Nobody’s Perfect

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, June 04, 2026

 

I get it—I do: I also have some tattoos I regret.

 

Nobody is perfect.

 

We all make mistakes. As a Christian, I believe that there is nothing—nothing—that is unforgivable. And at the more mundane level, I believe in second chances as someone who has needed a lot of those over the years. I myself am not very good at forgiving and forgetting, but that is a shortcoming in my character that says nothing about the virtues of forgiving and forgetting.

 

That stipulated, Graham Platner should not be in the Senate. It would be bad for the country and bad for him.

 

There are not many productive uses for negative polarization, but it sometimes is helpful to turn a question around. And so there is a question I sometimes ask my evangelical Christian friends who are committed Donald Trump supporters: “How many pornographic films would a man have to have appeared in before he lost your support as a political leader? Is there some number? Because three obviously ain’t it.” Donald Trump, in case you missed that detail among the many other colorful bits of his résumé, has appeared in cameo roles (as himself, of course) in at least three softcore porn films produced by Playboy Enterprises. Many of the same people professing to be Christians who scoff at James Talarico—because they object to his diet and his insistence, obviously true if expressed with modish imbecility, that the metaphysical essence of the Almighty transcends that which can be communicated in the gendered pronouns of the English language—somehow make their peace with Trump’s depicting himself as Jesus, with his plainly heretical religious views, and with his desultory, undistinguished career as a performer in pornographic films. It is almost as though these professing Christians do not believe the things they profess to believe. It is almost as though they cannot serve two masters.

 

How many porn films would be too many? One might as well ask these gentle Christians how many lies, how many adulterous affairs, how many probably illegal hush-money payments to porn stars diddled while the humiliated rent-a-wife was at home tending to the new baby ...

 

Well, they almost always say, Trump’s not perfect, but ….

 

And that is how you know they are stupid and dishonest.

 

Trump has made political life worse in obvious ways. But political life has made Trump worse, too, bringing out the worst in his already contemptible character, amplifying his vices, vanity, and venality to such a point that they have become strategically consequential geopolitical variables. It is as if Providence wanted us to have the most straightforward possible example of a man who gains the world but loses his soul. That’s the God of the Old Testament saying, as (cover thine ears, Mr. Talarico) He often does, whatever is Hebrew for, “Hey, stupid.”

 

Progressives rallying around the troubled candidacy of Graham Platner, the habitually dishonest skirt-chasing Totenkopf enthusiast challenging that nice Maine lady for a Senate seat, have learned precisely the wrong lessons from Republicans’ experience with Donald Trump, an experience that has left the GOP morally debased and ethically discredited and—perhaps Republicans will actually care about this part—unable to get much of what it wants politically. Legitimate issues, such as immigration control and abortion regulation, have been tainted by association with Trump and Trumpism, which means dishonesty and stupidity in the formulation of policy followed by incompetence and corruption in the execution of policy.

 

Progressives will get the same thing from such a figure as Platner. This is, evidently, a man who is a drama generator with a short attention span. And Democrats are telling themselves the same stupid lies Republicans offer when they want to feel better about their political situation. Again, look across the aisle and what you will see is a mirror.

 

Republicans looking for a reason to support Trump naturally found one, and, being Republicans—and therefore suffering a certain intellectual disability when it comes to imagination—they settled on the most decrepit, most obvious, most banal one: Our opponents are so wretched and so dangerous, and the emergency of this moment is so critical, that we must not only accept and ignore but explain away or positively embrace the thoroughly rotten character of the man we are putting forward as a candidate for high office.

 

But what about the character stuff? The Republican answer, in short: Hocus-pocus!

 

If I had a dollar for every useless goblin, prominent or obscure, who wrote or said the exact words “Trump isn’t perfect,” I would have ... many more dollars than I do right now. It is as though this were some kind of magical incantation, some handy formula of moral alchemy. Presto change-o!

 

And, now, inevitably, comes: “Graham Platner isn’t perfect, but ...”

 

To say that Platner “isn’t perfect” is to say nothing at all. None of us is perfect. To say that a man is not perfect is akin to saying he is not a giraffe or a Tiffany lampshade. Platner is a man with an SS tattoo and fidelity problems who cannot manage to give a forthright account of either these or many other legitimate concerns about his character and his candidacy. It is not that Graham Platner is not perfect—it is that he is positively bad, not in a merely private sense as some apologists would have it but in the sense of being a bad sort of person to endow with significant political power. Private morality and civic virtue are not the same thing (Cato the Younger was a drunk) but there is a great deal of overlap in that Venn diagram.

 

The standard for public men is not perfection. To write and speak and argue as though it were is simply a cheap and cowardly rhetorical dodge, one that should always and everywhere be treated with the contempt it deserves.

 

Should we love a man such as Platner—pray for him, forgive him, help him along, welcome him, encourage him? Yes, of course, all that. Should we endow him with a position of extraordinary public trust? Of course not. We should forgo that not only for our own sake—as a matter of prudence and political hygiene—but also for his sake. Putting a man with Platner’s weaknesses into such a position before he has reached a more mature and well-integrated state of life is like asking a newly reformed drunk to work as a bartender. A man with troubles of that sort should go where he will not be tempted.

 

If Graham Platner had an R next to his name, progressives would get it. If Donald Trump still had a D next to his name, conservatives would get it.

 

But, sure. Nobody is perfect. 

Calling a Nazi Tattoo a Nazi Tattoo

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

I can’t be alone in finding the Graham Platner conversation exhausting. Though I might be a little isolated for some of the reasons I find it exhausting. But let’s work through the obvious stuff first.

 

When the news broke that the married Platner was sexting with various women, feminist writer Jill Filipovic declared:

 

The Graham Platner story is landing because it confirms a bunch of his critics’ prior concerns: unvetted, history of poor decision-making, the kind of light misogyny that tends to go along with male bad decision-making. Those are all problems! But it’s worth asking if they’re problems that should be disqualifying for a senate seat and I think the answer to that is no.

 

Cenk Uygur said that the establishment backlash was a symptom of its contempt for “real people who aren’t corrupted by the system. They never go after insiders like this, because they’re already good boys and girls who do exactly as they’re told.”

 

Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project dismissed the whole thing, saying that “nothing that has come out about Graham Platner is scandalous.” The controversy was just “weirdo gaslighting from upper class ninnies.”

 

So, Platner’s “light misogyny” and “history of poor decision-making” have little bearing on his ability to do the job of being a senator. I don’t exactly know how to define the job of a senator, but I kind of feel like “decision-making” is part of it.

 

I think Uygur is a buffoon, but buffoons sometimes make plausible observations. I mean, even morons can be correct when they say, “Hey, that’s a duck!” when they see a duck.

 

But does anyone actually believe that “they” never go after “insiders” for their sexual indiscretions? Were Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bob Packwood, Matt Lauer, Bob Livingston, Andrew Cuomo, Dennis Hastert, Al Franken, Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Mark Foley, David Vitter, John Edwards, Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Sanford, Anthony Weiner, David Petraeus, Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Les Moonves, and Harvey Weinstein, all populist anti-establishment outsiders?

 

Oh, and was the #MeToo thing just “weirdo gaslighting from upper class ninnies”?

 

Big, if true.

 

And then there’s the whole Nazi tattoo thing. Last Sunday on This Week, Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager, lamely tried to push back on the claim that Platner has a Totenkopf tattoo—used by the SS—saying it was just a “skull and crossbones” tattoo, “not a Nazi tattoo.” Never mind that Platner, a “big history buff,” apparently admitted more than once that he knew what it was.

 

Now, having written a whole book pushing back on argumento ad hitlerum, you’d think I’d want to go ballistic on this controversy. After all, from the 1930s to five minutes ago, there are innumerable examples of lefties—including FDR and Harry Truman—who’ve insisted that being a conventional conservative or a libertarian makes you a Nazi, a Nazi sympathizer, or a patsy for fascism. But voluntarily having the symbol of the SS drawn over your heart with indelible ink is essentially meaningless? And finding it worthy of criticism is essentially fascist gaslighting?

 

But let’s stipulate that Platner’s hypocritical defenders are hypocrites. He does have non-hypocritical defenders. Their position is that he’s a bad person who’s made bad decisions, but it’s worth supporting him to defeat Sen. Susan Collins and possibly win a Democratic Senate majority. I disagree with that take, but I don’t think it’s outrageous or indefensible.

 

And just to annoy everybody, I think a lot of Republicans are equally hypocritical. Trump’s history of sexual impropriety—even if you reject the worst allegations—is surely as bad as Platner’s, and a great many Republicans making hay about Platner don’t care. Similarly, our vice president has passionately argued for a “big tent” that makes room for fans of neo-Nazis and Nazi cosplayers. And he’s hardly alone.

 

If you widen out the context to the question of unacceptably flawed Senate candidates, the case against Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton is just as disqualifying as the one against Platner, if not more so. Platner is just a spoiled, louche loser propped up by his rich parents, pretending to be a regular Joe to win public office. Paxton has demonstrably abused his office as Texas Attorney General. Also, while Platner has only been accused—so far—of saying terrible things and sexting with women, Paxton actually cheated on his wife.

 

So spare me any of the selective moral outrage.

 

There are two arguments for supporting Platner, and Nick Catoggio lucidly combines them. What he calls the moral argument is that checking Trump by voting for a “chud” is worth it. “Six years of Graham Platner in the Senate would be mortifying,” he concedes, “but two more years of unified GOP control in Washington would be full-tilt banana republicanism for the United States. Not all chuds are created equal.”

 

I find this entirely defensible.

 

The reason I say there are two arguments is that Nick is not a partisan Democrat and his interest is not grounded in a desire to see the Democrats win, but in a reasonable desire to check Donald Trump. He calls this the “moral argument.”

 

Now I am sure that virtually every Democrat who supports Platner from afar or in the voting booth subscribes to this moral argument in whole or in part. But partisan Democrats and partisan DSA Democrats (not the same thing) don’t rely solely on this argument. First of all, many of them reject the idea that Platner’s any kind of chud at all. If they believed that, they would have rallied around Janet Mills, the normie Democratic governor of Maine with a better shot at defeating Susan Collins. Platner’s fans think he’s a heroic, “authentic,” man of the people with great ideas about economics and foreign policy while Mills is part of the Democratic establishment that must be toppled. So, for this crowd, the moral argument is just gravy.

 

These people care about power. I don’t necessarily mean that in some sinister way. Politics has to be about power to be politics. The people rallying around Ken Paxton have pretty much the exact same outlook. If they cared solely about denying Democrats a Texas senate seat, they would have supported incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.

 

Primaries color everything.

 

What annoys me is the way the populists demonize and denounce the “establishment” in the primaries and then, once they win the intra-party fight, they insist that the establishment must do everything it can to assure that their populist rabble-rouser wins the general election. Suddenly the establishment’s resources and expertise are good things, and the victorious rebels have an unlimited entitlement to them. Internal insurrection for me, establishmentarian party loyalty for thee. Donald Trump ran against the Republican Party, but once he won, he demanded absolute party loyalty from everyone else. Bernie Sanders has been a passionate enemy of the Democratic Party for his entire career, but if he’d won in 2016, you know all of the Bernie Bro Jacobins would demand strict partisan unity.

 

It’s like some Game of Thrones scenario. Launch a rebellion against the corrupt monarchy and once the rebel chieftain seizes the Iron Throne, start talking about the divine right of kings and the obligation to show fealty.

 

Now, you can argue that this is simply how party politics works in the era of primaries—and you’d be right! But I think that’s a very bad thing.

 

So yeah, it’s normal to have big fights in the primary and then to hear calls for party unity when “the people” have spoken. But that normal is fairly new, and it sucks.

 

I really don’t want to go on another tear about how terrible the primary system is for democracy. But the simple fact is that “the people” haven’t spoken, only a tiny sliver of the most rabid primary voters have spoken. These voters aren’t necessarily bad, or even wrong. But broadly speaking, they tend to have contempt for their own party, they just hate the other party more. They tend to vote with more passion than reason. And in the Trump era, many Republicans simply vote based upon whether the candidate is supported by Trump, and many Democrats simply vote for whoever hates Trump the most. That’s a really stupid way to run a country.

 

The result is that many Democrats and Republicans and most independents hate the choices they’re presented with in the general election. As a result, elections become a contest to determine which candidate represents the lesser evil.

 

Some will say, “It was ever thus.”

 

But it really wasn’t. Obviously, it’s true that prior to the adoption of primaries, people still argued about whether general election candidates were qualified for the job. But that argument tended to be comparative: Is candidate A more qualified than candidate B?

 

That’s because there was a backstop: Party leaders vetted and ultimately vouched for the candidates. The party establishment’s decision to nominate a candidate was on the ballot, too. After 1972, that decision-making process was outsourced to whoever showed up to vote in the primaries.

 

Democracy fetishists and populists (not the same thing) may think that’s exactly how it should work. But I am neither a democracy fetishist nor a populist. Democracy is what should happen between the parties, not within them. This is even more the case in an era where campaign finance reform and partisan media have basically made it impossible for grown-ups in the party to put their thumbs on the scale for the more responsible or electable candidate. Parties run by grown-ups would simply say, “Yeah, we’re not nominating the dude with the Nazi tattoo” or “Paxton is not fit for the nomination and, besides, we’re obliged to support the incumbent, who is more electable and upstanding anyway.”

 

No other significant institution in American life has been democratized the way the parties have (and no major democratic country does it the way we do). In fact, I struggle to think of any significant institution that has been internally democratized at all, certainly not the Catholic Church, the military, the police, etc. One could argue that much of the media has been democratized in the sense that so much of it organized around the imperative to tell audiences what they want to hear. Some also wrestle with a younger generation of staffers who think they should be able to rebel against management when “justice” demands it. How has that worked out for us?

 

There are two problems with supporting the lesser of two evils. The first is you’re still supporting evil. If the word “evil” triggers you, feel free to substitute “less bad.” You’re still voting for bad (or unqualified or dangerous or corrupt).

 

The second problem is that in an era where all notions of small-r republican virtue elicit contempt from anyone who finds virtue inconvenient to their pursuit of power, power becomes the measure of virtue. How many people who said Trump was the lesser evil a decade ago “evolved” to believe that Trump was the avatar of all that is good? His bad character was once a regrettable problem that was outweighed by the need to defeat Hillary Clinton. In short order, the definition of good character was rewritten to fit Trump. The same thing is happening before our eyes with Graham Platner, and I’m sure we’ll get there with Paxton.

 

I would like to live in a country where institutions, specifically political parties, do what institutions are supposed to do: take themselves and their responsibilities seriously. Serious parties screen, vet, and test candidates for office, just as serious news outlets vet their reporting and serious businesses vet their products.

 

When you hear someone say “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” you should ask them what they mean by that. Because republic is just a fancy word for “establishment”—a group of leaders who care about what the people think, but also care about what is right and proper.

 

Lacking responsible institutions that care about character and qualifications isn’t an excuse to abandon such concerns. It means that responsibility falls on voters (and journalists). It was good and valuable to have parties (and major media outlets) that took their responsibilities seriously. Just because they have abdicated their responsibilities doesn’t mean you’re liberated from yours. If a candidate is unqualified, it doesn’t matter if they have an R or D after their name. I’m not saying you have a moral requirement to make the perfect the enemy of the good, or that it is unacceptable to vote for the lesser evil. I am saying that you have a moral obligation not to lie about it, to yourself or anybody else. Because when you start saying the lesser evil is objectively good, you’re still calling evil “good.” And it never is.

Finishing the Job

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

Last week our friend David French summarized the state of play with Iran this way: “At the moment, the United States is negotiating with a regime that President Trump claimed we had already changed, to open a strait that was supposed to be open last month, and to end a nuclear program that we said we had obliterated.”

 

Geez. When you put it that way, it’s amazing that support for the war is still as high as 35.7 percent.

 

David’s piece was published before yesterday’s resumption of hostilities, when Iran launched air attacks against U.S. allies Kuwait and Bahrain and American forces responded with strikes on Qeshm Island. That was the second time in eight days that the two sides had skirmished. Which means we can update his formulation to add that the United States is also currently observing a “ceasefire” in which fire hasn’t ceased.

 

The president was asked about all of this on Monday and claimed that he’s grown bored with negotiations. “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly,” he told CNBC. “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.” Which wasn’t true: Given the tenor of his phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that same day, he cares a lot.

 

But let’s assume that he meant it. He’s given up on talks. Is it time at last to finish the job?

 

Byron York addressed that subject last week in a piece for the Washington Examiner. “It’s a question heard everywhere from casual cookouts to the halls of Congress: Why doesn’t President Donald Trump just finish the job in Iran?” he wrote. “Bomb the hell out of it, send in the troops, double down, and get it over with?”

 

I’ve had the same question put to me, verbatim, by a Trump supporter I know while chatting about the stalemate. The president tried jaw-jaw, he told me, so now it’s time for war-war—as if war-war wasn’t what we spent the first seven weeks of the conflict doing.

 

All of which makes this one of those rare and horrifying moments when a senescent megalomaniac who wants to put his face on the money seems more sober than many members of his own party. To insist that Trump should “finish the job” in Iran is to invite two exasperated replies on his behalf, one obvious and one less so. The obvious one: Do you realize what “finishing” it could entail?

 

Less obvious: What is “the job” at this point?

 

The job.

 

We’ve arrived at the stage of this conflict where American and Israeli definitions of “the job” have plainly diverged.

 

And I do mean plainly. “You’re f—ing crazy,” an Axios source paraphrased the president as telling Netanyahu on Monday. “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” If you aren’t worried about Trump eventually scapegoating the Jewish state for the war, you should be.

 

The conflict began with the two nations’ interests aligned. Both sought nothing less than regime change in Iran, assessing correctly that Khomeinists will seek ways to threaten American and Israeli interests as long as they’re in power. Mossad believed they could be toppled; Trump agreed, letting his fantasies about another Venezuela-like capitulation override the skepticism of his own CIA director.

 

Yet, for obvious reasons of size, capabilities, and geography, the threat that the two countries face from Iran isn’t symmetrical.

 

Israel needs to worry about all forms of power projection by its regional neighbor, very much including conventional attacks like the ones being staged from Lebanon by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Nothing will solve that problem short of cutting off the head of the snake. The United States, however, worries mainly about unconventional power projection, i.e. nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. And that problem can be solved—or managed, for some period of time—without decapitation by degrading Iran’s nuclear program and missile arsenal.

 

So when dreams of regime change went up in smoke during the first weeks of the war, the two partners were destined to disagree about what “the job” going forward entailed. Netanyahu would logically want to fight on, eager to seize this opportunity to further weaken an already battered enemy and knowing that Israelis would support a sustained campaign against an existential threat. But Trump would look for an exit, believing that key U.S. goals on Iranian nuclear enrichment (and ICBMs) could be achieved in negotiations—as had happened once before—and fearing that Americans wouldn’t tolerate another Middle Eastern “forever war.”

 

The Iranians cleverly exploited that asymmetry. By tantalizing the White House with concessions on nukes while drawing red lines around Hezbollah, the Khomeinists functionally enlisted Trump as a partner against Israel in protecting their conventional capabilities.

 

That explains how we ended up with the president screaming at Israel’s leader through the phone on Monday. Trump was angry at Netanyahu for escalating his reprisals against Hezbollah in Lebanon, as doing so threatened to spoil negotiations with Iran. (The same negotiations he supposedly “couldn’t care less” about, mind you.) That was a rational reaction from a president who believes he can get what America needs from Tehran at the bargaining table and spare himself the political and economic costs of further warfare.

 

But the escalation in Lebanon was also a rational reaction by Netanyahu. He understands that Iran’s power in the region will grow once America retreats, so he’s making hay of the present conflict to weaken the proxy on his doorstep. Telling him that he’s imperiling the ceasefire by retaliating against Hezbollah must sound absurd to him. Hezbollah is Iran, for all intents and purposes. They already broke the ceasefire—ecstatically.

 

So when Trump fans declare that he should “finish the job,” which job do they mean? The job of regime change, which seven weeks of bombing failed to accomplish? The job of seizing Iran’s enriched uranium? The job of destroying more Iranian missiles? The job of getting a deal that’s slightly better than the one Barack Obama negotiated, simply to let Trump save face?

 

If even the president and Benjamin Netanyahu can’t agree on what “the job” is, I’m afraid hawks will need to be more specific.

 

To some, “the job” at this stage is simply to ease the global inflation crunch by reopening the Strait of Hormuz, with nuclear negotiations to follow later. That was obviously Trump’s goal in ordering a naval blockade of the strait, aiming to force Iran to release its chokehold on regional oil commerce by choking off its own oil exports. But if that’s “the job,” those demanding that Trump “finish” it are asking for nothing more exalted than returning energy shipments to what they were on February 27, the day before U.S. and Israeli bombs began falling.

 

What sort of heroic sacrifice should Americans be expected to bear to simply restore the status quo ante before the White House launched this dumb, unpopular, unauthorized misadventure?

 

Finishing.

 

Even if you manage to settle on a workable definition of “the job,” you’re stuck having to explain how Trump should finish it.

 

We could try to finish the job of degrading Iran’s missile arsenal. But how? Despite the Pentagon hitting no fewer than 13,000 targets during the hot phase of the war, Iran still had roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and 70 percent of its mobile launchers intact as of a few weeks ago. Of the regime’s 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, 30 allegedly remain operational.

 

It is very hard to believe that our failure to do more damage to Iran’s arsenal was due to insufficient ruthlessness initially by Pete Hegseth and a president who likes to watch highlight reels of explosions. That sounds more like a capability problem. Hooting “finish the job” won’t fix it.

 

We could try to finish the job of crippling Iran’s enrichment program by sending in U.S. troops to seize the uranium that’s buried in the wreckage of nuclear facilities Trump bombed last year. But that would be very risky business for the men involved, as we’ve discussed before, with no assurance of success. Worse, it might be unnecessary: Iran willingly gave up most of its uranium after signing the Obama nuclear deal and allegedly sounds amenable to doing so again now.

 

If we can finish this particular job without getting any Americans killed, we should, no? Especially when the president has described confiscating the uranium as little more than “public relations” given that the U.S. is monitoring the sites where it’s buried 24/7.

 

We could try to finish the job in the Strait of Hormuz by deploying U.S. infantry to seek and destroy the drones, mines, missiles, and “mosquito fleet” that Iran has used to make the waterway impassable. But that would be a harrowing undertaking, according to former CIA analyst Ken Pollack. “You have to go almost door to door on the northern shore of the strait to do this,” he told the New York Times, estimating that “at least” one Army division would be needed for the task.

 

A division has more than 10,000 troops. My Trump-supporting acquaintance seems to think Americans will tolerate mass casualties in that endeavor even though they’ve never supported the war, are unclear on its goals, and were promised it would last no more than four to six weeks. (“Those soldiers signed up to fight!” he reminds me.) I do not.

 

But even if I’m wrong, seizing the coastline would be the easy part. How long would American soldiers need to occupy that territory to prevent Iran from regaining its positions and its chokehold on the strait? Could they ever leave?

 

We could try to finish the job of regime change, but I can’t imagine what that would look like in practice after the first go at it fell short. To attempt it with ground troops would involve an Iraq-scale invasion pitting Americans against a military much more formidable—and smartly organized—than Saddam Hussein’s. To attempt it with another massive bombing campaign (“a whole civilization will die tonight”) would likely create terrible hardship for the people of Iran and almost certainly fail to force the regime to surrender.

 

After all, the Khomeinists’ strategy is to show that they can take any punch the United States throws at them while maintaining their grip on the strait. It’s worked well enough that the president has been forced to come to the bargaining table and consider concessions that would send billions of dollars to the regime and potentially lift sanctions. Why would they abandon it now in response to a new round of intense bombing, especially if Trump is foolish enough to hand them a propaganda victory by committing war crimes?

 

There’s something else that the average barstool hawk isn’t considering: Every extra day of conflict with Iran will dig the United States deeper into a readiness hole. One recent analysis estimated that the conflict has already cost the Pentagon “at least 45 percent of its stockpile of Precision Strike Missiles; at least half of its inventory of THAAD missiles, which are designed to intercept ballistic missiles; and nearly 50 percent of its stockpile of Patriot air defense interceptor missiles.” It will take three years at least to restore those critical weapons systems to their prewar capacity.

 

“Finishing the job” in Iran potentially means not being able to finish it in a future war where there’s more at stake for the United States.

 

On top of all that, a new round of escalation with Iranians would mean a new surge in gas prices and a new spike in global inflation. More financial misery for average people will flow from that, and electoral misery for the president’s party will flow in turn. If you think continuing the war is so important that it’s worth inflicting further hardship on Americans and total destruction on the GOP at the polls, fair enough. But my guess is that much of the “finish the job” contingent hasn’t given a moment’s thought to it.

 

Mugged by reality.

 

I haven’t seen data that would prove it, but I’d bet that that contingent is dominated by older people. And not just because younger ones (especially draft-age men) logically have more reason to worry about a war widening than the elderly do.

 

“Finish the job” is the sort of glib reaction you might be prone to have if you were weaned on the idea of American military supremacy as a sort of Newtonian law of nature. If you came of age during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, you’ve already learned hard lessons about the limits of military power. But if you came of age after World War II, hearing of how the United States rolled back two sinister imperial juggernauts simultaneously, you’ll spend your life believing that there’s nothing our boys can’t do.

 

It’s not a coincidence that the president came of age after World War II, I think.

 

“Trump believed that the U.S. military was unstoppable,” The Atlantic reported last month, explaining his thinking in choosing to attack Iran. The proximate cause of that hubris was the child’s-play ease with which Nicolás Maduro was removed in Venezuela, but it makes sense that a baby boomer would overestimate what the armed forces are capable of. Especially to an “American greatness” nostalgist like Trump, I’d imagine that our failures in Iraq and Vietnam were chiefly a product of having dumb nation-builders as leaders who insisted on overly restrictive rules of engagement.

 

Once we had someone like him in charge, we’d be back to our old unstoppable ways.

 

I suspect many people his age and a bit younger share that belief. Postliberals in particular should be inclined to believe it, as they tend to blame problems on failures of will by “soft” leaders who won’t act as ruthlessly as is necessary to solve them. Combine that with boomers’ faith that the U.S. military is invincible, and you have a perfect recipe among right-wing hawks for wanting to “finish the job” in Iran: The only obstacle to victory is our willingness to achieve it, so let’s achieve it!

 

We’re in a bad, strange place when Donald Trump, of all people, is a very belated voice of reason to the contrary.

 

I’m reluctant to say that a fantasist as stuporous as the president has been mugged by reality, but the fact that he’s straining to end the war without further hostilities suggests he’s now less deluded about the military’s capabilities than much of his boomer cohort is. It shouldn’t be surprising, really: Unlike them, he must have received many sobering briefings about the many potential costs that I’ve described of restarting the campaign.

 

Yet it is surprising. This is not a man known for responding rationally to bad news and adjusting his tactics accordingly.

 

My advice is to enjoy his skepticism of “finishing the job” while it lasts, as no one will blink if he ends up trying to destroy Iran anyway in the belief that one more hard punch to the nose will surely, surely cause the regime to capitulate. Someone who’s spent as many years believing in the military’s, and his own, invincibility as Trump has will not lightly be disabused of his illusions. But if that’s too pessimistic a note to end on, remember that Iran is unlikely to be the last war he fights—and that the next demonstration of how unstoppable he is should go more smoothly than this one.

Trump Has Lost the Thread on Iran

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, June 03, 2026

 

President Trump seems to think that his diplomatic efforts to resolve his war against the Islamic Republic of Iran are going swimmingly.

 

“Yeah, I’d like to meet him,” the president said of his Iranian counterpart, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, in an interview with the New York Post’s Miranda Devine. Trump gushed over the “respect” Iran’s new ayatollah enjoys, even if he is “missing a lot of different parts,” and Trump forecast a face-to-face with Khamenei “at some point, depending on how it all works out.” After all, he added, “we seem to be getting along quite well.”

 

Maybe the president is trying to butter up his interlocutor in his pursuit of a favorable diplomatic resolution to the war. He could also be attempting to speak what he knows to be unreality into existence, as he so often does. Or perhaps the president is simply delusional.

 

Either way, Trump’s forbearance risks sacrificing the gains that the U.S. and Israel made during Operation Epic Fury. Indeed, his bottomless well of patience with the remnants of the Iranian regime could have further-reaching consequences than even the war itself.

 

In his sit-down with Devine, Trump confirmed reporting in Axios and elsewhere that he launched into a profanity-laced tirade in a recent conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump admitted that he expressed his frustration with Bibi for “constantly fighting with Lebanon.”

 

If that’s what the president told his Israeli counterpart, Trump has a loose grasp of the facts. Israel is engaged in a fight with the Iranian terrorist proxy Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, not the Lebanese government — a fight that began when Hezbollah attacked Israel during the kinetic phase of the president’s war.

 

The Iranian regime, which had previously denied that it had any operational control over Hezbollah, has shifted its position. Today, Iran insists that the U.S.–Israeli war against Tehran and the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah are the same conflict, and they must end simultaneously. Trump’s acquiescence to Iran’s advocacy on Hezbollah’s behalf is an unreciprocated gift to the Islamic Republic.

 

Indeed, the president announced this week that he “had a very good call with Hezbollah, and they agreed that all shooting will stop.” But Hezbollah did not stop shooting, and Trump broke the taboo against direct White House engagement with Iran’s terrorist proxies for nothing.

 

Someone who prides himself on understanding the “Art of the Deal” should be expected to recognize leverage when he encounters it. But Trump seems to have gotten little out of his tacit concession to the Iranian side, humiliating himself and his Israeli allies in the process.

 

That’s only the latest embarrassment Trump is engineering for himself. To a farcical degree, this administration remains committed to the notion that there is a cease-fire in place in the region when the evidence of your own eyes tells you otherwise. Since major combat operations ceased on April 8, the U.S. and Iranian forces have periodically shot at one another’s assets. But this week has been especially hot.

 

On Monday, the United States executed limited retaliatory strikes on Iranian radar and offensive drone sites after Iran reportedly shot down an unmanned American drone. Iran responded by firing missiles at U.S. soldiers stationed inside Kuwait.

 

Each of Iran’s missiles “failed to hit their intended targets,” according to CENTCOM. But Iran’s disproportionate attacks on regional targets led the Pentagon to conduct “self-defense strikes” on key elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, including a ground-control station on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz.

 

Iranian forces again responded with disproportionate force, lobbing dozens of drones and missiles at Bahrain and Kuwait. Kuwait City claims that 63 people were injured and one person was killed in the air assault on its civilian infrastructure, including the country’s badly damaged international airport.

 

Iran’s conduct suggests that it has adopted a doctrinal approach to the cease-fire in which it reacts to provocations with more than the measure meted out against it. The Islamic Republic whisperer Trita Parsi all but confirmed that impression on Tuesday when he related that his “Iranian sources” are “now striking back ‘at least 1.5x as hard’ for every attack the US against Iran.”

 

The region is once again up in arms. Representatives for the United Arab Emirates condemned “Iranian aggression.” Kuwait called the attacks on its territory “criminal” acts, declaring Iran’s diplomats in the country persona non grata and ordering their expulsion. Saudi Arabia savaged “the brutal Iranian aggression and the flagrant violation of sovereignty of Bahrain and Kuwait.” But Trump is taking the whole thing in stride.

 

During Operation Epic Fury, the region’s Sunni powers — stunned by Iran’s attacks on their civilian assets — rallied to the side of the Americans and the Israelis. Trump’s nonchalance risks altering the region’s risk calculation. They only gravitated toward the U.S. because the U.S. was the regional power actively protecting their interests. If he’s not going to hold up his end of that bargain, why should they?

 

The president’s unfailing resolve to secure a diplomatic conclusion to the war highlights the political pressure on him to avoid a return to high-tempo combat operations. But the Iranians are feeling the pain, too.

 

“Iran’s Central Bank said the consumer price index, which measures a basket of goods and services, reached 77.2 percent in May compared with the year before,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday. “Inflation in daily and general needs — like medicine, taxi fares, tobacco and communication fees — rose 113.8 percent from the year before.”

 

The economic pressure on Iran, which one think tank noted is unlike anything the country has experienced since at least World War II, may be fracturing the regime from within. One Iranian diaspora network revealed at the end of May that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian offered to resign. Whether or not that’s true, hardliners within the regime are attempting to discredit and sideline the accommodationists within the Iranian hierarchy.

 

The New York Times wrote last week that those hardline elements set out to impugn Pezeshkian and his ally, General Mohamed Ghalibaf, by revealing the existence of a letter to the supreme leader warning that Trump’s blockade was functioning as the president intended. “The letter warned that the economic situation was dire,” the Times related. “The government faced an acute budget crisis, and there could be mass riots, the two senior officials said.”

 

Iran’s behavior is becoming more erratic as it hemorrhages hundreds of millions of dollars per day under the weight of economic isolation. And yet, the regime continues to speak with one voice, and it retains the ability to coordinate with commanders on the ground to send coherent political signals by attacking U.S. and regional targets.

 

Nor should observers dismiss the endless talks as a total disaster for the U.S. The Atlantic’s Karim Sadjadpour recently observed that the maddening Iranian “bazaar style” approach to negotiation involves driving your interlocutor crazy. As Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in his memoir, “continuous and tireless bargaining” is designed to frustrate and bore the other side of the talks into conceding just to give the impression of progress.

 

Well, Trump is giving the Iranians a dose of their own medicine. America, Iran’s foreign minister recently complained, is “constantly changing its views and putting forward new or contradictory demands,” which will “prolong negotiations.” Trump may be bored, but he hasn’t walked away from the conflict. He may perceive that time is on his side.

 

It is, however, clear that the president hopes to avoid the resumption of hostilities for valid political and practical reasons. But even as he projects confidence in his commitment to staying the course, he’s lost sight of the course he’s on. It is no longer one that will lead to an unambiguous victory over the Islamic Republic.

 

If the war was a tactical triumph, the cease-fire has been a disappointment. If anyone should know what throwing good money after bad looks like, it’s Donald Trump. He should cut his losses, ditch the talks, and prove that his threats are more than bluster.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund Is Dead. Long Live Its Death

National Review Online

Thursday, June 04, 2026

 

Well, that didn’t take very long. Two weeks after we editorialized against the Trump administration’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a House subcommittee hearing that the administration is not going forward with the fund.

 

That’s good news. It’s a sign that Senate Republicans in particular have remembered that they run an independent branch of the federal government, with its own responsibility to voters and its own duty to uphold the Constitution and the laws it writes. They should go two steps further: bar Trump from reviving the idea, and ensure that future presidents are no longer empowered to engage in similar mischief.

 

Republicans on the Hill, especially in the Senate, had concerns from the start about the fund. Its huge and transparently symbolic price tag was obviously not calibrated to any realistic assessment of the government’s actual liability for legal wrongs allegedly committed by the Biden administration. Its December 1, 2028, end date was obviously designed to ensure that it served the politics of this administration and not its successors. There were real worries that it would be used not only as a corrupt slush fund to reward political allies, but specifically to pay off January 6 rioters in ways that would be both morally wrong and politically embarrassing to Republicans.

 

To the extent that there’s an argument for creating new rights of compensation for government misconduct beyond those already on the books, that’s the job of Congress. The Senate and House were justifiably concerned that the fund would be an end run around their powers, and would be used by Trump and Blanche to redress what they perceive as unfairness and injustice rather than to pay for violations of established legal rights that could be proven in court.

 

It is also heartening to see that the power of the purse still works. The direct impetus for Blanche’s concession was that he and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin were both testifying hat in hand as Congress considers another bill to fund immigration enforcement. That gave leverage to the legislative branch that it seems at times to forget that it has.

 

The fund was publicly indefensible, and election years have a way of putting a stop to indefensible things. The closest thing to a defense of the fund is that prior Democratic administrations have also used collusive settlements to pay off political allies who did not suffer specific legal wrongs that could have been proven in court. But that’s just another way of saying that what is wrong today was wrong before Trump got to town.

 

Republicans should use the uproar over the Trump fund as an opportunity and a teaching moment, and pressure Democrats to agree to more restrictions on the self-licking ice cream cone that is the permanent Judgment Fund. Critics have long argued that the fund, which pays out claims without consequence to the budgets of offending agencies and which abdicated congressional oversight over executive spending on settlements, is ripe for abuse and offends the proper separation of powers. This would be an excellent time to fix that.

Do Senate Democrats Really Buy Graham Platner’s Assurances?

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, June 04, 2026

 

“Worse than [the] Nazi tattoo.”

 

That’s the claim of Steve Robinson, who runs the website Maine Wire, regarding some sort of forthcoming scandal news about Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner. I think that may be the first time those words have been put in that order in the English language.

 

Robinson isn’t alone; other folks claim to have heard similar claims of some worse scandal that will emerge soon.

 

Yesterday on X, I had some fun wondering just what skeleton Platner could have in his closet that could be worse than having a tattoo of the Nazi SS Totenkopf tattooed on his chest for 18 years.

 

A tattoo that the military history buff insisted that he never recognized as a symbol of the Nazis, even as he discussed on Reddit forums the German helmets in a photo of the Swedish Volunteer Battalion in a trench during the Continuation War in 1941. (More solid reporting from the good folks over at the Washington Free Beacon.) For a guy who says he knew nothing about the Nazis, he sure seemed to know a lot about the Nazis.

 

A tattoo that he coincidentally just happened to cover up in his photo on the hook-up app, Kik.

 

If you’re not familiar with the app Kik, Aaron Ford, the Democratic attorney general of Nevada, offered some details in August of last year.

 

“Kik’s anonymity feature and low barrier to entry, among other things, harm Nevada’s youth,” said AG Ford. “The company’s actions and false claims of safety also put Nevada’s children in danger. I will not allow companies to neglect their responsibilities to Nevada’s youth, and I will bring any offender that does so to court.”

 

Kik’s easily created anonymous accounts have created a haven for child predators and facilitated the dissemination of child sexual assault material. Until recently, Kik actively marketed itself to teen audiences, all the while failing to disclose known hazards and risks.

 

The OAG has alleged that Kik’s low barrier to entry — the app did not require email, phone or other identification — and its large userbase — the company once boasted that 40 percent of American teens used its platform — made the app a “predator’s paradise” according to one serial offender.

 

So, the Maine Democratic Senate candidate was looking for extramarital sexual thrills on an app that a Democratic law enforcement official and one of its users has characterized as a “predator’s paradise.”

 

Platner still had an active profile on Kik as of the start of the week.

 

The Wall Street Journal has the scoop about how Platner assured Senate Democrats in Washington on Tuesday that he has no more skeletons in his closet, and that they don’t have anything to worry about with additional scandals or bombshells.

 

In a private meeting Tuesday with some Senate Democrats, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner attempted to quell growing concerns from some in the party that a string of negative revelations about his life had jeopardized his candidacy.

 

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders asked Platner if any additional allegations would emerge against the embattled Democratic candidate, according to people familiar with the discussion. Platner said there weren’t any.

 

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also attended the meeting, followed up and said there is a big difference between marital issues and allegations of sexual assault, the people said. Platner agreed and denied any credible allegations of assault were forthcoming.

 

“It’s not a secret I’ve had a messy, complicated life,” he told the senators, one of the people said. “The worst of the rumors we’ve all heard are not true.”

 

I don’t know about you, but that wording does not seem particularly reassuring if you’re a Democrat. First, which rumors was Platner referring to? And if only “the worst” are not true… how about the merely moderately bad? Doesn’t that sound like a de facto concession that some rumors out there are true?

 

Mind you, in April, Platner assured a supporter that he had no additional scandals or past bad behavior to disclose.

 

Toward the end of a town hall meeting in Sabattus, Maine, in April, the night before Ms. Mills dropped out, a Platner supporter named Carolyn Greeley asked him a blunt question.

 

“Is there anything you need to share with us?” she asked.

 

Ms. Greeley was bothered by his past comments about women, she said, and wanted assurances that there would not be more damaging revelations to come.

 

Mr. Platner was unequivocal in his response. Republicans would certainly “make stuff up” about him, he said. He had dated, had girlfriends, “gone through life.” But everything had already been “dragged up,” he promised the crowd.

 

“In my past, there is not some big, dark secret,” he said.

 

And here’s Platner in an interview with the New York Times, May 16:

 

Q: The test right now is if you can run in a general election. There have already been quite a few controversies, and we’re going to talk about that later. But the G.O.P. is going to dig up everything and more that they can.

 

Platner: And probably lie at some point.

 

Q: Is there something new you want to get ahead of?

 

Platner: No. I have lived my life. I’ve been there for the whole thing. I know what I’ve been through.

 

In other words, Platner has twice already assured the public that he has no other scandals he needed to admit, and then the Kik account and sexting came out. If you’re a Democratic senator, why on earth would you believe his assurances now?

 

One more thought, from that essay from River Page in the Free Press that I mentioned earlier this week, about the notion of regrettable tattoos.

 

Likely, there are many in Maine who can sympathize with Platner’s embarrassing situation. One in four Americans say they regret at least one tattoo, according to a 2023 consumer survey, and removing them is a $1.29 billion industry.

 

Okay, but when people say they regret a tattoo, I figure it’s often a circumstance that they got a tattoo of the person who they thought they were going to marry, but who ended up cheating on them or dumping them. Or they got one that they thought was of the Chinese characters for ‘serenity’ and the tattoo artist gave them ones that mean ‘gullible.’ I have a hard time believing there are that many Maine voters who relate to getting a symbol of the Nazi Schutzstaffel concentration camp guards.

 

It’s been fascinating to see the euphemisms deployed to defend sticking with Platner at this point. Jesus Mesa of Newsweek refers to the Democratic Party’s “purity tests” and “years of holding candidates to strict standards of personal and ideological conduct.” Don’t have a Nazi tattoo for 18 years, and don’t use the app called a “predator’s paradise”… those are “strict standards”? Those are “purity tests”?

 

Amanda Litman, co-founder of Democratic recruitment and training organization Run for Something, said in a video statement, “[I]s Graham Platner a perfect person? No.” Again, the standard is not perfection; the standard is no connections to neo-Nazi-ism nor presence on a social media platform for sexual predators.

 

Litman also declared that “people are allowed to grow and change.” (Take that, straw man!) Except the sexting was from last summer. Where’s the evidence that he’s grown and changed?

 

There are a handful of voices on the left who are horrified by what they’re seeing from their fellow progressives, who adamantly insist they stand for something better and higher than the moral turpitude of Donald Trump and the glaring hypocrisy of his religious-right defenders. But Alan Elrod notices that a whole bunch of supposedly feminist men are defending Platner with blatantly misogynist rhetoric.

 

Jerusalem Desmas notices that the defenses of Platner are coming oddly close to insisting that cheating on your wife is a virtue: “What unites these reactions isn’t so much the defense of Platner as the staunch denial that there’s anything wrong here at all. Cheating isn’t a moral failing we can forgive; it’s a mark of rugged authenticity, and any qualms about infidelity are the prissy reflexes of an out-of-touch elite. . . . A choice I make because someone else lied to me isn’t really my choice at all. This is the old liberal point about why deception wrongs us — it’s not about the sex, it’s the theft of another person’s ability to make an informed decision about her own life.”

 

(Some people would argue it is about the sex, but let’s also recognize that a lot of people would be deeply distraught to hear their spouse declare that they’ve secretly fallen in love with someone else but hadn’t consummated the relationship.)

 

Magdi Jacobs reminds us that Platner was expelled from the elite Connecticut prep boarding school Hotchkiss, and that Platner’s claim he was expelled for truancy does not align with the school’s stated policies. Expulsion at the school requires . . . more serious violations.

Scott Pelley’s Left-Wing Bias Was Clear Long Before His Firing from 60 Minutes

By Kaitlyn Kiepert

Thursday, June 04, 2026

 

Scott Pelley’s 37-year career with CBS News ended on Tuesday after the 60 Minutes correspondent accused Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the newsmagazine.

 

After a long career at CBS, Pelley’s downfall came as he resisted changes by Weiss and other new leaders who sought to return an air of objectivity to the program.

 

“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” wrote 60 Minutes’ new executive producer, Nick Bilton, in Pelley’s letter of termination. “I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama.”

 

Bilton, a British-American journalist with a background in film but not in television news, was appointed the newsmagazine’s new executive producer on May 28. Pelley met the new hire with hostility, having been a supporter of former executive producer Tanya Simon, who was fired that same day.

 

Bilton’s appointment was the final straw for Pelley amid a tense season at CBS as he and many of his fellow veteran reporters resisted Weiss’s new aims.

 

“60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause,” he wrote in a letter after being fired. “Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.”

 

“For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” he said. “I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified.”

 

But despite claims that she aims to shift CBS to the political right, Weiss is a self-identified “left-leaning centrist” whose stated goal is to serve the forgotten majority of Americans who are neither part of “an America-loathing far left” nor a “history-erasing far right” and have been ill-served.

 

In attempting to achieve that mission, she set out ten “core journalistic values” when she took over the news network last year, including the goal of holding “both American political parties to equal scrutiny” and a promise to report on the world “as it actually is.”

 

But Pelley and others at the program had gotten comfortable injecting their own left-wing biases into 60 Minutes.

 

Pelley made clear his political positions and his distaste for President Trump on many occasions.

 

On March 4, 2025, Pelley interviewed Marc Elias, the elections and voting rights attorney who defended the Biden administration and Democratic National Committee in lawsuits brought by President Trump over the 2020 election results. Pelley introduced the program with a statement aimed directly at the Trump administration: “It was nearly impossible to get anyone on camera for this story because of the fear now running through our system of justice,” Pelley said.

 

“[D]espite being a target,” the 60 Minutes Facebook page announced, “Mark Elias is still talking.” Many of the network’s left-wing viewers applauded Elias as a “hero” and celebrated his “very brave 60 minutes,” while critics were quick to point out the show’s bias toward Democrats.

 

Pelley’s attacks on Trump were even more direct one month prior, during a 60 Minutes program on the dismantling of USAID.

 

Aired on February 16, 2025, the program opened with a direct reproach of the president. “It’s too soon to tell how serious President Trump is in defiance of the Constitution,” Pelley said. “Presidents often push limits — FDR’s New Deal, for example — and voters in this last election wanted change. But the scope and speed of Trump’s reach for power may be unprecedented.”

 

The program also targeted Elon Musk, accusing him of exorbitant spending and unwarranted job cuts.

 

Following the 2024 election, Pelley’s November 17, 2024, program was widely criticized for its overt rebuke of Republicans. “This past week, Republicans won the House majority and President-elect Trump made nominations to his Cabinet,” he said. “Some nominees appear to have no compelling qualifications other than loyalty to Trump.”

 

By the end of the update, his tone was outright skeptical. “It’s up to the new Republican majority in the Senate to decide whether these nominees are equipped to represent the American people,” he said. “It seems hard to remember when America was united.”

 

And in March 2025, Pelley delivered an anti-Trump commencement address at Wake Forest Academy. In it, he compared modern America to George Orwell’s dystopia in 1984 and encouraged the graduates to fight against the fear stirred up by modern American leaders.

 

“‘Diversity’ is now described as ‘illegal.’ ‘Equity’ is to be shunned,” he said. “‘Inclusion’ is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends. There is nothing new in this.”

 

But Pelley failed to use that same critical tone when reporting on President Biden.

 

Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Pelley met with then-President Joe Biden during his October 15 60 Minutes program. “Rarely does a president confront so much peril; the catastrophe in Israel — the war in Ukraine — and no help from a paralyzed Congress,” Pelley said, opening the program. Pelley acknowledged Biden’s apparent weariness but attributed his physical exhaustion and “life-long stutter” to the pressure of politics.

 

Pelley had also raised the subject of Biden’s age and general exhaustion during a 60 Minutes interview with Biden a year earlier, even going so far as to ask, “How would you say your mental focus is?”

 

Biden’s reply was indistinct. “I’d say it’s– I think it’s– I– I haven’t– look, I have trouble even mentioning, even saying to myself, my own head, the number of years. I no more think of myself as being as old as I am than fly,” he said.

 

Pelley turned away from the opportunity to press Biden on his slowly-delivered rambling, choosing to instead move on to discuss Biden’s “string of legislative successes” and his approval ratings.