SATURDAY: Trump's summit had been a perfect 10!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 2025

Then K.T. McFarland showed up: K. T. McFarland doesn't vote the way we do—but also, she's no dope.

Nor is she a household name. The leading authority on the topic offers a bit of her background:

K. T. McFarland

Kathleen Troia McFarland (born July 22, 1951) is an American political commentator, civil servant, author, and former political candidate.

McFarland began her political career in the 1970s as a night-shift typist and assistant press liaison for National Security Council staff. In the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, she worked in the Department of Defense as a speechwriter and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.

[...]

Kathleen Troia was born on July 22, 1951, in Madison, Wisconsin, where she grew up as the oldest of four siblings...She graduated from Madison West High School in 1969.

Troia studied at the Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In 1970, she worked part-time at the Nixon White House for Henry Kissinger's National Security Council staff...Intrigued by U.S. foreign policy and Nixon's 1972 China visit, Troia majored in Chinese studies, graduating from George Washington in 1973.

After working in the Ford administration, Troia studied on scholarship at Oxford University, where she earned a combined master's degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Troia attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While there, she studied nuclear weapons, China, and the Soviet Union for three years, but did not complete her Ph.D.

Time spent at GW, Oxford and M.I.T. help suggest the possibility that McFarland is no dope. According to the leading authority, things did come apart, to a substantial extent, when she ran for the Senate:

In 2006, McFarland ran in the Republican primary in the United States Senate election in New York for a seat held by Democrat Hillary Clinton. She was a late entrant who was recruited once the candidacy of the leading Republican, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, imploded.

...She ran into trouble with a March 2006 comment that appeared to allege that the Clinton campaign had been flying helicopters low over her Southampton, New York, house and spying on her, or that Clinton forces had rented an apartment across from her $18 million duplex on Park Avenue; she later said she had been joking, but the episodes upset her. The race between McFarland and her opponent, former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, was ugly.

McFarland's candidacy was plagued by allegations that she overstated her credentials. Specifically, The New York Times reported that McFarland's claim that she had written part of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" speech was false, that her contention that she had been the highest-ranking woman of her time at the Reagan Pentagon was false, and that her claim that she had been the first female professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee was false. Also, the Spencer campaign objected to her assertion that she had held a civilian rank equivalent to that of a three-star general.

McFarland's inconsistent record of voting in prior New York state elections also became an issue, with her having failed to vote in six of the past 14 elections. McFarland also unlawfully maintained voting addresses in two different places at the same time, sometimes voting in one municipality and sometimes voting in another. She emphasized that she had never voted twice in one election, promising to cancel one of her voter registrations. By late June, her campaign was nearly out of money, and she loaned $100,000 to the campaign. On August 22, McFarland suspended her campaign after her daughter was caught shoplifting in Southampton.

Yikes! That said, it has been a major part of American politics over the past thirty-three years:

The wheels have come off the Republican cart any time opposition to the endlessly demonized Hillary Clinton has been involved.

Back in December 2005, Judge Jeanine's campaign against Clinton had imploded. The candidacy of McFarland may have been even worse. 

She went on to lose the race for the GOP nomination, and with it the chance to run against Clinton. That said, the years at Oxford and M.I.T. remain—and so it was when she appeared, this very morning, on the Fox & Friends Weekend program.

Let's go ahead and say their names! The friends this morning were these:

Fox & Friends Weekend
Charlie Hurt: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend
Rachel Campos-Duffy: co-host, Fox & friends Weekend
Johnny Joey Jones: Fox News contributor

As required by Fox News Channel law, the friends had been gushing about President Trump's masterstrokes in Alaska.

The program started at 6 a.m.; as required by corporate law, the friends were soon gushing hard. At 6:12, they played tape of the aforementioned Hillary Clinton 

She loves this war, Campos-Duffy said. She said that Clinton had "set a trap" for President Trump with her recent statement about nominating him for a Nobel prize if he manages to end the war in the way she described.

In short, things were proceeding as planned as the morning started. After Campos-Duffy spent some time trashing Barack Obama ("He's so uncool"), extremely clueless remarks about the logic of congressional districting followed at 6:14.

The day was proceeding as planned. And then, dear God! At 6:25, McFarland, a foreign policy specialist, was brought on to discuss the miracles which had occurred in Alaska.

McFarland did time at Oxford and M.I.T.—and no, she isn't a dope. On this occasion, dear God

She quickly seemed to say that things hadn't gone all that well!

Plainly, she said that in her opening statement, in which she said that the summit of the midnight sun had turned out to be "not that great."

The summit was "not what I hoped for," the Oxford grad now said!

Eventually, McFarland scrambled to make things right in certain predictable ways. First, though, she provided the kind of respite which occurs, on extremely rare occasions, on group propaganda programs like the channel's Fox & Friends Weekend.

As we post, we can't yet link you to videotape of what McFarland said. We can't yet provide a transcript of her complete remarks.

That said, for one brief shining moment, an unplanned event occurred. A guest had come on this "cable news" show and had wandered away from pure script.

Let us quickly add this:

When a brutal war like this war in underway, there is no single unassailable way to seek its resolution. One person might think that Ukraine should fight on against the Russian bear. Someone else may think that the overall game has been lost—that Ukraine should start feeding the beast.

There's no scientific formula which lets us compute the perfect way to proceed from here. But on messaging programs like Fox & Friends Weekend—on messaging programs like Fox News @ Night—politely scripted corporate stooges come on the air and say the things their owners want them to say.

Question to self:

Have we ever seen anything stupider than the segment which ended last evening's Fox News @ Night? We expect to show you what was said at the start of the week.

The village Stoopnagles were out in force during that final segment. As if the official Stoopnagles weren't pathetic enough, Trace Gallagher then read a set of text messages from a set of scripted viewers.

The stupidification of the American nation is underway at such times. Also numbered among the offenders are the Blue American stars who have agreed that what happens on Fox must stay on Fox—that this corporate conduct must never be reported, critiqued or discussed.

Alaska was a perfect 10, President Trump had said. Campos-Duffy quoted his statement  several times—and then, up jumped McFarland! 

Making a aet of reasonable observations, she instantly wandered off course. 

Regarding what will flow from yesterday's event, we think today of Sandburg's Lincoln. We refer to Sandburg's description of what would happen, out in Coles County, Illinois, where Lincoln's beloved stepmother lived.

We refer to his account of what would happen as the months went by after her boy—"he was all of a son to her"—had stroked her face a last time, and had then gone away, off to the White House, from which he would never return:

The sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months would come sifting down with healing and strength; between harvest and corn-plowing there would be rains beating and blizzards howling; and then there would be silence after snowstorms with white drifts piled against the fences, barns, and trees.

What will happen in Ukraine after yesterday's perfect 10? You won't likely hear it said on Fox & Friends Weekend, but quite possibly this:

The drone attacks will still rain down on the hospitals and the kindergartens. We'll be two weeks away from being two weeks away from being told what might take place, or possibly not, during Vladimir's next phone call.

Or then again, maybe not.

Sandburg's fuller passage: Sandburg was a poet biographer. As Lincoln said that last goodbye, Sandburg's fuller picture was this:

The next day Lincoln drove eight miles out to the old farm along the road over which he had hauled wood with an ox team. He came to the old log house he had cut logs for and helped smooth the chinks; from its little square windows he had seen late winter and early birds.

Sally Bush and he put their arms around each other and listened to each other’s heartbeats. They held hands and talked; they talked without holding hands. Each looked into eyes thrust back in deep sockets. She was all of a mother to him.

He was her boy more than any born to her. He gave her a photograph of her boy, a hungry picture of him standing and wanting, wanting. He stroked her face a last time, kissed good-by, and went away.

She knew his heart would go roaming back often, that even when he rode in an open carriage in New York or Washington with soldiers, flags or cheering thousands along the streets, he might just as like be thinking of her in the old log farmhouse out in Coles County, Illinois.

The sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months would come sifting down with healing and strength; between harvest and corn-plowing there would be rains beating and blizzards howling; and then there would be silence after snowstorms with white drifts piled against the fences, barns, and trees.

Her astonishing stepson would never come back. With respect to that final meeting, that's the way the poet imagined and told it.

With that in mind at this terrible time, Professor Brown said it long ago:

Our civilization has to be "renewed by...the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new."

We have to feel our way out of this mess. We can't just rattle script.