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Why I'm Not Canceling Amazon -- Or My Washington Post Subscription

Why I'm Not Canceling Amazon -- Or My Washington Post Subscription

Had you ever heard of Patrick Soon-Shiong before last week? For that matter, do you recognize him today? Probably not. He’s the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, who has decided that his personal newspaper will not publish a presidential endorsement this year or ever again. I had to google his identity just now myself.

Soon-Shiong is a South African physician of Chinese descent, a professor at UCLA and several other prestigious medical schools around the world. He’s clearly a scientific genius and a pioneer in transplant surgery, cancer treatment and vaccine development. A philanthropist, he’s said to be the richest man in Los Angeles.

I can think of no obvious reason, however, why anybody would take Soon-Shiong’s political opinions—whatever they may be—more seriously than their brother-in-law’s. It may be that he has come to the same conclusion. Or maybe he’s simply hedging his bets because he doesn’t know which presidential candidate will win next week’s election, and he has heard and heeded Donald Trump’s threats of retribution against anybody he deems a political enemy.

True or false, that certainly appeared to be Jeff Bezos’ motive. The founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post ended up looking cowardly to the many readers who have cancelled their subscriptions to the newspaper whose motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” strikes them as lame in view of his decision not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in decades. The Post itself is an insignificant part of its owners’ far-flung financial interests.

As a business decision, the newspaper’s non-endorsement looked like a no-brainer. Also a no-guts move, according the the Post’s justly-celebrated former editor Marty Baron. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” he posted on X. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

But you know what? Even if the Washington Post had published a strongly-worded editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris, as everybody had expected it would, this subscriber probably wouldn’t have read it. As I haven’t read the New York Times’ official endorsement of Harris, and wouldn’t dream of perusing the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s expected encomium to the manly virtues of candidate Trump. Although I read large parts of all three newspapers daily, I normally skip unsigned, team-written editorials on any and all topics—politics in particular.

Having spent some years working at a publication where editorial decisions were made by committee (Newsweek in the 1980s, back when it was still a respected publication) I have limited enthusiasm for anonymous, group-written voices from nowhere. The Washington Post publishes a number of opinion columnists I read regularly: Jennifer Rubin, Fareed Zakaria, Philip Bump, David Ignatius, Dana Millbank, Eric Wemple...There are others whose individual voices I greatly respect.

Many of the above were among the 17 Post staffers that signed a protest letter to Jeff Bezos. Which tells you one good thing about him: they don’t fear retribution.

Indeed, I found myself in agreement with what Bezos himself wrote about his decision not to endorse anybody:

“Presidential endorsements,” Bezos wrote in the Post “do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

That said, Bezos’ timing couldn’t have been worse. If he was going to make this decision at all, he should have made it months ago. It’s also a naïve assumption on his part that the news media’s lack of credibility among some Americans stems from editorials they disagree with. Judging from hostile reader emails, I’d have to say that many never absorbed the distinction between fact and opinion taught in seventh grade in the first place.

They certainly pay little heed to the distinction between the news and opinion pages of the newspaper, and there are well-financed propaganda operations working hard to be sure that they never do. Any and everybody whose opinion differs from their own is a notorious liar.

Just the other day, Donald Trump threatened to come after dissenting journalists during his imagined second term: “They’re so nasty. They’re so evil. They are actually the enemy of the people,” he said last Saturday.

Yeah, well you know what? To hell with him.

Speaking as somebody who once resigned from the best job I ever had in a 3 A.M. email rather than allow my byline to appear on an article filled with statements I knew to be wrong, I’m not about to cower before a manifest fraud like Trump.

But I’m also not going to drop my subscription to the Washington Post nor quit shopping at Amazon. My Kindle alone justifies the price of admission. On that score, I see Jeff Bezos as a benefactor of mankind.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Trump Cult Crazies Blame Hurricanes On 'Weather Control' -- And Defame FEMA

Trump Cult Crazies Blame Hurricanes On 'Weather Control' -- And Defame FEMA

Chances are quite good that yet another major hurricane will come ashore in the United States some time before the 2024 presidential election is decided, and that it will afflict mainly Republican areas of the country. And if that should happen, large parts of the country will go even crazier than they already are.

And that is seriously crazy. Barking mad.

No particular expertise is required to see how these things could happen. We’re still in the midst of hurricane season, after all, and 2024 has been a particularly active one so far. Also, if you glance at a map, Southern coastal regions is where Republicans live. Damn few Democratic strongholds in the gulf states.

Houston, New Orleans, that’s about it. You’d think even a dunce like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) could figure that out.

But no, the Georgia Republican thinks it’s all a big conspiracy. She professes to believe that “they” control the weather. “They” presumably being the same mysterious cabal responsible for “Jewish space lasers” that caused massive wildfires in California a while back.

What’s more she has lots of company. Writing in The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel documented how crackpot conspiracy theories swept the internet. “Infowars'” Alex Jones alleged that Hurricanes Helene and Milton were “weather weapons” deployed against American patriots by the U.S. government, i.e. the Biden administration.

“Scrolling through these platforms,” Warzel wrote “watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.”

Remember when Vice President Al Gore used to carry on about “the information superhighway” that was going to usher in a new age of enlightenment? Well, that’s not what happened.

Instead of roadside shacks at the edge of town housing palm readers, tarot card mavens, horoscope experts and other solitary purveyors of mystical mumbo jumbo and superstition, we now have websites peddling delusional nonsense to thousands. Sheer folly has gotten organized.

And the politicians are not far behind. Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Fox News have all peddled the lie that FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Administration) is offering only one-time payments of $750 to homeowners who have lost their property due to the hurricanes, and that the money must be repaid.

None of that is true. Republican governors in the affected states have been unanimous in praising the federal response.

Elon Musk, owner of X, claimed—utterly without evidence, because it’s also absolutely false—that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away…It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.”

Musk’s post has been read a reported 40 million times.

If the United States is going to deport immigrants, maybe we should ship him back to South Africa.

Anyway, in consequence of Musk and Trump’s lies, crazy people have been harassing and threatening to shoot FEMA workers trying to deliver life-saving supplies to hurricane victims. Other idiots are threatening to kill TV meteorologists for debunking “weaponized weather” fables.

It’s enough to make a newspaper columnist feel superfluous. I used to get death threats all the time. Haven’t had one for months now. Perhaps I should become an “influencer.”

Anyway, hurricane or no hurricane, when and by whom will the 2024 election be decided? It’s not necessary to use your Marjorie Taylor Greene magic decoder ring to understand that the signs and portents aren’t good. Is there any chance that candidate Trump would concede defeat? I would say that there is no chance at all.

The man has been visibly “decompensating,” as psychologists say, for months now. During his increasingly chaotic “rallies,” Trump can scarcely keep a coherent thought in his head. It’s all sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and name-calling Kamala Harris now. At an appearance near Philadelphia the other night, he quit talking and stood listening to recorded music for fully forty minutes. Just stood there.

That’s a long damn time. Members of the Trump Cult pretended it was a genius stroke, because that’s what cults do. There is pretty much no behavior so bizarre that it can’t be rationalized as an expression of sheer genius. Adepts surrender to reality quietly, and one at a time. Meanwhile, Trump is much more far gone than Joe Biden at his most confused.

That doesn’t mean Trump can’t try to incite an insurrection if he loses come November 5. But it surely means the effort would fail. But what do I know? I’m one of those “radical left lunatics” the great man blames for betraying America. An elitist. A guy who believes what the National Weather Service tells him.


Are The Sexist Atrocities Of Men Like 'Diddy' Ingrained In Our Culture?

Are The Sexist Atrocities Of Men Like 'Diddy' Ingrained In Our Culture?

Of two appalling sex crimes currently in the news, one strikes me as entirely predictable, the other so bizarre as to make one question how it could possibly have happened in a civilized country. In this I differ from Elizabeth Spiers, an opinion writer in the New York Times who asserts that both demonstrate that “viewing women as subhuman and inferior is not just tolerated in much of American culture; it’s an integral part of it.”

Actually, the more shocking and incomprehensible of the two events took place in France: where a husband and father made video recordings of more than 50 men raping his wife as she lay unconscious due to sleeping pills he’d ground up and slipped into her food. The crimes were discovered only after he was arrested for taking “upskirt” videos of women in a market and the police seized his cellphone. The evidence they discovered there has led to the mass trial of 51 defendants for rape in the southern city of Avignon, previously best-known as the seat of the papacy in the 14th century. The trial has turned the nation of France upside-down.

Clearly, the perpetrator is quite mad, although he has pleaded guilty and begged his wife for forgiveness from the witness stand. Because she has shown astonishing dignity and courage in insisting that the trial be held publicly, they were face-to-face in the courtroom. By all accounts, Dominique Pelicot had been an ostensibly devoted husband and father for more than fifty years.

Pelicot also evidently took and distributed graphic photos of his daughter and daughters-in-law when they were drugged. Previous to French police showing her videos and photos that her husband had catalogued and saved, Giselle Pelicot had complained of dizzy spells, headaches, and forgetfulness. Her children worried about Alzheimer’s disease.

None of her doctors ever suspected the cause.

But then, what sane person would?

The 51 men facing rape charges represent what one reporter described as “a kaleidoscope of working-class and middle-class French society: truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters, and trade workers, a prison guard, a nurse, an I.T. expert working for a bank, a local journalist. They range in age from 26 to 74.”

And how did Dominique Pelicot assemble this mob of perverts and sadists? Online, of course. He found them on a notorious website which French authorities say has been implicated in more than 23,000 police cases. It has since been shut down. The Internet can be dangerous that way, giving deranged individuals a means of finding each other.

It’s not only political crackpots whose delusions are magnified online; sexual outlaws and madmen are also empowered.

But, yes, it’s shocking how many there are: men obsessed with hurting and humiliating women sexually.

As for the alleged transgressions of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the infamous rapper and hip-hop mogul Spiers also cited, those are rather less surprising. Gold chains, fur coats, “bitches and ho’s,” Diddy has long-exhibited the dark side of rap culture at its most low down and misogynistic. Some months ago, a hotel security video surfaced of Combs sucker-punching and kicking his then girlfriend to the floor and dragging her by the hair.

She filed a lawsuit and he evidently bought her off.

I hope she got a big payday, because a man who will brutalize a woman will do almost anything. He’s a psychopath who belongs in a penitentiary. So I am neither shocked nor surprised that federal prosecutors indicted Combs last week on racketeering, sex trafficking, and related charges centering upon the violent sexual abuse of women. The evidence is strong enough that he is being held in prison without bail pending trial.

But no, contrary to Elizabeth Spiers, neither I nor any man I respect is in any way complicit in either of these crimes. It’s counter-productive to say otherwise. These are elemental issues. My father taught me more than a half-century ago that only the most contemptible cowards hit women. Sexual violence was to him unthinkable. I’ve done my best to pass these lessons on to my sons.

Back in the day, our boys used to say that All in the Family wasThe Man Like Grandpa Show, based on their perception that Carroll O’Connor’s portrayal of Archie Bunker somewhat resembled my father in accent and demeanor.

He did have a slogan about men and women, my old man, that drove my wife crazy. “You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them,” he’d say.

She found it condescending and sad.

My mother, to put it as politely as possible, could be extremely difficult. But regardless of the provocation, the old man insisted, hitting was out of the question. I could no more strike my own wife than I could punch a child. And I’ve always known that the first time I did would be the last time I’d ever see her.

Exactly as it should be.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Vance Is Just An Awful Politician -- And Trump Is Stuck With Him

Vance Is Just An Awful Politician -- And Trump Is Stuck With Him

Some of my best friends are cat people. I’m particularly indebted to our neighbor Laura, a self-described “crazy cat lady” who took in Albert, the most unusual feline I’ve known.

One time when we lived in the country, we walked through the fields to check on Albert where he’d set up temporary headquarters hunting mice in the neighbor’s hay barn. He came sauntering out to greet us, walking straight through a flock of turkey vultures cleaning up carrion on the ground. The buzzards paid him no mind. My wife was flabbergasted.

Albert always had his own plan. Except for one time after I’d broken three ribs in a fall from a horse. He converted himself from a barn cat to a house pet: sitting on the arm of my chair purring and helping me watch the Red Sox on TV until I healed up.

I was absurdly fond of that cat.

Altogether, Albert lived with us for ten years before relocating to Laura’s front porch. After moving back to town, we’d adopted an energetic young dog—a Great Pyrenees-Husky mix who thinks cat-pestering is great fun. I don’t believe he means to hurt them—Aspen is a friendly, gentle animal in other respects—but Albert wasn’t sticking around to find out. I figured he’d adapt, but he chose Laura’s front porch instead.

He's always been a shrewd judge of character. Laura feeds him, pets him, and takes him to the vet. We pay the vet bills and make occasional visits, where he’s somewhat aloof but friendly. So, it’s all worked out for the best.

Indeed, Laura has recently managed something I’d have thought impossible: she’s converted the now 15-year-old orange tabby to an indoor cat. He no longer prowls the neighborhood killing rats and getting into fights. He’s living as an older gentleman among Laura’s several cats.

In short, she’s a feline philanthropist and a wonderful neighbor. I know she has elderly parents nearby that she cares for, but Laura’s intimate life isn’t something we talk about. Her immediate family consists of her and the cats.

In other words, J.D. Vance can kiss my grits, as we say in Arkansas when we’re being nice.

So, I don’t know if “weird” is the right word, but he and Trump are definitely soul brothers. Try to imagine why a politician would be fool enough to call Jennifer Aniston, the widely beloved actress—she has a reported 50 million Instagram followers—"disgusting.”

Aniston’s sin was objecting to the “childless” part of “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives” and therefore “have no direct stake in America.”

On her Instagram account, the actress, who has made no secret of her struggles to become a mother, commented “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not have to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her too.”

It's true. A fierce anti-abortion activist, Vance voted against a Democratic bill to protect IVF rights. What he found “disgusting” was the actress’s mention of his two-year-old daughter. Evidently, only he gets to use his children as political pawns.

Has any national politician ever had a more unfortunate coming-out? This guy makes Alaskan “Hockey Mom” Sarah Palin look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison. As my man Charles Pierce puts it, “Vance may be the worst public politician I have ever seen. No kidding. This guy could screw up a two-car funeral if you spotted him the hearse.”

Vance’s liege and sovereign lord, meanwhile, has been going around the country promising his followers that if he’s elected in 2024, there won’t be any need for future elections. Or something.

“Christians, get out and vote! Just this time,” Donald Trump told an audience of evangelicals last week. “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine! You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians! I’m a Christian.”

Yeah, well if he’s a Christian, I’m the Pope.

On her Fox News program, Laura Ingraham all but begged Trump to clear up his ambiguous remarks. Surely, he didn’t mean to say he’d rule as a dictator?

Trump only repeated himself in one of his classic bafflegab statements: “Don’t worry about the future,” he said. “You have to vote on November 5. After that, you don’t have to worry about voting anymore, I don’t care, because the country will be fixed, and we won’t even need your vote anymore because frankly, we will have such love if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

We’re all supposed to pretend that Trump’s engaging in strategic ambiguity, and is not simply a cunning but confused old man slipping into senility.

Truth is, he’s halfway gone.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

With Biden Out, Will Media Notice That Trump Is Befuddled And Deluded?

With Biden Out, Will Media Notice That Trump Is Befuddled And Deluded?

You do know that Donald Trump has never won a majority of the votes in any election, right? Hillary Clinton got 3.5 million more votes than Trump in 2016; Joe Biden beat him by 7 million in 2020. So, the idea that he’s a political superstar is nonsense. Even polls showing Trump leading in the 2024 presidential contest have him topping out at 46 percent—about what he got in 2016.

Yeah, yeah the United States is a republic, not a democracy. Republicans say that a lot. In this country we privilege cows and square acres over American voters. But even so, to be confident of winning, a presidential candidate needs to do better.

Clearly, the MAGA faithful will believe anything. But millions of American voters view Trump with mistrust and fear. Nothing about the turbulent events of last week: Joe Biden’s dropping out of the 2024 race and Trump’s accepting the Republican nomination, changed the odds appreciably. He and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris remain in a statistical tie. Some polls even show her with a modest advantage.

That’s why Trump’s bizarre GOP convention speech promising unity but delivering anger, self-pity and delusion was such a shocker. It was also as boring as one of those hours-long rants Fidel Castro used to deliver. TV ratings dropped steadily the longer it went on. By the time it ended, hardly anybody was watching.

So, here’s my question: With one geriatric candidate having left the race, is there any chance that the national news media—normally capable of focusing on only one bouncing ball at a time, like a golden retriever—will notice that the remaining aged party in the contest is faltering before our eyes?

Remember when Trump confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi? Tell me how a neurologically healthy person does that. And he didn’t merely stumble over a name. He did a whole routine about it.

Reporters largely pretended not to notice.

Trump began his big convention speech in his mincing baby talk voice—always a sign of total insincerity—talking about national unity and “God Almighty” saving him from an assassin’s bullet. Then he put aside the teleprompter (my theory being he can barely read it, which would explain a lot) and started in with the traditional thunderous lies and false accusations against “Crooked Joe Biden” and “communist” Democrats generally.

Before Trump went on, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared that “the radical woke progressive left” is trying to build a “borderless, lawless, Marxist, socialist utopia.”

Ho-hum. People in Louisiana actually vote for this guy.

But the real fabulist was Trump. MVP blogger Kevin Drum dissected his speech’s more bizarre lies. The candidate claimed that Afghanistan has turned over Bagram Air Force Base to China, which is simply and totally make-believe. Did not happen. He neglected to mention that the chaotic US withdrawal was caused his own surrender to the Taliban, negotiated without Afghan government participation.

It’s also false than “many, many American citizens” were left behind in Afghanistan. Thousands were evacuated from Kabul, and the handful who remain clearly want to stay. The only military equipment abandoned belonged to the Afghan army. Bringing it out would have required re-invasion and months of bloody combat. And for what?

Trump complained that Russian warships and nuclear submarines are operating “60 miles” offshore and that the news media refused to cover it. In reality, a ceremonial visit by a Russian nuclear-powered (not nuclear-armed) sub to Havana was well-publicized on all major US TV networks, as Russia and Cuba clearly intended.

(It’s actually a bit more than 90 miles from Havana to Key West.)

But then pretty much everything Trump said about foreign policy was pie-in-the-sky fantasy. If he were president, there would be instant peace in the Middle East and Russia would never have dared to invade Ukraine. Biden’s fault, not Vladimir Putin’s.

But it was Trump’s lies about “Crooked Joe Biden” and Democratic domestic policies that were most egregious. No, crime hasn’t risen sharply under Biden. It’s declined every year since Trump left office. Partly that’s because millions more have jobs. Trump also keeps saying that foreign governments are emptying their prisons and “insane asylums” and shipping them across the Mexican border.

There is zero evidence that’s happening.

Trump claims that Democrats are scheming to cut Social Security and Medicare. How out of it would you have to be to believe that? Maybe far enough to believe that “this is the only administration that said we’re going to raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now.”

As Drum notes, this “bears no relation to reality.”

Hardly anything in Trump’s speech did. Even at his most confused Joe Biden never came anywhere close to this delusional rant. The man is clearly losing it. Now that they haven’t got Biden to kick around anymore, you’d think maybe the national media would take notice.

Why So Many Americans First Suspected Trump's Shooting Was Staged

Why So Many Americans First Suspected Trump's Shooting Was Staged

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote. “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

That’s my fancy alibi for my initial suspicion that Donald Trump had staged last week’s assassination attempt as a kind of WWE professional wrestling stunt—a suspicion that lasted approximately 30 seconds until the grim reality sank in. Nothing dignifies an absurd opinion like citing Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher about whom I know very little.

I do believe that Trump’s theatrical instincts, honed by years of WWE extravaganzas and reality TV stardom, kicked in almost immediately as Secret Service agents wrestled him to the floor and dragged him to safety. Hence the iconic photo of the former president gesturing defiantly with blood streaming from his wounded ear.

That’s what set me off. Back in the Fifties when Trump and I were lads, grapplers with bleached blonde pompadours were frequently seen on TV from Sunnyside Gardens in Queens with blood streaming down their faces from surreptitiously self-inflicted razor cuts. (Even small head-wounds bleed copiously.) Dr. Jerry Graham, the melodramatic “heel” who was the great star of the era, and from whom Trump stole his whole act, was a master of the technique.

If you doubt me, Google a video of Trump’s low comedy “Wrestlemania” confrontation with WWE impresario Vince McMahon, who’d done a kind of apprenticeship with the late Jerry Graham. Clambering into the ring, Trump throws some of the most limp-wristed fake punches in the history of make-believe combat.

It’s really quite funny.

So, that’s where I was coming from. Everything about those first confusing moments as Trump was dragged to safety said “Sunnyside Gardens” to me. Unlike some, however, I took a deep breath before racing to the Internet with my screwball first impression.

All indications so far are that Trump’s would-be assassin, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a classic lone-demento of a distinctly American type: an alienated, lonely kid with an AR-15 assault rifle. As for motive, it’s normally futile to seek rational reasons for irrational acts. Beyond some twisted desire to die famous, that is.

Almost all of us can list the mass shootings carried out by such individuals off the top of our heads: Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Columbine, Uvalde, Buffalo, Majory Stoneham Douglas high school, Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the Las Vegas music festival massacre… In Arkansas, where I live, a crazed individual with an AR-15 recently murdered several shoppers at a Mad Butcher grocery store in Fordyce.


These things happen so frequently, most of us have grown numb to them. Does America have more crazy people than anywhere else? No, but we have more crazy people with AR-15 assault rifles.

Anyway, I have nothing to apologize for. When it came to screwball first impressions nobody topped Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance. Within hours of the event, he blamed President Biden.

“Today is not just some isolated incident, the Ohio Senator tweeted. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Directly, the man said.

Never mind that Vance himself once called Trump “cultural heroin,” and speculated that he might become “America’s Hitler.”

Evidently, he’s changed his mind.

Donald Trump the younger was equally accusatory. “Don’t tell me they didn’t know exactly what they were doing with this crap,” he tweethed. “Calling my dad a ‘dictator’ and a ‘threat to Democracy’ wasn’t some one off comment. It has been the *MAIN MESSAGE* of the Biden-Kamala campaign and Democrats across the country!!!”

Actually, Junior, the first person to call former President Trump a would-be dictator was the former president himself. As for “threat to democracy,” he remains under indictment for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election by force. He has also indulged in loose talk about abolishing the Constitution, enabling him to remain in office indefinitely. While nobody’s obliged to take him seriously, he did say it.

Trump has also, New Yorker’s David Remnick points out, routinely described Democrats as “scum,” “vermin,” “animals” and “enemies of the people.” When Nancy Pelosi’s 84-year-old husband was bludgeoned with a hammer by a crazy man, Trump made jokes about it.

Don, Jr. speculated groundlessly that the assault stemmed from a gay lover’s quarrel.

In short, Joe Biden has done all the apologizing he ever needed to do for saying he wanted to put Trump “in the bulls-eye” during a private conversation with donors. It’s preposterous to think this motivated his would-be assassin.

I’d also have to see a very different Donald J. Trump before accepting him as the “Unifier” he’s currently pretending to be.

Fat chance.

Much As I Admire Joe Biden, It Is Time For Him To Step Aside

Much As I Admire Joe Biden, It Is Time For Him To Step Aside

Toward the end of the Biden vs. Trump debate on CNN, I got up from the TV and posted this message on Facebook: “It's a catastrophe. The Democratic party has to do something. Biden is coming across as weak, indecisive and even older than he is. Trump's a madman and a world class liar. But it's a TV show and he's in charge of the screen. God help us all.”

I haven’t changed my mind. If anything, my conviction has grown stronger after reading the transcript, as much of it as I could stand. True, Trump emitted a veritable avalanche of lies. And granted, it’s hard debating somebody so compulsively dishonest. Correcting lies takes far more time than telling them.

Trump lied when he said undocumented immigrants are collecting Social Security. Totally illegal and simply not happening. He lied when he said Nancy Pelosi admitted turning down his offer of 10,000 soldiers to guard the Capitol on January 6. He made no such offer. In reality, he never spoke with her at all. Also, he was president. Why didn’t he send troops if he thought they were needed? Instead, he did nothing.

It’s absolutely false that “everybody” wanted Roe vs. Wade overturned. Pretty much everybody knows better. It’s also not true that his planned tariffs would be paid by China. Tariffs are paid by importers not exporters; US consumers would foot the entire bill. The economy would crater.

But why go on? A couple of my Facebook friends made half-hearted excuses for Biden, but none dissented from my bleak assessment. A couple of wondered what drug Trump was on. Adderall was suspected. Besides his manic delivery, the Republican nominee had accused Biden of taking “uppers”—projection often being a reliable guide to a psychopath’s intentions.

But so what? The president was terrible. Let me put it this way: the Democratic Party is put in the position of a baseball manager whose ace pitcher has walked the bases loaded in the seventh inning of a scoreless playoff game. Regardless of how shaky his bullpen has been, he has no choice but to trudge to the mound and put his hand out for the ball. Conversation is unnecessary. Somebody else has to take over.

Saying so doesn’t make me a “bed-wetter” nor have I succumbed to panic. I’m simply trying to deal with the real-world situation. As a personal matter, I’ve long been a fan of Joe Biden. He’s always reminded me of my late father. There’s some physical resemblance, and his accent and demeanor were similar, although a prep school punk like Trump would never have challenged him. So, I hate seeing Biden like this.

But like the great majority of voters who think he’s too old for the presidency, I can’t deny the evidence of my senses. Maybe he struck out the side in the sixth, but he hasn’t thrown a strike in the seventh.

OK, enough baseball.

Here’s the thing: it’s likely to happen again. Whatever laid Biden low on debate night. Whether it was a cold or simple fatigue (his recent travel schedule would have exhausted a man half his age), the only way through the political crisis his awful performance has created is for Biden to appear unscripted in public with no teleprompter as often as possible in the coming days.

He needs to do live TV interviews with challenging interlocutors, take questions from the astonishingly rude White House press corps, exhibit vigor and strong-mindedness, and show everybody who’s in charge. And if he can’t do that—if White House staffers need to hide him away—then he should do himself and everybody else a favor and withdraw his candidacy.

Not resign the presidency and hand it over to Vice President Harris. But continue to serve and ask the Democratic Party to nominate a successor at its upcoming convention in Chicago. Let Kamala Harris contest the nomination—assuming she’d want it—with such prominent Democrats as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Cory Booker or some other ambitious dark horse candidate.

I agree with my former colleague and friend Jonathan Alter that “rather than a chaotic mess, an open convention would create enormous excitement that would propel the nominee into the fall campaign. And without Biden to trash, Trump would try to slam a new nominee. But after chasing a moving target of possible rivals over the summer, he would have only a short time to make anything stick.”

To me, Joe Biden has been the best and most consequential president of my lifetime—I’m just a year younger than he is—and deserves immense gratitude for bringing the country home safe from Covid and Trump.

So, I take no pleasure in saying that it’s time for him to go.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Why Mandating Religion In Schools Is Not Just Mean But Utterly Pointless

Why Mandating Religion In Schools Is Not Just Mean But Utterly Pointless

It’s precisely because of the First Amendment prohibition of an official state religion, of course, that Americans are so much more inclined to spiritualism than other technologically advanced countries. A reported 56 percent of us say we believe in the God of the Bible, as opposed to only 27 percent of Europeans.

Maybe it’s because I live in the South, where professions of skepticism are rare, but that first number seems a bit low to me. The Founding Fathers’ “wall of separation” between church and state has never had many adherents in the Confederate states, where enforced conformity strikes the majority as right and proper.

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in his “Notes on Virginia.” Perhaps not, but it would certainly prevent the man from being elected in much of the country today. The “wall of separation” phrase is also his, causing the author of the Declaration of Independence to be reviled as an atheist even in his day.

Laws like Louisiana’s latest—a measure requiring the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament to be posted in all public-school classrooms—keep getting passed and then declared unconstitutional by federal judges mindful of the First Amendment’s plain statement forbidding a government “establishment of religion.”

A lawsuit has already been filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and other groups representing parents with children in Louisiana schools who object to mandatory religiosity. As recently as 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law had no secular purpose, but violated the First Amendment’s ban on state-sanctioned holiness.

Two thoughts: First, I doubt that Louisiana voters, if given the option, would ratify the U.S. Constitution as written today. Second, I suspect that the right-wing majority on the current Supreme Court could be up to the challenge of turning the First Amendment inside-out, leading to shrines and altars in public buildings nationwide.

I also frankly doubt that it would make a whole hell of a lot of difference either way. Partly, that’s because I’m old enough to remember when we had mandatory prayers in the public schools of my youth—mumbling performances serving mainly to remind us of our differences.

This at P.S. 12 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where multi-culturism was invented, although nobody called it that. Because many of my classmates were Jews, student-led Bible readings were restricted to the Old Testament. Mainly, we stuck to the 23rd Psalm, although its metaphors—shepherds, pastures, still waters—meant little or nothing to most of us. Mostly, it was blessedly short.

Then we’d recite the Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer, although there were few Protestants among us. When we got to the “For thine is the Kingdom…” bit at the end, we Catholics would fall ostentatiously silent. I don’t recall what the Jewish kids did. Mumbled and looked at their shoes, I imagine.

Mostly, we were just filling in the blanks. Then we’d salute the flag. More mumbling.

I wonder what they’re fixing to do in Louisiana about the rival Catholic and Protestant versions of the Ten Commandments, which differ in important particulars. I’m guessing Catholic in Lafayette, Protestant in Shreveport.

Come to think of it, my ecumenical experience as a public-school student led to the most memorable religious experience of my childhood. I believe I was eight or nine when an Irish nun giving Sunday religious instruction to us P.S. 12 heathens sent me to see Monsignor for expressing doubt that God would burn all Protestants in a fiery hell.

I said that my best friend Jeffrey was Presbyterian like his mother and father, and that I didn’t think God would be mean enough to punish him for his parents’ sins. If memory serves, Father told me that Sister may have been laying it on a bit thick about the Lord incinerating Protestants, but that I should keep my skepticism to myself lest I trouble my classmates’ faith.

I guess Monsignor was a liberal by the standard of the times. Or maybe just not Irish. I don’t recall his name, only his advice, which troubled me no end.

Anyway, it’s this kind of nonsense Louisiana’s pious Governor Jeff Landry and the GOP legislative supermajority mean to visit upon the state’s public schoolchildren. He describes it as a “drastic reform” that will “bring common sense back to our classrooms.”

Meanwhile, regardless of which version of the Ten Commandments Louisiana chooses, good luck to the state’s attorneys finding a secular purpose for “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.”

As for explaining the prohibition against adultery to second graders, that could definitely prove ticklish.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

An Epidemic Of Teenage Depression? Blame Smartphones

An Epidemic Of Teenage Depression? Blame Smartphones

As far as I’m concerned, they can’t put warning labels on social media websites soon enough. Indeed, I’d go a lot further. I’d consider banning Smartphones altogether for children under sixteen. Me, I’m so old I can remember when what Vice President Al Gore called “the information superhighway” was going to usher in a new Golden Age of enlightenment and democratic well-being.

Instead, we got flat-earth theorists, high school boys sending “dick pics” to girls in their geometry class, porn addiction and MAGA. Turns out that most people, adolescents in particular, don’t need and certainly haven’t got the critical thinking skills to cope with the veritable tsunami of titillation, disinformation and delusion that comes pouring in over the internet.

I was recently shocked I was to learn from a friend who’s a high school teacher in that her students are permitted to bring cellphones to class. What can educators responsible for this situation have been thinking? They may as well shut down classes altogether. There’s no chance of getting and keeping high school kids’ attention with the accursed things buzzing in their pockets.

Back in my own school days, teachers pretended they were unaware of boys carrying transistor radios during the World Series, but that was a special circumstance. Not smutty videos or digitally-created nude photos of our female classmates.

If we had any sense as a culture, we’d recognize that putting Smartphones in the hands of children and adolescents makes about as much sense has handing out whiskey sours in the school cafeteria.

According to a recent article in the Washington Post, “research finds a correlation between cellphone use and lower grades and test scores.” How could it be otherwise? Furthermore, “a recent Gallup poll shows teens spend an average of nearly five hours a day just on social media — not including games and texts. A report by Common Sense Media finds teens check their phones an average of more than 100 times a day.”

Social scientist Jonathan Haidt, who has made a personal crusade out of warning against what he sees as the dire effects of cell phone addiction, reports that “I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night.”

Some think Haidt has contributed to what one academic critic calls a “moral panic” scaring parents needlessly. He counters by pointing to studies showing that the typical American adolescent “now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour.”

I’m sorry, but that’s crazy.

And crazy-making too. According Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in the New York Times: “The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor. Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours. Additionally, nearly half of adolescents say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies.”

It’s not just in the United States either. Haidt has pointed out that skyrocketing rates of adolescent depression and suicide—they rose more than fifty percent between 2010 and 2019, when widespread Smartphone use began—"similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond.”

Basically, anywhere the wonders of the information superhighway were bestowed willy-nilly upon the young. Academic achievement began to slide around the same time. It’s gotten to where a teenager reading a book is a rare phenomenon. We’re raising a semi-literate generation. No wonder they’re so easily bamboozled by Russian propaganda.

Nobody meant for these things to happen, but by encouraging near-universal cellphone usage among the young, with social media algorithms designed to lure users ever deeper into the online world, we’ve been conducting a vast, uncontrolled social experiment with unforeseen results upon the most vulnerable members of society.

Skeptics point to other potential causes—financial panics, mass school shootings and “active shooter” drills, the Covid epidemic, the opioid crisis, even global climate change. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.


The good news is that the damage can be reversed if we have the will. Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen writes of visiting a high school near Albany where cellphones have been banned to nearly everybody’s satisfaction—including students, many of whom say they’re relieved not to have to deal with the constant intrusion.

That should happen everywhere, and for pretty much the same reason we don’t serve whiskey sours in school cafeterias.

Kids can’t handle them.

Judge Juan Merchan

Hey Judge! Just Lock Trump Up Already

To hear angry MAGA Republicans tell it, former President Donald J. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records is a shock and an outrage. But how could anybody be surprised? Never mind the evidence presented to the New York jury was voluminous and pretty much uncontested.

For all his bragging and whining, Trump didn’t dare testify — officially. But the judge’s gag order didn’t prevent him from spouting off. That was a Trump lie for the MAGA chumps in the cheap seats.

Legally speaking, has there ever been a bigger loser than Trump? Kevin Drum compiled a list on his invaluable website, jabberwocking.com.

He’s pretty much constantly in one court or another, Trump. And he nearly always loses. Following his 2020 election defeat, the candidate filed 62 — yes, 62 — lawsuits alleging election fraud.

And lost every single one.

Back in 2018, a federal court ordered him to pay $25 million in restitution to students defrauded by the Trump University scam. In 2019, a New York judge ordered the Trump Foundation permanently closed for playing fast and loose with the charitable organization’s funds. He and his family were fined $2 million and forbidden to operate a charity in the state again. Trump whined they should have investigated Bill and Hillary Clinton instead.

So, he sued Hillary. That one ended up costing him only $1 million after a federal judge in Florida ruled the suit was “completely frivolous” and should never have been brought. Trump, the judge wrote, was no babe in the woods: “Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries. He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process.”

That same day, Trump dropped a lawsuit against New York State Attorney General Letitia James that sought to stall her office’s civil case against the Trump Organization. The resulting trial found the Trump Organization guilty of massive tax fraud. “Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” Judge Arthur Engoron wrote.

The chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was sentenced to five months in prison. He subsequently pleaded guilty to perjury and returned to the slammer for another five months.

For his part, Trump called the ruling a “sham,” the judge “crooked” and James “corrupt.” He denounced the case against him as “ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and a “WITCH HUNT.”

Sound familiar? Evidently, the Trump Organization was staffed by cheats and perjurers like Weisselberg and star prosecution witness Michael Cohen from top to bottom.

Everybody but Boss Trump, who knew nothing.

Elsewhere, Trump has brought lawsuits against The New York Times, CNN, NBC News and The Washington Post. All were dismissed due to lack of evidence. He was successfully sued for sexual abuse by magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll and ordered to pay her $5 million in restitution. When Trump continued to mock and malign her publicly, a second jury ordered him to pay her $83 million for defamation. But for the statute of limitations, the judge in the Carroll case commented, Trump could have been convicted of rape.

Needless to say, these levies are all on appeal. Chances are that Trump’s estate will end up owing E. Jean Carroll and the State of New York many millions of dollars in fines and interest.

Meanwhile, the hot-button issue of the day is whether Judge Juan Merchan will put Trump behind bars come his July 11 sentencing. And there, I fear, Trump’s big mouth is giving Merchan no choice.

Normally, a first-time offender of a paper crime would be sentenced to probation. But Trump shows no remorse, only contempt and defiance. During the trial, he openly and repeatedly violated a gag order intended to protect the proceedings against threats to court personnel, witnesses and jurors.

Indeed, Trump continues to defy that order, which remains in force until the judge says it doesn’t. He’s aided and abetted, it must be said, by canting Republican politicians who fear the MAGA horde.

Trump went on Fox & Friends the other day to vend the preposterous lie that he never chanted “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton. Anybody who believes that will believe anything — the hallmark of a MAGA cultist. As for jail time, he said the prospect doesn’t trouble him, but he’s “not sure the public would stand for it … You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”

And then what? To me, it’s an empty threat. Trump’s been trying to raise a MAGA mob throughout his tenure, and they keep not showing up. People aren’t going to risk their own freedom to save his mangy a**.

But a threat is a threat, and no American court can stand for it. Even if it’s only for a couple of months, Merchan is going to have little choice but to lock him up.

Reprinted with permission from Chicago SunTimes.

Does Trump Belong In Prison -- Or A Mental Institution?

Does Trump Belong In Prison -- Or A Mental Institution?

I remember when a politician who expressed an easily debunked, crackpot conspiracy theory would be through in public life. Indeed, it took a whole lot less than that.

Just 20 years ago, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean was more or less hounded out of the race after emitting what TV news producers deemed an inappropriately loud cheer at an Iowa campaign event.

Dubbed “The Scream,” the event was broadcast on network and cable TV a reported 653 times over the next four days. Late-night comic Jay Leno joked “the cows in Iowa are afraid of getting mad Dean disease,” and that was pretty much it for the Vermont governor’s campaign. (Reporters on the scene found nothing odd about it; TV monitors had greatly amplified the sound.)

But times have changed. Only last week, a presidential candidate accused a political rival of conspiring to have him murdered, and the general response was “So what else is new?”

Needless to say, that candidate was Donald Trump, who delivered a screed on his Truth Social network claiming that “Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”

The Trump campaign followed up in a fundraising email with the all-caps headline: “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” The message claimed Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out.”

Trump loyalists everywhere echoed the claim — and they will continue to do even after their hero was found guilty on all counts in his “hush money” case. The candidate’s willing propagandists on Fox News gave the story big play. Sean Hannity and the rest feigned shock and outrage. Never one to miss a chance to fly her own freak flag, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., posted on X (formerly Twitter) “The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light.”

In real life, of course, making public such delusional allegations could lead to a person being confined to a psychiatric hospital for their own protection. In Trump World, however, pretty much anything goes. Hardly anybody thinks the candidate himself actually believes half the crazy things he says — not for more than a few hours anyway, before he’s on to the next damned thing. The only constant is that everybody’s out to get him, the Universal Genius and the Greatest Man in the World.

You do have to wonder, however, about the deluded followers who send him money. Are they in their right minds?

Search warrants have boilerplate language about force

In reality, of course, the FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago for the thousands of pages of classified documents Trump had illegally taken from the White House, refused to return and repeatedly lied about having in his possession did everything possible to avoid encountering him.

They deliberately scheduled the action for a day when the great man was 1,000 miles away in New York, notified the Secret Service in advance and were escorted onto the property by Trump’s protectors. They carried a search warrant duly authorized by a federal magistrate. Everything was done scrupulously by the book.

The simple, easily verified fact is that all FBI search warrants, every single one, everywhere in the United States, include boilerplate language empowering agents to respond with force if physically attacked while doing their jobs.

The idea that the FBI and the Biden White House were scheming to execute Trump is simply preposterous. Indeed, it’s already old news. The candidate himself has already dropped the idea and moved on. Fox News quit talking about it after 24 hours.

Indeed, Trump attended a NASCAR event in Charlotte, North Carolina, last Sunday — an odd thing to do for a man claiming the president of the United States meant to have him whacked. There he reverently saluted the playing of “Amazing Grace” as if it were the national anthem. It’s tempting to wonder if he knows the difference.

Of course, if President Joe Biden did something so peculiar as to salute a hymn, we’d never hear the end of it. The great paradox of Biden as depicted by Trumpers is that he’s a doddering old man who can barely speak coherently.

“Why isn’t Joe Biden here speaking to you tonight?” Trump asked a crowd of Libertarians he addressed recently. “You know why? Why isn’t he? Because he can’t put two sentences together.”

In the next breath, Trump depicted his rival as the ruthless boss of the “Biden Crime Family” scheming to have him assassinated and masterminding “a toxic fusion of the Marxist left, the deep state, the military-industrial complex, the government security and surveillance services and their partners all merging together into a hideous perversion of the American system.”

Oh, and Biden, the feeble old-timer, is also a “fascist” who, if reelected, means to “put Christians in prison for 11 years for the crime of singing hymns.”

Why 11 years, I really can’t say.

Reprinted with permission from Chicago SunTimes.

No, I'm Not Going To Flee The Country After The November Election

No, I'm Not Going To Flee The Country After The November Election

According to the New York Times' veteran political reporter Peter Baker, the number one topic of discussion at Washington dinner parties and receptions these days is “Where would you go if it really happens?”

“It” being Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House following the November 2024 election.

Canada, some say. Others mention Portugal, Australia, even the United Arab Emirates. “The range and seniority of people who talk about it is striking,” Baker writes. “They include current and former White House officials, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, agency directors, intelligence and law enforcement officials, military officers, political strategists, and journalists.”

Trump’s vows of retribution against his political enemies he has called “vermin,” his stated intention to prosecute pretty much everybody who has offended him, and his loose talk about disobedient generals deserving the death penalty have got a lot of people wondering if it can indeed happen here.

“It” being an overt fascist dictatorship.

One former Trump administration official turned critic told Baker, “People are feeling that it’s very obvious if a second Trump term happens, it’s going to be slash and burn.”

As for me, to put it in Arkansas vernacular, “I ain’t going nowhere.” First, because I’m too old to think about relocating to a foreign country, which is a difficult thing to do—even if you can afford it. Second, because while I yield to nobody in my contempt for Trump, I’m too obscure to persecute.

Besides, my wife and I could never agree about where to go. Chances are, for example, that I could qualify for an Irish passport, given that all eight of my great-grandparents were born there. Not long after we married, Diane was surprised to see tears in my eyes for the first time at the tomb of my great literary hero Jonathan Swift in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. (Swift died in 1745, but lived on in my imagination.)

I have always felt at home in that country, which welcomes immigrants unlikely to become a burden on the public. The Irish are great talkers and listeners. They want to hear your story and tell you theirs. Now that they’ve quit killing each other over religion, the Republic of Ireland is one of the most peaceful countries on earth, and among the friendliest.

I’ll never forget how emotional I got seeing that rapscallion Bill Clinton with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on TV from Belfast announcing the Good Friday Accords. I thought I’d left all that Irish business behind when I followed an Arkansas girl home from school all those years ago. But no, there it was, deeply embedded.

But here’s the problem. I’ve always been a weather-maven. So here’s my summary daily weather report for Dublin over the next ten years: High, 56; Low, 42. Rain. At least 250 days every year fall within those parameters. Chilly, wet and windy. I don’t think I could fool myself into being happy with that.

The Arkansas girl’s people emigrated from France into South Louisiana by way of Cuba. (Her parents met at Louisiana State U, where he was a ballplayer.) She thinks France is the most beautiful and fascinating country in the world, with the best cuisine. The food is great even in the airport. When we’ve visited there, she’s frequently been stopped on the street by people asking directions. She has to haltingly explain that, appearances notwithstanding, she doesn’t actually speak the language.

So France is out. Even if we could afford it. Besides, she’d never leave Arkansas unless the entire Gang of Four—her closest girlfriends for forty years—agreed to come too. Me, I don’t know how I’d get along without my daily Boston Red Sox broadcast, or Arkansas Razorback basketball for that matter. Somebody’s got to load up the pack for their daily outing at the dog park, and it’s pretty much got to be me.

No matter. Because while I fear that the several months following the November 2024 election will be filled with turmoil and foreboding—Trumpist loudmouths have made it clear they will accept nothing but victory and will resort to violence if denied—I believe that Trump is not going to be inaugurated come January 2025.

The exact sequence of events is impossible to predict, but in terms the former Apprentice star would understand, the Trump Show is about to be cancelled. He has zero chance of winning the popular vote. None. The public is heartily sick of him. Just seeing his scowling face and listening to his endless boasting and whining have become almost unendurable.

For that same reason he has little chance of running the table in the so-called “swing” states. Also, this time around no amateur insurrection will take the authorities by surprise. Trump’s attempts to summon a mob to disrupt his New York trial have fallen flat.

So never fear, it’s almost over.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Former President Donald Trump

No, We Won't Be Having A 'Normal Election' In 2024

Does anybody really believe the United States is going to have a “normal” presidential election in 2024, with Joe Biden and Donald Trump as the nominees and a peaceful resolution? Or will chaos and disorder take the nation to the brink, as MAGA supporters appear to wish?

Among several possibilities I can imagine, “normal” seems the least likely.

If Biden had paid attention to me—absurd, I know, but bear with me for the sake of argument—the Democrats wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s possible to agree with the president that Independent Counsel Robert Hur’s editorializing about his mental acuity amounted to an unfounded partisan smear without thinking that Biden’s in the clear politically.

(Will Democrats never quit falling for these fakers? Why must all “independent” investigations be conducted by GOP apparatchiks? For sheer fake sanctimony, this guy resembled that psalm-singing hypocrite Kenneth Starr. Bringing the president’s dead son into it was, as Biden said, an outrage. Also, I think, a craven lie.

Nothing in his 330-page report supports it. That said, the most appalling thing about the president’s ill-advised press conference following the report’s release was the conduct of the White House press corps, who screamed at Biden like a troop of baboons.

I noticed that CNN, when it re-broadcast the exchange, muted the sound. As my old friend James Fallows noted almost 30 years ago in his book “Breaking the News,” the White House press corps often acts “with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public’s views much less than they reflect the modern journalist’s belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.”

But last week’s performance was over the top. You won’t see sports journalists treating NFL players the way the White House baboons treated Biden, because, well, they wouldn’t dare.)

That said, everybody knew what the President meant when he identified the president of Egypt as the leader of “Mexico.” The whole exchange took place in the context of an otherwise important (and overdue) warning to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States is losing patience with Israeli brutality toward Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Biden, a lifelong stutterer, had simply transposed two words. He knew what he meant, and so did everybody else. So what?

Politically speaking, however, the timing could hardly have been worse. The baboons were screaming because they sensed weakness, and everybody in the troop wants to be in on the kill. The political reality is that upwards of 62 percent of voters told a recent NBC News poll that it’s a “major concern” that Biden might not have the “mental and physical health” for a second term as president. He has aged visibly during his term.

That’s the political reality the president appears reluctant to confront even now. I’m guessing he’ll have to some time between now and the Democratic National Convention in August. As things now stand, he’s gone from being the only name-brand Democrat who could defeat Trump to maybe the only one who can’t. Always a political realist, I suspect Biden will come to see that.

Meanwhile, only 34 percent expressed similar concerns about Trump, an obese 77 year-old who wears orange pancake makeup and adult diapers, but who does appear comparatively vigorous on stage regardless of what stimulants he inhales or what poisonous nonsense he emits.

Such as this treasonous nonsense only last week:

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?,’” Trump said at a rally at Coastal Carolina University. “I said, ‘You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent.’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”

Never mind his cowering before Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, nor his envisioning NATO—maybe the most successful military alliance in world history—as a protection racket.

Trump's "Sir" stories are always brazen lies. Does ANYBODY believe this conversation actually took place? If so, it would be easy to document. But nobody will so much as try, because reporters having such a big time picking on Biden's verbal miscues are too intimidated. Or because they think nobody believes him.

Nobody but the most far-gone MAGA idolators, that is.

However, barring a bizarre and constitutionally absurd intervention by the US Supreme Court in the coming days, Trump and his right-wing media allies’ ability to control the national political conversation will come to an abrupt end on the first day of his trial for inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

His conviction, highly likely in view of the voluminous evidence against him, would be the end of Donald John Trump politically. Then comes the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, where the evidence is even stronger.

So no, nothing’s apt to be “normal” about the 2024 election.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

If Joe Biden Were As Demented As Donald Trump, He'd Be Forced To Retire

If Joe Biden Were As Demented As Donald Trump, He'd Be Forced To Retire

No wonder Trump won’t show up on a debate stage. He’s gotten to where he can barely keep it together in front of the adoring throngs at his campaign rallies. Somewhat smaller throngs it must be said, but, hey, it’s January, and everybody’s seen The Trump Show many times by now.

Even so, that was a real humdinger the great man emitted the other day, when he confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, blaming her for failing to provide adequate security during the January 6 riot. Psychiatrists call it “decompensating.” Ordinary people call it “losing your marbles.”

Courtesy of Mike Tomasky in The New Republic, here’s a transcript of what Trump said: “By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6. You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley … you know they … do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it? All of it! Because of lots of things. Like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people. Soldiers, National Guard—whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t wanna talk about that. These are very dishonest people.”

That’s right, sports fans, Trump confused the then-Democratic Speaker of the House with his Republican presidential rival and former UN Ambassador. Not once, but several times. All in service of one of his most absurd lies: that he offered Speaker Pelosi soldiers to defend the U.S. Capitol from the same mob he’d urged to “fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore.”

Also that the House Select Committee that investigated the events of January 6 possessed this exculpatory evidence, but destroyed it. Yeah, sure they did. And all of Humpty Trumpty’s horses and all of his men couldn’t put it back together again.

In reality, numerous White House aides testified that Trump spent hours enjoying the spectacle on TV, even as they begged him to call off the mob. Then at 2:44 pm, with the crowd having erected a gallows and chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump sent out a tweet: “Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

That is, to prevent the Electoral College vote and award the election to Donald Trump. The election he’d lost by 7 million votes.

But, yeah, it was all Nikki/Nancy’s fault.

And if you believe that…

Well, what won’t you believe?

Tomasky asks an interesting question. If Nikki Haley herself hadn’t made an issue of Trump’s senility, would the news media even have covered the event? Probably not. They’ve been ducking it for months, even as the deterioration in the former president’s affect has grown steadily clearer.

Here's the self-proclaimed “stable genius” on the topic of wind turbines, which he claims are driving whales crazy: “I never understood wind. You know, I understand windmills very much. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything.”

Now I don’t want to brag, but I could never get that drunk. But, of course Trump famously doesn’t drink. Instead, he boasts about acing a screening test for dementia. Going on six years ago.

Now, if Humpty Trumpty were a doctor, lawyer, a veterinarian or a hair stylist, his clients would tiptoe quietly away. A presidential candidate, however, is to many people a fantasy figure—a combination sideshow barker and shaman, credited in the popular mind with powers he does not and never will have. So, it’s not a practical decision. Tribal loyalties are involved.

During my lifetime, the most astonishing example of mass psychosis I’ve seen was the Jonestown Massacre of hundreds of religious devotees by suicide—the origin of the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Second was the Branch Davidian catastrophe in Waco, where evidence showed cult leader David Koresh helped massacre his followers.

No, Trump’s MAGA movement is nowhere close. Even so, it’s going to be interesting to see how his followers react as his psychological and intellectual decompensation proceeds under the enormous pressure of a presidential campaign and a series of criminal trials.

Tomasky points out that given the media obsession with Joe Biden’s age—Fox News and others televise his every verbal or physical stumble relentlessly—for the president to commit anything like Trump’s Nikki/Nancy blunder would probably result in his being forced to withdraw.

And properly so, as far as I’m concerned.

Anybody who’s ever had a relative or close friend disappear over the event horizon into dementia knows the story. Trump will have better days and worse days, but it’s a one-way journey to nowhere.

Meanwhile, it’s not the MAGA faithful that scare me; it’s the cynics and opportunists who think they can flog him across the finish line.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Can Trump Win In 2024? Probably Not, But He Will Certainly Cheat Again

Can Trump Win In 2024? Probably Not, But He Will Certainly Cheat Again

Theoretically speaking, the United States will be having a presidential election in 2024. Everybody acts as if it’s a sure thing. Political “horse race” coverage dominates the news. Debates, rallies and candidate speeches take place. Newspapers and TV news outlets publish polling results every few days. Every-body’s familiar with the ritual, and everybody plays along.

That’s the whole point of rituals. All the solemn mummery of holding a presidential election, right down to the balloons and silly hats, exists to reassure the public that everything will be alright. That’s why phony democratic elections are the essence of dictatorial regimes around the world.

Everybody plays the game. Russia, China, Myanmar, you name it. Record voter turnout is assured. Vladimir Putin will no doubt win a thunderous majority.

But real democracies can be fragile things.

Let’s try an analogy from the sports page. Consider the recent national collegiate football championship. What would we say about it if one team, say the Michigan Wolverines, showed up with assault rifles and vowed to shoot referees who threw penalty flags adverse to them?

Well, we wouldn’t call it a football game.

So how can we call it a proper election when everybody knows that the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, one Donald J. Trump, will refuse to accept defeat? Adam Serwer puts it this way in The Atlantic: “there is something naive to assuming that Trump would accept such a verdict from the electorate a second time when he didn’t accept it the first time. Neither a close election nor a sound defeat matters when Trump can induce his supporters to believe any fiction he conjures.”

And there appears to be little doubt that he can. The GOP front runner’s campaign appearances in Iowa have been almost phantasmagoric of late. He has gone so far as to post a TV commercial on his Truth Social website claiming that he is God’s Chosen One.

Narrated in the electronically-recreated voice of the late radio pitchman Paul Harvey, the ad begins like this: “And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said, 'I need a caretaker.' So God gave us Trump."

Got that? Trump’s birth was divinely inspired.

Try to imagine the hullabaloo if President Joe Biden even hinted at such a thing. They’d say the old fool had clearly lost it. “Dementia” would be the kindest diagnosis.

Instead, what Biden did say in a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, was that Trump is an unpatriotic sore loser, and nothing more.

“Trump lost 60 court cases, 60. Trump lost the Republican-controlled states. Trump lost before a Trump-appointed judge—and then judges. And Trump lost before the United States Supreme Court…

“Trump lost recount after recount in state after state. But in desperation and weakness, Trump and his MAGA followers went after election officials.”

Biden described Trump’s actions and inaction during the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol as “among the worst derelictions of duty by a President in American history: an attempt to overturn a free and fair election by force and violence.”

And Trump’s response? He went all sixth-grade bully on the President before an audience of Iowa supporters.

“Did you see him? He was stuttering through the whole thing,” Trump told a crowd in Sioux Center, Iowa. “He’s saying I’m a threat to democracy.”

“’He’s a threat to d-d-democracy,’” he continued, pretending to stutter. “Couldn’t read the word.”

Many in the audience, who, of course, hadn’t seen Biden’s speech, chortled.

“The remark was not true,” the Washington Post reported. “Biden said the word “democracy” 29 times in his speech, never stuttering over it.”

As if that wasn’t low-down and infantile enough, Trump dragged the late Sen. John McCain into it, mimicking McCain’s inability to raise his arm over his head due to injuries sustained under torture in a North Vietnamese prison camp.

Trump was never fit to shine McCain’s shoes. Not that he’d know how. The great tribune of the common man hires butlers for that.

Outraged MAGA supporters should do themselves the favor of watching the video of these incidents before sending me threatening e-mails. Otherwise, knock yourselves out.

Alternatively, check out the video of Trump telling a credulous Lou Dobbs the other day that thanks to Joe Biden, gasoline now sells for “5, 6, 7 and even $8 a gallon.” I don’t know about you, but I filled up yesterday for $2.37.

Another few months of Trump’s screeching and whining and all but the dullest MAGA cultists are apt to catch on. So no, I think there’s little chance of Trump winning a national election.

But that’s not the point, which is that there’s no possibility of this profoundly disordered man conceding defeat, and every chance that the authoritarians mobilizing behind his candidacy—the Steve Bannons and Stephen Millers—will be far better prepared the second time around.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

Why The Trump Cult Is So Appealing To Fundamentalists

Why The Trump Cult Is So Appealing To Fundamentalists

Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is fundamentalist at its core—with fundamentalism being understood as a psychological rather than a religious concept. Pretty much every large-scale public movement, secular or sacred, has its share of extremists, and as the religious columnist Paul Prather has argued: “remove the labels, close your eyes and quickly the fundamentalists in one group start sounding uncannily like the fundamentalists in all other groups, as if they were reading from the same script.”

It's another word for fanatic.

Most Trumpists call themselves “conservative,” which used to signify a belief in limited government, low taxes, free trade and freedom of conscience, but which under Trump signals tribal loyalty and revenge. This explains what some see as the central paradox of the MAGA movement, that a congenital braggart who pretty much embodies what Christianity has traditionally called the Seven Deadly Sins—greed, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, pride and wrath—has come to seem the embodiment of faith for millions of Republican evangelicals.

Trump spent Christmas Day typing up and posting laments and threats in ALL CAPS on his Truth Social website, targeting “JOE BIDEN’S MISFITS & THUGS, LIKE DERANGED JACK SMITH.” They’re “COMING AFTER ME,” he warned “AT LEVELS OF PERSECUTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR COUNTRY???...looking to destroy our once great USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

A bit lacking in the spirit of the holiday, some would say.

Not to mention he's the world's biggest crybaby

But they would be wrong, the MAGA faithful would insist. George Orwell captured the essence of the whiny strongman in reviewing the British edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf way back in 1940, after the German dictator had driven Germany to war, but before it was clear that he had doomed his country to catastrophe.

Hitler, Orwell wrote, "knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, [and] short working-hours …they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades."

Orwell understood Fascism’s appeal to an aggrieved population. While European and North American democracies, he wrote, told people, in effect, that “'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

Orwell also understood the personal psychology of the crybaby conqueror: “The initial, personal cause of [Hitler’s] grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.”

Sound like anybody we know?

That said, I do believe Trump when he says he never read Mein Kampf. Too long, too many big words. Donald Trump never learned anything from a book. He stole his whole act from 1950s professional wrestlers at Sunnyside Gardens in Queens—specifically from Dr. Jerry Graham, who swaggered around boasting that “I have the body men fear and women adore.”

The hairstyle too, a bleach blonde pompadour that taught a generation of wrestling fans how a “heel” behaved—that is, basically like a cartoon Nazi. The man was a masterful showman who aroused thousands to frenzy with balsa wood chairs and fake blood capsules. He was as fat as Trump too, although there was muscle under the lard.

Likewise, Donald Trump needed no books to absorb the lesson that non-white immigrants are “vermin” poisoning the nation’s blood, or that (white) people in Minnesota, as he assured an audience there the other day, are genetically superior. He learned those things at his slumlord father’s knee. Fred Trump was arrested at a Manhattan Ku Klux Klan rally some years before The Donald was born. This business about racehorse genes is straight KKK dogma. It's always appealed to people who fear outsiders.

But back to the great man’s hypnotized fanbase. Paul Prather credits David French with defining fundamentalism’s essential nature. He argues that whether religious or political, all “fundamentalist cultures exhibit three traits: certainty, ferocity, and solidarity. He says certainty is the key to the other two traits.”

“The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt,” French has written. “In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.”

Doubters should see this column’s e-mail feed, although I must say the Trumpist faction has been relatively restrained of late. Maybe they’ve given up on me, or maybe reality has begun to creep in at the edges.

One way or another, fundamentalist cults always implode; often violently, but sometimes not.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.

The Incomprehensible Cruelty Of Those 'Pro-Life' Texas Republicans

The Incomprehensible Cruelty Of Those 'Pro-Life' Texas Republicans

Try as I may, I simply cannot comprehend the thinking of Texas Republican officials who forced a 30-year-old mother of two to flee the state to secure a legal abortion to spare the doomed fetus in her womb from terrible suffering, preserve her ability to bear a third child, and possibly her life.

Kate Cox, the Dallas woman who sued the state over its impossibly vague law forbidding her doctors from administering life-saving care, could simply have gotten on an airplane in the first place. But after four emergency room visits due to cramping and pain from her doomed pregnancy—she was 20 weeks along, and her baby had been diagnosed with trisomy 18, a fatal genetic disorder that often kills mothers too—she may have felt she couldn’t risk it.

Or shouldn’t have to.

“I kept asking more questions, including how much time we might have with her if I continued the pregnancy,” she wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “The answer was maybe an hour — or at most, a week. Our baby would be in hospice care from the moment she is born if she were to be born alive.”

But her doctors feared—accurately, as it turned out—that they could lose their medical licenses or go to prison if they terminated the pregnancy.

If Cox were a barnyard animal, a cow say, no veterinarian would have hesitated to relieve her agony. After all, cows are worth a lot of money. 30-year-old wives and mothers, not so much.

Have they never loved a woman? Do they not have wives, sisters, aunts, or cousins? Have they forgotten their own mothers, these stern Texan moralists led by the state’s recently-impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton, a MAGA stalwart? Apparently, they have.

If she didn’t want to suffer and die, Kate Cox shouldn’t have gotten pregnant. Or had sex with her lawfully-wedded husband to begin with. Religious authoritarians of every kind and description, seemingly in every benighted jurisdiction around the world, are always about that.

In Iran as in Texas, shaming and controlling women’s sexuality is always Job One for the holiest among us. Except when they’re getting caught molesting children or indulging in group-gropes, it appears to be pretty much all they think about, the anointed ones.

(Actually, it appears that abortion is legal in Iran to preserve the life and health of the mother. Always supposing she covers her hair, of course.)

Along with petitioning the Texas Supreme Court to reverse the (Democratic) judge who ruled in Kate Cox’s favor, Paxton sent stern letters to area hospitals, warning of dire legal consequences for any institution that dared to interfere with God’s will that she and her baby suffer for her sins.

He reminded them of Texas’ so-called “bounty law,” enabling any private citizen to sue anyone who "aids or abets" an abortion and to earn a $10,000 reward. Theoretically, I suppose, Cox’s husband could be found guilty.

The Texas Supreme Court, as expected, played along, in effect forcing the unfortunate woman to flee the state to relieve her suffering and preserve her ability to have a third child. The Texas Right to Life organization thought the ruling entirely appropriate: “The compassionate approach to these heartbreaking diagnoses is perinatal palliative care,” the organization said “which honors, rather than ends, the child’s life.”

Notice whose well-being isn’t so important? Kate Cox’s. Her two children’s. Her husband’s. Apparently, It’s God’s will that they suffer. As in, say, the Seventeenth Century.

Given that, according to the Mayo Clinic, roughly some twenty percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage, variations of Cox’s sorrowful ordeal are playing out in every state that has enacted draconian abortion bans. Facing voter backlash, “pro-life” politicians are hunting cover. "We got to approach these issues with compassion, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on CNN recently, “because these are very difficult issues and nobody would wish this to happen on anybody."

GOP presidential aspirant Nikki Haley, calling herself pro-life, served up this word-salad: "We don't want any women to sit there and deal with a rare situation and have to deliver a baby in that sort of circumstance any more than we want women getting an abortion at 37, 38, 39 weeks. We have to humanize the situation and deal with it with compassion."

Amen to both.

But if you want to know how Florida’s “heartbeat” abortion law works in practice, read “The Short Life of Baby Milo” in the Washington Post. Born without kidneys or lungs as doctors had predicted, Milo survived outside the womb for 99 agonizing minutes. They could have spared him and his mother the agony, but for Florida law.

Ten-year-old rape victims, women compelled to give birth to their half-brothers… The beat goes on. And will continue, it’s clear, as long as it’s politicians, “activists” and judges making the calls instead of women and their doctors.

Gene Lyons is a former columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a winner of the National Magazine Award, and co-author of The Hunting of the President.