MONDAY: The nation's first lady delivered a speech!

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2026

George Harrison wrote a song: It occurred to us some time ago:

If a person spent his entire life as a songwriter, and he only came up with "Here Comes the Sun," that would have been a case of fifty years just extremely well spent.

("And if a person lived in obscurity / Making his friends in that obscurity / Then obscurity is not uninteresting?")  

Stating the obvious, the late George Harrison (1943-2001) didn't live in obscurity. Also, he wrote many more songs than just "Here Comes the Sun."

That said, what out there, well-past-perfect simplicity! Our favorite rendition is here. 

(We'll go with "Colours" as our purest substitute off the bench. It's hard to do something this simple.)  

That said, do songs like those point the way toward a "politics of meaning?" Not toward that specific "politics of meaning," the "politics of meaning" Hillary Clinton described, perhaps unwisely, very early in her very first year as first lady.   

Under the mandated rules of the day, Clinton was savaged for what she said in that speech, delivered at the University of Texas in April 1993. And we don't even mean that we need that general type of a politics of meaning. We're looking for a new politics which both major tribes could endorse.  

"It seems like years since it's been clear?" In our view, Harrison wrote one of the world's most perfect songs.

In this country, we're badly in need of some modernized sort of "awakening." Barring the latest bizarre event, we'll advance our search tomorrow.

FAULTY: The president continued his "nonstop talk!"

MONDAY, JULY 20, 2026

The next night, Brooks reacted: Last Thursday night, the president delivered his major address about our scary elections.   

The next morning, Manohla Dargis described the speech in the New York Times. She even made it a CRITIC'S PICK. Here's part of what she said:

The speech consisted of 12,109 lines of nonlinear, nonstop talk and action featuring gods, mortals, monsters, weird doings, hospitality rituals and oceans of blood, tears and wine.   

No, wait! Actually, that was part of Dargis' review of the new feature film, "The Odyssey." With apologies for the error, here's the actual passage in question:

‘The Odyssey’ Review: Passion in Every Frame   

Throughout his career, Christopher Nolan has taken on big stories—though especially those of men, their struggles and their wars...  

[...]

It seems inevitable that Nolan would eventually take on “The Odyssey,” one of the foundations of Western literature. And why not? The story is a trippy, far-out blast, and has the kind of sinuous, complex layering that has become one of his signatures. Credited to Homer, the original poem consists of 12,109 lines of nonlinear, nonstop talk and action featuring gods, mortals, monsters, weird doings, hospitality rituals and oceans of blood, tears and wine. Whatever the adaptation, the tale is so ingrained in our cultural DNA that even those who haven’t read the original...will be familiar with it. 

That's what Dargis actually said. But as with Homer's endless tale, so too with the sitting president's! 

By now, everyone is familiar with the "nonlinear, nonstop talk" driving its ever-shifting stream of allegations. Everyone is familiar with its "monsters, weird doings and oceans of blood," even though the president's tale has only been around for six years!   

What actually happened, or didn't happen, in the 2020 presidential campaign? Tomorrow, we'll try to fashion a list of the various claims the president made in his 26-minute address.

That said: 

One night later, on Friday night, David Brooks offered his assessment of the address on the PBS NewsHour. As always, he was paired with Jonathan Capehart on the program which occupies the highest end of Blue American journalism.   

David Brooks is a good, decent person. But we thought you should see what he said.   

Full disclosure! In the immediate aftermath of the address, politicians and journalists in Blue America fact-checked the rambling effort within an inch of its life. 

Over in Red America, the Fox News Channel essentially disappeared the address. Fox chose not to discuss it at all, pretended it hadn't occurred.   

One night later, out came Capehart and Brooks for their weekly session with Geoff Bennett. We thought the assessment offered by Brooks was remarkably strange:    

BENNETT (7/17/26): President Trump once again putting false claims about the 2020 election at the center of the national political debate is where we start as we turn tonight to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. 

That's The Atlantic's David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart of MS NOW. Good evening, gentlemen.

CAPEHART: Hey, Geoff.

BENNETT: So, David, what did you hear in that speech last night? What do you think President Trump is trying to accomplish here?   

BROOKS: Oh, subtle. I couldn't figure it out.

(Chuckling)

He was— He's got to get more original in his confabulation. I mean, he's just stuck on this 2020 thing. There's never been any evidence. There's no evidence. 

I think the good news is, he doesn't have any policies to actually ruin our election system, as we heard from the secretaries of state. So we're going to have fair elections in this country.

We're going to have fair elections, he said. We thought that remark by Brooks was amazingly strange.  

As you can see, Bennett began the session by saying that the president's speech had been driven by "false claims." 

As far as we know, that statement is fundamentally accurate—but it represents a new way of doing journalism, an approach which sprang full-blown from the head of Zeus in reaction to the endless counterfactual wanderings of the sitting president.   

Bennett referred to "false claims;" Brooks went with "confabulation." Tomorrow, we'll try to list the various presidential claims they were talking about—but what in the world, what on earth, led Brooks to say something like this:

The good news is, he doesn't have any policies to actually ruin our election system...So we're going to have fair elections. 

Why in the world—why on earth—would Brooks say something like that? Tomorrow, we'll show you why we ask.

In the Odyssey, sacred Homer fashioned a tale full of "monsters, weird doings, and oceans of blood." The sitting president has done something similar in the course of six long years of nonlinear, nonstop talking.

Last Thursday night, we saw two of the brightest bulbs in the Congress express their fear about what President Trump might decide to do this fall to undermine our elections. One night later, up jumped Brooks with a very strange statement. 

There's nothing to worry about, he said. Why is the world did he do that?

Tomorrow: Confabulations and fears

SATURDAY: Who in the world was he talking about?

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2026

Yevtushenko, Watters: You're right! There was no mention of the president's ballyhooed national address on yesterday's edition of The Five.   

Answering yesterday afternoon's question, the Fox News Channel's apparent disappearing of the president's speech continued! In place of any such discussion, the normal standards of The Five prevailed:   

The program's first segment was dominated by Jesse Watters' mocking presentation regarding Ashley Webb, a visibly awkward transgender woman who somehow got onto the undercard up in Maine this past Thursday night.  

What "undercard" are we talking about? We'll let CNN explain:   

Maine Democrats’ first debate laid bare their difficulty in replacing Graham Platner   

As Maine Democrats prepare to replace Graham Platner as their Senate nominee, eight candidates pitched themselves as best prepared to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins over two hours of debates Thursday night.

The first hour featured four candidates who were on the primary ballot in different races this year. All lost—but all earned at least 20% of the vote in their contests.

Former public health official Nirav Shah pointed to his performance in the gubernatorial primary (he earned the most first-place votes, but finished second once ranked-choice votes were tabulated). Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson touted his state-level accomplishments. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows highlighted her attempt to disqualify President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot...

The second hour was an undercard of sorts, with four lesser-known candidates looking to break through in the abbreviated race...

And so on from there.

How had this collection of candidates been assembled? We aren't entirely sure.

According to the New York Times, "twelve Maine Democrats ha[d] signed up to run to replace Graham Platner." We've seen no one explain why eight potential nominees, not twelve, took part in Thursday's two-tier event.   

At least three debaters in the first group possessed traditional qualifications. (We saw Shah do a town hall event on C-Span last weekend. We thought he was quite sharp.)

By way of contrast, Webb does not have traditional qualifications. Her performance was extremely uneasy—and as we mentioned, she identifies as transgender. 

Inevitably, this invited the extended ridicule from Watters which came at the start of yesterday's The Five, with a mocking lead-in from Kayleigh McEnany. Inevitably, producers had decided to direct the program's focus to the least polished, least qualified, of the possible nominees.

Plus, she was transgender! Watters took over from there.

After Watters finished his several minutes of mugging, no one, including Jessica Tarlov, found it within him- or herself to challenge what he had done.   

We'll suggest that you watch the way yesterday's program started, with a "disclaimer" from the clown star-adjacent McEnany that "this is not a skit from SNL."  To do so, just click here.

The Five is our rapidly failing nation's most-watched "cable news" program. Its audience is roughly three times the size of primetime programs on MS NOW. Yesterday's imitation of life is very much the way the program is typically designed to run.   

The president's Thursday night address was once again disappeared! Instead, the gang settled on the least capable of the eight Democratic hopefuls, then let the mockery of that transgender person flow.   

"No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko said, long ago. Along the way, in that eternal poem, he even offered this: 

People   

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. 

[...]

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?   

Who we knew as faulty. The poem continues from there.

"No people are uninteresting," Yevtushenko plainly said. But who in the world was he talking about right at the start of his poem? 

Could he possibly have been talking about people like those you see on The Five? People like the unnamed people who produce that show?   

You're asking an excellent question! He was likely talking about the millions lost under Stalin—or about the thirty-three thousand, and after that the thousands more, described by the leading authority:  

Babi Yar 

Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, in which some 33,771 Jews were murdered. Other victims of massacres at the site included Soviet prisoners of war, communists and Romanies. It is estimated that a total of between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar during the German occupation.   

The decision to murder all the Jews in Kyiv was made by the German military governor Generalmajor Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch...Sonderkommando 4a and the 45th Battalion of the German Order Police conducted the shootings. Servicemen of the 303rd Battalion of the German Order Police at this time guarded the outer perimeter of the execution site.

The massacre was the largest mass-murder by the Nazi regime during the campaign against the Soviet Union, and it has been called "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust" to that particular date...  

With much, much more after that. Because Yevtushenko's most famous poem is Babi Yar (or Babiyy Yar), that may be who he was talking about at the start of People. 

We're sure there are different views about the poem, Babi Yar. The leading authority says this:   

Yevgeny Yevtushenko 

[...]   

Yevtushenko was one of the authors politically active during the Khrushchev Thaw. In 1961, he wrote what would become perhaps his most famous poem, Babiyy Yar, in which he denounced the Soviet distortion of historical fact regarding the Nazi massacre of the Jewish population of Kyiv in September 1941, as well as the anti-Semitism still widespread in the Soviet Union. 

The usual Soviet policy in relation to the Holocaust in Russia was to describe it as general atrocities against Soviet citizens and to avoid mentioning that it was a genocide of the Jews. However, Yevtushenko's work Babiyy Yar "spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but the Soviet government's own persecution of Jewish people." 

The poem was published in a major newspaper, Literaturnaya Gazeta, achieved widespread circulation in numerous copies, and later was set to music, together with four other Yevtushenko poems, by Dmitri Shostakovich in his Thirteenth Symphony, subtitled Babi Yar. 

Of Yevtushenko's work, Shostakovich has said, "Morality is a sister of conscience. And perhaps God is with Yevtushenko when he speaks of conscience. Every morning, in place of prayers, I reread or repeat by memory two poems by Yevtushenko: 'Career' or 'Boots'."   

We're sure that there are other views. Along the way in Babi Yar, Yevtushenko, in translation, is able to offer this: 

Babi Yar 

[...]

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The “Union of the Russian People!”

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes...  

And so on from there. At this site, as we've noted before, we consider Anne Frank to be a sacred being, though others may have alternate views. 

(Very happy, very young.) 

For a different translation, through PBS, you can just click here.   

That's who he may have been thinking about when he made his remarkable statement. That said, he quite explicitly went beyond that. Quite explicitly, Yevtushenko claimed that no people are uninteresting. 

He stated that view about everyone. We'll offer more musings next week.

Next week: "The politics of meaning?"

FRIDAY: Sitting president delivers address!

FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2026

Fox & Friends disappears it: We still haven't watched the full speech. Last night was one of the rare occasions when the president's viewers were falling asleep before he did!  

That said:   

It isn't always what a cable news channel might say—it's what the channel leaves unsaid! Over at Mediaite, Tom Durante advances a striking claim about the Fox News Channel:   

Fox & Friends Completely Ignores Trump’s Election Speech—Doesn’t Mention It Once in 3-Hour Show   

As other networks picked apart President Donald Trump’s prime-time address to the nation early Friday morning, Fox News went in a completely different direction.

Fox & Friends produced not one mention of the president’s address from the night before, during which the commander in chief once again attempted to cast doubt on the integrity of American elections—pointing a finger at Venezuela and China.

Instead, the regular lineup of co-hosts Brian Kilmeade, Ainsley Earhardt, and Lawrence Jones discussed the latest campaign of U.S. airstrikes against Iran, the air quality crisis choking much of America, disastrous flooding in Texas, the World Cup, and a “phenomenal” speech—by Marco Rubio.  

Near the end of the three-hour show, the F&F crew turned it over to America’s Newsroom host Dana Perino for a preview of the 9 a.m. show. In it, she also did not mention the speech.   

And so on from there.  

Assuming the accuracy of Durante's claim, that's a very sharp bit of reporting. Despite the massive emphasis the president placed on this event, it seems to have been disappeared by the Fox News Channel!  

Any news org can be defined by the events and topics it chooses to ignore. But this is quite a report from Durante:

What will they say on The Five?

Award-winning national update: Did Perino and company mention the speech on America's Newsroom?  In a sense, but not as such! 

As you can see by clicking here, Chad Pergram offered a two-minute report on Trump's desire to pass the so-called SAVE America Act. No other part of the speech was mentioned. 

Though a bit of videotape was played, Pergram never mentioned the fact that a ballyhooed national address had actually been delivered.

On CNN and MS NOW, the speech has been aggressively fact-checked. Over on the Fox News Channel, it doesn't seem to have happened at all!

NO PEOPLE... Attempted suicide twice, age 12!

FRIDAY, JULY 17, 2026

We advise you to pity the child: "No people are uninteresting?"   

Would that include the 12-year-old child who is described in this passage from a new AP report?

An immediate relative of David Brouillette who spoke on the condition that their name not be used said he was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder as a child—a diagnosis that Ashley Brouillette confirmed. The immediate relative described him as “extremely mentally ill” and said he attempted suicide twice at age 12 and was hospitalized multiple times.  

The relative said they’ve been estranged for years, after they broke off contact because they feared he would harm them. He did not respond to their outreach this week, the relative added.

For ourselves, we'd advise you to pity the child—the child who was so deeply disturbed when he was 12 years old. 

In this instance, the tragedy grows. This is the start of the AP report, no paywall, headline included:

AP Exclusive: ICE officer in Maine shooting has history of violent behavior, family and records say 

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot a Colombian man in Maine this week is an Army veteran who has struggled with serious mental health issues since early childhood and never should have been given a badge and gun to patrol American streets, several of his close relatives told The Associated Press.

David Brouillette has a history of terrifying and violent behavior, according to those relatives. They accuse him of attacking women in his life over the years, and one shared a voicemail with the AP from last winter in which he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.

Brouillette’s troubling past further challenges how thoroughly the Department of Homeland Security has vetted recruits as it went on a hiring spree to help carry out President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.   

At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump launched the crackdown after retaking office, including 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national who was shot and killed by Brouillette on Monday while in his car near his home in the coastal Maine city of Biddeford.   

Regarding the young man who was shot and killed, the New York Times has quoted a neighbor describing him and his wife:   

"They were always so happy and so polite. I’d be watering my flowers in front of the house, and they would stop and say, ‘Very nice flowers.’ And their little girl would wave.”  

They were always so happy. That's what the neighbor has said. 

Once again in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway once said this about his early years in Paris:   

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.  

That was a recollection from the earliest years, when he said that he and Hadley were "very poor and very happy." 

As we all know, when people are very happy and very young, they should get the chance to continue. Also, when people are 12 years old and are deeply disturbed, they should ideally get capable help.

In this case, it seems that no such assistance ever took hold. The AP report offers accounts of Brouillette's conduct as an adult which are truly horrific, if perhaps somewhat familiar.

These accounts involve abuse of his two wives and his children. The reported behaviors start as shown, but they become even worse:   

Brouillette, 37, told his ex-wife Ashley Brouillette late last year that he had been hired by ICE. She said that because of his long history of psychiatric issues, she thought he was having a mental health episode and she didn’t believe him. She didn’t realize he’d been telling the truth until this week, when videos began circulating online of the moments surrounding the shooting.  

Ashley Brouillette told the AP that she spoke to her ex-husband in a Facebook audio call, and he acknowledged that he had killed Durán Guerrero. Their 18-year-old daughter, Madison Brouillette, also told the AP that her father called her Wednesday and said that he shot and killed Durán Guerrero. 

David and Ashley Brouillette were high school sweethearts who got married in 2007. She said she divorced him in 2009 because he had become physically violent with her, which began after she got pregnant with their daughter.  

According to Ashley Brouillette, he once threw boiling water at her while she was holding their child—an incident her mother Avis Collins also recounted. The abuse continued after she left him, she said.

[...]   

His oldest daughter, Madison Brouillette, said she also witnessed her dad’s volatility.

“I watched my dad struggle a lot with a lot of things,” she told the AP. She said she came home from school once and he told her he had been sitting on a tree stump with a gun to his head.

Madison Brouillette is just 18. The report doesn't say how old she was when that incident occurred—and yes, the accounts of violence in the AP report get worse than what we've posted.  

This week, we've worked from a poem by Yevtushenko. "No people are uninteresting," he says as he begins:

People   

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a [person] lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting...

And so on from there. But who was Yevtushenko talking about? 

No people are uninteresting? Was he talking about someone like David Brouillette? 

We'll postpone that question until tomorrow. Today, we'll end with two points:   

First, journalists will speak explicitly about "mental illness" and "mental health issues" when reporting on incidents like this. They will not discuss the possibility of serious mental health disorders—the possibility of serious mental illness—in the case of major public officials, even if the official in question had to be sent off to "reform school" at the age of 12 because of his own disturbing behavior.   

(We advise you to pity the child.)

Second point:  

A phrase has been going through our heads in the past several days: "The Politics of Meaning." 

The politics of meaning! It suddenly played an unpleasant role in the discourse of the early 1990s, then disappeared from view.  

Do we need a politics of pity, compassion, engagement, forgiveness? A politics in which we all understand that whichever tribe may be our tribe, that tribe is quite often wrong too?   

Tomorrow: Who he (presumably) meant

THURSDAY: Once the witticisms end...

THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2026

...they turn to the evasions: We employ the moment to offer a gripe about the weekly Bruni/Stephens colloquy at the New York Times. 

This week's colloquy starts as shown. Our gripe concerns the rollicking, tongue-in-cheek, humorous back-and-forth style: 

Trump Is at His Wit’s End

Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. We seem to be sliding back into war with Iran. Do you see any good outcome? Or, at least, a least-bad outcome?

Frank Bruni: Yeesh, Bret, you really know how to perk up a guy’s day, don’t you?

Bret: Would you rather discuss interest-rate policy?

Frank: In honor of “The Odyssey”—Christopher Nolan’s new movie adaptation opens this weekend—I’m going to describe that as a Scylla-and-Charybdis choice.

Bret: Listen, Penelope, your suitor is waiting for his answer.

Frank: Fine. I’ll abandon my loom long enough to give you a response. No, I don’t see any good outcome, because whatever happens over the next weeks or months can’t erase or rewrite the, um, odyssey that brought us to this wretched juncture. 

Witty opinion scribes, please! 

Do Times readers really need to be humored this way before they'll read an analysis of the claim that the sitting president is somehow "at his wit's end?"

In fairness, no one can blame Bruni for this feature's rollicking style. It came into being during the earlier weekly "Conversations" between Stephens and Gail Collins. The rollicking style was simply held over when Bruni was subbed in.

At any rate, is the president at his wit's end? And what might that whimsical claim even mean? 

Once the early joshing (largely) ends, it sounds like things are substantially worse than that! Stephens soon unloads in this straightforward manner:   

Bret: ...What isn’t solvable is an erratic president who issues threats he withdraws, signs cease-fire agreements he doesn’t appear to have read, claims he’s indifferent to political and economic considerations until he caves to both, and lacks not only a coherent strategic concept but an elementary understanding of what strategy is.   

Oof! Bruni is no less unimpressed with the sitting president—but an intriguing refusal lurks in this presentation:  

Frank: ...Never in the past 50 years have we seen anything from an American president like Trump’s determination to undermine voters’ faith in democracy itself, which is fine with him if it’s the only way to hold on to power and get what he wants. It’s a degree of ruthlessness and a magnitude of narcissism that add up to a kind of political sociopathy. I’ve written this before and stand by it: He’ll burn the whole thing down if that’s best for him. He’ll gladly rule over ashes, just as long as he’s the one ruling. 

Bruni is deeply unflattering too. Our comment would go like this:   

"Narcissism" is a clinical term. So is "sociopathy." 

Like Stephens, Bruni's an excellent writer. That said, has it ever occurred to him that this isn't a kind of political sociopathy—that it's straight-up clinical sociopathy, a dangerous "personality disorder" the president's niece attributes to him in her best-selling 2020 book?   

These high-end scribes today! They've agreed that they'll never speak directly about any such possibility. 

They've agreed that they'll never speak directly. Promises made, promises wittily kept!

NO PEOPLE: No people are uninteresting?

THURSDAY, JULY 16, 2026

Can this possibly be what he meant? Friend, did Candidate Trump actually win the 2020 election? 

Did President Biden spend four years in the White House only because that 2020 presidential election was "rigged?"  

For the record, Candidate Trump was also President Trump at the time of the election in question. If that election was somehow "rigged," that massive fraud occurred at a time when Complainant Trump was in charge of the federal government.   

Needless to say, that doesn't mean that the election couldn't have been rigged. And as we noted in last Friday's report, many people seem to believe that it actually was.  

"No people are uninteresting?" Here's the overview of the recent survey we linked you to that day:   

Half of Republicans say the 2020 election was rigged   

This week's Economist/YouGov Poll finds sharp divides in public confidence in U.S. elections, with Democrats and Republicans holding vastly different views on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, the credibility of Donald Trump's recent election-rigging claims, and expectations for the fairness of future elections.

28% of Americans—including half (50%) of Republicans and only 9% of Democrats—believe that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged." Republicans who identify as MAGA supporters are about twice as likely as non-MAGA Republicans to think the election was rigged (66% vs. 32%). 

Many respondents told Economist/YouGov that they believe the election was rigged. According to the published internal data, that includes 53% of respondents who said that they voted for Trump.  

A nation wracked by such widespread belief comes close to no longer being a nation—might be thought of as "failed state-adjacent." In the past, we've advanced the comparison to the Oscar-nominated film, The Sixth Sense:   

A nation like that may already have ceased to exist. It just doesn't know it yet.    

Tonight, the sitting president of that nation is apparently going to go on TV and advance some form of that claim all over again. For MS NOW's report on what he's likely going to say, you can just click here.  

President Trump has been insisting that the election was rigged for almost six years now. He's never made any attempt to offer evidence in support of that claim, but he just keeps making the claim—and by this time, he seems to have persuaded something like half of all Republicans.

We're prepared to believe that the sitting president may even believe his claim! That's because we assume that his niece is probably right. As we showed you yesterday, here's what she told CNN's Erin Burnett earlier in the year:

BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a decline?

MARY TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.

But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.  

"He has never been fit in any capacity," the president's niece told Burnett.

For the record, a serious, untreated "psychiatric disorder" is a serious, untreated "mental illness." And Mary L. Trump, the president's niece, is a doctorate-holding clinical therapist.  

That doesn't mean that her assessment has to be correct. But we'll guess that it most likely is.   

(We also believe that a serious mental illness is in fact a serious illness. We believe that any such serious illness is a human tragedy. Ideally, we believe the current situation should be regarded that way. That would take us well beyond the limited capacity of our mainstream press corps and of our pre-existing American discourse.)

Yesterday, in a high-profile Senate hearing, Jay Clayton couldn't quite bring himself to say that Candidate Biden won the 2020 election. Everyone within the Trump administration understands that such a thing can simply never be said.

Clayton clammed before the Senate panel. Here's another place it will never be said:    

The Five is our failing nation's most-watched "cable news" show. Its daily viewership is roughly three times as large as that of MS NOW's daily shows.

None of the panelists on The Five believe that Candidate Trump won the 2020 election. That said, Jessica Tarlov will never ask the four pro-MAGA co-hosts if they think that election was rigged. 

She will never ask them why President Trump keeps saying that the election was rigged, in the absence of any evidence in support of that claim. The Fox News Channel's very large audience will never be asked to see that question asked.

Very good salaries are slipped into pockets in service to such deceptive behaviors. On MS NOW, very good salaries are slipped into pockets as everyone agrees not to report or discuss what Mary L. Trump once again said and meant.

"No people are uninteresting?" Can any of this possibly be what Yevtushenko meant?   

Tomorrow: What Yevtushenko presumably meant

WEDNESDAY: He had permission to work in this country!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 2026

But he didn't have legal status? Tomorrow, we expect to discuss the second person who recently lost his life.   

For today, we return to a bit of a technical question from this morning's report. It's a question about Johan Sebastian Guerrero, 25 years old, "always so happy and so polite," late of Biddeford, Maine.  

The question: 

Did this young man "have legal status?" That's the way the question was framed in the headline of this New York Times report.   

Did this young man "have legal status?" In this newer report in the Washington Post, it starts to look like he did:

Man killed by ICE came to Maine seeking better life for young daughter   

The woman stood in a hallway of her apartment building, pressing her hands up against a window as she took in a scene of unfathomable violence: The white Kia her partner had been driving was angled against a curb, its windshield pierced with bullets.

“Mi amor, mi amor,” she cried. His lifeless body was lying in the street. When she and her 3-year-old daughter went outside, she dropped to her knees and sobbed, witnesses said.

Her partner, 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian citizen, was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Monday morning on the block where the couple lives in this small city in southern Maine, the second deadly shooting by ICE in less than a week.

Durán entered the United States via the southern border in September 2023, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement, and received work authorization in May 2025. 

According to the DHS, he received authorization to work in this country as of May of last year. Forgive us for being simple-minded, but if the federal government has conferred that status on someone, it's hard to see how the recipient can be said to be in the country illegally.   

That's how it seems to us! But thanks to the phenomenon we've described as "the complexification of everything," there was room in the Post's report for this additional copy:

ICE enforcement and removal officers appeared to be looking for someone else. They were conducting surveillance at the last known address of an undocumented immigrant who was subject to a final deportation order, an agency spokesperson said. 

But Durán was not the person they were looking for, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said in several interviews.

[...]

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said that Durán did not have legal status in the U.S. Durán likely received work authorization while seeking asylum, an immigration lawyer who reviewed the DHS statement said.  

Say what? Speaking directly to the language which appeared in the New York Times headline, a DHS spokesperson is now quoted saying that he didn't "have legal status." The Post then repeats the fact that he did have permission to work!

He'd been given permission to work in this country. (Also, it seems, to seek formal asylum.) But that certainly doesn't mean that he was in southern Maine legally!

Should the Post have tried to straighten this out? Yes, we think they should have. But so it goes in tongue-tied modern cultures driven by an instinct for various forms of mumble-mouthed verbal complexification.   

We humans! Within the modern American context, discussion of almost every major issue is clouded by this instinct. 

A wide array of murky formulations may seem to clash with each other. Attention doesn't get paid. Tribal propagandists may repeat only the formulations which support the political outcomes preferred by their own infernal tribe.   

He had permission to work, but not to be here! As we've noted in the past:

We humans are skilled at building tall buildings, less skilled at everything else.

With apologies, this: "Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday." 

This case isn't really the sort of thing the later Wittgenstein was talking about, bit it almost comes somewhat close.

NO PEOPLE...: "They were always so happy and so polite!"

WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 2026

What the neighbor said: "They were always so happy and so polite," their neighbor in Biddeford, Maine has now said.   

They were a husband and wife and a 3-year-old child. The New York Times is reporting the neighbor's recollection in yesterday's news report:

Colombian Immigrant Killed by ICE in Maine Had Legal Status, Father Says

The father of a Colombian immigrant shot and killed by a federal agent in Maine on Monday described him as “a good person raised with strong values,” who worked two jobs to support his wife and 3-year-old daughter.

“He had a great vision for getting ahead, so many dreams to fulfill,” Omar Duran, the father of Joan Sebastian Guerrero, told Noticias Caracol, a Colombian news outlet, on Tuesday, speaking in Spanish. “My son is a wonderful son—I don’t know why they did that to him.”

Mr. Guerrero, 25, lived in Biddeford, a small city south of Portland, where he worked as a food delivery driver and a late-night cleaner at a veterinary clinic. Mr. Duran said his son was in the United States legally.

[...]

“They were always so happy and so polite,” Don Gregoire, 69, a hairstylist, said of Mr. Guerrero and his wife. “I’d be watering my flowers in front of the house, and they would stop and say, ‘Very nice flowers.’ And their little girl would wave.”  

Did the deceased "have legal status?" As far as we know, that still isn't clear. It's also true that many people seem to have learned, in the past eighteen months, that "legal status" under one president may suddenly be something different under the subsequent president.   

“They were always so happy and so polite,” their neighbor has told the Times. Polite may often follow from happy, and it's good to be happy and young. 

Hemingway wrote about happy and young in his beautiful recollection, A Moveable Feast. In its original version, the memoir ends with this:  

A Moveable Feast

[...] 

This is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.   

That's the memoir's final paragraph. Until the sudden astonishing end of the story, he and Hadley were poor and happy, and they were very young.   

No people are uninteresting, Yevtushenko said. We came upon his poem in a book, way back when we ourselves were somewhat younger. When we first read it, we found it deeply moving in a way we still do, though we still can't begin to say why.   

No people are uninteresting! We'll change one word in the translation as we recall the way the poem starts:

People   

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a [person] lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

Or if a person lived "in obscurity" complimenting his neighbor's flowers as he walked down the street with his wife and his 3-year-old child.  

(Many people in southern Maine grow flowers in their shorter, cooler summers. We've seen it with our own eyes.)   

No people are uninteresting! Presumably, Yevtushenko was thinking of the millions lost under Stalin, or of the tens of thousands of men, women and children—none of them uninteresting—massacred at Babi Yar.   

Presumably, that's who he mainly had in mind. Presumably, though, he was also thinking of this young couple in Maine, and of their 3-year-old child.   

That said:   

Can it possibly be true? In the simplest colloquial sense, can it be true that no people are uninteresting? None of us people at all?

How about the furious fellow whose video rant was recently reposted by the sitting president? As we noted yesterday afternoon, the 49-minute rant started off like this:   

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM MUST BE CRIMINALIZED; LEADERS DEPORTED  

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

These were all invaders.  

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

And so on from there. For the record, this man chose "Savage" as his pen name. Over the weekend, the sitting president chose to report his 49-minute rant on his own Truth Social site.

At this site, we're willing to wait to see how Mayor Mamdani's tenure turns out. According to the furious Michael Savage, the mayor is a "smirking bastard"—a smirking con man from Uganda—who is planning to oversee the slaughter of millions of people, just as Pol Pot did.  

No people are uninteresting? Does Michael Savage count? And how about the high official who chose to repost that rant?  

Regarding the high official in question, we've suggested that it would be effective politics, and more accurate on the merits, to pity him for his "mental disorders." 

We've suggested that a (serious) mental illness is, in fact, an illness. We've also said that we would guess that his niece's assessment is right:   

BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a decline?

MARY TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.

But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.   

For the longer exchange with CNN's Erin Burnett, you can just click here.

In the passage posted above, Mary Trump said her uncle is experiencing an obvious cognitive decline, layered atop decades of untreated psychiatric disorders. She went into much more detail in her best-selling 2020 family memoir, Too Much and Never Enough. 

"No people are uninteresting?" As he blusters and keeps changing his mind, does her uncle count?    

The so-called democratization of media—the rise in technologies which Jeffrey Rosen has now discussed—has brought many savage voices into the public square. At present, we'd say that most of these voices come from Red America, but those of us in Blue America have our own decidedly mixed track record.   

Is there a way to get out of this mess—a way "back out of all this now too much for us?" For today, we'll return to what one Maine resident said:   

"They were always so happy and so polite." 

They were always so happy and so polite! So how do we deal with this mess?

Tomorrow: Additional people

TUESDAY: Nutball calls for deportations!

TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM MUST BE CRIMINALIZED; LEADERS DEPORTED  

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

These were all invaders.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TUESDAY, JULY 14, 2026

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

The poem in question starts off like this:  

People   

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

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

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

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

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

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

[continuing from above]  
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth’s creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?  

Of whom, what did we know?   

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

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

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

What went on in Lindsey's head?   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2026

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

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

Back to My Antonia:

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

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

BOOK I. The Shimerdas

I

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

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

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

BOOK IV. The Pioneer Woman’s Story   

[...]

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

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

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

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

Still:

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

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

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

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTERVIEWER: Is that right?  

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

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

Lindsey Graham Chokes Up Talking About Joe Biden    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow: "Communist bastards," he said

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

SATURDAY: At the Atlantic, they say no names!

SATURDAY, JULY 11, 2026

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

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

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

Directive

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

And so on, at length, from there.   

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Rosen (legal academic)  

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

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

[...]  

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

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

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

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

The Gift Outright 

[...]   

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

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

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

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

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

[Photo of Abdul El-Sayed]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoyable copy like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frost ends the difficult poem Directive with these difficult lines:  

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

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

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

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

LONG ENDURE: Rosen discerns the shape of the threat!

FRIDAY, JULY 10, 2026

Refuses to say their names: Can our form of government, can our nation, "long endure?"   

President Lincoln floated the question at Gettysburg. Today, we're involved in a great societal war which raises the question again.  

Will we be able to find our way "back out of all this now too much for us?" We've been asking that question for years at this site. 

As he starts this essay for The Atlantic, Professor Rosen joins us in not being real sure.  Just to refresh you, we'll show you his headlines again:  

IDEAS
American Democracy Wasn’t Designed for This
Can our 18th-century institutions survive 21st-century technology?

In his essay, Rosen suggests the possibility that our democracy won't survive the influence of a set of new technologies. We've been telling you that for years. We think his aim is true.

What's the nature of this existential crisis? As he starts, Rosen takes us back to the questions the founders asked when they decided to form a new nation. For starters, he quotes Hamilton saying this:

"The important question: whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice."  

Are we humans really capable of engaging in cool, clear reason? Rosen describes "a central premise of the Enlightenment," a premise he says the founders shared:

"Ordinary human beings are capable of recognizing truth on their own." 

According to Rosen, the founders generally believed that. We humans have the capacity to sit down and reason together.

Today, though, we're mired in a tribal propaganda war which has largely given the lie to that cheerful notion. We humans believe the darndest things:

Remarkably large percentages of the population have been persuaded, over the years, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya; that "death panels" were part of the Affordable Care Act; and that Hillary Clinton was involved in a pedophile ring which may have operated out of a Washington pizza shop.   

Before that, one of our nation's most famous Christian preachers had peddled a film which suggested that Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in a long string of murders. In 1994, the nation's leading talk radio host had advanced the notion that Hillary Clinton was somehow involved in the death of Clinton aide Vince Foster. 

(On the Fox News Channel, the multimillionaire monster Greg Gutfeld continues to pimp that general framework today. He pimps it night after night.)  

How many of us "ordinary human beings" may come to believe such notions and claims? Below, you see the numbers from a recent survey concerning the most significant misapprehension of the past six years:

Half of Republicans say the 2020 election was rigged   

This week's Economist/YouGov Poll finds sharp divides in public confidence in U.S. elections, with Democrats and Republicans holding vastly different views on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, the credibility of Donald Trump's recent election-rigging claims, and expectations for the fairness of future elections.

28% of Americans—including half (50%) of Republicans and only 9% of Democrats—believe that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged." Republicans who identify as MAGA supporters are about twice as likely as non-MAGA Republicans to think the election was rigged (66% vs. 32%).  

As a result of persistent claims by President Trump, 50% of Republican respondents said they believe that the 2020 election was rigged.

The sitting president has had six years to produce evidence in support of this poisonous claim. Many Americans have failed to notice the fact that he has neglected to do so. And not only that—also this! 

[continuing directly from above]  
Trump recently claimed that this year's primary elections in California were rigged. One-third (33%) of Americans believe he has concrete evidence to support this claim; 67% think he is just trying to sow doubt in the legitimacy of the elections. Most Republicans (72%) think Trump has [concrete] evidence to support his claims of rigging in California. MAGA Republicans are far more likely than non-MAGA Republicans to believe Trump has evidence of rigging (84% vs. 51%). Only 3% of Democrats think Trump has concrete evidence of the elections being rigged.  

How about it? Did the president really produce "concrete evidence" in support of that additional claim? In this survey, 72% of Republicans said they believe that he did. 

In many cases, it's hard to prove that a given claim is false. (Old bromide: You can't prove a negative.)  Under current arrangements, it may not matter if you do manage to prove, or if you do manage to seem to prove, that a given claim is false.

Quite routinely, it won't matter if you show that some claim is bogus—and Rosen understands why that is. 

The founders were fearful of "factions," Rosen writes. (Today, such entities sometimes go by the name of "political parties.") 

In Professor Rosen's telling, "Madison believed that the tendency to form factions is 'sown in the nature of man.' " Rosen explains why Madison was optimistic in spite of that belief.

That said, it's plainly true! We humans seem to be wired to split off into rival tribes. And some modern technologies have created a world in which the tendency to split into tribes badly undermines our ability to reason together as an intelligent nation. 

He mentions the Internet, and he mentions social media. Such technologies have created an obvious problem, he says. He says the problem is this:

Democracy has been resilient for a long time, but that doesn’t mean it can’t reach a breaking point. Social media is an unprecedented challenge: In every way, it represents the Founders’ nightmare. ...More than any previous communications technology, social media has the effect of herding users into likeminded communities where they never have to hear an opposing point of view. In a 2020 article in Science, 15 psychologists and political scientists wrote that America’s political divisions were being amplified by “popularity-based algorithms that tailor content to maximize user engagement.” If the Founders had been able to spend an hour on X, they would have been a lot less optimistic about human beings’ capacity to govern themselves by reason rather than passion.   

According to Professor Rosen, "social media has the effect of herding users into likeminded communities where they never have to hear an opposing point of view." In other words, it has the effect of creating like-minded "factions"—including political parties in which 72% of members believe poisonous claims which almost surely aren't true.

According to Professor Rosen, social media has this effect more than any other new technology. We can't necessarily say that's true.

Unfortunately, and rather strangely, Rosen never mentions talk radio. Also, more tellingly, he never mentions "cable news." And he certainly never says the names of the players who, at present, are undermining the very chance of continuing with a successful version of government "by the people."

Rosen doesn't say their names! As you may have noticed by now, people of his professional class never do. 

Tomorrow, we'll explain what we mean by that unflattering comment. Also, we'll visit a world where the corporate messenger Charlie Hurt is eating away at the possibility that government of the people will survive—will long endure, won't "perish from the earth."

Tomorrow: They never say their names