SATURDAY: She had a question for President Trump!

SATURDAY, MARCH 28, 2026

We have a question for you: You'll have to forgive us for our minor activity today. 

We're looking ahead, starting Monday, to (as Lincoln had it) "a task greater than that which rested upon Washington." Also, how can a person hope to keep pace with the moral and intellectual squalor which now stirs the drink of this failing nation's imitation of a public discourse?

We speak as someone who watched the angry, fantastically bungled first segment of last night's Gutfeld! show. But also, as someone who watched the children pretend to question President Trump on Thursday's edition of The Five, in an imitation of an interview which lasted 46 minutes.

As we noted yesterday morning, the children's attention spans were notably short that day. As we noted, it fell to Jesse Watters to ask the session's fourth question. 

By now, attention spans were almost spent. This was the best he could do:

WATTERS (3/26/26): But let me ask you about Iran. You've kind of suggested that we'd knocked out Ayatollah Junior. Have we—and did the CIA tell you that Ayatollah Junior is gay? 

Is "Ayatollah Junior" gay? It seemed to be the only question the famous fellow could conjure. 

Question 6 came from Greg Gutfeld. Inevitably, it concerned himself: 

GUTFELD: Mr. President, let's shift onto some other topics. I'm debating whether to be serious or not serious. 

I'm gonna be not serious! 

[...] 

You know, you're doing the White House Correspondents Dinner for the first time, and you're gonna get a 10. Why wasn't I asked to do the roast? 

It was the best he could manage. (We think we've correctly transcribed the part about the president getting a 10.)

(We've edited out an interruption, in which the president asked if "Sleepy Joe" could have handled an interview session like this one. The children chuckled and agreed that he never could have done it!)

Lincoln headed off from Springfield, hoping to save the nation. As in The Sixth Sense, so too today:

Has the death of the nation already occurred, but we just don't know it yet? 

Special bonus question: Question 9 came from Dana Perino. By now, the charade was splayed out for all to see. This is what she asked: 

PERINO: Hi, it's Dana again, and I have a kind of pop culture question for you. 

So I'm new to New York, relatively speaking—so, fifteen years—and there's all these young people across America are watching Love Story, which is the story of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. And I'm curious: 

Did you know JFK Jr.? And do you have any nostalgia for the 90s? 

Other questions were even more pointless. Are these the death throes we've chosen?

FRIDAY: We took two books to the medical place!

FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 2026

We've advised you to pity the child: With trepidation, we'll admit that we took two books today to the medical mission. It occurred to us, only today and down in that place, that each of these books tells the story of the upbringing of a child:

Mary L. Trump
Too Much and Never Enough 
Simon & Schuster, 2020

Francine Prose
Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife
HarperCollins, 2009

As a courtesy, we're omitting the subtitle to Mary Trump's book. We plan to return to her general subject matter at the start of the week. 

That said:

Prose's book always consumes us. The fuller story of Anne Frank's famous book—of the way the book was written; of the way the book was saved—does include magical elements. 

Prose's book is also the story of a child who was lucky enough to be loved within her family and within her Amsterdam neighborhood, until the madness fully arrived. 

Prose says she was a "challenging" child. One anecdote goes like this:  

A demanding and often sickly baby, Anne grew into a challenging child—mercurial, moody, humorous, alternately outgoing and shy. A natural performer, she liked to pop her elbow out of its socket to get her friends’ attention. She was bossy, theatrical, and outspoken. She was only four when she and her beloved grandmother Oma Hollander boarded a crowded Aachen streetcar, and Anne demanded, “Won’t someone offer a seat to this old lady?”

In Amsterdam, she grew close to Hanneli Goslar, the “Lies” about whom Anne would later have the waking nightmare she describes in the diary. (“I saw her in front of me, clothed in rags, her face thin and worn.”) A German refugee who had arrived in Holland around the same time as Anne, Hanneli met Anne in a grocery store; their mothers were glad to find someone with whom they could speak German. The Franks called on Hanneli Goslar’s parents every Friday evening, and the two families celebrated Passover together. Eventually, Hanneli’s mother, Ruth, would say about Anne, “God knows everything, but Anne knows everything better.”  

A beloved grandmother too! 

Meanwhile, Anne knew everything better? For that, we'll give thanks to the gods! In our view, that was her job, as a young developing human person. She was encouraged by her parents—by her neighbors and by her various neighborhood friends.  

Prose holds that Anne Frank, who died at age 15, has never received her due as a precocious developing writer—as someone who was determined to become a writer. She rewrote what had started out as her personal diary, turning it into "a memoir in the form of diary entries," in the final year of her life. 

She hoped that the (famous) book thus produced would be read by people around the world. We'll reproduce one other anecdote: 

Interviewed by Ernst Schnabel, a novelist and dramatist who served in the German navy during World War II and who wrote the 1958 book Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage, the mother of Anne’s friend Jopie van der Waal...also remembered making dresses for Anne. But what she mostly recalled is Anne’s forceful personality, her desire to be a writer, and her precocious sense of self. The phrase, “She knew who she was,” recurs, like a refrain, throughout the conversation, during which Mme. Van der Waal described the ceremony and the theater with which Anne arrived to spend the weekend:

“When Anne came to stay with us, she always brought a suitcase. A suitcase, mind you, when it wasn’t a stone’s throw between us. The suitcase was empty of course, but Anne insisted on it, because only with the suitcase did she feel as if she were really traveling.”

She wanted to feel she was really traveling! Six million others (and many more) were lost to the world in the astonishing madness which followed. 

We'll return to Mary Trump's general subject matter next week—to her uncle's possible medical situation. In our view, no other topic is more important at this particular time. That strikes us as fairly obvious.

In our view, obvious danger is present there. Also, we've advised you to pity the child.

BREAKING: We recommend Hall's opinion piece!

FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 2026

Also, the fourth question POTUS was asked: We're back to the medical mission today! There's a whole lot of sitting around involved in such an excursion.

We may post later this afternoon. In the meantime, we recommend Colby Hall's opinion piece over at Mediaite. More precisely, we recommend the important question he raises:

OPINION
We’ve Stopped Noticing That Trump’s Cabinet Meetings Are Completely Insane

Here is a partial list of subjects covered by the President of the United States at Thursday’s cabinet meeting:

The obliteration of Iran’s navy. The TSA shutdown. A woman killed in Chicago. The Federal Reserve building renovation. The cost of Sharpie pens. Venezuelan oil revenue. King Charles’s cancer. Gavin Newsom’s self-reported learning disability. Cognitive tests. SCOTUS. The Kennedy Center. California high-speed rail. NATO’s failure to send ships. A thousand-dollar pen that didn’t write. The prime minister of the United Kingdom. Caravans. Sanctuary cities.  The 25th Amendment. A joint venture with Venezuela. Drug smugglers who don’t watch television.

That was one meeting. Ninety-eight minutes. A wartime cabinet briefing...

That's the way the column starts. As Hall continues, he raises a very good question about ongoing press corps behavior—a question we think we've been answering over the past many months.

(And yes, we've noticed the rather strong language found at the end of that headline.)

Hall is asking a very important question; he's raising important concerns. Next week, we plan to return to what we regard as the central question now facing this failing nation:

We refer to the basic questions which seem to be obvious concerning the sitting president's health.

As we rush out the door today, we also offer you this:

After yesterday's "cabinet meeting," the president proceeded to spend the bulk of the 5 o'clock hour on the phone—on the phone with The Five!

He came on the line at 5:14. Presumably, the children could have asked any question they pleased.

That said, attention spans are remarkably short on this dimwitted "cable news" program. Believe it or not, after a bit of towel-snapping and some joking around, this was the fourth question asked:

WATTERS (3/26/26): But let me ask you about Iran. You've kind of suggested that we'd knocked out Ayatollah Junior. Have we—and did the CIA tell you that Ayatollah Junior is gay?

Is the new Ayatollah gay? He wanted to know about Iran, so that was the fourth question asked. 

(For the record, no one ever asked the president to explain the overall purpose of the ongoing war. We aren't assuming that he couldn't have explained the purpose. We're just saying that nobody asked.)

All in all, it was an instructive 46 minutes. A nation which tolerates this imitation of life without a word of comment is a nation which finds itself in a very large volume of hurt.

There's more to be said about yesterday's show. But that was one star's first ask.

Go ahead—peruse Hall's piece! We disagree with him on one point, but he's raising important concerns.

THURSDAY: A minor but prickly conceptual question!

THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2026

Can anyone here play this game? This very morning, in this report, we briefly voiced an awkward question, if only inferentially. 

Our question concerned Greg Gutfeld and Emily Compagno, a pair of Fox News Channel co-hosts. The question we floated was this: 

Are Compagno and Gutfeld qualified to appear as analysts (or as whatever you might want to call it) on Fox News Channel "cable news" TV programs? Are Compagno and Gutfeld qualified for the roles in which they're currently cast?

No one else will ever ask. So we thought we'd go ahead.

Granted, Fox is an actual "cable news" channel in much the way Mayberry's Barney Fife was head of the FBI. That said, it may seem to offend against a basic American principle to ask if Persons A , B and C are "qualified" to discuss news topics on American TV programs. 

"All men [sic] are created equal," it's often said in these parts. That may trigger a populist sentiment which rebels against the idea that some people qualify to serve on TV news programs while other people don't. 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall—and perhaps a question like that!

At any rate, how about it? Are some people simply unqualified to serve as major figures in nationwide TV news? The Fox News Channel almost seems to be running an experiment testing that very question, given the array of Improbables, Unlikelies and Unrecognizables you encounter on their most-watched programs.

A former "wrestler," a former NFL cheerleader; a former MTV VJ? A chef named Gruel, a bunch of struggling comedians, Bill O'Reilly's "man in the street?" 

A star from the early years of MTV's Real People? (In fairness, she met her husband during that reign—and he's in the cabinet now!)

Once again, let's be fair! Any such person could be up to the task of conducting intelligent news discussions—but have you ever actually watched the programs we have in mind? Would you compare those shows to performances by an offshoot of the Village People, or might it be more like the Bad News Bears? 

Obviously, it's no sin to be under-qualified for an assignment of this type. But is it possible that some or all of the "television personalities" on this corporate messaging channel actually fit in that box?

Tyrus and Jesse and Gruel oh my! Where in the world do they get these people? 

But also this, it must be said:

Over here in Blue America, why don't our pretenders complain?

JEREMIAD(S): The pastors were speaking to the whole world!

THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2026

So was the disordered Herr Gutfeld: Today, we turn to jeremiad as our communication mode of choice. 

"Look over here," such declamations say. As we noted yesterday, the current jeremiads in question were those delivered right here:

HAYMES (3/17/26): First and foremost, we pray that a man like this will be cut to the heart. My wife and I were talking about this in the car the other day...

Public enemies—these are the orcs at the gate. You are not called to love the barbarian horde that is planning to break into your city and, you know, pillage, plunder, rape and mutilate you and your people. You don't love that horde. That is your enemy, and this is where you have imprecatory psalms. This is where you pray, strongly. 

The Psalmist is not shy. "God, destroy them. Make them as dung on the ground," right?  Madison and I were talking about that...

I pray that God kills him. Ultimately, that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ. That's the first thing.

POTTEIGER: Right. We want him crucified with Christ. 

HAYMES: That's exactly right. 

That was just part of the declamation. As we noted yesterday, Haymes had been talking it over in the car with his wife.

Who did these fellows want to be "made as dung on the ground?" As we noted yesterday, the target "orc at the gate" was James Talarico, the 36-year-old Texas Democrat who is his party's nominee for John Cornyn's Texas Senate seat. 

Can Talarico possibly win that seat? We have no idea! But he traces his own Christianity to some things he says he learned from his maternal grandfather, a Baptist preacher in South Texas. He says his grandfather taught him this:

Love God, and love your neighbor.

Along the way, Talarico has said some things that have Messrs. Haymes and Pottinger hoping to see him made as dung. To cite one example, he has said that God is nonbinary—neither male nor female! 

Last week the children on the Fox News Channel were reeling about that claim. On the other hand, a letter to the Washington Post offered this milder reaction to what Talarico had said:  

A narrow-minded attack on James Talarico’s religion 

James Talarico sets out a vision of Christianity that can be embraced by people who were raised in fundamentalist denominations but no longer feel at home there because our experiences and science-based learning have taken us beyond the doctrines of our native churches. For us, the alternative would be to leave Christianity altogether. Talarico gives us hope that there is a future for us inside Christianity. 

When Talarico says “God is nonbinary,” he is not making some new liberal pronouncement; he is restating traditional Christian teaching as reflected in the Catholic Catechism: “God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God.” 

[...] 

[J. C. F.], Austin 

Can that highlighted claim possibly be accurate? Also, does it actually matter in the current context? 

Concerning only the first of those questions, Brent Barry offers this for the Baptist News Global site:

Fact checking three things James Talarico said

James Talarico was a child when I was on the pastoral staff of his church for a year. We attended the same seminary, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

I want to look at three of the things he has said that I see going most viral.

“God is nonbinary”

When Moses asks God’s name, God doesn’t say “father” or “king.” God says I AM: existence itself, beyond human definition. The Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century, hardly progressive revolutionaries, were careful to insist that God transcends human categories, including gender. 

This isn’t liberalism. It’s classical Christian theology.

[...]

Paul reminds us we see through a glass darkly. Any confident claim to fully contain or define God should give us pause. Acknowledging the limits of human language about God isn’t radical. It’s orthodox humility. 

On the other hand, who you gonna believe? Classical Christian theology, or the Fox News Channel's master blowhard, Tyrus?

Within the current political context, each person gets to decide if such topics actually matter. Plainly, they matter to Haymes and to Potteiger—but should the jeremiads they delivered on Haymes' podcast actually matter to us? 

To its credit, the New York Times has tackled this sudden news event. The paper did so yesterday, in this news report. 

Yesterday, we ourselves skillfully asked what Haymes and Potteiger were praying for. Were they praying for Talarico's death or for Talarico's conversion? 

What were the gentlemen praying for? We offer excerpts from the Times' news report:

A Pastor Called for a Democrat to Be ‘Crucified With Christ.’ Was It a Threat?

James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, responded on Wednesday to a pastor who had suggested he should be “crucified with Christ” as part of a conversion, saying in a statement, “I love you more than you could ever hate me.” 

[...]

Responding to the remark, Mr. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, emphasized compassion, a core theme of his campaign, and suggested that Mr. Potteiger was praying he would die. Mr. Potteiger and a representative for Mr. Hegseth said the pastor’s words were being twisted. Mr. Potteiger said he had not called for Mr. Talarico’s death, but rather called for him to have a religious conversion....

“I did not call for his death,” Mr. Potteiger said in an interview with The New York Times. “I called for his conversion.” 

[...]

Mr. Haymes said in an interview that he and Mr. Potteiger had not been calling for violence and that they had been speaking to a Christian audience.

He called Mr. Talarico a “liar,” accusing him of seeking to “weaponize the ignorance of the masses” to target him and Mr. Potteiger.

“I want him to repent and to follow Christ,” Mr. Haymes said.

Haymes had only the best intentions! The problem arises with the claim that he and Pastor Potteiger had been "speaking to a Christian audience."

Sorry, Charlie! Given the "democratization of media"—given the nature of the new technologies—it's very, very, very silly to imagine some such thing.

Haymes was no longer in a storefront church, speaking to forty followers, something which has always been part of the American experience. Instead, he had placed his remarks on the world-wide web through the magic of modern podcasting. 

His jeremiad was (and is) available to everyone on the planet! As we all understand, some of those people are deeply, tragically disturbed—and we know that it only takes one. 

Last Thursday, on an imitation of a "cable news" show, Greg Gutfeld also played this potentially dangerous game. He too was utilizing a new technology. He was appearing on (an imitation of) a "cable news" show.

Greg Gutfeld is just a person—a person like everyone else. It's been our view that he could use (and that he deserves) some help, and that his corporate employer should be the one to provide it.

(Hank Williams: "I was just a lad—nearly 22. Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you.") 

In our view, Gutfeld is saddled with limited judgment. He has legitimate complaints to make, but he tends to make them in the ugliest—and dumbest—possible fashion. Presumably, that's what his corporate employer actually wants him to do. 

Last Tuesday, before comparing Talarico to Ted Bundy, a human being just like you offered this unsupported,  rambling rant. We'd score what follows as tragically hapless:

GUTFELD (3/17/26): The problem with Talarico—and I'm surprised, Jessica [Tarlov], that you don't see this. And maybe you do, but you don't want to, because he's on your side. I can't read your mind.

But his biggest division isn't in gender or politics, it's belief.  You know, if you don't believe as he does, you are evil. 

You know, Christians and Jews, they divide by behavior. You can be a bad Christian. You can be a bad Jew.

But that doesn't happen with someone like Talarico. It doesn't matter if you're a good, decent person. If you believe in two sexes, you are evil.

Gutfeld continued from there, explaining that Talarico is ready to declare grandfathers and parents "evil," along with "the nice people who would help you fix a tire." 

"It didn't matter what their behavior was like. It was that their belief was evil. This is what happens with progressives," the messenger boy now said.

As you can see by clicking this, his jeremiad continued:

GUTFELD: This guy speaks a good game, but if he doesn't—if he doesn't like your beliefs, it doesn't matter how good you are. He's as extreme as a radical Islamist, because that's how they think as well, because his values are not based on behavior. 

And that is something you have to understand when you listen to them. You can get lost in all that rhetoric—"My values are the same." 

That guy's bad news. And you're gonna find out.

So the screed went. Moments later, Gutfeld said he's "getting Ted Bundy vibes" from James Talarico. 

In case you've forgotten, Bundy "was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls between 1974 and 1978."

To double-check that, just click here. But yes! That's what Gutfeld now said!

"At long last," a person might ask, "has the Fox News Channel no sense of decency left?" But then, a person might ask the same thing about the legion of Blue American journalists and "news orgs" who refuse to report or discuss this astounding public misconduct.

Does James Talarico believe that you and your grandparents are "evil" if you don't share his theological beliefs? Gutfeld said it again and again, while presenting exactly zero evidence in support of that ugly claim.

He compared Talarico to "radical Islamists," then compared him to Ted Bundy. Moments later, up jumped Emily Compagno, with dreams of David Koresh banging around in her head.

The New York Times? The Atlantic? MS NOW? Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O'Donnell? Mika and/or Joe?

Have you ever seen those cowardly kittens say even a single word about the ugly, braindead mayhem routinely broadcast by Fox? 

When Fox News broadcasts its jeremiads, they too are no longer confined to a little storefront church. They're speaking to everyone everywhere all at once, and they're actively bringing our failing culture down. 

As they do, our Blue American cowardly kittens refuse to say the first word. They won't even say their names!

"Wouldn't be prudent," we'll guess.

Tomorrow or Saturday: Her "second cousin, once removed" did in fact notably serve