DEMOS / DEMOCRATIZATION: Eric Holder states his view!

THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2026

But what did he actually say? Friend, it's very much as we told you all the way back on May 2: 

We tend to admire Eric Holder on this sprawling campus. 

In that original admission, we said we wouldn't mention the principal reason for our admiration. It involves Holder's contradiction, when he was serving as attorney general, of a key piece of Blue American agitprop, and so we fear that it might make the occasional reader dislike him.    

For that reason, we'll skip that bit of behavior again. But who the heck is Eric Holder? The moving finger writes, but still can't quite move on:  

Eric Holder

Eric Himpton Holder Jr. (born January 21, 1951) is an American lawyer who served as the 82nd United States attorney general from 2009 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, Holder was the first African American to hold the position.

Born in New York City to a middle-class family of Bajan origin, Holder graduated from Stuyvesant High School, Columbia College, and Columbia Law School. Following law school, he worked for the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice for twelve years. He next served as a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia before being appointed by President Bill Clinton as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and subsequently U.S. deputy attorney general.  

And so on from there, with distinction. We regard the person in question as decent and highly sane.

(For the record, "Bajan" is a reference to Barbados, where Holder's father and maternal grandparents were born.)

We like this guy around here. That said, we ask a basic question again, the same question we asked on May 2:   

What does Holder think we Blues should do in response to the Supreme Court's Callais decision?   

What should we angry Blues do? Yesterday, print editions of the New York Times included a guest essay by Holder concerning that very question. Headline included, here's where his proposal begins:   

This Redistricting Chaos Must End 

[...]   

When Democrats eventually take control of Congress and the White House, top of their list should be banning partisan gerrymandering and mid-decade redistricting, along with reviving protections against racial gerrymandering and guarding against other forms of voter suppression. Democratic senators should exempt such a bill from being filibustered, preventing Republicans from blocking it. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema prevented this from happening in 2021 when Democrats had the power to do it, which is one reason the country is in its current mess.   

We agree with the general thrust of Holder's essay, as signaled in that headline. Ideally, the current rush toward "partisan gerrymandering" should be brought to an end.  

That said, will normal elections take place this fall? Will Democrats ever control the White House and the Congress again?  

We can't necessarily say that normal elections will proceed. But Holder assumes that Democrats will achieve full control at some point, and he says this again and again:

He says that Democrats should pass legislation which outlaws "partisan gerrymandering." 

Partisan gerrymanders have to go—but what is Holder's stance with respect to "racial gerrymandering?" We've read his essay more than once. And yet, just as it was at the start of the month, we still aren't able to say.

Citizens, listen up! Holder uses the term "partisan gerrymandering" six separate times in his essay. He leaves no doubt about his view—it's time for that practice to go.  

On the other hand, he refers to "racial gerrymandering" only once, in the passage we've posted above, and he does so somewhat murkily. Indeed, what's his prescription concerning that practice?

We can guess, but we can't really say.

We need "protections against racial gerrymandering," Holder explicitly says. It sounds like racial gerrymandering is an undesirable practice. 

But does that mean that states should be forbidden from creating the weirdly shaped "majority Black" congressional districts under review in Callais? We're going to guess that it possibly doesn't—but Holder, who is perfectly capable, is never quite willing to say.

In such ways, our floundering discourse constantly fails. We can't be sure, but we'll guess that Holder's view about "racial gerrymandering" may go like this:

Friend, there are two different practices which get described as "racial gerrymandering." We refer to the equal-but-opposite rhyming practices known as "packing" and "cracking."

In the practice known as "packing," a state legislature creates a sprawling, weirdly shaped congressional district for the purpose of making the district majority Black. 

In the practice known as "cracking," a state legislature splits a pre-existing majority Black area into two or more different congressional districts. Or it disassembles a gerrymandered majority Black district which its predecessors may have created in the past.

"Packing" creates congressional districts which are majority Black. "Cracking" splits such districts apart. 

Each practice has been described as "racial gerrymandering" down through the years. Our guess would be this:

We'll guess that Holder would seek protections against "cracking," but might let "packing" proceed, as it's been done in the past.

That would be our own best guess, but we don't actually know. Even in his lengthy guest essay, Holder fails to clarify this matter—and then too, we find this largely incoherent effort by Ezra Klein and a specialist guest:

THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW
How to End the Gerrymandering Doom Loop Forever

The piece appears at the New York Times site. Klein is understood to be one of the paper's brightest players, as he most probably is.

That said, the lengthy transcript goes on forever. If you listen to the audiotape of the discussion, you'll spend an hour and fourteen minutes—and we can't say that any part of this confusing topic gets clarified along the way. 

With that in mind, we offer this warning: 

When we the people can't speak with clarity, the agitprop tends to take over.

Is our nation in decline? Could it be that we've already became a failed state, but we just don't know it yet?

Our answer to that second question is a provisional yes. In our view, it's a form of "democratization" which has brought us to this low place. 

We'll continue from there on the morrow. For today, we'll leave you with this:

We the people have very limited cognitive skills. We routinely get lost in the mist as we try to explain elementary concepts, and at such times we may be inclined to move to the memorized agitprop.

Bajan refers to sun-splashed Barbados. Demos is (or was) a Greek term referring to us the people, an eternally challenged group.

We admire Holder at this site. With respect to this fascinatingly complex matter, we'd like to see him speak with greater clarity. We'd like to see him do better.

Tomorrow: Lord Russell's ginormous IQ?

WEDNESDAY: How many seats could the Democrats win?

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 2026

New districts beneath the palmettos: South Carolina is known as the Palmetto State, thanks to the sabal palmettos.

Now that state is involved in a great civil war. Before too long, there may be new congressional districts beneath the stately palmettos.

Rep. Clyburn, look out! The New York Times starts to explain:   

South Carolina House Passes New Map Aimed at Forcing Out Clyburn

The South Carolina House of Representatives passed a new congressional map early Wednesday morning aimed at eliminating the state’s only Democratic seat at the urging of President Trump.

Among the proposed changes is a significant, Republican-leaning shift of the Sixth Congressional District, which is currently represented by James E. Clyburn, a powerful Black Democrat.

The map now heads to the State Senate, where some conservative members have been more hesitant to jump into the nation’s redistricting battles. Republicans already hold six of the state’s seven congressional seats, and some lawmakers have expressed skepticism about possibly unseating Mr. Clyburn, a power broker who has funneled vast resources into South Carolina over the years.   

Long story short:   

At first, it looked like the state's GOP planned to leave Rep. Clyburn's district alone. At present, the state elects six Republicans to the House, along with the venerable Clyburn as the only Dem. 

At first, it looked like the state's map would be left that way. Then, President Trump insisted on getting his way, and Rep. Clyburn's district may now get broken up, in the hope that the state GOP can capture all seven House seats.  

That said, a problem may exist. Let's start with a quick description of Rep. Clyburn's district. At present, the scorecard looks like this:   

South Carolina's 6th congressional district
Black: 46.8%
White: 41.6%
Hispanic: 6.2%
D+13 

According to the leading authority, it's a fairly common story:

"The district's current configuration dates from a deal struck in the early 1990s between state Republicans and Democrats in the South Carolina General Assembly to create a majority-black district," the leading authority says.  

In the early 1990s! That was the time when various states, reacting to 1982 amendments to the original Voting Rights Act, moved to create majority Black districts, with the two major parties generally working together on the project.

Today, Rep. Clyburn's 6th Congressional District is a "majority minority" district. (For the record, no other district in South Carolina is more than 25% Black.)

Also this, for future reference:

Following the 2020 census, the state moved 30,000 Black voters from Rep. Nancy Mace's neighboring district into Rep. Clyburn's district, thereby making it easier for Mace to hold onto her seat.   

Rep. Clyburn is a giant in South Carolina. Under current configurations, he serves the state's only plus-Democrat district. 

Now, the state GOP, bowing to Trump, is on the verge of breaking his district up—but uh-oh! Look what Rep. Clyburn said when this idea hit the fan

‘Careful What You Pray For’: Jim Clyburn Warns GOP Redistricting Could Blow Up In Their Faces and Help Democrats

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) cautioned House Republicans should “be very careful” what they “pray for” as he claimed redistricting efforts in his state of South Carolina had opened the opportunity for three Democratic candidates to get elected.

The congressman appeared on CNN’s State of the Union to speak with anchor Jake Tapper who raised the “gerrymandering wars” that had begun across multiple states ahead of the midterms, “kicked off” by President Donald Trump’s push for Texas redistricting in 2024.  

[...]

“All I’m going to say to that is be very careful what you pray for,” [Clyburn] added. “Because what I do believe is that when they finish with the redistricting, there will be the possibilities of at least three Democrats getting elected here in South Carolina to the United States Congress.”

Say what? According to Clyburn, if the state's Republican poohbahs remove a bunch of Democratic voters from some new version of District 6, they could end up flipping election outcomes in two of the neighboring districts to which they had been moved. 

The state could end up with three Democratic House members, not the current one!   

Did Rep. Clyburn really mean that? Did he really believe that could happen?   

We don't know the answer to that. But soon thereafter, the Republican majority leader of the South Carolina Senate warned his colleagues that South Carolina Democrats could end up winning two House seats if Clyburn's district was reconfigured.

Disappointingly, David French wrote a column praising that solon as a type of "good government" hero. He failed to mention the stated partisan reason behind the solon's rejection of the redistricting proposal.  

What will happen if redistricting proceeds in the Palmetto State, as now seems possible? Especially in the current environment, is it possible that Palmetto Democrats could win two or three House seats, instead of the current one? 

We don't know the answer to that, but this turn of events helps lead to the not-so-secret political history of the way the two major parties cooperated in the 1990s, creating new majority Black districts and thereby increasing the number of Black congressional reps.   

People, why did Republicans want to cooperate in that historic undertaking? That's the not-so-secret story Carl Hulse told in a recent retrospective in the New York Times. 

We've seen no one else recall this part of our recent history in this convoluted, confusing area. 

Back in the 1990s, why did Republicans want to create those districts?  Tomorrow, we'll visit what Hulse wrote about this long, winding road. 

DEMISE: "I tremble for my country," he said!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 2026

He managed to get that one right: Does President Xi believe that our nation is in decline? As he huddles in his Moscow safe rooms, does President Putin believe the same thing?   

As we noted yesterday, President Trump explained Xi's suggestion away during his recent sleepover. But are we merely in decline? Might we already be a "failed state?"   

Are we still a functioning nation state? Pew has started to wonder about that! As of last October 1, Pew had long since noticed such oddities as this:

Congress has long struggled to pass spending bills on time  

Large chunks of the federal government, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the National Archives, are shut down because there’s no money to keep them open, and federal workers are facing possible mass layoffs. The new federal fiscal year began on Oct. 1, but Congress didn’t pass any of the dozen annual appropriations bills it’s supposed to enact. Nor did lawmakers pass a stopgap spending law to buy themselves more time.   

Congress’ chronic inability to follow its own appropriations process is hardly new. In the nearly five decades that the current system for budgeting and spending tax dollars has been in place, Congress has passed all its required appropriations measures on time only four times: fiscal 1977 (the first full fiscal year under the current system), 1989, 1995 and 1997. And even those last three times, Congress was late in passing the budget blueprint that, in theory at least, precedes the actual spending bills.  

Say what? Congress hasn't managed to pass a budget in time since 1997? But then again, whatever! And then again, also this, from a different source:

 It is an attack by white people against the very concept of Black representation. It is Jim Crow 2.0.

That was Elie Mystal, appearing on Velshi, speaking about that recent court decision. Mystal went to say this:

Unless white people get over themselves, unless they reverse themselves and their ancestors and their voting habits since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they will get exactly the racist country that they have long desired.

These White People Today! They need to get over themselves, he said, and then again they also need to reverse their ancestors.

On the Fox News Channel, they luv/luv/loved those remarks! When you wonder how the sitting president's approvals can possibly stay in the mid-30s (or may be even higher than that), we'd advise you to think about many possible explanations, not excluding the vague but deliciously righteous suggestion that it may be 1892 all over again.  

Full disclosure:  

It isn't 1892, and we haven't exactly found our way back to Jim Crow again. That doesn't mean that we haven't already become a failed state, because it may be that we have.   

With respect to that possibility, a question must be asked:

Does anyone think that our current rolling collapse is going to end right here? Does anyone think that it's going to end with the $1.8 billion "compensation fund," or with the agreement by the Justice Department that the sitting president—with all his peculiar financial behaviors—will of course never be audited?  

("No Kings?" That's what millions of protesters perfectly sensibly said.)

Stumblebums, please! Is anyone sure that we're going to have a normal set of elections this fall? Why would anyone doubt the possibility that schemes might already be in place—schemes which flow from ancient human desires, ugly schemes which have been designed to undermine our normal election procedures?  

Are we already in a state of demise, but we just don't know it yet? Is it possible that we just can't see or possibly say it yet? 

In this Best Picture-nominated 1999 film, Bruce Willis plays a character who doesn't know that he has already died. Might it be that way with us, in our state of demise or decline? 

In Camus' famous novel, The Plague, that's pretty much the way it was for the good and decent citizens of the fictional sun-splashed seaside city, Oran. As a plague invaded their city, here's how they didn't respond:

Camus, La Peste (The Plague)

Our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves. In other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions. 

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. 

Is that the way it is with us? Are we forgetting that ancient dreams of conquest and overthrow still lurk in the hearts of some modern women and men?

Is that the way it is with us when we rant and yell about Jim Crow 2.0? Or when a couple of white guys sittin' around talking, while getting drunk or getting stoned, come up with a groaner like this:  

‘Couch Money’: Bill Maher and John Fetterman Defend the Cost of Trump’s Ballroom   

Bill Maher and Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) took turns defending the White House ballroom that President Donald Trump is building, with Maher saying it doesn’t make sense to get angry about it when the project will cost the equivalent of “couch money” to taxpayers.

The comic and senator talked about the ballroom at the start of Monday’s latest episode of Club Random.

“This thing won’t even be finished by the time he’s done!” Fetterman said. He then quipped Trump wasn’t building a “Dave and Buster[s],” which Maher got a kick out of.   

“Meanwhile the money is like one angstrom unit of a percentage point of what our budget is. So it doesn’t matter anyway,” Maher said. “It’s couch money.”

He added the price tag for the ballroom doesn’t sound outlandish to him. “$330 million is about what a ballroom costs,” Maher said. 

Bill has been pricing ballrooms! What in the world have they done with the highly perceptive Bill Maher?  

Motherfrumpers, please! Building a ballroom may (or may not) have been a good idea. Beyond that, the original (stated) cost of the ballroom may (or may not) have been completely OK.  

The warning signal in this event was not the idea-in-itself! It was the lunatic way the sitting president went about his treasured project—demolishing the East Wing of the White House on a series of weekday afternoons, after swearing that he'd do no such thing and after checking with no one.  

The pair of randos sat around saying a ballroom might be nice—but like many such denizens of our own Oran, they'd blown right past the main point. It was the remarkably peculiar way our president chose to blow the house down—the disturbing way he'd elected to do so without notice and no questions asked!

Ladies and gentlemen, might we speak? The sitting president seems to be mentally ill, and that's a dangerous state of affairs.

The sitting president is mentally ill? Like so many other savants, the stoners blew right past it! It's very hard to miss that fact, and yet the thought leaders of our declining society all seem to be eager to do it! 

Test scores are falling in our own Oran, but we the humans were never built to perform the task of spotting such things in the first place.   

The sitting president is mentally ill? We won't attempt to count the ways, but let us say this about that: 

People who are (severely) mentally ill didn't choose to be mentally ill.

People who are (severely) mentally ill quite often don't know that they are. Also, a mental illness is an actual illness, much as a physical illness is.   

In fact, a mental illness often is a physical illness, linked to genetics and to human physiology.

A mental illness frequently is a physical illness? As we've noted, the leading authority on this matter limns it as shown:

Most international clinical documents use the term mental "disorder," while "illness" is also common. It has been noted that using the term "mental" (i.e., of the mind) is not necessarily meant to imply separateness from the brain or body.

And so on from there. We should also mention this:

Mental illness ("mental disorder") should not be cause for insult. But our American journalistic culture is quite underdeveloped with respect to this complex topic, and insult is where we typically go when mental illness is colloquially implied.

"I tremble for my country," a president once said.

He seemed to think that a just God wouldn't tolerate our nation's misconduct forever. In our view, he pretty much got the ethics of that one right, adjusting for religious belief and for historical context.

No one living today engaged in the conduct to which he referred. But isn't there ample reason to tremble for our country today? To tremble for the fate of a nation which may already be a failed state? Which may already be The United States of the Bruce Willis Character?

Citoyens, a very important figure seems to be mentally ill—and that is always a personal tragedy. 

We'll guess that President Xi is aware of that fact—that he has factored it in.

Tomorrow: The late Barney Frank's lament?

TUESDAY: Dare to struggle, dare to win?

TUESDAY, MAY 19. 2026

Could Democrats win in the South? Yesterday afternoon, Harold Ford sat in the (one) Democratic seat on the "cable news" confection, The Five.

The first topic under review was our struggling nation's redistricting wars. As happenstance happened to have it, we can tell you this:

From 1997 through 2007, Ford served as the congressman from the majority Black Memphis House district which is now being split apart. His father, Rep. Harold Ford Sr., had been the Memphis district's congressman for 22 years before that.

Before the district was marked for splitting, it was heavily majority Black—and it was strongly pro-Democratic. Before the district was split, the Cook Report scored it like this:

Tennessee 9th congressional district
Black: 60.2%
White: 25.2%
Hispanic: 9.2%
D+23

As constituted, it was hard to lose that district as a Democrat. For that reason, the district is now being sliced apart as part of our flailing nation's ongoing redistricting war.

Please note this:

From the Democratic Party perspective, there were also a lot of "wasted votes" in that district. (In 2024, the long-time incumbent, Rep. Steve Cohen, won re-election by a walloping 46 points.) 

All those Democrats crammed into that one district made it easier for Tennessee Republicans to win neighboring congressional seats. That widely understood political pattern seems to have played a significant role in the history of these majority Black House districts—a phenomenon which came into being in the wake of an addition to the Voting Rights Act in 1982.

We'll hope to return to that key point on some bright and beautiful day.

At any rate, Harold Ford Jr, knows Memphis! He also understands the workings of majority Black congressional districts. 

Indeed, Harold Ford Jr, knows rivers! In part for that reason, we were struck by what he said on yesterday's The Five when The Pro-MAGA Four let him speak.

The segment had started with very brief bits of tape from last weekend's voting rights rally in Selma. Some Democrats were shown railing against the Callais decision—against the Supreme Court's ruling that the deliberate creation of majority Black districts was constitutionally impermissible.

As is common on The Five, some of the statements had been edited down so far that you really couldn't tell what the Dem officeholders were saying. By way of contrast, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) was shown saying this:

There are people in this hostile, anti-Black administration that would rather Black Americans pick cotton than pick the president, than pick their congressman... 

We suppose that could always be true. But when it came time for Ford to speak on The Five, he said that he has a different type of reaction to the redistricting turmoil:

FORD (5/18/26): I think about this differently than my friends and former colleagues in Congress... 

Now, interestingly, on the Democratic side, I've heard Senator Warnock and a few others talk about this. Senator Warnock is African American. He represents a state that is majority white and yet he was elected a United States Senator.

You have four Republican Black members of Congress who represent districts that are predominantly white—Byron Donald, Wesley Hunt, John James and Burgess Owens.

You also have a senator from Delaware, Black woman senator from Delaware, who represents a predominantly white state, and a [Black woman] senator from Maryland. And obviously Tim Scott, who represents South Carolina—Republican.

I understand what [my friends and former colleagues] are trying to say, but I think it's important we put all of this in context...

Intriguing! To our ear, Ford seemed to be making a radical suggestion. He seemed to be suggesting that, under current arrangements, Black candidates can win their way into the House, and into the Senate, in jurisdictions which aren't majority Black.

He specifically mentioned four Republican congressmen who were elected in districts which are heavily white. But there's a good number of Black Democrats in the House who have also won their seats in districts which weren't and aren't majority Black.

Uh-oh! When Ford went on to state his main point, his main point had nothing to do with the examples he had cited. (His work on this show can be like that.) But we were struck by his original drift, in which he almost seemed to be saying this:

Maybe it's time for Black candidates to shock the world in a new, post-Obama way. Maybe it's time for Black Democrats to go out and win House seats, including in states like Louisiana, in what a person might call the old-fashioned way.

He mentioned Senator Scott, someone we ourselves wouldn't vote for. But let the word go forth to the nations:

Scott was elected to the House from a South Carolina district which wasn't majority Black. And good God! In the Republican primary for that seat, he defeated a pair of famous (white) names:

One of those names was Paul Thurmond. Republican voters in South Carolina had decided they liked the black guy more than they liked Strom Thurmond's son!  

We're going to go ahead and admit it. It's one of our favorite political stories.

Did the Supreme Court rule correctly in Callais? We don't have the slightest idea, and we've seen none of our greatest Blue thought leaders stoop to the tedious task of trying to reason it out.

Instead, we Blues have been hurried off to the agitprop wars—to excited cries about Jim Crow 2.0, with the chaser of stirring remarks about the picking of cotton. We're going all the way back to 1892, one major voice hotly said.

Then too, there's what Rep. Jim Clayburn said, again in South Carolina. It's possible that he didn't mean what he said, but we'll show you his statement tomorrow.

Even more disclosure! Several years after he lost that race to Tim Scott, Paul Thurmond delivered one of our favorite political speeches. It's even better the way we remember it, as opposed to the way it was said.

We'll show you what Thurmond the younger said that day before our efforts are done. But in the wake of the Callais ruling, we Blues have been riding the agitprop train. The agitprop is easy to memorize, amazingly easy to say. 

They love such statements on The Five. They plainly feel that our agitprop kelps keeps MAGA hope alive!   

That's what they seem to believe on The Five. We can't swear that they're wrong.

Tomorrow: What Rep. Clyburn (and one state senator) said

DECLINE: When you won't say what's staring you right in the face...

TUESDAY, MAY 19, 2026

...have you moved past the point of decline? As we noted yesterday, President Xi may think that the United States is in a state of decline. 

President Trump seems to think that he heard Xi say something like that. As we noted yesterday, he soon set the record straight in this typically silly Truth Social post:   

Truth Details   

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct. Our Country suffered immeasurably with open borders, high taxes, transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, DEI, horrible trade deals, rampant crime, and so much more! 

President Xi was not referring to the incredible rise that the United States has displayed to the world during the 16 spectacular months of the Trump Administration, which includes all-time high stock markets and 401K’s, military victory and thriving relationship in Venezuela, the military decimation of Iran (to be continued!)—Strongest military on earth by far, economic powerhouse again, with a record 18 trillion dollars being invested into the United States by others, best U.S. job market in history, with more people working in the United States right now than ever before, ending country destroying DEI, and so many other things that it would be impossible to readily list. In fact, President Xi congratulated me on so many tremendous successes in such a short period of time.

Two years ago, we were, in fact, a Nation in decline. On that, I fully agree with President Xi! But now, the United States is the hottest Nation anywhere in the world, and hopefully our relationship with China will be stronger and better than ever before!   

Sad.

His friend had spoken "very elegantly," the sitting president said. But he'd of course been referring to the decline we suffered under Sleepy Joe Biden!  

Xi wasn't referring to the incredible rise we've enjoyed under President Trump!  That's what the president quickly said, in typically childish fashion.

Does President Xi believe that we're in a state of decline? As best we can tell, he didn't explicitly say so, though he may have dropped a suggestion to that effect, or he possibly floated a jibe.  

That said, it's hard to believe that he doesn't think something to that effect. And if he does believe that we're in decline, he can pretty much join the club. 

It's long been said that that's the view of the sitting president's other friend—the one who's the master of Russia. The age of "government of the people" is gone, Vladimir Putin is said to believe. The age of the strongman is now upon us.

Setting the views of the satraps aside, we're left to restate our own assessment. We'd say a nation—a people—has moved well past the point of decline when it can't bring itself to discuss what's sitting right there before it. 

When a nation can't bring itself to perform that task, that nation has moved past the point of decline. It's striving to be a failed state. 

Are we in a state of decline? Let's take a look at the basics:  

Our sitting president is almost surely mentally ill—and Blue thought leaders have all agreed that we must never discuss that. 

His behavior becomes more transparently phony by the day—but also, perhaps, more menacing. Yesterday, he offered a set of ridiculous claims in this transparently ludicrous post:

Truth Details

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

I have been asked by the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, and the President of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to hold off on our planned Military attack of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was scheduled for tomorrow, in that serious negotiations are now taking place, and that, in their opinion, as Great Leaders and Allies, a Deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America, as well as all Countries in the Middle East, and beyond. This Deal will include, importantly, NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS FOR IRAN! Based on my respect for the above mentioned Leaders, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, The Chairman of The Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, and The United States Military, that we will NOT be doing the scheduled attack of Iran tomorrow, but have further instructed them to be prepared to go forward with a full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment’s notice, in the event that an acceptable Deal is not reached. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP  

He was all set to launch his attack! And then, a group of leaders he greatly respects persuaded him to hold off.  

(He is, of course, making that up. The claim that he "respects" three people is the claim which tips us off.)

In the past, we've stated several points about the nature of (severe) mental illness. We won't bother restating them now.  

That said, Blue cognitive failure is also playing a major role in our nation's headlong decline.

All in all, it seems to us that Lincoln's gamble may have been lost. He prayed that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" would never "perish from the earth."

That gamble is in major trouble. President Trump is mentally ill—and we'd have to assume that his instincts and impulses make him potentially dangerous.  

That's the push from Red America. We'll try, in the next few days, to speak in frank ways about us Blues—to speak, for example, about the unimpressive ways we're reacted to the redistricting war.

In truth, our human species was never built for this line of work. Red America is making that clear, but we Blues are a part of this too.