SATURDAY, MARCH 21, 2026
You know it when you see it: "Presidential timber" is hard to find. You know it when see you see it.
There are one hundred United States senators. Within the political realm, they're all extremely high achievers.
Very few of them are real presidential timber. We don't mean that as a criticism.
Last night, we were surprised to see that elusive quality right there on our TV screen. We saw it in someone who's only 34 years old.
By law, he can't ever run for president. We were surprised to see it, but there it was, unmistakably, right there on the screen.
Amna Nawaz conducted the interview for the PBS NewsHour. The first exchange went like this:
NAWAZ (3/20/26): Mr. Mayor, welcome to the News Hour. Thanks for making the time.
MAYOR MAMDANI: Absolutely. Thank you so much for being here.
NAWAZ: So let's talk a little bit about your first few months in office. You really had to hit the ground running. You had a lot coming at you too. You had a major nurses strike to handle, a record-breaking snowstorm.
I know you have probably heard the difference between campaigning in poetry, governing in prose. Does that bring true to you? Have you found that to be true?
MAYOR MAMDANI: I think there's still a little poetry in the day-to-day. I think it's important that we don't let our imagination become constrained by what we are inheriting.
Mamdani's term as mayor on New York could always turn out badly. Also, because he was born in Uganda, he can't ever run for the White House.
That said, you know it when you see it! The smile, the poetry, the look to the future? We were surprised to see that all the key timber was there.
Elsewhere, possibly not so much! Tens of millions of fellow citizens will disagree, but this is the way Chris Hayes began Thursday night's All In program:
HAYES (3/19/26): Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes.
You know, every once in a while, you just have to remind yourself that the president of the United States is a sociopath—or at the very least, being charitable here, he just can't help himself from acting like one.
And that's particularly relevant right now as the man is directing the military might of this nation in yet another war in the Middle East, and that is not going well.
Is the current sitting president a "likely sociopath?" Hayes floated that notion at least six times as his monologue continued.
As we've noted, "sociopath" isn't a clinical term. Beyond that, we'd prefer to see this question discussed by (carefully chosen) medical specialists—and we'd rather see any such affliction portrayed as a deeply unfortunate (though dangerous) illness, not as a source of insult or denigration.
That said, that's where Hayes began on Thursday night. Real Clear Politics transcribed the first several minutes of what he said. You can see fuller videotape at the All In site.
Beyond all that, we're forced to report that Greg Gutfeld, 61 years old, fell off the wagon again last night. For whatever reason, there he went again, opening his program on the Fox News Channel with a "joke" in which he compared Joy Behar to "a hippo."
Soon thereafter, things got substantially worse. We remain amazed but instructed by the fact that no major journalist in the Blue American firmament thinks this endless cultural swill is worth reporting or discussing.
Our big Blue stars let this garbage. Our Blue stars, and our Blue orgs, just plainly don't seem to care
Now for the latest postponement! We're going to wait until next week to show you what Gutfeld and Emily Compagno said about James Talarico on Tuesday's edition of The Five.
Can Talarico win the Texas Senate seat? We have no idea! But it should have been shocking to see him instantly compared, on the grisly Fox News Channel, to Ted Bundy and David Koresh.
It should have been shocking—but by now it almost wasn't.
"At long last," do the people who run that imitation news channel "have left no sense of decency?" And how about the finer people who agree to avert their gaze from this swill?
We'll turn to one quick Q-and-A from last evening's NewsHour. As a bit of background, Amna Nawaz was born and raised in the state of Virginia, the daughter of South Asian immigrants:
NAWAZ: I have to ask you about your family before I let you go, because I think anyone familiar with the specific and what I would say very fortunate experience of being raised by Desi parents, South Asian parents, especially those with the courage and the hope to forge an entirely new life in new nations, you know that you can learn a lot from them.
MAYOR MAMDANI: Yes.
So the mayor said. We thought of that favorite passage from My Antonia—the passage in which Willa Cather's gender-switched narrator is discussing the Nebraska "immigrant girls" for whom Cather, in real life, had a lifelong high regard:
My Antonia: Book II, Section IX
There was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had ‘advantages,’ never seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.
They had learned so much from poverty! Has a more beautifully crafted statement ever been placed in print?
And yes, we'll admit it again. Yesterday, we took Francine Prose's book to the medical mission, where there's a lot of sitting around.
We hadn't reread it in several years. We could spend weeks writing about every page in the parts of the book where Prose discusses who the real Anne Frank actually was:
("A demanding and often sickly baby, Anne grew into a challenging child—mercurial, moody, humorous, alternately outgoing and shy." Also, though, a much-loved, precocious child who was a gifted, determined young writer.)
Also, the parts of the book in which in which Prose discusses the remarkably complex way Anne Frank's famous book actually came to be written.
Also, the part of the book in which Prose describes the serendipity thanks to which the famous writing in question wasn't carried away and discarded by the people who arrested Anne Frank, along with her parents and her older sister, Margot Frank. (Only her father survived.)
Postponing the torture of transcribing the latest statements of the Fox News Channel Two, we'll leave you today with Prose's description of the one tiny bit of film which remains—a piece of film which can be seen, even today, right there for the whole world to see on YouTube:
A FLICKER of a home movie. June 22, 1941. The whole thing lasts ten seconds.
The bicycles slipping by provide the only indication that we are in Holland. The brick Merwedeplein apartment block looks more like married students’ housing on an American state university campus than the quaint center-city canal houses we associate with Amsterdam.
The camera waits outside a door, peering up a stairwell. In search of something to focus on, it pans up the side of a building. In the open windows are neighborhood residents, girls and young women, their elbows propped on the sills, waiting. The women at the windows alter the look of the street, so the scene begins to look more like a village in southern Europe.
The newlywed couple appears, arm in arm, the groom in a top hat, cane, and formal wear, the bride in a flattering pale suit, a jaunty white fedora, and gloves; she carries a bouquet. They walk down the stairs and pause like movie stars obliging the paparazzi. Passersby lean against their bicycles, staring.
Suddenly, the camera zooms toward the sky and finds Anne Frank, watching from her window. She turns and speaks to someone inside the apartment. She looks back at the couple, then away. The camera appears to lose interest. It glances at a few more spectators, then returns to the Amsterdam street.
On the Web site for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, you can watch those few seconds of Anne on film, in blurred and grainy close-up. Anne’s body language is quick, electric. A breeze, or maybe the motion of her body, lifts her hair as she turns, and her eyes smudge into dark ovals as she gazes down at the bridal couple.
As familiar as we are with images of Anne Frank, as inured as we may think we are to the sight of her beautiful face, the film pierces whatever armor we imagine we have developed. It is always shockingly short and always the same, and yet you are never entirely sure what you have, or haven’t, seen. It’s less like watching a film clip than like having one of those dreams in which you see a long-lost loved one or friend. In the dream, the person isn’t really dead. You must have been mistaken. You wake up, and it takes a few moments to understand why the dream was so cruelly deceptive.
We're with Prose every word of the way. We regard that as sacred film, sacred film of a sacred being.
Anne Frank is so viewed in certain cultures around the world. But what could possibly make us think that she was, or that she is, some sort of "sacred being?"
We'll admit that you're asking a very good question. You know it when you see it, we'll thoughtfully say. Though we don't see it much around here!
For today, we chose to stay with Prose and Anne Frank. Ted Bundy, David Koresh?
Fellow citizens, thank you for asking! We'll present that disaster next week, Blue American silence included.
