TUESDAY: Nutball calls for deportations!

TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2026

President follows suit: With respect to calls to arms by the sitting president, it just was another day ending a Y. 

That said, we'd describe the Truth Social post in question as the fruit of normalization. 

When the sitting president floats suggestions like the one described below, no one says a word about it at this point in time. No one bats an eye. 

A society like that has given up. Somewhat imprecisely, Mediaite's Sean James starts to explain:

Trump Boosts Right-Wing Pundit Calling for ‘Hardcore Communist Bastards’ Like Mamdani to Be Deported

President Donald Trump shared a video on Sunday from conservative pundit Michael Savage calling for the U.S. to criminalize and deport “hardcore communist bastards” like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D).

Trump posted the video on Truth Social as he has been ripping socialism and communism over the last month. The president continued that trend this weekend with a few posts on Truth Social where he warned Democrats they were stupidly letting “unattractive” socialists like Mamdani—and several other democratic socialist candidates who won primaries recently—“take over” the party.

Savage went even further in the searing 49-minute rant that Trump posted on Sunday.  

Say what? The president posted a videotape calling for the mayor of New York City to be deported? 

At present, we're forced to say that it seems that he did! But here's the way the Savage podcast starts, title included:   

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM MUST BE CRIMINALIZED; LEADERS DEPORTED  

Right now in America, politically, we are in the late stage of the disease of Communism. The smirking con man from Uganda had the audacity to sit behind George Washington's desk in New York City the other day, basically declaring a revolution on America, surrounded by no Americans, none of them were citizens. 

These were all invaders.  

 I'm going to tell you a story today about a little man just like this smirking bastard in New York City named Pol Pot...  

That's the start of a 49-minute podcast. The tape was reposted by the sitting president on his Truth Social site. 

Savage was talking about Mayor Mamdani's July 4 address. As he starts, he refers to Mamdani as "the smirking bastard in New York City." He also says that Mamdani is "just like Pol Pot."   

For what it's worth, we thought the tone of the mayor's July 4 address was perhaps a bit off-putting. Opinions will differ on that.

Opinions will differ about the tone of the holiday address. But just to establish the factual record, Mamdani was "flanked by [ten] newly naturalized US citizens" as he spoke—and that's the New York Post we're quoting, not some "lunatic lefty" rag.   

The New York Post (correctly) described the onlookers as citizens. To Savage, they were something different. To Savage, they were "invaders."   

In what world has it ceased to be news when a sitting president posts something like that on an official site? It has ceased to be news in the world in which we all fitfully dwell, waiting for the president's formal address to the nation this Thursday night.

As he continues his report for Mediaite, James offers a further account of the podcast the president chose to repost:

[continuing directly from Mediaite report]
The veteran radio host said Americans should not be fooled by Mamdani—whom he called a “smirking bastard”—and the other democratic socialists who are rising through the Democratic ranks.

Savage argued those candidates may talk about turning the U.S. into a socialist utopia by launching a bunch of “free” programs, but in reality they are more like Pol Pot—the communist leader who engineered the Cambodian genocide that killed 1.5 million to 2 million people.

“That is exactly what Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists will do to you,” Savage said. “Forget the smirks, forget the smiles, forget the b*llshit that it’s like Denmark and Norway. These are hardcore communist bastards who must be stopped, criminalized and deported. I’m clear as a bell on this.”   

We haven't watched the full tape yet. Based on what we've seen, we'll guess that James's account of the material Trump will turn out to be all too accurate.   

The sitting president reposted the Savage tape. "Nothing to look at," our Blue news orgs said.  

Conduct like this on the part of the president was normalized a long time ago. This is a note about a land which has possibly, without even knowing it, already become a failed state.

NO PEOPLE...: Flipped on Biden, fell in with Trump!

TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2026

Of whom, what did we know? "No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko said (in translation). 

The poem in question starts off like this:  

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 man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.   

To this day, we don't know why we find those lines so moving. But they hit us that way every time.

For each person, those moments are private! Then too, there are the people who largely live their lives in in the public sphere. Of whom, what do we really know?  

[continuing from above]  
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?  

Of whom, what did we know?   

In the first hour of today's Morning Joe, Mike Barnicle expressed a bit of puzzlement about the late Lindsey Graham. He referred to Graham's videotaped statement about Joe Biden, the remarkable statement we quoted in full in yesterday's report.

At the time, Biden was sitting vice president. This morning, here's what Barnicle said:  

BARNICLE (7/14/26): He once said, about Joe Biden, that if you could meet a person—that God never created a better person than Joe Biden. And yet he said some horrible things about Biden during Biden's presidency, and just quite recently. And I've never been able to juggle that. 

What went on in Lindsey's head?   

"Access to power," Joe Scarborough said—and he said that Graham would admit it. 

Scarborough knew Graham better than most. That dated to their entry into the House in 1995, following the 1994 wave election which gave the GOP control of the chamber for the first time in forty years.

Speaking this morning to Barnicle, Scarborough said he could never understand Graham's decision to be "a shapeshifter" (Scarborough's term). But he also said this:

"You can trace the fall of the Republican Party" to Graham's peregrination from a feisty opponent of Speaker Gingrich to an admiring sidekick to John McCain, then on to his role as a prime supporter of President Trump, who he had once denounced.   

For the record, that "fall of the party" leaves President Trump in place in the White House. No one has the slightest idea what may be planned for this fall's elections There will be more than two years of his presidency left after that, and no one has the slightest idea what those years might hold.

"No people are uninteresting?" We're going to guess that what you see in this report isn't what Yevtushenko meant:   

Trump Will Use Primetime Speech to Claim Newly-Declassified Intel Reveals Foreign Plot...

President Donald Trump will reportedly use his primetime address on Thursday night to push specific new claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

On Monday afternoon, Trump announced on Truth Social that he’d be giving a Thursday speech... 

On Deadline: White House, MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace revealed Trump’s speech would focus on the six-year-old election—citing a report from the network’s Jake Traylor. Specifically, the president will reportedly point to newly-declassified reports he claims will show foreign interference in the 2020 election.   

That isn't quite what Traylor's report actually said, but it's in the ballpark. Traylor's report came in the form of a tweet. You can read it here.  

"No people are uninteresting?" Some people are dangerous—you might say potentially menacing. 

If Traylor's report is correct, the sitting president is gathering the nation on Thursday night to advance his obsessive belief about the 2020 election again. 

No people are uninteresting? On this campus, we're inclined to assume that the sitting president is (clinically) delusional. We further assume that we're describing a tragic but dangerous state of affairs.  

Back in 2015, Lindsey Graham said that God never made a better person than Biden. He also said this, near the end of that year, during an appearance on CNN:  

GRAHAM (12/16/15): I want to talk to the Trump supporters for a minute. I don’t know who you are, and I don't know why you like this guy....

Here’s what you’re buying: He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.  

"Yet scarcely two months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration [for his first term], a grinning Mr. Graham could be found in the office of the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, chatting with Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s top advisers," the New York Times later reported.  

In November 2020, he was on the phone to Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, assisting Trump in questioning Candidate Biden's win in the state. On January 6, 2021, there was his instant denunciation of that day's attack, followed by a fairly speedy reversal.

Thursday night, the president's delusion may be back, at the heart of a national address. No one knows what may be planned for the days and years to come.

Senator Graham died this weekend. Of whom, what did we know?

MONDAY: "Ain't it wonderful, Jim," she said...

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2026

"...how much [we] can mean to each other?" Actually, no, we aren't "well read." But there's a line from My Antonia that seems to speak to us, loud and clear, at this dangerous, barely sane time.  

(This "barely sane" time? See the story the president told about the late Lindsey Graham's one, lone, solitary 40-minute mistake. Also, continue to see the way the high-end press will keep disappearing the president's fairly obvious state of illness.)  

Back to My Antonia:

We're fascinated by the way high-end commentators skip past the most intriguing part of Willa Cather's profoundly autobiographical novel. We refer to the way she gender-switched her narrator—letting Jim Burden (male) stand in as a substitute for her own (female) self.   

As described in Cather's novel, Jim Burden's life is Cather's life. We learn that in the first paragraph of Burden's narration:   

BOOK I. The Shimerdas

I

I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America. I was ten years old then; I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. I travelled in the care of a mountain boy, Jake Marpole, one of the ‘hands’ on my father’s old farm under the Blue Ridge, who was now going West to work for my grandfather. Jake’s experience of the world was not much wider than mine. He had never been in a railway train until the morning when we set out together to try our fortunes in a new world.

By the norms of literary logic, the young Jim Burden's railroad trip, from Virginia to Nebraska during his childhood, is the real-world railroad trip of the young Willa Cather. She chose to gender-switch her narrator for reasons which are tragic but also understandable and, one assumes. which are also perfectly obvious.    

We think the gender-switch does undermine the ardor expressed at the end of the book. Decades earlier, when she's still "barely 24," the novel's Antonia says this to Jim Burden:   

BOOK IV. The Pioneer Woman’s Story   

[...]

She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. ‘I’d always be miserable in a city. I’d die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here. Father Kelly says everybody’s put into this world for something, and I know what I’ve got to do. I’m going to see that my little girl has a better chance than ever I had. I’m going to take care of that girl, Jim.’

I told her I knew she would. ‘Do you know, Ántonia, since I’ve been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.’

She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them slowly, ‘How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when I’ve disappointed you so? Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?'...

In fact, she hadn't been his sweetheart or wife. We think the ardor he displays at the end of the book is undermined by that fact.

Still:

Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other? At this very dangerous time, we Americans, Red and Blue alike, badly need to relearn the skill of meaning things to each other.   

"No people are uninteresting," the poet improbably said.

NO PEOPLE...: Long ago, and quite far away...

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2026

...Graham heaped praise on Joe Biden: "When a person dies, what has gone is not nothing..."  

That's the way we've always remembered the lines (in translation) from Yevtushenko—lines we came upon a very long time ago. That isn't the way the lines truly read, but we've always remembered them that way. 

We came upon the poem in question in Deschooling Society, "a 1971 book written by Austrian priest Ivan Illich that critiques the role and practice of education in the modern world." (So says the overview offered by the leading authority.)

Late in the book, Illich included the entire poem (in translation). We remember nothing about the book, but we've never forgotten, or given up on, the thrust of the memorable poem. 

"No people are uninteresting," the poem says as it starts. The poem moves us, very deeply. To this day, we don't know why.

Also, Senator Graham suddenly died this weekend. One time, in 2015, that very same person had this to say about the sitting vice president:

GRAHAM (undated, 2015): The bottom line is, if you can't admire Joe Biden as a person, then it's probably—you've got a problem! 

You need to do some self-evaluation. Because, what's not to like?   

The statement was made during an interview with HuffPost, back when Graham was running for president. The interview was videotaped. Here's the text of the longer chunk regarding Vice President Biden:   

GRAHAM (continuing directly): Here's what I can tell you— 

Life can change just like that [snaps his fingers]. Don't take it for granted. Don't take relationships for granted. 

I called him after Beau died and he basically said, "Well, Beau was my soul." We talked for a long time. 

He came to my [military retirement?] ceremony and said some of the most incredibly heartfelt things that anybody could ever say to me. And, um [pauses]— He's the nicest person I think I've ever met in politics.  

INTERVIEWER: Is that right?  

GRAHAM: He is as good a man as God ever created, and we don't agree on much, but I think he's been dealt a really gut blow. I think he focuses on what he's got to do, not on what he lost.   

There's a bit more to the videotape as it was originally presented. As you can see by clicking here, HuffPost placed it on YouTube under this heading:   

Lindsey Graham Chokes Up Talking About Joe Biden    

"Life can change just like that," Senator Graham said that day. "Don't take it for granted." 

He also said that Vice President Biden was "as good a man as God ever created." 

A lot has changed since the day when that interview took place. Joining Jeffrey Rosen, we aren't sure that our flailing nation will be able to find a way out of our current state.

"No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko wrote. "Their lives are like the chronicle of planets..."   

We can't say that we really think that Graham's statement was interesting. The same is true of the predictably ugly statement Katie Miller made, just yesterday, about that same Joe Biden.

As people, we live in a world of people. We've shown you what Graham once said. This week, we'll briefly look at some of the people now crowding our failing public discourse. 

A type of democratization has occurred in the past (let's say) forty years. As a result, the discourse is open to many people who possibly shouldn't be there.

Tomorrow: "Communist bastards," he said

In translation, also this: "Not people die but worlds die in them / Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures..."

SATURDAY: At the Atlantic, they say no names!

SATURDAY, JULY 11, 2026

The refusal to serve is general: "Back out of all this now too much for us?"  

As we've noted in the past, that's the opening line of Frost's difficult poem, Directive. We often think of that line in these extremely dark days. 

The poem—it's a difficult poem—starts exactly like this:   

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry -
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it...

And so on, at length, from there.   

It's a difficult poem. With that acknowledgment, we now offer a question:

Do we Americans now find ourselves in "a house that is no more a house, upon a farm that is no more a farm and in a town that is no more a town?"  

If so, there are very few stories in books about it, in part because of what happened when Jeffrey Rosen's promising essay in The Atlantic moved past its promising start.   

Judged by the norms of the established world, Rosen is very sharp. At this point, we remind you of the things we showed you earlier in the week:  

Jeffrey Rosen (legal academic)  

Jeffrey Rosen (born February 13, 1964) is an American legal scholar, journalist, and author.

Rosen is a law professor at The George Washington University, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the author of nine books, including New York Times bestsellers. He served as the President and CEO of the National Constitution Center from 2013 to 2026, where he is now CEO Emeritus. Rosen is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. 

[...]  

Rosen attended the Dalton School, a private college preparatory school on New York City's Upper East Side, and graduated in 1982 as valedictorian. He then studied English literature and government at Harvard University, graduating in 1986 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude. He was subsequently a Marshall Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, in philosophy, politics, and economics, from which he received a second bachelor's degree in 1988. He then attended the Yale Law School, where he served as a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal...  

As CEO of the National Constitution Center, he has produced a long series of outstanding public forums—public forums which operate on what is seen as the culture's C-Span-adjacent high end.  

Over here in Blue America, we've been told that we should respect and admire "contributing writers for The Atlantic." At present, we especially recommend the work of that magazine's Helen Lewis, but there's something even she may be doing—or may be agreeing not to do.   

There's something they've all agreed not to do? We'll turn to Frost again:

The Gift Outright 

[...]   

Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Something we were withholding made us weak? We've quoted that line before. Here's why we quote it today:

At present, here in Blue America, our journalistic and academic leaders refuse to "say their names." That is what is being withheld in this discourse which is no more a discourse in a nation which is perhaps no more a nation and which may almost seem to be perhaps going down.   

We agree with Rosen! The advent of various new technologies has turned our nation, which is now barely a nation, into a modern-day Babel. Putin smiles on a summer night as he sees Charlie Hurt, guest hosting on Jesse Watters Primetime, litter the landscape this way:

HURT (7/9/26): So Democrats finally got their pervy Platner off their back, but he's the least of their worries. Ranks of Commie radicals worse than the Nipple Nazi are mobilizing across the country, positioning for their takeover. 

[Photo of Abdul El-Sayed]

This Commie doc without a medical license is running for Senate in Michigan, and he's already hard at work indoctrinating your kids...   

(For the sake of the record: According to the leading authority, El-Sayd "is an American epidemiologist, politician, and former public health official and academic. He was the director of the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services of Wayne County, Michigan, from 2023 to 2025.")

You see there how Hurt started. After he cited the "pervy Platner," producers played tape of the "Commie doc" telling a bunch of pre-school kids that they should share their cupcakes. 

That was the Commie indoctrination to which Hurt referred. Viewers were even told that this "Commie doc" is worse than "the Nipple Nazi!"  

This intellectual squalor only got worse as the guest host continued—this guest host on the second most-watched "cable news" show in this, our nation which is perhaps no more a nation.     

Along the way, viewers were told that Brad Linder, the former comptroller of New York City, "went full Commie in his victory speech" after winning a Democratic Party primary last month. He'd been endorsed by "Commie Mamdani," viewers were pleasingly told.  

Eventually, the guest host read this copy, smirking as he went:   

HURT: The collapse of the media, and the lack of clear leadership in the Democrat [sic] Party, or a hopeful vision for the country, allowed an army of Commie radicals to take over the Democrat [sic] Party. 

The Commies are organized, they're mobilized, and they've just rolled out their takeover course of action. Project 2029. It's a ready-to-go, governing blueprint for their Commie leader in the White House... Desperate Democrats like Kamala see the end, and she's hopping on the Commie express train before it's too late.

It was low-IQ squalor like that, read from prompter by the constantly smirking Hurt. 

For the record, Project 2029 is the work of a liberal policy journal, not of the Democratic Party. As Hurt read his Commie-rich copy, the chyrons were saying this: 

HERE COME THE COMMIES! 
COMMIE QUACK IS FOR THE KIDS  
BRAD LANDER GOES FULL COMMIE
DESPERATE DEMS HOP ON THE COMMIE EXPRESS 
THE COMMIES ORGANIZE AND MOBILIZE  
COMMIES INFILTRATE THE DEMOCRATS

Enjoyable copy like that.

For the record, there's plenty that can be criticized about the Democratic Party and about some of its candidates. At this site, we've sometimes criticized Senator and then Vice President Harris, though we're going to guess that she hasn't "hopped on the Commie express" at this point in time.

There's plenty that a sensible person—a person who is still a person—might critique or criticize about the party in question. Instead, Hurt was offering a braindead imitation of human political discourse—of a discourse which is no more a discourse in a town which is no more a town.

It was a braindead imitation of life—unless you read Jeffrey Rosen's essay in the Atlantic. In his essay, Rosen declines to say the names of people like Hurt—of the types of corporate messaging agents who are no longer persons. 

Nor does he say the name of the Fox News Channel, or of "cable news" in general. It's an essay in which a highly promising, insightful start rapidly disappears.  

No, Virginia! No nation can remain a nation if it becomes a Babel—if it turns into a welter of competing voices feeding different tribal groups the stories they long to hear. 

As he starts, Rosen gives voice to a profoundly sensible fear—to the fear that our democracy (such as it is) may not "survive" the effects of the new technologies which have made every flyweight a king. 

Rosen's start is extremely strong, but then the withholding begins. He names "social media" and "the internet," but he doesn't mention cable news and he doesn't mention podcasts.   

Bowing to an intractable rule, he doesn't say the names of people like Charlie Hurt. He doesn't say the name of the ludicrous corporate messaging agent for whom Hurt was guest hosting. 

Rosen has been to what Dylan once mocked as "the finest schools," but he hasn't learned how to say their names—or it could be that his superiors at the Atlantic aren't willing to let him and others do that.  

"Something we were withholding made us weak," the poet Frost once wrote. Within the realms of Blue America's modern elites, we'll guess that the rewards are simply too damn high, and the risks are simply too great.

The celebrity and the salaries are too good to put at risk. No one wants to say the names of the modern-day jugglers and clowns who are devouring the present-day discourse.

At the New York Times, at MS NOW and CNN, but also at the Atlantic, they refuse to say the names of the people and the entities which are creating "all this"—all this which does indeed seem, as we slide toward the sea, to be "now too much for us."

They type from a realm which is no more a realm, producing a discourse which is something quite different.   

Frost ends the difficult poem Directive with these difficult lines:  

I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it!  

"Drink and be whole again beyond confusion," Frost wrote as his closing line. Here in the present day, the ginormous confusion largely results from an amazingly systematic act of withholding.

As a group, they simply refuse to say their names! There is zero sign that this deception, this failure to serve, is ever going to stop.