuous.” But that’s not how the beneficiaries of Soros’s largesse responded to it. “As you know, there is a concerted right-wing effort the world over to demonize Mr. Soros and his foundations, which I lead—an effort which has contributed to death threats and the delivery of a pipe bomb to Mr. Soros’ home,” Patrick Gaspard, a longtime Barack Obama hand then serving as president of OSF, wrote in an open letter to Facebook. “You are no doubt also aware that much of this hateful and blatantly false and Anti-Semitic information is spread via Facebook.”

 

Money is fungible, and whether the Open Society Foundations were funding protesters vilifying two Jewish business executives (Zuckerberg and Sandberg) with a hoary anti-Semitic trope directly or via cut-outs is immaterial. Gaspard’s deflection of factual information concerning his boss as the product of “tactics out of Putin’s playbook” and his imputation of bigotry to Facebook and Definers were emblematic of left-wing defenses of Soros—conservative criticism of whom, no matter how legitimate, they have long mechanically labeled as anti-Semitic. (Indeed, conservative criticism of Soros is one of the few things liberals can unanimously agree is anti-Semitic.)

 

Following intense backlash from the activist left, Facebook fired Definers and apologized for hiring them in the first place. The fall guy, a Republican communications operative named Tim Miller, happened to be a friend of mine. The insinuation that Miller was in the least bit anti-Semitic was ridiculous, but he nonetheless decided to deal with his defamers in good faith. “I understand that there is sensitivity—for very good reason—these days around making claims that Soros is behind some globalist cabal to ruin our country,” he wrote. Noting the double standard in scrutiny that attends to the political activities of conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, Miller articulated his view that “pointing out to reporters that someone funds or supports a group that the organizers have admitted he funds/supports…is relevant and fair game.”

 

Miller’s explanation was insufficient for his friends Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor. The three former Obama White House communications officials and founders of the Crooked Media podcast empire were coming under enormous pressure from their listeners to dump Miller, who at the time was serving as the token conservative guest on their flagship show, Pod Save America. After wavering for several days, the trio issued a statement: “We invited Tim to contribute to Crooked because he took a public stand against Trump when most of his party capitulated. That took courage.” Alas, upon learning of Miller’s role helping Facebook “discredit its critics,” they “ultimately found it impossible to square that work with the values of our company.” First expelled from the GOP for taking a stand against Trump in 2016, only to have his reputation trashed by his new friends on the left, Miller truly became a man without a party.

 

What a difference seven years makes. Today, Miller and many others in the conservative “Never Trump” space are no longer homeless. Like many one-time political operatives, Miller now fashions himself a political analyst, and he has made himself a home at the Bulwark, a news and opinion website, alongside several other ex-Republican strategists. While it occasionally offers criticism of left-wing excesses, the Bulwark is a highly partisan outlet whose overriding purpose is to generate enthusiasm for Democrats and loathing of Republicans.

 

For political operatives cast out of their former party and working in a two-party system, becoming a Democrat in all but name makes, at the very least, economic sense. The rent, after all, must be paid. What doesn’t make sense is treating room-reading political animals like Miller as if he is an independent-minded intellectual, which is what the Bulwark’s large audience and much of the mainstream media appear to do.

 

Consider the lengths to which Miller and his colleagues at the Bulwark have gone to downplay, if not deny, the extremism of the Democratic Party’s burgeoning progressive left. In April, the publication ran a piece entitled “How Big Is the Democrats’ ‘Big Tent?’” One center-left activist quoted in the article argued it was getting too big: “If people really are arguing that the price of winning is becoming like a bigoted misogynist like Hasan Piker, then I’ll take not winning,” said Jonathan Cowan.

 

His words displeased Miller. “This seems like a bad message to me given the state of things,” Miller commented on X. It was a strange turn for a man who had once risked his career over his party’s nomination of Trump, whom he considered, not without reason, to be a dangerous bigot. Hasan Piker is a meathead Marxist anti-Semitic zealot, but he somehow has managed to escape Miller’s ire. Miller has also become a defender of Graham Platner, the Nazi tattoo–sporting Maine oysterman challenging Senator Susan Collins, the beau ideal of the moderate, northeastern Republican whose near-extinction Miller and his colleagues supposedly lament.

 

On his podcast, Miller recently hosted Gaspard, now president of the Center for American Progress, for a friendly interview in which he allowed the man who had successfully pressured Facebook to fire him make the case for Zohran Mamdani. The New York City mayor, Gaspard said, should be praised for his “position on Gaza and the permission structure he created in the Democratic primary in New York” for Democrats to become more hostile to Israel. Gaspard further castigated the “Netanyahu regime” and “people like Senator [Kirstin] Gillibrand from New York and other Democrats who used” Mamdani’s equivocating over the genocidal phrase “globalize the intifada” to “attack him.” They should, he said, be “attacking the American foreign policy that made it possible for billions of dollars in American resources to go to the starvation of communities, the bombing of children, the bombing of hospitals and a set of measures that made, I thought, Israel less safe and was responsible for eradicating Palestinian populations.” Miller allowed Gaspard to present these lies unchallenged.

 

This tacit endorsement of extremism in service to Trump-hatred is not limited to the left. Solely because Trump opposed him, Miller supported the renegade GOP congressman Thomas Massie in his primary battle against a Trump-backed challenger. Massie, for whom a political action committee ran a campaign advertisement featuring an image of Republican donor Paul Singer alongside a rainbow-embossed Star of David (Singer, a former Commentary board member, was a major giver to gay-marriage initiatives), ended his failed campaign in the disreputable way he ran it, with a jibe about his opponent celebrating his victory in “Tel Aviv.” One would have hoped that the crude gay-baiting, if not the equally loathsome Jew-baiting, would have been disqualifying for Miller, who is gay. But such is the price of all-consuming partisanship.

 

One can say the same for Miller’s erstwhile friends at Crooked Media, who have since welcomed him back into their good graces despite never having publicly apologized for smearing him as the brains behind an anti-Semitic hate campaign. On assignment for the New York Times, former Obama deputy national security adviser and Crooked podcast host Ben Rhodes traveled all the way to Maine to paint a sympathetic portrait of Platner in which he said that the highly specific SS Totenkopf tattoo Platner had inked on his chest for 18 years merely “resembled a Nazi symbol.” Favreau in particular has been vociferous in his defense of Platner, ridiculing those who find his choice of body art problematic. One does not need to imagine what these two would say were it to emerge that Senators Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton had been hiding a swastika on their chest for nearly two decades.

 

This is the problem when one’s priority is maintaining the approval of a political faction; so important is it to prove one’s partisan bona fides that you enter an escalatory spiral. One day you’re excommunicating someone as an anti-Semite for criticizing the activities of a politically active Jewish billionaire, the next you’re defending a guy with an SS tattoo. the Bulwark and Crooked are what I call “operative media,” in that they are media institutions populated not by journalists but political operatives posing as them.

 

I don’t begrudge Miller the choice he made. As the careers of the admirable politicians he worked for—among them Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush—illustrate, it isn’t easy for non-MAGA Republican political operatives to make a living these days. Political consulting, which requires articulating and ruthlessly enforcing a political line, is a valid career choice. It does not require, and in fact penalizes, independence of thought and the courage of one’s convictions. Which is why Miller’s principled decision not to ride the Trump train was, and remains, admirably rare.

 

From this break with the GOP, however, Miller did not prolong his independence streak. He just switched teams. Though most of them would be loath to acknowledge it, playing for a side is what most of the influencers who increasingly dominate our media space are doing. As long as there are politicians, there will be Machiavellis yearning to whisper in their ear and journalists whose job it is to scrutinize them. It’s crucial that we never lose our capacity to tell the difference between them.

The Trump Administration Repeats Obama’s Mistakes

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

Republicans have consigned themselves to a torturous ordeal in which they’re forced to relearn why they opposed Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal in the first place.

 

Upon the conclusion of the first round of talks with the Iranian delegation in Switzerland, America’s lead negotiator, JD Vance, said the two sides had set “a good foundation for a successful final deal.” As evidence of progress, the vice president revealed that the Iranians had agreed to let International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors back into the country.

 

Obama crowed about that one, too. But the IAEA was on the ground inside Iran both before and for some time after 2025’s Operation Midnight Hammer. Letting inspectors back in is nice, but what they are allowed to inspect, when they’re allowed to inspect it, and what safeguards are in place to prevent Iran from (proudly) misleading foreign investigators are thornier matters.

 

Likewise, Vance assured Americans that they need not worry about the funds Iran will derive from U.S. sanctions-relief initiatives. “If there is [sic] any frozen Iranian assets that are unfrozen, then we have approval over that process,” the vice president insisted, “and then the money would actually go to buy American soy, American corn, and American wheat.”

 

The thing about money is that it’s fungible. Even if the Trump administration manages to verifiably compel Iran to use its unfrozen assets to reward the White House’s preferred constituencies, reliving economic pressure on Iran gives the regime space to divert its resources away from critical civilian projects and toward its terrorist proxies.

 

Maybe the primary reason the JCPOA was destined to fail, even before Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement, was Obama’s intention to use the nuclear deal as a bank shot to address other regional issues.

 

The Iraq War and the U.S. military presence in Iraq set the backdrop against which Obama embarked on nuclear negotiations with Iran. Obama wanted out. And to get out, he needed Iran’s Shiite militias to prop up the faltering Iraqi Security Forces. The plan imploded with the rise of ISIS, but not before Obama’s deference to Iran’s terrorist proxies horrified the Sunni states. This dynamic lit a fire under nascent intelligence-sharing and coordination initiatives with Israel that later blossomed into the Abraham Accords.

 

The Vance-led delegation in Lucerne has apparently fallen into a similar trap.

 

In a joint statement on Sunday, the U.S. and Iran, as well as the talks’ mediators, Pakistan and Qatar, affirmed their intention to establish a “de-confliction cell” designed “to ensure the adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.”

 

The Iranian side of the equation was particularly enthusiastic about this provision, even beyond the sanctions relief the U.S. acknowledges and the release of “some frozen assets” that America doesn’t. Moreover, the “de-confliction cell” is already operational. “Lebanese President Joseph Aoun received a phone call from U.S. Vice President JD Vance and discussed consolidating the ceasefire in Lebanon, stopping Israeli strikes, and the possibility of forming a mechanism for this purpose,” i24’s Ariel Oseran reported. “Qatar’s PM and Jared Kushner were also on the call.”

 

Missing from this equation are the parties to the conflict that the “de-confliction” mechanism is supposed to rein in: Hezbollah and Israel. This provision, an extension of the memorandum of understanding’s article 1, is the weakest part of the deal and the component most likely to fail. Maybe that’s why both Iran and the United States have become so invested in it.

 

Indeed, to hear Vance and his political allies talk about the MOU with Iran, you could be forgiven for concluding that the U.S. just finished a shooting war with Israel.

 

The vice president has taken to selling his deal to a faction within a faction of the American right. He’s waged a merciless assault on straw men (the MOU’s critics in Israel want “to go on until every bomb has been dropped, or until every Iranian is dead,” he said recently) and invoked disturbing stereotypes (“Pro-Israel people in the United States make two critical mistakes,” Vance asserted, including “not delineating between America’s interests and Israeli interests”).

 

In a pointed message to Jerusalem, Vance warned that Trump “is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic” toward Israel. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” the vice president warned.

 

Certainly, Iran has no problem with any of this. Indeed, it was within Tehran’s strategic interests to secure an agreement that treats Israel as though it were all but indistinguishable from Hezbollah — a puppet with no agency independent of America’s and no sovereignty beyond that which America grants it. The MOU’s article 1 codifies that lie. Moreover, it allows Tehran to insist that it should not have to abide by the deal if America’s attack dog does not.

 

In Lucerne, Vance went so far as to all but dismiss Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. Sometimes, he said, those attacks are just “a junior guy who fires a drone that didn’t have approval from the high command.” Sure, “Israel has to respond to that,” Vance conceded. “But then, sometimes, that response — we could actually have a better and more peaceful situation if Israel responds in the context of the conversation that is ongoing between Hezbollah, Lebanon, Israel, and other partners in the region.”

 

That’s a long way of saying that Israel must subordinate its defense initiatives to the deal. And, really, aren’t they responding to what should be ignorable — perhaps even accidental — attacks on their soldiers, civilians, and territory?

 

The stage is now set for both America and Iran to blame Israel for the MOU’s imminently foreseeable collapse.

 

“What would America do,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked on Sunday, if a terrorist enterprise armed with thousands of rockets and drones attacked U.S. territory from the other side of its borders? “You know damn well what America would do,” he continued. “It would cross the border, create a security zone, kill the terrorists, and protect its people until the threat is removed. That’s exactly what we are doing.”

 

That is what Israel is doing in southern Lebanon. Also on Sunday, Israeli soldiers captured an underground drone “airbase” located just kilometers away from the Israeli border. The IDF even gave journalists a tour of the sophisticated facility that Israeli officials contend was constructed within the last decade “with direct Iranian assistance, including planning and funding.” In a potential intelligence coup, the seizure of this facility — one built to a “much higher standard” comparable to an Iranian missile factory in Syria that the IDF raided in the fall of 2024 — led to the capture of intact Iranian drones by Israel for the first time.

 

That Israeli operation is the sort of thing that Americans should celebrate. Instead, the logic of the MOU compels the United States to wring its hands with trepidation over Israel’s failure to defer to the peace process in Switzerland.

 

As long as the United States remains committed to the MOU, it will be compelled to at least tacitly take Hezbollah’s side in a fight it started with Israel. And all in the craven pursuit of a “peace” unworthy of the word. Of all the mistakes Obama and his acolytes made in their pursuit of the nuclear deal with Iran, this is one that Republicans have no right to repeat.

Hell Is Other People, Especially Diddy

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

How has American culture changed since the 19^th century? Consider this: John Wilkes Booth was a handsome celebrity whose career came to an end when he became an assassin, while Luigi Mangione is a handsome assassin whose career as a celebrity was launched by the assassination. It is, indeed, an upside-down world.

 

When I tell people about Luigi: The Musical—a current off-Broadway production about the handsome young prat who gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—I get the same reaction from both sides of the political aisle and especially from the fundamentally apolitical: surprise that such a thing is permitted.

 

In the real world, Luigi Mangione, a morally illiterate, manifesto-writing child of privilege, presented his crime as an act of protest against the domination of the U.S. healthcare system by for-profit private insurance. Incarcerated for a time in the same facility as other high-profile prisoners such as Sean Combs and Sam Bankman-Fried—the situation in this situation-comedy musical—Mangione has become a sort of folk hero among a slice of the Bernie Sanders-aligned left, the intellectually vacuous foot soldiers of which enjoy having the itch of their free-ranging and bloodthirsty resentment scratched by a photogenic if callow young man. Luigi: The Musical aims to scratch that same itch in the pursuit of one kind of profit or another, and many people are understandably scandalized by this.

 

How are they even allowed to do that? people ask. Even here in the United States of America, the land of the First Amendment, the notion that people need permission to speak, to write, and to perform is deeply implanted. Can’t his family stop them from doing that? Aren’t they going to get sued? Who let them do this? Implicit in most of these responses, though not in all of them, is a belief that this performance should not have been allowed.

 

I myself am a partisan of free speech, as close to an absolutist on the issue as you will find. God bless America even if I don’t love the ubiquitous incest porn, etc.

 

So I do not have very much time for the question of whether this sort of thing should be allowed as a matter of law—of course it should. (There’s your line for the poster: “Probably should not be banned outright!” Kevin D. Williamson, The Dispatch. You’re welcome.) Americans do not need anybody’s permission to offer commentary—including stupid and distasteful commentary—about public events, and the assassination of Brian Thompson was a public matter and remains very much a live public controversy: The trial of his killer and the hero (yes, hero) of the new musical is under way even as I write.

 

You can go to the internet and find the worst sort of people making the worst sort of arguments about why Mangione’s murder of Thompson was not only morally permissible but morally necessary. Some of those imbeciles—many of them—are buying tickets to the new show, ensuring that its performances are generally sold out. Some of them wear T-shirts depicting Mangione as a Catholic saint; one fellow, sitting at my table in the cabaret-style (and Cabaret-style) venue wore a T-shirt emblazoned with Mangione’s image over the caption: “But, Daddy, I Love Him!” The number of occasions when a grown man should deploy the phrase, “But, Daddy!” is, in my admittedly conservative view, somewhat limited.

 

One step down from the question of whether such a performance should be allowed is the question of whether staging such a thing at all is in bad taste, which is itself separate from the question of whether this particular work is in bad taste.

 

Luigi: The Musical itself considers the question of whether such a performance might be in bad taste: Informed by a prison guard that he has become a celebrity and that there is even a musical about him, Luigi is offended and incredulous, demanding to know what kind of monsters would buy tickets to such a travesty—a line delivered with an accusing glance at the audience, which, unless I am very much mistaken, was disproportionately peopled by middle-aged gay men of the Very Online variety. There were moments when the mood was very much that of a strip club (there is a fair bit of skin on display, though nothing obscene in that particular sense)  and it seemed to me that the jeering, leering members of the audience were not entirely in on the joke—that they are at least as much an object of criticism here as is the role of for-profit insurance companies in our healthcare system. But, then, people with bad taste rarely are aware that they have bad taste—and the worst of them do not have anybody around who loves them enough to tell them so. There is a reason dictator chic is so tacky.

 

In a similar way, moral monsters always believe that they are the heroes of the story, not the villains. John Wilkes Booth thought he was a patriot and a hero. So did Timothy McVeigh. So, presumably, does Luigi Mangione. Mangione will always have his admirers. So does McVeigh. So does Booth.

 

My instinctive reaction to the question of whether staging such a performance as Luigi is in bad taste was: Yes, of course it is, and this is an example of the sort of thing that should not be done even though it may be, and must be, permitted. But I think my instinct there probably is wrong. There is a long and mostly proud tradition of offering humorous commentary, often dark and satirical, about horrifying events, often published before the blood is even quite dry and with no thought of waiting until the matter is legally resolved or for whatever we might judge to be a decent interval. The Roman pasquinade is one of the foundation stones of modern journalism, and no one seems to be very much upset by headline-driven humor such as Saturday Night Live’s beloved “Weekend Update” feature or the old Colbert Report—we do seem to very strongly prefer that such commentary be packaged as ersatz television news programming, for some reason. Perhaps we find the form psychologically reassuring.

 

But, if you will forgive such obvious and elevated points of comparison, Virgil surely had current imperial affairs in mind when he was writing the Aeneid, and Shakespeare was keenly aware when writing such works as Richard III that his characters represented near relatives of his sovereign and sometime customer, Elizabeth I, some of whom died badly. (Virgil and Shakespeare were involved in broadly identical political projects: legitimizing the regime.) Somewhere between the Aeneid and Luigi we might look to the œuvre of Mel Brooks, who was very bold in his treatment of racism, antisemitism, and the career of Adolf Hitler, among other subjects. (“You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today,” an admirer once told Brooks, who retorted: “You couldn’t make it then.”) The murder of Brian Thompson is not funny, and the Holocaust was not funny—but The Producers is funny.

 

Which raises the real question: Is Luigi: The Musical any good?

 

***

 

Luigi: The Musical has been so roundly denounced as a moral failure that someone must point out—and I suppose it falls to me—that it also is an artistic failure.

 

That isn’t the indictment it might sound like: Most plays and musicals are artistic failures. Even the masters only rarely strike gold. Bob Dylan has written, by some counts, around 1,000 songs, and there’s a reason you know only four of them. Luigi offers several moments of real intelligence, wit, and charm. Unfortunately, these are too few and too far between, the dried cranberries in some otherwise pretty bland trail mix. Every show of this kind is a blend of the real stuff and filler, and the better ones are the ones with the better proportions in the mix. Comedy is very hard to write and harder still to write quickly—there is a reason that so little humor stays funny for more than a few months. And I tip my hat to the authors here for even attempting to write satire in times such as these, which seem to me to be quite beyond parody. I don’t know that even Tom Wolfe would have been up to it.

 

So, a failure. But how and why?

 

T.S. Eliot famously argued (in “Hamlet and His Problems”) that Hamlet is an artistic failure, a result of Shakespeare’s having taken on a theme that he was not capable of adequately treating on stage: maternal sexual guilt. Hamlet the character may be a psychological puzzle, Eliot argues, but Hamlet the play is a dramatic mess, particularly in its treatment of the prince’s neurotic inability to act, which is treated more straightforwardly in the material Shakespeare borrowed from, notably Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. (Eliot is among those who hypothesize that Kyd wrote a lost ur-Hamlet.) Luigi: The Musical may not merit so rarefied a line of comparison, but it exhibits much the same problem: The authors are so bewitched by Luigi the character that they treat him as only an object of fascination (albeit a fascination that alternates between admiration and revulsion) rather than as a part of a dramatic whole. There is very much a sense that this is Luigi vs. everybody else, that Luigi is not only the star of the show but effectively in a different show from the rest of the characters. That leaves his sudden final descent into sympathy-forfeiting, plainly stated homicidal megalomania disconnected from the wider arc of the story—which, I probably should mention at this point, contains two musical numbers about McDonald’s hashbrowns, the greasy treat that was the proximate cause of the murderer’s falling into the hands of the law.

 

Our story picks up when Mangione is incarcerated in a special New York facility for high-profile prisoners: a celebrity wing, in effect, where Mangione was, in reality, held for a time alongside crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and entertainment mogul Sean Combs, aka Diddy. In the real world, Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud and currently is campaigning for a pardon from Donald Trump, who previously pardoned crypto-criminal Changpeng Zhao after firms controlled by the Chinese billionaire went into business with firms controlled by Trump’s family. Combs was convicted on relatively minor sex crimes (Mann Act offenses) and acquitted of the more serious charges he faced. Combs also is campaigning for a presidential pardon, but Trump says this would be “difficult” given that Combs has said things at times that have hurt the president’s feelings. (Like I said: beyond parody.)  In the musical, both Bankman-Fried and Combs end up pardoned by the president, which is, if unlikely, far from beyond imagining.

 

Mangione is forced into an awkward three-way relationship with Bankman-Fried and Combs, in whom he sees both that which he hates (greed, corruption, exploitation) and that which he is becoming (a celebrity). Mangione is played by Mike Cefalo, who sings well enough and whose comedic gifts are considerable. He begins with a song in which he rehearses, in a musical litany, all the ways in which he is an incompetent criminal: “I shouldn’t have pulled my mask down,” “I shouldn’t have had those hashbrowns,” “I shouldn’t have driven around the country with a backpack full of guns and my manifesto and fake IDs,” etc. It is the best and most memorable song in the show, marked by a pleasing sort of Jim Steinman grandiosity that composer Arielle Johnson applies to most of Luigi’s music—appropriate inasmuch as one of Cefalo’s main jobs in the show is to stand there shirtless as a hunk of meatloaf while the audience hoots and slavers.

 

By contrast, Bankman-Fried’s big number, “Bay Area Baby,” is too long and repetitious. Diddy sniffs at the notion that Bankman-Fried is a celebrity at all: “There’s a reason you have so much more exposition than the rest of us!” he sneers. But it seems to me that the more likely reason is that the character is played by Andre Margatini, one of the show’s principal writers.

 

Cefalo, as the characters in the play observe in a moment of meta-awareness, resembles Mangione. Combs, on the other hand, is played by a woman, Chine Ikoro, while Bankman-Fried is played by the aforementioned Andre Margatini, who uses male pronouns and boasts of being “mid-transish.” Margatini’s Bankman-Fried is a sexless social incompetent whose irritating disquisitions on crypto and repeated rhetorical flights into business-school jargon are announced by the band’s vamping on the soft jazz chords of classic elevator music. One of the show’s (excessively) repeated jokes is his going on about “effective altruism” only to be misunderstood by Combs, who thinks he is talking about autism—“They can test you for that!” Ikoro is pretty good as a louche Combs—whose ecstatic fantasy about a post-prison party with flowing champagne is suddenly sidetracked by a sharp turn into “a room full of goats”—but her role is underwritten, the jokes are superficial and a little obvious, and it is especially disappointing that the only genuinely musical figure in the show gets so little in the way of memorable or inventive music. By contrast, there is a bit too much Bankman-Fried, and his songs could use some merciless editing by someone who is not in love with them.

 

So: Pretty good, at least in spots, but not very good.

 

It is necessary to keep separate the question of the show’s merits as a musical and the question of its morality or propriety. There were many objections to The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’ opera about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by the Palestinian Liberation Front, during which the terrorists murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a partly paralyzed Jewish American who relied on a wheelchair. If you would like to hear a preview of those who justify Luigi Mangione’s actions, Klinghoffer’s real-world murderers can oblige: “I chose Klinghoffer, an invalid, so that they would know that we had no pity for anyone,” the leader of the group said, “just as the Americans, arming Israel, do not take into consideration that Israel kills women and children of our people.” The complaints about The Death of Klinghoffer were complaints about its propriety and decency, not complaints about its music.

 

My own view is that, in general, there isn’t any point to trying to apply a social or moral criterion to works such as this. What happens in a play or a musical happens within the four corners of the stage just as what happens in a film stays within the four corners of the screen; it may refer to events and people in the real world, but it has no bearing on these as a dramatic work. Oliver Stone’s Nixon is probably the best film to have been made about American politics, but it has nothing to do with the life and times of Richard M. Nixon. Richard III probably was not the kind of villain he is in Richard III, but Shakespeare worked in drama, not in history or in political philosophy.

 

Luigi: The Musical may be different in that it takes as its material events that are still unresolved—as noted, Mangione’s trial is in the news, and the accused recently withdrew his plans to offer a psychiatric defense—and it takes a particular kind of cruelty (cruelty here understood as a species of indifference) to offer up a series of gags based on the assumption that Brian Thompson, husband and father of two sons who were teen-agers at the time, had it coming. And Luigi does lean into that notion when it is convenient, with the audience lustily cheering Luigi’s series of “Dear Manifesto” songs, in which his rationalizations and justifications for the murder are offered as self-evidently legitimate. The show also offers a critique of that notion when convenient, especially in the show’s closing number. That is not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but there is a world of difference between emphasizing and exploring that kind of tension and simply trying to ignore or evade it, which is what it seems to me the authors too often do here.

 

Luigi: The Musical, being dramatically incoherent, wants to have it both ways, offering the murder of Thompson as justifiable and justified while simultaneously presenting Mangione and—especially—his leering admirers as stunted grotesques.

 

The show grows up all of a sudden in its final number, with Bankman-Fried and Combs turning into a kind of AEI-pundit chorus singing about the complexity of policy trade-offs and the difficulty of reforming institutions in meaningful ways while Mangione sings about his plan to shoot people until there is peace and justice and equality upon the land. Why join a movement that is about other people and their boring policy papers when I can do something exciting that is all about me? he asks. The authors of Luigi are not obviously fools, but they do not have the sophistication or the intellectual courage to apply the emotionally organizing wisdom of the climax to the rest of the proceedings, which makes a mess of things.

 

There are those bits of self-awareness, of course: The show has them even if the audience does not. As the people who were seated next to Shia LaBeouf at Cabaret can tell you, it sometimes is the case that the audience is even more disconnected from reality than are the actors on the stage. If I could have waved a wand and disenfranchised the entire audience of Luigi, it would have been an act of democratic hygiene. Unlike the authors of Luigi, they did not seem to have the good sense to be half-ashamed.

 

A little bit of shame is a good thing for moral development, but it is deadly to comedy.

 

***

 

Can one joke about a murder? Can one joke about a murder before the corpse is even cold?

 

Yes. But the joke has to land.

 

Readers of National Review (which was my journalistic home for about 15 years) will know that the magazine begins with a section called “The Week” (a holdover from the brief period during which National Review was a weekly magazine) and that “The Week” begins with a short joke. But the news does not always put one in a joking frame of mind, and that was the case for the issue of December 17, 1963, following on the heels of the assassination of President John Kennedy.

 

The murder itself had caused a great psychological convulsion throughout the country, and the editors of National Review surely were acutely aware that there already was under way an effort to lay Kennedy’s assassination—by a communist—at the feet of the American right, with Dallas—“the city that willed the death of the president”—standing in for anti-Kennedy conservatives at large. Earl Warren, then the chief justice of the Supreme Court, insisted that Kennedy had been killed by “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots,” while Mrs. Kennedy is reported to have refused to change out of her blood-stained clothes, insisting: “I want the world to see what Dallas has done to my husband.” Crackpots such as Oliver Stone still insist that the death of Kennedy was a right-wing plot. Making a joke out of that material was a very delicate thing, and the editors settled on what is now one of the magazine’s most famous lines: “The editors of National Review regretfully announce that their patience with President Lyndon B. Johnson is exhausted.”

 

That was, in my judgment, just about perfect. It acknowledges that National Review was a critic of Kennedy and would continue that line of criticism rather than being dishonestly shamed into self-censorship; it invokes the image of Lyndon Johnson, an inherently comical figure; and, like the best of such jokes, it provides a kind of Platonic catharsis, acting to drain the tension out of an emotionally difficult situation.

 

Sarah Silverman’s famous joke about being raped by a doctor—“so bittersweet for a Jewish girl”—works only because it is shameless both in composition and in delivery: economical, shocking, ruthless. Silverman wrote and delivered the line with perfect artistic confidence; for a point of contrast, consider Pete Davidson’s half a dozen never-quite-there attempts to come up with a good joke about the death of his father, a fireman, in the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Davidson never really lands that one, because there is always a palpable sense—entirely understandable—that he himself thinks it isn’t really funny. National Review’s joke after Kennedy’s death was both a good joke and an announcement that the editors would decline to be blamed for Lee Oswald’s crime.

 

Oswald would go on to become a kind of literary figure. In the early 1990s, there was a play (which even the internet has forgotten) performed in Austin called Texans and Their Guns, a purgatorial conversation among three famous marksmen from the Lone Star State: Oswald, his epigone John Hinckley Jr., and Charles Whitman, the sniper who helped to usher in the modern age of theatrical mass murder from his perch atop the Paul Philippe Cret’s famous clocktower at the University of Texas. (Trivia: It was not Whitman’s homicidal spree that caused the tower to be closed to the general public, a decision that was taken nearly a decade later in response to a string of suicides.) Three horrible men trapped together, each of them forced to see the worst of himself reflected in the others: The structural similarity to Luigi is obvious enough, and the form is not uncommon—No Exit is the textbook example, and few plays have produced an epigram so memorable—or so true—as “Hell is other people.”

 

Oswald is, in the right hands, a character with a good deal of comic potential: See, for example, Don DeLillo’s Libra. (Not a comic novel, but very funny in places.) But I imagine that a jokey play about Oswald looked different to, say, Mike Quinn, who taught media law at the University of Texas when Texans and Their Guns was being performed and who had been present at the assassination as a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. Richard Linklater’s Slacker, a love letter to Austin, contains a comical manic reverie about the Whitman massacre, and surely the 1990 film was seen by at least a few people who had been personally present for that event. I thought the scene was hilarious—maybe those who witnessed Whitman’s murders felt differently.

 

Or maybe they appreciated it all the more.

 

My former National Review colleague Kat Timpf has a book about this subject, titled You Can’t Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred and We’re All in This Together. She has been through some grisly stuff and has written some good jokes about it. Being a comedian herself, she gets to the heart of the matter: You can joke about anything—but make it a good joke.

 

***

 

The tricky part in keeping the moral questions separate from the aesthetic questions is that they are not entirely separate. I do not take very seriously the notion that forms of entertainment such as popular music and video games are morally consequential at the social level—the dumbest version of that argument is that we have so much crime and sexual misbehavior and drug abuse because of music or video games “glorifying” that sort of thing, when the truth is that the music and the video games are the result of the same deep culture that produces the real-world social dysfunction, with entertainment having relatively little power to shape that deep culture. He would never have done that awful thing if he hadn’t seen it on television, or if he hadn’t played at doing it in a video game first, or hadn’t talked to an AI chatbot about it—these are principally psychiatric propositions, medical claims, not moral claims. Even the less dumb versions of the argument do not seem to me very persuasive.

 

But moral tension, moral complexity, and moral coherence are artistic and literary considerations as well: A story that relies on being situated in a particular moral universe has to respect the rules of that moral universe in the same way that a work of science fiction has to follow the relevant rules of science in order to succeed on its own artistic terms. That morality has to be legible enough that characters’ interactions with it—and violations of it—make dramatic sense. Some people will argue that such considerations may be set aside when it comes to light entertainment or to comedy at large, but that gets it exactly wrong: The lighter the entertainment, the more need for sturdy and reliable foundations. The classic comedy of manners, for example, can only succeed where the authors have the necessary moral lucidity to represent the hypocrisy or dishonest social conventions that they are writing about—it is a question of control, the difference between chasing an emotional effect and summoning one. There is a lot of chasing in Luigi. It is uneven in the way sketch comedy shows are uneven, being the work of too many authors with too much time to fill and not enough good ideas to go around. Its occasional slides into didacticism—the smug moral preening about the healthcare industry—are the worst bits, which is no surprise: The authors and their critics predictably fall into the same kind of clumsy moralizing.

 

All that said, I am pleased in a sense that Luigi exists. (Another line for the poster: “Does not merit total ontological erasure!” Kevin D. Williamson, The Dispatch.) It will contribute nothing at all to the debate about healthcare financing in the United States and may very well make that debate a little dumber and angrier, if such a thing is possible. But it is something I would like to see more of: It is, among other things, a work of theater that is not written for theater critics or for theatrical writers, its ambitions being instead genuinely popular. God save us from “relevance” in these things, but, at the same time, it does seem as though the only books of poetry that are bought and read in the United States are bought and read by people who write books of poetry or want to write them, the poets having become a kind of guild and consequently having lost the ability to connect with general readers along with the sense that doing so is either necessary or desirable. There is a liveliness at work in Luigi that I hope will find its way into other, better work.

 

I do not have much hope for the political conversation, such as it is, in the United States. At the risk of sounding as though I have gone Marxist, this is a case in which the means of production is truly the controlling cultural force: As long as social media continues to be the dominant mode of communication and debate, the conversation is going to be stupid. Brevity and immediacy are wondrous weapons for the witty and the wise, but for the demos at large the unfiltered and unconsidered nature of social media discourse makes it the rhetorical equivalent of a crate of hand grenades in the hands of a methed-up chimpanzee. Coriolanus, probably completed sometime in 1608, supposedly was written in part as a response to the Midland Revolt of 1607. Shakespeare was a fast writer, but he probably spent at least a few months working on the great play. Many pasquinades were written in the form of Petrarchan sonnets, which even for the deftest versifier take a little bit of time to write. A half-assed musical is a more considered thing than the typical Bluesky post. It takes a little work.

 

And taking our time, putting in a little work—not the worst thing to do in times such as these, no?