SATURDAY: Who in the world was he talking about?

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2026

Yevtushenko, Watters: You're right! There was no mention of the president's ballyhooed national address on yesterday's edition of The Five.   

Answering yesterday afternoon's question, the Fox News Channel's apparent disappearing of the president's speech continued! In place of any such discussion, the normal standards of The Five prevailed:   

The program's first segment was dominated by Jesse Watters' mocking presentation regarding Ashley Webb, a visibly awkward transgender woman who somehow got onto the undercard up in Maine this past Thursday night.  

What "undercard" are we talking about? We'll let CNN explain:   

Maine Democrats’ first debate laid bare their difficulty in replacing Graham Platner   

As Maine Democrats prepare to replace Graham Platner as their Senate nominee, eight candidates pitched themselves as best prepared to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins over two hours of debates Thursday night.

The first hour featured four candidates who were on the primary ballot in different races this year. All lost—but all earned at least 20% of the vote in their contests.

Former public health official Nirav Shah pointed to his performance in the gubernatorial primary (he earned the most first-place votes, but finished second once ranked-choice votes were tabulated). Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson touted his state-level accomplishments. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows highlighted her attempt to disqualify President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot...

The second hour was an undercard of sorts, with four lesser-known candidates looking to break through in the abbreviated race...

And so on from there.

How had this collection of candidates been assembled? We aren't entirely sure.

According to the New York Times, "twelve Maine Democrats ha[d] signed up to run to replace Graham Platner." We've seen no one explain why eight potential nominees, not twelve, took part in Thursday's two-tier event.   

At least three debaters in the first group possessed traditional qualifications. (We saw Shah do a town hall event on C-Span last weekend. We thought he was quite sharp.)

By way of contrast, Webb does not have traditional qualifications. Her performance was extremely uneasy—and as we mentioned, she identifies as transgender. 

Inevitably, this invited the extended ridicule from Watters which came at the start of yesterday's The Five, with a mocking lead-in from Kayleigh McEnany. Inevitably, producers had decided to direct the program's focus to the least polished, least qualified, of the possible nominees.

Plus, she was transgender! Watters took over from there.

After Watters finished his several minutes of mugging, no one, including Jessica Tarlov, found it within him- or herself to challenge what he had done.   

We'll suggest that you watch the way yesterday's program started, with a "disclaimer" from the clown star-adjacent McEnany that "this is not a skit from SNL."  To do so, just click here.

The Five is our rapidly failing nation's most-watched "cable news" program. Its audience is roughly three times the size of primetime programs on MS NOW. Yesterday's imitation of life is very much the way the program is typically designed to run.   

The president's Thursday night address was once again disappeared! Instead, the gang settled on the least capable of the eight Democratic hopefuls, then let the mockery of that transgender person flow.   

"No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko said, long ago. Along the way, in that eternal poem, he even offered this: 

People   

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. 

[...]

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?   

Who we knew as faulty. The poem continues from there.

"No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko plainly said. But who in the world was he talking about right at the start of his poem? 

Could he possibly have been talking about people like those you see on The Five? People like the unnamed people who produce that show?   

You're asking an excellent question! He was likely talking about the millions lost under Stalin—or about the thirty-three thousand, and after that the thousands more, described by the leading authority:  

Babi Yar 

Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, in which some 33,771 Jews were murdered. Other victims of massacres at the site included Soviet prisoners of war, communists and Romanies. It is estimated that a total of between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar during the German occupation.   

The decision to murder all the Jews in Kyiv was made by the German military governor Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch...Sonderkommando 4a and the 45th Battalion of the German Order Police conducted the shootings. Servicemen of the 303rd Battalion of the German Order Police at this time guarded the outer perimeter of the execution site.

The massacre was the largest mass-murder by the Nazi regime during the campaign against the Soviet Union, and it has been called "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust" to that particular date...  

With much, much more after that. Because Yevtushenko's most famous poem is Babi Yar (or Babiyy Yar), that may be who he was talking about at the start of People. 

We're sure there are different views about the poem, Babi Yar. The leading authority says this:   

Yevgeny Yevtushenko 

[...]   

Yevtushenko was one of the authors politically active during the Khrushchev Thaw. In 1961, he wrote what would become perhaps his most famous poem, Babiyy Yar, in which he denounced the Soviet distortion of historical fact regarding the Nazi massacre of the Jewish population of Kyiv in September 1941, as well as the anti-Semitism still widespread in the Soviet Union. 

The usual Soviet policy in relation to the Holocaust in Russia was to describe it as general atrocities against Soviet citizens and to avoid mentioning that it was a genocide of the Jews. However, Yevtushenko's work Babiyy Yar "spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but the Soviet government's own persecution of Jewish people." 

The poem was published in a major newspaper, Literaturnaya Gazeta, achieved widespread circulation in numerous copies, and later was set to music, together with four other Yevtushenko poems, by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar. 

Of Yevtushenko's work, Shostakovich has said, "Morality is a sister of conscience. And perhaps God is with Yevtushenko when he speaks of conscience. Every morning, in place of prayers, I reread or repeat by memory two poems by Yevtushenko: 'Career' or 'Boots'."   

We're sure that there are other views. Along the way in Babi Yar, Yevtushenko, in translation, is able to offer this: 

Babi Yar 

[...]

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The “Union of the Russian People!”

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes...  

And so on from there. At this site, as we've noted before, we consider Anne Frank to be a sacred being, though others may have alternate views. 

(Very happy, very young.) 

For a different translation, through PBS, you can just click here.   

That's who he may have been thinking about when he made his remarkable statement. That said, he quite explicitly went beyond that. Quite explicitly, Yevtushenko claimed that no people are uninteresting. 

He stated that view about everyone. We'll offer more musings next week.

Next week: "The politics of meaning?"

FRIDAY: Sitting president delivers address!

FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2026

Fox & Friends disappears it: We still haven't watched the full speech. Last night was one of the rare occasions when the president's viewers were falling asleep before he did!  

That said:   

It isn't always what a cable news channel might say—it's what the channel leaves unsaid! Over at Mediaite, Tom Durante advances a striking claim about the Fox News Channel:   

Fox & Friends Completely Ignores Trump’s Election Speech—Doesn’t Mention It Once in 3-Hour Show   

As other networks picked apart President Donald Trump’s prime-time address to the nation early Friday morning, Fox News went in a completely different direction.

Fox & Friends produced not one mention of the president’s address from the night before, during which the commander in chief once again attempted to cast doubt on the integrity of American elections—pointing a finger at Venezuela and China.

Instead, the regular lineup of co-hosts Brian Kilmeade, Ainsley Earhardt, and Lawrence Jones discussed the latest campaign of U.S. airstrikes against Iran, the air quality crisis choking much of America, disastrous flooding in Texas, the World Cup, and a “phenomenal” speech—by Marco Rubio.  

Near the end of the three-hour show, the F&F crew turned it over to America’s Newsroom host Dana Perino for a preview of the 9 a.m. show. In it, she also did not mention the speech.   

And so on from there.  

Assuming the accuracy of Durante's claim, that's a very sharp bit of reporting. Despite the massive emphasis the president placed on this event, it seems to have been disappeared by the Fox News Channel!  

Any news org can be defined by the events and topics it chooses to ignore. But this is quite a report from Durante:

What will they say on The Five?

Award-winning national update: Did Perino and company mention the speech on America's Newsroom?  In a sense, but not as such! 

As you can see by clicking here, Chad Pergram offered a two-minute report on Trump's desire to pass the so-called SAVE America Act. No other part of the speech was mentioned. 

Though a bit of videotape was played, Pergram never mentioned the fact that a ballyhooed national address had actually been delivered.

On CNN and MS NOW, the speech has been aggressively fact-checked. Over on the Fox News Channel, it doesn't seem to have happened at all!

NO PEOPLE... Attempted suicide twice, age 12!

FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2026

We advise you to pity the child: "No people are uninteresting?"   

Would that include the 12-year-old child who is described in this passage from a new AP report?

An immediate relative of David Brouillette who spoke on the condition that their name not be used said he was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder as a child—a diagnosis that Ashley Brouillette confirmed. The immediate relative described him as “extremely mentally ill” and said he attempted suicide twice at age 12 and was hospitalized multiple times.  

The relative said they’ve been estranged for years, after they broke off contact because they feared he would harm them. He did not respond to their outreach this week, the relative added.

For ourselves, we'd advise you to pity the child—the child who was so deeply disturbed when he was 12 years old. 

In this instance, the tragedy grows. This is the start of the AP report, no paywall, headline included:

AP Exclusive: ICE officer in Maine shooting has history of violent behavior, family and records say 

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press.

David Brouillette has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of attacking women in his life over the years, and one shared a voicemail with the AP from last winter in which he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.

Brouillette’s troubling past further challenges how thoroughly the Department of Homeland Security has vetted recruits as it went on a hiring spree to help carry out President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.   

At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched the crackdown after retaking office, including 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national who was shot and killed by Brouillette on Monday while in his car near his home in the coastal Maine city of Biddeford.   

Regarding the young man who was shot and killed, the New York Times has quoted a neighbor describing him and his wife:   

"They were always so happy and so polite. I’d be watering my flowers in front of the house, and they would stop and say, ‘Very nice flowers.’ And their little girl would wave.”  

They were always so happy. That's what the neighbor has said. 

Once again in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway once said this about his early years in Paris:   

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.  

That was a recollection from the earliest years, when he said that he and Hadley were "very poor and very happy." 

As we all know, when people are very happy and very young, they should get the chance to continue. Also, when people are 12 years old and are deeply disturbed, they should ideally get capable help.

In this case, it seems that no such assistance ever took hold. The AP report offers accounts of Brouillette's conduct as an adult which are truly horrific, if perhaps somewhat familiar.

These accounts involve abuse of his two wives and his children. The reported behaviors start as shown, but they become even worse:   

Brouillette, 37, told his ex-wife Ashley Brouillette late last year that he had been hired by ICE. She said that because of his long history of psychiatric issues, she thought he was having a mental health episode and she didn’t believe him. She didn’t realize he’d been telling the truth until this week, when videos began circulating online of the moments surrounding the shooting.  

Ashley Brouillette told the AP that she spoke to her ex-husband in a Facebook audio call, and he acknowledged that he had killed Durán Guerrero. Their 18-year-old daughter, Madison Brouillette, also told the AP that her father called her Wednesday and said that he shot and killed Durán Guerrero. 

David and Ashley Brouillette were high school sweethearts who got married in 2007. She said she divorced him in 2009 because he had become physically violent with her, which began after she got pregnant with their daughter.  

According to Ashley Brouillette, he once threw boiling water at her while she was holding their child—an incident her mother Avis Collins also recounted. The abuse continued after she left him, she said.

[...]   

His oldest daughter, Madison Brouillette, said she also witnessed her dad’s volatility.

“I watched my dad struggle a lot with a lot of things,” she told the AP. She said she came home from school once and he told her he had been sitting on a tree stump with a gun to his head.

Madison Brouillette is just 18. The report doesn't say how old she was when that incident occurred—and yes, the accounts of violence in the AP report get worse than what we've posted.  

This week, we've worked from a poem by Yevtushenko. "No people are uninteresting," he says as he begins:

People   

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a [person] lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting...

And so on from there. But who was Yevtushenko talking about? 

No people are uninteresting? Was he talking about someone like David Brouillette? 

We'll postpone that question until tomorrow. Today, we'll end with two points:   

First, journalists will speak explicitly about "mental illness" and "mental health issues" when reporting on incidents like this. They will not discuss the possibility of serious mental health disorders—the possibility of serious mental illness—in the case of major public officials, even if the official in question had to be sent off to "reform school" at the age of 12 because of his own disturbing behavior.   

(We advise you to pity the child.)

Second point:  

A phrase has been going through our heads in the past several days: "The Politics of Meaning." 

The politics of meaning! It suddenly played an unpleasant role in the discourse of the early 1990s, then disappeared from view.  

Do we need a politics of pity, compassion, engagement, forgiveness? A politics in which we all understand that whichever tribe may be our tribe, that tribe is quite often wrong too?   

Tomorrow: Who he (presumably) meant

THURSDAY: Once the witticisms end...

THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2026

...they turn to the evasions: We employ the moment to offer a gripe about the weekly Bruni/Stephens colloquy at the New York Times. 

This week's colloquy starts as shown. Our gripe concerns the rollicking, tongue-in-cheek, humorous back-and-forth style: 

Trump Is at His Wit’s End

Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. We seem to be sliding back into war with Iran. Do you see any good outcome? Or, at least, a least-bad outcome?

Frank Bruni: Yeesh, Bret, you really know how to perk up a guy’s day, don’t you?

Bret: Would you rather discuss interest-rate policy?

Frank: In honor of “The Odyssey”—Christopher Nolan’s new movie adaptation opens this weekend—I’m going to describe that as a Scylla-and-Charybdis choice.

Bret: Listen, Penelope, your suitor is waiting for his answer.

Frank: Fine. I’ll abandon my loom long enough to give you a response. No, I don’t see any good outcome, because whatever happens over the next weeks or months can’t erase or rewrite the, um, odyssey that brought us to this wretched juncture. 

Witty opinion scribes, please! 

Do Times readers really need to be humored this way before they'll read an analysis of the claim that the sitting president is somehow "at his wit's end?"

In fairness, no one can blame Bruni for this feature's rollicking style. It came into being during the earlier weekly "Conversations" between Stephens and Gail Collins. The rollicking style was simply held over when Bruni was subbed in.

At any rate, is the president at his wit's end? And what might that whimsical claim even mean? 

Once the early joshing (largely) ends, it sounds like things are substantially worse than that! Stephens soon unloads in this straightforward manner:   

Bret: ...What isn’t solvable is an erratic president who issues threats he withdraws, signs cease-fire agreements he doesn’t appear to have read, claims he’s indifferent to political and economic considerations until he caves to both, and lacks not only a coherent strategic concept but an elementary understanding of what strategy is.   

Oof! Bruni is no less unimpressed with the sitting president—but an intriguing refusal lurks in this presentation:  

Frank: ...Never in the past 50 years have we seen anything from an American president like Trump’s determination to undermine voters’ faith in democracy itself, which is fine with him if it’s the only way to hold on to power and get what he wants. It’s a degree of ruthlessness and a magnitude of narcissism that add up to a kind of political sociopathy. I’ve written this before and stand by it: He’ll burn the whole thing down if that’s best for him. He’ll gladly rule over ashes, just as long as he’s the one ruling. 

Bruni is deeply unflattering too. Our comment would go like this:   

"Narcissism" is a clinical term. So is "sociopathy." 

Like Stephens, Bruni's an excellent writer. That said, has it ever occurred to him that this isn't a kind of political sociopathy—that it's straight-up clinical sociopathy, a dangerous "personality disorder" the president's niece attributes to him in her best-selling 2020 book?   

These high-end scribes today! They've agreed that they'll never speak directly about any such possibility. 

They've agreed that they'll never speak directly. Promises made, promises wittily kept!

NO PEOPLE: No people are uninteresting?

THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2026

Can this possibly be what he meant? Friend, did Candidate Trump actually win the 2020 election? 

Did President Biden spend four years in the White House only because that 2020 presidential election was "rigged?"  

For the record, Candidate Trump was also President Trump at the time of the election in question. If that election was somehow "rigged," that massive fraud occurred at a time when Complainant Trump was in charge of the federal government.   

Needless to say, that doesn't mean that the election couldn't have been rigged. And as we noted in last Friday's report, many people seem to believe that it actually was.  

"No people are uninteresting?" Here's the overview of the recent survey we linked you to that day:   

Half of Republicans say the 2020 election was rigged   

This week's Economist/YouGov Poll finds sharp divides in public confidence in U.S. elections, with Democrats and Republicans holding vastly different views on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, the credibility of Donald Trump's recent election-rigging claims, and expectations for the fairness of future elections.

28% of Americans—including half (50%) of Republicans and only 9% of Democrats—believe that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged." Republicans who identify as MAGA supporters are about twice as likely as non-MAGA Republicans to think the election was rigged (66% vs. 32%). 

Many respondents told Economist/YouGov that they believe the election was rigged. According to the published internal data, that includes 53% of respondents who said that they voted for Trump.  

A nation wracked by such widespread belief comes close to no longer being a nation—might be thought of as "failed state-adjacent." In the past, we've advanced the comparison to the Oscar-nominated film, The Sixth Sense:   

A nation like that may already have ceased to exist. It just doesn't know it yet.    

Tonight, the sitting president of that nation is apparently going to go on TV and advance some form of that claim all over again. For MS NOW's report on what he's likely going to say, you can just click here.  

President Trump has been insisting that the election was rigged for almost six years now. He's never made any attempt to offer evidence in support of that claim, but he just keeps making the claim—and by this time, he seems to have persuaded something like half of all Republicans.

We're prepared to believe that the sitting president may even believe his claim! That's because we assume that his niece is probably right. As we showed you yesterday, here's what she told CNN's Erin Burnett earlier in the year:

BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a decline?

MARY TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.

But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.  

"He has never been fit in any capacity," the president's niece told Burnett.

For the record, a serious, untreated "psychiatric disorder" is a serious, untreated "mental illness." And Mary L. Trump, the president's niece, is a doctorate-holding clinical therapist.  

That doesn't mean that her assessment has to be correct. But we'll guess that it most likely is.   

(We also believe that a serious mental illness is in fact a serious illness. We believe that any such serious illness is a human tragedy. Ideally, we believe the current situation should be regarded that way. That would take us well beyond the limited capacity of our mainstream press corps and of our pre-existing American discourse.)

Yesterday, in a high-profile Senate hearing, Jay Clayton couldn't quite bring himself to say that Candidate Biden won the 2020 election. Everyone within the Trump administration understands that such a thing can simply never be said.

Clayton clammed before the Senate panel. Here's another place it will never be said:    

The Five is our failing nation's most-watched "cable news" show. Its daily viewership is roughly three times as large as that of MS NOW's daily shows.

None of the panelists on The Five believe that Candidate Trump won the 2020 election. That said, Jessica Tarlov will never ask the four pro-MAGA co-hosts if they think that election was rigged. 

She will never ask them why President Trump keeps saying that the election was rigged, in the absence of any evidence in support of that claim. The Fox News Channel's very large audience will never be asked to see that question asked.

Very good salaries are slipped into pockets in service to such deceptive behaviors. On MS NOW, very good salaries are slipped into pockets as everyone agrees not to report or discuss what Mary L. Trump once again said and meant.

"No people are uninteresting?" Can any of this possibly be what Yevtushenko meant?   

Tomorrow: What Yevtushenko presumably meant