NEW ARRIVALS: Press and staff stayed on the plane...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2026  

...after the president left: Crouched behind barrels of chicken salad, he made his way out of Turkey!

It was the Washington Post which broke the story. The Post's report starts like this: 

Contradicting public statements, Trump took secret flight from Turkey amid Iranian threat

An Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump prompted an extraordinary operation last month in which he flew secretly from Turkey on an alternate military aircraft while the White House said he was aboard Air Force One, The Washington Post has learned.

The clandestine mission, which has not been reported previously, was carried out unbeknownst to journalists and some White House staff members who believed they were on the same plane as the president, according to material reviewed by The Post, a U.S. official familiar with the operation and another person with knowledge of the president’s travel. These people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the matter.  

[...]   

In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane—an Air Force C-32A—via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, according to the U.S. official and corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a “decoy” with media and some White House staff aboard, the official said.   

The catering truck took the sitting president to the smaller C-32A. Flying out of Turkey on Air Force One was deemed too dangerous for the president, though media and some White House staff were left aboard the doomed plane.   

We were puzzled by the ethics of this procedure. Last night, someone finally asked about that, as Mediaite reports:  

REPORTER (8/11/26): Why was it too dangerous for you to fly on Air Force One, but not too dangerous for the press?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, I don’t know. I think, actually, the plane that I flew on was at greater risk. I think it was at greater risk.

REPORTER: Why do you say that? 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Because that would be the plane, I think, that they would be more likely to go for.  

You're right! The reporter asked a good question, but she got a ridiculous answer. 

(To see C-Span's unedited tape of the full exchange, you can just click this.)

At first glance, the arrangement here was quite strange. It was decided that the president couldn't leave on Air Force One due to the possibility that the plane would be attacked. But the press was allowed to leave on that plane—and no, they apparently weren't informed that they were presumably in danger.   

We were surprised to think that some such arrangement had actually taken place. We've also been surprised by the way cable discussions have tended to skip right past this apparent moral dilemma.  

Those were our initial reactions to this unusual event. But when we read the Post's report, we ran headfirst into this:   

To transport the president out of Turkey, U.S. officials relied in part on a technique that has occasionally become public knowledge. One such mission occurred in March 2000, when President Bill Clinton visited Pakistan. With television cameras recording in Islamabad, Clinton disembarked from a plain white jet that followed the blue-and-white Air Force One, clarifying where he had been.

There have been other times in the last 30 years when Air Force One served as a decoy for the president because of a serious threat or because he was flying to a dangerous location, another U.S. official said, declining to elaborate. [Air Force One] is highly secure, but also highly visible, so putting the president on an alternate plane instead can be considered safer, that former official said.   

"Considerably safer" for him, but not for the staff and the press!

Rather plainly, that passage seems to suggest that this sort of thing has been done in the past. Does that perhaps explain the silence of the journalists? 

Is it possible that news orgs have agreed to have their employees exposed to danger in this way? Is it possible that they don't want their employees to talk about this ongoing arrangement? 

Whatever the truth may turn out to be, the madness of the age is all around us today. We don't know of any reason to assume that a modern nation can survive this degree of tribal madness—the tribal madness referred to at the start of Kurt Andersen's guest essay for the New York Times:

Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?

“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”    

Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours" and “jumped again a few weeks later...

As we noted in Monday's report, that's the way the essay starts. We think it gets a bit unrealistic from there.

In our view, Madness Red is everywhere, as we've endlessly noted. And as we'll note tomorrow, we're also dealing with the rising tide of something which could even be seen as Madness-Adjacent Blue. 

Can things really "go on this way?" We can't say the answer is obvious. At any rate, for today, we'll leave you with these stone-cold basic questions:

While the president fled on the C-32, were journalists and White House staff subjected to significant danger?

Will news orgs choose to explore the question that one reporter asked?   

Also, was this troubling procedure a "new arrival?" Or has it been here all along? 

Tomorrow: Who is [NAME WITHHELD]?

TUESDAY: Wehner and Jha tilt different ways!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 11, 2026

One cable star knows for sure: Yesterday afternoon, we took a look at the David Wallace-Wells opinion column about the Senate hearing in which mountains of rage were directed at Dr. Fauci 

In print editions, the column appeared in last weekend's Sunday Times.  Online, the headline on the column says this:  

Fauci Has a Lot to Answer For. But We’re Asking the Wrong Questions.   

Is the first part of that headline true? Does Dr. Fauci actually "have a lot to answer for?" 

We have no clear idea. The issues involved in the GOP's accusations were scientific—technical. It's hard for non-specialists to make assessments with respect to topics like that.   

Wallace-Wells is typically very sharp. But in an assessment for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner seems to feel that Dr. Fauci was mugged by a lack of reality, which is largely the way it looked and felt to us. 

 The start of Wehner's piece suggests his general drift, which may well be perfectly accurate:

Why MAGA Is So Obsessed With Fauci   

Half a dozen years ago, Anthony Fauci was as popular as he would ever be. A respected physician and researcher for decades, he became in 2020 the public face of the pandemic response—calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. And the country turned him into a folk hero. He was on the cover of Time, named one of People magazine’s People of the Year, and played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live...   

Then it all came apart.

Last week, Fauci testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator Rand Paul—a fierce Fauci critic who has said that the American people want the 85-year-old retired scientist “behind bars.” Acting on his lawyer’s advice, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, citing what he called Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with him. Yesterday, the committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions.   

It's a bit like what Woody Guthrie wrote in his ballad, Pretty Boy Floyd:  

"And every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name."   

Every crime was added to Fauci's name at the Senate hearing. But had he actually committed the crimes in question? 

It's extremely hard for a layperson to know. In a wide array of subject areas, this has become a growing problem for our flailing political culture.   

Wehner was a speechwriter for Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush. He didn't much like what he saw the Republicans doing at that rage-filled Senate hearing. His portrait starts like this:  

[continuing directly]  
The hearing produced an avalanche of ad hominem attacks, ludicrous claims, and accusations—most of them years old and long since answered. But two matter more than the rest, because so much of Paul’s case rests on them: (1) that Fauci funded the research that made the pandemic, and (2) that he lied to Congress about it. 

Wehner seems to be placing those two accusations in the basket of claims marked "ludicrous." As his column proceeds, he dispatches matter #1 in two quick paragraphs. A bit later, the claim that Dr. Fauci lied also meets a quick death.    

Wehner's analyses may well be perfectly accurate; we aren't saying they aren't. But along the way, Wehner says this about where the Covid virus came from:   

As for the origins of the virus itself, nobody has established with certainty where the pandemic began. Chinese stonewalling means that we are unlikely to ever know. No outside investigator has been given the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s records, its early samples, or the medical files of its staff.  

However, the scientific evidence favors a natural origin.    

And so on from there. That too may be an accurate assessment. But nine days ago, on CNN's State of the Union, Dr. Ashish Jha seemed to surprise Dana Bash when he stated a different view.

Dr. Jha served as White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator under President Biden. Here's what he told Bash as she tried to recover from 22 minutes with Robert Kennedy Junior:

BASH (8/2/26): Before I let you go, you reshared a tweet that said...Well, let me say it this way:

You said that the available evidence points towards research-related incidents in Wuhan as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that we were funding research in an institution where we lacked full transparency into what research was being conducted.

You agreed with that.

JHA: I did. This is going to surprise some people. When I went into the White House, my view was this was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak. Based on information I learned and based on information I have seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak.  

Here's the bottom line: No one in the United States knows for sure. The only people who know for sure are officials in China, and we still need transparency and accountability on that. So that is my best assessment. I'm not suggesting I know for sure, but I'm saying my best assessment is that it probably was a lab leak.

BASH: That is definitely news to hear that from you, for sure, and shows that we're just—we're still learning, which is really important.

For the record: If it was a lab leak, was that somehow Dr. Fauci's fault, if only in some absurdly tangential way? As with almost everything else, we can't exactly tell you for absolute sure.

That said, Dr. Jha was clearly wrong on one key point. At least one person in this country really does "know for sure!" We've seen the all-knowing Greg Gutfeld say, with absolute certainty, that we do know that the Covid virus emerged from the lab.  

Fox sends him out, twice a day, to make a joke of our culture. On the brighter side, profits are good.

NEW ARRIVALS: When he did it again, the New York Times...

TUESDAY, AUGUST 11, 2026

...did what a news org should: Incomparably, your astonishing Daily Howler keeps banging out those results!

We refer to a news report which appears in print editions of this morning's New York Times (but also online, of course). The news report starts like this: 

Trump Stokes Islamophobia by Calling Democratic Candidates ‘Jihadists’

President Trump on Monday described Democratic candidates in the midterm elections as “jihadists,” adding to Islamophobic statements recently made by Republican elected officials.

Mr. Trump also delivered another tirade against people of Somali descent, saying: “They’re not smart, they have no aptitude, they have nothing going, and they’re telling us how to run our country.”   

Asked about the candidates representing the Democratic Party in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that “we have jihadists being elected all over the place. We have this — whether it’s communism, jihadism.”

White House officials did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. Trump’s statements on Monday, and about how the comments could alienate Muslims in the United States.

"And about how the comments could alienate Muslims in the United States?" What an absurd instant focus! And yet this news report goes where it ought to go and it does what it should:   

It reports the inexcusable, perfectly recognizable conduct being engaged in by the man who currently sits in the White House.   

On this sprawling campus, we assume the person in question fits the description given by his niece earlier this year. We assume that the person in question is dealing with "obvious age-related cognitive declines," layered atop "decades of serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen."   

The fact that she said it doesn't mean that it's true. On balance, we'd be inclined to assume that it is.

We're inclined to assume that it's true. Borrowing therefore from a fictional freedom fighter, we therefore will tell you this:

"Since no one is to blame, I demand no [further] explanation."
(Victor Laszlo)

There's no one to blame for cognitive decline, or for serious "mental illness." But we'll call it a "new arrival"—we'll call it a welcome new arrival—when the New York Times, the very next day, reports such inexcusable conduct as this:   

While the president did not name a specific candidate, he targeted Mr. El-Sayed hours later when he posted an image depicting the Democratic candidate standing in front of a crowd that included two women wearing head scarves. “They are coming for your home and your belongings,” a caption read along the image.

And his rant came two days after he posted on social media an image of himself with the first lady, Melania Trump, next to an image of Dr. El-Sayed and his wife. The text above the image read: “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s.” 

[...]

A number of other Republicans have ramped up their anti-Muslim language since Dr. El-Sayed’s primary win. Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama wrote on social media that “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST,” calling him a “TERRORIST.” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina said on social media that “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”   

Most senior Republican officials have remained silent...

Most officials have remained silent? As we noted yesterday, so has the bulk of Blue America's mainstream press corps, as for example when the sitting president engaged in this very familiar behavior last week, before a crowd in Las Vegas:  

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/5/26): In Congress, we're working every day to defend the American dream for you and your children. The radical left, the maniacs, they're trying to destroy it with the disaster known as, not socialism—Communism!

It's Communism. These are Communists. And the polls were wrong again last night when they thought it would be a landslide victory for a hater of Jews and a hater of Israel. 

This guy hates Jews. Somebody said, "Oh, that's a little strong." No, he hates Jews, and he hates Israel.

 "Abdul El-Sayed." Can you believe this? This could only happen to me. 

Abdul El-Sayed, a lovely gentleman! He's a man of hate, and now he's going around saying, "No, I love everybody." He doesn't love everybody. Put him in office, you're going to find out what he loves. 

He doesn't love Israel. He doesn't love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart, and there's not a fricking thing he can do about it. There's not a thing he can do about it because he hates them.   

Sadly, there was more from where that came from that day. We regard that as a blindingly obvious type of behavior—but also, in all likelihood, as an artefact of the situation his niece had described.  

It's a tragic but deeply dangerous fact about modern American life. Almost surely, the sitting president is afflicted in something like the ways his niece, a doctorate-level clinical therapist, described in her best-selling 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough:   

Prologue

[...]

None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.   

For fuller context from her book, you can just click here. But so the gentleman's niece assessed—and you didn't have to read very far. It was right there in the Prologue!

The fact that Mary Trump said it didn't mean that it's true. But among trained medical specialists, she was hardly the first to say or suggest it. 

Former Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee had already died for our sins by the time Mary Trump's book arrived in the stores. But nothing has ever inspired our mainstream journalists to report, or to discuss, these unfortunate but plainly dangerous medical possibilities.   

That said:   

The president's behavior is inexcusable, but it's also undisguised. It's easy to see what it is.   

Today, in a type of new arrival, his behavior has been instantly chronicled by the New York Times. Also appearing today is this second news report, a first cousin to the report we've already cited:   

Trump Signs Executive Order Calling for Fewer Childhood Vaccines  

For the third time in less than a year, President Trump on Monday issued an executive order that calls for American children to be routinely immunized against fewer diseases, as they are in countries like Denmark.

The latest version embraces more explicitly than its predecessors a revised schedule that recommends immunizing children against 11 diseases, rather than the 17 that are currently recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The order also “directs the attorney general to advance legal challenges against states that violate children’s rights to religious or medical vaccination exemptions,” Mr. Trump said.

Speaking in the Oval Office before signing the executive order, Mr. Trump said he was motivated in part by concerns over whether vaccines were tied to autism, even though dozens of studies have found no link between the two.   

There he's gone again! Meanwhile, Robert Kennedy's name doesn't appear until paragraph 9. For the record, also this:   

“There’s no science behind these recommendations,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, who directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s all about ideology.”  

A reader doesn't encounter that until she hits paragraph 8.   

In recent weeks, quite a few "new arrivals" have appeared on the front. Some members of the DSA have brought the eternal note of sadness in. 

When a Muslim was nominated for the Senate, his arrival was greeted with this.  

Tomorrow: New arrivals, arriving fast

MONDAY: Did the madness of that Senate hearing...

MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2026

...elude the Times' Wallace-Wells? "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on?”  

(Or while it's putting its pants on? Is that also true of a misstatement, even of a false impression?)   

It's a famous apocryphal statement! Back in 2017, the New York Times shot the standard attribution down. The report by Nirai Chokshi started off like this:  

That Wasn’t Mark Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born

How fitting that the man often credited with saying “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” most likely did not invent the phrase.

Commonly attributed to Mark Twain, that quotation instead appears to be a descendant of a line published centuries ago by the satirist Jonathan Swift. Variants emerged and mutated over time until a modern version of the saying was popularized by a Victorian-era preacher, according to Garson O’Toole, a researcher who, like Twain, prefers a pseudonym.   

And so on from there. All in all, Twain didn't say so many things you wonder if he ever made any real statements at all!  

Wherever that famous bromide started, it's only that much truer today, given the speedy transmission of bogus claims our modern media make possible. 

With that in mind, we start with a peculiar hook, one which seemed to appear in many post mortems of the charges made against Fauci in thar recent rage-filled Senate hearing.

David Wallace-Wells wrote the lengthy piece, and he's plenty sharp. We'll offer two clips from his lengthy piece, again for the New York Times. We were puzzled by his initial premise:

Fauci Has a Lot to Answer For. But We’re Asking the Wrong Questions.   

Pleading the fifth was cowardly. It was also revelatory.

When Anthony Fauci categorically refused to answer any questions at a Senate committee hearing last week, he inadvertently showcased a throwback scene of irreconcilable pandemic partisanship. On one side were Republican ideologues boiling over with grievances familiar from 2020 and 2021. On the other side, Democrats nominally committed to the principle of defending science against partisan attacks but unsure exactly what that meant beyond lip service...   

[...]

The United States was not the only country to wrestle with Covid, to improvise a policy response that upended the lives of its citizens or to watch as even burdensome restrictions failed to prevent a mass mortality event, only lightening it. But for years Fauci has been bullied and harassed and intimidated and, above all, vilified and scapegoated by bad-faith critics mounting contradictory attacks that allowed them to pin responsibility on one man for everything they might not have liked about the experience of living through a brutal pandemic. Yet that is exactly why Fauci should have talked last week: to answer those critics, defend his approach and those of his colleagues, and explain what lessons he’d learned and might like the rest of us to learn. Evidently, he felt too boxed in to try, even with Joe Biden’s blanket pardon in hand.  

Say what? For years, Fauci had been vilified and scapegoated by critics mounting contradictory attacks? Indeed, they'd been doing so in bad faith? 

But even in the madhouse environment in which the sitting president is trying to lock everyone up, he should have gone into that Senate hearing and taken his chances with the presumptive fairness of the Tr\ump/Blanche DOJ?

At age 85, in this madhouse environment, it was cowardly of him not to try? Are we all on the same planet here?

Many opinion and editorial writers have adopted this peculiar stance in their reviews of that Senate hearing. A bit later, Wallace-Wells extended his portrait of the venomous bad faith Dr. Fauci should have ignored:  

...If you believe that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak, it’s not crazy to suspect that American support for gain-of-function research around the world may have played some role in bringing it about. How much responsibility remains an open question, because the subject of pandemic origins itself remains open as well. This is another reason that Fauci should have come prepared to explain and defend himself last week, as he told me he would several years ago if presented with the chance to expound at length and with nuance about the value of this kind of research.

But it is also politically convenient to make Fauci the sole villain in the lab leak morality tale, because so many of his haters have already taken to blaming him for everything else about the pandemic, no matter how contradictory their complaints.

You can’t think we overreacted, for instance, and at the same time think that Fauci was indifferent to ongoing American deaths during the period when pandemic restrictions were strictest. You can’t charge him with a million murders while doubting the mortality statistics or insisting that Covid was actually a “scamdemic.” (“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine,” as “The Daily Show” joked.) You also can’t pin the whole thing on Democratic safetyism when Trump was president through the most restrictive phase and pointedly criticized governors who wanted to reopen too soon...

"If you believe that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak, it’s not crazy to suspect that American support for gain-of-function research may have played some role in bringing it about?" The only question would be how much responsibility to dump on Fauci's head?

That seems to make perfect sense! But what if, apparently like Dr. Fauci, you don't believe that the pandemic came from the lab? And as he continues, Wallace-Wells further describes the "bad faith" to which he has already referred:   

"You can't charge Fauci with a million murders"—some senators charged him with nine million deaths—"if you're also saying that the whole thing was a scam?" By now, Wallace-Wells is saying the tribal rage was so phony that it could be summarized in the way The Daily Show engineered:   

“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine.”   

To our eye, one analysis after another blew right past the apparent madness of the current age. In our view, our journalistic elites are having a very hard time understanding this basic fact:

A blatantly obvious type of plague is present within our own Oran.

Tomorrow, we'll visit another appraisal. Writing for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner starts right there, with a reference to Camus' The Plague, but after that the corrections and fact-checks start.

Are Wehner's defenses of Dr. Fauci accurate? How are we supposed to know? The "democratization of media" has created a type of modern Babel. Again and again, matters of technical complexity pretty much take over from there.

NEW ARRIVALS: A new arrival on the front...

MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2026

...was met with familiar old conduct: "The appearance on the front of a new arrival...became the topic of general conversation."   

In the translation by David Magarshack for Penguin Classics, that's the first sentence of Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog. The famous story has its own Wikipedia page. Included there is this:  

The Lady with the Dog

"The Lady with the Dog" is a short story by Anton Chekhov. First published in 1899, it...is one of Chekhov's most famous pieces of short fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov considered it to be one of the greatest short stories ever written.

[...]

Nabokov wrote about the unconventional ending:

"All the traditional rules of storytelling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories every written."

You could call it a story without an ending. So too with our ongoing, unresolved, unfolding national dilemma.   

Variously named in various translations, The Lady with the Lapdog is a story about human growth. As such, it has no obvious political application under current arrangements. 

Still, we've been thinking about that opening sentence because of several new arrivals who have appeared on the scene in the past few weeks.   

First, we had the DSA's Megan Romer, a thoroughly good and decent person. She declared her support for that organization's party platform on the July 26 edition of Fox News Sunday.   

(To watch the entire interview, you can just click here.)   

Several parts of Romer's discussion with Shannon Bream "became the topic of general conversation," at least on the Fox News Channel's heavily watched "cable news" programs. Later, Romer's interview with The New Yorker's David Remnick also became widely discussed on Red American shows.  

Not long after that arrival, Francesca Hong joined Romer as a topic of conversation on Fox News Channel programs. 

Hong is the leading candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for governor of Wisconsin. A statement in 2021 about her desire to abolish Thanksgiving has received a lot of play on Fox, though also on CNN.  

(Then too, there's the easy-to-mock "proximity to whiteness" hook.)

Finally, we turn to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Party's nominee in the Michigan Senate race. News orgs have chosen to ignore the remarkable statements about this candidate made by the sitting president during last Wednesday's speech in Las Vegas.

Perhaps understandably, major news orgs have chosen to avoid that day's familiar old madness. With apologies, here are some of the things the sitting president said:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/5/26): In Congress, we're working every day to defend the American dream for you and your children. The radical left, the maniacs, they're trying to destroy it with the disaster known as, not socialism—Communism!

It's Communism. These are Communists. And the polls were wrong again last night when they thought it would be a landslide victory for a hater of Jews and a hater of Israel. 

This guy hates Jews. Somebody said, "Oh, that's a little strong." No, he hates Jews, and he hates Israel.

 "Abdul El-Sayed." Can you believe this? This could only happen to me. 

Abdul El-Sayed, a lovely gentleman! He's a man of hate, and now he's going around saying, "No, I love everybody." He doesn't love everybody. Put him in office, you're going to find out what he loves. 

He doesn't love Israel. He doesn't love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart, and there's not a fricking thing he can do about it. There's not a thing he can do about it because he hates them.   

That's what the sitting president said. Big orgs have largely averted their gaze.

(Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can read the transcript of the speech, and you can watch the tape.)

Dr. El-Sayed, a former Rhodes scholar, is a new arrival on the national front. Yesterday, Jake Tapper praised his performance on CNN's State of the Union. 

We're sorry to say that we disagreed—that we thought Dr. El-Sayed's relative inexperience may perhaps have showed.

El-Sayed is a new arrival on the national front. By way of contrast, the president was demonstrating the oldest form of ugly political conduct—and just for the record, moments later, he went on to say this:  

PRESIDENT TRUMP: One of the things I see, and you see it here in the Blue states run by Democrats, everything's filthy dirty all the time. The cities stink. They smell. The sidewalks are loaded with horrible stuff. 

I don't want to use the term because my wife will get—she hates it when I use the term. I use it, but she doesn't love it.  

There's more to what he said that day, but we're trying to keep it short.

It may be understandable when major news orgs duck the difficulty of reporting this kind of familiar old conduct. It may be understandable, but these new arrivals will be the subject of general conversation as the midterm campaign unfolds.

Tomorrow, we plan to focus on a different type of new arrival—a new arrival which won't produce much discussion at all. We refer to Kurt Andersen's new guest essay for the New York Times. 

The essay won't produce much conversation. But this is the way it starts:

Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?

“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”   

That's the way the essay starts—and we'd say that headline about a "soft breakup" is itself rather soft, given the essay's contents and suggestions.

Does our flailing nation already qualify as a type of "failed state?" In the past, we've suggested that the answer may be yes. As the president rants and rails in the oldest and most familiar ways, Andersen's gloomy essay seems to be saying much the same thing.   

"We can’t keep going this way," Andersen eventually says. "[A]voiding real hostilities over the long term will require some kind of radical shift."

Tomorrow: From the New York Times identity line:

Kurt Andersen is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Breakup,” about the United States’ split into two nations.